Paris vu par... (1965)

Directed by Jean Douchet, Jean Rouch, Jean-Daniel Pollet, Eric Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol

As a kind of meta-cinematic calling card for one of the most varied and disjointed film movements to straddle mainstream and art cinema, Paris vu par... is appropriately fun and disorienting. Like a banal conversation chopped up by jump cuts and ending off-screen as the camera pans right for no reason, these six New Wavers turn everyday Parisians into portentous vessels of quirks, tragedy and love.

The six vignettes are named for the neighborhoods they're set in (an organizational mode recently refurbished for Paris, je t'aime) and alternate between typical, whimsical and self-referential. Jean Douchet's opening short, for instance, is pure Godard. The aftermath of a one-night stand is presented by an omniscient narrator, references to Picasso and Sartre are tossed around like stale croissants and half-smoked cigarettes, intense reds and yellows seem as important as the familiar story.

That said, Godard's own segment (filmed by Albert Maysles!) is itself a heightened version of his features, the story of a romantic young woman and intensely hypocritical older men that happens so fast it reads like a thesis proposal for his next few films. Going against that choppy New Wave style, Jean Rouch's claustrophobic apartment argument might be the film's most engaging for its immersive style. Filmed in long takes and contorted handheld movements that recall the cramped submarine of Das Boot, it walks briskly from cramped neo-realism into sidewalk philosophy without missing a beat.

In fact, eruptions of the unexpected in urban routines might be the closest thing Paris vu par... has to a unifying thread (aside from small apartments, of course). Eric Rohmer studies Parisians' walking patterns around the city's largest traffic circle as if presenting a parody of everyday ethnography, and anticipating Christopher Guest's deadpan mockumentary style. Claude Chabrol's bourgeois family farce veers into tragedy when its ignored son takes to always wearing ear plugs. Pollet's super-saturated bachelor pad short inverses familiar power dynamics between a sex worker and her John.

Throughout, snappy tirades on sexual relations and the intersection of Frenchness and Americanness – which marks the style and content of so many New Wave films – present a pleasantly varied mix of the movement's familiar fare. If these director's features are often referred to disparagingly as laborious cine-essays, Paris vu par's quick clip reads like exceptionally stylish Cliffs Notes.

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

Miracle at St. Anna

Directed by Spike Lee

After criticizing Academy cuddle-buddy Clint Eastwood for excluding black actors from his two-part WWII saga last year, Spike Lee has mounted a revisionist war movie (adapted from a James McBride novel) to rectify the omission of race from American war movie discourse.

Whatever Miracle at St. Anna was intended to be – suppressed history revealed, a studio-era trench ensemble throwback, a war movie patchwork borrowing heavily from the kid-in-war subgenre – it fails rather spectacularly. Having proved himself capable of a sweeping politicized epic (four-hour Katrina doc When the Levees Broke) and excellent genre revision (heist flick Inside Man), Lee’s attempt to do both simultaneously disappoints. For a director whose most problematic films still fascinate, St. Anna is uncharacteristically flat. At its core are predictable war-time interactions between a host of Tuscan villagers, four stranded African American soldiers and their super-cute eight year-old attaché Angelo. The alliance of politically and racially marginalized groups should have been St. Anna’s (and Spike’s) salvation, but instead few characters transcend Lee’s usual set of archetypes, and what seems intended as a departure from war movie formulas ends up indulging them. Most puzzling is the semi-supernatural friendship (remember how much Lee loves magical connections?) between Angelo and Omar Benson Miller’s gentle giant Train (think Vin Diesel’s Iron Giant plus Michael Clarke Duncan in The Green Mile).

It’s as if, unsure whether to adhere to his super-stylized “Spike Lee Aesthetic” or go in for crispy war epic realism, Lee dances between the two and trips himself up in the end. By the time he drops everything for a finale on a heavenly Bahamas beach, it’s clear that even a miracle can’t save St. Anna from military movie mediocrity.

