http://blogcritics.org/ A sinister cabal of superior bloggers on music, books, film, popular culture, politics, and technology - updated continuously. en Copyright 2005-2007 by the authors Mon, 17 Jul 2006 18:05:13 EDT http://backend.userland.com/rss Blogcritics.org custom software http://blogcritics.org/ Phillip WinnSunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding. Administration0@blogcritics.org Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/07/17/180513.php Paul FrankensteinIt’s almost inevitable that the filmed versions of novels suffer in comparison to the original. The structural and storytelling requirements of film all too often flatten characters, compress events, and obscure themes and motives. The film version of Bridget Jones’ Diary completely omitted the novel’s commentary on female self-image and culture, for example. Often, making a successful film from a printed source requires significant transformation of the source material (see Dr. Strangelove [or, indeed, most of Kubrick’s mature oeuvre]; Blade Runner; Apocalypse Now).However, there is a very small category of movies-from-books where the film not only stands on its own two feet but actually exceeds the original. The Godfather and The Godfather, Part II (also the rare case where the sequel exceeded what preceded it) is the canonical example. And now I have to report that the filmed version of The Devil Wears Prada is another case of the film far exceeding the original (I admit that I haven’t actually read the novel, but by all accounts, it’s both awful and self-serving). Our heroine, Andrea “Andy” Sachs (her self-selected choice of a boy’s name is supposed to signify her spunky, independent spirit) is supposed to be a brilliant budding journalist seeking entry into the publishing world (she turned down Stanford Law to pursue her dream; one wonders how hard it would be for someone with the record and intellectual firepower to get into Stanford Law to apply to a graduate program in journalism). Anne Hathaway, the actor who plays Andy, is a pretty and appealing screen presence, even in the first act of the film, when she’s saddled with an unfortunate haircut and dowdy clothes (signifying, of course, Andy’s status as a fashion outsider and naif). Andy somehow manages to acquire a job as second assistant to Miranda Priestly, the wicked witch of the west imperious doyenne and editrix of the entirely fictional Runway magazine (for those of you keeping score at home, Runway=Vogue and Miranda Priestly=Anna Wintour). Priestly rules her magazine - and the fashion world at large - with pursed lips and an air of slight disappointment -- an iron fist in a Chanel glove. Working alongside Andy at Runway is an evil step-sister Miranda’s first assistant, a tart-tounged Englishwoman named Emily (Emily Blunt in a scenery-chewing, scene-stealing turn). Stanley Tucci plays a fairy godmother art director who takes Andy under his wing and helps her fit in.The film’s fairy-tale setup is a large part of the film’s initial attraction, and Andy’s Cinderella-like metamorphosis from frumpily unfashionable bookworm to sleek, glamourous clotheshorse is, indeed, a sight to behold (the subtextual message, of course, is that the route to being fabulous lies in a makeover). Ill-fitting corduroy and discount-store sweaters are discarded in favor of designers who need only one name; functional flats are replaced by towering stilettos; an unruly, frizzy mane of hair is pared down into a glossy, sleek, swinging do.It should be pointed out that ugly duckling roles seem to have become a speciality for Hathaway; this is the third movie she’s appeared in where she undergoes a transformation from frumpy to fab.The real star, though, is Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly. Despite the fact that Priestly is, structurally, the story’s antagonist, she dominates every scene she’s in — and the film as a whole. Part of this, of course, is simple magnetism; Streep is a Movie Star, and the camera loves her as such. Curiously, while most classic movie stars play variations on a theme - James Garner, for example, has become the living embodiment of the affable (if now aging) rogue - Streep is a movie star despite herself; she embraces roles that are alike only in that they’re all middle-aged white women (see her sentimental Yolanda Johnson in A Prairie Home Companion as a contrast to Priestly). From the calculatedly unthinking manner that she dumps her coat and purse on Andy’s desk, to her brilliant first-act speech where she draws the line from a turquoise belt to Andy’s blue sweater, to the chilly way she savors the fashion world’s fawning obsequiousness, Streep’s Priestly is