Movies Which I Have Done Seen Recently

A Serious Man

Here's the Coen brothers in full-on "weird" mode, as in more "Barton Fink" than "Raising Arizona." But what a strange, captivatingly weird one this is -- a kind of tangled meditation on fate, faith and the cruel whims of the universe, all cycling around one Larry Gopnik's tragic, slow downfall in 1960s Minnesota. Gopnik (a superb Michael Stuhlbarg) is a college professor who over the course of the movie battles infidelity, spoiled children, crazy neighbours and student blackmail. The theme is, as Roger Ebert says, "why, God, why?" It's the Coen brothers at their best -- comic in as black a fashion as possible, but also quizzical, with plenty to chew on afterwards. It may not have gotten quite as much acclaim, but in its wry way it's easily as good as "No Country For Old Men." It's also their most explicitly "Jewish" movie, meditating on whether God really cares. Stuhlbarg -- who looks like a nerdier Joaquin Phoenix -- is a marvel as Gopnik, who remains hopeful up to the very end of his trials. Of course if you're the kind of viewer who wants to shout at the television to characters "stop being such a doormat," you might find Gopnik's adventures irksome. But there's beauty, quirk and grace galore in this gem, particularly in its fragile, haunting ending. Grade: A

Where The Wild Things Are

It's a funny beast, this adaptation of Maurice Sendak's wonderful picture book. I'm a huge fan of director Spike Jonze, whose "Adaptation" and "Being John Malkovich" are in my top movies of recent years. Visually, this movie is a marvel -- lovely, textured beasts, a sun-burnished island paradise, and the kid who plays Max is just perfect -- but yet, while I liked it, I didn't quite get swept away by it. It's hard work spinning out a 12-page story or so into a full movie, but Jonze gets too carried away by the sadder undertones of the story and turns it all into a rather emo ode for lost childhood. I knew going in this wasn't one for kids, really, but I don't see why this movie had to be so darned melancholy, basically -- there's just not a lot of joy to it, and everyone is rather mopey. Yes, childhood ending is sad and we all have feelings we can't articulate, but I feel like "Wild Things" just wasn't quite wild enough, that it missed the colourful (if slightly disturbing) feeling of Sendak's works. A little solemnity goes an awful long way. The beasts look perfect, though -- they aren't some CGI monstrosities, but have real depth and soul.

Grade: B-

The Blind Side

A wealthy white Southern woman (Sandra Bullock) takes in and basically adopts a poor black kid -- who then goes on to become a college football superstar and changes everyone's lives. Yeah, it's another Saintly Black People Make Uptight White Folks Feel Good movie. Yet hang on, because it is based on a true story, so that takes some of the sanctimonious feeling away, at least for me. The tale of Mike Oher and his harsh upbringing rings true, as does Lee Ann Tuohy's (Bullock) unplanned intervention in his dead-end life. Sometimes people do just do good things, and in its way "The Blind Side" is predictable and yet kind of sweet. Bullock is quite good -- Oscar-deserving good, I don't really agree, but she does really make you believe she's a certain type of steely-yet-soft Southern matriarch. But she does show more acting chops than she's generally known for. But the kid, Oher, is a bit too much of an empty vessel. This is a hugely "American" movie with people glued to college football and eating huge Thanksgiving dinners and so forth; it made me a bit homesick for the South and it amused me to see a movie where the entire plot turns upon a fellow being accepted to my old alma mater, Ole Miss. It's a bit overlong, but while you know where it's going, it's an OK movie for the kind of movie it is.

Grade: B-

Winding our way to Wellington

So last week was school holidays and we packed up for a quick jaunt down to Wellington, New Zealand's illustrious capital city. I hadn't been there in 10 years, since my very first trip to NZ. It was good to get on an old-fashioned road trip, too. Geography here kind of means you can't drive most directions without hitting the sea before too long, but the 8-hour drive south to Wellington is one of the longest treks you can take on one island. And sometimes, this American just misses the lure of the open road.

Of all the NZ cities I've been to Wellington reminds me the most of my beloved San Francisco -- jammed into a tight bay, hilly, perched over the tempestous ocean, with lots of nifty architecture, narrow, charming timber structures wedged onto vertical spaces. And Wellington is WINDY. Not just mildly breezy but incredibly windy, with winds pouring into the U-shaped harbour at varying degrees of severity. It wasn't even particularly gusty while we were there but after a couple of days of it I thought yeah, this could be tiresome.

