The Screengrab : once

Screengrab's Favorite Movies About Music: Fiction Edition (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 20:30:00 GMT

ALMOST FAMOUS (2000)

Some people knock Cameron Crowe's fictionalized cinematic memoir for viewing the '70s through rose-colored granny glasses...but, hey, it IS told from the point-of-view of a very, very happy 15-year-old kid who not only gets to write for Rolling Stone, but also loses his virginity to a trio of sexy groupies! For me, the hero's starry-eyed wonder was the whole point: it's a rare movie that can honestly make me remember how exciting, innocent and mysterious life (and, for that matter, show biz) seemed before I became such a cranky old man. And I've always gotta give props to any Hollywood movie made with such heartfelt emotion, humanity and attention to detail...PLUS it’s got Philip Seymour Hoffman as cool-nerd Jedi Master Lester Bangs, Fairuza Balk in a well-deserved good role for a change, Kate Hudson (in her ONLY good role to date) as the embodiment of the Great Unattainable and Zooey Deschanel in a cool-ass stewardess uniform. It’s all happening!

THE COMMITMENTS (2001)

Alan Parker's once-a-decade good movie -- and now that I mention it, Alan, you're almost twenty years overdue for another one -- has a solid grounding in one of Roddy Doyle's exuberant novels about Irish life. Because Parker was able to get the milieu down right, he and his screenwriters -- Dick Clement, Ian La Frenais, and Doyle -- were able to fiddle with the book's cast of characters in order to accommodate the cast they assembled from the extensive audition process (for instance, changing the book's lead singer from a young George Michael type to a beefy lout after meeting Andrew Strong, a heavyset 16-year-old with a powerful voice) without losing its flavor. The cast also included Glen Hansard, who took to turning down subsequent offers of acting jobs so as not to distract from his music career, which would eventually yield its greatest success when he returned to the movies for 1996's Once.

GREENDALE (2003)

Neil Young has been dabbling with filmmaking since at least 1974's Journey Through the Past, but this companion piece to his album of the same name is his best work as a director. Like many artists who basically play around at making movies when they're taking a break from their real work, Young's work in film is amateurish, but the amateurism here is playful and lively, and it expands on the story and ideas of the ten-song cycle of the album, which is perfectly achieved but also a little cut and dried. The story involves three generations of Greens: Grandpa, who sits on the porch all day thinking sadly about how the world has gone to hell; his used-up son Earl, who winds up in a jail cell; and young Sun Green, who preaches rebellion and freaks out the military-industrial complex armed with a megaphone and some killer tats. Even after all the changes Young has been through, the hippie dream dies hard.

AMERICAN HOT WAX (1978)

When rock and roll was young and frisky, exploitation filmmakers threw together movies in which kids celebrated the new music with the help of actual music stars who stopped by to perform a number for a quick buck. This movie, directed by Floyd Mutrux, functions simultaneously as a parody of those movies and a fantasy of what it would have been like if someone had gotten one of them right. The terrific, late character actor Tim McIntire greased back his thinning hair and donned a succession of eye-abrasive sports coats to play the legendary disc jockey Alan Freed, who popularized rock and roll until he was destroyed in the payola scandal. (Freed himself was a mainstay of early rock movies, like Rock Around the Clock and Mr. Rock and Roll.) McIntire plays him as sweaty, medium-rung show business hustler who plays the role of Prometheus to the kids and comes to love it so much that he turns into a real hero in spite of himself. The cast also includes Laraine Newman as a character based on the young Carole King, the still-human Jay Leno and Fran Drescher, the child actor Moosie Drier as the head of the Buddy Holly Fan Club, and as themselves, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, and Frankie Ford. The whole thing builds to the big rock show, where the forces of repression, horrified at the sight of interracial dancing in the aisles, orders the house lights turned on while Jerry Lee Lewis is onstage pumping out "Great Balls of Fire", inspiring the indignant Killer to complain, "Folks, it's mighty hard to do a rock and roll show with the lights on. Can't do it! Now, the police are over there doin' their job, Alan Freed's doin' his job, let Jerry Lee Lewis do his job and turn the damn lights off!" It is said that Abraham Lincoln sometimes reached comparable peaks of oratory, but there is no filmed record to confirm this.

PRIVILEGE (1967)

Filmmaker and media critic Peter Watkins trained his camera on rock'n'roll culture with the 1967 film Privilege, which examined the circus that sprung up around the (fictional) pop star Steven Shorter. Shorter is a worldwide musical phenomenon, and so rabid is his fan base that when Shorter stages a musical number in which he gets beaten and thrown into jail by police, an actual riot breaks out. In short, Steven's fans will follow him anywhere -- he endorses dozens of products Oprah-style, and when British farmers experience a surplus of apples, guess who they get for an advertising spot? As played by then-Manfred Mann lead singer Paul Jones (excellent in his big-screen debut), Shorter is a magnetic performer, but in the end, Watkins is more interested in him as a media commodity. The Steven Shorter we see in Privilege is less a three-dimensional person than a commodity, and indeed he seems to have little discernible personality when he's not onstage -- how ironic that Shorter's fans claim to love their idol "because he gives so freely of himself." In the end, Shorter is little more than a pure media image, as easily manipulated as any other, to the point where the establishment powers of the government and the Church of England can put Steven in front of a stadium full of fans and motivate them to chant "We will conform!" Privilege is the polar opposite of a rockin' good time -- it's a stark head trip in which even the most ruggedly individualistic of art forms can be co-opted and corrupted by the powers that be, and in which the populist media don't so much create stars as consume them and crap them back out when they're no longer needed.

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Paul Clark

Smells Like Indie Spirit: Our Favorite Sundance Films Of All Time (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 22:00:00 GMT

MARY JANE’S NOT A VIRGIN ANYMORE (1997)

Sundance is a phenomenon largely because of the buzz and excitement surrounding million dollar jackpot acquisitions, iconic crossover hits like Napoleon Dynamite and star-studded “indie” darlings like Garden State or Little Miss Sunshine. Lost amid the hype are films like Mary Jane’s Not A Virgin Anymore, a humble, charming work of DIY guerilla filmmaking by the late, lamented “Queen of Underground Film” Sarah Jacobson (who died far too young of endometrial cancer in 2004). Lisa Gerstein, as the titular virgin, is gawky, sincere and loveable, just like the accessible, naturalistic movie she inhabits. Sure, the production values are rough and the only real “star” power is a cameo by Jello Biafra, but the low-rent Northern California rock scene Jacobson captured feels like a real place, populated by actual humans, unlike the over-the-top quirksters and too-pretty people filling much of the rest of the indie cineverse.

