Music and Film Review Samples

Boris “Noise” (Music Review Sample)
Reviewed by James Slone

Japan’s ultimate power trio Boris have been blasting out heavy rockers, sludgy drone doom and psychedelic hardcore for nearly two decades now, entering a highly productive and musically diverse phase with 2011’s New Album. This era saw the band draw on J-pop, shoegaze and electronic elements to both broaden their appeal and deepen their tool box. This process, carried out in fits and starts, has brought us to what is arguably the band’s finest moment, Noise, an album as colorful and deliriously multifaceted as it is pulverizing.

The album’s opener “Melody” kicks things off with beautiful swirling feedback before plowing into a charging song that combines Boris’s classic noise metal sound with a groove that wouldn’t feel out of place on a Swervedriver album. Fast on its heels is “Vanilla,” an up-tempo rocker with a hard-and-heavy breakdown that is gradually enveloped in a wall of rich noisiness. The third track “Ghost of Romance” eases down the energy level with a slow crawl of lightly drifting melancholy before “Heavy Rain” imposes itself with a thunderously heavy doom sound, softened slightly by guitarist/vocalist Wata’s plaintive singing. Not content to let the listener wallow in solitude, the fifth song “Taiyo no Baka” presents a jangly pop song with an infectiously catchy chorus suspended in a dreamy gossamer haze.

Next up is the album’s central epic, “Angel,” a mellow and slow rock song that turns into this year’s most epic and layered doom metal dirge. The song both drifts and uplifts with almost tectonic deliberateness, with faster tempos and reassuring melodies breaking up the murky clouds of funeral feedback that dominates the rest of the song, one that gradually disintegrates into some of the most beautiful grassland psychedelia this side of the Boredoms. The band follows this beautiful giant with the speedy, melodic and updated d-beat crust punk of “Quicksilver”, an injection of pure energy that thrashes about before terminating in swampy sludge. The final song is “Siesta,” a quiet lullaby that closes the album with a sleepy sendoff that leaves the listener in a contemplative, and sedated, headspace.

The Boris that emerges on Noise is a more melodic and thoughtful band. Gone are the frenetic three-minute noise bursts and repetitive drones. Instead we’re treated to highly structured, multi-part songs free of the experimental gimmicks that the band has sometimes relied on in the past. Most of the vocals are sung, and while the singing is not always especially tuneful, it is genuinely emotive, tending toward the gentle, sad or pleasantly upbeat, even when the surrounding sounds are crushingly heavy (the one exception being the metalcore shrieks of “Quicksilver”).

Despite these concessions to melody and structure, the album is appropriately named because every song takes advantage of the band’s expertise in managing distortion and feedback, reveling in the sometimes profound beauty that can be generated through pedals and stacks. This album flows, swells and crashes around the listener with an ocean of gorgeously lush sounds, but never loses the hook, the beat or the joy of a band firing on all cylinders. And don’t let the kitten on the cover fool you, this is rock/metal music played at a very high level.

Originally published by Avant-garde Metal.com

G.I. Joe: the Rise of Cobra (Film Review)

Like “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” before it, “G.I. Joe: the Rise of Cobra” enlists pop culture nostalgia to sell toys and tickets. Both the Transformers and G.I. Joe properties have been lucrative for Hasbro in the last few years, raking in millions upon millions of dollars with intellectually challenged and emotionally stunted b-movies.

“G.I. Joe” and “Transformers” both prove that with the right property and corporate backing you can sell pretty much anything. Movies that would have at one time been considered crass, low-rent entertainment for kids are now considered acceptable for adults. Thirty-something men have no problem plunking down their hard-earned cash for cinematic junk that would insult a thirteen-year-old boy’s intelligence.

If you’ve seen the trailers for “G.I. Joe” you already know it’s a stupid movie. In fact, the trailer pretty much summarizes the film’s best scene for you, a high-speed race through the streets of Paris culminating in the destruction of the Eiffel Tower by some kind of green nanite weapon. Like “Transformers” before it, “G.I. Joe” is replete with bad special effects (the Joes’ secret desert base is an especially egregious example) and a blatant disregard for the national treasures of other countries.

