Micmacs an Offbeat Gem

Prepare to enter a magical, weird world.

Micmacs (2009)
Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet

105 mins. Rated R (brief sexuality and violence)
In French with subtitles.
* * * * *

Think of a film that’s one part Oceans Twelve and one part Brazil and you’re still a few dollops of mayhem and weirdness short of the delightful French film Micmacs. It’s directed by the eccentric Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the filmmaker who gave us treats such as Delicatessen (1991), The City of Lost Children (1997), Alien Resurrection (1997), and Amélie (2001). If you know any of these films, you know that the only drummer to which Jeunet marches is one pounding the offbeat.

The protagonist of Micmacs is Bazil (Dany Boon), a young man whose life started going wrong when he was just a lad and his soldier father was killed by a French-made landmine. A decade later he’s the victim of a stray bullet made by the same French manufacturer. Surgeons decide to leave the slug in his brain as it would be too risky to remove it, leaving Bazil subject to moments of odd behavior and in danger of sudden death should he take a blow to the wrong part of the cranium. All of this also leaves Bazil both seething at the injustice of a system that makes millionaires out of merchants of death, as well as eminently unemployable. Just when the future looks very bad indeed for Bazil, he runs into Placard (the delightful Jean-Pierre Marielle), a former convict who brings him to live among the weirdest bunch of misfits you’ll ever encounter. They reside in a salvage yard, but beyond the external wall of junk lies a labyrinth that’s like an Erector set assembled by Dr. Seuss and Rube Goldberg. It is the abode of others just like Bazil—intelligent, resourceful, and slightly damaged. The good-natured Tambouille (Yolande Moreau) is the den mother to an oddball troupe crew that includes a math savant, a human cannon ball, and a contortionist (Marie-Julie Baup) who has the hots for Bazil. Together they plot a zany revenge scenario against France’s two top arms merchants.

Sound weird and implausible? It is. It’s also a total gas. This black comedy is laugh-out-loud absurd in places, touching in others, and pure got-the-bastards pleasurable in all the right moments. It’s so odd that a lot of theaters had no idea how to market it. Unless you’re lucky enough to live in a town with an arts cinema and a smart booker, you’ll probably have to catch this one on video. Do so—it’s unlike anything else you’ll see outside of a Terry Gilliam film, and Jeunet is a far more consistent storyteller than Gilliam

Thomas Kinkade Further Ruins Christmas

The last trend in art--View and Barf.

I don’t normally wish bankruptcy on people, but when I read that Thomas Kinkade’s production company filed a Chapter 11 petition in June, I have to admit that I experienced gushes of guiltless glee. Thomas Kinkade’s art is to good taste what double-knit polyester is to high fashion. (I swear that if you put a Kinkade decal on your sweat pants it will make your ass look fat.)

Hooray! I thought—no more garish neon skies, yellow light shining in the windows of faux castles, stone-bridged s-curve creeks, or cottages that look like they were designed by bourgeois hobbits. My God! Good taste might break out right here in America.

As The Beatles sang, ‘Whoa-o-o-o I, should have known better….” Not only is Tom still committing aesthetic assault with a sabled brush, he’s just teamed up with the Bradford Exchange for a new offering that manages to sink lower than a shunned mole and be actively vile at the same time. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Kinkade’s “The True Meaning of Christmas," a composition that features jolly old Saint Nick busily at work in front of his fireplace carving crèches. This masterpiece is crowned by a painting above the mantle of “Victorian Christmas II.” It’s by the old master himself, Tomasardo da Kinkade. (Maybe the reproduction rights to “Drink the Kool-aid III” are tied up in bankruptcy court.)

Jesus, Mary, and the Reindeer!!! How many ways is this offensive? All hail the new Trinity: Santa, Jesus, and Kinkade. Isn’t it bad enough that Christmas has become an orgy of consumerism without Kinkaide rubbing our noses in it? In friggin’ July no less. If we wanted to get all PoMo (postmodernist) about it, we could speculate on why Santa and the painting are much larger than the crèche. Let’s. After all, Santa’s bag is next to him, toys and a list flowing out the top. Somehow I doubt that Jack through Matti are on the must-have-manger list and the carving is too large to fit in the “Mrs. Claus” stocking. Guess the crèche must be destined for the next person on the list. Maybe “Mitt.” Mitt Romney’s actually a Mormon, but he’s willing to become a born-again if you promise to vote for him. (He’s be willing to become a gay raccoon-juggler from Seti Alpha VI if you'll vote for him.)

