Robin Wood's Favorite Criterion DVDs

This will be an unusually informal post, but the awesomeness of this treat merits the loosening of style and form. Word comes today (via film criticism blog Green Cine Daily) that British-Canadian film theorist and retired professor Robin Wood (a personal all-time favorite and author of book-length studies of Bergman, Ford and Hitchcock, and long-time champion of the horror genre) has submitted a list of his ten favorite Criterion Collection DVDs to the seminal purveyor of art house and world cinema. No surprises here really, with an even smattering of American, European and Japanese classics. The only shocks are the absences of horror films (though, admittedly, there aren't many in the Criterion library) and any of the "New Hollywood" films discussed in his seminal period investigation Hollywood From Vietnam to Reagan. Check out the complete list here. And while you're over there, check out some of the other awesome top 10 lists from the likes of Ramin Bahrani, Steve Buscemi, Nicholas Roeg, Richard Linklater, Guy Maddin and Diablo Cody.

"Pro Tools" by GZA/Genius

(Babygrande Records)

As opposed to more visible Wu-Tang Clan members, GZA isn't prone to grandiose releases like Method Man's spectacular solo failures and Ghostface's uneven biannual twenty-track epics. He's also less extraterrestrial than co-founding crony RZA, keeping one foot in the rap game while the other rests comfortably in the stylized Staten Island of the Wu's Shaolin. His '95 classic Liquid Swords thrilled fans of the latter universe with its kung fu samples, Five Percenters mythologistics and bounteous RZA production, while recent releases have been mostly earthbound, with albums since 1999's Beneath The Surface remaining, for better or worse, in some sort of dialogue with the prevailing trends of independent and mainstream rap. GZA doesn't capitulate to the mediocre tyranny of rap's indie and commercial factions though, but records his creative, rippling, effortless rhymes on some distant planet in the DMZ between the universes of commercial compromise and indie obscurantism, a planet all his own that still flies the Wu's iron flag proudly (if not so prominently as before).

This sixth GZA album features only two RZA beats (and one terrific verse on the closest Pro Tools comes to the often compulsory Wu posse cut, the awesome 'Pencils') but they're among the album's many highlights. The first single, the 50 Cent-dissing 'Paper Plate' (does 50 even merit dissing anymore, especially by someone so unambiguously more talented?), is a moody gem with GZA letting loose for nearly three uninterrupted minutes while RZA layers then peels off various drum, synth and chime samples. Other producers do good by GZA, with the MC's breathless cross-country car-themed narrative matched wonderfully by Jose "Choco" Reynoso's pumping guitar and brass on the thrilling '0% Finance', and exchanging rhymes with his son Justice Kareem on Bronze Nazareth's booming, nostalgic 'Groundbreaking'. The soulful 'Alphabets' and chopped up '7 Pounds' keep Pro Tools's first half exciting, with GZA treating the wild sampling of soundscapes like a lyrical lab wherein he makes good on each successive experiment. The second half slows noticeably ('Firehouse' and 'Path of Destruction' are merely decent on an album with a high average), though a sudden thematic shift makes for a triumphant ending built around two movie-themed tracks. First, GZA applies his storytelling skills to the horror genre on the whispered creeper 'Cinema', then RZA closes things off (save a serviceable live bonus track) with 'Life is a Movie', a dramatic, steadily mounting rock mash-up. Like some of its best tracks, Pro Tools is short and satisfying (over half the songs last three minutes or less), proof for those who can find this isolated planet (and those who've lived there for years) that GZA is among the most consistently great MCs around.

A similar version of this review appears in The L Magazine, and can be read here.

Louise Bourgeois at the Guggenheim Museum

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum building is bold and seductive, an art lover’s gravity-defying ivory slide toward the heavens. It’s also particularly apt to present a lifetime of work by an idiosyncratic artist whose career paralleled (but only rarely participated in) many of the 20th century’s modernisms.

Louise Bourgeois, a 97 year-old New York émigré, was raised in a wealthy French household where her father’s affair with the live-in nanny was an open secret. Accordingly, issues of parenthood, homes, bodies and space that first appeared in Bourgeois’ Femme Maison (Woman House) drawings from the 1940s and totemic Personages sculptures from a few years later are never finally treated as in certain artists’ therapeutic art practices. Instead, Bourgeois delved further into that rich childhood material, investing her art with new creative vigor in the 1960s after a hiatus of several years.

