In Which Space Is Disease And Danger Wrapped In Darkness And Silence

It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes The Starship Enterprise To Cry

by MOLLY LAMBERT

Star Trek

dir. J.J. Abrams

Stardate: 2009

America is ready to come out of the closet! As science fiction fans! Yes what better way to herald the Obama era than with a reboot of the grooviest most racially integratediest show of them, Star Trek. While we were all hoping for a black Captain Kirk (T.I. perhaps?), Chris Pine is totally charming as the cocky would-be captain. Spock is the role Zachary Quinto was clearly born to play.

Star Trek ruled. I had no expectations or prior interest in the franchise and its mythology. I was more of an X-Phile than a Trekkie. But it was sweet. Sure there are missteps (CGI vaginasaur, Eric Bana looking like a bald Michael Richards in Maori Tā Moko, old makeup on Winona Ryder) and plenty of plot holes, but whatever dude. It was 90 percent dope and Simon Pegg made up for the weak spots. 

Pre-Show Summer Movie Trailer Round Up:

G.I. Joe: super fucking shitty. tremendously shitty looking. 

Transformers 2: not as shitty as G.I. Joe. I would maybe see this 4 Shia 

A "Serious" CGI Movie About Rag Dolls: nobody wanted this

Origin stories are not my fave. They are tough to pull off. I'd love to see a super-hero franchise make its first pic in medias res. But I loved this. Even the stuff with Kirk and Spock as kids didn't give me the Anakin Skywalkers as bad I thought it might. Despite the PG-13 rating, there are plenty of redshirts dispatched in amusing ways.

Best CGI I have seen in a big summer movie since the first Pirates Of The Carribean. The reason for that? Models. They used scale models as much as possible, JJ Abrams apparently insisted on it, and it looks much better, more like 2001 and O.G. Star Wars than anything in recent memory. I was prepared for the time travel fuckery from having watched this current season of LOST.

the Wolverine faces on the wall r killin me

I don't know what kinds of future sexualities the Vulcan race follow, but Spock is at least bisexual. He def had way more chemistry with Kirk than Uhura. There were as many non-sexual sex scenes in this movie as there were in "Twilight." I can't count the number of times they showed Kirk panting post-orgasmically after a hot stare-down with Spock or a shot from Bones.

Str8 women have told Hollywood that they are fine with lusting after gay dudes. It's not like they'll get to fuck Gerard Butler either. If the popularity of Sylar and Adam Lambert on ONTD doesn't demonstrate that, I'm not sure what will. More importantly, a probably gay dude that isn't Hugh Jackman or Tom Cruise co-headlined a big summer movie! .

Kirk/Spock is the first ever fanfic pairing (no homo) and the ultimate One True Pairing, and now I see why. There will be Kirk fans (me) and Spock fans (my friend Jess) but mostly there is no one without the other, as Mahnola Dargis noted in her (mostly positive!) review. The supporting cast is terrific. The dialogue is decent with some bright spots. The story is ridiculous but hey, it's Star Trek! "Bones" McCoy was the best. That dude was awes. More Gambit than a Gambit.

there are no rules about story construction in space

Everything that went wrong in Cloverfield goes right here. I completely gasped in awe at a couple of the space CGI effects. The cast has great chemistry and the whole thing has an underlying goofiness befitting the original series. Couldn't ask for much more from a summer tentpole.

THIS RECORDING SUMMER MOVIE TALLY

Star Trek: A

Wolverine/17 Again: C+/B-

Robert Altman films: A+

Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording. She tumbls here.

"Giving That Heaven Away" - Jackson Browne (mp3)

"The Drums of War" - Jackson Browne (mp3)

"Time the Conqueror" - Jackson Browne (mp3)

In Which You Can Pacify But Never Kill The Medfly

Why Does Naked Make It Art?

by WILL HUBBARD

Someone help me out with this. Is it the lighting, film quality, or decade that makes Robert Altman's Short Cuts feel like a made-for-TV movie? Did he like that style, or was it just that Short Cuts came on the heels of a dark period—if you can really call making great money for directing mindless television programming 'dark'—of Altman's career?

Thankfully, the spell of TV-like mediocrity breaks with the film's first moment of utter bewilderment—so much an Altman specialty—in which a man with a pool-cleaning business (Tarantino's Mr. White, in much the same character and wardrobe) is trying to put his children to bed to the sound of his wife talking dirty (really really dirty) to a man on the phone for money. It's a cue that says Here ends the formulaic Hollywood expostion— now for something a little different.

Who doesn't <3 Lily Tomlin?Credit the original plotlines to Raymond Carver, but with the acknowledgement that Carver's stories had, previous to Altman's agile weaving, seemed unfilmable. Carver's fictions, like Faulkner's before him, are an attempt to mirror reality in all it's paradoxical, unseemly interrelations. Altman's a good fit, because a moment in his sprawling movies is not a moment in time but a synapse firing in all directions forward, backward and sideways.

In a particularly poignant moment in Short Cuts, Altman proves—with no small help from prime-of-her-life Julianne Moore—that even the obligatory minute of nudity can function artfully in an adult movie. Because a sex scene does not fit into his cosmology, Altman has the woman take her clothes off while engaged in brutal emotional conflict with her lover (a spilled glass of wine causes her to remove and frantically scrub her skirt just as the dinner guests are supposed to arrive). The sequence so reverses the expected order of events that it might safely be called heartbreaking.

