Sonic Youth — Daydream Nation

The opening chords of Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation lurch, dissipate and echo as if reaching through the murk of the '80s underground, searching for that vein of emotional and sociopolitical gold that ran through the rough of cocaine-fueled hyper-gloss. Sonic Youth, having honed their craft from a messy, highly experimental yet tame no-wave sound into something unique and formidable with previous albums EVOL and Sister, were on the precipice of launching themselves to the top of the budding indie rock heap. In Kim Gordon's drifting prologue, the band at last sees the path to glory, and they break through to it with as much majesty as rock 'n roll has ever contained.

When the riff for "Teen Age Riot" flies out of the speaker as soon as Gordon's prose fades, you know the band has crossed a threshold. An anthem worthy of placement with "Like a Rolling Stone," "Born to Run" and "My Generation," "Teen Age Riot" manages to cement the noise side of the band after it developed over the last two albums even as the group blended it with their first dose of pure, unadulterated pop. Unlike those aforementioned odes to defiance, "Teen Age Riot" is not a call to arms, instead capturing the feelings of youth in all their ennui. By not presenting adolescence as an "us vs. them" struggle with the outside forces of the establishment and elders but a tug-of-war within teenagers' own ranks for a sense of clarity, "Teen Age Riot" achieves the purity of an anthem with the complexity of a more realized composition.

From there, Daydream Nation combines the heightened songwriting ability the band displayed on their previous two albums with their propensity for elongating tunes into noise jams in a live setting. Songs easily stretch past the six- and seven-minute marks, elongating the band's most developed pop hooks into its most successful art-noise jams yet. "Cross the Breeze" opens with jangling, blissful chords before morphing into a fast-paced freak-fest that might pass for a thrash metal song. When Kim Gordon, at her most intensely stand-offish, enters the mix several minutes in, she leads the Youth through a song too long and disoriented to be considered punk but so righteous and furious that it's impossible to view it as anything but. "The Sprawl" is even looser, propelled by a tight beat that pits the band against each other as if in a battle royale. Both songs shouldn't stay together; you expect them to take off in a thousand different directions, either in reckless abandon or mathematical precision. Instead, the group always finds their way, always keeps the beat and always finds just the right balance between considerable ability and free-form, emotional playing.

When the lengths of the songs are tighter, as they are on "Silver Rocket" and most of the second LP, Sonic Youth attains a ferocity they occasionally displayed but never fully developed. The echoing clang of Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore's guitars, the buzz and hum of Gordon's bass and the carefully modulated sloppiness of Steve Shelley form a white-hot focal point on the shorter numbers, melting through whatever surface they touch. The raucous "Kissability" shows off Gordon's dry wit, while the three-part finale pays homage to the band that pointed the way for Sonic Youth's growth into the ultimate teen band, Dinosaur Jr.

Daydream Nation, despite being released the year before I was born, always sends me back to visions of high school, slamming lockers and idly doodling in binders. Like all teenagers, Daydream Nation mumbles, moves around uncertainly and self-consciously. But it also has the bravado of youth, the brash confidence of its crashing punk sound. Beneath it all, though, is the sincerity that marks the best of adolescence: we may not have a damn clue how the world works, but we mean well and want to change things for the better. And that's a damn sight more appealing than selling out for greater popularity and wealth (right Boomers?).

I actually have less to say about Daydream Nation than other Youth albums, such as Sister or the magnificent late-career masterpiece Murray Street. But the simplicity is what I most admire about the album. On its surface, it's just a blend of songwriting hooks and post-Krautrock electronic wash, but that doesn't get at its appeal. After all, Krautrock itself was, in the best cases, a mixture of pop hooks and sonic wash. What makes Daydream Nation so transcendent of time is the subtle, almost indescribable manner in which the band marries that sound to an undercurrent of shared emotion. Nearly everyone can relate to the feeling expressed by the record, even though the lyrics themselves border on nonsense (or, given how rarely anything approaches logic in the words, perhaps it's more accurate to say they border on sense).

One of the few enduring classics of the 1980s, Daydream Nation is all the proof one would ever need of Sonic Youth's greatness. Fortunately, they decided to pad their resumé with at least three or four other classics, just in case. Dinosaur Jr. inspired Sonic Youth with their seminal You're Living All Over Me, but Moore, Gordon and co. replaced J. Mascis' sludge with a sort of industrial twang; yes, there is a hint of country sorrow under the punk and no-wave influences, and maybe that's the aspect that makes Daydream Nation so gripping. That trace of a genre built upon self-pity, however justified, fits seamlessly with the crafting of the ultimate teenage anthem. It took numerous listens to glean that from the record, to hear in the echo of ringing guitars the sound of outlaws. Most of the country rebels weren't really that dangerous, and they peddled an angst not too dissimilar from the sort that alt.rockers sell. The only difference is that country aims years down the road, once the doubt of youth reveals itself to be a correct foreshadowing of a broken life. Because that sound, whether the band intended it or not, moves through the cascading mix of sounds and moods, Daydream Nation not only survives for each new generation of teenagers, it can be equally affecting as one moves out of that age range. It's as forward-thinking as it is nostalgic. Not bad for an album that contains the lines "To the extent that I wear skirts/and cheap nylon slips/I've gone native/I wanted to know the exact dimension of hell."

What Time is It There?

When someone describes a film as minimalistic, he usually refers to the aesthetic quality, a sparsity of construction and mise-en-scène that leaves a chill in the air. What so many, including myself, fail to adequately convey is that minimalist film, when done well, tends to be richer, more painterly and more evocative than more complicated work. Perhaps it's because the removal of classical elements of mise-en-scène take away the intellectualism of the cinema. Rather than give us symbols to toil over, directors pull back and leave emotions to fill the gap. Thus, it's harder to talk about these movies, because even when shots are deliberately arranged and edited and you see what the director is saying, you cannot fully discuss the picture without investing in it emotionally. For those who believe criticism should strive for objective verisimilitude, meaningful criticism of such works is impossible. It's easy to talk about someone's creative and emotional vision when it comes caged in unlockable elements. It's much harder when you have to expose yourself to talk about someone else's bared chest.