THEREMIN: AN ELECTRONIC ODYSSEY (1994)

I’m afraid that no clips of this movie (winner of the Filmmakers Trophy: Documentary) are available for posting, although you can find scenes on YouTube here and here. The above clip is Clara Rockmore, the virtuoso thereminist, performing Saint-Saëns’ “The Swan.” You may notice that one of the links includes footage of Leon Theremin playing the same composition in the 1920s. Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey is the story of the theremin (that’s the odd electronic instrument Rockmore is playing, if you’re not in the know) and the creator for whom it was named. His story is even more bizarre than you can guess, and I fear that revealing some of the odder elements here could take away from their surprise in the movie. The film also features talking-head segments from Robert Moog (the creator of the Moog synthesizer), Brian Wilson (the fractured genius behind the Beach Boys), and Todd Rundgren (who is, get this, Todd Rundgren). The Wilson interviews are especially interesting for fans, as director Steve M. Martin (who is not the guy you’re thinking of) lets Wilson ramble off on tangents far and wide in a way that his handlers rarely allow. Anyway, this is a beautiful documentary, full of twists and surprises and an terrifically emotional climax.

DiG! (2004)

Proving that a compelling documentary can be made about two extremely (for me, at least) uncompelling bands, DiG! (winner of the 2004 Grand Jury Prize: Documentary) pits the keepin’-it-real psychedelic band The Brian Jonestown Massacre against the ready-to-sell-out Dandy Warhols. The Brian Jonestown Massacre is the brainchild of one Anton Newcombe, a guy who seems to believe that acting like a self-indulged, petulant asshole is exactly the same as being a genius. His sidekick is Joel Gion, who adds little to the music (being a non-singing tambourine player) but who Newcombe apparently keeps around because of Gion’s God-given gift of mugging for the camera and making playful comments during interviews. All of the other members of the BJM appear to be either stoned or barely holding their hatred of Newcombe in check. The BJM’s music is devoid of dynamic, interest, and a third chord. And yet in DiG!, they play the part of the authentic band a little too pure for the corporate scene. The Dandy Warhols, on the other hand, appear to be composed entirely of models or exhibitionists and make music that sounds like the product of a Clear Channel focus group. DiG! seems to view them as the band that does everything more or less right, and maybe by some metrics they are, in the sense that the Dandy Warhols are rock stars and the BJM are still relatively obscure. Anyway, the documentary shows the early camaraderie between the bands, which quickly devolves into a bitter rivalry, as the Dandy Warhols’ slick pseudo-psychedelic pop leads them towards a popularity that the BJM’s gritty (and dull, don’t forget) psych-sludge will never achieve. I’ve wondered whether fans of either band would see the movie differently, but I think the viewer may enjoy the drama more without feeling inclined towards either band.

THE DEVIL AND DANIEL JOHNSTON (2005)

There are a few mentally ill performers who fans have embraced out of a sense of irony, and this has always reeked to me of exploitation. Wesley Willis, for instance, was an obese paranoid schizophrenic busker when he became semi-popular, and I rarely got the sense that many of his fans could separate the songs he wrote from these essential facts. Daniel Johnston is also a songwriter who struggles with mental illness. However, Johnston's songs are beautiful, lyrically profound, and more sophisticated than his rudimentary musicianship can convey. Don't believe me? Check out Kathy McCarty's album Dead Dog's Eyeball, in which she and producer Brian Beattie arrange Johnston's songs to give them the context they deserve. Actually, many, many artists have covered Johnston's songs (and very few have covered Willis). The Devil and Daniel Johnston (winner of the Sundance 2005 Documentary Directing Award) is more or less a biographical documentary about Johnston's life, but documentarian Jeff Feuerzeig, who also directed a movie about the band Half Japanese, spices the story with animation, talking head interviews that include a picture-in-picture frame that illustrate their comments, and a deep sensitivity to Johnston's plight and the toll that it's taken on everyone who loves him. The movie has almost as much to say about the effects of mental illness as it does about Johnston's musicianship.

ONCE (2007)

The music is from the U2 School of Anthemic Irish Rock Songs, so your appreciation may vary depending on how you feel about U2 (or lead actor Glen Hansard’s band The Frames, to be more accurate). But the relationship is pitched just right. A girl meets a busker and helps him to move on with his life. But she’s not just any ordinary manic pixie dream girl (thanks for the phrase, AV Club). She has her own reasons for helping the guy -- a toddler, an absent husband, a love of music, and fundamentally not enough joy in her young life. It helps that the director, who was formerly the bassist in the Frames, also loves the music. By all rights, the above scene, in which our scrappy underdogs record their first song in the expensive studio they’ve rented, should not work. The engineer’s reaction is too broad. See, at the beginning of the song, he’s a jaded insider, completely uninterested in the music. Then the drums kick in, and he seems to hear the song for the first time, dropping the magazine to start fiddling with the knobs, finding himself becoming a fan despite his years behind the board. That turnaround shouldn’t work, but it gets me right where I live. I love that moment, and I love that song, too, even if only for the time it’s on-screen. The overall restraint in the central relationship works well for the movie, too, because yearning for something or someone is better for your music than having the object of your desire. (Winner: Sundance 2007 World Cinema Audience Award: Dramatic)

MAN ON WIRE (2008)

In the early dawn of August 7, 1974, Philippe Petit strung a wire between the World Trade Center towers and walked between them, a quarter of a mile over Manhattan, for about 45 minutes. He was all of 24 years old. Perhaps you saw him on The Colbert Report earlier this week, so you already know that he didn't fall. The movie somehow makes an end-run around your knowledge, presenting the difficult logistics of Petit and his crew sneaking into the yet-unfinished towers with a 450-lb steel cable and several crates of equipment as nothing less than a caper movie with the intensity of Rififi or Bob Le Flambeur. You feel the excitement and fear when Petit steps out over the yawning chasm between the towers, but you already know he's going to survive because you've already seen the older Petit pop up as a talking head. It's a clever conceit, and it pays off in spades. On a note of personal pimpage, my book Shoot Out The Lights (about Richard and Linda Thompson's album) includes a section about Petit and his walk, as Thompson has written a few songs about tightrope walkers. Thompson, of course, did the soundtrack to Werner Herzog's documentary Grizzly Man, and Herzog is apparently a good friend of Petit's. In retrospect, Petit seems like the classic Herzog subject, brilliant and obsessive, and in this world but somehow not of it. Man On Wire is completely unlike a Herzog documentary, but it certainly has a Herzog-like appreciation for the holy madness of the man at its core. The film just came out on DVD within the last week, so be sure to check it out. (Winner: Grand Jury Prize: World Cinema Documentary, 2008 World Cinema Audience Award: Documentary)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Hayden Childs