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

Alexander Nevsky

Directed by Sergei Eisenstein

Fans of period military epics rejoice, this is your Odyssey (the foundational text from whence all others derive); strapping Russian leader Nevsky is your Ulysses; and Eisenstein your Homer. The Soviet master of montage (and blacklisted Lenin dissenter shortly after Nevsky’s release) moved celluloid crowds more effectively in 1938 than Ridley Scott or Peter Jackson (maybe even Steven Spielberg) ever could.

Eisenstein’s signature style – a mounting rhythm of cuts and incrementally shorter shots – illuminates more than the mere story arcs and editing styles of ensuing classical war epics. State-sanctioned Nevsky also brandishes the war-mongering nationalism of the grandiose genre proudly, whereas subsequent entries do so more covertly and insidiously.

Approved by Stalin as anti-German propaganda, Eisenstein’s cinematic adaptation of the story of Prince Alexander Nevsky – pressed to lead Russia against the Roman Empire’s invading Teutonic Knights in 1242 despite insurmountable odds – is sometimes laughable in its manipulations. After an early victory on Russian soil, the Teutonic leader orders all the citizens of a captured city killed, then stands next to a fire while his aides bring him children to stoke the flames. Silly and unsubtle, perhaps, but at least one other seminal crowd epic director took the idea up – remember how devastating it was to see George Lucas’s animatronic teddy bears being killed by stormtroopers in Return of the Jedi?

Aside from killing cuties during its narrative set-up, Nevsky’s epic battle on a frozen lake lasts a third of the film, and was most recently copied in 2004’s disastrous King Arthur. It’s a feat of crowd choreography that makes up for the slow pace of the opening, with its populace-rousing speeches (Soviet cinema was all about the masses) and march towards battle. That said, the “Yay country, yay war!” message behind Nevsky still resonates with many contemporary military epics, a fact that its nationalist speech scenes brings to light. As Nevsky addresses a square full of poor, proud Russians, who can’t help remembering President Bill Pullman’s air base speech in Independence Day, or King Kenneth Branagh’s battlefield soliloquy in Henry V?

Aside from its pro-war nationalism, in fact, part of what makes Nevsky so interesting is how Eisenstein forgoes the proletarian mass perspectives of his classic Battleship Potemkin for identifiable heroes and supporting characters. Again, we have the makings of historical Hollywood epics like Gladiator in the series of vignettes surrounding reluctant leader Nevsky (Nikolai Cherkasov) and romantic officer buddies Vasili (Nikolai Okhlopkov) and Gavrilo (Andrei Abrikosov). Neksy’s value, then, extends beyond its being a historic and cinematic artifact: it also reveals some unsettling precedents still at play in our everyday entertainment.

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

"Year of the Gentleman" by Ne-Yo

(Def Jam Recordings)

Ne-Yo's third album in three years starts like a spaced-out blend of Michael Jackson and Usher (who's already a singing, dancing MJ homage himself), set to a digitized toolbox of 80s pop production styles. That vocal lineage isn't surprising, Ne-Yo's written several songs for Usher and is rumored to be involved with Michael Jackson's forthcoming album. In fact, Ne-Yo's transition to superstardom is one of those backstage success stories: he wrote chart-topping songs for just about every pop star of the last decade before making his own name.

The reigning king of suave pop-R&B (as opposed to R. Kelly's more gangsta-fied sub-genre) begins Year of the Gentleman with a bang. 'Closer' starts with pumping base, slows for an acoustic guitar interlude, then blends the two into a mounting affair of snappy samples and squeaky sound effects. 'Nobody', meanwhile, sounds uncannily like an updated Michael Jackson classic (something from Thriller or Bad, probably). The self-conscious dance floor serenade 'Single' (produced by Polow Da Don) rounds out an engrossing opening.

Things start to go downhill though, when the next track, 'Mad', sounds almost identical. By the time Ne-Yo whips out a line like "I won't attend your pity party, I'd rather go have calamari" on 'So You Can Say', it's already clear the album's second half is fishy. There are a few more gems here, like 'Miss Independent', a gentle, clubby love song updated with an eye to gender equality. 'Back to What You Know' is also memorable for being largely instrumental on a predominantly cybernetic album. In fact, overly uniform production helps keep this from being more than a routine R&B release.

