False Familiarity Breeds Mistaken Contempt--Watching British Film

      As I have very probably mentioned here before, Albert Finney is one of my favorite actors, and I've always been impressed with his uncharacteristically understated performance as a failed English schoolmaster with an unfaithful wife in Mike Figgis's The Browning Version, based on the Terrance Rattigan play. So I was very surprised to discover only recently that the movie was in fact not the first film version of the play; Michael Redgrave played the Finney role in a 1951 version directed by Anthony Asquith. Redgrave, too, proved excellent in the role of the anti-Mr. Chips, and now I can't decide which version I prefer; they differ only slightly in interpretation, but the differences--especially in the treatment of the unfaithful wife--seem significant.
      Anyway, both versions have got me thinking about British actors and British films, and have reinforced a belief of mine that there are some British dramas that can really only be fully appreciated through the filter of that peculiar British aesthetic of self-repressed emotion and the famous stiff upper lip.
      I’ve noticed over the years that many American viewers of films such as The Browning Version or Remains of the Day or The Winslow Boy chafe with impatience—why doesn’t he/she just tell her/him how he feels? Why don’t they act on what they’re obviously feeling? This American frustration with reticence and reserve will often damn the element of a certain type of British film that is in fact the very primum mobile of the drama—this self-repression is the very core around which The Browning Version and Remains of the Day revolve, for example.
      I have a half-baked theory about this. Because of our shared language and a great deal of shared heritage, American viewers might be lulled into the notion that we also share our culture with Britain. Although Britain’s cultural assumptions are probably closer to America’s than those of most other countries, there are many large discrepancies between the two, and these gaps (and a viewer’s familiarity with or ignorance of them) color our experience of British art, in this case, film.
      Of course this is true of other cultures as well, but if I’m watching a Romanian film, for example, my lack of familiarity with the language and the culture have predisposed me to, as much as possible, view the film around my own cultural lens rather than through it. Knowing that I'm on foreign ground going in helps make me more empathetic to what the filmmakers are trying to do visually and dramatically. But with a British film, my supposed familiarity (which might often prove to be false) can easily breed contempt.

Being and Nothingness, or "Well, What Now?"

      OK, granted, when I initiated the query shown below, I was applying my search criterium to a very narrow set of web pages. But the results were still a bit depressing in their fruitlessness.

"E" is for "Eclectic"

      I've been walking through my iPod's playlist letter by letter, and although "E" is the most common letter in the English language, it's not necessarily the most common first letter of song titles, at least according to my small sampling. Of the 3,401 songs currently loaded on my iPod, 85 of them start with the letter "E"--less than 2.5% of the total (if all 26 letters were represented equally, "E" should begin about 3.8% of the song titles). But those 85 songs seem to represent a little bit of everything from everyone in my music collection, including 16 songs that begin with the words, "Everything" or "Everyone." That makes "eclectic" today's watchword, and I've decided to feature the most disparate collection of "E" songs that I can concoct, a truly jarring playlist of great--but incongruous--music.

