Eyes: '08 Edition

Personal favorites from the cinema of 2008. Kind of in a descending order though only slightly...

Paranoid Park (dir. by Gus Van Sant) "Best Film of the Year"

A cinematic poem to innocence and the loss of. A hyper-culmination of the style developed and explored in Van Sant's self-proclaimed "death trilogy" (Gerry, Elephant, Last Days), Paranoid is much more kinetic than his previous three films and benefits heavily from an emotive soundtrack and beautifully steady visuals. These images float onscreen and possess a lyricism sorely lacking in today's cinema of "realism."

Best in Realism

Rachel Getting Married (dir. by Jonathon Demme)
This film depicted life as both euphoric and tragic (as opposed to the one-sided Synecdoche, New York which seemed unfairly obsessed with the latter). Although Anne Hathaway recieved most of the attention for this film (deservingly), its Bill Irwin's performance as the eager yet helpless head of the family that I found the most heartbreaking. The scene in the kitchen, packing the dishwasher is simultaenously the emotional peak and nadir of the film. Witness the American family trying to be whole once more in the aftermath of divorce, family tragedy, drug addiction and general disfunction. With Tunde Adebimpe from TV on the Radio!

Happy-Go-Lucky (dir. and written by Mike Leigh)
Another great realist film that follows the blissfully positive Poppy, an elementary school teacher in London, as she attempts to hold on to her self-prescribed naivete in the face of psychotic driving instructors, child-abuse and the homeless. Beautiful in its highs as well as lows.

Best in Vampires

Let the Right One In (dir. by Tomas Alfredson)
What a strange little film. A beautiful story of adolescence and young love accented with scenes of intense horror and violence. The ending is one of the most perversely satisfying endings of any film I've seen in a long while.

Best of Hollywood

Milk (dir. by Gus Van Sant)
Gus Van Sant returns to the populist cinema of Hollywood to make a movie about the political life and death of a gay politician in San Francisco. What a guy. Like Elephant and Last Days, most of the audience knows how Milk ends but Sean Penn and Josh Brolin's performances doubled with Van Sant's visual poetry elevates the script above its trappings as a standard biopic. A bar raid shot from outside with a gradual zooming single take not only captures the hysteria better than a handheld, choppily-edited sequence would but also shows the thought put in to even the smallest of details.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (dir. by David Fincher)
Forrest Gump makes me cry. I don't think its a coincidence that Button also wrecked me. I mean REALLY wrecked me. Good thing I saw this alone because it was embarrassing. I can't even remember the last I was this emotionally devastated by a picture. A subdued love story (no grand emotional peaks or valleys) was boring to many but I found it quietly beautiful.

Iron Man (dir. by Jon Favreau)
I saw this film on opening night in packed Paris theater and it was one of my proudest moment as an American abroad. No one does spectacle like Hollywood. And no one does snark and charm like Robert Downey Jr. U S A!!! U S A!!! U S A!!!

Forgetting Sarah Marshall (dir. by Nicolas Stoller)
The funniest movie I saw all year. Its taken me a while to warm up to Jason Segel (I found him annoyingly whiny and pathetic on Freaks and Geeks [perhaps it just hit a little too close to home?]) but he was great in this (though still pretty pathetic). I'm working my way through How I Met Your Mother currently and find him hilarious there, as well. Wheelz seems disgusted by the idea that Segel is a "star" but I'm happy see his average mug on billboards across town. Nice counterpoint to all the Clive Owen posters.

Best de l'Amour

Wall-E (dir. by Andrew Stanton)
A beautifully felt picture that glued a stunned smile to my face for the majority of its runtime. The Hello, Dolly touches were particularly affecting. And that ballet in space was quite magical. Though it deserved a better third act, the perfection of the take-off made forgivable the stilted landing.

Slumdog Millionaire (dir. by Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan)
The "Its His Destiny" answer at the end made me scoff but it was a fun ride. Danny Boyle's cool.

