Roman Polanski's Oliver Twist (2005)

This review pretty much captures my take on Roman Polanski's version of Oliver Twist (2005). It's a letdown for a number of reasons, not least because most of the actors aren't up to the characters they're playing. I was particularly disappointed in this film's Artful Dodger and Bill Sykes. (Some of the grotesques really look the part, however: if I'd seen this film as stills rather than as moving pictures, I'd probably think it was perfect.)

But mostly I think the problem is, as the Little Professor notes, Oliver himself. And, echoing LP, I'll point out that this is a problem with the book, not Polanski's adaptation: Oliver is an almost completely passive creature. What I realized, after this film, is that one reason that halfway works in the novel is because we know he's actually highborn - that he actually doesn't belong in this society. He's thus connected with tropes of the wan young nobleman, and more than that of Christ - passive suffering makes sense because we see Oliver as not of this world. That's what weakens the novel's social criticism (as I've said), but I now realize it helps the novel hang together. Polanski eliminates that subplot, which strengthens the social criticism (and of course makes the story easier to film), but it makes Oliver's passivity more of a problem for the narrative.

The other reason Oliver's mildness works in the novel is because everybody else is such a grotesque. We've already established that Polanski moderates the grotesques - and that the other actors (with the exception maybe of Kingsley as Fagin) aren't very memorable. So, again, Oliver's mildness becomes a real problem.

Unless you're like this guy, and see Polanski's Oliver Twist as not a Dickens adaptation at all, but a depiction of Polanski's harrowing childhood. In which case the passivity makes historical and emotional sense as part of Polanski's vision. Unfortunately, I think this writer is seeing what he wants to see: he admits that what he really wants is for Polanski to film The Painted Bird. And he's right: that would be something. I'm almost tempted to agree with him that Oliver's passivity here is an echo of that novel, not Dickens - but in the end I don't think so.

Rather - and I don't mean to pick on a blogger whom I only discovered looking for other opinions on this movie - but I will - that review strikes me as typical of a lot of what I read on Polanski. It borders on hagiography. I often think I see a willingness to overlook imperfections in his films just because they're his - even an eagerness to interpret these imperfections as marks of a personal vision, and therefore evidence of the auteur's genius. Judgment calls like that are difficult for any critic with any artist, to be sure, but I seem to notice the calls going Polanski's way an awful lot of the time.

I'm not as bothered by certain aspects of Polanski's past as some people are (and that's all I have to say about that), but neither am I as taken by his personality as others seem to be. I'm not sure, now that I've seen so many of his films, if I'd rank him a genius. I think he's made maybe four or five films that I'd rank with the best ever - which is of course a great achievement - but a greater number of imperfect films. And while I sometimes see something interesting going on even in the failures, I don't find his failures as fascinating and revealing as I do, say, Kurosawa's or Coppola's. In short, I'm not sure I see the appeal of Polanski as an auteur.

Aaron Neville: I Know I've Been Changed (2010)

I'll admit that picking this up (Aaron Neville's 2010 gospel release I Know I've Been Changed) was a reaction to having picked this up the week before. One good resurrected NPR-ready Americana turn deserves another, right?

This review of the album is worth reading for how it explores the likely role of, as in Allman's record, a big-name roots producer, in this case Joe Henry, in determining the final artistic tone of the record. I'm not up enough on contemporary music, even of the NPR-ready Americana variety, to know Joe Henry from John Henry, but that review is probably right.

This is a successful record in all the ways Allman's isn't.
The intricate arrangements and expert playing never overshadow the singer: Aaron owns these recordings in a way Allman seldom approaches on his outing. You can hear how on the very first track, "Stand By Me." The first half of the track is Aaron singing, first a capella, then over standard gospel-style instrumental washes. Piano trills, dobro resonances, backup singer ooohs. Aaron's all over the place, naturally, but mostly in a lower (for him) register. As I say, this is a standard gospel approach: the lack of rhythm and a melodic through-line for the instruments puts the focus squarely on the singer, and therefore the Message. Halfway through the song, they kick into rhythm, and at this moment Aaron leaps up into his falsetto, where he stays, mostly, until the end of the song. This does two things: it gets him out of the way so we can appreciate the subtlety of the groove the musicians are making, but it also allows him to surmount that groove, so that he's still master of the song. He's owning it, but not through a more urgent assertion of personality: this being Aaron Neville, the falsetto sounds utterly effortless. He's just claiming a territory that's all his own.

