Pet Shop Boys - Axis

Alright, we have to call a spade a spade, and Pet Shop Boys' 2012 album Elysium (not linked to the upcoming Matt Damon/Jodie Foster movie of the same name) was something of a snooze. I think it may be lack of promotion - but then again, the PSBs aren't really known on this side of the pond as hyper-promoters of their music and have historically let their work speak for itself. That may have worked in the beginnings of their career when songs could on radio airplay alone make an album achieve notoriety in sales, but nowadays, sales drive an artist's success or failure. Unless you were and are a die-hard fan of the PSB, you didn't really hear or care for Elysium and instead focused on whomever hit the charts last year, take your pick. [Personally, I rarely follow pop, and when I do, it's only because I know without a shadow of a doubt the artist merits listening to.]

So it's not a surprise to me that the PSBs, instead of taking another three year hiatus from the music scene, have decided to create another album that was this time around not a chilled out bore but a dance-floor stomper. I haven't heard anything past their intro-lead single Axis, which hit a paltry 196 on the UK charts (which pretty much spells out how far the duo has fallen in musical tastes whilst still producing mind-blowing music, while younger pop acts emulate them and get the juicy chart placements that the PSB should be getting) this past April, and already I am blown off my Converse sneakers. Tennant and Lowe have tinkered with mainly instrumental formats before, the most notorious and well-known being their moderate hit Paninaro from 1986, re-released ten years later with more spoken lyrics to chart as a top 15 hit on the UK charts. While the music for both versions was somewhat stark and drab (yet compelling; I recall how people flocked to dance the shit out of this in both 1986 and 1995), nothing prepared me for the audio assault of their mainly instrumental Axis.

I don't know the concept behind it nor do I care. One listen and I felt the grandiose, frightened, and alive, falling through my own rabbit hole of synth, complex layers of sound somewhat derivative of the instrumentals Paninaro and Music for Boys on the Alternative CD with a borrowed synth-line from Phyllis Nelson's 1985 hit "I Like You". This time around the sound is extremely muscular, densely synthesized, and an explosion of rhythm. I haven't heard PSB sound this dense, layered, or dark for that matter. The video is pretty much an exercise in crazy -- immediately one is thrown into a wormhole only to resurface to find to ominous looking men in buffalo heads moving robotically as a backdrop of psychedelic lights all but induces you to an epileptic attack.

Which, again, is all fine with me. These guys know music, know dance, and could create nothing I wouldn't like. Dance musicians of today should take notice. One doesn't reach 60 and make music like this out from one's own ass. If you like it, get it, and tell everyone you can. Pop music needs all the help it can get, and the PSB could lend much influence to today's headliners.

Amour

Amour (seen at the Film Forum, late January):

I'd read all the reviews and knew what was coming. I'd seen a couple of Michael Haneke's movies before (Hidden and The White Ribbon) and I knew it would be austere, solemn, and difficult. So I kept somewhat putting it back because I knew this one would be not Paris, Je' Taime.

Police break into an apartment where they find a corpse in bed, its body sprinkled with flowers.

A flashback to several months before, we meet an aging couple, Georges and Anne (two names that always pop up in Haneke's movies by the way), who live a tranquil life of retirement in Paris, enjoy the outing at a cultural event and keep in touch with some of her former music students. Nothing remarkable about them except the kind of amicable argument that old couples have had over the years and color their relationship with a sense of old, frayed love that still lingers. One evening, Anne cannot go to sleep, but stares blankly into the darkness of her room, clearly worried -- almost scared, perhaps? It is eerily prescient of what is to come.

