Some Came Running

2013 In Review: Great live music

Bells≥ at the Tiger Lounge, May 4. Chris Ernst, Zach Barocas, Stephen Shodin. Photo by D. Robert Wolchek.

As a New York dweller who's often virtually consumed by the exigencies of making a living, I frequently worry that I don't partake sufficiently in the Cultural Advantages the city ostensibly has to offer. Some of this anxiety is of course offset by the fact that the aforementioned living is largely made writing about culture, and yes, I know I get to see motion pictures such as Inside Llewyn Davis way, way ahead of many of you. Still, I worry. I haven't seen the Vermeers at the Frick nor the Magrittes at MOMA and those are like my favorite artists, guys. 

In 2013 I did manage to make it out to a fair number of live music events, though,  and some of them were, in the word of I think Shelley Duvall's character in Annie Hall, "transcplendent." Here, some brief accounts of a few of them. 

William Parker's "Alphaville Suite" at Roulette, Brooklyn, February 14

Master bassist, composer and improviser Parker has been performing this unusual work since mid-decade, I think. On paper, it sounds like one of those alternative-soundtrack things that are sort of in fashion in avant-garde or cult circles, especially since the piece is performed, yes, as a version of Godard's film Alphaville is projected. Except it's not really that. Perker's work doesn't attempt a scene-by-scene correspondence, and by using not only repeated melodic leitmotifs but also songs, recitations, and improvised passages it presents a very African-American-defined commentary on the movie's themes of alientation, dehumanization, love, and poetry. In a cultural atmosphere that's so thoroughly dominated by white appropriation of African or African-American modes and works, it is entirely refreshing to see an African-American appropriation of what is at least incidentally a very Caucasian-identified piece. Also, the music itself cooks. 

Bells≥ and Pauses at Tiger Lounge, Brooklyn, May 4

The Tiger Lounge is not really a proper venue but rather a low-ceilinged rehearsal space under a bar in Williamsburg that occasionally hosts private or semi-private shows, or so I understand. In any event, it's got the potential to be a punishingly intimate place, as I learned with the top of my head nearly grazing a ceiling pipe. On this evening the knowingly naive and not-entirely-fecklessly winsome songcraft of Pauses made a provocative appetizer for the irresistable force of Bells≥, an instrumental quartet anchored and driven by monster drummer Zach Barocas who, full disclosure, is a friend. I'd like this combo quite a bit even were that not the case, given the volume at which they play; the Park Avenue Armory would be challenged to contain its wall of sound. The music is difficult to describe: imagine if Polyrock ditched its keyboard player and spent a summer dropping mushrooms and listening to AC/DC and that hits a part of it, maybe. Intricate but remarkably unfussy, swinging even, the music, played without barriers between the band and the audience, was almost literally transportive. Taking out my necessary earplugs afterwards, I thought maybe I'd been inside the Large Hadron Collider. 

Robert Fripp and the League of Crafty Guitarists, St. Mark's Church, Manhattan, May 26 

This account of the show by one of the musicians is an evocative window into an event that moved its performers and spectators equally, I reckon. 

Gary Peacock and Marilyn Crispell, Rubin Museum, Manhattan, June 14 

Christian Wallumrød Enemble, Rubin Museum, Manhattan, June 21

The Rubin Museum of Art, a beautifully laid-out and friendly haven of Himalayan and Buddhist culture, continues to sponsor an ever-intriguing series of jazz concerts, and last summer I saw two shows by artists who record for the ECM label. The recital by bassist Gary Peacock and pianist Marilyn Crispell, tied to their recent excellent release Azure, was a marvel of instrumental command, musical "telepathy" achieved through years of interplay, and concentrated meditation. The New York debut of the Christian Wallumrød Ensemble, from Norway, showcased music of a more immediately architectural structure, with the musical interlinkings performed by sometimes unusual instrumentation (toy piano, Hardanger fiddle, harmonium) giving way to improvisation that was constricted by design, but never felt restricted. 

The Feelies, Maxwells, Hoboken, New Jersey, July 6

I am sure I'll be able to see the band play at Brooklyn's Bell House soon, but I'll always miss the ritual trek to my old old stomping grounds. I wrote about the show here. 

Michael Hurley, City Winery, Manhattan, July 29

The legendary Vermont-based artist and folkie snuck into Manhattan as an opening act for Black Prairie, a Decemberists offshoot. I bought a seat at the end of the bar closest to the stage to witness the white-haired, frail-looking but strong-voiced (relatively speaking—even in his early years he was never what you'd call a belter) Hurley reel off, with a young, game, and distinctly unshowy band, a batch of his quirky but not particularly silly tunes, subjects ranging from the lusts of werewolves to the depradations of Monsanto. It was while he and bandmates were reeling, lucid but slightly indolent, through the outro of one of his classics—it might have been the tipsy "I Paint A Design"—that I felt I really finally understood the idea of "psychedelic folk." Anyway, it ruled, and I did not stay for Black Prairie, but I thank them, if indeed it was their idea for Hurley to open. 

Fred Frith, The Stone, Manhattan, Aug 28-30

I had only originally intended to catch a set or two, ended up going to five. I wrote about them here. 

Steve Gunn and band at Pioneer Works. 

Steve Gunn, 75 Dollar Bill, Bobb Trimble's Flying Spiders, Omar Souleyman, ISSUE Project Room/Pioneer Works, August 31, 2013

This show, a beautiful indoor/outdoor event in not-quite deepest Red Hook, was the opening event of a ten-year-anniversary series celebrating ISSUE, a venue and concept founded by the late Suzanne Fiol, who I had been honored to call a friend since 1985. I kind of drifted in and out of the show, getting caught up in socializing in the Pioneer Works yard, buying some pretty excellent food from a vendor whose name escapes me, so I can't speak with a great deal of authority on the music—I have almost no memory of Trimble's ensemble. I dug Gunn's spin on raga-rock, enjoyed the semi-busking stylings of 75 Dollar Bill featuring No Wave stalwart Rick Brown and guitarist Che Chen, and  boy can Syria's Omar Souleyman move a crowd. I am generally skeptical of events that provide entertainment for Hipsters And Their Children but I have to admit that the sense of community this day finally acheived was rather moving. 

