Best of 2010

This is the best music I listened to in 2010. My little blurbs about the albums are not supposed to be comprehensive criticism, just a note about why they're appearing in my list.

Best Songs of 2010

20. “Age of Adz” – Sufjan Stevens/Age of Adz

19. “Live in Dreams” – Wild Nothing/Gemini

18. “When Will You Come” – Wavves/King of the Beach

17. “My Plants Are Dead” – Blonde Redhead/Penny Sparkle

16. “Paranoid Clusters” – Postdata/Postdata

15. “Can’t Hear My Eyes” – Ariel Pink/Before Today

14. “Mouthful of Diamonds” – Phantogram/Eyelid Movies

13. “Terrible Love” – The National/High Violet

12. “Who Knows Who Cares” – Local Natives/Gorilla Manor

11. “Devil in a New Dress” – Kanye/My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

10. “Everything I Have” – Siskiyou/Siskiyou

9. “Sailing” – Deerhunter/Halcyon Digest

8. “Ready to Start” – Arcade Fire/The Suburbs

7. “Sentimental X’s” – BSS/Forgiveness Rock Record

6. “You’re So High” – Peter Wolf Crier/Inter-Be

5. “Carolina” – Girls/Broken Dreams Club EP

4. “Silver Soul” – Beach House/Teen Dream

3. “The Suburbs” and “The Suburbs Cont’d” – Arcade Fire/The Suburbs

2. “Tithe” – Menomena/Mines

1. “Helicopter” – Deerhunter/Halcyon Digest

Best Albums of 2010

10. Siskiyou – Siskiyou

There were a few admirable attempts to make America in 2010, but no album engaged a mystical America, an America enchanted by a pantheistic wilderness, as willingly as Siskiyou. The album operates on the frontier (unlike The Suburbs, for instance, which does America with modernist introspection): a humanoid Sasquatch graces its cover, and a Northern California mountain range is its namesake. With simple folk-rock instrumentation, Siskiyou’s essence is its tonal and rhythmic shifts. This primitivism is romantic, so its ebbs and flows feel rather like tiring oxen lugging us to Oregon territory. “This Land” is a dark rendition of an American classic, an expression of the type of disappointment that can only come from a shattered ideology. But the amazing thing about Siskiyou is that it empathizes with a sense of disillusionment while refusing to submit to the resultant malaise: “Brevity and Insult,” the album’s rugged conclusion, embodies the sort of childlike resolve that is uniquely American.

9. Inter-Be – Peter Wolf Crier

Peter Wolf Crier make lo-fi, bar-soaked folk music. Inter-Be is the hurried brainchild of the band, written in one Minneapolis evening. It is difficult to imagine listening to Inter-Be anywhere other than a hole-in-the-wall pub, lonely and sipping whiskey. It’s intimate but tragic. Hopeful but going nowhere. A simple, beautiful sojourn in twentysomethingness.

8. Mines – Menomena

The conclusion of Mines feels like the end of the psychedelic tunnel at Willy Wonka’s Chocolate factory. Its three authors collage their improvised riffs—hardly an efficient mode of composition—so the jarring loops distend the band’s artistic capacity by maximizing the productivity of its independently moving voices. They share the same fifty-five minute space, but it’s an uneasy compromise. “Tithe,” the album’s highlight, melds Knopf’s keys, Harris’ punk-tinged riffs, and Seim’s xylophone over shifting vocals that croon “nothing sounds appealing.” It’s sophisticated uneasiness; a tension embedded in the song’s hectic movements that is both dazzling and nauseating.

7. Broken Dreams Club EP – Girls

Broken Dreams Club is a glossed up, psyched out conclusion to last year’s Album. Part alt-country, part ambitious stoner protest, it wavers with In The Aeroplane Over The Sea’s disturbing brass (“Broken Dreams Club”) and seduces with velvety, bad-boy riffs (“Substance”). This is like something that Jack Kerouac would sing to a girl he wanted to sleep with—it knows how cool it is, and it doesn’t give a shit. It’s cool because Chris Owens’ voice is mellifluous, and it sounds like it was recorded around a game of beach volleyball; it’s cool because Owens’ childhood was shaped out of a Hollywood mold, and he sings about love, sex, drugs and everlasting youth. It’s cool because Girls are cool.

