In Which We Try To Appreciate Ellen Page On Another Level

The iTunes Playlist: Ellen Page

Oh to be Ellen Page! We already want to be a lesbian, and Ellen takes it up to another level. We so wish iTunes was new to us. All music is new to Ellen. She heard of music about three months ago when Sean Penn told her who Eddie Vedder was. Ellen was produced via an immaculate conception somewhere in Halifax, much like Howard Norman's classic novel of the city, and one of our favorite books of all time, The Museum Guard.

Ellen probably has an addiction to cute pills, otherwise it would be difficult to look like this all the time. I wonder if when she stares at Alison Janney and Catherine Keener if she thinks that is what she will become. Diane Keaton is v. jealous of Ellen. Jack Nicholson is jealous of Ellen. Fuck, we all are. Being a cute little lesbian like Ariel Schrag in Potential is pretty much as good as it gets.

The celebrity playlist she made for iTunes follows.

"Possibly Maybe" - Bjork (mp3)

I adore Bjork. The swan dress and all. This is probably my favorite song by her. Feels like someone stuck in their head while falling for another, but not knowing how the other individual feels. Intense, beautiful, and scary.

"Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl" - Broken Social Scene (mp3)

I would love if some sort of machine existed that could tell me just how many times I have listened to this song. I guess iTunes tracks it, but I only recently got into this iTunes thingy. Anyway, the point of that ramble is to say that I adore this song. Emily Haynes (from Metric) singing with Broken Social Scene. It's just a cosmic blend of awesomeness.

"Wild is the Wind" - Cat Power (mp3)

I am crazy about Cat Power, she is one of my favorite musicians. I could create an entire playlist with just her songs actually. In any event, here is a cover of 'Wild is the Wind' that paralyzes me. It is so gorgeous.

"Honey or Tar" - CocoRosie (mp3)

This song is beautiful, still, but very dirty. Elements that I love compacted into one stunning song. CocoRosie is fantastic.

"Gymnopedies, No. 1 (Bank of America)" - Erik Satie

Erik Satie's music is the score for my favorite film, The 400 Blows. I cannot even describe how his music makes me feel. So simple, but full of so much emotion.

"En Gallop" - Joanna Newsom (mp3)

When I first heard Joanna Newsom, I immediately fell in love. She was all I listened to for awhile. Both of her albums are insanely amazing. This song fills my heart to the brim.

ellen & catherine keener are the same person at different times

"You Love Me" - Kimya Dawson

Kimya Dawson inspires me to no end. She has an enormous heart. She is one of those people that makes me feel better about being in this world. This song is extremely touching.

"Please" - Mary Gauthier (mp3)

This album was just recently introduced to me. I am loving Mary Gauthier. Her voice blows me away.

"In a Manner of Speaking" - Nouvelle Vague (mp3)

I was obsessed with this song at one point. There are no words.

"Ice Cream" - New Young Pony Club (mp3)

Wow, all the music so far is incredibly beautiful and also very mellow. So here is one that makes me feel sugar high. It makes me feel other things too...as in it gets me pretty excited...tee hee.

"Break It Up" - Patti Smith (mp3)

Patti Smith is one of my icons. This song is from one of my personal favorite albums of all time, Horses. It makes me want to tear off my clothes and run through a field or something. Is that weird?

"Entertain" - Sleater-Kinney (mp3)

This song makes me freak out, basically when I listen to it I can't control myself. For intense, their album Woods should never be playing if I am driving. I love these girls, but I am also totally jealous, because I will never be them.

"Love Will Tear Us Apart" - Susanna and the Magical Orchestra (mp3)

This song knocks me out. It is so beautiful, honest, and sad. Sends a feeling straight to my gut.

"Lover's Spit" - Broken Social Scene (mp3)

Leslie Feist singing this Broken Social Scene song...need I say more? Let's just make out.

In Which We Enter Hell Through The Back

Onwards Satanic Soldiers

by ELEANOR MORROW

I still remember being dragged to the movies by a boy I had liked, or thought I liked. I knew absolutely nothing about what we were about to see. That would never happen today - the vast majority of films we see we know something about: a trailer, a story from the set, a history. But I was more interested in the boy than the film. This is what I surely thought, but turned out to be wrong completely.