Sculpture and installation became her dominant mode thereafter, and delightfully suggestive phallus forms her favorite subject to play with (pun intended, and backed up with evidence). Distinctly feminist implications in her work also crystallized during this phase, like the breakout work The Destruction of the Father (1974) that features a family of amorphous blobs devouring their patriarch (with its macabre red lighting and fleshy forms, the scene is not unlike the Leatherfaces’ disturbing dinner sequence near the end of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre).

However, Bourgeois relentlessly leaves the politicizing of her work to others, insisting on the personal sources and meanings of her iconography. This creates an impression of being immersed in the self-contained narrative of her life and sealed off from specifics of geo-political time and place (hence the appropriateness of the Guggenheim building’s gently-sloping white space).

Not surprisingly, one of Bourgeois’ most recent series engages the idea of the cell, spaces that protect and imprison whose artistry lies as much in the theatrics of their display as the details of the objects they contain and conceal. The concept of the woman house comes full circle in these works, while more recent installations made from clothing and salvaged fabric quietly betray Bourgeois’ worn physique. Nevertheless, her work’s broad resonance proves her lasting relevance, a delightful ability to draw us into her narrative while revealing things about our own.

Louise Bourgeois runs at the Guggenheim through September 28, Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, The Mistress and the Tangerine (reviewed here) plays at Film Forum through tomorrow. $2 off Guggenheim admission with your Film Forum ticket stub.

A similar review appears on The L Magazine's "Blog About Town", and can be read here.

Two Shows at MoMA Right Now...

That Don't Involve Salvador Dalí or Pre-fab Housing

Sure, shows about crazy mustachioed Basque surrealists and homes made in factories are interesting (seriously, Home Delivery and Dalí: Painting and Film are great exhibitions), but they're also perpetually packed and difficult to enjoy after the first half-hour MoMA opens its doors (at 10:30am Wednesday through Monday). Two less-popular (and more brainy, weird...) exhibitions well-worth your crowd-ducking moves at MoMA these days deal with very specific artistic production at fairly specific times and places.

The newest is Looking at Music (through January 5, 2009), an exploration of (mostly) American multi-media art beginning in the 1960s with the sudden wide availability of audio-tape recorders, portable cameras and electric guitars. A wall-sized projection of a close-up on John Lennon smiling benignly (filmed by Yoko Ono in 1968) greets visitors and bluntly states a recurring theme in the show: the intermingling of rock and roll and early video artists in America's 60s and subsequent avant-gardes. Accordingly, several music video-looping TVs occupy the show's second room (featuring The Beatles' "Penny Lane" and Bowie's "Space Oddity" among others), and an accompanying screening series features a plethora of brilliant short films set to hot tunes both classic and recent. There are also collections of envelope-pushing music sheets and indie magazines from modernist musicians and composers that will certainly thrill the music theorists in the audience.

Multi-media videos and installations are the bread and butter of this show though, so Laurie Anderson's "Self-Playing Violin" (1974), standing staunchly upright as if saluting gallery-goers while it solos, is a particularly fun entry (especially when one reads that Anderson used to accompany the violin on another instrument in live performances). Meanwhile, Joan Jonas's "Organic Honey's Visual Telepathy" (1973), a video of the artist performing a variety of roles for the camera while donning a series of masks and peering into mirrors, questions how one performs in everyday life and to what extent the camera undermines those performances. It's an effective exercise, boiling ideas Altman, DePalma and Romero have spent entire films (careers?) addressing down to a clever shorthand. Works from the likes of Nam June Paik, Jack Smith, Bruce Nauman and John Cage round out a dense and (thankfully) small crash course in the seminal early works of multi-media and mixed-media art.The second easy-to-miss but not-to-miss show recently opened at MoMA, Kirchner and the Berlin Street (through November 10) looks at Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's densely creative period in Berlin between 1913 and 1915. The core of the show is a series of large-scale portraits of sex workers on Berlin's streets, rendered in an incredibly jagged and enchantingly colorful aesthetic. To one side of the central series we see smaller drawings and prints (some studies for the larger works, others stand-alone pieces) taken from the period that feature similar subjects from Berlin's bustling nightlife and streetscapes. At the dim gallery's opposite end are works from Kirchner's previous period in Dresden as a member of Brücke (a group of Expressionist painters he co-founded).

