Welcome Back, Conan

Compared to the exuberant, triumphant opening video of his first Tonight Show, in which he took the reins of a franchise with such joy that he ran cross-country rather than wait a few seconds for any other mode of transportation to arrive, the opening of Conan O'Brien's self-titled show on TBS bore the scars of the lanky ginger's previous job. This time, Conan was bitter, telling his bosses to screw themselves for ruining his dream and driving off-set, only for a Godfather parody to leave him riddled with bullets and told by stern doctors that he'd never return to network television. After working a series of odd jobs, Conan finally, with the help of guardian angel Larry King, found his way to basic cable, and all seemed right with the world. Until gangsters showed up once more with Tommy guns and tore him apart once more.


Funny as it was, the opening sketch of Conan suggested a continuing resentment for NBC, one that could dominate the focus of his new show. But, apart from a few (excellent) zingers at his old employer's expense, Conan quickly moved into his new job with ease. Whether a conscious attempt to set himself apart from his nemesis, Jay Leno, or simply an expression of gratitude for the fan support that won him his new position, Conan inverted Leno's recent penchant for having the crowd flock around him in a faux-populist move by actually interacting with the crowd of his own volition. As he took his bows before a standing ovation, Conan slipped off behind the camera to hug a woman in the front row. Later, in-between monologue jokes, he casually ducked to the side and shook a guy's hand. Rather than lavish in a sense of community, as Leno does to detrimental effect -- Patton Oswalt nailed it when he said that people creepily congregated around Jay as if he excreted a healing elixir -- Conan poked fun at these moments by playing himself up as a creepy old man playing grab-ass with a captive audience.

One could chalk the strength of his monologue up to the fact that his writers had, oh, about nine months to work on it, but even the delivery was sharp. The nervousness that tinged Conan's first Tonight Show performances, the result of a man -- even a professional -- getting his deepest wish granted on national television and being accordingly stunned, was gone, replaced by the Conan that emerged at the end of his tenure at NBC, a fiery blend of his old Late Night madness with the sophistication (or at least the steely self-confidence) of a host working at 11:30.

Conan is at his best when he's making fun of himself, and beneath the jabs at his former employer were a host of gags at his own expense. Apart from a number of monologue jokes that made fun of himself, Conan brought Andy Richter to the couch, where they broke out Conan Halloween masks that, for legal reasons, were depressingly named "Ex-Talk Show Host" masks. "It smells like tears!" quipped Andy, muffled through the rubber of the hysterically creepy costume. And if that wasn't odd enough, the host then turned to look at the background image painted behind the desk, complete with a moon Conan could move via remote control, leading to a low-fi wobble that made Andy shout "Any Mayans watching this are freaking out!" (In case it wasn't obvious, Richter was as on-his game as O'Brien.)


Compared to the moving but shaky first episode of the Tonight Show, Conan hit the ground running, displaying the best of its host. In some ways, frankly, it displayed better than Conan's previous best. As an interviewer, Conan has always been good at setting up funny and interesting guests with whom he has a prior relationship, but he has been desperately stilted with stars just there to plug material. With a taped message from Ricky Gervais, an interview with Seth Rogen and a musical performance by (and with) Jack White, Conan certainly surrounded himself with buddies, but I found myself most drawn to his chat with Glee star Lea Michele. Where I expected him to stick to the cards and ask simple questions, he suddenly got involved with the guest, engaging in as much of a chatty atmosphere as he did with Rogen -- hell, he might actually have been more on-point with Rogen with his questions concerning Green Hornet. Michele, while not a bore or a ditz, didn't bring a whole lot to the conversation at first, and I feared a dull interview, but Conan's more natural side brought out the best in her, and by the end of their five or six-minute chat, I was a fan of her.

Even the set reflected a honing of Conan's skills. Though he eventually made great use of the expansiveness of NBC's Tonight Show set, his previous digs were simply too massive, creating too wide a gulf between host and audience and leaving the vast majority of the room unused. Only when Conan started running races, practicing Hollywood stunts or bringing elephants in the place did he finally make it feel human. TBS gave him a set that resembled his large but still intimate Late Night studio, bigger than the cramped, '80s-Letterman style room he got at the start of his run but manageable. He still has plenty of room to do something big, and I hope he brings some of the more daring (if expensive) ideas from his Tonight Show to TBS. But the smaller set works to his benefit and allows him to seem more human instead of the occasional detachment that came with Conan's previous show, even when it took off in terms of quality. (Now they just need need to condense that Lopez Tonight set; does he tape in a goddamn abandoned warehouse or something? You can hear the mic echo, for God's sake.)

If there was anything I wanted to see done differently, it was the ingenious bit of Conan's "first guest," introduced to much fanfare, only for it to be the curator of a nutcracker museum who walked from stage right to stage left, pausing just long enough to hand Conan a notably stereotypical leprechaun nutcracker before exiting the building. It was pure Conan, but I couldn't help but wish he'd asked her some questions. Some of Carson's (and Letterman's) best bits came from interviews with the unconventional "normal" people in society, not celebrities. Regular people weren't so much plugging something as discussing a passion, and in all their weirdness they were endearing -- who can forget Johnny inviting a woman on who collected potato chips, only to play one of his most riotous jokes on her?

I also view the unchanged talk show format with a slight amount of hesitation. Coming off his live tour, which mixed performance art, monologue, taped segment and various forms of off-the-wall, borderline avant-garde comedy into something that befitted his absurdity. Yet the traditional talk show format is how he worked for 20 years, and just because he worked within a formula didn't mean he was stilted. Sure, his monologues work mainly because of his wacky delivery and recovery, but the two staples of talk shows -- monologues and interviews -- have been weak spots for him. Even so, he made his show(s) work, and work brilliantly. As he showed last night, he still had the touch.

We'll see what happens when the initial luster wears off, the guests aren't stacked to be friends of Conan and the writers have to come up with material daily instead of on their paid leave, yet something was different in Conan last night. While far from arrogant, he did not let the humbling power of his recent career path subdue him. He was not a man meekly inheriting a dynasty but a confident leader establishing his own, a Yu the Great for basic cable. It's easy (and sensible) to take Conan at face value when he says he chose the title because "it makes me harder to replace," but his decision also acknowledges, perhaps painfully, that talk shows no longer have a legacy beyond their host. No one watches The Late Show or The Late Late Show, they watch "Letterman" or "Craig." O'Brien admirably brought a reverence for the Tonight Show's history to his all-too-brief run, but Leno had spent nearly 20 years pretending as if no one else had ever hosted the thing. Hell, he had to: the king of late night was, is and forever shall be Johnny Carson, and Leno forced him out with weaselly business practices. As much as people, even of my generation, continue to love Johnny, it was Jay's show long enough that he became synonymous with it, and also with its slide into tame mediocrity. Now, Conan can build something from the ground up, and in a forum where the financial stakes are lower and the potential for creative freedom is higher. Some continue to mock the transition as a downgrade, and it is -- he lost the Tonight Show; everything else is a step down -- but moving to basic cable in an era when nearly everyone has regular cable and the distinction no longer matter was a masterstroke that sidestepped the hairy issues of working for FOX. I can't wait to see how Conan works with the change.

