Despicable Me: Modal Verbs - Rules with Will and May

Despicable Me is a lovely animated movie about a kind-hearted villain you end up falling in love with. This scene is marvelous and perfect to talk about rules, using will and may.

I. You will watch a scene in which a father is setting the rules with his recently adopted children. First, read the rules below and decide which ones you think are forbidden and which ones are permitted.

1.___ touch something.
2.___ touch the floor.
3. ___ touch the air.
4. ___ bother him while he is working.
5. ___ cry.
6. ___ whine.
7. ___ laugh.
8. ___ giggle.
9. ___ sneeze
10. ___burp.
11. ___ fart.
12. ___ make annoying noises.
13. ___ eat.

II. Watch the segment and check your guesses. Now write the rules, using YOU WILL (NOT) if the activity is forbidden and YOU MAY if the activity is allowed.

WORKSHEET

Answer key:

you may: 1, 2, 3, 13

you will not : the other items

Television — Marquee Moon

For those in the know, Tom Verlaine is the best alt.guitar soundsmith this side of Robert Quine, though those not in the know would be even less aware of ol' Quine. Picking up where Robert Fripp left off, Verlaine added sinewy, raw energy to Fripp's piercing laser lines. Amazingly, he took this style to CBGB in time for the punk explosion there and somehow stayed on the stage. He even fired the only punk among his group of actually competent musicians, Richard Hell. And yet, Television thrived during its brief lifespan, releasing just two albums and building a decades-long influence with only one of them.


Marquee Moon does not remotely sound like anything that came out of out CBGBs, including the work of Talking Heads. Mislabeled as proto-new-wave by those struggling to find some genre for the wild album, Marquee Moon is the greatest rock guitar record. to rest just outside the spotlight, neither obscure nor mainstream. It's too advanced and esoteric to ever fly as quickly to the lips of any sputtering wannabe axe-slinger as Are You Experienced? or Machine Head, but it's also too damn appealing and transporting to be ignored altogether.

By the time Verlaine made Marquee Moon, he ironed out all the wrinkles with Television, canning Hell (a move for the best for both of them), solidifying his interplay with rhythm guitarist Richard Lloyd and hammering out his poetry. Yes, his poetry. That Verlaine took his stage name from the French symbolist poet was the first indication he might not jel with the ethos and style of the Ramones. Verlaine didn't even mesh with Hell or Patti Smith, who both traded in a more gritty, streetwise brand of poetry. For where Smith and Hell used harsh rock as a backdrop for socially conscious and rebellious lyrics, Verlaine used lyrics to weave in and out of the music, as if instead of imagery and meaning Verlaine obsessed over meter.

From the opening strains of "See No Evil," his approach can be vividly heard. Vocals bend and scatter with guitar lines, chugga-chugga rhythms fall apart into peeled-off notes at mid-tempo, as if someone took a shredder, slowed him down, then placed him over a crunchy post-punk riff to see if anyone would notice. When everything snaps together for the chorus shout of "I see/I see no/EVAHLLLLLLLL" the effect is, if anything, more disorienting than when the band all seemed to be doing their own thing. What might have passed for a more accomplished brand of slop from a half-talented punk group suddenly reveals itself to be a carefully modulated effort by supremely gifted and practiced musicians.

Just as you get a handle on this, the band launches into "Venus," a warped ode with a call-and-response chorus that makes the shaking yelp of the previous track seem tame. Lilting guitar lines always sound as if leading to a solo until it becomes clear Verlaine has been soloing the entire time over his plaintive lyrics. When the backups shout "Huh?!" one sympathizes. "Friction" brings Lloyd into the fore with Verlaine, trading intervallic licks and crunching effects as Fred Smith's bass and Billy Ficca's drums hold down some semblance of a beat. Ficca and Smith are superb in their own right: Smith's bass so fluid he must have torn out his hair dealing with the average string smashing goon holding down the low end in other CBGB favorites. He meshes perfectly with Ficca, whose jazzy style navigates the winding turns of each song.

Lloyd and Verlaine's intertwining guitars, unified only when not in direct, thrilling conflict with each other, find their true outlet on the next song, the title track. A 10-minute behemoth that severed any ties still linking Television to its earlier, rawer roots, "Marquee Moon" is the culmination of Verlaine's approach to music, much as it much chagrin him. Savage and beautiful, contradictory yet whole, the song is a mounting climax, Lloyd and Verlaine thrusting and receding, pitting Lloyd's more chord-based improvisations rubbing against Verlaine's legato style. But to lump in this cascading, wild soloing with the dinosaur rock Television's contemporaries raged against would be inaccurate: this is a whole other style of rock, one that incorporates jazz without being fusion (which came with its own host of lumbering, masturbatory musicians). As much as Verlaine might be the mastermind, the others are not there merely to back him up, and a degree of understanding and intuition exists between them one normally expects only from a jazz combo. It makes even their most drawn-out noodling thrilling, something to be taken in for more than mere admiration of musical chops. The solos here are alive, vivacious and emotionally engaging as well as jaw-dropping in a "how the hell did they do this?" kind of way.

