music

Thief (1981)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

EPSON MFP image

threehalfstar

“I am the last guy in the world that you want to fuck with.”

With the recent passing of Edgar Froese, founding member of influential German electronic band Tangerine Dream, it seemed appropriate to revisit one of the first films the band scored: the hardboiled crime thriller Thief. Thief follows professional safecracker Frank as he agrees to do one last high-risk diamond heist for the Mafia. Tangerine Dream’s score, with its layered soundscapes and pulsating synths is one of the first aspects of the film that jumps out at you. While not fashionable at the time (the film was nominated for a Razzie for Worst Musical Score), the moody soundtrack has an 80’s John Carpenter/Goblin vibe that has thankfully become trendy again and utilized in recent films such as Drive and The Guest.

The film’s score isn’t the only thing that feels ahead of its time. With Scarface & Die Hard several years away, the film’s violence, antihero protagonist, highly stylized cinematography, and overall bleakness are pretty revolutionary for 1981. Heavy praise for this effect should go to both director Michael Mann and cinematographer Donald Thorin. Mann knows how to make a damn good thriller and is helped tremendously by Thorin’s dark, brooding images. Thief was Mann’s’ directorial debut, but it is shot with confidence & style that makes it feel like a precursor to his later films Heat, Manhunter, and Collateral.

Heightening the neo noir style of Thief’s cinematography, the film’s screenplay is tense, gritty, and smart. James Caan gives a scenery-chewing performance as the film’s titular thief, Frank. Key scenes like a dazzling diamond heist and a shockingly candid diner conversation between Frank and a woman he barely knows are iconic. Caan himself cites the diner scene as the all-time personal favorite of his career.

The film is not without its misfires, mainly an underserved subplot involving Frank’s criminal father figure Olka (played by Willie Nelson) that doesn’t really go anywhere. James Belushi as Barry, Frank’s longtime partner, and Tuesday Weld as Jessie, Frank’s lover, both give flat, but passable performances that are easily overshadowed by Caan’s crazed, manic Frank. Viewers might also be put off by Frank’s nasty temper & casual racism and feel that he is undeserved of any potential happy ending (rightfully so in my opinion, which is partly why the film remains edgy today), but if you’re a fan of gritty crime movies that have brains & balls as well as slimeball protagonists, Thief is a flawed masterpiece that you should definitely check out.

Thief is currently streaming on Netflix.

-James Cohn

Drawing Restraint 9 (2005)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

drawing rest 9

onestar

I recently watched & reviewed the two cinematic elements of Björk’s multimedia project Biophilia: Biophilia Live & When Björk Met Attenborough. Both films make outlandish claims about science, art, and nature that could have been pretentious drivel in the wrong context, but come across as both personal & fun in Björk’s capable hands. Biophilia is a vast, ambitious intellectual exercise, but one that never feels labored or pompous. Drawing Restrait 9, conversely, is a pompous multimedia project Björk participated in, the exact kind of pretentious drivel she avoided when her own hands were on the wheel.

The film Drawing Restraint 9 is one element of a project that includes sculptures, books, photographs and drawings. It’s a single entry in the much larger Drawing Restraint art project that’s been ongoing since 1987 and currently in the Drawing Restraint 19 phase of its evolution. It’s the work of visual artist Matthew Barney, whose now defunct personal relationship with Björk is the subject of her most recent release, a heart-wrenching breakup album titled Vulnicura. Björk plays a large role in the film Drawing Restraint 9, both composing the music & playing one of the main characters opposite Barney himself. As it is a mostly dialogue-free affair with a very loose narrative, her musical contributions are a vital aspect of the production and one of the only pleasant elements in play (until it too takes a savage dive at the film’s climax). Drawing Restraint 9 is a work of avant garde filmmaking, the kind of art that dares you to hate it. It’s a dare I accept often.

The film opens with an unidentified figure carefully wrapping organic material in beautifully delicate packages. There’s a care & precision to the ceremony that’s both suggestive of the portrayals of precise, careful ceremonies to come as well as the overall craft of the movie itself. Barney’s background in visual art is constantly on display in some truly impressive images of the dance teams, tea ceremonies, and working class fisherman that participate in the mysterious rituals of a Japanese whaling ship. Very little dialogue is provided for context of how this all fits together. At almost 80min into its massive 3 hour run time, a few, sparse lines provide a brief glimpse into the occasion & purpose of the elaborate tea ceremony that takes place aboard the whaling ship, but it’s not a story that wants to be understood completely. It instead wants to be effective visually.

