At the movies: Of Gods and Men.

A great teaching tool for religious tolerance, as well as a sad companion to Roland Joffe's 1986 masterpiece The Mission. That film, if you didn't know, had me wanting to be a Jesuit for a while. This one didn't have as much of an impact, but I see it as a useful film, and one that I look forward to wrangling folk in to see.

At the movies: White Material.

It's staggering that it took almost two years for the latest Claire Denis film to make it to the U.S. But we can certainly be glad that it did. It's a haunting and majestic film that will nonetheless make you think about what Africa is and represents in your own life.

At the movies: 35 Shots of Rum.

Lionel (Alex Descas) is a conductor on Paris’ subway system, a man living simply with his student daughter Joséphine. They live in a small apartment building, along with a taxi driver named Gabrielle and a young businessman, always traveling, named Noé, and together the four have evolved a weird sort of family life- one defined by absence, distance, and uncertainty just as it is by blood, love, and obligation.

Director/co-writer Claire Denis (Beau Travail, Trouble Every Day) is one of the most gifted filmmakers currently working, and with this film, she refines her organic and sensual method of storytelling into something truly comforting and lovely. Critics all over the world have been rapturous in their response, though with the indifference that many audiences have been showing toward challenging foreign cinema, it remains to be seen if that will be enough to bring viewers in.

If nothing else, 35 Shots of Rum will be responsible for countless drunken slow dances to The Commodores’ “Nightshift” over the next few years and several quality rice-based dinners.

Denis has made something magical here: a family drama where nothing feels clichéd, conflict isn’t forced where it isn’t needed, and we spend time with people we’d genuinely like to get to know. Hearts are stoked and broken, lives get irrevocably changed without a moment’s notice, and when the film finally ends, you just want to spend more time in its world. There’s a pervasive loneliness milling around these characters in the periphery, which is why their choice not to be alone is thrilling on a purely emotional level.

Magical and intoxicating.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Miss Grace Jones.

Grace Jones is a goddess, and it breaks my heart that she is only doing two stops in the U.S. on her Hurricane tour this summer. Costumes by Eiko Ishioka (Bram Stoker's Dracula, The Cell, The Fall, Mishima, the upcoming Spiderman musical). The song is thanks to La Mome Edith Piaf, but La Jones has been singing it for thirty-teo years, and it still sounds ravishing. Behold.
There are lots of other YouTubed excerpts from the show, but this is the one I wanted to share.

At the movies: Summer Hours (L'Heure d'Ete).

Following their mother’s death, three siblings, all with different homes, lives, and children of their own, must try and take the physical remnants of their family history and figure out what to do with them. So much love, so many lives, and so very many things- and there’s no way to keep everything. And there’s no way to keep everyone together.

Conceived as a piece commemorating the twentieth anniversary of France's Musee d'Orsay, Summer Hours (L'Heure d'Ete) finds director Olivier Assayas moving from his globalization trilogy (Demonlover, Clean, and Boarding Gate) to focus on family, and in the process he's made one of the most beautiful and restrained dramas of the year. We have one mother, three children, five grandchildren, two dogs, a housekeeper, and an exquisite country house filled with several lifetimes worth of memory and objects.

There are no big scenes, no flare-ups or crying jags, just a rapturous dive into the eddies and whorls of the time that we spend as families. What remains of someone once they've gone? Family bonds, and love, and security- these things are ephemeral. And who really decides what the tactile remnants of our loved ones mean? It is as remarkable an analysis of human behavior and the rippling, fragmented nature of death. With Juliette Binoche, the legendary Edith Scob (Franju's Eyes Without a Face), and Charles Berling.

Assayas has combined his interest in globalization with a rock-solid emotional center, refining his interests and making a film that gets under the skin of even those who were unaffected by his sleek technothrillers. Audiences all over the world have been transfixed by this subtle and moving effort, and even the staunchest stoic will be a little teary.

