I just had to take a look at the quite popular Homicide: Life on the Street after reading David Simon's true crime epic that inspired it. Maybe part of me was hoping to find an expectedly paler substitute for The Wire since we've finished all five seasons now but after three episodes (which I know is not enough to judge properly) we didn't exactly find it.
They actually use a lot of stories from the book in the first episodes, even though Simon was not directly involved in writing them, but it could have benefited from the books structure: where crimes are solved over time, not within a few screen moments.

It is a clearly more gritty take on the genre popularized by Law and Order, where Simon's stories lead the way, but you can actually see when script writers took over and imagine the meeting where they said “Let's find out what these characters are all about” and the result is the third, stilted, show the “human” side episode that turned me off.

But as I said, one episode can't damn seven years of work. Wow, seven years – did anyone else know it was on that long? It must have been immensely popular in it's day with people I've never met. It was ahead of its time, using new wave editing in prime time. It was a hybrid of easy to swallow neatly tied up crime fighting and more bleak, complicated realism that was perfected with The Wire.

While I am not hooked enough to devote months to seeing all seven series in a row, I was intrigued enough to hope against hope it might come to my roku,?if only to substitute more annoying procedurals over dinner. The actors are top notch (you've got Ned Beatty, Richard Belzer, Yaphet Kotto, and Andre Braugher), the art direction is appropriately florescent and back alley lit, and I would love to see what made it such a hit for nearly a decade.

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Posted on January 12, 2009

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While it’s no surprise that The Village Voice is hard up these days, and even though it’s been viewed as less and less relevant daily, some of their staff is extremely awesome and in particular Lynn Yaeger is a city icon who gave thirty years of her wit to the paper. So, of course, in a clear last breath of desperation, they laid the wonderful woman off!
Her distinctive, bright orangey-red short bang crop, her Betty Boop lips, and her dots of glowing blush makes her instantly recognizable on the streets, more that once my day’s been made just seeing her. She is obsessed with clothes and as a woman after my own heart who believes in individual style (of which she had plenty). In a recent interview she said:

quot;I think people should wear whatever they like!”,?”There are no no-nos!” and “Be yourself! Ignore the rules.”

As everyone else has also predicted, I am sure Yaeger will find a home and happiness with a career like hers under her belt, and it truly will probably hurt the Village Voice more than her, but maybe she can pick up on the career she once told Refinery 29 she would take on if she ever lost her job: “helping ripped-off people take on the system” and demand justice for her fellow pink slip legend Nat Hentoff.

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Posted on January 12, 2009

Sometimes a hard-to-find movie attains a frenzied cult status but ultimately disappoints once you finally track it down and watch it. Trouble Every Day has almost the opposite problem, despite absolutely glowing reviews like this one by Walter Chaw, “Mesmeric and entrancing, intuitive and impossibly intimate, the picture is alive with craft, intelligence, and the absolute courage of its macabre vision. Trouble Every Day is among the finest films of the year, but handle it with care” this dark and bloody vampire tale doesn't seem to be on everyone's lips.

But that's something I expect will change as more and more people happen across reviews and articles – maybe one day it will even be released here on DVD. And it will surely, as word of mouth builds, claim a rightful and honored place in vampire, horror, and strange cinema thanks to its masterful and artful blend of dread punctuated by extreme violence.

In some ways, it's really just a typical vampire story: a man of science travels to a foreign country to find his former colleague and stop him from unleashing the monster they created years before, but it's told in a very irregular fashion – at least for a horror movie. In fact, it's much more in step with contemporary French art house cinema. The film is nearly silent with little or no dialogue and sparse music, and for the first forty minutes or so you're left to decipher what's happening through the beautifully framed actions of the characters alone.

The result is a brooding mystery where each scene escalates the dread and prompts questions like: Who are these hot teenagers hell-bent on breaking into a lone woman's apartment? What are these scientific experiments that were so suddenly abandoned? And why can't Vincent Gallo stop masturbating?

It's a technique that may tax less patient viewers desiring the gore they imagine might come from the trailer instead of moody shots of a scarf fluttering over Parisian rooftops. But more patient viewers need not worry, you'll get blood and lots of it courtesy of the enigmatic and beautiful Beatrice Dalle. Never again will you imagine vampiric bloodletting as a clean, sanitary act, but one of total chaos. The film takes on vampirism as a medical condition, a horrible disease and, as a vampire, her plight is both frightening and sad; in one of her only lines in the film she tells her caretaker/lover that she is ready to die.