Sundance Roundup: Day Six

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 18:00:00 GMT

More wheeling and dealing, via The Hollywood Reporter: Fox Searchlight snapped up the rights to the New York romance Adam, which it “hopes to turn it into the next Once, which it acquired here in 2007.” Sony Pictures Classics won the bidding war for An Education, “for a price in the $3 million-$4 million range for North American and select Latin American rights.” Lionsgate picked up “The Winning Season, James Strouse's tale of a high-school girls' basketball team starring Sam Rockwell.”

This year’s Sundance It Girl has been coronated. Per Entertainment Weekly, it’s 23-year-old British actress Carey Mulligan. “The star of Lone Scherfig's An Education and the bright spot in Shana Feste's melodrama The Greatest, Mulligan is transfixing audiences with her angelic looks and broad acting range.” You can also catch her in Michael Mann’s upcoming Dillinger epic Public Enemies, with Johnny Depp and Christian Bale.

E! Online is on the celebrity swag watch. Any truth to the rumors that Paris Hilton walked off with 30 goodie bags? Apparently so, but not all Sundance stars are so greedy. Screengrab sweetheart Zooey Deschanel refused all handouts, saying it “it takes away from the festival.” Awwww.

Previously:
Sundance Roundup: Day Five
Sundance Roundup: Day Four

Movie Review: "In Search of a Midnight Kiss"

Phil Nugent — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 15:00:00 GMT

It's August, a time when the summer movie season is running on fumes and new releases are traditionally thought to be at their suckiest. It's a time when an unexpected little pleasure can generate a great deal of audience good will and vacuum up a lot of business without much competition, as M. Night Shyamalan proved when The Sixth Sense opened with no fanfare in August 1999. Now the writer-director Alex Holdridge may be in a position to step into the void with In Search of a Midnight Kiss, which opened at New York's IFC Center this past week and opens wider on Friday. Holdrige's movie bills itself as coming from "the producer of Dazed Confused and Before Sunrise", and it's the latter title that tips you off to its ambitions: set during a period of about twenty-four hours in the life of the hero, Wilson (Scoot McNairy), a recent transplant to Los Angeles and aspiring screenwriter, it is a worthy addition to the "will-they-or-won't-they?" romantic genre. The girl in the equation is Vivian (Sara Simmonds), who answers Wilson's Craigslist ad "Misanthrope seeks misanthrope"), placed in a desperate attempt to not be alone on New Year's Eve.

Midnight Kiss is not a two-person movie, though it might be better if it were. The subplot involving Brian McGuire as Kathleen Luong as Wilson's supportive friends, whose own relationship is threatening to enter a potentially scary new stage of its own, sometimes feels like padding, even though Luong is a shot of lemonade as the faithful girlfriend who feels flattered to discovery that the pathetic Wilson thinks of her when he's masturbating. Having Wilson's private moments with his Johnson interrupted is typical of the kind of gag that Holdridge uses to prevent this love story from overdosing on its own sweetness. Mostly, though, he's indebted to his actors: unlike some of the leading men employed by Judd Apatow, Scott McNairy knows how to play loser hopelessness as a passing phase in the life of someone who might plausibly be a real catch when he snaps out of it. For her part, Sara Simmonds, who has the kind of face that can make a camera question its religious beliefs, and who's playing a character who comes on as an unreachable bitch because she's just been hurt and feels like taking her sweet damn time working up to the learning-to-trust-again level, is able to make the bitchiness funny and to let the character's vulnerability shine through without making an emotional mess of it. Midnight Kiss doesn't have the beautiful, unearthly flow of Before Sunrise or Once; a degree of contrivance remains visible. But the actors are so winning and play their characters' need to break through their loneliness with such touching restraint that when, towards the end, Simmonds worries that there'll be "no more nights like this," it sounds like a projection of a possible future more heartbreaking than anything in Wall-E. Slipping into theaters just as people start stumbling, in a daze, back to their college campuses, In Search of a Midnight Kiss is unquestionably the date movie of the year so far. Unless you've got tire treads for legs, in which case Wall-E still has the edge there.

A Brief Guide to this Year's Academy Awards Outrages

Phil Nugent — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 18:00:00 GMT

The Academy Awards were handed out this past weekend in an annual ceremony whose main reason for being, aside from giving me the chance to look like a mouth-breathing chucklehead in my "Oscar predictions" piece, is to give the bloggers of this great nation a chance to pick out things to be scandalized over. It's important to make sure that everyone can read about the three-ring circus of horrors with extra added attractions that is the Oscars show, since it's already been well established that nobody actually watches the damn thing. But people who read the Screengrab but otherwise have lives may have missed out on a few of the finer points of this year's extravaganza. Here's a handy breakdown of all the terrible things they did this time to help you make conversation this weekend with your hairdresser or bookie.

They dissed Whoopi Goldberg: Goldberg, who stepped in to host the Oscars ceremony four times, presumably because Billy Crystal was feeling light-headed those years and was afraid that if he went on he might slip and say something funny, was not included in a montage of past emcees. It has been reported that the next day, Goldberg "choked up" and "forced back tears" on her day job, The View, because she was so hurt by the perceived slight. I would assume that this is, at the very least, a gross exaggeration, but I once saw a clip from The View where one of the regular co-hosts proudly announced that she didn't know whether or not the Earth is flat because there was no way that she could investigate the subject and still have time "to feed my child" — what's the kid weigh, six hundred pounds? — and she didn't immediately vanish through a trap door, never to be seen again, so I can only assume that anything goes on that show, so long as it's stupid. Anyway, Gil Cates, the distinguished veteran director and Oscars honcho whose own children refer to him as "Phoebe's uncle", is said to have called Goldberg and assured her that no insult was intended and urged her to dry her tears on his slightly used handkerchief.

