Some Kind of Monster

Some Kind of Monster is one of my favorite documentaries of all time. That so many Metallica fans hate it, hate it, only cements its impact. It is one of the most viciously anti-romantic films ever made about a person or group considered heroes and legends by millions. Metallica has a reputation for being one of the hardest (and hardest partying) bands around, yet the movie shows essentially one long group therapy session, with a liberal dose of midlife crisis sprinkled in for spice. Anyone hoping to see "Alcoholica" destroying hotel rooms and using blocks of heroin as pillows found what may be the event horizon of metal, an inescapable force of gravity sucking in the last bit of fury from the '80s into the void.

Hammering home how much the band has changed, the film opens with the crushing news of Jason Newsted's departure from the band and, perhaps more devastatingly, the band convenes in a Ritz-Carlton to discuss the new album with a management-hired therapist leading the chat of the personal quibbles and hangups tearing at the band. The band wants their next album to sound like a return to raw, aggressive playing, a subtle outgrowth of their desire to prove to outraged fans that the Napster episode did not demonstrate the band fully abandoning their fiery side. If they can just make something to tap back into Kill 'Em All, all will be forgiven.

Yet the transparency of the act is astonishing. The band insists on not going to the same old studio and cranking out one of their increasingly standard, hard rock album, yet they end up going to the Presidio in San Francisco, the idyllic setting wholly at odds with the basement tapes feel they want to create. Then again, the setting is the least of worries, as the band soon collapses into inaction, bickering and tedious hand-wringing over which direction they should head toward to regain their spot at the top. The band is situated between two extremes: run back to the well and hope the fans disregard every slip-up (which is a safe bet in the world of metal), or try to stay "current" and cater to the then-explosive nü-metal fad. Anyone who has listened to St. Anger knows which decision won out.

Some Kind of Monster does not quite fit into the Spinal Tap mode that has become expected of any profile of a hard rocking outfit, but it contains its own set of cringe-inducing dark humor. James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich argue like an old married couple, and poor Kirk Hammet sits between them always trying to diffuse the situation, the young child who just wants to get through one dinner, just one, without mommy and daddy going at it. James has become so used to getting his way as the frontman of Metallica that his life spirals out of control: he up and goes to Russia on a hunting trip and misses his son's first birthday. The producer, Bob Rock, looks as if he wants to quit at every second to go make the same money without all the hassle elsewhere. Family commitments become horrid reminders of how much these men have mellowed, and even their hobbies (Kirk's surfing, James' vehicle collecting, Lars' land-buying) come off as the sort of things middle-aged men do to feel cool.

And then there's the therapy itself. The "therapist" (actually a "performance-enhancing coach," a terminology that recalls steroid use, which might explain the scrotum-tightening rage he produces whenever on-screen) is a complete charlatan. Armed with a collection of shirts he rescued from a burning souvenir shop in Disney's Polynesian Resort, Towle is a huckster, not seeking to help the band so much as manipulating their stress to ingratiate himself among them and reap the benefits. One look at this asshole and you just know that, had someone documented the band during their '80s heyday, he'd have been one of the faux-psychologists on Oprah or Donahue talking about how this music was polluting young minds and that the answers for how to protect the children could be found in this book he's conveniently written. At one point, he actually suggests lyrics to the band members. Never mind that the final lyrics of St. Anger sounds as if the band cribbed them from freshman-year diaries littered with doodles of the English teacher being decapitated by a dragon summoned by Ronnie James Dio; this is such a massive breach of ethics, morality and, frankly, sanity that someone should have pushed him out immediately.

Yet, in a strange way, Towle largely succeeds in reuniting them, precisely because they all rally around hating him. As the band becomes aware of Towle's BS, they grow resentful of his presence, and one of the funniest moments of the film comes when James says, without a trace of irony, “I think Phil is under the impression that he's actually in the band.” Maybe that's Phil's ingenious plan: be so cloying and ridiculous that people at each other's throats dispel their anger at the third party, but considering how incompetent and useless he is as he dispenses trite advice, I'm disinclined to believe that theory.

More than fictive films, documentaries tend to be memorable through individual moments over the overall story (though that's important too, of course), and Some Kind of Monster has moments to spare. After the Napster fallout, the band is wary of anything that might make them look like sellouts, but the label strikes a deal with radio companies to have the band record promos for some asinine contest. However, this cynical marketing helps the band, as they push the image of their lavish homes and huge tracts of land out of mind to sarcastically ruin each take, tapping into their goofy younger mood and making them a group of kids again instead of 40-somethings mired in arguments. Then there's Lars' dad, an amazing old man with a beard down to his navel and the direct tone of English spoken through a Dutch accent. Torben is so deadpan it hurts, and when Lars lets him listen to what the band has put together so far, his pacing suggests he's more terrified of what Torben will say than anyone. As the rambling warble comes to a close, Torben strokes his beard and solemnly intones, "DELETE THAT." Torben! The best. Just the way he says it, like the proclamation of a Norse god through the calm, detached avatar of Werner Herzog, is so devastating and funny. If a storm ever manages to breach the Dutch levee system, it must be retroactively named Hurricane Torben.