John Prine, Beacon Theater, Manhattan, September 6

A pair of tickets to this was thrown into my lap by my friend and onetime director Preston Miller, and my wife and I were instantly converted from distant admirers of Prine to hardcore fans. Roseanne Cash and her husband John Levanthal opened, beautifully. I was particularly impressed by the way Prine and his bassist and guitarist marched onstage like gunslingers about to prove a point. I wish Mr. Prine a speedy recovery from his recently announced illness, not only because I hope to be able to see him play again. 

John Zorn's Masada Marathon, Skirball Center, Manhattan, September 15

Advertised as a three-and-a-half hour show, it came out to four-and-a-half, and I would not have missed a minute. About a dozen or so permutations of performers laying out a cornucopia of Zorn-composed themes, in styles ranging from klezmer to speed metal to electric Miles and beyond. Too many highlights to name, but man, what a privilege it was to see Marc Ribot just sit down and spit out the best guitar solos you've heard all year, or maybe even ever, from twenty feet away. Also a treat to watch Zorn egg on Ikue Mori and her laptop. 

Fred Frith performing Gravity, Roulette, Brooklyn, September 20

Frith is not one for the nostalgia trip so I was a little surprised that he had formed a large band to perform his 1980 dance record (I, and he, use the most expansive form of the term "dance") Gravity for selected audiences around the world. It's a testament to his modesty and generosity of spirit that he did not compel this band—made up largely of Bay Area progressive musicians including what I presume to be a substantial number of Frith's Mills College students, former and current—to slavishly recreate the record's particular drive. (Gravity, recorded with two different support bands, one per LP side, was a kind of declaration of independence for a newly envigorated Frith, who had recently departed both the band Henry Cow and his native England.) On certain songs ("A Career In Real Estate," and the encore "Killing Time," which originated with Frith's proggy power trio Massacre), the excellent drummer Jordan Glenn's disinclination to lower any kind of sonic boom was noticeable; these were not necessarily tunes that wanted the kind of breathing room a softer touch provided. But the prevailing humaneness of the bandleader meant the music got across anyway. It was a particularly poignant gig, as news of the death of Frith's former bandmate Lindsay Cooper had come down that day; Fred's voice broke as he dedicated the show to that great musician. 

Steely Dan, Beacon Theater, Manhattan, October 4

When they reformed  their group for live gigs and later recording in the late 1990s, Steely Dan founders Donald Fagen and Walter Becker had the great good fortune to be able to draw upon a generation of musicians who had grown up with, and learned to replicate, the Dan music of the 1970s. (A notable exception in the current band is bassist Freddie Washington, a near-contemporary of Fagen and Becker well-tempered in jazz and funk.) This helps make the combo one of the most reliable tickets around, provided you can afford the ticket. To see this band whip out "Aja" with a perfectly balanced mix of precision and hard-hitting abandon remains a wonder, and any night that Keith Carlock is playing drums with this particular ensemble is a night on which the Best Drummer In The World competition is stiff indeed. The increasingly voluble Becker takes droll pleasure in his self-appointed master-of-ceremonies role. I don't think I've missed them on any of their hometown Beacon stands, and I've always had a blast despite being seated close to a different variety of jerk each time. On this occasion my wife and I were obliged to get up from our on-the-aisle orchestra seats about nine times for a trio of former frat brothers going back and forth from the bar and/or the pissoir. I'm not sure if this was the same group whose head alpha proclaimed outside the venue, "No, really, 'Steely Dan' is the name of the favorite dildo of the heroine of some 19th century novel they got into in college!"

Gary Lucas, "The Edge of Heaven," BAM Fisher Theater, Brooklyn, October 5

My friend Gary Lucas recorded his visionary album The Edge of Heaven back in 2001, and because it's a compendium of music he loves from a culture and period he reveres, he revives it frequently, but these shows at BAM's recently opened quasi-cabaret represent his most elaborate recent realization of the material in the U.S. Working with his band Gods and Monsters (bassist Ernie Brooks, drummer Billy Ficca, saxaphonist and keyboardist Jason Candler) and Chinese vocalists Sally Kwok and Mo Hai Jing, Gary applies his fearsomely kmotty guitar pyrotechnics to amazing, plaintive Asian melodies; the band arrangements coax the material westward while never overwhelming it. Sublime. 

American Symphony Orchestra, Elliott Carter, Carnegie Hall, Manhattan, November 17

A bracing dose of musical polychromatics, well-chosen by Leo Botstein. Drawing from all over Carter's career, a sense of purposeful play made the program less severe than it otherwise might have been; a highlight was Anthony McGill's palpable sense of delight in handling the soloist's hurdles of Carter's Clarinet Concerto. 

15-60-75 The Numbers Band, Bowery Electric, Manhttan, December 5

"Imagine Captain Beefheart crossed with Johnny Cash and your shop teacher." This was an old hand at the Bowery Electric bar trying to explain Numbers Band founder Robert Kidney to a newbie. That's apt, but it's not the whole story, as this rare New York gig for the Ohio band proved. On the way in a proud older fellow boasted to me, "I used to see these guys when they were the house band at Kent State University," and that tells a story too. In any event, over the course of a magnificently incantory 90-minute set, singer/guitarist Kidney, his multi-instrumentalist brother Jack ("a whole band in himself," Chris Butler, once a bass player with this unit, and later, well, Chris Butler, observed to me), alto sax player and keyboardist Terry Hynde (who's just a monster on the horn), bassist Bill Watson and drummer Clint Alguire, coiled and uncoiled and lashed out like a single organism: a rattlesnake, maybe. Magnificent, haunting, uncategorizable music.   