From a conceptual standpoint, Tsai Ming-liang's films suggest minimalism taken to an extreme. Not only is he a master of the long, static take, he reuses the same actors in essentially the same roles. Lee Kang-sheng plays the protagonist in all of Tsai's films, and he even carries the same character name, Hsiao-kang, across more than one feature. Lu Yi-ching tends to play the mother figure, Miao Tien the father. Chen Shiang-chyi plays the young woman, be she a love interest or something else. Tsai even reuses the fish from The River. Plenty of directors work with actors multiple times, but by assigning the same cast to roughly the same parts each time, Tsai expands upon his ideas of dissociation and conformity before a film even starts: though he leaves open the possibility that the feelings of disconnect and ennui in his characters are rooted in the same people, the recycling of casts allows him to make the case that we're all becoming the same. Modern thinking coined the term "nuclear family," and it also made that unit into its own prison. No longer about community, now all we have is our immediate relatives, and we cannot even communicate with them.

The first shot of What Time is It There? hangs outside the kitchen of a humble Taiwanese home as an old man finishes preparing dinner. He walks into the room where the camera rests and sets down his plate on a table, but he doesn't eat, restlessly reaching for a cigarette and fidgeting. Though he sets a plate for no one else, he gets out of his chair and calls for Hsiao-kang, then he steps outside on the back porch and rearranges a plant. His disquiet, though calm, introduces an anxious mood, and the look of emptiness in Miao's face when he sits closer to the camera is haunting but understated. The only dialogue of the entire scene is the father shouting "Hsiao-kang!" The rest unfolds in near silence, only the rustling of the rearranged plant and the creak of the wooden chair putting something in the audio track.

In the next shot, Tsai relocates to a car with the young Hsiao-kang, now cradling a container with his father's ashes. He and his mother head to an interment, located in what almost looks like a reference library, filled with shelves of fine oak cabinets in which to store remains. Instead of the unique and differentiated headstones in Western cemeteries (one of which Tsai later shows), this place literalizes the idea that we are all equal in death, and it also suggests that we are equal and unoriginal in life. As I watched this scene, I thought of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, that horrific obsidian wall that reduces the meaningless sacrifice of so many thousands to simply their names, at once an admission of our shame and a final attempt by the powers that be to minimize the disgust by removing all humanity from the equation. We know as little about Hsiao-kang's father in death as we did in the brief amount of life we saw.

Tsai complicates the shot further by introducing the first of many tragicomic elements in the film. As the camera sits in the narrow corridor of this modernized, efficient form of interment, a Buddhist priest performs a funeral ritual, clanging chimes and chanting centuries-old prayers in the middle of this clinical room. The sight of the priest, in his bright orange robe, standing among the polished, nondescript, dark wood paneling is inherently funny, but the sorrow it communicates, of committed Buddhists trying to ensure their beloved will return, is rending. At the same time, the way that the rows of ashes resemble a kind of reference section, a place of storage, also implies that these wee cupboards might actually aid the Buddhist idea of reincarnation: they might merely be places where one's former body is stored while the spirit seeks a new host.

It's impossible to feel optimistic about that line of thought, though, when you follow the reactions of the son and wife left behind. The mother continues to hold Buddhist rituals in the hopes of bringing her husband back, constantly setting his plate for dinner and interpreting anything remotely suspicious as her husband's ghost floating around. Hsiao-kang, who does not seem as if he was ever that sociable, retreats into his room, not even leaving to urinate. Instead, he pees in plastic containers -- bags, bottles -- like Howard Hughes. During the day, he leaves the room only to go sell watches on the street, where a woman (Chen Shiang-chyi) approaches him looking for a watch that can keep two times as she is leaving for Paris soon. Unimpressed by any of the watches he's flogging, Shiang-ciyi asks if she can buy the one Hsiao-kang is wearing. Having received the watch from his father, Hsiao-kang feels not only an emotional connection to the timepiece but a superstitious one, fearing that he would give away a piece of his dad. But he relents, and the woman goes on her way.

After this brief encounter, Hsiao-kang's behavior begins to shift. On a whim, he begins to set the watches in his case to Parisian time, then any clock he can find. He visits a bootleg stand and asks for French films, taking home François Truffaut's The 400 Blows (Tsai's favorite movie). At night, he sits awake, watching this scratchy, panned and scanned version of the movie that lops off 2/3 of the original frame. Later in the film, Tsai shows the woman in Paris sitting on a bench when the star of Truffaut's masterpiece, Jean-Pierre Léaud, sits beside her and attempts to make small talk.

These tendrils snake and wave, directionless as the tentacles of a sea anemone, but they never converge or brush against each other. The vague connection that tugs at Hsiao-kang is perhaps not romantically motivated so much as the outgrowth of his increasing hollowness. No one else who stops to buy the boy's watches makes any impression, as they do the usual: they scan over Hsiao-kang's wares, maybe haggle a bit and move on. Shiang-ciyi stood out, and whether he feels any attraction to her is secondary to the mere fact that she broke the routine.

When Tsai takes his camera to Paris to follow the woman, though, he does not resort to portraying her as some free spirit to extend her unorthodox actions with Hsiao-kang. Rather, she seems as lost and without purpose as the man whose watch she purchased, if not more so. In Paris, she is naturally alienated from the domestic population, and she does not make clear why she even came. She nurses a piece of paper with a phone number but never calls the mysterious person, leaving her isolated in France. Listlessly, she wanders Paris, not even taking in the sights as she uncomfortably sits coffee in cafés as if she heard that's what Parisians do and just repeats the action over and over in an attempt to fit in. A sense of displacement pervades the film, but Shiang-chyi literalizes it, having traveled to another part of the world to find somewhere she might belong, only to be even more lost.

Compared to the ragged howl of pain in Wong Kar-wai's films, loneliness and loss in Tsai Ming-liang's movies are more contained, held behind a dam that holds back the flood until cracks appear. He denies us the catharsis of full release, achieving a pain even greater than that of Wong. Where his previous film, The River, was more explicitly about modernity and the threat of interpersonal loss in a world that now functioned on a global scale, What Time is It There? approaches the same general subject in a way that complicates and deepens it.

The problem Tsai finds in the modern world here is not that we lose all sense of connection but that there are so many possibilities opened up to us that we experience sensory overload and shut down. The mise-en-scène in Tsai's shots is always static and angled, not in mathematical precision but to ensure that no one faces horizontally, where they might make eye contact with someone to their side, nor directly at the camera, where they might at least feel us watching and caring about them. They have options, but in their confusion they wind up stuck in the middle, facing diagonally to nothing.

