A Terrence Malick Viewing Primer

In nearly forty years working as a director, Terrence Malick has released only five films — Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, The New World, and The Tree of Life — and each one has polarized audiences with their contemplative pacing, tangential narration, and often unconventional editing.

Go read some online discussions about Malick’s work and you will see debates with little gray area. Insults fly in all directions. Malick’s detractors call his supporters pretentious, whereas his supporters call the detractors obtuse and shallow, or worse, lazy moviegoers. The fact is, Malick’s films are difficult. They explore deep issues and not in a linear fashion. Malick never holds the audience’s hand. During The Tree of Life’s theatrical run last summer, one theater printed a disclaimer for potential viewers, telling them to read up on the film before purchasing a ticket because no refunds would be given. It is funny to think the theater management would have to warn people about a, “uniquely visionary and deeply philosophical film.” It is as if the theater was telling customers, “If you don’t want to think, avoid this movie.” (The last time I remember a disclaimer for a movie was for The Blair Witch Project, and not for being philosophical, but for the motion sickness some viewers experienced.)

I write all this to say I do not think many of Malick’s detractors are insipid or dense. Granted, there are some who would likely be more at home with a Transformers movie, but I do not think many fans of that series are watching Malick’s pictures. Most of my friends who do not like Malick’s work have no problems with challenging, serious, and ambiguous films. When watching Malick’s work, they could praise the beauty of the cinematography, they could sense that they are about something, but what that something was remained frustratingly out of reach. They simply find Malick’s movies to be too wandering, even impenetrable.

This post then is my attempt to offer a primer on how to understand Malick’s films to people who are curious about them or who were turned off and want to give his works another shot. I make no claims to being a Malick expert — I simply like his films and after each one have felt enriched.

Year-End(ish) Picks, 2011: Favorites in Film, Books, Music, Television

Continuing a tradition from my old blog, here is my 2011 Year-End(ish) List — my list of favorite things seen, heard, and read in 2011. The items on the list may or may not have been released in 2011, I merely experienced them for the first time this past year. The items on the lists are presented in alphabetical order.

Film
2011 was a fairly strong year for new releases. I also finally watched some of the classics that any lover of film is supposed to know.

• 12 Angry Men (d. Lumet, 1957) Deserves to be shown in every high school civics class. Maybe every prospective juror should see it too given how many people have difficulty with the concept of the presumption of innocence.
• 127 Hours (d. Boyle, 2010) Filming the unfilmable. I hugged my arm for an hour afterward.
• Bicycle Thieves (d. De Sica, 1949) Simple and extremely heartfelt. Holds up after several decades.
• Breathless (d. Godard, 1960) Shows its age, but clearly influential. Patricia asking Michel to explain all his idioms is great character development.
• Contagion (d. Soderbergh, 2011) Unsettling to watch in a crowded theater. Awesome female protagonists.
• The Fighter (d. Russell, 2010) Great performances ranging from the sympathetic to the I’d rather use battery acid for lip balm than be related to that person.
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 (d. Yates, 2011) Strong ending to a wonderful series. Splitting the last story in two films made for much better pacing.
• Hoop Dreams (d. James, 1994) Some of the most utterly gripping suspense in a sports movie ever, and it really happened.
• Hugo (d. Scorsese, 2011) Sweet ode to imagination. Worth seeing in 3-D.
• Inside Job (d. Ferguson, 2010) The 2008 economic meltdown clearly told. Be prepared to be infuriated.
• The King’s Speech (d. Hooper, 2010) How a film about a super-rich monarch could be an underdog story is beyond me. This film, however, pulls it off.
• La Dolce Vita (d. Fellini, 1960) Episodic. Slow. Somehow mesmerizing.
• Moneyball (d. Miller, 2011) Awesome movie about lateral and unconventional thinking. Great performance by Brad Pitt. Love how the first stylized action sequence is of David Justice taking a walk. This film is one of the only positive things an A’s fan has going for them in recent years.
• Super 8 (d. Abrams, 2011) Fun nostalgia for movies that were made twenty to thirty years ago. Made me remember riding my bike everywhere with my friends during long summer days.
• The Tree of Life (d. Malick, 2011) One of the most beautiful films ever made. Read my review/reflection here.
• Wings of Desire (d. Wenders, 1987) Deliberately paced story about angels watching humans. Opens the eyes to the image of God in all humans.
• Winter’s Bone (d. Granik, 2010) Terrific use of place. The impoverished Missouri setting is its own character.
• Zodiac (d. Fincher, 2007) Creepy film that emphasizes the detective work of the press and police instead of glorifying the violence of the killer.