But wait…there’s more. Not only do we get nearly 11 inches of “lifelike” hand-painted resin, flip a switch and the painting illuminates. Push a button and hear minstrel Tom himself “narrate the Christmas story.” Which one, I wonder—the one told in the New Testament, the poem by Clement Moore, or the story by Charles Dickens? To really get in the correct spirit it should be the script from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, or maybe NLCV II to provide symmetry with “Victorian Christmas II.”

All of this is yours for $99.99 plus $14.95 for shipping and handling. How much to contribute to the creditors’ fund in the bankruptcy lawsuit? Santadamn it! I want Kinkade to be sent to the seventh layer of hell where he will be body painted by elves for eternity.

NEW BEDFORD SUMMER FEST A SWEET TREAT

Sloan Wainwright--Best in Family!

New Bedford Summer Fest
July 2-4, 2010

It’s a great mystery to us why New Bedford Summer Fest continues to be unknown to most people more than an hour from Boston—it might well be the very best music festival in all of New England, and just $15 per day gives you access to a lot of the same people you’d spend well over a hundred bucks to see at Newport. It’s better run than Falcon Ridge, more creative than Old Songs, more diverse than Champlain, and easier to get to than the Boston Folk Festival. What is it? New Bedford?

If you’ve never been to New Bedford, give it a try. Think Gloucester without Moonies or Yuppies. It’s an old whaling town and is gritty in places, but the downtown, where Sumer fest is held, has been redone with cobblestone streets, small museums, galleries, and cafes. The town’s jewel is the Whaling Museum operated by the National Park Service—with more than you ever wanted to know about the leviathan hunt days of yore.

As for Summer Fest, it’s seven stages dispersed among vendor-lined streets. The July 4 weekend was clear, bright, and low humidity, the latter a rarity this summer. Lots of festivals have multiple stages but obvious choices as to who needs to be seen at what time. That’s not the case at Summer Fest; the lineup is so impressive that you have to make hard choices. Here are our highlights, though we didn’t even get to see some old favorites such as Susan Werner, Vance Gilbert, Little Johnny England, or The Kennedys.

Jack Amerding is a name to know, a talented guy who’s like a younger version of John McCutheon. Amerding dazzles on fiddles, frets, and vocals with a repertoire that runs the gamut from bluegrass to Celtic.

We had not heard Caroline Aiken very much before and man does she sizzle! She reminds us a bit of Bonnie Raitt in her blues personae, Janis Joplin when she airs it out, and of a white griot when she tells tales of her Southern girlhood

We laughingly call Benoit Bourque “the happiest man in folk music.” Check out his clogging, his perpetual smile, and his good-time Quebecois repertoire.

John Gorka was once the goofy rising star—now he’s the consummate pro. His rich baritone voice, smart songs, and trenchant observations make him a must-see no matter who else is on the bill.

Anne Hills was on hand to remind us of folk music’s link with social change, the joys of group singing, and the pure magic that comes from one guitar and one clear-as-a-bell voice.

Had it with stupid people and dumb songs? Check out old friend James Keelaghan, a poetic voice from Canada who writes some of the smartest lyrics around. Very few people can put tale to song like James.

We've only been mildly moved by the recordings of Peter Mulvey, but he sure does put on a heck of a show, one that traipses through Tin Pan Alley, dresses up in some blues, and waltzes around the Americana stage.

One of the promising new lineups coming out of Scotland is The Paul McKenna Band. McKenna’s tenor voice has unique light qualities and he and his band studied with Brian McNeill at the Royal Scottish Academy, so you’ll hear echoes of early Battlefield Band.

Po’Girl is a real mash-up—four members and a stage full of instruments that run from the expected (acoustic guitars, dobro, piano) to the say-what? (clarinet, glockenspiel, gutbucket bass, bicycle bell). Think folk with a gospel feel, some blues, and bohemian sensibilities.

The brightest star in the constellation? That would be Sloan Wainwright, who delivered killer sets everywhere she appeared and with everything she sang. If you’re going to cover Marvin Gaye, you’d better have chops. She has ‘em, alright. Talk about your family trees! She’s the sister of Loudon Wainwright III, the sister-on-law of Kate McGarrigle, her nephew is Rufus Wainwright, and her nieces are Martha and Lucy Wainwright. Believe us when we say that Sloan is more talented than any of them! She does it all—soul, pop, acoustic folk, jazz, rock…. and boy does she get into it. If you don’t know her you might be tempted to say that she’s stagey, but it’s genuine—the woman simply loves to sing. And so would you if you had a contralto voice like hers. Imagine what Celine Dion would be if she know how to sing. She still wouldn’t be as good as Sloan Wainwright.