I hope that a more madcap style seeps into the show's actual format and not just in Conan's behavior, but either way, Conan's return exceeded my expectations. Once they get settled in, I imagine we'll be treated to a new set of bizarre characters, the always enjoyable moments when Conan leaves the studio and just interacts with people as kooky as him, and the legacy of a great comic will be restored. Glad you're back Conan; Neil Young sang for Conan's last Tonight Show, "Long may you run."

Plastic Bag

How I have managed to elude Ramin Bahrani's short film Plastic Bag for months baffles me. Bahrani, the greatest newcomer to American cinema, is guaranteed my money for anything he does, and Plastic Bag was conveniently available on YouTube, legally, for free. However I ended up getting distracted, I was reminded at last to finally set aside the time for the 18-minute short upon seeing that Ed Howard posted a review earlier today. Before I could read it, I had to sit down and watch Plastic Bag, and when it was over, I kicked myself even harder for waiting all these months.

Superficially an expansion of the (in)famous bag sequence of American Beauty, one of the dumbest and most vacantly symbolic moments in modern American cinema, Plastic Bag plays like what Sam Mendes and Alan Ball wished they'd said in their film. Where Ball intended the bag sequence as one of the few serious moments in a suburban satire, Bahrani understands the innate humor of following a bag around as it floats through the air, sticks in trees and rolls along a beach. Yet he also delves into the suggestive properties of such an insignificant thing in an indifferent world.

Ergo, the decision to use Werner Herzog as the voice of the bag is a stroke of genius: no other filmmaker has more consistently focused upon the imposing endlessness of the world around the speck of an ambitious protagonist than Herzog, and no one has been as darkly funny in the process. His unique cadence, in which words slur together slightly as if being rushed out of the mouth even as Herzog draws out every last syllable in sostenuto tones, is fatalistic but deadpan, creating a depressing narration but also one filled with laughs.

The bag speaks of taking its first breath when a grocery clerk pulls the flattened bag open to fill it with groceries. The woman who buys the food grabs the bag, which comes to view her as his Maker, and takes her stuff home. There, she continues to reuse the bag as a means of recycling, and the bag speaks of the pure ecstasy of carrying her lunch and other items, bordering on sexual desire when she puts ice in the bag and rests it on a sore leg. Then, she starts using the bag to hold dog food and, finally, to pick up the dog's crap before tossing it in the trash.

The landfill where a garbage truck takes the bag is endless, stretching over hills teeming with seagulls as bulldozers try in vain to compact the refuse. The bag speaks of being pecked by the monsters who take pieces of it until they realize that the bag is not food. Several types of creatures do this to the bag in its journey to return home, poking holes in the thing but never fully destroying it.

Through Bahrani's lens, the sight of a plastic bag being endlessly pecked and experiencing moments of blissful flight and excruciatingly dull stillness when the wind dies becomes a poetic view of life itself. Everything is sunny and wondrous at the onset of being, only for maturation and moving into solitary life to bring the hardship of feeling as if the world casually steals pieces of you. Worse, it has no reason to do so, no way to use those bits it strips from the flesh and soul. The bag enjoys a moment of happiness when it enters into a midair "dance" with a red bag, but in an age where half of marriages end in divorce, the wind blows the two apart. At last, our hero makes its way to the Pacific Trash Vortex to be with its kind, only to pine for its Maker until it cannot relate to the other trash. Bahrani -- and maybe even Herzog -- paints life as the combination of fleeting moments of bliss and a sense of discomfort that nags whenever the good moments pass, and they always pass so quckly. Maybe that's bleak, but the director achieves a more beautiful rumination of life by choosing exclusively neither optimism nor cynicism.


The subtlety of Bahrani's direction also allows him to deal with environmental and economic messages. He tracks the bag through the outside world through alternating shots of nature and post-industrial decay. The press material for the film places it in the "not-so distant future," and the sights of suburban rot the bag passes by speak to a dying world where the pollution of humans may be the inheritor to mankind. The only human ever shown is the woman who bought the groceries, but the effects of humanity on the world are plainly evident. The bag, itself trash that could kill one of the animals that pecks at it if something swallowed the whole bag, rolls through abandoned homes possibly foreclosed upon during the economic crisis and finds not one but two massive areas coated with non-degradable garbage. At the same time, nature surivives, and the bag's spoken views on its surroundings, which displays a peevishly human view of nature as an obstacle, are contrasted with the beauty of Bahrani's high-definition imagery, capturing blue skies and green foliage in brilliant clarity. Mankind may be circling the drain like the garbage in the trash vortex, but nature will survive, and its beauty is mesmerizing in the background.

What amused and affected me the most was the Freudian streak running through Bahrani's narrative. The first person who has any use for the bag, just as the first person to care about us, is his "mother," who creates an expectation for life that life cannot live up to. Eventually, she sends him packing to go into the world, and for all the bag's adventures, it can never stop thinking about its maker/mother, even drowning itself (literally) in its own kind to try to forget about her. In the end, it cannot, and it throws itself outside the vortex, only to get caught on a rock and be left to float for eternity to be gently nibbled at by fish. But the bag finally sobers up a bit and accepts the beauty of what's in front of it. Still, it has one complaint for the mother that abandoned it and provided the basis of a life of searching: "I wish you had created me so I could die."

In 18 minutes, Plastic Bag manages to be funny, bleak, thought-provoking, emotive and poetic. It is the fourth significant work by Ramin Bahrani, and the fourth great movie. Plastic Bag contains as many memorable images as any feature I've seen this year, from the gorgeous, lilting sky ballet between the two bags to a shot of the main bag floating through the ocean by jellyfish that do not look so different from the flimsy but endurable plastic. Bahrani's direction normally recalls the other great modern North Carolinian, David Gordon Green, only with a clearer deference to Abbas Kiarostami than Terrence Malick. Yet it is this short film that breaks him fully of even the slightest dependence on any other director. The comparisons to American Beauty are as meaningless as the scene in Mendes' movie that prompts the juxtaposition: this is art, symbolic yet emotive and expressive, stylistic but aesthetically spare. Once again, I am reminded that a short film in the hands of a master can be vastly superior to the full-length products of the less-talented.

Alien3

Though it is rightly regarded as one of the most intriguing franchises in motion picture history, the Alien saga can also be viewed as a microcosm of changing studio values in the last quarter of the 20th century (and, if you count those Alien vs. Predator films, the beginning of the new millennium). The first film, made for a slightly hefty budget for the time, cast either unknowns or character actors and used the extra money afforded to craft something artistic and visionary out of a potential blockbuster. By the time James Cameron got attached to Aliens, the studios had figured out how to pump out blockbusters to make boatloads of cash. Alien and Star Wars had been creative gambles, but Cameron's film was a tax shelter, organized to be a write-off if it failed. Cameron did not have the opportunity to make something fully into his vision -- even the dynamic theatrical cut slices out much of the humanity to maximize the thrills -- but even the trimmed version displayed a clear directorial stamp, one that became clearer when Cameron cemented himself as the go-to guy for smartly paced (if dumbly written) action.