Dalle is by far the greatest embodiment of a vampire ever put on screen. She is irresistible, unleashed, uncontrollable, and truly not human. She's a siren of death that makes Hollywood's cloak clad, widow's peaked Dracula look like a joke. Her portrayal of a real-life monster is pure genius and I only wish the film had focused on her just a little more.

Gallo's off kilter performance is right on target as a frotteurist but hard to buy as a research chemist. Still, even for someone who finds him silly (like me), he doesn't ruin it all – even when he and his wife first punctuate the film's prolonged silence with dialogue that sounds like it was over-dubbed by shy children.

There's a pervasive sexuality throughout which, as any symbolist will tell you, is something a good vampire movie ought to have: nearly every scene includes kissing, touching, extreme close ups of skin, masturbating, small French breasts, panty removal and more masturbation, and it's all set to a great soundtrack by Tindersticks (not Frank Zappa).

You may not yet have heard of Trouble Every Day, but if you're a fan of shocking and arty horror cinema, I'll leave it to you to spread the word. You can find the DVD at my favorite place for rare and hard-to-find movies, J4Hi.

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Posted on January 12, 2009

Oh, how I love NY1! My friends may tease when it's blaring in the background when they stop by but they're just missing out on some amazing journalism by Roger Clark whose described on their a site as having “eaten prawn at seven in the morning” and by The Observer, (affectionately) as “The Last Schlub on TV“.

Even the stoic Lewis Dodley had to chuckle after seeing Roger's face turn a bizarre shade of out-of-shape-man red during an intense b-boy and b-girl session. Clark is like a dream character for Ed Helms, a likable, well intentioned nerd whose friends and family, I imagine must endure weekly cringe-fests at his latest on screen antics.

Like the time he was supposed to report on a major political round table where the president was meeting “with like, all kinds of people” and quoting Coming to America to an unamused Pat Kiernan. Or when he was trying to wrap his head around Rick Rolling. Or as he was patiently being taught how to scratch like a DJ.

While it's not updated, you can meet another fan of the man's doofus ways here at the I Heart Roger Clark blog.

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Posted on January 12, 2009

My friend Mike lent me Desertshore based upon the assumption that I'd go ga-ga for the wild combination of Nico's gloomy voice and medieval vibes. He was right, of course, and this spooky, funereal, and oddly beautiful album has been whisking me off to moors and other dying lands for days.?Her strange voice makes for an interesting listening experience, one that on the first few go-rounds is like listening to a foreign language, which often times it actually is (“Abschied”, “Mutterlein” and the creepy “Le Petit Chevalier“, sung by a little boy who sounds like a trapped ghost wandering the halls of an abandoned estate). But the more you listen, bits of lyrics begin to speak out:

You are beautiful and you are alone!,
Their hands are old
Their faces cold
Their bodies close to freezing,
Deceive the Devil's deed!

The cryptic lyrics don't offer too much insight into exactly what Nico was trying to say (I assume she was kind of down, kind of vague, kind of witchy and with a less than cheery outlook on the world), but they certainly help to build the overwhelming feeling Desertshore evokes in its listeners, a feeling perhaps unique to the individual. There's definitely a prevailing theme of motherhood here, and we all know that she was among rock history's worst – but she's no hypocrite, it's not a celebration of the joys of parenting. After all when was Nico ever joyful? Even at her most radio friendly on These Days, she can only manage completely soul crushing regret at best.

Some of the songs (“Abshied” and “Mutterlein”) were made for her collaboration film La Cicatrice Interieure with then-lover Philippe Garrel. I?didn't want to know the movie's plot because I wanted to interpret what this short but haunting music was about for myself – turns out there was no reason for caution because from what I've read, the film is largely plot-less, consisting essentially of Nico walking around a desert looking fabulous.

The arrangement by John Cale, a Brix Picks fave, is sometimes genius – particularly in the albums most dynamic (and my favorite) song All That is My Own – a layered, Medieval, goth, experimental should-be classic.

Desertshore may not qualify as a classic yet, it has few fans (or even people who've heard it) but you'll find by looking around the internet that those fans are rabid. It's like a charm spell and if you're taken in you can never escape the wailing of the blond siren… or at least it's the type of album I'd like to imagine has those kinds of powers.

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Posted on January 12, 2009