an astonishing creature. Her ability to strike fear into her underlings with just a whisper (a trick Streep borrowed from Clint Eastwood, her co-star and director in The Bridges of Madison County, another decent movie fashioned from an absolutely awful novel) invokes power both power and respect. The film dutifully trundles through its various plot mechanics (the hunky writer rake; the up-and-coming designer; the rival editor), but set against the simple pleasure of watching Streep, they fade to become simple window dressing; the actual details of the plot seems secondary and serve only to bump the film through its acts.The Devil in both the book and the movie refers to Miranda Priestly, of course. But the novel’s devil is a one-dimensional harridan, high on power and thoroughly unlikable. The movie’s devil is a seductive demon, using glamour and power and shiny pretty things to lure Andy into changing who she is; Priestly is akin to Milton’s Lucifer, a devil who seduces rather than overpowers. The title sequence of the film is a rapid-fire montage of assorted female Runway staffers going through their daily prep; their artifice is contrasted against a pre-makeover Andy stumbling through her morning (the end of the sequence has the staffers all hopping into cabs, while Andy descends into the subway on her way to her job interview at the magazine). The message seems unmistakable; yet, post-makeover, Andy turns into one of them, even going so far as to lose enough weight to go from a perfectly respectable size 6 to a size 4.The devil knows that glamour seduces even those who reject it; at the end of the film, Andy turns her back on Runway and gives away all her couture clothing. But she keeps her fabulous haircut. Video50483@blogcritics.org Mon, 17 Jul 2006 18:05:13 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/09/02/192542.php Paul FrankensteinI saw a whole bunch of movies over the Labor Day weekend—I was trying to catch up on all the summer movies that I haven't seen but have been meaning to (that, and pretty much the entire population of Manhattan had abandoned the island for the long weekend, so I didn't have all that much else to do). To review them, I'm enlisting the help of my imaginary friend Herb. You could say that it was a mini-film festival, kinda sorta.Winged MigrationPaul: This is a beautiful, plotless film about birds. Yeah, the things that fly up in the sky and have feathers. Made over four years, it has absolutely stunning cinematography and quite a few "oh my gosh, how did they do that" moments. It tracks the seasonal migration of a number of different kinds of birds: assorted kinds of geese, cranes, puffins, eagles, and so on (they even spend some time with penguins!). Because the camera operators were able to get so close to the birds, you can actually see how they fly, and some of the different solutions that each species uses to solve some of the same problems of flight. It's an ornithologist's wet dream. It also managed to achieve a rare grace and elegance; it's 87 minutes of visual poetry. One curious thing is that the birds featured tend to be waterfowl of one kind (geese, ducks) or another (albatrosses, puffins, cranes). Highly recommended, and highly recommended that you see it on a big screen. I saw it as a 35mm print projected onto an IMAX screen, which was probably not the best way to see it, but it was still pretty amazing. Herb: No plot, no girls, no gunfire. Next!The MedallionPaul: For the past few years, Jackie Chan has split his time between making Hong Kong-style films (Who Am I?, The Accidental Spy) and big Hollywood films with western stars (Rush Hour, Shanghai Noon, The Tuxedo). The Medallion is an attempt to meld the two genres: made in Hong Kong and Ireland, it features an international supporting cast (Julian Sands, Lee Evans, John Rhys-Davies). It also features Claire Forlani as the female lead/love interest, which is a horrible, horrible mistake, as the two of them are utterly unbelievable as a romantic couple, despite their best thespian efforts. It was certainly an entertaining diversion and there are some very funny bits from Lee Evans, but it's hardly one of Mr. Chan's best efforts. Herb: I don't think that I'm giving anything away by telling you that half-way through the film, Jackie Chan's character dies and then comes back to life as a supernatural power. Up to there, it's a by-the-numbers chopsocky flick, with some great, great stunt work. After the guy dies, though, it's turns into a computer-generated extravaganza. Put it this way: it turns bad. Real bad. And the whole love interest thing doesn't work on so many different levels. People were laughing at it when I saw it. For one thing, Claire Forlani is about 30 years younger than Jackie, and for another, when she smiles, she's got waaaaaaaay too many teeth. Plus the fact that they have zero—ZEEEEE-ro!