That aside, though, Wellington is a fine place -- the city centre is compact and has that "government town" feeling most capitals do, with lots of folks in suits and ties. Compared to the 1.2 million or so people in the Auckland area, Wellington feels like a small town. You've got the Parliament (which I toured last time I was in town so we didn't go today), plus the huuuuuge national museum Te Papa, which we took the boy to. It's full of art, buttons to push, flashing lights, holographic maps and even a giant dead pickled colossal squid.

As I mentioned before, Wellington is VERY vertical (many houses have long steep steps going up to them, and some even have little motorized cable cars to carry them up). I love the steep scale of Wellington, with so much packed vertically into small space, it's got a cozy feeling. There's some excellent shopping -- big ups to Slowboat Records where I found a rare Alex Chilton CD I've been hunting, and the awesome Sweet Mother's Kitchen, a New Orleans-inspired restaurant where we ate twice in once day (and I had hush puppies for the first time in yeeeears). Another nifty spot to visit was Weta Studios' small museum/shop out in the burbs -- Weta is the special effects studio who work with Sir Peter Jackson on films such as "Lord of the Rings" and "King Kong" and they had tons of interesting props on show. We also drove along the Wellington peninsula which had marvelous views out into Cook Strait, and full of beautiful little isolated beach communities that don't feel like they're 10 minutes from downtown. You could even park at the edge of the airport and watch planes come down into the runway.

'Twas a swell trip down to NZ's second city, and I'm hoping it's not another 10 years before we make it down there again!

Movie Review: Kick-Ass

What if Quentin Tarantino had made "Spider-Man"?

The result might well be something like "Kick-Ass," an absurdly violent and profanity-filled romp that is definitely not a superhero movie for kids.

Dave Lizewsky (a nerdy-yet-heroic Aaron Johnson) is a typical New York teen, obsessed with superheroes.

One day, he decides to toss on a colourful wetsuit and patrol his neighbourhood as the superhero Kick-Ass. Unfortunately, Kick-Ass soon draws the attention of the local mob man (a sneering Mark Strong) and other vigilante heroes, including the menacing ex-cop Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) and his whirling dervish of a daughter, Hit Girl (Chloe Grace Moretz). Needless to say, things get out of control fast.

"Kick-Ass" prides itself on being a "realistic" look at superheroes -- nobody has strange powers, and Kick-Ass -- well, he spends a lot of the movie getting his ass (or arse, if you prefer) kicked.

Director Matthew Vaughan piles on the colorful carnage and comedy, with buckets of profanity, blood and slayings that are more for laughs than anything. But he also cleverly makes "Kick-Ass" feel topical with nods to Internet celebrity and televised terrorism.

"Kick-Ass" is a heck of a lot of fun, although it's kidding itself if it thinks it's really that revolutionary and "realistic." "Kick-Ass" at its core is no more realistic than Batman, really.

Confession and digression: I actually haven't read the "Kick Ass" comics the movie is based on yet, but this movie's whiz-bang shock-and-awe approach is pure Mark Millar, the comic's prolific creator. Millar can be an entertaining comics writer, but he's also hugely up himself when he blathers along on comments like "Watchmen isn't that realistic – there's a big blue guy with his dick out, you know?" Kick-Ass is hardly a model of realism either. Millar's work is all about the action-movie kick - which he does very well in stuff like "Wanted," "The Ultimates" and "The Authority." Frankly, I'm turned off by Millar's egocentric public persona, but his comics do deliver a punch. But Millar's flaw is that his work rarely engages the heart like it does the fanboy gut, and to me nothing Millar's ever written comes within the range of what Grant Morrison or Alan Moore have done with the genre.

Rant aside.

Johnson, in his first big role, makes a mark as Kick-Ass, making this rather clueless do-gooder believable. Cage is marvelous as "Big Daddy," doing a kind of twisted impression of Adam West as Batman in the 1960s TV series. And little Moretz as Hit-Girl just about steals the movie.

But if you find the notion of a 12-year-old girl swearing like a sailor and killing gangsters in assorted inventive ways offensive, "Kick Ass" is probably not the movie for you. It definitely pushes the edge of good taste, but never in a truly sadistic way.

The movie is best when it goes gleefully, goofily over the top, making fun of superheroes but also embracing them in all their colourful glory.

Like blogger, like son

I reckon I've been blogging on and off 6 years or so now and it's time to let the younger generation do their thing. Allow me to hype to you my wee boy's blog, showcasing the remarkable variety and creativity of his swell and nifty art creations! With a little help from Mum, it's Peter's Creations! Go check it out.