Taken as a whole, the show is an argument for Kirchner's contribution to German Expressionism, and for the vitality (and daring) of this phase in his career. The style of the works clearly falls under the umbrella of "Expressionism", but it's also starkly individual, Kirchner's highly-developed distortions evoking a bustling city's rich street life, under whose elegant fashions and urban rituals a not quite covert brand of salesmanship (saleswomanship, really) thrived. In one work, "Potsdamer Platz" from 1914, a war widow dons a veil while walking leisurely, announcing her mourning but also her availability to all those she passes (a frequent practice in post-WWI Berlin, we are told). His recurring choice of the liminal sex workers as subjects also intimates Kirchner's isolation in the big bad city, experiencing a rich public life that is nonetheless deeply isolating. So head to MoMA and avoid the cattle lines of alienating crowds and find some gems in these satisfying, intimate exhibitions.

This double review also appears on The L Magazine's "Your Blog About Town."

Trouble the Water

Directed by Tia Lessin, Carl Deal

Trouble the Water re-energizes the DIY aesthetic adopted in the name of "realism" for big-budget escapism like Cloverfield and Diary of the Dead, with two important exceptions. Firstly it's non-fiction, a view of an impossibly immense disaster from the perspective of those whose lives Hurricane Katrina most radically affected. Secondly (more importantly?) its main characters are antitheses to the depthless, target market-researched twenty-somethings of those supernatural disaster films.

Introduced as the filmmakers met them while attempting an entirely different Katrina doc, Kim and Scott Roberts command Trouble the Water's narrative long after the waters recede from their Ninth Ward neighborhood – unlike those blockbuster protags, their lives extend beyond their films' first and last monster attacks. Kim is particularly charismatic, musing in her enchanting New Orleans accent, "maybe I'm gon’ sell it to some white people" while knowingly collecting footage of her block before the storm. Trees swaying in the gathering winds haven't spelled doom so plainly since Kurosawa's Throne of Blood.

Beyond the opener's shocking storm footage, Trouble the Water keeps its disaster voyeurism minimal (national news footage serves mostly as depressing propagandistic counterpoint to lived reality) focusing instead on its main characters' relentless optimism. Kim, Scott and another Katrina refugee Brian pack enough charm and personal redemption to make the shift in scope entirely successful. Brian, a recovering addict, is strikingly forthcoming with forgiveness, thanking indifferent and ineffectual would-be re-builders stationed in and around the Ninth Ward.
Meanwhile, Kim's discovery of her old rap EP and impromptu performance is an incredibly eloquent scene, proving the survival of New Orleans' rich vernacular culture despite the indifferent city government's blind promotion of postcard-ready tourism as a means to top-down reconstruction. If T.I. and Lil Wayne hadn't already convinced you that Southern rap is an art form, Kim's music (recorded under the name Black Kold Madina) certainly will. The notion of music and hardship providing a motor and fuel for personal re-making (Kim and Scott were both drug dealers before Katrina) recalls Hustle and Flow with more empowering sexual politics.

Kim's impassioned rap also serves as a shorthand articulation of Trouble the Water's complete immersion in America's frequently ignored class issues. As Scott states casually while walking in his mud-caked neighborhood, "the hood's always last to be fixed." Following the film's bottom-up aesthetics though, it makes sense that Kim and Scott will have to do the fixing themselves. At film's end their journey is just beginning, with Kim pouring herself completely into her rap career, while Scott works at rebuilding homes in New Orleans. It's not the cathartic finale of your average monster movie, but it's about the happiest conclusion to be extracted from this never-ending disaster scenario.

A similar version of this review appears in The L Magazine, and can be read here.

Richard Serra: Thinking on Your Feet

Directed by Maria Anna Tappeiner

For those who've experienced Serra's environmental iron sculptures this doc is fascinating, with the sculptor (and college buddy Philip Glass) offering very intelligent commentary on his career and process-driven method. In the absence of the twisting, tapering rust-colored structures Tappeiner's gliding, panning camera provides a good experiential substitute for works that really need to be seen and walked through in person to be understood. For those less familiar with Serra's work, this might be a dull artist doc – not to be confused with an artist biopic, since very little (well, basically nothing) of Serra's personal life ends up onscreen. Does this verbose San Franciscan have a partner or a family (or friends, for that matter), or does he just fly into museums and steel mills like that other man of steel, Superman, then disappear until the next time a foreman needs to consult one of his graphite sketches to figure out where to put a 7-ton metal slab?