Numerous moments of the film speak to this disconnect. At a subway station in Paris, Shiang-chyi sees an Asian man, perhaps Taiwanese, across the gap, but when he board the train that fills the space between them, she does not move to make conversation despite the longing for communication that's plain on her face. Hsiao-kang and his mother cannot relate to each other, but if they could just sit down and talk about their emotions over the patriarch's death, they might move forward. Instead, the mother is reduced to sobbing and begging for answers from the family fish as she grips the tank desperately. Later, Hsiao-kang listens to a frothy, lightweight radio show that recounts silly news stories as a chirpy but disengaged female voice bounces through titillating nuggets. One of the stories concerns a dog running around a highway, and the woman on the radio goes through a series of awful jokes about it trying to get a suntan, only for someone to call in and say the poor thing got run over. After the slightest pause and downturn in the host's voice, she returns to business as usual, masking a sense of pain with the same hollow façade Hsiao-kang and the others use, even if they're not as bubbly.

In the film's most tragicomic moment, Hsiao-kang sits in a theater after leaving a store where he rearranged the time on the clocks. The other customer who watched him do it comes in, sits next to Hsiao-kang in a nearly empty theater, takes the kid's giant clock and walks off. Hsiao-kang follows him, ending up in a bathroom where the man opens a stall to reveal dropped pants with the clock covering his penis. It's quietly absurd, but it suggests that the man was snapped out of his own ennui and disconnect by watching Hsiao-kang. Just as the boy felt an imperceptible tug toward the woman, so too does this man to Hsiao-kang, and while it's funny when he casually knocks the stall door closed on the man and walks out with a sigh, it's also sad because Hsiao-kang cannot see his own pain in others.

There are casualties in Tsai's view of the modern world, however. The director sees the irony of his fears of cultural loss in a homogenized world when his own cinephilia sprang from European cinema, and he rather reluctantly places the New Wave on the chopping block. The hissing, snowy bootleg of The 400 Blows casts the young Jean-Pierre Léaud as a ghost, and when Shiang-chyi meets the aged Léaud, they sit in a cemetery (itself contrasting classical Western interment, ornate and influenced by Christian social values, with the crematory policy of Taiwan). Shiang-chyi has no clue who he is, both a result of generational gap and cultural separation, and Tsai clear mourns the New Wave even as he makes clear that if the final nail had not been put in the movement's coffin, he is going to be the one to do it.

The title of the film is What Time is It There?, but 'where' is a relative term dependent on 'here.' Nothing makes time more disjunctive than the cinema, which can cross space and time in a single cut. For a film that uses clocks as a central symbol, the movie wryly has a non-linear progression even though it does not seem to ever double back. The structure of the film becomes as displaced as its characters, always moving forward but never really going anywhere, never recognizing what's happening.

The climax of the film is among the most haunting I've ever seen, similar in its culminating expression of directionless ennui and existentialist doubt to the ending of Tokyo Sonata. Each of the three primary characters engages in a sexual activity that only separates them further from others. In Paris, Shiang-chyi meets a woman in a restaurant and comes back to her hotel room. They sleep together, in a literal sense, but Shiang-chyi leans over and kisses the woman as if repaying the favor of talking to someone. The woman is unresponsive. Back in Taiwan, Hsiao-kang has sex with a prostitute, while the mother vents her sorrow and her fantasies of her husband returning by masturbating with the container of her husband's ashes. The awkwardness of this and Shiang-chyi's moments might be funny, but they are intensely affecting. The mother in particular seems to think that this perverse act with bring her closer once more with her husband, that his ghost might return and pleasure her. In the end, she seals herself off, reduced to isolated self-love she envisions as reconnection instead of finding someone else. (And what Western actress would sob noiselessly, avoiding histrionics and awards-baiting monologues, while still letting snot run down her face?)

The film's final scene does not bring these people together, because that's not the point. Where so many of the "network narrative" try to link people, the only thing the characters in What Time is It There? have in common with each other, even the relatives, is how alone they are. Tsai moves at last to Paris, unable to bring mother and son together, to close on Shiang-chyi. She sits by a pool, lounging uncomfortably and meditatively in a chair built always to lean back. Behind her is an empty chair. Some children play with her suitcase, throwing it into the pool, only for Hsiao-kang's father to walk by and fish it out. What does this mean? I cannot say on a first watch, but it spoke to me about those tendrils that connect even the loneliest of people, and that perhaps all that we saw was Hsiao-kang's projection of the woman he obsessed over, looking to her to get over the pain of his father's loss. In his mind, maybe she actually did take a piece of his father with her to Paris, where he now lives. It's a magical moment, reminiscent of the end of Being There, but it also has its bleaker side. The woman who made an impression on Hsiao-kang is stuck in Paris, and his father is there too. But he remains in Taiwan, possibly imagining all this but never going there himself. Some part of him knows Paris won't really be like that, and that he will just become as alienated as Shiang-chyi there. It's the final joke in a dryly comic film, the prospect that a third of the story, as depressing as it was, was actually someone's most hopeful fantasy. But like all the other gags, it's rooted in a deep sadness that turns laughter into tears.

Four Lions

Chris Morris, the most ingenious and darkly savage man in British television comedy (which places him high in the running for most ruthless comedian period), is no stranger to controversy, but he pulls no punches for his debut feature. Four Lions is a jihadist comedy, focusing on a group of British-born Muslims planning a fundamentalist uprising in England. What is most surprising , and rewarding, about it is the manner in which the film manages not only to avoid cheaply offending Muslims but to deliver a scathing blow to fundamentalism of all stripes.


The nature of terrorism makes the enemy a nebulously defined other that lives as a specter in the minds of those who fear it. Recently, it has taken root in the Western consciousness as nothing more specific than Arabs or those of Arab ethnicity. What Morris recognizes, especially in the wake of the 7/7 bombings on the London Underground, is that even if Muslims are the ones primarily targeting Western infrastructure at the moment, many of those involved have been raised at least partially with a connection to the West, either benefiting from Western financial cooperation, as Osama bin Laden did until the royal family broke contact with him, or like those responsible for the London bombings, having grown up in the Western world.

Morris could all too easily have fallen into the trap of making his natural-born Muslim characters symbolic of a perceived need for post-9/11 or 7/7 constant vigilance concerning all Muslims. Instead, he portrays the group of five British Muslims yearning for jihad as the result of the extremities of a religion they haven't outpaced and a society that essentially views them as terrorists anyway. Far from crazed fundamentalists, these men appear stuck in millennial ennui, so unable to find their place in this hypermodern world that they return to their roots.