It helps that Aaron's instrument is undiminished by time: he still sounds as much the angel as he did in 1967. It's uncanny. And it helps that the production is invisible. I'm sure a lot of care went into choosing players, and making sure they were being recorded right, but there's no intrusive murk, just complete clarity, so that every rasp of the dobro, every piano chord, every thump of the bass comes through perfectly.

Which allows the listener to appreciate the arrangements, which are gorgeous. It's not a typical gospel record in this respect - no church organ anywhere to be found. Instead it's gospel sung with gospel fervor but played as country blues. When a roadhouse electric guitar comes in for the "Don't Let Him Ride" solo it sounds natural. Part of the gestalt. ...The album is bursting with delightful playing, from Jay Bellerose's sensitive drumming to Allen Toussaint's piano, as fresh and sparkling as baptismal water.

This is why I keep collecting records, when I already have far more than I could digest if I lived fifty more years: because once in a while I stumble across a record like this, and I remember why I love music.

Bill Wyman on the end of rarity

Every once in a while I still find something worth reading on Slate (and when I do I simultaneously realize how rare it is for me to actually visit that site anymore: it used to be a daily read for me, but I really can't stand their knee-jerk contrarianism and self-satisfied snark anymore. Like, it oozes from just about everything they print. Which, in media terms, probably means they've honed an identifiable brand. Awesome!).

This essay by Bill Wyman ("no, not that Bill Wyman") is one of them (I got there through a link on a Dylan site). It points out that the concept of rarity or scarcity, which once governed the lives of serious aficionados of music or film, is now virtually extinct. There's almost nothing in pop music, no matter how obscure, that you can't find with a little savvy net searching. What does that mean?

It's a great essay, but in the end perhaps a little too technoutopian for me. It is great, no doubt, for everything to be available all the time. I mean, I certainly enjoy it. But aren't there prices we're paying, without even knowing it? In the end he nods toward someone else's thoughts on the early Stones, and how the very inaccessibility of the blues they loved had a lot to do with their early thinking on it, and their goals in forming their own band. Bands today, formed in a surfeit of knowledge about whatever music that interests them, aren't going to have that problem: doesn't that explain a lot of the contemporary music scene? That it's fueled, not by overpowering desire for something that's truly unknown, but by a sort of finicky curatorial discrimination between things that are known too well?*

Of course merely being able to possess all this music doesn't at all mean that we're understanding it - having doesn't equal knowing. I even wonder if having too much precludes knowing, to a certain amount. I wonder about this the bigger my music collection grows - and I mostly confine myself to CDs still. But I've felt myself learning more about music in the aggregate - understanding, or thinking I do, the broad contours of a genre or a label or a period - but at the same time I know I'm failing to take the time to listen deeply, to understand the full dimensions of records. My knowledge is becoming wide and shallow, rather than deep.

All of these are not necessarily bad things - there's a real joy that comes from starting to grasp the big picture. But they are trade-offs. It's foolish to pretend there isn't a price to pay for what we're getting. I'm not even saying we wouldn't pay the price willingly if it was stated up-front, but it's kind of unsettling that we're only dimly aware of the price, and that only long after it's been exacted.

*Okay, I admit I have no basis on which to make that suggestion, since I clearly have no interest in the contemporary music scene.

The Moody Blues: On The Threshold Of A Dream (1969)

On The Threshold Of A Dream, the Moody Blues' first album release of 1969, is where things start to get a bit...grand. It begins with the packaging: gatefold sleeve, wraparound cover art, lyric sheet, guest liner notes. And what is that on the cover anyway? A robot octopus uprooting a braintree? Yeah, I know, I know: dreams.

That's the concept, evidently: dreams. Problem is, they don't seem to have anything really to say about dreams. Their first two albums approached the concept-album theme simply, but with ideas that allowed for fairly natural follow-through. Both rubrics, the day-in-the-life and the man's-search-for-meaning, lent themselves to a loose teliology. Movement: progression. You wake up, you go to bed. You search, you find. Dreams, not so much. Lyrically the concept seems to be limited to random insertions of the word "dream" into love songs, plus a song explicitly about daydreaming, plus poem that announced itself as the dream. Meh.