As James and Lars tear at each other, the others begin to show the strain of dealing with this for years. Long-suffering Kirk patiently deals with the bickering, but when Hetfield and Ulrich decide to leave solos off the album in a transparent attempt to fight back into the mainstream trends of the day, Kirk can stay silent no more. He accurately claims that leaving off solos does not prevent dating the record to the past: it only cements the band in an ephemeral present. When the filmmakers interview Jason, his measured, relieved tone cannot disguise the lingering resentment for not being accepted as a true member of the band.

Neither can compare, however, to Dave Mustaine, that tragic figure. Twenty years on from being ejected from Metallica just prior to the band recording their first album for substance abuse, Mustaine still cannot see the impressive career he carved outside the group. Sitting down with Lars while James is away in rehab, Mustaine makes painfully clear why he cannot let it go. It is not simply a matter of being angry for being fired. Dave then spent the next 20 years watching Metallica conquer the world while Megadeth, celebrated as they were (and are, far more consistently these days than 'Tallica), always played second fiddle. Sheila O'Malley calls him Shakespearean, and that's an apt description. He actually refers to himself as a failure, though thousands would call him a legend, all because he missed his shot to make it with his friends, who became his bitterest foes (the feud continued for years after this movie and was, in fact, prolonged in part because of it, though all now seems to be well at last). I am never emotionally prepared for the moment where Mustaine quietly says he misses "my Danish friend."

The greatest aspect of documentaries and reality television is the manner in which directors and editors must make drama out of spontaneity. Even if reality TV is scripted or a documentary subject is playing to the camera, there is still a degree of the unknown far greater than that of a regular film. For example, I believe the editing on Jersey Shore is something of a masterpiece, a series of consistently hilarious juxtapositions that know exactly the right facial expression to use in a reaction shot and how to make the inherent, sleazy absurdity of the program all the wilder. The filmmakers here achieve a similar degree of inventive comedy, finding just the right shot or quote to puncture the ballooning self-loathing and let the bilious self-awareness spill out.

Without question, the funniest of these examples comes when Robert Trujillo attends his first meeting as a member of Metallica. Trujillo, the clear front-runner among some massively talented competition (I was particularly surprised/pleased to see Scott Reeder, one of the most underrated bassists working, trying out), is ecstatic. The band briefly discussed looking for someone their age, and though Trujillo technically fits that criterion, his youthful vivacity is a blast of fresh air in the jaded airing of grievances seen throughout. If someone had pulled him aside during the audition and asked how badly he wanted the gig, he'd almost certainly have said he was just glad to be in the same room as these guys, and he'd be totally sincere.

Which is why it is so achingly funny when he gets the gig and shows up to a meeting. I was talking on Twitter about the movie with Sheila, who is also a fan of the film, and we both laughed over this scene. Trujillo is overwhelmed: not only is he joining one of the bands that set the standard in his youth, that band also goes by the nickname Alcoholica. God knows what he's fantasizing about when he walks in that room. (My personal belief, as I related to Sheila, is that somewhere in his head he was strapping on skis to slalom around hookers down a mountain of blow.) He has it MADE. And then, James Hetfield starts pouring out his soul. He comes to the point of tears as he talks about how much he doesn't want to face the idea of working without his friends. And the cameraman, that blessed, ingenious cameraman, just moves onto a shot of Trujillo not making a sound. He thought he was going to be in one of the baddest bands of all time, and he showed up for some form of platonic marriage counseling. I have laughed harder and more consistently at that one shot than the totality of nearly every comedy I've seen in the last decade. It is perfect.

Complete with well-assembled archived footage -- just compare those dorky, teenage versions of James and Lars headbanging at Lars' house with the multimillionaires of the present -- and excellently shot concert footage, Some Kind of Monster does not seek to undermine the image of a legendary band but honestly deals with issues most headbangers would prefer not to confront. The first few times I watched the film, I cringed whenever James or Lars' children would come to the studio, because they just deflated the men, who stopped screaming and thrashing to listen patiently to toddler speak and make their own noises for the kids' amusement. Only recently did it even occur to me what a horrible reaction this was: why was I so angry at children for, basically, existing? They represent the band getting older and having to shift their lives. We all have to do it, and so do artists. While Ulrich may have a huge collection of art he can sell on a whim for millions of dollars with which to buy other works of art or Kirk can get himself a nice ranch, their mellower attitude does not mean they've sold out. We all like adults who are big kids, but everyone has to act like an adult at some point.

Near the end of the film, Metallica plays a gig at San Quentin, and Hetfield gives a brief speech to the inmates. "There's a lot of misspent anger that has come out sideways for a lot of people. Including yourselves. And if I hadn't had music in my life, it's quite possible I could be in here, or not even in here, be dead. And I'd much rather be alive." He doesn't chastise them, doesn't preach. Most importantly, he recognizes that any of them are harder than he or Metallica could ever be, so he just gets something off his chest and gets back to entertaining, and the crowd eats it up.

