Kill Bill Vol. 2 (Tarantino): A-

Fuck artistic development. In Kill Bill Volume 2, QT finally brought back exactly how I felt when I first saw Reservoir Dogs. Volume 2 is pure old school Tarantino, unmistakeably the crafted from the guy who made fanboyism not only cool, but meaningful. When Tarantino's at his best, he doesn't just create cool scenes loaded with obscure movie references that make fanboys drool with delight (the Corbucci and Chang Cheh homages here and the entirety of Volume 1). Nor is his gift merely adding clever footnotes to movie cliches (favorite touch: Elle flushing the toilet), though he's possibly the best filmmaker on the planet in doing that. He's at his best defying expecatations and hitting you with an emotional payoff against all odds.

But you know what? I don't have anything to say about Tarantino's artistry. Best I'd just point you in the direction of two reviews that do adequately describe QT's unique powers and how it shapes Volume 2's movie-specific pleasures, courtesy of Manohla Dargis and John Powers.

Yeah, maybe we'll see a mature, Eric Rohmer riff from QT next time out. In the meantime, I'm gonna save my bucks for the 2 volume Kill Bill DVD.

Added! Do not miss QT's interview with Powers, in which he opines that Passion of the Christ is fifteen times more visual (!!!) than Night of the Hunter, that a four hour cut of Kill Bill will eventually be released, and that if he had released Kill Bill as one feature, he woulda trimmed "Useful as an elbow right here" (aka, take off your hat, Budd) and much of the Pai Mei section. Those were my two favorite parts in Volume 2, I suppose, not counting the Elle/Bride showdown. So maybe cleaving the movie in two was the right decision after all.

Interlude from procrastinating on figuring out my gross taxable income and also from tackling von Trier

The two pundits (whom I still semi-read) I find most irritating right now are:

Mickey Kaus

and

Gregg Easterbrook.

Both bloggers are New Republic alumni, and neither has shaken that magazine's narcissistic obsession with producing Interesting Iconoclastic Opinions (IIO). Skilled practioners of IIO, like hunky wonk Michael Kinsley, bolster their goofy-legged stances with careful research and unassailable logic. Then we have knee-jerk contrarians like Kaus and Easterbrook, who offer little but their own abiding affection for their "unorthodox" positions.

Kaus is a preening, monomaniacal jerk. His entire blog is now devoted to Hating John Kerry, which wouldn't be so bad if (1) Kaus doesn't keep bringing up that he's a Democrat; (2) if he's actually has substantive critiques; and (3) if he'll willfully overlook the flip-flops and blatant pandering of politicians he supports (because his "Democratic friends" don't), like Ahnold.

However obnoxious Kaus is, though, he can occasionally tear some establishment reporter a new one, though he seems to specialize in eviscerating the NY Times and the LA Times (why? because his "Democratic friends" read those papers!). Easterbrook is also a monomaniacal narcissist. Except instead of snark, ol' Gregg traffics in earnest indignation. He's the contrarian professor to Kaus' contrarian wisecracking drinking buddy. Okay, so Easterbrook isn't quite as monomaniacal as Kaus, and Easterblogg has interesting posts on science news and sports. But a regular feature is his laughable defense of Bush's environmental policies, which are exercises in self-delusion.

More than that, Easterbrook holds the distinction for being the only columnist whose idiocy provoked me to fire off a letter to the editor in the last year. My letter, like my other four letters to TNR, didn't get published, alas. (But hey, I can self-publish now!) Anyway, that letter attacked Easterbrook's notorious slime of Kill Bill Vol. 1. For those of you who follow blogosphere/journalistic controversies, you might remember the firestorm surrounding Easterbrook's use of anti-Semitic language in condemning the producers of Tarantino's splatterfest (in the Likudnik TNR of all places!). For my part, I wasn't so much interested in the anti-Semitic charges as I was in the complete idiocy of Easterbrook's comments on Kill Bill. Here's a guy who had no clue on film history, film grammar, or anything else cinema-related who somehow believes he's got the authority to make pronouncements designating which films are worthwhile and which worthless as art. I was absolutely flabbergasted by his arrogance. At the time, my conclusion was to lament the downside of blogging, which inspires bloggers to opine on everything under the sun, even things they know not the first thing about. (For example, I know nothing about being fey, or fey people, or fops for that matter, but I still deign to make snarky comments about them!)