The only problem is that they are all magnificently stupid. Omar (Rix Ahmed), the de facto ringleader, is the sharpest of the bunch but still naïve and childish. When his son, who may not be as erudite as dad but has the same ignorance, asks his father about holy war, Omar likens it to the plot of The Lion King, and one wonders if that's not how he actually envisions the role of fundamentalist Islam against Western oppression. His closest friend, Taj (Kayvan Novak), is hapless and often confused, to the point that he even knows he makes a specific face when bewildered and continues to irrationally until he starts making that face and takes a step back. He believes heaven to be a place not unlike the theme park Alton Towers, specifically the "rubber-dinghy rapids" ride. Faisal (Adeel Akhtar), who attempts to train crows to carry tiny bombs into targets, to no avail.

Then, there's Barry (veteran actor Nigel Lindsay), a convert who, as the old saying goes, is more devout than any of the men raised Muslims. He speaks of bombing a mosque in a Watchmen-esque double-blind to rally the moderate Muslims to jihad, but in that plan is also a hint of self-righteousness against the mosques that are starting to soften as they enter the 21st century. He speaks of women "talking back" and mosques playing music with stringed instruments, horrifying changes that must, of course, be swiftly eradicated. "I'm the most al-Qaeda one here," the hysterically white, well-fed man whines when Omar and Taj head off to Pakistan to join a training camp, but the absurdity of the moment doesn't disguise the fact that's he not wrong. Barry reminded me of John Goodman's character in The Big Lebowski, save for the fact that he converted to Islam instead of Judaism. Both are portly, loud, inept yet unstoppably confident, and their zeal makes for as many moments of fearful discomfort as laughs.

Morris, whose programs The Day Today and Brass Eye precipitated The Daily Show's format under Jon Stewart (albeit much, much darker), is familiar with the media's role in society. In the advent of 24-hour news channels, much less the Internet, the media serves less to inform the public than it does to do anything in its power to grab ratings. As such, these men seem to view suicide bombing not only as a path to heaven but to fame. Hassan, a prankster who makes himself known as Barry speaks at a panel discussion on Islam in the UK, loves to rhyme everything, acting as if he might become the next 2pac on his path to salvation. Never mind that no one ever remembers those who carry out the bombings, only the ones who planned attacks in secrecy and safety; the constant recording of home-video tapes à la Osama's video messages only rams the idea home. These guys probably got their picked and chosen Qur'an quotes and their fame-hungry approach from the same place: YouTube.

After all, they all display a total lack of Islamic knowledge. In Pakistan, Taj faces east to pray, having faced east his whole life, and he even argues when one of the Pakistanis berates him because Mecca is the other way. Taj has clearly never had to truly face Mecca, only a vague direction that someone told him to face in England. Omar is enlightened enough to treat his wife with respect and equality, but his mockery of some friends' outdated ways falls flat when he returns to cherry-picking other fundamentalist quotes from his holy text. And when the Muslims say something terrible is always "God's plan, they sound as fatalistic and unbelieving as the Christians who utter it." When Taj somehow corrals some hostages in the film's climax, he notes that they are Muslim but asks Omar, "I still get points for taking them with me, right? Like Nectar card?"

No one escapes unscathed from Morris' withering eye. At the panel discussion where Hassan reveals himself, he sets off fake explosives after scaring everyone, only to yell police brutality when security escorts him out calmly. As the audience is mostly bourgeois college students, there are actually boos when cops gently take him outside. A liberal MP on the panel rightly separates extremists from the rest of the pack, but he wrongly takes such a soft, PC view on the matter that he neglects to issue the proper response to those who do commit terrorism: unforgiving punishment carried out in due process. Police come off as inept at the wannabe terrorists, chasing them around in the climax and firing at the wrong Muslims in an unspoken demonstration of the "they all look alike" racial view; Morris then undercuts this more scathing attack with a more riotous argument over whether a man in a marathon dressed as Chewbacca are with the other costumed terrorists, leading to an argument over whether Chewie is the "bear" being targeted.

Four Lions is funny. It's damned funny. I haven't laughed so hard since...oh dear, since Morris' Day Today cohort Armando Iannucci put out In the Loop last year. We learn that Barry tried to order silver nitrate on Amazon, and he constantly blames his dilapidated car's breakdowns on "Jewish parts" (mainly spark plugs, natch). Omar and Waj have fun discussing how they'd kill each other for Islam, describing in graphic detail how they would destroy each other but making it sound like the "Do you know how I know you're gay" scene in The 40-Year-Old Virgin. And just like those two idiots, Omar and Taj come off as so vapid that it's impressive they still know how to breathe.

Near the end, Four Lions loses its way a bit, with Morris looking for a way out that maintains his attack on the various targets of the film -- blinding liberal guilt, incompetent (and possibly racist) police force, religious fundamentalism -- without coming to any too-definite conclusions that might reduce everything to oversimplified points. But the problem is that Four Lions lacks any real climactic punch because of it. In the end, it becomes unexpectedly tragic, but if the last 15 minutes were tighter that peek of emotion at the end could have been much more poignant.

Nevertheless, Four Lions is as good a comedy as I've seen in some time, a well-researched, well-measured study of a prickly labyrinth of controversy and the endless double-back of religious and social hypocrisy that maintains a tight hold until the last 20 minutes and rallying again at the end. It may not measure up to the heights of either In the Loop or Morris' own television work, but it's more than a worthy debut feature for its creator and a hopeful sign of more blistering cinema to come from one of the UK's best talents. Being as used as I am to the typical American approach to social and ethnic comedy, I was deathly afraid that Four Lions would take the easy, race-baiting way out despite the best efforts of those involved. That'll teach me to underestimate the British.

House

From the opening title card, featuring the "O" in the film's title turning into a cartoon mouth with pointy teeth, House more or less guarantees you're going to have a good time. A broad mixture of slapstick humor, late-'60s existentialist/stoner road movie and cabin-in-the-woods supernatural horror, House serves as a meeting of matter and antimatter between Eastern and Western pop culture that explodes upon contact. The only thing more bewildering than the madness of what director Nobuhiko Obayashi puts on-screen is the obvious skill with which he works. The Room this is not; here is a midnight movie that throws together the best (and worst) that pop culture had to offer in 1977, and the glorious mess that follows may inspire hoots and hollers that make it perfect for showing past curfew on a Wednesday night in an art house, but it's also genuinely and unironically enjoyable.