Summer Hours will resonate with anyone who has had to navigate estate taxes and sentimental values, putting prices on things once beloved and having to move out and move on. Never manipulative or venal, this film is graceful and haunting, and its final scene unforgettable.

I've Celine that face before.

So, an excerpt from my exigesis on last week's Celine Dion show got used in the Nashville Scene in their "The Spin" music gossip column, and you can read it here.



But there's more fun to be had on that front, y'all. Without further ado, here's my unedited thoughts on l'Affaire Dion.

Dion and on.

You know that feeling, that “I’m gonna sit in this car outside of this son of a bitch’s house with this bottle of Boone’s Farm until he realizes that we’re meant to be together” feeling? Well, Céline Dion does too, and even the most die-hard ironist had to bow down before the ‘wake up and love me’ passionate desperation of “To Love You More,” the 1996 sometime hit that she used to close the ‘Here’s the Hits’ opening portion of her show at the Sommet Center. We wanted some diva moments, and Canada’s most endearing export since Edith Prickley delivered in full.

Never anything less than completely committed to the songs, which she nurtures to maturity using melisma and Intellabeams, she nonetheless spends her between-song patter as a goofy spaz who loves nothing more than making silly faces or sincerely asking the audience’s permission to perform songs that people’d gleefully shelled out dollars to hear in the first place. If she weren’t so completely genuine, it would seem like Gena Rowlands-in-Opening Night madness, and yet you come away from the Taking Chances tour with the kind of respect normally afforded to civil engineers or a really adventurous chef.

Her commitment, especially during the ‘didn’t see that coming’ James Brown medley, her fits of floor-writhing ecstasy during her Andrea Bocelli duet “The Prayer,” and during a fierce barrel through her 1995 Francophone career-definer “Pour Que Tu M’Aimes Encore,” is unquestionable. It’s weird, though, how so many of her songs could be seen as other artists’. She’s had a gift for much of her career for taking others’ almost-theres and minor hits and making them into something major and epic.

“The Power of Love,” written and initially recorded by Jennifer Rush but then also a big pop hit for Laura Branigan, is now Celine’s. Her Jim Steinman collaboration was originally a minor UK flash for the producer’s attempted girl group Pandora’s Box. Tonight’s show opened with “I Drove All Night,” which was recorded by both Roy Orbison and (definitvely) Cyndi Lauper. And we also got a cover of Heart’s “Alone.” Similarly, we had Eric Carmen’s “All By Myself” and a take on the Phil Spector/Tina Turner classic “River Deep, Mountain High.” That Dion is not a songwriter (often) is not up for a debate. But it’s fascinating that she takes the same approach to pop music as her fans do, finding the songs that speak to her and giving them voice as she sees it.

What she excels at are songs where there is some distancing factor; not to say some form of irony or dramatic device, but more where she incarnates a character in the song who is at a remove from song’s object. Perhaps a remembrance, a crippling regret, a dramatic shift between indicative and subjunctive tenses; these are the hallmarks of the truly exceptional Dion offering.

She shines as the outsider, whether as the shunted one who wants “To Love You More,” or the narratrix of the so-devastating-they-couldn’t-even-translate-it-into-English/’What would Bible Belt America think of this” “Le Fils du Superman,” or, in the shimmering, 60s girl-group coulda been “I Love You,” from 1996, where the subject and object of the song’s profound love don’t even get to speak to one another directly until the bridge.

And then, of course, there’s that Titanic song. And that’s the key to Céline Dion. You can’t approach her or her songs ironically (Oh, if only she’d recorded a theme song for Revolutionary Road…). That’s why The Mattoid’s cover of “My Heart Will Go On” seems like such a great idea in the abstract, then just becomes painful in the concrete. You have to give props to a woman who ties herself to the vicissitudes of pop music without hesitation. At times, that means feeling a bit like you’re at a show in Blanche and Baby Jane’s living room, but it’s unquestionably worth it.

