The fanboy sensation Cloverfield shreds your nerves. Elsewhere, Cassandra's Dream turns out to be one of Woody Allen's strongest films in years, and Steve Martin tells all (kinda) in a great new memoir.
Usually, January is the cinematic no man’s land of the truly awful film experiences. But in between In the Name of the King and One Missed Call and Meet the Spartans, there have actually been not one but two pretty great movies to come down the pike.
Cloverfield (Paramount Pictures)
Because of its structural novelty – the movie is the recovered videotape taken by one person during a horrifying monster attack on New York – and because of its unspoken references to the death and destruction of 9/11, there's a mistaken belief that Cloverfield is somehow about something or that it should be about something. But beyond the very gripping filmmaking and occasionally insanely unnerving sequences, perhaps the movie's greatest asset is that it actually doesn't pretend to be about anything or offer anything new in terms of subtext. (Is it by design that not a single character even mentions 9/11? Is this some sort of parallel New York where it never happened? It's worth pondering.) At first, the no-name, impossibly cute and/or hip young characters seemed hopelessly callow in the face of what they experience – perhaps a commentary on a media-savvy, super-technologically-advanced generation facing a primordial terror even their cellphones can't defeat? But soon enough, director Matt Reeves and writer Drew Goddard threw me into the terrifying deep end right alongside the characters, and I realized there was no sociological discussion going on – like The Blair Witch Project before it, this is horror made new because it's done in a different way, and it unsettles us more because there isn't a clear "point" to the horror. If you want an intellectual dissection about how we "see" our world only through the context of another form of visual medium, watch Redacted. If you want a monster movie with deeper philosophical underpinnings, by all means seek out The Host. Cloverfield is pure ride – certainly not a thrill machine, but definitely a grim, very convincing shredding of the nerves. I have my objections to some of the dumber things the characters do – a central figure never stopped annoying me with his "funny" sidekick prattle – but it's hard to mount much of an objection to a movie so terrifying you can barely breathe.
Cassandra's Dream (The Weinstein Company)
Really, what's lazier: Woody Allen's filmmaking or the critics sent to cover his movies? To report that his latest is similar to Match Point or Crimes and Misdemeanors is akin to noting that In Utero doesn't sound any less angry than Nevermind. In a career marked by different series of films that repeat and reanalyze themes from earlier films, Allen's recent preoccupation with the world's moral emptiness is a far more interesting way of handling aging than hiring one more young starlet to play alongside him. But where Match Point elaborated on Crimes' ethical quandaries while largely following in the snow-prints of that film's plotline, here there is no concern about repeating himself. After all, the ending is clear from the outset – that's what Philip Glass’ mournful, tense score is for – and so the point becomes not the chance of redemption for these ultimately luckless brothers but the grim details of just how bad it will go. Cassandra’s Dream has been compared unfavorably to Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, but both movies share the dispassionate calm of old men who seem to be playing out their obsessions through characters we come to love because their fleshed-out ordinariness speaks to our own. In this context, the repetition of a line or scene from a previous Allen movie is largely immaterial – this film feels like a marshaling of the unshakable pessimism he has obsessed over for years. Love is futile, God is futile, family is futile, a sense of a personal code is futile. Though it couldn't be further removed structurally, thematically this feels like the sort of bleak, bracing nothingness that Bergman did so well. Major kudos to Ewan and Colin, who are both terrific, and shame on Harvey for dumping it in January.
Born Standing Up (Scribner)
The complaints about Steve Martin’s memoir are as follows: (1) Not emotionally engaging enough; (2) Not long enough; (3) Not enough detail into how he developed the routines that made his standup career so legendary. To which I say, “Wrong, wrong, you gotta be kidding me.” Martin has enjoyed a second (third?) life as a writer of humorous essays, plays, novellas, and screenplays, but he’s never looked at himself with such candor as he does in Born Standing Up, which recounts his evolution from fumbling kid magician to the biggest comic in America. His writing style has always been overly analytic – his gags are usually clever as opposed to hysterical – and so by comparison the restrained sentiment of his reminiscences about his strained home life and lonely adventures on the club circuit nearly burst with emotion. Throughout, Martin is thorough about giving credit to those who suggested a great standup line or piece of comedic business, and much like Bob Dylan’s memoir, there’s little insight into the writer’s secrets because, really, if you want to know why someone is a genius the worst person you can ask is the genius himself. But Martin compensates by explaining a process of hard work, discipline, and ambition that propelled him forward. As an added bonus, his memories about the emptiness of major success has to be one of the most convincing and least smug. Born Standing Up is inspiring mostly because Martin makes a strong case that he was not a gifted entertainer but a dedicated one. And after all that, he includes a finale that just about rips your heart out and brings the book full circle in a way that’s unexpected and yet was planned from the start.
Panda Bear, Person Pitch (Paw Tracks)
The more I listen to this album, the less I understand it. Noah Lennox’s mixture of psychedelic and sun-kissed pop gets it compared to Brian Wilson a ton, but to my ears the better analogy is Love’s Forever Changes, a record whose ‘60s exuberance is consistently undercut by the darker, stranger impulses flowing underneath. Lennox’s regular band, Animal Collective, is other people’s idea of artistry, but here he supplies a steady stream of mystery and song suites (but never ever songs) that are simply unfathomable, even when they do come with lyrics. (“Sticks and stones may break my bones/But words will never hurt me”? Thanks for nothing.) But beyond being aural relaxation, there’s something unconscious or subliminal in Person Pitch’s method. I can’t say I’m gonna listen to it a lot in the future, but when I do, I’m gonna listen all the way through.
Jens Lekman, Night Falls Over Kortedala (Secretly Canadian)
Pitched somewhere between Stephen Merritt and Antony Hegarty on the operatic/sarcastic pop-singer spectrum, Jens Lekman sings beautiful love songs without irony using lyrics that are filled with it. He’s best when he tries his hand at storytelling: I can already imagine the impressionable aspiring young filmmakers writing treatments based on the lesbian con job “A Postcard to Nina.” Other times, his amorphous beauty is nothing but string swells and Morrissey vocal flourishes. Recommended to those drunk on love who want to avoid the wine hangover. For anyone else, a convincing emotional replica of first love, with all the excesses, embarrassing silliness and genuine excitement such a description implies.
Consumables is a biweekly overview of popular culture.