It's rare that critics totally miss on a film, but from the moments that Wojciech Kilar's haunting score takes over in one of the greatest title sequences in cinematic history, these hacks missed on The Ninth Gate. God knows they should never underestimate Roman Polanski, one of our finest working directors, but they did, and North America missed the best film noir since Miller's Crossing.

I don't blame them, or the boy I saw the film with, for not getting it. Most people can't accept drama and comedy together, and adding a dash of horror stirs the pot to an almost unrecognizable place. There's the example of David Mamet's The Edge: director Lee Tamahori flatly misunderstood the script, and a hilarious satire never got the laughs it deserved.

An unsympathetic protagonist is the common element in both of these films. Dean Corso (Johnny Depp) is a specialist in the rarest of rare books. The opening scene of the film has him appraising a family's collection, picking off what he likes from it, and telling them all the rest of the collection is ten times as valuable as it really is. Critics have no use for sleazy antiheros, because their business is the sleaziest of all.

Depp and Polanski didn't argue about how he should play the malignant tumor that is Dean Corso, but Roman later admitted he didn't know his star would be so laid back with his performance. What was in the director's head might have made The Ninth Gate more money, but it would have made it a lesser film. Depp made a brave choice, and in doing so, created a hilarious not-Philip Marlowe that is more entertaining to watch than a debonair Daniel Craig. Understated is so rare in our cinema today that we should throw a party every time it happens.

Boris Balkan (a pitch perfect Frank Langella) hires Corso to appraise the four extant copies of The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows, a book by a writer named Torchia that contains nine engraved illustrations. When correctly deciphered and matched, the illustrations are supposed to raise Lucifer himself.

This is Balkan's goal, so believing only one of the copies real, he gives Corso one of the copies and asks him to prove it genuine or fake. He covers his expenses to find out if the other two copies are real, too. Corso immediately hangs out with an antiquarian bookseller, who is murdered in short order in a fashion that simulates one of the engravings in a book. He is treading a dangerous path, but who is after him?

From then on, Corso meanders through Europe on Balkan's say-so, while himself trying to figure out what exactly Balkan wants, and what sort of book this is. It's a mature premise, and that's where Liza Schwarzbaum's impossibly tiny brain got tripped up. Who could guess that this was a comedy? Since I didn't even have a college education at the time, I can vouch that it didn't take much.

I don't say I have such a great sense of humor. If I find something funny, I laugh, even if the music is dramatic and Johnny Depp has an expression on his face like he just smelled Kate Moss after a coke binge. The Ninth Gate starts as one kind of movie, and then it becomes several more. It resists genre, flauts genre, answers to something that is at once sillier and all too real. Everyone is evil and crazy here, which adds to the ludicrousness of the proceedings. There are more laughs in this movie than in the entire first season of Parks & Recreation.

People behave according to their baser motives, and they're not terribly good at hiding them is one of the lessons of this tale, and that's why Depp is right to hold back - we must at least guess what the mercenary Dean Corso is thinking and doing. Most of modern drama depends on us knowing more than our protagonist. In The Ninth Gate, compared to Dean, we know less, much less.

Connection with the devil herself is always dangerous business, but why should it be? We speak to God every day, or some of us do, but we can never commune with the devil. Do our interests never coincide with those of the devil? What if the devil found Amy Adams' nude scene from Sunshine Cleaning and posted it on its blog? Would we be violating ourselves if we viewed it and left a comment like, "thanks for the upload, devilbro"? Answer: not in the least.

At the beginning of the movie, we can't imagine why someone would want to go to Hell, to know the power that it offers and willingly set out on this dark road. By then, we're totally sure we want exactly what all these insane book collectors do - a method to the madness, a way out of the starched dullness of modernity, to a darker and more destructive future, near the setting of the sun.

Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording. She tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages on the subject of The Hangover.

"Cut The Cake" - The Fiery Furnaces (mp3)

"Staring at the Steeple" - The Fiery Furnaces (mp3)

"Even in the Rain" - The Fiery Furnaces (mp3)

In Which We Are Underneath The Ground, Hoping To Grab Your Feet

Hell Is Other Loan Officers

by ALEX CARNEVALE

For me, hell is being a loan officer at a California bank. For others, it's a delicate heaven, and Justin Long is a trained psychologist and also your boyfriend, and his mother wants him to marry a lawyer, and you're not good enough. Sam Raimi's incredible return to the horror genre takes this basic dismaying premise and makes things so much worse I was begging for sweet relief.

