0 A History of Violence (1997)

I guess it makes sense that my favorite part of this graphic novel is the art by Vince Locke. The story didn't much impress me in the movie version by David Cronenberg and it doesn't much here either. I understand the temptation to go to the device of New York City Italian-American organized crime as the most heinous evil the mind can conceive, but it's old now, so old. Can we please have another brand of monolithic evil please? The story here goes well over the top to a much greater degree even than the movie, into areas that are frankly unbelievable, such as holding a hostage for 20 years and torturing said hostage all that time. With blowtorches, pliers, crowbars, etc. For 20 years? Man, that's harsh. Locke's illustration style feels scratchy and sketchy and rushed, black and white, and some very serious cross-hatching, but I came to like it a great deal. On the downside, his skill level with portraiture is so weak I had a hard time separating characters from one another, which was really a critical lack at some junctures. I liked the ways he compensated it, establishing certain elements, such as cars, by their shapes, and then varying the angles of view from close-up to medium to long and back and all around, recognizable by the shape. Lots of great interiors, some really nice cityscapes, and a solid sense for propelling a story. That could as well have been writer John Wagner, of course. I don't know much about him—I was slightly familiar with Judge Dredd in the '80s, which never made much impression though I liked the premise a lot. In the nuts and bolts of this graphic novel the storytelling is perfectly fine. I'm just tired of some of the things I've already mentioned and others: the Mafia, children in danger, sadism pushed into farce, the Ethan Edwards who's got what it takes, and similar nonsense. In conclusion, I'm not sure whether or not I can recommend it, and I suppose that means I am actually not recommending it at all. But hey, YMMV.

In case it's not at the library.

Detail: A History of Violence (1997)

0 The Game (1997)

USA, 129 minutes
Director: David Fincher
Writers: John D. Brancato, Michael Ferris
Photography: Harris Savides
Music: Howard Shore
Editor: James Haygood
Cast: Michael Douglas, Sean Penn, Deborah Kara Unger, James Rebhorn, Peter Donat, Carroll Baker, Anna Katarina, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Daniel Schorr, Spike Jonze

In the '90s, as director David Fincher worked on branching away from the music videos (notably with Madonna) that helped make him, he drifted a lot into tricksy and self-consciously "dark" projects—Fight Club, which I don't like, may be most famous, but Alien 3, Se7en, and The Game all fit the profile too. Though later, especially with Zodiac and The Social Network, Fincher found more useful ways to sublimate the impulse, much of that early work is burdened by relentless piling on with excess of excess.

That's true enough of The Game, which presents us a thriller wrapped around a puzzle box inside of a new-age bubble (which Todd Haynes had exploited far better in Safe). But the big concept of The Game remains irresistible: a company named Consumer Recreation Services sells a mysterious product known as "the game." Conrad Van Orton (Sean Penn) gives one to his brother Nicholas (Michael Douglas) for his birthday. The result is a pretty wild ride, especially the first time the movie is seen. Trying to be very careful with spoilers on this one.



On one level, from one angle, Fincher is following a common impulse of filmmakers and has simply found another way to make a movie about making movies, because the experience of the game is inherently visual and cinematic, fitted well to his style, shot dark to be dark, in swallowing browns, with dark rooms lighted by TV screens, walnut-paneled boardrooms, dark streets at night, long shadows falling across everything.

Just the fact that it is Michael Douglas once again reprising his classic role as Yuppie Scum puts it into familiar movie territory. Indeed, one of the best parts is the way it riffs away on the stock Douglas psyche—we already know this guy from Basic Instinct, Falling Down, Fatal Attraction, and Wall Street. And when the pranks are things like clown dolls, or vandals installing black light in his mansion and triggering "White Rabbit" at massive volume, they are made to be gaped at in wonder. And I did. It is truly a movie full of surprises and I'd put the overall cheat level at a modest 30%.

The cheats are all for the sake of making the visuals spectacular, shot by shot as much as possible (the Michael Mann formula for thriller), but it must be asked, at what cost to the narrative? For example, as fascinating as the lengthy screening process in a clinical setting is, how likely is it that a busy investment banker will let himself be put through all that, just because his ne'er-do-well younger brother gave him an off-the-wall birthday gift? Also: it's extremely dangerous to cause someone to enter the San Francisco Bay in a motor vehicle. It's also extremely dangerous to fire live rounds from automatic weapons into an apartment building.

I can accept "near future" if that has to be part of the explanation for all the high-tech gewgaw, and I can accept overreach by corporations too, but in the context of one overarching theme (of many) in this picture—the supposed life-changingness of the experience of the game—some things seem implausibly risky for the service provider, not to mention the client. Still, the momentum in this thing is propulsive, so you don't think too hard about it—the way you don't think too hard about a perilous amusement park ride when you're on it.