Obayashi made the film in a dark spot of Japanese film history, after most of the postwar giants were dead or in decline. Even the Japanese New Wave had faded from the public consciousness. Toho, that great studio that had bankrolled Kurosawa's masterpieces before casting him out, must have felt it a sign of the times that someone working for them even financed Obayashi, and even the desperate studio felt a pang of revulsion when House proved a hit. But how couldn't it have been? It's just too weird, even for the most stereotypical opinion of Japanese pop culture and its oddities, to ignore. Hell, Janus Films only acquired the rights last year and it's already proved to be one of its more popular grabs, playing to packed art houses around the country.

House opens properly on a vision of Japanese schoolgirls, that most overplayed of fetishes, and Obayashi makes sure to emphasize the creepy adoration grown men fawn on these Lolitas even more by using soft, white lighting and lilting music whenever he shoots the main schoolgirl, a young lady named Gorgeous (Kimiko Ikegami). Later, when everything goes somewhere just south of Hell, he continues to use softer lighting for Gorgeous.

Gorgeous and her friends are excited for summer vacation, and Gorgeous in particular cannot wait to head off to her usual vacation spot with her loving father, who just got back from scoring films in Italy ("Leone said my music was better than Morricone's," he boasts). All is well, until the father introduces Ryoko, his new bride-to-be. Before the poor man can even get into how lonely he's felt all these years without her mom, Gorgeous flies into a petulant rage and flees, canceling her plans to go off with her father and stepmother. Instead, she writes to her dead mother's sister to announce a visit, and she even brings five of her friends.

Obayashi does the audience the favor of preparing them in advance for what's about to come by setting up wild mise-en-scène and bizarre editing techniques from the start. The use of painted skies for backgrounds recalls the inexplicable CGI backdrops in The Room or, to stop forcing comparisons to midnight movies and instead place House with contemporary Japanese cinema -- the oneiric kaleidoscope of the dream sequences in Kurosawa's 1980 Kagemusha. Obayashi also uses overlapping images, different film speeds, even rewind and replay to draw out some actions with deliberate artifice. It's overwhelming and more than a little annoying, but the style is so unique that it hooks you from the start, long before the film itself matches up to the madness of the framing.

After a surreal ride through the country by train and car that resembles Yellow Submarine on acid -- sorry, more acid -- the young women find themselves at "Auntie's" house. Auntie, seemingly confined to a wheelchair, welcomes them with open arms, so glad to have company at last. Yet objects in her home move slightly but forcibly, and she has a habit of speaking in faintly ominous lines. When one of the girls (a pudgy lady by the name of "Mac," an unfortunate shortening of "stomach") goes to retrieve the watermelon the young women got for Auntie as a gift, no one hears from her again until her decapitated head floats over a terrified schoolgirl and bites her on the bum. Oh, I'm sorry, you were expecting transitions?

At this moment, House flips the switch from lightly surreal teen comedy with thinly veiled undertones of ephebophilic lust into balls-to-the-wall horror-comedy. It amazes me to think that House never got shown in the States until last year, because otherwise I would have to retroactively accuse Sam Raimi of rampant plagiarism in his own frenetic take on the Evil Dead films. Obayashi uses sped-up footage and ingenuity to pull off some of the haunted house's effects, such as windows slamming and shuttering of their own accord and a suspended lamp falling down to eat one hapless girl. And the climactic bloodbath makes the spray of red stuff from the cellar in Evil Dead II look tame in comparison. It might even outdo the flooding elevators in The Shining. Before that, he turns the Lolita aspect of the film on its ear, presenting the stereotypically arousing sight of a young woman in a pillow fight, only for the poor thing to be smothered to death by possessed pillows.

Beneath all this insanity, however, are some deeper and more affecting thoughts. It is revealed that Auntie died some years ago, but that her ghost remains because she waits for her lover to return from World War II. In an early flashback, Auntie poses at her sister's wedding day, looking anxious in photos about one day being the one in the bridal gown. When the photographer snaps off a picture, Obayashi contrasts his bulb flash with the detonation of an atomic bomb. Obayashi, born in Hiroshima and sent to live with his grandparents when his father went to the battlefront, lost all his friends on Aug. 6, 1945, and he vents some of that pain and rage here. By eating unmarried girls, Auntie not only forces others to feel her pain, she targets the young, meaning those who grew up without the baggage of World War II and Hiroshima/Nagasaki. How easily they might forget without a reminder, and what better reminder than being themselves consumed for their giddy appropriation of Western ideas?

That is not to say that House is some anti-Western screed, mind you. Its soundtrack is blatantly Western, with a combination of pop and light funk playing in all the places not occupied by the gentle piano motif that announces Gorgeous. American pop culture has as much to do with the aesthetic as the Japanese variety. Ultimately, this more complex line of thought is just another part of House's puzzle, a gloriously incoherent off-masterpiece that never lets any one idea last long enough for anything to make sense. I've gotten into the midnight movie craze recently, attending my share of bad film showings -- I've seen The Room more than any of my 10 favorite films by this point -- but what we ignore when latching onto "so-bad-it's-good" is that there are out-there, cult films that are just plain good. It makes them so much easier to watch.

Welcome Back, Conan

Compared to the exuberant, triumphant opening video of his first Tonight Show, in which he took the reins of a franchise with such joy that he ran cross-country rather than wait a few seconds for any other mode of transportation to arrive, the opening of Conan O'Brien's self-titled show on TBS bore the scars of the lanky ginger's previous job. This time, Conan was bitter, telling his bosses to screw themselves for ruining his dream and driving off-set, only for a Godfather parody to leave him riddled with bullets and told by stern doctors that he'd never return to network television. After working a series of odd jobs, Conan finally, with the help of guardian angel Larry King, found his way to basic cable, and all seemed right with the world. Until gangsters showed up once more with Tommy guns and tore him apart once more.


Funny as it was, the opening sketch of Conan suggested a continuing resentment for NBC, one that could dominate the focus of his new show. But, apart from a few (excellent) zingers at his old employer's expense, Conan quickly moved into his new job with ease. Whether a conscious attempt to set himself apart from his nemesis, Jay Leno, or simply an expression of gratitude for the fan support that won him his new position, Conan inverted Leno's recent penchant for having the crowd flock around him in a faux-populist move by actually interacting with the crowd of his own volition. As he took his bows before a standing ovation, Conan slipped off behind the camera to hug a woman in the front row. Later, in-between monologue jokes, he casually ducked to the side and shook a guy's hand. Rather than lavish in a sense of community, as Leno does to detrimental effect -- Patton Oswalt nailed it when he said that people creepily congregated around Jay as if he excreted a healing elixir -- Conan poked fun at these moments by playing himself up as a creepy old man playing grab-ass with a captive audience.