— chemistry doesn't help.Swimming PoolPaul: It's cool, it's sexy, it's got a great twist at the end, and it's completely different than the director's previous film, 8 Women. It's also the first English-language film for Ludivine Sagnier, who gets around the accent problem by playing a Frenchwoman (it also helps that for much of the film, she's not burdened by much—if anything—in the way of a costume) who's at that uncomfortable age straddling the border between being a girl and being a woman. Charlotte Rampling is fantastic as a overly-buttoned up English writer of Agatha Christie-style murder mysteries -- it's a performance that's measured in millimeters, and it's a wonderful display of the actor's art. One of the things that I really liked about the film was how it moves naturally between French and English, similar to the way that Wings of Desire flipped between multiple languages (a pet peeve of mine is when movie characters indicate that they're speaking a foreign language by adopting ludicrously heavy accents). Herb: Whoa. Hot naked French chicks and a surprise ending? Ok, it moves a bit slow (ok, very slow), but I can live with that.American SplendorPaul: This is an amazing movie. It's based on the comic book series American Splendor, wherein Harvey Pekar, file clerk for a VA hospital in Cleveland, chronicled his grimly sardonic and frequently hilarious life. You'd think that a film about a chronically depressed and angry man who lives in Cleveland would be depressing, but it's not. It's actually kinda uplifting. The film, which also features the real Harvey Pekar as himself, not to mention his wife and his co-worker Toby as themselves, veers between biography, docu-drama, and outright documentary (real clips of Harvey visiting the David Letterman show are used, for example). Paul Giamatti, the actor who plays Harvey, wanders throughout the film with a curled lip that seems poised halfway between puzzlement and hostility; an unrecognizable Hope Davis plays his wife Joyce in a long black wig and huge glasses. What's interesting is that the real Harvey Pekar is actually better-looking than the actor who plays him in the movie (he's kind of a cross between Carl Sagan, Neil Young, and Earl from the comic strip Red Meat), but Giamatti looks more like the comic-book version of Pekar than Pekar himself (since Harvey can't draw, the comic books are illustrated by a number of different artists, the first of which was Robert Crumb). Herb: This movie blew me away and made me realize that my suck-filled imaginary life could be a lot worse. Definitely check it out. Dirty Pretty ThingsPaul: The English-language debut of another French ingenue, this movie by Stephen Frears is a small, dark thriller set in a demimonde of illegal immigrants in London about a doctor who's a wanted man in his native Nigeria; a Turkish immigrant who's seeking refugee status, and a sinister trade in human kidneys. Mostly set in and around a small, semi-sleazy hotel in central London, the film has a star-making performance from Chiwetel Ejiofor as the doctor on the run. Audrey Tautou, the luminous star of Amelie gets around her accent problem by playing a Turk and adopting a fairly indeterminate "foreign" accent (for what it's worth, either she's really really good at learning scripts phonetically or she spent a lot of time working very hard on her English, 'cause I remember when she was doing PR for Amelie and her English was only slightly better than my French (which itself begins and ends with "steak frites, c'est vous plait"). It's not a great, landmark, groundbreaking film, but it's certainly a very entertaining diversion. Herb: Yeah, it was pretty cool. I dug the Chinese guy who worked as a porter at the morgue. You could see the twist at the end coming a mile off, though. Note: despite what the movie poster promises, ya don't get to see Ms. Tautou with her shirt off. Still, I say check it out.This review was originally posted at paulfrankenstein.org. Video8043@blogcritics.org Tue, 2 Sep 2003 19:25:42 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/04/09/131857.php Paul FrankensteinI was three years old when I first heard Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps (or, The Rite of Spring for those of use who can't pronounce French worth a damn). My parents had taken me to see Disney's Fantasia (the original version, not the pale imitation that was Fantasia 2000) and I was entranced by it. Specifically, I was entranced with the dinosaurs (I don't know