Should we go outside?

The Strangers
Directed by Bryan Bertino
Rogue/Universal


There's a war of approach currently being waged in the field of mainstream American horror. On one hand you've got the "more is more" contingent, made up of "torture porn" progenitors Eli Roth (Hostel) and the Saw series, as well as Rob Zombie's retro gorefests (House of 1000 Corpses, the cred-busting Halloween remake). On the other sits the small but significant movement towards no-frills horror more or less grounded in reality - last year's Vacancy, while only fitfully effective, springs to mind, and so does The Strangers, a movie so doggedly minimal that one senses the screenplay could fit in your pocket.

The film opens with its most unusual set of decisions: a stern voice mentioning the frequency of violent crimes in America, and mentioning the story's (dubious) ties to a specific real-life incident. The film's opening scene skips to the end, showing us the viscera and destruction in and around the home where Kristen McKay (Liv Tyler) and James Hoyt (Scott Speedman) will spend the next 80 minutes getting terrorized by a masked trio of remorseless invaders. Following this peculiar opening (which serves to dampen the film with a sense of inevitability, cutting strongly against the post-Sixth Sense "twist ending" trend) we get the obligatory 20-minute opening to inform us of the strained relationship between our protagonists and to familiarize ourselves with their environment. Tyler and Speedman do a fairly good job of communicating the unspoken history they share, although given the circumstances surrounding the tension between them (Tyler quietly rejected his offer of marriage earlier in the evening), their interactions evoke too much comfort and not enough caution. The film misses a major opportunity here, in that it could have used this setup to explore the tension between them, but instead (as expected) their bonds simply heal themselves as a result of the ensuing terror.

To Bertino's credit, however, some of his decisions (as director and screenwriter) are bracingly original; the film's greatest innovation by far lies in its unorthodox treatment of the folk and country music that intermittently plays from the couple's gramophone. The film's most effective moment comes with a tense confrontation involving a gun, an axe, a piano, and Joanna Newsom's "The Sprout and the Bean." The scene mines the sonic tension in Newsom's double-tracked vocals ("should we go outside?") and spare harp plucking. Another scene memorably milks the Appalachian harmonies and odd intervals that characterize Gillian Welch's Time: The Revelator by looping two seconds ("quicksilver girl") from "My First Lover" for what feels, briefly, like an eternity. The soundtrack represents another categorical rejection of the heavy-metal excess that has pervaded recent horror (see: the soundtracks for the Saw movies). The film also contains the longest stretches of silence and inaction seen in a major American horror film in a long time, making good use of ambient noise and shadows (never more effective than the moment in which the bag-headed intruder slowly emerges behind Tyler in the kitchen, as unfortunately revealed in some of the film's posters).

Bertino shows his weaknesses as a filmmaker when he distrusts elements he has already established; the decision to separate the lovers for much of the film's last half-hour both robs the film of its only real character interactions and feels maddeningly improbable. He also doesn't shy away from two major horror movie tropes: a character intoning that they'll "be right back" as a harbinger of doom, and a highly questionable final shot that rings hollow with familiarity and cheapens the film's opening gambit. Until that moment, The Strangers feels like something very strange indeed: a horror movie with an argument. That phrase of course brings to mind Michael Haneke's Funny Games, a considerably more brutal film that essentially acted as a movie-length guilt trip on the nature of entertainment. The Strangers, on the other hand, is unconcerned with the nature of film, instead serving to emphasize the ordinary nature of the crimes on display - underlined by the decision to stage the ritualistic carnage that takes place near the film's end in the full brightness of morning, punctuated with barren shots of the surrounding countryside. Bertino's debut turns out to be a deeply flawed one that only communicates that one idea effectively, but that puts it ahead of some of his contemporaries, most of whom (Haneke included, given his masturbatory shot-for-shot "U.S." remake of Funny Games) feel the need to stretch out their one idea over the course of several films. It remains to be seen if Bertino's small, but welcome eccentricities will prevail in future endeavors or if he'll fall prey to the self-cannibalization that has characterized the genre's other recent would-be auteurs.