Keith Jarrett Trio, Carnegie Hall, Manhattan, December 11

I wonder if there wasn't some selfish motivation in my decision to take my mom to this Carnegie Hall show for her 74th birthday. My mom had gotten to know Keith Jarrett a bit when she ran a video store in Washington, New Jersey in the mid-1980s. Somehow it had gotten out that I was some kind of video critic, and so it transpired that I lent Jarrett a couple of laser discs by proxy. He was particularly keen on seeing Roger Vadim's Dangerous Liaisons '60, I suppose because Art Blakey and his Jazz Messengers (here bassist Bobby Timmons, French saxist Barney Wilen, searching tenor man Clifford Jordan, and the spectacular Lee Morgan on trumpet) appeared in the film. My mom came to enjoy Keith's music, and when I heard tell of this concert at Carnegie celebrating the 30th anniversary of the stalwart "Standards" trio he leads with bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Jack De Johnette, I jumped, because I'd never seen the group live before. So I thought. My mom remembered otherwise, and cited a Carnegie Hall show I'd brought her to twenty years prior, taking her to dinner at Trattoria Dell'Arte beforehand. This can't be right, I insisted, because surely I'd remember having seen this band play, and I had no recollection of such a thing, although I DO remember taking my mom to that restaurant once. Horrors: what if I saw the trio in a blackout? It would not have necessarily been out of the question but I don't think so. In any event, we agreed to disagree and went forward, and my mom loved the show, as did I. Jarrett was in a chipper, chatty mood; his little granddaughters were seeing him play for the first time, so he opened with "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town." Ballads were of course plentiful; their "It Never Entered My Mind," based around Red Garland's treatment of the theme in the legendary 1950s Miles Davis Quintet recording of the tune, was particularly breathtaking. The group was also downright funky at time, with an aggression I rarely hear on the recordings of their concerts. An encore reckoning with "God Bless The Child" had Jarrett's playing harking back to not just the Scandanavian quartet with Jan Garbarek but the Fort Yawuh years with Dewey Redman and Charlie Haden. Peacock and De Johnette were immaculate throughout. At the microphone by the side of the stage Jarrett related something that happened before this significant show; Peacock, showing in Jarrett's estimation the effect of one espresso too many, implored his bandmates, "Let's knock 'em dead tonight." Jarrett countered that he'd be happy just to play one or two good notes. I found it almost inexpressibly moving that Peacock, now almost 80 and having come into prominence playing music (with Albert Ayler and Paul Bley among others) that in some ways constituted a direct challenge to the jazz audience of the time, is still so engaged in that precise way. In any event, his mission was accomplished that evening.  

Improvising combo Plymouth. From left, Jamie Saft, Gerard Cleaver, Chris Lightcap, Joe Morris, Mary Halvorson (seated).

One and Plymouth, Shapeshifter Lab, Brooklyn, December 13

I saw two-thirds of the RareNoise Records night at this friendly, spacious Gowanus venue. Aside from the raw vitality of the music, there was a bit of an object lesson in what a difference a drummer makes. The first group was One, a trio led by the adventurous tenor sax player Ivo Perlman. On electric bass was the guitarist Joe Morris, on drums Balázs Pándi, an avant-garde guy who has been, among other things, the live drummer for synth-noise terrors Merzbow. Where Perlman's default mode can be described as a knotty lyricism, in this ensemble he's the lead player in a power trio, and at times the music did indeed feel more like improvised rock than jazz, largely because of the way the ferocious Pándi was pushing both his fellow players. It was pretty cleansing. Following their performance was Plymouth, an ensemble I'm not sure is one-time-only or semi-permanent or what. Now the lineup here seemed like a more rock-oriented one: two guitarists, a keyboardist playing both acoustic and electronic instruments, bass and drums. The guitarists were Morris and Mary Halvorson, both superb players with distinct personalities (although Halvorson seemed a trifle intimidated by Morris, which was too bad); the keyboardist was Jamie Saft, a polymath of prodigious invention, and the bassist, Chris Lightcap, is also an eclecticist who's worked with The Swell Season and Regina Carter. But because the drummer was Gerard Cleaver, who plays jazz in a way that does not encompass rock sensibilities or rock beats—which isn't to say that he doesn't play hard, for he can play very hard indeed—the music that came out of the group, for all its psychedelic colorings, was more "Sun Ship" than "Dark Star." I had to split before the final group, the aggressively bluesy Slobber Pup, which features Saft, Morris, Pándi and bassist Tim Dahl. But I knew that they would rock. 

More "Wolf of Wall Street"

WARNING: This piece should only be read after you've seen The Wolf of Wall Street. Thanks.

Writing about the Randy Newman album Born Again in 1978, the critic Robert Christgau registered a mild but pertinent complaint: "[R]ather than making you think about homophobes and heavy-metal toughs and me-decade assholes the way he once made you think about rednecks and slave traders and high school belles, he makes you think about how he feels about them. Which just isn't as interesting."

I suppose that in certain quarters, the only thing interesting about a movie, or the launching pad for anything interesting about a conversation or consideration about a  movie, is how the moviemakers feel about their characters. Golly, the Coen brothers sure hate their characters don't they? But that David O. Russell, he LOVES his characters —characters who, like those in Wolf of Wall Street, are criminals—but they're NICE criminals, they're passionate they're in love, they're cuddly, and Jennifer Lawrence is AWESOME. Gosh, when did the critical class become so a) filled with flowery feeling and b), for lack of a better world, thick? Buñuel wouldn't do well with this crowd at all. "Hey—he's...he's...he's making FUN of us!"

OK, I'll stop. And I'm also being unfair. I'm not talking about much that's new. The specific complaints relevant to the Why-Doesn't-Martin-Scorsese-Take-Us-By-The-Hand-And-Show-Us-These-Are-Bad-People perplex goes way, way back. I can't find the actual piece on line, but well do I remember Rex Reed, back when he was more "with it," complaining of the sound-and-fury-signifying-little-or-nothing in Mean Streets. "Three hours of horrible people doing horrible things," is New York magazine film critic David Edelstein's description of Wolf; this isn't so far from Pauline Kael's disgust with 1984's The King of Comedy, her claim that "[t]he move reduces everybody to crud." I daresay Edelstein would respond "she's right!" Critics are of course entirely entitled to see things their own way and write about them thusly. Edelstein kicks off his review by saying that with this film Scorsese "continues his worship of masculine energy." But is it really worship? By the lights of Robin Wood, certain of Scorsese's works constitute the fiercest and most radical critiques of masculinity as it is formulated in the Western world. Wood himself formulated a reading of Raging Bull as a study of repressed homosexuality that the more famour David Thomson started peddling a few years back. A conventionaly worshiper of "masculine energy" might have smacked Robin Wood upside the head. Scorsese all but thanked him. 