The Game also uses a clever strategy to deal with its implausibilities, explaining some of the blatant plot holes, often late—in at least one case after a long enough time that it had begun to nag at me, "but what about" style. In this way it distracts from all the plot holes it can't explain. It lets the audacious experiences Van Orton goes through dazzle and boggle you instead of answering questions. After awhile it just gets too hard to hang on to the niggling inconsistencies.

But what's it all about, Alfie? Why is it walking this infinitely fine line of believability in the first place? Aye, there's the question. Interestingly, it's so full of tricks and surprises that it somewhat insulates itself from such matters by reason of the spoiler issue. I'm going to respect that here, because The Game is a pretty good trip and the less you know going in the better. But I will say, and see if you don't agree with me, that it tends toward using the most plausible explanations to shore up its credibility with viewers, raising the stakes of the story without thinking very hard about how they can possibly be resolved. In that way it's a bit like the TV series Lost.

It does have a classic Sean Penn reading of a line I never get tired of: "It's so fucked. They fuck you and they fuck you and they fuck you! And just when you think it's all over, that's when the real fucking starts." Take that as likely intended: mission statement for this movie.

Detail: The Game (1997)

0 Please Kill Me (1997)

This is approximately exactly as advertised, an uncensored oral history of '70s New York punk-rock, reaching back for its origins to the Doors, Velvet Underground, and Stooges, and proceeding directly from there. The copious drug use and sexual practices account for the "uncensored" appellation, though in its totality few are spared the judgments of one another on account of discretion, so in that way it's kind of gossipy too—but always fascinating and there is likely plenty for many to learn. Me, I was surprised to encounter some of the people in the thick of it, such as Todd Rundgren, and to gain some proportionality of impact on my own heroes of the time, Lou Reed (huge), Iggy Pop (colossal), and David Bowie (marginal). It was good to see so much attention paid to Richard Hell and the Voidoids, though I could have done without so much on the Dead Boys. Talking Heads are all but missing in action, except for one glancing mention of yuppies, which just goes to show the rest of us ... something. Once again I am forced to consider the New York Dolls, who never meant much to me. Guess you had to be there—the shows sound awesome. My blind spot extends to Johnny Thunders as well, on whom there is a good deal here. He's one of the giants striding all through it. The Ramones also figure large, of course, and unfortunately many of their stories are sad ones. They should have been superstars, I still think that. Blondie gets treated nicely too, which surprised me given the approach to Talking Heads. Lots of voices are heard here, from the obscure to the famous, but a few are missing. I don't think there are any (or many anyway) quotes from Tom Verlaine. It's great on the cross-pollinating relations between New York and British punk-rock, funny and interesting to see the view from the inside as the whole thing is virtually carpetbagged out of New York by Malcolm McLaren after an inspiring visit, incidentally earning him a lion's share of credit for punk-rock, with the Sex Pistols (McLaren again), the Clash, and all the rest. They're here too, of course—but mostly only in appropriately marginalized roles. This one's fast and fun to read.

In case it's not at the library.

Detail: Please Kill Me (1997)

0 The Conet Project (1997)

Jeff Tweedy's inspiration for various facets of the Wilco album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot—including the title—provided a fascination for many. I understand it was even a bit of a fad some 10 or 12 years ago, used in the Vanilla Sky movie and championed generally by the likes of Tweedy, Devendra Banhart, so on so forth. Now I've had my own infatuation with it. Released as a 4-CD set, with something in the neighborhood of 150 separate tracks, it's culled from hours and hours (and hours) of tape recordings of the mysterious broadcasts on so-called numbers stations (Wikipedia: "shortwave radio stations of uncertain origin believed to be operated by government agencies to communicate with spies 'in the field'"). Most often it's just voices, speaking in many different languages, saying numbers (usually, though not always, one voice and one language per broadcast), in any number of accents. Sometimes it is letters of the alphabet, or words. All kinds of voices, young and old. Sometimes there is music. Sometimes there is only music. Various beeps and tones flutter around in peripheral audio. Some of the electronic ambient noises remind me of Sonic Youth breaks (or Wilco's, for that matter). It's raw, hot, unfiltered, staticky, and riveting. For me, the attraction is how unsettling it all is as documented reality. They sound like broadcasts because they are broadasts, they sound like humans because they are humans, but they also sound unhuman and meaningless in the totality (achieved in seconds of play) of the bland recitations, which nonetheless proceed with purpose. There's a sense of a thousand people hearing, a hundred thousand, a million, but few who understand. At this point, as classified intelligence, no doubt the value is nil—on a par with most email or motel registries from 20 years ago. Yet its power to exclude remains strong. One always feels on the outside; it must tap directly into a portion of the brain that directs paranoid thinking. The conspiracy feeling is strong with these. It's just hard to know what to make of them, but for a long period I compulsively kept coming back to hear more, and I still love hearing them emerge out of the shuffle stream. They have the sound quality of late-night AM radio between the stations, fading in and out, cutting in and out, hissing—which I suppose is a nostalgic pleasure for me there. But there's a weird and undeniable urgency to it too. Here.

Detail: The Conet Project (1997)