6. High Violet – The National

I listened to High Violet as much as I could stomach for the month following its release, but each time I’d respite with Alligator. The familiar brooding is absent, the interpretive poignancy shed for swashbuckling gallantry. In the unbearable “Vanderlyll Crybaby Geeks,” Matt Berninger is “hanging from chandeliers” amongst overdone strings and warm orchestral chords. This cannot be the same band that made “Mistaken For Strangers,” because High Violet is obscured by the silvery lights they so willingly chide in Boxer. It turns out there is such a thing as being damaged by popularity. The National have emerged from relative anonymity to be featured on Obama’s campaign and network melodramas since 2008. Whispers of their new album generated media hype, to which they quipped “it will be our best, our longest,” “expect more blood-letting on this album.” In other words,High Violet is barely recognizable as an album by The National because it has been ventriloquized by cultural expectation. There are moments of poetic pathos that thankfully redeem High Violet, but they are scarce and grow scarcer as the album wears on. It is meticulous but contrived to the point of staleness, and it is nowhere near The National’s best.

Inexplicably, it is the album I have listened to most this year.

5. Forgiveness Rock Record – Broken Social Scene

Forgiveness Rock Record is a sprawling epic with skyscraping aspirations. Though it sometimes misses (“Water in Hell”), it delivers its most important statements with rhetorical genius. “World Sick” ought to be some kind of homosexual rallying-cry, and “Forced to Love” narrates an indelible feeling of social suffocation. Because of sheer size, Broken Social Scene are versatile, so they are able to complement the quirkiness of “Texico Bitches” with the effectual nostalgia of “Sentimental X’s.” If nothing else, Forgiveness Rock Record rewards listeners by broadening its scope without inhibition.

4. Gorilla Manor – Local Natives

The most common mode of criticism for new bands these days goes as follows: New Band is like Old Band X but with some characteristic of Old Band Y. There are even fleeting moments of some other, unexpected characteristic of Old Band Z’s nth album.

The reason I like Local Natives so much is that they have been compared to Bon Iver, Grizzly Bear, The Arcade Fire, Fleet Foxes, The Dodos, Jump Little Children and Talking Heads (because of a mid-album cover) without consensus. Gorilla Manor is something like sunny avant-pop that willfully accommodates both hooks and improvised breakdowns. I have included “Who Knows Who Cares” in my songs list because it best encapsulates the elusive tenor of Gorilla Manor. One moment it’s a harmonic ballad, like a run-of-the-mill soft rock tune tinted with California sun and bright horns, then the next moment it’s a barrage of anthemic guitars, crashing toms, fluttering strings, and washed out choral effects. It’s a remarkable composition that couldn’t have been made by any other band this year. It carves a place on the indie scene uniquely its own.

3. The Suburbs – Arcade Fire

More mature, more self-contained than Funeral, The Suburbs issues a manifesto about middle-aged life in the modern world. Arcade Fire are suffocated, paranoid, and anxious across the album’s sixteen tracks. “Ready to Start,” the album’s best single, is simultaneously an exclamation to the audience and Win Butler’s summoning of himself to hasten a movement behind the white picket fence. It is a cookie-cutter Arcade Fire song, except it’s not an us-against-the-world rallying cry; the Springsteen-esque stadium-rocking is one gigantic façade, Arcade Fire’s attempt to fool listeners and themselves. The irony, of course, is that life inside the suburbs engendered The Suburbs. The moments of unbridled cheerfulness on this album feel misplaced until you consider the portentous artistic achievement at play. “Sprawl II” wittingly sings with this context in mind: “They heard my singing and they told me to stop,” Renee croons over 80’s pop-synths. Arcade Fire may have resisted their oppression, but The Suburbs shows that learning to cope with it may produce better music than living outside its grasp.

2. Halcyon Digest – Deerhunter

Halcyon Digest catches Deerhunter in the act of turning down the post-punk, de-garaging the electro-catharsis. The album literally bids farewell to punk revivalist Jay Reatard in “He Would Have Laughed,” Halycon Digest’s closing elegy. Much of the album situates itself in this framework. “Sailing,” for instance, is an ambient song stripped bare of Microcastle’s raw kinetics. “Only fear / Can you make you feel lonely out here,” Cox murmurs. Deerhunter recognize the musical space evacuated in Halcyon Digest, and they embrace it. It is a liberating retreat, one that may only be compromised by trepidation. But they never look back onHalcyon Digest. “Coronado” is textured with saxophone and “Earthquake” is a half-tempo pastoral about sex. “Helicopter,” the year’s best track, opens a space for spiritual recovery via “the lights inside my cave.” It is a story about a Russian prostitute, according to the liner notes. It is replete with harpsichord and electric effects that build to a hopeful crescendo even as the tragic heroine repeatedly utters “Now they are through with me.” “Helicopter” could not have been made by Deerhunter two years ago. It’s assembled from new musical territory discovered by Deerhunter’s bucolic retirement from hard-core garage rock, a retirement which Deerhunter come to terms with over the course of the wonderfully complex Halcyon Digest.