The Secret in their Eyes Decent but Not Great

The Secret in their Eyes (El Secreto de Sus Ojos)
Directed by Juan Jose Campanella
Argentina (2009); In Spanish with subtitles.
127 mins. Rated R (nudity, rape, violence, language)

* * *

When the Oscars came around last spring we had seen almost every nominee except the foreign language entries. As it turns out, this was the most controversial category. Odds makers had The White Ribbon (Germany) as the prohibitive favorite with The Prophet (France) as the dark horse. The winner, Argentina’s The Secret in their Eyes was a shocker. Those who would dismiss the Oscars as irrelevant should consider--The White Ribbon, which is a masterpiece was only in theaters long enough to down a box of Raisinets before heading to DVD, while Secret, a middling film, is still selling tickets. It’s been at our local cinema for six weeks, which is where we finally saw it.

Many critics liked the film, including Roger Ebert, but quite a few hated it. Wesley Morris of The Boston Globe averred that it “has the high, slightly nauseating stink of perfume on garbage.” Great line! But inaccurate. So too is Ebert’s praise. The Secret in their Eyes is something in between a classic and a dog—call it a stylishly done run-of-the-mill thriller. It attempts to graft a film-detective formula—a decades-old unresolved mystery—to a cliché posing as wisdom: that the eyes cannot conceal or lie.

The film also breaks out the shopworn tool of a man late in life feeling the need to exorcise old demons by writing a book about them. In this case we meet retired judge Benjamin Esposito (Ricardo Dario) in 1999, who is haunted by the 1974 murder that he solved when he was still a court investigator. It involved the brutal rape and murder of a pretty school teacher and the eventual conviction of a creep she knew from her youth. Already we’re on clichéd ground and director Campanella adds a few more: Pablo, Benjamin’s drunken-but-loyal sidekick (Guillermo Francella); Ricardo, the widower husband determined to solve the murder on his own (Pablo Rago); Irene (Soledad Villami), the new judicial officer for whom Benjamin yearns; and a jumbo-sized popcorn bucket full of corrupt politicians. The latter describes most of Argentina’s ruling elite during the 1970s, but this is no Missing (1982) and Campanella is no Costa Gavras. (Okay, so Missing was set in Chile, but Argentina’s Peronistas were no better. Campanella’s passing reference to the Perons is ham handed.)

The eyes are the key. Benjamin is determined to break the case when he sees the pain in Ricardo’s face. Irene reads guilt in the killer’s eyes and sees Benjamin’s yearning for her in his. Benjamin reads Pablo’s besotted intelligence beneath his Beatle-cut brow, and--for reasons never quite explained--reads Irene’s longing for him but averts his eyes. Etcetera…. Twenty-five years later there are still some secrets that need to be cleared up. Can Benjamin still reach a person’s soul through their gaze? For the record, I believe that the eyes can tell tales—I can often identify an intelligent student by an ineffable spark I see in the iris—but there’s a reason why we have expressions such as “poker face.” Campanella would have use believe that the eyes are better than sodium pentothal and that it’s never too late to start all over. The degree to which you believe these things will pretty much shape to degree which you find his film compelling versus contrived.

The film has a classy look to it—almost as if it’s a 40s film noir shot in color. The acting is also very good, especially Dario as Benjamin exuding approach-but-don’t-touch buttoned-up reserve. Villami is also superb as a nobody’s fool woman who’s equal parts competent, desirable, and cool as ice. The film also has a creepy resolution that invites contemplation of the word “justice.” In all, it’s a film that’s worth watching, but for heavens sake, don’t buy into its hype.

Postscript: We finally saw Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon. We wholeheartedly concur with Lloyd Sellus’ review on this site. Put this one on your Netflix queue immediately. What if the testimony of the children in the Salem witch trials had never been repudiated? Put those kids in a repressed Protestant German village in 1914, the kind where everyday brutality passes as improving character. Talk about the “secret” in the eyes! You can almost see swastikas shooting out like time-delayed bombs in the pupils of the village offspring. This isn’t a good film—it’s a contender for best of the century. Too bad Hollywood was dazzled by Campanella’s bling and was blinded to Haneke’s steely glare.

Ruth Reichl Book Lightweight

Ruth Reichl
For You Mom, Finally
Penguin Books
978-0-14-311734-6
* *

In the academy where I work, scholars still worry about genres and outdated ideas like the literary cannon. That’s really quite quaint when you think about it, as our students live in a world of mash-ups, category-crossing, and genre-smashing. And lord knows they don’t read very much. I’ve long been an advocate of replacing all literary genres with just two: good books and bad books, a “good” book being that students will read, and a “bad” one that which you can’t bribe, cajole, or force them to read. If that makes Kurt Vonnegut a more important writer than Jane Austen, so be it. (Confession: I think Vonnegut is way better than Austen!)