By the time Some Kind of Monster comes to a close, you'll be hard-pressed to look upon the quartet as bad-ass partiers ever again. Yet the band does not completely tarnish themselves with the level of access they allowed the filmmakers. Whatever happens behind the scenes, hell, whatever happens on each new record (at the time, new Metallica generally brought only more grumbling, an issue not rectified until Death Magnetic), none of it matters on the stage. Even now, when Metallica takes the stage, they give a goddamn show, and by ending on a concert, Some Kind of Monster reminds the audience why they fell in love with Metallica in the first place, and why no personal action by one or some of the band members can ever stop a tour from selling out. These guys have to play, and when they get on-stage, they only have time for the performance, not for the baggage. That they can still mop the floor with lesser bands shows that nothing can ultimately keep these guys down.

Ulysses, Chapter One: Telemachus

The first chapter of Joyce's Ulysses is both inviting and lightly bewildering, providing almost no background information on characters, setting, or narrative yet putting forth so much wordplay and so many possible meanings that the 20 pages burst at the seams. I realize instantly the folly of charting my thoughts of this book as I read it, as I can only faintly guess at what's happening

Joyce structured Ulysses as an intimate version of The Odyssey, exchanging the turbulent, monster-laden Mediterranean with Dublin. Consequently, the first chapter lines up with the first part of Homer's epic, focusing on Telemachus, here represented by our dear friend Stephen Dedalus. Having left Ireland for France at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen returns home in 1904 to be with his dying mother, and by the time we join him on the morning of June 16, she has already passed. Stephen, who renounced religion with his national identity at the end of Joyce's previous novel, could not bring himself to pray over his mother's deathbed, an act that haunts him even at the start. Joyce's Telemachus therefore displays a more Catholic hangup in grieving for a lost mother, but, as the annotations included with my texts note, the same religious denunciation that prevented Stephen from praying for his mother also creates a hole in him where a spiritual father should be (as far as I know right now, Stephen's actual father, Simon, should still be alive).

This quest for a replacement for the Almighty Father is an understanding reading of the text, given the overwhelming amount of Catholic imagery present. The first dialogue of the film, courtesy of Stephen's sort-of friend Buck Mulligan is "Introibo ad altare Dei," meaning "I will go in the altar of God." It is the start of a Mass, and Mulligan's ironic tone speaks to the tongue-in-cheek manner in which Joyce uses religion. By opening his book with an impromptu Mass, he not only ties his novel further to The Odyssey (which opens with a prayer to the gods for inspiration) but also establishes Ulysses as his attempt to set down a new path for spiritual fulfillment after leaving the Church through Stephen. That the writing is still so based in Catholic writing demonstrates the difficulty of trying to extricate oneself from a religion that defined the social codes of conduct. You can take the Irishman out of the Church...

Joyce wastes no time piling on the puns and inventive lingual exercises, contracting hyphenated words into garish wholes, many of which connote some body part or fluid not normally mentioned in "masterpiece literature." Mulligan boisterously speaks of "the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea" and the rambling narration (neither 1st person nor fully 3rd person) discussing the milk poured by the old maid before clarifying any possible misconception with a hastily added "not hers. Old shrunken paps." Alliteration abounds, as does lewd innuendo: "Is she up the pole?" asks Stephen in response to news of a woman seeing a mutual acquaintance of his and Buck's, and the idiomatic suggestion of intoxication was not the first mental image I arrived at with these choice of words.

What struck me most about the chapter, however, was not potential meanings or even the mastery of Joyce's prose but the manner in which he defines these characters' voices in an instant without so much as a "Once upon a time" to give the audience some basic information. I immediately envisioned Mulligan as the pompous student he is, speaking in a voice that is too loud and too enunciated, his dips into offensive humor the outpourings of the educated asshole. Haines, meanwhile, is the new guy, innocently asking questions of Buck and Stephen's worldviews that the two are tired of hashing out with each other and do not want to share with another until one triumphs over the other. And Stephen, well, Stephen is Stephen. He continues to sound in my head like the most humanist character Dostoevsky never wrote, an intellectual rejecting normalcy in an attempt to find some social outlook that accounts for his genius, albeit without the darker element that runs through the Russian master's work. Stephen may be cocky, but he's lovable, and that's all the more apparent now that Joyce juxtaposes him against another wunderkind who revels in his intellect instead of seeking constantly to expand it.

While the structure of this first chapter deliberately leaves a number of connecting details that make not only the big picture but even smaller details vague and unknowable, I still found the Telemachus episode eminently readable and flowing. The flecks of outright silliness made for an unexpected bounce and even the most esoteric references do not bog down the story. I am sure I will continue to go through the annotations and look up various analyses as I work through the book, but even from the outset I can see the other side of reading Ulysses, the one that accepts it as a damn fun read despite the complexity. As I continue to move through the book, I shall strive to recall two key quotes on the importance of Ulysses. The first comes from Joseph Collins, a noted American neurologist who sent in a rave of the book to the New York Times upon its release in 1922 (and a decade before it could be legally distributed in the United States). Among the many brilliant and tantalizing things he had to say about the book was this nugget:

That he has a message there can be no doubt.