The narrative-free images are not the problem. There is an entertainment value to ambiguity & obfuscation that Drawing Restraint 9 could have achieved, but it’s as if the film deliberately wanted to be devoid of entertainment as well. The climactic tea ceremony/mating ritual is a perfect encapsulation why the picture doesn’t work in this respect. As the characters played by Björk & Matthew Barney sensually gut each other with knives on a sinking ship in the film’s sole moment of action (as opposed to its endless portrayals of preparation), the music becomes aggressively horrendous. A lone male voice & an arrhythmic woodblock combine to create without question the single most unpleasant song I have ever heard in my life. The disgusting surgical gore in this scene is violent enough to get its point across without the somehow even more painful sound design. Minutes after the gore stops the song continues to soldier on, leaving an intensely bitter taste in its wake. It turns out Björk’s potent approach to music can be used for evil as well as good.

In addition to her distinctive musical contributions, it’s easy to see Björk’s fingerprints elsewhere in Drawing Restraint 9. There are themes about humanity’s inseparable connection to nature running throughout and the final line she sings is “Nature conspires to help you”, something you could reasonably expect to hear in Biophilia or The Juniper Tree. She appears on screen as the first sign of a natural image, perched on beachside rocks in furs. Aboard the whaling ship she is treated as royalty, as if she were Mother Nature incarnate. It’s a role and an image that fits her well, but like with the violent climax, any entertainment value is severely undercut by Matthew Barney’s pretentious, overwrought inclinations. The farfetched philosophy of Biophilia is tempered by a desire to entertain & include, while Drawing Restraint 9 is the result of an ego (or two) unchecked. The images Barney crafts are undeniably powerful, but utilized poorly in my opinion.

Of course, I’m admitting a bias here in this preference between the Drawing Restraint & Biophilia projects. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m typically a less artsy and more fartsy kind of an audience. The two albums Björk recorded during this phase of her career, Medúlla & Volta, are the only two she’s released in my entire lifetime that I honestly don’t enjoy, which may be part of the problem. But maybe the problem is bigger. Maybe the problem is that I hate Matthew Barney’s aesthetic (or at least think he should stick to sculptures & still images). Maybe I hate avant garde cinema. Maybe I hate all artists everywhere. I’m not sure. I do know I hate Drawing Restraint 9, though. I hate this movie.

-Brandon Ledet

Tangerine Dream & the Nightmare Sounds of Sorcerer (1977)

/ swampflix / 6 Comments

EPSON MFP image

Edgar Froese, the founding member and creative mastermind behind the prolific German band Tangerine Dream, passed away this past Tuesday, January 20th. The news broke yesterday via the band’s Facebook page, with a brief message announcing that his death was sudden & unexpected. Tangerine Dream’s long history dates back almost 50 years, 20 musicians and more than 100 releases. They were an experimental, mostly instrumental band that pioneered the forefront of psychedelia, krautrock, and synthpop, pushing the limits of their music through each new evolution. As the only continuous member of the group, Edgar was there for it all.

Arguably, Tangerine Dream’s most significant contribution to music was their soundtrack work on films in the 70s & 80s. The moody synth scores that are making a comeback in recent films like Drive, The Guest, and Cold In July owe just as much of a debt to the band as they do to John Carpenter, perhaps even more. Their score for Michael Mann’s debut feature Thief perfectly updates the film’s gritty noir for a 1981 aesthetic. Their music gave Ridley Scott’s fantasy epic Legend an otherworldly atmosphere to work in. Their synthpop provided a sense of dangerous fun in Kathryn Bigelow’s vampire Western Near Dark. Tangerine Dream’s scores not only elevate the movies they’re featured in; they become intrinsic to their mood & quality. This is especially true with their score to William Friedkin’s cult classic thriller Sorcerer.

