Jeffrey Overstreet—one of my fave critics—gets not one, but two hat tips.
First off is his interview with Darren Aronofsky, whose latest film, The Fountain, opens this week.
The whole “Big Bang,” the scientific theory of how we’ve evolved, and the question of whether or not there is a Creator—it doesn’t matter to me. I think The Fountain is open to all of that. All of our energy and all of our matter comes from something before us. It’s the old “ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” idea that we go back to the earth and then something else comes out of it. I don’t think it affects how you look at Heaven or Hell, or reincarnation, or whichever religious belief you come from. I worked really hard in The Fountain not to get in the way of that. I just wanted people to see that we’re part of this long, lasting cycle stretching back all the way to the Big Bang.
Second is this fascinating Sight & Sound article on Guillermo del Toro, and his latest film, Pan’s Labyrinth.
This willingness to confront pain and to forge his own cinematic dictionary has informed the blend of innocence and brutality that is a trademark of del Toro’s phantasmagorical cinema. From the crushing addiction of Cronos, whose ageing anti-hero is reduced to licking blood from the tiled floor of a public toilet, to the redemptive fantasy of Hellboy, whose titular demon takes an industrial grinder to the horns of his head in a bid to take control of his destiny, del Toro has returned compulsively to these twinned themes. Now in Pan’s Labyrinth, which he wrote, directed and produced, this latterday Welles has created a Citizen Kane of fantasy cinema - a modern masterpiece made entirely on his own terms. Set against the backdrop of fascist Spain in 1944, Pan’s Labyrinth is a “dark fairytale about choice” that distils his distinctive mix of fact and fantasy, poetry and politics, pain and pleasure to form what is, for my money, the best film of the year.
On a related note, one of my fondest memories from this year’s Toronto International Film Festival was the post-Pan’s Labyrinth Q&A with del Toro. Del Toro was thoroughly entertaining and gregarious. You could tell he loved being there as he answered fans’ questions with wonderful stories about filmmaking as well as wonderfully crass jokes.
In short, he struck me as just the sort of person that you could easily hang out with some evening, shooting the breeze over a couple of pints.
Swoon has a new look (courtesy of Mr. Elastic Heart) and a new focus: Our focus with Swoon will be less on “band/news of the week” posts, trying to keep up with the hype of whatever is new and worth listening to, and instead focusing on the albums (and films now), past and present, that we truly love and go into more essay-like depth on those things.
Sounds good to me; I’d like to see more so-called “music blogs” take this approach (including Opus).
Yes, I know that the trailer for the upcoming Simpsons movie was just released, and yes, I know that I will probably be there opening day. But right now, the Simpsons have ceased to have any meaning for me, and the reason can best be summed up in two words: Dynamite Warrior! It’s like a Thai kickboxing western, only with men surfing on missile!
Simpsons who?
I know I ragged somewhat on Lansing-Dreiden’s latest full-length, The Dividing Island. But I still pull it out on occasion, and it still contains some of my fave songs so far from this year (i.e. “A Line You Can Cross”). Now, the faceless art collective is cooking up a new batch of songs… er, well, sort of.
Entitled D.I. by D.D., the album is a collection of hip-hop influenced remixes and alternate versions of songs from The Dividing Island, courtesy of producer Dazzle D. Stereogum has a preview track, as does Lansing-Dreiden’s website.
Unless you’ve been living in a cave or have been on a nice, long vacation for the past week or so, than you know about the scandal surrounding noted evangelical preacher Ted Haggard. Haggard, who is perhaps best known for his teachings condemning homosexuality, has now confessed to a “lifelong sexual problem” after a former male prostitute accused him of a three-year-long tryst involving gay sex and methamphetamines.
Oh the irony.
To say that this is one giant snafu would be a gross understatement, especially as it arrives on the heels of the recent scandal involving Mark Foley and Congressional pages. But what disturbs me about all of the responses in the heat of the moment, with journalists and politicians licking their chops over the latest scoop or political advantage (the elections are right around the corner, after all), is that very few people seem to be talking about the human cost of this disaster.