Books (Fiction)

• Batman: Knightfall, Part One: Broken Bat (Moench, Dixon, Aparo, Nolan, Breyfogle, Balent, 1993) Fun, enjoyable, and brisk. Surprisingly good character development. Keeps Batman in his own universe — I’m not a big fan of Justice League type stories.
• Cities of the Plain (McCarthy, 1998) One of McCarthy’s most accessible books. Builds wonderfully on the previous two novels of the Border Trilogy and has that sense of impending doom that is classic McCarthy, while also holding out glimmers of hope.
• The Crossing (McCarthy, 1994) The first section of this second book of his Border Trilogy contains some of the strongest writing and pure storytelling McCarthy has ever accomplished. Unfortunately, the next two-thirds of the novel are not nearly as engrossing and the book slows to a near-halt at several places. It thankfully ends on a strong note with one of McCarthy’s most evocative images.
• Red Mars (Robinson, 1992) Part one of a trilogy on the colonization of Mars. Inventive and gives a strong sense of plausibility in its depiction of the science and psychology needed to make a home on a different planet. The second book, Green Mars, unfortunately crumbles under its own weight as it attempts to focus on politics.

This list makes it look like I didn’t read much fiction this past year. I reread a couple of novels — so they are disqualified — and some other novels that were just OK.

Books (Non-Fiction)

• Captive to the Word of God: Engaging the Scriptures for Contemporary Theological Reflection (Volf, 2010) Ruminations on how Christian Scripture and contemporary life intersect. As the historical-critical method of biblical study falls back into the pack with all the other methods of interpretation, it is good to see theological readings have their time in the light as well. And it’s even better that Volf is doing that reading. The essays in this book show creative, yet faithful interactions between the Bible and some of the issues that we face today.
• Introducing the Missional Church: What It Is, Why It Matters, How to Become One (Roxburgh and Boren, 2009) A much easier introduction to the missional church and its theology than the wonderful 1998 tome, Missional Church, edited by Darrell Guder. Roxburgh and Boren offer strong examples in ways that will not tempt readers to miss the forest for the trees. They do the appropriate deconstruction of the Christendom, consumer-driven, and attractional church models, as well as offer a good constructive approach for becoming a missional church, a church that follows God out into the neighborhood. They wisely do not offer a formula and instead offer several reflections and narratives. Admittedly at times, it does feel like the second half of the book is an advertisement for some of their consulting services.
• Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light (Mother Teresa and Kolodiejchuk, 2007) This is the book that created a stir when it came out because it revealed just how deeply vexed Mother Teresa was by doubt and what theologians call, “The Dark Night of the Soul.” Not the easiest read as it feels repetitive, but it remains insightful and inspiring in a very nontraditional way of inspiration. Reading about Mother Teresa as she holds on to what she knows for certain while she doubts just about everything else challenges me since I can give up easily at the first sign of difficulty. I’m very grateful this portrait of a hero of the faith exists. It gives hope to us who find certainty hard to come by.

Television
We don’t have cable and due to Mt. Diablo’s interference with signals, we only get three Spanish-speaking channels. Thus, all our television viewing happens on the internet. I haven’t seen many of the dramatic shows people seem to love, so I’ll have to catch those on DVD in the future. Here are some comedies I like.

• The Colbert Report. Awesome, awesome satire. His recent ribbing of Donald Trump is so cathartic.
• Community. The meta aspect of this show is extremely enjoyable. Even better, the writers never forget characters are always more important than gimmicks.
• The Daily Show. The warm-up to the 2012 election cycle has been terrific.
• Modern Family. Another great ensemble cast. The writers took their time establishing the characters and now it’s a blast to watch them mix up the pairings. The show reminds me of I Love Lucy in that we laugh at the characters and their hijinks, but we love them and the show never feels mean.
• Parks and Recreation. I had written this off after the first few episodes of the first season, but it has really come into its own. A very sweet and silly show.

Songs
My music intake was low this year and while some of my favorite artists put out new albums, none of them really blew me away. Instead of mentioning albums then, I’ll emphasize the songs I liked most in 2011.