1. Teen Dream – Beach House

It was easy to forget about Beach House’s January release this summer—hard to imagine given their weed-pop misnomer—but it has been impossible not to return to Legrand’s Nico-esque falsettos as the year comes to a close. Wistful synths adorn her airy lyrics with a hopeful snow-globe aesthetic. This is good gingerbread-house-making music or snobby Holiday-party fare, but it’s better to take in slowly, passively, gazing on blackened snow or shimmering Christmas lights. It wraps you in its cushiony embrace and transports you to its winter dreamland, decorated with glittering cymbal crashing and optimistic sleigh bells. But what Beach House conceals beneath its glossy aura is that “It’s a vision, a complete illusion.” Beach House is just as lonely as you are in the frigid, thin night. But the winter is bearable precisely because we’re all lonely. “I’ll take care of you / If you ask me to,” Legrand tells us as the album fades to white. It’s in this act of charity, this selfless outreach, that we meet Beach House in its most vulnerable, most honest moment. And 2010’s best.

The Return of Rooster

True Grit

4.5 stars out of 5

When one thinks of the western movie genre, the works of John Ford, John Sturges, or Sergio Leone are probably first to come to mind for many people. These men excelled at exceptional films which could be considered pure westerns. The Joel and Ethan Coen are generally not filmmakers one associates with the great American western ... or at least, not before now.

The directing duo enter new territory in their newest film, a remake of the classic 1969 western, True Grit, staring John Wayne. The Coen Brothers briefly entered the genre in their 2007 Best Picture winner, No Country for Old Men, however, even that film could not be labeled a pure western. In fact, most Coen films are never easy to label in any genre. Their comedies are dark - often satirical in nature - and filled with eccentric characters more likely to be found in a screwball comedy. Their dramas are gritty journeys into realistic situations, most often associated with crime, and always laced with the signature humor audiences have come to expect from Hollywood's favorite brothers.

Their updated version of the film that won the Duke his Oscar is less a romanticism of the frontier and more a story of the virtue of unfaltering determination - even if it is a determination to get revenge for a murder. Like the original, the film follows 14-year old Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) as she organizes her late father's affairs and sets out to see his murderer, Tom Cheney (Josh Brolin), hanged. Told of three marshals who could assist her in her mission, Mattie chooses Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges), who has a history of catching almost all of those he pursues and returning them to authorities already dead. Cogburn - sporting an eye-patch, a bottle of whiskey, and cigarettes - is not one for taking on a little girl as his employer. However, "the fight" in her slowly wins him over. The two are joined in their "coon hunt" - as Cogburn refers to it - by LeBoeuf (Matt Damon), a self-interested Texas Ranger also looking for Cheney.

Damon and Brolin are more comic foils for the film. Damon's pompous ranger shows himself to be more a fool than an intellectual, using big words and Latin-based legal terms when voicing his thoughts. Of course, he fails to impress either the marshal or Mattie, who is well-educated and naturally exudes her smarts. Damon's somewhat over-the-top accent and emphasis on LeBoeuf's sense of self is sometimes annoying and inappropriate to the story, but serves a convenient balance in mood. Brolin plays Cheney as a nitwit with very little self-control, reacting suddenly and without conscious thought to various situations (from the murder of Mattie's father to the climactic ending).

If Damon and Brolin are the film's stock characters, then Bridges and Steinfeld share the role of Grit's protagonists. Bridges' version of Cogburn is arguably better than that of the Wayne's. Bridges is more ... well, gritty in his performance. While was was trying to create a offbeat, but lovable hero, Bridges' is trying to create an aging, drunken, overweight, profane western lawman, who is hard to truly like, much less love. Not to say that Cogburn does not win over the audience. The Coen dialogue written for Cogburn is never short of humor or respect. Bridges is easily one of the best actors of the year - if not the best - once again. Joining Bridges during the awards season will be Steinfeld, who not only hold her own opposite a legendary actor and character, but delivers one of the greatest breakthrough performances of any actor in the past decade. Two early scenes in the film of Mattie negotiating the sale of her father's horses with the town's trader (Dakin Matthews of Gilmore Girls fame) include the most entertaining straight dialogue in the movie. At 14, Steinfeld would not be the youngest actress to receive her share of acting award nominations, but she could be one of the youngest to actually win them.

