LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE ROLLING STONES

Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah..I get all the close-ups!

If “everybody got to go,” where are they? Jagger’s the only Stone I see going. A little Keith, Jagger, Charlie’s profile, Jagger, Mick Taylor’s hands, Jagger Jagger Jagger, a glimmer of Bill Wyman’s silhouette, repeat. Only, while repeating, ignore Bill Wyman for three songs in a row. The glories and problems of this then-groundbreaking 1974 legendarily-delayed concert documentary leap off the screen in the first 30 seconds of the first song. The problems are, in order of severity: 1) Mick Jagger’s inescapable face and/or ass and 2) the peevish indifference on Mick Jagger’s face. The glories are 1) the Rolling Stones live in 1973 at the absolute height of their powers, which includes: 2) Keith singing his guts out through blackened rotting teeth while chopping riffs with the authority and posture of a figure on a Tarot card; 3) Mick Taylor, the blank-faced guitar genius plucking blues lines of unsung poetry and viscera in pretty much total on-stage darkness; 4) Charlie Watts wearing a shirt stolen from Carmen Miranda; 5) Keith proudly slashing away—all he cared about was his special tuning system and the capo that made it work.

On most songs, the lack of engagement—the sheer “must I be doing this again?” look—on Mick’s face proves shocking, and not a little dislocating. It’s inescapable, given how myriad and monumental Jagger’s close-ups turn out to be. Sharing a mic with Keith—as in Keith’s Happy—Jagger suddenly wakes up and appears to be enjoying himself. Remember—this was 37 years ago, and the Stones still tour; if Jagger could barely get it up then, when the Stones were the best live band in the world, how indifferent must he be today?

The film’s priority—to convince us that the Stones exist to back up Jagger—manifests during the first verse of Happy. At the time, the song was a revelation: Keith sings! And harrowingly well. So the band plays the opening riff, Keith steps to the mic and we cut to Jagger’s ass. And hold on said ass throughout Keith’s singing. When Keith finally gets his close-up during the second verse, we cut to Jagger, stage right, mouthing along with the lyrics. Lordy, it’s discouraging. We know Jagger’s an unquenchable and dissatisfied egoist. But we might have thought, or hoped, that 37 years on he could be willing to share an instant of the spotlight. Never happens, though, and a great opportunity goes wasted.

Upon its release, the film was regarded as a post-Warholian experiment: no crowd reactions, no cutaways, no nothing but the band onstage, using super-long lenses from the back of the hall to capture faces and figures with heretofore unseen intimacy. That style once wielded enormous power, and in 1974 it proved a forceful rejection of the dominant concert-film tropes, which included crowd reaction shots aplenty and endless close-ups of flashing fingers on the fretboards. Sad that this vesting in reductivism now reads like pure indulgence. Which is not to say you shouldn’t see it—you should, if only for 1) the acoustic version of Sweet Virginia, when Jagger blows harp with unfeigned yearning and Taylor picks his brains out and 2) the ol’ warhorse Midnight Rambler, which all these decades later still demands to be played deafeningly enough to piss off the neighbors upstairs and down and rattle all the plates in the cupboard. It also brings to mind Keith’s great line about Jagger. After asserting that Jagger was an underrated master of the harmonica (true), Keith said he wished Jagger could just once sing like he blows harp.

So do we all.

The 11 best films of 2010 +1

by David N. Meyer

THE GHOST WRITER
(France, Germany, United Kingdom)
Dir. Roman Polanski

“Confess! How many times did you watch Aguirre, The Wrath of God?”

Polanski understands structure. Few directors remain whose poetry and narrative depend on knowing why one line demands a close-up or how a tiny gesture changes the universe or how to dramatize moments that bear no inherent drama, but prove later to be crucial notes in the symphony. Polanski’s pacing matches his formal genius; his scenes unspool so naturally, with such a light hand on the reins, but his narrative momentum never flags. A cynical, finely-wrought, intellectual, politically sophisticated suspense thriller/character study—seen many of those lately?—demands a master formalist, and a worldly, corrupted point of view. Does that sound Hitchcockian? It should. While Kim Catrell and her embarrassing U.K. accent defy casting logic (must be some investor dough coming in behind her), Olivia Williams provides the revelation. After an early career of thankless support babes (the wife in The Sixth Sense) her prospects seem to have devolved into a succession of glasses-wearing spinsters (An Education). Here she plays the least-seen of all adult female characters: sardonic, articulate, sexually aggressive, demanding, and respected for those qualities. Ewan McGregor’s a star with brains, and it should surprise nobody that Pierce Brosnan can actually act. He certainly commands the screen. A terrifying Eli Wallach appears not so much as the Angel of Death, but as mortality incarnate. Ghost deserves an audience, and awards, too, if for nothing more than its noble lack of pandering. In Europe, it garnered both aplenty. Over here, nobody saw it.