There's this thing that I see in certain critics who don't care much for Scorsese's work. I certainly see it in David's review of Wolf, and having looked over Kael's reviews of many Scorsese movies while preparing my critical study of Robert De Niro, it's there too, with a strong class bias as well; that is, they think Scorsese is a little bit dumb. Yeah, sure, he's a "ferociously" "accomplished" filmmaker and very erudite ABOUT MOVIES and so on, but he also kind of has to be some sort of unrefined mook, doesn't he? (Scorsese's own modesty concerning his intellectual attainments in interviews no doubt also contributes to this perception.) And thus, for instance, the extended, language-and-existence-debasing scene of Belfort and his lieutenants yammering about dwarves simply cannot be an Ionescoesque tour-de-force; no, it's a pointless scene that doesn't advance the narrative. (N.b., I'm not much for points myself. Christmas Eve, three people to whom I'd recommended Inside Llewyn Davis came up to me and told me they didn't much like it, largely because they didn't see that it had much of a "point." Didn't really have a good comeback for that.) 

Two recent reviews of the film from friend-colleagues Richard Brody and Matt Zoller Seitz have addressed some of these issues quite eloquently. I think Matt really gets to the nub of a particularly uncomfortable aspect of the movie in the kicker of his review, which states: "We laugh at the movie, but guys like Belfort will never stop laughing at us." Wouldn't you rather talk about the new  Beyonce album a little more, while we can still afford a download, than think about the criminality inherent in certain aspects of income inequality? Most employed movie critics, inasmuch as they are employed, are in a sense pipes in the Mighty Wurlitzer, after all. There is a certain irony that Scorsese's particular critique of capital is such an expensive one, and don't believe for a minute that he is not unaware of it. We all, or most of us, do what we can with the resources made available to us. 

Richard Brody's close reading of the movie is also superb. (He also keys in on the movie's exhilaration factor in a way that's more sensitive and sensible than Jeffrey Wells' Dennis-Hopper-in-River's Edge riffs of approval.) His close reading of the movie's final shot is a masterpiece of both observation and critical-connectivity. He makes his case without giving anything away. 

Brody reels off a list of Scorsese's strategies that more than, um, hint at a very specific directorial perspective, including "counterfactual scenes, subjective fantasies, and swirling choreography on a grand scale." These things aren't hidden; they are right there on the screen, filling the viewer's eyes and ears. Some, though, are more conspicuous than others. For instance, during one sequence Belfort recounts both the promiscuity and technical sexual virtuosity of a female Stratton Oakmont employee in detail that can only be called "gross." He then muses that another, male, Stratton Oakmont broker married the woman "anyway;" then Belfort tells us, "Three years later he got depressed and killed himself," and there's a flash of a photograph, practically Weegee-esque in its luridness, of a blood-filled bathtub with a dead arm hanging out of it, which the camera can't cut away from fast enough, it seems. But it stays on screen long enough to elicit a gasp, to make a near-viscral impression of the world outside of Belfort's necessarily circumscribed perspective. As do the dour but nearly lyrical shots of Kyle Chandler's F.B.I. agent in exactly the sort of workaday sad-sack scenario he mock-self-effacingly outlines to Belfort in their first meeting. Only by this point of the film Chandler's character is still "free," while Belfort is going to jail. What does it all mean, indeed. 

As for the film's sexual politics, such as they are; because the themes of Scorsese's films have largely centered around masculine worlds, he's bound to come in for some critical challenges, some of which may be based on misunderstanding and some not. It's worth noting that prior to Wolf of Wall Street Scorsese was not known to use female nudity a whole hell of a lot. Nude scenes were frowned upon by his friend and mentor John Cassavetes. Scorsese himself has said that they tend to "stop a movie dead." With few exceptions (and even those exceptions weren't particularly outstanding), the women in Belfort's world were commdities, objects, and those who didn't play along with that scheme (see the stewardesses in the flight-to-Europe scene) were subject to special abuse. As rife with female nudity as Wolf is, Scorsese doesn't shoot it with anything like the sharp-focus knuckle-biting of a Michael Bay or the dreamy luxuriant arguable overappreciation of latter-day Bertolucci. And the glimpse of Donnie Azoff pulling his pud I think automatically answers the "where's the male full-frontal" question (which, yes, some have asked). 

UPDATE: "What the fuck are these people watching?" a friend asks, in an e-mail headed "Every frame is soaked in point of view." He then cites the Stratton Oakmont employee who gets her head shaved. YES. That scene (aside from harking back to Dreyer) tilts the debauch of Wolf explicitly into the realm of the grotesque—of Guignol, even—and it takes place in the first ten minutes of the movie. "What the fuck?" my friend continues (he's a little worked up, and understandably so); "Did people forget what GoodFellas felt like the first time through?"

"The Wolf of Wall Street"

 “Once, my father told me that the difference between the average Briton and the average American was that a Briton looks at a man driving a Ferrari and thinks, 'What a b*****d,' while an American thinks, 'I’ll be him one day.' This my father considered a great virtue — as do I. By the time that I was ten years old, I didn’t just think that America was the world’s great hope, I knew it.”

That's Charles C. W. Cooke, a British-born writer for National Review, in a piece for that magazine's online outlet, a piece titled "Why I Despair," which title is followed by a subhed reading "The central problem is that America, knowing Obama, gave him a second term." This is not the sole piece of writing in which Mr. Cooke trots out that cute little Ferrari story, but the story neither gains nor loses charm in different contexts. (The coy asterisks blacking out the word "bastard" are the author's own.)

Anyway, The Wolf of Wall Street—written by Terence Winter, adapted from a book by Jordan Belfort, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, and directed by Martin Scorsese, who co-produced the picture with DiCaprio—is about a guy who drives a Ferrari. The guy—whose name is, it happens, Jordan Belfort (for Belfort's book is about his own early life)—drives a Ferrari that, he emphatically points out early in the movie, is white, not red. This is important for the movie of his life to get right, he avers, because there's a reason the Ferrari he bought is white. That reason is because the Ferrari that Don Johnson drove on the television series Miami Vice was white. Not red. The movie is about why he, and maybe why you, want the Ferrari in the first place. And about how the Ferrari is gotten. 