Another of the film's stars is cinematographer Roger Deakins, who's touch makes True Grit one of the most beautiful films of 2010 and, indeed, one of the most visually attractive films in the Coen Brothers' entire filmography. Deakins' past work includes some of the most gorgeous films of the last decade (i.e. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Doubt, In the Valley of Elah, and the Coens' own No Country for Old Men and O Brother, Where Art Thou?). Unfortunately, Deakins has often been ignored come awards season. With True Grit, Deakins is the man to beat in his category this year.

True Grit proves that sometimes - though, rarely - remakes can give moviegoers a refreshing and terrific product.

Dusting off the Family Albums

Originally published in Gadfly.


I got lost again last weekend. GoogleMaps can only guide you so far when the sun goes down and the street lights get dimmer and dimmer. I always thought that my tremendous lack of direction might evaporate once I started driving all across town, like some mechanical part of my brain that I never knew existed would pop up in a flat-screen inside my mind and project a fully functional map of Saint Louis and all of its suburbs. But, as time has fluttered by on its winged whatchamacallit, I’ve realized that I’ll probably never get over this lack of directional and practical sense. I’ve often thought about living in New York when I grow up, not for the city’s great cultural or historical landmarks but for the simple and easy-to-use public transportation. People are often quick to acknowledge that we are all born with natural talents and skills in certain areas. What they don’t often mention is that we’re also born with horrible deficiencies in scores of other disciplines.

I think my trouble with direction has something to do with my horrible lack of foresight. I’ve never been one to look to the future. Instead I’ve found myself constantly looking backwards. Which is probably what I was doing that night last weekend when I got lost on my way to a friend’s house in the backwoods of Affton. While the roads twisted and turned into heavy thickets and I had to guess which street I wanted—was it Country Field Drive or Country Field Court?—I was also caught up in the old David Bowie record that I’d dusted out of my dad’s old collection and thrown into my car. It was Hunky Dory, and the album’s warm and friendly sounds made the lostness feel kind of exciting. There was no one on these back roads and I enjoyed the countless U-turns my poor judgments called for. And the Bowie, too—there’s an electricity to his voice on that album, and it doesn’t come through warm and muted like many of the other albums of the early 70s. Instead, it’s wiry and wild and relentlessly playful, and it made my small directional transgressions seem like amusing footnotes rather than major miscalculations. When I finally arrived at the party, I rushed inside with Hunky Dory and a few other CDs in hand—my friend had requested that I pick out some tunes for his party. Perhaps he was there the weekend before, for Halloween, when my Steely Dan album got scrapped in favor of Z 107.7 by some vociferous girls in capes, who apparently “couldn’t dance to that” and was acting out of pity. Whatever the case, I quickly threw on the Bowie and was delightfully surprised when people immediately began to sing the words to “Changes.” I heard a couple of satisfied grunts and even a muted but passionate “I love this song.” Things seemed to be going well so I had my friend place a couple more albums in the stereo system to save for later. I waltzed over to the snack table with eyebrows cocked and feelings assuaged and as I did so, I started to fill out a small self-confidence checklist in my head: 1) I made it without having to call my parents to ask which way direction to go on 270. Check. 2) I successfully avoided a situation that would require parallel parking. Check. 3) They appear to have a full cooler of Dr. Pepper at this house. Check. 4) These people like the Bowie. They really like the Bowie. Check.

“Changes” hopped toward its ending and I smiled as I weaved through the crowds to say hello to friends and acquaintances. Soon, though, I realized something was up. As “Changes” finished its last chorus, I suddenly heard the fuzzed-out chords of the Rolling Stones’s “Shattered.” How come Bowie and Jagger were mixing? Was that even allowed? And, moreover, how come it was “Shattered” that was playing? That song doesn’t come to the end of the Some Girls album. I ran and shook the shoulder of my friend to see what was going on. He informed me, quite casually, that he had put the albums on “shuffle.” I jumped back a bit, thinking about the terrifying possible combinations—Stevie Wonder leaking into Sonic Youth, Pavement blurring into the Allman Brothers. It was scary, and I had to make it stop.