“You can’t see the weapon I’m carrying.”

A PROPHET
(France) Dir. Jacques Audiard

In 1980, Maurice Pialat’s Policerevealed that French cops hated French Arabs, that the Arabs hated them back, and that their worlds were mutually incomprehensible. As urban Arabs gained control over what the urban French craved—drugs—the cops slowly accepted their nemeses. Police presents this as a moral victory for the Arabs. The unspoken revelation to most viewers was the entrenched unrepentance of the French Arab universe. Gone were the Jean-Pierre Melville days of cops and crooks as living mirrors. Now they gazed with fear and loathing across an unbridgeable divide.

2002’s Nil Pour Nil Contre (Cedric Klapsich) furthered this idea in a noir as social comedy. His small-time, small-scale Arab underworld was only working stiffs looking for kicks. That they lived—for all their good humor—in a perpetual state of resentful anger, with rage lurking under the surface, required no explanation. They were on the bottom looking up, the outside looking in. Crime was their self-expression and they were everywhere, fully French. Not the aliens presented in Police, but neglected French-identified proles coping with warring cultures within and without.

The Prophet hardly bothers to place its characters in a larger society; their prison happens to be a penitentiary, but it only echoes the world beyond the walls, a bigger prison with invisible fences. The metaphorical example –the only example - of what was for generations regarded as a racially ‘normal’ Frenchman is a corrupt guard—the useless former uberclass hanging onto its shreds of legitimacy by enforcing rules that everyone knows bend to the highest bidder. The embittered, imprisoned Corsican mobsters understand that the “real” French regard them as only slightly less subhuman than the Arabs. They cling to that difference as poor southern rednecks prided themselves on their social superiority to blacks—that is, homicidally.

Our protagonist, an illiterate Arab youth, knows only the law of the jungle, and he does what survival demands. At first, his sole tool is native cunning, but slowly he develops a broader sense of criminality and of the world. As the entrenched order moves aside, a culturally unified criminal force ascends—one that could care less about assimilation.

“Let’s take aim at the oppressive paternal power structure in them there hills.”

WINTER'S BONE
Dir. Deborah Granik

Here the culture explored is not a rising criminal underworld separated by race and language from the dominant culture whose vices they feed, but a self-alienated sub-working class that turns to criminality not for riches nor to climb the ladder, but for groceries. Bone operates under shocking, admirable economies of unembellished story-telling and its themes emerge from the souls of its characters. The moral landscape appears as stark as the hills and as inescapable. Men rule women, violence overhangs every utterance, and if you want to survive, you better learn to gut squirrels. André Gregory says—inMy Dinner With André—“The prisoners are always happiest when they build the prison themselves.” And these poor white trash love their home, their ways, and the prison of pain they’ve built brick by brick and from which nobody ever escapes, or really, wants to. Oscar for Dale Dickey.

THE ECLIPSE
(Ireland) Dir. Conor McPherson

Ciarán Hinds is haunted by his recently dead wife. His house may or may not be. Aiden Quinn plays the biggest and most accurately drawn literary asshole ever. Iben Hjejle, last seen on these shores playing John Cusack’s girlfriend in High Fidelity, provides the sane, reticent love interest. And that’s it: a sad man, the shimmering Irish seaside, a ghost or two, and a little too much piano plinking away at the high end of the keyboard. It’s a thoughtful, unvain, adult love story, simply told and satisfying.

RESTREPO
Dir. Tim Hetherington,

Sebastian Junger

The directors embedded with U.S. troops in an isolated valley of Afghanistan. They stayed a long time, long enough to understate, which was never Junger’s way. The directors explain nothing, contextualize nothing, because what takes place defies explanation and the action is the context. They expect us to absorb it as they did, as if we were visiting Mars and translating words and events as fast as we can. Their lives depended on their translation skills. We get to watch.