Sorcerer was Friedkin’s loving retelling of the 1953 film (or at least the same novel adapted by) Wages of Fear, a French-Italian thriller about desperate men risking their lives to transport the delicate explosives necessary to snuff an oil well fire. Hot off of his career-high success with The Exorcist, Friedkin allowed his hubris to inflate the film’s budget and shooting schedule. It was a dangerous & expensive film to make, but one Friedkin thought worth the trouble, as he hoped it would be his legacy. That’s not exactly how it worked out. Initial critical reception was mixed and the box office numbers were even worse. It’s been speculated that the film failed because of its unfortunate debut alongside the first modern blockbuster Star Wars. Its commercial failure has also been attributed to audience’s confusion with seeing a film called Sorcerer from the same director as The Exorcist and understandably expecting a supernatural horror instead of the tense, gritty thriller that was delivered. Friedkin was expecting Sorcerer to be his greatest accomplishment, the one he’d be remembered by. Commercially speaking, he failed.

The film has rightfully earned a more long-term success critically, though, gradually earning cult classic status in the decades since its initial release. It was restored for a home & brief theatrical release in early 2014 to commemorate its reappraisal. Sorcerer’s tense sense of impending doom may have not been a surefire commercial venture in the summer of 1977, but remains as potent as ever as the years go on, particularly in the film’s awe-inspiring centerpiece: “the bridge scene”. It’s an unsettling picture that slowly cranks up its existential dread over what’s got to be the most nerve-racking road trip story I’ve ever seen on film. A lot of the film’s achievement in tone is surely do to the forceful, synth-heavy score from Edgar Froese’s Tangerine Dream.

In his memoir The Friedkin Connection, Friedkin tells the following story of how he discovered the band at a show in an abandoned church in their native Black Forest, Germany: “The concert began at midnight and they played long, rhythmic, sensuous chords, somewhere between classical music and the new pop sound. They performed for three hours in darkness, outlined only by the twinkling lights of their own electronic instruments, and along with a large audience of stoned young people, I was mesmerized.” He approached the band after their set to ask if they would collaborate with him on his next film. Working with only the screenplay Friedkin provided them and not a minute of footage, Tangerine Dream sent him two hours of recordings while the film was still in production. Friedkin says he & the film’s editor cut the picture while listening to random passages of the soundtrack for inspiration. Their music had a very significant hand in the shape & the tone of Sorcerer.

Tangerine Dream had a hand in the tone of many films, including ones they didn’t directly work on. Sorcerer, however, is the film that’s most inseparable from their work. It’s undeniable that the movie would not have been the same without them, as their music literally guided the shape of the final product. Edgar Froese’s passing leaves a massive legacy in its wake. Sorcerer is just one note on an extensive list of accomplishments, but it’s a note that deserves to be highlighted.

In the band’s farewell Facebook message Froese is quoted as saying “There is no death, there is just a change of our cosmic address.” Let’s hope that before he made the journey to his new address, he was well aware of the impact he made on this one.

-Brandon Ledet

When Björk Met Attenborough (2013)

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

EPSON MFP image

three star

At just over 45 minutes, the short-form documentary When Björk Met Attenborough is more or less supplementary material for the brilliant Biophilia Live concert film. The documentary’s central conversation between the idiosyncratic musician Björk and famed naturalist David Attenborough is philosophically stimulating, but is not all the film has to offer. The movie also serves as a key to understanding exactly what Björk was trying to accomplish with the muli-media Biophilia project, especially her ambitions in trying to change the way we “see, hear, think about and make music”. She says early in the run time that “It seems to be around this age I am now you have to make a sort of spiritual statement” and When Björk Met Attenborough does a great job of detailing just how ambitious her statement is.

In her attempt to position Biophilia as a spiritual statement, Björk looks back on the way she experienced music as a child. She speaks fondly of singing on her lonely walks to school through inclement Icelandic weather, music serving as a private conversation between her and Nature. She also expresses frustration with how schools taught her to interact with music through ancient Europen composers and non-intuitive instruments. With Biophilia, Björk attempts to rewire how music, nature, and technology interact with each other into a more innate process. She begins this journey with a tour through London’s Museum of Natural History, the largest natural history collection in the world, guided by Sir David Attenborough.