1. "Easter Parade" by The Blue Nile--Mellow synth-pop Glaswegians The Blue Nile may not be prolific (they've produced only four albums in their 20+ years as a band), but what they lack in quantity they make up for in quality (or clichés to that effect). Their sweet, soothing melodies and languorous rhythms are simple enough for easy access, but reward repeated listenings with surprising nuance. In "Easter Parade," lead singer Paul Buchanan talk-sings his way through a nostalgic picture-poem, apparently inspired by a found photograph.
2. "Eat Steak" by The Reverend Horton Heat--This song isn't the best example of the Rev's manic "psychobilly" brand of raucous, adrenaline-fueled rockabilly, but it definitely reflects their unapologetically irreverent sense of humor. Although Boston Market restaurant briefly made "Eat Steak" their theme song, they carefully left out the lines, "Look at all the cows in the slaughterhouse yard, gotta hit 'em in the head, gotta hit 'em real hard; first you gotta clean it then the butcher cuts it up, throws it on a scale, throws an eyeball in a cup." It's like when Levi's or whoever used a ruthlessly bowdlerized version of CCR's anti-establishment anthem "Fortunate Son" to sell jeans. Further proof that irony is, in fact, alive and well.
3. "Electra Made Me Blind" by Everclear--I can never recommend Everclear without equivocation; they miss as often as they hit for me. "Electra" is definitely one of the "hits," though. They're also one of those bands whose music suffers at moderate volumes--you've got to PLAY THEM LOUD. The straight-up jangle and holler of "Electra" is no exception and is about as far from the sweet pop of "Easter Parade" and the cornpone country of "Eat Steak" as you can get.
4. "Everything is Everything" by Lauryn Hill--There's not one but three songs that start with "E" on Hill's outstanding "The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill," but "Everything is Everything" is clearly the best. Even the video is cool, as all of New York City becomes a giant disc on her DJ's scratch platter, with Empire State as the spindle. My paper-thin collection of hip-hop may be hopelessly whitebread and devoid of gangsta cred, but an appreciation for Lauryn Hill requires no explanation or apology.
5. "Effect and Cause" by The White Stripes--A high hat, a snare, a tambourine, and an acoustic guitar are all The White Stripes need to flesh out this witty three-chord romp about getting the wrong end of the stick. I don't really need 85 songs from dozens of different bands to put together an eclectic playlist--I could just grab a handful of White Stripes tunes at random and likely come away with some hard rock, some blues, a little country or bluegrass, or some unclassifiable business featuring Jack on ukelele.
6. "The Electric Version" by The New Pornographers--I have to confess that the only reason I originally sought out The New Pornographers when I heard about their debut album "Mass Romantic" was because I knew that Neko Case was part of the ensemble that formed from various, mostly Canadian pop and rock outfits (ahhhh, Neko). It quickly became clear that TNP were a very different kettle of fish from the sort of things that Neko does on her own, but when they come together periodically from their other musical projects, the impressive collection of talent, led by main songwriter Carl Newman, produces track after track of infectious, hooky power-pop tunes that put 98% of the crap in commercial radio's heavy rotation to shame. If "The Electric Version" doesn't make your head start bobbing, then there's just no bob in you.
7. "Evidence" by Susan Tedeschi--My introduction to the straight-from-the-diaphragm electric blues sound of Susan Tedeschi came via my favorite radio station, WYEP in Pittsburgh, who featured her second album "Just Won't Burn" when it came out in '98. I loved the songs, but I truly fell in love with Tedeschi when I bought the album for myself and saw the picture on the cover. It wasn't so much that she was totally hot (she is). What really won my heart was the revelation that her guitar was festooned with Colorforms™ stickers (remember Colorforms?), including Eeyore and Tigger, my personal spirit guides, yin and yang. "Evidence" comes off her most recent album "Hope and Desire," and features her in full Koko Taylor voice, covering a great soul song by George Jackson and Raymond Moore. I swear it was the Colorforms. Not the hotness.
8. "Prelude in E" by Frédéric Chopin, performed by Vladimir Ashkenazy--OK, this one is a bit of a cheat because the "E" doesn't come first, but I figured that the "E" is essential enough to the work to count. I enjoy classical music and have quite a few classical CD's, but for whatever reason, only a few have made it to my iPod, including Chopin's exercise in creating short piano preludes in every key of the musical scale. Maybe I have a short attention span, or maybe Chopin tapped into something elemental with these eclectic fragments. Whatever the appeal, I never tire of them. Even if you think you don't know anything about classical music, you'd likely recognize at least three or four of the preludes if you heard them--including the "Prelude in E"--that's how much popularity and presence they've maintained.

