Arf She Said

All you gotta do to get me is have characters who can't look at each other but desperately want to. EMOTION! Great trick for an actor to pull off, to be hyperconscious of another person.









And of course...

A rough guess and anecdotal evidence suggests that A Woman A Man Walked By is in the bottom tier of most people's personal PJ Harvey album rankings. It is a weird one. John Parish wrote the music and sent it to Harvey in a couple of batches. She then either wrote lyrics or matched already written lyrics to the music, figured out how to sing them, and sent them back for approval. He approved just about all of it and they put the album together.

As a result it is very much an album of individual songs -- "individual worlds," Harvey calls them, each demanding a different approach. The range is shocking on first and subsequent listens. Black Hearted Love is a pure perfect rock song and her voice is powerful, melancholy and sexy. Pig Will Not is snarling rage. Cracks in the Canvas is spoken word. The Soldiers presages the eerie delicate falsetto she experiments with in White Chalk.

Each piece of music demanded of her that she seek out a new way to use her voice, to turn it into the right instrument for each song. She would try different voices, create different characters, working at different ways of singing. In the end, each song, between music, lyric and voice, finds the way it "has to be." For her, co-writing this album was a matter of working at it until she reached the limits of what she was able to do with her voice sylistically, emotionally, and, fascinatingly, physically.

April is a standout track. Imagine first listening to that quiet moan of organ and drums and thinking, what I need to do now is sing ugly. A squeaky, croaky tilting warble like I have no technique at all. She has no vanity.

Aside from the brainworks, if you have vocal chords, a pair of lungs, and a mouth you can sing. In the clip below of her (and Parish & Co) performing April live I am amazed by two things:

1. That croak in her voice during the bulk of the song is vocal fry. What you are hearing is the physical fact of her vocal folds vibrating and allowing air to pass through irregularly. Vocal fry is a pretty common sylistic tool in singing - the most famous example is Britney's characteristic "oh baby baby." It's easiest to hit on low notes (metal vocalists use it a lot too) and can lend a sexy feel to vocals when used judiciously. What you never hear is someone using it for a whole song and to pitch it up in the clouds. Not only is it super weird and unsexy it is DIFFICULT and requires a ton of technique and control. Try and sing "oh baby baby" over and over again a couple of octaves up and see how hard it is.

2. She spends most of the song tense, repressed, and internally focussed. When the music rises and she belts out the climax her shoulders drop and her mouth opens wide and her tongue flattens and bends to make those vowels as strong as possible. You can see it changing shape in the middle of words, reaching up to tap the back of her teeth to make a t. Pure phonetics, stretched to extremes in service of emotion and character.



To be clear this is not just how "how PJ Harvey sings." In that same session for the elaborate hide-and-seek song Sixteen, Fifteen, Fourteen she waves her arms, laughs, yips, ducks out of view, tosses her head about as characters call from different sides of the garden.



It is not enough to sing the right words at the right pitch in the right order. Your voice comes from your body; she creates the emotion in her posture, her throat, the physical facts of her body. A song like April is ONLY successful if she can deliver it right, which would be, for most people, an impossibility. She is a genius.

You were just doing your thing, looking forward to a good psychological drama. You'd heard a bit about this but the whole narrative's pretty over the top, right? Then wham! THIS IS TRUE in face-punching sans serif stuns your critical faculties and lets you know the score. You look it up on Wikipedia and wow, it does seem to have actually happened, and it was awful. Your heart starts to sink but it'll be okay, you've taken on tough movies before and ultimately, it is just a movie, it's not a big deal, and Dreama Walker is extremely pretty.

You can't see much with all those close-up details of the objects in the room but you can trust they mean something because the director wouldn't do it otherwise. It does get coy with framing and focus, but you know you couldn't handle that information anyway, it's too nasty.

It's too claustrophobic and greasy and exhausting, and when you start to question why someone would do something like that you remember the simple parameters laid out at the start -- busy day, bit of guilt, power imbalance and the answers come pretty easy. When there's an elision three-quarters of the way in you wake up a bit and ask, really? So you check Wikipedia and find out you have to go along with it -- this Really Did Happen.

But there comes a point where you have to say, this is enough. This is too disturbing and watching has become untenable. And it hears you, and it cares about you, so it steps back and gives you a long take in a car, sitting close on a gumshoe driving in to save the day. You take a deep breath and watch, and are glad to be reassured that the police are really just trying to help. After all, they work hard, they catch the bad guy and the assaulted woman gets protected and eventually sues. That's a good outcome.

The credits roll after some text reminds you again about how it was a true story. Sure it was unpleasant and you didn't like watching it; gosh, nobody would. It's not like you wanted to see Dreama Walker's boobs, at least never like this, but now you're down with this bit of the film conversation. And it's true, so these kind of stories need to be told, and you supported an indie movie in these tough economic times. The movie needs you, really.