There is a structural similarity to Scorsese's 1990 Goodfellas, but there are crucial differences too. While Goodfellas maintained a nearly breakneck pace throughout, Wolf of Wall Street has a start-stop rhythm. There are breakneck fast-forward voice-over led sequences that give way to long scenes, scenes which a lot of critics have called pointless. For instance, once finance tyro Belfort is making ridiculous money heading up his fake-respectable firm of Stratton Oakmont, the viewer learns that Belfort's father (played brilliantly by Rob Reiner) has a prodigiously bad temper, and was hired to oversee Stratton Oakmont's books. What follows is a conference room scene in which Belfort and his senior staffers are sitting around very earnestly discussing the dwarves that they are looking to hire for some in-house revelry. Because they now inhabit a world in which everything is commodified, their talk is half earnest, half "can't believe we're getting away with this shit" shitty awe, trading observations about how you should never look a dwarf in the eye and how the wee folk gossip among themselves. It's only after several minutes of this that Reiner's character bursts in, fit to pop a blood vessel over a corporate American Express bill just shy of half a million dollars. Can one genuinely not see the point of this scene, or would one just rather not? In any event, from where I sat the banter among these young capitalists was Ionesco out of early Python—and by early Python I mean Swiftian Rage Python. It's important to remember that it's at the very beginning of the movie that a character played by Matthew McConaughey explains that the entire edifice of investment banking is built on a "fugazi," or "fairy dust." Think of all the people who got incredibly angry and genuinely outraged when the current head of the Catholic Church said "How can it not be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?"

The movie's main action is bracketed by two television commercials, each telling the same lie, but at a different pitch. The first is an extravagantly mounted but irredeemably poshlustian ad for Stratton Oakmont in which a regal, well-groomed line lion strides through the firm's offices wherein many serious men and a few women make very grand decisions for your financial future. The second is a fast-paced, underlit, shot-on-video-as-in-magnetic-tape ad for Belmont's post-epiphany get-rich-quick motivational course. They're the same commercial, pushing the same dream, the dream that Jordan Belfont realized by being a criminal. 

Writing about the then-upcoming-on-Broadway musical Miss Saigon for the New York Times in 1991, the novelist Robert Stone talked about the much-tossed-about phrase "the American Dream." "For the record, the phrase 'the American dream' is attributed to a historian named James Truslow Adams, who in 1931 wrote a treatise called 'The Epic of America.' 'It is not,' Adams wrote of his American dream, 'a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of a social order in which each man and woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.' Since then the phrase has taken on an adventurous life of its own. 'We defend and we build,' said Franklin D. Roosevelt in one of his fireside chats in 1940, 'a way of life, not for ourselves alone, but for the world.' Surely the days are long gone, victory in the Gulf or no, since anyone would say such a thing publicly. The younger contemporary American audience is likely never to have heard the phrase 'the American dream' used other than ironically." Stone's a very smart man but he did not have it quite right: then and now, there was a way in which "the American Dream" came to be used absolutely unironically. 

"Stratton Oakmont is America," Belfort tells his minions in what's supposed to be his "old soldiers never die" speech. The opportunity is sitting right in front of your desk, he tells his traders; if your life's not going the way you want it, "Pick up the phone and start dialing." Look at him: he's got the trophy wife, the yacht, the Ferrari, and much, much more. Of course, Stratton Oakmont is only America so long as America and Stratton Oakmont are getting along. Not ten minutes after this scene, as he literally pisses on a subpoena, Jordan's second-in-command Donnie (Jonah Hill, also brilliant, damn him) is leading a chant of "Fuck you U.S.A." Because, you know, they're not to happy that the F.B.I. is under the impression that Stratton Oakmont has been breaking the law. 

Underneath all of the fast-paced "fun" and entertainment value of the movie that so many critics have been made ecstatic by, or made alienated by,  there lies, ever present, in the fact of the way the frames are composed, a distance. And within that distance there is a steely anger, that Swiftina rage I mentioned. The rage only explicitly shows its hand a couple of times. There's a bit in one of the narrated fast-forward interstices in which Belfort details the sexual escapades of a female employee, and recounts the fact that one of the male employess at Stratton Oakmont married her anyway; there's a couple of shots from their wedding album, and then Belfort says blithely, "Then he got depressed and killed himself," and the image that accompanies this, in its framing and grading, is distinctly unlike anything else in the film. Then there's an interlude into the world that most of us observe Belfort's world from, a few quiet, poetic (in the T.S. Eliot rather than William Wordworth sense) shots of Kyle Chandler's F.B.I. agent character on the subway. It's in these brief shots that the genuine nerve endings of the movie are located, and these shots are No Fun at all. 

We all remember the story Peter Biskind recounts in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, during which one of the executives in charge of Raging Bull's production expresses frustration at Scorsese, and at  that movie's leading man Robert De Niro,  that they are making a movie about someone this executive considered to be "a cockroach." To which Scorsese De Niro replies, quietly but very definitely, "He is not a cockroach. He is not a cockroach."

Finally, Scorsese has made a movie about a cockroach. But the cockroach is not just Jordan Belfort. 

Joan Fontaine, 1917-2013

With Louis Jourdan in Letter From An Unknown Woman, Max Ophuls, 1948. Image stolen from Gary Tooze. Sorry!

I can't even discuss Tom Laughlin. So many feelings. I'm going to go to bed before someone else dies. 

My poor friend the Self Styled Siren has good O'Toole stuff, and will likely have good Joan stuff. 

UPDATE: Dan Callahan, who is a saint and a genius, has a great piece on Fontaine at RogerEbert.com. The site, which I must say does quite a bit right, is also featuring a vintage interview its founder conducted with Peter O'Toole.  

FURTHER UPDATE: The Siren has indeed given us a wonderful Fontaine post, but you'll likely feel as bad as I do that she had to write it. 

Peter O'Toole, 1932-2013

 

"Don't go." With Paula Prentiss in What's New Pussycat?, 1965. Because somebody has to stand up for him in What's New Pussycat?.

Inside Mitch and Lillian Gorfein

WARNING: The below divulges substantial plot components of both Joel and Ethan Coen's Inside Llewyn Davis and Ernest Hemingway's "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber." You will like me better, and have a better life experience overall, if you refrain from reading this post before familiarizing yourself with these works. Thanks. 

When I was in college I spent a couple of sessions of an American Short Story course going over Hemingway's "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber." I haven't read much Hemingway criticism so I can't say for sure whether the professor was on the level or just baiting the students, but he informed us that there was or had been a good deal of controversy as to whether Francis Macomber was deliberately killed by his unhappy wife, or whether his death by gunfire at her hands, while the man was being charged by a buffalo, was accidental. The professor let us kick this around for a while, and then one particularly sharp student proclaimed, "It was an accident," and pointed to the precise sentence which proved this: "Macomber had stood solid and shot for the nose, shooting a touch high each time and hitting the heavy horns, splintering and chipping them like hitting a slate roof, and Mrs. Macomber, in the car, had shot at the buffalo with the 6.5 Mannlicher as it seemed about to gore Macomber and had hit her husband about two inches up and a little to one side of the base of his skull."