The central conversation between Björk and Attenborough is unfortunately a little stiff and, well, unnatural. Ignoring the artifice of the encounter, though, the ideas discussed about where nature & music meet are thoroughly engaging. Lyrebirds mimicking ring tones & chain saws, the evolutionary advantage of a beautiful singing voice, and the prevalent sexuality in modern pop music all make for great philosophical fodder. The true highlight, however, is their discussion of the Biophilia song “Crystalline” in the museum’s massive crystal room. Attenborough & Björk pick apart the “mathematical beauty” of crystal formations & other natural phenomenon and how Nature’s patterns are mimicked in music’s time signatures. It’s a lofty concept, but one made convincing by two abstract minds who love to look for such connections between science and art.

The “Crystalline” segment opens other threads for the film to follow, especially in how technology can be exploited to harness the stated connection between nature & music. First, the film demonstrates through cymatics (the study of sound’s visible patterns) how the song “Crystalline” looks, as opposed to how it sounds. Other inventions like the sharpsichord, a rigged Tesla coil, and swinging pendulum harps that use gravity to play their notes all prompt the audience to consider “the way we see, hear, think about, and make music”. Björk also collaborates with legendary neurologist Oliver Sacks and several software developers to utilize touchscreen technology in computer apps that create new ways of making music in a more intuitive way. She not only integrates existing technology in Biophilia, but also pushes to create her own.

When considered in isolation, When Björk Met Attenborough is an interesting intellectual exercise. When considered as part of Biophilia as a larger multi-media art piece it’s a Rosetta Stone, documenting a vastly ambitious work that tries to encompass music, nature, and technology in one definitive whole. The matter-of-fact tone of Tilda Swinton’s narration and Björk’s titular conversation with Attenborough makes this ambition seem perfectly natural and reasonably attainable. It’s not the kind of documentary that’s going to pick apart the ideas at play and question their validity. After all, the movie ends with Attenborough paying Björk a huge compliment. Instead it’s the kind of film that offers strange ideas at face value so the audience’s minds can run away with them and draw their own outlandish, philosophical conclusions.

-Brandon Ledet

Björk: Biophilia Live (2014)

/ swampflix / 9 Comments

bjork
fourhalfstar
“I do believe motion pictures are the significant art form of our time. And I think the main reason is, they’re an art form of movement, as opposed to static art forms of previous times. But another reason that they’re the preeminent art form is they’re part art and part business. They are a compromised art form, and we live in a somewhat compromised time. And I believe to be successful over the long run, unless you’re a Federico Fellini or an Ingmar Bergman or a true genius in filmmaking, you have to understand that you’re working in both an art and a business.” – Roger Corman

The concert movie is a disadvantaged art form, as it has a lot to prove out the gate to justify its place among other films. While documentaries & fictional films can pretend not to be what Roger Corman would call a “compromised” artistic commodity, the concert film is always conspicuously selling a product: the band or artist that’s performing. The blurred line between short film & advertisement is acceptable in a music video, because they’re generally free to access and easy to consume. A full-length concert film on the other hand, especially one with a theatrical release, has a much steeper hill to climb. It’s asking you to pay admittance to a long-form promotion, spectacle or not. This is an especially hard sell for someone that’s not already a dedicated fan of the product on display.

Although some concert films make no attempt to hide their commercial aspirations or reach an audience outside of their fan base (last year’s One Direction: Where We Are is a recent high-profile example), others bend over backwards to prove themselves worthy to be discussed among their less-scrutinized film peers. Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense proves itself a genre benchmark through its careful consideration of how the band’s literal stage presence affects its cinematic image.  Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars uses the silver screen to breathe life into the fictional character of the film’s title. The Band’s The Last Waltz uses some of that good old Scorsese grit to give the account of its “farewell concert” the feeling of an intimate late-night jam session shared between a few dozen (exceptionally talented) friends. I don’t mean to pick on the One Direction concert movie. The group has a wide enough fan-base that the demand for a no frills concert movie is loud enough on its own to justify Where We Are’s existence. I’m just trying to distinguish why Bjork’s Biophilia Live, a movie in the same distinctly commercial-minded genre, deserves to be considered among the best films of 2014.

