Pot Luck Review #4 - De Stijl

WHAT: The White Stripes's De Stijl (2000)

WHY: A couple months ago I was burning some of my CDs for my friend and ex-blogger Jason when we came to my White Stripes collection. "You don't have De Stijl? That's my favorite White Stripes album. It's much better than White Blood Cells."

I really love White Blood Cells, but then thought their next two records, Elephant and Get Behind Me Satan get progressively worse. Maybe the earlier stuff would stand out? I picked up the album a few month back but hadn't had a chance to listen to it. Until now...

1. You're Pretty Good-Looking (For a Girl) - Nostalgic, lo-fi garage romance. I like it, and wasn't expecting something, well, so sweet to come out as the first track. It's got a chord progression like the pop songs from the 60's.

2. Hello Operator - I am immediately bouncing before the singing starts. Then the drumsticks tap out a stupid beat on the rim and I'm almost ready to leave this track behind when it kicks back to 11 again. Rude, old-fashioned bluesy rock. If it wasn't for the stupid rim shots, this would rule over all the heavens and earth. As it is, it is merely great. Bonus points for the harmonica.

3. Little Bird - A Led Zeppelin riff straight outta Physical Graffiti. Holy crap, I keep waiting for Jack White to sing "I'm gonna love you till my dying day." And yet I'm not angry, but pleased as punch. This is so far my favorite track on the record.

4. Apple Blossom - A piano sweeps some arpeggios (major/relative minor, anyone?) into the usual drums/guitar mix, serving the song well. I also like Jack's unique voice up front in the mix. Short - I can already hear the song ending.

5. I'm Bound to Pack It Up - Acoustic. I keep thinking this is Led Zeppelin if Robert Plant and Jimmy Page stayed in their garage and never had any sex. It's all the sentiment, the influences and soul laid bare without the enormous swagger that accompanied Zep in whatever they did. I like this song a lot, and am ranking it right behind "Little Bird" for favorite track.

6. Death Letter - I can see why Jason loves this record. This is a nice blues number with an authentic feel and move to it. I more and more see all of this in relation to Zeppelin - this could be a demo album from them covering most of the musical stylings from the first six albums. But the biggest record influence I hear is definitely Physical Graffiti, especially with all the slide guitar.

7. Sister, Do You Know My Name? - A little more of the same, mixing a little of the pop sensibilities of the first track. I like short songs - one thing you see too much of mow is bands and performers trying to cram as much music onto a disc as possible, regardless whether or not the music all fits together, or is even of the same caliber. Remember buying tapes when each side was maybe 15-17 minutes of music? Every song mattered, every note punched you in the gut.

8. Truth Doesn't Make a Noise - Wow, nice title. More piano, and again it serves to break the monotony of the record a bit. Slow, sprawling like a western in feel if not in actual tone. Every note sounds drenched in sweat. I think this is a song that will grow on me over time. I think I am definitely at the point where I can say this album is much better than the last two. Still not convinced it's better than WBC yet.

9. A Boy's Best Friend - Blues. "I just don't fit in this place." This album is very different from WBC - there's a lot more breathing room here. Although the songs are short, they take their time to roll over you.

10. Let's Build a Home - The pace picks up a bit. The chords swing and lock in with the drums, and you got some rock n roll, baby! There's not much in the way of substance here, and I think that's the point.

11. Jumble, Jumble - Time warp. I get a sense of The Yardbirds here. This sounds like it was recorded in a cellar with Jack simply jamming away as his foot beats the bass pedal. Short!

12. Why Can't You Be Nicer to Me? - Good, but at this point I'm beginning to wind down a bit. This sounds like something that would come on their later albums. Was that an electric violin? Is Jean Luc Ponty here? I think this could have gone earlier in the track listing to break up the sound a bit. I think we passed the 3 minute mark on this song. I dig it.

13. Your Southern Can is Mine - Some more acoustic lovin' for you all. A little countrified bluesy-boogie, which I think also defines The Doobie Brothers. This ain't them, though. Sounds like it would the last thing on an album, coming a few seconds after the last "proper" song. Which I guess this is.

BOTTOM LINE: B+ I don't think it's better than White Blood Cells, but I don think it's a great record that seems to be a natural progenitor of White Blood Cells. Much better than their later stuff, and something I'll be playing a lot of in the future.

Mom Would Be Proud

Your Vocabulary Score: A+

Congratulations on your multifarious vocabulary! You must be quite an erudite person.

How's Your Vocabulary?

I won't lie to you: the words they test you on are pretty easy. Still, it's worth having to see if my mom will still give me $5.00 for each A I bring home, even 11 years after graduating college.

I got this link from a blog called High Maintenance Hags, who was thoughtful enough to list me as an interesting blog to read. The writer, headbang8, describes himself as "a late-out gay guy. Balancing a job in New York with a lover in Tokyo and family in Australia."

And if you read his latest post, about his crazy adventures in Tennessee with his lover and their two lesbian friends, you will also describe him as balls-out funny.

The Friday Office

The Home Office immediately after my last conference call. Despite the fact that I have a perfectly serviceable desk directly opposite my chair, this is my preferred arrangement for Fridays. The only thing you don't get from this picture is the Bad Religion blaring from the stereo and my Friday Office uniform: sweats, thermal shirt and sheep skin slippers (hence the tossed clothes on the corner of the futon).

