I’m a big fan of Peter Hedges’ Pieces Of April—it’s the perfect blend of quirky indie charm and real emotional heart—and so I was fairly intrigued when his latest, Dan In Real Life, popped up on the radar. The trailer looked promising, and it starred the always luminous Juliette Binoche and John Mahoney (for whom I have a great fondness following Frasier). Oh yeah, and Steve Carell.

Renae and I finally sat down and watched it a week ago or so, and we both thought it was alright. Not nearly as enjoyable or affecting as Pieces Of April, but it seemed to have its heart in the right, albeit ultra-sappy, place. But more I thought about the movie, especially its last act, the more I found myself disliking the film. And Ken Morefield’s review, er, rant sums up why quite nicely.

Dan in Real Life is one of those Three’s Company/sitcom style comedies in which people get themselves into bigger and bigger complications trying to cover up something that wouldn’t be half the problem their secrecy was if they simply were honest and rational for any thirty second segment of the film.

It is the type of film in which a woman will strip and get into a shower where she knows a guy is hiding because she is too embarrassed to admit he was in the bathroom talking to her while she was washing her face and too stupid to tell the person who asks to talk to her to wait for her in the other room and she’ll be out in a few minutes.

It is the type of film in which characters spend days of screen time (what seems like years of our life time) lying to or avoiding honest conversations with people they love so much because they love them so much and are afraid the truth might hurt them a little bit.

 

And his observations of the film’s “reconciliation” between Steven Carrell’s and Dane Cook’s characters is spot on. Truth be told, I found this to be the most egregious of the film’s missteps—or to put it more bluntly, the part of the film that really pissed me off. As Morefield puts it:

I think the part of Dan in Real Life I liked the least was Dan’s resolution with his brother who first hits Dan and then interrupts Dan’s attempts at apology to rush out the door and get in a car with a hotter, younger chick who was trying to pick up Dan at a bar earlier in the film. What, exactly, is the point of the scene? Turnabout is fair play? The brother landed on his feet or wasn’t really that into the girl to begin with? No reading of this scene is consistent with what the character and the film has told us is true to that point about the brother’s feelings for his girlfriend, but, I’m hard pressed to see how any scene that tried to honestly deal with the fallout of the discovery could be resolved in 30 seconds or less so that we can get on with the happy ending.

 

I’m not a huge Dane Cook fan, but his Mitch Burns was by far the film’s most enjoyable character, and in some ways it’s most sympathetic: a guy who, it’s implied throughout the film, has always been something of a screw up but is now finally trying to do something right with an honest, loving relationship.

But the movie sees fit to to repay such behavior by screwing him over, by turning him into a total ass in the final act—a move that, for lack of a better term, is just mean-spirited. And this, in a movie that espouses the need for love, forgiveness, and understanding—all traits needed to survive in a family of any size.

I can’t help but compare this family to the one in Pieces Of April. Certainly, the family in Hedges’ previous film was quite a bit more dysfunctional, on the verge of falling apart, really. But I believed them. There was truth in their interactions, squabbles, and blow-ups, and as such, there was truth in their moments of redemption and grace, however fleeting they might’ve been.

However, I don’t believe in the family in Dan In Real Life. However much fun they might have playing family games of hide-and-seek, or taking excursions to the beach or bowling alley, however tight they might be during family talent shows, barely any of it rings true. The Burns are the sort of family that you expect to find living in one of those warmly glowing houses in a Thomas Kinkade painting. They’re idyllic, charming, nostalgic, and winsome—because, really, who doesn’t want a picture-perfect family like that—but with ‘nary an ounce of truth to be found anywhere.

For many years, the only way that folks on this side of the pond could see Spaced—the brilliant, pop culture-literate sit-com that launched the careers of Simon Pegg, Edgar Wright, and Nick Frost—was either to catch it on BBC America or to purchase a multi-region DVD player and pick up the “Definitive Collector’s Edition” from Amazon UK.

However, that’s all about to change. According to this AICN interview with Pegg, a Region 1 released of Spaced will be released in July, complete with commentaries from Pegg, Wright, Jessica Stevenson (Daisy), Kevin Smith, Quentin Tarantino, Diablo Cody, and Matt Stone. I am curious, though, as to how they resolved all of the copyright and trademark issues surrounding the show’s soundtrack.

This is particularly wonderful because it’ll give us Yanks a chance to see the original, in all of its brilliance, before the Americanized version, aka “McSpaced”, comes out on the airwaves.

For those you who don’t know anything about the whole “McSpaced” hullabaloo, folks are rather pissed off because the U.S. studio made no efforts to consult or contact the original series’ creators, but simply cashed in on their names (following the success of Shaun Of The Dead and Hot Fuzz) and handled the whole affair in rather poor taste. You can read Simon Pegg’s statement concerning the whole affair here.

Eric hits the nail on the head:

Frankly, I’m sick of “spirituality” - this natural inclination towards moralism and amorphous, touchy-feely mysticism. I am in no way religious by nature. I don’t get my kicks from transcendent experience and feel-good messages. I am not nice, bubbly or happy. Left to myself, I like to smoke, drink and offend people. I have no desire to fool myself about life or its ugliness, and am completely disinterested in trying to deceive myself or others with fairy-tales. I am most assuredly not a spiritual person…

...I am a Christian because Jesus was God. If he wasn’t, don’t give me empty platitudes and Oprah-style bull. Light me up a joint and buy me a hooker, because if He is not who He claimed to be, I’ve had all the spirituality I can stomach.