Biophilia Live begins with the voice of famed naturalist David Attenborough making wild, unrealistic declarations over breathtaking nature footage befitting the TV series Planet Earth. Attenborough urges the audience to “forget the size of the human body. Remember that you are a gateway between the universal and the microscopic, the unseen forces that stir the depths of your innermost being and Nature, who embraces you and all there is.” He goes on to claim that “we are on the brink of a revolution that will reunite humans with nature through new technological innovation.” Holy shit. That’s quite an ambitious opener. The film itself nearly delivers on this majestic promise, finding a unique visual language that combines “nature, music, and technology” into one cohesive whole.

This union of “nature, music and technology” is accomplished through a layered visual collage that matches the on-stage aspects of the concert being filmed to the beautiful nature footage & pixelated CGI that swirls around and above it. During the opening song “Thunderbolt” Björk appears in the Earth’s stormy atmosphere, her backing band’s synths (and a specially rigged Tesla coil) seemingly controlling the lightning that illuminates the air around her. The imagery then shifts from the earthly to the celestial, the rhythm of the music correlating to the phases of the moon and the glacially shifting lights of stars and galaxies. The focus then shrinks from the heavenly to the microscopic: Fantastic Voyage-style close-ups of blood moving through veins fade to pixelated bacteria attaching to strands of DNA before the images finally devolve into distorted television color bars & computer monitor static. My favorite use of the nature footage arrives during this microcosmic section when crystals form over the image of Björk performing the song “Crystalline”, only to disappear in a blink to match the song’s violent rhythms. “Crystalline”‘s “internal nebula” & “crystalizing galaxies” lyrical phrasing also feels like the film’s tone in a nutshell. It’s in the stranger moments like this and like when vibrant mushrooms slowly expand in the foreground, leaving the stage antics out of focus that Biophilia Live shines brightest.

These phases of the imagery are cleverly allowed to bleed into one another instead of remaining isolated, which leads to some transcendent juxtaposition: a lightning storm in outer space, the moon perched on a spinal column, crystal formations melting into prism light. Even Björk herself looks like a combination of two ostensibly separate natural phenomenons, her gigantic wig like a colorful galaxy & her asymmetrical dress like an underwater growth. Attenborough’s opening monologue defines “biophilia” as “the love for Nature in all her manifestations” and Biophilia Live tries desperately to capture all of those manifestations in one definitive catalog. Conceived as a single facet of a multi-media project alongside a studio album, music-composition computer apps, and a filmed conversation between Björk & Attenborough, the film itself is more than just a document of a single concert. It’s also an attempt to tie years of far-reaching ideas spread across various art forms into a single product, the same way it tries to tie all of Nature into a single entity. What’s most impressive is that the film succeeds.

Although Björk exhibited creative control through all aspects of the production, part of the film’s success is surely due to the involvement of British director Peter Strickland. Strickland had already established his skills in visually displaying reverence for sound in his 2013 film Berberian Sound Studio, a bizarre thriller that’s just as much homage to foley artists & sound engineers as it is to old school giallo movies. There’s a lot of maddening, horrific energy in Berberian’s dissociative conflict between its imagery & its sounds. Here he & co-director Nick Fenton instead synchronize sounds to their visual equals in the style of Björk’s previous music video collaborations with Michel Gondry. The dissociation occurs instead in how the images relate to each other: how the screens interact with the stage, how distant stars relate to plankton, etc.  Through various camera movement & editing techniques Biophilia Live creates a world that’s simultaneously intimate and expansive.

The live concert format is occasionally at odds with the film’s intimacy. The crowd sometimes intrudes mid-song, breaking the reverie with premature applause. Björk is appreciative of their presence at least, punctuating the end of each song with a polite “thank you”. Of course, the film’s very existence depends on Björk’s relationship with her audience, the same way the existence of One Direction’s Where We Are depends on theirs. Without a basic appreciation for Björk’s music, it’s unlikely that that someone would enjoy a feature-length document of one of her concerts.

What makes Biophilia Live remarkable is the ambition to reach beyond pleasing fans musically. It also asks its audience to contemplate the totality of Nature and how its individual parts interact and unite into a cohesive whole. It’s a zealous, far-reaching work that deserves to be included in the conversation of the best films released in 2014 as well as the best concert films of all time.