This brings me to Ruth Rechl’s memoir For You Mom, Finally. Bad book! One reviewer hailed it as a “feminist manifesto.” Good grief! If this is all that feminism has to show in the 47 years since The Feminine Mystique, it’s time to reexamine its assumptions. My reading of this breezy 120-page over-simplification of women’s lives suggests that it’s less a feminist tract than a work aimed at the pseudo-genre of “chick lit.” Given how I feel about scholarly categories, you can imagine what I think of pseudo genres.

Reich is a food critic and TV celebrity, not a literary powerhouse. She has a good story to tell, but she filters it through the nostrums, glib asides, and easy-to-digest analyses suitable for TV rather than asking the harder questions historians would ask. It’s a shame because her story could be compelling. Reichl muses on the meaning of her mother Miriam’s life¬—that of a woman who wanted to become a doctor but yielded every step of the way to the bourgeois gender expectations of the twentieth-century. She studied music, though she was not good at it; took low-level clerical jobs that bored her; and ultimately became a homemaker, though she had no aptitude whatsoever for it. Miriam (“Mim”) never stopped dreaming of being a doctor and moved through life with a spacey detachment from reality that led from one domestic train wreck to the next—think the character of Sylvie in Marilynne Robinson’s superb Housekeeping. Along the way Mim gets lots of bad advice and loads of pharmaceuticals.

The arc of Mim’s tragedy is familiar to those who’ve studied women’s history; in fact, it’s quite similar in many ways to what drove Betty Friedan into the arms of feminism. But those who want to give similar heft to Reichl’s volume are seeing things that aren’t there. Reichl claims to have assembled part of the tale from a cache of her mother’s letters, but there’s no way of telling whether these are actual documents, or a literary device. If they are actually letters, they need to be put into the hands of a critical-eyed scholar. And when a book opens with the admission that “my mother was a great example of everything I didn’t want to be” (7) we must wonder at key moments whether the motives being described are those of Mim, or those imposed by Ruth. Moreover, Ruth admits that her mother’s frustrated ambitions justify her own workaholic lifestyle. When asked why she labors so hard she replies, “Because I can.” (10) But she has no answer for the woman she met at a book signing (117) who asked her why anyone would want to toil as hard as she. (I wonder what Reichl would make of the old Industrial Workers of the World campaign for the “right to be lazy?”)

Herein lies the tale not told. My reading of feminism is that it’s about choices in the plural, not a simplistic either/or selection. Reichl had an opportunity to tell a complex tale of the forces shaping women’s lives; instead she wrote a justification for her own life choices. It is a story filled with enough—as she calls them—“Mim Tales”--to tantalize and suggest, but at every step of the way she opts for cheap emotionality instead of depth. There are several moving passages, but her Kleenex-box approach to writing is classic chick lit to be consumed in a setting no more thought-provoking than the beach.

Video Review: The Time Traveler's Wife

Not particularly intriguing in any era.

The Time Traveler’s Wife (2009)
Directed by Robert Schwentke
PG-13, 107 mins.
New Line Cinema
* *

We live in a really good movie area that includes six independent screens, so we often delay seeing films that get mixed reviews in commercial release. The Time Traveler’s Wife was one of those movies and now that we’ve seen it, about the best that we can say is that it’s a mindless diversion for a rainy summer night.

We’ve not read the Audrey Niffenegger novel upon which the movie is based, but reviewers say that it’s an odd book and that the central idea of a man whose genetic disorder causes him to time travel is a metaphor for absent and emotionally withdrawn men. We also gather that the book centers on Clare Abshire, the unfortunate “wife” of the book’s title, who has to endure long period’s of Henry DeTamble time-traveling truancy. Bruce Joel Rubin’s screenplay shifts this so dramatically that the film should be titled The Time Traveler and (by the way) His Wife. Eric Bana plays DeTamble, mostly as a gentle, well-meaning guy who would like to stick around, but those darn genes keep pulling him in and out of the present. Rachel McAdams plays Claire, mostly as a saintly and forgiving figure who stands by her man. Heck, this could have been a film about a 1950s suburban housewife if you took away the sci-fi elements. Mostly McAdams fawns and empathizes. She has no clear personality, hence those few scenes in which she expresses anger over her episodic widowhood ring false. To be fair, this is not McAdams’ fault—neither Rubin’s screenplay nor Robert Schwentke’s direction provide enough scene development for McAdams to do much more than smile, frown, or cry.

