Unedited thoughts on Physical Media Resurgence & Backlogs & Media Access & Self-Control

 I’ve been seeing more and more videos of people younger than me doing self imposed challenges where they don’t use social media for X amount of time, or limit their media consumption to just a few things for a month, or spending a year tackling their backlog of movies/videogames/etc. And it’s interesting seeing people live in the way a lot of people HAD to in the 90s and earlier. I was just thinking recently about how I have more, and more easy access, to videogames than when I was in say 8^th grade, where unless you borrowed a game from someone or rented it, you just had the games you had to play, and nothing else. Same with CDs: I remember when I finally owned more CDs than my 15 disc CD wallet could hold, and how it felt like I had SO MUCH music, whereas now I can open Spotify and have access to thousands upon thousands of albums and songs.

At the same time, I see comments on social media about how people miss videostores and that whole experience. Of course they forget the inconvenience and limited stock and the other downsides that were the reason videostores went away, but perhaps in some way the limited stock is a desirable trait.

Anyway, all of this has me thinking it’s not a black and white issue like it’s portrayed as. When I was in 8^th grade, I would’ve given anything to have access to media like I do now. And this isn’t even a matter of we’ve been spoiled for so long we don’t appreciate what we have; I, at least, always appreciate the convenience of the Internet and nearly-limitless access to information and entertainment. So this whole topic doesn’t to me boil down to “limited media access” vs. “unlimited media access” and which one is better. As with anything, the truth is more complicated and nuanced. Yet ultimately this can be boiled down to self-control. If you can’t stop yourself from endlessly scrolling TikTok all day and checking Reddit every 20 minutes, no amount of self-imposed challenges will permanently alter your behavior. As soon as the week or month or whatever length of time the challenge lasts, I would bet dollars to donuts that most of those people eventually slide back into their old habits. YOU must control your consumption. YOU must learn the balance of mindless content vs. meaningful content you need in your life. YOU must learn to put your phone down and sit down to concentrate on an album or book wholly. But that’s not as simple and sexy as a clickbait title that screams “I lived like someone in the 80s for a week!”

So let’s do a little thought experiment. If you go to your local used media store and buy a DVD boxset of, say, The Office, and this is in your selection of physical media you’re “allowed” to watch during your self-imposed challenge. So on the first day of it, you begin watching season one of The Office on DVD. Outside of the interface and having to physically change the discs as the seasons go on, there is no fundamental difference between the two ways of watching. You could just as easily have used your self-control to say, “I’m going to put my phone down and watch the first 6 episodes of The Office on streaming.”

Ultimately you can use whatever methods or systems proposed by YouTubers and others to enjoy as much media as possible and not waste your life on social media and mindless content churn websites. But you still have to have the self-control to stick with these methods or systems, and this ultimately is what makes them a novelty rather than a paradigm shift: you are ultimately responsible for yourself. It’s always within your power to decrease your social media time and increase time spent reading or watching new TV shows or whatever.

I do think the one valuable thing people are taking from this whole topic is getting back into physical media and as a result having real ownership of media again. While I still maintain there’s a balance to find between being all physical media and all streaming, I can’t deny that with the former the movie studio can’t come into your house and steal your bluray copy of The Princess Bride.

My own system for say music is that I curate a collection of vinyl records of my absolutely favorites and rare releases you can’t always find on streaming, but I also use streaming all the time because of the ease of use and the amount of music you get for that monthly fee. Similarly with movies, I only buy a physical copy of something if I especially love it OR if it’s an obscure movie that might go out of print—it’s been re-released recently, but for a long time you couldn’t watch Dogma on any streaming services and had to track down a DVD copy, for instance.

Now as for backlogs…I think this is also about self-control, but additionally about having honest conversations with yourself. We all know that sometimes we purchase things because we’d like to think of ourselves as the kind of person who casually decides to read One Hundred Years Of Solitude but realistically most of us will stop at the purchase/acquisition. This is why so many people have dozens of games in their Steam library they haven’t touched. You WANT to be the kind of person who plays in-depth strategy games or esoteric RPGs with dense mechanics, so you buy those games, yet you never end up playing them. You can use whatever systems or self-imposed challenges you want, ultimately you have to make yourself accountable and actually play them. I have this thing where, when I’m between videogames, I play an hour or two of a few different games I’ve bought but haven’t played. This gets me to rapidly reassign games in my own ranking: Games I’ll Never Want To Play, Games I Might Want To Play Someday, and Games I Want To Keep Playing After This Is Over.

 

Oh Sees Retrospective #8: Thee Hounds Of Foggy Notion

It’s a common experience in music to listen to something that you just don’t get. Maybe it’s an album you’ll eventually like, maybe it’s a style of music that isn’t your cup of tea, maybe you just weren’t in the right mood that day. Expectations, too, can play a part. In my early days of being an Oh Sees fan, I hadn’t memorized their discography yet, and would often stumble on their releases not knowing exactly what I was getting into. Spotting Thee Hounds Of Foggy Notion in a record store in Ann Arbor in the Fall of 2013, I remember thinking, “weird, they have a live album that comes with a DVD, why didn’t anyone tell me?” Funnily enough, I was actually on a first date that day. It didn’t end up going anywhere but my love affair with this album had only just begun, in a quite literal sense. You see, at first, I didn’t really like it.