When 20th Century Fox began pre-production on the third film in the franchise, two things affected how the movie would be made. First, the artistic and commercial success of the previous two films created an intense pressure where there had previously been none, not even for Cameron's feature. Had Aliens failed, the numbers would have been balanced on the Fox budget, and fans of the original would simply go back to that film. When Cameron made a film every bit as good in its own right, now the franchise had the potential to the second-best and most profitable sci-fi franchise at Fox, next to George Lucas' space opera. Second, commercial cinema had entered into an uneasy amalgamation of '80s greed and New Hollywood talent searching. The only catch was that Hollywood never integrated the two, snatching up the Sundance talent and, for the most part, keeping them working with limited budgets that yielded potential for high profit ratios and awards prestige, only to continue to churn out big-budget features that managed to lack both the artistry of early blockbusters and the charming excess of the best of the '80s.

When David Fincher finally came on-board to the project after several directors had dropped out, any hint that he or any other filmmaker would have the last word on Alien³ had been openly eliminated. "We set out to make a release date, not a movie," laughs production executive Jon Landau ruefully in the comprehensive documentary on the making of the film, and Fincher, then known only for some music videos and commercials, had the unenviable task of making his first feature out of a wildly successful franchise and without the luxury of a script. Alien³ was written by committee and handed to the director in piecemeal each day, and the finished product is clearly not a bet on Fincher's talent, as the first two films were the results of gambles on unknowns who became stars. Instead, it takes elements of Scott's vision and Cameron's and filters them through a hired-hand who was too talented to be a conduit for the ideas of others.

Thus, the use of evil megacorporation Weyland-Yutani becomes, for the first time, an open metaphor for the studio system bankrolling the alien that the in-film company desires so deeply. Looking at the comparison retroactively, the first film puts the suggestion of corporate greed into the film, having the studio/company entrust the crew, only to make it known near the end that they are expendable in the name of profit. The second film, reflecting Hollywood's attitude in the '80s, shows Weyland-Yutani covering its bases by infecting many people rather than leave chance to a single creature. Here, they rely on a single egg once more as Fox limits the budget and tries to prevent costs from getting remotely out of control. Fincher would have his revenge in that respect, as the constant rewrites imposed by the studio forced him to go wildly over budget.

He also displays his disdain before the film itself even begins, subverting the 20th Century Fox theme to end on a minor chord before the end, sustaining the sound until it becomes ominous and vile instead of inspiring and exciting. The opening credits then establish a more cynical mood. Using quick cuts instead of the slow pans of the first and second movie, Fincher cruelly gets through the studio's desire to kill Newt and Hicks in their cryogenic pods, ending any hope for a happy life for Ripley. Between the black title cards, we see a hatched egg, a facehugger stretching into life, a medical scan of it attached to one of the passengers before dripping acidic blood onto the floor, leading to malfunctions that force a jettison of the pods in an emergency craft that crash lands on a planet. Without any time to get our bearings, Fincher destroys everything from the previous movie, a nihilistic slam to those who now felt that Ripley's character arc in Cameron's film meant nothing.

Before one assigns the usual "nihilist" label to Fincher, though, it is important to note that even the unfinished script did away with Newt and Hicks before Fincher came aboard. Fincher's credits sequence communicates the mandate that he combine the previous two films, trying for the disturbing mood of the first in the faster, active pacing of the second. It also speaks to the disdain he picked up for the project during shooting, cynically killing off key aspects of a film he clearly loved in a way that immediately throws a wrench into the franchise. He knew Alien³ would be a disaster, and even the elements of the film that remained in his control (which is exceedingly little, even in the superior workprint cut) communicate an exasperation and hopelessness. The only time I would genuinely consider Fincher a nihilist was when he got royally screwed.

Yet that alternate cut reveals Fincher's true outlook, one of cynicism but also perseverance. Marooned on a prison colony and suffering the loss of the makeshift family she created to fill the void of losing her real family, Ripley must worry about yet another outbreak with a group of people to whom she has even less connection than previous crews. She lives with prisoners who have converted to an apocalyptic religion as tehy toil in their rotting station, long ago abandoned by the company and kept running only because the prisoners asked to remain. Even with their conversion, however, they remain self-absorbed and violent, and when Ripley finally tells them about the alien and the company's intention to take and weaponize the creature at the expense of hundreds, maybe thousands of lives, no one seems to care. But Ripley continues to fight, just as Detective Somerset, try as he might, cannot bring himself to run from horror, Jack pushes back against the monster he created and Robert Graysmith continues to hunt the Zodiac killer. No one can accuse Fincher of being cheery, but even in the darkest moment of his career, he does not fully give in to hopelessness. What makes Alien³ unique is that someone else came in later and did the job for him.

Still, there are things that the film gets right, especially in the longer, admittedly lethargic version. The planet where Ripley crash-lands is perfect for the religious zealots in the colony. It's grimy, rotting, lit in industrial yellow and always dripping. The heat coming off the dilapidated machinery can almost be felt, and the grime cakes until it's as solid as the metal it rusts. If the planet in Aliens, still in the process of terraforming, resembled an Earth at the start of Genesis, unformed by God, then the fiery, collapsing world of Alien³ resembles one nearing the end of Revelation.

Killing Newt and Hicks may reek of cynicism on Fincher and the studio's part, but the decision allows Fincher to develop the series' narrative to its next logical step, wherein the alien is no longer as key a threat to the humans as the overarching corruption of Weyland-Yutani, which sends a rescue party to get Ripley off-planet not to save her but in the hopes of, once again, collecting a specimen. After proving they held sway over the military in the previous film, they here demonstrate that every level of society must be run by the company, even prison control. Nobody has any sympathy for the company -- the thought of Weyland-Yutani succeeding in getting an alien, only for it to tear through the science division is a darkly appealing idea -- but who can afford to leave its employ?

The deaths of Newt and Hicks also feed into the most ingenious element of the film, the effect of rampant misogyny on cinema's most visible action heroine. Aliens was all about maternity, taking the androgynous character from the first and emphasizing her femininity by contrasting it with the perverse idea of pregnancy and birth offered by the aliens. Ripley found a surrogate child in Newt and a possible romance in Hicks that promised to be mutually supportive, one where Hicks would give Ripley respect instead of shouting her down like the other men. Killing them rips Ripley's second family away from her, leaving her with nothing and symbolizing how cruel the world can be to a woman.

It also plants the idea in her head that maybe she's just bad luck, something the prisoners latch onto immediately. Not only are all the prisoners men, they have double-Y chromosomes. Having sworn themselves to celibacy to prevent the usual prison rapes, this band of rapists, murderers and molesters view the presence of a woman as an evil temptation, and the confluence of reactionary religion and hyper-masculine violent offenders makes Alien³ into a study of the effects of misogyny. After Cameron lightened up on the eroticism to focus on the more nurturing side of the gender issue running through the franchise, Fincher contacted H.R. Giger about reinjecting some blood into the series (or at least a certain body part). Sexual imagery abounds once more, from blood trickling out of Ripley's nose in menstrual fashion as men look on uncomfortably to the sensual design of the quadrupedal alien, even if designers ultimately rejected Giger's more outlandish features.