They also dissed Brad Renfro: Renfro, who died a month ago at the age of twenty-five, was not included in the montage honoring movie people who passed on over the course of the past year. The inescapable point of comparison here was with Heath Ledger, who died a week to the day after Renfro's death. Rather than send Gil Cates over to the cemetary to cry on Renfro's grave, the Academy felt content with just sending out a spokesperson to say, "Unfortunately we cannot include everyone." With TMZ and Perez Hilton leading the charge, some entertainment news outlits and random bloggers tried to erect a conspiracy theory that Renfro had been denied a place in the memorial roster because his youthful death of a drug overdose after a prolonged slide in his career and personal life was not a "feel good" kind of death; they seemed oblivious to the fact that they seemed to be suggesting that Ledger's death had, by comparison, made everybody feel all warm and fuzzy inside. A lot of people checking in at the comments sections seemed to be awfully well-adjusted to the idea that Renfro just wasn't as big a name as some of the others who had made it in. The whole sad business served mainly to underline the fact that, by a quirk of fate, Renfro's death was overshadowed by that of Ledger, which the public and the press alike seemed to agree was more tragic, or at least more shocking and unexpected. Also omitted from the montage: Roy Scheider, whose death a couple of weeks ago came too late for him to be included.

They didn't do F. W. Murnau any favors, either: Handing out the award for Best Cinematography, Cameron Diaz reported that the first award ever given in that category had gone to F. W. Murnau's 1927 silent masterpiece Sunrise and then mentioned that the lead characters in that movie were identified in the credits only as "The Man", "The Wife", and "The Woman from the City," and giggled, "Sounds like a fun shoot." Film savvy bloggers such as Self-Styled Siren and James Wolcott were put out by Ms. Diaz — or, to assign the blame where it really belongs, by whatever nimrod wrote that "joke" to go on the cue cards — for apparently mocking a masterpiece. I'm not even sure that anything as self-confident and opinionated as mockery was intended; maybe it was just a tone-deaf stab at double entendre, it's really hard to tell. But it's easy to share in the feeling that it's a strange way for people who are presumably gathered to honor the art of the motion picture to behave, to snicker at a classic in a way that seems to presume that nobody who's not dead or kicking back in an iron lung has seen or would want to, just to kill thirty seconds of a show that's too long anyway. The really funny thing is that, by general consensus, the highlight of the evening was provided by the kids from Once — whose characters in that movie are officially identified in the credits as "Guy" and "Girl."

And their mama dresses them funny: The main news about this year's collection of carps about ugly-looking clothes of the rich and famous may be that the daughter of a legendary American playwright and the wife of the world's greatest actor seems to have inspired more incredulous stares than the award-winning screenwriter and former stripper whose name sounds like a '70s porn star's CB handle. Writing in Slate, Dana Stevens took this gracious approach with regard to Rebecca Miller: "She's a published fiction writer who's also directed several films (Personal Velocity, The Ballad of Jack and Rose). She's just too smart and cool to be wearing that dress unironically." A few brave souls elsewhere did note that Mr. Rebecca Miller, one Daniel Day-Lewis, was wearing shoes he stole from the kid who always gets picked last for red-rover, red-rover and a tuxedo that actually looks like one of those T-shirts that's supposed to look like a tuxedo. And to judge from his hair, the couple had recently moved into Jerry Seinfeld's building after the super installed the low-pressure shower heads. Is it possible that one of them first tried on his or her outfit as a joke that the spouse didn't get, and that then the spouse went out of his or her way to pick out a ridiculous-looking outfit so at least that the other wouldn't be publicly humiliated without a little company? And you thought The Gift of the Magi was a heart-tugger!

2008 Independent Spirits Award

Phil Nugent — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 18:30:00 GMT

The Independent Spirit Awards, designed as a counterpoint to the Academy Awards (and traditionally handed out the day before the Oscars ceremony) were distributed this past Saturday. It may say something about the current state of the movie industry that, at first glance, the list of nominees did not seem as glaringly different from the list of Oscar nominees as might have been expected, though if the two institutions tended to pick their nominees from basically the same talent pool, they tended to diverge in their selection of winners. Juno won for Best Picture, while its Oscar-garlanded screenwriter, Diablo Cody, took the prize for Best First Screenplay, and its star, Ellen Page, won for Best Actress. Philip Seymour Hoffman won the Best Actor prize for his work in The Savages, whose writer-director, Tamara Jenkins, won for Best Screenplay. Awards for Best Supporting Actor and Actress went to Chiwetel Ejiofor (for Talk to Me) and Cate Blanchett, who dedicated her award to her I'm Not There co-star, Heath Ledger. Rounding out the major categories were Julian Schnabel's award as Best Director for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (which was also honored for its cinematography, by Janusz Kaminski), John Carney's Once (winner for Best Foreign Film) and Scott Frank's The Lookout (Best First Film). The evening also marked the first appearance of a new award named in honor of the late, great Robert Altman, to honor the film that makes the most impressive use of its ensemble cast; it was given to Todd Haynes's I'm Not There. The movies got a little more independent, or at least a lot more obscure, a bit further down the list with John Eska's August Evening, winner of the John Cassavettes Award for best feature made for under $500,000. Among the hardcore independent filmmakers on hand, Eska did the best job of putting his place in the food chain, in relation to the Philip Seymour Hoffmans and the Cate Blanchetts, in pespective by taking the stage and saying that he wanted to thank his agent, the only problem being that he doesn't have one yet.

Paul Clark (Kinda) Liveblogs the Oscars

Paul Clark — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Well, it's that time of year again, and unlike last year, I'll actually be posting here as the night goes on. While it's difficult to me to actually "live-blog" because my computer faces away from the television, I'll try to post something over every commercial break. Let's see how this goes. Hopefully I'll at least be more coherent than Harry Knowles usually is, but you never know.