Then there was Joyce himself, who offered up what sounds like a most Catholic response:

The pity is, the public will demand and find a moral in my book — or worse they may take it in some more serious way, and on the honour of a gentleman, there is not one single serious line in it.

Joyce layers his story even at the start, but I'm almost inclined to believe him here: for all the references to Ancient Greece, the Church, imperial Britain, Shakespeare and parental loss, Ulysses truly bounds out of the gate on the strength of its style, which is arresting and incomparable even after nearly a century. Overall, the Telemachus episode confirmed and dispelled my fears over tackling the novel, presenting me with a host of allusions and double, even triple entendres but also sublimating all that into a unified style, even if the style changes throughout the novel. But I'm just repeating myself at this point: I'm sure it will get harder to process later, but for now, I can't wait to keep moving forward through Dublin.

Stuff I Like: Devin Townsend

Devin Townsend may be the closest thing extreme metal has to a singer-songwriter. As evocative of Van Morrison as Meshuggah, Townsend has amassed a trove of idiosyncratic, deeply personal music over a 20 years that contains enough albums and collaborations for a career lasting twice as long. The hardest metal has always come from the most unlikely of places: death and black metal emerged from from the chilled idyll of Scandinavia (well, and also Florida, but if you've ever driven behind people in Florida, death metal makes perfect sense). Townsend, born and bred in British Columbia, also came from calmer settings, and the rage that ripples through some of his work appears less his war with that environment than his deep desire to fit in with it.


One of Townsend's defining characteristics is his offbeat sense of humor, which helped get him his first major gig. For whatever reason, Townsend assumed that the best way to make his demo tape stand out from the stacks of CDs and cassettes was to wrap it in underwear. The trick worked, and guitar virtuoso Steve Vai plucked a 19-year-old Townsend from Canada to sing lead vocals on his attempt at a "band" album, the disjointed but interesting Sex & Religion. Vai's album might have displayed how out of his element the guitarist was when forced to write actual songs instead of solo showcases for himself and his prodigiously skilled backup musicians, but it also showcased an off-the-wall talent with an esoteric wit and an incredible range. Vai, who got his start as a player in one of Frank Zappa's lineups, inadvertently found one of the few musicians who would later be heralded as Zappa's heir.

But working as a gun-for-hire didn't particularly suit Townsend. Genius cannot work for someone else, and while there does not appear to have been anything remotely approaching animosity between Vai and Townsend, neither was in his element. After a brief stint as a touring backup for The Wildhearts, a band that found some glorious combination of Guns 'n' Roses, Metallica and The Beach Boys, Townsend properly struck off on his own, and he's been a powerhouse ever since.

Townsend's output can be generally divided into two groups: the music he makes under his own moniker (with an occasional "Band" or "Project" after "Devin Townsend"), and that which he makes as the head of Strapping Young Lad. The latter made his name, SYL's schizoid brand of industrial groove metal winning over metal critics with a combination of furious and humorous lyrics and Townsend's impeccable production, a crushing yet crystal clear sonic wash that makes Phil Spector's Wall of Sound resemble the sparse crackle of an old blues recording. Strapping Young Lad served as the primary outlet of Townsend's aggression, acerbic self-loathing at 185 BPM. For one of his albums, Alien, the bipolar musician stopped taking his medication and the recording reflects the fluctuations he suffered because of it, often within each song. For example, "Love?" -- the band's most successful single -- contained angry-man rejection and intense, crippling longing in the same verses, a sort-of five-minute version of Notes from Underground. Elsewhere, tracks displayed the unorthodox inspirations that swirl through Townsend's head, chiefly on "Skeksis," a track named for villains of The Dark Crystal and lyrically structured around a musical take on the conclusions drawn from Fermat's Last Theorem.

Strapping Young Lad existed in a field populated by like-sounding grind factories that buzz out riffs as fast as a guitar player can keep up with a drum machine, but Townsend and co. always stood out from the pack. It is something of a tired maxim that the best musicians are the ones who play least -- this is an oversimplifying extrapolation of the importance and grace of restraint -- but Townsend is one of the few who exemplifies this approach. In both SYL and his solo work, Townsend has given audiences glimpses into a prodigiously talented axeman, but he primarily works in moods and tones, even in the more straightforward sound of SYL. I've never wondered which Strapping Young Lad song I'm listening to when a riff kicks in: they're all distinct, all separate from each other, and most songs contain an impact beyond mere headbanging goodness.