Anyone else would have ended the album with such a show-stopper, yet Television regroups for a whole other side of material, all of which holds its own against the preceding leviathan. "Elevation" sports such a beautiful riff I find myself almost wishing it remained a simple tune just so I could hear it more, but Verlaine and Lloyd by now are emboldened; they used the title track to prove their mettle, freeing them to explore full-time. The rest of the cuts demonstrate the same degree of exploration as seen in the side-one closer at shorter lengths, cramming jams into manageable chunks. "Guiding Light," with its lilting melody, could have worked as an off-kilter slow dance tune, but even Verlaine's softer pleads have their witticisms -- I always get a kick out of "Never the rose without the prick."

The album closes with "Torn Curtain," a song that appropriately tears down the veil. Staccato lyrics flit around clanged chords and broken choruses. Everything falls apart, then it comes together just long enough to prove to everyone that the crumbling is a planned detonation before breaking down again. Still, even the mild insecurity of this double-check cannot hinder the raw energy of the song, its broken windchime-like jangles doing as much to pave the way for atmospheric post-punk as the two Joy Division albums a few years down the pipeline.

Marquee Moon exploded among the critical community in 1977, placing third in the Pazz & Jop poll and building mountains of hype the band could never hope to match. Their live shows were clear expansions of the rapport the band shared in the studio, long songs growing into longer ones (but still coherent and focused, in the band's singularly unfocused way), and the punks who might have tolerated Television in the studio found little use in their live act. Johnny Rotten himself, a not-so-closeted art rock lover, reversed his complimentary appraisal of them after seeing Television live and understanding he could not protect his punk cred unless he threw Verlaine under a bus.

When the group returned to the studio to record the follow-up, the wonderful Adventure, the pressure had taken its toll. Though Adventure is more than a worthy successor, it received and continues to be received indifferently by many for the terrible sin of not being as revolutionary as Marquee Moon. Few albums are. Even today, the guitar work of Verlaine and Lloyd defies easy description, and Verlaine's scattershot poetry holds up a great deal better than many of the supposed rock bards. Television broke up shortly after the release of their second album, and Verlaine went on to enjoy a decently healthy solo career befitting a cult hero, but everything in those albums can be traced back to this one wild slice of art rock outside any genre. Verlaine's name has faded from the minds of many, but I can't understand it. One listen to Marquee Moon and every neophyte will come away with a new guitar god. I'll take these magnificent fractals and searching melodies over Eric Clapton's tired crap any day of the week.

Sweet Smell of Success: "Sidney, conjugate me a verb."

My review of Alexander Mackendrick's masterpiece Sweet Smell of Success is up now at Cinelogue. This was the biggest "newspaper movie" I'd yet to see, and it may well be my favorite. It's one of those films that might inspire the usual pooh-poohs of "People don't talk like that," but damn, don't you wish they did. Features career-highlight performances from both Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis, who each have enough fantastic performances to their names to make finding a best role futile. And again, THAT DIALOGUE. Ugh, it's so good I almost hate real people, myself included, for not living up to it.

Please check out my review.

Stuff I Like: Miles Davis

"I never thought that the music called 'jazz' was ever meant to reach just a small group of people, or become a museum thing locked under glass like all the other dead things that were once considered artistic." — Miles Davis

"White folks always think that you have to have a label on everything — you know what I mean?" - Miles Davis, interview with Les Tomkins, 1969



Over the course of a career that spanned nearly five decades, Miles Davis constantly stayed ahead of every label people tried to stick to him, including some he partially coined. Cool jazz, modal jazz, hard bop, fusion. Miles helped pioneer them all, mastered them and then moved on just as copycats moved in to try to figure him out. Everything about Miles screamed "genius" -- in the sideman world of jazz, he became a leader early and stayed a leader, spring-boarding from Charlie Parker's bebop quintet to make his breakthrough album, Birth of the Cool, a reversal from Parker's style despite Bird's input and the bebop chops of all involved. That was the first sign of Davis' ability to abruptly change everything, but it wouldn't be the last, not by a long shot.

Davis is often dismissed as the jazz musician rock kids listen to in order to say they listen to jazz. Musically, the connection between Davis and rock is thin (well, at least before he led the charge of moving jazz into rock, of course). I would look to John Coltrane and his sheets of sound before Miles' modal explorations when linking jazz to rock; Coltrane's spiritualism throughout the '60s even made the ties more obvious, what with the Love Generation rising around the same time. But aesthetically, oh man. There ain't never been a rock star like Miles Davis, and that was as true when he played smooth legato lines down in Birdland as it was when he took to stadiums. Davis once said he could tell if a cat could play just by how he stood; one look at Davis and you not only knew that he could play, you could surmise how he played. Cool in the classical (i.e. poised and resolute) and contemporary (i.e. one bad mutha) senses, Miles parlayed his glacial mood into the atmosphere of his music. Even when he pushed his music into fiery cataclysms of rock, funk and white-hot jazz, Miles still brought the smooth.