Take a deep breath, I’ll get there by the end of the story!

Let’s detour briefly and talk about the hard facts. Thee Hounds Of Foggy Notion was released on August 22^nd, 2008 (or the 25^th, if you believe Wikipedia). Due to the vagaries of music release schedules and DVD production, it came out after The Master’s Bedroom Is Worth Spending A Night In despite being recorded before it. With the classic freak-folk lineup including Patrick Mullins on drums, Thee Hounds features songs from the band’s releases up to this point, a few originals, as well as nascent versions of ‘Block Of Ice’ and ‘Ghost In The Trees’ that would be reworked for Master’s Bedroom. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the DVD included with this album. Not only does it feature the band performing the songs in various locations around San Francisco, but it has segments between songs of the band goofing off, telling stories, and doing party tricks. I believe the whole thing is on YouTube for those who haven’t seen it. It’s essential viewing, equally intimate and electrifying, and a glorious window into the otherworldly being that is John Dwyer.

I’ll dispense with any more formalities and come out and say it: Thee Hounds is one of my favorite albums, ever. I love everything about it, from the production style to the improved versions of past songs to the album cover to the look and feel of the DVD performances and between song segments. Sometimes when I do the dishes I put on this album and I get so caught up air guitaring along to ‘We Are Free’ and singing along to the songs that I forget I was even doing dishes. So, you’re probably still wondering: why didn’t I like it at first? Mostly it was down to expectations. I had no clue about the earlier era of this band, and the vast difference between something like ‘If I Had A Reason’ and latter day classics like ‘The Dream’ left me confused. Was this some kind of stripped down, MTV Unplugged style live album? Sure ‘Golden Phones’ is pretty as hell, and ‘Dreadful Heart’ is spellbinding. But…but I want to hear ten minute versions of ‘I Come From The Mountain’ and ‘Destroyed Fortress Reappears’! I want to mosh along to it alone in my apartment, spilling beer on the floor and falling over my couch! I suppose the other reason it didn’t click with me at first is that I was going through a serious “I want music to be as crazy as possible!” phase, mainlining Miles Davis live albums from the early to mid ‘70s, getting into No Wave and industrial music, obsessing over shoegazer and noise pop, and continuing to make my own crappy, amateurish experimental music with as many layers, samples, and effects as I could get my hands on. But I digress. I love this album now, all is right with the world.

I get the sense that Thee Hounds is a more or less universally beloved Oh Sees album. Maybe I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know when I say it’s a perfect live artifact of this era of the band. The only complaint I have is that ‘Highland Wife’s Lament’ doesn’t quite belong. I think it’s an interesting experiment though I usually skip over it. I dunno, it seems more like something I’d expect on a Blackout Beach record. Anyway, as I said earlier, I love the reworkings of earlier songs, and comparing the slower versions of ‘Block Of Ice’ and ‘Ghost In The Trees’ to the Master’s Bedroom versions is interesting, particularly because they sound like a halfway point between the freak-folk and garage rock eras. Still, Thee Hounds is a very special album to me regardless of its rarity, style, and place in the band’s history. It’s the best starting point for getting into the earlier freak-folk era of Oh Sees and the DVD is an essential piece of understanding Oh Sees and the world of John Dwyer.

The Holy Mountain

While I can't cite any specific studies, I do know it's widely acknowledged that the human mind always attempts to organize and structure our experiences, even when they seem completely obtuse and non-sensical. People are inherently wired to want to tell stories, or hear stories. When relating the series of events which led to a failed relationship, for instance, we generally do so in a linear, chronological way, each sub-story or event along the way leading to the next. This is why, I would argue, most of the highest grossing films of all time have such prototypical, strictly linear and traditionally structured narratives. Understand that narrative and story are not interchangeable terms, so while the Lord Of The Rings trilogy has an epic and relatively complex narrative, the actual story it's relating can be as happily reduced to archetypes as the Star Wars trilogy, itself famously influenced by George Lucas's study of Joseph Campbell's The Hero With A Thousand Faces.

However, entertainment, or art if you will, that seems to willfully buck any notions of accessible narrative, story, or meaning captures the imagination of everyone. Even if their reaction is to look at the surrealist and absurdist branch of movies, music, literature, and art and say “this is weird and pointless”, I think it still interests them on a subconscious level. By which I mean, they have a negative reaction to it, but it provokes such a strong reaction because their mind is attempting to piece things together or decode some meaning even while they consciously reject it. The common reaction to watching just the trailer for Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain, judging by the YouTube comments seems to be “what the hell is this?” and/or “I bet they were on drugs” and/or “I want to watch this while on drugs.”

