Two From Tori

Two Amos songs to see in the New Year with, the first a great improv on a subject I guess most of us are thinking about at this time of resolutions - the need for change in our lives - the second an ode to lost loved ones, Midwinter Graces' finale. Glasses raised ...

Sherlock Holmes

Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes is bloated, tedious, unendearing. I've boycotted Ritchie's movies up to now, but, as a great lover of the Basil Rathbone Holmes films of the 1940s, I was curious to see what the director would do with the material. Well, what Ritchie and his screenwriters have done is to turn Holmes into a run-of-the-mill action extravganza, a Die Hard-y romp featuring explosions, protracted fight scenes (including a very odd bare-knuckle boxing sequence) and weak buddy-buddy quips. (It comes as no surprise to find Joel Silver credited amongst the film's producers.) The violence - and there's quite a lot of it for a 12A certificate - comes super-stylised, speeded-up and slowed-down. What Ritchie's "style" doesn't seem to encompass, unfortunately, is any charm, lightness, or wit. The world-domination plot (masterminded by Mark Strong's Lord Blackwood - the hair-piece does much of the work here) is terribly vague, there's little delight in piecing the mysteries together, and, worst of all, this Holmes and Watson (Robert Downey Jnr and Jude Law) do not prove an appealing team. Trying for eccentricity, a weary-looking Downey Jnr comes off as merely odd; Law (after his inventive, compelling performances this year on stage in Hamlet and on film in Rage) is blandness itself. The actors who don't look ill (Rachel McAdams seems particularly pallid as Irene Adler, Holmes's nemesis/paramour) look ill-at-ease, with the exception of James Fox, who brings a bit of authority and comic style to his all-too-brief appearance as Blackwood's father. There are a couple of incidental (unintentional) pleasures: I particularly enjoyed Downey Jnr's slippery diction on his English accent: he makes the line "You're in over your head, Irene" sound like "Urine over your head Irene" while "You is us" becomes "You is arse." But in the time it takes this movie to clunk to its blatantly franchise-heralding conclusion you could have watched two of the Rathbone films - and had a much better time doing so. This one's shit, Sherlock.

Dave Rawlings Machine: A Friend of a Friend

One belated addition to the Albums of the Year list: Dave Rawlings Machine’s delightful A Friend of a Friend which I just got through reviewing for PopMatters. A timeless album book-ended by two particularly wonderful new songs: “Ruby” and “Bells of Harlem”.

20 Albums of the 00s

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Concluding the List-o-mania.

Scarlet’s Walk (2002)/American Doll Posse (2007) - Tori Amos
For me, the decade’s two most immersive album experiences came courtesy (surprise!) of Tori Amos, firstly Scarlet’s Walk’s deeply textured travelogue and then ADP’s wild, playful-and-profound treatise on the value of exploring with your identity. Albums for always. (Can I get Strange Little Girls [2001] as well?)

In Rainbows (2007) - Radiohead
After several forbidding and brittle albums, it was delightful (and unexpected) to get such a welcoming, humane and - dammit! - enjoyable record from Radiohead. “Reckoner”’s “Dedicated to all human beings” sums up the spirit of the deeply sublime In Rainbows. And Thom Yorke’s solo album The Eraser (2006) was pretty good, too.

Red Dirt Girl (2000) - Emmylou Harris
On which the seraphic Harris proved herself a skilled songwriter as well as a peerless interpreter of others’ work.

An Echo of Hooves (2003) - June Tabor
Tabor’s magnum opus, perhaps: startling renditions of Child ballads delivered with consummate command and feeling. Spare and intimate musical settings, but the effect and impact of a wide-screen epic.

The Man Comes Around (2002) - Johnny Cash
For me, the American Recordings series is not just an interesting addendum to Cash’s career but its major highlight. From the robust first record to the heart-rendingly frail My Mother’s Hymn Book (2004) and A Hundred Highways (2006) Cash never sounded so moving or so true. It’s almost churlish to pick favourites out of these great records, but for choice of material The Man Comes Around (2002) just wins out for me.

Aerial (2005) - Kate Bush
So now I always hear birdsong as “a sea of honey.”