But it may take you a few listens to realize that the concept is so thin, because the album comes on with such determination, like a real strong enthusiastic handshake, or a white-booted go-go dancer whipping her hair in your face when you just want to ask her her name. This album was the Moodies' swing at a pure pop masterpiece. They miss: too much swing. Relax, kid. Don't try so hard.

Side One starts off with a spoken-word piece, like their first two albums, but that's misleading. They really do try to break out of their formula on Dream, and this isn't a poem, precisely. More like a very short radio play with three roles: First Man (a tentative voice groping his way through Cartesian propositions), Establishment (a robot octopus, one presumes, promising to dehumanize First Man), and Inner Man (a Carnaby Street beat poet who tells First Man to, essentially, keep on truckin').

Yes, I know, but it has nice cosmic sound effects behind it. Chilly space hums. And it bursts into a second surprise: Justin Hayward singing a rock song of his own composing. "Lovely To See You." And it is. Catchy, propulsive, even danceable (one speculates: one has never actually danced to Moody Blues music).

The upbeat mood is broken next with Ray Thomas's "Dear Diary." For this record Thomas seems to have traded in his familiar whimsy for a slightly snarkier outlook. At heart this number is an English Romantic take on "Ballad Of A Thin Man," with Mr. Jones musing to himself while gazing through a rain-streaked window out at a pastel street scene. But the title conceit and the spoken part over the fadeout contain a mean little satire on self-absorbed diarists. It's not half bad.

John Lodge's two numbers come next, back to back near misses. "Send Me No Wine" is kind of a Moody Blues-play-Byrds thing, and works about as well as it sounds like it would. "To Share Our Love" has all the tension and bombast of Lodge's psychedelic freakouts, without the sense of freedom and unpredictability: it's a very highstrung number, not a lot of fun.

Mike Pinder ends the side with a song that almost slips into self-parody: "talk to me baby," it starts out, with all the subtlety of a plastics salesman in a Holiday Inn bar. It only goes downhill from there: he's lonely, and wants to feel the fire so deep within you. Heavens to Murgatroyd. On the other hand, the instrumental refrain has nice tympani and flutes, and the bridge is the dreamiest thing on the first side of the album. So far I don't think any of Pinder's songs have been unalloyed successes, but none of them have been total losses, either. There's always something really interesting in them, even if it's hiding.

Side Two: Now we're in familiar territory, with a prize Hayward ballad getting pride of place at the beginning of the side. A tremendously, tremulously romantic verse ("if only you knew what's inside of me now / you wouldn't want to know me somehow" - an eloquent evocation of self-doubt, I always thought) that breaks into an easy, assured, swinging chorus. Just like with "The Actor," the arrangement and playing are top-notch, with subtle harmonica accents on the rhythm adding a touch of cowboy that fits right in. Again they show how sophisticated a mainstream pop band they can be.

"Lazy Day," Ray Thomas's second number, sounds like it's going to be a kiddie song, but again gets into a little gratuitous meanness. This time it's a satire on the working man's lazy Sunday afternoon. Like, look at the lame people watching the idiot box. ...At least, I hope it's a satire. If it's an affectionate look at everyman's weekend, then it's inadvertently horrifying in its evocation of banality. Either way, kind of an odd essay. But the wordless vocal refrain ("ah-ah-ah" etc.) is mesmerizing. I suppose that's the dream imposing itself upon the scene?

"Are You Sitting Comfortably" is the only real dream song on the record. Assisted dreaming, is what it's about: sipping something and seeing visions. Visions of Camelot - escape into daydreams of Tennysonian splendor. Merlin is our guide this time, rather than Timothy Leary, but it's all the same: trips around the bay. A Thomas/Hayward collaboration, sung by Hayward, this song shouldn't work, but it does. Gentle minor-key melody that sounds like a less sun-tanned third-cousin twice removed of David Crosby's "Guinnevere," pensive acoustic accompaniment, sighing flute lines. It's the best thing on the record.