Lately, Easterbrook's on this anti-9/11 Commission kick. His position is that anybody who claims Bush could've stopped 9/11 is off their rocker because there was no way he could've invaded Afghanistan. (This is the reasoning taken up by some wingnuts, too, I hear, though I stopped reading many of these wingnuts for fear of being infected by their obviously contagious dementia.)

All I can say in response to Easterbrook is: What?!?

The criticisms put forth by Clarke and others isn't that Bush could've killed Osama and destroyed Al Qaida if only he'd pay attention. No, it's that, given all of the information presented to him, why didn't he do more? Why didn't he "shake the trees" and post alerts to the FAA and hold meetings with "principals" to gather all this material? After all, we know two of al Qaida members are in flight school in the US, Osama wants to hijack planes, etc. Meanwhile, back at the ranch...Dubya continued his long-ass presidential vacation, more evidently concerned with fishing and stem cell research in August than vigilantly protecting the homeland.

Easterbrook is getting snookered by Bush into changing the topic ("if we *knew* that they would attack the WTC on September 11, we would've acted"), which is not the sign of a first-class mind.

The most incisive pundit out there right now is William Saletan, who once again broke it down for us. Broke what down? Why, Shrub's pathetic press conference of course, and how his answers reflect his utter contempt for facts. I'm getting tired of hating the guy, but everyday something comes up where I have to ask myself: how did these third-rate hacks, led by an inane (okay, "incurious") chimp, get to run the most powerful country in the world?

Yes, I shouldn't even be reading these people. That time could be spent teaching geometry to inner city youth. I know.

(The above annoying parenthetical exclamations are meant to be a parody of Mickey Kaus!)

Favorite albums of 2003

In a typical year, my CD buying habits will consist of completist purchases (Sinatra's Capital records), canonical albums (Love's Forever Changes), random acts that I get into for a month or so (Fantastic Plastic Machine; The Orb), random classical albums, and catching up to records I missed out in the late Nineties while toiling away at torts and contracts (U.N.K.L.E., Mos Def). I used to buy maybe four or five new albums a year, but last year I became much more "contemporary" in my music listening, primarily because (1) half of my time is spent driving, the other half at work -- hence the need for aural distractions; (2) the newly discovered pleasures of CD-R; (3) the newly discovered pleasures of P2P; (4) more social outings to see live perfomances. Free music makes the world go round, I tell you.

I spent a good part of the last ten months catching up to post-millennial music. So I haven't always been hip and with it like The Unit, but it sure beats feeling like some washed-up hipster bitching about how some new hot band is just biting Husker Du.

Anyway, in a class by itself (and utterly deserving of its wild acclaim):

01 Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, OutKast. Especially The Love Below, which is like the late-80s Prince masterpiece the Purple One never recorded. "Roses" is dedicated to my loyal reader Sally. Also, thanks to JZ for springing for this...


Then:

02 Chutes Too Narrow, The Shins. Oh, Inverted World redux, but why should that be a bad thing?
03 Shades of Blue, Madlib. Tops Guru's Jazzmatazz as the best fusion of straight-ahead be-bop to hip hop grooves I've heard.
04 Haha Sound, Broadcast. Broadcast's Emperor Tomato Ketchup -- more jamming and a richer, warmer sound, and I still dig how Trish Keenan's spacey vocals linger outside the melody.
05 So Much for the City, The Thrills. An Irish band singing about Santa Cruz and Big Sur -- poseurs or not? Who cares, when their shit is so damn melodic.
06 One World Extinguisher, Prefuse 73. The hip hop Fantasma.
07 Give Up, The Postal Service. Eighties kitsch -- OMD synth pop sung by the Death Cab dude who sounds just like the New Order dude. And with that obscure New Order/Smiths-like lyrics to boot. Pretty awesome, especially "Such Great Heights."
08 Neon Golden, The Notwist. I'm hooked on "Consequence".
09 One World Underground, Where Are You Now?, Metric. Ditto "Combat Rock."
10 You Are Free, Cat Power. I don't usually go for Lilith Fair stuff, Chan's wild child volatility is pretty bracing (and sexy). She's no Indigo Girl, that one.
11 Boy in Da Corner, Dizzee Rascal. Some awesome tracks mixed with annoying tracks, all courtesy of Dizzee's alternatingly awesome machine gun staccato flow ("Brand New Day") then annoying stylings ("Fix Up, Look Sharp").
12 Daily Operation, Gang Starr. Old school Gang Starr -- I'm a fan.