It sure couldn't do it without you.

I wish I had more time this week to talk about Dog Day Afternoon, one of my favourite movies and surely one of the great American movies of the 70s, as self-contained as The Godfather is sprawling. It starts with the classic piano beat of Amoreena, a quick shot of Sonny's car tucked in in between dogs and billboards pointing out that for all of the police and drama, today's events are just one moment in the hustle and bustle of New York life, and will be just as quickly forgotten.

I wish I had time to talk more about the amazing sound design. Jesus Christ that awful telephone ring that drills down into your brain like a jackhammer; the clicks and clacks of ordely banking that are disrupted when Sonny makes his move; the pock of tennis balls through the opening tune; the chopper blades and engine that drown out the radio chatter; the hoarse cry of Attica man!; the retort of a shot that sends people screaming and fleeing; the obliterating scream of a jet engine.

I wish I had time to talk about how important queerness is to the plot without being some kind of prop for it, or the portrayal of the media, the greatness of every supporting character from Chris Sarandon and Penelope Allen right on down to the pizza delivery guy, or a thousand other things, including how prettily framed Pacino is in this movie, at the height of his wide-eyed beauty.

I wish I had time to rhapsodise about how precise and efficient and helpful Lumet's direction is, how it lays out the bank and its surrounds for us with clarity and hilarity. This skill seems to be essentially forgotten these days, but Lumet's direction in the bank is a marvel. The bank is a well-organised space that so perfectly set in our mind that a recent episode of Bob's Burgers, of all things, was able to recreate it, triggering instant recognition.







We never go big in the bank. The camera always sits at a natural height. The second we go outside it's all overheads and helicopters, all those barriers and the people that seep through them like molasses, those guns that can only with great effort be reholstered. Oh, the irony of that overkill because you know the smallness of what's going on inside -- two people are falling apart, sure, and that's a big deal, but the situation is so tiny.

Speaking of falling apart --
( you got it man )

Check out more entries in the series here.

When people ask me who my favourite author is, I usually say Patrick O'Brian, because it's an impossible question, and because it's basically true. I recently read his 1953 pre-Aubrey-Maturin book Richard Temple, which is excellent -- if typically abrupt at the end -- a really contemplative and dissociative portrait of the life of a young painter. It has plenty of those delightful O'Brian surprises where really important stuff happens between words in the most overlookable places (for instance, the surprise gay: He and Gay had always got along well together, but it was only in the last year that they had been such close friends, drawn together, it must be admitted, by the abominable vice of sodomy.).

Towards the end, and after several periods of greater and lesser moral and financial dissolution, Richard has an encounter with some of his older work.

( Let's read it now. )
I love O'Brian's writing for its ineffable intimacy, this kind of rhythmic stepping through characters' psyches. His writing seems so clinical -- and indeed the above passage is probably the most clinical of the whole book -- but that objectivity, that commonsensical mundanity, is such a lie. His books are entirely bent around his protagonists (slipping sweetly between them, in the case of Aubrey and Maturin). He is such a generous writer, so evidently delighting in their passions and joys, from which he draws terrific humour and pathos.

There is less joy and humour in Richard Temple, perhaps because Richard is extraordinarily, and unknowingly, lonely, despite the intense attachments he forms with a succession of men and women. He is recounting his life to himself while he is interred in a POW camp, trying to hang on to his identity in the face of torture, but this backward-looking sets up an essential foreignness, a distance, a search that meanders and loses its way. The Richards of school, of France, of London, of Churleigh, even of Germany, are strangers, connected more by a happenstance of space-time, and less by any concrete Richardness. There is something really curiously hollow at the centre of this book and character, a space in which buzzes about the sneaking fear that connection is impossible, that will is empty, that encounters with people and art are never transformative because there is nothing to transform; a terror with which I empathise keenly as I get older, uglier, and boringer. So I love the above passage for how vivid and visual it is and how forgiving about the past, for how Richard is able to pull a kind of shocking, beautiful unity into being, to sit contentedly with himself if only for a moment.

Certainly Richard Temple is not about any such fucking pablum as "how passive resistance can be a form of courage and what it truly means to be a hero", as the blurb suggests.* It's an excellent book though, if not as comforting as our dear old friends Aubrey and Maturin.

