Archive for April, 2010

special thanks to miss tara for being gifted enough to indulge my night-before-hey-can-you-do-something-with-movies request.

she’s the cupcakes, our Lady Noble.

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I think it goes without saying that Sam Mendes is a fine director.  American Beauty, for my money, was nothing short of a masterpiece.  And even though I didn’t personally enjoy Revolutionary Road (it made me feel like a teenager who had locked myself in my room because I was scared of my parents’ fighting), I had to admit that it was beautifully shot and thoughtfully framed.  Mendes bears the mark of a confident director who knows exactly what he wants out of a shot and always manages to get his actors to carry out that vision.  He clearly knows what he is doing, but he doesn’t seem to be adled by an overly-inflated ego, either.  In that regard, it’s not entirely surprising to learn that he comes from the stage.  Yes, many years before the glossy big budget movies he would put up on the silver screen, he was directing Cabaret, Company and Little Voice back in London.

And it’s this Sam Mendes that we feel in Away We Go.

This is not a movie with an especially ingenious plotline. It does not exude its own star power like so much sexy sweat.  It almost feels home spun.  It wouldn’t have surprised me to find out that it had been made by a girl I went to high school with on a budget of 200 thousand dollars.  I think these are all reasons why it works the way it does.

Sam Mendes was no doubt thanking his lucky ass stars when this movie wrapped.  The actors in this movie did a truly amazing job.  The chemistry, especially between the two lead actors (John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph),  is so genuine that you buy everything that they are selling.   They are all (this movie has a fantastic supporting cast!) utterly natural, believable and sometimes even so recognizable, it makes your heart ache.

This is a movie about two people who literally don’t know where they are going in life.  And being 34 years old with a baby on the way makes it all feel especially distressing.  It is as much about self discovery as it is about the dynamics of different kinds of families and support systems.  In other words, there’s a little something for each and every one of us to relate to in this sweet movie.

At one point, Maya Rudolph’s character, Verona, leans into John Krasinski’s Burt wearily and asks, “Are we fuck-ups?”  And that instance feels like walking out onto the porch at a house party and accidentally interrupting a bittersweet moment between two lovers.  You almost feel like backing away and apologizing, it feels that intimate.

There’s also an all too realistic messy-family-plot-twist wherein Burt and Verona rush to Burt’s older brother, who has just discovered his wife has left both he and their young daughter behind.  The brother has an especially heart-wrenching monologue about how his little girl’s future is about to become irrevocably damaged having been abandoned by her own mother.  I had more than a little difficulty getting the lump in my throat to subside during that scene.  And it’s only one gem of many.

Being a music fanatic, the soundtrack is very important to me.  It’s really something that can make or break a cinematic experience for me.

Choosing Alexi Murdoch to helm the soundtrack of this film was a further stroke of genius for this production.  Alexi was born to a Greek father and a Scottish mother and he lived in both countries before eventually making his way to America.  He seems like a rather unassuming person given his obvious skills as a musician.

The story goes that not long after moving to Los Angeles, he ran into KD Lang in a grocery store and handed her a demo tape.  She called him back two days later wanting to work with him and he simply told her that he wasn’t ready.  After receiving radioplay on KCRW, he sold 50,000 CDs on CD Baby.  But he turned down every major label offer that came his way in the interest of maintaining creative control over his own work.  He eventually self-published, again for CD Baby, in 2002.  But it wasn’t until 2006 that he would release a full-length album  (Time Without Consequence) and he did so under his own label, Zero Summer.

The accompanying music to this movie is as organic as the work of everyone else involved. It is tender without being cloying, complimentary without being overbearing or distracting.

If you have not yet seen this movie, I highly recommend that “away you go” to your Netflix queue;)

Alexi Murdoch – All My Days

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catch all of ‘tuesdays with tara’ here. and all the rest, the most, of tara here.

I’ve known Tara a little while longer than most of you.

yet, since we started chatting

and comparing music notes,

I began trying to put my finger on what it was she had.

‘moxy’ made her sound outdated.

‘hip’ would give our present zeitgeist too much credit…

and then it hit me:

girl’s got soul.

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I’ll come right out and say it: I’m white bred. I’m so white-bred that one of my favorite room mates ever (who happens to be black) affectionately refered to me as his “little cornapple”. I don’t actually know what a cornapple is, but it sounds country.

There’s just no denying that I am the result of a middle-class middle-American upbringing. I was a cheerleader. I played soccer on a team called the Panda Bears. And like most suburban teenagers, I was as self-absorbed as humanly possible.

Well, that all changed quick fast in a hurry in 1989. There were three men (actually, one a boy) responsible for that bubble burst:

Clay Masterson, Spike Lee, and Chuck D.

Clay was a neighborhood buddy. He and I established a trio one summer along with his best friend, Wesley.

Wesley and Clay had an interesting friendship. You see, Clay honestly couldn’t understand why he had been born white. He felt black inside. He felt completely alienated from his white family. No one seemed to take his feelings seriously, either; except Wesley. Wesley actually is black, something Clay was very jealous of. So I guess you could say that Wesley adopted Clay in a way, taking him under his wing and allowing him to express his hidden blackness. I didn’t really get it. Nobody did. It was just “their thing”.

Clay and Wesley unwittingly changed my life that fateful summer. Clay called me and asked if I wanted to go see a movie that afternoon. It was rated R, so we’d have to sneak in, but Wesley knew a guy who worked there, so he figured he could get us in.

That movie was Do the Right Thing. And that movie knocked my teeth out. It felt like Spike Lee put his hand on top of my head, looked me dead in the face and screamed, “OPEN YOUR EYES, GIRL!” It was unrelenting. I think we sat through the whole thing bug-eyed and slack jawed, barely breathing.

Then Chuck D entered the arena. “Fight the Power” felt like getting jacked in the stomach, full on. That voice may well have been the voice of God or Buddha or Mohammed for how it affected me.

We stumbled back out into the daylight and it seemed forever before any of us could get a word out. We had all been stunned in our own ways. The point is that that movie, and that song, had burst our collective bubble. I don’t think any of us felt like kids anymore. We felt we had seen too much.

Clay was the first to buy It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. He made Wesley and I each a tape of it. I listened to my copy until I had memorized every single word and nearly driven my parents insane.

The funny thing is that for the longest time, my love of rap was a dirty little secret that I shared only with Clay and Wesley. My other friends were all punk and goth. I never would have admitted to liking Yo! Mtv Raps more than 120 Minutes. (gasp!)

Public Enemy was just the tip of the iceberg, as it turned out. The following years would bring me to L.L.Cool J, Eric B and Rakim, Gang Starr (Guru!), KRS-1. Later there were my East Coast brothers De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, Jungle Brothers. Later came Das EFX, Black Sheep, Wu Tang Clan, Nas, Black Moon, and 3rd Bass. By the time I hit university there was the West Coast explosion: NWA, Dr.Dre, Too Short (“Life ain’t nothin’ but bitches and money”), Notorious B.I.G, Tupac.

I would like to point out that the reason I kept my love of rap hidden was pure teenage cowardice. I was afraid that people would think a middle class white girl who listened to rap was playing at some kind of game. And because it was precious to me, I didn’t want anyone to take that away.

I later learned that music is a place where you can truly be yourself, with no regard for what others might say. It can also be a place that brings us together and therein lies the magic.

This track takes me waaaay back and I think this is what it was meant to do. David Dallas grew up on hip hop and R and B. But he always thought that nobody would care about a white rapper from New Zealand. I’m glad he finally changed his mind. I hope this brother blows up.

Somewhere, Biggie is smiling.

David Dallas – Indulge Me

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