what it is about three-year-old boys and dinosaurs, but there's some kind of primal link there -- someone should do a study). I thought that it was the coolest thing ever.And that music! So alien, so otherworldly, just so right for those mighty, fearsome beasts with their scales and claws and teeth (disregarding the fact that Disney had shuffled the order of the music around to make it fit the story better, but more on that later). Something about it struck a chord in my heart. This was my music. Loud, irregular, primordial.My sister still tells the story: our parents were out, perhaps gone shopping, perhaps to go visit the neighbors, and the two of us were home alone. I must have been about four. I put the LP on the stereo (I am, I know, dating myself -- we actually had (and probably still have in a box somewhere) a Kenwood turntable that played real vinyl records) and turned up the volume to a level somewhere between pants-wetting and eardrum-breaking. Le Sacre (or, as I called it back at that nascent age, the dinosaur music) has one of the widest dynamic ranges of any pieces of music ever written. Or, in other words, there are bits that are very, very quiet, and then there are bits that are very, very loud. And there's not a lot of transitioning between the two: it goes from v.v.q. to v.v.l. in the space of a single downbeat. So there I was, dancing away when these thunderous hammered chords came blasting out of the stereo. Scared the bejeezus out of my sister. Probably would have scared the bejeezus out of me, too, if I didn't know it was coming.It is an article of faith among musicologists that Le Sacre was so controversial, so radical, so revolutionary, that the first public performance caused a riot. And that's mostly true. But explaining the legend requires a little bit of backstory.In 1910, Igor Stravinsky wrote The Firebird, one of the great Russian ballet scores. The success of the relatively conventional Firebird encouraged him to write Petrushka, another ballet, for the great choreographers Serge Diaghilev and Vaslav Ninjinsky. The music of Petrushka is rather different than that of The Firebird; it's more angular, more syncopated, more dissonant; in short, it points the way to Le Sacre. Le Sacre itself was supposed to be a ballet celebrating the violent Russian spring; it harkened back to a mythical pagan Russia and was to end with a ritual sacrifice. The birthing process of the ballet was itself labored, as Stravinsky wrote:"I will count to forty while you play", Nijinsky would say to me, "and we will see where we come out." He could not understand that though we might at some point "come out" together, this did not mean we had been together on the way. The dancers followed Nijinsky's count, too ... and as Russian numbers above ten are polysyllabic -- eighteen, for example, vosemnadsat -- in the fast tempo movements neither he nor they could keep up.This accounts for at least some of the hostile reaction the piece encountered on its premiere. Stravinsky again, on that fateful opening night in 1913:At the performance, mild protests against the music could be heard from the beginning. Then, when the curtain opened, a group of knock-kneed and long-braided Lolitas jumping up and down, the storm broke. Cries of "ta gueule" came from behind me. I left the hall in a rage. ... For the rest of the performance, I stood in the wings behind Nijinsky holding the tails of his frac, while he stood on a chair shouting numbers to the dancers, like a coxswain.What Stravinsky leaves out, though is the fact that much of the booing was due to a claque that had been paid by enemies of the composer to disrupt the performance. The second night's performance, was, by all accounts, significantly more successful.Despite its origins as a ballet score, Le Sacre quickly achieved success as a concert piece. Perhaps contemporary audiences heard a musical reflection of the chaos of the First World War. The music itself is notoriously difficult. The piece opens with a solo bassoon exploring the oft-neglected upper range of that instrument; the time signature changes eight times in the first ten bars. Other parts of the score venture into outright bizarre time signatures, like 9/4, 3/16, 2/8, and 6/4. Stravinsky could play the music before he could figure out how to write it down (he re-notated the score in the late 1940s to make it easier to read (an exercise that had the happy and not entirely unintended consequence of extending his copyright)).When Disney approached Stravinsky with the idea of using Le Sacre as part of Fantasia, the composer was all ears. Or, more specifically, all eyes, as he was most attracted to the check that the movie company