I love Fridays.

Stranger Than Fiction (2006)

The set-up is unique, but the questions posed in STRANGER THAN FICTION are those many have had to face: "What do you do when you know you're going to die? "

If that was the only question driving the actions of Harold Crik, a shy, sweet, lonely tax auditor for the IRS who suddenly begins to hear his life narrated, the movie might have been amusing, perhaps even decent. Instead, it transcends the confines of a simple comedy by analyzing the mechanics of Harold's own life to further ask: "Is the life you've been leading worth continuing, knowing the reasons behind your death?"

I won't go too much into describing the plot: for reasons known later Harold Crik's (played by Will Ferrel) ordinary clockwork life is turned upside-down when his watch begins to act funny. At the same time, he begins to hear a disembodied voice narrating his life as if he were the main character in a book. The voice is more an annoyance than anything else until one morning the voice says, "Little did he know that events had been set in motion that would lead to his imminent death."

Across town, Emma Thompson plays Karen Eiffel, a reclusive novelist attempting to overcome Writer's Block and finish her first novel in ten years, Death and Taxes, about a lonely IRS agent named Harold Crik. The problem? All of her main characters die at the end of her books, and she has just figured out a way to kill Harold Crik.

As Harold begins to overcome his timid life to embrace the things he's neglected, Will Ferrel turns in an exceptional performance, relying on the humanity of his character and the pathos of his situation to filter through the more comedic elements of the film. He's done drama before (notably WINTER PASSING), but here he makes the kind of turn Jim Carey did in THE TRUMAN SHOW and, to a lesser extent, Tom Hanks did in NOTHING IN COMMON.

Thompson and Dustin Hoffman also do well with their supporting roles. Hoffman in particular plays the quirky comedy well - as he gets older his features and mannerisms lend themselves more to comedy than drama. I didn't think it was possible that Maggie Gyllenhaal could be even more adorable, but here she proves me wrong as the love interest for Ferrel, which should not work on paper, but works wonderfully in the film.

Marc Foster, who has now defied genre labels with his last three films (MONSTER'S BALL, FINDING NEVERLAND and STAY) manages a fine balancing act, never letting the comedy fall too broadly, and letting every moment serve the story as a whole. His visual representation of Harold's thought processes throughout the film are a highlight of one of the best mainstream movies this year.

The Fountain (2006)

There are two things that need saying up front before commencing with the review:

1. This is a hard film for me to recommend to a general audience.
2. This is one of the most beautiful, moving films I've seen this year.

Explanations may be in order.

Darren Aronofsky's new film THE FOUNTAIN explores the search to stave off death, to prolong life, and to reconcile with a world where loneliness is an inevitable aftermath of the connection of true love. It's also a film about time, how lifetimes can be encapsulated in a book, and how the time we have is never time enough. It's a poem of sound and image, a romance and a tragedy, and a shout to a world whose concepts of love and loss have been spoon-fed to them by prime-time soap operas on the CW and films starring Lindsey Lohan.

Aronofsky shows how much he's learned from his experience adapting Hubert Selby's REQUIEM FOR A DREAM and presents a story that unfurls through dream logic and multiple narratives that are at heart the same story: Tom (Hugh Jackman in his best role) and Izzi (Rachel Weisz - also brilliant) are in love and know that there isn't enough time: Izzi is dying of cancer and Tom, a brilliant scientist, is trying more and more exotic experiments in his lab to halt the growth of the tumor, to gain more time, more life, even as he neglects Izzi when she needs him most. He finds strange results from a rare plant found somewhere in South America, but will it save Izzi?

Izzi is also trying to complete her work with the little time she has left - a novel that takes place 500 years earlier about a young Spanish conquistador named Tomas (also played by Jackman) in search of a legendary Tree of Life that promises eternal life for his Queen, Isabel (also played by Weisz).

How these two tales intertwine with the third, in which a man (Jackman in his most vulnerable part) 1500 years in the future flies through space in a bubble containing the Tree of Life turn THE FOUNTAIN into something more than a loose narrative, something to be experienced rather than analyzed during its initial viewing. Where Tom is going, how he got there, and what he's searching for all lead to the same end, the same struggle that people who have ever known love seek to answer: how to hold on a little longer, and what can you do when your grasp begins to slip...

The road to bring THE FOUNTAIN to the screen has a long and storied history itself - the roles were originally to be played by Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchette. How that fell apart, how the movie stalled for years only to ultimately be re-written for a budget half the size and with new leads Jackman and Weisz all seemed to have focused Aronofsky to make the best film of career - one that does not hold easy answers or allows itself to be pigeon-holed into a specific genre.

And that's why even though I loved it, I find it hard to openly recommend. I wish I could get more people to see it, but the truth of the matter is this so different than what you would typically find in mainstream movie theaters that the spoon-fed crowd is going to hate this. And that's too bad, because I think it you're willing to dig a little, to be challenged by a film that seeks to circumscribe conventional narrative, you'll find in THE FOUNTAIN one of the most beautiful, expressive movies playing this year.