• “All My Favorite People,” Over the Rhine. A prayer for my friends who endured an unbelievably difficult year. Given the pattern of loss and pain that has fallen on my loved ones over the past decade or so, I’m beginning to think odd years suck.
• “Blood Bank,” Bon Iver. Simple and beautiful. It seems like my wife plays this just about every day and I don’t mind.
• “The Cave,” Mumford & Sons. I love the folk-roots revival these guys create.
• “Death In His Grave,” John Mark McMillan. This ain’t no, “Jesus is my boyfriend,” praise fluff. McMillan’s new hymn is one of the few contemporary praise songs emphasizing that deep biblical theme of Jesus’ victory over death. Thank God for that victory.
• “Funeral March,” Patrick Cassidy, composer. Perhaps it’s embarrassing to say a piece from a movie trailer is one of my favorite songs of the year. But that film — The Tree of Life — is incredible and this song fits it perfectly. “Funeral March,” is not in the actual film, but it easily could have been. Beautiful and celebrative and mournful.
• “In Your Eyes,” (New Blood Version), Peter Gabriel. Listen to the richness and joy that comes from the orchestral sound. I love how Gabriel continues to rework his classics.
• “Lacrimosa,” Zbigniew Preisner, composer. Another track associated with The Tree of Life. This piece plays during the breathtaking creation sequence. “Lacrimosa,” brings tears to my eyes. I don’t care if you don’t like classical music — it is nearly impossible to deny the beauty of this song and Elzibeta Towarnicka’s soprano. I think I’ve listened to this song more than any other in 2011.
• “Little by Little,” Radiohead. A strong song from the lukewarm album, The King of Limbs. Still, a lukewarm Radiohead album would be a masterpiece for 99% of the bands out there.
• “Longing to Belong,” Eddie Vedder. The cello gives a terrific lift to this song that sets it above the rest from the album, Ukulele Songs. The album as a whole is a mood album — if you’re in a mellow mood, it’s great and if you’re not, it’s not.
• “Midnight Sun,” The Choir. A song a friend turned me on to as he was enduring tragedy and loss. A heartfelt prayer.
• “Solsbury Hill,” (New Blood Version), Peter Gabriel. The orchestra perfectly complements the lyrics expressing liberation and potential.
• “Someone Like You,” Adele. Her voice is unfairly good.

Favorite of All Media, 2011ish

• The Tree of Life

In 2011 Terrence Malick released one of the most splendid pieces of cinematic art I have ever seen. I try not to use so many superlatives, but this film earns them. I have never seen anything like The Tree of Life. It is a film that one must let wash over them, take them on a journey, and yet, the viewer cannot remain passive. The viewer must consider his or her own life, not just the lives of the characters on the screen. I thought of my life growing up as I watched the O’Brien boys navigate childhood and early adolescence. I thought of my relationship with my father. I thought of deaths of family and friends. Most of all, I thought about God. This film is grand, ambitious, and utterly remarkable. After first viewing it, my wife and I went into our backyard and looked up at the stars, talking about the film and all the things it made us remember. Both of us expressed that we found ourselves praying throughout the movie as if we were looking at a religious icon. This is a film that will stay with me for the rest of my life.

Film as Labyrinth and Icon: The Tree of Life

Terrence Malick’s newest film, The Tree of Life, is at once a poem, a prayer, a family drama, and an exploration of humanity, God, and all of creation. It is therefore fitting that the film opens with a quotation from the book of Job — “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation…while the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” (38.4,7) — which, besides being the oldest book of the Bible, is itself a poem, prayer, family drama, and an exploration of humanity, God, and all of creation. This will not be in any way a traditional review because, quite simply, I don’t know how to review what I saw last Friday night. This post has taken me a long time to write. The Tree of Life is one of the most beautifully-photographed and beautifully-written films I have seen. It is challenging and also extremely risky. For large sections of the film, we hear little dialogue aside from some voice-overs in prayerful whispers. These whispers are the only things linking the brief shots of the O’Briens, the central family of the film. There is also a long sequence detailing the creation of the universe that brings to mind 2001: A Space Odyssey. This movie calls people in, but it will not pander. The Tree of Life ushers us into another world, or rather, another way of seeing our world as full of violence and grace, yet it is no summer escapism. It demands that you work and it makes for a wonderful experience.