Best in Joints

Pineapple Express (dir. by David Gordon Green)
Has gotten better with each repeat viewing. More Undertow than George Washington as far as Green goes but that's not a slight. Tim Orr's gorgeous cinematography floats through scenes of awkardly realistic violence until the end where Seth Rogen is fucking flying around the warehouse. Little touches like the young overweight Hispanic girl in a swimsuit staring at James Franco crying into a sandwich and the weightlifting neighbor of Rogen's girlfriend show that Green still has an eye for the beautiful oddities of life. The walking through the forest interlude stands as the most poetic sequence in the film.

Smiley Face (dir. by Greg Araki)
A strange and hilarious picture that would surely benefit from a good joint. While its still good sober the unspeakably bad cinematography tires the eyes and the mind. Anna Farris continues to impress, throwing herself into these silly roles with such reckless abandon.

Best in Comebacks

JCVD (dir. by Mabrouk El Mechri)
Jean-Claude is incredible in this movie and its a shame it didn't get as much attention as the other comeback role this year. But this isn't so much a comeback as a realization of the skills that Van Damme has. He's funny, sad and beaten by the end of the film and vulnerable in a way no other star was this year, except maybe ...

The Wrestler (dir. by Darren Aranofsky)
A nice piece of realist filmmaking that shows Aranofsky roping in his style in order to let Mickey Rourke dominate the screen. He goes out on top with the only family that stands by him - his fans. The last shot of this movie was one of the most beautiful and heartbreaking endings of any film this year (though JCVD's was pretty devastating also). We leave Rourke soaring through the air, knowing full well he's falling just as much as flying.

I need to work on being more concise. Next time.

808s & Heartbreak: Breakin' the Blues!

With Kanye's most recent re-imagining of the VH1 Storytellers format, here's a review of what i believe to be his masterpiece, 808s & Heartbreak...

Beeps and blips bounce back and forth over a sparse drum beat created by the generally reviled Roland TR-808 drum machine. Sampled vocals create a mournful choir and the occasional chord on piano drops. The light among this desolate arrangement? The melodies of auto-tuned Kanye West. A question arises - the same one that came to mind when I heard Charlie Kaufman would be directing a feature film of his own - why?

It all sounds too terrible to be true. A loudmouthed, arrogant popstar lamenting the life he's built for himself full of money, women and sports cars? 808s & Heartbreak would be worthy of contempt were it not so beautifully contradictory and simply strange. You get the sense that Mr. West is really trying something here. Trying to write a proper pop song. Trying to excise the pain of losing a fiancé (she left him) and a mother (to a botched surgery) in the same year.

Above all, Mr. West is coping with this loss using his music, hoping for some sort of catharsis. Each song has all the immediacy we've come to know from Kanye (the man's first single was sung while his jaw was wired shut after a car accident) with little reflection. This is both a strength and a weakness. On one hand it makes the album incredibly contradictory. Sometimes on the same song - "Heartless" laments the loss of a girl, while also bragging "you'll never find nobody better than me." But, in a way, its an honest snapshot of the conflicted, unfiltered emotions one experiences after a break-up. Kanye's not thinking straight and neither are his songs as they bounce through his doubts ("Love Lockdown"), the career he chose ("Amazing"), his regrets ("Street Lights"), and - most underrepresented on this album - his cool (the transcendent "Paranoid").



Then there's the formal elements, most specifically the auto-tune. The man can't sing. But in this day and age why should that stop him? His use of auto-tune I find most effective in his live performances, where the rawness of his voice often overpowers the electronic vibrato of the correction tool. Its not always the most aesthetically pleasing but its real in a way that is absent from most pop. The 808 drum machine is known as a punchline in the music industry for sounding unapologetically fake. It was introduced to Kanye by composer / producer / songwriter Jon Brion (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Fiona Apple's When The Pawn..., Meaningless) who co-produced most of Kanye's sophomore effort Late Registration. Brion's love of orchestral strings appears to have also influenced Kanye (see "Robocop" on Storytellers below). The true beauty of 808s comes from the fact that Mr. West uses these tried and despised tools to create something wholly new and interesting. And the album ends up sounding like a robot discovering its humanity.