One could chalk the strength of his monologue up to the fact that his writers had, oh, about nine months to work on it, but even the delivery was sharp. The nervousness that tinged Conan's first Tonight Show performances, the result of a man -- even a professional -- getting his deepest wish granted on national television and being accordingly stunned, was gone, replaced by the Conan that emerged at the end of his tenure at NBC, a fiery blend of his old Late Night madness with the sophistication (or at least the steely self-confidence) of a host working at 11:30.

Conan is at his best when he's making fun of himself, and beneath the jabs at his former employer were a host of gags at his own expense. Apart from a number of monologue jokes that made fun of himself, Conan brought Andy Richter to the couch, where they broke out Conan Halloween masks that, for legal reasons, were depressingly named "Ex-Talk Show Host" masks. "It smells like tears!" quipped Andy, muffled through the rubber of the hysterically creepy costume. And if that wasn't odd enough, the host then turned to look at the background image painted behind the desk, complete with a moon Conan could move via remote control, leading to a low-fi wobble that made Andy shout "Any Mayans watching this are freaking out!" (In case it wasn't obvious, Richter was as on-his game as O'Brien.)


Compared to the moving but shaky first episode of the Tonight Show, Conan hit the ground running, displaying the best of its host. In some ways, frankly, it displayed better than Conan's previous best. As an interviewer, Conan has always been good at setting up funny and interesting guests with whom he has a prior relationship, but he has been desperately stilted with stars just there to plug material. With a taped message from Ricky Gervais, an interview with Seth Rogen and a musical performance by (and with) Jack White, Conan certainly surrounded himself with buddies, but I found myself most drawn to his chat with Glee star Lea Michele. Where I expected him to stick to the cards and ask simple questions, he suddenly got involved with the guest, engaging in as much of a chatty atmosphere as he did with Rogen -- hell, he might actually have been more on-point with Rogen with his questions concerning Green Hornet. Michele, while not a bore or a ditz, didn't bring a whole lot to the conversation at first, and I feared a dull interview, but Conan's more natural side brought out the best in her, and by the end of their five or six-minute chat, I was a fan of her.

Even the set reflected a honing of Conan's skills. Though he eventually made great use of the expansiveness of NBC's Tonight Show set, his previous digs were simply too massive, creating too wide a gulf between host and audience and leaving the vast majority of the room unused. Only when Conan started running races, practicing Hollywood stunts or bringing elephants in the place did he finally make it feel human. TBS gave him a set that resembled his large but still intimate Late Night studio, bigger than the cramped, '80s-Letterman style room he got at the start of his run but manageable. He still has plenty of room to do something big, and I hope he brings some of the more daring (if expensive) ideas from his Tonight Show to TBS. But the smaller set works to his benefit and allows him to seem more human instead of the occasional detachment that came with Conan's previous show, even when it took off in terms of quality. (Now they just need need to condense that Lopez Tonight set; does he tape in a goddamn abandoned warehouse or something? You can hear the mic echo, for God's sake.)

If there was anything I wanted to see done differently, it was the ingenious bit of Conan's "first guest," introduced to much fanfare, only for it to be the curator of a nutcracker museum who walked from stage right to stage left, pausing just long enough to hand Conan a notably stereotypical leprechaun nutcracker before exiting the building. It was pure Conan, but I couldn't help but wish he'd asked her some questions. Some of Carson's (and Letterman's) best bits came from interviews with the unconventional "normal" people in society, not celebrities. Regular people weren't so much plugging something as discussing a passion, and in all their weirdness they were endearing -- who can forget Johnny inviting a woman on who collected potato chips, only to play one of his most riotous jokes on her?

I also view the unchanged talk show format with a slight amount of hesitation. Coming off his live tour, which mixed performance art, monologue, taped segment and various forms of off-the-wall, borderline avant-garde comedy into something that befitted his absurdity. Yet the traditional talk show format is how he worked for 20 years, and just because he worked within a formula didn't mean he was stilted. Sure, his monologues work mainly because of his wacky delivery and recovery, but the two staples of talk shows -- monologues and interviews -- have been weak spots for him. Even so, he made his show(s) work, and work brilliantly. As he showed last night, he still had the touch.

We'll see what happens when the initial luster wears off, the guests aren't stacked to be friends of Conan and the writers have to come up with material daily instead of on their paid leave, yet something was different in Conan last night. While far from arrogant, he did not let the humbling power of his recent career path subdue him. He was not a man meekly inheriting a dynasty but a confident leader establishing his own, a Yu the Great for basic cable. It's easy (and sensible) to take Conan at face value when he says he chose the title because "it makes me harder to replace," but his decision also acknowledges, perhaps painfully, that talk shows no longer have a legacy beyond their host. No one watches The Late Show or The Late Late Show, they watch "Letterman" or "Craig." O'Brien admirably brought a reverence for the Tonight Show's history to his all-too-brief run, but Leno had spent nearly 20 years pretending as if no one else had ever hosted the thing. Hell, he had to: the king of late night was, is and forever shall be Johnny Carson, and Leno forced him out with weaselly business practices. As much as people, even of my generation, continue to love Johnny, it was Jay's show long enough that he became synonymous with it, and also with its slide into tame mediocrity. Now, Conan can build something from the ground up, and in a forum where the financial stakes are lower and the potential for creative freedom is higher. Some continue to mock the transition as a downgrade, and it is -- he lost the Tonight Show; everything else is a step down -- but moving to basic cable in an era when nearly everyone has regular cable and the distinction no longer matter was a masterstroke that sidestepped the hairy issues of working for FOX. I can't wait to see how Conan works with the change.

I hope that a more madcap style seeps into the show's actual format and not just in Conan's behavior, but either way, Conan's return exceeded my expectations. Once they get settled in, I imagine we'll be treated to a new set of bizarre characters, the always enjoyable moments when Conan leaves the studio and just interacts with people as kooky as him, and the legacy of a great comic will be restored. Glad you're back Conan; Neil Young sang for Conan's last Tonight Show, "Long may you run."