For my money, however, it is Townsend's solo work that defines his fullest capacities as a musician. Townsend's first solo effort, Biomech, came first under the moniker of Ocean Machine, which later became an addendum to the album title, not a separate group. Released the same year as Strapping Young Lad's second (and best) album, the pummeling City, Ocean Machine was at the other end of the sonic spectrum. Where the SYL album packed Townsend's howling pain and nervosa into layered blasts of shrieks, perfectly executed double-bass drums (Gene Hoglan is a percussive John Henry in a sea of drum machines) and crashing riffs, Ocean Machine is far more insular. If City was a scream of rage, this was the ragged after-rasp, a pained croak through ruptured vocal cords that etched out an image of a man standing on the edge of a cliff trying to think of reasons not to jump. It is an album of almost painful beauty, frightening and isolated but plaintive and outreaching. Where the non-sequiturs in the Strapping Young Lad lyrics typically played as jokes, the esoteric memories foisted in chunks here (i.e. "Here I am/Driving through Japan" in "Night") constrict full meaning solely to Townsend's understanding even as he lets the audience into his thoughts.

That personal-to-the-point-of-obscure style pervades Townsend's canon, from a whispered "fuck off" in the middle of "Nobody's Here" on Terria that comes where one might otherwise have whispered an admission of love to the oddly endearing touch of off-poetry "You are the sun to my chameleon" on Synchestra's "Pixellate." Townsend crafts albums out of fractured moments, and those fragments are hard to shake loose. The bridge of Ziltoid the Omniscient's "Solar Winds", the soothing guitar solo of Terria's "Deep Peace," the totality of the minimalist triumph "The Death of Music" on Ocean Machine; these are the longer moments in the man's discography. I've not even counted the impassioned scream in the middle of "Night," the twanging break four minutes and 30 seconds into "Tiny Tears" or the yee-haw yelp of renewed vigor on "Supercrush!"

Townsend has always been prolific, usually good for an album a year and often for more than that, but newfound sobriety has turned an already dedicated artist into a force to be reckoned with. Since bottoming out after the release of the goofball concept piece Ziltoid, Townsend has returned with a four-part series as "The Devin Townsend Project," a title aptly summarizing the artist's attempt to take stock of himself. Two of the four albums have already been released, while the other two have been postponed only because Townsend continues to add songs to them, bumping at least one, and possibly both, to a double album. It's been a treat to hear how much fresher he sounds when he already sounded damn good, and where most artists slow down as they near 40, Townsend appears to be just entering his prime. I can't wait to hear how he keeps evolving.


Top Five Albums

1. Ocean Machine: Biomech (Devin Townsend, 1997)/Accelerated Evolution (Devin Townsend Band, 2003)/Addicted (Devin Townsend Project, 2009)

As I said in my review of Addicted, that album fits in with the other two as a "Bosch triptych in reverse," charting Townsend's ascent from hell to the mixed bag of Earth and, finally, to Heaven. It may be a complete cheat to put his three most accessible albums in one slot, but they feed off each other and demonstrate his abilities better than anything else he's done. From the spacious opener "Seventh Wave" to the triple-punch of "Funeral," "Bastard" and "The Death of Music" (quadruple-punch, if you count the hidden track "Things Beyond Things), Ocean Machine is intense, its pain in no way diluted for being chilled. Accelerated Evolution splits between pure pop metal and intense, pleading desperation ("Deadhead" is heartrending), capturing Townsend's bipolarity as well as Alien. And then there's Addicted, in which heavy metal is filtered through Enya and Europop. You gotta love it.

(Key track(s): Bastard; Deadhead; Numbered!

2. Terria (Devin Townsend, 2001)

The nearest thing to heavy metal's Walden, in which our maladjusted protagonist retreats into the sounds and textures of nature to try to sublimate. Like Thoreau, he is of course not really isolated but sounds like he is, and that's just as important. Also like Thoreau, he must eventually leave when he unintentionally conquers the world with which he wished to become one. It is hands down the most complex album Townsend's recorded, not in technical flash but emotional obtuseness and abstraction. But it's also his most rewarding, and the more times I head out to British Columbia with him for a retreat, the more fulfilled I am when I return.

(Key track: Nobody's Here)

3. City (Strapping Young Lad, 1997)

The best balance of Townsend's earlier humor and the force with which he'd propel later SYL albums, City is bursting at the seams with inventive, hilarious, terrifying extreme metal, its defiant anthem "All Hail the New Flesh" rubbing up against the rawer, less secure "Detox." Six years would pass before Townsend reconvened SYL, and the more carefree, anarchic humor that runs through tracks such as "Home Nucleonics" wouldn't again rear its head in so open a fashion.

(Key track: All Hail the New Flesh)

4. Alien (Strapping Young Lad, 2005)

If City was the most balanced SYL album, Alien works just as well for being the most unbalanced of them all. Apart from the aforementioned "Skeksis, " Townsend incorporates black metal into the opening "Imperial," quirky vocal harmonies in "Love?" (Eduardo Rivadavia of Allmusic aptly described the sound as "King's X from hell"), beautiful space in "Two Weeks" and the panic attack-literalizing static and hiss of "Info Dump." This album best exemplifies Townsend's ability to collide disharmonious sounds into a working, cohesive whole, and the tension between unity and discord is sometimes unbearable in the best way.