-Brandon Ledet

Frank (2014)

/ swampflix / 7 Comments

EPSON MFP image
fourstar
“I’ve always wanted to work with someone who shares my dream of making extremely likable music.”

It seems easier now than ever to be a “musician”: gather a couple friends, write a few songs, release them on the Internet.  But just because your music is easier to get heard does not mean that it’s necessarily good. In the 2014 comic drama Frank we follow one such mediocre musician, Jon, played by Domhnall Gleeson, who finds himself dropping everything to join an avant-garde pop band led by the enigmatic and mysterious Frank. Frank is a musical savant with a history of mental illness who hides himself inside a large papier-mâché head.  Jon is enthralled with Frank’s outsider art but fails to see past his own ambitions and realize that there are dark secrets behind that fake, gigantic head.

Frank is grounded by a stunning performance from Michael Fassbender as the titular protagonist who channels Jim Morrison, Captain Beefheart, and Daniel Johnston; artists whose own troubled past and history of mental illness mirror Frank’s. Props should also be given Domnhall Gleeson, as it could have been easy to lose our sympathy for Jon as he latches on to Frank’s coattails. But in the end we realize he’s just trying to be something he’s not and for that he earns our sympathy instead of our scorn.

Some viewers might feel that the story loses steam in its melodramatic finale but the emotional third act brings home the larger theme of how different people react to mental illness when it is coupled with something like vast creativity: diner patrons call Frank a “freak” and laugh at him; Jon thinks he must have been ‘traumatized’; Frank’s parents love and support him, but are clueless about how to help him.

Ultimately, what sounds like a premise for a ridiculous indie comedy instead ends up being a deeply moving exploration of mental illness and blind artist worship. It is also wickedly funny. Director Lenny Abrahamson does a great job of juggling the seemingly contradictory tones in the film: whimsical and offbeat, sweet and punk-spirited, funny and melancholic. A definite must watch.

Frank is currently streaming on Netflix.

-James Cohn

The Juniper Tree (1990)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

EPSON MFP image

three star

Discovering Björk’s acting debut in The Juniper Tree was some divine happenstance. I had lost track of her music career sometime after 2001’s Vespertine, so it was delightful to recently give her latest album Biophilia a (four years late) first listen and discover its fantastic weirdness, obsessively looping it through my headphones all last week. A recommendation that same week alerted me that I was 25 years behind on the release of another Björk project, a small budget, black & white indie film about witchcraft.

The Juniper Tree was filmed in 1986 in the months following the dissolution of Björk’s post-punk band KUKL and the birth of her first child. By the time the film cleared its financial hurdles and saw a 1990 release in Iceland and on film festival circuits, she had already earned much greater success with the alt rock group The Sugarcubes. By the time it saw a wide, international release in 1993, she had achieved major success as a solo artist with the album Debut. In comparison to the huge “Bad Taste” art collective behind The Sugarcubes and the big-name record labels behind Debut, The Juniper Tree’s cast and budget are microscopic, but the film does a lot with a little, pulling a weird little story and some bizarre images from a few locations and even fewer moving pieces. At least from a funding standpoint, it was a time capsule of a primitive state of Björk’s growth as an artist, but one that demonstrates how little material she needs to work with to produce something great.

Loosely based on the Brothers Grimm fairy tale of the same name, The Juniper Tree is the story of two grieving families struggling to blend into one cohesive unit. Think of it as an Icelandic Brady Bunch, but with witches & cannibalism instead of puppy love & nose-breaking footballs. Björk plays Margit, a young woman whose mother was recently stoned & burned for practicing witchcraft. In the escape from their home her sister Katla marries a young widower who lives alone with his son. The boy befriends Margit, but is vehemently against his father’s marriage to Katla, who he knows to be a witch. Although Katla does cast spells (cruelly & often), it is Margit who possesses truly magical abilities, most importantly the ability to communicate with ghosts.