I will not try to write even a basic summary of Davis' progression from his days as a sideman after dropping out of Juilliard in '44 through his death in 1991 after he had crawled back from the brink and enjoyed a popular comeback almost no one expected of the habitual heroin addict. No single volume could ever capture the twists and turns of Davis' career nor the number of masterpieces he put out under ever-shifting lineups. Besides, I don't know a thing about music theory, so I would only stumble more in the futile effort to to catalog the evolutions and impacts of Davis' output.

What attracts me to Davis is that sense of growth, that incessant reaching for something more, something fresh. Born to a middle-class family in 1926, Davis fought against both racism from whites and scorn for his higher upbringing to keep African and African-American music alive. He abandoned the Western, white music preached at Juilliard to play jazz with Charlie Parker, helped bring the blues back to the medium via hard bop, and by the time he moved into jazz-rock and hard funk, he'd incorporated soul, funk, R&B and tribal rhythms into his sound. Everything Miles ever played tied into a rich musical past, but he modernized it, contextualized it around new ideas. In the process, he laid the foundations for future forms of black and urban music, from dance and dub (On the Corner) to electronic-driven hip-hop (much of his '80s material). Why, where would dear old Prince be without him?


Yet no matter how far Miles went with his sound, you can always recognize him. His chops, unreliable even during his rare moments of mental and physical health, do not lend to a consistency in sound: on some of his finest albums, Davis himself clearly falters, straining for notes and occasionally blowing out such watery tones I wondered if he just hadn't drained his spit valve in a month or so. You can hear the same soul-searching-as-tonal-straying at the nadir of his mid-'70s personal tailspin and a decade earlier with the second great quintet at the Plugged Nickel. And the powerful work with the first great quintet and resultant sextant returns later in Miles' earliest fusion recordings when the prince of darkness felt emboldened by his risky musical cartography. Through it all, however, he maintains a certain feel, a clearly defined approach that identifies the player as Miles from the first note.

The tone and the swagger might make Miles a dominating presence, but, for this writer, Davis' greatest contribution to music was his ability to find and nurture talent in others. Selecting only a handful of the musicians he launched through his work, one could still wind up with such names as John Coltrane, Chick Corea, Ron Carter, John McLaughlin and Tony Williams. He brought out the best in his bandmates, and while he unlocked their fullest potential, few reached the same level without him. The fusion musicians especially wandered without him, McLaughlin initially crafting incendiary work with the Mahavishnu Orchestra before that project set the benchmark for tedious, masturbatory excess in the genre. (Wayne Shorter and Chick Corea's projects followed similar arcs, while Herbie Hancock managed to break the mainstream by softening his style enough to work in pop.) Davis' ability to not just pick talent but give his backup musicians the space to explore made him more than a mere leader; small wonder that, by the time he released Bitches Brew, the album credited Miles with "directions in music." That's what he did, checked his inner compass and pointed his crew toward his idea of north, and along they went into the jungle. Somehow, they always made it to the other side.

After his five-year hiatus at the end of the '70s, Miles never fully recovered his embouchure nor his strength, but he still gathered significant rising talent, still pushed the boundaries where he could, still pushed himself. That restlessness is the truest sign of artistic genius. Davis himself railed against the idea of comfort and complacency in artists, treating it as the ultimate sign of surrender. Whether smoothly taking jazz forward by returning it to the pre-Bird and Diz days, incorporating the free jazz he initially disparaged into his work or finally playing over synthesizers and drum loops, Miles always worked fads and trends into his sounds, but when he played them he ensured their immortality. Since his death, Davis' legacy has only grown, partially because the half-admirable, half-cynical onslaught of box sets and archived material released but primarily because the public and critics are only now beginning to fully uncover the depth and beauty of his work. More than any artist, Davis encapsulated the technical and theoretical intricacies of jazz but also the emotional immediacy of the genre. Of course, by the end of his life, he'd moved so far beyond genre he could never be said to be representative of any genre, though he damn near mastered them all.


Top Ten Albums

1. Agharta/Pangaea (both 1975)

Two double-CDs culled from one day in Osaka (the former the afternoon show, the latter the evening gig), Agharta and Pangaea collectively represent the pinnacle of Davis musical wanderings. Agharta, taking its name from the mythological underground city filled with the greatest wisdom mankind could ever learn, appropriately matches its title. Churning like the magma in the Earth's mantle, it unleashes sounds unlike any that have been heard before or since, the fullest extent of Davis musical exploration. After the eruption of the first show, Pangaea cools the lava to form a new supercontinent, resetting the Earth to coincide with the uncovering of our destiny. The music here isn't as blazing as Agharta's, but cooling lava can still melt you.