Later though, as the night continued, I started to think about the thinking behind the “shuffle” button and why so many of us choose it on our iPods and stereo systems. Ideally, when an artist creates a record he does so with order and sound and pacing in mind. Essentially, the tracks are being shuffled for us to suggest the greatest depth of sound and meaning. Why then do we need randomizer to undo all that work for us? It seems that with the pressings of the digital age of iTunes and iPods, we’ve lost our interest in the album. Things in the technological world work too quickly for a piece of art to be consumed in an hour. Instead, we place our value on the song before the album.

In my four years writing for Gadfly I’ve tried to avoid slipping into generalization and writing one of those “state of the music world” pieces, but sometimes a piece just nabs at you and you get a little pissed off and you find yourself drinking Sprite at two a.m. the night before you have to print this magazine and you need something to comment on. It’s an interesting phenomenon to think about, though, in the world of rock and roll. How much emphasis do we put on the single these days? Has the song even eclipsed the singer?

One of my favorite parts of musical investigation is tracing a band in all its incarnations and phases. It’s fun, for instance, to track the Rolling Stones—from tinny sounding white boys to psychedelic sitar players to the grizzly blues players they are now. Even single albums, like Exile on Main Street for example, teem with variety. There’s the rock and roll side, and then the folk and country side, and then the gospel and soul side. It goes on and on. Today, though, it seems like bands and artists have constructed themselves and their ideas around the single song and that, unfortunately, means the single sound. Even some of the most talented groups of our generation seem guilty of this—where album after album seem like repetitions and layers of the same fundamental sound. This is true of the most recent Arcade Fire release, The Suburbs. I was waiting for the stripped-down soul Arcade Fire record, or the solo acoustic Arcade Fire record. Perhaps the artists might have recorded it, too, if there were any kind of market for an album instead of a collection of singles. Rather than getting one band that absorbs many different genres and ideas, we get many different bands each devoted to a specific genre or idea. In the current indie scene, this is painfully clear. There’s your synthesizer, hipster pop bands and your noise-rock bands and everything in between but nothing that attempts to tackle anything comprehensive.

It’s an interesting paradox of the internet age that we find our music becoming more and more stilted and niched. In one sense it’s a sensible response to the technological market, where a specialized product that can fully appeal to one group is more important than a broad one that can partly appeal to many. But, at the same time, sites like Facebook are committed to an idea of constant iteration, which is to say that they are constantly changing. Think about how much Facebook has changed in the last year (I’m thinking of the invention and then frequently adapting look of the “chat” feature) and compare that to how much Arcade Fire has changed in the last year. The Facebook age means constantly changing ideas and a variety of them too, but it also means presenting those ideas in the simplest, fastest way possible. This is not good news for artists, whose work is less concerned with ergonomics and more concerned with drama and tension in both the simple and the complex, the accessible and the difficult to understand. Rather than encourage us to find the subtlety and variety over artists’ careers, the digital age prefers us to find artists, enjoy their musical shtick for a little bit and then throw them aside for the next band that sounds a little bit different.

This is scary stuff for me to think about, as one who grow up along side the Beatles—hitting A Hard Days Night in third grade and working my way up to The White Album in the eighth, when I bought a corduroy jacket and grew my hair out. I saw John’s songs go from “She Loves You” to “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” all in a span of five years. That’s certainly rapid change, but it’s also growth—and that’s where the difference lies. I’ll always prefer some songs as singles contained outside their albums—songs like “Like A Rolling Stone” or “Born In The U.S.A.” come to mind, songs that are too wild and singular for inclusion in something grander. But, as far as I’m concerned, listening to “After the Gold Rush” is only part of listening to After the Gold Rush. There’s that feeling of extreme connectedness, a personal bond that exists between you and an album. You hear the opening lick of “Rocks Off” on Exile on Main Street and you know you’re in for an hour and a half of wild music. Over time, too, I find myself returning more to the albums that I love more than the songs I love. For me, “Like A Rolling Stone” will always exist outside of time, as some liquid flow of energy that can take no context. But when I pull out of my driveway with a warm piece of GoogleMaps paper and an uncertain mind, and I slide in Blood on the Tracks to the CD holder, I’m pretty sure I’m going to end up someplace special.