Another part of Gentleman's problem is the lack of any guest appearances. For an artist whose ubiquity is partially a result of his collaborations (both as a hook-singer for rappers and a verse-writer for other singers), the decision to go it solo over eleven tracks was admirable, but risky. The single-handed album is sort of like the Mt. Everest of R&B, and despite Ne-Yo's recent ascendancy (as he sings on 'Stop this World': "I've never felt so high as I do now"), his career hasn't peaked yet.

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

Pierre Rissient: Man of Cinema

Directed by Todd McCarthy

A film lover's tribute to a film lover that will likely only keep the interest of film lovers, Variety critic Todd McCarthy's documentary Pierre Rissient: Man of Cinema is particularly memorable for the amazing lineup of directors who weigh in on the titular movie buff's career. It's also a kind of wet dream for devout film fans everywhere: What movie buff wouldn't want to go from critic to art house programer to new director champion to Cannes emperor and Asian New Wave patron?

For all the stylish cinema its subject facilitated, there's not much style to recommend McCarthy's film, unless one counts the jumpy editing rhythms during its interviews as a nod to the French New Wave. After all, the first of Rissient's many contributions to film history was as assistant director on Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless. Rissient's subsequent achievements are related by beneficiaries of his eye for talent like Sydney Pollack, Jerry Schatzberg, Quentin Tarantino, Clint Eastwood, Jane Campion and Hou Hsiao-hsien. Meanwhile, McCarthy accompanies Rissient to his small hometown in the French countryside, where the globetrotting movie industry chameleon discusses regional history with picture-perfect little old French ladies.

Rissient's charm and passion for film are self-evident, particularly when he tells industry anecdotes. One story about trying to keep an aging, boozing John Ford dry during a visit to Paris is especially memorable. It speaks to his many close relationships with film legends and the friendly, personal way he could still interact with them, all the while stoking his fan-boy adoration.

Rissient emerges as a benevolent patron of cinema. First as a discoverer of overlooked classical Hollywood gems, then as a promoter of American independent cinema in the 60s and 70s, and thereafter dedicated to the development of Asian art cinema. At moments, the absence of counter-arguments looms large. Did Rissient ever pull strings against a director he didn't like? Also, fairly late in McCarthy's film several friends chuckle that film and women are Rissient's two great passions, "especially young Asian women." It's an uneasy, potentially creepy moment the film quickly speeds along from, on to the opening of a cinema named for the aging Frenchman.

Old but far from retired, Rissient tries to offer McCarthy some closing remarks, only to be interrupted by his interminably ringing cell phone. He takes the call, and we're left having discovered one of the most independent cogs in the international movie machine, one that's still turning out of sheer passion.

A similar version of this review appears on The L Magazine's website, and can be read here.

All of Us

Directed by Emily Abt

For a doc about a health crisis, All of Us ends up engaging some of our cultures gravest and most endemic ills. Investigating the disproportionate rise of HIV rates among black women (who make up 68% of new HIV cases in the US) leads Abt and her star, Dr. Mehret Mandefro, to grapple with unaddressed racial and gender inequality. What – according to conventional wisdom – is a simple question of sexual education, proves to be a symptom of America’s most enduring humanitarian shortcomings: engrained racism and sexism, and crippling Puritanism.

All of Us explores its Bronx locales like a case study, touching on national biases with terrific rhetorical efficiency. If not for its far-reaching implications for (yes) all of us, the film might be re-titled 3 Women (the Altman reference might not be entirely inappropriate, either). Abt’s camera is embedded with Ethiopian-American Mehret (whose drive and charisma keep All of Us interested even when the director seems stalled between two ideas) and makes its discoveries through her self-reflexive musings and the daily hardships of two patients, Tara and Chevelle.

Abt brushes aside the massive class differences between the three women to uncover their fundamental similarities through point-counterpoint editing and (sometimes uncomfortably) prying questions. Only Mehret is a college grad and HIV-negative, but all three suffer various repercussions of sexual, racial and economic inequity.

