The Future is Unwritten: Julien Temple journeys through the past, takes a long look at Joe Strummer, asks around, fucking rocks out

If we’re to take a hard line about it, if we want to get purist and all, the very notion of a punk rock icon should rightfully be a sort of aberration, a betrayal of punk rock sensibility. Punk rock thrives on something like anonymity, on its participants’ willingness to submit their identities to an attitude that makes articulation or nuance highly precarious. Punk rock iconography allows for symbols, certainly –a crudely drawn “A” for Anarchy, a provocative, gravity defying haircut, hell, maybe a middle finger– but as soon as you turn an individual into an icon things get complicated.

Those seeking evidence of this conundrum need look no farther than Joe Strummer, the late, great frontman of The Clash and subject of Julian Temple’s Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten. Long after the first fires of punk burned out, after corporate co-opting and the transformation of punk rock into a marketing-friendly commodity, Strummer remained. Now that he’s gone, following a heart attack at the appallingly young age of 50, dissection of Strummer’s life renders him far more human than even a crappy mid-career album. A quick survey of his biography reveals a young man who baldly emulated Woody Guthrie, who later developed this deep affection for campfires and their tribal vibe. In short, this king of punk was a goddamned hippy.

Of course, any veteran fan of Strummer’s already knows most of this stuff and likely came to terms with it long ago. Though it’s highlighted by some brilliant, invaluable archival footage –Temple met and shot The Clash at the beginning of their career– what distinguishes Temple’s film isn’t so much the biographical facts it digs up as the impressive parade of friends, cohorts, admirers and commentators he’s assembled to pay tribute to Strummer. The end result inevitably transcends the philosophical dictates of punk to show us how Strummer’s influence is pan-genre, pan-cultural, pan-ideological.

Strummer was both a seductive, shrewd and ruthless businessman and a genuine musical stylist who, prompted to change his style after witnessing the birth of the Sex Pistols, nurtured his public persona. He was an artist of deep political convictions that at times sat uneasily with his art and the industry it became increasingly shaped by. He was a wandering spirit, a dreamer, a drinker, a druggie, and a dad. He helmed some of the best rock records ever made, yet was also capable of mediocrity and seemed excessively impressionable to passing fads. He was a pretty kick-ass DJ, and his radio show narrates the film. He was, finally, an irresistible presence, and what Temple gradually conveys is that most people, whether they knew him or just his music, couldn’t help but love the guy. You’ll likely walk away from the film loving him, too.

Temple’s long, prolific career as director encompasses countless music videos as well as films as diverse as The Filth and the Fury and Earth Girls Are Easy. Imminently adaptable, Temple has used his friendships and diplomatic skills to wrangle up a star-studded guest list to sit around the fire and talk Strummer. You get the impression that some of the bigger names only made the final cut to satisfy financiers. Comments from the likes of Martin Scorsese, Jim Jarmusch –an über-fan, who directed Strummer in Mystery Train– Steve Buscemi, and the ubiquitous Bono (yes, Bono) all provide insightful, passionate testaments to the contradictions and the particular genius of Strummer. Others, well, don’t fare as well. Johnny Depp: terrific actor. Musical commentator? Not so much.

Anyway, I can quibble, but overall The Future is Unwritten proves itself indispensable to any viewers with even a passing interest in popular music from the last 40 years or so. It’s not especially innovative in its style, but it is smart, mostly unsentimental, at times satisfyingly visceral, and utterly attuned to both the thrill and the provocation inherent in the music. There’s a terrific Silver Jews song that features the lyric, “Punk rock died when the first kid said/”Punk’s Not Dead…” Reflection such as that found in The Future is Unwritten assures us that yes, punk, the real thing, is indeed dead. But the spirit that animated punk is very much alive, and it charged at least one life with the strength to go on one hell of a musical adventure.

Old Joy: fleeting glimpses as feature film

It's one of those moments when the flickering image nearly becomes something else, a portal, when the audience’s perspective overlaps that of the characters’: though the car window a wild landscape passes, the characters sealed within, longing for what’s outside. Once the car’s parked, the doors opened, the invisible barrier is penetrated and the spell broken, the fluidity of steady movement replaced by awkward stumbling onto rough earth. There are these pesky moments that only touch you when passing you by.

I’m referring to moments in Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy, adapted by Reichardt and Jonathan Raymond from Raymond’s short story. The premise is so simple –two estranged friends reconnect for a night of camping and day-hike to a hot spring– that such reveries just bubble up from the fortitude of the atmosphere, accentuated by Yo La Tengo’s hushed score. It’s a different sort of character identification than we’re accustomed to, one entirely about implications drawn from few rather than innumerable cues.