The Brooklyn Rail would never pander to the baser instincts of our readers to increase circulation. Jamais!

CARLOS
(France) Dir. Olivier Assayaz

Ché had no business being five hours; it felt overlong and under-motivated at two and a half. Carlos, which attempts, like Ché, to present the sweep of history as the product of one man’s neurosis and vice versa, earns its length. Assayaz could never be hurried, and he meanders here as ever. When his star can’t hold the screen, the director turns to Carlos’s seemingly endless remuda of exquisite, brainy, astringent Euro-babes, and lets them carry the moment. In this way, Assayaz proves not unlike Carlos. Assayaz takes a singular, and far from compassionate view of the terrorist; he presents Carlos as a driven naïve artist, compelled early on by pure ambition, then by lust for fame, and finally rotting in his dotage, which arrived earlier than expected, since history had no more use for him. When his accomplishments didn’t quite stack up to his rhetoric, Carlos turned annoying. His comeuppance seems more rooted in being a pain in the ass than in any act of terror.

FISH TANK
(United Kingdom) Dir. Andrea Arnold

English adolescent working class rage takes a different path than its Ozarkian counterpart, apparently. In the U.K., it turns inward. Amateur Katie Jarvis creates all the problems and provides all the solutions in this by turns awkward and mesmerizing low-budget neo-realism. Kierston Wareing portrays the toxic, desperate, fading-away party mom of all time, and the director lets her get thisclose to being sympathetic before mom’s ugliness—born of the same frustrations that have doomed her daughter—resurface. A study in lifestyle and class, and thus more attentive to detail than action, but the detail stands up for itself. As does Katie, until she just can’t.

“I can do studious and tormented.”

THE AMERICAN
Dir. Anton Corbijn

Video master Corbijn’s (Madonna,U2, Depeche Mode, Metallica) an adult now, and so is Clooney. Here they reach for adult themes: moral failure, impending mortality, craft and how it armors the soul against the disappointments of life, the unlikely connections that make the latter worth living, and the unworthy temptations that failure teaches adults to avoid. When Clooney’s not playing buffoons for the Coen brothers, he vests in scruffy, tormented, emotional fugitives, as if they provide absolution for being a movie star. He taps into his not-immediately-apparent alienation, evoking the best of Jimmy Stewart. Corbijn reaches so avidly for mood over narrative that you want to deny the gestalt he seeks, just to spite him. Only, every now and then, Corbijn gets what he’s after and so does his star. The picture fails on its own terms as a character study and a suspense thriller, but so what? The transcendent Italian locations, the understated score, and Clooney’s quiet desperation provide whatever truth the script can’t quite deliver.

OSS 117 LOST IN RIO
(France) Dir. Michel Hazanavicius

The French make better Austin Powers movies by never winking at the audience, by willing to be political, and by featuring a hero every bit as racist, misogynist, oblivious, and sociopathic as, say, Ian Fleming’s in-print James Bond. The second in the Lost series, starring the deadpan, world-class smirker Jean Dujardin, seeks out ex-Nazis in an early 1960’s Brazil populated exclusively by bikini- and go-go girls. The fashion, color palates, closeted homoeroticism and plot lines evoke the era without adding any sophistication, which, like everything else in the picture, charms. Oddly unseen on release, now even more oddly available on Netflix Instant.

LA LOI
(France -1959) Dir. Jules Dassin

Ah, operatic S&M class critique in the Italian sea-side boonies: torn black silk slips and slaps to the face, Gina Lollobrigida tied down and whipped with belts (by her sisters!), Melina Mecouri discovering the pleasures of pain and everyone as trapped in the wheels of tradition and township as the po’buckers in Winter’s Bone. They dress better, of course, they’re Italian. Jules Dassin had himself some issues, and no shortage of rage. He lets it all out, composed in theatrical frames whose ornate structure belies his characters’ unstoppable intertwining of love and malevolence.

VALHALLA RISING
(Denmark) Dir. Nicholas Winding Refn

Can a broody Viking movie avoid evoking death metal videos? Apparently not. Can white explorers invade aboriginal turf without evoking Aguirre, The Wrath of God? Negatory. Other than Polanski, Refn is the most astute, concise structualist directing today, a master of form and tautness (cf. Pusher, Pusher II, Pusher III). That Valhalla wanders more than its ocean-crossing protagonists provides its primary disappointment and irritation. Why then, is it so addictively watchable—even while being dull? (Aside from the promise of a swordfight or two, of course) Why do images linger in the mind as if dreamed by the viewer? Refn’s a modern literalist; he’s not a fable kind of guy. And even though myths usually have plots, Refn incongruously gets ahold of something that feels awfully close to mythology.