The film makes these bold statements: all of creation can be told in the story of one family and one family fits into the story of all of creation. In print that sounds audacious and even pretentious, but it is a testament to Malick’s skill that the film does not come across as bombastic. Rather, it deals deeply and sincerely with some of the most difficult questions we ever face — those questions we often are afraid to ask because answers seem so elusive.

“You must pay for everything in this world, one way and another.” True Grit Review

Joel and Ethan Coen’s adaptation of Charles Portis’ novel True Grit paints a beautiful if harsh picture of life on the Arkansas frontier. The film follows Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) as she hires Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges), a deputized gun, to hunt and hopefully kill her father’s murderer, Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin). Cogburn is an infamous and frequently drunk marshal, having shot or killed many of the people he set out to find. This fact actually ingratiates him to Mattie, as she wants nothing less than for Chaney to suffer the same fate as her father. Mattie has intelligence, rhetorical skill, courage, and an unflinching nerve that surprise nearly everyone she meets given that she is only fourteen years old. Chaney is also being hunted by a Texas Ranger, LaBouef (Matt Damon), for murdering a senator back in Texas. The film takes the shape of a quest narrative, and given what we know of quests, we can safely assume that the journey will not be what the characters expected, nor will they return unchanged.

True Grit is an extremely watchable film and incredibly funny. I found myself laughing throughout the movie at the pinpoint dialogue and brilliant characterization of the world’s inhabitants. Damon’s gregarious and cocky LaBouef is so tonally correct I wondered why it took so long for the Coens to put him in one of their movies. The film is textured and surprising, which marks a true accomplishment since the quest is one of the oldest motifs in literature. Brolin does not portray Chaney as some monster, but more like a dangerous child who has never felt appreciated. Bridges embodies every inch of Cogburn’s body. You can nearly smell the booze on his breath. The real surprise of the film, however comes from Steinfeld, who handles the smart and complex dialogue with incredible ease. There are accomplished and well-paid actors and actresses two or three times her age who would sound incredibly dumb trying to deliver these lines. Every character, from the leads, to each supporting role is three-dimensional to such a degree I was reminded of the Coens’ mid-1990’s masterpieces Fargo and The Big Lebowski. In those films each role, including those with only a few seconds’ screen time, were wonderfully quirky without being caricatures. The inhabitants of True Grit are similarly well-developed. It is an exceptional film.

Missing the Mark: American Pastoral and The Corrections

Recently I read two of the most critically-acclaimed American novels of the past fifteen years: Philip Roth’s American Pastoral and Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. (It was actually my second time through The Corrections.) American Pastoral won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 and The Corrections won the National Book Award in 2001. Time listed both books as two of the best English-language novels from 1923-2003. In the fascinating New York Times 2006 survey of prominent writers, critics, and editors that asked, “What is the best work of American Fiction in the past twenty-five years?” Roth had more novels listed than any other writer and American Pastoral was his most-cited.

The similarities between the novels are found in more than their near-universal acclaim, however. Both books deal with the breakdown of the American dream and family, though taking a look at the phenomenon from different angles and time periods. American Pastoral is narrated by Roth’s alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman, who tells the story of Seymour “the Swede” Levov through the early 1940′s to the end of the 20th century, focusing primarily on the 1960′s. Levov is a Jewish-American former high school all-star athlete from Zuckerman’s hometown of Newark, New Jersey. He is tall, handsome, intelligent, and energetic. Levov inherits his father’s glove-making factory, marries a former Miss New Jersey, and embodies the American dream as held by many immigrants. Zuckerman’s fictionalized account of Levov’s life also includes a catastrophic dismantling of that dream. The Corrections follows the Lamberts mostly through the 1990′s, though with some flashbacks for context. The Lamberts are a Midwestern Protestant family in which the value of hard work is paramount. Each of three children — Gary, Chip, and Denise — eventually emigrate from the geographical and cultural locale of their childhoods and stake new lives in the Northeast. Every member of the Lamberts achieves some level of success in their family-lives or careers and suffer frustrating defeats in the same arenas. Both novels show the futility in seeking ultimate meaning from the guiding American myth.

Despite the near-universal acclaim for both works, they left me dissatisfied and I’ve spent months wondering why exactly that is. Make no mistake, Roth and Franzen can write. Roth’s prose, with its nearly page-long sentences, delves thoroughly into the psyche of the Swede. The narrative weaves in between events decades fluidly in ways that are surprisingly successful. Franzen similarly mines his characters’ thoughts and emotions to levels that few authors can achieve without losing sense of direction. I appreciated Franzen’s dark humor more on the second reading. The chapter following the eldest son, Gary, is extremely effective in how Franzen guides us to see everyone conspiring against Gary and slowly realize along with him that he is depressed.

