Earl Sweatshirt - I Don't Like Shit, I Don't Go Outside

Earl Sweatshirt's Previous album, Doris, from 2013, was a breakthrough for the artist, critically if not commercially. Sweatshirt is part of the rap collective Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All, a group in which most of their 15 members have remained faceless outside of the collective. Odd Future, and their appointed leader, Tyler, The Creator, have made a career out of aggressive music - sounding like they're testing how ugly and depraved they can go without losing listeners. And Sweatshirt sounded like this for a while, too: Doris was the sound of dead end suburbia, with Sweatshirt's timid voice reveling in a life of marijuana and broken childhood. Of course critics ate it up: Sweatshirt has the skinny underdog look down tight. I couldn't tell you why I disliked Doris so much; like other critically acclaimed albums, I played it on repeat hoping to catch glimpse of the spark others had seen, but to no avail. I liked Sweatshirt, he wore his vulnerability on his sleeve, but Doris was steeped in Odd Future's loopy vibes, and covered in guest stars that sometimes had no reason to be there.

Sweatshirt's second studio album, I Don't Like Shit, I Don't Go Outside, is nothing but Earl Sweatshirt, which, if you're familiar with the rapper's style, should be enough to tell you if you'll like this one. He raps "I've been alone in my shit for the longest": Earl is stuck in his own head. After the last album, he found fame; now all he can write about is getting high and getting pussy. The production is so dour and downbeat that even Sweatshirt's voice sounds like it's cutting through the speakers. His flow has always been aggressive without being fast or angry, and the music too is built on slow beats - on "Faucet", the beat sounds like a ringing church bell, the chimes of death hanging over his every word. This is production so focused and purposeful it'll suck the air out of any room you play it in. There is few guest stars and fewer places where Earl's influences are clear, the music is too bare bones in places to have any influences. He raps "I spent the day drinking and missing my grandmother" - a lot of the album involves just sitting with Sweatshirt's thoughts, or listening to him wallowing in them.

The tone is dark, sometimes to the point of suicidal, and painfully self-conscious; usually, with albums like this, I'd say the music was for a mood piece or best listened to alone, and likely as a whole set, but I've had "Faucet" on continual repeat since I first heard it. There's nothing bouncy or fun to this music, but the words have meaning. Sweatshirt doesn't see the exotic nature of going on tour - to him it's nothing but dealing with "truck stop racists". While Sweatshirt's complaining about his own golden chains it's hard not to think about Drake, and the goldmine of emotional, self questioning rap that Drake opened up. This little sub-genre can be fantastic: the dramatic woes of the rich and famous played out with hauntingly articulate rap. And its popularity is at a high right now - vulnerability as a sort of game. Even Drake, with his endless self-criticism has turned his problems into a game. Sweatshirt doesn't feel like that (not yet, anyway), when he raps "Fame is the culprit who give me drugs without owing cash, Sipping 'til I melt, Never trying me, I'm diving, falling victim to myself, Middle finger to the help" the words resound in your ears, and it's the emotion you're there for, not the beat, not anything else. One might guess that's the reason Sweatshirt's felt the need to make the most minimalistic rap album possible: to know that his words have meaning, and that he is worth all the fuss, not his band or his producers, just him.

The music is inherently ugly. On the best track, "AM", guest star Wiki raps "Nineteen, still gettin' kicked out the crib, Ripped off my bib, spit out my food, hiccup and piss". It's an ugly image, but not malicious or mean, like, say Tyler, The Creator. It's all directed inwards, as is the whole album. I doubt there's big appeal for these tracks: if you do go outside, or you've forgotten you don't like shit, then you won't find much here. But there's gems to be found. At points on the album it can sound like we are hearing Sweatshirt's conscience talking to him; a similar thing is done on Kendrick Lamar's latest album, To Pimp A Butterfly, an album just as weird and violent, but also much wider in its sound so surely headed for greater success. Sweatshirt's album is all about personal demons - it deals frequently with Sweatshirt's breakup with Mallory Llewellyn and his troubled relationship with his mother - while Kendrick's album is a political album (admittedly driven by a personal anger). It sounds like a fight through black history. As well as his conscience, Lamar had an army of guest stars, he'd brought the boys, even 2Pac showed up from beyond the grave on the final track to aid Lamar's cause; Sweatshirt, by comparison, is fighting his fight alone.

You're Next (2011)

You're Next opens with a scene that Scream (and to a further extent, Scary Movie) parodied over a decade ago. We're first introduced to a couple while they're having sex, before the man, clearly having enjoyed himself, leaves to go in the shower, and the women, looking deeply unsatisfied, looks solemnly out of the window into the isolated countryside setting we'll spend the rest of the film in. These two are quickly killed; the filmmakers' choice to instill brief moments of emotion in either character appearing bafflingly pointless. This whole sequence is only to introduce the setting, the tone, and the killers - here wearing bunny masks (going by the old horror maxim that cute things make for extra scary things when they're trying to kill you). Although an opening like this is telling us something else, whether it knows it or not: that this is one of those horror movies, playing into the traditional formula with only slight aesthetic changes from the last one of these you watched, similar to a new map pack for a video game you've already invested hours in.

If you've watched enough of these movies then you should recognize the formula: the isolated setting relies on inconveniences like no one having a phone signal; the core cast of characters - made up of four siblings, their significant others, and their mum and dad - all seeing each other for the first time in a while, have some underlying conflicts which are swept under the rug once the killing starts (creating a strangely inspirational 'lets band together in the face of evil' message that feels out of place); one of the characters having some exceptional survivalist skills, providing an unexpected challenge for the killers as the house is transformed into a booby-trapped lair, resembling an adult version of Home Alone. Even the plot twist in the film's finale feels done out of obligation to the genre. It's not that You're Next gets anything wrong, it has some squelchy killings and tense moments, it just never goes out of its way to get anything extremely right. The filmmakers were clearly never aiming for 'the most squelchy killings' or 'the most tense moment' - You're Next is the horror movie equivalent of that school kid who's only aim is to not fail his exams, nothing more. Which is at least a way to say You're Next doesn't fail.

There's some obvious situations when a film following the formula has its positives, i.e. when looking for a movie to watch while snuggling up with a significant other that promises some scares, or when choosing a movie to watch late at night that comes with the guarantee you won't have to use much brain power. These compliments might sound a little backhanded, and they are: I won't defend You're Next because it is guilty of everything a whole subcategory of film is guilty for. Genre movies are funny things though, no one ever watches one because it has threw out the rule book: people want to see the usual conventions, just done in new or interesting ways. You're Next doesn't do this, it only upkeeps the usual stuff to a decent quality.

Kendrick Lamar - To Pimp A Butterfly

At some unknown point people decided that the sign of a quality rock album is how concise and snappy it is. No filler allowed. Ambition is welcomed but overstepping the mark isn't. In almost complete opposition, hip-hop and rap albums are rated on their messiness. From the start they had filler tracks built into their DNA, with intros and outros and comedy skits; being ambitious and showing it off were part of the game. Which, rating on this scale, makes Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp A Butterfly, Lamar's third studio album, a grand success. Butterfly is Lamar at his most pissed off, and spilling it all onto tape; it's a kaleidoscope of ideas - some work, some don't - that's so wide in its area of attack I can't imagine anyone liking or disliking everything on it.