It's followed by - linked to - the only real recited poem on the album, "The Dream," about which the less said, the better. And then we get the Epic. Pinder's real contribution to the record, and really the band's most ambitious piece yet. It's a ballad, the limpid "Have You Heard," bisected by a faux-classical instrumental passage entitled "The Voyage." The dream theme seems to have disappeared here, in favor of more journey imagery, or is that what the title means: we've now crossed the dream's threshold and we're sailing across the sea of the subconscious? Who knows? What I know is that this is a suite, right, or reaching towards that idea; which is why this track (trio of tracks, on CD) is always part of the argument in favor of seeing the Moodies as prog. And, what the hell, I'll give it to them. "The Voyage" does pick up a couple of classical-derived melodies and develop them in sort of chamberish ways. And its placement between the two halves of the ballad creates a formal complexity in the work that distinguishes it from the typical pop song; the arranged interlude, with its succession of complex and delicate moods, is a far cry from the typical rock instrumental break, and when it subsides back into the song it really does feel like we've been somewhere. Again, compared to what Yes and KC and the like would be doing very soon it feels pretty primitive. But if you can stop thinking of prog as a contest, and just judge this as an ambitious, trippy pop song circa 1969, it works pretty well.

Fade to space sounds.

And that's the album. Closing with that epic and all, it is, as I say, a pretty grandiose statement. And because the songs aren't as consistently good as those of its immediate predecessor, I have to say the grandiosity is a bit empty. The highlights here stand with their best work: but I don't love this album like I do the previous two.

Gregg Allman: Low Country Blues (2011)

Okay, so I'll admit that I picked this up after seeing it in my local Starbucks. I didn't know Gregg was coming out with a new album until I saw it by the register, and then I said to myself, just like the Starbucks marketing team must have figured at least 5% of the over-40 white males who buy coffee there would say to themselves, "hey, a new Gregg Allman record in 2011 sounds like a good idea. I have to have it."

I'm a victim of marketing.

But I will note that I am an Allman Brothers fan from way back. ...Wait, I guess that doesn't really contradict my previous statement. Um.

Anyway. When did Gregg's voice change? I guess I haven't heard any of his work since the late '90s, but at that point his voice hadn't aged appreciably since his early '70s heyday. He had that same plush blues howl, deep-pile and bare-feet-enticing. But now his voice sounds thin and pinched, threadbare. He sounds a lot like Dickey Betts now, actually. Which is kind of ironic, since Betts was disowned by the Brothers over ten years ago.

I've listened to this record maybe a dozen times since getting it - that's incredibly heavy rotation for me. And I just can't get past the voice. Otherwise it's an excellent record, living up to the promise that cover photo made to me over the counter: it's a record as drenched in bluesy wisdom as that road is in rain. A fine assortment of familiar and not-so-familiar old songs (and one new original), expertly played by a collection of crack studio musicians, including former Clapton second banana Doyle Bramhall and the ubiquitous, omnipotent Dr. John, all produced by T-Bone Burnett in a style that sounds like he's channeling Daniel Lanois. Lots of fecund murk, in other words. The high point may be a bemused "I Can't Be Satisfied" with a new lilting hypnotic piano line.

And I'll even praise Gregg's singing: he's using his diminished instrument about as well as he can, I guess, singing with a plaintive simplicity that almost saves the record. I mean, he refuses to oversing, and that's incredibly refreshing these days. But at the same time, he just doesn't quite have the vocal power anymore to own these fairly busy arrangements. As artful as they are, he might have been better served by a plainer backing. He sounds a bit drowned out here, like a guest on his own solo album.

The result leaves me with a curious sadness. Kind of like the Allmans' career as a whole. They've made records that move me like nothing else can. But not many of them. Just enough to show you the potential that they otherwise busily fail to live up to.

Roman Polanski's The Pianist (2002)

I saw this back when it came out, knowing not much about Polanski. Now I was able to watch it as a Roman Polanski film. Or not, more like: because of the subject matter, it resists being seen as an exercise in directorial style. Both because Polanski was, he says, trying to rein it in, understandably, and because, you know, you feel kind of inhuman trying to think about technique while watching a movie about the Holocaust. So, mostly I didn't: I just watched.