She "had shot at the buffalo." That was it. She did not believe that she had shot at the buffalo, she didn't tell herself she was shooting at the buffalo while actually aiming the gun at her husband; she shot at the buffalo, missed, and hit her husband. What this all meant was still up for grabs, but as one pieced together what it all meant, one would be prohibited from asserting that Mrs. Macomber had performed Action Y when the story precisely states that she performed Action X. 

So. Last week a friend and I were talking about Inside Llewyn Davis, and he mentioned that another friend had read something in an early review: that Mitch and Lillian Gorfein, the Upper West Side academics who sometimes provide a couch for the freewheeling folkie Llewyn to crash on, were the parents of Mike or "Mikey," Llewyn's former singing partner who, the viewer learns over the course of the film, had taken his own life some time before the movie's action begins. Enough time for Llewyn to have recorded a solo LP, and it's worth remembering that back in the early '60s it was just as likely for artists to issue records every six months as every year or two years. In fact, shorter was the norm. 

For our friend, the idea that the Gorfeins were Mike Timlin's parents was bolstered by a line of dialogue said by an upset Lillian Gorfein after she's excoriated by Llewyn for singing "Mikey's part" of a song that Llewyn is very reluctantly (or maybe not) performing for the Gorfeins and some of their dinner guests. Our friend heard Lillian say, "We let you sleep in his room." I've seen the movie three times and I never heard the line that way; I always heard it as "I don't want to be in this room." I don't usually consult scripts in matters such as these, but in this case I made an exception because I was gifted with the paperback book edition of the script. And the line as written is, yes, "I don't want to be in this room." Which Lillian then leaves, after which she makes a trauma-increasing discovery concerning the cat that Llewyn has brought to their apartment. 

So there's that line. There's also the fact that the Gorfein's don't "let" Llewyn sleep in anyone's room, or anyone's bedroom, at least. As at Jim and Jean Berkey's place, when Llewyn sleeps at the Gorfeins, he sleeps on a couch, and the couch is in a den or a study of some sort. Again, from the screenplay: "The walls in this den are decorated with masks and totems and other naive early-civilization art." In the hallway, the living room, the foyer, there are framed photos of musicians and art exhibition posters, one original piece of proto-Op-Art. The Gorfeins' milieu, and the way the couple relate to each other, strongly denote something very specific: a childless, perhaps now even sexless, married couple that enjoys the company of other academics, artists, and aesthetes. Llewyn, and Mike or "Mikey" before the movie's now, fit comfortably in their "lifestyle" as, in Mitch's words, "folk singer friends."

And yet. Yesterday on Twitter, a critic proclaimed: "Mike was a Gorfein. That's not opinion. That's plot," and later added, "Bench scene with Carey. Train platform phone call. Disruptive dinner. It's text." "It's text," what a charmingly grad-student thing to say. Except "it's" not "text." There is precisely nothing in the scenes cited that give any indication that Mike Timlin of Timlin and Davis (and for all we know, Mike Timlin could actually be his real name, just as Llewyn Davis is the real name of the character for whom the movie is titled) is the Gorfein's son. Carey Mulligan's Jean character sadly blurts "I miss Mike" during a fraught conversation with Llewyn. She does not say "How are the Gorfein's coping with his loss?" when their name comes up, or express any kind of concern for them whatsoever. In the train platform phone call—well, there are actually two, concerning the Gorfeins and the cat situation, but anyway—there's one call in which the dialogue shows that the Gorfeins took a call from Jim for Llewyn at their place. Proving nothing except that Jim knows that the Gorfeins' place is one which will take messages for them. And the disruptive dinner is what it is.

Why does this matter? Because if Mike or "Mikey" WAS the Gorfein's kid, then Llewyn's behavior toward the Gorfeins pushes his character from "wounded and prickly" to "unforgivable asshole." Well, maybe he is an unforgivable asshole, some might counter. This is, after all, a Coen brothers movie, and those Coens, hoo boy, they sure are mean, etc., etc. Granted. (I bet they're really sorry they put that ambiguous ending in No Country For Old Men now.)

Only wait: there's more! If "Mikey" was the Gorfein's kid, then the Gorfeins themselves are horrible monsters for goading Llewyn into performing for their dinner guests. If they know Llewyn at all, if they knew Mikey at all, if they were in fact grieving parents, the request would be an almost ghoulishly insensitive one. I don't believe that this emotional temperature is what the movie is going after.

But in any event, that's not the case, because, and I don't know if I can put this more strongly, THE GORFEINS ARE NOT MIKE'S PARENTS. Most of us are old enough now to know some real-life parents who have lost their children when their children were adults; some of us know parents who have lost children who have taken their own lives. These parents usually will have pictures of that child prominently available in their living spaces. It's normal. Again: the only token of Mike Timlin in the Gorfein's apartment is the Timlin and Davis album If We Had Wings.

I'll write about the meaning of "Dink's Song" in the context of Llewyn Davis' narrative when I've calmed down a bit. 

2013 in review: Q.E.D.

The ensemble of American Hustle, beloved of David O. Russell, and why not: Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper, Jeremy Renner, Christian Bale, Jennifer Lawrence. 

In an interview last winter with Mary Kaye Schilling of New York magazine,  the director Steven Soderbergh, prompted by Schilling’s remark “You’ve never been a fan of film critics,” responded, “It’s what Dave Hickey said: It’s air guitar, ultimately. Was it helpful to read Pauline Kael’s work when I was growing up? Absolutely. For a teenager who was beginning to look at movies as something other than just entertainment, her reviews were really interesting. But at a certain point, it’s not useful anymore. I stopped reading reviews of my own films after Traffic, and I find it hard to read any critics now because they are just so easily fooled. From a directorial standpoint, you can’t throw one by me. I know if you know what you’re doing, and, ‘Wow, critics’—their reading of filmmaking is very superficial.”