Curmudgeon's Corner (6)--Netflix Just Doesn't Understand Me

      First off, you should know that Smokey Burner, the Broken Stove's resident curmudgeon, loves Netflix. When Smokey bought his first DVD player back in 1999, it came with an introductory come-on offer to join a fledgling mail-order movie service that would ship him DVD's in the mail--as many as he could watch for a flat monthly rate--and their selection was already way better than the small shelf of DVD's available at his local Blockbuster (now they've introduced their on-demand box to instantly watch downloads on your TV). Smokey signed on, and has never regretted his decision. Smokey owns some Netflix stock, for crying out loud.
      But sometimes, Netflix makes Smokey just want to sit down in the middle of the road and have a good cry, because there is perhaps no more eloquent proof of the continuing inability of computers to extrapolate than Netflix's movie recommendation algorithm. Smokey has given Netflix his opinion about more than 3,400 films--albeit through the very limiting 1-5 star rating system. A fifteen minute conversation with another human film lover would no doubt yield an excellent list of recommendations for movies that Smokey has not yet seen but would thoroughly enjoy, but after almost ten years of tracking Smokey's movie-watching preferences, Netflix's bank of UNIVAC's still spits out head-scratchers like this:

Because you enjoyed

• All About Eve
• All Quiet on the Western Front and
• Annie Hall

we think you'll enjoy Shoah (ed. Claude Lanzmann's highly-regarded 4-disc documentary on the Holocaust)

      WTF?! What do these three movies possibly have in common with Shoah? OK, yes, the directors are all Jewish. But two of the three movies have absolutely nothing to do with Judaism, and the third is a romantic comedy. That would be like recommending Time Bandits (short actors) because Smokey liked Gangs of New York and Death to Smoochy (short directors). (That's purely hypothetical, by the way--Smokey liked Time Bandits but not so much Gangs of New York, and nobody liked Death to Smoochy). Is it because Woody Allen's character in Annie Hall keeps going to see The Sorrow and the Pity? Does Bette Davis compare Anne Baxter to Goebbels and Smokey just missed it? Is some ghost in the Netflix machine having Smokey on?
      Netflix has offered a million bucks to whoever can improve their Cinematch recommendation algorithm by a certain measurable percentage. So Smokey has a request for all you math and code geeks out there: please drop your silly pet projects like calculating Mars orbital approaches for JPL or mapping cancer's genetic triggers for Sloan Kettering and get to work on this problem for Netflix. Smokey's future movie-watching happiness depends on you. Smokey says, "Give a hoot, film compute."

You Still Can't Go Home Again--Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)