Yet there is more to this reaction, and more to the film itself, than just weird-for-the-sake-of-weird or, to paraphrase the Spacemen 3 album title, taking drugs to make movies to take drugs to. To the average viewer, most of David Lynch's films are impenetrable messes that tease some kind of logical, knowable story but obscure it via surreal narrative conceits. Even though I've watched Inland Empire a half dozen times and still can't quite say for sure I know what the plot is, I—and this is crucial—do believe there is some kind of simple story to uncover. It may sound like bragging, but if, as I try to, you spend enough time with willfully perverse or “difficult” entertainment (or, again, art, if you will), then you can more and more easily tell the difference between weird-for-the-sake-of-weird versus weird-but-with-something-to-say-that-couldn't-be-as-effectively-said-in-a-more-traditional-framework.

So, The Holy Mountain. This is an infamous cult film, and easily the most psychedelic movie I've ever seen. It is not psychedelic in the cliched 60s flower power sense, but in the sense of dreamlike, symbolic, spiritual, and philosophical motifs and story fragments. To put it another way, it's the difference between hallucinogenic drug use of the Sgt Pepper's/Summer Of Love sub-culture and the hallucinogenic drug use of Huxley's The Doors Of Perceptionand the avant-garde music/film/art scene of the late 50s/early 60s. So while you might go in expecting a seemingly random and arbitrary collection of hippies freaking out, doing drugs, and having sex, what you actually get is something like a scene wherein frogs and toads re-enact the Conquistadors coming to the New World and the systematic genocide that resulted. Or a scene where a group of people push piles of money into a fire in the middle of a table in some sort of weird, Buddhist-like acceptance ritual of leaving behind property and material goods. Or a scene where an old man with only the left half of a beard/mustache is breastfeeding a dude, but then the breasts turn into growling jaguars for some reason and...I don't know; I think it's supposed to be a dream sequence or some kind of projected distraction meant to keep the dude from ascending the titular mountain and...you know what, forget it.

This is definitely a movie that is impossible to explain or summarize in all but the most vague and lucid of terminology. It exemplifies all that is possible in the film medium, because it would not remotely be the same thing if translated to a novel or album or videogame. It defies categorization or traditional scored reviews because it simply is. Even if you don't do any drugs before, during, or after watching The Holy Mountain, there will be sequences that have you saying “is this really happening?” at least every 10 minutes. You may consciously reject it and say it's pretentious, inscrutable bullshit, but somewhere in the deepest recesses of your mind, Alejandro Jodorowsky is speaking to a part of you that not only wants to listen, but wants to understand. And I don't know about you, but I am much more excited by things I want to understand than by things I can too easily understand, are in fact, mundane. With an open mind and/or ready access to some of nature's finest psychedelic smoke-ables and eat-ables, The Holy Mountain may already be waiting for you, beckoning for your first steps up its strange facade. Just don't get distracted by angry jaguar tits.

loudQUIETloud: A Film About The Pixies

Unlike many of the classic rock gods and huge stars of the past, the misfits and underground bands (whether it be punks of the 70s, new wave and college rock groups of the 80s, or alternative/indie rock bands of the 90s and 00s) don't cry out for humanizing. Sure, it's still too-easy for critics and fans to put them on pedestals and throw around terms like “genius” and “brilliant”, but when I use such terms it's always with a foot firmly planted in reality. I don't think of these bands as flawless super heroes; I know they have personal problems and likely struggle to make a living. So I don't need to see those problems and struggles revealed in the clear light of day.

Before seeing loudQUIETloud: A Film About The Pixies, I had a vague idea of what the band had been up to since its break-up, and even with my limited knowledge and assumptions, none of it was good. Drummer Dave Lovering and guitarist Joe Santiago had fallen off the face of the earth; Kim Deal put out Breeders albums at a very irregular rate; Black Francis aka Frank Black aka Charles Thompson had a long running solo career, but hadn't seen much acclaim or interest in almost a decade. As the documentary reveals, I wasn't far off. But while loudQUIETloud is valuable for filling in the details of what they've been up to, it unfortunately isn't a wholly satisfying examination of the why's and how's of the reunion.

Setting aside the issue of the band doing it for the money (who could blame them, since like other ahead-of-their-time acts they didn't get nearly enough love and cash back in the day), the band seem most interested in and subsequently shocked by how badly they were missed. Or, in some cases, how much they're now loved and embraced by young people who couldn't have caught them the first time. There's a real touching mini-story arc about a female fan who discovered them via a novel. She's interviewed and plays it a bit cool, but when meeting her heroine, Kim, she loses her composure. She's shown giving Kim her copy of said novel, which is touching and cute, and over the credits footage of her band performing a Pixies song is cut into and out of the actual Pixies playing the same track. This serves as perhaps the best summary of both how influential the Pixies were and still are, and how their music still sounds amazing today. What I mean is, young kids are being directly influenced by them instead of modern indie rock like, say, Wolf Parade or Vampire Weekend.