The longer cut fleshes out the ideas of perverted spirituality in a universe where one has traveled the stars and still hasn't seen God. Who knows how badly polluted and devastated Earth is in this franchise, but these colonies cannot be any sort of improvement, and it's understandable that these prisoners look to a cataclysmic event to deliver them. The spiritual leader, Dillon (Charles S. Dutton), understands that the driving motivation behind the colony's conversion is less hope for salvation than catharsis for their barely contained rage, and even the prison warden (Brian Glover) lets them maintain their reactionary views because the alternative would be riot. When the creature attacks, one prisoner, Golic (Paul McGann), is coated with another's blood, prompting a religious experience in which he views the alien as some sort of angel of death. In the theatrical version, Golic is randomly cut out of the movie: in the workprint, he actually foils Ripley and the others' efforts to trap the alien when he releases it from a hold expecting deliverance. He gets his wish.

Even in the version that displays more of what Fincher had in mind, however, Alien suffers from key flaws. The CGI is as clumsy as you'd expect from an early '90s movie, and even when the production swelled over budget, Fincher's movie never enjoyed the amount Jim Cameron required to make the computer animation in Terminator 2 so convincing. The cast here is as talented as the previous crews, but the shaving of everyone's heads makes it difficult to figure out who's on-screen. The Alien franchise impressively built its stock on not one but two separate casts of mostly unlikable people that do not make us root for clear favorites (the only exceptions being Newt and Ripley herself), but here it's next to impossible to discern which character is on-screen. Even when that's intentional, as in the bewildering climax, a chase through the labyrinthine corridors of the foundry's molding facility (complete with raucously clever use of POV Steadicams to show the alien running along the walls and ceiling), this confusion becomes irritating. Furthermore, the brief romance between Ripley and the colony's medic (Charles Dance) is unconvincing, unexplored and, frankly, too quickly inserted as Ripley contends with the death of her implicit new boyfriend, Hicks.

The biggest issue, however, is in the open struggle between what Fincher wanted to do with the material and the studio's attempt to make the sequel nothing more risky than an amalgam of what people liked about the first two films. Fincher himself seems to want to find a happy medium between atmospheric horror and a faster pace: his decision to shave Ripley's head brought the character back to her androgynous roots, while his experience making commercials and music videos made him a whiz at telling a story quickly (see how the credits sequence is a short narrative unto itself. But Fox's involvement cut out any hope he might have had to explore the area between Cameron and Scott. Renny Harlin, the first director attached to the project, left when the project came to resemble something made by Scott and Cameron and not something he might craft into his own work.

Even in the longer cut, the discrepancy between Fincher and the studio is evident. If anything, it's more obvious, because the theatrical version looks like the work of a decently talented hired hand with a bad script. The long version drags, not because it's 2.5 hours long but because one can see from scene to scene which moments were meticulously planned by Fincher and which were just handed down to him one day and forced to shoot. I was more fascinated by the epic Charles de Lauzirika documentary for this film than any of the others he made for the saga (and, at times, Alien³ itself), precisely because we see the devolution of the studio's idealism. Original planning of the film shows writers and executives hunting for the next big thing as the first two films had done, taking two directors who had just begun to raise a profile and shooting them into the stratosphere. Then, the script issues begin and the studio starts moving to cut possible losses, hobbling their potential wunderkind at every turn. In interviews conducted on-set and retroactively for the 2003 DVD release, the cast sings Fincher's praises to the heavens, all of them marveling that a first-time director could be so intuitive not only with the action and visuals but the characters and the ways that actors discover how the people they play live and function. They would gladly have given them their full confidence but, as ever, those with the least creativity had the last say.

Looking back today, Alien³ can be seen as an intriguing mess, an underrated attempt to get the franchise back to its erotic horror roots that is improved more by its alternate cut than even Aliens (at least that film was good in its theatrical version). One cannot help but wonder what might have happened had Fincher made Se7en first and proved his mettle, whether that would have secured him more freedom from the studio*. Sigourney Weaver purportedly refused to do the movie if executives rewrote a draft that had Ripley die at the end, but by the time we reach the film's conclusion, Ripley's self-sacrifice, a final act of defiance to the company, seems mostly a cathartic release for Fincher, who would eventually prove trusting executives correct when he proved a more visionary stylist than either the inconsistent Scott or the more pedestrian Cameron. I enjoyed the Assembly Cut of the film, having detested the theatrical version, and its post-industrial decay managed to take what would have otherwise been a rehash of the Aliens sets and made something original. No one can deny that the series took a sudden, drastic step downward, but those paying attention will also find it impossible to overlook how much of Fincher's innate ability was on display, even if the powers that be buried it at every juncture.



*I also wonder what might have come from sticking to Vincent Ward's original concept, in which the story took place on an ironically Luddite space station inhabited by a monastic order that would have taken the religious angle of the film to a whole new level. Storyboards depict a fascinating man-made planet segmented by climates and differing sects of monks, and the narrative was to be backed up with Bosch-like visuals in a Gothic throwback in space. At the same time, I sympathize with those who kept asking why the ship interior was to be all wood and the logistics not only of the ship within the film (one cannot create atmosphere without a much more massive size than a man-made orb) but also of designing the thing in a studio lot. Still, watching David Fincher get his start with a Boschian nightmare in space would be something, that's for sure.

Up: Modal Verb for Suggestion - Could

This is probably the best animated movie I have ever seen. The story is great for both children and adults. The graphics are perfect and it has some touching moments that will make any sensitive viewer cry. Other moments are so funny that you will never forget them. I used two scenes for this blog. This first one is to have students practice modals for suggestions - could - in a contextualized manner.

A. Work in small groups. make a list of 5 things a young teen can do to help the elderly. Make sure you use the modal verb for suggestion - could - to express your ideas.

1 ...............................................

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B. Now watch the segment and write down 3 suggestions the boy gives to help the old man in the scene.

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C. Work in small groups again. Make a list of 3 things people could do in the following situations.



I. To protect the environment.


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II. To help needy people at Christmas time.


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III. To become more popular at school.


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WORKSHEET

Wild Grass

As silly as it is to look for trends in the cinema, sometimes they're just so esoteric that they're too fun not to share. If 2010 has a thread I never expected to see, it's the emergence of a few off-the-wall, brilliant romantic comedies. Rom-coms have become a one-stop shop for the worst of commercial cinema lately, removing the charm and wit that once characterized the genre as one of the most rewarding of mainstream types and turning it into a juggernaut of weak titillation, barren emotion and the most reductive stereotypes in film.

Wild Grass, which premiered to great ballyhoo at last year's Cannes Festival, finally got a U.S. limited release in July of this year before quietly coming to DVD last Tuesday stands with Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy as a romantic comedy that returns to the roots of the genre as a screwball outpouring of the silliest, most ebullient joy the early talkies had to offer. And like Certified Copy, Wild Grass is informed by cinema. Helmed by the 87-year-old Alain Resnais, the film is also but the latest evidence that the cheekiest, freshest and most giddily cinematic films made this year have almost exclusively been made by those above the age of 65 (see also: Kiarostami, Polanski, Scorsese).

