Werner Herzog once ate his shoe, so why wouldn’t he chase the Loch Ness monster? What’s a little harder to swallow is that the famously idiosyncratic German director – who pulled a boat over a mountain for 1982’s Fitzcarraldo – would team up with Zak Penn, a Hollywood hack who has written such gems as PCU, Inspector Gadget, and Elektra. Yet that’s what happens in Incident at Loch Ness, a 2004 movie that documents their collaboration.
In part three of my River Roots Live trilogy, I present the September 22, 2006, performance of guitar hero Junior Brown.
I start an essay for most every movie I see. Whether I actually finish the essay – or even make any headway on a thesis – is another matter entirely. Today I’ll be the old man who runs out of candy at Halloween and starts handing out worthless crap that’s lying around the house.
When I think about Sin City, the memory is of watching a cartoon. Not merely a striking approximation of the graphic novel on celluloid, but animation; it seems as if what I saw involved no live actors.
If two young women characters in a movie decide to take a vacation to an exotic locale before going to their respective colleges, the viewer can be certain one of two things will happen: They’ll have passionate sexual awakenings at the hands of a handsome stranger, or they’ll be unjustly imprisoned in a fucked-up judicial system with seemingly no hope of ever getting out. In the case of Brokedown Palace, we get both.
In his “Great Movies” article on Caché, Roger Ebert teases that he found a key to understanding this ever-mysterious movie: “How is it possible to watch a thriller intently two times and completely miss a smoking gun that’s in full view? Yet I did. Only on my third trip through Michael Haneke’s Caché did I consciously observe a shot which forced me to redefine the film.”
When Spoon was finishing its 2001 album Girls Can Tell, the band didn’t know what to do with “Chicago at Night,” which would close the record. In an interview last week, drummer and co-founder Jim Eno told this story about what he and guitarist, singer, and chief songwriter Britt Daniel decided to do: “I never would have tried this, but Britt and I were so young, and we were just like, ‘Oh yeah, let’s do it.’ We had to turn all the mixes in for mastering. … We have these two versions, and we like different things about each version … . So Britt says, ‘Why don’t we use the left side of this mix and the right side of this mix?'”
So it was written, and I agreed. On the other hand … .
In Palindromes, writer/director Todd Solondz has a wonderfully oddball conceit: Eight actors of widely disparate ages, races, body types, and dispositions – and even one boy – play 13-year-old Aviva Victor over the course of the movie. It’s obviously meant as a jarring, difficult film, but it’s curiously tame, the function of a concept in search of something to say.
I won’t be coy. The genesis for this piece was the hypothesis that The Last Jedi was not “divisive,” despite that word being 