I don't remember what I thought about it in 2002. Now I find my views on it match up pretty closely with Ebert's. The passivity and stillness of the second half are effective in conveying the sense that this man survives because of chance and the humanity of a very few strangers. Not (despite what the interviews on the disc claim) because of any inner strength, or the power of music.

I found it curious to watch the interviews on the disc and learn how many of the incidents in the first part of the movie, the scenes set in the Warsaw Ghetto, were drawn from Polanski's own life. I mean, I knew he was a Holocaust survivor, but watching the film, I actually felt like the ghetto scenes were just the tiniest bit conventional. Infuriating and horrifying too, of course, but perhaps not too different from what one would expect to find in any Holocaust movie.

But the second half: that felt like a Roman Polanski movie. I mean, this is an Apartment Movie, right? The most powerful scenes involve Szpilman in interiors, little spaces where he's locked away from the world, usually alone. The film is about being alone in a city that's turning ever more hostile: alone because there's nobody in the apartment with you, and alone because almost everybody who could potentially come into the apartment with you wants to kill you.

I don't mean to reduce it to urban angst and ennui: that's not it. It's more that I think Polanski's using familiar urban angst and ennui to accentuate the very unfamiliar terrors that Szpilman is enduring. He's hiding: he has to be still, silent, and unseen. It's an enforced passivity. All he can do is peek out the window and watch a world quickly disintegrating; all he can do is privately try to keep from disintegrating, while moving around like a ghost in his genteel interiors.

The movie is about the way what we can see becomes our whole world, and the way sudden changes of scenery can shock us with the realization that there are other worlds out there. The moment when Szpilman, on a work detail, steps out of the ghetto into the peaceful, green, bountiful gentile streets is a shock: how can such normalcy exist side-by-side with such horror? Abruptly we realize that Szpilman has probably been assuming that the rest of occupied Warsaw is a hellhole too; and we realize that the gentile Poles have been refusing to imagine what really goes on behind the walls of the ghetto. There's a similar shock at the end when Szpilman, fleeing the German flamethrowers, climbs over the hospital wall into the bombed-out ruins of the city. Up until then he - and we - haven't suspected the true extent of the destruction. We assume that, just like the block we've been looking at for the last half hour, the city has survived: broken and bloody, but still there. Now we realize, along with him, that it's gone.

The Kids Are All Right (2010)

My nerd reaction to this film: it's been cleverly titled to evoke the Who song "The Kids Are Alright" (note spelling difference) but the song appears nowhere in the movie. It probably wouldn't have fit - as Jules says about Paul, they're pushing the alternative thing pretty hard here - but then why tease us?

My other reaction: My favorite moment was when Paul calls Jules: their phone conversation. She tells him Nic found out about their affair, he proposes they run away together, and she, incredulous, says, "I'm gay!" and hangs up while he's still babbling away.

Julianne Moore's delivery of that line was perfect. In that one moment you see so much about the character. There's a bitter note of cognitive dissonance there, if you try to parse her sexuality too closely, and if you take this line too literally, because what we've seen of her in the movie so far makes it clear that she's at least situationally bi, not strictly gay. But that's not the point: the point is that, in this moment, when her life is falling to hell because of a shitty thing she's done, she realizes with complete clarity what her life is, what she's chosen it to be, and that she doesn't regret that choice, despite a moment of confusion. She's married: she's committed to Nic, and to their family (not just the individual members, but the idea of it: what it means in her life, and what she means to it). Whatever the exact vectors of her desire, in her life as a whole, she's gay: that is, committed to certain people in ways that society has defined as gay, and she's fine with that definition. At least she feels that it captures more of her than whatever Paul thinks he knows: that's why she sounds so incredulous when she says it, why she talks over whatever fantasy nonsense he's spouting. And maybe she's just realizing all of this in the moment, or maybe she never forgot it, only doubted it. But whichever, this is a decisive moment.

But I also like that this moment of clarity doesn't redeem her - I like that the movie follows this scene with several showing how difficult it will be to repair the relationship. And I like how the movie takes Nic's feelings seriously - it's not a parable about Jules's personal growth, with Nic waiting there to embrace her when she's ready. It's more adult than that, more equal.