The film opens with a zoom-in on an old castle rook overgrown with vegetation before cutting to a piece of cracked asphalt with grass starting to creep through the break. The shot becomes something of a leitmotif throughout the film, with the grass growing ever longer as the narrative progresses. The initial edits are light and springy, with the camera placed low on the vertical axis as it moves through shots until Resnais comes to crowded streets. Rather than the usual shots of endless bored faces, Resnais photographs their feet trotting along en masse. In a move that would have Quentin Tarantino panting in jealousy, Resnais follows a single pair of feet until they reach, naturally, a shoe boutique where an attendant tries out each pump as the camera pulls back enough not to reveal this mystery woman's face. Even when Resnais freezes everything and tracks around her, the actress slowly pivots with the camera, leaving us only with the sight of her frazzled ball of red hair.

That sense of ingenuity powers the film far more than its plot, which could be basically described as follows: on her way out of the store, the woman, Marguerite (Sabine Azéma), a dentist, gets robbed by a thief who skates by and takes her purse. Later that day, George Palat (André Dussollier), a man in his 50s, stumbles across her emptied wallet in the shopping center's parking garage and develops a crush on her ID photo. He proceeds to stalk her until the police get involved, at which point he stops, only for Marguerite to suddenly display a curious interest in Georges.

There it is in essence, but what makes Wild Grass so charming and unexpected is the spin Resnais puts on the material. I am by no means an expert on the director, having seen only Hiroshima Mon Amour, Night and Fog and Last Year at Marienbad, but even those films give an adequate taste of Resnais' style. In Wild Grass, the director displays more visual wit than someone a third his age: as Georges drives his car, tiny thought bubbles appear that show him rehearsing and fantasizing scenarios, turning the casual handover of someone's lost property into the breakthrough into romance, rehearsing his phone call to her in his head as if a teenage boy practicing asking someone to the prom. When he drops the wallet off at a police station, he ends up debating Marguerite's attractiveness with the officer who takes his info (Mathieu Amalric!). The officer scoffs at her ID photo, but Georges pulls out Marguerite's aviation license with a more flattering photo and the cop seems to consider it as if the two were frat buddies debating the hotness of some chick.

Eventually, Georges' behavior grows more erratic. Seemingly content with his home life (and his younger, doting wife), the man cannot keep his thoughts from Marguerite. His inner monologues betray a disturbing propensity for violence with the vague hint that he's done something in the past. When two young women pass him in the parking garage at the start, he jumps to thoughts of strangling them. At the police station, he worries officers will recognize him.

Resnais' camera dances around the action, moving in leaps, swirls, smooth tracking shots and zooms. Occasionally, the direction becomes more frantic, using handheld shots of Georges' family life to show how he feels uncomfortable in what seems the perfect life. When the police come to question him about stalking Marguerite, each question the cops ask, however innocuous, is delivered through quick-zooms on the officers. Resnais then moves to a POV shot looking down as Georges leaps from his chair and shouts at the officer, then he cuts back to show Georges standing at the end of the room. It's not altogether clear if anyone's actually in the room with him at that point, though the sheer distance he got by leaping from his chair is comic in its own right.

Georges' slashing of Marguerite's tires when she does not respond to his letters or phone calls is a twisted act that speaks to inner demons, but Resnais frames that outburst, and all others, as a battle between id and superego without delineation. One can easily differentiate between sanity and madness in something like Fight Club once you learn the steps, but Wild Grass stays elusive. You can never be sure what's motivating Georges from one moment to the next; hell, you can't even be sure whether what we're seeing on the screen is even happening. Georges, not only mourning his father's passing but subconsciously focusing on his own mortality, appears to be suffering from mild memory loss, the kind that doesn't necessarily suggest anything wrong but signals at the very least the transition into old age. Faced with a life that's a bit too calm, he fills the gaps with fanciful ideas of a dangerous past.

Georges finally agrees to back down and settle back with his family, only for Marguerite to start chasing him. If Georges began to fantasize as a way to stave of thoughts of old age and wasted life, Marguerite has reveries simply to escape the doldrums of the present. At work, she's so distracted that she heedlessly causes pain to her patients, and she looks to her refurbished Spitfire with almost fetishistic admiration, even resting her head on its fuselage as if cuddling up with a lover. When her stalker finally backs down, some part of her misses the excitement. She even begins to meet in person with Georges, further confusing an already addled man. Her friend and business partner, Josépha (Emmanuelle Devos), confronts the man at one point, but it is Marguerite who looks hurt by the demand to be left alone. And as Georges came to her apartment, so too does Marguerite come to his home and interact with his family. She even has Josépha seduce Georges while she speaks with the wife, only for Georges to return and try and cast her out. He is unsuccessful.

"Everything is excusable," Georges says in one of his early reveries before amending himself. "Not everything, not bad taste." Wild Grass exists in its own world where the most gaudy and self-apparent camera movements create the story rather than hang off a narrative as adornment. The camera turns a pointless rom-com into an open-ended feature that blurs genre lines. Accompanied by the riotously ominous music by Mark Snow (of X-Files fame), Resnais' camera adds the suspense of a paranoid thriller, and no joke in the film is as funny as the constant deflation of this false unease. At the break between Georges pursuing Marguerite and her chasing him, Georges goes to a midnight showing the old war film The Bridges of Toko-Ri, and the split in the film is offset by the epic 20th Century Fox theme. Resnais uses it again for a false ending, already subverting the usage of the theme as something that announces the start of a film in order to end one, then throwing all that away and moving into the real ending, which is even more baffling.

Wild Grass may be nothing more than an 87-year-old's attempt to prove he's still got some charm. But he succeeds brilliantly, so who am I to knock the film? This is not shaping up to be a year in which cinema uncovers the truths of where we are as a society. Then again, in so political a year as this, it's nice to be spared, for the most part, the usual preaching. That 2010 is instead destined to be a year in which some of the more intriguing stylistic exercises in some time have been released domestically offers some measurable comfort in the face of overwhelming mediocrity offered up at the multiplex. With its screwball wit and its artistic sophistication, Wild Grass is as fundamentally dispensable yet incessantly fun as all the action blockbusters this year failed to be.

Seven Samurai

When I graduated high school, I naturally received congratulatory checks from friends and family, Baby's First Nest Egg to ease the transition into the adult world (or, to speak more accurately of college, the transition into the transition into the adult world). I saved most of it but took a small amount for a minor spree to celebrate graduating with honors. One of the things I bought was Criterion's re-issue of its Seven Samurai package. To this day, I'm unsure why I spent the money; it was expensive, and I knew not a damn thing about the film. But I wanted to watch the only film then in the top 10 of IMDB's voter poll* that I had not seen. Maybe it was just fate, some inexorable pull that lured me away from the modern, cookie-cutter blockbusters into the grandfather of the action extravaganza. More than any other movie, Seven Samurai is the reason my small but greatly humbling audience is reading this blog right now.


