Ready Player One

Ernest Cline’s book is the subject of much deserved backlash, but Steven Spielberg’s film might be interesting if it was even half as problematic

Ready Player One PosterI feel like one of those angry male fanboys complaining about “accuracy” and being “faithful” to source material. While Ready Player One maintains most of the plot points of Ernest Cline’s novel, it often feels like a completely different story. Masturbatory and overwritten though it may be, the book Ready Player One at least took its fandom seriously. Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation is a sugary pop culture smorgasboard. It’s empty, overstuffed and bland where it should be awe-inspiring. And instead of a virtual reality world filled with wonder, Spielberg’s latest vision of the future looks corny even for him.

Ready Player One has been the subject of a lot of backlash, much of it deserved. Cline’s adventurous sci-fi novel celebrates ‘80s pop culture but does so trivially. And in the process it overlooks art made by and for women and champions insular, nerdy dudes who view the whole world as a video game and have become the model for hateful trolls on the Internet.

If Spielberg’s movie were half as problematic it might be interesting. It cheapens the Willy Wonka sense of discovery you got from reading the book and simplifies the idea of the OASIS, an infinite, game-like universe to “a place where you can climb Mt. Everest…with Batman!” Cline’s book isn’t celebrated for his prose, but even he never wrote a line that bad (he’s a co-screenwriter on the film). And better luck next time to any tech guys who thought this movie might put VR headsets on the map. For every remarkable thing that happens in the OASIS, Spielberg can’t help but cut back to someone in the real world looking like a total dweeb. Continue reading “Ready Player One”

A Quiet Place

John Krasinski’s horror thriller goes beyond being a gimmicky movie for enhanced jump scares

A-Quiet-Place-PosterDirector John Krasinski does an excellent job in the opening moments of A Quiet Place establishing the unfortunate predicament of these doomed protagonists. It’s your typical end of the world scenario, the camera scours some deserted pharmacy, but no one is making a noise. The scavenging family speaks only through sign language, and when the mother picks up a bottle of pills from a shelf, she does so with the utmost care. But if that wasn’t enough, there’s a helpful New York Post with a headline that blares, “IT’S SOUND!”

The hard part for Krasinski is going beyond those opening minutes and making A Quiet Place something more than a horror movie without sound. And it doesn’t take long before even that trick starts to feel gimmicky. But even without much dialogue, A Quiet Place is a heartfelt and consistently tense movie about a family coping with the loss of a member and learning to appreciate one another.

In A Quiet Place, monsters that look like a cross between Alien’s Xenomorph and Stranger Things’ Demogorgon hunt down anything they can hear. And in the movie’s prologue, the youngest son of the family is eaten alive. Now a year later, they’ve cultivated a whole life without sound, stepping gingerly on worn parts of a creaky wood floor, playing board games with felt pieces and sound proofing a nursery for the arrival of their newborn. Continue reading “A Quiet Place”

Thoroughbreds

Olivia Cooke and Anya Taylor-Joy are remarkable in Cory Finley’s darkly funny, opulent and dryly smart film destined to become a cult classic

thoroughbreds poster“It means I just have to try a little harder to be good.” That’s Amanda in an early line in Thoroughbreds plainly explaining her mental affliction to her old friend Lily. Amanda is without feeling and emotion, though she’s not quite a “sociopath.” She blankly stares into a mirror, tilts her head and flashes a smile. She can turn on a sunny demeanor in an instant, but there’s nothing behind that façade. And yet Lily is trying just as hard to be “good.” We’re all trying.

Cory Finley’s Thoroughbreds examines the effort we exert and the demeanors we put on to appear “normal.” It takes two teen girls, one who feels nothing and one who feels all too much, and examines what a friendship can do to these individuals.

Finley tells his character study via black sense of humor, opulent production design and stirring performances. Thoroughbreds feels like a modern indie take on “Heathers” in a way that makes it destined to become a cult hit. Continue reading “Thoroughbreds”

Red Sparrow

“Red Sparrow” starts with an intriguing premise built around sexual power, but becomes a more convoluted and conventional spy thriller

Red Sparrow poster 2
Fox

The most interesting scene of Red Sparrow could also be its most problematic. Jennifer Lawrence has just stripped off all her clothes and hopped onto a desk in front of a classroom of people. A day earlier, one of her classmates attempted to rape her in the shower, and now he’s standing before her. This is an invitation. But he can’t get it up. “Power, that’s what he wants,” she says.

It’s a line that speaks volumes in the post-Weinstein, #metoo era. And if this were The Handmaid’s Tale, it might just work. Lawrence’s line comes as part of a class in which Russian spies are trained as “sparrows” to use their bodies and sexuality to manipulate their marks. Charlotte Rampling leads the class in which young women and men are asked to give blow jobs and study their own sex tapes. “Your body belongs to the state,” Rampling says. “Now it asks something in return.”