Lifeline (2004) - Iris DeMent
In terms of recorded output (though not, thankfully, live performance) Iris DeMent has practically become the Kate Bush of Country. I’d love to hear an album of new music from the creator of what I firmly believe are two of the greatest records ever made, in any genre, Infamous Angel (1992) and My Life (1994). Lifeline was DeMent’s sole offering this decade, and one that gave us only one original, self-penned song. But, still, it was an utter pleasure to experience the Gospel According to Iris.

No-one Stands Alone (2002) - Blue Murder
Songs of beauty, grace, humanity and humour delivered in gorgeous, gritty harmony by seven brilliant singers. Magic.

The Animal Years (2006) - Josh Ritter
Mark Twain, Laurel and Hardy, the Bible, Westerns and silent movies provide just some of Ritter’s lyrical inspirations on this superb record, Ritter’s best so far.

Antony and the Johnsons (2000)/I Am A Bird Now (2005) - Antony and the Johnsons
Quavering between Nina Simone and Bryan Ferry, but with its own original stories to tell, Antony’s music defies gender and genre categorisation. The Mercury-winning Bird Now received the raves but I’m equally fond of the debut album which has a playfulness and brazen theatricality that his most recent work sadly seems to have lost.

Bowery Songs (2006) - Joan Baez
From 1962’s In Concert onwards, Joan Baez has produced a string of live albums which rank among her very best work. Bowery Songs is one such, demonstrating what a vital and compelling artist Baez remains in her 60s, especially in a live setting. Starting with the a cappella benediction of “Finlandia” and ending with Steve Earle’s “Jerusalem,” the set mixes old folk (Guthrie’s “Deportees”), very old folk (“Silver Dagger”), new folk (Earle, Greg Brown) and a couple of Dylans for good measure, presenting the material as one seamless story.

Vampire Weekend (2008) - Vampire Weekend
With its cool Afro-pop rhythms, ska guitars and arch, allusive lyrics, Vampire Weekend’s debut might be the feel-good album of the decade. Substantial, too. Not long to wait now for the new one.

Funeral (2004) - Arcade Fire
Epic, yet intimate, and entirely exhilarating.

Time (The Revelator) (2001) - Gillian Welch
“You be Emmylou and I’ll be Gram…” Roots music at its most hermetic and mysterious: stark, strange, beautiful.

Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not (2006) - Arctic Monkeys
The catchy hooks were expected; the razor-sharp lyrics weren’t. Funny, swaggering, finely detailed slices of Sheffield life encompassing takeaways, boozy nights on the town, “mardy bums” and the odd bit of police brutality. As good as everyone once pretended Oasis were.

Blues and Lamentations (2006) - Kate Campbell
Campbell synthesises Southern music traditions here with effortless grace.

Caroline, Or Change (2003) - Tony Kushner [book/lyrics] and Jeanine Tesori [score]
On stage or on record, Kushner and Tesori’s rich, political people’s opera - combining jazz, blues, Motown, classical and Klezmer - proved equally powerful and compelling.

Modern Guilt (2008) - Beck
Beck released better-received, more ambitious albums this decade but none that involved or moved me more than Modern Guilt.

Some Christmas Movies

Five to watch about this time of year.

Home Alone
“This is my house - I have to defend it.” Slapstick violence, vigilantism, and family values, Hughes -style. A childhood obsession, this one. Don’t mess with the Culkin.

Gremlins
“And that’s how I found out there wasn’t a Santa Claus…”

Dans Paris
I love grumpy papa Guy Marchand dragging a Christmas tree through the Paris streets.

Joyeux Noel
Christian Carion’s sincere and touching film about the Christmas truce.

It’s A Wonderful Life
Must we? Oh, go on then.

20 Films of the 00s

There were many films I loved this decade, but, challenged to come up with 20 quickly, these are the ones that emerged.

Magnolia [dir. Paul Thomas Anderson]
Limbo [dir. John Sayles]
Topsy-Turvy [dir. Mike Leigh]
American Beauty [dir. Sam Mendes]
1999 releases strictly speaking, but since these movies didn’t reach this sceptred isle until 2000 they started the decade as far as I’m concerned. And what a start. For me, the 00s offered no better films than Paul Thomas Anderson’s thunderous yet tender emotional epic, John Sayles’s profound exploration of the concept of risk, Mike Leigh’s thrilling anatomisation of the collaborative creative process, and Sam Mendes’s soulful and subversive study of rebellion in the 'burbs. Provocative, intelligent, deeply felt movies all.