By "Coldest Winter" Kanye proves himself to be just as big as he boasts he is (or at least on his way), with a heart bigger than any of the written-by-committee trash found on most Top 20 radio. Its an album of awkwardness, ambition and honesty that is extremely refreshing coming from an artist who could just as easily keep shilling out more of the same with great returns. I didn't hear anything else in 2008 that featured an artist challenging himself and pushing himself to the edge of his limitations as much as 808s & Heartbreak did for Kanye. One hopes that once he overcomes this bout of self-pity and grief, this ambition will manifest itself in an even greater way. 808s deserves applause for its intentions and a nod for its achievements. Here's to the self-proclaimed Elvis of our day.

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(note: please delete all versions of the bonus track found at the end of the album as it is pretty lame. you'll be doing yourself and Yeezy a favor.)

Altman And Anderson

i'm not fond of multiple character storyarcs that intertwine only fleetingly. i guess i like the idea of it. expanding on supporting characters giving them the fullness they deserve as human beings. but its just been abused as of late with the likes of Babel and Crash. though some of the best examples of this device come from Altman and Anderson. three standouts for me feature their characters being connected by increasingly more surreal events. the assassination of a country star in Nashville, earthquake in Short Cuts, frog rain in Magnolia (this really is the absurdist end of the 'genre'). after those three is there really much else to be mined from this overly realist conceit?

The Curious Case of Me Bawling in Benjamin Button

From multiple sources of mine (i refuse to name names), i was under the impression that Benjamin Button was an overlong, mediocre turd of a movie. But i wanted to like it for a handful of reasons (my affinity for sweeping romances, David Fincher, Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett and Forrest Gump - which, admittedly, this film resembles in a number of cases). Ok, i'll name names: Roger Ebert is completely dismissive (he doesn't even mention Cate Blanchett, let alone anything beyond the concept). He misses the point, however. The moment where everything fell in to place for me i will retell right here, for Mr. Ebert's sake.

Benjamin, at age 7, living in a retirement home because he resembles a geriatric, explains his reverse-aging to a fellow resident. In reflecting back on the conversation he doesn't remember the woman's name but he does recall she taught him how to play piano. After he tells her of his condition she says she pities him, "to have to see everyone you love, die before you. That would be an awful responsibility." I sit in the theater and think to myself, 'that is terrible.' Benjamin had never thought about it this way. She sees his thoughtful stare, "Benjamin ... we're meant to lose the people we love. How else would we know how important they are to us?" I was sad for Benjamin having to go through life the way he does. But in a split second i realized how unfairly appropriate this is. I thought about losing my grandmother last year, and my 20-year-old cousin the year before that. That pain all rushed back as the next scene announced the passing of that dear old woman who taught Benjamin to play piano. They didn't show her in the coffin in the cemetery. Because she wasn't in there. Aaron was. Gramma Smoot was. And i realized that i felt more connected to the plight of that hideous CGI-ed geriatric Brad Pitt than any other character i had seen on screen in many a long while. I wept several times during the movie. Bawled like a helpless infant. I haven't been moved to tears like that by a film in a long while either. Good thing i saw it by myself. It was pretty goddamn embarrassing.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button wanders through life, rarely peaking with the dramatic intensity we've become accustomed to in epic romances (no yelling matches between lovers ending in ecstatic sex - no yelling of any kind really). Its understated tone made the simplistic love story all the more devastating for me. Instead of leaving my wife and child for fear that i will end up burdening them as i regress in age, i'll probably just get divorced like most. And i'll be left sending postcards to my daughter from the faraway lands that i selfishly pursue. I only hope, after all that, i can have someone there for me at the end. Whether its an old love or my daughter. Going out the same way i came in: surrounded by love. Oh, did i mention this movie is kind of corny sometimes too? That may be affecting my writing about it ... maybe.

Repost from Facebook (Ears: '08 Edition)

Seeing as McHip gave a pretty thorough musical round up for this year (save for some Deerhunter love), I'll stick to my personal favorites. Starting at the top:

1. 808s and Heartbreak by Kanye West. a.k.a. "My Favorite Album"

If you get past the first two sluggish - but still strong - tracks, the middle portion of 808s is quite beautiful. Filled with all the contradictions one feels directly after a break up (sometimes within the same song - "Love Lockdown"), Mr. West stumbles through the immediate aftermath with very little reflection or perspective. Its a flawed and simple record that despite the use of the generally reviled Auto-Tune and phony sounding drum machine, the Roland TR-808, is one the most honest and unique albums to come out this year.

