The Factual Opinion

Charade

Charade
1963
Directed by Stanley Donen
Written by Peter Stone
Starring Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, Walter Matthau
with James Coburn and George Kennedy

The lack of copyright has put Charade into the public domain, which is why there is a massive glut of DVD and VHS copies of the film in circulation, including an inclusion of the film as a Bonus Feature with its abysmal remake The Truth About Charlie.  The Criterion version of the DVD is, unsurprisingly, the preferred way to watch the film, until Charade finds itself in a film revival. One of Grant's last films (and his last good film), he finds himself in the very position he had avoided when he turned down Roman Holiday: romancing Audrey Hepburn at an age when she could have believably played his daughter. Luckily, the script outright embraces the age difference, and when the romance begins early in the film, every following scene contains some barbed reference to the generational gap that seperates the two. Hepburn, never one for depth of performance, is well-used here. The cuteness that can often irritate is an excellent counterbalance to the disgusting behavior she is surrounded by, from Matthau's hilariously revolting CIA operative to George Kennedy's tour-de-force performance as a claw handed bad guy straight out of Moonraker. It's a lucky stroke that Stanley Donen was able to bring in Grant for a rare turn as an unrepentant liar, as few actors could make being a sleaze so charming. Charade is funny, yes, ridiculous even, but the brilliance of the film is in its embrace of the nuts and bolts of the spy drama.  Excepting Hepburn, our foolish guide through the interworkings of "scary people," no one in Charade can be trusted. While death is, as always, right behind the hotel door, it's death as obvious blunder instead of unforgiving horror (like today's spy masterpieces.) When the bad guys begin to go down, there's no missing the motive--lack of class. As Charade puts it, being cool will keep you alive while being gross will get a plastic bag over your head. Excepting the final gun-battle (a totally unnessary attempt at high drama, after a subway chase that leaves one exhausted) Charade tells a lazy story that refuses to get cornered into one genre. Unlike many forays into the classic thrillers of the past, which usually leave me wondering what Fincher or Greengrass could do with the same script, Charade is a film that leaves no room for improvement.

As for bonus features, there's a conversation with Donen and Stone and not much else--although it is always fun to see how cheap previews were in 1963.

-Tucker Stone, 2006

Five Highest Average Playcount of 2006

We used math, or math used us. After very little work, iTunes and I got together, and hashed out a top 25 in the middle of the year. Here are the top five, in descending order.

5) Belle and Sebastian The Life Pursuit

It is never pleasant to insult an album you have clearly listened to repeatedly. But than again, ab workouts are not pleasant either, and they are very good for you. Life Pursuit is yet another neo-pop album from High Fidelity favorites; it's adorable and sweet, like the old Gummi Bears cartoon. (Remember? They lived in a tree, and no one ever tried to eat them.) However, like real Gummi Bears, Pursuit becomes an exercise in tolerance the more you listen to it. Unlike previous Belle and Sebastian albums, Pursuit becomes, on multiple listens, an album that strips away the gloss on top of the songcraft, begging the question of whether these guys are serious or not. By the time you have mastered the childlike lyrics, you have overdosed on a level of saccharine that belongs on a Smoosh release. If anything memorable came out of this album that will last, it'll be an upcoming interview where B & S admit that they did not have much to do in the studio, so they recorded an album that's reminiscient of their best work--but lacking the soul and direction that remains unquestioned from that earlier, better sound. Then they will offer to sell you an old cardigan.

4. The Knife Silent Shout

Oh, for a return to those first few weeks hearing it. Like 2005's Silent Alarm, The Knife released an immediately accessible album that everybody loves when they first hear it, a rollicking post-punk post-dance art-pop laptop-Post what-the-hell "put that cat in here" album that is as stupid as it is irresistible. It is unlike anything else that has showed up in these first six months of 2006, and it remains (for the first 90 plays or so) endlessly enjoyable. It will not be until you figure out that, like Bloc Party, (or Madonna) that all these cats want to do is have fun, meaning they have, quite literally nothing to say that you start craving something that has a bit more meat on the bone. That does not mean you can't try to live on Silent Shout, and Silent Shout alone, but eventually, you're going to need some leafy greens.  Or else--well, we all know what happens without leafy greens, right?

3. Islands Return to the Sea

These kind of albums aren't supposed to be any good. Album's that grow on you, that are weird and silly, overly serious about themselves while being about Abominable Snowmen and happy Volcanos; hell, that's the very definition of goofball idiot music.  It should not be any good. It is not allowed. And therein lies the magic of Islands.  (And there is no "the," thank you very much.) Formed out of the ashes of the Unicorns, and I have the 'Islands (ex-Unicorns)" ticket that proves it, draped in all-white clothing, and dashed with a sprinkle of steel drums and Paul Simon's Graceland, Islands haven't just replaced the Unicorns meager output, they have rendered it moot. Bands aren't supposed to be this experimental and sound so happy at the same time. But that's the Islands for you--making music exciting again, while bucking the rules. It's just luck that the bands stayed together long enough to make it to a studio.

2. Band of Horses Everything All The Time

It's a point that's been made, and it's here again. Band of Horses aren't anything special. Everything All The Time isn't innovative. It is indy-rock gone alternative, meaning it is a standard-bearer for the masses. It's pop, it's the closest thing ironic t-shirts and facial hair have near the top forty, it the top forty wasn't full of Cristina and Shakira. But after you finish with cynicism, and you have stopped trying to turn your mom onto Scott Walker, you'll want something that is well-done, sweet, and isn't trying to hard. Unfortunately, Built to Spill did not step up to the plate. So here's to the new boss, same as the old boss.