It was a lot easier to say what Lamar's previous album, good kid, m.A.A.d city, was about: however authentic he was being, Lamar was playing gangster (or playing with gangsters) on the mean streets. It's harder to say what Butterfly is about. It's an album about race, which is an understatement: it's easily the most angry fight against racism I've ever heard put onto tape. It's steeped in references to black history - such as Lamar's recycling of lines by James Brown and Michael Jackson, and referencing Richard Pryor infamously setting himself on fire - and Lamar sounds like he is using it all just to fuel himself up for another fight with the microphone. There's been other recent albums that dealt with race in a big way, an obvious example being Jay-Z and Kanye West's Watch The Throne, although that celebrated black culture from two people who had already risen to the top. As Jay-Z rapped, it was a celebration of "Black tie, black Maybachs, black excellence, opulence, decadence". Lamar approaches race from the opposite angle: it's all in the title of King Kunta, which matches Lamar's hostile rage with a militant backing track, by updating the title of the real life 18th century slave to that of king. Lamar might be the current king of the rap game, a level of fame a black man would never have dreamed about not long ago, but Lamar isn't forgetting all the blood spilled on the journey to get to his crown.

But for an album that bites into huge chunks of black history it's also (somewhat disturbingly) personal. On u Lamar raps "I place blame on you still/Place shame on you still/Feel like you ain't shit/Feel like you don't feel/Confidence in yourself", before turning his words on himself into a harsh self criticism, calling himself a "fucking failure". The song feels like it could be the manuscript of a weepy church confessional. The album's production - part freestyle jazz, part sorrowful piano score - matches Lamar's weirder tendencies. Almost all tracks have prologues and epilogues, with Lamar and other character speaking and playing part of a wider story; it's not all fun listening, the same way a lot of the tracks are tough listens too, but Lamar never runs out of things to say.

The best moments on Butterfly are when Lamar's outspoken side is matched by some fun beats. These Walls opens with the sound of a woman groaning, whether this is out of pleasure or pain - possibly giving birth? - isn't made clear. (By the end of Butterfly everything is mixed up: the personal, the political, the pleasurable). The music is catchy and seductive, and way sexier than anything Lamar's ever done. The walls of the title at first refer to the vaginal walls of a woman Lamar is pleasuring, but in the final verse are flipped to refer to the walls keeping said woman's baby daddy stuck in a prison cell. And when Lamar ponders "If these walls could talk" it opens things up to a lot more than prison cells and vaginas. It's songs like this that have the thoughtful groove that was heard in D'Angelo's Black Messiah from last year, only with a lot more aggression to it. As the title of Butterfly warns you, there's beauty in difficult things, but you can't ignore the ugly, messy, violent side while you're finding it. And isn't that what hip-hop is all about?

The Prodigy - The Day Is My Enemy

The Prodigy is a band I have a hard time writing about due to the personal affinity I hold for them. As a child the shelf next to my TV held all the secrets of video games, movies and albums my parents had bought before I was even born. I got acquainted with a lot of this music - my mam's love for Boyzone; my dad's interest in cheesy 90s rubbish like No Doubt - but The Prodigy I was always a little too scared of to listen to. They just sounded so... wrong. They weren't among the first wave of electronic music artists but they were there before the whole thing blew up. For a band still grappling with early 90s soundboards and pre-internet technology, their music perfectly captures some of the ugliest things about being human. The Prodigy's violent punk-techno was perfect for the claustrophobic setting of most acid house raves. The change in culture, and broadening of the meaning of electronic music, is maybe why The Prodigy's post 90s output hasn't managed to garner the same love as their older work, although as I say, I've always been inclined to overlook this.

Like everyone who spends too long in the corners of dark rooms taking lethal substances, The Prodigy believed they were the most important band in the world (and hell, maybe for a very brief moment they were). It wasn't long before they had an album titled Music For The Jilted Generation, coming in a case filled with typical us-against-them artwork. This self imposed importance made sense in the 90s; since then, like on Invaders Must Die, the epic feeling of conquering the whole world has felt misplaced: the music was fun and playful now, not epic and trendsetting. The best compliment that can be leveled at The Day Is My Enemy is that for the first time in a long while it sounds like a band who knows exactly who they are. Firstly, they've dropped the illusions of grandeur: the album is far more angry and psycho sounding to, I imagine, ever get play on the radio. Secondly, this is closer to The Prodigy's 90s output than anything they've done since. The argument could be made for them going backwards, although I'd make the bigger argument about needing to know when to turn back.

The sound is unrelenting. It mimics what I imagine a good time at one of The Prodigy's concerts would be like, aka an all out assault on the ears. A track like Roadblox feels like layer after layer of oncoming attack (hence the title, I guess) with the bass never letting up. TDiME sounds like it's telling you to do no good. In interview, Howlett has said the aim for TDiME was to oppose the current trend of formulaic dance music, and on that objective the album is a success: the songs so thrashing that even after a few listens no structure is immediately clear.

The best track on the album is Wild Frontier, which uses loopy sound effects to indulge in The Prodigy's still present interest in extra terrestrial life. All the familiar Prodigy indulgences are here: Howlett's repetitions of the title on Nasty bring to mind the late night scary man on the British streets that Howlett once perfectly encapsulated. TDiME is the band's weakest lyrical effort, although everything adds to the weird mood the band puts in place. TDiME isn't the best album by The Prodigy, and only a handful of tracks stick in the mind, but there's a confidence to this album in feeling like The Prodigy are happy making the sound of music they for a while sounded bored in making - like a respectable gentleman now through a mid life crisis and happily accepting of life. Only The Prodigy are neither respectable or gentlemanly and are all the better for it.

A Hard Day's Night (1964)

A big music act doing a movie meant a very different thing in 1964 than it does today. The first movies that come to most people's minds are those associated with The Jonas Brothers, Miley Cyrus, The Spice Girls. I think we're all expecting at least one movie out of Justin Beiber, less so out of Arcade Fire. Which might just be a comment on the divide that now exists between fun, mainstream entertainment and critically acclaimed, "important" works of art that has grown since the days of The Beatles, when they could practically be the same thing. What I'm trying to say is: A Hard Day's Night wouldn't have seemed like a cheap cash in or something just for screaming fan girls. Movies had obviously been around a long time, but there was still a mystique to them - the glitz and glamour and the big American stars. No one was shooting hour long drunken videos on their phones on a Saturday night and using it as proof they were the next Scorsese. There is something really playful about The Beatles doing a film. It doesn't feel like people capitalizing on The Beatles success, it feels like people simply enjoying it. These four Liverpool lads had blown up: they were playing in night clubs, now they're making a movie!

The film opens with the four Beatles running through the streets while a crowd of fans chases them. They're trying to make it on a train in time, touring the country at the height of Beatlemania. There's no goal or journey that drives the film forward, instead we're allowed to see a brief snippet of life from the biggest band in the world. This could have easily been a concert film, or a documentary that just recorded what The Beatles were up to, but instead the story is part fiction. I don't imagine the details of backstage shows were hugely different from this, but all of the characters are exaggerated. Again, if a modern band like One Direction filmed a movie playing exaggerated versions of themselves I imagine they'd be accused of tricking people, of their performances only adding to the 'PR machine', but nothing about what The Beatles are doing seems malicious. I imagine the fab four found fantasy more appealing than reality. John fancied himself the mischievous joker, George reckoned himself the cool, smirking ladies man. Even Ringo gets to play out a 'being yourself' narrative straight out of a Hollywood fantasy. The Beatles music, especially the music they were playing when A Hard Day's Night was released, is all a fantasy: I've never seen the point in criticizing The Beatles' love songs as unrealistic, or too picturesque, when surely everyone wants things so perfect and serene. The film only adds to the warm aura that surrounds The Beatles.