The friends are Mark (Daniel London) and Kurt (Will Oldham, a.k.a. Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, whose music shares a particular kinship with Reichardt’s vision). Both are in their late 30s, with the period of their lives in which they could easily relate to one and other clearly far behind them. Mark has more or less settled into grown-up life in Portland, Oregon. We first see him attempting half-convincing yogic meditation when he gets the surprise invitation from Kurt, resulting in disapproving glares from his very pregnant wife.

Mark’s reserved, perhaps uncomfortable. Kurt effortlessly assumes control of the conversation once on the road. He’s a lonely, non-committal, restless spirit with vaguely New Age tendencies, still sniffing around for some elusive satori that convention advises is best found in our 20s. Gradually Kurt’s nervousness hints at a deeper, long-simmering panic. He confesses that this trip was intended to rekindle their friendship, though once the words leave his mouth it’s obvious such hopes are in vain.

I’m told the film’s title refers to a Chinese proverb. It slips into the film’s spare dialogue as Kurt recounts a strange, affecting dream. That Old Joy seems founded in proverb, in a piece of wisdom honed down to something both essential and multifaceted, seems appropriate, directing us toward a reading of the film that might do justice to its measure of depth in tone and feeling.

There were more than 10 years between Reichardt’s debut feature River of Grass and this, her follow-up. (In between was a short entitled ‘Ode,’ with music by Oldham.) I’ve no idea what Reichardt did in the meantime, but there’s something curiously satisfying in the fact that she’s waited so long to –in the literal sense– say so little. Old Joy’s only 76 minutes long, distinguished by a dearth of narrative events, and feels utterly out of time, an accumulation of details and feelings more than a story. Yet I don’t think there’s a single moment that doesn’t hold the glow from the filaments at the film’s core.

Reichardt lets things play out in a way that’s pointed, poetic and maybe not as dire as it first seems. After parting ways with Mark, Kurt appears unnervingly aimless on a nocturnal urban street, passing some change onto a homeless guy as an act of fleeting communion, or way to stave off fear of eventually winding up in the same place. The camera swings off into the street that gives way to the darkness on the edge of town and the title suddenly appears, abandoning Kurt but leaving him very much alive in the closing moments of this quiet film that only grows in meaning and beauty after its over.

Christopher Walken: genetically predisposed to imbalance?

Christopher Walken has this condition called heterochromia iridis. His screen presence is typically described as unbalanced: does this uneven distribution of pigment in the irises, resulting in his two different coloured eyes, one blue, one hazel, hold the key to his uncanny, singular abilities with convincingly embodying unbalanced characters? 

I think through my mental catalogue of images of Walken on screen, and he's never grounded, never standing evenly and calmly on both feet. He bounces and sways. He's a compulsive dancer. His speech patterns are never what you could describe as evenly measured. He likes to throw in a little surprise emphasis or spike the end of a sentence. He's a master of catching you off guard, and when combined with a sense of vulnerability and tenderness, such as in the scene where he tells Isabelle Huppert about his wallpaper (one of my all time favourites) shortly before his violent death, or when he utters his final words to Brooke Adams after Geza Kovacs plugs him full of lead, the outcome is unusually touching, always odd, and arguably unlike anything else in movies. 

Walken turns 65 today. He looks fit, agile like a man half his age, still plowing indiscriminently through several dubious projects. I understand he's supposed to play Ozzy Osbourne in some movie about Mötley Crüe. He seems like he could go on like this forever. I'm confident that there are still great roles ahead, but either way he's still so enjoyable in the lousy ones.

From the Fox vaults: not quite noir, but noir enough

On the back cover of every disc in the Fox Noir series is a serviceable, quickie definition of the noir genre/style/cycle. In the case of the three latest additions, this definition seems to exist primarily to convince the prospective buyer/viewer that the titles in question really do belong under the noir umbrella. In fact none of these films would ever pass as anything like a noir avatar, yet in each, to varying degrees, we’re able to trace a sort of dialogue with noir, and their noir elements tend to comprise their most enduring aspects.

Though directed by Otto Preminger, who helmed several prototypical noirs of the classier ilk for Fox, including the masterpiece Laura (1944), the genre that best fits Daisy Kenyon (47) is something we used to call the women’s picture. The story, adapted by David Hertz from Elizabeth’s Janeway’s novel, concerns an independent single career woman –played with unusual charisma by Joan Crawford– torn between two equally precarious suitors. Though its final moment is arguably compromised, this is above all a movie about female self-actualization, though lingering within its peripheries, both figuratively and literally, are dark shadows that imbue it with deep intrigue and considerable psychological complexity.