It also shares with “Transformers” a blatant disregard for character development. Like the old cartoon, every one is a superficial type. Super soldier Duke (Channing Tatum) is ‘fearless male lead,’ Scarlet (Rachel Nichols) is ‘hot redhead,’ General Hawk (Dennis Quaid) is ‘grimacing leader,’ Ripcord (Marlon Waynes) is ‘funny black man’ and Snake Eyes is, well, he’s a ninja. The Joes are supposed to be the most elite soldiers in the world, but look like soft strutting actors, more chiseled than tough.

Cobra, their evil terrorist counterpart, is allowed to be a little more interesting. They have more elaborate costumes and get to ham it up with bold proclamations and lots of choice overacting. They also have their own ninja, Storm Shadow (Byung-Hun Lee).

The two-faced arms dealer, Destro (played with a thick Scottish accent by Christopher Eccleston), talks of world domination with the zeal of a Bond villain, while his second-in-command and future leader, Cobra Commander (a largely underexploited Joseph Gordon-Levitt), slumps around in a breathing apparatus straight out of David Lynch’s “Dune,” rambling on about his mad science experiments. Their plan to take over the world is nearly as convoluted as Cobra’s brain-rotting schemes in the original cartoon, relying on every improbable piece falling into place.

The action is about what you’d expect. It comes in a fast and constant stream of cheesy special effects and one-on-one fights, only taking time out for some breathless exposition, talking villains and crude one-liners. The filmmakers know that if the action stops, the audience might start thinking about the actual story.

You can usually depend on movies like this to provide plenty of fan service, but “G.I. Joe” can’t even get that right. One of the most popular Cobra villains of the 1980s was the Baroness, a slinky brunette espionage expert with a merciless disposition and thick Eastern European accent. Standing in for vaguely menacing left-wing terrorists the world over, she was an object of dark sexual infatuation for young boys everywhere.

Now you’d think the filmmakers would have an easy time capitalizing on the Baroness’s broad sexual appeal, but no, we get a nice, watered-down all-American girl who kind of looks like the Baroness. The movie manages to extinguish everything that made her dangerous and interesting by giving her an American accent and a good guy love interest. I’m not exactly sure how you screw something like that up, but they did.

Somehow, this multi-million-dollar Hollywood movie is worse than the cheap cartoon commercial it was based on. How is that even possible?

Originally published by EndofMedia.com in 2010.

Wendy and Lucy (Film Review)

Looking at this year’s major Oscar nominees, you get a pretty good sense of Hollywood’s sensibilities. What they want are big and brash entertainments, crowd pleasers, sentimental melodramas and in-your-face political polemics. There’s not necessarily anything wrong with these approaches, of course, but they tend obscure everyday, recognizable reality behind layers of supped-up editing, swelling soundtracks, exaggerated close-ups, and lots of blood, sweat and tears. And despite this, at least half of them are pretty boring too.

Consider the alternative. “Wendy and Lucy,” Kelly Reichardt’s follow up to the aggressively low-key “Old Joy,” eschews the sound and fury for something much more realistic and considerably less bombastic. It like a demonstration on what movies can be when they’re content to linger and observe everyday experiences. Not a lot happens in “Wendy and Lucy,” but it’s never boring. In fact, it’s deeply affecting, and it’s angry without being insistent on its political themes. It engages you without telegraphing its ideas with music or speeches.

Michelle Williams (miles away from “Synecdoche, NY”) plays Wendy, a woman down on her luck and heading to Alaska for work, escape, anything really. Her car breaks down in a small semi-urban area in Oregon, buffeted by forests and flanked by train tracks. We learn that the town used to house a mill, but the mill’s dried up. Her traveling companion is Lucy, a dog, probably her only friend in the world. During a phone call to her sister, we realize that even her closest relatives have turned their backs on her. With only 500 bucks left and a broken-down car, Wendy’s situation looks precarious.