If the scenario sounds nightmarish (and it is), Mehret’s trip to Ethiopia near the film’s end reveals how much worse things could be. What's often referred to as a health crisis here is a national crisis there, the unfortunate result of endless humanitarian mistakes and misplaced resources. Again, though, Abt and Mehret make clear how few dissimilarities actually exist between the Ethiopian and American AIDS crises. Sexual equality is still a long way off, resources for sex education are generally funneled towards abstinence programs, and public healthcare is forever underfunded.

With domestic measures consisting literally of ABCs (the Bush Administration’s AIDS prevention doctrine: Abstinence, Being faithful, using Condoms), the battle against HIV seems stalled on the home front. The home, in fact, is where All of Us locates the root of most of its problems. With histories of childhood and sexual abuse, most HIV-positive women find their health at the mercy of African American men’s fractured psyches (absent fathers, incarcerated relatives, abusive partners, etc.).

Mehret’s positing an alternative DEF (Demystifying, Empowerment/Equality, moving Forward) preventive shorthand offers inklings of a solution that should be applied more universally. If the HIV spread that All of Us addresses is being accelerated by culture-wide problems, its solutions for the one can certainly do wonders for the others.

A similar version of this review appears on The L Magazine's website, and can be read here.

Towelhead

Directed by Alan Ball

In indie American cinema’s recent tradition of quirky, vacuous back-patting (Juno, Little Miss Sunshine, etc.), Towelhead elevates the status quo semi-successfully. Many of its failures and successes follow from director Alan Ball’s HBO show Six Feet Under. That series about a family-run funeral home delved expertly into bodies and middle-class psychosis, rarely addressing its LA setting’s economic and racial rifts. Similarly, Towelhead – Ball’s feature debut adapted from Alicia Erian’s eponymous novel – mobilizes more issues than it can tackle intelligently.

During Gulf War I adolescent Jasira (Summer Bishil) and her Lebanese-American father (Peter Macdissi) butt heads, reacting to their Houston cul-de-sac’s suburban seediness. Imagine American Beauty blended with Paul Haggis’s Crash. Like the latter, Towelhead’s engagement with racism never transcends one-dimensional tokenism (economic inequality, meanwhile, seems non-existent in cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel’s magical realist suburban wonderland). Adults are one-dimensional here, social ills boiled down to knee-jerk behaviors: Jasira’s infantile mother (Maria Bello), Aaron Eckhart’s rapist reservist (he’s conservative and a sex offender, wow, don’t Republicans suck!?), and Toni Colette’s perpetually pregnant superwoman (well, okay, it’s always nice to see Colette, and the idea of her actually playing Wonderwoman is not unappealing).
For better or worse, this makes Towelhead’s intelligent and horny teens the fascinating core of the film, and the site of its greatest successes. Jasira’s sexual initiations, especially, provide an unflinching portrayal of childhood sexuality sadly absent from contemporary cinema. If it takes feigning topical interest in American race relations for Towelhead to address a more taboo topic with greater intelligence, the result is worthwhile despite its shortcomings.

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

FLOW

Directed by Irena Salina

“Big Oil” and “Big Tobacco” have shared the marquee as star corporate villains for some twenty years, but “Big Water” will upstage them any day now. We’ve been told for years that “sometime in the future wars will be fought over water,” but FLOW (For Love Of Water) suggests those days are already upon us. Technically unremarkable (even ugly in certain low-quality video sections), the immediacy of Irena Salina’s topic overwhelms her film’s aesthetic shortcomings. She intersperses footage of small-scale water fights throughout the world (in Bolivia and India, predictably, but also in South Africa and Michigan) and interviews with corporate interests, grass roots activists and environmental experts. No point in repeating the exhaustive stats and examples laid out throughout FLOW, let’s just say they're very convincing and depressing.

Salina reveals any number of entry points into this problem, water being the world's third largest industry (at $400 billion annually, behind oil and electricity). After mentioning early on that seventy percent of the world’s water is used for agriculture, Salina opts to focus on the ten percent implicated in the bottled and drinking water industries. The choice is justified, particularly as global drinking water shortages become linked to the IMF and global warming, but it’s a shame more time isn’t spent addressing the water war’s implications for the world’s food supply. Presumably this might have side-tracked FLOW into an update on the evil-doings of agri-business multinationals; interesting stuff, but slightly off topic. Plus, there are great docs like The Future of Food around, so that territory is being illuminated by others.