      I can't pretend that I approached the new Indiana Jones movie with anything like high hopes. George Lucas's repeated, failed attempts to recapture the lightning of Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark in a bottle, coupled with Steven Spielberg's frustrating "more is more" approach to filmmaking, left me walking into the theater with nothing more than the fervent wish, "Please, please don't let this suck."
      It does not suck. But neither are you likely to leave the theater with that same feeling I had as a teenager, walking out of Raiders for the first time, thinking, "Man, I have got to see that again!" It might be wrong to let nostalgia for my early movie-going years--a time when Star Wars IV and V, Raiders, Blade Runner and Terminator burst upon my nascent cinematic sensibilities in rapid succession--color my evaluation of the new Indiana Jones, but let's face it, nostalgia is exactly what this franchise is all about. Raiders embodied Lucas's and Spielberg's nostalgia for the Saturday matinées, the serials that left the swashbuckling hero in an impossible situation each week, only to show his improbable escape into yet more trouble the next. In the 80's those kind of movies didn't exist anymore--couldn't exist anymore--except in their memories, so they re-imagined them for another generation. In much the same way, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull embodies our nostalgia for Raiders. Movies like Raiders don't exist anymore either, except as parodies of themselves (where Raiders winked, today's actioners leer), but Spielberg and Lucas are savvy enough to know that those of us who remember Raiders with the same fondness they remember the old serials are willing to give Indy a special pass.
      Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull has a plot of sorts, much in the same way that porn movies do, as a vehicle to move from one action setpiece to the next. Evil Commies have replaced the evil Nazis of the previous movies (affording Ford the chance to growl, "Russians," in exactly the same disgusted tone he once growled, "Nazis"), led by the sinister, sword-wielding Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett), who sports the wickedest Prince Valiant hairdo ever seen outside the funny papers. Spalko wants Indy to lead her to the MacGuffin, which this time around is a mystical crystal skull that she and the Russkies will somehow turn into the ultimate weapon in a new kind of "psychic warfare." Along the way Indy hooks up with Mutt (Shia Lebeouf), a motorcycle-riding, switchblade-wielding greaser who's looking for his missing mentor, Professor "Ox" Oxley (John Hurt), who disappeared while searching for the skull and the legendary city of gold, El Dorado. And, oh yeah, Mutt's mom turns out to be Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen), Indy's spunky love interest from Raiders. And I haven't even mentioned George "Mac" McHale (Ray Winstone), who we're told is a great spy buddy of Indy's from their war days, and who may or may not be working with the Russians or the CIA, or both, or neither.
      None of this matters, of course, any more than the arrival of the pizza boy in the aforementioned porno matters; we're mentally fast-fowarding to the sex scenes action scenes. Action is something that Spielberg knows well how to orchestrate, and action is what he gives us; we get a rocket sled, a digital counter ticking down from ten, a motorcycle chase through an Ivy League campus, a swordfight across the gap between two speeding jeeps, poison darts, angry natives, voracious man-eating ants, monkeys, shout-outs to Tarzan and Marlon Brando, inter-dimensional beings, and not one, but three rides over a waterfall in an amphibious vehicle. Oh, and a thermonuclear blast. This is a partial list.
      All of this rolls along pleasantly enough--Spielberg is too skilled a craftsman ever to let the patched-together story collapse completely under the weight of all the CGI gee-whizzery. There are even a few real-live stunts with real-live stuntpeople, perhaps for old times' sake. But there's no magic here. The chemistry of Marion and Indy's love/hate relationship has been lost, replaced with loud, unfunny bickering that's so annoying, even one of their Russian captors begs them, "For God's sake, please shut the hell up!" The constant nods to icons of the franchise--the hat, the whip, the fear of snakes--simply remind us how much we prefer the original to what we're watching now. Winstone and Hurt are given almost nothing to do, and everyone else seems to be very professionally going through the motions, killing some time until they're told to go stand in front of the green screen again. I don't really blame Lucas and Spielberg for being unable to recreate the magic of Raiders in the face of so much audience nostalgia; it's an impossible task. I just wish they'd stop trying.

Stripping for the Artistically Handicapped

      There's a fun website called Bitstrips.com which allows the artistically handicapped among us to create our own comic strips, using an easy-to-figure-out point and click interface. I only discovered this yesterday, so my first attempt is, shall we say, a bit rough. But it's a lot of fun to play with, and some of the inherent limitations actually force you to be creative; you have to develop the eye of a caricaturist for which details in a simple figure imbue it with life and action and (hopefully) humor.

WalMart Purchasing Department Harbors At Least One Rebellious Soul

      For the first time ever, and much to my own surprise, today I found myself purchasing one of those 2-in-1 Double Feature DVD packages from WalMart's bargain bin. You know the ones--Steven Seagal in Exit Wounds and Half Past Dead, or Honey I Shrunk the Kids boxed with Honey I Must Fulfill My Contractual Obligation.
      But somewhere in the bowels of a cubicle dungeon, deep in the dark heart of Bentonville AR, at least one huddled mass must be yearning to breathe free. He or she--giggling maniacally all the time, I'm sure--somehow managed to ensure that WalMart's bargain double feature inventory includes A Darren Aronofsky Collection: Requiem for a Dream and π. Neither of which did I previously own. For just 9 bucks! That's...um...less than 5 bucks each!
      Fight the power, my ghostly friend, fight the power.