Casino Jack Review

Originally published in the Prep News.

In the Prep News’s recent remembrance of SLUH filmmaker George Hickenlooper, Nick Fandos chews on a quote from Joe Schulte about the director’s interest in telling stories about people living on the outside of the world they populate, and trying to fight their way in. “In a way,” Fandos asserts, “that outsider was Hickenlooper.”

It seems strange then that the filmmaker’s most recent work, Casino Jack (which premiered at the Saint Louis International Film Festival last night) is through and through a Hollywood film. After all, it stars the bankable Kevin Spacey and it boasts a deft, fast-paced script from studio sweetheart Norman Snider. More than anything, it appears to come out of a period of swiftly paced but grandly designed topical films like, say, Oliver Stone’s Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps or David Fincher’s The Social Network. Hollywood, it seems, has finally caught up with the wave of grimy, slimy events of the last decade. If the 2000s were about immediate indictments of failing systems in documentaries like An Inconvenient Truth and Fahrenheit 9/11, the 2010s appear to be about using those events as templates on which to construct tight, character-based narratives. Even this summer’s Will Ferrell comedy blockbuster, The Other Guys, built its story around cops who are out to bust money launderers instead of drug dealers. At first glance, Casino Jack is just one more Hollywood film made by, apparently, one more set of Hollywood insiders.

It’s hard, also, to immediately find the connection between Schulte’s outsider claim and Hickenlooper’s chosen subject: Washington super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff. By all first impressions, Abramoff is nothing if not an insider. He shoots through back doors of the Capital and smiles while he hands Senators corporate kickbacks. We quickly learn that these are the men who really make things happen in Washington. In one early scene, we travel through Jack’s office and see the framed photos of Abramoff alongside Republican mastermind Karl Rove and House Majority Leader Tom Delay. Soon we see the Ronald Reagan baseball cap that sits on a plaque by Abramoff’s desk and a thank-you note signed by President Bush. If anything, we’re thinking, this guy is the insider’s insider.

Hickenlooper is also quick to marry the big-budget Hollywood scene with the politics of Washington—Abramoff had, at one time, produced a few Dolph Lundgren flicks and he and his lobbyist cronies spend all day spouting out classic movie quotes and impressions, usually borne from Robert De Niro gangster movies. Abramoff, in his slick-laced humor, tells off a Senator by stating that “Washington D.C. is Hollywood for ugly people.” Certainly, Jack shows us that Washington, like Hollywood, is a world dominated by a tight relationship between approval and ego, where how you think about yourself is defined by what everyone else thinks about you. In the first scene, we listen in as Jack gives himself a pep-talk while he brushes his teeth. He talks about the “disease of the dull” that he fights against, that those around him who do not do and do not act are nothing more than slaves to mediocrity. There are few other moments of incredible outbursts of tragic-hero hubris where the usually mild-mannered Abramoff explodes into incalculable rage, yelling “I’m Jack Abramoff, the one Time magazine called the most important man in Washington.” I think of the end of Macbeth when the mulish king announces loudly to young Siward, “My name’s Macbeth” and then moves in to slay him. It’s hard not to wonder if Hickenlooper ever received that same worksheet we all did in Sophomore English about the qualities of a tragic hero.

It’s at these moments of incredible emotion and inflated ego that the viewer starts to wonder if a classic Hollywood piece is all Hickenlooper has up his sleeve. Around a fourth of the way through the film, we learn of Abramoff’s devout Jewishness. He says his prayers, he wears his Yamaka, and he preaches about using his money to give back to the community by creating a top-level Hebrew school and new addition to the Jewish Community Center. Suddenly our Washington, hubris-headed insider is something fundamentally different. He’s a Jew in the land of born-again Christians. And where his lobbyist cronies buy mansions and speedboats and shuffle from affair to affair, Abramoff stays at home with his wife and kids and invests his money in restaurant ventures to help finance his community projects. “I want to give back,” he tells his wife. And, of course, Kevin Spacey is acting it all out. Spacey holds a common and comforting face but, as he does in most roles, quickly subverts all that normality into something kinetic and, often, strange.

Ultimately, Abramoff is able to rationalize his work by latching on to a few moral footholds by lobbying for under-represented Native American Tribes and other ethnic outsiders. Perhaps the film’s most haunting scene plays out when Jack’s main lobbying partner talks about his plans to kick an adversary while he’s down. Not only are we going to kick him, he says to Jack, we’re gonna gouge out his eyes and rip out his teeth. “Don’t do that,” Jack says, “that’s bad karma.”