This film really 'gets' The Beatles. They had an interest in women, surely enjoyed the interest their fame gave them, undeniably objectified women too, but there was a romance there that this film gets. The Beatles might have been sexy but they weren't dirty sexy like The Rolling Stones were. If you hooked up with a Beatle they might have taken you back to their hotel room, but after that they might have taken you on a romantic trip to take slow walks in the moonlight and written catchy songs about you too. This film gets that. It gets that they were very 'us against the world', they didn't want to play by the rules or listen to their managers, but that they were too playful to cause any real trouble. They had a comforting glow that surrounded them, like the best comedians, and A Hard Day's Night is such a care free film - in one scene the boys run around a wide open field together, they don't look like they know what they're doing, they are just doing it for the hell of it.

There was a few Beatles films, although none remembered as fondly as A Hard Day's Night. By the time of the other films, starting with Help, and especially with Yellow Submarine and The Magical Mystery Tour, The Beatles weren't the same: they'd packed in touring and moved into the studio, and joined the psychedelic movement which dictated much of their image. These other films were more about what The Beatles were trying to share with everyone else: the drugs, the culture, the freedom and the success. A Hard Day's Night works because The Beatles aren't sharing anything but themselves.

Streaming, Buffering

I have the habit of working through The New Yorker website by opening each article I'd like to read in a new tab, until the tabs at the top of my screen don't have enough space to include any words - which I realized a long time ago I like doing a lot more than reading the actual articles. I guess you could blame this on The New Yorker, the over-expensive-fancy-restaurant-that-if-you'd-only-stop-being-such-a-snob-you'd-realize-tasted-like-piss-compared-to-McDonalds of the writing world, although this rule applies to nearly everything I do on the internet. My "bookmarks bar" works as a procrastination bar that now has over 300 pages saved. I'll be on a page I like, tell myself I need to focus on something else or that my brain is too tired right now for something new and add it to the list to view tomorrow. Which is bullshit, since whenever I do decide to make my way through my bookmarks I start from the top, which means the oldest links. By the time I get to most pages I'm confused why past me thought future (now present) me would be interested in this. How did I even get onto this? I even do this with porn - I probably spend more time masturbating to the main pages of porn sites as I line up tab after tab than I do jerking it to the actual videos. It's because there's just too much - a landfall of blogger posts and news articles and new links to look at, and god forbid I miss any of it. Which I do every second. Reading one article means ignoring the hundreds being posted during your reading, some of them probably better than the one you're reading, and more useful too, but you'll never know most of these pages exist. The internet is everything you don't know expanding second by second; standing in the middle of a rushing stream made out of gold coins and only able to catch what you can carry while the infinite wealth of the world passes you by, and still you don't swim to freedom.

Frank (2014)

We've all been living under the guise that Gonzo died when Hunter S Thompson did, or likely well before that, when actually it just migrated over to film, where no one seems to care what's real and what's not anymore. Take Frank: the title character inspired by the real life papier mache headed alter ego of comedian and singer Chris Sievey, who from 1984 til his death wore the head more often than not. One of the film's writers, Jon Ronson, toured with the real Frank, although the real man seems to be only an influence on the movie - other real life stories like Captain Beefheart's infamous recording sessions of Trout Mask Replica are mixed in, the story is updated to modern day, and things end up more dramatic and romantic than I imagine anything life would allow.

Domhnall Gleeson plays Jon, an amateur keyboardist who lucks out on landing a job in Frank's band. He packs up and moves with the band to a remote lodge in the countryside of Ireland while the band record their album - a claustrophobic recording session that goes way over schedule.  Jon doesn't fit easily into the band: like any musician who's only ever imagined himself on stage, he finds reality an anti-climax. Another bandmate, Don, hangs over Jon as a a reminder of what he doesn't want to end up as: a backup musician, his music never good enough to take the spotlight, forced to the background of his own life. Frank, more than anything, is about an artist who can't accept he sucks; everyone who's ever wanted the creative lifestyle knows the itch to be truly great at something, and the pain of not being good enough, of not being Frank. In one scene Jon says how he wishes he had had a troubled childhood - I know many won't understand this line, although anyone who's ever put up posters of Kurt Cobain or Jimi Hendrix on their walls and knew what those walls now said about them will. It's easier to chalk other people's talent up to their tortured lives and troubles. Thing is, it's all a myth. Even with the head off, Frank has real talent, the talent that Jon longs for. Frank is as much a story of Jon accepting this as about the curiosity of watching a man who refuses to take his head off.

Michael Fassbender is great as Frank. It's one of the "in things" in acting right now to praise performances that impair the actor in some way. Like Tom Hardy's emotion hiding mask all through The Dark Knight Rises, or single person films like Locke and Buried. It's becoming a cliche to see people going crazy over performances because they were a challenge for the actor, regardless of whether they were good or not. Fassbender's Frank still doesn't feel like a gimmick though; his natural charisma comes through even from behind the papier mache, and he manages to suppress it to show a much darker human being when the mask comes off.

The premise alone made me think the filmmakers had found a quirk mine of a character and Frank would end up a film about a lovable weirdo, but the film arrives at a much darker place than that. The characters travel to America for a big gig and the film changes to something else, it becomes a film about all the things artists think about but wish they didn't. The line between selling out and becoming more "likable" as Frank puts it. If all music is for an audience or if, sometimes, it's for no one more than the people it's made by. If the torture of every "tortured artist" is really where the magic springs from, or if they're the rare lucky ones who've made it despite their problems. The film talks about these things, as all films can talk, in such simple terms. I wouldn't imagine everyone would understand the appeal of this film, the same way many people would consider wishing you had a troubled childhood a weird thing to do, and not a bad thought pattern you have to work your way out of. Frank is a film more for people who, at least at their lowest moments, could see the benefits of living inside a papier mache head.

The real Frank

Gone Girl (2014)

Gone Girl: not David Fincher's worst film but his blandest, despite working perfectly on paper. Fincher's directorial style - calculated, efficient, precise - has meant his best films tend to be based around the analytical side of detectives and police work. He has a knack for making the uninteresting interesting. The mystery of Gone Girl might be in the title, but it's hardly a mystery film at all, and not as cold and inhuman as Fincher wants it to be.

A man walks into a bar. He chats awhile with his sister who works there. He says it's his anniversary but he doesn't look in the mood to celebrate. The phone rings, it's his wife; he heads on home. When he gets there he finds no wife and a broken table (despite no sign of a break in). The police are slow on providing answers; the media are a lot faster. 

Gone Girl is based on the bestseller by Gillian Flynn (who also adapted it into a screenplay). I can't comment on the adaptation having not read the book, although Flynn's work here is good; yet Fincher never accepts the more human side of the story. A savage killing is edited so that after every jab the screen fades to black and a dramatic sound effect repeats - it feels more like a trailer than an actual scene from the movie, especially one so savage. A woman experiences true freedom for the first time in years, possibly ever - she's speeding down the motorway and chugging on coke and not giving a shit. We only see this for a few seconds though. She's feeling alive but we're still trapped in Fincher's precisely boxed frame. His direction feels perfect for the earlier parts of the movie, where the viewer is as curious and confused as the characters. For the rest of the film, Fincher feels limp. 

Like any good mystery story, Gone Girl isn't really about that mystery at all. Flynn's story is about the media and how people's reactions to a topic become part of the topic itself. Ben Affleck is perfect casting as a man who has a bipolar reception from the public. There is a lot to like about the movie - the ending will get a chuckle from those with darker tastes - if only Fincher had saw the potential in the material, or someone more accustomed to this sort of material entirely. 

Drake - If You're Reading This It's Too Late

Drake is one of the few modern artists who fits into one style. Kanye West did emotionally raw and self conscious, but he did it on 808s and Heartbreak then moved onto a different style. Drake called 808s one of his biggest influences, not for any particular album, but for the type of music that has defined his whole career so far. Not that he hasn't changed, his first album, So Far Gone, was more bombastic, the production matching the melodrama Drake created out of every moment. In the six years since, Drake's productions have become more bare and minimalistic, his songs have moved further with each release from traditional hip hop, and his lyrics have went from expressing nervous enthusiasm towards his newfound fame to confidently dismissing any sense of fun in the celebrity lifestyle.