The film’s heart lies with the relationship between Margit and her young brother-in-law and the mourning that bonds them, but it’s the fleeting, hallucinatory imagery that makes it noteworthy. Despite its budget, The Juniper Tree manages to produce an impressive range of images: a hand thrust into a black hole, a ghost perched on Icelandic cliffs, fish picking at an underwater corpse, Northern Lights, birds in flight. It’s a somber, self-serious affair, but one that earns its odder moments in a very short run time. If nothing else, the heavenly tones of Björk’s singing voice elevate the material into otherworldly territory. She’s perfectly suited for this world of witchcraft & mourning and it shows in the final product.

Of course, The Juniper Tree will always be known as the other Björk movie. Lars von Trier’s powerful Dancer in the Dark gave her a much larger stage to prove herself not only as an incredible composer, but also as an actress, a talent she doesn’t utilize nearly enough. The Juniper Tree gets drowned out in the comparison, but when considered in isolation it’s an interesting little art movie. It’s very much Super Serious 80s/90s Film School Fodder, but if a young, feral Björk practicing witchcraft goes as far with you as it does with me, you’ll find it kinda perfect in its small-scale intimacy.

The Juniper Tree is currently streaming on Hulu.

-Brandon Ledet

Electrick Children (2012)

/ swampflix / 5 Comments

electrickchildren

fourhalfstar

Tape Jacket
The first & last sounds you hear in the dreamlike Electrick Children are ocean waves & a cassette player. If you played the film on loop, these sounds would parallel the experience of listening to the clicks & hisses of an audio tape switching from Side A to Side B and back again. This reverence for sound is a vital part of the film’s allure and essential to its plot. When the protagonist, a 15 year old girl simply named Rachel, listens to her very first rock & roll song she becomes inexplicably pregnant. As she navigates the consequences of this “miracle” in two irreconcilable worlds, her life takes the same Side A & Side B anatomy of the cassette tape that changed it forever.

Side A
Rachel’s home life is an isolated, fundamentalist Mormon community in Utah. It’s a loving environment, but one that strangles her personal desires & freedoms. Rachel has a sense of humor that’s generally discouraged in her piously pensive household. Her father (played by a terrifying thing that calls itself Billy Zane) is the community’s patriarch & spiritual leader, exuding a level of control that’s never purely healthy. He’s suspicious of Rachel’s prayers thanking God for modern inventions like tape recorders. Rachel’s mother is suspicious of her daughter’s intense interest in a bedtime story about a red Mustang. The story is meant for the kids to interpret as the tale of a mythical horse, but is in fact the story of the mother’s seduction in the passenger seat of a sports car. Her parents were right to be worried, as this fascination with the outside world literally impregnates their daughter through the conduit of a cassette tape recording of a new wave band covering Blondie’s “Hanging on the Telephone”. The only modern world objects in their house are hidden in the basement like a dirty secret: an electric light with a picture of the ocean, the audio cassette player & tapes. It’s in that basement where Rachel becomes pregnant. She confesses her transgression to her parents, reasoning “Maybe I listened to something I wasn’t supposed to and then I’m pregnant.” They don’t believe her and plan to conceal her “sin” by marrying her to a near stranger.

Side B
To avoid the unwanted marriage, Rachel runs away to Las Vegas in search of the voice on the cassette tape, a voice she believes belongs to her baby’s father. She approaches guitar-playing street performers and boys wearing images of cassettes in her desperate search. Vegas is a blown up version of the electric music & lights in her parents’ basement. Typical pillars of teenage rebellion swirl around her: cursing, drugs, kissing, punk shows & skate parks. Her mother’s mythical red Mustang appears to her throughout the journey: first on the drive into Vegas, then during her first kiss, and a final time after her first legitimate crime. Each time the car passes through her life it’s blasting “Hanging on the Telephone.” The car & the musicians she befriends don’t lead her to the father of her miraculous child, but along the way she falls in love, discovers autonomy, and hits every other typical beat you’d expect in a cinematic coming-of-age story. Rachel’s parents warned her of the sinful, destructive nature of the modern world, but it proves not to be true. She treats the modern world with a humble, humorous kindness and it returns the favor. Her only conflicts, including the pregnancy, result from her own transgressions.