'i sense that you are juno's understudy...does this word 'juno' mean anything to you?'I have never been particularly good with horror films. A book can be put down; you can't see it, anyway. A light can be turned on in a dark closet. A grizzled old man who brushed against you accidentally on a crowded train can be reported to the police. But a film - that is a different story altogether. The only way to get around the diegesis, in this case, is to realize that the only thing that lurks in those shadows is death, and death is not really all that scary - in fact after watching an episode of Nurse Jackie, it's a welcome revelation.

Sam Raimi and his older brother Ivan have gotten around this by creating a series of hells, all of which exist in the real world, and have to be dealt with. There is actually something in all those shadows, there's no Macguffin making it all happen, no trick ending waiting. There's just eternal damnation, and running from it as fast as you possibly can.

sup?Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) is in the pickle I described, and she has to think of a way out of it. She's a bright, well-meaning young person, the kind of woman that under other circumstances you'd like to know or even impregnate, but not these particular circumstances, no. Her face is perfect for Raimi's purposes - even in quiet confidence it betrays an inner fear. Replacing Ellen Page, Lohman is a dead ringer for the androgynous young person, and she's as talented an actress.

go ask obama, I'm totally sure he'll write you a checkAfter denying a disgusting Gypsy woman another extension on her mortgage to impress her boss (David Paymer), she gets cursed with an object that marks her as fodder for a demon called Lamia. Demons! They just don't understand fiscal responsibility. The fact that Raimi turns this into a joke is hilarious, but there is also a major truth underneath this well-timed setup.

The banks were blamed for targeting the weak, for okaying loans that couldn't possibly be repaid. Little condemnation has come in for those who couldn't make their payments. Probably there is blame on both sides, and since the government bailed out only one of those sides, I'm not even sure who to be sympathetic to. That is where we are in American life - there are no winners, just different levels of losers in hock to a federal government that has no idea when to stop spending.

Thankfully it is in Drag Me to Hell that Judgment comes, Raimi-style. It doesn't matter who you are: if you have a button on your shirt, you're going underneath the ground where Hell is.

this happens at every single seance i go to

In order to avoid this fate, Christine gets barfed on, she kills animals, she throws up, she bleeds out, she tries anything to get herself uncursed. And as funny as this all should be, it's seriously frightening to know it's not in her head. She's a dead woman, but she won't die -- she'll live on in Hell.

By the end of the film she's trying to find a reason to justify condemning someone else to her fate, even wanting to bop off her sniveling Asian coworker before thinking better of it. The decision she comes to, and the ending the film spirals toward in the 99 minutes it holds you I won't spoil here, but it is more exciting than anything else that will hit theaters this summer.

lamia also nabbed david carradine recentlyWhat makes Raimi such a masterful director? When he's taking himself seriously instead of delivering another hammy Spiderman sequel, he is the best at stringing together action and humor, a relentlessly eye for how things should pile on top of each other to create something surprising and funny, but wholly real.

With Spiderman, he took a series of increasingly nonsensical scripts, and made a film completely foreign to them out of their mediocre dialogue and situations. He turned the superhero genre into comedy, and in doing so made all other like movies over-serious and dull. As in Spiderman, everything here holds a demonic menace: a messy psychologist's office, a medium's goat, the button on Christine's shirt. The next day, you can't even look at a doorknob without imagining yourself going through it full bore. There is no one better in the genre, and we can hope he finds reason to come back to horror again after Drag Me To Hell.

The film's had some moderate success at the box office, and while it is devoid of big stars, I think I have some idea why audiences didn't exactly flock in droves. It's pretty much the September 11th movie all over again. We have no desire to relive these horrors when worse is befalling us every day, in the seeming safety of what was America. We won't be safe again, not here. We will tear each other apart even if big banks lend more and people are able, again, to buy beyond their means. Once you've been cursed, you can't go back.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He tumbls here.

"Reborn as a Wind Chime" - Silent Paper Radios (mp3) highly recommended

"Rise of the Foundling" - Silent Paper Radios (mp3)

"Bullet Holes" - Silent Paper Radios (mp3)

Silent Paper Radios myspace