Because Soderbergh and his work are well-liked by most critics, this verdict did not elicit the howls of derisive outrage that might have attended the exact same words had they been delivered by Michael Bay or Tyler Perry (not that they would have been). Sure, I detected a slight wounded whiff of “Dad’s just giving us the tough love” defensiveness from some younger colleagues in conversation, but that was about it. (I have no real dog in this non-fight, as Soderbergh pretty much closed The Iron Door on me after I panned The Good German in Premiere magazine back in 2006.*)

However, as if to provide the Q.E.D. to Soderbergh’s blanket condemnation of a “superficial” reading of filmmaking (a generalization I feel Soderbergh might revise were he to read Kent Jones on Paul Thomas Anderson, or  on anything else), earlier this month the New York Film Critics’ Circle, once considered an august, deliberative, and not-really-pandering-to-mainstream-taste entity, awarded it Best Film award to American Hustle, directed by David O. Russell. American Hustle is a  film that is very engaging in parts, and full of lively performances. Also a film that is incredibly sloppy and practically incoherent and not even close, by any objective  or quasi-objective standard of directing or any other aspect of filmmaking, to being the best any-kind-of-movie released in 2013.

Some Dude on Twitter™ (not a member of the New York Film Critics’ Circle) recently opined that American Hustle was a "better Scorsese movie" than Scorsese’s own The Wolf of Wall Street. I don’t imagine this person will be the first to voice this opinion. It is an idiotic opinion, and it is based entirely on superficial readings of both films. (Because neither Hustle nor Wolf has  yet opened [oh, wait, I see Hustle opens in "exclusive" engagements today], I’m going to try to keep my descriptions as spoiler-free as I can.)

American Hustle, directed by Russell from a script by himself and Eric Singer, is a two-hour-and-change, sort-of based-on-a-true-story picture ("Some of this actually happened," reads a title card at the beginning) about a con man and his partner in love and crime who get gathered up in a venal law man’s net and are compelled to set up "stings" with the federal agent in order to escape jail time themselves. Along the way various complications, dressed up in outer-borough and Jersey accents and 1970s fashion filigree, and including criss-crossed romantic entanglements, and the emergence of a criminal fish bigger than anyone in this scheme is comfortable trying to handle, take the double-dealing into some unusual areas. But Russell, who is nothing if not exuberant in his approach, also doesn’t really know what movie he wants to make. The narration, the hard-stressed period flourishes, and the milieu suggest, yes, Scorsese's Goodfellas, but Russell never pulls off that movie’s headlong (or breakneck) narrative momentum. Indeed, one suspects that he’s a little ashamed of the fact that his script has a very distinct plot, one that’s more in the tradition of The Sting than of any ostensibly realistic film (fact-based or not). And so, he presents the actual story of  American Hustle through a series of sprawling scenes in which he lets his actors do their soulful/funny/weird things, while also giving  his ‘70s song soundtrack something like free reign. Russell seems to deeply deplore the fact that karaoke had not caught on in America in the late ‘70s, or that he wasn’t able to configure the whole film as a musical, because he does love to let his actors sing, and when he can’t have them sing, he likes to cut to shots of them copping various attitudes while a particular song plays out, in full or something like it,  over the soundtrack.  There’s one scene about two-thirds of the way through the picture that should be a crucial one, in which the loose-cannon wife of Christian Bale’s character (played by Jennifer Lawrence) first lays eyes on her romantic rival (Amy Adams), at a big party during which Bale’s con artist and Bradley Cooper’s F.B.I. guy find out their entrapment of politician Jeremy Renner is leading them to the aforementioned bigger criminal fish, and a bigger risk. There’s a lot of character and plot material at stake, but Russell seems more interested in backlit slo-mo shots of Amy Adams being all open-mouthed luscious as Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” plays really loud. And she does look luscious, and you think you’re watching a music video.

"So what?" you may ask. All those things I cite—slow motion, pop-song soundtrack, digressiveness—are hallmarks of, yes, what people associate with Martin Scorsese movies. (It's clear too that Russell has also seen Boogie Nights. And Magnolia.) Except here’s the thing. In Scorsese’s films—in  Goodfellas, and, yes, in The Wolf of Wall Street—these elements are put together with very distinct purpose, and they fuel the dynamic of the scene and what’s going on within it. (Think, in Goodfellas, of the overhead shot of Joe Pesci's Tommy hitting the floor at his “made man” ceremony, juxtaposed with De Niro smashing up the pay phone.) Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker are not dogmatic about “matching” (and as filmmakers heavily indebt to a New Wave that had a deeply ambivalent relationship to “invisible editing,” why should they be), but they’re damn serious about scene construction, and when it’s necessary, they cut in microbeats. Russell goes all over the place. As he waxes up an “everybody cons everybody” theme that isn’t really justified by the movie’s payoff, and drops empathetic notes about various of the characters’ debilitating or potentially debilitating instabilities, hints of Soderbergh’s own The Informant! emerge, but Russell isn’t nearly conceptually or technically accomplished enough to come within swinging distance of Soderbergh’s achievement. Still, the showy generosity of Russell’s vision will no doubt (if it hasn’t been already) earn praise for being “visual jazz.” Which it is not.  Believe it or not, even the free-est of free jazz, as in actual music, has its rules. What Russell’s up to in American Hustle is just plain can’t-make-up-his-mind sprawl/bloat. It’s possible that Russell's movie is sloppy for arguably the best of reasons—he loves his actors, man!—but it’s still sloppy. In a movie that didn’t selectively hit their pleasure centers so squarely, the critics who are proclaiming this the best movie of the year would be deploring its incoherence.

But isn’t hitting the pleasure center all that matters? That was pretty high on Kael’s priorities, “entertainment” value or more-than-entertainment-value or not. Again, I did not find the experience of watching American Hustle to be pleasure-free. Indeed, I’ve never heard or seen the intro to Chicago Transit Authority’s “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is” put to better use than in the Bale/Adams meet-cute scene. And Jennifer Lawrence really does do the trick, although Russell serves her ill with the movie’s second faux-karaoke scene. But while Lawrence is indeed a very good actress, the way the chattering classes fall all over her is getting kind of embarrassing; every profile of her reads like a wordy upmarket variation of a “Celebrities! They’re Just Like Us!” caption. She’s certainly a factor in the overpraising of American Hustle. But the real reason I believe Hustle is winning over so many is because it rather overtly flatters its audience. Its observations concerning corruption ultimately take a back seat to a cockeyed optimism and a consoling (conditional) tolerance of everyday venality. While the now-beloved Goodfellas, The Informant!, and The Wolf of Wall Street are all deeply pessimistic, distinctly un-ingratiating movies, American Hustle slobbers all over its viewers like an overeager puppy. (That’s something that 12 Years A Slave, reportedly the main challenger to Hustle during the NYFCC’s vote, certainly doesn’t do, either. Hmmm.) It likely sounds pat to say that the people going gaga over American Hustle have fallen for some kind of con, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.