And, of course, what ensues is serving after serving of bad karma. After the first part of his community work, Abramoff’s financials start to dive and swerve until he gets involved in bad deal after bad deal. It’s not so much what Abramoff does, but what happens under his watch. A wave of excess and greed and rather un-kosher acts that bubble up around him start to bring him down. There’s also, though, the nature of Abramoff’s own vaulting ambition and his desire to no longer be the faceless man behind the scenes. Ultimately, the film finds incredible strength and power in the conflict between the Jewish family man and the Hollywood cowboy.

Hickenlooper, too, works subtly and tirelessly to make these twin personalities pull at each other. In addition to the scores of gangster film cross-references, he also adds a touch of an alienated hero approach. As Abramoff brushes his teeth and peps himself up in the film’s first scene, it’s hard not to think of Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront or Robert De Niro in Raging Bull. These are hard-nosed characters, sure—they’re bullies, even killers. But they’re also lovers living in the gutter, outcasts that fate picks around and then throws into the drainpipes. Ultimately, Casino Jack makes us ask the question that all great films of its kind do: why do we care so much about such rotten people? The answer, I guess, is because those rotten people are people too.

What’s most interesting, though, is how exactly Hickenlooper guides us to these questions. Those familiar with my reviews will recall that I reached very similar conclusions at the end of my treatise on The Social Network. Hickenlooper’s film, though, accomplishes something that The Social Network, or any other similar film for that matter, doesn’t. With Casino Jack, Hickenlooper created a film from a true story of real events and real people that, in the end, still is a real movie—one that gains traction from ideas pulled from old gangster and noir flicks that the director must have spent hours and years consuming in dark rooms. Hickenlooper treats the world of those old De Niro and Brando films so seriously that he’s willing to put them into a story that the whole world already knows about. He’s willing to say that those films mean something in the way we really think, in the people we really are. It’s a daring act, and one that rarely is attempted, let alone succeeds. Casino Jack is a movie hopping between reality and illusion, truth and theatricality. Towards the end, we witness an explosive sequence only to find out it was all imagined. It’s this fusion between reality and illusion, journalism and filmmaking that makes our willful suspension of disbelief both easy and terrifyingly hard. Hickenlooper’s working from the inside out and the outside in—a technician and a rebel, a truth-teller and a mythmaker.

What TJ Watched: Week of Oct. 18, 2010

Hey kids,

This week, I watched:

The "Reganing" episode of 30 ROCK. Though I found the whole Reganing bit amusing and the Kelsey Grammer guest performance pretty funny, this episode felt a lot like a filler. I think after all the work that went into the live show, the team scrambled to throw this one together. The space is small and there are only about 5 people in the whole episode, with many of the supporting characters being gone completely. Still pretty solid comedy, but not what I've come to expect from the 30 ROCK gang.
2.5/4

The stars align in Woody Allen's "You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger." With Anthony Hopkins, Antonio Banderas, Naomi Watts and Josh Brolin, among others, Allen offers up another solid comedy that the latter-part of his career is filled with. How do you critique a guy who puts out a movie every year in his 70s? It's tough. And though "Stranger" manages to have some of the most refreshing characters you'll find in comedy on screen right now, I was pretty disappointed. Allen is just so cynical, so damn pessimistic. It used to be amusing, when it was neurotic, but now it's just plain sad. The message of the film is that nothing means anything, love doesn't work and life is miserable, so just distract yourself to get through it. Ha ha?
2/4

I watched "Paranormal Activity 1 and 2" in the same day, so they kind of blend together in my mind. I'll review them as one. I was utterly flabbergasted by the low-budget effectiveness of these films, especially the first one. The long static shots play like a modern Hitchcock, something that would make Michael Haneke proud, but the delivery can often be too slow and too insufficient. These films are a lot more effective in the theatre. And despite a few scares in the second and the chilling final 5 minutes of the first, there's not too much memorable in "Paranormal Activity," but it's a nice break from torture porn.
2.5/4

Lastly, I saw the all-star-studded "R.E.D." featuring Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, Helen Mirren, John Malkovich, Mary-Louise Parker, Karl Urban, Ernest Borgnine, Brian Cox and Richard Dreyfus (am I forgetting anyone?) Though the first 20 minutes are so slow and "cute" they are brutal, the film finds some thrills later, mainly at the sight of The Queen behind a machine gun, and John Malkovich, well...being John Malkovich. Most of the cast was well-used and worth the odd collection. But the film never really climaxed. It never went as bat-shit crazy as I was hoping. I mentioned to some friends that I wouldn't mind there being a R.E.D. 2 because it's just so much fun watching old people kick-ass.
2.5/4

A bit of a disappointing week.