FLOW serves as a galvanizing introduction to a global crisis that will only move further into the media spotlight internationally and domestically. One of the doc’s recurring speakers, Blue Gold co-author Maude Barlow, points out that California’s water supply will run out in less than twenty years. The water wars haven’t begun yet (though isolated battles have), but they’re not far off. That’s terrifying knowledge, but (like water) crucial to our survival.

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

Secrecy

Directed by Peter Galison and Robb Moss

Amidst swirling discontent and suspicions regarding our government's wartime activities (torture, unlawful imprisonment, needless civilian casualties, misinformation, etc.) Peter Galison and Robb Moss could easily have presented a much less even-handed – and thereby less effective – account of the U.S. military and intelligence industries' concealment of information. Secrecy mixes point-counterpoints from government big wigs and various watchdogs (think tanks, journalists, lawyers) and an historical inquiry into the 1952 plane crash that set a false precedent for unilateral government immunity in cases involving sensitive secret information.

Being a film essentially on government and media policy, there's little pertinent archival footage or room for stylish digressions. Accordingly, a series of black-and-white animated interjections by Ruth Lingford add pleasant flurries of dark expressionism to a film so rooted in the dry reality of courtrooms and classified documents. Galison and Moss make great use of these animations – welcome breaks in a film that consists of ninety-nine percent talking heads – and also maximize the rhetorical power of complete silence.

Blank pauses after certain sections let the weight of a statement develop or allow back-logged streams of facts through our overwhelmed brains. As one interviewee notes, for instance, the U.S. government recently spent over $7 billion dollars in one year on matters of secrecy, a budget comparable to an entire cabinet department. We, in essence, have a department of government secrets that – fittingly – we don't know about. Cut to black, pause, contemplate... How Cold War!

Indeed, throughout Secrecy the current degree of information control around terrorism and Gulf War II is repeatedly compared to similar activities during the Cold War. The parallel is drawn for contrast not similarity though, as former head of the Information Security Oversight Office Steve Garfinkel remembers, "We have lost that... the comfort zone of the Cold War." In a time when there's endless information to process and innumerable parties to track, easily drawn lines between us and them seem so deceptively simple.

This is not a simple issue, however, and Secrecy's strength is in laying out opinions from all over the political spectrum and not positing a clear solution. That said, Tom Blanton of George Washington University's National Security Archive does come off better than others, musing in his cheerful drawl that "in the dark, you can get as lost as the people you're trying to hide things from."

Disastrous instances of leaked information make clear that total transparency is not the answer, while unchecked concealment of information is, as one interviewee notes, "profoundly un-American.” Rhetorically sound and powerful, Secrecy makes clear that a secretive government (as ours is, more than ever) needs to be held responsible by someone. As another interviewee concludes grimly, “when things are secret, we don’t have to be responsible.”

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

August Evening

Directed by Chris Eska
Veronica Loren, Pedro Castaneda

Another for the ever-expanding “immigration movie” category, though Eska’s border neorealism often plays more like a melodrama whose machinery is alternately slowed and sped up by the ennui and displacements of migrant work and limited citizenship than a straight-forward “issue movie.” Eska’s characters have an inner life whose mere backdrop is the perpetual tension of being without status in a country where one’s only valued insofar as one can work. Gentle, firm Jaime is nearing the end of his (working) life despite his resilience while his daughter in law Lupe stays withdrawn after her young husband’s (Jaime’s son) death.

The film opens, like City of God, with chickens. Where that trickster favela chicken symbolized a life spent perpetually fleeing slaughter, August Evening’s multitudinous chickens are crammed into a factory farm, kept as long as they produce eggs then unceremoniously evacuated the second they drop. The analogy is frightful – particularly set to Windy & Carl’s ominous electronic score – and if it quickly takes a backseat to the family drama at the film’s center it still remains crushingly present.

