The Wily Filipino

Your New Favorite Song.

Music for an Imaginary Wes Anderson Film, Track #4.

Just got back from a night out with some friends -- a very good Cuban restaurant in Palo Alto was the highlight of the evening (apparently Bill Clinton's favorite, when he's in Silicon Valley). But alas, we ended up at the lamest-ass club in the world, Fanny and Alexander -- this was mistakenly called "Frederick and Alexander" by these two women smoking in front of Gordon Biersch who recommended it, which gave my gay friend some false optimism. The lesson: never trust the recommendation of a couple of drunken temps, who couldn't even recognize a Bergman film if it smacked them in the face, ever again.

Anyhow, this post has really no relation to the music, except that 1) Francoise Hardy's "Comment Te Dire Adieu" is cool, even if it's French; 2) it'll probably fit in a Wes Anderson film, in some, um, gently ironic scene.

All right, I gotta crash.

Hear it (3.33 mb, .m4a)

Movie Quiz #5.

[Answers posted.]

Movie Quiz #4: The Answers.

Shot 1:

The philosophical detective Lemmy Caution (played by Eddie Constantine -- what a cool name) walks by a naked woman in a vitrine, in Jean Luc-Godard's pulp sci-fi noir Alphaville (1965).

Shot 2:

Egbert Sousè (W.C. Fields) discovers the perks of his new job as a detective for the Bank of Lompoc -- a free calendar. Edward F. Cline's The Bank Dick (1940) is not necessarily Fields' funniest film -- the honor goes to It's A Gift -- but his prodigious gift for misanthropic, drunken verbal repartee is on full display here. The madcap car chase sequence at the end is a minor miracle.

Shot 3:

The titular character of Ralph Bakshi's Fritz the Cat (1972) gets it on with slumming coeds -- from Columbia or NYU, I can't remember which. The callow, wise-ass Fritz isn't the reason to watch the rather dated and puerile film; it's the set-pieces built around "ethnic" dialogue, that are probably the most interesting.

Shot 4:

Penises are instrinsically funny, as Brian (the late Graham Chapman) discovers to his dismay in Terry Jones's Monty Python's The Life of Brian (1979).

Shot 5:

In one of the most controversial (and fascinatingly unwatchable) films ever, a group of beautiful youths are trapped in a palazzo in the last days of Mussolini's Fascist regime. Pier Paolo Pasolini's gorgeously vile Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1976) is, thankfully, one of a kind, and one designed -- its attention to visual complicity on the part of the audience perhaps makes this clear -- to be seen only once. (Be thankful I'm not using this film for the next quiz's theme.)

Four people got all five films correctly: Chris Bales, Brandon, Greg Levrault, and Rolf Riebig. Congratulate them for being able to identify five movies with naked people in it.

Quiz 5: we've done nudity, so violence is up next…

Your New Favorite Song.

Soundtrack to an Imaginary Wes Anderson Film, Track 3.

Nick Lowe's "So It Goes" will have to be played during some sort of montage: a quick rundown of our characters' backgrounds (or futures), perhaps. I love the hints of impending political apocalypse, the way Lowe hurtles through the chorus, the vague similarity to "Reelin' in the Years" -- a perfect little pop song.

Hear it (3.51 mb, m4a).

Movie Quiz #4.

[Answers and a new quiz coming up...]

Movie Quiz #3: The Answers.

As I wrote before, a character -- or, in the case of Shot #2, every character -- sings the song:

Shot 1:


Larry Fishburne (oops, he's Laurence Fishburne now), who must have been all of 16 when Francis Ford Coppola filmed Apocalypse Now (1979), sings along to the Rolling Stones' "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction." (I think a shot of Sam Bottoms on a surfboard would have been an easier vidcap.) Probably my favorite film of all time, as I've mentioned on this blog over and over.

Shot 2:


Paul Thomas Anderson has pretty much the entire cast -- including Tom Cruise -- of Magnolia (1999) -- sing along to Aimee Mann's "Wise Up." It's a wonderfully risky scene, but it works.

Shot 3:


"Don't you never sleep?" asks Billy Chapin to himself when he hears Robert Mitchum on the horizon, singing "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms." Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter (1955) is one of the greatest American movies ever made.

Shot 4:


In Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994), Uma Thurman dances to an Urge Overkill cover of a Neil Diamond song: "Girl, You'll Be A Woman Soon." Most everyone got this correctly.

Shot 5:


Keir Dullea unplugs HAL 9000 -- who, in a last attempt at communication before his death, sings "Daisy" (the original title, though, is "Daisy Bell" from 1892!) -- in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

Our highest scorer for this quiz is Steve Spence from New Mexico, with 9 points; Pat Padua, Pete Culley and Eric Braden all got 8 points each as well.

New Order, Kaiser Auditorium, Oakland, 4/29/05.

In some ways, the New Order concert was about wish fulfillment: the longing of a band to come to grips with what happened a quarter of a century earlier, or if you want to be more cynical, the wish of a band (with a new, relatively disposable album) to make big bucks off the nostalgia circuit.

This is not to say that I didn't enjoy it -- on the contrary, I was jumping up and down like a madman, yelling out the lyrics just like everyone else -- but the setlist seemed so stupidly unimaginative: a big chunk of Substance, a song each from Republic and Get Ready, a liberal helping of relative plodders from Waiting for the Sirens' Call.