dangled in front of him.Of course, when he actually saw the movie, he hated it, objecting to both the setting (dinosaurs?) and, somewhat more loudly, the shuffling of his score. Unsurprisingly, though, his level of disapproval never rose to the point where he felt required to return his fee.While it draws on many different sources (a cottage industry has sprung up finding bits of Russian folk tunes in the piece), Le Sacre truly is one of the few revolutionary pieces of music in the canon. For one thing, some 90 years after its first performance, it still sounds modern. It still sounds new, and it still has the capability to surprise. My own love affair with the music continues to this day, even though I'm no longer four and have grown to the point where I don't try to scare people with the music. I own five different recordings of the piece (a record only challenged by the number of Rachmaninoff 3rds I acquired several years ago in a fit of temporary insanity) if you include a version scored for four hands. The gold standard, is, of course, the version conducted by Stravinsky himself; but each of the versions I own have their own strengths and weaknesses. The music itself is so complex and layered that orchestras and conductors are still exploring it, still finding new nuances and shades of color and sound in it. I've been to performances that explore the Russian roots of the piece; I've been to performances that makes it sound like it comes from outer space (for the record, I prefer the "outer space" interpretation). I don't think that there can be a single definitive performance or interpretation of this music. I still like the Disney version, out-of-order and all; the slow march of the brontosauruses to their eventual demise in on a red-hot earth; the thrilling, mano-a-mano (if you'll excuse the mixed metaphor) battle between the desperate, heroic stegosaurus and the looming, rapacious tyrannosaur; I think back on that and I'm three years old again, in the grip of terror and excitement as that gloriously strange music washes over me yet again. This article was originally posted over at Mimeograph.org Music4453@blogcritics.org Wed, 9 Apr 2003 13:18:57 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2002/11/30/014415.php Paul FrankensteinNeed a stocking stuffer for the film buff in your life? Try one of these: Ikiru A dying bureaucrat tries to build a children's playground. Something of a departure for Akira Kurosawa, this small, focused urban drama is miles away from the samurai epics he's better known for. Yet this study of a man's search for meaning is perhaps Kurosawa's most moving film. In the Bleak Midwinter (aka A Midwinter's Tale) Unemployed actors attempt to put on an unorthodox production of Hamlet at Christmastime. Kenneth Branagh made this small, modest film (in black and white) about a community production of the play about the Danish Prince right before he tackled his own oversized film of the play. Think of it as a kinder, gentler Waiting For Guffman. La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc The trial and death of Joan of Arc. One of the greatest films ever made, it was long thought that the original version of this movie was forever lost. A chance discovery in a laundry closet yielded a virtually pristine print. The dialogue (such as it is for a silent film) is taken directly out of the transcripts of the real Joan of Arc's trial. Le Samourai Conflicted, perfectionist hitman in 1960s Paris plans one last hit. Alain Delon is just too cool as contract killer Jef Costello, who makes one fatal mistake and then watches as both the police and the underworld slowly close in on him. A cool, elegant, clever noir. Local Hero Texas oilman goes to Scotland to convince recalcitrant locals to sell out; arrives, finds that locals aren't recalcitrant at all. In Bill Forsyth's engaging comedy, little is what is appears to be. The humor is relaxed and unforced, and the sly, deadpan pacing makes this film a welcome respite from the frantic, in-your-face pace of modern films. Runaway Train Either an extended metaphysical meditation on the nature of man, or a cracker-jack action flick about a pair of escaped convicts on a train. You decide. Personally, I think that it's both. Starring John "father of Angelina Jolie" Voight as one of the convicts and Eric "Julia's older brother" Roberts as the other convict. The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension Buckaroo Banzai is a neurosurgeon/rocket scientist/rock star/comic book hero who saves the world in his spare time. Starring Peter Weller, Jeff Goldblum, Ellen Barkin, John Lithgow and Christopher Lloyd before they became big stars. One of those