In sharp distinction from Louise Bourgeois, whose recent biopic at Film Forum was considerably more interesting than this film, Serra's art contains little of his own experience and therefore the omission of his personal life is somewhat justified. That said, it's this lack of a more candid connection in favor of modernist artspeak that keeps Thinking on Your Feet from transcending the category of DVD-bound artist documentaries into something more engaging. Visually, meanwhile, the crisp imagery of Serra's installations looks terrific on the big screen, and repeated visits to the German steel mill where his massive sheets are formed are the stuff of sci-fi space docks and alien torture chambers. You practically expect to see Han Solo, cast in metal, propped up against a wall somewhere. Glowing, molten metal, steamy cooling contraptions and hulking steel-bending mechanisms prove nearly as poetic as the minimalist installations they churn out for Serra. Strange industrial spaces and modernist musings aside, those not already interested in Serra's work might have a hard time getting into this exploration of his artistic process.

A similar version of this review appears in The L Magazine, and can be read here.

Hell Ride

Directed by Larry Bishop
Michael Madsen, Dennis Hopper

The point (ideally) of genre revisions like this throwback to the leather-clad mythic machoism of highway gang violence is to use familiar devices (the chase, the stand-off, the barroom brawl, the unacknowledged love between a band of stoic slimeballs) to communicate something new and timely. Director/star Larry Bishop and executive producer Quentin Tarantino seem blissfully ignorant of that point in this high-octane, low-everything else vigilante biker gang dust-off.

Bishop’s Pistolero, an ugly and uncharismatic leader of some kind of drug-peddling middle-aged treehouse club, exchanges horribly uninspired one-liners (and punches, so many punches) with his business partners The Gent (Michael Madsen) and Comanche (Eric Balfour) as they meander towards an encounter with the gang that killed one of their mothers (Dennis Hopper also appears, but does nothing more). The gang’s many sexual partners, meanwhile, are alternately undressing or undressed and always mute (maybe blind too, since they don’t seem to mind how horribly unattractive Pistorelo is), and nothing in Hell Ride suggests that we, like them, aren’t supposed to sit back passively, take it and say “yeah!”

Clearly, there’s something to be made of the open road, highway-Western genre movie (one such film was awarded an important Oscar a few months back, in fact), but this is not it. This is dirty old men indulging irresponsible, offensive and exploitative fantasies with their encouraging best buddies. A not nearly redeeming factor, if nothing else, is the barely concealed love the gangmembers play out for one another in their partner-swapping and butt-grabbing (conspicuously, the men’s leather gear and bad-ass tattoos get as many close-ups as the various plasticized female body parts).



A similar version of this review appears in The L Magazine, and can be read here.

Patti Smith: Dream of Life

Directed by Steven Sebring

Listening to Patti Smith’s music or watching footage of her raw, explosive performances (most of which is withheld until the second half of this documentary), you’d doubt her likeliness to be quoting William Blake backstage or musing on the differences between Picasso and Pollock while painting in her studio. Best known for her music and its part in developing American punk rock, poetry comes off as Smith’s motivating passion (Sebring accompanies her to the gravesites of Blake, Shelley and Ginsberg).

Outside performances and painting, Smith’s verbose honesty, warmth and shyness come in surprising contrast to her raging stage persona. Sebring quietly crafts his very effective portrait with this psychological profile taking precedence over stargazing. Smith’s only voice-over is a deadpan timeline of her life recited during the opening minutes that comes off as practically sarcastic, a parody of the obligatory conventions of the artist biopic. In the end, we don’t learn the exhaustive details of Smith’s career or even her personal biography, but anybody seeing this film will know exactly how to speak to her should they meet her one day at a poetry reading.

In fact, for making his feature-length debut Sebring seems very confident, foregoing any thesis-pushing structure and opting for an expressively edited, casually beautiful portrait excised from footage shot following Smith for over a decade (lots of crispy black and white scenes, and fuzzy, meditative cut-aways of landscapes gliding past in a colorful blur). The result is not the crash course – detailing Smith’s musical career and its significance – some unfamiliar viewers might be hoping for. As the title indicates, this is a film about the entire life of an enigmatic woman who writes music and poetry, sings, paints, raises children, has living parents and a deceased husband, and is close friends with some of the most significant members of America’s recent modernisms.

A slightly awkward living room acoustic jam session with Sam Sheppard is more interesting and revealing than any of Smith’s concert footage. Elsewhere, surprising screentime is devoted to poring over the items strewn about Smith’s home, slow pans fetishizing her various possessions as if searching for some hidden clue to her psyche hidden among browned pages and rumpled baby clothes. In such scenes she also becomes a kind of time capsule for a recent moment of bustling cultural vitality and possibility, the magically remembered 70s and 80s whose arts were exciting and whose New York was gritty (scenes at the Chelsea Hotel or CBGB stroke a kind of collective nostalgia).



A similar version of this review appears in The L Magazine, and can be read here.