This trajectory continues on If You're Reading This It's Too Late, to what I imagine is the furthest it can be pushed. An easy comparison to an album so raw would be Kanye West's Yeezus, but that was angry and out of control; Too Late is as slow and controlled as Drake's ever been. A better comparison is 2Pac's 7 Day Theory - 2Pac had recently got out of prison and felt manipulated by the music producers around him and the media; the production meant very little, it was simply a background to put 2Pac's thoughts to. Too Late feels similar, it's a 17 track think piece, about fame and the current rap game and how much Drake isn't buying into any of it. The obvious difference is, 2Pac had a reason to be angry, so had a lot to say - Drake is the opposite: the production means very little, but so does Drake's words.

I've heard arguments defending this before, that Drake's lyrics, narcissistic and seemingly uninterested in anything beyond his field of vision, hold up a mirror to modern culture. That Drake's self-centered nature yet harsh self criticism reflect social networking - that the emptiness of his boasts is like the hollowness of the average tweet. I'll admit I've always liked Drake's lyrics, his melancholy raps always felt true. You could like the guy because he never asked you to like him. The lyrics on Too Late are something less interesting; he repeats "Oh my God, oh my God/If I die, I'm a legend" again and again on the opener. It's another piece of honesty pulled straight from his id, but hard to get along with on a song so repetitive and colourless. Too Late opens up the realization that part of the reason it was so easy to let Drake's attitude off the hook all these years was it was wrapped up in some great music. Too Late has no major guest stars; the least notable production of any album I've ever heard; and a feeling of complete disinterest from its creator. Drake's empty brags do for once sound empty.

It's clear Drake knew this wasn't his best material: despite Too Late being an album, Drake's said it isn't an album, it's a mix tape. Drake's fourth album is set for release later this year, and was announced before anyone had heard anything about Too Late. It's an unrelenting album, an onslaught of Drakeness - maybe it was just something he needed to get off of his chest. I didn't care for most tracks, even after a few listens I can't remember almost any of them. There's a few highlights: "Know Yourself" is great, Drake's chorus declaring he's been "runnin' through the 6 with my woes" sounds like the rapper closer to the edge than ever, and it's crazy fun to listen to on repeat. "You and the 6" is an ode to Drake's mother, and has some of the rappers most lovable, yet emotionally raw lines: "Ain't been returning the texts, so she been reading the press/She got Google Alerts, them shits go straight to her phone/She worry 'bout me from home, you know she raised me alone". The rest of the album feels like it's from a different person. It's Drake's least listenable release yet, but there's a hypnotic quality that made me find the whole thing worth listening to, like not listening would be missing out on something important. He just might make a legend of himself yet.

50 Shades of Grey (2015)

I've never seen a movie work an audience the way 50 Shades of Grey did. It was a cinema packed with women, me and five friends the only guy group in there (don't ask). It strung the audience along like a great jazz player: with its obvious innuendos, its slow hints to what everyone knew was coming, and eventually the scenes of two attractive young actors doing it. I could say I hated this movie but I'm pretty sure most did, even the women in our showing were grunting when the lights came on (and not out of pleasure), but I didn't expect to like it going in (again, don't ask) - I was disappointed though, at how little fun this jazz player was having with us.

In an early scene, Christian Grey, a young billionaire businessman with a clean if mysterious image, enters a DIY store where Anastasia, a uni student he met by chance, is working. It's obvious what he's there for. He plays the game anyway - in his deep, smooth voice he asks for: cable ties, masking tape and rope. She asks if he's doing some decorating - not quite. Then she tries to do some flirting herself, with a clumsy line about handymen; which is weird only because it's rare to see a movie admitting both sexes stumble while flirting. It's a funny scene, one that has the audience in on a joke that our innocent female lead cluelessly misses. If only the people working on this scene had realized how naturally tongue-in-cheek the material was, and if only the rest of the movie had played around in its own ridiculousness. 50 Shades is a very "if only..." movie.

You could argue that this movie had a right to be serious: that female sexuality needs more than tongue-in-cheek, especially since the only sex focused films to ever make it as big as 50 Shades are 70s women-degrading shlock like Deep Throat and Emmanuelle; and 50 Shades, despite being about a man who wants be the "dominant" to a girl he hopes will sign a contract to become his "submissive", works as a woman's empowerment movie. In the end, the man is left wanting the relationship and the woman is the one who's had a sexual adventure and decided to end things there. I guess me criticizing the movie itself would be pointless as it wasn't made for me, and that complaining would only be whinging I wasn't part of an audience that women are left out of nine times out of 10.

50 Shades is already a go-to term for over-the-top BDSM, the same way to most mainstream audiences Brokeback Mountain is "that gay cowboy movie" and some mean connotations. But turning these things into jokes is just a way to ignore what they're saying. Brokeback Mountain did have a lot more to say, because it was a much better movie. 50 Shades is poorly made: the script not even in on its own joke; the ending an obvious ploy to leave things open for the sequel; two uninteresting stars cast as two very simplistic characters. But like I've said, I could only speculate on how women, the film's audience, found this movie; and on contemplation, regardless of quality, the movie does more good than not.

Valentine's Day

Balloons and hearts light the room

And I'm still too self conscious to love you 

Refill your pitcher, go ring the boys 

I bet they'd dance on tables for you 

Don't ask me to look in the mirror 

My ego's got enough cracks 

Just sit there and tell me lies 

yes means yes, even you know that 

I'm sure my night doesn't compare 

To your best friend's imaginary brass band 

But she'll face reality one of these days 

And you'll already have a head start 

Who knew this was a race anyway? 

I thought we were running solo together 

The waiters sure made an effort 

I guess you're glad someone did 

Storm out or break something

I'd find you sexier if you made a scene 

At least file a complaint 

You're the only one here who will

I'm sure St. Valentine is laughing
Thinking about Romeo or Casanova
Or any of the other jokers or fools
That you were expecting tonight 

Uptown Special - Mark Ronson

The first real track on Uptown Special is called Summer Breaking - it's the mellow groove sound that Stevie Wonder was the king of in his 70s heyday (and who also appears on the album's intro and outro). It highlights the main enigma of Mark Ronson: is he a commercial artist working with big names whose music only appears weird in comparison to the usual radio garb, or, is he one of us superfreaks who's managed to hit it big time? 

Uptown Special makes a case for the latter. Lead single Uptown Funk may lead you to think Ronson's interest in the 70s is in a world of flash and style that never quite existed (at least not outside of Michael Jackson music videos) but the rest of the album's 70s obsession - and Uptown Special is the most adoring love letter I've listened to in a long time - is in the weirder, sleazier side of funk. Some moments are downright psychedelic, others are dance-ready disco pop. The best tracks, like In Case of Fire, are perfect combinations of the two.

There's no other obvious single-ready tracks, and some drag: Heavy and Rolling matches its name, weighed down by a quirky beat and attempts at psychedelic poetry. All add to the feeling though, of sitting in a calm, chilled lounge, with some approachable folks, possibly a few hallucinogenic in the system, although never too many to not bust a move. Lyrics add to the vibe, talking about "Pulling your top down/In the back of some pretty boy's ride" and telling you to "Jump out the window/A human cannonball... Congratulations, baby". 