Plastic Bag

How I have managed to elude Ramin Bahrani's short film Plastic Bag for months baffles me. Bahrani, the greatest newcomer to American cinema, is guaranteed my money for anything he does, and Plastic Bag was conveniently available on YouTube, legally, for free. However I ended up getting distracted, I was reminded at last to finally set aside the time for the 18-minute short upon seeing that Ed Howard posted a review earlier today. Before I could read it, I had to sit down and watch Plastic Bag, and when it was over, I kicked myself even harder for waiting all these months.

Superficially an expansion of the (in)famous bag sequence of American Beauty, one of the dumbest and most vacantly symbolic moments in modern American cinema, Plastic Bag plays like what Sam Mendes and Alan Ball wished they'd said in their film. Where Ball intended the bag sequence as one of the few serious moments in a suburban satire, Bahrani understands the innate humor of following a bag around as it floats through the air, sticks in trees and rolls along a beach. Yet he also delves into the suggestive properties of such an insignificant thing in an indifferent world.

Ergo, the decision to use Werner Herzog as the voice of the bag is a stroke of genius: no other filmmaker has more consistently focused upon the imposing endlessness of the world around the speck of an ambitious protagonist than Herzog, and no one has been as darkly funny in the process. His unique cadence, in which words slur together slightly as if being rushed out of the mouth even as Herzog draws out every last syllable in sostenuto tones, is fatalistic but deadpan, creating a depressing narration but also one filled with laughs.

The bag speaks of taking its first breath when a grocery clerk pulls the flattened bag open to fill it with groceries. The woman who buys the food grabs the bag, which comes to view her as his Maker, and takes her stuff home. There, she continues to reuse the bag as a means of recycling, and the bag speaks of the pure ecstasy of carrying her lunch and other items, bordering on sexual desire when she puts ice in the bag and rests it on a sore leg. Then, she starts using the bag to hold dog food and, finally, to pick up the dog's crap before tossing it in the trash.

The landfill where a garbage truck takes the bag is endless, stretching over hills teeming with seagulls as bulldozers try in vain to compact the refuse. The bag speaks of being pecked by the monsters who take pieces of it until they realize that the bag is not food. Several types of creatures do this to the bag in its journey to return home, poking holes in the thing but never fully destroying it.

Through Bahrani's lens, the sight of a plastic bag being endlessly pecked and experiencing moments of blissful flight and excruciatingly dull stillness when the wind dies becomes a poetic view of life itself. Everything is sunny and wondrous at the onset of being, only for maturation and moving into solitary life to bring the hardship of feeling as if the world casually steals pieces of you. Worse, it has no reason to do so, no way to use those bits it strips from the flesh and soul. The bag enjoys a moment of happiness when it enters into a midair "dance" with a red bag, but in an age where half of marriages end in divorce, the wind blows the two apart. At last, our hero makes its way to the Pacific Trash Vortex to be with its kind, only to pine for its Maker until it cannot relate to the other trash. Bahrani -- and maybe even Herzog -- paints life as the combination of fleeting moments of bliss and a sense of discomfort that nags whenever the good moments pass, and they always pass so quckly. Maybe that's bleak, but the director achieves a more beautiful rumination of life by choosing exclusively neither optimism nor cynicism.


The subtlety of Bahrani's direction also allows him to deal with environmental and economic messages. He tracks the bag through the outside world through alternating shots of nature and post-industrial decay. The press material for the film places it in the "not-so distant future," and the sights of suburban rot the bag passes by speak to a dying world where the pollution of humans may be the inheritor to mankind. The only human ever shown is the woman who bought the groceries, but the effects of humanity on the world are plainly evident. The bag, itself trash that could kill one of the animals that pecks at it if something swallowed the whole bag, rolls through abandoned homes possibly foreclosed upon during the economic crisis and finds not one but two massive areas coated with non-degradable garbage. At the same time, nature surivives, and the bag's spoken views on its surroundings, which displays a peevishly human view of nature as an obstacle, are contrasted with the beauty of Bahrani's high-definition imagery, capturing blue skies and green foliage in brilliant clarity. Mankind may be circling the drain like the garbage in the trash vortex, but nature will survive, and its beauty is mesmerizing in the background.

What amused and affected me the most was the Freudian streak running through Bahrani's narrative. The first person who has any use for the bag, just as the first person to care about us, is his "mother," who creates an expectation for life that life cannot live up to. Eventually, she sends him packing to go into the world, and for all the bag's adventures, it can never stop thinking about its maker/mother, even drowning itself (literally) in its own kind to try to forget about her. In the end, it cannot, and it throws itself outside the vortex, only to get caught on a rock and be left to float for eternity to be gently nibbled at by fish. But the bag finally sobers up a bit and accepts the beauty of what's in front of it. Still, it has one complaint for the mother that abandoned it and provided the basis of a life of searching: "I wish you had created me so I could die."

In 18 minutes, Plastic Bag manages to be funny, bleak, thought-provoking, emotive and poetic. It is the fourth significant work by Ramin Bahrani, and the fourth great movie. Plastic Bag contains as many memorable images as any feature I've seen this year, from the gorgeous, lilting sky ballet between the two bags to a shot of the main bag floating through the ocean by jellyfish that do not look so different from the flimsy but endurable plastic. Bahrani's direction normally recalls the other great modern North Carolinian, David Gordon Green, only with a clearer deference to Abbas Kiarostami than Terrence Malick. Yet it is this short film that breaks him fully of even the slightest dependence on any other director. The comparisons to American Beauty are as meaningless as the scene in Mendes' movie that prompts the juxtaposition: this is art, symbolic yet emotive and expressive, stylistic but aesthetically spare. Once again, I am reminded that a short film in the hands of a master can be vastly superior to the full-length products of the less-talented.

Wild Grass

As silly as it is to look for trends in the cinema, sometimes they're just so esoteric that they're too fun not to share. If 2010 has a thread I never expected to see, it's the emergence of a few off-the-wall, brilliant romantic comedies. Rom-coms have become a one-stop shop for the worst of commercial cinema lately, removing the charm and wit that once characterized the genre as one of the most rewarding of mainstream types and turning it into a juggernaut of weak titillation, barren emotion and the most reductive stereotypes in film.

Wild Grass, which premiered to great ballyhoo at last year's Cannes Festival, finally got a U.S. limited release in July of this year before quietly coming to DVD last Tuesday stands with Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy as a romantic comedy that returns to the roots of the genre as a screwball outpouring of the silliest, most ebullient joy the early talkies had to offer. And like Certified Copy, Wild Grass is informed by cinema. Helmed by the 87-year-old Alain Resnais, the film is also but the latest evidence that the cheekiest, freshest and most giddily cinematic films made this year have almost exclusively been made by those above the age of 65 (see also: Kiarostami, Polanski, Scorsese).