Declaring independence

Shearwater
Rook
Matador

Seven years ago, Jonathan Meiburg and Will Sheff teamed up to create Shearwater's debut album, The Dissolving Room. It wasn't very good - Meiburg seemed incapable of stringing together a decent melody, opting instead to warble aimlessly, and Sheff seemed to devote only his most maudlin material to the project - even as Okkervil River cranked out their brilliant early releases. Only their third album, the sprawling Winged Life, felt like an evenhanded collaboration between the two, with Meiburg gaining confidence with sterling, lyrical tracks like "The World in 1984" and surreal banjo workout "Whipping Boy." Then, as the Sheff-led Okkervil River grew in stature with their breakthrough fourth album Black Sheep Boy, Sheff left Shearwater, leaving Meiburg to steer Shearwater's follow-up without him, even as Meiburg remained in Sheff's more popular group (providing a distinctive caterwaul on tracks like "All the Latest Toughs" and The Stage Names' closer "John Allyn Smith Sails.")

The resultant record, Palo Santo, turned out to be a mild sleeper hit, eventually earning a profile-boosting partial re-release (and partial remaster) courtesy of new label Matador. The record boasted a markedly more jagged sound than Meiburg's past work, juxtaposing his crystalline tenor with blasts of feedback and spare orchestral flourishes. The songs themselves brimmed with equal parts menace and tenderness. Recently, and likely to no one's surprise, Meiburg announced his departure from Okkervil River, citing the impossibility of properly promoting his own work while playing in both bands.

With Rook, Meiburg, along with bandmates Thor Harris and Kimberly Burke, assert their complete independence not only from the work of their associates but from the greater paradigms of indie rock. Instead of constructing a world and working within its borders, Rook feels palpably engaged with the one we actually inhabit - likely stemming from Meiburg's background as an ornithologist and nature enthusiast. On "Rooks," Meiburg tells of nature's revenge on human aggressors ("the ambulance man said there's nowhere to flee for your life / so we stay inside and sleep until the world of man is paralyzed") and by song's end has made his allegiance known - "let the kingdom come tonight / let this dream be realized."

With "Rooks" as the centerpiece of a swift opening trio (including startling opener "On the Death of the Waters," which uses piercing horns to announce the album's arrival much as Elbow did on Seldom Seen Kid opener "Starlings"), "Home Life" finally allows for a some breathing room, peppering its seven minutes with lively percussion, gamelan, oboe, and a soaring string arrangement, and Meiburg's vocals at their most ornate. Unlike many lushly orchestrated records, Rook never feels compressed or overstuffed, and never lets any one element overwhelm all others. Meiburg is also careful not to overstuff the record with maudlin material, carefully sequencing left-turns like terse rocker "Century Eyes" and screeching instrumental "South Col." By the time Rook runs out its brief 39-minute runtime with blissful closer "The Hunter's Star," we're left wondering if Sheff will fare as well without Meiburg. The Stage Names was among the best records of last year, and now Rook stands at least as tall in this one.

Armful of secrets

Islands
Arm’s Way
Anti-

Young and Sexy
The Arc
Mint

2008 appears to be the year Canada goes prog. Seemingly, no major Canadian indie-rock release can get by without at least one ten-minute opus: we’ve already had Ladyhawk’s incendiary “Ghost Blues” (Shots) and Black Mountain’s 17-minute “Bright Lights” (In the Future). Not to be outdone, Wolf Parade’s forthcoming At Mount Zoomer caps off in spectacular fashion with a “Kissing the Beehive.” Before long we’ll be seeing a return to side-long epics that characterized album rock in the late '70s.