Which is all ignoring Ronson's work as a technical whizz kid. Seeing the man behind the scenes orchestrating an album, and the usual headliners among his instruments, while not new, is still different from most albums. Ronson is the most mainstream in terms of success in this genre, although far weirder and more ambitious than the sum of his parts, his guests included. In a music industry where the money makers are ambition-less and the critically claimed don't know how to groove it, a crossover like Ronson is surely someone to savour. 

Boyhood (2014)

Every filmmakers who makes "personal films" (i.e. any not governed by studio heads or McDonalds sponsorships) lets you see the world through their own view. Filmmakers build ideologies into their work as much as authors do. Take Spielberg, who has worked in every genre you can think of yet wraps it all under the idea that great evil does exist in the world, but there's always enough good to overpower it. Sometimes you'll watch a film and know whoever made it has the sort of brain you wish you could jump inside and take a roam around in. This is true of all art, really: I'll read something or watch a movie or even watch an interview and decide I love a person's mind. (There's really not enough love for people's minds). Richard Linklater, going off of my (so far incomplete) viewing of his movies, has a mind I'm totally in tune with.

Linklater isn't so much interested in twisting the world to fit into his movies as capturing that world and hoping it'll make a good movie. In Slacker (1991) we follow one Los Angelino to the next, observe their weird conversations and day-to-day mundanities, and then they leave (never to return) and we move onto the next character. Linklater's movies are best viewed as examinations of a subject (LA slackers, youths on the last day of school, two lovers) than as an exact story that can be spun out of them. It's why Boyhood, Linklater's newest film, breaks one of the 101 rules of screenwriting, not having any "inciting incident" or problem to give the film a driving force, and yet still has the power to create a sense of importance in every scene. The driving force of this movie is simply the driving force behind watching other people, or observing a child grow - watching the changes, or the things that never seem to change, for god knows what reason beyond trying to explain some infinite, unexplainable thing.

You can't blame the marketing team for focusing on the gimmick of Boyhood - a film that follows a boy from the ages of 5 to 18, shot with the same actors over 13 years, the actors visibly aging the same as the characters. Such gimmicks remind you of the power of film, but most filmmakers who try to carry them out are more interested in pulling off such a lengthy, original feat than doing anything with it. So it's good Linklater's the one behind the camera - he's just as interested in entertaining as in showing off, more so actually. The movie's length and the amount of time it shows means it doesn't feel weird watching the mundanities of real life drama: things repeat even when they shouldn't, not all characters get what they deserve (in a good and bad sense) and despite the changes that happen to the boy, Mason, whose "boyhood" we're following, there's no "arc" he goes through as a character - like in real life, people change in small ways, they don't go through grand personality makeovers.

I'm sure some will complain about how the film's title only references Mason when the film also shows the coming-of-age of his sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater) and his parents (Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke). I could sing all of their praises although all the current award buzz highlights the acting talent on display anyway. Linklater's script gives them all stuff to do, but it's really how the father character is presented that is the most impressive. Hawke's character at first appears an absentee parent, his kids haven't seen him in a long time under the guise he's working in Alaska. Yet, when he does show up, he wants to be a good dad. And be active in shaping his kid's lives. In one of his earliest scenes, the dad pulls his car over to the side of the road because he doesn't want to do "this", be the biological dad who has to be ticked off of a list along with the kid's chores every weekend. Simply: different from all other movie dads, who are never anything but abusive arseholes or passive scenery dressing.

This is why I like Linklater (and why I'm sure many don't): his films let in life instead of trying to edit it out. Boyhood deals with so much: being a high school nerd but dating one of the popular girls; letting a girl paint your nails in sight of your possibly alcoholic military step-dad; the petering out of sibling rivalry (and how it never disappears completely); having a parent for a teacher while going through your experiments with alcohol and weed stage; being able to have nerdy conversations with your dad about Star Wars while out camping. Linklater doesn't rely on the amount of time the film spans to interest the viewer - his story follows the particulars of a specific young lifetime. It would be stupid to think all films should let in everything they can and explore every facet of a character's life, film's usually have clear goals and purposes, but there's something special in a film that does this. And something very special about it being done on the unmatched scale Boyhood does it on.

Infinite Jest (1996) by David Foster Wallace

I read an article the other day that summed up the novels of David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Don DeLillo and other comparable writers as nothing but long form essays tagged as "stories". And meant it as a negative thing too. I'll admit I'm not good with making negative criticisms, especially with the form of something. Is the form of anything bad, or just different? Infinite Jest, Wallace's 1000+ page behemoth (its reputation precedes it; I see no reason writing out its accolades) is the best realization of this story-essay form. It really feels like an essay when you're about half way through: the stories and characters aren't at all connected yet, few things make sense, but the themes Wallace is getting across are matching up, and the direction he's taking the whole thing is already clear even if the direction of the characters isn't.

It took me a little over two months to read Infinite Jest. Time is precious and anything that takes up two months of someone who hopes he knows this is going to leave a lasting mark. If Infinite Jest really is more like an essay - and an essay at its barest is a pondering; the reader discovering in the same way the writer did - then a simple good or bad review wouldn't work for it. The reason why every review I can find, despite nearly 20 years since the novel's release, either expresses awe or disappointed and very little else. I loved the book, maybe my favorite, but below isn't a case for that, it's simply an exploration of my scrambled thoughts after reading the novel:

The book opens (and the story chronologically ends) with Hal Incandenza sitting in an office room waiting for his university interview to begin. He's not far off adulthood; a tennis prodigy who grew up at a tennis academy founded by his mother and late father. The interview starts well, Hal's uncle and his coach talking him up to a board of administrators while he remains silent. Eventually these two are sent outside, the administrators wanting to hear from the boy himself. He starts to explain what an interesting guy he is, how he's so much more than a tennis champion; of all the beloved lines from this book, one of the most well known comes in this speech: 'I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it"'. He looks up to see a room of gaping mouthes. No one can understand him, they instead hear his speech as a horrible ear drum shattering noise, and his body appears to flake out like he's having an epileptic fit. He is rushed into a bathroom where an ambulance is called, while the uncle and the coach try to tell everybody he's fine. He too tries to tell everyone he's fine, but no-one can understand him. He's eventually put in an ambulance. The book then jumps back and the story begins.

I've seen people refer to this opening section as a "key" to the rest of the story. It's recommend you go back and read it after completing the novel. When I did just that it helped explain a few story details; this section doesn't suddenly become illuminated though. Nothing suddenly clicks. Like any good pondering, it asks you to ponder it yourself. Wallace is one of those figures, like Kurt Cobain, who people create wild fandoms over, and worship, because in their work they tackled the dark, depressing depths that most don't go to. Their suicides provide a sort of deranged legitimacy that they were one of us, one of the people who understood hardships. Yet such things are clear in sections like this too. The place and meaning of Infinite Jest's opening within its wider story is up for debate, the thematic, personal meaning you find in it is an open door for interpretation.

I responded to this section deeply. About having ideas and personality and possible brilliance in your head but not being able to communicate this to anyone else. I've spent conversations being amazed by how someone is so similar to me and yet unable to show that I share the traits I see in them. IJ is set in the future in the same way A Clockwork Orange is: it's an author's imagining of a fictional future, yet the year it's set in has already passed (around 2010) and things we left behind in the real 1996 (the book's release) are still in the fictional future (no sign of the internet; films stored on cartridges). But the culture and atmosphere the book is set in is recognizably ours - a culture of image where being knowledgeable or having a high IQ just isn't enough. You have to be able to show it too, and give it a neat presentation. I doubt Wallace was intending to invoke these things when writing, but in novels this ambitious - of which one must look to the Behemoth's Reading List of Ulysses and Gravity's Rainbow and Underworld etc - that are such Smörgåsbords of different ideas, that they just become a kaleidoscope where what you take from the words is as valid and important as any intended meaning. There's a good story in this book, but then there's this other level which makes the story seem secondary: you just let the themes and the ideas wash over you. IJ could be handed in as a philosophy thesis, but instead it's branded as entertainment (which it surely is).