It’s almost laughable, and it’s hard to swallow (forgive the euphemism) within a movie that wants to be about female empowerment and survival. But I’d trade much more of this bizarre, questionable sex boot camp for the convoluted and conventional spy thriller Red Sparrow becomes. Continue reading “Red Sparrow”

Loveless

From director Andrey Zvyagintsev, “Loveless” is equal parts “Prisoners” and “A Separation.”

Loveless PosterThe Russian drama Loveless, nominated for 2018’s Best Foreign Language Oscar, wouldn’t be the first to show how a deteriorating marriage destroys other lives in its wake. But Loveless isn’t just bleak, it’s bitter, with contempt for how the culture that still lingers from the Soviet Union breeds hatred and distrust across generations.

Zhenya and Boris (Maryana Spivak and Aleksey Rozin) are long past salvaging their marriage. Zhenya is cold and superficial and Boris is distant and noncommittal, and neither of them wants their son. Loveless reveals its observant sensitivity when in a single shot Zhenya storms to the bathroom after a heated argument with her husband, oblivious that their son Alyosha (Matvey Novikov) has been eavesdropping and sobbing behind the door. Continue reading “Loveless”

Annihilation

Alex Garland’s “Annihilation” blends too many genres, themes and tones in this often entrancing, colorful, yet impenetrable sci-fi.

Annihilation PosterIn the sci-fi “Annihilation,” director Alex Garland has built a luminous, colorful playground with infinite possibilities. He takes us into a mysterious region called “The Shimmer,” a kaleidoscopic, morphing bubble. Light and technology are all scrambled and refracted inside this ever-expanding space, and the flora and fauna inside are rife with mutations and impossibilities. It’s a place where the rules of nature don’t apply and anything can be imagined.

Early on, “Annihilation” is entrancing, an endlessly fascinating trip in which Garland only begins to scratch the surface of the mysteries The Shimmer holds. But disappointingly, “Annihilation” starts to do all too much. All those wonders and possibilities that were frustratingly withheld become overwhelming. The movie becomes bloodier, weirder, more colorful and more esoteric, and as a result it’s less fun, less interesting, less profound and at times, even dumb. Continue reading “Annihilation”

A Wrinkle In Time

Ava DuVernay’s “A Wrinkle in Time” wants to be the most glorious, inspiring movie you’ve ever seen. It’s also ridiculous.

A Wrinkle In Time PosterAva DuVernay truly wants “A Wrinkle In Time” to be the most glorious, inspiring movie you’ve ever seen. She wants you – yes you, little black girl who has never seen herself represented on screen before – to believe in yourself so you can bring light into the world and be a force for positive change. DuVernay believes this so strongly that she’s even dressed Oprah in space age chain mail, glued-on diamonds and a glittery lip gloss that looks like it cost half of the movie’s $100 million budget so that Oprah can do what Oprah does best and make it seem like she’s speaking directly to you.

DuVernay certainly can’t be faulted for ambition, and at times, “A Wrinkle In Time” really does reach that high standard. It has color and beauty and a humanistic touch that another director, even one more suited to a franchise, tentpole budget, could not bring to the film.

But “A Wrinkle in Time” has no room for cynicism and snark, and it’s near impossible to avoid them for a movie with as many garish costumes, laughable set pieces, nonsensical plot threads and inflated sense of importance as this film. For as much as “A Wrinkle In Time” wants you in awe, it’s a frustrating, bizarre mess of a movie that gets harder and harder to love. Continue reading “A Wrinkle In Time”

Songwriting Blog #2

I think I had this fantasy that the next time I wrote one of these blog posts, I’d have a completed shell of the song I did a very rough demo of the last time.

Surprise surprise! Songwriting is hard. And it’s work. I’ve had enough jam sessions that make me feel fantastic about how I’m sounding and what I’m playing, and in those moments I get it in my head that I’m really close to having something I can share, something I can record. It couldn’t be further from the truth.

Part of the reason this blog post already feels delayed is that I was really tempted to share ANOTHER song snippet I had worked on not long ago. This one is an easier acoustic strummer, but I was thrilled with the melody I whistled into my phone and suddenly wanted to listen to a bunch of Neil Young to figure out how to hammer that one out into something good.

But I think part of the discipline of songwriting, or any kind of writing, is staying focused on a given idea. I have way too many reviews and think pieces that I’ve written an opening paragraph for and then put off returning to because I didn’t want to do the hard work beyond that initial moment of inspiration. So I’m specifically not going to share that other song and instead focus on the work I did following my first post.

Tempo

When I sat down to play today, I started by practicing the riff I had previously recorded. I wanted to get a feel of it again and get back the muscle memory of playing it. I drilled it a few times with the intent of then looping the riff so that I could solo or play a melody over the top of it. But I was finding it difficult to play along with my looped recording and stay on time, and I realized it was because I was still playing the song fast and loose with no regard for tempo.