Davis sounds on the brink of his impending collapse on these records, his pinched, electric squeal the dying moans of a sonic Moses trying to enter the promised land he's taken his people to, only to be denied at the last moment. Around him, his virile band -- Pete Cosey (one of a handful of guitarists to ever launch off Hendrix in just the right way, exploring sonic wash over technical tedium), Sonny Fortune, Reggie Lucas, good ol' Michael Henderson, Al Foster and Mtume -- gathers as if waiting to bear his casket. Beautiful, terrifying, conquering, defeated. It's all here. Not for the faint of heart. (Note: in 2006 Sony Japan remastered these albums, which can be found floating around the Internet as rips from the out-of-print DSD-CD. The remastering is revelatory, rescuing these sonic journeys from muddled whump-whump bass and overheated treble. It says something about the nature of the music that contemporary technology just couldn't handle it.)

2. Kind of Blue (1959)

The highest selling jazz album of all time and such an essential work it should be included gratis in all desert island selections alongside the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare, Kind of Blue more than lives up to its sterling reputation. Universally hailed by critics and appreciators of all music styles, Kind of Blue represents the pinnacle of Miles' modal efforts, each song beginning on a key, not a theme, allowing for greater range of exploration during group improvisations and individual solos. Yet the focus on modal, not chordal or harmonic, development made each exploration melodic, to the point that the album rewards whether studied intently or played as background music. It's one of the few times Davis' backing group -- incidentally one of his finest, with Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Bill Evans, Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb contributing -- fully reflected Miles' own sound: cool, legato and beautiful. That unison makes the album listenable long after one nails down its variations.

3. A Tribute to Jack Johnson (1971)

Though Davis' mid-'70s material plunged the artist fully into soul-funk territory, A Tribute to Jack Johnson is by some degree the "rockiest" album he ever made. Opening on a downright sick riff by John McLaughlin, "Right Off" gives way to what is quite possibly Miles' strongest, boldest solo, the result of sobriety and a brief dedication to ultra-healthy living. The second side, "Yesternow," incorporates takes from a group take-off of "Shh/Peaceful," a modification of the bassline of James Brown's "Say It Loud — I'm Black and I'm Proud" and an edited version of the tune "Willie Nelson" recorded by a different lineup. Yet of all Miles' electric studio albums, this one sounds the least spliced together, the force of the music carrying a spontaneity and perfectly synchronized looseness to it that gives the illusion of being a single take. After Kind of Blue, Miles' purest record.

4. The Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel (recorded 1965, released 1995)

The second great quintet had only released one album together when then played seven gigs across two nights in December 1965, but you can tell from these complete recordings just why the lineup ended up Davis' longest lasting. With Miles himself slightly faltering, the rest of the band steps in, especially the boisterous Tony Williams on drums and a hopped-up Wayne Shorter looking to prove himself worthy of taking the spot vacated by John Coltrane. Packed into 8 CDs, these hours of music demonstrate exactly where Davis would take the quintet: forward through the past. They stick mainly to standards and classics from Miles' back catalogue, but each version played sounds different from the studio, and even the other versions heard at the club. After slamming free jazz for years, Miles starts to absorb some of it, freeing his compositions along harmonic and rhythmic lines. But he still directs his band through smooth jams, and his own solos sidestep the occasional weakness of his phrasing to overpower. Fair warning: your hard drive will not like you becoming a Miles Davis fan, but those lost gigabytes (oh yes, you'll measure Miles by the gig) are more than worth it.

5. Milestones (1958)

Following the brief dissolution of the first great quintet over money and drug issues, Miles let them back in and picked up Cannonball Adderley while he was at it in order to deliver his first great modal statement. Though it lives in the shadow of Kind of Blue, Milestones is nearly as worthy and features a white-hot band at its peak. As ever, Coltrane tends to start each song by lying down his sound, at which point Davis glides in and gently shapes those sheets in a direction as Paul Chambers saws his bass and Philly Joe Jones monitors the shifts in current to adjust the beat. More electric than Kind of Blue in tone, the album nevertheless has a stripped-down, classic tone that lets each song breathe. Essential.

6. In a Silent Way (1969)

Bitches Brew might have been the album to truly herald jazz fusion to an unsuspecting and unprepared world, but for my money Davis' first electric record holds more rewards. The sound of a band dipping its toe into the water to test its temperature, In a Silent Way is one of the quietest artistic revolutions I've ever heard. When Dylan went electric, he did so boisterously, scabrously, ready to take on anyone. But Dylan ultimately was only responsible to his own image. When Miles made the switch, some thought he took down jazz with him. Maybe they were right; Miles certainly did care for any kind of boundary after this. Heard today, I process only the gentle courage of the music, one figure drifting out into the darkness with a torch until he finds the way clear and calling the others to come to him until the next member of the party moves forward another hundred yards. Yet for the gentle nature of the album's probing, it still displays enough of Miles' restless invention that it still does not fit neatly into either jazz nor rock. Already, he was aiming beyond such labels.