Favorite Moment: The background vocals falling into the mix moments before the second chorus kicks in on "Street Lights."

2. Dear Science, by T.V. on the Radio. a.k.a. "Best Album"

The best band of the decade? I don't know. They're damn good though. From the opening "bop bop"'s of "Halfway Home" to the rapping on "Dancing Choose" to the ballad of "Family Tree" and Kyp Malone's falsetto on "Crying", these guys are incredible doing anything. Lead singer Tunde Adebimpe was even in Jonathon Demme's Rachel Getting Married! That's talent!

Favorite Moment: The "bop"-ing.

3. Fate by Dr. Dog. a.k.a. "Best Throwback Album"

There's some Beatles and some Beach Boys and I guess some Van Morrison, too, in these guys. Early R&B maybe? Psychedelic Folk-Pop? Anyways. I listened to this a lot so on here it goes.

Favorite Moment: From "Army of Ancients": I don't want to wake up / I don't want to move / I'll skip the sermon / and stick to the booze / I'M SORRY!

4. Stay Positive by The Hold Steady. a.k.a. "Best Drunk-Rock Album"

A summer album to beat all others. Reminds me of driving to San Jose with friends, drinking, smoking and that junkie girl I fell in love with. ... wait, that last memory's not mine ... HA! *Cue Slash-like solo*

Favorite Moment: The Joe Strummer reference on "Constructive Summer"

5. Some Racing, Some Stopping by Headlights. a.k.a. "Best Nice Indie-Pop Album"

Simple, cute, pop. Probably considered boring by most. One of four albums i had on my mp3 player after my Polish brothers stole my shit on spring break. Woohoo!

Favorite Moment: "Market Girl"

Though i could think of about a dozen "better" albums these are the ones I've most enjoyed and become most familiar with over the past year. Throwing some love towards tracks who's albums i'm less familiar with ...

Best Use of Falsetto

• "Sleepyhead" by Passion Pit
  Anxiously awaiting an LP.


• "Highly Suspicious" by My Morning Jacket
  Why this was not the biggest dance track of the year will always remain a mystery to me.


• "Flume" by Bon Iver
  His momma loves him, as does mine.

Best Tracks to Dance/Shake Uncontrollably To

• "Teen Creeps" by No Age
  Best moshpit i've ever experienced at an LA concert.


• "Brainwave" by Nomo
  Weird blips and beeps make groove time fun!

Indie-ness

• "Sentimental Heart" by She & Him
  Aaawww. I (Heart) Zooey Deschanel


• "Acid Tongue" by Jenny Lewis
  Cute and sad. With nice backing vocals.


• "Winter" by The Dodos
  "My friends they understand me better but they don't whisper 'good night' / I want a lover and a sister but we know that's not right". This whole album is actually really good. Here's a live performance of "Fools."

Marvelous Bittersweet Beauties

• "The Trees Were Mistaken" by Andrew Bird
  The more Bird collaborates with Dosh the better.


• "In The New Year" by The Walkmen
  Despite his Dylan-lite stylings this is quite the optimistic heartbreaker. '09, "It's gonna be a good year". Let's all cross our fingers.

Why 2009 Will Undoubtedly Be A GREAT Year for Music
Tracks that have leaked from upcoming releases. These have made my ears and heart all warm and fuzzy during this depressingly cold (by SoCal standards) closing '08 months.

• "Not a Robot, But a Ghost" and "Anonanimal" by Andrew Bird
  Two high points (with the obvious Dosh influence) in an otherwise disappointing yet pleasant new album. I wanted a vicious machine but got instead a Noble Beast. But its still Andrew Bird so i like it.


• "Daylight" and "Good Ol' Fashioned Nightmare" by Matt and Kim
  I'm wondering what Dan and Philly crew think of these. Much more poppy. And i love pop. So i am happy. Already my soundtrack to summer '09.


• "Two Weeks" by Grizzly Bear
  From a performance on Letterman. Amazing, direct pop. It makes me bounce!