* This is a joke. 

2013 in review: My 30 top films

  Kittie! Inside Llewyn Davis.

I decided to challenge myself this year and compile this list in order of preference. Although the further down you go, the looser the hierarchy of preference becomes, if you follow my meaning. 

As always, thank you for reading. 

1) Inside Llewyn Davis, Joel and Ethan Coen. Or, The Story of My Life,With Added Impregnation And Musical Talent. Reviewed here. More before year's end.

2) Apres Mai, Olivier Assayas. Or, The Story of My Life, With Added Radical Politics, Frenchness, House Fires. 

3) The Wolf of Wall Street, Martin Scorsese. More when the embargo lifts. One thing: it is really not a GoodFellas retread.

4) You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet, Alain Resnais. Written about here. 

5) Upstream Color, Shane Carruth. Reviewed here. I was amused by the way some of the skeptics reacted to this: "Yes, we want more radical narrative cinema, but not this." 

6) Nebraska, Alexander Payne. One line: "No one around to whip me now, I guess." I'm paraphrasing. But that's the movie. 

7) The World’s End, Edgar Wright. With Inside Llewyn Davis, the most beautifully and audaciously constructed narrative mainstream picture of the year. And ceaselessly funny. Reviewed here.

8) 12 Years A Slave, Steve McQueen. Written about here.

9) Post Tenebras Lux, Carlos Reygadas. As with Upstream Color, this got a lot of "We want more films of personal vision, but not like this." Why not? 

10) Like Someone In Love, Abbas Kiarostami. Reviewed here. 

 

11) Beyond the Hills, Christian Mingiu. Reviewed here. Sorry about the headline. 

12) Before Midnight, Richard Linklater. Reviewed here. 

13) Gravity, Alfonso Cuarón. Written about here. 

14) The Bling Ring, Sofia Coppola.

15) To The Wonder, Terrence Malick. Reviewed here. 

16) Greetings From Tim Buckley, Dan Algrant. Written about here. 

17) Spring Breakers, Harmony Korine. Reviewed here. 

18) Her, Spike Jonze. Review to come. 

19) Bastards, Claire Denis. "Why would anybody wanna listen to music that makes you hate...when you can listen to music that makes you love?" Jack Klugman as Quincey, M.E., "Next Stop Nowhere," 1982. Anyway, this is why.

20) Prince Avalanche, David Gordon Green.

 

21) Short Term 12, Destin Cretton.

22) The Grandmaster (U.S. cut), Wong Kar Wai. Reviewed here. 

23) Pain and Gain, Michael Bay. Reviewed here. 

24) Frances Ha, Noah Baumbach. Reviewed here. 

25) Pacific Rim, Guillermo Del Toro. Reviewed here. 

26) Blue Is The Warmest Color, Abdellatif Kechiche. Reviewed here. Written about before seeing, here. Lead actress's "sand" admired here. 

27) Room 237, Rodney Ascher.

28) Fruitvale Station, Ryan Coogler. Reviewed here. 

29) The Purge, James DeMonaco. That's right. Reviewed here.

30) Rush, Ron Howard. That's right again. Reviewed here. 

Some may find American Hustle conspicuous in its absence here. I am not even sure the movie honored as best of the year by the New York Film Critic's Circle would make my top 50, let alone top 40. This shall be discussed further tomorrow. 

My favorite film of 2013

...is Joel and Ethan Coen's Inside Llewyn Davis. Granted, I'm seeing Wolf of Wall Street this afternoon, but even if I love Martin Scorsese's new picture, it will probably not knock Davis out of my heart's top spot, because, well, I might as well just admit it, I feel an abiding/irritating kinship with the cranky folk singer of the Coen picture. I reviewed it for RogerEbert.com, and I'll write more about its magnificent knottiness once more potential readers have seen the movie. All I'm going to say to you is that you have to see it from the very beginning. It's not even an opening credit thing. If you're three minutes late, even, you're lost. 

But go, and see. It's awesome. My friend Michelle Dean has a nice piece at Flavorwire taking issue with the movie's naysayers and putting her finger on some of the reasons it resonates so naggingly with folks like herself and myself. 

I also reviewed The Last Days on Mars, a close-but-no-cigar sci-fi horror thingie. 

Jean-Luc Godard, 83 today

Godard in Eric Rohmer's Le Signe du Lion, 1959, when he was about 30.

"The public is neither stupid nor intelligent. No one knows what it is. Sometimes it surprises, usually it disappoints. One can't count on it. In one way this is a good thing. In any case it is changing. The old average cinema audience has become the television audience. The cinema audience has divided in two: those who go at the week-end, and those who seek film out. When producers talk to me about audiences, I tell them: 'I know what they're like because I go to all sorts of cinemas and I pay for my seat; you never go anywhere, you don't know what's happening.'"—Godard, in an interview with Cahiers du Cinema, December 1962.  

One of the things I learned during the recent Film Society of Lincoln Center Godard retrospective is that condemnations of late Godard running run across lines of "we prefer your earlier cooler films" are, while perhaps tenable on the ultimately utterly banal grounds of individual taste, built on an essential fallacy. There is no divisible Godard. The idea that you can have A bout de souffle and shrug off Le vent d'est is convenient and comfortable but ultimately impossible. If you are talking about the fashion-industry approved version of Godard you're not really talking about Godard at all, but of an aspect of Godard that's been removed from the host organism, so to speak. 

Here are a few things I've written about Godard that I don't find entirely embarrasing. 

1) An off-the-cuff NYFF-screening based consideration of Film Socialisme.

2) A review of an excellent compilation of Godard/Mieville short films.

3) An official review of the aforementioned Film Socialisme. 

4) A reconsideration of some Godard writing that I do find entirely embarassing. 

5) A look at the "War on Christmas," Godard/Chandler style.