The frankness with which the film’s themes are addressed is conveyed in the first scenes, which evoke Daisy’s love life as a virtual revolving door. Her long-time boyfriend Dan (Dana Andrews), a hot-shot lawyer, married and father to two girls, leaves her apartment just as Peter (Henry Fonda), a veteran, widower and Daisy’s date for the night, shows up. Too sophisticated to put on macho airs, the men kid one and other about their rivalry while exchanging a taxi. Daisy adores Dan –Andrews is a wonderfully understated, effortlessly seductive actor– but the chances of him leaving his wife feel pathetically slim. Daisy’s strangely drawn to Peter, yet he’s clearly, as Daisy herself describes him, “a little unstable.” Haunted by his wartime experiences abroad –a major noir theme– and uncomfortable with what seems a hollow optimism at home, he suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, able to switch with alarming quickness from amiability to brooding despair. Their first date ends with one of the most disturbing declarations of love I’ve ever seen, desire and resentment spookily commingling in Fonda’s visage before he turns away from Daisy without farewell to walk back into the tranquil night.

Repressed sexuality, child abuse, racism, divorce, death and capitalism’s disenfranchised victims –these themes loom large over Daisy Kenyon, while the marvelous cast and Preminger, with his clean, cool, actor-driven style, engagingly maintain the centrality of their very adult love triangle, an emotionally palpable drama with no clear outcome. In his informative and otherwise insightful commentary track, historian Foster Hirsch claims that Crawford, 42 at the time, was too old for the part –yet this is precisely what I felt most drawn to in the story, what seemed most touching, the urgency that arises from people no longer young yet still desperate for love. If Daisy Kenyon starred an ingénue, I don’t believe it would possess the same layering, maturity and elegance.

The desperation of adult love also features prominently in Dangerous Crossing (53), a thriller so initially draped in mystery and sinister confusion as to evoke David Lynch. A woman (Jeanne Crain) boards a ship with her very new husband, only to lose him just as they set sail and thereafter have the entire crew deny the fact that the couple were ever even registered as passengers. As directed by Jopseh M. Newman, there's a pleasing emphasis of atmospherics, The camera swoops a lot, the foghorn moans a lot. The phone rings –but her husband has time only to tell her to trust no one. She becomes hysterical. Is she nuts and the whole prelude an unreliably subjective detour, or is some conspiracy being exacted? The only ones sympathetic to her claims are a delightful cougar, played by Marjorie Hoshelle, and the ship’s doctor, played by the same weird guy who played the wise alien Klaatu from The Day the Earth Stood Still (51), so we already know nobody’s going to believe him. Where it all finally goes is, unsurprisingly I guess, not as textured and creepy as the set-up might promise, but the getting there’s still pretty fun.

Set within the milieu of the New York theatre elite, Black Widow (54) was, for its time, as shockingly casual about adultery as Daisy Kenyon. While, disappointingly, it culminates with the sort of drawing room kangaroo court whodunit that is the very antithesis of noir, the film overall is characterized by nicely shaded performances and a seething corruption that infects most of the characters. Broadway producer Peter Denver (Van Heflin) begins his allegedly platonic relationship with nubile aspiring writer Nancy Ordway (Peggy Ann Garner, who, oddly enough, played one of Dana Andrews' daughters in Daisy Kenyon) while his stunningly gorgeous actress wife (Gene Tierney) is out of town. When upon his wife’s return Nancy turns up dead in his own home, Peter naturally becomes a prime suspect.

Though director Nunnally Johnson seemed constrained by the dictates of the then-new Cinemascope frame, Black Widow’s dominant aesthetic is suitably theatrical in flavour, if at times awkwardly so, with scenes playing out in large spaces with a minimum of cuts. It’s richest by far when still leading up to the resolution, when it’s still difficult to know who to trust and violence seems always on the verge of erupting. Heflin, who also starred in the superb noir Act of Violence (48), was so skilled, and had such an odd sort of star persona -the large head, the broad face, the round, mesmerizing eyes, the often slack jaw, the paternal ease with which he can take control of a situation, or wrap his arm around a young woman's neck- that his contribution to Black Widow is especially significant: even when we know he’s the hero, he can still kind of give us the creeps.

Stop-Loss: Good ol' boys gone bad, courtesy of the red, white and blue

Whisking us from a nail-biting ambush in a Tikrit alleyway to drunken punch-ups deep in the heart of Texas, the first act of Stop-Loss wisely sets a tone of visceral urgency right off the top. For all its emphasis on matters of immediate political import, this is not a film that benefits whatsoever from slowing things down or getting too contemplative. Often awkward in its storytelling yet commendably sincere and suitably messy, Stop-Loss packs a solid emotional whollop even while it dances around an issue at once timely and, perhaps as a result, irresolvable.