The following morning, as Georges prepares breakfast and they engage in the small talk of the quotidian, Anne goes into a blank. Georges thinks she may be playing a trick on him for the argument of the previous night, but she's not. She's sitting at the table, eyes staring at nothing. When she comes to, she can not remember what happened. Georges sends Anne (after some resistance; she does not like doctors), to go see a doctor; Anne is diagnosed with having had a stroke that requires medical intervention. When Anne returns she is in a wheelchair and requires assistance to even go to the bathroom. Georges takes on the task of being her 24-hour caretaker until a second stroke renders Anne needing a part-time nurse as she has lost her speech and can only moan. Things turn for the worse as with each day, Georges becomes overwhelmed with caring for Anne.

What was amazing for me as a viewer was that Amour never goes overboard with emotion and yet it strikes at the heart, deep. There isn't a manipulative scene meant to make you cry -- the movie is actually rather light in tone even after Anne's first stroke. The appearance of their daughter, played by Isabelle Huppert, brings some much needed levity mixed with neuroses -- she worries for her parents, but it seems somewhat insincere -- polite, yes, but lacking depth.

The lion's share of performances goes to Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva. While the most action they get into is a scene where he helps her move around a room and makes it look like slow dancing, this is a couple you believe have been married forever and despite some rocky moments do love each other, intensely. Riva tackles a difficult role that strips away her dignity and reduces her to a moaning old woman on a bed. You feel every inch of her pain because as she states early on, she still feels 30. Trintignant has an equally meaty role as an old man who is trying desperately to keep the woman he has been linked to in life, alive, even when the odds mount against him and slowly lead him to an unthinkable resolve. One of the scenes that I remember the most is one where he is telling Anne a story with enormous affection as she moans "Hurts!" in French. I won't say what happens here, but the staging is glowing, full of light, intimate, and Trintignant's voice is overflowing with healing as Anne's pain diminishes.

Michael Haneke gained a lot of attention in the US with The White Ribbon and finally got his due as a director in the 2012 Oscars and I can see why. Amour resonates with the audience by telling a painful, realistic story about the sacrifices of love, love at its most devastating. His style, closer in spirit to the equally austere Woody Allen movie Interiors (1978), hides a powerhouse emotional truth that otherwise would have been missing in a tearjerker with programmed music.

Opening this Week: Francois Ozon's Dans la Maison (In the House)

I almost saw this movie when it premiered at Rendezvous with French Cinema and cursed myself over being too slow to get tickets. I was, however, rewarded with Guillaume Nicloux's La Religieuse (The Nun), and now, merely a month and a half later, I get to see my intended film by my favorite French director.

The plot of In the House, as per Production:

A sixteen-year-old boy insinuates himself into the house of a fellow student from his literature class and writes about it in essays for his French teacher. Faced with this gifted and unusual pupil, the teacher rediscovers his enthusiasm for his work, but the boy's intrusion will unleash a series of uncontrollable events.

Here's a sneak peak.



At the Lincoln Plaza Cinema and Landmark Sunshine this Friday.

The Nun

Thanks to Rendezvous With French Cinema I was able to capture a film (Francois Ozon's Dans la Maison,due out this Friday at the Lincoln Plaza and Landmark; Claude Miller's Therese Desqueyroux, and Regin Roinsard's Populaire are due later were sold out) that wasn't on my immediate list: Guillaume Nicloux's La Religieuse (The Nun) based on the Denis Diderot novel of the same name. The promotional poster was intriguing: one nun being bullied by another. The lesbian tension alone in that still was enough. I was sold and in the theater at the IFC Center at the movie's sole showing.

Poor Suzanne. To see her two older sisters being married off in expensive weddings and have nothing left for her must be a bitter pill to swallow. This being a darker time where feminism was unknown and religion was the politics of the day, she doesn't have much of an alternative given to her. Even so, she does believe in the Church and decides to give it a go early on. Once Suzanne realizes this convent life isn't for her she returns home. Her parents have other plans already laid out: they cannot support her at home because they have run out of money, and after a brief familial struggle of wills, off Suzanne gets carted off to the convent she left. Madame de Moni (Francoise Lebrun), a progressive Mother Superior, provides sage advice and seems to understand what Suzanne is wrestling with. However, her untimely death brings in the younger Superieure Christine (Louise Bourgoin) who zeros in on Suzanne and decides to degrade her in every possible way, a long, tense sequence fraught with enormous violence. Suzanne's spirit of survival, however, becomes strong,and while in solitary confinement she is able to produce an account of her life in the convent which becomes the narrative of The Nun, later mailing it out to anyone who may help her and thus regain her freedom as a regular civilian again. At the end of her rope the bishop presiding over this order intervenes and effectively both punishes Christine and sends Suzanne to another convent where she may live out the remaining period of her time in the church in relative peace.

