Post-9/11 on the Big Screen

After years of hearing the buzz from nearly ever film website and podcast on my daily rotation, I decided to watch Margaret during the week of the latest 9/11 anniversary.  The film was actually shot years ago (so long ago that they almost - almost - get away with casting Anna Paquin as a high school student ... but honestly, when I saw the first shot of her in the classroom, all I could think of was the running joke in the recent 21 Jump Street reboot that 20-something guys look nothing like teenagers).  Yet, after a series of post-production lawsuits spurred by studio meddling with the final cut, the release date shifted from somewhere in 2006 to 2011.  The battle over editing calls to mind Terry Gilliam's epic struggle with his studio over Brazil, and while it's too early to tell if Margaret deserves that top shelf level of comparison, I will say it's among the best films I've seen over the past few years, easily.

I'm going to pass on posting a trailer to encourage going in blind.  Any clip you might see in advance is likely to give you the wrong impression of what this film is.  On that note, what follows is mostly spoiler-free except in the vaguest of terms.

Inside the Wall, Vol. 3 (9.23.12)

The back half of my summer involved a lot more time in the office than I'd prefer, hence the lack of any posts since early July (aside from a short thought experiment proposing concept albums that ought to be made into feature-length films).  So now I have a few months worth of culture to summarize.  This post comes back-to-back with a longer write-up of the stunning, red-headed stepchild of a film called Margaret and other "Post-9/11" films I highly recommend, so I'll be brief:

Starting with music, a new collaboration between David Byrne and St. Vincent called Love This Giant is reliably solid and underlines nicely the direct influence that Talking Heads had on the latter.  I will be seeing the two perform together next weekend, so the real question will be whether the Brooklyn newbie can match the legend's considerable stage presence (or, like the time I saw David Bowie tour with Nine Inch Nails, whether all the glam rock trappings that Trent Reznor adopted from the master will look flimsy by comparison). 

  

"So ya' thought ya' might like to go to the show ..."

I'm a big fan of the concept album. Maybe it has to do with the fact that my parents subjected me to a  constant rotating loop of movie soundtracks growing up -- Jesus Christ Superstar, Saturday Night Fever and (for the holidays), Star Wars - Christmas In The Stars: Star Wars Christmas Album ... which does exist:

Anyways, because of (maybe in spite of) that exposure, it makes a lot of sense to me to consider an album as (essentially) a novel with a beat -- and I mean "a novel" and not "a thematically unified short story collection."  Plenty of great albums fit into the latter category, but my richest musical experiences tend to come from the former.  Discovering The Wall during high school was a real benchmark in my early musical explorations (and not just because The Wall speaks directly to disaffected youth seeking their identity in the face of soul-crushing adulthood).  In fact, I can probably say that my list of favorite albums from any given time of my life has at least a couple concept albums in the top 5 (if not at the #1 slot).

Inside the Wall, Vol. 2 (7.1.12)

Here at the half-point for 2012, I'm ready to add Passion Pit's performance of "Sleepyhead" at the Governor's Ball to the short list of "best live performances of the year."  It doesn't hurt that their visually arresting but often lackluster performance up to that point in the show had drained much of the energy of their studio cuts.  It's hard to blame front man Michael Angelakos for cutting much of the falsetto intensity from his vocals; that kind of mania has to be impossible to maintain over an entire show.  Still, it's the most striking feature on Passion Pit's otherwise standard-fair synth pop style that put them above tepidly enjoyable bands like Chromeo, who took the stage shortly before Passion Pit but generated barely half of their audience enthusiasm.

Coloring Outside the Franchise

(This is a spoiler heavy discussion, particularly with regard to Super 8, Cloverfield, (um) St. Elsewhere and Prometheus. You've been warned.)

There was a moment as I was watching Super 8 -- an enjoyable enough homage to Spielberg-style sci-fi adventures from the 1980s -- that I thought maybe J.J. Abrams had something up his sleeve, something that would have blown my mind if it was true.  "Did Abrams make a Cloverfield prequel without telling anyone?!?"  In today's age of a thousand websites devoted to dissecting the minutiae of every movie still, every comment by the director (or star, co-star or set caterer), every viral campaign launched (whether real or imaginary), could it be that Abrams slipped one past the goal keepers???  The sheer audacity of the idea excited me far more than the otherwise forgettable movie itself.

Inside the Wall, Vol. 1 (6.10.12)

(That name is tentative, as is the format.  Basically, I'm going to try to post a semi-weekly round-up of what I'm checking out between the larger posts. )

It's been a solid summer so far across the board in entertainment.

Starting with music, Beach House put out a worthy follow-up to Teen Dream, which may have been my favorite album of 2010.

 
The new album Bloom doesn't measure up yet to that instant classic, but it's a solid offering that I expect I'll come to appreciate more with time.

Does Comedy Have To Be Funny? (part 2 of 2)

In the first part of this post (which it feels like I wrote forever ago), I ended with the question whether a "comedy" can be successful when the story takes precedence over the laughs. The question was inspired generally by my love of the so-called "anti-sitcom" Community and specifically by an epic (and private) rant by (anti-)cast member Chevy Chase.  Here's a choice quote:

You've got two choices, one is storyline, the other is - you know, like everyone gives a [bleep] about the [bleep] story when they don't even know who the [bleep] characters are - or there is make people laugh.

Indeed, who does give a [bleep] about the story?

In the many weeks since that last post, both Community and Parks and Recreation seemed to embrace that question directly and forcefully, and in very different ways.