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Burn after Reading
There's been a bit of grousing about whether the Coen brothers have set themselves on cruise control since multi-Oscar wins for No Country for Old Men,the current evidence being the new comedy, Burn After Reading. It's familiar character terrain for Coen fans, this time focused on a gaggle of Washington DC nitwits and imbeciles who try to get the upper hand when a canned CIA analyst's memoirs , on CD, is found by an attendant on the locker room of a local gym. What follows when the CD gets into the hands of two inordinately self-seeking body trainers, wonderfully kinked performed by Francis McDormand and Brad Pitt , is the sort of comedy the Coens excel in, a detached though acute view of a many characters operating agendas from myopic cocoons who are frantically pursuing their own ends regardless of consequences. Theirs is a comedy of situations where nothing is thought-through by the characters, everyone is looking for the short cut, and all the assumptions crash, burn and sometimes are fatal when the gravity of collected self-regard takes hold and takes over. Their genius is to make you laugh at all this no matter how unsympathetic the characters might be; the unsympathetic nature of the figures in Burn After Reading is the charge leveled against the brothers this time out, as well as some complaints that they're borrowing from their other movies, particularly Fargo and Oh Brother , but to the first challenge mostly I'd counter that being able to "relate" shouldn't be the sole basis to enter a film's narrative. What matters is how well matters are brought out, made compelling; Burn is compelling, if nothing else, but more so, it is a film by masters. They are are practioners of Hitchcock's techniques of voyeur-noir --their camera notices everything, notes each gesture, figure of speech, constructs different scenarios as to where the plot might go, and then allows a particularly fragile house of cards to collapse. Shallow as they be in life's purpose, their quirks, their world views are fully delineated and detailed. This has the sort of aesthetic remove that made Nabokov an effectively satiric novelist; wouldn't a Coen Brothers' version of Laughter in the Dark be an ideal match up of sensibilties? Nabokov, always in love with people's schemes , their rationalizations, and the erotic inflection when lust and avarice influence the chatter and buzz phrases, would like the Brother's merciless technique and distance; he'd appreciate the way their movies can get in close without embarrassment in order to expose a huge vacancy where something like a soul should be.— August 22, 2017 1:20 p.m.
Jethro Tull, written and performed by Ian Anderson
I'm the first to admit that Jethro Tull had "pretty parts", but I would reserve that classification for the those musical moments where a shining bit of ensemble work actually clicked and highlighted a fine band raging happily along with some problematic time signatures. In that vein, I rather like the Martin Barre composed introduction to "Minstrel in the Gallery", a tour de force of quirky transitions and sculpted dissonance that rises to actual art. Compression and brevity are the keys to those instances when JT catches my attention, but as often as not Anderson refuses to move from his signature amalgam of styles he likes and provides than is needed, or even effective, in the then-mistaken belief that length of composition and promiscuously convolutions of theme equals serious art. I was always one who preferred their progressive rock not to drag along the road. Lyrically, principle songwriter Ian Anderson is not so stunning ; he had an effective light touch with imagery in the early work like "Living in the Past" or the particularly riveting tune "Nothing to Say"; 'though perhaps guised in a fictional character's persona, Anderson all the same connects with a convincing humanity as matters of being alive without certainty are sussed through impressionistically and, yes, concisely,closer to true poetry . The man had a knack, in the day, of getting to the point and getting you to think about things other than material gain. That word smithing, I think, has been far less in evidence since their career took off, from 'Aqualung" on ward.— November 6, 2016 11:17 a.m.
Gaslamp 15, we hardly knew ye
Was very sorry to see that the theatre had closed, as it diminishes by over half the number of new films available for me to view . Being sans automobile and residing in Pacific Beach, downtown San Diego was a cinch for me to get to in order to pick a flick from both the Gaslamp and Horton Plaza Theatres. I had, in effect, seen dozens of films at the Gaslamp, to my good fortune. The pickings are slimmer for downtown first runs now, and the effort to get to other venues via public transportation amounts to too much time getting too and from and too little time watching a film. What Reading could have done better is beyond my expertise, but a long with the absence of bookstores, music stores and now a precipitous decline in dedicated movie screens, downtown has become increasingly a place where you don't hang out but merely pass through to where you need to be.— September 30, 2016 3:09 p.m.