A group of pals, first seen singing Toby Keith’s moronically patriotic country anthem in lumbering unison, return home from a tour in Iraq, the whole lot of them destined for a wicked blanket diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. Their façade of ass-kicking bravado swiftly slips away to reveal a grotesque grimace of fear and guilt. Their superior actually needs to command them not to beat their wives and kids while on leave –for all the good it does. These good ol’ boys gone bad waste no time going ballistic, ending their celebratory return home by busting up the living room and using the wedding presents given to an already destroyed couple for pissed-up target practice out on the ranch.

Immediately after being awarded a purple heart at the end of what was to be his second and final tour, Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe) is unexpectedly ordered to return for a third go-round, bound by a legal loophole referred to as a stop-loss, which allows the US military to send soldiers back in a time of war. King points out that the President already publicly stated that the Iraq War is over, but his insurgent reasoning does him no favours when dealing with shouting jarheads all to aware that the numbers of volunteer enlistees are way, way down. Sent to the stockade to think things over, King soon goes AWOL, hitting the road with his best friend’s girl (Abbie Cornish, superb, an din her quiet way the heart of the movie) in the hope of finding a friendly authority figure who can help him wriggle out of going beyond the call of duty.

Stop-Loss is the fist feature to be directed by Kimberly Pierce since Boys Don’t Cry, her lauded debut from nine years back. Stop-Loss shares its predecessor’s deft handling of regional folk –she neither sentimentalizes or takes pot shots at small town Texans– but its script isn’t nearly as focused. Written by Pierce and Mark Richard, the film fumbles with corny flashbacks, boilerplate dialogue and too many overwrought scenes where the characters, otherwise defined by their inability to articulate their inner turmoil, announce the themes to us rather than evoke them. Yet somehow, these deficiencies never entirely get in the way of the film’s integrity or vigour. There isn’t enough artistry, poetry or perspective here to make this The Deer Hunter for our era, but there is a huge commitment to conveying the raw, fresh wreckage of lives fucked-up by senseless violence, and that’ll do just fine before one comes along.

Some thoughts on Jimmy Stewart, perverts, the mysteries of arm acting, and what, should it need repeating, is still one of the all time greats

The name of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac’s novel upon which Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) was based is D’entre les morts. As splendid as Hitchcock’s title was, an accurate description of the condition which afflicts both the film’s protagonist and its unsuspecting audience, Boileau and Narcejac’s evoking of the charnel house with the best-whispered words From Among the Dead so exquisitely capture the tone of what must be one of the most genuinely morbid movies ever to come out of Hollywood.

Curiously, Vertigo is also arguably among the best movies ever made, period, its goulishness absolutely matched by a sublime level of craftsmanship on display. From Saul Bass’ incisive opening credit sequence, text slashing across a looming eye like some sly wink to Buñuel's surgery in Un chien andalou (29), through the desperate, white knuckled roof-jumping prelude, through the unfolding of the haunted attraction of acrophobic detective ‘Scottie’ Ferguson (James Stewart) to doomed beauty Madeline Elster (Kim Novak) and the helpless, headlong tumble into psychological and moral collapse that follows, Hitchcock and company place us under a long, fevered trance, incited by Robert Burks’ pulsating Technicolor photography and guided by Bernard Hermann’s score, a thrilling, complex work of art in its own right, punctuated by those tremendous foghorn blasts from the netherworld.

This Sunday, the kind folks at Edmonton's Metro Cinema will screen Vertigo along with Hitchcock’s other most revered collaboration with Stewart, Rear Window (54), a movie that when placed in virtually any other double feature would be considered the residing masterpiece. A murder mystery involving a wheelchair-bound photographer spying on his neighbours, it is in fact more fun than Vertigo while still playfully incorporating similarly obscure impulses into its narrative, this time casting Stewart as a voyeur rather than a necrophile.

For all the praise rightfully heaped on both of these films, it’s often been suggested that Stewart was a poor choice for such shadowy, morose material. This proposal has been articulated most recently by Devin McKinney in the current issue of The Believer, where he argues that Henry Fonda should have played Scottie, for a variety of reasons both attributed to his talents and his tragic personal life. Yet watching his performances you get the sense that Hitchcock found something irresistibly delicious in subverting Stewart’s iconic wholesomeness and peculiarly American optimism into a weary façade disguising a catalogue of repressed perversions. Indeed, there are moments in Vertigo where Stewart's relative blankness of expression appears to me not as an actor's resignation to material beyond his abilities, but as a sort of mask, a defense against a mounting inner horror. Whether or not this was Stewart's intention finally matters little -the effect is striking, even with repeated viewing.