Here is where things in The Nun take a much needed, lighter tone even while defying the graver topic of clerical cruelty it seems to be denouncing. Superieure Saint-Eutrope (Isabelle Huppert) is good to her--maybe too good. It becomes clear very quickly that she's head over heels in love with Suzanne, who doesn't return the sentiment and decides to take matters into her own hands.

The Nun is a very good movie overall. It's very French (if one can call it that) in that while dramatic and tense for two thirds of its narrative it makes a hard left turn into bawdier territory which may seems to belong to a lighter farce. The sole presence alone of Huppert suggests that there will be some incursion into hysteria and it delivers. A conversation with Nicloux and the audience after the movie was over suggests that he aimed to portray the excesses of the Church at the time -- in both elements of the cruelty of its members towards those deemed impossible to save and women trapped under the veil living a lie. Because the novel was unfinished, Nicloux was able to give Suzanne a sense of empowerment: she is able to break through from her confines and into the fourth wall -- the house where her story was written.

Visually, The Nun is gorgeous and looks a product of its time -- bright whites infusing confrontation sequences with even more drama as the nuns torment Suzanne, luscious chiaroscuros for night scenes or when we see Suzanne in her cell, frantically trying to survive, counter pointed by brilliant colors that seem to burst through the camera. Pauline Etienne is fantastic as the movie's moral center, suffering nobly but not going down without a fight. Louise Bourgoin sinks her teeth without overdoing it into a role that makes the viewer hate her. And Isabelle Huppert can do whatever she wants in my book. Hopefully it will be re-released in a limited format in the States.

The Girl

I've seen so many movies that, parsing and reframing the words of the late Roger Ebert in his review of To the Wonder, it's becoming clear to me that all movies are essentially the same, mirrors of each other. It's the set-up that looks different. Watching The Girl I kept thinking that it looked like a companion piece of Chris Weitz's similarly themed A Better Life. That movie depicted the hard realities of an illegal Mexican, Carlos (Demian Bichir, Oscar-nominated in 2011 for this role) trying to make ends meet in Los Angeles to support his son, getting into deeper trouble. and ended with his deportation back to Mexico. The last scene showed Carlos about to cross the river with a group of illegals and a coyote. His last words? "Vamos a casa." ["Let's go home."]

David Riker's The Girl tackles the story from the opposite perspective: the coyote. Abbie Cornish (seen in Madonna's W. E. and Cate Shortland's debut picture Somersault) plays Ashley, a woman struggling to make ends meet, sober up, and be a good mother to her estranged child, taken away from her by CPS (Child Protective Services). Not much back-story is offered about  her -- all we know is that she's basically bankrupt, living in a trailer, and has a very volatile relationship with her son's foster mother. She knows she can't provide a decent living to her son by working at minimal wage. And here is where fate enters the picture.

Her father (Will Patton) comes into her life with huge amounts of money. On a night out she hears thumps and noises from inside his truck. It doesn't take much for her to realize how he's made his earnings. It doesn't take much, either, for her to make a crucial decision.

Of course, inexperienced in these matters, Ashley is really a wannabe coyote playing tough in a land that is known for its unforgiving harshness and random violence. When the woman she was transporting drowns and leaves behind a young girl named Rosa (Maritza Santiago Hernandez), the story turns left and now poses a new problem. With an impending date with CPS, what will Ashley do with a girl that by her own responsibility she has orphaned? A girl that keeps asking for her mother and wants to go home?