Liner Notes
Some reviews for Electrick Children unfairly take points off for it being too cute or fanciful. There’s a preciousness to the story that could be a turn-off for some viewers, but is entirely appropriate for what the movie is: a modern fairy tale, an exercise in magic realism. The film’s Big Hollywood Ending brings its two worlds together in a moment that feels unreal, but no more unreal than the central Immaculate Conception. The characters come across somewhat as indie movie archetypes, but that artificiality is exploited to its full advantage. They’re only assigned first names and limited motivations, but that plays into their allegorical usefulness. The actors playing Rachel and her love interest Clyde (Julia Garner & Rory Culkin) get great mileage with the shorthand, bringing depthless empathy to characters that are mostly limited to one mode: wide-eyed hope and Bill & Ted style sloth, respectively. The skill with which first time director Rebecca Thomas handles her limited budget is remarkable. She pulls a fantastic dream world out of a few locations and a small-scale cast, finding an impressive wealth of significance in a few minor details like an electric light, a cassette tape, a Mustang, and Clyde’s Hawaiian shirt. She even seemingly taunts potential detractors with lines like “You guys playing Garden State or are you coming?” Most importantly, Thomas establishes fantasy in her attention to sound: the clicks of a cassette player, “Hanging on the Telephone”, Rachel’s recorded prayers & their accompanying somber piano notes, the sounds of ocean waves. When the waves return at the film’s end and Rachel says “Let’s go back to the beginning”, it’s tempting to take the suggestion and let the tape play over again, automatically switching back to Side A.

Secret Bonus Track
Rebecca Thomas cites Pasolini’s film The Gospel According To St Matthew (1964) as a stylistic influence on Electrick Children. She said “He takes a fairly neutral and nonjudgmental approach to the New Testament […] It was also important for me to keep my version of the Virgin Mary story as grounded as I could, even though I was dealing with the supernatural: I like to ground things that are fantastical to understand them more.” As the debauchery-benchmark Salò was the only Pasolini film I had seen before, I found that influence pretty surprising. As Thomas says, the film itself is a fairly literal, unsentimental telling of (an unusually angry) Jesus’ life, but one with some striking imagery and occasional brutality, even if it does feel like eating your vegetables. It’s not required viewing to enjoy or understand Electrick Children, but it does help provide context for Thomas’ ambitions. Also, it features an Odetta song, which is always nice.

Electrick Children is currently streaming on Netflix.

-Brandon Ledet

Can’t Stop the Music (1980)

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

EPSON MFP image
three star
campstamp
I’ll never forget the first time I discovered Can’t Stop the Music and all of its tacky goodness. My best friend and I were searching for a Friday night movie at Major Video, a great local video rental store that has sadly closed up shop, and we hit the jackpot. Waiting on the bottom shelf of the comedy aisle was Can’t Stop the Music. Deciding to rent it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made in my life. This film’s got everything: an amazing soundtrack with loads of Village People tunes, bizarre dance routines, tons of exposed chest hair, and Bruce Jenner in his prime.

The film starts out with one of the greatest roller-skating scenes ever, and it’s personally my favorite part of the movie. Jack Morell (Steve Guttenberg) is skating around the streets of New York like a pro to the David London’s “The Sound of the City” after quitting his job in order to take a DJ gig at a nightclub. This scene is the reason I own a pair of roller skates; that’s how inspirational it is. Another unforgettable moment is the dance number the cast performs to the Village People’s mega-hit “YMCA.” There’s a bit of nudity (no surprise there) in this scene, which really makes me wonder how this received a PG rating. What was the MPAA thinking? I could list all my favorite parts of this movie, but that would probably take forever because the whole movie is just so bizarre.

Even though I’ve seen this movie a million times, I still don’t understand what it’s about. I guess that’s the magic of it? It’s basically supposed to be a movie about the formation of the Village People, but it’s really just a mess of terrible acting, a bad script, musical numbers that make no sense whatsoever, and crappy special effects. It’s no secret that the film didn’t achieve much success. Also, releasing a disco-themed musical in 1980 wasn’t the best idea since disco was pretty much dead. Can’t Stop the Music actually won the very first Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Picture and inspired John J. B. Wilson to start what is now known as the Razzies. If that’s not reason enough to see a film, then I don’t know what is.

Can’t Stop The Music is currently streaming on Netflix & Amazon Prime.

-Britnee Lombas