(The degree of evolution and softly radical change in these two sidelong pieces is reflected by the strength of the Complete In A Silent Way Sessions box set, by some degree the strongest of all the mammoth sets documenting the creation of Miles' electric albums. Taking some piece from Filles de Kilimanjaro (the preceding second quintet album that was outright fusion in every way save electric instrumentation), alternate takes and revealing jams, the set demonstrates the astonishing pace with which Miles and co. advanced their already adventurous sound, even as it points toward the huge leaps to follow.)

7. Porgy & Bess (1958)

Davis scarcely looked back from his time at Juilliard, but he acknowledged the influence his brief formal education on his understanding of music theory. One of the clearest examples of that impact is Davis' take on Porgy & Bess, the Third Stream opera by George Gershwin, one that respects the original but emphasizes the ethnic flavors Gershwin sprinkled into his operatic gumbo. The best of Miles' collaborations with Gil Evans, Porgy & Bess is one of the most enduringly entertaining, complex and captivating of Davis' classic records. As ever, Miles does not settle for simply capturing the feel of the past, instead adding new dimensions, new interpretations, Davis' lyricism forging subtle new paths just as adroitly as the passages of Kind of Blue.

8. On the Corner (1972)

Always resentful of jazz's position in the public consciousness as something for the arty and elite, Miles constantly sought new ways to add current flavors to his music. On the Corner marked the first time Miles managed to fully jump ahead of the curve and predict a trend rather than work with one. With its title and finger-snappin' cover right out of a Fat Albert cartoon, On the Corner gave some idea as to its musical contents, but no one could have anticipated the sounds coming from the vinyl. Not only infused with soul and funk, On the Corner took Teo Macero's (a man deserving of Sir George Martin-esque veneration) editing skills to their zenith, piecing together fragments of hot, sulfuric sludge into one of Davis' most forward-thinking albums. Not only does it show Miles finally achieving his wish of becoming the Sly Stone and George Clinton of jazz, the album also lays down all new sounds. Hip-hop, dance music, even post-punk can be heard in its ragged, angular soundscapes and unexpected moments of swing. It's as scathing as Bitches Brew, and as revolutionary, but by now Miles and his crew (whomever they might be, for the lineups shifted all over these four numbers) had worked out the kinks, and one could tell they knew exactly what they were doing.

(Just as the In a Silent Way sessions proved fruitful, the box set of On the Corner provides hours of pleasure, incorporating all the outtakes that made fine cuts of their own on vault-airing releases Big Fun and Get Up With It and adding enough alternate takes to set the mouth watering. The box set for Bitches Brew contained a great deal of superfluous material, the one for A Tribute to Jack Johnson the most relevant to seeing how the final music was made (yet also the most boring save for a few fascinating takes), but the sets for In a Silent Way and On the Corner, though perhaps the ones that cheat most brazenly by widening the time interval to include material that simply fits with the final music and not just the relevant sessions, offer the greatest insights into Miles' electric growth.)

9. Birth of the Cool (recorded 1949/1950, released 1957)

Comprising three sessions in 1949 and 1950 with an orchestral nonet, Birth of the Cool's belated release in 1957 did nothing to detract from its forward-thinking prescience. Of course, by the time this compilation came out, Miles had moved far beyond, having already pumped out classics with his first quintet that found the harder edges around this sound, but other players scrambled to imitate it. Even today, it's easy to see why someone would be glad to copy it after Daivs himself had grown bored of the sound; hell, it'd be a joy to nail down this sound 20 years after the man passed on. Birth of the Cool has all the hallmarks of the classic Miles sound: smooth enough to go down without a fuss but with an after kick that makes your whole chest burn.

10. Sketches of Spain (1960)

After Cannonball Adderley and John Coltrane departed Miles' band following Kind of Blue, Miles decided to morph the sound of that album to compensate, turning his ear to Spanish folk music after hearing a classical arrangement of the Concierto de Aranjuez. With Gil Evans, Davis crafted one of his finest modernist pieces, a work so respectful of the traditions it recreates that, if you close your eyes to sway with the piece, you start to think that you'll be in Barcelona when you open them. Backed by 19 musicians, Miles proved his leadership abilities once and for all. Plus, he would not sound as in command of his own playing for another decade; check the solo on "Saeta," his best until "Right Off" blasted out of speakers in 1971. One of Davis' most popular albums, it remains so for a reason.