IJ made me wish people would ask me what the book was about just so I could make some snobbish noise then tell them that it was just too complex to explain, in a voice that said it was more for their benefit than mine. I wouldn't attempt to give more than an outline here. There's three main story threads: Hal Incandenza's time at the tennis academy and his (somewhat complicated) family life, in the build up to the book's opening scene; ex-con Don Gately who, instead of a long jail sentence, has found himself the night manager at a half way house for recovering addicts (of which he is one) and the troubles that mount up from such a job; and two top agents from opposing governments who land in the desert to discuss the building hostility between their respective nations. What connects them together is the existence of a rare and banned video tape titled Infinite Jest that is so entertaining that the viewer doesn't wish to do anything else but keep watching to the point of lying dead in front of their TV screen. Although to say that these stories are connected would falsely advertise an aha! moment where all characters meet up that never actually comes. Characters and events cross over between stories but everything doesn't slowly merge into one mass entity. One tip for reading the book (beyond the obvious recommendation of using two bookmarks to keep track of the mass of footnotes) is to stop filtering things into what's important to the story and what's not like in a usual novel, and just accept everything adds to what Wallace is trying to say. I've seen lots compare reading IJ to working through a TV box set. Some episodes will stick out as favorites, some will suck. And you'll be with these characters so long that you'll get to know them in a way most books don't offer - they'll exist in a piece of your psyche after you've finished reading.

Like any good TV series, you'll have a favorite character too. Mine was Don Gately, who Wallace based on a real person he met during his own time in a halfway house and that he wrote to be the moral centre of the book. Following Gately's example, one only has to keep doing the right thing and striving for the right choice, and you'll have good done to you in return. This resonates so strong because going into Gately's backstory, we see what a flawed man he is and the mistakes he's made in the past. This is such a long book that Wallace has the time to go into the back story of everyone and everything. No one is a gleaming white knight the same way no one is pure, total, irredeemable evil. Like in real life. There's more picturesque views of making the right choices and striving to follow set moral codes within literature, just look at Atticus Finch from To Kill A Mockingbird. Finch is a symbol of perfectness through and through. No wonder kids are taught that book in schools - schools want to give the impossible responsibility of being perfect all the time. Wallace, through Gately, shows this inner quest for goodness but shows how hard such a thing really is. Which probably makes IJ sound as cold and unforgiving as its grand size and its efficient, precise use of language, although this ignores how gooey and romantic and sentimental Wallace can be. Wallace surely took a cynical view when he looked at the world around him, which only makes it more impressive he was a lot more hopeful than to leave all his characters in a dark, narcissistic void.

It's worth talking about the language - admire Wallace's style or not (I do) his writing is certainly unique. Wallace wrote with a wide vocabulary although never to the point of not being understandable - the famed "challenge" of IJ comes from the density of the information you're being given. It wasn't until recently, when I was writing few thousand word essays for an English course that I realized how much Wallace mimics the style of academic essays. The clear explanations built on parenthetical after parenthetical; use of full names every time a character is mentioned; the over-informativeness of subject headings. Even Wallace's page long stream-of-conscious ruminations are all grammatically correct. Wallace obviously didn't invent this style but he struck on a private goldmine when he decided to apply it to fiction. And still no-one's imitated his style - because it's such a hard style to write and not make everything sound dry and stale (like every school assigned essay you never bothered to read). Wallace intersperses technical language with 90s American slang - sort of like an isolated intellectual trying to decode 'normal people speak', never making it sound jarring though. The real fun of Wallace's writing in IJ is that the book is always one step ahead: you start a new section and you'll have to work out who's narrating or why it's important to the story. You're always catching up. Most famed writers prize shorter sentences, quoted lines being quick, snappy pearls of wisdom - Wallace is the opposite: his wisdom, and beauty, coming through in very long sections. This isn't like an insightful speech where you're hit with lots of short quotes that you'll remember and apply yourself, more like a one sided conversation with an old professor passing on wisdom, the general idea of what he's saying to you more important/memorable than the exact wording.

That's IJ. Well, a really small part of it. It's so long you'll forget so much by the time you get to the end; repeated readings are recommended, and something I'd like to get around to despite the book's mammoth size. My copy of the book (the 10th anniversary edition) has a foreword by Dave Eggers, who says the book's size is part of what draws people to it. That, like other huge books, or bigger-than-usuals works of any medium, Lawrence of Arabia for example, the interest stems from wanting to see how much a medium can be pushed. In this case, how much effort and creativity and skill a single author can put into a novel. This is true, and it's also true that the size and reputation of the book is why IJ will likely always be a book that is more talked about than read. I'd rank it on any list of best books but I doubt I'll recommend it to anyone; it's a personal interest you either have or don't have. I almost feel like I could write about it forever: Wallace doesn't provide all the answers, only clues and hints, so you can really interpret and try and "figure out" the book forever, and still not quite have a complete whole. That's the "Infinite" of the title. The "Jest", the joke, is that it's all just entertainment. If you enjoy the book, then its function becomes the same addictive void filler that the killer video tape in the story is. But then again, I'm sure Wallace was the type who would like to think that three years of writing and unimaginable effort on his part creating the book was just one big joke, although anyone who's read it knows it's a lot more than that.

Short Story: Befriending A Fly

The Boy was reading something or other on the monitor, highlighting and unhighlighting words as he read them as he tended to do. A fly landed onto the screen - it appeared as a tiny silhouette on a screen of bright white. The Boy took little interest in it as he read.

Midway through whatever it was he was reading, the Boy's attention changed to the fly which was still idle where it had first landed. He moved the mouse cursor to where the fly was. It reacted straight away by moving slightly up the screen. The Boy moved the cursor onto the fly again and again it moved. 

This continued on for a short time. It was the first time the Boy had thought about the inner workings of a fly's mind. The fly eventually leaped (hovered?) onto the Boy's desk, below the monitor. The Boy put his finger down next to the fly, expecting it to attach itself like a spider would. The fly instead jumped (flew?) to the other side of the finger. The Boy started to alternate between putting his fingers to the right or left of the fly, always with the fly jumping over. The Boy felt like he had made a connection with the fly. 

The Boy then squished the fly with his thump, its orange-ish magma coloured blood oozing onto the desk, and the Boy got back to reading whatever it was he had been reading.  

Oh Spike, Where Have Ye Gone? - He Got Game (1998) Review

When the subject of baggage comes up in a discussion of art the answer is usually simple: ignore it. This idea that a piece of art you like can be tainted or ruined by the personality or views of the person who made it annoys me - it shouldn't change the words in print or the images on screen unless they too exhibit their creator's downsides. Which is why someone like Spike Lee confuses the whole argument - his films and his public persona, however overblown and exaggerated the latter has become, say the same thing. A supporter for black rights who's done more by making films than waving banners.

Yet the one sided-ness of the modern Spike Lee persona - the one that's become little more than a negative name drop for rappers - appears to be turning people off of his films which, ironically, boast as their best asset Lee's ability to see almost nothing in black and white. And understanding that there's no yes or no questions, and that any answers you do find aren't easy ones. One good example of this would be in (the go-to for Lee's best film) Do The Right Thing. Because in the end, who in that film really does the right thing? Every character, whether black or white, whether they started the conflict in that film or simply got caught up in the heat of things, appears to do wrong. Lee's reputation would have you expecting nothing but a two hour preaching session. Instead, your moral compass is chucked into the middle of a minefield. Do The Right Thing is Lee's clearest message on race, yet it's the mostly forgotten He Got Game that shows Lee's biggest look into everyday morales of right or wrong, or doing something for others versus for yourself.