What stood out for me the first time I saw Seven Samurai and continues to stand out today is its subversive element. Made only a decade after the conclusion of World War II, a time when the government coerced filmmakers into making propaganda pictures, many of them jidai-geki movies, Kurosawa Akira's epic slashes the ideal image of the samurai to tatters. The samurai here, collected by poor farmers to defend their village from bandits, fight not for honor nor rank but a bowl of rice a day. That is all the farmers can afford, which is less surprising than the fact that the samurai, even if they won't say it aloud, can expect no better. For a nation told to see itself in the noble tradition of the samurai, Kurosawa offers a cynical bit of reassurance after their grand defeat in the war: "Don't feel so bad, guys," he seems to be saying. "We actually have a long tradition of being downtrodden and defeated."

Kurosawa, who embraced the West as much as Ozu feared its cultural implications, forges Seven Samurai into something of a postwar propaganda piece not on behalf of the occupying American forces but as a means to inspire change in those who felt their entire way of life had been upended. The villagers who face the wrath of marauding bandits come every harvest splinter to protect their own farms, only to be forced into subservience. If they unite, however, they can repel the force. Strange, then, that the most influential of Kurosawa's pictures upon Western filmmaking, and the one most inspired by the Hollywood epic, should be perhaps his most Japanese, both in terms of historical accuracy and its open call for the downtrodden Japanese to set aside their self-pity and stand up for themselves as one people. Patriotism does not necessarily equal nationalism, and just because Japan could not, would not ever attempt to be an imperial power again didn't mean it couldn't at least be its own state.

Of course, this is extrapolation that becomes more plausible with each viewing, and may well be interesting more to myself than others. What is universally appealing about the film is its nearly perfect sense of pacing and editing. Almost exactly one hour and 13 minutes pass from the start of the film to the moment where the belligerent wannabe samurai, Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune) enters the central village just behind the real ronin and sounds the alarm, panicking the farmers who treated the arrival of the samurai with fear and disdain, only to run for their help at the false sign of danger. It is that moment that marks the true end of the first act, as it earns Kikuchiyo his place in the fold and completes the titular seven. That first act consists of nothing but character introductions, backstory and setup, yet the hour and change feels no longer than 30 minutes. The next hour, preparation for the upcoming battle, passes as swiftly. And when hell erupts in a rainstorm with gale winds, hell, you stop looking at the clock altogether.

Yet it is precisely the amount of detail that Kurosawa inserts into the frame and the narrative that moves the film so fluidly. Kurosawa neither burdens us with such plot that we lose interest, but he also inserts enough to give the audience, even the characters, an emotional stake in the proceedings. To save time, the director avoids redundancy in the dialogue where his ever-immaculate imagery tells the story, relying on Japanese knowledge of tradition to advance the whole of the first act, knowing damn well his film would play in art houses around the word. The peasants head to a local village to find samurai to recruit, but they have no luck initially. Then, they spot a crowd gathering with hushed awe around an aged ronin, Kambei (Takashi Shimura), who cuts off his topknot and shaves his head to pose as a monk in order to save an abducted child. To lose one's topknot was a grave dishonor, inferring punishment and humiliation. This samurai cuts his hair in plain view of the villagers, who stare at him as if he were possessed. Who could do such a thing? Even for Western audiences utterly unaware of the significance of Kambei's actions, the mise-en-scène and angling of the actors' faces communicates their awe until it becomes ours. To have a character speak of the moment would kill its power, halt the film, but as it is this extraneous bit of information involves the audience more deeply even as it displays several layers of Kambei's personality without him speaking a single word. We see his capacity and cunning as a strategist, as well as a dismissive sense of the honor codes that bind samurai who can no longer even feed themselves. The peasants follow him reverently after the incident to recruit him, but two other samurai tag along as well, and Kambei tries to send them away because he can not even afford to care for himself, much less take an apprentice.

Kambei cannot keep them at bay, however. Kikuchiyo hangs around like an unpopular kid circling the cool table, while young, inexperienced Katsushiro is so reverent there's no hope of getting rid of him. Kambei finds four more warriors for the villagers, silently testing their abilities by having Katsushiro lunge at them unexpectedly. All true samurai will be prepared and move to parry the blow. The way each ronin responds says something about them: the first warrior enters, successfully blocks, but leaves in a combination of personal offense and unwillingness to help farmers. Another, Gorobei, realizes the game simply by looking at the shadow the young samurai casts before he enters. Later, Kambei makes him second-in-command. (Of course, when Kikuchiyo lumbers in to join, he gets smacked square on the head with a log as the others sob with laughter.)

At last assembled, the samurai arrive at the hamlet they are to protect, only to be met with aforementioned disdain and fear. The only samurai farmers have ever dealt with have been as rapacious and thieving as the bandits who ransack them each season -- and at least the bandits work out an arrangement rather than simply tearing the place apart. For their part, the samurai are furious when they discover old battle gear and swords taken from ronin the farmers killed. And just as Kikuchiyo dissolved the farmers' tension upon the samurais' arrival, so too does he cow the pride of the ronin. "Who turned them into such monsters?" he screams. "You did. In war, you burn their village, trample their fields, steal their food, work them like slaves, rape their women and kill any who resist. What do you expect them to do, anyway?"

This interaction becomes the dominant focus of the film, and what I notice more and more with each viewing is how much more invested I become in the characters and the implications of their dynamics than I am by the masterful action. As I have become more acquainted not only with Kurosawa's canon but the works of the other two titans of Japanese cinema, Ozu Yasujiro and Mizoguchi Kenji, I must admit that the director who introduced me into the wider world of cinema does not have the same compositional genius of the peers he greatly outlived. Yet Kurosawa is a master in his own right, and his chief ability as a filmmaker is his capacity for moving through immaculate mise-en-scène faster than anyone without losing the power of the image. That does not make him superior to his more modestly (or in Ozu's case, glacially) paced peers, of course, but in an age in which the audience is denied even a coherent progression of events in action cinema, the evocative compositions of Kurosawa's mise-en-scène are an absolute delight. It is his editing of them, however, that carries the most weight.

Kurosawa understood the power of editing in implanting emotion in an audience, and Seven Samurai is, if nothing else, a masterpiece for its editing. Every cut carries a psychic weight, more so when the action explodes at the end. Each shot holds long enough to give the audience a chance to take in the mise-en-scène, to give us something to care about so when a peasant dies or a hut gets burned, we feel it. The intelligence of the cuts compound even the longer, calmer takes. We are introduced to the master swordsman Kyuzo as spectators to a duel between him and a belligerent ronin. Kurosawa communicates Kyuzo's discipline through long takes that cut only as the agitated samurai gets restless waiting for Kyuzo to make the first move. At last, he lunges and the two connect their wooden practice swords. The one ronin declares it a draw, but Kyuzo correctly notes that his blow would have been lethal while the other fighter's would simply have been an injury. Enraged, the other challenges to a real duel, and the pacing cools further. The camera pulls back and pans between them, holding until the man at last runs at Kyuzo, who moves so fluidly you know the cantankerous ronin made a mistake he won't live to regret.