Rango

When the Rango trailer met with near-unanimous derision and dismissal among critics and, seemingly, audiences, I wonder if Gore Verbinski sat back and knowingly thought to himself, "To hell with it. They'll come crawling back when the time comes." If he did, he was right: Rango wastes no time announcing itself the first major mainstream release of the year, driven by a visual design unseen in any recent animated film that comes to mind and laced with a humor that never feels cheap or easy.

From its opening moments, Rango carries a mild sense of Dadaist whimsy, a mariachi band addressing the audience directly and introducing a character "who has yet to enter his own story." Cut to a flower-shirted chameleon going stir-crazy in a terrarium, organizing plays with the plastic objects littering his boxed home and even holding conversations with such props as a wind-up fish and a mock tree. Just as the lizard hits upon a new idea requiring an ironic twist for his protagonist, his masters' car lurches in traffic and sends the terrarium out of the foolishly open back window, stranding the domesticated creature in the middle of a harsh desert highway with a sun so hot a drop of water sizzles and evaporates on the tongue before it can even offer the tease of a quenched thirst. The poor beast shrivels up and partially crumbles twice in the rays.

At this point, the metafictional devices employed with the mariachi band and self-reflexive acting of the protagonist among his props gives way to outright surrealism, from a squashed armadillo carrying on a cryptic conversation with the lizard and sun-baked hallucinations allowing for some truly breathtaking yet hilarious animation. At last, our hero finds his way to a parched town called Dirt where he avoids a swift beating by taking the name Rango and putting his acting chops to the test with fanciful tales of gunslinging prowess.

Amazingly, Rango sidesteps the lazy appropriation of winking clichés seen in recent animated films, even as it eschews putting a toe into the Western genre pool for splashing in with a cannonball. This is the closest anyone has come to making a CGI Tarantino movie. Rango does not simply regurgitate pop culture, it embraces it, honoring conventions even as it pokes fun and adds new dimensions to them. Leone references dominate the landscape, from the use of a Morricone-esque score by Hans Zimmer to a likeness of the Man with No Name. The film also incorporates the work of Chuck Jones in its chaotic yet carefully composed animation, ensuring strict adherence of spatial relationships and perspective so that the sudden breaks are even more clanging, hilarious and daring. Verbinski even throws in a Fear and Loathing nod, recalling not only Hunter's own mad, hallucinogenic ride through the desert but Terry Gilliam, whose influence can be seen all over Rango's visual originality rooted in the work of others.

To even get into how gorgeous, how memorable and how singular the animation of Rango is would send this review down a dead-end street of superlatives. Who on Earth could have guessed from Rango's unalluring teaser that the primary influence on its visual scheme, even above classical Western imagery, would be the work of Salvador Dalí? To be fair, the animators left a hefty clue for the audience in the unimpressive frame of the protagonist. Rango, too weird to appeal in a trailer, works brilliantly in context: set against the startlingly realistic animation of the other animals, Rango visually clashes. His askew, pencil-thin neck supports his vast head like a glacial till holding up a balancing rock, and his slightly uneven eye sockets with narrowed nipples for peepers subtly resemble breasts. Only Rattlesnake Jake, a massive, coiling psychopath who comes to town to pop the bubble of Rango's inflated persona, matches Rango's off-kilter animation, what with his seemingly endless body and his machine-gun rattler.

The backdrops offer even more chances for innovative rendering. Hallucinations of terrifyingly symmetrical cactus configurations, slow-motion shots of a desert highway illuminates overhead by cars passing over the hero, and a transparently fake (and thus disgustingly recognizable) Las Vegas are but some of the masterful background animations in which Verbinski places his characters. Where Wes Anderson's inexperience with animation did not preclude him from dictating style and movement to his supposedly tortured team on Fantastic Mr. Fox, the less-mannered Verbinski appears to have reacted to his own unfamiliarity with the medium with humility, ceding artistic control to his animators. Amazingly, Rango fails to fall into the trap that entangled infamous examples of competing visions in animation (Disney's 1951 Alice in Wonderland comes swiftly to mind), maintaining a cohesive juxtaposition between surprising realism and the most brazen use of Dada in children's entertainment since the early brilliance of Spongebob Squarepants.

Of course, to say that assumes Rango could conceivably be seen as a kid's film, which it most emphatically is not. Though it sidesteps Tarantino's vulgarity, the sheer amount of adult-oriented pop culture references and film history on display offers nothing for a child, and most of the dialogue plays at, at the least, a teenage level. Only the slapstick could fully appeal to a child, but then physical comedy, when done well, is universal, and the comedy here is dynamite. And if the sophistication of the writing does not turn off the children, the sight of Rattlesnake Jake surely will, each lunge of his bared fangs or constricting coil around heroes terrifying enough to shake an adult. Those dismissing Rango for not being palatable to children (or praising it in spite of this "shortcoming") have grown too accustomed to the idea of animation being something that must appeal to children. Rango has just enough to keep a kid entertained -- and for the love of God, parents, let your kids get scared; it does 'em good -- but it clearly aims for an older audience.