The answer is the question is the answer

It's been our Wednesday night ritual now for the last six years to watch "Lost," and see where the twists and turns take us next. Now that it's in its final year, I honestly admit I have no idea where this show will end up. It started off as a "when will the castaways be rescued" drama, but that rescue ended up happening in Season 3. Now, it's some kind of time-travelly science fiction existential mythological epic that appears to be, in its last weeks, shaping up into a clash between good and evil god-figures. Not quite what one first expected when Oceanic Flight 815 went down!

The byzantine path the show has taken in the last six years is breathtaking. The closest comparisons to a TV show that I can make is "The Prisoner," or "Twin Peaks" but unlike those shows, which were elliptical and surreal from the start, "Lost" has gradually spun its web into something vast, mythological and occasionally overwrought (any time the series focuses too long on cliched Kate, the "hot girl led astray," for instance). In Series 6, "Lost" keeps spiraling its fractal story outwards, making you wonder how it can possibly all come together at the end in a few months. (We're a couple of weeks behind the show as it airs in the US, so no spoilers please!)

One big theme of "Lost" seems to be that nobody is quite what they seem. Jack, the ostensible "hero" of the show, has turned out to be frequently bungling, easily unmanned and troubled. Sawyer, the loveable rogue, has become the show's angry but steely man of action, while the most compelling character arc has been the one-time villain Ben's gradual redemption. Which might not pan out, of course.

But is there a more fascinating character than the one who I think is the real focus of the series -- poor doomed, then resurrected John Locke. Locke is the man of constantly shattered faith, the endlessly questing philosopher who is always being proved wrong. Locke's dogged search for the answers and the heartbreaking end of this quest is by far "Lost's" most interesting storyline, I think. And in Series 6, it's taken a twist by the resurrection of "John Locke," now host to the mysterious adversary, Jacob's enemy, who appears to be the "main" villain of the series. Or is he a villain? Terry O'Quinn has been great throughout the series as Locke, who swings between clenched confidence and abject misery. Now, as "Not-Locke," O'Quinn makes an absolutely fascinating focus for "Lost's" endless twists. I don't know if the "real" John Locke will return or not -- dead doesn't always mean dead -- but even if he doesn't, John Locke's quest for meaning neatly sums up "Lost."

It's still a wild ride, even if several times an episode the wife and I have to turn to each other and say things like "who's that again?" and "where was Jin last time we saw him?" "Lost" has woven such a tangled web that I feel like I'll have to read some of the inevitable "Guide to Lost" books that will come out once the series concludes.

There will be those who inevitably complain that we didn't get all of the "answers" when "Lost" ends. I would say that a huge part of the story has actually become clear this year. But you know, even if every dangling subplot isn't resolved, I'm enjoying the questions just as much.

Who's drinking the tea party?

I'm an expatriate, but I've never subscribed to the whole "I left America because I hate it" notion of being an American living overseas. We moved to New Zealand because of family, and because hey, it'd be neat to live in a foreign country for a while, however long it ends up being for. George Bush being President had nothing to do with it. But I love many many things about the US, miss it a lot, and usually stick up for it when I get the occasional "America-bashing" comment from people here.

But I admit -- I don't understand this "Tea Party" nonsense or the school of Sarah Palinism at all. The incoherent rage and anger of people like the Glenn Becks and Bill O'Reillys and so forth is bizarre to me. There are people on the Republican end of things I've respected, but they seem to be a dwindling voice amongst the crazies. People on both sides of the political divide get angry and idiotic, but I don't know, it just seems like the American right wing has a patent on over-the-top lunacy.

Living overseas, I see everything now through a curious filter of distance. I wonder, are people really getting crazier, or is that just the way it seems from afar? I end up often feeling like I need to apologise for my country, or trying to explain to people that a politician or a talk show host does not equal a country.

When you get people like Sarah Palin saying things like 'Don't retreat, just reload," and you think about the likelihood that a certain amount of disturbed, gun-owning people are likely to take that as more than just rhetoric, you have to wonder. If left-wingers talked about shooting Bush, they rightfully would've been prosecuted. It's hard to imagine endlessly red-faced, violence-invoking rhetoric isn't going to lead to real trouble.