These touches are brilliant, but the most remarked-upon aspect of Kurosawa's style with the film is his transition to frame-flattening long lenses, which he would use for the rest of his career. Yet he introduces them gradually here, using depth of field in the beginning to emphasize the distance between the samurai and the peasants, and even between the unlinked samurai themselves. As the characters come to trust each other and the stakes raise, the frame tightens, bringing the tragedy closer to the audience. Kambei realizes that if the peasants are to have any shot at fending off the bandits, the outlying houses must be sacrificed to maintain a strong defense of a smaller perimeter. When the bandits set fire to those huts in a rage, Kurosawa frames the blazes in a way that stresses how far away the houses are for anyone to save them yet flattens the composition enough that the arson feels closer. We get inside the peasants watching their homes burn so close, yet so far away. That sense of tragedy pervades the film, from Kikuchiyo, the orphaned farmer-cum-samurai discovering a baby left orphaned by the bandits and seeing himself in the child to a peasant being reunited with his wife, stolen and raped by the bandits, only for the women to throw herself into a fire rather than face her shame.

The director balances this sense of horror with gallows humor. When the village elder sends the handful of peasants to find warriors to defend them, some note that all they have as payment is some rice. "Find hungry samurai," responds the old man without hesitation. The farmers face mass indifference and derision in their quest, but Kurosawa slyly inserts a Fool in the Shakespearean tradition, laughing at the farmers in their cheap living area but shaming the samurai who arrogantly turn them down, pointing out the gruel and millet the peasants eat just to be able to provide rice to the samurai. When the samurai arrive, one farmer cuts his beautiful daughter's hair to make her resemble a man, hoping to prevent a warrior from ravishing his girl. Ironically, the young samurai Katsushiro wrestles Shino to the ground and accidentally rips open her robe because he does mistake her for a man and finds her behavior suspicious. Because of the father's actions, the two young lovers meet and enter into a relationship that provides a light relief in the film's darkest moments. Even the casting suggests a humorous bent: Bokuzen Hidari, the teetotaler comedian who gained fame for his convincing drunken pantomimes, is hilarious as the constantly sobbing old man whose grief and terror is so incessant that at some point you just have to laugh, then you find you never stop laughing.

No one, however, makes as big an impression, comic or severe, as Mifune, who pours the totality of his physical expression into Kikuchiyo. I confess that, Mifune fan that I am, I find aspects of his performance in Rashomon to simply be too much, too broad and farcical for a rapist-murderer. But here, he is something else entirely. The spirit of the film imbues him, uses him as its messenger: his Freudian sword and galloping trot are pure comedy, while the moment of anguish he has over an abandoned baby who's parents just died captures the pain and despair that links these characters. Mifune's tics could make Woody Allen look centered and calm: he scratches restlessly at his beard, randomly rears back and laughs in a booming, fake tone and does not run so much as bound like a bipedal antelope. But his drunken caterwauling has an innate charm, and as much as he might be the clown of the group, it is precisely his goofiness that softens the samurai.

His clothes are always ragged, not frayed and torn but merely left open in animalistic threat. But it also links him to the farmers, who can barely afford the clothes they themselves probably made. When the bandits finally attack, they burn the outlying homes beyond the defensive perimeter. Kikuchiyo finds an abandoned baby by the site, and suddenly sees his own life in this new orphan. "This baby is me!" That barely concealed pain explains Kikuchiyo's erratic behavior and his ability to unify the samurai and the farmers, but Mifune plays that pathos less as psychological backstory than its own competing force for Kikuchiyo's behavior. Mifune excelled at playing characters with extreme confidence (whether they deserved to display it or not), but when a close-up catches his eyes, Mifune communicates a deep insecurity and a desire to please. He laughs and boasts constantly, but when the others have even a light chuckle at his expense, he looks devastated. The tough front dissolves, as does the comic inversion of that front. All we see is the man, a man who runs headlong into any situation to try to outpace his own insecurity. Small wonder, then, that he dies with his bare ass in the air.

Seven Samurai is, without a doubt, a Western, backed up by an epic score filled with pounding drums and brass that makes every shot bombastic. But it also contains some of Kurosawa's more trenchant views of society, as piercing as his more modern films. The use of the musket as a device in the film has a slight anti-Western/technological bent, but Kurosawa goes to great pains to dispel any sense of honor in classical fighting: the peasants, the overwhelming numbers of the army in feudal society (modern society, too, if you check the link between poverty and enlistment), fight savagely with spears, unstoppable monsters being directed by social superiors. But even these noble warriors do not seem so superior to send these people to their deaths: Kambei projects an aura of authority and wisdom, but the sighs in Shimura's line deliveries belie an unspoken pain and defeat. Unlike a typical Western, Kurosawa doesn't eulogize the past, instead using it to show how far we've collectively failed to come since then.

When I finished watching Seven Samurai for the first time, I felt drained. Three and a half hours had passed quickly, too quickly, for me to account for all that had happened, and the ending drained me. It still does, a comedown that's too sobering to bring tears. Some might accuse Kurosawa of having his cake and eating it too by devoting most of the last hour to all out war just to get to a dénouement that denounces meaningless fighting. Yet it's the sort of wisdom that comes from those who've been to the other side and returned. And in the aftermath of World War II, who in the world, especially in Japan, didn't have firsthand experience of what war could do?

The end equalizes the peasants and samurai in death, the flattened image crushing the lower placed peasant mounds just in front of the bigger tributes at the top of the hill. As the three surviving samurai stand before it, Katsushiro slinking away from Kambei and Shichiroji to be with Shino, the old friends find themselves contemplating the sight before them. "Again we are defeated," Kambei sighs, to the confusion of his old lieutenant. Looking out at the farmers merrily planting their rice crop that they will finally enjoy themselves, Kambei sadly notes, "The farmers have won, not us." Kambei is left back where he was, a respected general without a home, even if he makes one with the villagers. A lord goes to war to protect his land, or to expand it. A peasant fights to keep what meager scrap they have. But a samurai? A samurai just fights until he dies, and whether he's serving as a vassal or as the savior of farmers, he's left alone once more when the fighting is done. From that perspective, the end of every battle is a loss, regardless of who is declared the winner.



*I WAS YOUNG, OKAY?!

Pavement — Slanted and Enchanted

No songwriter better exemplifies that old maxim our mothers used to tell us, "It's not what you said but how you said it" like Stephen Malkmus of Pavement. Scarcely any songs of the band's earliest (and best, though Pavement maintained such a standard of quality that the distinction is a matter only for die-hards) recordings hold up to any lyrical scrutiny, with unhelpful liner notes only offering one of countless misdirections and the obscurity of the lines themselves never letting on whether the group was sincere or taking the piss.

When processed through the band, however, these floating reveries of sub-Bowie free association become intense and universal, the soundtrack of the suburbs in a way that neither glamorizes bourgeois life nor, and this is important, condescends to the stifling ennui of middle-class conformity. Plenty of Malkmus' lyrics are hip and sardonic, but the manner in which he can cast his irony aside for a moment of sincerity without warning suggests that the real joke is acting as if he doesn't care.

After making a handful of EPs that hinted at Pavement's direction but lacked even the cohesion of their early, looser albums, Malkmus finally bolstered the spare lineup of guitarist/vocalist Scott Kannberg (a.k.a. Spiral Stairs) and 40-something drummer/producer Gary Young with bassist Mark Ibold and multi-instrumentalist Bob Nastanovich. Before either could get down to business, however, the original trio convened for their debut full-length, kissing off the old Pavement by offering the first complete taste of what they had to offer. The result is perhaps the greatest of lo-fi masterpieces, and an enduring staple of indie rock.