Part of Rango's promotional package highlighted Verbinski's staging of the voice cast as if they were actually on-screen, filming them acting together in what seemed a desperate gimmick. Yet the move paid off, and Rango sports one of the voice casts of major stars to sound as if the actors did more than simply speak into the microphone. Bill Nighy properly sinks into his role as Jake, adding menace to his speech and not just his movement. An unrecognizable Isla Fisher plays Beans, the unfortunately named love interest who chatters in a contradictory mile-a-minute drawl shockingly familiar to those of us who have heard the slowed-down Southern accent as sped up by inflamed passions. And what a weird niche in which Ned Beatty has found himself, playing a crippled authority figure exuding false comfort and harboring ulterior motives in an animated film only a year after....well, you know.

Casting Rango, a delusional pet with aspirations of being a thespian, as a chameleon was a sly gag, and one Johnny Depp undoubtedly got. After the last two Pirates movies, the relationship between Depp and Verbinski went stale, to the point one could not easily recall how incandescent their first pairing was (and on a film preemptively dismissed as derivative and money-grabbing). They capture lightning in a bottle once more here, letting Depp exercise his most exuberant techniques without the setbacks of watching the actual man contort himself into buffoonish shapes for a laugh. Never appearing on-screen, Depp hasn't been so watchable in years.

Stuffed with allusions and surprises, Rango occasionally goes so far as to recontextualize its references and make something else out of them. A massive canyon chase not only combines elements of the podcast race and Death Star trench run of Episodes I and IV, respectively, it also adds a dash of the flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz, albeit with bats. Three superb sequences combine into one visual tour-de-force that borrows the best aspects from all of them and plays around in the white space left over. At the other end of the spectrum, the film pokes fun at the stereotypes of Native Americans, the somber raven to whom Rango incessantly condescends always subverting expectations based on genre clichés (a reference to Depp's involvement in the thoroughly anti-cliché, anti-Western Dead Man, perhaps?). I also enjoyed the idea of a town so literally dry that, when the locals laugh at the naïve city slicker asking for water, they do so because they'd all love nothing more than a sip of the stuff instead of alcohol.

In a year where Pixar already seems to be planning a working vacation with Cars 2, Rango might survive in the public consciousness through the year and win some accolades come the next awards season. One can only hope; Rango is one of the few animated films to ignore Pixar entirely, either as competition or influence. The makers focused only on telling a good story in the way they saw it, and the results freely leap off the screen despite staying in obsolete ol' 2D. Intelligent, witty, original films of any stripe do not come along often, and to see something this bold come from the seemingly dessicated corpse of Nickelodeon Studios proves one should never count anyone out. The film circles around the idea that anyone can be a hero given the right circumstances and sense of perseverance and duty; Rango itself proves how dedication turns a decent concept into great art.

Drive Angry

Drive Angry resides in the No Man's Land between ignorant bliss and smug self-awareness, noxious tar pit that slowly sucks down fun premises into a black morass of lazy winking and absolving self-deprecation. However, it is also the first film in a while to successfully navigate its way back and forth through this trap-filled territory. Drive Angry certainly does not work as a subversive take on grindhouse in the vein of Tarantino's Death Proof; it is not even great trash. But it's damn fun, and as soon as I finished watching it the first time I admit I immediately planned a second trip to the theater.

Having managed to avoid nearly everything regarding the film save for its absurd title, I got to experience Drive Angry's slow mounting of story elements with a degree of unknown I never enjoy anymore, not in the age of total media saturation. The opening scene of the film depicts a CGI prison in a red-coated frame. For a second, I did not even recognize it as hell, though the presence of a muscle car tearing out of the place on a bridge also threw me off the trail. I don't recall Virgil mentioning that when he showed Dante the place.

The first 30 minutes of the film veer wildly out of control, jumping any fluid kind of editing with haphazard introductions for the movie's cast list weaving an unnecessarily ornate web for only a handful of characters. I saw the film two times and was still bewildered at the lack of context for the opening barrage of images, from Nicolas Cage chasing down some rednecks with pentagrams marked on their chests to a supremely tarted-up Amber Heard crushing the testicles of her lascivious, greasy diner boss. And just when you've settled down and accepted the absurdity of the situation, along comes William Fichtner in a suit calling himself the "Accountant," always asking if Cage has just come through the area knowing full-well the answer. Those left alive by the stranger's tears through town ask the Accountant who he is and what the man has done, but he deftly avoids any exposition.

By the time pieces start to fall in place and the character name John Milton drops a huge clue for those of us who remember senior-year English, Drive Angry has amassed such an impressive horde of contrivances, loose ends and overall questions about the physical properties of certain items and people that the whole shebang nearly collapses. Then, it acts as if nothing ever happened and finally gets down to the good stuff: blatant, unabashed fetishism of every body part and overcompensating gadget.