Riker places an apparently simple story in a tough spot. Making right when one has stupidly destroyed another person's life carries a heavy burden. The Girl for the most part plays its dilemma straight: Ashley drives Rosa through Mexico, her motives veering between shallow selfishness (at one point she attempts to abandon Rosa in a municipal building) and ersatz maternity. Rosa, on the other hand, moves from outright disliking Ashley (not understanding her situation) to a gradual accepting of her. If Riker had devoted more time to letting his two female leads learn from each other the ending would feel more genuine, but his movie is so short that when we do arrive there, and while it does end on a positive note, it comes a bit easy, as if it would be better to leave things as they are and  not ask any deeper questions. I will say this, though: The Girl is even so, a good movie -- better than many I have seen involving dissimilar characters -- because it feels real, straight from the headlines, and not a Hollywood tearjerker with a happy resolution. Anyway you see it, The Girl is a difficult movie, open to interpretations and much analysis, but should be viewed as a slice of life with a positive message.

Evil Dead (2013)

Of course it's going to have its haters. How dare anyone even remotely try to tamper with greatness? I tend to be a purist at heart so yes, while there are movies out there that are sacred cows, Evil Dead (1981), while a classic in its own right, doesn't quite fall under that territory. Don't get me wrong: it's frightening as it should be, its manic, frenzied, and good, but it's still in that category reserved for "cult status". And while we're splitting hairs, even mainstream classic movies like Psycho and The Exorcist got the remake treatment - both miserably so. So I guess that makes it all fair game.

So. What's to see in this Evil Dead? Nothing new, really. Okay, let me explain that: the premise is basic (and it's already been done in 2011's Cabin in the Woods, so there.). College kids go to a cabin in the woods (heh-heh) and one of them tampers with something best left untouched. Mayhem, literally, ensues.

That's it. The thing that makes this version stand out is that it's not a scene-by-scene retelling of Sam Raimi's version but a story told from a fresh angle. These aren't just kids coming to the remote cabin for shits and giggles. One of them -- Mia -- is about to kick the habit and will need intervention. She's tried before and failed, so this time, this is serious business. Of course, anyone knows that going cold turkey doesn't come with its own set of hallucinations, so when one of her pals does open the Necronomicon despite it being scribbled in harsh red ink with "DO NOT OPEN THIS BOOK" and 'LEAVE THIS BOOK ALONE", she starts seeing horrific visions and freaks the fuck out. Her friends believe she's just going through the motions of drug-remission, but little do they know until it's clear, something bigger and infinitely more horrifying is with them and looks just like Mia.

Fede Alvarez is a new director to me: his only feature being a 5 minute short called Panic Attack. His version contains a lot of panic and attacks (sometimes both at the same time), and the good thing here is he doesn't go for the cheap imitation but a steady, deadpan build-up that releases its violence not in parody but as pure carnage. Evil Dead 2013 is extremely visceral, bloody, ferocious, sadistic, and unrelenting -- a heavy metal version of the more campy original that launches a full-on assault on the senses. There were moments when I was literally squirming in my seat -- cue the scene in the trailer with Mia slicing her tongue in two on a box-cutter knife, inches away from the camera, which is us. Now that's fucking sick-scary.

Justin Utley - Stand for Something Music Video Project

I had the chance to meet Justin Utley a year ago at Stonewall while he was performing and promoting his most current endeavor, Nothing this Real. I was blown away by the intensity of his music and how he pours himself into his performances. Recently I became aware that he launched a non profit project page aimed to funding Campus Pride by raising 25,000 dollars and is requesting your help. Campus Pride is a volunteer-driven network for and by student leaders. Campus Pride envisions campuses and a society free of LGBT prejudice, bigotry and hate. If you can, please stop by his page, and note that if you help out, even if it is a small amount, is tax-deductible, contains perks, and will help a major cause.