(Key track: Zen)

5. Infinity (Devin Townsend, 1998)

Terria may be Townsend's most complex album, but this is certainly his weirdest. Infinity is the most disconnected album he's ever put out -- including the final SYL album, a label-mandated affair that reeked of halfheartedness -- but luckily all the parts are worth listening to. It jumps from the euphoric opening teaser to a Wildhearts-esque love ditty (Ginger even co-wrote the lyrics) before dumping into "Bad Devil, the sound of Baron Samedi unleashed upon Nawlins through the power of rock. Where else can you hear a heavy metal trombone? The second half of the album contains the more personal touch of Townsend's best work, but it also has some of his strangest material ever, particularly the "wait, what the hell was that?" burst of gibberish that is "Antz." It's a mixed bag, but one of those mixed bags where all the different candies are still tasty.

(Key track: Life is All Dynamics)

Honorable Mention: Cooked on Phonics (Punky Brüster, 1996)

A one-off piss-take of the pop-punk resurgence of the mid-'90s, Cooked on Phonics profiles a death metal group that goes punk for the money and sells out everything for that bite of the cherry. Some of the jokes fall flat and one cannot listen over and over without breaks lest the gags that do work go stale, but this is probably the best indicator of Townsend's wit and his moral view of artistic integrity. Also, frankly, some of these tunes work as fantastic pop-punk songs. For completionists, only, perhaps, but still an album I return to with surprising frequency.

(Key track: Ez$, or the hidden tune "The Girls Next Door")

Domino

Tony Scott's Domino is simultaneously one of the sloppiest yet most fascinating American mainstream films made in the last 20 years. It combines the slapdash abilities of two of the most off-the-wall filmmakers working today into a hodgepodge that displays the best and worst of both. It contains Richard Kelly's swirling eddy of jumbled, half-baked ideas as filtered though Tony Scott's postmodern pseudo-poetry. The entire film has, as someone in the film says of a television executive, "the attention span of a ferret on crystal meth." And yet, when the film clicks, it manages to push the most outlandish elements of Kelly and Scott's élans to their extremes, to the point that the whole thing goes collapses in on itself, a red giant becoming a denser white dwarf. Somehow, it works, precisely because it doesn't.

Perhaps the only bit of honesty in the whole damn thing is the opening disclaimer that flashes, "Based on a true story" on the screen before another bit of text, almost as an afterthought, fades in: "Sort of." From the start, voiceovers and shots add exposition even as they bewilder. Scott loops sections of Keira Knightley's dialogue with his layered shots, starting in medias res not only within the narrative but within the background Domino Harvey (Knightley) provides about her life and her missions as a bounty hunter. Every so often, the film folds back in on itself, filling in details of the plot, some of which rearrange seemingly resolved stories with new perspective.

Scott cast Knightley in the role of Harvey, a model-turned-bounty-hunter, after seeing her in the first Pirates of the Caribbean film, but there wasn't much in The Curse of the Black Pearl to hint at the part she plays here. Domino represents the opposite of the majority of Knightley's other roles, an anti-glamor punk who turned to busting noses to vent her Soho and Beverley Hills-injected ennui. She works in a team with Ed Moesby (Mickey Rourke), the greatest bounty hunter in L.A., and Choco (Édgar Ramírez), a street urchin getting out his own psychopathic rage through chasing down bail skippers. Together, they break down doors, crack heads and generally confuse everyone who sees two juiced-up apes with a lithe, petite pixie in tow, a sight all the more confounding in that the lumbering, more experienced masses seem to follow her lead.

Domino unfolds in flashback as the protagonist recounts a horrifically botched job to an FBI psychologist (Lucy Liu). The first action we see is a shootout in a mobile home involving a locked freezer filled with money and a decoder ring on a severed arm, and just what the hell just happened is not fully explained for another 80 minutes. This is one of the more normal sequences of the film. Kelly went hog-wild with his treatment, connecting Domino's early life with her bounty hunting career by having her first assignment end with a lap dance to diffuse a tense situation (natch).

Scott, meanwhile, takes his leap forward with Man on Fire and makes it look like the most aesthetically conventional action movie around. The framing device setting up a flashback leads to a narrative that flashes back, forward and seemingly sideways at will, duplicating the image literally with Scott's production effects and recreating the image in broader terms when each scene is invariably echoed down the road with new details.

If Man on Fire showed Tony Scott broadening his artistic palette, Domino shows him upending his bag of tricks on the table. Besides the sickly yellow gauze that washes over the film, Scott shifts film speed, exposure and lighting on a dime, overlapping images, his long lenses blurring the edges of the frame and capturing the object of focus in almost uncomfortable detail. Domino shares more than a few tricks with Scott's previous adaptation of a narratively daring upstart's script, True Romance, albeit in a more frenzied tone. The reveries in which Domino pours out her thoughts in the narration over half-connected imagery recall the lilting "Gassenhauer" sections of True Romance, and the final shootout is a bigger and bolder take on Tarantino's humorous climax. Even as Scott heads into new territory, he finds ways to tie himself back to his earlier work.