Things get worse when Lucy disappears. Wendy leaves her tied up outside a grocery store. Busted for shoplifting by an “upstanding” employee, she’s sent to be processed and fined at the police department. When she finally gets back, Lucy is gone. The film follows Wendy as she tries to track down Lucy, all the while dealing with the kinds of mundane bullshit people without resources have to routinely suffer through: fines, unscrupulous auto mechanics and their flexible pricing, harassment from homeless men, people staring at her as she sleeps in her car, condescension from her family. She visits a local pound but can’t even leave basic contact information.

Williams plays Wendy as an introverted misfit, an insular woman stranded in a place and a country that doesn’t really seem to care about her. She doesn’t say much, but is an amicable presence. We sympathize with her without knowing much about her background—what is she running away from? Joblessness, a bad relationship, credit problems? We don’t know, but we intuit that she’s nice and probably undeserving of her fate. Her performance is all in her face, her expressions, her body language, the guarded way she smiles and the raw determination in her grimaces.

Lucy is Wendy’s only close friend. Her desperation to find her dog is deeply affecting, and anyone who’s ever loved a dog will identify with her increasing anxiety. She only loses her cool once, during an encounter with an angry, mentally ill transient, the kind of situation a dog would be useful in. The scene shows how terrifying being homeless can be, especially for a lone woman. In a particularly harsh scene, Wendy has a panic attack in a gas station restroom, realizing that she might have been assaulted or worse.

The only person who helps Wendy is a kindly Walgreens security guard played by Walter Dalton. His job sucks (though as he points out, five twelve-hour days beats seven night shifts a week), but the shitiness of his job doesn’t prevent him from aiding a woman in trouble. He gives her advice, tells her where local services can be found and even lets her use his cell phone to contact the pound. It might not seem like much, but small favors are often the best. And he helps her with such kindness and lack of judgment that it’s almost heartbreaking.

In its unforced, naturalistic and delicate way, the film moves towards an unexpected ending of deep emotional truth. Without bludgeoning the audience over the head with preachy histrionics, Reichardt shows the audience what it’s like to be broke, transient or peripheral in this country. While watching “Wendy and Lucy,” I kept thinking about the latest round of anti-welfare, anti-assistance rhetoric coming out Congress, this time in opposition to anything that might help disadvantaged individuals in the economic stimulus bill. The political philosophy that has been advanced over the last three decades is arrayed against the Wendys of the world.

With the economy being the way it is, a lot more Americans might soon find themselves in Wendy’s situation, broke, isolated and alone, without a helping hand. Some of them will be lucky enough to befriend kindly security guards, but as Reichardt shows with barely a murmur of unspoken pain, that’s quite often not enough.

Originally published on EndofMedia.com in 2010

Pray the Devil Back to Hell (Film Review)

Charles Taylor, Liberia’s former president and warlord, was deposed in 2003. He is currently being tried in The Hague for 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including murder and mutilation of civilians (hacking off limbs and heads for example), abducting both adults and children to serve as laborers and soldiers, and using young girls and women as sex slaves. While most of these charges are for acts he committed in Sierra Leone, the way Taylor treated his own people wasn’t much better.

Elected to office in 1997, Taylor’s regime was mired in human rights abuses, including widespread use of torture and violence against civilians. He recruited child soldiers and put them to work terrorizing his population, allegedly using human sacrifice and cannibalism as psychological weapons against his political enemies. The Muslim rebels (Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy or LURD) and warlords who fought against him weren’t any nicer, recruiting preteen soldiers, pumping them full of drugs and sending them on armed rampages where they raped and murdered thousands of civilians. War and rapine became facts of life, creating a huge flood of displaced refugees who trickled into Monrovia, Liberia’s capital.