I dunno. Maybe it's just the up and down of politics as always (people have been shouting about politics as long as they've had larynxes, after all). Maybe the Internet, the Twittery and Facebookery and so forth just make everything that much louder and less avoidable. I try to tell my NZ friends that all Americans aren't like the Palinites -- that the Tea Party folk just are a very vocal, very loud fringe element that gets a lot more press than the number of people they actually represent. But maybe I've been out of America too long and the lunatics have actually taken over the asylum. Can anyone tell me?

Alex Chilton was a Big Star

Alex Chilton is dead, and lordy does it hurt to type those words. For a certain stripe of pop fan, he was kind of like our Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen, and when I heard he'd died today at the too-young age of 59, of an apparent heart attack, I was stopped stone-cold. It's been a crappy kind of week anyway, and Alex Chilton should never die. Michael Jackson dying, yeah, kind of saw that coming, but Alex Chilton was the voice of heartbreak and strained emotion and man, he just shouldn't be dead, y'know?

I discovered Chilton's never-quite-made-it 1970s band Big Star in the 1990s, when I was living near Memphis, Tennessee, their home town. Big Star were a cult fetish for music nerds, with their blend of power pop, rock chops and lyrical truth. It's taken years, decades, for them to get their due -- the awesome box set of pretty much everything they did, "Keep An Eye On The Sky," was one of the best music albums of last year or any year, really. You listen to a Big Star song, and you think, man, why have I never heard of these guys?

Chilton's songs may never have quite topped the charts, but the best of them hit a chord with many artists - you might know "September Gurls," given a lovely cover by The Bangles, or "In The Street," which covered by Cheap Trick became the theme song for "That '70s Show." Big Star only released a couple of albums, but these '70s records are universal in their stumbling honesty. There was just something really fragile and sincere yet strong about Chilton's best work. There's been one jillion overwrought songs about being young, uncertain and in love, but somehow, Chilton's never seemed forced. His thin, quavering voice danced through tunes like "Thirteen" and "Back of a Car," finely detailed little snapshots of everyday emotional fumblings--
"Sitting in the back of a car 

Music so loud, can't tell a thing 

Thinkin' 'bout what to say 

And I can't find the lines"

Read it on the page and it sounds like generic teenage angst, maybe, but man, Alex Chilton SELLS that sentiment and if you've ever been 16 years old and digging that person so much your stomach boils, you know the feeling. Big Star and Alex Chilton touched that moment and always sold it, always made it feel real. Over their three-year recording career their songs ran the gamut from teen-bop of "Don't Lie To Me" to the dark, glistening sorrow of songs like "Holocaust." Endlessly contrarian, Chilton's post-Big Star career was a strange twisty journey -- he seemed to spurn the fame he could've had -- but he never stopped playing -- he was going to play with the reformed Big Star this weekend.

There's a tribute song by The Replacements that'll be played thousands of times by Chilton fans in coming days -- as heartfelt as any of Chilton's best, it's an homage to a cult artist who should've been a household name but never quite was, but that doesn't really matter. It's a valentine to a secret idol, a star who's huge in your own personal universe and you don't care if anyone's never heard of him. In my mind, Alex Chilton will always be a Big Star.

Children by the million sing for Alex Chilton when he comes 'round
They sing "I'm in love. What's that song?
I'm in love with that song."

Superheroes I Love No. 1: The Man-Thing

Everyone knows about Superman, Spider-Man, Batman and Wolverine. But one of the things that keeps me hooked on comics is the sheer variety of goofy, semi-obscure superheroes out there. Here's one of a series of occasional looks at lesser-known characters I've always dug.

Who: The Man-Thing, a swamp monster who first appeared in 1971.

What: A scientist transformed in a horrible lab accident -- you know how it goes -- into a mindless, shambling muck monster, who feeds off human emotions. Haunts the Florida Everglades, ends up in lots of strange magical-inspired escapades.

Catchphrase: "Whatever knows fear burns at the Man-Thing's touch!"

Why I dig: There's something about Man-Thing I've always liked, even if his name is vaguely giggle-inducing. (And we won't even get into the short-lived series "Giant-Sized Man-Thing," source of more comic geek jokes than you could fill a barn with.) I've always liked his bizarre design, kind of a pile of muck with a carrot for a nose and dreadlocks. He was created around the same time as DC Comics' "Swamp Thing," but has been used in rather different ways over the years. He's less a character than a catalyst -- there's a challenge in writing a story around a mute, basically brain-dead protagonist, who basically just reacts to events and puts plots in motion.