---

* True heroes, Channel 9 and Telstra have taught me over the last couple of days, are people that can swim really fast, or perhaps do other things fast. Our great nation is currently undergoing the developmental anxiety and trauma of realising that there are other people, who also have heroes, and that our heroes sometimes do not swim as fast as those other heroes. Thus indicating that we have turned five.

my primary take away from The Avengers is being impressed. Impressed at the quickness and cleverness of the extremely efficient script: Avengers would not have been the a hardest movie of the last year to write, but it would have been one of the hardest to write well, and it is written very well. Star Trek, the other recent ensemble-of-icons adaptation/reborquel, did a great job introducing characters with flair and giving everyone a hell yeah moment, with humour. Avengers does all this, but think of everything else it has to manage. It needs to generate equalities and equivalencies in status and power between 4 superheroes, some of whose set-up films were seen less than others, some of whom have less obvious roles and purposes in the oncoming conflict than others. It needs to (did it? I don't know Hawkeye and Black Widow from Adam but I assume they're important to the comics) incorporate two lesser, more human powers, who had seconds of honestly forgettable screentime in previous films, as major characters who can carry arcs. It needs to locate a strong organisational pivot around a character, Nick Fury, who has the built-in pull of an eyepatched SLJ, but who was really just previously just some guy that you saw if you were also interested in reading copyright and humane society disclaimers. The only place it really struggled structurally I'll put under the spoiler cut along with more general discussion.

Joss threw in a couple of neat camera tricks, mostly playing with reflections, which is not really thematically relevant but oh well, but mostly kept things pretty neutral, generally avoiding the standard chaos of present-day blockbuster action. Certainly other action directors could learn from the gorgeous Serenityesque floating shot that tracked the action of the major players in the climactic confrontation. Beautiful clarity!

I loved the way it moved the pieces around on the board, often delaying maximum superhero deployment. Robert Downey Jr was always genius casting for Iron Man, but imagine how distracting, how completely beamed-in-from-another-movie, that scenery-chewing, dominating, obnoxious charisma could have been. Instead they turned it into a plot point! In fact, a character arc! Instead of trying to force these characters together they split them off into interesting pairs, giving just about everyone at least two major relationships.

( slightly spoilery for characterisation, minor plot points )

Mostly though, very impressed, with its visual and verbal wit, its care and efficiency, its devotion to examining interpersonal and group relationships, and its cameo appearance of Enver Gjokaj. Never change Joss.

What a boring Oscars that was. However, possibly the first Oscars I had a legitimate stake in as I had seen all the BP nominees and Have Opinions on them.

Said opinions being rather pedestrian so here instead is a ranking.

1. Black Swan
2. Toy Story 3 - another film with an astoundingly stellar last half hour
3. Winter's Bone
4. The Social Network - So well put together, and so cold. And such an AWFUL last line.
5/6. The Kids Are All Right - the least epic of all the crop of darlings, with some mighty fine actressin' (and actorin') that makes these very personal crises compelling.
5/6. The Fighter - made me care about boxing. Unlike The King's Speech, can harness performance to a story engine that feels like it actually has stakes.
7. True Grit - even lesser Cohens makes for awesome funtimes but in the wake of Deadwood an ornery mumbled western doesn't feel as unique an achievement as their other work.
8. 127 Hours - Franco is game (unlike at the Oscars - BURN NOTICE!) but Boyle is such an insincere mess.

and then way beyond the black stump....

9. The King's Speech - warm milk in the form of a movie; enjoyable in the moment, pointless and nap-inducing after the fact. Firth is great, but he ought to have won last year's A Single Man. Who else could have projected such organic, minimalist feeling into Tom Ford's gorgeous, glossy, rigid frames? No-one. Who else could have played a stuttering dude who sits in front of mouldy wallpaper? Any British actor. Hooper's directing win is ridiculous in the face of the skill it must have taken to turn what is largely three long conversations and a bunch of typing into a driven, exciting movie (The Social Network).
10. Inception - BLERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGHHHMMMMMMMMMMMM.

Okay so I did have opinions.

I take back what I said about Black Swan being old-school Hollywood camp. The excess is there, yes, the big female performances, the heavy-handed symbolism, the archetypes -- stage mother, aging actress, temptress, seducer/abuser.

But it's too interior a film to be camp in that sense. These figures are not unruly women, they're categories filtered through a mind under increasing strain. Watching it again I see how completely Nina's psychotic break overwhelms and dictates the movie. Cracks appear early, before the pressure really starts to mount. The paintings move the first time you see them. Her shadow haunts her in the subway (embodied and reflected) before she even hears they'll be doing Swan Lake.

( cut for length and spoilers )

So Brotherhood (Brodeskab) you guys, I don't even know where to start with this movie.



I could start with the heartwarming scene where the two attractive white guys bond over the creation of awful, just simply vile racist Neo-Nazi propaganda and proceed to distribute it with the sweet, guitar-accompanied abandon that sees young lovers in other movies frolicking in autumnal drifts.

I could start by comparing it to Brokeback Mountain and Einaym Pkuhot, two other recent, stunningly acted movies about the intense homoeroticism of a repressive, masculinist culture.

Or I could start with David Dencik.

( Let me start with David Dencik. )

Man, I am so glad to purge my thoughts on this, I haven't been able to think about anything else for a whole day now.