First I slowed down my playing, taking the riff down to about half speed. It sounded something like this (this was actually recorded in 2016 and not today since I’m an idiot, but you get the idea):

I determined what the tempo was (around 80-90 BPM) and then played the power chord verse and bridge riffs at that same tempo. I also found myself strumming in something other than straight eighth notes when I was playing fast, so at the slower tempo I even simplified the riff to straight eighth notes and even tried to count out what I was playing to a point where it actually made sense rhythmically. The next step should’ve been to physically write out the rhythm on paper or sheet music, but I digress.

For a while I even tried playing at the accelerated tempo I wanted to play but keeping my metronome even as low as 75 BPM. So rather than eighth notes at a brisk tempo, I was forcing myself to effectively play sixteenth notes at a slow tempo. That got complicated to count, but it helped me gradually build up to the appropriate speed I wanted. This latest recording of my riff clocks in at an upbeat 180 BPM.

Song Structure

One thing I haven’t quite cracked yet is how my chorus should tie into my verse and bridge. I decided that the opening, intro riff would also double as my chorus. So if that’s the case, the song structure is effectively this:

Intro/Chorus
Verse
Verse
Bridge
Chorus
Verse
Verse
Bridge
Chorus
Solo
Chorus

Or something like that. I’m working on it. But the progression for the verse doesn’t fit my opening riff, so I need a rhythm guitar line that can go underneath the chorus riff…or do I? I started envisioning a track with only a lead guitar, and just bass and drums underneath, but there still has to be a progression that will sound appropriate.

Hitting that impasse, I decided to record each section separately, which helped lead me to that song structure and get each portion to something I liked a little more. I even took the time out to solo over my looped verse, playing around on the A major pentatonic and A sliding pentatonic scales. I’m finding it hard to play a strong solo at that tempo for a punk song, but I’m beginning to get an idea of how I might drill a specific solo, and I’ll have to listen to similar songs to get an idea of what licks I can incorporate.

Melody

This is where it starts to get funny and embarrassing. Once I had my tempo and my components, I looped the verse and bridge and hummed some bars that I think could be the outline of a vocal melody.

Would you call that humming? It’s more hushed growling in my mind, like I’m a caveman who can’t quite find the words to what I want to say. At times during this very improvisational exercise it appears as though I almost sound out some words. “I gnnnhnned somethnnn,” I think?

What I like about this is I can already imagine how the bridge vocals might break down into phrases, as well as how I would escalate my voice vocally. I do want this to be a more shouted, punk sounding song, and this, rather than my whistling on a different song recording, feels weirdly right.

I also recorded this for my chorus without looping the chorus riff, but you can hear how I intentionally made my melody follow the guitar riff.

You know how when Paul McCartney developed the melody for “Yesterday,” he didn’t yet have the words for it, so his placeholder lyrics were “Scrambled Eggs?” (a note: these blog posts are going to have a lot of Beatles anecdotes) Somehow the word I latched onto during this improv’d melody was San-Fran-Cis-Co. I’ve never been to San Francisco, so maybe that could be a good starting point when I take a stab at writing lyrics, which will be my goal for Songwriting Blog #3!

Thanks for reading, and again, let me know your thoughts on this update below. What is it sounding like? Where could I go from here? What should I listen to for more inspiration? And check out my first entry here.

I, Tonya

Margot Robbie shines in “I, Tonya,” but the movie often feels tone deaf in its comedic depiction of domestic violence amid Tonya Harding’s tabloid story.

i tonya posterIt’s a cliché to announce at the beginning of your movie “based on a true story,” but it’s almost become as much of a cliché to now be tongue-in-cheek about it. “Based on wildly contradictory interviews,” the opening to “I, Tonya” proclaims. It tells you two things about this movie: that it thinks it has a blank check to take as many liberties as it wants with Tonya Harding’s (Margot Robbie) tabloid story, and that this movie wants to have a sense of humor it maybe doesn’t deserve.

That’s because “I, Tonya” feels tone deaf in trying to meld the goofy, unreliable testimonies of Harding’s family and cadre of rednecks with a more sobering story about domestic abuse and mental torture at the hands of her husband and mother in her pursuit to be the best. It’s a movie about domestic abuse, but hey, let’s try and be funny and edgy too! Continue reading “I, Tonya”

Good Time

The Safdie Brothers’ “Good Time” is a neon-lit trip that’s hypnotically chaotic as though we’re seduced by Robert Pattinson’s tragic trial and error.

Good Time Poster“Don’t count your chickens before they hatch, do you know what that means?” A social worker in the Safdie Brothers’ “Good Time” asks that question to Nick (Benny Safdie), a dead-eyed man with a stony, gaping face and who is mentally challenged. The social worker asks a few more questions, and just as he’s making a breakthrough, with Nick even shedding a tear, his loving but unhinged brother Connie (Robert Pattinson) whisks him away.

Connie would’ve done well to hear that age-old proverb. That’s because “Good Time” is a carnival ride careening out of control, a neon-lit trip as one man’s desperate attempts to get his brother out of jail destroys the lives of everyone in his wake. It’s hypnotically chaotic and irresistibly surreal as though we’re seduced by the character’s tragic trial and error as things get worse and worse. Continue reading “Good Time”