Under the Sand (Sous le Sable) [dir. Francois Ozon] (2001)
A classic of first-person cinema: Ozon’s haunting, anti-closure masterpiece of mourning and melancholia.

Talk To Her (Hable con Ella) [dir. Pedro Almodóvar] (2003)
One of Almodóvar’s finest: elegant, surprising, deeply moving, all-of-a-piece.

Uzak [dir. Nuri Bilge Ceylan] (2003)
Ceylan’s droll, sad portrait of two cousins (mis-)connecting in wintry Istanbul.

The House of Mirth (2000) [dir. Terence Davies]
Davies’s struggles with getting financing this decade were one of the sorriest indictments yet of that chimera known as the British film industry. But the two films he did manage to get made were both rewarding, in particular this masterful, subtle adaptation of Wharton.

Lost in Translation (2003) [dir. Sofia Coppola]
Pitching itself between apparent irreconcilables - humour and melancholy, connection and isolation, resignation and hope - Sofia Coppola’s lovely, atmospheric, invigorating movie is Brief Encounter for the 00s. Props, too, to the misunderstood Marie-Antoinette (2007).

Hidden (Caché) (2006) - [dir. Michael Haneke]
The best movie yet from cinema’s most rigorous analyst of what we watch, how we live, and the relation between the two.

Mad Hot Ballroom (2004) - [dir. Marilyn Agrelo]
In joyous tone and generous sprit, the perfect anti-Michael Moore documentary.

Gosford Park (2001) [dir. Robert Altman]
Altman’s final decade of film-making was an erratic one, as always, with as many lows as highs. But his sublime amalgam of country-house murder-mystery and Upstairs Downstairs social critique grows richer with every viewing.

The Village (2004) - [dir. M. Night Shyamalan]
Shyamalan’s odd, imaginative movies rubbed many people up the wrong way. Overlooking the paltry The Happening (2008), I think he’s a great artist, and The Village unfolds with the beauty, terror and dream-logic of a fairy-tale.

Dans Paris (2006)/ Les Chansons d'amour (2007) - [dir. Christophe Honoré]
Watching Honoré’s delightful movies I discovered that I preferred New Wave "homage" to the "real" thing.

The Child (L’enfant) (2005) – [dir. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardennes]
For all its associated pain, the massive humanity of the Dardennes’s cinema makes me very happy indeed.

O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) - [dir. Joel Coen]

"It didn't look like a one-horse town, but you try finding a decent hair jelly."

Dogville (2003) – [dir. Lars von Trier]
By the end of the decade, von Trier’s provocations seemed tired and tiresome. But the expert Dogville remains a great, gruelling work.

Far From Heaven (2003) – [dir. Todd Haynes]
Haynes’s ode to Sirk emerged not as a cold theoretical exercise, but rather a rapturous rediscovery of the rawness of melodrama, its depths of feeling, its social comment, and its humanity. Props to I'm Not There (2007) as well.

The Class (Entre les murs) (2008) - [dir. Laurent Cantet]
Cantet's riveting drama absorbs from first frame to last.

2009 Best Ofs [Theatre]

The Merchant of Venice (Propeller)
Where Sam Mendes’s cross-cast The Cherry Orchard/Winter’s Tale productions were solid but rather staid and unsurprising, Propeller’s artful, prison-set all-male Merchant reinvigorated the play.

All’s Well That Ends Well (NT)
Ditto for Marianne Elliot’s entrancing re-imagining of All’s Well as Tim Burton-esque Gothic fairytale.

Phedre (NT)
Not all it could have been, due to a compelling but overly contained Helen Mirren and a bombastic Stanley Townsend. But Nicholas Hytner’s elegant production had some fine, memorable moments.

Mother Courage and Her Children (NT)
Deborah Warner’s thrillingly messy production of Brecht’s classic, with a magnificent Fiona Shaw.

Allison’s House (Orange Tree)
A rare outing for, and a beautiful production of, Susan Glaspell’s neglected 1932 Pulitzer-winner.