4:30 PM- Just for the record, here's my complete list of predictions, so I won't be able to weasel my way out of them later and declare my predictive powers to be any more awesome than they actually are:

Best Picture: No Country for Old Men
Best Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis
Best Actress: Marion Cotillard
Best Supporting Actor: Javier Bardem
Best Supporting Actress: Tilda Swinton
Best Director: Joel and Ethan Coen
Best Original Screenplay: Juno
Best Adapted Screenplay: No Country for Old Men
Best Animated Feature: Ratatouille
Best Art Direction: There Will Be Blood (winner: Sweeney Todd)
Best Cinematography: There Will Be Blood
Best Costume Design: Atonement (winner: Elizabeth)
Best Documentary Feature: No End in Sight (winner: Taxi to the Dark Side)
Best Documentary Short Subject: Sari's Mother (winner: Freeheld)
Best Editing: The Bourne Ultimatum
Best Foreign Language Film: The Counterfeiters
Best Makeup: La Vie en Rose
Best Original Score: Atonement
Best Original Song: "Falling Slowly," Once
Best Animated Short: Peter and the Wolf
Best Live-Action Short: Tanghi Argentini (winner: The Mozart of Pickpockets)
Best Sound Editing: The Bourne Ultimatum
Best Sound Mixing: No Country for Old Men (winner: The Bourne Ultimatum)
Best Visual Effects: Transformers (winner: Golden Compass)

How will I fare? Stay tuned...

Preshow- Oh, great. Regis is hosting. Better than Joan and Melissa at least.

8:05- Cotillard is so hot. Just wanted to get that out there.

8:06- Host lady to Travolta: "You're not wearing a dress in honor of HAIRSPRAY." Come on, he's not Trey Parker.

8:08- Bardem: "seeking money AND revenge?" All right, did you SEE the movie?

8:10- How many times is Regis going to say "what's wrong with these people?"

8:13- Wow, Mickey Rooney's still alive, and more Yoda-like than ever.

8:13- JUNO: "the little movie that could." Way to go, Fox Searchlight marketing team.

8:23- Uh-oh, there's Hilary Swank. Nobody tell Nathaniel, OK? "People say you can play any kind of role." OK, WHAT? It's Hilary Swank, not Meryl Streep.

8:27- Remember this for next year, ABC- fewer random stars, more Bill Conti.

8:29- XAVIER Bardem? Come on, Regis, you've had time to practice your pronunciations.

8:30- FYI, I'll be boldfacing all the predictions I get right, in case you're keeping score at home.

8:33- Maybe they should hire Arnold to transport the Oscars every year. Would've saved them a big headache back in 2000.

8:34- Jack's next to Javier Bardem. Mothers, lock up your daughters...

8:36- "Oscar-nominated psychopathic killer movies." Wow, a Dorothy Hamill reference. You definitely don't get this from Whoopi.

8:38- NORBIT- "too often the Academy ignores movies that aren't good." OK, Oscar director, where's the Rick Baker cutaway shot? That's just sloppy, buds.

8:40- A stripper named Olympia Dukakis- forget Chigurh and Plainview, that's the most disturbing image we'll get tonight.

8:42- Spike Lee likes the black President joke. You're doing well, Jon.

8:44- Costume Design- I miss the models they had last year. Much better than the diagrams. Gah... ELIZABETH? Lots of costumes, but to what end? At least she kept it short.

8:51- Some of those production numbers are frightening, but none so much as accompanying the montage with Celine Dion. Classy wrap-up with Chaplin though.

8:53- Carell/Hathaway- must we really play the GET SMART theme? Hathaway's pretty smoking though. And Carell's clueless schtick still works. Yes... first correct prediction of the night. Go RATATOUILLE. Fun story too- Brad Bird is so cool.

8:57- Cutting from Heigl to Keri Russell? Is this a pregnancy-movie-themed edit? Yeesh. Also, settle down Heigl. But hey, LA VIE EN ROSE won. Go me. At least it wasn't frickin' NORBIT.

9:01- First song nominee- "Happy Working Song", quite possibly the first Oscar-nominated song with the lyric about scrubbing a toilet. Adams is a charmer, but did we really need to nominate 5 songs this year? 3 ENCHANTED songs seems like a lot of padding in my opinion. At least there's no production number behind her.

9:09- Stop trying so hard to be funny, Rock Dwayne. Yikes... THE GOLDEN COMPASS? Granted, it's the least terrible of the five movies, but the effects weren't all that stellar, except of course for the polar bear ripping the other polar bear's jaw off. That was awesome.

9:12- That's two bum predictions in a row for me. SWEENEY TODD sort of deserves it too though, so I won't complain.

9:14- Yes, Cate's awesome. But why not mention her cameo in HOT FUZZ?

9:17- Much as I love Casey Affleck's performance, this is the wrong category for him... Bardem- what other scene would they have picked? Hoffman, likewise... wow, that's a lot of applause for Holbrook. Could an upset happen? Nope, guess not. Also, I'm guessing Wilkinson will have an Oscar within the next decade. Nice quick speech, Bardem. Too bad most native English-speaking winners can't keep it that brief.

9:24- At least wasting our time with fake montages is more entertaining than wasting our time with real montages. Also, Pee Wee!

9:26- Holy crap, who's responsible for such prosaic and literal-minded lyrics? The little girl's good though, even if she does sound like she's auditioning for Teenage Idol. Still, this better not beat "Falling Slowly".

9:30- Sweet, it's Owen Wilson. He could use some more practice reading the TelePrompter though. Ick... THE MOZART OF PICKPOCKETS won. Probably the least of the nominees, at least in my estimation.

9:32- Wait, BEE MOVIE? Couldn't they afford RATATOUILLE? The bees montage was pretty amusing though. Go MADAME TUTLI-PUTLI! OK, PETER AND THE WOLF wins. I predicted this, but that doesn't mean I'm happy about it.

9:36- Alan Arkin rules. Nice little speech there- don't know if he wrote it, but he made it his own. Hope you were watching folks, you've just watched Ruby Dee's entire performance in AMERICAN GANGSTER. And wow, it must've been tough to find a non-foulmouthed scene for Amy Ryan. Yesssssssss... Tilda wins. Righteous. She's so cool. Much better speeches this year all around, I'd say.

9:45- "The always fantastic Jessica Alba." Unless she's trying to act, that is. At least she's only presenting the Sci-Tech awards, fitting since I'm not entirely convinced she's not a special effects creation herself.

9:47- Brolin, you were robbed bud. At least you got a Muriel Award this year. Pretty obviously, it goes to the Coens. We'll be seeing plenty of them tonight, methinks. "We've only adapted Homer and Cormac McCarthy." Nice.