Ginie Reticker’s documentary “Pray the Devil Back to Hell” is about women—mothers, daughters and wives, both Muslim and Christian—who finally reached their breaking point and decided to do something about it, channeling their moral outrage, anger and indignation into peaceful and democratic action against both Taylor and the LURD, action that contributed to the resignation of Taylor in 2003 and the election of the first woman president of an African nation, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, in 2005.

Leymah Gbowee, interviewed extensively throughout the film, organized the Christian Women’s Initiative at her Lutheran church after experiencing an epiphany during a dream. The two-pronged Initiative would seek peace through both prayer and direct action. In an early controversial decision, Gbowee and other organizers concluded that Muslim women would also have to be included in their actions, since half the violence was being perpetrated by Muslim men.

Gbowee’s mission inspired Asatu Bah Kenneth, a Muslim police officer (also interviewed extensively), and she soon began to organize Muslim women for the cause. Some Muslims were initially reluctant to work side by side with Christians, but overcame their skepticism when they realized the only people they could find complete solidarity with were other women. In one organizer’s words, “Can the bullet pick and choose? Does the bullet know Christian from Muslim?” Soon both Christian and Muslim women gathered in the thousands in the capital, all wearing white t-shirts advocating peace, to confront Taylor directly.

Their efforts initially went ignored by the government, but as they continued issuing press releases, protesting, blockading and calling out Taylor on his religious hypocrisy (he is a Christian), the international community, including the press, took notice, bringing a new front of outside pressure to bear on Taylor and the LURD. The women, despite setbacks and periods of despair—especially when the rebels seized most of the capital and brutalized the refugee camps—were eventually able to use international pressure to convince Taylor to engage in peace talks, negotiations that eventually ended with his resignation and arrest.

Reticker’s film, having only so much time to focus on its subject, tends to overemphasize the movement’s role in pushing Taylor out. International pressure, especially from the United States and Liberia’s West African neighbors, was crucial to driving a stake into the heart of the regime. In general, the film’s perspective is narrow, relying on the testimony of the top participants of the Women’s Peace Initiative, and doesn’t provide much outside political context. Audiences unaware of Liberia’s overall status then and now will come away with the view that the women were solely responsible for Taylor’s downfall and that everything’s looking up in Liberia now that he’s gone.

But the women’s movement was undoubtedly a central player, and the documentary effectively highlights their important contribution to ending the civil war. What they did was attract the attention of the world by embarrassing Taylor and the rebels, confronting them with their crimes right out in the open. Without their daring public challenges and media savvy, you never would have had the kind of international pressure required for removing Taylor. Without their direct action (in one scene they bravely block the exits of a peace conference attended by the nation’s top warlords), there probably wouldn’t be peace in Liberia.

The film shows that their efforts did not arise from a political ideology, but from the horrific conditions of their everyday lives. Women were constantly assaulted, beaten and raped; quite often, their assailants were armed preteen boys. As mothers, their situation was made more terrifying by the knowledge that their own children could be, and were, recruited to kill. In a country without infrastructure, schools, health care, women were left to their own defenses. They couldn’t expect men to do anything; most men were passive, complicit or active in perpetuating the violence. One strategy the women employed was a sex strike against their husbands and sex partners.

Despite the horror of the events these women describe, every one of them is tough, resilient and surprisingly good-humored about their work. Asatu Bah Kenneth, is a big jolly presence in her white police uniform, with an easy laugh and a lot of perspective. And her job was one of the more dangerous ones: informing the women’s movement of upcoming police actions. Any one of these women could have been arrested, tortured and killed at any time, but their desire for peace and contempt for the regime and the rebels made them a disciplined and fearless political force.

All of these women were able to see through a bad situation to a brighter world on the other side. Whether it was because of their religious backgrounds or some hidden reserve of moral strength I don’t know, but what they did was unimaginably heroic. And Liberia is better off today for it.