The personal problems and struggles of the Pixies before and during the reunion are surprisingly mundane. The implication of the unnecessary shots of a shirtless Frank Black is that he has gained considerable weight since the early 90s, and his flagging solo career of rootsy/country-ish music has gotten to the point that he is shown admitting to a producer that most labels have absolutely no interest in him. Kim Deal has struggled with drug and alcohol problems and is bizarrely shown drinking non-alcoholic beer in half the scenes she appears in. At the same time, she lives at home with her mother despite releasing well received Breeders albums with twin sister/care taker Kelley Deal. Joey Santiago, meanwhile, has a family and makes a living with his new band with his wife as well as by doing soundtrack work; he is the most stable and down-to-earth of all the Pixies by far. Perhaps the saddest story is Dave Lovering, who goes from being an eccentric, practically broke magician with long hair to being a harrowed, bald figure by film's end, dealing with his father's recent death by beginning to use pills and booze.

As not enough attention is paid to the break-up of the band or the story behind the union, the main point of loudQUIETloud is their music. The Pixies seem revitalized by performing again. Kim Deal is shown working on new music for the Breeders; Frank Black casually mentions the possibility of new music from the Pixies. Joey Santiago initially struggles with doing a soundtrack while on tour, but it goes better when he invites the Pixies to help out; Dave Lovering seems to have rediscovered music entirely, raving in one scene about how he can't stop listening to music, and in seemingly every scene he has a pair of drum sticks in his hands, banging on this or that surface.

In the midst of all their issues and financial motivation, loudQUIETloud succeeds as a film because it's about the music: the process of playing it, recording it, and loving it. The point seems to be, this is what really matters in the end. Not the break-up or reunion drama; not their personal problems and issues. The people behind the Pixies are fragile and human, but the music they made—that can never be humanized or brought down-to-earth.

King Of Kong

One of the downsides of documentaries is that their content can be very ephemeral. I suspect that most of Michael Moore's films will age into irrelevancy as their righteous indignation and anger go from being poignant and timely to strident and outdated. A film following the world record contestants for a classic videogame is much less ambitious than Moore's socio-political potboilers, true, but it nonetheless would be just as moment-in-time because the record is bound to change hands many times after the movie comes out. Indeed, after King Of Kong's release, the record changed hands, and continues to.

However, this is not the focus of the film. The record, and indeed the game being played, are beside the point. It's really about the personalities involved, and the drama they go through before, during, and after the world record attempts, that matters. It's also about the alliances and seemingly devious rules and practices of a competitive, insular scene that few people knew existed. You could therefore accuse King Of Kong of being flagrant in its characterization of Steve Wiebe as the lovable loser, family man, and artistic underdog who is on the outside of the videogame world record scene going up against one of its Goliaths: Billy Mitchell, an egocentric, calculating businessman with a trophy wife. But that all depends who you believe or what you believe. Director Seth Gordon has stated that they actually made Mitchell out to be “lighter” than he really is, but again, who do you believe?

For what it's worth, Wiebe recently reclaimed the top score on Donkey Kong, but this knowledge is boring without the personal struggles and details this documentary gives. Reading the dry fact on Wikipedia isn't exciting without the faces, voices, and drama King Of Kong provides. It struck me as very odd, then, that King Of Kong throws a bait and switch with its climax by showing Wiebe failing at a world record attempt and rolling credits...but actually ending with a baffling coda that delivers the news that Wiebe did eventually succeed. It does this with all the pomp and circumstance of a casual P.S. and blunts its impact in the process. Still, my point remains: it's the rivalry and the political machinations of both sides that are the story here, not who is on top. In other words, it's a character study as much as anything. King Of Kong is full of (to put it mildly) eccentric characters, from the obsequious Brian Kuh, two-fisted-son-of-a-bitch Roy Shildt, to hippie musician/referee Walter Day. You may hate Billy Mitchell by film's end or tire of Wiebe's sad sack personality, but without those elements, the story of the Donkey Kong world record is just as boring as the hot dog eating championships without the “dude comes from nowhere to take it back from the Japanese” story of Joey Chestnut.

If this documentary leaves you feeling mildly unsatisfied, it's probably because there is no true head-to-head competition between Mitchell and Wiebe. They only briefly meet face to face and are never shown playing in person against each other. If King Of Kong had been a fictionalized account, it would undoubtedly have had an epic showdown between the two men. I found myself wishing this was the case since the actual conclusion is the very definition of an anti-climax. Still, I might argue that this lingering disappointment mirrors both Wiebe's own personal history of failures and losses as well as the way everyone in the documentary is bummed that when Mitchell finally shows up to a tournament he refuses to play in front of a crowd or challenge Wiebe directly. The problem of the muted, tossed-in “oh by the way, Wiebe does succeed after all” ending remains, instantly transforming the tone from someone learning to cope with failure while also being finally accepted/acknowledged by his peers, to being an oddly Hollywood-esque happy ending that is about three minutes long and treated with a anti-climactic tone. This weakens the film as a whole and should have been excluded, since the record was bound to change hands multiple times after its release. After all, without success at claiming the record, Wiebe's story is more poignant, affecting, and believable. An ending that says “you may have lost, but you still have your family, your artistic talents, the newly won respect of your peers...and you aren't that douchebag Billy Mitchell” leaves it up to the viewer to decide if this is happy or not. Therefore, it is infinitely better.