Often in August Evening, family drama is truncated by the demands of work. Amidst arguments and reconciliations, Jaime’s surviving children – down and out dad Victor (Abel Becerra) and cold suburban career woman Alice (Sandra J. Rios) – are repeatedly called away from family matters and back to the grind. Family-centric communal life, it seems, is incompatible with a “time is money” society. Not surprisingly, by film’s end characters often opt for TV over conversation.

The characters – compelling for the most part – seem awfully familiar. For much of its mid-section, August Evening plays like one of those Victorian novels wherein our young heroine slowly but surely succumbs to the advances of her sweet, deserving mate. Lupe, granted, is a very strong presence around whom to structure a film (it’s disappointing that the final image is of Jaime, not her), but it’s certainly no surprise when she finally discards her mourning armor for Luis (the film’s only depthless, blindly benevolent character).

Solid acting throughout often keeps Eska’s work from being too noticeable, though he and director of photography Yasu Tanida’s visual style calls attention to itself repeatedly, both for its flair and its ugliness. Early countryside scenery – especially brief still asides to contemplate minor details of mis-en-scene – looks terrific in soft, bold video. Later city photography, meanwhile, provides a good argument for why video has yet to completely eclipse film (think of Michael Mann’s Collateral).

For all its ugly and pretty, urban and rural melancholy, August Evening keeps viewers’ attention on the strength of its leading actors for its first hundred minutes. The final chapter slows considerably, merely dramatizing events best left implicit. The section’s inclusion has the added effect of positing frail and lonely Jaime as the film’s lasting image, where Lupe’s shifting fortunes seem more appropriate. In an earlier scene she and Luis discussed the various misfortunes that had finally brought them together, and in a film about turning one’s disadvantages into strengths theirs seems the more relevant tale of survival.

A similar version of this review appears on The L Magazine's website, and can be read here.

The 39 Steps

Alfred Hitchcock
Robert Donnat, Madeleine Carroll

Five years before leaving for Hollywood, Hitchcock had perfected the suspense-romance genre formula that had become his calling card in the British film industry. The 39 Steps – moreso than the fun but less thoughtful The Lady Vanishes (1939) and the comparatively clumsy Secret Agent (1936) – doesn’t just skip between its crime and romance registers, it substitutes them for one another just long enough for accidental spy Hannay (Robert Donnat) and his handcuff-bound would-be wife Pamela (Madeleine Carroll) to get out of a dangerous situation and into another.

In addition to familiar devices of Hitch’s early years (awkward train car interactions, potential murder weapons brandished casually during civil conversations, staged and stageless performances, uneasy urbanite-farmer exchanges, and ineffectual cops) we see embryonic signs of his Hollywood iconography. The opening play of footsteps is like a thesis proposal for the frenzied cross-cutting that would open Strangers on a Train 16 years later. Mistakenly accused of murder and chased over the Scottish Highlands (towards a town called Killin no less!), Hannay inevitably anticipates Cary Grant’s Roger O. Thornhill in North by Northwest – there’s no crop-dusting scene here, granted, but a helicopter isn’t bad.

Unlike that epic of Americana, The 39 Steps stays intimate, following the resourceful Canadian diplomat Hannay closely, then prodding him and Pamela together – first with handcuffs then, after the bonding born of evading murderers and police, with the delightful camaraderie of a great screen duo. If Grant and Ingrid Bergman (in Notorious) or Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly (in Rear Window) packed more star power and beauty, they also never achieved the level of playful banter the leading pairs of The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes displayed. Here the pleasure is as much in watching two people grow closer despite themselves as in watching the machinations of a spy story play out.

This focus on the couple may speak to a firmer belief in romantic love, one evidently worn thin by the time Hitch made Vertigo. The strength of 39 Steps’s love plot also attests to the budding star director’s lingering willingness to be merely a director and not yet the star of his own films. His persona (real or branded) would swiftly take center stage after the move to America. In The 39 Steps, Hitch quietly raises familiar themes like his distrust of crowds (the opening scene starts as a parody of British propriety then devolves into a barroom brawl), his skeptical portrayal of marriage (Hannay and Pamela alternate performing newlyweds and fleeing criminals until the distinction is merely nominal), and balances a dislike of blind loyalty with suspicion of roving mercenaries.