In the case of Haggard, I feel nothing but sympathy for his wife and five children, and for the thousands of people who trusted him and looked up to his leadership and example. And now, all of that has been dashed upon the rocks. I even have pity for Haggard, whose life is in absolute shambles, whose witness is non-existant. Mind you, this isn’t an attempt to explain away what he did, or to pass the buck, or to point fingers at anyone other than Haggard. What Haggard did was wrong and immoral, and his attempts to deny the truth, to explain away allegations, to hesitate in confessing the truth, are the very pictures of hypocrisy.
Of course, the story is still developing, and noone knows what’s going to come to light in the coming days and weeks—it might even be worse than we thought. But hopefully, some good will come out of this. If nothing else, I hope this whole debacle will serve as a gigantic wake-up call, not only for Haggard, but also for those who followed him, and for every other Christian out there in America.
Apple has just posted a profile of Roger O’Donnell, whose solo debut album, The Truth In Me, I wrote about a few weeks back. More on O’Donnell and his music can be found on his website.
Christianity Today on the films, and life, of Krzyzstof Kieslowski: ...Kieslowski clearly had an interest in the spiritual, religious and metaphysical aspects of his characters, not only in his subject matter, but also in his transcendental style.
I know that nowadays, bands co-opting the sounds of early 80s post-punk/new wave, be they from The Smiths, New Order, or The Cure, is absolutely nothing new (Interpol, Bloc Party, Ladytron, The Faint, Figurine et al, I’m looking in your general direction). But IMHO, few of them do it nearly as well as My Favorite. Probably because lead singer/songwriter Michael Grace Jr. so fully indulged in all of those sounds, travelled so far into the musical cliches—jangly Johnny Marr-esque guitars, billowy synths a la Disintegration, New Order-esque rhythms—that he ultimately came out the other side and the cliches became original, the decades-old sounds fresh yet again.
But unlike so many other bands that My Favorite might get lumped in with, it’s ultimately all about the lyrics. Grace’s lyrics are clever and pretentious, sometimes too much so for their own good (for example, using Joan Of Arc as the metaphorical poster-child for misunderstood and alienated youth everywhere). His lyrics are full of cynicism and sarcasm and cheekiness and hubris and dry wit.
But at the same time, there’s a sense of real teen angst. Not the sort of angst that we see everywhere and is just full of anger and bitterness, but the sort that touches on and manifests itself in a palpable melancholy, displacement, and lostness. These are songs for everyone who fumbled through high school romances; who stayed up too late in their bedroom listening to The Cure, Joy Division, Depeche Mode, and This Mortal Coil; who painted their fingernails black without having the comfort of the “goth” label to fall back on; who wrote really bad poetry for that girl in AP English (which, of course, she never ever saw), taken to an almost epic level.
I mean, how can you argue with lyrics such as “Loneliness if pornography to them/But to us it is an art”, “The ghosts of dead teenagers sing to me while I am dancing”, “You did what you did because a pathetic mythology is better than no mythology at all”, or “It is a terrible fall/When your teen idol is proved mortal/And the saddest thing is/I’ll say that I never liked him at all”? Or songs like “Black Cassette”, which is one of the best odes to both burgeoning teenage sexuality and unrequited love I’ve ever heard (perhaps because it comes painfully close to capturing the mood of several non-relationships that I had)?
Sadly, the band is no more, having broken up in 2005. However, they released one final disc on Double Agent Records entitled The Happiest Days Of Our Lives which compiles a number of their early EPs and throws in an extra disc of remixes to boot. As I pointed out in my review, it’s full of some of the most stirring 80s pop to be written in the 21st century.
You can find some songs on the band’s official website, as well as this MySpace page set up by fans.
Opus is a website masquerading as a blog masquerading as a webzine. It’s where I (that’d be Jason Morehead) write about music, movies, art, web design, religion, family, and whatever else happens to interest me at the time. More...
Not sure where to start? Then check out this revolving hand-picked list of some of my favorite articles and reviews.