That referential streak extends beyond Scott's own corpus into a host of pop culture items that are paraded about the film on stakes. Domino's father, Laurence Harvey, was an actor, and we see him when The Manchurian Candidate comes on TV -- "I knew Frank Sinatra," chimes in Ed, to which more than one person at different parts responds, "Who didn't?" (Ed also claims to have jammed with Stevie Ray Vaughan and hooked up with Pat Benetar.) The Jerry Springer Show gets lampooned directly with Springer himself joining the fray, while the aforementioned executive (Christopher Walken, who communicates solely in his various tics as if someone made a supercut of his weirdest and funniest moments) signs up the bounty hunting team for a Dog the Bounty Hunter knockoff that glamorizes them in a manner that both disgusts and allures the Hollywood-detesting Domino. Tagging along for that show are former Beverly Hills 90210 stars Ian Ziering and Brian Austin Green, whom Scott torments with constant references to their age and faded profiles, to say nothing of the physical punishment he metes out to them. The film even references Alf via the Afghani driver/demolitions expert. "He once ate a cat," Domino randomly supplies in a voiceover before clarifying: "We don't know how to pronounce his fucking name so we call him the cat-eating alien."

Had Kelly himself directed the film, he might have attempted to make some form of satire out of these references, but Scott uses them to contextualize his aesthetic and the offbeat, absurdist humor of the piece: the attention-deficit visuals grow out of the odd assortment of cultural touchstones assembled here and arranged by a man who trained as a painter. It's the perfect marriage of class and tastelessness.

Perhaps my favorite aspect of the film, however, is the manner in which Scott, whether intentionally or not, heads off any attempt on Kelly's part to try for any depth. Donnie Darko was riddled with symbols and metaphors that opened up interpretations beyond the bog-standard nature of the actual narrative, but Scott seems to take particular delight in throwing every potentially meaningful image at the wall until all that's left is a splattered collage. Domino constantly returns to the metaphor of a flipped coin to discuss her chances of survival during a job, and Scott shows a coin flipping in the air endlessly, often in front of a backdrop of an icon of Jesus, which in turn sometimes flashes back and forth between Jesus' and Choco's face. Domino's goldfish also enters into the fray, and given how many shots are repeated to the point of becoming motifs, even a seemingly meaningless image becomes a deliberately empty "symbol" through suggestion. The scene involving Tom Waits (ever the show-stealer) as some mystical wanderer in the desert proves this best of all: he speaks in portents but is divorced from the narrative even as he envisions the finale. The message is that there is no message. By stripping Kelly's more esoteric and muddied aspects and making them at once even more vague yet streamlined, he makes the strongest and most cohesive work Kelly's ever written, keeping all the fun and engaging doublebacks and misdirections while leaving out the thin satire (here, it's just dark comedy, and it works magnificently).

Despite the ridiculous pace the film maintains, Domino sags under the strain of its moving parts, most of them barreling ahead in opposition to the rest. But I still can't help but love the movie. Scott's visual style is so playful, overshooting someone and drifting back to proper framing as if someone accidentally put the outtake reels of setting up the blocking into the canisters for copying and distribution. He does not attempt to make the film about anything, instead using his knack for detail to paint an emotional abstract of what would otherwise be a painfully uninteresting film. I can not get the memory of the college kid's foot shaking in antsy impatience, the actual lion roar that comes out of Choco's grimacing mouth while on mescaline or the illuminated glimpses of Knightley's furious face in the climax as she fires assault rifles in darkness. Domino allowed Scott the chance to take stock of all that he'd learned with both the camera and the editing suite. He would refine the best of his abilities for use in his next project, and he'd end up making his masterpiece.

Upcoming Blog-a-thon: Iranian Cinema

Per The Sheila Variations:

In light of Jafar Panahi’s open letter to Isabella Rossellini, the Berlinale, and all of us and his plea for artistic freedom, I am going to host (very last-minute I know) a blog-a-thon during the week of Feburary 21 – 27 celebrating the contributions of Iran to the world of film-making. If you are interested in participating, just send me the links you have written during that week and I will post them here on my site. It can be about whatever you want, it doesn’t have to be about Jafar Panahi, specifically, although posts about his work would be fantastic. If you don’t have a blog and want to participate, feel free to write something and send it to me. I will post it here.

I'm extremely excited for this. I was about to watch Panahi's Crimson Gold anyway and will be contributing a piece on that film and, if time allows, at least one other post on another Iranian film I've never seen, Dariush Mehrjui's Leila (I also have yet to speak on Kiarostami's Koker trilogy, but I am getting way ahead of myself if I think I'll have time for all that). As Sheila said, no familiarity with Iranian film is necessary, and I hope to see some people joining in who have never seen a film from the country. Speaking from my own, extremely limited experience with Iranian cinema, I have found it beautiful almost to the point of pain, filled with commentary on humanity that transcends national borders -- a particularly impressive feat, given how ripe a sociopolitical structure like Iran's theocratic dictatorship lends itself to polemics.