But the best stories, by the late, great Steve Gerber, use Man-Thing as a pivot to tackle themes of all stripes. You'll find Man-Thing used in ghost stories, religious parables, environmental spiels, wacked-out pirate tales. Gerber had a knack for using Man-Thing's empathic nature as a mirror to reflect man's own lunacy, and was probably the best writer by far to tackle the character. Although his heyday was in the 1970s, he's even been used fairly successfully in more straightforward superhero tales -- one of my favorite "Marvel Team-Up" issues pitted Spider-Man in a gooey battle against Man-Thing. Sure, it's a funny name -- Man-Thing, tee-hee! -- but the muck monster has yielded some great stories.

Concert review: The Pixies, Auckland, March 12

So last night was alt-rock legends The Pixies' very first tour in New Zealand, like, ever, on the road on their never-ending reunion tour, this time playing their 1989 classic album "Doolittle" straight through, beginning to end. They pretty much sold out the massive 12,000-seat Vector Arena, filled to the brim with former hipsters-now parents like myself (fun game -- count the balding 30-something blokes with shaved heads! Pretend they're all clones!). NZ has been waiting a LONG time for Pixie love -- I know several people that were practically buzzing out of their seats all week in anticipation. And it was awesome good fun, with Frank Black, Kim Deal and co. slashing out the riffs, yelps and screams like it was 1990 all over again.

It was a bit of deja vu for Avril and I as we were (probably) one of the few there who'd actually seen the Pixies live since they reformed in 2004 -- we caught them on one of their very first gigs almost exactly six years ago back in Oregon. So we didn't have the shock of novelty going for us, but it was quite interesting to contrast seeing them at a 1,200-seat club vs at a cavernous 12,000 capacity arena. We definitely had better views at Eugene, where the band was a bit looser (Joey Santiago doing an impressively fun series of impromptu guitar solos), but Auckland's show was a prime spectacle -- there was something quite awesome about seeing so many thousands of people so totally into the definitive "cult" band, singing along to grotesque and weird anthems like "Debaser," "Gouge Away" and "Hey." They were smoothly professional with just enough of a gritty edge to not seem like a total cash-in reunion tour, and the two encores were awesome, with fantastic versions of "Into The White" and "U-Mass." I'm just too darned old for the front row, but I actually like sitting a bit back from the stage and seeing the sweep of hundreds of heads bobbing, hands waving. Kim Deal was the definition of rock-chick cool, Frank Black screamed so much I thought his throat would explode, and we all thrashed away.

We also had the fun of people watching -- as usual there were a fair percentage of goofs who seemed to just show up to spend $100 on tickets, get as drunk as humanly possible on $8 beers, then get thrown out (the guy who got tossed out during the second song was tied for 'Winner of the Night' with the other guy who tried to vault a fence into the pit and did an amazingly epic face-plant on the concrete floor instead).

Anyway, it was totally cool to see the Pixies once again -- the last time Peter was just a 10-week-old shrimp, today he's a bouncy 6-year-old! -- and to see them earning the cash and the acclaim that they deserved back in the day. "Doolittle," at 21 years old, still sounds strange and spacey and surreally menacing, as fresh as anything from 2010. Gouge away, my friends, gouge away...

500 words or less on why I'm here

To blog or not to blog? ... The question that's been rattling about these last 10 weeks or so since I 'gave up' regular posting on here. I tend to over-think most things that aren't really important enough to overthink, so the question of whether I should keep blogging or not took up a lot of brain space the last couple months of 2009. In the end I thought I'd pull the plug on "Spatula Forum." But I kept feeling that itch to express myself, and while I've also done other creative type pursuits -- taken up sketching a bit more, done various freelance movie and book reviews for papers down here -- in the end the free-form, whatever-the-hell I want to say allure of a blog is mighty compelling. I placed arbitrary "rules" on myself about how much I should post and I think that contributed to a lot of my feeling burned out by the whole thing at the end of the year.

So anyway. After seeing Pavement last week I felt darned itchy, wanting that outlet to blather about the cool gig -- brief comments on Facebook aren't really enough. The itch only went away when I just rambled out a little blog entry on it (and it was cool to see the several hundred hits I got writing a review of a well-known indie rock band's first gig in 10 years).

So I'll dust off the blog, change the design a bit (I've switched from Haloscan commenting so all the old comments are going away, I'm afraid), and I'll scratch this itch sometimes, putting aside any self-defeating notions of "how much" I should blog (a lesson I shoulda learned in 6 years of doing this, I know) and just doing it when and where and why I feel like it. That's why the Internet was put here in the first place, ain't it?