-TJK

The story of Secretariat, Disney-fied

Turning the bend at 37 miles per hour, breaking away by 20 … 22 … 24 lengths, his chestnut color becomes almost a red blur to anyone standing within a few feet of the track. Chins drop, time seems to have evaporated and the sound of four solitary hooves becomes the music of the race as he majestically sails past the finishing post 31 unbelievable lengths ahead of the closest competitor. He is Secretariat.

It is no surprise that this Triple Crown winner drew the attention of director Randall Wallace and the Walt Disney Company, who have taken the 1975 biographical novel by William Nack and left audiences with “Secretariat”. The story is of one of the most impressive athletes in history. Oh yes, he was an athlete. In 1999, ESPN named Secretariat the 35^th greatest athlete of the 20^th Century. His achievement is unquestionably grand, rivaled by no other racehorse. While spiced with humor, entertaining characters, a “never give up’ attitude and a likable tale, “Secretariat” cannot compete with its fabled namesake or the thrilling true story.

The film follows Penny Chenery Tweedy (Diane Lane), the Denver house-wife thrust into the horseracing world following her beloved mother’s death and her revered father’s downfall at the hands of dementia. Her story is one of struggle. Her husband, Jack (Dylan Walsh), a tax attorney is wary of his wife’s wish to take on control of her parent’s business thousands of miles away from her children and home. Her brother, wanting to sell the farm, considers his sister’s decision to invest time, effort and money into the sport a waste. The “old boys” running the exclusive industry only laugh at her confidence. Chenery wants to prove her worth and ability. Thanks in part to her father’s ingenious breeding prowess and a great deal of luck (or fate, if you are so inclined), Chenery’s driven spirit meets its soul-mate in the form of a remarkably unrelenting colt that comes to be named Secretariat.

History’s most famous horse won the 1973 Kentucky Derby, Preakness Stakes and Belmont Stakes in an unprecedented manner. His speed record at Belmont of one and one half miles in two minutes, twenty-four seconds stands as the fastest time ever recorded for a racehorse. Secretariat’s best races never failed to excite the American public. Unfortunately, the adaptation of his accomplishment to screen is a dud in the drama department.

The races are never fully shown. For the Preakness, director Wallace comes closest to getting it right when he decides to show the original CBS broadcast of the 1973 race on the Tweedy family television set instead of trying to recreate the impossible. Nothing can compare with Secretariat’s actual races and Wallace’s greatest failure in this film is to fully recognize this fact, instead opting to show technically difficult shots of horse and jockey between continuous cuts to Chenery and company in the grandstand. We do not get any close-ups on the intensity in Chenery’s eyes between long shots of what are miraculous races or any other cinematic choices that could have placed the audience in the scenes. The Derby is billed as the “fastest and most exciting two minutes in sports”, so where is the excitement?

The film’s plot, while fairly solid in its refusal to shift too far from the centerpiece of the film (Secretariat), is too melodramatic as it becomes devotional in its depiction of the horse and owner — Lane’s voice can be heard quoting the Book of Job in the film’s opening narration. Lane gives the most multi-layered performance in the film as Chenery, but her lines often fall victim to horribly cheesy writing. Characters like trainer Lucien Laurin (John Malkovich) and Chenery’s secretary, Miss Ham (Margo Martindale) provide punctuated laughs and running gags, like Laurin’s hideous attire. However, they are far too one dimensional to be of any significant impact on the viewers.

The music, which is an injustice, does sadly leave a mark (or wound). Whoever decided that “Oh Happy Day” best complimented Secretariat’s sprint to the finish line should be put out to pasture. Calling John Williams and a clichéd triumphant score!

Perhaps the story of Secretariat is too good to be told or perhaps the story of his owner is too dry. Most likely, the fault lies with Disney, who decided the story was not emotional enough and chose to replace reality with overpowering sentimentality.

Originally published in the 10/14/10 edition of the Truman Index.