The first to try that on for size will doubtlessly be Islands’ Nick Thorburn, whose latest opus is entitled Arm’s Way – and make no mistake, it’s an opus. It runs sixty-eight minutes, and boasts expansive orchestral arrangements on most of its tracks. It’s also almost impossible to traverse from beginning to end – a fact that is undoubtedly lost on Thorburn, old-school champion of The Album that he is. Even if you can make it past incredibly bloated opener, “The Arm” (which lies somewhere between a theme song for a late-90s Xena-esque TV show and a Vampire Weekend reject), you’ll be subjected to a cavalcade of sonic blunders on an epic scale. “Pieces of You” relies on its empty titular phrase like a hollow pirate leg ready to snap (the sort of cartoon metaphor Thorburn could get behind) even as its grandiose-yet-predictable string arrangement tries in vain to embiggen the track. Briefer pop tunes like “Creeper” and “J’aime Vous Voire Quitter” fare better largely due to their, well, brevity, but of course they take up less than a tenth of the total runtime, and even “J’aime” manages to squeeze in an awful, kitschy Graceland breakdown.

Besides the bloat (which only grows worse over the course of the record, with its last seven tracks all meandering past the five-minute mark), Arm’s Way isn’t aided by Thorburn’s bizarre insistence on loading his prog-lite tunes with lyrical references to physical trauma and tough-guy dilemmas. He’s plagued by attacking/invading forces (the “Arm” and the “Creeper”) and mentions being stabbed on at least two tracks, as well as pondering a “Life In Jail.” On the latter track, Thorburn complains that he’s “lost his way.” He seems intent on countering his aimlessness by throwing around random images of violence, but they ring false given the weightless nature of the arrangements. If the listener manages to make it all the way to the cloying Godspeed build of the 11-minute closer “Vertigo (If It’s A Crime)” and still feel convinced of Thorburn’s genius, then he’s precisely the auteur they deserve.

There’s more than one way to meander, though, a fact Vancouver’s Young And Sexy seem privy to. Their third full-length, Panic When You Find It, featured three-minute pop songs that seemed to float effortlessly through their thick harmonies and mellow guitar tones, with quick reprises and perfect sequencing making for one of the best indie-pop records to come out of Canada in the last decade. With The Arc, they take a turn away from the tangible pleasures of that record into an altogether different realm, not entirely unlike the one explored on sophomore album Life Through One Speaker’s more expansive tracks, but without the sense of punctuation provided on that album with songs like “Herculean Bellboy” and “Ella.” Instead, The Arc spends the entirety of its 42 minutes inhabiting a hallucinatory space, often employing unpredictable melodic turns, off-the-cuff vocal lines, and fluid guitar lines.

At first the approach is entirely successful – the first four tracks effectively define the album’s mood and pace, while packing enough memorable progressions to maintain our interest. “The Poisoned Cup” boasts a great chorus that reflects the track’s hazy atmospherics (“I stole through the garden and fell to my knees / the air is thick, my time it’s gone to shit”), and opener “Saucerful of Fire” takes full advantage of the group’s trademark vocal harmonies. They let themselves drift a little too far, however, with a shapeless middle section characterized by songs that elude memory even after multiple listens (particularly the “Ella” soundalike “Step Inside” and the pretty but shapeless “The Fog”). “Demon Dreaming” briefly resuscitates the record with its attractive rush, but ultimately “The Echo” and closer “Up in the Rafters” are little more than great bedtime music, which might be charming if they weren’t separated by a tuneless, half-speed Comets on Fire psych dirge called “Spill the Sky.” The Arc, appropriately enough, carries a certain narrative weight in its leaden movements, but can’t help feeling like a disappointment considering the group’s unerring focus in the past.