On a related note, I’m always befuddled when someone claims that they’re “spiritual” but not “religious” (and this almost always seems to be within the context of Christianity, not just religion in general). I’m not exactly sure what they mean by that, but I think it usually means that they like the “therapeutic” (for lack of a better term) aspect of thinking/hoping/believing that there’s more to this life than the physical, that there’s a way to tap into something bigger than themselves, whatever that might be. But they have no interest in doctrine, liturgy, discipline, or ceremony.

And yet, it’s impossible to have one without the other. There’s a symbiotic relationship between the two that you break only at your own peril. If you focus solely on “spirituality”, I don’t see how you can end up with anything but a limp milquetoast belief system, one that is merely content to trade in “feel good” platitudes and warm fuzzies (or “amorphous, touchy-feely mysticism”, to use Eric’s words). All of which may sound wonderful, but really have no ability to address the real, honest, hard, dirty, complex truths of life in this world.

On the other hand, focusing too much on “religion” and its side of the equation leaves you with nothing more cold and callous ritual, with ceremonies that have no power or passion but simply get by the mere repetition of words and genuflections. And these ceremonies have no ability to speak to the passion, warmth, and light of life. (To be honest, this is the side on which I tend to err. Give me old-timey ritual and liturgy, I say! Which, of course, just exposes flaws in my own understanding of such matters, and reveals how much growing I still have yet to do.)

The one needs the other. “Spirituality” needs “religion” to give it orthodoxy—a foundation that provides structure and order lest it be left swaying in the wind, tossed to and fro by whatever feels good or is popular, regardless of its real merit. And “religion” needs “spirituality” to keep it fresh, vital, and in full fighting trim—to remind it that it’s still alive, and hasn’t reached the pearly gates yet.

If you choose one over the other, for whatever reason, you end up impoverished, experiencing only a fraction of the whole truth.

April is shaping up to be a fine month for musical releases. Sun Kil Moon and Portishead are releasing new albums, and now, I’ve just found out that Woven Hand will be releasing Ten Stones next month as well (exact date TBA). Sounds Familyre has more:

This April, David Eugene Edwards takes to the road and sets the stage for the release of Ten Stones, the follow-up album to his extraordinary Mosaic. For this unique set of shows, Edwards is joined by the masterful Ordy Garrison on percussion to create an otherworldly sound that is stripped-down, driving, immediate, potent. The fourth full-length release under the moniker Woven Hand, Ten Stones is produced by Edwards and Daniel Smith (Danielson), engineered by Smith and Emil Nikolaisen (Serena Maneesh), and features the formidable talents of Peter Van Laerhoven (guitar), former 16 Horsepower bandmate Pascal Humbert (bass), Garrison (drums), Nikolaisen (guitar), and Danielson’s Elin K. Smith (vocals).

 

There are also some tourdates listed, including one in Des Moines, Iowa on April 19.

I’ve been busy lately, busier than I’ve been in a long time. Between a fulltime job, freelance work, and an eight-week-old, life is fuller than I ever imagined it could be. Besides missing all of the sleep I used to get, I find myself missing the work that I used to do on Opus. Simply put, I miss writing honest-to-God music and movie reviews, and not just little blog entries about this or that release. I miss diving into an album or film, exploring it as I write about it, using the reviewing process as a way to contemplate and ultimately, better understand the media that I seek out, consume, and experience.

It felt incredibly refreshing to post my first music review in over a month. But all of the work I’ve been doing lately has meant that such writing is the exception, and not the rule. But there is a light at the end of the tunnel, or at least the first faint few glimmers. Several projects will be coming to completion in the next week or so, freeing me up for more personal work, including more writing, a redesign that has been in development for several months now, and a project that has been nearly a year in the making.

Beyond that, the future looks a little more wide open, a little more unknown. And that’s a very good feeling right now.

Ah, the mixtapes. Kids these days with their iPods, their iTunes playlists, and their file-sharing don’t know what they’re missing.

As much as I like iTunes, it just doesn’t compare to sitting down in your bedroom, a 90 minute high-bias cassette in one hand and a stack of CDs and tapes in the other, and spending the next couple hours (or days) working your way through that stack and trying to put together the perfect tracklist. One that would not only contain nothing but awesome songs, but also one that would use up as much of those 90 minutes as possible.

And it wasn’t simply a matter of dragging, dropping, and burning, but rather, a laborious hours-long process of pushing buttons, manually rewinding and advancing the cassette, and ultimately, just sitting there with your stereo, hoping that the result sounded even half as good as it did in your head.

Ah, but enough of my curmudgeonly nostalgia. Muxtape is an extremely cool way to share music, the Web 2.0/37signals-esque equivalent of the analog mixtape. You can only create one mix per account consisting of up to twelve songs; you can only upload one song per artist or album; and you can only upload songs that you have permission to let Muxtape use (yeah right). It’s an extremely straightforward and easy-to-use system with no frills whatsoever, and it does one thing really, really well.

I’ve recently rediscovered my love for Low‘s earlier albums, such as 1994’s I Could Live In Hope and The Curtain Hits The Cast. You know, the albums that basically cemented the group’s reputation as the creators of “slowcore” (a term the band themselves dislike quite a bit).

Below is the video for “Words”, the opening track from I Could Live In Hope, and the very first Low track I ever heard. I still remember the first time I heard it, via a low-quality recording on a fan-site, and how something just clicked as Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker’s harmonies came drifting over Sparhawk’s lazy guitar and that simple, ominous bassline.

I was hooked, and even after all these years, few bands can hold my attention as readily and surely as Low.