Special Mention:
SPARTACUS: BLOOD AND SAND (Starz Network)

I keep asking myself: even given the expansion of scope that’s the nature of a series, and the attendant opportunities for in-jokes, character development, and suspense/themes sustained over weeks, are any of the films on this list more daring, unhinged, satisfying, committed, or as complete a narrative entity asSpartacus?

Only a couple, and neither of them are as much fun.

OMNIBUS 08: THE 2008 NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL

More balls than brains. © IFC FIlms

Last year’s Festival marked an inspirational return to its original purpose: showcasing the best films from around the world with no pandering and no worrying about what NY audiences might be ready for. The middle of the roading and compromised choices of previous years were gone. Last year was a brave, forward-thinking and comprehensive Festival. And this year follows…after nobody showed up last year for John Ford’s Iron Horse, the Festival contented itself with a revival only of Lola Montes, and its screenings were held in the best theater on earth, the Ziegfeld. The Festival ran into trouble when it reached out too eagerly to Hollywood, but otherwise presented a true omnibus, a comprehensive report from the world—the entire world—of movies.

Chouga Dir: Darezhan Omirbayev

A Kazahkstanian adaptation of Anna Karenina filmed at a cough-syrup pace and performed by zombies. The dialogue, delivered in muted tones, matches the actors’ blank faces and compressed movements. Is this is a stylistic choice made to metaphorasize the crushing existential weight of life in the new Kazakhstan or does the director simply prefer a super mega hella deadpan? Either way, time slows to a crawl and one’s attention turns to the other-worldly mise-en-scene.Omirbayev’s lingering, static camera, and embalmed narrative provide a detailed tour of the ghastly interior decorating choices of the Kazakh bourgeoisie. Again, is the director filling space or offering social commentary? I don’t know, but I do know this: the main problem with remaking Anna Karenina is the same problem with re-making the story of Jesus: we all know exactly how it turns out.

Summer Hours Dir: Olivier Assayas

Another tale of manners among the haute bourgeoisie, this time focusing on adult siblings dealing with the loss of their mother and her exquisite house, a place of memories for them all. This is a long way from Assayas’s Boarding Gate and its super-hot, super-tough jet-setting corporate babes writhing in liquid leather while being electrocuted on internet torture sites. Since I walked out of Gate at the 3/4 mark, I cannot tell you the point of that exercise. Summer Hours fomented a similar response. The familial moments are well-played (if hardly credible), the cinematography warm as home-baked croissants, and the house a marvel ofDwell-Magazine perfection. But why, at this point in history, does Assayas find the tiny emotional torments of the extremely well-off so fascinating? There’s no drama save gauging how constantly irritated Juliet Binoche appears, and how cumulatively irritating her performance becomes. When Michael Haneke makes mincemeat of tales like these with Caché, and builds his story on the lies that underlie Assayas’s every premise, you have to take Summer Hours as a case of willful blindness, straight-up nostalgia or misguided Truffaut imitation. Though, as in all of his films, Assayas does create a sense of long-time, fraught relationships among his characters.

 Night and Day Dir: Hong Sang-soo

Hong’s baffled, paralytic, passive-aggressive male hero sits in his Parisian hostel (run and peopled by other Koreans) killing time, smoking, talking to his wife on the phone, ignoring the fact that he’s in Paris and waiting for something to happen. He has no money, goals or ambition. The guy’s a dufus and fantastically repressed. His response to anger or affection is an affable smile. And yet, he falls in love and others fall for him and he somehow remains compelling. Hong’s the Korean Eric Rohmer; his simple frames, flummoxed men, willful women and Paris backgrounds are such Rohmer tropes. The familiarity of Hong’s form renders his content even more charming and recognizable. Like Rohmer’s, Hong’s films are perfect little jewel boxes of adult idiosyncrasies, vanities and follies. When Hong breaks his realist mode for an unannounced dream sequence, the power of his natural style is fully revealed.