Mamet's machines

Redbelt
Sony Pictures Classics, 2008
Directed by David Mamet

Can a film fail to relate huge swathes of plot and still succeed? David Mamet’s incoherent but tersely thrilling Redbelt certainly seems to operate that way. Jiu-Jitsu instructor Mike Terry (Chiwetel Ejiofor) lives by a strict Samurai code of ethics, often to the chagrin of his wife Sondra (Alice Braga), who runs a fabrics business that helps to fund Mike’s struggling gym. While instructing cop buddy Joe (The Unit’s Max Martini), a distraught, pill-popping lawyer (a note-perfect Emily Mortimer) shoots out the gym’s front window. This kickstarts a series of events too labyrinthine to describe here, involving the aforementioned players, an aging action star (Tim Allen), mixed-martial-arts fight promoters (Joe Mantegna and Ricky Jay), and Sondra’s extended family of shady Argentineans.

While Mamet is principally known for his Nobel-winning Glengarry Glen Ross, his recent work on films like Val Kilmer vehicle Spartan and television’s The Unit has been marked by a reliance on tough-guy clichés and lackluster attempts to substitute his trademark rat-a-tat dialogue style with thick plotting. Redbelt sees him not necessarily rectifying these issues, but at least making something deeply entertaining out of his recent fixations. It helps that he’s enlisted a few reliable scene-chewers, especially Jay and Mantegna, as well as a restrained, bitter Allen, far removed from his cuddly Disney persona. The dialogue itself is largely unmemorable, but it’s delivered with such infectious gusto (aided by Barbara Tulliver’s nimble editing) that even the film’s most nonsensical plot contortions seem, if not natural, then at least necessary. Much of the film lies squarely on Ejiofor’s shoulders, however, and he performs on a tightrope for much of its duration, having to negotiate his character’s stubborn insistence on archaic wisdom with his need for basic human pride – all while working within the script’s absurdly amorphous machinations. Even as the film succumbs to its tiresome Samurai mysticism in the worst way possible in its final moments, Ejiofor’s troubled face grounds the film in a certain reality, if not our own.

They can feel it in their bones

War Dance
Thinkfilm, 2007
Directed by Sean Fine and Andrea Nix

Young@Heart
Fox Searchlight, 2008
Directed by Stephen Walker

Anyone who ever found solace in any of its myriad forms can testify to the transformative powers of art, and those who do will find something to relate in two seemingly unrelated but thematically similar documentaries.

War Dance introduces us to the Acholi tribe of Northern Uganda, an ethnic group that faces unthinkable violence on a daily basis at the hands of Ugandan president Yoweri Musevini (who has frequently been compared to Uganda’s more infamous despot, Idi Amin). Forced into isolated camps, the greatest burdens are carried by the group’s children, many of whom have been orphaned by the killers that wait in the surrounding bush. The doc’s focus, however, lies with a Uganda-wide music and dance competition, in which the Acholi children are competing for the first time.

While the performance sections of the film are invigorating enough to keep the proceedings afloat, the approach taken by Fine and Nix in detailing the disturbing pasts of the children in question is problematic. The children are filmed detailing the incidents that most brutally exposed them to violence (one sequence in particular, in which the child must identify his murdered parents, involves nauseating levels of detail), juxtaposed with close-up footage of their pained faces. In the context of a documentary devoted to exploring issues of violence and trauma, it might have been an effective approach, but in a film centered around the childrens’ efforts to advance their singing and dancing, it’s instead a needlessly heavy-handed one. It doesn’t help that the translated versions of their stories seem improbably eloquent.

Stephen Walker’s Young @ Heart faces a similar dilemma, but negotiates a slightly better balance. Walker documents the seven-week rehearsal period of the titular octogenarian choir as they prepare for a series of sold-out concerts, run by the steady hand of choir director Bob Cilman. The obvious charm of the film’s subjects first emerges as they struggle to interpret Cilman’s left-field musical choices (including tracks by Sonic Youth and Talking Heads) and reveal their boundless energy in the face of looming health crises.