Ultimately, I think that the books are unsatisfying because I do not think they say much new or in new ways. American Pastoral spends most of its time in the 1960′s with its race-riots, counter-culture, and anti-government protests. Has not that period been mined enough in American fiction? Roth adds nothing really new to the conversation. Disillusionment with the self-made mythos expressed itself uniquely in the 1960′s. I think John Updike covered that rather well in his novel Rabbit, Run when he published it in 1960. Distrust of authority emerged in new ways as the youth rebelled against their parents, the government, and the military. Did not films such as The Graduate and MASH address those themes?

Admittedly I have not read much of Roth’s work — The Plot Against America is his only other novel I have read. Many of the reviews of American Pastoral called it Roth’s most compassionate work. If this is Roth expressing compassion, I fear reading him when he is angry or scathing. In the novel, Zuckerman lives as a virtual hermit, spending most of his time writing, and rendered impotent by surgeries to remove prostate cancer. He grew up in awe of the Swede and when he meets him later in life — remarried and with young sons — he finds Levov extremely boring. But when Zuckerman learns at a high school reunion that Levov’s daughter was involved in a bombing and that his life was not as perfect as he tried to let on, Zuckerman undertakes a fictionalized retelling of the Swede’s life. Zuckerman goes to great lengths to detail the downfall of this once universally-admired youth from Newark. By ending the novel with Levov’s marriage in shambles and his only child on the lam, Zuckerman attempts to render the Swede as impotent as he is. The things that the Swede cherishes cannot merely dissolve, they must explode in race riots, extramarital affairs, and bombings. Zuckerman does not even allow one murderous bombing to be enough — he must create three more bombings for the Swede’s daughter Mary to commit. The picture of Levov that readers come away with is one of a sincere, but ultimately naive man, a man who, in Zuckerman’s (or is it Roth’s?) world must have everything taken from him, including his values and beliefs. In the end, we are encouraged to laugh at Levov like his dinner guest in what seems to be a nod to French existentialist literature. But unlike that literature, American Pastoral will not commit to saying that life and humanity’s efforts to improve are absurd. It merely seems to shrug and say, “Check out this idiot.”

Neither American Pastoral nor The Corrections offer another vision of what life is supposed to be like. That is a bit more forgivable in the case of The Corrections since it deals with the 1990′s and it was published in 2001. The 1990′s needed some deconstruction. For American Pastoral to criticize the 1960′s and offer no alternative, to provide no sense of what should have been done otherwise, means it ends with something of a limp thud.

The Corrections ultimately suffers from many of the same problems of American Pastoral. While the narrative gets deep into nearly every aspect of the characters’ lives and minds, it is lacking in empathy. The story remains at a distance and we are invited not so much to see ourselves in these characters’ lives, not to laugh with them, but to laugh at them, to watch them with a sense of superiority that we can see their problems on the horizon before they ever do. We laugh at Chip trying to steal salmon in the grocery store, but mostly because it is so absurd it is hard to imagine ourselves in similar situations. We watch Denise’s competitiveness creep into all areas of her life, including romance, and we see the train derailing well before she ever does, but that inevitability does not make her more empathetic or even tragic. We may know all the details of her life, yet it never feels like we get our hands dirty, it never seems like we are invited to care for her. And in the end, The Corrections has little to say that has not been already said. Are we really shocked to realize that this American myth of hard work leading to monetary success and that money giving us ultimate meaning is false? Are we surprised that the temptation is therefore to numb ourselves with medications — what was once the purview of the local drug dealer is now packaged by big pharma — and that those medications do not solve our deepest problems? Are we caught off guard to learn that the mid-20th Century ideal of the nuclear American family was bound for failure?

For all my dissatisfaction with these novels, they are worth reading for their excellent prose and they are, in my opinion, examples of fascinating exercises in missing the mark — I reread The Corrections because when Time recently put Franzen on its cover and called him a “Great American Novelist,” I was wondering what it was that I missed from his book. I know that my views about both novels are in the minority. I do not mind unlikeable characters, but I think it is necessary for authors to express some empathy for their characters if they expect their readers to connect to them. Richard Russo writes some people who do pretty awful things, and yet we get the sense from his novels that he has true compassion for his characters even if he cannot stand their decisions. Despite liking aspects and large chunks of these novels, I have a hard time being very excited about them because all they seem to offer is critique without any sense of something greater existing.

