The White Ribbon Dir. Michael Haneke
Styles: drama
Others: Funny Games, Caché, The Piano Teacher
It lacks the grizzly body horror that made Antichrist a succès de scandale, but it just may be that the grimmest film to come of the 2009 Cannes Film Festival is Austrian angst-meister Michael Haneke’s Palme d’Or winner, The White Ribbon. Indeed, the violence may largely be off screen, but it’s palpable throughout this alternately starkly beautiful and oppressively bleak film.
FILM IST. a girl & a gun Dir. Gustav Deutsch
Styles: video essay, avant-garde
Others: FILM IST. 1-12
In Jean-Luc Godard’s masterpiece Pierrot le Fou, famed American director Samuel Fuller pontificates, “Film is like a battleground. Love. Hate. Action. Violence. Death. In one word… ‘emotion.’” The fragmentary nature of the quote suggests a collision of these elements, with cinema itself as the explosion. If this is so, then the aptly titled a girl & a gun, the 13th installment of Gustav Deutsch’s FILM IST. series, settles in right at ground zero.
Scout Niblett The Calcination of Scout Niblett
Styles: blues, grunge, sludge, minimalist, singer-songwriter
Others: Mudhoney, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Elisa Ambrogio, Mount Eerie, Gillian Welch
For the past decade, Scout Niblett has managed to linger between singer-songwriter Americana and more experimental terrain. On 2001’s Sweet Heart Fever, she moved from the dissonance of “Miss My Lion” to the more intimate and minimal sounds of “Ground Break Service.” For 2003’s I Conjure Series, she accompanied her voice with amateurish drums, not giving a fuck whether the listener wanted to hear her learning the instrument as the tape rolled.
More about: Scout Niblett
Links: Scout Niblett - Drag City
MV & EE Barn Nova
Styles: psych folk
Others: Bardo Pond, Neil Young, The Grateful Dead
MV & EE’s musical output is bipolar, one moment droning against beads and sitars and chimes, the next moment simply belting American music damp with the liquid of outer space. Evoking Jerry Garcia, Ravi Shankar, Neil Young, and Sun Ra — oftentimes all at once — each subsequent MV & EE release falls on a sliding scale of Out and In. Barn Nova, their latest for Ecstatic Peace!, falls further within the latter category than anything prior.
More about: MV & EE
Links: MV & EE - Ecstatic Peace!
Crazy Heart Dir. Scott Cooper
Styles: drama
Others: Walk the Line, Honeysuckle Rose, Tender Mercies
A vehicle as carved and corroded as the roads on which it drives glides its way across pristine countryscapes, marking off another day. As it reaches its destination — a small-town bowling alley in the heart of the American Southwest — we get our first glimpse at country music’s notorious rebel, Bad Blake. He exits his dirt-covered chariot with belt unbuckled, pants unbuttoned, and shirt untucked. He is a road warrior, the true savant of the old days of relentless touring and hard living.
Eels End Times
Styles: smart-alec indie pranksters
Others: Beck, Yo La Tengo
With the end of the world looming just two short years away in 2012, it seems fitting that Eels’ Mark Everett would offer his prescient insight into the collective apocalyptic consciousness on his latest opus, End Times. Only six months removed from Hombre Lobo, his lycanthrope-themed exploration of the nature of human desire, it can be argued that his latest is as natural a progression as any of Everett’s work. After all, his choice in album topics has always alternated between the absurd and the melancholy.
More about: Eels
Dove Yellow Swans Live During War Crimes #3
Styles: noise
Others: Wolf Eyes, Moha!, Zs
If you listen close, you can hear the sound of angels dying. It’s like a bright spring morning, when the air is thick with impending storm, a sense of violence ringing in every molecule of oxygen and carbon dioxide, rendering the colors hyper-real. The clouds come rolling over the horizon and stretch their shadow across the land like a gangrenous paw. So far away. They seem to be moving in slow motion, yet by the time you realize they are upon you, it’s too late to seek shelter. There is no place to hide.
More about: Dove Yellow Swans
Links: Dove Yellow Swans - Release the Bats
Nine Dir. Rob Marshall
Styles: musical
Others: Chicago, Memoirs Of A Geisha
With a mini-skirted Kate Hudson shouting “Guido, Guido, Guido!” over brassy fanfare, as men in sharp Italian suits preen and prance around her, the trailer for Nine lets earnest Fellini fans know they might prefer to spend another night with the Criterion Collection than check out this musical adaptation of a successful Broadway adaptation of 8 1/2. But those not turned off by the inanity may have even more reason to complain: The humdrum slog surrounding it makes Hudson’s tribute to “cinema Italiano” an ironic highlight.
Holy Sons Criminal’s Return
Styles: stoner post-rock and lo-fi singer/songwriter
Others: Grails, Will Oldham
From the initial recorded sound of waves splashing softly on the beach to the raucous, swaying send off that closes Criminal’s Return, Emil Amos’ latest effort as Holy Sons meets, exceeds, and occasionally frustrates expectations. Oddly enough, that’s probably the exact reaction Amos anticipated when recording the album, his third of last year. In April, Amos released Drifter’s Sympathy, his collaboration with Japanese noise guru, Merzbow, and then in September, God is Good, his first studio album working with Al Cisneros from Om, hit the streets.
More about: Holy Sons