ODDSAC (Animal Collective/Danny Perez)

The idea of a “visual album” isn't a new one though it remains a novelty. I'm sure the history can be traced back further, but Autechre's Gantz Graf EP is the earliest example I can think of for music and visuals being developed to complement each other. Having never seen/listened to it, though, my experience with something like a visual album is limited to Drum's Not Dead by Liars, the deluxe edition of The Information by Beck, and Beach House's recent Teen Dream; all of these came with a DVD of videos for every song. They don't precisely fit the idea of a visual album because they were created as music first and only later were visuals added. As far as I'm aware, then, ODDSAC is the most fleshed out and fully realized hybrid of music and visuals outside of art installations.

I would love to tell you that ODDSAC is a revolutionary leap that proves the validity of a new hybrid artform for a mass market, but it works only slightly more often than it doesn't. The music and visuals share a kind of mutually complementary/antagonistic see-saw: when lovely musical moments of pastoral acoustic or syrupy electronic bliss are tweaking your lobes, sudden stabs of noise and visual interruptions will eventually intrude in. Most of the segues between songs/scenes are pulled off with some finesse and have a taking-a-nap-while-stoned flow, but the more violent flailings give this visual album a quixotic, if not schizophrenic, feeling. Taken as whole, ODDSAC is either the worst set of dreams I've ever had or the best set of nightmares. Or a bit a both.

I suspect the visual aspect—presumably the one most attributable to Danny Perez, though the band no doubt helped—will not be the thing that draws most people to this project. Which is a fair expectation since it's easily the least compelling half of ODDSAC's hybrid form. Even though it's meant to be judged as a whole, I think that its visual side actually fails to be more than just a bunch of weird stuff that gives you something to look at while music plays. It only occasionally seems to relate to the music or interact with it in an effective way that makes you forget you're not just listening to an album with a DVD of videos. This, of course, is the question at the heart of most music video concepts: how much should it reflect the music, if at all? Should it supplant the music to the point where it's arguably successful even without music, or should it play second fiddle? Perhaps visualizers—from iTunes's built-in one to Milk Drop to even something like the Electric Sheep screensaver—are more of a relevant point of reference, since a good chunk of ODDSAC is spent congealing and melting through highly abstract globs, fractals, and polymorphs of color, light, and texture. In fact, it's the scenes where people are featured and some narrative is unfolding that the visuals really falter. There are some entrancing images, particularly in the use of bright colored lighting in night settings, but just as often you get what feels like ten repetitive minutes of a vampire sneaking up on a woman who's wringing the water out of the same piece of cloth over and over.

The music, then, is what most people will care about. Indeed, there are already rips of only the music floating around online. I have to wonder what their reaction will be, and I don't wonder this simply because it was meant as a visual album and not just an album. I suspect the people who have only listened to Animal Collective's last few albums will hate most of what ODDSAC has to offer, since those pastoral/syrupy sections I spoke of earlier are few and far between. It's helpful to remember what the early Animal Collective sounded like and adjust expectations accordingly. Those first few albums were experimental beasts, utilizing noise loops, thunderous drumming, and improvisational dalliances to craft music that was more about the total effect and the moments contained therein than traditional 'songs' or gripping melodies. As this visual album was four years in the making, the band would have begun working on it during the Feels/Strawberry Jam time frame, which was well into their modern song/melody focused era that began with Sung Tongs. Well, so what? So, theorists might posit that ODDSAC was the place where their wilder material went, allowing their pop chops to be honed until the honeyed peak of Merriweather Post-Pavilion. But I don't believe that for a second. The music of ODDSAC is more analogous to the modern Animal Collective's take on the older style, effectively throwing their entire discography into a pan and seeing what kind of gumbo results.

I hope it's no dig on Danny Perez or ODDSAC as a whole that I think it's better as an experimental album with visuals instead of a visual album. That's simply because the visuals aren't always great and don't always properly fit the music. The times where the visuals seem to be dictating the music is always to the detriment of the latter. The sudden stabs of noise I spoke of earlier are the worst offenders, their only purpose to startle you or rouse you from sleep, but there's also the random samples of people talking/laughing when characters pop up on screen that serve no purpose at all. It feels arbitrarily shoved in to echo the people appearing onscreen instead of the much more naturalistic way Boards Of Canada uses vocal samples. But as with other experiments in new art forms, maybe that's the point: trying to discover how this thing is going to work and work best by not sticking to the tropes of music or film. Just as trying to piece together a sensible plot to ODDSAC isn't the point, wanting the music to not be affected by what's going on in the visuals is also an incorrect desire. But no amount of doubling back over myself will change the fact that ODDSAC isn't the home run, proof of concept for the visual album art form that many have wanted it to be or many will go on to insist it is. What it is, though, is pretty damn cool, and a success at being visually and musically experimental without feeling forced or aimless. Fans who wish the band would record something like Danse Manatee or Hollinndagain would do well to track down a copy, not to mention a healthy amount of their substance of choice.

4 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5

Samurai Champloo

Considering it as a text, as any good Liberal Arts student is taught to, Samurai Champloo can be interpreted as much as a commentary on the encroaching Westernization of Japan during its Edo period (and echoes in modern times) as it can be about family and friendship, and the changes those can elicit in people. It seems only appropriate, then, that I begin this by talking about college and one of my friends.