Waldman on Writing Bore-geously

Ayelet Waldman has a great piece up on The Wall Street Journal about “bore-geous” writing — that is beautiful writing that has nothing to do with a story’s plot.

Though you won’t find it in Webster’s, there’s a word to describe the kind of meticulously constructed writing that bores even its author. A “bore-geous” novel is one that is packed with gorgeous, finely wrought descriptions of places and people, with entire paragraphs extolling the slope of one character’s nose, whole chapters describing another’s perambulations through a city. These novels are often historical or set in foreign lands, their bore-geousness inspired by the author’s anxiety about making an unfamiliar world feel convincing and true. It’s not that the sentences aren’t well-constructed, even lovely. They are. That’s part of the problem. Bore-geousness happens when you are writing beautifully but pointlessly.

Go check it out while it’s still online for free.

An Evening of Paradoxes: Sufjan Stevens at the Paramount Theatre

On October 26, Sufjan Stevens played the second of two shows at Oakland’s Paramount Theatre (setlist here). The setting matched his musical style very well with its elaborate art deco designs and reliefs. Like Stevens’ music, which is thick, layered, and never dull, the inside of the Paramount was busy, too much to take in at once, and yet came together in a strange cohesive whole. It is hard to get my head around the show. As a musician and lyricist, Stevens is at once incredibly sincere and dryly ironic. The challenge in listening to his music and in watching him live is knowing where the irony stops and the sincerity begins, or where the sincerity ends and the irony starts. Or perhaps they inhabit the same space and time. Along with playing along the spectrum of ironic and sincere, the show was at once melodic and dissonant, intimate and distant, welcoming and off-putting, hopeful and terrifying. I distinctly remember in the midst of the show thinking, how am I going to re-enter the rest of the world after this? Experiencing the show was like seeing a film like The Lord of the Rings that is so big, so thorough in its creation of another world that the audience really does feel like it has left its known world for a few hours and is shocked upon reentry when they walk out on the streets and climb back in their cars. It’s taken me a while to even get my thoughts in order to begin to describe what I saw on Tuesday night.

Stevens is touring in support of his recent EP All Delighted People and album The Age of Adz, his first full-length album of new songs since 2005′s Illinois. The Age of Adz is a departure from the sounds and lyrical themes he crafted in his abandoned fifty states project, which brought him his fame. Those familiar with his electronica album Enjoy Your Rabbit or the multimedia and orchestral ode to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, The BQE, will recognize the more dissonant sounds and expansive arrangements. Most of the show consisted of the newer material, which Stevens acknowledged might frustrate some of the fans who wanted to hear his older stuff. Stevens reminds me of artists like Bob Dylan, Radiohead, or even Picasso, who change styles dramatically several times throughout their careers. The joy of being a fan is not so much curling up with the familiarity of their work, but the knowledge that with each new outing, one is going to be surprised and challenged.

“Dreams Feel Real When We’re In Them,” Inception Review

How does one even begin to review a film as complex as Christopher Nolan’s latest work Inception? As my friend Jason Spitzer, who saw it before I did, said, “I could tell you the ending, but it wouldn’t matter.” So what does one say about a film like that? Let us start with the basics. Inception is brilliant. The story is one of the best pieces of science-fiction on film in years, though I hesitate to place it in a single genre. It is utterly original and not a rehash of familiar tropes. It is a piece of confident filmmaking. Inception is not afraid to keep the audience in the dark, but the reveals and payoffs are wonderful. Nolan has written a maze of a script that reveals to members of the audience what they need to know at the exact time they need to know it. It is extremely well-acted by the entire cast. Along with writing difficult yet accessible movies, Nolan has emerged as a top-rate director of action. The visual effects are wonderful, organic to the story, and seamless. Watch for the scene of a city folding in on itself. Inception is quite simply, one of the best movies of the year and Nolan deserves way more accolades than he receives — I for one think he was not adequately congratulated for his work on The Dark Knight.

Inception reminded me of films from ten to fifteen years ago in which the nature of reality and truth were constantly being questioned and played with — films like The Usual Suspects, Dark City, The Truman Show, The Matrix, Fight Club, or Nolan’s own film Memento. I love those movies and welcome their return.