Drive Angry knows how dumb it is and occasionally shows its hand to the audience to let us in on its cheek, but the sincere, shameless ogling pervading the film makes for a far funnier and more entertaining ride than the occasional plodding moments of overt self-awareness. Cage, toned down from his most manic work, looks increasingly withdrawn in his roles, as if the weight of his recent manic episodes on-screen, be they good (Bad Lieutenant) or bad (almost all the rest). His rage here is amusingly insular given the wild insanity of his actions, a slow burn of resentment and self-loathing that grounds the film's nonsense in the sort of dramatic seriousness that only makes a film like this funnier. Then again, these days it is not always clear whether or not the self-loathing in a Cage character reflects its actor's own feelings.

However, he looks as if he had fun here, delivering his lines with a halting relish as if he wanted to savor every last morsel of such delicious lines as, "I never disrobe before a gunfight." Milton's story unfolds so ponderously that Cage's seriousness pales in comparison to the pseudo-pathos of his character, but Cage comes out of his gloom with enough dry humor to make the convoluted issue of his daughter being murdered by Satanists (led by a Chris Gaines/Garth Brooks-lookin' Cajun Jim Jones played by Billy Burke) and his granddaughter abducted for sacrifice not as cumbersome as the pile-on of narrative could be. Heard has scant to do save shout terrified or angry responses to Milton's dour carnage, and she does not appear to have put up a fight against the too-loving gaze of the camera, which always finds the time to scan over her rear and zoom in on her eye-shadowed face. It's harder to read what she thinks of her role, as she commits to the half-tough, half-damsel Piper but occasionally gives a glance that suggests she went back to her trailer to chew out her agent.

Even if she had a blast, though, she and Cage combined could not equal the unrelenting glee with which Fichtner, a super-solid character actor, plays his role. Delighting in the mysterious yet inevitable nature of his character's origins and purpose, Fichtner ignores everyone sharing the screen with him, walking around side characters asking the Accountant's repeated questions as he consumes every piece of scenery not nailed down, casually munching cud as the characters' bewilderment perhaps reflects the actors' own. Fichtner is one of my favorite "that guys," and to see him get to let loose in a role that does not so much take advantage of his skills as let the more subtle actor get his chance to mug shamelessly. If Cage hilariously meditates on his lines, Fichtner does not need to think before spewing out some ingenious, unmistakably sinister yet delightfully bizarre threat or insult. As a villain, he is not particularly frightening, but he does not want to be. The Accountant chases down his escaped quarry not out of a need for vengeance nor even a sense of duty (though he does need to "balance the numbers"): he's just having fun playing with Milton.

I would file Drive Angry under "guilty pleasure" but it does something I've been begging dumb movies to do for some time now: it never undercuts its thick-headedness with too many winks, never tries to forgive its exposition (and my GOD is the exposition in this movie ridiculous). Because it does not attempt to pass off its bad moments as knowing jokes, they actually work as comedy, and when the actual madness kicks in, Drive Angry has inventiveness to spare. A shootout featuring Milton still inside a bar waitress is one of the most outlandish sequences in years, and the use of slow-motion for the entire sequence is cleverer than anything in a Zack Snyder movie. I continue to prefer 3D in films that use it for the kitsch gimmick it is, and the flying limbs and slow-motion bullets flying at the audience make for as good a time as the schlock of Piranha 3D. I expected to go into this film to feed my ironic love affair with the bad Nic Cage (I have a completely sincere adoration for the man when he's on his game), and instead I got a perfectly delightful bit of screwball amorality. But I have a soft-spoken for chicken-fried crap; I am, after all, from the South. Also, can we get a buddy cop film starring Nic Cage and Bill Fichtner, please?

What Dreams May Come: Simple Present

This movie has a great message about the afterlife. The special effects are overwhelming. This beautiful scene is great to have students practice the simple present tense.





I. Make a list of at least 10 activities you do in your spare time.

Ex:
1. I listen to music.
2. I go swimming.

II. Ask your partner if he/she does it in his/her spare time.

Ex:
1. Do you listen to music in your spare time?
Yes, I do / No, I don't


2. Do you go swimming?

Yes, I do / No, I don't

II. Watch the segment now. The scene takes place in heaven. Observe what people do in heaven and write at least 5 sentences saying what they do there to spend time.

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

2. ..............................................

3. ..............................................

4. ..............................................

5. ..............................................



III. Are there any similarities between your list and the activities in the segment?


IV. Talk to a friend.


1. What's your opinion about the heaven in the segment? Is it interesting or boring? Why?

2. What do you like and dislike in the heaven you saw in the segment?

3. Do you think heaven is like that? Do you believe in heaven?



WORKSHEET