1. Liars Drums Not Dead

Let's talk about a band that's trying harder at not trying, a band that's making an album that doesn't need listeners.  Let's talk about music that you can't explain.  Let's talk about music that makes you feel ashamed to like.  Let's talk reading critical acclaim for an album that you have a hard time believing anyone else likes, and you still have not figured out why you like it.  Let's talk about the sense of pride that comes when you find out that said album has a higher average playcount than everything else.  Let's talk about art.  Because that's what Drum is, it's music as art, maybe not even italics, but capital A-Art.

Giving the Liars the crown of best album of the year when there's still six months to go, when one is still waiting on the Roots and trying to stop dancing to Girl Talk is a stupid move, but nobody, not even the Islands, took chances and went to the level of the Liars in 2005, much less since January.  It's not that 2006 has been an awful year in music, it's that 2006 has been a bad time for albums that are different, difficult, serious work.  Everything that's been good (or great) has been in the entertainment genre.  Some of the best work of the year has been by guys like T.I., Lil' Wayne, The Knife and The Fiery Furnaces, yet all of those albums keep the fun at the forefront, even when they are bitching about Katrina.  Pushing the limits of what music is has not been on the radar.  Even the oddness of an album like Return to the Sea stems less from musicality--Islands are wierd because they have a strange frontman.  The same arguement could, in some circles, have been applied to the Liars; that is, unless you've seen them live.  Like Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, the Liars are operating on a level of call and response type improvisation that is totally dead outside of the WIRE's circle of influence.  Don't get it twisted-the Liars have setlists, that's clear.  But they're three individuals bouncing ideas off each other, and if a metaphorical imagining of Oppenheimer's bomb crew is surfacing, it's not a sarcastic one.  No, the Liars are bringing the lab back to popular music. To top it off, they are doing it after everyone, (and I mean everyone) talked shit about their last foray into the field.  Testify.

-Tucker Stone, 2006

Batman 655

Grant Morrison and Andy Kubert on Batman. Grant Morrison and Andy Kubert on Batman! That's pretty much been the advertising campaign for the last few months. Now that Morrison is under exclusive contract with DC, his name has been splashed across as many books as possible, whether it's "based on concepts developed by," "co-written" or the gold standard "written by," Grant has gone from the weird Scottish bald guy who practices something called "Chaos Magic" and wrote all those bizarre works like The Invisibles, Seaguy, and the masterful Doom Patrol to "The Man Who Will Save The DC Universe."

It would be a great story, if it were true. If, as Morrison's recent interview with Deepak Chopra had mentioned, Grant was really sent from God, the future, or whatever, to "give humanity the new cave paintings," then hell yeah, that would be great.

Morrison has made a pretty good name for himself in the last few years. He jumps back and forth between two worlds--the one where he's an acid-laced weirdo, writing comics full of new-age spirituality mixed with pacifist renewals of late 60's culture, comics so full of hyperbole and gutter violence that they often only reach readers in love with Morrison himself; and the other world, the underwear and spandex set, where Morrison "re-invents" superhero comics. It's how he's paid the rent for years. Whenever a major comic goes stale, like the Justice League in the late 90's or the X-Men in 2001, Morrison is brought in to restore it them to their former glory. The thing is that "former glory" doesn't mean the same thing to everyone--in these cases it just meant to get back to the point where comic buyers walk out of stores with a copy of X-Men in their pocket. Whether what Morrison wrote was factored into the future of the storyline was totally unimportant--which is why X-Men has once again returned to the bottom of the barrel, starting over yet again, and why Joss Whedon has been permitted to ride slipshod over the stories Morrison wrote. And the Justice League? Hell, they just cancelled that. (It will be restarted under different ownership, again, in the hands of a celebrity writer, in the coming months.) Either way, none of Morrison's status quo changes end up adopted by his follow-up writers, most of whom are the same individuals who ruined sales in the first place.

Naysayers may cry out to Grant Morrison's current series All Star Superman as evidence that proof that Morrison is pulling it off, but hard evidence says otherwise. All Star, while being one of the best comics published in the last twenty years has still failed to crack the market that DC Comics was hoping for.  According to a recent editorial in The Comics Journal, "1/5 of one percent of the American public" buys comic books. Morrison claims to want to change that. DC claims to want him to do it.  But it's the same guys in the comics store every week, and it's the same characters they're buying. All Star Superman may have won an Eisner last week, and it may have outsold everything else on the shelves, but if that hasn't changed the basic problem. Comics are the black sheep, and Grant Morrison is still another shepherd, regardless of his talent.

Batman 655 takes off like a shot, mainly because it takes off with a shot.  The first few pages read like they hyperbolic tabloids that comics use to steal their plots from back in the 30's--COMMISSIONER GORDON POISONED! and CRAZED BATMAN SHOOTS JOKER! It's a set-up, yes, and it's an overused setup at that, but its entertaining enough that complaints come later. The remainder of the issue is classic Morrison, with dry wit and nefarious foreboding splashed across every line of dialogue and Andy Kubert showcasing some of the finest super-hero art of recent memory. Last year's terrible Ultimate Iron Man mini-series was incapable of giving Kubert anything worthwhile to do, and that wasted time is more than made up for here. The plot follows the basic method of sending Bruce away to "relax" only to have him end up embroiled in some type of criminal scheme that "only" Batman can solve, but after 70 years, one should stop expecting Batman comics to end up anywhere near innovative. Batman 655 an excellent example of how good a superhero comic can be--it's got a timeless beauty to it, and a well-done story to boot. It's just too bad that means it will get filed as a waste of time for 99.5% of the American population.

-Tucker Stone, 2006