Slanted and Enchanted sounds like crap. Even in its remastered form, it hisses and buries the mix to the point that you wonder if the band accidentally set up in the same room as the soundboard without realizing the mics were next door. Not helping matters is the fact that Kannberg played bass lines by running a down-tuned guitar through a bass amp, or that Young was so routinely plastered during the few weeks of recording that Nastanovich had to keep time for him. Yet the grimy sonic wash somehow benefits from its grubby recording, giving the whole thing an air of authenticity most bands would kill for these days.

It is a time-consuming enterprise to act as if one doesn't care. Proper attention must be paid to the right sort of anti-fashion, the practiced glares of defiance, the careful judging of just enough success to make a living without going noticed by a major label or more than a vaguely defined "acceptable" number of fans. Even Jarvis Cocker, who deftly avoided the pissing match that was the Britpop's movement to out-working-class every other band, had too much style and cool to be totally immune to image-making. Pavement may have been the first band that genuinely didn't give a damn, or at least the first to mix that with music so compelling that no sane individual could, once hearing it, could ignore.

From the opening hum of "Summer Babe (Winter Version)," SM and co. establish the warring contradictions of the album, not so much a balance between noise rock and pop as a tug of war that never consistently cedes to any one side. Malkmus' lyricism, though nowhere near the impressionistic purity of, say, Van Morrison's, nevertheless cuts to the heart of everything while circumventing the subject entirely. One might as well count to infinity than name the songs focusing on an unattainable woman, but "Summer Babe" uses lines like "Ice baby,/I saw your girlfriend and she was/Eating her fingers like they're just another meal" to evoke deeply personal visions of that someone you had a crush on but could never approach.

The chief influence on the band, at least in these days, was The Fall, and the impact of Mark E. Smith's absurdist realism, to say nothing of the percussive, careening style of his singing and his ever-shifting lineup's playing, can be felt all over Slanted and Enchanted. The energetic "Conduit for Sale!" might as well credit Smith as a co-writer, what with its repeated yelp of "I'm trying!" over clanging guitar squeals. Yet where the early EPs show the band only occasionally moving beyond Smith's influence, Slanted and Enchanted cements Malkmus as his own writer and Kannberg as his own arranger.

Smith could never really handle sincerity, at least not in the plaintive sense, but Pavement throws a curveball when they reach "Here," a song that would qualify instantly as a power ballad were it not as angular and obscure as any of the songs on the record. But its first pair of lines are so direct that the song grips you instantly: "I was dressed for success/But success it never came." No song on the album better epitomizes the band's ability to condense an entire worldview into a few cogent lines before diverging into esoteric absurdity and surrealism that only deepens the meaning. So many affecting songs rely on targeting a specific feeling and addressing it vaguely enough to be universally appealing while inserting a few phrases focused enough to give the audience an easy feeling of "Hey, this guy's on my wavelength!" Malkmus gives an audience on the barest of threads to go on before moving into areas that only he can understand, and that brave willingness to expose only himself without throwing us all into the mix makes his lyrics more powerful than a number of more direct songs.

In that respect, Pavement's reception by rock critics surprises me. Without much in the way of traditional hooks (the band always pulls back just before they settle into an identifiable groove) or discernible lyrics, the group offers critics few of the traditional ledges to latch onto for an analysis. Yet the rock press fell over themselves to praise the album, shooting it to the top of best-of lists before Slanted and Enchanted even hit record store shelves (well, in the few places that would stock it, anyway). Ray Carney, that lover of Cassavetes and one of the more thought-provoking contrarians in film criticism, bases much of his critical approach to a typically stand-offish view of traditional criticism. He says teachers, critics and those the former instruct look for symbols and metaphors as a way of cheaply unpacking a work of art into something manageable while ignoring the nuance and tones of a film or book. "Metaphors, symbols, images are the most primitive way of making artistic meaning," he said in one interview, looking, as ever, for a fight. As much as I find Carney infuriating in his condescension and arrogance, I think his point, while not a universal truth, does apply in cases: certain bands and directors -- even, I think, great ones -- put out works that directly appeal to a broad audience because an artist lives of his or her work, and the more people who can identify with it, the more copies or tickets one sells.

Rock writers, or at least the best ones, tend to follow Carney's view of ideal criticism. Lester Bangs, Robert Christgau, Cameron Crowe, vastly different as they all are, are linked by one universal trait: they wrote according to how the music hit them. Bangs, the greatest of music critics, got at the heart of the matter: he responded to primitivism, writing exegeses on neglected garage rock and trashing any band that dared to treat rock 'n roll as anything more than an outlet for savagery. For him, rock was about feeling, not just any feeling but the primal, unevolved emotions that poke out from behind social conditioning.

Pavement, with its perfect blend of sneering indifference and freely associated personal relevance, strike a chord and steadily grow in cultural stature as Nirvana fades more with each passing year. Kurt Cobain could put misery into chunks of Pixies-esque pop that appealed to the demographic that had not yet figured out its emotions: teenagers. Malkmus, in contrast, didn't humor the young by suggesting that their feelings were true and that society really didn't understand. No, Malkmus captured the doubt of puberty and that nagging feeling of reason in every teen's mind that what you're thinking isn't necessarily how things truly are, that the anxieties and pain are real in the sense that they are felt, but also misleading in that they do not carry an understanding of the world. Ergo, Pavement is sarcastic but also lets that front drop without vanishing, mocking the SoCal lifestyle relentlessly but acknowledging the band returning to the suburbs at night for safety. By admitting this dichotomy, they avoid becoming hypocrites.

Slanted and Enchanted placed second on the Village Voice's annual Pazz & Jop list comprising the submitted lists of numerous critics, but it has yet to be certified gold. Even today, it exists more as an acid test for underground music fans than a cultural touchstone on the level of Nevermind. Pavement would clean up their sound (barely) on their next album, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, and brush with commercial success, only to react against it as if placing a hand on a hot stove and instinctively pulling back immediately to avoid serious damage. That album offers serious competition to the title of best Pavement album, though all five LPs are great, but what makes Slanted and Enchanted such an enduring landmark for those in the know is how personal the method of sharing it is. I spent quite a lot of time in high school sneering at those who enjoyed something up to the point that most of the other students caught on, only to abandon it -- bands weren't the only target; even YouTube videos suddenly lost favor in the eyes of the beholder -- but Pavement's music suggests a more emotional reason to limit an audience. Slanted and Enchanted works because nobody has yet made the mistake of assigning any central meaning that tidies up the mess of an album. Even the routine mentions of suburbia that run through every review of the band's early work -- including this one -- are less attempts to summarize the album than the placement of one of the many ideas Malkmus' lyrics swirl around provocatively. Pavement sang about disaffection with SoCal and its celebrity worship, but the music could speak to a suburbanite in any state, as well as someone living in the city. Just shy of two decades later, it has solidified its position as one of the defining works of the 1990s, and one of the few works that can proudly call itself indie. Of course, because it is true indie, it would never call attention to itself so openly.