Tokyo Sonata Dir: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

After the slowly building supernatural worlds of Cure and Pulse, Kurosawa turns to the shomen geki of everyday Tokyo, with its redundant and abandoned salarymen, dutiful trapped wives and children whose parents know nothing about them. Working in the tradition of Ozu and Naruse, Kurosawa upends their every signifier, and offers a world so rich in alienation that silence becomes the primary form of communication. Where the supper tables of Ozu and Naruse were the one place their characters communed, Kurosawa modern family slurps together without a word, each standing when finished and gratefully returning to the universe inside their heads. There are moments of heartbreaking naturalist beauty (a Kurosawa specialty) and grotesque family violence, but this time, for the first time ever, Kurosawa’s loses his impeccable sense of pacing. The film has three endings and the first self-consciously arty shots in any of his pictures. Much is redeemed in the poetic, six-minute, one-shot finale. If Kurosawa had cut the fifteen that preceded it, the film would be perfect.

Gomorra Dir: Matteo Garrone

I don’t know how director Garrone found the precise film stock used for most Blaxsploitation or even if he did it on purpose. But the ugliness of his images, the luridness of his colors and the harsh, grating soundtrack provides the perfect visual counterpoint to his mind-blowing, underexplained, hyperrealist account of the Naples’ Mafia. As Garrone demonstrates in scene after bloody scene, the Neapolitans do not play. (The author of the book on which the film is based was so terrorized he gave up his 24 hour police protection and fled Italy altogether). Nobody lives very long in this film; its episodic nature and crude structure give it a vitality that no American crime movie has come near in years. It’s quite confusing—several of the characters look alike, it’s impossible to tell who’s allied with whom and Garrone offers few reasons for the all-lethal feuds. In this corrupt, hopeless world, the closest he comes to heroes are two moronic teenagers with far more balls than brains. In The Godfather and even Goodfellas (pictures to which Gomorrawill be inaccurately compared ad nauseum) death was a big deal, the ultimate, mostly avoided solution to an unsolvable problem. Here it’s the first and last option.

 Waltz With Bashir Dir: Ari Folman

A singular, shocking animated documentary that makes no bones about conflating the personal/psychological with the political. Folman narrates his evolving acceptance of his suppressed memories of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon via discussing that campaign with his friends who were there. Foremost in his memories, but never revealed until the climax are his—and the entire Israeli army’s—passive complicity in the Christian Phalangist’s massacre of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps outside Beirut. Folman does the film harm by opening with an extended sequence that showcases the limitations of his chosen form of animation. But after that initial alienation, the story—told in the words of his combat patrol buddies and lifelong friends—dominates the technology. Folman presents his guilt and confusion as his apology, and he is as unapologetic about the glamour and terror of war as was Michael Herr when he wrote Dispatches. Like Dispatches, Folman uses colloquial language to frame an atrocity, and makes war universal by never stepping outside the deeply subjective experience of his interviewees. Folman’s compassion for his buddies, his nation and its victims is manifest, along with his bafflement that any of his decent cadre could have been involved in such a thing. A great film.

 A Christmas Tale Dir: Arnaud Desplechin

For some, a garbled, lighthearted, semi-surreal romp through the rotting French upper-classes and all their little schemes and insanities, with a blank-faced Catherine Denueve cast to anchor the film in the tradition of the better movies it aspires to emulate. For others with less patience, an insufferable wank.

Changeling Dir: Clint Eastwood

The Festival’s bigger than what it presents, and only cheapens itself when it panders. While Changeling is nowhere near the nightmare of that Ralph Fienes disaster Strange Days, you gotta wonder who the Festival thought would be served by scheduling such a mediocre exercise in Oscar-bait. Granted, the lure of filling every one of the Zeigfeld’s however-many thousand seats must have been irresistible, and the director’s press conference was equally SRO. As for the film itself, I yield to the prescient words of Rail film critic Sarahjane Blum, who said of Eastwood’s Mystic River: “That’s way too much acting for any one movie.” To which I can only add: and ditto on the lipstick.

