The Wily Filipino

Signs Say No

So I finally got to see my second-most anticipated film of 2002 (the first was The Two Towers, naturally), M. Night Shyamalan's Signs. This was a huge disappointment, coming from the director of the excellent The Sixth Sense and the very good Unbreakable.

Mel Gibson -- showing his age, and shot from a much higher angle than he is ordinarily, making him look like the short fellow that he really is -- plays a Catholic deacon of some sort who has lost his faith after his wife's death. The film starts with him puttering about on his farm, his two kids (cut from the same cloth as that "I see dead people" kid whose name escapes me right now), and his dour brother (played by Joaquin Phoenix). The dog starts barking. He goes off into his field and finds the crop circles. Actually, this is all in the previews, so everyone knows the beginning by now.

What is ostensibly an alien-invasion film turns out to be more of a "meditation" on faith and belief. That's fine. But even Close Encounters of the Third Kind handled this theme so much better, as Shyamalan simply clomps around with it. It's a bit of a mess: it's part Field of Dreams, part Night of the Living Dead; there's a Bernard Herrmannesque theme for the opening credits, and the deadpan jocularity of The X-Files running all throughout.

The real heavy-handedness comes in when Gibson sets it up midway -- in fact, Shyamalan gives the goods away very, very early -- when he tells Phoenix something to the effect that there are two kinds of people: those who believe in signs (that things happen for a reason), and those who think it's sheer coincidence. (Surely there's room for skepticism somewhere there?) Simply put, are there really such things as coincidences?

This would be fine as the movie's core question for the viewer to ponder -- but the "coincidences" are, alas, so clumsily stacked on top of one another that the conclusion looms too clearly for us. (And does one really need quick flashbacks to events that happened ten minutes before?) The seams are showing in the way Shyamalan structures his screenplays, unfortunately,and by the time we get to the ending the thrill is gone. And indeed, seen in the context of his two previous films, it's clear that the higher power here is Shyamalan himself.

American Splendor

This I have to see: a film based on Harvey Pekar's American Splendor just won the grand jury prize at Sundance...

Brrrrr

Something to think about: compare the weather in Ithaca, NY and Base Bernardo O'Higgins -- love that name -- in Antarctica.

Eye Rules

The Yamatsuka Eye quote of the day:

Eat shit noise music. Kill the all noise artists! We hate Whitehouse. Piss Off NWW. Asshole C93. Suck PTV. Fuck Coil. We love disco sound.

Tiny Bubbles

As someone who grew up watching elementary-school girls dancing the hula -- at Maquiling School "Tiny Bubbles" and "Aloha Oe" were the songs of choice -- I thought that Don Ho epitomized Hawaiian music. (Okay, Arthur Lyman is great, too, but that's a different story.)

But a visit to Hawaii with Madeline for a friend's wedding a few years ago brought the joys of more or less real Hawaiian music straight to my ears. Sure, they were playing the slack-key guitar stuff right on the Hawaiian Holidays plane as they served up the mai tais, but it was pretty cool all the same. When Madeline and I (her in her tankini, me looking all skinny without a T-shirt) drove around the island in our little rental car, the car radio was tuned in to local radio (Da Kine) the whole way.

This essay on Hawaiian Music at the Perfect Sound Forever website is a nice little intro, more or less encapsulating the same experience I had, though it doesn't mention my favorite album (an instant purchase from the Ala Moana Shopping Center): Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar Masters, a compilation selected by George Winston out on Dancing Cat Records. This has truly stellar guitar playing; quite gorgeous stuff. (The easy thing to say would be that it instantly brings back fond, relaxing memories of the islands, but the amazing musicianship should be appreciated regardless of the context by which the music was originally heard.)

Best Albums I Heard in 2002

The best albums I heard in 2002:

• Guided By Voices: Universal Truths and Cycles (2002)

Sonically, it's leagues away from their lo-fi classic Bee Thousand; the production is wholly beefed up, and the usual song fragments now get the full Who treatment. But Robert Pollard's amazing songwriting still shines through.





• Diana Krall: Live in Paris (2002)

Her last two albums were profound disappointments -- too much gloppy strings and not enough swing -- as they relegated her piano-playing to the background. But on this live album, Krall acquits herself very nicely, with long, almost fiery solos, and on the DVD the groove within the band is crystal-clear.





• Jacques Louissier Trio: Bach's Goldberg Variations (2000)

I became obsessed with the Goldberg Variations (and Glenn Gould) over the past few years or so, and so it was a lovely surprise to hear jazz interpretations of the pieces. There is little room for the band to fling itself into the material, jazz-wise, as it conforms very strictly to the pieces' original durations, so they make do extremely well with those time constraints -- a bass solo here, a samba rhythm there.





• Puffy: AmiYumi Jet Fever (2000)

The best pure pop rush of the year. I don't know much about Puffy -- do they write their own songs, even? -- but if there was some pop candyland realm out there somewhere, Ami and Yumi would be the reigning queens. Makes my previous pop favorites, the Cardigans and Girlfrendo, seem indie-rock by comparison. Puffy cribs from a whole slew of different genres, and steals riffs from the Beatles, and puts them all together into a too-sweet power-pop lollipop. Or something like that.





• Swans: Soundtracks for the Blind (1996)

I got turned on to the Swans fairly late in my musical listening life, and it's a wonder I wasn't into them earlier. Soundtracks distills industrial clang, gothic death strum and nihilistic wallow into a sonically bleak and adventurous double album.
Posted by the wily filipino at 01:28 PM | Comments (0)

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