Often, bloggers hold retrospectives and blog-a-thons simply out of a love for a particular director or genre, which is more than a valid reason. But it's nice to see a real impetus for engagement and learning here, a chance for many of us to get better acquainted with a fascinating but little-seen section of world cinema with copious treasures waiting to be discovered. If you don't want to participate, please help spread the word. A few Tweets go a long way. Hope to see a nice turnout for this.

(Contact information about the blog-a-thon can be found on Sheila's site via the link at the top of the post.)

2012: Future Perfect

This movie is about the predictions of the end of the world in 2012, but it ended up being just an adventure movie with action and fight for survival. I'm sure this topic will be recurrent as we get closer to 2012, so this activity comes in good times. I used this scene for the practice of the future perfect tense.


A. Read the predictions below. Check the ones the characters in the segment previewed that will occur.



( ) 1. The earth will expire on 2012.

( ) 2. The sun will emit an extreme amount of radiation that the core of the earth will melt.

( ) 3. Men will find ways to stop the destruction of the planet.

( ) 4. This incident will leave the crust of the earth free to shift.

( ) 5. There will be earth crust displacement.

( ) 6. The world will come to an end on December 21st, 2012.

( ) 7. Humankind will be terminated.



B. Now rewrite the sentences above using the past perfect tense after the expression "By December 21st, 2012..."



Ex:



1. By 12/21/12, the earth will have expired.

2. ...........................................
3 ...........................................
4 ............................................
5 ............................................
6 ............................................
7 ...........................................



Talk to a partner:

1.What do you think about these predictions?.Do you believe them? Why (not)?

2.Do you think the world will end one day? Why (not)?

3.What would you do if you really knew the world would end in December 2012? Why would you do it?

4.Why have men always foreseen the end of days throughout history?

WORKSHEET


Answer Key:

A.

Incorrect items: 2 and 7.

B. By 12/21/2012,

2. The sun will have emitted ... and the core of the earth will have melted.

3. Men won't have found ...

4. This incident will have left...

5. There will have been...

6. The world will have come ...

7. Humankind will not have been terminated.

Upcoming Series: Ulysses Reading Diary

*Update: I've placed links at the top of the post so readers don't have to scroll down to find them. Each post focuses on a chapter at a time.

Reading Log
Chapter One: Telemachus
Chapter Two: Nestor
Chapter Three: Proteus
Chapter Four: Calypso
Chapter Five: The Lotus Eaters
Chapter Six: Hades
Chapter Seven: Aeolus
Chapter Eight: Lestrygonians
Chapter Nine: Scylla and Charybdis
Chapter Ten: The Wandering Rocks
Chapter Eleven: Sirens
Chapter Twelve: Cyclops
Chapter Thirteen: Nausicaa
Chapter Fourteen: Oxen of the Sun
Chapter Fifteen: Circe
Chapter Sixteen: Eumaeus

Chapter Seventeen: Ithaca
Chapter Eighteen: Penelope

Hello, all,

I apologize for the severely slowed output as of late, but schoolwork has reared its ugly head (or heads, for, like the Hydra, every time I kill one assignment three more spring in its place) and I've been too busy to focus on reviewing. I should have two new posts by the end of the weekend, one on a film, another a continuation of my "Stuff I Like" series, where I spotlight an artist from any medium who has had an impact on me. For now, however, I still have some work to do.

Though I have not had time to sit down and digest a film in one go, I have been spackling the narrow cracks in my schedule with reading, and I've been both returning to old favorites and finally tackling classics that previously daunted me. The greatest blind spot in my literary awareness must be Ulysses by James Joyce, almost universally considered the crowning literary achievement of the 20th century. Joyce himself was foreign to me, considering I'd only ever read brief excerpts of his work with minimal explication.

I just completed A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, however, and the wonderful time I had with it made the fears I had over tackling Joyce's titanic novel all the more transparently unnecessary. However, when my copy of a reprinting of the original 1922 text of the novel arrived in the mail, I turned to the back to check the annotations and found nearly 300 pages of notes explaining Joyce's esoteric, highly advanced and multilingual wordplay, in addition to notes delving into the novel's connection with Homer's Odyssey. So, some apprehension remains.

Therefore, I've decided to handle the book differently than my usual style, which is to just read like the wind because I can never stop myself. Instead, I will keep a running log here of my trek through Dublin, a post for each of the novel's 18 chapters. I should say that this will almost certainly not be a book review, insofar as analysis may be scant in favor of simply spilling out how I've processed the text and the notes. I hope it shall amount to more than a running list of characters, motifs and happenings like some second-rate SparkNotes, but we shall see how it goes. I do at least hope, in deference to Professor Nabokov, to put forward some idea of who the man in the brown mackintosh is. A catalog of the posts will be collected here for easier access once I'm finished.

See you at the top of the Martello tower in Sandycove, everyone.