Porky-Piggin' itNow that I think about it, other glimpses of nude females mark many of the film's other significant junctures. There's the pool guy secretly watching the manic cello-virtuoso nihlist tomboy fake kill herself/skinnydip, the too-old-to-be-that-drunk-and-broey guys finding a nude female corpse floating around their favorite fishing hole, and the egoist doctor coming home to his wife painting her best friend in the buff, prompting the unforgettable query: "Why does naked make it art?"

In Altman there is always the growing sense that things are about to fall apart. Borges called this "the imminence of the revelation," but in Altman it is more the imminence of the conflagration. In Short Cuts, this comes in the form of a minor, run-of-the-mill LA earthquake. I'm not sure the 74 plotlines Altman has opened are totally resolved when the earth begins shaking, but at least the pool-guy won't be listening to his wife pillow-talk into the phone anymore. Or will he?

Will Hubbard is the executive editor of This Recording. If you'd like to complain about or request a change to this website, please contact him at fuckoff@thisrecording.com.

"West Coast" — Anni Rossi (mp3) highly recommended

"Venice" — Anni Rossi (mp3)

"Machine" — Anni Rossi (mp3)

Anni Rossi website

In Which We Think About It Every Night And Day

This Man-Boy Flies

by CHAD PERMAN

How I yearn to throw myself into endless space and float above the awful abyss.

— Johann Wolfgang Goethe

It begins inside a mostly barren Astrodome, the one-time Wicked Witch of the West (literally) leading the red and white uniformed African-American marching band she has hired through an out-of-tune rendition of the national anthem.

(They will soon revolt and launch into "Lift Every Voice and Sing", long considered "The Black National Anthem").

Elsewhere in the dome — in a forgotten bomb shelter buried deep within its bowels to be exact — lives an awkward, lonely teenage boy with big glasses named Brewster McCloud who is building the wings he hopes will one day enable him to fly far away from the worries of this world.

It was 1970 and Robert Altman, armed with the ability to do whatever the hell he wanted to do next in the wake of M*A*S*H's massive success, reared back and swung for the fences. The result is a comic fable of sorts, a parabolic meditation on birds, flight, adolescense, innocence, Icarus, love, temptation, sex, dreams, guardian angels, detectives, serial killers, the impossibility of freedom, and guano.

From the very opening (and then, re-opening) credits, Brewster McCloud feels like a film sent down from another dimension: a ridiculous, anarchic, funny, bizarre, oddly beautiful character piece that seems entirely unconcerned about whatever you might think of it.

Even in a filmography as eccentric and diverse as that of Robert Altman's, Brewster stands out as an insane film, the sort of thing you almost can't believe you just saw. Not for nothing, it was also Altman's own personal favorite of his films.

Bud Cort plays the titular character, a man-boy perched somewhere between Harry Potter and Waldo, whose dreams of flying fuel the narrative thrust of the film.

He hunkers down in the Astrodome and works endlessly on his wings, often under the watchful, protective eye of Louise (Sally Kellerman), who may or may not be his mother — and is later revealed to be a fallen angel herself by virtue of the wing-shaped scars we see across her bare back.

Louise believes Brewster can one day fly, but only if he follows one certain condition: he can never have sex.

If he loses his virginity, she will no longer be able to offer him her protection — a protection that just might have something to do with the recent deaths of people in Brewster's life who have treated him poorly (their deaths continually foreshadowed by being shit upon by birds). Obviously, psychoanalysts would have a field day with this one.

Brewster, though, is human and horny and ultimately unable to resist the temptations of an Astrodome tour guide named Suzanne (Shelley Duvall, in her very first film), and thus begins his tragic downfall, which ultimately concludes in an Icarus-like warning about flying too close to the sun (or in this case, the roof of the Astrodome), before giving way to a surrealistic, Fellini-esque parade of a final scene.

To some extent, Brewster plays out like a stream-of-consciousness ramble of a film, and that's certainly no accident: Altman reportedly disliked the original script so much that he tossed it aside completely and, rather than hire another screenwriter, decided to improvise a great deal of the film on the spot — a style of shooting he would frequently return to throughout the remainder of his career.

Chocked full of ornithological information provided by way of the professor (Rene Auberjonois) who serves as the film's interstitial (and increasingly bizarre) narrator, the film is able to soar to great absurdist heights in some moments, while seemingly teetering on the very brink of complete disaster at others. It's Altman's directorial hand, finally, that keeps the whole thing from coming apart entirely, and you can sense all the fun that he's having behind the camera while doing so.

And so, while Brewster McCloud never emerges as a truly great film, it is also never anything less than an entertaining one. It's also an important film in terms of Altman's own development, expanding on many of the themes and techniques (overlapping dialogue, crowded scenes, improvisation, parallel editing, zoom focus) he had first begun to seriously play with on MASH and would continue to develop and refine throughout his remarkable string of 1970s films, culminating in the crown-jewel masterpiece that was Nashville. As such, it's an vital if often overlooked film in Altman's oeuvre, as well as a strange and wonderful document of a time in American cinema where serious directors — under the guise of being auteurs — were allowed to make things this outrageous and ridiculous with the full support and bankroll of big Hollywood studios.

Chad Perman is a writer and a psychotherapist living in Seattle.

"No Love Today" — Michelle Phillips (mp3)

"It's Getting Better" — Cass Elliot (mp3)

"I Call Your Name" — The Mamas and the Papas (mp3)

"Blueberries for Breakfast" — The Mamas and the Papas (mp3)

"California Dreamin' (live at Monterey)" — The Mamas and the Papas (mp3)