As huge fans of Cowboy Bebop during our early college years, a friend and I were eager to dig into the next series from the same creators when it was released in the U.S. While Bebop mixed scifi with a kind of Western/bounty hunter/jazz aesthetic, Champloo promised to be an irreverent mash-up of street/hip hop culture and wandering samurai tales. Since Japan has had a complex interaction with the West for hundreds of years, it seemed clever to juxtapose the initial 'opening' of Japan to the West with some ultra-modern Western cultural influences on the country. I ended up taking a course later in college called Post-War Japan that made the parallels and socio-political implications that much clearer. Anyway, the friend and I liked what we watched of it, but we never got past the first two DVDs, and eventually said friend and I graduated and drifted further and further apart.

Having recently finished the rest of the series, the two main things that strike me about Samurai Champloo are 1) it goes to greater tonal extremes than Bebop ever did and 2) it's a more “traditional” anime in a few regards. Bebop had some lighter/sillier episodes, such as 'Stray Dog Strut' and the justly famous 'Mushroom Samba', but by and large it was a much more serious series than most anime tend to be. Perhaps “mature” or “sophisticated” are better adjectives to use. There's a subtlety to some of the episodes that consistently catches me off guard, even during subsequent viewings, and almost all of the character arcs don't play out in the obvious, trite ways. Champloo, though, falls from time to time into the amusing-but-inessential-episode dilemma. These are the episodes of a series that are merely meant to be amusing and have no bearing on the characters' development or the main plot line. The baseball game and zombie episodes of Champloo, for example, are irrelevant to anything that happens before or afterwards. Speaking of irrelevant, the blood/violence factor is ratcheted up a notch or two in this series, thanks in part to the period appropriate weapons, but it all rings hollow and lacks true consequences. Mugen and Jin seem to get messed up and nearly die every other episode with no long term ramifications. What's more, the tragic endings to episodes like 'A Risky Racket' felt more forced than the poignant and bittersweet tone to Cowboy Bebop.

As for its more traditional feel, that's partially due to the usual anime stereotypes of over-exaggeration of facial features and emotional reactions. Part of why I think Cowboy Bebop is a more mature series is simply because it only has about half of the usual over-the-top anime expressive stuff. Mostly, though, Champloo is more traditional for the way its story progresses and ends. With Bebop, you had this long simmering character arc with Spike: Vicious and Julia were, respectively, the antagonist and romantic interest who popped up throughout the series. The friend I spoke of earlier expected that Spike would end up with Faye at the conclusion, since they're two of the main characters. This would be the obvious, traditional approach, but Bebop subverted that. Champloo may not end (SPOILERZ) with Fuu hooking up with either Mugen or Jin, but it allows all the main characters to survive. While it's true that having them go off without remaining together was an interesting way to end the series, it still feels traditional in the sense that they have all completed their growth as characters and learned all they could from each other, tying up the loose ends of their pasts in a mostly-neat bow.

My other issue with the series was its over-reliance on two-part episodes. There's fully four of them, and that's not counting the finale, which is practically a mini-movie in its own right since it's a three episodes long. There's nothing wrong with two parters in principle, it's just that they often felt unnecessary here. Champloo tries to juggle too many stories at a time rather than focusing on one character or event. When Bebop dipped into two parters, it was for epic story arcs that involved the main Spike/Julia/Vicious thread. Too often Champloo's two parters could've been edited down to a single episode if the focus were tightened. The final three-part episode is particularly egregious in this regard, since it suddenly throws in both a main villain to harass all three main characters and a group of villains out for revenge on Mugen specifically. None of these characters had appeared before, so it comes off as arbitrary and rushed. Mind you, Champloo had some loose ends—the hired killer that Jin is unable to defeat earlier in the series, the crazy-or-not Native American-type guy who Mugen says he's sure is still alive even after the dude dives over a cliff while on fire(!)—that never come up again but would have felt like excellent pay-offs if they were worked into the conclusion. Instead we got a bunch of villains thrown in at the last moment to give Mugen and Jin cool villains to fight. This type of thing happens in videogames all the time, but boss battles serve a purpose there. In an anime series, it's just cheap, unimaginative, and, well, traditional to a fault.

Unfortunately, that sense of “cool” things being thrown in just for the sake of being cool is most of what I took away from my finally-completed journey through the series. Samurai Champloo's chief flaw is that it spends too much time on getting appearances just right and not enough on the underlying personality and substance. However, I'll be blunt and say that I liked Champloo. It feels like this has all been about how the series didn't live up to my expectations, or how it wasn't as good as Bebop. I didn't intend such a thing, but it's hard to help it. Bebop is my gold standard for an anime series, and unless something is so totally unlike it as to be barely comparable (like Neon Genesis Evangelion), it's tough not to complain when the standard isn't met. The fact that this series is from a lot of the same people, and has many parallels in the characters and overall pacing/feel, doesn't make it any easier. Champloo is very similar to the album that comes after the best album by one of your favorite bands; you still like it quite a bit, more than most other albums, yet it doesn't have the same originality and magic, and suffers by comparison. As with such albums, the greatest praise I can give Champloo is that it when it's at its best, it matches its brilliant predecessor. There are some incredibly arresting moments to be experienced in Champloo, like the tense, mostly dialogue-less ending to the two-parter 'Misguided Miscreants', as well as some engaging stories and unique characters that are artfully executed. While I ultimately will keep Bebop as my gold standard, I still consider Samurai Champloo a must-watch for even the most dilettantish anime fans like myself, and a steadfast silver standard to boot.