9:50- Hey, there's Sid Ganis. Time to get myself a drink. Wait, MICHAEL BAY's in the Academy? That explains so much.

9:53- This was a pretty fun production number in the movie, but it's really not that great a song. Chenoweth actually sounds quite a bit like Amy Adams, although she's a more polished singer to be sure. All these dancers look kind of dumb outside the context of the movie, I gotta say.

10:02- Angelina Jolie baby jokes never get old. Right? RIGHT???

10:03- Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill- awesome. Way to liven up the Sound Editing category. I'm calling BOURNE for this one, but who knows? Damn, I got it. How about that? And see, these are the people who should be getting flustered, not the professional actors.

10:06- Oh sweet, "Halle" and "Dame Judi" are doing the Sound Mixing category too. I'm guessing this'll be NO COUNTRY, although maybe Kevin O'Connell might get finally get his for TRANSFORMERS. Nope, this one's BOURNE too. Cool, I guess. And nice shirt, buddy.

10:10- Wait, Best Actress already? Go Carice Van Houten! Oh, never mind. Whitaker's gotten much better at public speaking since last year. Look at Cate cringe- she knows how terrible the movie is. But it's not like she'd say no. Christie, always classy. And you know what would be awesome? If they could use a Cotillard clip where we hear her real voice for more than a second. Wow, Cate was pretty happy about Cotillard winning. And since I predicted her, so am I. I mean, just look at her up there- she's glowing. Only question is whether an American can take home Best Actor, since otherwise the foreign actors are sweeping.

10:19- This commercial lead-in was brought to you by Wii.

10:20- Farrell presents "Falling Slowly." Because, you see, he's Irish, and the movie's Irish, so why not? Sounds good though. Also, nice music shop motif in the background with the guitars and all. At least there aren't any slow-motion dancers. But why the orchestra?

10:24- Come on Jack, try a little harder to sell what's been written for you. You're an actor, right?

10:26- Best Picture montage- yikes, some of these HURT. I won't even say which ones, you know the ones you hate.

10:29- Best Editing. I bet BOURNE, but I'm hoping for NO COUNTRY, just to see what'll happen. Alas, Roderick Jaynes' Oscar will have to wait.

10:32- Nice jab at IMDb, Jon. And holy NECKLACE, Nicole! Cool montage for Robert Boyle- pretty impressive filmography, I gotta say, and looking darn good for 98. I hadn't even heard who had gotten the honorary award, but now that I know I must say they've made a fine choice.

10:43- Holy crap, I forgot Andrzej Wajda's new film was up for Best Foreign-Language Film. And of course the WWII movie wins. Yeesh, that was easy.

10:47- Oh Jesus, THIS song? Boooooooooo-ring. Didn't they have a "Blame Canada"-style spoof song they could've nominated? It would've livened things up, that's for sure. And they say this guy's name is John McLaughlin? I was sort of hoping it'd be the dude from The McLaughlin Group instead of yet another sensitive, blandly hunky singer. If this song beats "Falling Slowly" I'm throwing my shoes at my television. So if the liveblogging stops abruptly, you'll know why.

10:50- This is one of your favorite categories, Travolta? Funny, it's one of my least favorites, since they usually pick sentimental junk. Naturally, I will except "It's Hard Out Here For a Pimp." WHEW, thank GOD. I was afraid I'd have to use my next Screengrab paycheck to replace my TV.

10:57- A propos of absolutely nothing- I like Stewart well enough, but am I the only one who'd welcome an Oscar ceremony hosted by "Halle" and "Dame Judi"?

10:58- Wow, Stewart just invited Marketa Irglova back to finish her speech. Extremely classy of him. I sort of take back what I just said about Halle and Dame Judi.

11:00- OK Cameron, have you seen SUNRISE? Doesn't sound like it. Almost all these cinematography nominations are awesome- THERE WILL BE BLOOD takes it. Sorry Deakins. And way to recognize everybody else.

11:03- "Two time Academy Award nominee Hilary Swank"- somewhere, Annette Bening cringes.

11:07- Why can't they put the necrology in chronological order by the dates they passed away? By saving the "biggest name" for last, it's like they're making a value judgment on whose death is most notable. For example, I like Heath Ledger, but how is career more worthy of remembrance than Ousmane Sembene? Just a thought.

11:10- This category sucks without THERE WILL BE BLOOD. Predicting ATONEMENT, rooting for RATATOUILLE. And ATONEMENT it is. Wow, I'm actually doing pretty darn well tonight.

11:13- See, we can't bring the soldiers home, or they'd have to come up with a different gimmicky Oscar presentation. The winner is... FREEHELD, about homosexual soldiers. Had I known that I would've predicted that instead of going with the cutest-sounding name.

11:17- I've only seen two of these- SICKO and NO END IN SIGHT. NO END IN SIGHT is the better of the two, but LAKE OF FIRE blows them both away. So does THE KING OF KONG, for that matter. Of course, can you imagine the documentary branch honoring a movie about video games? Well, looks like I'm wrong here too- TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE takes the award.

11:25- Harrison Ford walks onstage to Indiana Jones theme- too obvious? WAKE UP, HARRISON! Wait, think he's drunk? Please MICHAEL CLAYTON... Please MICHAEL CLAYTON... nope, JUNO. Well, that's a point for me in the Oscar contest anyway. Grumble grumble... also, that tattoo is super-classy. I bet Tom Hanks has one just like it.

11:32- Helen Mirren just said "cojones"- she's awesome. Awesome pick for the Day-Lewis clip- powerful and bravura but not the "milkshake" bit everyone knows by heart. Who's that with Viggo? And of course Day-Lewis wins. What else is there to say but "DRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAINAGE"!!!!!!!!! "The handsomest bludgeon in town"- well put, man. I wonder what he'll be doing next?

11:44- What if the Coens DIDN'T win??? Guess we'll never find out. Whew... I could listen to the Coen brothers talk all day. Some part of me wants to see "Henry Kissinger: Man on the Go" included on the NO COUNTRY DVD.

11:46- Should be NO COUNTRY. Would be awesome if it was THERE WILL BE BLOOD as well, but I doubt it. As I suspected... NO COUNTRY it is. Now we get more of the Coens onstage, which is fine by me. And hey, it's not even midnight yet! Rudin: "with the opportunity for making movies comes the responsibility of making them good." Someone please relay this message to Joel Schumacher.