Che Dir: Steven Soderberg

See Che run; See Che shoot; See Che die

At 262 minutes, longer than Andre Rublev, Heaven’s Gate, La Maman et La Putain, Lawrence of Arabiaand, inconceivably, last year’s Festival’s champion ass-deadener, the Peter Bogdonavich-directed Tom Petty documentary Running Down a Dream. Unlike Che, however, whenDream ended and feeling returned to the nether regions, I thought I’d gained some sense of its hero as a mythic figure and a man. The dominant impression of Che remains: how did Benecio del Toro get his beard to be so perfectly scraggly? Soderberg shot on a new, rare and astonishingly film-like digital camera. The light weight, low cost and easy portability apparently freed him from worrying about whether every idea that could be filmed should be. The first half—which presents in excruciating detail the Cuban revolution and its armed struggle—features a few killer action sequences (Soderberg channels Lawrence as a locomotive gets blown right off its tracks) and lots of strutting and posturing in green fatigues. Del Toro never gifts Che with much interior life; his character communicates in weighty silences, Zen pronouncements and revolutionary declamations. All three seem pretty rote by the third hour. The final two hours + follows Che’s confused, futile and really depressing attempt to galvanize a Bolivian populace unable to care less aboutliberacion. Betrayed by the local peasantry, abandoned by the Bolivian Communist Party, hunted like a dog by the army, Che, you know, dies. End of story. Two enormous components are missing, and their absence informs every moment. Soderberg presents Che as a man of action, and action is what we experience. But he never addresses what might have gone on between Castro and Che when the shooting stopped. Nor does he show what Che—who seems to believe in revolutionary liberation—thought of the Stalinist Cuba his revolution delivered. Soderberg offers a Che with no context, no sense of responsibility for his actions and no doubts. By the end of the film, Che is an action figure, running through an anachronistic world that Soderbeg cannot present in any way that resonates.

Michelle Williams as Wendy.

Wendy and Lucy Dir: Kelly Reichardt

"Good times are comin,’" Neil Young once sang, "but they’re sure coming slow." Here Reichardt dissects the all-at-once arrival of the worst possible times, chapter and verse. Her heroine, Wendy, lives with her dog Lucy on the working class’ razor’s edge, one tiny mishap from problems that cannot be solved. It’s a straightforward, unadorned portrayal, almost too spare, almost willfully ugly, but you could rightfully call it Americana. Reichardt’s quiet rigor fuels a credible, moving tragedy that features a burning, self-contained performance from Michelle Williams. Singer/songwriter Will Oldham perfectly cameos as the one guy you would never want to hop a freight beside.

HELP ME EROS (BANG BANG WO AI SHEN)

At first this strikes as madhouse, Taiwanese Fassbinder on steroids: lurid, hallucinatory colors; post-modernly over-composed, photographic frames; post-verbal characters overwhelmed by existential paralysis or sexual ennui/compulsion; alienation/suicidal impulses in response to the over-stimulating, ruthless modern world; gestures of (life-saving) connection thwarted by too-available communication technology (well, that might be more Taiwan than Fassbinder) and cheesy, emotional pop songs slathered over all the “action.” Yet for all its lucid depiction of urban dislocation, Help’s self-conscious beauty and even more self-conscious mood-to-mood narrative enveloped me from the first sequence (a live carp being butchered and served-while still repulsively opening and closing its drowning mouth-on a TV cooking show).

I remained awe-struck and hypnotized through one tableau after another: a neglected, overweight wife bathing in a tub of live eels; her chef husband shooting pool with his boy-pal, both of them naked from the waist down; gorgeous scantily-clad girls dispensing betel nuts, cigarettes and hauteur to passing motorists; a couple tirelessly 69’ing in positions that would baffle a contortionist. There does seem to be a protagonist and he does seem to live out a narrative arc (loses all his money, cultivates whup-ass marijuana, conceives a romantic obsession for the (girl) suicide hotline-answerer, sells priceless designer furniture for a pittance to buy lottery tickets, makes the most beautiful of the betel nut girls fall for him, breaks her heart and somehow disappears between life and death) but the emotion does not derive from observing the protagonist’s life, nor from the Herculean effort required to figure it out.

Rather, the emotional power is rooted in Lee’s absolute conviction in his own methods. His fractured narrative is not willfully post-modern; he’s not referencing story-telling in a Godardian sense. I’m sure for Lee the plot is as apparent as Jack & Jill going up the damn hill. He creates one emotional landscape after another, most held within a single shot and utterly complete. These keep coming and coming; Help has more ideas than any one movie can contain. Lee’s a singular mad genius, so citing Fassbinder gives only a rough sense of what he’s doing (and I did not say: attempting to do), and cannot not capture the breadth of his ideas-about character, narrative, visual design, language, fashion, technology, music, culture, sexuality, drugs, desire and, inescapably, cinema.