You Can Take the Boy Out of the Small Town…: Bridge of Sighs Review and Reflection

Richard Russo is perhaps our greatest living chronicler of small-town American life. Because I grew up in a small town — in the San Joaquin Valley and not in Russo’s New York, mind you — reading his novel Bridge of Sighs hit too close to home at times. This was a surprisingly emotional book for me to read. I am not in a similar life situation as the novel’s three main characters who are all on the verge of turning sixty and dealing with the physical ailments that emerge later in life, but I related to the story they inhabit. In my experience I have seen many people from larger cities state that small towns are quaint, which they could be using as a romantic compliment, as in small towns hearken back to a simpler, more rewarding time. Or these people could use quaint as a thinly-veiled epithet meaning something like naive or backwards. For those of us who grew up in small towns, however, we know them to be anything but quaint. In Sanger, California, the small farming town of my youth, I saw awe-inspiring compassion as well as ghastly vengeance. In a town where everyone seems to know everyone else, or at least where everyone knows of everyone else, gossip is like wildfire and secrets become valuable commodities. I was witness to life as complex as anything found in the megalopolis of Southern California where I have lived for the past eight years. This post will be something of a review and reflection on Bridge of Sighs because it brought out so many unexpected responses from me.

I first read Russo when I picked up his 2001 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Empire Falls and was immediately blown away by how true it all rang. Russo has the touch to depict with generous clarity small towns and their layered histories. Inhabitants in Russo’s worlds have decades of history together in which forgiveness can be learned and practiced or grudges can fester. He always treats his characters with depth and fairness and he never talks down to them as if their blue-collar lives are somehow less interesting than those who spend their days in universities or metropolitan settings. Russo reminds us that every human being is capable of an utterly rich emotional life and every place where people live together is full of beauty, tragedy, comedy, and guilt.

An Artist In the Best Sense of the Word: Peter Gabriel at the Hollywood Bowl

On May 7, Peter Gabriel brought his New Blood Tour to the Hollywood Bowl. The tour is in support of his latest album Scratch My Back, an album of songs by other artists that Gabriel covers and reinterprets using an orchestra. Some of the songs on the album such as Paul Simon’s “The Boy in the Bubble” and Talking Heads’ “Listening Wind” would seem to be in Gabriel’s wheelhouse given that these three artists were some of the most responsible for bringing African polyrhythms into western rock music, but Gabriel chose to have no drums and little rhythm sections in the orchestra and thus he creates not only unique renditions of these songs, but a unique sound for Gabriel music. The arrangements of the covers range from rich and layered — as in his version of David Bowie’s “Heroes” — to sparse — “The Boy in the Bubble” is nearly reduced to three notes on the piano. In all of this, Gabriel’s voice shines, though he is not afraid to keep in the cracks during times his falsetto gives out, such as on his version of Radiohead’s “Street Spirit (Fade Out).”

So how does a stripped-down orchestral set of songs Gabriel didn’t write translate into a live show? Exquisitely. If there is one way to experience “Scratch My Back,” it is live with the full orchestra and amazing stage show before you. This ain’t Muzak — Gabriel is making something legitimate, following that maxim that good artists copy and great artists steal. Gabriel has stolen the work of other musical acts and has created something uniquely his own, telling a new story through other peoples’ words. This was the second time I’ve seen Gabriel live — the first being the Growing Up Tour of 2003. Gabriel benefits from years of financial success and can afford the latest technology to give a mulit-sensory experience. He puts on performance art pieces, not rock concerts. That is not to say that the music or songs are reduced to some self-serving pretension, but Gabriel uses the visuals with the music to tell a story. One can almost consider his shows concept-concerts. This differs from say, U2, who also use technology to engage the senses at their shows, but usually the visuals are to enhance the songs themselves; the focus there is never taken off the music.

Gabriel, who has been making music for decades does not strike me as the type of artist who would participate in a retrospective, greatest-hits, give-me-the-applause-one-last-time-as-I-phone-it-in type of show that some artists who have been around as long as he has seem content to do. Instead, he always seems to push himself, whether it is creating a dissonant version “In Your Eyes” as he did on the Growing Up Tour, or taking a new direction and holding off on his strengths of rhythm in favor of strings, brass, and woodwinds.