4 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5

David Lynch's Inland Empire

Inland Empire (2006)

When you watch a David Lynch movie for the first time, there's always that scene or moment when the film takes the plunge down the rabbit hole, so to speak. You tell yourself that you're going to keep a mental catalog of all the characters, events, locations, and story elements that have taken place so far, and you're not going to let the plot lose you this time. But then, before you know it, characters are suddenly entirely different people, or seem to be. Or you're in scenes with characters you've never seen before who talk about cryptic subjects. You lose track of whether this is a dream or a fantasy or a nightmare. And then you give up any chance of puzzling it all out, content to let the images, emotions, and scenes wash over you. Moreover, I'm not sure there's any overriding plot to Inland Empire that one is supposed to decode. I'm not even sure David Lynch knows precisely what is always taking place. But then again, that's never been the point of his movies.

Film is primarily a visual medium. How the shots are composed and lit, how the camera moves, what the camera focuses on, where the actors and the sets are and how they move and interact...all these concepts are ways of conveying not only story to the viewer, but also meaning. Some directors are well known for being incredible with their style and unique vision. Others are content to let film be another way of telling a story which could just as easily be a book. I love Kevin Smith, but even he will admit that he's not an ambitious director. Yet his 'style' fits his films well. What I'm getting at here is, David Lynch is one of those auteur directors who make masterful use of film as a visual medium. To watch his work is to see his vision and his vision alone. He almost always writes the screenplay and either writes himself or handpicks the music that is used. As someone who writes fiction, I know how hard it can be to get down exactly what you see/feel in your head. Even if you dislike what David Lynch films are, you can at least admire that he's able to get things from his head unto film as well as he does.

Inland Empire is a three hour epic and feels equally like a summation of Lynch's career up until that point as it raises new possibilities for his future. It starts out as the story of the filming of a cursed movie before becoming a strange series of somehow interconnected scenes centered around the various personas of lead actress Laura Dern. It seems to weave a spiderweb of realities in which, after a point, we're never sure if what we're watching is the actors in real life, the actors in the movie, a movie about the making of a movie, or the fantasies/dreams of the different characters. Inland Empire is a dense, difficult work but I find myself returning to it, as I do all of Lynch's films, because it's like nothing I've ever experienced.
The most interesting visual aspect of Inland Empire is the use of digital film. This gives it a glossy, hyper-realistic look which helps underscore the movie's themes of reality vs. fiction and how films affect the actors. It's as if you're watching the behind-the-scenes footage of a movie while also watching the movie at the same time. The 'movie' being made in Inland Empire--something about adultery in the south--bleeds over into the actors' lives. One scene has Dern laughing and saying "this sounds like a line from the movie" and then we see that she thought they were in reality but were filming a scene. There's a another scene early in the film where a mysterious old Polish woman comes calling on Laura Dern's actress persona. I always get the feeling that they were never in the same room together. Dern's responses and reactions don't quite match the woman's, as if Lynch were interviewing her and then cut in the old woman later. Again, it's like behind-the-scenes footage mixing with the film itself. Meanwhile, Inland Empire occasionally cuts to seemingly unrelated scenes with three people in rabbit heads who have stilted, vague dialogue. And there's a crying girl who watches those rabbits and the ongoing film and who ends up murdering one of Dern's personas with a screwdriver...but then that turns out to be a scene from the movie being made and...yeah, it's all very confusing.
While watching the movie for the third time the other night, a phrase kept repeating in my head: "watching someone else's dreams." The film's tagline is "a woman in trouble", which is barely adequate to describe the "plot." More helpful and relevant to my phrase is a quote that Lynch offered, taken from one of the Upanishads, a sacred Hindu text: "We are like the spider. We weave our life and then move along in it. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream. This is true for the entire universe." Going along with my dreamlike interpretation, David Lynch is a well known practitioner of Transcendental Meditation. Less informed viewers might watch his films and think their bizarre, absurdist plots were the work of a drug addled mind. Rather, I feel like Lynch brings back images, ideas, and feelings from his dream-life and what he experiences in meditative trips. How else to explain the hypnotic, beautiful, and terrifying look of this film and the events that take place??
Is Inland Empire a good movie?? I'm not sure. It sounds presumptuous to say this, but I don't know that you can apply typical critical metrics to it. Three hours sounds like a lot of time yet it passes so quickly and you still won't really "know" what happened. While I may like some of Lynch's films better than others, I think the success or failure of his work rests less on the usual meters of a movie's success or failure and more on how much they stick with you. I'm drawn into Lynch's world (or whichever world he's made this time) for two hours or more and, when I'm through, how much of that world sticks with me, and has me thinking about it, is my measure of success. For the majority of the population, Inland Empire will be a baffling, pretentious, overlong art film that makes no sense and never goes anywhere. But I'm still thinking about the movie, and the characters, and the arresting, hypnotic images it presents. Inland Empire might just be Lynch's magnum opus. Highly recommended.