BUT FOR WHAT YOU ARE NOT: 13 MOST BEAUTIFUL...ANDY WARHOL SCREEN TESTS

13 Most Beautiful...Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests, Dean & Britta, Los Angeles Film Festival, Ford Amphitheatre, June 30, 2009

It’s impossible to watch  Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests without comment. As Pauline Kael said of Godard, the Tests turn an audience into film critics. And art critics, amateur shrinks, and fabulosity deconstructors.

Shot in two and a half minutes, and projected over four in Warhol’s slow playback method, the Tests are unblinking cinematic portraits of subjects told to “sit still and not blink.” By dictate, they do almost nothing. Lou Reed fondles and drinks from a beautiful mid-’60s Coke bottle and Baby Jane Holzer languorously, mischievously brushes her perfect teeth. That’s it. Everyone else stares back at the camera or into the middle distance or who knows where they’re gazing behind their impenetrable shades?

Those omnipresent shades (Lou rocks some fine wraparounds, Billy Name prefers big pilot-style Ray-Bans) are no less opaque than the portraits themselves. Cinema, portraiture, animated furniture—like so many Warhol films from this period, theTests just is. Though nothing happens in their content, their presence alters the molecules around them. They prove entrancing, tedious, inspiring, and fabulous: lost artifacts, gleaming communiqués rooted in a quite specific period and—if you knew no backstory—from no time at all.

Something in their stillness makes the mind race. Among the notions evoked: that Warhol imparts so much glamour and gravitas to his subjects it becomes impossible to tell who was famous/important/creatively productive and who was just hanging out; that methamphetamine—the Factory drug of choice—gave everyone the most razor-sharp cheekbones; that  the women’s hairstyles so incarnate this era (1964–66) that one can practically identify the month and week of the shoot.

It’s oddly difficult to keep these notions to oneself through the almost endless four minutes that each portrait hangs, as it were, projected on a massive screen raised behind the stage of the 1929-era, cozily outdoor Ford Amphitheatre. And so the woman in front of me whispered her insights pretty much continually into the ear of her apparent boyfriend. Didn’t bother me—she spoke so softly that I never heard a word she said. But suddenly, about halfway through,  a classic little old lady  (classic in the L.A. style, which meant severe pedal-pushers, cool sneaks and a little sweater) popped across the center aisle from three rows down to shush the whispering woman. The chastened whisperer turned ’round to me—dunno why—to share outrage and surprise and I told her: “You’re the first person I’ve ever seen shushed at a rock-and-roll show.” When folks in L.A. are told they’re witnessing Fine Art, apparently they’re compelled to behave like they’re in a museum or at the opera. Or, more accurately, at a funeral. The shushing should have felt discordant and incongruous. But incongruously, it did not.

The gargantuan screen, the opiate Tests, the sweet L.A. evening air and the naively reverential audience generated a weird denial. Denial of the fact that Dean (Wareham, formerly leader of Luna) and Britta (Phillips, his romantic and artistic partner, formerly of Luna,  co-star of the 1988 chick-band flick Satisfaction with Justine Bateman, Liam Neeson, Julia Roberts, and the singing voice of the animated heroine Jem) were onstage below the screen, rocking out, along with guitarist/keyboardist/bassist Matt Sumrow and drummer Jason Bemis Lawrence.

D & B were determined not to upstage the Tests. They did not want the film projected over them (like the Warhol films which poured over the Velvet Underground during the Exploding Plastic Inevitable), and so played in darkness, dwarfed by the static but constantly moving images over their heads.

Maybe because of outdoor venue noise ordinances, or an opera being performed live right across the Hollywood Freeway, at the Hollywood Bowl, the band rocked at a subdued volume. Though even in clubs Dean & Britta seldom shatter ears, here they sublimated themselves to the Tests, seeking music and presentation that formed a harmonious whole. They succeeded to an astonishing and transcendent degree.

A while back, the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh asked Dean & Britta to compose a score for a live show of the Tests. Warhol used to put Tests together for parties under the rubric of “The 13 Most Beautiful;” D & B honored that number. Dean went to Pittsburgh and watched over 150 tests. He took “between 30 and 40” home. He and Britta were at first intimidated into procrastination, then began to study the Tests with care as they narrowed their choices. The final selection took months. At one point D & B were watching dueling Lou Reed Tests simultaneously, trying to suss which seemed the most Lou-esque.