cult films that's too smart for its own good (c.f. Repo Man), this is a funny, entertaining comic book come to life. Tombes du Ciel (Lost in Transit) Man loses passport on flight; is forced to live in the international zone at the airport. Inspired by a true story. This is unfortunately not available commercially, but if you're lucky enough to catch a screening or a bootleg copy, get your hands on it. Not a big film, but a very human one. The great Jean Rochefort is utterly charming as the befuddled passenger. Trust A 16-year-old pregnant high-school dropout and a thirty-something sociopathic electronics genius who still lives with his father have nothing in common. Right? Right? Filled with deliberately over-literate dialogue and characters who are just too darn smart for their own good, it's the closest that Hal Hartley ever came to writing a romantic comedy. Wings of Desire Angel falls in love, decides he wants to be human. Infinitely better than the Hollywood remake. A long, intentionally indirect movie about love, desire, and what it means to be human, this is probably Wim Wenders' most accessible film. Video2056@blogcritics.org Sat, 30 Nov 2002 01:44:15 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2002/11/19/191504.php Paul FrankensteinFinisterre literally means The End of The Earth.As usual, fans of Saint Etienne are left to puzzle over the subtext (if any), while the band itself publicly insists that it was simply taken from a now-discontinued location on the BBC Shipping News. Is the band breaking up? Do they think that they've reached the end of their artistic journey? Or, in more typical fashion, is it simply a giant inside joke?While I'll leave it to others to debate any hidden messages that the band has left behind, there is no doubt about the album itself. Finisterre is a welcome return to form for this English pop trio who spent the entirety of their last album (the interesting if ultimately weightless Sound of Water) stuck in the soundscapes of German electronica. The band -- consisting of Sarah Cracknell, Pete Wiggs, and Bob Stanley -- has returned to England (Sound of Water was made in Berlin and Good Humor was recorded in Sweden) to make a distinctly English album, punctuated by the voice of actor Michael Jayston (I've never heard of him either, but he's apparently one of those character actors who makes you say, in a Pavlovesque reaction, "hey, I've seen that guy before") providing inter-track spoken-word interludes (sample: "Our Father, who art in Heaven, please stay there").While they haven't gone back to the organic live sound of Good Humor, the new album is clearly an attempt to return to the clever dance-oriented pop that has been their traditional stomping grounds. While Finisterre does not match up with some of their earlier efforts (the astonishing Foxbase Alpha, the crystalline So Tough, and the glorious Tiger Bay (one of the best albums of the 1990s and one of the most misunderstood)), it is still miles beyond the vast majority of popular music churned out by the recording industry today."Action", the first single and the lead track of the CD, is a cheery, upbeat euro-disco (I've been informed that the correct word to use here is "house") track vaguely reminiscent of recent Kylie Minogue, awash in shimmering keyboards and a propulsively thumping four-on-the-floor drumbeat. A surefire floorburner, the relentlessly hedonistic music masks the content of the lyrics, which are actually about suburban ennui and a desire to return to the halcyon days of youth. In a sense, this is a typical Etienne single: upbeat, cheerful, populist music with a twist in the lyrics.The Saint enlists the services of the English rapper Wildflower on the track "Soft Like Me", a paean to the positive powers of femininity with a sunny, bouncy chorus that you can almost imagine Karen Carpenter singing. The genius of this song is how it places praise for the qualities of emotional openness and tenderness in the context of rap -- an American genre noted for brutish masculinity and misogyny. I would use the word "subvert" here, but I've been informed that only licensed Academics can use it without irony."Stop and Think It Over" is a ballad that would, in most hands, turn irredeemably syrupy; the regret in Cracknell's breathy voice and the musically unresolved ending keeps the track from toppling over entirely into mush. "Shower Scene" is another house (that is the right word to use, right?) anthem with utterly obtuse lyrical content ("in the rain/in the fall/in the mud/in the hall/in the rain/in the fog/in the shice/call my name" are pretty much all the lyrics of the four-and-a-half-minute song); interpretation of what