Why does the heart go on? It’s a grammatically awkward and lyrically inconclusive song, and there’s not a single other big ticket diva who could tackle it and make it work. It’s not in their personae as singers to allow that much uncertainty into their work, and Dion thrives on precisely that.

When you listen to “Pour que Tu m’Aimes Encore,” or even its English version “If That’s What It Takes,” there’s an almost submissive streak in the lyrics, and that’s what allows her voice to thrive. Divas by the dozens use their voice to let you know who calls the shots, and Dion, with just an occasional shift in phrasing, says that’s not always the case. It’s why the only enduring ballad that Mariah Carey has ever recorded is “I Don’t Wanna Cry,” where she uses her silky (and hence almost completely unused) lower register for the first two thirds of the song. There’s a dangerous sincerity there that practically defines Céline Dion’s best work.

She has the rigid and fierce articulation of a drag queen, which is meant as a complement. Gestures carry a lot of meaning across, especially when dealing with as polyglot a fanbase as Dion’s. I’d love to see one of her shows in France, or Belgium, or Québec; it’s no secret I adore her Francophone material, and her whole policy of only performing one song in French at U.S. shows I find somewhat of a shortchanging. The glittery black bell bottoms, the toreador dancers, the extended Chrysler dancer remix that opens the show, even the ceaseless thanking of the audience. You feel like that’s just how she is, and she’d be doing it even if millions of people worldwide weren’t there to see it.

That joy and that drive, that’s rarer than unicorns or decent Vandy parking. Sincerity, even strapped to the hood of a Jim Steinman roadster like “It’s All Coming Back To Me Now,” punches through even the thickest of Lithium and Zoloft hazes, and it’s no surprise that the near twenty thousand faces filing out after the show were moved. I went with two pregnant women and an angel-faced vixen whose name was, in fact, Love, and we felt it for the rest of the night, the four of us.

International pop music interlude: Mylene Farmer (NSFW)

Now, a lot of people pay lip service to the idea that love/sex can stop our most ingrained and violent impulses- but not French diva Mylene Farmer. She's spent over twenty years making great pop music and phenomenal videos, and she's decided to put the record label's money where her ideology is.

Mylene Farmer - "Degeneration"

And all I can say is that between the new Grace Jones clip and this, it's been a staggeringly good week for classic innovative pop artists to come back strapped and bring their a-game. "Degeneration," directed by Bruno Aveillan, feels like a fusion of Madonna's "Bedtime Stories" with one event from Species and an inversion of several of the scenes from Lifeforce- only here, everybody gives instead of taking. Lots of flesh, Lots of unconventional pairings and triplings. Fun stuff. Since it contains nudity, I fear Youtube will pull it, but for the time being, I think it's okay just where it is.

Half Baked French.

So I was watching the Half Baked DVD with the French option a ways back, and what follows are the ten most useful pieces of language I picked up from it. Though I will readily confess that translating comedy must be really hard.



10. "bourdon" - bong.

09. "oui, sois cubain B." - yes, Cuban B.

08. "des chips a la creme sure et aux oignons avec de la trempette" - sour cream and onion chips with dip.

07. "fous le camp!" - "get away from me, bitch!" This phrase is also used, however, for "goddamn you!" and "Boo this man!"

06. "j'le crois. Je sais pas quoi, mais j'le crois." - I believe him, yo. I don't know why, but I do.

05. "va t'faire foutre, sale negre!" - fuck you, n*gga!

04. "oh, ton nichon" - damn girl, your titty.

03. "J'ai tue. J'ai aide a tuer. J'ai tue partoe de moi-meme. J'ne peux rien y changer, moi. Je dois rechercher Buddha. Je dois rechercher du Christ." - I have killed. I have helped to kill. I have killed a part of myself. I cannot change this, I. I must seek Buddha. I must seek Christ.

02. "Abba-Zabba, t'es mon seul pote" - Abba-Zabba, you're my only friend.

01. "Nous etions defonces" - We was to' up.