Dean said in interviews that he wanted “people who were at the Factory (Warhol’s headquarters on West 47th Street) every day.” He found even the most stunning one-offs, like Bob Dylan, to be less representative of the time and place, and of the soul of the Tests themselves. Dean and Britta finally chose to project and to compose original music for the Tests of Edie Sedgwick, Dennis Hopper, Paul America, Susan Bottomly, Ann Buchanan, Freddy Herko, Jane Holzer, Billy Name, Richard Rheem, Ingrid Superstar, and Mary Woronov.

For the radiant, doomed, terrifying Nico, the band played Bob Dylan’s ode to the blonde singer/model/femme fatale, “I’ll Keep It With Mine,” which features a couplet that could speak of everyone in the show:

“I’m not loving you for what you are / But for what you’re not…”

For the utterly I-don’t-give-two-shits Lou Test, they played a quite recently discovered Velvet Underground original “I’m Not A Young Man Anymore." Though the original’s a White Light-era VU rave-up, D & B rave more quietly, and demonstrate how perfectly their post-Luna sounds accompany the Tests.

As the Tests become animated paintings or furniture, neither wholly plastic art nor cinema, D & B’s music becomes dreamscape. After no more than a minute, the Tests morph into the view out of a moving car’s window onto an empty, desolate land that barely changes mile to mile, but somehow remains hypnotic. The score—sometimes meandering, sometimes howling with pain, sometimes funereal—proves rich in thematic material and functions as both the car and whatever’s on the radio during that unchanging 10-hour day behind the wheel. As one looks at the Testsand drinks them in without actually seeing, so the music permeates and nourishes without conscious listening.            

The D & B visits the early Velvet Underground, show a strong Leone influence, recreate the sonic-scapes of (Wareham’s first band) Galaxie 500-ish noodling, and even put the pedal to the metal. But in keeping with the we’re-watching-art-now-please vibe, only one person in the Amphitheatre—me —showed any head-nodding, foot-tapping physical response to the music, and that included the band.

Dean set up most of the Tests by telling a little story about each’s subject. He told most, Britta told a couple. When Britta spoke of Ingrid Superstar’s real name, Dean corrected her onstage with much greater tact and ease than Britta utilized in gesturing tempo corrections at the drummer, which she did in no uncertain terms about every other song. Wareham is disconcertingly disengaged, or deadpan or catatonic, depending on your view. Rather than the spacey, dazed dislocation of David Byrne, which convinces the observer that he spent his formative years going around and around inside his mom’s dryer, Dean’s blankness seems to spring from simple natural cool. He spoke in a bemused monotone, and Britta responded to his correction as if they were sitting around their hotel room eating room service. It was a deeply Warholian exchange.

Dean and the other guys in the band dressed like indie rock schlubs, which in L.A.is a reach for anti-fashion cred. In most videos and photos, Wareham’s a bit of a clothes-horse, so his baggy pants and nondescript black oxfords were a surprise. Britta sported the Kim Gordon (Sonic Youth bass-player) uniform with ease: a shiny black mid-60s-evoking minidress and what seemed to be—under the dim stage lights—white thigh-highs and delicate to-the-minute evening sandals. Gordon, despite her I-will-kick-your-ass androgyny, seems softened by her chic, more accessible. As if Britta wasn’t already intimidating and cooler than thou (or certainly me), her oh-I-dress-like-this-all-the-time attitude, ethereal vocals, and willfully adorable faux-naïve keyboard riffs kicked her onto some otherworldly plane of can’t-touch-this-ness.

The most moving moment of the evening came when Dean spoke—like the coolest camp counselor ever at campfire story time—of Factory regular Freddy Herko, a dancer who gave up his career to shoot speed and live in a closet. One Sunday, people gathered for brunch in the fourth-floor walk-up loft that contained Freddy’s lair. Someone put on a Mozart Mass; as it peaked, Freddy emerged naked from the closet, dancing across the room. The Mass climaxed and Freddy, in one perfectly extended galvanic leap, soared right out the window to his death on the sidewalk below.  As Freddy’s chiseled cheekbones flashed black and white against the L.A. night sky, the band played a gentle, murmuring dirge.