Well, everything turned out more or less as expected- a solid Oscar ceremony for a year when the very possibility of a ceremony was long in doubt. Good job keeping it moving along, while still finding time to bring back Marketa Irglova, a truly gracious move by Stewart and probably the highlight of the night for me.

No big surprises, but also no bad surprises, and I'll take that. Looks like I got 17 out of 24 categories right. Hope you did as well or better, unless of course you're in the same Oscar pool I'm in this year.

Hope you've enjoyed reading. Sorry I wasn't funnier. Good night.

Oscar Nominations: Is the Egg Showin'?

Paul Clark — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 16:00:00 GMT

So. . . what was it William Goldman said again? I suppose my predictions weren't too bad under the circumstances, but just like every other year, the Oscar nominations held plenty of surprises.

A full list of nominations can be found right here.

In no particular order:

- The almost total lack of love for Into the Wild. I figured that the acclaim for this true-life story, and the presence of Sean Penn — an actor they clearly love — in the director's chair, would make the film Academy catnip. Clearly, I was mistaken.

- On the other hand, they loved There Will Be Blood even more than I'd anticipated, looking past its darkness to see how flat-out brilliant it is (sorry, haters), giving PTA not only best director and adapted screenplay, but a best picture nomination as well. The Jonny Greenwood thing stung a bit, but the other technical nods — art direction, cinematography, sound design and editing — compensate pretty well. And Daniel Day-Lewis is looking pretty unstoppable for best actor at this point. All in all, Blood received eight nominations, tying it for the most-honored film with widely-acknowledged frontrunner No Country for Old Men.

- Atonement. Wait, this movie's chances for best picture were supposed to be more or less dead. Don't the voters read the prognosticators? Still, despite the film's considerable pedigree and handsome production values, Joe Wright was shut out of best director (in favor of Ivan Reitman's kid, no less), which leads me to believe this barely squeaked in. But you never know.

- Show of hands: who saw the best actor nod for Tommy Lee Jones coming? Certainly not me. I figured that he had a good chance for his supporting work in No Country for Old Men, but I'm surprised any of the voters actually remembered In the Valley of Elah. But I won't complain. As an avowed Crash hater, nobody was more surprised than me that Elah turned out to be pretty darn good, due in large part to Jones' great performance. I'll certainly take him over, say, John Travolta in a fat suit.

- The double dip for Cate Blanchett. Yes, she was a deserving nominee for playing the most fondly-remembered of Todd Haynes' menagerie of Dylans. But honoring Elizabeth: The Golden Age tells me that the voters ran out of suitable nominees. Lord knows I'm no fan of Angelina Jolie, but at least she tried to give a multilayered performance in A Mighty Heart, which is more than I can say about Blanchett in Nobody But Elizabeth Expects the Spanish Inquisition. Just. . . ugh.

- When I floated my best supporting actress theory — that in recent years, the great majority of nominees in this category appear in films opposite performers who also get nominated — I wasn't just blowing smoke. Seriously, look it up. But, probably just to confound me, the nominations bucked the trend this year, with only one of the nominees (Michael Clayton's Tilda Swinton) appearing opposite another Oscar nominees. Just as unexpectedly, only Clayton managed more than one acting nomination, wrangling three for Swinton, George Clooney, and Tom Wilkinson.

- Three out of five Best Original Song nominations went to Enchanted. Either they really love Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz or it was a really slow year for original songs. Probably both. At least they were smart enough to nominate "Falling Slowly."

- Hey, did you know that people made documentaries this year that didn't deal with the war in Iraq? I only ask because three of the five Best Documentary Feature nominees were Iraq-themed, with only Michael Moore's Sicko and the Uganda-themed War/Dance tackling different subjects. The biggest disappointment is the snubbing of Tony Kaye's exhaustive, empathetic abortion documentary Lake of Fire, by my estimation the year's finest non-fiction film.

- Finally, I leave you with four horrifying words: "Academy Award Nominee Norbit." Sure, it's for best makeup, and considering that the makeup branch loves the hell out of Rick Baker it would've been madness NOT to predict him. But think about it: Norbit, possibly the most reviled film of 2007, received more Oscar nominations than Zodiac, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, Knocked Up, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, and Control. . . COMBINED. Hard to believe, but the makeup branch has actually managed to outdo last year's Click nomination.

Top Ten of 2007: Phil Nugent

Phil Nugent — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 21:00:00 GMT

1. There Will Be Blood, directed and written by Paul Thomas Anderson

A triumph of personal filmmaking, epic scale division, and an excellent argument that anyone who nominates anyone whose initials aren't D.D.-L. for the title of greatest living movie actor is a fool.

2. Killer of Sheep, directed and written by Charles Burnett

A triumph of personal filmmaking, garage-inventor division, and worth the thirty years' wait.

3. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, directed by Julian Schnabel, written by Ronald Harwood, from the book by Jean-Dominique Bauby

Set almost entirely behind the eyes of a paralyzed stroke victim, it is in just about every way the most adventurous movie in recent memory, Schnabel’s visual imagination, which is kinetic yet lyrical and charged with feeling, has somehow enabled him to make a movie that is a celebration of the pleasures (and a lament for the lost possibilities) of a life cut short that never feels bathetic.

4. The Host, directed by Bong Joon-ho, written by Baek Chul-hyun and Bong Joon-ho

Big rubber monsters and real blood. In his previous film, the police procedural Memories of Murder, Bong demonstrated a special talent for treating genre conventions with satirical irony in a way that only heightened the story’s emotional impact. With its rude shocks, horse laughs, family of unlikely heroes and absolute lack of faith in the official protectors of society, his twist on the rampaging-mutant horror movie may be more fun than anything else seen this year.

5. Once, directed and written by John Carney

This small love story — Before Sunrise as a Dublin-set pop musical — is also the suspense film of the year: the first time you watch it, a part of you is on the edge of your seat, waiting for the inevitable wrong step that never comes. As perfect and buoyant as a soap bubble glistening in the sunlight.

