Katy Perry: Part of Me Dir. Dan Cutforth, Jane Lipsitz

[Paramount Pictures; 2012]

Styles: biopic, behind the music
Others: Never Say Never, Journey to Fearless

Some thoughts on Part of Me (#KP3D).

Chris Forsyth Kenzo Deluxe

[Northern Spy ; 2012]

Styles: abstract American guitar folk
Others: Fahey, Chatham, Jagger, Adorno

I’m losing my faith in the guitar. Each year, it seems more and more like a relic. For starters, it’s a fully manual technology — a thing to be gripped, stroked, played in the hands, a partner or extension of a decisively human body. It’s also a specifically expressive technology, an instrument that’s made to “talk,” to mime and amplify the resonance and rhythm of human speech. For this, for all its seeming universality, the guitar, like the novel, has a shelf-life; it exists historically.

Links: Chris Forsyth - Northern Spy

The Imposter Dir. Bart Layton

[Indomina Releasing; 2012]

Styles: true-crime, documentary
Others: The Thin Blue Line, Capturing The Friedmans

In a different world, The Imposter could be a superhero summer blockbuster. Our caped and masked avengers fight for truth and justice, and, less nebulously, for revenge. They are cruelly orphaned by fate, but through some kind of magic, a shift or tear in the fabric and logic of reality, they are given the opportunity to sublimate their tragic flaws. We recognize this as sorcery, the bending of rules to serve the narrative, yet one of our most persistent and indulgent fantasies, shared by everyone from Comic-Con fanboys to Oprah devotees, is that your wound can become your superpower.

“Blue” Gene Tyranny Detours

[Unseen Worlds; 2012]

Styles: solo performance, contemporary composition
Others: Robert Ashley, David Behrman, Ran Blake, Thelonious Monk

One major facet of modern composition has its locus in the merger of composer and performance, and the increasing presence of the interpreter’s hand as intrinsically tied to what’s on (and sometimes off) the page. Far from the detachment of David Tudor or the brothers Kontarsky, the player’s nuances are in many cases the flesh and blood of contemporary acoustic composition.

Links: "Blue" Gene Tyranny - Unseen Worlds

Various Artists Tensión: Spanish Experimental Underground 1980-1985

[Munster; 2012]

Styles: Spanish experimental underground
Others: Munster, Vampisoul, Vinilísssimo, Electro Harmonix

“Weird” is an interesting term because, at least where music is concerned, what was Weird 20 years ago often becomes accepted by the time a few decades have passed. Take a band like Young Marble Giants; in their time, they were weird as fuck. Nowadays, however, they’re revered because they’re NOT so weird, as a lot of bands, over the years, have endeavored to sound like them in one way or another.

Links: Munster

Ballplayer: Pelotero Dir. Ross Finkel, Trevor Martin, John Paley

[Strand Releasing; 2012]

Styles: documentary
Others: Road to the Big Leagues, Sugar, Hoop Dreams

Ballplayer: Pelotero, a new documentary about Major League Baseball recruiting in the Dominican Republic, focuses on two teenage prospects, using their stories to illuminate the larger picture and its thorny consequences. Its real subject is not so much baseball as international commerce, and what happens when a poor country has resources a rich country wants.

Savages Dir. Oliver Stone

[Universal Pictures; 2012]

Styles: action
Others: Natural Born Killers, Traffic, Act of Valor, Into the Blue

The main problem with Savages is summed up in the way it blithely renders the big three — rape, torture, and murder — simultaneously seriously and inconsequentially. Its many horrors are perfectly serious to the characters participating in them, but totally don’t matter much to the movie itself, a safely shocking American revenge fantasy given a sheen of grungy violence by provocateur director Oliver Stone.

The Do-Deca-Pentathlon Dir. Jay and Mark Duplass

[Red Flag Releasing; 2012]

Styles: Sibling Rivalry/Indie Comedy
Others: The Puffy Chair, Jeff, Who Lives at Home, Step Brothers, Chariots of Fire

With their fifth feature in eight years, you could say the Duplass brothers have come full circle, or you could say they haven’t moved an inch. After widening their scope with household names in Cyrus and this year’s Jeff, Who Lives at Home, we now find them reining it in and returning to their roots. While they never strayed too far from their origins, The Do-Deca-Pentathlon’s modesty is essentially the antithesis of Jeff’s cosmic grandeur.

To Rome With Love Dir. Woody Allen

[Sony Pictures Classics; 2012]

Styles: comedy
Others: Celebrity, Midnight in Paris

In the titular city of Woody Allen’s new film To Rome With Love, four parallel stories do not intersect over a lazy, eventful summer. Whether too vaguely or too pointedly, each of the stories has something to do with the higher classes rudely intersecting with the lower, and the message, by and large, is that people should stay in their place — the social classes are divided the way they are for a good reason. It’s perhaps the worldview of a comfortably successful auteur on autopilot, but it isn’t the satirical point that Woody Allen would like it to be.

The Amazing Spider-Man Dir. Marc Webb

[Sony Pictures; 2012]

Styles: comic book reboot
Others: Those other three Spiderman movies

The Amazing Spider-Man is like familiar sex with someone you used to date. The best part about it is its chance of surprising you; the worst part is its predictability. By pretending the Sam Raimi films never happened, director Marc Webb and his screenwriters waste precious screen time with exposition that feels like half-hearted foreplay. Once the action gets into gear and Spidey flings himself around Manhattan, Webb proves he knows how to craft an action sequence while preserving physical heft. There are some new moves, but not enough to stave off a feeling of disappointment.

Most Read



Etc.