From: owner-loud-fans-digest@smoe.org (loud-fans-digest) To: loud-fans-digest@smoe.org Subject: loud-fans-digest V6 #262 Reply-To: loud-fans@smoe.org Sender: owner-loud-fans-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-loud-fans-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk loud-fans-digest Saturday, December 23 2006 Volume 06 : Number 262 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Re: [loud-fans] Let's question ["Larry Tucker" ] Re: [loud-fans] my new and improved top ten list (actual size) [zoom@mupp] [loud-fans] Movies 2006 [zoom@muppetlabs.com] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 22 Dec 2006 09:30:26 -0500 From: "Larry Tucker" Subject: Re: [loud-fans] Let's question Mark, that was shot at Pilot Mt. which is about 20 miles north of Winston-Salem. - -Larry On 12/22/06, CertronC90@aol.com wrote: > > Sorry for the multitiude of e-mails, but I just watched the video to Let's > Active's "In Little Ways." on You Tube. Was that shot at > Mount Mitchell? I > know WNCW has it's big tower up there (it has gone down and it cost a > fortune > to get it back on). > > --Mark, who find it strange and exciting seeing videos to songs I've > known > like the back of my hand for twenty years, but have never seen the vids > for ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 22 Dec 2006 11:14:38 -0800 (PST) From: zoom@muppetlabs.com Subject: Re: [loud-fans] my new and improved top ten list (actual size) Which reminds me, isn't it time for Aaron to run the Loud-poll? Wondering if Grizzly Bear sounds anything like Shearwater's THE DISSOLVING ROOM, Andy "To be discontented with the divine discontent, and to be ashamed with the noble shame, is the very germ of the first upgrowth of all virtue." - --Charles Kingsley ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 22 Dec 2006 11:33:51 -0800 (PST) From: zoom@muppetlabs.com Subject: [loud-fans] Movies 2006 Dan Sallitt, wherefore art thou? I forgot to write about "Hollywoodland" (watch that one, too), Andy 1. "Host & Guest" (Shin Dong-il) You don't need a film degree to love Shin Dong-il's debut. Knowing that when Ho-Jun, the defeated, divorced assistant film professor, offers a bodega girl a copy of "Ali: Fear Eats the Soul," and a DVD player to play it on even, he retraces the desperate reaching out of humanity to fellow humanity shown in that film, adds a layer of understanding. But not knowing it, you'd get the story in Ho-Jun's hunched posture and his breathless, clipped speechmaking. The bodega girl has no clue how to handle him. Neither does Gye-Sang, the cheery polite missionary knocking on Ho-Jun's door while the latter fires up Internet porn. Getting no answer, Gye-Sang leaves and Ho-Jun steeps in isolation 20 minutes more (Shin isn't afraid of unforced exposition) until he accidentally locks himself in his own bathroom, resolving that he'll die naked on the tiles. Gye-Sang returns to smash him free with a hammer swing most unbecoming a missionary. Ho-Jun boozes, enjoys operatic shouting matches and misses his kid like hell. Gye-Sang's Jehovah's Witness faith (oddly never named) puts him on a collision course with South Korean law. Their chemistry, misadventures, and blossoming affection spark the first distinctly great film I've seen from SIFF this year. 2. "Deliver Us From Evil" (Amy Berg) Mr. Horton's comment that the monster doesn't know he's a monster certainly seems apt. "Shakespeare Behind Bars" reminded me that killers and molesters can look like anyone (which, sadly, I found I needed). "Deliver Us From Evil" shows us a charming, bright monster, almost as horrible in that contradiction as the system protecting him. Hard to imagine anyone being a Catholic after watching this. Though I wasn't big on organized religion going in. 3. "Brothers Of The Head" (Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe) Cojoined twins (at the chest, not the head, for superior symbolism) fall under a manager's spell and become unlikely rock stars. One plays guitar, one sings. One possesses a few licks of sense. The other one wants to rock and roll *and* party all night. Then they fall in love, elliptically, with a singular woman. Perfected by Clive Langer's three-chord, howling-"fuck"-at-the-moon bashers for the band. 4. "What Remains" (Steven Cantor) Sally Mann probably wouldn't have a solvent career (or a documentary study) if she hadn't started out photographing her children nude, then switched to photographing corpses. But Cantor's matter-of-fact tone allows us to see the resonance beneath the controversy in Mann's work, and to simultaneously think and feel our way through the intellectual conundrums of her indecision and fresh directions. 5. "The Wild Blue Yonder" (Werner Herzog) Space shuttle and Antarctic scuba-diving footage recontextualized as documentation of aliens in, and before, our midst, with Brad Dourif as the surviving alien for narration. An abandoned town near Los Angeles doubles as a woebegone alien settlement. Philosophically both intriguing (Dourif calls it all downhill for humanity after agrarianism) and overreaching (space wormhole highways?). Aesthetically, an important reminder that earth and its immediate environs, present landscapes more gustily unbelievable than most wholehearted science fiction. 