There are numerous movie devices that are presumably explained in the book, but make for puzzling holes in the movie plot. Every time Henry time travels, for instance, he appears naked. Why? Okay, so the guy’s age changes and if he left 2005 and landed back in 1990, his clothing wouldn’t have been made yet. But if you had Henry’s problem, wouldn’t you wear old underwear? And if Henry is nude, where’s he hiding the lock picks he uses to break into houses and steal clothing? Again, we learn next to nothing about Clare, so her transformation from the curious six-year-old who first encounters Henry, to the love-struck twenty-year-old who beds him, to the feminist tiger spouting lines about having her own life require watchers to suspend quite a lot of disbelief.

It’s possible that The Time Traveler’s Wife is an unfilmable book. It’s also possible that the job was botched by Rubin and Schwentke. This was the latter’s fifth feature directorial effort, but if the name rings no bells it’s because none of his previous or subsequent efforts have caused any heart palpitations. The Time Traveler’s Wife as a movie is a metaphor for nothing except mindless escapism.

Tribute to Sandy Denny

I couldn’t believe my ears when I heard National Public Radio say that “many people have no idea who Sandy Denny was.” Surely there was some mistake. How could anyone who loves music not recognize Sandy Denny (1947-1978), the voice that made Fairport Convention’s 1969 album Liege and Leaf one of the most important recordings of the 20th-century? So I asked around—young folks as well as folks old enough to remember the 1960s. Zilch! And they don’t remember Fairport Convention either.

Okay—education time. There’s nothing startling about mixing electric and acoustic instruments these days, but almost nobody did that before Fairport. When Dylan plugged in at Newport in 1965, he put his acoustic guitar in mothballs. Fairport didn’t exactly invent folk rock, but what they did was stunning for its time—they took century’s old ballads and amped them. They were more than pioneers. Denny on vocals, Dave Mattacks on drums, Ashley Hutchings on bass, Dave Swarbrick on fiddle, Simon Nicol and a young Richard Thompson on guitars! That’s not a band; it’s the gathering of gods who laid down the standards by which mortals would be measured. Nobody had ever before heard a ballad like “Tamlin” played with thumping bass, wailing electric guitar, and manic fiddle. And none who heard it could forget Denny’s clear, steady voice standing as the calm amidst the mayhem, “Matty Groves”—another classic. Ditto the werewolf tale “Reynardine,” only marginally less edgy than “Crazy Man Michael,” a song that is the ultimate cautionary tale for braggarts. But it’s Denny’s voice that lingers after the tales have been told—pure, strong, lovely, and not a hint of a quaver or strain.

Denny cut her teeth in folk clubs in the mid-1960s at a time in which the British folk revival was on its last legs. In 1967 she joined The Strawbs, a so-so rock band until Denny added some balladry to their repertoire. It was with them that she first dusted off her own "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?," quite possibly the best song written in the 20th-century. (If not, I’m only exaggerating slightly.) By the time Denny recorded it again with Fairport on their 1969 Unhalfbricking release, she had it down. It’s been covered by many singers, but only Judy Collins approached the glory of the original.

Sandy Denny made three albums with Fairport in 1968-69 and then formed her own band, Fotheringay, in 1970. It only lasted one record and broke up when producer Joe Boyd left for America. Before he split, Sandy’s recording of “Banks of the Nile” became a classic, and her own “The Sea” won acclaim for its innocence and beauty. She went on to make three solo records featuring her own compositions between 1970 and 1974, with Sandy (1972) the best of the lot. In 1974-75 she rejoined Fairport (minus Richard Thompson) for another go-round, though it was only partly a folk rock ensemble by then. One more solo record in 1977 included her fine “No More Refrains,” and then there were none. Denny died of a cerebral hemorrhage on April 21, 1978, four days after falling down a flight of stairs. A freak accident or the aftermath of too much drinking? Both stories circulate and by then Denny had fallen prey to the temptations that laid low too many of her contemporaries: too much smoking, too many controlled substances, too much frustration with the music industry.

If you’re one of the ones who have “no idea” who Sandy Denny was,” start with the fact that she was twice voted the best singer in Britain. Move on to the tidbit that she’s the only guest artist to appear on a Led Zeppelin album—her 1971 duet with Robert Plant on “The Battle of Evermore.” Consider that she was so highly regarded that there have been ten posthumous Sandy Denny releases, that she inspired virtually everyone who heard her, and that most people would have stopped if they made an album as good as Liege and Leaf or written a song as perfect as “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?”

Every song mentioned in this piece is on YouTube. Listen to one and you’ll want to hear them all. Listen—and let your education begin.