The 39 Steps’s careening plot and delightful, self-aware humor makes it memorable beyond its ostensible auteuristic foreshadowing and thematic engagements. Hitch, even to his staunchest detractors, was always capable of terrific entertainment. As Hannay remarks to the elegant freelance agent who sets the film’s events in motion: “ ‘ beautiful, mysterious woman pursued by gunmen’, sounds like a spy story.” It is, but it’s also a lot more.

A similar version of this review appears on The L Magazine's website, and can be read here.

"LAX" by The Game

(Geffen Records)


The Game's album titles tend to be more revealing than intended. His first, 2005's The Documentary, claimed raw street level objectivity but also foreshadowed the fictional street stories and publicity beef that would soon follow. 2006's Doctor's Advocate was a frenzy of name-dropping, much of it reserved for Dr. Dre, the title's medical expert. Shortly after the album's release though, Game and Dre (the engineer of so many gangsta rapper's careers) had a major falling out. The advocate had been dismissed. With LAX, Game is again saying more than he means. Named for his hometown's airport, the album marks the departure of a hip hop subgenre, the end of gangsta rap's journey to the top of the charts and back down.

Game will never be remembered as a great gangsta rapper – a fact sadly confirmed here, on the weakest of his three albums – but he will go down as the last "big" gangsta rapper. After the disastrous turn in 50 Cent's career, the failure of the refashioned gangsta Busta Rhymes (brought to you by Dr. Dre, who else?), and the takeover by the Kanyes, Weezies and Lupes, Game is the only guy left rapping hard about drugs, cars, guns, women and (occasionally, evasively) his feelings. How fitting then that LAX is book-ended by prayers from one of Game's biggest East Coast predecessors, DMX. More fitting, even, is Ice Cube's appearance on the chorus of the disappointing 'State of Emergency'. The first man to completely inhabit the gangsta rapper paradigm appearing with its final incarnation – at least in the current cycle of hip hop styles, presumably we'll see a resurgence of the gangsta somewhere down the line.

Tellingly, some of LAX's best moments come from those artists who've slowly edged gangsta rap off the hip hop charts. This is Game (no longer apprenticed to gangsta enabler and media mastermind Dr. Dre) trying to adapt to his shifting fortunes. Lil Wayne provides a roboticized hook on the melancholic Cool & Dre-produced 'My Life', a moving, optimistic rumination on death and perseverance: "ain't no bars, but niggas can't escape the hood/and it took so many of my niggas that I should hate the hood/but it's real niggas like me that make the hood." Meanwhile, 'Angel' featuring Common and produced by Kanye is a terrific melding of styles and sounds. Game and Common casually wrap their words around Kanye's amazing Gil Scott Heron-sampling beat, a strangely engrossing hybrid of fluttery, synthy psychedelia and deep, funky West Coast smoothness.

As with other "big" rappers, a Game album is as much about production as it is about the Angeleno's lyrics. Generally, LAX falters where The Documentary and Doctor's Advocate were non-stop contests of one-upmanship by the most gifted producers around. Aside from that terrific entry by Kanye, two excellent (if successive and suspiciously similar) Cool & Dre beats, and a handfull of others, the majority of LAX's 19 tracks are disappointing. There's nothing here as amazingly awesome as Timbaland's space anthem 'Put You on the Game' from The Documentary, or Just Blaze's drum-fueled party-starter 'The Remedy' on Doctor's Advocate.

The overwhelming absence of such incredibly upbeat tracks isn't entirely surprising though, given LAX's ostensible subject. Taken as a swan song for a surprisingly resilient subgenre in a particularly short cultural cycle, Game's inadvertent goodbye to gangsta rap (possibly his final solo album, he claims), is appropriately somber. From the moody opener 'LAX Files', through the Eazy-Biggie-2Pac memorial 'Never Can Say Goodbye' and the closing MLK Jr. elegy 'Letter to the King' with Nas, LAX isn't the state of the union album that Game's first two were. Instead – as the album's airport title suggests – it sounds like the gangsta rapper's last stop, his final destination on a decades-long journey Westward.

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