Spike Lee’s 25th Hour would appear to be about a good-hearted drug dealer’s last day of freedom before he begins a seven-year prison sentence, but the movie insistently pushes itself beyond that. It should be a circumscribed drama limited to the dealer (named Monty and played by Edward Norton), his girlfriend, his father, and his two best friends, but the film regularly veers into the margins.
I don’t expect many people to actually read through this entire list, let alone try to find patterns or analyze it. But it’s an interesting ongoing exercise for me, listening to the collection album by album, song by song, and figuring out which ones I like best.
For a series whose mystery and suspense are central to its allure, Lost’s ploy of eating up airtime minutes with background that is seemingly irrelevant to the central plot is positively brilliant. When you don’t need to move the story forward for a couple handfuls of your weekly forty-odd minutes, it makes it a lot easier to sustain the series over a longer period of time. And here’s the shocking thing: The backstory structure is an artistic triumph, a skeleton that gives the series its distinctive shape, depth, and resonance.
You hear it and you cringe immediately. Who the fuck thought of that stupid-ass name? So Culture Snob here introduces a regular feature, offering free band names to whoever wants them.
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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?'”
Memento is such a triumph of tricky narrative structure that it’s difficult to get (and keep) a grip on what happens, let alone the objective truth of its protagonist’s past. Christopher Nolan’s second feature, which he wrote and directed based on his brother Jonathan’s short story, seems perpetually slippery and elusive. I’ve seen it at least six times since it was released in the U.S. in 2001 (it debuted at festivals in September 2000), and even though I know it well, each time it repeatedly throws me off. The movie’s closing line – in context, a sick joke by Nolan – is an excellent summary of how I feel watching it: “Now … where was I?”
What’s unfortunate about Michael Haneke’s Caché is that the writer/director has created a movie that requires such intensive decoding at its terminals that it’s easy to overlook the rest of the movie – to, in fact, miss its entire point. By spending so much time and effort on the beginning and the ending, we neglect essential questions: What is the film trying to say? Is this an effective way to communicate that message?
Birth is the perfect antidote for anybody who thinks reincarnation is a romantic notion, allowing for a reunion with the spirit of a loved one who has died. By mining the practicalities of the situation, the movie becomes a rare work that humanizes and seeks to understand the effects of reincarnation instead of merely employing it for cheap horror or cheesy romance.
Volker Schlöndorff’s The Tin Drum has so much to say that it can’t survive as a narrative. Still, slogging through it might be worth the effort if the movie spoke meaningfully to the human condition, but the essence of the film is distilled misanthropy, and its flavor is so outrageously bitter that you immediately reject it.