(Admittedly, while his face gives me no problems, I have always wondered about the weird way Stewart's arms always seem to be dangling limply in Vertigo, always functioning primarily from the elbow down. There should be a special study done on the arm acting of American movie stars, and it should begin by analyzing the bizarre poses Bogart holds every time he gets up in The Petrified Forest (33). He holds his arms stiffly, elbows-out, like he's in traction or something. Don't get me wrong, I adore Bogey in the film, but really, what the hell is with that?)

Likewise, Novak is admittedly not of the same elevated stature of many of Hitchcock’s stars. Yet (and I say this with, you know, respect) the whiff of trashiness that lingers around her persona, especially -and purposefully- apparent in Vertigo’s second half, is so utterly perfect for conveying the banal horror inherent in the story, the pathos of Scottie's need to project his fantasy upon her, that I can’t imagine anyone else in the role, especially the lovely and elegant Grace Kelly, Stewart’s love interest in Rear Window.

When regarding films as rich and obsessed over as these, film-lovers can of course debate the balance of merits, deficiencies and accidents endlessly. What’s absolutely essential is that you see these films, especially on the big screen, where the spell they cast takes full effect. Don’t miss your chance.

The Band's Visit: Tons of loneliness, rendered ever so lightly

Dressed from cap to pant cuff in a spotless powder blue rarely seen these days outside of baby pajamas and vintage tuxedos, an all-male group of mostly older Egyptian musicians, practitioners of a classical style that’s entered its cultural twilight, arrive in Israel, where they’re booked to perform a modest concert. Confused, and suffering a serious linguistic handicap, they mean to go to one town and accidentally wind up in another, one so sleepy it’s practically inert. Mid-day, its citizenry are found catatonically propped up on chairs in front of what may very well be the only café. With no means of transportation available until the following day, the musicians, entirely dependent on the kindness of these locals, have no choice but to spend the night.

The café proprietor is Dina (the terrifically vivacious Ronit Elkabetz), an almond-eyed knockout divorcée somewhere in the neighbourhood of 40 who tends to survey everything with a baldly sexy, cockeyed skepticism, often with one hand on her hip. She feeds the group, then arranges accommodations for them all. With considerable, hormone-fuelled persistence, she talks the impossible gentlemanly, droopy-nosed bandleader Lieutenant-colonel Tawfiq Zacharya (Sasson Gabai) out for a night on the town. Haled (Saleh Bakri), the band’s youngest and most subordinate member and a self-styled Don Juan, meanwhile is whisked away to a cramped roller rink that serves as the town’s disco, where he plays Cyrano to a timid young nerd and his weepy blind date in a marvelous scene of purely physical comedy.

Most of the Egyptians and Israelis can at least communicate in the lingua franca of broken English –which offers a surplus of comic delights for Anglophone audiences. When Haled sings Chet Baker through Plexiglas to a pretty girl held captive in the airport’s info booth, there’s the doubled pleasure of our recognizing both the mangled spoken words and the song being sung. But central to our understanding of the scenario is the fact that everyone, to some degree, knows ‘My Funny Valentine,’ that is, they at least know the feeling, the cadence, the song’s usefulness as a seductive tool. Later, an uncomfortably assembled group huddles around a dinner table and breaks into an ensemble rendition of ‘Summertime.’ Gradually, it becomes clear that the other lingua franca spoken here is music. It can’t resolve conflicts, change anyone’s course or alleviate the banal frustrations common nearly all the characters –something one of them describes as “tons of loneliness”– but it can provide fleeting connections between strangers in the night.

The cinema of dislocation that is the melancholy-comic terrain traversed in The Band’s Visit (Bikur Ha-Tizmoret) has found a worthy cartographer in writer/director Eran Kolirin, here making his feature debut. Previous travelers along this particular road include Aki Kaurismäki, Gus Van Sant, Wim Wenders, Sophia Coppola, Takashi Kitano and Jim Jarmusch, whose Stranger Than Paradise so emphatically subverted any exoticism once associated with the road movie a quarter century ago. The trick to charting your way through this meta-country is to light one’s gaze upon the specifics of a place while carefully rendering it not quite anywhere.
The arid Israeli backwater where the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra accidentally find themselves is imbued with a wealth of rich detail to help define it, yet it nonetheless feels like a locale that’s managed to slip off the maps: forgettable, insignificant, a footnote in a travel guide. Insignificance is of course essential to this sort of movie, which vies for its status right from the opening title card, informing us about the band’s visit before qualifying this with “not many remember this. It was not that important.”