that actually means is fairly open.Like all clever pop bands, Saint Etienne has often been accused of being too self-referential; they do nothing to refute this charge on Finisterre. The track "The Way We Live Now" is clearly a reference to "The Way We Used To Live", a nine-minute single off of Sound of Water; the band name-checks one of their own songs in "B92," a satiric take on the music industry. The one thing from previous Saint Etienne albums that rabid fans might miss is the constant sense of Ameriphilia; there are, as far as I can tell, virtually no explicitly American references on the album (which is rather unusual for a band that has produced songs titled "Erica America", "The Boy Scouts of America", "I Buy American Records", and "Zipcode", among others). The closest they come is in "Finisterre", the last track on the CD. Sarah Churchill (any relation to the PM? I don't know) intones "I believe in Donovan over Dylan, a laugh over cynicism" during a memerizing interior monologue, a retreat into the landscape of the mind. The final chorus -- "Finisterre, to tear it down and start again" -- is maybe a message, perhaps a manifesto, and, possibly, a hint for those wondering what the band is trying to do. Music1932@blogcritics.org Tue, 19 Nov 2002 19:15:04 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2002/10/16/201806.php Paul FrankensteinSpirited Away is the latest film to hit theaters from Hayao Miyazaki, the genius who also created Princess Mononoke. It's a beautiful film, and it's highly recommended to anyone who's interested in Anime at all (or to anyone who enjoyed Mononoke). The computer animated sequences are seamlessly integrated into the traditionally animated sequences, and there are simply some astonishing visuals.The plot is neatly summed up by the trailer; for those of you disinclined to download the trailer, a young girl gets separated from her parents and gets sucked into a parallel world of spirits. There she finds that her parents have been turned into giant greedy pigs by an evil witch; she spends the rest of the film attempting to both find her way back into the "real" world and to find a way to return her parents to their natural form.The character design is amazing; from a spidery old man to assorted spirits to a gigantic spoiled baby, there's a tremendous amount of creativity and care in the creation of the characters who populate the film. They contribute tremendously to the familiar-yet-utterly-alien feel that the spirit world has; Miyazaki has taken familiar types and expanded, contorted, and elongated them to the point of grotesqueness, then cast them in his movie.More interesting is how the spirit world is presented: it's a huge, massive, independent universe with its own history and infrastructure that we only see a small part of. There's a train (don't ask) that runs through the spirit world; at one point, before the little girl gets on the train, a character tells her that she'll have to get off at a particular stop, then adds, with a sigh, "you'll have to find your own way back; the train used to run in both directions but doesn't anymore." And from that point on, the matter is dropped.That's a huge departure from your average American (or western) fantasy movie (or novel, for that matter), where everything is explicated and fully explained. A western fantasy would have made something like the one-way train a major plot point; Miyazaki simply treats it as a detail of a larger world that we never get to explore. The movie is full of things like that, little details and gracenotes that create a fuller, larger world.The voice acting is nicely done; someone spent a lot of time making sure that the English translation actually matched up with the characters' mouth movements. This film broke all sorts of box-office records in Japan; while it's unlikely to do so here in States (for one thing, we lack the cultural background to fully appreciate the symbolism sprinkled throughout the film), it is definitely a cut above the mindless dreck that populates our multiplexes. I strongly suggest that you go see it; you'll come back surprised.The film isn't as thematically complex as Mononoke, and it's more episodic; but one suspects that Miyazaki wasn't trying to make a statement movie. It works on many levels; it is at once an adventure movie, a meditation on identity, and a sly, subtle comment about industrialization and the environment.Note: this really isn't a children's movie. It's rated PG -- not G, which is very rare for an animated feature -- for a reason. Maybe for older children, 10 and up, but I suspect that anyone younger will be bored. Video1336@blogcritics.org Wed, 16 Oct 2002 20:18:06 EDT