Halloween: Film Round-Up 4

Friday The 13th (1980)

One could make the argument that it's with the emergence and popularity of Friday The 13th at the beginning of the 80s which gave birth to the slasher genre as we know it. While obvious predecessors like Halloween (which is violent, but also virtually bloodless) and Psycho were slasher flicks, most future such movies would be reading from the notes they took during this one. Friday The 13th is a decent if unremarkable horror film by today's standards, though there is something haunting and memorable about the way a summer camp and surrounding woods look at night. The ending is interesting because it's basically an inversion of Psycho: the killer is the mother. If memory serves, Jason--with the famous hockey mask--doesn't put in a proper appearance until the third entry, by which point the series also began to morph into a more supernatural "Jason is an unstoppable force" kind of beast.

Gothika (2003)

Watching this film, I realized that Robert Downey Jr. basically plays the same character in every film. Well, OK, they are different characters, but so much of his personality seems like it shines through--the way he delivers a line, his physical movement and mannerisms--that you begin to wonder if he's a really great actor with a distinctive style or a really bad actor who has limited range. But hey, Gothika!! This is one of those spooky murder mystery thrillers that come out every year and I mostly ignore them. However, this one has a nice supernatural touch and, as a review quote on a film's poster might say, "it leaves you guessing til the end." The various revelations and twists are fairly decent and believable, so give this one a try if you like movies that are more creepy than scary.

The Haunting (1963)

I'm finally going to watch The Exorcist soon, a horror film still considered one of the scariest ever made despite being almost three decades old, but I also wanted to get in another classic "scariest film ever" or two for these round-ups. Thus, The Haunting, which, like The Exorcist, is still scary to this day. While the characters and plot are interesting enough on their own, the real star of this film is the location and set design which create a creepy, slightly surreal atmosphere. The Haunting is a surprisingly modern minded film in which the characters debate about the nature of 'hauntings' and refuse to generally classify the phenomena taking place at the mansion as 'ghostly.' The idea is that, science or no, something is happening there and not knowing what it is makes it scarier. Whatever is causing the strange noises, cold spots, slamming doors, etc., it sure makes for a frightening watch. I'm rarely set on edge by movies, but The Haunting managed to make me tense even though you never see any ghosts and there are a few scares that relieve the tension. It mostly keeps building and building until one of the characters loses her mind and drives her car into a tree, letting the mansion claim another victim. "A house that was born bad" indeed. Fun story: while watching this movie a friend sent a message to my newly purchased cellphone, which I forgot I had on, and the sudden noised scared the hell out of me.

I Am Legend (2007)

This movie makes the unpardonable sin of removing entire plot elements from the book its adapted from. This is further infuriating because the novel already has been adapted twice and those movies managed to work in the interesting gray areas that this version entirely drops. At one point in the 2007 version, our hero (Will Smith, the 'go to black guy' for scifi films since the mid 90s) is trapped by a snare, suggesting that the infected creatures in the film are intelligent and trying to catch/kill him. But rather than follow this--or examine the insanity of the character after spending so much time alone with only his dog for companionship--it eventually boils down to a black-and-white issue of "they're infected and monsters, so let's develop a serum and/or kill them." Sadly, the first half hour/45 minutes of the movie is fascinating but once the action kicks in it loses all sense of atmosphere and finesse. You may as well know that in the original book version, the infected monsters are intelligent and adapt to the disease and want to rebuild the world, while our hero is a relic of the past and a crazy human who murders their people, thus becoming a 'legend' to them like vampires and monsters are 'legends' to us. So, yeah, the film pretty much ignores this awesome plot revelation and makes our hero the titular 'legend' because he cures the plague. Lame. Skip it.

A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984)

I may as well admit that I liked Freddy Vs. Jason, but that doesn't mean I think it was a good movie. In fact, it's too bad that both characters have been run into the ground so much with countless stupid reasons for their survival or return, because in the right hands you could make a good movie with Freddy and/or Jason. Anyway, tthe original Nightmare is a much more violent and serious film than many remember--Freddy Krueger was mostly just a monster here, without all the personality and one-liners he's known for. If Friday The 13th made slasher flicks more bloody, A Nightmare On Elm Street took it even further, with a literal geyser of blood at one point.

All that said, the idea of a killer who attacks from inside your dreams (....err, nightmares??) is endlessly brilliant because it puts no limits on what Freddy can do. See, horror villains like the ghosts from The Grudge or any that are seemingly unstoppable and/or have god-like powers aren't scary because you have no chance and can't get away. At least when Freddy has god-like powers it's because he attacks from inside dreams, where anything goes. But, whatever. Like the first Friday The 13th, the first Nightmare film is a must see for anyone who likes horror cinema, or anyone who has seen all the parodies and homages to these two series but not the films themselves.