It would be all too easy to characterize The Band’s Visit as a slavish exercise in this little dislocation subgenre, to note how it features the customarily subtle balance of cuteness and sadness while staying just a hair’s breadth away from sentimentality. The gags are deadpan, there’s a lot of walking through strange lands with luggage noisily rolling behind, plenty of your standard miscommunication via linguistic limitations, and blank Buster Keaton stares abound. All of these could be called tropes –yet any genre, however tenuously defined, has its tropes. The question is whether the tropes are displayed or discovered anew. Kolirin, with a very adult attitude toward resolution and the staying power of life’s lingering aches, manages to breathe life into these throughout. While some moments feel more vital than others, his film is genuinely unforced, genuinely sweet and man, is it funny. And very much worth a visit. 

Weightless words: devices, choices, and the future of reading

Introducing Kindle™

The following, abridged text was authored by The Amazon Kindle Team: “Three years ago, we set out to design and build an entirely new class of device—a convenient, portable reading device with the ability to wirelessly download books, blogs, magazines, and newspapers. The result is Amazon Kindle…

“Thanks to electronic paper, a revolutionary new display technology, reading Kindle’s screen is as sharp and natural as reading ink on paper—and nothing like the strain and glare of a computer screen …you can be anywhere, think of a book, and get it in one minute… Newspaper subscriptions are delivered wirelessly each morning. Most magazines arrive before they hit newsstands. Haven’t read the book for tomorrow night’s book club? …Kindle delivers your spontaneous reading choices on demand.

“Kindle’s paperback size and expandable memory let you travel light with your library. With the freedom to download what you want, when you want, we hope you’ll never again find yourself stuck without a great read.”

The Illusion of Choice

I think it’s fair to say that I’m not a technophobe. Technological advancements fill me with as much wonder and excitement as they do trepidation. As a freelance writer, these days, without the internet I’d need a new profession, which is problematic since I seem to possess no other skills. And, need I add, you're reading this on a blog.

To be sure, I am by some standards a dinosaur. I covet vinyl –its weight, texture, bottom-rich sound, visual beauty, the decisive pleasure of dropping the needle– and when at home listen to it almost to exclusion of other formats. I go to the movies to sit in the dark with strangers as often as possible. I own the rather morbidly named Magic Bullet (are we meant to ponder the mysteries of the JFK assassination while we whip up our smoothies?), but I grind my pepper with mortar and pestle for no other reason than I have a really cool mortar and pestle and these smooth, well-crafted objects feel good when gripped in my hands. I’ve never downloaded a song or a movie from the internet, above all because it seems the most boring way possible to discover something new, removing all the pleasure of finding.

Yet I was the first person I knew to buy an iPod. I run in the mornings and thrive on music to keep me going. I have an obsessive need to travel light, so I was totally jazzed about not having to fit a bulky wallet of 48 CDs into my backpack anymore. I took my iPod everywhere, all the time, and always on shuffle. I became a walking advertisement for the device, enthusiastically showing it to everyone I met.

Then, without ever thinking about it, something changed. I grew tired of the sterile exercise of shifting music from CDs to my computer. When preparing for a walk, I found myself actually wanting to consider what to listen to, to walk up to my collection, take a disc from the shelf, examine the cover, remind myself of the track listing, what the packaging had to tell me. On my iPod were hundreds of songs, available through a mere finger tap, a seemingly mind-boggling selection –but I wanted to make a choice. Lately, unless I’m going for a run, if I want to move through the city with music I use my discman. A teenager in a restaurant recently asked me what it was.

The principle behind the marketing of Kindle is choice, but the choice it offers is not unlike that of a big box bookstore: contained within are a lot of books, but nothing in particular. How do you choose something from the virtual “everything” on offer? For most of us, managing the babel of infinite choice is a journey dictated by advertising, by whoever has the most money to spend. Does it make me a Luddite that I want to leave my house, enter a public space inhabited by other people, browse, maybe read a random page, linger in the aisles, maybe talk to someone who might share or understand my interests, might direct me toward some unexpected title or even engage me in conversation about a book?

The Unbearable Lightness of the Virtualization of Everything

In Denys Arcand’s Days of Darkness, a problematic film, but one whose essential despair I find touching, the protagonist, a middle-aged family man and government employee, lives in a world where seemingly every pleasure has been compromised by a draconian conspiracy between labyrinthine bureaucracy and regulation, mindless consumerism, superficial status obsession, and technological distance. The protagonist’s only refuge lays in banal fantasy, yet in this sense he’s no different from his daughters, who when their not locked into some video game have their iPods constantly stuffed in their ears. Everyone around him is continually plugged into some electronic device that allows them to hover in a sort of fantasy realm, cut off from their immediate reality. It’s a comedy, incidentally.