Jake (Denzel Washington), in prison and still facing the majority of his sentence, is given the opportunity to get let out early if, in the short time he is given on the outside, he is able to convince his basketball prodigy son Jesus (Ray Allen) to go to college. The problem: Jesus wants nothing to do with his father and everyones constant touting of this as the biggest decision of his life isn't making him excited over the educational route. Supporting characters include Lala (Rosario Dawson) Jesus's girlfriend and Dakota (Milla Jovovich) a prostitute Jake runs into not long after getting out.

Like in most Lee films, like the whole issue of race, things look like they should be easy. If Jesus agrees to go to college then: he'll be getting a full time scholarship for free; he can have his shot in the basketball leagues; the money would help out his girlfriend and little sister; his father would get a lesser sentence; and from the way Lee (maybe over-) presents it, the whole nation would celebrate Jesus going to college. But Lee presents a of cast of characters where no one is making smart choices, or good ones: Jesus is confused by all the responsibility and may not even go to college; he later takes very little persuading to cheat on his girlfriend and blows off a conversation about her maybe being pregnant; Jake is unable to hide his intentions (that is, playing with his son's future for his own good) and for a man given a brief chance on the outside he still acts like a violent thug; and then there's all the universities and marketing men surrounding Jesus - like they've got the kid's best interests in mind.

In the end, like most Lee films, the answer to the film's original question ceases to matter. Lee knows (or at least knew) that the things people want worked out the simplest will become so cluttered that looking for an easy solution is nothing but deluded wishful thinking. The only thing someone can do is, well, try and do the right thing. This isn't a perfect movie. Like Lee's Summer of Sam (released a year later) the direction is overly flashy: the camera moving around too much and sudden editing cuts. But if Lee and his newest films are now nothing but caricatures of the energies of a good cause focused in the complete wrong place, then films from Lee's golden years should be even more craved as important relics from a filmmaker spreading the word that doing the right thing isn't usually the easy thing and that sometimes truths don't always sound as poetic and romantic as you'd think, in the case of He Got Game: that sometimes you just have to do things for yourself and have faith that others can manage their own happiness.

2014

Adults are STILL telling me about how fast their years are going by and they can't believe it's 2015 and OMG where has all the time gone? Yet despite 2014 being the year I officially (under some unknown force's authority) became an "adult" (that's 18) I had what felt like the longest year of my life. Until I looked at my twitter feed at New Year's I hadn't noticed how much people rate a year - all my friend's were writing "best year of my life so far", or "it was good, but nothing will ever beat my 2010". The consensus was generally positive - if I had bothered with twitter I would have probably just wrote "well that royally sucked".

I think the year felt so long because I changed so much. I turned 18. I started to go out drinking. (Although maybe not in that order). I finished my first year of Sixth Form; ended up quitting one subject from bad grades and keeping on the rest. Plus I fell in love for the first time. She didn't love me back. Those are how I picture 2014 - not in specific events but in things that just shifted my life. Which is probably why my image of the year is so murky. There was events too - I went skydiving (the first time I'd been in a plane, funnily enough); I "fired" my driving instructor because he was being a dick; and then I ended the year at a friend's house, sprawled drunk on a sofa and watching two other couples making out.

The last few months of the year are just a blur to me. I've suffered depression before but just powered through it, and for some weird reason always talked myself out of going to a doctor, but it's only as some mist faded and I could actually look back at those months when I realized how much I needed help. Because I couldn't see anything from this time. The days blurred together. What date specific things happened to me is lost. I just lay in bed, feeling tired but unable to sleep and thinking dark thoughts. I always used to agree with those descriptions of depression as a black pit that traps you and won't let you out for even the shortest vacation to the surface, but I realized I'd never really felt this until this dark period. I'd only experienced depression like a few spare weights attached to me at all times.

Which is my bit of reasoning why this year was the first time I ever bothered with the whole "New Year's Resolution". I'm not one for traditions so this was something I'd never done. I saw no point in saying "I'm going to quit chocolate" on the first day of the year when, if you really needed to quit it, you could just quit it straight away. But now I see the point. Doing shit is hard. I imagine quitting a comfort like chocolate is damn hard. I wrote down a list of things to do (someone of them done, some not) - going to the doctors about my depression (among other things), handing in some CVs and getting a job, asking my teacher's specifically about what I need to do and about work experience placements. It's all really hard. That's why you need a specific date, to make it official, so it's not just some random goal you've imagine up for yourself, told no one else about, then fucked up at and forgotten all about it.

I had good times in 2014, just not as many as I would have liked. Far too many bad times. Which is my way of saying that 2015 is going to be better, I'm going to make it better. That really, after a year, I just want to be a better person and be in a better place.

The Stone Roses: Made of Stone (2013)

The opening of Made of Stone is grand: Ian Brown walks through the stands of fans awaiting a gig; high definition camera picking up the beaming lights from all directions; all audio silenced and a soundbite of Alfred Hitchcock talking about happiness played over the top. It's one of those moments when all the elements that could go into film - visuals, editing, sound, the whole shebang - are firing full speed ahead and you can just watch in awe. You allow a moment of total sentimentality through your bullshit filter. I imagine for a fan truly immersed in The Stone Roses, you'd get this same feeling of full immersion and joy being part of the audience of their comeback gig, after nearly 20 years of silence. And director Shane Meadows succeeds in his job of giving the same feeling of awe to people watching at home in their bedrooms.

Watching The Stone Roses: Made of Stone made me ask: to enjoy a documentary, do you have to be a fan of the subject? At least know somewhat about it? Or are films like this, based on one artist, mainly for the fans? I realized the answer's no; the best of these movies treat you like a fan, and let you catch up if you're not one. My experience with The Stone Roses was giving a single listen to their first album (of two - and the only acclaimed one) and rarely playing their songs since. Not that I didn't like their music, just that I didn't have the context that Made of Stone makes it much easier to understand.

The film is part tour diary, part band history; Meadows includes his own fandom in the movie and from the feeling he gives, he seems to have just picked up a camera, a small crew, and followed the Roses with the confidence that magic would happen. Magic is subjective, but seeing a group of men who once trashed their guitars mid-gig and walked off stage, claiming they'd never work together again, rehearse together and re-find the rhythm in the lead up to their comeback is something special. Meadows structures the film showing the band's ups and downs reforming alongside the ups and downs of their original lineup. This isn't like a TV special - scanning the Roses' Wikipedia page will tell you more about how they formed; instead Meadows is interested in what a Wiki can't give you: showing the band back stage and in rehearsals and how the personalities bounce (and sometimes grate) off of each other.

The past footage of the Roses brings to mind funny anecdotes, not serious info videos. Out of all the interviews Meadows could have played, he chooses to include one where two members of the band sit gormless, not really sure of anything other than that they are in the best band in the world. You understand the personality and where the band comes from more than anything. I can't comment on how Made of Stone will appeal to a hardcore fan, but I'll say that, as an outsider, this is the sort of documentary that makes me want to go out and watch as many videos on bands I hardly know about as I can. Which I'd call a success.

Under The Skin (2014)

If watching movies is all about the "pleasures" they give you then you should at least be warned that the pleasures of Under The Skin aren't shared by any other movies that come to mind. If Hollywood has cracked the code of what audience's want - why the pleasures of "mainstream" movies seem to be the same to the point of painful boredom - then Under The Skin is in the much riskier business of searching out those unknown pleasures. What you could call the definition of a "film for film fans". Why I thought it was a great movie but wouldn't recommend it to anyone I know - this is one you have to find yourself.