6. Away from Her, directed and written by Sarah Polley, from a story by Alice Munro

As an actress, Polley has had the hint of something wise-beyond-her-time going on behind those heavy lids since before she was ten. Her directoral debut, about a marriage of some forty years’ duration that’s finally torn asunder by the wife’s struggle with Alzheimer’s, is an uncommonly mature romantic drama, and in many ways an uncommonly hard, clear-eyed one. Julie Christie’s mere presence as the unreadable, coquettish old woman lends the movie some star power, but Gordon Pinsent and Olympia Dukakis give risk-taking performances that keep the film raw and alive.

7. Ratatouille, directed by Brad Bird and Jan Pinkava, written by Brad Bird.

An exhilarating triumph of sheer craft from the director of The Iron Giant and The Incredibles, and a major return to form for Pixar after the sugared gas tank of Cars.

8. Control, directed by Anton Corbijn, written by Matt Greenhalgh and Deborah Curtis

An uncommonly solid, beautiful-looking rock-star biopic, with relative newcomer Sam Riley giving a bracingly unsentimental yet thoroughly winning performance as Ian Curtis of Joy Division. (In one of his few previous movie roles, Riley turned up briefly in 24 Hour Party People, playing Mark E. Smith of the Fall.) With its black and white cinematography (by Martin Ruhe and John Watson), its confident grasp of the period and its milieu, and its surprising bursts of humor, this is one of the rare films that threaten to give music video directors-turned-moviemakers a good name.

9. Knocked Up, directed and written by Judd Apatow

There are nits you could pick, but here’s what makes them all seem ridiculous: more quotable, genuinely funny lines and inspired, perfectly shaped jokes per square inch than in any movie since the last time somebody produced a script by — hell, I don’t know, John Guare, maybe? Alan Bennett? Ben Hecht!?

10. Year of the Dog, directed and written by Mike White

This is the first time that White has directed one of his own screenplays, and the results are confident and exciting enough in their strangeness to make one suspect that some of the earlier movies he wrote seemed shifty and half-baked because the directors weren’t as eager to turn convention on its head as White meant for them to. Molly Shannon is amazing as the frustrated, lonely spinster-in-the-making whose attempt to change her life is dotted with missteps and false starts but ends in triumph — triumph for her, at least, whether her friends (or the audience) can see it that way or not.

The Movie Moment(s): Notable Moments of 2007, Part 1

Paul Clark — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Keeping with the year-end theme of looking back, I've decided to post some brief thoughts on some of my favorite movie moments from 2007. These aren't necessarily my five favorites, nor are they from my five favorite movies of the year. However, they're all treasured cinematic memories from this past year, each for its own reason. I'll be posting two today and three more tomorrow, and I encourage all of you to give a shout out to some of your favorites in the comments section.

"If You Want Me", Once

Once was one of the year's best surprises, a movie that had few of the trappings of the big-budget musical but many of that genres pleasures, plus more than a few of its own. Most critics singled out the getting-to-know-you number "Falling Slowly" as the film's best, but for me the one that really captures the charms of Once was "If You Want Me." The scene is simplicity itself- the film's female lead (played by Marketa Irglova) walking back from the corner store in her pajamas and slippers, while she tries out her freshly-penned lyrics to a backing track given her by male lead Glen Hansard. It'd be a gross oversimplification to say that Once's triumph is due primarily to what it lacks- no elaborate production numbers, no fancy orchestration, and definitely no polished direction or gorgeous cinematography. But I think it's important to remember that director Glen Hansard is the bandmate of Hansard in The Frames, and because of this he was more inclined to trust the music to bear much of the movie's emotional weight, which a more experienced director might not have done. More than any scene in recent memory, this scene boils a musical number down to a character and the song she carries inside her.

Giant tadpole gone berserk, The Host

The creature feature has fallen on hard times lately, with most multiplex audiences preferring their villains in humanoid form. Who could have predicted that the best monster movie to hit American screens in 2007 (sorry, fans of The Mist) would bypass the big chains and take up residence in the arthouse? But The Host is no genteel latte-swilling night at the movies. Director Bong Joon-ho has made a full-blooded throwback to the genre movies of yore, easily the best movie of this kind since Jaws. Few films of 2007 delivered more pure thrills than The Host, beginning in an early showstopper of a scene. With a flair for crowd-pleasing suspense equalling that of a young Spielberg, Bong masterfully shows us a day by the river gone very, very wrong. As more people realize there's something in the water, they begin to gather by the river bank. And then the creature appears in the distance, charging at the people, and all hell breaks loose. The scene is tense as all hell, and a big reason why it works so well is the way Bong shows the creature approaching. The creature itself is a marvel, less a graceful killing machine than a gigantic amphibious St. Bernard. It's an inspired creation- detailed enough to be frightening, but so lovingly rendered to be just as endearing as the classic movie monsters.

Rock Around the Crock

Peter Smith — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 19:00:00 GMT

David Carr's story in the New York Times — posted yesterday — is a typical trend piece. Entertainment journalism (and, hence, people like me, admittedly) couldn't survive without the occasional story that identifies three or more roughly similar things happening at roughly the same time and concludes that it means something important; still, Carr's piece struck me as particularly off the mark. He concludes that we're in for a renaissance of movies about rock music: he cites documentaries on Tom Petty, plus features like Across The Universe (The Beatles), I'm Not There (Bob Dylan) and break-out hit Once.

What Carr seems to be getting out, without being really aware of it, is how the rock biopic has displaced any other kind of biopic, with VH1's Behind The Music cited as the prototype for every rise-and-fall arc peddled. "We all know these stories from VH1’s Behind the Music, and even though we know what to expect, we still love watching them," weighs in Judd Apatow, apropos of his upcoming spoof Walk Hard. (We do?) The real question is, why are biopics nowadays seemingly all about musicians just old enough to be canonized — where are the artists (it's been years since Pollock), politicians and writers? When Richard Attenborough stopped churning out stuff like Gandhi and Shadowlands, did the genre die? If so, why?

The cynical, probably correct answer, is "because these movies suck." Still, it's a question worth thinking about; boomers are getting older and more secure about canonizing previously disreputable idols. Notice how Carr doesn't cite Musician (a recent documentary about jazz avant-gardist Ken Vandermark), Dig! (the indie-music bible featuring The Brian Jonestown Massacre and The Dandy Warhols), or Metallica: Some Kind Of Monster. It's not a rock renaissance, it's another smug round of cultural gentrification. I smell another think piece coming on; hire me, New York Times! — Vadim Rizov