Like other Arcand films, the philosophy guiding Days of Darkness reminded me of Milan Kundera, a writer with a peculiar gift for chronicling the uglification of the world. But the film’s final image made me think of John Berger’s writing, with its emphasis on attending to the sensual world. We see the protagonist sit down at a table, before him a large bowl of apples. Nearby a woman is canning preserves. The protagonist picks up an apple and begins to peel it, and the act yields a sort of quiet, modest revelation. We can smell the inner flesh of the fruit as its peel falls away, feel the spray of juice as the knife traverses its surface.

For the lover of reading (as opposed to a book-lover), Kindle promises an unprecedented freedom: wherever you are, a virtually fathomless selection awaits. Contrasting the dusty, bulky weight of libraries you’re offered perfect lightness, an entire literature cradled invisibly in the ether. It sounds like something out of science fiction –like a dream deal. As I write this I’m still amazed by the prospect and all it implies.

But what about that shed weight? What about the weight of a page, of a real book, with its margin notes and worn corners? What about the weight of an apple? The weight of a real baseball bat? The weight of a real body next to yours? I’m under no illusions that technological progress can be reversed, nor would I wish it so. Our relationship with technology is absolute, at least as old as the wheel, its path is carved deep into our destiny. But I also think, perhaps now more than ever, its worth considering every how and when to use that technology, to question whether we want to simply adopt every new development without considering what’s lost.

Bawl in the family: Rocco and his Brothers

There is pulsing through Rocco and his Brothers (Rocco e i suoi fratelli), Luchino Visconti’s celebrated 1960 epic drama, a towering force as wild, forbidding and fearsome as it is transfixing. That force is called family.

Based on the novel by Giovanni Testori, this story of five brothers and their newly widowed mother transplanted to Milan from the rural Italian South, at nearly 3 hours, moves, explodes and engages with tremendous energy. The film’s vitality emerges from the accumulation of several talents working harmoniously at the peak of their powers. Giuseppe Rotunno’s restless, roaming camerawork, especially in the protracted close-ups or spectacular exteriors, such as the massive street brawl or the cathedral-set lovers’ break-up; Mario Serandrei’s masterful editing, with sharp transitions that catch you off guard before hurling you into some new, unexpected scene, sweeping confidently across the tale’s broad chronology; Nino Rota’s jazzy, often detached but never glib music that makes menace weirdly seductive; the international cast of actors, deeply committed and nimble enough to shift convincingly from tender nuance to grand opera in a hastened breath: everyone involved contributes something substantial to the film’s overall power. But I think what truly makes all these elements gel, a unifying vision that we should probably attribute to Visconti, is an acute, mythical understanding of the fathomless potency of blood ties in determining the fate of the characters.

Upon the arrival of the Parondi family in the spectral, snow-covered Northern city, clashing loyalties are already wreaking havoc: a few words construed as disrespect launch an instant shouting match and mutual antipathy between the Parondis and the future in-laws of the eldest Parondi son Vincenzo (Spiros Forcás). Soon after, the charming, thuggish Simone (Renato Salvatore) takes up boxing, womanizing and petty theft seemingly all at once. After a stint in the military, Simone’s younger brother Rocco (Alain Delon) follows him into the ring and, in an act that will later spell disaster, takes up a quiet romance with a smart, beguiling prostitute named Nadia (the superlative –and sumptuously leggy– Annie Girardot) who was Simone’s girl of two years previous. As stray caustic elements spin into increasingly closer proximity, Rocco and his Brothers builds to its climax on waves of violence and toxic moral perdition, culminating at a scene of unbridled emotion, a well-calibrated frenzy of weeping and hollering that feels less like the indulgences of some fine actors than like an impotent purging, an attempt to redeem unforgivable crimes through the ecstasy of sheer, manic volume. It’s like something out of Wild Kingdom. I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen.

Though Visconti was once heralded among the masters of cinema, in the 30 since his death his name has fell from the place it once held near the top of the heap. It seems safe to presume that a revival of Rocco and his Brothers will likely find a new audience with limited knowledge of its director’s career and reputation, which I’d argue is a blessing. To come to this film without prior knowledge of Visconti’s role as an affluent Marxist or founder of neo-realism is to come to it freed of a burden that can only hamper a more fluid, fresh reading of the film.

Case in point: after my own riveted viewing of Rocco and his Brothers I prepared for this piece by reading Bosley Crowther’s 1961 New York Times review. He writes: “there is in this strong and surging drama of an Italian peasant family's shattering fate in the face of the brutalizing forces of unfamiliar modern city life a kind of emotional fullness and revelation that one finds in the great tragedies of the Greeks.” By tracing a Leftist tradition from Steinbeck to Visconti, Crowther renders the Parondi clan as being above all victims of a modern capitalist-industrial urbanism –which strikes me as a hell of a stretch. Perhaps it’s my own baggage –my father is also of poor, un-educated, Mediterranean, hot-blooded and rather oppressively loud folk– but the root of the Parondis tragedy seems to reside all too clearly in cultural traditions that predate Crowther’s point of reference. The city and its corrupting elements play a crucial role, but nothing in the film strikes me as being more flamboyantly destructive than its titular fraternity of pathologically misogynists, lorded over, somewhat ironically, by a matriarch that will not suffer any threats to the singular sovereignty she inhabits in her family. In plain terms, these guys are serious mamma’s boys, and mamma is one formidable figure.