A few runners-up:

Transatlanticism, Death Cab for Cutie.
Elephant, White Stripes
The Black Album, Jay-Z
Ego Tripping at the Gates of Hell [EP], Flaming Lips
The Secret of Elena's Tomb [EP], And You Will Know Us By Trail of Dead

Overrated: Dear Catastrophe Waitress, Belle & Sebastian. Sounds like a bunch of guys whose hands will snap clean off upon lifting a coffee pot. I'm all for fey, foppy music in small doses, but this is like a fucking frilly shirt convention. Maybe I'll give this a few more spins, but right now, it's looking like a fine re-gift item.

Is the Delgados' Hate considered a 2003 release? If so, I'd have it in the top 15 somewhere.

Which New York Times Columnist Are You?

Take the test.

Can't vouch for the test's accuracy. I would've figured that I'm closest to Kristof or maybe Krugman. Instead, I'm Mr. "If They Only Listened to Me Me Me, a Modern Athens Would Have Sprung Up Between the Tigris and the Euphrates."

Just don't be a schmuck and get your ass Safired.

Not on the Lips (Resnais): B+/B (or content-free review buffed up by obsessive linking)

Has Alain Resnais recently become the most influential of the French New Wavers? Putting aside whether Resnais actually should be counted as part of the nouvelle vague (it's been suggested that he should rightfully be grouped with Left Bank intellectual filmmakers like Marker), consider Resnais' influence on some of the most impressive films released in the last four years:

* The mindbending memory leaps in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind prodded some reviewers to recall a similar device used by Resnais in his awesome Je t'aime, Je t'aime.

* The meta-jackoff games in Adaptation has been compared to the self-loathing fictionalizing of John Gielgud in Providence.

* Far From Heaven, Todd Haynes' simulacrum of dated melodramas, was predated by Mélo, Resnais' meta-experiment in adapting an anachronistic melodrama.

* Mulholland Dr.'s dreamlife of the dying conceit was deployed by Resnais twenty five years earlier in (again) Providence.

* More generally, David Lynch, Wong Kar-wai, and Raoul Ruiz, among others, all blur memory/dream and waking states that Resnais perfected in Last Year at Marienbad.

While Resnais' name pops up with increasing regularity in movie reviews, his films have not achieved the canonical status of, say, The Four Hundred Blows or Contempt (Hiroshima, Mon Amour comes closest). And his recent films, despite their popularity in France, are ghettoized here. None of his recent films have received proper distribution (my favorite Resnais, Same Old Song comes closest).
The conventional wisdom among movie buffs is that Alain Resnais has shifted from his early, "difficult" experiments on representing aspects of human memory to a kind of middlebrow frivolity in his late period. In truth, Resnais has remained uncompromising, and Not on the Lips, Resnais' first film in seven years, is in many ways as uncommercial as Marienbad. But instead of Robbe-Grillet, he's adapting an obscure French operetta from the Twenties with such rigid devotion to his unfashionable source that audiences fled en masse at the screening I attended.

Resnais' is one of my all-time favorite filmmakers, but my reaction to Not on the Lips pretty much echoes my response to each movie (I've seen) that Resnais has made since Mon Oncle D'Amerique in 1980 (the aforementioned Same Old Song excepted). Life is a Bed of Roses, Mélo, Smoking/No Smoking and Not on the Lips are all enjoyable, intermittenly funny, tres Français farces. But these uncompromising films are suffocating in their strident adherence to artifice -- Resnais is so faithful to the theatrical blocking, deliberate timing, and stylized acting of old burlesque comedies that his films never shake the feel that they're concepts first. In other words, as funny and involving as these films often are, they're also frustratingly abstract.

Sabine Azéma and Pierre Arditi, Resnais regulars, are among my favorite actors, but they've been called upon to repeatedly mug in an anachronistically theatrical style that end up grating. Here thankfully, Azéma and Arditi, and indeed, the entire cast (which includes the lovely Amèlie) have fun with the broad, stylized acting style -- and a few of the operetta tunes were hilarious (especially Arditi's "Don't Come Here Just to Say Hello" tune) but ultimately, it's another one of Resnais' noble attempts at resurrecting dead art that leaves me admiring from afar. Effervescent but arid, if that makes any sense.