• "My Girls" and "Brothersport" by Animal Collective
  My favorite thing about Animal Collective is when they cut through silly nonsense about "femurs sitting in my cherry dream" ("Grass") and "birthin" ("Fireworks") and instead express simple beautiful sentiments like "Would you like to see me often / though you don't need to see me often?" ("Grass") and "You're only what i see sometimes" ("Fireworks"). "My Girls" is currently my favorite track of '09 with the bouncing refrain "I don't mean / to seem like i care about material things / like the social stats / i just want / four walls and adobe slabs / for my girls."

Blah, blah, blah. If you've gotten this far in the note ... you really need some direction in your life.

Missing You,
-daren

Ron and Rachel Getting Married

From Drop Box

"If you like these people i'm sure you wouldn't mind watching them for two hours. But me ... i was bored as shit."
-Prof. Ron F., writer of Transformers: The Movie (1986) and 10 episodes of "Chico and the Man", on Rachel Getting Married

Being prone to hyperbole (but also lacking a general understanding of what i actually mean when i say things) i like claiming - in my defense of such movies like Paranoid Park and The New World- that "I like boring movies." This isn't necessarily true. (Though i must divulge i stole this admission from an interview with Abbias Kiourastami i once saw. Hey, i'm unoriginal, too!) I don't find these films boring. My mind wanders in them but its usually a very productive wandering motivated by whats happening on screen. Its an active participation in the film. Hooray for movies!

Ron is great guy. He's capable of being quite funny, in spite of his sitcom-y punchline-heavy style of teaching. I appreciate him as an old soul of TV's (and Hollywood's) past. He's a bit sexist ("what do you tell a woman with two black eyes? (beat) Nothing! You already told her twice! Haha! ... I'm sorry. That's inappropriate.") I almost wish i would have taken him freshman year when his opening expletive chant ("Everybody say it together ... Shit! Piss! Fuck! Ass! Damn!") would've have been seen as wildly inappropriate and incredibly freeing. "College Rules!" i would've told my wide-eyed blythian self. Senior year Sprawls simply lets out a slight chuckle. "Oh, Ron," i smile politely, "your attempts at irreverence and hipness are amusing."

Ron didn't like any of the characters in Rachel Getting Married. And therefore, he didn't like the film. He's a strong believer in the likable protagonists of classical Hollywood movies, as seen in the films he screened in class: Cary Grant in North by Northwest, Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window, Jack Lemmon in The Apartment, Roy Scheider in Jaws. Anne Hathaway plays one of the most abrasive characters of the 21st century. Selfish, narcissistic, embarrassing. She induces many a cringe. Its a sad performance. I saw myself in her on a couple of occasions, making the cringe all the more unbearable. She's a very weak, very human character.

But its her father, played by Bill Irwin, who has the most amiable role in the film. His struggles to keep the family together, with a hopeful smile, are hard fought and often heartbreaking. Irwin's character (and his performance) is a bright light in the gloomy family and my favorite part of the movie.

Unlikable characters do not equal a bad film. They're all very flawed and real. The lows they experience (most of them self-inflicted) are low and the highs (brought about by the whole of the family) are grand. And i didn't see a better movie depicting the dichotomy of life all last year. Modern American life in a two hour block. Featuring the lead singer of TV on the Radio!

Here is music.

I've set up a Best of '08 playlist on my iTunes. Its partly my own, partly a collection from different best of lists i've seen (mainly those that have been posted on Stereogum). I've been floating through it on random recently. I do this in order to make sure that i'm aware of this music supposedly of "my generation." And because most of its pretty good. And i think there is some desire to be "hip" in there, as well.

It's kind of silly. I usually end up falling back on my favorites anyways. And those are as follows (from top to bottom):

Kanye West...808s & Heartbreak
TV on the Radio...Dear Science,

Dr. Dog...Fate
The Hold Steady...Stay Positive
My Morning Jacket...Evil Urges

Headlights...Some Racing, Some Stopping

There have been others i've liked and admired but these are the ones i've become the most involved with over the past year. I can think of at least a dozen albums that are better than the above but ... fuck it. It's my list. Not Pitchfork's.

Kanye explanation on the way...