The International (Film Review)

Clive Owen has a knack for playing jaded men in ridiculous situations. He lumbers around onscreen with his cynical frown and tired voice, and yet holds our attention. The withering stares and ruffled shirts are offset by a glint of sympathetic earnestness in his eyes, the occasional shit-eating grin, and the sheer size of the man. He can sustain an entire film simply by muttering complaints, hurling insults and sizing people up with incredulous glances. A by-the-numbers political thriller, “The International,” is elevated a little by his presence.

If I had to give you a reason for seeing “The International” aside from Owen, it would be the spectacularly bloody shootout in the Guggenheim that goes so far overboard with well-choreographed carnage that it threatens to break the generic film it’s buttressed by in half. It’s brutal, witty and unhinged in an almost liberating way, idiotically pointless but completely absorbing and, most important, entertaining. It’s the kind of scene that wakes you up in the theater—you rub your eyes and sit up a little.

Owen plays Louis Salinger, a bitterly idealistic Interpol agent investigating the illegal loaning and investment activities of a transnational German bank, the ominously named International Bank of Business and Credit. They’re one of these omnipresent corporate powers you find in movies, who can be anywhere with an assassin within a few days to rub out people who get too close. This is one of those stories where the hero is warned that the conspiracy goes all the way to the top.

Louis is accompanied in his investigations by a New York Assistant DA, Eleanor Whitman. She’s played by Naomi Watts in the thankless role of smart woman sidelined in a man’s world. By golly, she’s determined to help Louis bring down the bank, but when the story calls for action, she tends to disappear into the background. She’s a star, but not the star. She’s mostly around for aid and comfort, but not, I was relieved to discover, sex. Aside from some hot simmering passion, these partners are purely platonic, and I’m always quick to offer praise to any Hollywood film that defies the temptation to play matchmaker.

Owen and Watts trot around Europe, Turkey and NYC in an assortment of ultra-contemporary corporate buildings and postcard-ready cityscapes—the movie is called “The International” after all—and soon discover that the bank has been investing in and buying weapons for various warring factions and states in order to eat their debt, one of those neat scams that financial institutions in the developed world tend to take for granted. The film is so efficiently predictable that the director, Tom Tykwer (“Run Lola Run”) doesn’t even bother to show anyone traveling between the countries and cities; he simply cuts.

Louis has a couple of interesting encounters with the bad guys, including an expert assassin who lends a hand in the Guggenheim shootout ( Brían F. O’Byrne), the surprisingly amicable, family-oriented head of the bank (the crisply efficient Danish actor Ulrich Thomsen), and most interesting, an old ex-Stasi troubleshooter. Played by Armin Mueller-Stahl (“Eastern Promises”), he’s probably the most complex character in the film, an old Communist ideologue turned big business facilitator. In the film’s best conversation, Louis berates the old turncoat for selling out by working for the enemy.

The old man advises Louis that he may be able to take down the bank, but that banks are so insulated and protected in the West, he will have to accept a certain amount of collateral damage, will have to work outside the law and make sacrifices. Like the shootout, this scene blindsides you with radical conviction you’re not really expecting in the midst of a middling thriller. Of course, it goes a little too far by suggesting an implacable conspiracy. It’s one thing to indict the West’s financial institutions for corruption and exploitation, another thing to assign them power greater than governments.

While using a bank as a villain will certainly strike a populist chord in a period of bad loans and bailouts, the kind of power this bank exercises will be hard for most audiences to believe when half the private banks in the world aren’t even solvent. Banks have been handed an inordinate amount of power, but they’re not intransient, and nor is economic corruption as inevitable as the cynical finale of the film suggests. If elected governments are held accountable, so too will be the banks.

“The International” benefits from a well-cast lead, a few interesting ideas and one fabulous action scene, but feels curiously insubstantial. It’s diverting, but like a lot of classy political thrillers, doesn’t pack a lot of weight dramatically or stylistically. It’s a little too slick and neat to inspire any real emotions and a little too preposterous to spark genuine political debate—it’s ultimately too outlandish and inoffensive for its own good. Except for that shootout. That’s one hell of a scene.