Here are the album reviews I wrote for the March-April issue of EL Magazine, which was distributed in Tokyo Feb. 25.
The Catastrophist
-Tortoise (Thrill Jockey/P-Vine)
Songs For Our Mothers
-Fat White Family (Without Consent/Hostess)
It’s become a thing to label any musical style you can’t describe easily as being postrock, a situation that, in and of itself, goes a long way toward explaining how the term “rock” doesn’t make much sense any more unless preceded by a qualifying adjective or prefix. Chicago’s Tortoise has always been the default standard bearer for the genre if only because they’ve never rejected it. More to the point, their heady mix of prog and ambient refutes the visceral pleasures associated with “rock music” while mostly retaining rock’s instrumental and rhythmic touchstones. On their first album in 7 years, the group seems stumped for a way forward and so moves slightly backwards—anti-prog, as it were, and it’s not just the lead-footed version of David Essex’s 1973 off-center hit single “Rock On” that makes this case. Though Tortoise has always relied on the kindness of studio engineers to make their point, they never shorted the listener on chops, but The Catastrophist is notably lean on guitar or keyboard showcases. It’s an album of layered compositions, ideas that sound as if they were formulated while fiddling with knobs or patching together orphan fragments of abandoned songs. One exception is “Shake Hands With Danger,” which is built around a Bolero-like hard rock guitar pattern and propelled by metallic synth sounds that mimic those of a steel drum. It’s the closest thing on the album to what might be termed the Tortoise sound: lockstep instrumental activity that builds to something monumental without making your heart leap. The Catastrophist is too tasteful by half, an attitude that refutes the “rock” label even more. One would hate to see what would happen if they ever met Mogwai in a dark alley. “Tasteful” is the last word you’d use to describe the UK band Fat White Family. Obsessed with drugs, sex, and death, the band plays in an enervated style that recalls the narcotic thrum of Suicide or mid-period solo Tom Verlaine. And while the group pointedly doesn’t display much craft, they do stretch the boundaries of the bailiwick in ways that Tortoise might appreciate. Though “Satisfied” is little more than a two-chord rant pushed to the edge of discombobulation, it shapeshifts in interesting ways, as if the energy expended to drive it were producing more energy, like a hybrid gasoline engine. Some of the songs are abstract to the point of perversion: “Duce” is like somebody’s joke reply to Krautrock, six minutes of sludgy, beatless grunts and muffled choruses whose appeal is completely dynamic. Even when they attempt a conventional pop song, it either has to be slightly out-of-key (“Lebensraum”) or stripped of all of its pleasure signifiers except melody (“Hits Hits Hits”). It’s impossible to determine if this sort of rock is progressive or regressive. Tortoise moved back to get out of a rut. Fat White Family see no point in trying to budge out of theirs. Continue reading
The Big Short
As has been well documented, at least by the non-Japanese press, Angelina Jolie’s epic Hollywood retelling of the life of Olympic runner Louie Zamperini was not picked up by the usual Japanese distributor for Universal Studios product due to fears that right wing elements would make a stink about the film’s purported “anti-Japanese” slant. If the negative light this story shed on the Japanese movie industry was dimmed somewhat, it probably had more to do with the fact that foreign critics, not to mention American audiences, were cool about the movie. To a certain extent, the publicity stems from Jolie’s celebrity status and its somewhat paradoxical relationship with her intentions as a director. Her first film, after all, was set during the Bosnian conflict and featured unknown actors speaking in languages other than English. Unbroken isn’t quite as pure-of-purpose. It’s very much a big budget production, and while there are no famous faces on the screen, it has the melodramatic heft of a Tinseltown biopic. In that regard, and given Jolie’s popularity in Japan, it could have been a moderate money maker here, though I’m not sure if that explains why a distributor normally associated with European and Japanese art films took the risk of releasing it. 
Ben Cotner and Ryan White’s documentary, produced for HBO, immediately sets its priorities and its outlook. As the title forcefully suggests, the movie is a polemic against Proposition 8, the California state initiative to repeal legal same sex marriages, and which won in a 2008 referendum. That was the same election, the film notes, that brought Barack Obama to the highest office in the land. As journalism, the movie’s steadfast position in opposition to the particulars of the proposition would seem to make it less than objective, but Cotner and White gave themselves the luxury of covering the lawsuit that eventually annulled the election results, and which took five years. In that regard, the film is an invaluable investigation into how the American consensus on same sex marriages changed over time.
In Japan, real estate agents are by law required to inform potential renters or buyers of murders or suicides that occurred in properties under consideration, though if someone died there of natural causes no one has to say anything. In any event, if you look at an apartment that seems unusually cheap, it might mean the last tenant threw himself out the window—or worse.
It must be contractually mandated that every movie in which Morgan Freeman appears he has to provide folksy voiceover narration. He does it in this bittersweet domestic drama, though there isn’t a whole lot of need for it. The situation is easy to grasp and hardly requires elaboration. Freeman and Diane Keaton play Alex and Ruth, an elderly couple who have spent their whole married life in a 2-bedroom Brooklyn apartment. Since it’s a walkup and they live on the fifth floor, they decide, at the urging of their realtor niece, Lily (Cynthia Nixon), to sell and move somewhere closer to the ground or, at least, to a building that has an elevator because they won’t be able to handle stairs forever. 
As the Oscar nominations for The Big Short testify, the 2008 economic collapse continues to provide raw meat for heavy-duty dramas, as well as comedies of the blackest sort. 99 Homes gets down to the bone of the matter, since it’s concerned with the housing bubble that started the whole disaster. Set in Orange County, Florida, where rampant building in the late 90s and early 00s created a surplus of mini-mansions and put the notion in every existing homeowner’s head that his property was a bottomless gold mine to borrow against, Ramin Bahrani’s tale isn’t subdued enough to qualify as a cautionary tale. Though the losers who find themselves at the mercy of ruthless real estate agent Rick Carver (Michael Shannon) might provide lessons in reckless American financing, Carver’s unabashed opportunist does not, as some have analyzed, represent the 1%. What he actually represents is that element which sees through the sorrow and the pity of any economic disaster and finds a way of making money out of it. And for what it’s worth, Shannon is the perfect actor to play this land shark. His mush mouth delivery and rough features telegraph the man’s callous disregard for anyone stupid enough to have been caught in the racket the banks perpetrated on the public. He shows up at foreclosed homes with his paid cop pals and throws people out, along with their furniture and whatever shred of dignity they have left, without the slightest twinge of remorse. If anything, he implies they deserve it, not for being deadbeats but for being dumb. 
A winner at Cannes and favored contender for the best foreign language film Oscar this year, Laszlo Nemes’s debut feature is both formally audacious and thematically provocative, so much so on both counts that it’s difficult to absorb all the implications while sitting through the movie. Movies about the death camps start from a position of high tension, and making good on that tension is central to the value of the film. Nemes gears up our anxiety by throwing us directly into the horror. His protagonist, Saul Auslander (Geza Rohrig), is a Hungarian Jew assigned to be a Sonderkommando, an inmate who essentially carries out the labor at the Nazi death camps, in this case Auschwitz-Birkenau. Saul moves new arrivals into the gas chambers, clears out the bodies afterwards, and separates clothing and other valuables. Perhaps understanding that showing these atrocities would be overwhelming, Nemes chooses to keep his camera close to Saul, so that the horrors mostly occur on the periphery of the frame, but there is still the voices and other sounds—of barked orders, panicked victims, and various mechanical noises, all of which are sufficiently overwhelming in their suggestiveness. After fifteen minutes you want the projectionist to call a time out so you can collect your wits. 
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