Unsurprisingly, the theme of the family as agent of disaster isn’t especially popular in movies, but when it arises in the hands of artists who know the territory, it can make for masterpieces. Rocco and his Brothers reminded me of the Godfather trilogy, with Rocco himself bearing a striking resemblance to Michael Corleone, the family’s saviour who becomes corrupted by the very poisons he tries to exorcize from his family. In that film, the judgment of the father replaces the clinging grasp of Visconti’s mother, but either way, these films thrill us with stories that come with a clear warning: beware the elders that close off the forging of your own paths in the name of family pride, because once ensnared, every time you try to get out, they pull you back in.

Asleep at the wheel

It’s long been fashionable amongst critics to disparage American indie films that locate themselves in smaller, economically marginalized communities. Such settings are often regarded as a cynical trope, as though the mere vision of a trailer, run-down duplex or wood-paneled diner were enough to gain a film entry into Sundance. This attitude toward the use of a milieu that, let’s face it, a hell of a lot of people actually live in, is irksome. A lousy movie is a lousy movie, whether set in Beverly Hills or in the shantytowns of hillbillies, and I for one welcome any movie that expands our imaginative landscape to include all manner of geography and class. Yet in the case of Sleepwalking, we’re confronted with a movie that wears its small town despair like an impenetrable suit of armour, which is to say it’s an airless, self-consciously slumming affair, and is admittedly just the sort of thing that should send those antipathetic to the blue collar blues into fits of vehement dismissal.

Sleepwalking was written by Zac Stanford (Chumscrubber) and marks the directorial debut of Bill Maher. It opens with single mom Joleen (co-producer Charlize Theron, most recently embodying dinge in North Country and Monster) getting busted for running a grow-op out of her house in some bitterly cold corner of Northern California. With her place getting gutted by the fuzz, Joleen barges her way into the hovel of her pushover brother James (Nick Stahl) with her rightfully pissed-off preteen daughter Tara (AnnaSophia Robb) in tow. After drowning her sorrows and scoring some action from an anonymous good ol’ boy (a bit-part sadly played by the far too talented Callum Keith Rennie), Joleen abandons James and Tara with no forwarding address.

Tara is soon whisked away from James’ dump to an even more depressing dump of a Foster Home, and just in time too: James is not only fired but evicted soon after, forced to sleep on the floor in a buddy’s basement. If things weren’t bad enough, James, with barely enough cash to fill the tank, then deduces that his only recourse is to abduct Tara and hit the road. Stahl has no problem imbuing James with a convincing balance of dopey sweetness and poor judgment, but his implausibly stupid choices as the film goes along reek of dramaturgical convenience. By the time he gets to visiting his unsurprisingly evil old pa (Dennis Hopper, performing the perverse shtick he can do in his sleep), who unsurprisingly abuses both James and Tara, the story becomes perfectly exasperating.

We often mock movies in which, for example, some struggling university student transplanted from a modest Midwest farming community lives in some wildly expansive Manhattan loft. We roll our eyes at how movies seem so out of touch with the relationship between income and real estate, as though the affluence of Hollywood bigwigs renders them oblivious to the standards by which the rest of us live. But the reverse problem can be just as risible. The places where people live in Sleepwalking feel, not overly cramped (the crew does have to fit somewhere), but overly emphatic in their white trash squalor. James’ dark, dank apartment, with its unfinished walls, might turn off a discerning crackhead, but it fits all too well into Sleepwalking’s low-rent drudgery schematics, which are so demanding that they don’t even allow James to pay his rent, even though he performs not un-lucrative roadwork and seems to harbour no vices whatsoever that might exhaust his funds.

The fact that Sleepwalking is so relentlessly bleak is a problem mainly because it finally gets in the way of storytelling. Despite the efforts of a largely laudable cast (young Robb included), the movie just never seems to move, so bogged down in faux realism that it can’t work up the energy to convey even a fleeting sense of genuine joy in the escape plan James and Tara enact. (The incongruous pool sequence most certainly doesn’t count.) With no plausibly urgency to the characters’ desperation, no plausible hope to contrast their despair, Sleepwalking finally feels as shapeless and unengaged as its title.