The story isn't complex: a beautiful if not quite all there woman (played by Scarlett Johansen) drives around London, luring men back to remote locations that they don't seem to return from. I won't reveal anything else, because piecing things together is part of the movie (i.e. as much as it isn't part of most big Hollywood movies).

So what are the pleasures of this movie? It has a hypnotic quality - Mica Levi, who composed the music, gets the sound for this just right: a synth heavy score that sounds like a horror version of your favorite 80s sci-fi soundtrack; it just sounds like it could go on forever. There's so little dialogue; nothing gets explained; one image simply comes after the next and you make your own sense of it. If you find much story here then it's likely mostly stuff you applied yourself.

It's one of those movies that seems to very easily turn film fans into snobs (e.g. the first two paragraphs of this review) blasting people who didn't like it on how they didn't "get it" and should go back to Michael Bay movies. (Which irritates the shit out of me). You could so easily watch Under The Skin and not find any sense in it, which would make some of the longer sections - where the filmmakers hold the cameras for a long time on smaller, quieter moments - unbearable. If so, it simply wasn't for you.

There were bits that weren't for me either. The opening is drawn out; like the main focus of the filmmakers was making hard to understand. The visual light displays at the start of the movie weren't anything special (and pale in comparison to the fantastic, surreal images that come later). Sections involved real Londoners that didn't know they were being filmed, which was the film's main marketing gimmick, which is likely what made it feel underused in the movie. Yet if you do apply something to these images then there's great rewards here. Like looking into Johansen's performance as an imitation of a normal person, or the vileness of the final human character as compared to Johansen's character. Once again, I won't recommend; I'll just say I enjoyed it a lot.

Ida (2013)

If you've been injecting your yearly dose of best-of-year lists then you've already had Ida recommended to you many times. Below is the best argument I could come up with for why Ida isn't one of the best films of the year (but why so many people thought it was).

The story is simple, as is everything in the movie (its greatest asset): a young nun (Anna), before taking her vows, visits her aunt (Wanda) who she's never met. Wanda is the antithesis of a nun: she smokes and screws guys she doesn't know and gets jailed for drink driving. The two set out on a trip around Poland so Anna can find out about the parents she never met. 

It's easy to see why critics wanted to love this one (and why I'm sure some of them genuinely did): it's slow, pondering, black and white and its themes and main points of concern have to come from the viewer's head, because the movie is too polite to point them out. To stamp your giant critic stamper of approval on this one must say something good about film as a medium, and maybe even something about you as an intellectual too. And no one has questioned this because Ida is nowhere near as boring as the black and white nun movie your mind formulates when you hear the premise. The two main characters seem set for the same highs and lows as the average American feel-good road trip movie: two opposing characters going on a personal journey where they'll surely learn a lot about themselves from each other. 

Ida is only good in theory though. The emotional moments are there, only they're static. The filmmakers knew they had some weighty moments, some big things to happen, so they didn't seem to bother actually making them emotional. Same as the way the film was shot. Reviewers can't stop pointing out this film's "beauty" (and every other word their thesaurus tells them to write) and I won't argue with that. There's something static and cold about the cinematography: it captures the briskness of 60s Poland, and the cold indifference Anna seems to receive from almost everybody. But the framing, the exactities of every composition, which critics have been so excited to point out, are just as cold and static as the story becomes. There's mise en scene in real life, and I'd find it hard to argue that the best filmmakers make it seem like the frames they create - simple or complex - are just a lucky filmmaker landing on such a composition by accident, despite how un-accidental it usually all is. Characters in Ida stand awkwardly so the framing can look good and smart; it's a whole film that feels static and unmoving - a filmmaker who knows what is good, what's good story and good cinematography and good acting, but doesn't have the skill to work them in with any finesse. 

I didn't enjoy most of Ida (although it had its moments), only admired it as I imagine only someone really interested in film would. 

Endless Changes: On Starting Yet Another Blog

This is blog number four.

If you didn't get it from my first post, this is going to be a teenage blog. Which I've always thought means very little, because I possess weirder interests than any adult that I know, and probably bigger ambitions too. Below is me writing about starting another blog, a fourth one, and me trying to answer I imagine the only question you'd have for me which is "why? I mean, y'know, after no one read the first three?".

I've found it's not just on blogger where every few months I pack up and change things. Every now and again I need a new hair style, or I'll look in the mirror to pick a new thing to hate about my face for the next few months. Which is all crazy, I know, because I look at old things I wrote, not even old, just a few months back, and I think it's good. It's not holy-shit-is-this-James-Joyce's-long-lost-writing type good, but it's a lot better than I thought when I wrote it. It's like I can't like something openly or enjoy a part of myself without some distance. It's a problem. But the calendar just reset and here's the time for making amends, this time to myself. I used to only see the vulgar side in loving yourself, but now I see there is really something to it. You either have to be really stupid or deluded into thinking you're good enough to love, or you've been through enough hating yourself that you're smart enough to know that loving yourself is a good idea. It's as healing as medicine or love. So that's my New Year's resolution, to stop asking for something more, or something different.

I remember this brilliant Lou Reed quote that some publications wheeled out when Reed died. It's about art, but like anything worthwhile in art it's really about you and me and everybody:

“All through this, I’ve always thought that if you thought of all of it as a book then you have the Great American Novel, every record as a chapter. They’re all in chronological order. You take the whole thing, stack it and listen to it in order, there’s my Great American Novel.” 

Reed was such a messy artist. He has big masterpieces, like Transformer and his Velvet Underground work, yet he had screw ups too (just listen to something from the 90s) and he had weird stuff (he ended things with a Metallica collaboration). One discography that holds Berlin, Metal Machine Music and Sally Can't Dance. There's this myth about this "Great American Novel", or this perfect image of yourself and your life in your head, about it being perfect and cleaned up exactly as you like it. But really it's messy and weird. It just takes a long time to realize that those are the good parts.

You only focus on the bad parts of yourself but when all is said and done everybody else only remembers the good parts - and hopefully the weird, fucked up, oddball parts too. So this post was really about life and letting myself act like more of an idiot than I ever allow, but it's about blogging too and the fact that I'm hopefully going to write some good stuff here, but inevitably some shit stuff too, and stuff that won't really make much sense, but that hopefully in a year's time I'll be confident in myself enough to like it anyway and not scrap this blog for another one and put more impossible expectations into a blank canvas. Because as much as no-one ever complains about a blank canvas (even though they should) it's certainly not as good as one with some colour to it.

Charlie Ponders Important Things

Where I, Charlie, do indeed intend to ponder some important things.

At least stuff important to me. Which is a lot of stuff: my shitty ass school and grades and how it's all apparently going to affect the rest of my life. My family and my nowhere town in the north of England - and wanting to visit literally EVERYWHERE on Earth. Partying; "socializing". Getting drunk to the point of being sick. My friends and the people I love (and the many people/things I hate because I'm such a horrible bitter person). Chasing after girls (and hopefully eventually finding some success with that). Movies and wanting to be a film director - and moving away for uni soon and wondering if it's all the right thing to do. Music and being a cardigan wearing, pseudo-rebellious grundge kid turned hip hop fan - the only guy at my school to recommend Kanye West, Nirvana and Bob Dylan equally - and in my case "recommending" being forcing things onto people like an offended religious fanatic. Sitting in my bedroom reading David Foster Wallace and Lester Bangs and even a little Pynchon (and many more) and pondering whether I want to be a writer or just like to write. Hitting the gym. Fighting off what's nearly a sugar addiction. Masturbating a lot (possibly another addiction). Analyzing social situations too much and ticking all symptoms for a hypochondriac. Just anything and whatever.

So enjoy.