But hey, that was what I wished for anyhow; I wanted the hits, dammit. Everyone in our gang got our wishes fulfilled. (I don't know what Barb wished for -- she and her posse were lining up for margaritas and were then swallowed up by the crowd.)

I wanted "Transmission," a song I never thought I'd ever hear live, and then there it was. Lan and Juan wanted "She's Lost Control," and got it on the first try; you can't beat a set that begins with the 1-2-3 punch of "She's Lost Control," "Love Vigilantes" and "Regret" one after the other. (Sean and Eloise really got into that last one; right now it's the New Order song running around in my head for some reason or other.) By the time the concert peaked with a "Bizarre Love Triangle" / "Love Will Tear Us Apart" / "Temptation" combo, you could practically imagine the audience screaming its thanks. (But imagine the jeers if they were never played!) And Tracy finally got her wish in the one-song encore with "Blue Monday," spare instrumentation and robotic glory intact, but with the added cheek of a Kylie Minogue sample (I think this was from a mashup from a couple of years back). Probably the highlight of the show.

(The Chemical Brothers were the opening act, and I was almost embarrassed to mention this to people. There's a reason, I guess, why I really loved Exit Planet Dust and can't bear to listen to it anymore -- or any of the following albums, for that matter -- because I'd outgrown the Chems. The lights and visuals were cool, though, but I don't know how much mileage one can derive from the same tension-and-release dynamic in a DJ set.)

Ingmar Bergman's "Saraband."

The other night I saw Ingmar Bergman's sequel to Scenes from a Marriage, and I must say, at least initially, I'm somewhat dissatisfied; for all my high expectations, Saraband turns out to be -- not that that's such a terrible thing -- just another Bergman film.

(Spoilers follow.)

The film is not really about Johan and Marianne, for starters, and seems to squander the economy of the original: a series of verbal dances and jousts in airless rooms. In Saraband Johan has moved to a life of relative isolation in the wilderness, and Marianne has come to visit. But the film is really more about Johan and his relationship to his middle-aged son Henrik, and for those like me who wanted more of the same, opening up the film this way -- there's Henrik's daughter, the absent fifth character (Henrik's deceased wife Anna), and the audience, who Marianne addresses directly at the beginning and end of the film -- seemed to include people who shouldn't have been invited to the dance.

There are also plot revelations that seem terribly... lazy, I guess, is the right word -- the kind that you're probably told to avoid in screenwriting classes. Saraband also seems -- and this may ultimately be a half-empty / half-full glass situation -- frighteningly pessimistic.

Part of the many pleasures of Scenes from a Marriage was the spectacle of language unfettered, how it gushed out in torrents, even as it concealed and deceived, even as words were the manifestation of a perhaps unnecessary honesty, where language was used both as weapon and, crucially, as salve. The former film -- especially as seen in the last act -- focuses more on the giddy bond of intimacy; even if they couldn't stay together, they were at least open to each other. Even within their confined spaces, and in the joyless context of separation and divorce, their words had a liberating, even transcendent, effect. Even if they were alone "in the middle of the night in a dark house somewhere in the world," they at least had each other, and at least they were talking.

In Saraband, it's the corrosive power of distance, of isolation, of non-communication that concerns Bergman. (We see glimpses of the woods and the lake outside, but the film is even more stifling than its predecessor.) One of the little shocks (at least for me) in the film is when the audience discovers that the couple has not spoken in thirty years. Perhaps the vision of Johan and Marianne cheerfully cheating on their new respective spouses for the next three decades was too much of a fantasy for the audience after all, and maybe Bergman meant it this way. The irony is that Scenes from a Marriage, while about divorce, is the film that's more about openness; one expected Saraband to explore the further deepening of Johan and Marianne's relationship, but is in fact about its exact opposite.

One of the other shocks, at least for me, was the sight of Erland Josephson's right hand shaking involuntarily; indeed, I almost lost it when he struggles to get up from his chair to give Liv Ullmann a hug. Actually, there's only really one deliberately tearjerking moment which comes fairly early in the film; seen in the context of all five hours of Scenes from a Marriage, the pathos is well-earned. (But it was no surprise to see Liv Ullmann still look like, well, Liv Ullmann.)

But Saraband is also about how hate festers and is distilled. Johan's charm and wit (even as he was being the "pitiable" philanderer) in the first film has been boiled away, as it were, since he has been transformed into the stereotypically crotchety (and here, venomous) sad old man. Ultimately, the film is about love in its destructive forms, with the characters held up to a (perversely?) impossible, saint-like ideal as embodied by the absent Anna.

Towards the end, Johan is afflicted, in the middle of the night, by "mental diarrhea" trying to escape out of his body through every pore, terrified by (an unspoken) fear of death. The scene is capped by a lazy (for Bergman) visual metaphor: Johan takes off his clothes and stands naked in the doorway. But together his and Marianne's nakedness is merely superficial: they are naked, if not before each other, then at least to the world or an ostensibly pitying God, but the possibility for human communication is still stymied. Or maybe not: perhaps it is what unspoken between them that is, at this juncture, most eloquent.

Repeatedly Marianne is asked by each character why she has come to visit, and she responds, almost every single time, that she does not know. I think it is crucial that we take her answer at face value: the soul searches, but for what and which reason is never really clear. The film seems to be ultimately about, if one can reduce it so primitively, connection (or, that old Scenes from a Marriage word again, intimacy), our many failed attempts at it, and the impossibility of achieving it altogether -- but that maybe, even in our clumsy, inarticulate ways, we sometimes get it right.