6. "TV Junkie" (Michael Cain and Matt Radecki) The unexamined life *may* not be worth living, but Rick Kirkham, who shot 3000 hours of footage clad in the many hats as TV reporter, world traveler, playboy, crack addict, newlywed, family man, used-car salesman, jailbird, and rehab voyager, amazing produced that much documentation, with all of perhaps a single ounce of examination. Cain and Radecki put his story together. As a story arc they give us the umpteenth Icarus. From scene to scene, though, move through Kirkham's charming narcissism, a wife who fights back by grabbing her own camera, the banality of domestic violence, and the disturbing possibility that people shape their own crisis reactions to match what they absorb through prime time. 7. "Sa-kwa" (Kang Yi-kwan) Dumped by her longtime boyfriend, a beautiful young woman marries a nerd who's been genteelly stalking her at work. I don't see many films about the pain, and the resolve, of abruptly becoming an adult, with adult responsibilities, after larking at childhood's end in one's early twenties. Female lead Moon So-ri brings a richly complicated naturalism to heartbreak, struggle, whimsy, and temptation. 8. "The Hidden Blade" (Yoji Yamada) Yamada's last samurai film featured two fights. Now he's down to one. And perhaps his next film won't have any. He studies the mentalities behind the swords, centrifugal pulls of one's duty at court, one's barely-concealed true feelings, and one's humanity. 9. "Three Times" (Hou Hsiao-hsien) The space between us and the lengths we'll go to close it, spelled out in bus trips from 1966, scrolls from 1911, and text messages from 2005. 10. "Bubble" (Steven Soderbergh) "Never in this country," writes the "Voice"'s Michael Atkinson amidst his dismissal "has a film occupied itself so steadfastly with someone like [Debbie]Doebereiner." And how profound he waxes, even as he leaves that line behind. In real life Doebereiner's worked at a Kentucky Fried Chicken for decades, and no other recent narrative picture from a name director, at least, dwells upon such a person in such a place, the odd sexual ambiguity and fresh-faced motherhood of her workmates, and the depths of her (admittedly forced) soul transgressions. Soderbergh's outre side, possibly his only interesting one, manifests itself visually in those eerie plastic doll head popping warm out of their molds. Gilding the lily? I like to think he's matching outer landscapes with inner lives. 11. "The Death Of Mr. Lazarescu" (Cristi Puiu) While surely the least enjoyable film on my list, it holds black comedy for those willing to brave its enervating surface, and if nothing else, shows us the true face, in awful, awkward and relentless slow motion, of emergency medical care in the industrialized world. 12. "The Prestige" (Christopher Nolan) "Will you get your hands dirty?" asks Michael Caine, the magician's assistant. And by the end of this decade-long duel between magicians, one of them's gotten his life dirty. Very dirty. The other one's left with half a life. You get to decide which is worse. 13. "Wassup Rockers" (Larry Clark) The society matron in seven layers of makeup fails to convince in her seemingly simple scene of electrocution in the upstairs hot tub. She jerks, thrashes, the light fixtures spits sparks, the floating corpse fades out...and the pinpoints of Los Angeles just before sunrise. Most filmmakers have to choose between such stiltedness and such poetry. Clark follows a crew of barely-teen Latino skate punks, secure (at first) in their brotherly bonding, prone to attacks from black gangs who prefer gangsta rap to the skaters' Ramonesmania. They motor out to Beverly Hills, lose the car to the cops, and (shades of Xenophon's "Anabasis") have to skate all the way home through South Central. Spoiled rich girls, swimming pools, a chicken hawk, a Ramones-loving cop, and an uptight Clint Eastwood parody go flying past. 14. "Factotum" (Bent Hamer) People need to feel successful at something, says Charles Bukowski's proxy Hank Chinaski, to Lili Taylor's Jan. Can be love, but doesn't have to be. Chinaski experiences incandescent adventures in often-willful failure, and gets no closer to transcendence than an almost-empty strip club. As I read in a now-forgotten book some years ago, though, the substance of the effort, and not any success, constitutes the American character. 15. "Cave Of The Yellow Dog" (Byambasuren Davaa) This second feature and first feature film solo flight from "Story of the Weeping Camel" co-director Davaa wins no points for originality in terms of form or function, intellectual weightiness or surprise. Nor does it require any such. If the three Batchuluun children, real-life siblings Nansal (older daughter), Nansalmaa (younger daughter) and Babbayar (baby boy) don't steal your heart, check yourself into the nearest morgue. The family keeps sheep in the grasslands. Nansal finds a dog. Dad tells her to get rid of it. She doesn't want to. That's about it for the story. But God is in the details, such as 6-year-old Nansal's offhandedly-masterful horsemanship and sheepherding to help out Dad. Nansal dung-hunting with the same threadbare wicker basket little Babbayar rides in (and under which she'll futilely attempt to stash the dog, Zochor, or "Spot"). Mother curing cheese beneath a wooden wagon wheel. Or Nansalmaa watching Babbayar discover the family's ceramic Buddha, blowing into the top of Buddha's head and dancing him around the mantelpiece. "Stop it. You can't play with God," warns Nansalmaa, in perhaps this year's most memorable subtitled line. "I'm telling Mom!" ------------------------------ End of loud-fans-digest V6 #262 *******************************