It’s Walker himself who comes closest to derailing the film, with his often-insipid narration and irritating editing choices – from the “yee-haw” banjo music that accompanies a road-trip scene to the questionable placement of light-hearted music video sequences directly following a fairly grueling loss. Walker lacks trust in his compelling subjects to carry the film. Nevertheless, they carry it anyway, both with their charm and their fairly incredible performances. In particular, oxygen-deprived baritone Fred Knittle’s lead vocal on Coldplay’s “Fix You” reminds us that a gifted interpreter can transform even the most banal tune into a thing of beauty. Their group take on Sonic Youth’s “Schizophrenia” is similarly revelatory, coaxing a surprising grandeur out of the original’s doomed haze. It’s worth the price of admission alone.

Dead Meadow / The High Dials | 04.23.08 | Club Lambi

Before I get to the educational portion of this review, I'd like to say a few words about local openers The High Dials. I was struck, while listening to their last release War of the Wakening Phantoms and seeing them perform live, by the skewed nature of musical popularity. Their songs are slickly written and played, loaded with hooks and vocal harmonies, and some of them even stick in the mind after you've heard them, a rarity for indie-pop acts. Here's their problem: they lack…something. If they were British, they'd come here and headline venues twice the size of Lambi. If they were more eccentric and less workmanlike, they could develop Wolf Parade-like levels of fan devotion. If they had a younger and/or handsomer frontman, they'd make the indie girls swoon. As it is now, they show up, play their smartly written tunes expertly, and leave. When they want wider exposure, they appear in a Rogers ad, since none of the major online publications I visited had written a word about them. Are they the greatest unknown band ever? Definitely not -- much of their material doesn't stand out as memorable despite their obvious skill, and their albums meander far longer than they need to. Nevertheless, they deserve considerably better than they're getting.

Moving on,

Simon's Guide to Enjoying a Stoner Rock Concert While Not Stoned

I was a little concerned that I was going to be reviewing a Dead Meadow concert while not under the influence of any drugs. In my case, I simply don't do any of them, but perhaps you may find yourself in a similar predicament due to a lack of funds or some other complication. So here's my guide to getting the most out of your substance abusers of choice and their unholy racket.

1. Show up tired. This is the important one. If you're too alert, you won't be as inclined towards enjoying the slow, crushing grooves that typify good stoner rock. You might even find them a little annoying. When I arrived for the show, I was already a little bushed, so I sat down to watch the openers. Crucially, however, I stood up for Dead Meadow, preventing me from actually falling asleep -- if not necessarily preserving my attentive faculties. The other important thing to keep in mind is that any self-respecting stoner band should have some accompanying visual component to go with those grooves -- and indeed, Dead Meadow were projecting images evoking cell division all over the stage. To get a good sense of how tired I was, keep in mind that it took me a full ten minutes to figure out that the little black devices at the front of the stage were not, ineffective little fans, but projectors, and that they weren't hooked up to a sophisticated computer program, they just had little lava lamps inside them. Another good sign that the fatigue is working is that you might start to compose your own (terrible) songs while fixating on inane details around you. For instance, when I turned to spot The High Dials' Rishi Dhir staring at Dead Meadow bassist Steve Kille's remarkably nimble fingerwork, I started to piece together a song called "The Bassist Was Watching the Other Bassist." I forget how it goes now.

2. Show up relieved. Try to make sure you don't have to go to the bathroom during the show, since the longer you stand in one place, the more likely you are to be pleasantly entranced by the sounds being hurled at you. Plus, you never know when an actually distinct track will arise from the sonic morass to lift your attention a bit -- in this case, Feathers standout "At Her Open Door." Not that their set overall wasn't solid -- it was actually surprisingly engaging throughout -- but during certain stretches I was waiting for a hook or two. Regardless, your unbroken presence will heighten your overall enjoyment.

3. Stand on the bassist's side. Trust me, when the band starts to play, and you can barely stand upright due to following the previous instructions, you'll want to be getting the full force of that droning low end. Before long it will be a comfort to you, not unlike the sound of waves on a brisk summer night by the beach, or mild traffic going by your window in the late evening. Except that in this case you're probably surrounded by very sweaty people in what should be a distressingly confined space.

Follow these simple steps and you'll be good as blitzed.