John Kerry is my Friendster!

Finally, the windsurfing poseur approved my Friendster request. John Kerry has been on Friendster for some time, using the service to promote. Friendster gave him perks, like not capping his friends or testimonials (the cap on friends is 500). Now I'll get hit up for money not only over e-mail and snail mail, but on Friendster as well.

Plus side? The guy gave me access to hundreds of thousands of Friendsters.

(Favorite movie: Old School? I watched about half of that thing and laughed maybe four times. Apparently I'm in the distinct minority in not finding this supposed comedy funny. Well, at least the dude's a die-hard Sox fan.)

Tiger Shark (Hawks, 1932): A++++++++

As a learned cineaste and master of the auteurial arts, I have learned to develop many erudite and penetrating theories concerning the art of the auteurs of the cinema. One of my infallible theories is this: the summit any auteur's art is achieved on his or her twelfth film. At this precise nexus of art and experience, something magical happens, and a masterpiece is created. Under this theory, everything before the twelfth film in a filmography can be aptly described as juvenilia -- of academic interest in viewing the development of the auteur's powers and craft, but not as mature works of art. The films made after a dozen efforts may retain an imprimatur of greatness, but most of these can be largely described as refinement and honing of that ineffable twelfth film.

While those of you not nearly as well versed in auteurial study may express skepticism, my theories are, in fact, unassailable. They are arrived at after decades of talmudic examination of various directors' careers, and ladies and sirs, I will kindly suggest here that your auteurist knowledge is but a pittance -- a mere wad of sticky bubblegum -- compared to my vast Great Wall of cinematic knowledge.

Let's apply my theory to two of the great auteurs, Orson Welles and Jean Renoir. It is clear, after careful analyses of their respective oeuvres, that Welles' The Immortal Story, his twelfth feature by my count, is his crowning achievement, the most perfect synthesis of his late baroque style with his goal to cinematically transcribe high literature. While philistines champion Citizen Kane or The Magnificent Ambersons, overlooking Welles' psychologically insecure mise-en-scene and ham-fisted storytelling, Immortal Story's sublime poetics eludes the grasp of their sophomoric aesthetics. The same goes for Renoir, whose otherwise formidable body of work -- including the vaunted Rules of the Game and Grand Illusion -- are largely Ravellian variations on and restatements of the extraordinary La nuit du Carrefour, the first perfect statement of Renoir's cinematic Balzacianism.

This brings me to the American Cinematheque's screening of Howard Hawks' rarely screened twelfth and thirteenth features, The Crowd Roars and Tiger Shark. As I am on record declaring Hawks to be one of the top three directors in my personal pantheon, I was especially eager to see what would undoubtedly be his greatest work. Indeed, immediately after the screening, I was ready to declare The Crowd Roars one of the greatest narrative features of all-time. That is, until some killjoys in the lobby announced that what just screened wasn't the Hawks movie at all, but a film with the same title directed by one Richard Thorpe. A mix-up of prints, it turns out.

Disappointed, I remembered a corollary to the Magic 12 theory, which is this: if the twelfth feature is otherwise unavailable, then an auteur's most perfect film will be his thirteenth. As luck would have it, the next feature, Tiger Shark, is Hawks' thirteenth. As predicted, it was an astonishing statement of Hawks' main themes of group masculinity under strain and the existentialism of work, with Hawks' virtuoso flat visual field and his indescribably moving editing choices, from that tear-inducing cut in the third act from tracking establishing shots to a static two-shot of Robinson and friend placed vertically on the boat (in homage, no doubt, to von Stroheim's shot of same in Queen Kelly), to the anguished close-ups that make the viewer recall not a mere film, but Goya's stark, raw paintings of fallen warriors. Oh, you will find ignorant critics that will cite Red River or Bringing Up Baby or His Girl Friday or Rio Bravo or perhaps The Big Sleep as Hawks' best film. But they are all wrong. Hawks' masterpiece is in fact Tiger Shark. At least until I see The Crowd Roars.

(And if you happened to be an idiot who is still not convinced by my superior reasoning above, Tiger Shark is still worth watching for auteurist and non-auteurist reasons. It's a Hawksian romantic triangle set in San Diego among immigrant tuna fisherman, with Edward G. Robinson playing a flaming Portugese fisherman whose hook-arm renders him undesirable to women. Yes, it is even more bizarre than it sounds.)