The film opens with a zoom-in on an old castle rook overgrown with vegetation before cutting to a piece of cracked asphalt with grass starting to creep through the break. The shot becomes something of a leitmotif throughout the film, with the grass growing ever longer as the narrative progresses. The initial edits are light and springy, with the camera placed low on the vertical axis as it moves through shots until Resnais comes to crowded streets. Rather than the usual shots of endless bored faces, Resnais photographs their feet trotting along en masse. In a move that would have Quentin Tarantino panting in jealousy, Resnais follows a single pair of feet until they reach, naturally, a shoe boutique where an attendant tries out each pump as the camera pulls back enough not to reveal this mystery woman's face. Even when Resnais freezes everything and tracks around her, the actress slowly pivots with the camera, leaving us only with the sight of her frazzled ball of red hair.

That sense of ingenuity powers the film far more than its plot, which could be basically described as follows: on her way out of the store, the woman, Marguerite (Sabine Azéma), a dentist, gets robbed by a thief who skates by and takes her purse. Later that day, George Palat (André Dussollier), a man in his 50s, stumbles across her emptied wallet in the shopping center's parking garage and develops a crush on her ID photo. He proceeds to stalk her until the police get involved, at which point he stops, only for Marguerite to suddenly display a curious interest in Georges.

There it is in essence, but what makes Wild Grass so charming and unexpected is the spin Resnais puts on the material. I am by no means an expert on the director, having seen only Hiroshima Mon Amour, Night and Fog and Last Year at Marienbad, but even those films give an adequate taste of Resnais' style. In Wild Grass, the director displays more visual wit than someone a third his age: as Georges drives his car, tiny thought bubbles appear that show him rehearsing and fantasizing scenarios, turning the casual handover of someone's lost property into the breakthrough into romance, rehearsing his phone call to her in his head as if a teenage boy practicing asking someone to the prom. When he drops the wallet off at a police station, he ends up debating Marguerite's attractiveness with the officer who takes his info (Mathieu Amalric!). The officer scoffs at her ID photo, but Georges pulls out Marguerite's aviation license with a more flattering photo and the cop seems to consider it as if the two were frat buddies debating the hotness of some chick.

Eventually, Georges' behavior grows more erratic. Seemingly content with his home life (and his younger, doting wife), the man cannot keep his thoughts from Marguerite. His inner monologues betray a disturbing propensity for violence with the vague hint that he's done something in the past. When two young women pass him in the parking garage at the start, he jumps to thoughts of strangling them. At the police station, he worries officers will recognize him.

Resnais' camera dances around the action, moving in leaps, swirls, smooth tracking shots and zooms. Occasionally, the direction becomes more frantic, using handheld shots of Georges' family life to show how he feels uncomfortable in what seems the perfect life. When the police come to question him about stalking Marguerite, each question the cops ask, however innocuous, is delivered through quick-zooms on the officers. Resnais then moves to a POV shot looking down as Georges leaps from his chair and shouts at the officer, then he cuts back to show Georges standing at the end of the room. It's not altogether clear if anyone's actually in the room with him at that point, though the sheer distance he got by leaping from his chair is comic in its own right.

Georges' slashing of Marguerite's tires when she does not respond to his letters or phone calls is a twisted act that speaks to inner demons, but Resnais frames that outburst, and all others, as a battle between id and superego without delineation. One can easily differentiate between sanity and madness in something like Fight Club once you learn the steps, but Wild Grass stays elusive. You can never be sure what's motivating Georges from one moment to the next; hell, you can't even be sure whether what we're seeing on the screen is even happening. Georges, not only mourning his father's passing but subconsciously focusing on his own mortality, appears to be suffering from mild memory loss, the kind that doesn't necessarily suggest anything wrong but signals at the very least the transition into old age. Faced with a life that's a bit too calm, he fills the gaps with fanciful ideas of a dangerous past.

Georges finally agrees to back down and settle back with his family, only for Marguerite to start chasing him. If Georges began to fantasize as a way to stave of thoughts of old age and wasted life, Marguerite has reveries simply to escape the doldrums of the present. At work, she's so distracted that she heedlessly causes pain to her patients, and she looks to her refurbished Spitfire with almost fetishistic admiration, even resting her head on its fuselage as if cuddling up with a lover. When her stalker finally backs down, some part of her misses the excitement. She even begins to meet in person with Georges, further confusing an already addled man. Her friend and business partner, Josépha (Emmanuelle Devos), confronts the man at one point, but it is Marguerite who looks hurt by the demand to be left alone. And as Georges came to her apartment, so too does Marguerite come to his home and interact with his family. She even has Josépha seduce Georges while she speaks with the wife, only for Georges to return and try and cast her out. He is unsuccessful.

"Everything is excusable," Georges says in one of his early reveries before amending himself. "Not everything, not bad taste." Wild Grass exists in its own world where the most gaudy and self-apparent camera movements create the story rather than hang off a narrative as adornment. The camera turns a pointless rom-com into an open-ended feature that blurs genre lines. Accompanied by the riotously ominous music by Mark Snow (of X-Files fame), Resnais' camera adds the suspense of a paranoid thriller, and no joke in the film is as funny as the constant deflation of this false unease. At the break between Georges pursuing Marguerite and her chasing him, Georges goes to a midnight showing the old war film The Bridges of Toko-Ri, and the split in the film is offset by the epic 20th Century Fox theme. Resnais uses it again for a false ending, already subverting the usage of the theme as something that announces the start of a film in order to end one, then throwing all that away and moving into the real ending, which is even more baffling.

Wild Grass may be nothing more than an 87-year-old's attempt to prove he's still got some charm. But he succeeds brilliantly, so who am I to knock the film? This is not shaping up to be a year in which cinema uncovers the truths of where we are as a society. Then again, in so political a year as this, it's nice to be spared, for the most part, the usual preaching. That 2010 is instead destined to be a year in which some of the more intriguing stylistic exercises in some time have been released domestically offers some measurable comfort in the face of overwhelming mediocrity offered up at the multiplex. With its screwball wit and its artistic sophistication, Wild Grass is as fundamentally dispensable yet incessantly fun as all the action blockbusters this year failed to be.