Cause It Is What It Is, Is It Not? (Vulture Whale, Pianos, 8-22-09/Inglourious Basterds)

"We're from Birmingham, Alabama.  And most of you are too."

Good food at reasonable prices.

Vulture Whale - Sugar (mp3)(buy)

I already said my what-for about Vulture Whale (myspace), and I'll stand by that, I don't want to raise high holy only for folks to show up and find out they sound like, oh, a rock band.  But somewhere along the line bands playing very good songs well became an exception to the rule and these guys got very good songs.  Their second self-titled album is solid stuff start to end, it's not gonna let you down, you go do yourself that.  Wes McDonald's stylized plainspeak is a joy to hear, I swear "What Do" is one of the best-written songs of this year.

But "Sugar" is catchier, so instead you get that. "You're confusing me so nice," you're welcome.

Live the band is amiable and capable.  McDonald, through some unfortunate staging, wound up off to the side in the shadows.  There were gestures and faces made; his lines' character and cleverness were intact, unemphasized.  Lead guitarist Lester Nuby (late of Verbana, where I think he was the drummer?) has chops, boys and ladies, though the guy manning the boards hid him in the mix for the first couple numbers.  (Backing vocals were sort of off all night and overwhelmed the lead.)  They don't jam, thankfully, though "That's Cold" got teased out and the climactic "Land It" (from their first self-titled album) is designed to be pounded at.

Band got through all but two songs from the superior second record but folks in the crowd responded more to the earlier material.  (They also played "Rearranged," maybe one other?)  Vulture Whale was the first of four bands Saturday night (after headlining Maxwell's?), there were a decent amount of people there for that.  Room wasn't thick with accents or anything, but if, like the band suggested, many were expat Alabamans, they can only be accused of knowing better.

*

Pabst White Ribbon:  Inglourious Basterds is a smart and overextended bit of WWII fanfic and - despite my worries going in - possibly the best forum for the director's complicated relationship with violence.

It is probably the better for being a conflicted work; it is the worse for being unfocused.  The titular group would be completely superfluous to the action if Tarantino's main concern wasn't image manipulation; like Goebbels (or Batman, for that matter) they realize the power of branding.  (The director likes to be literal.  Film is explosive.)

The Basterds are the B-story to Mélanie Laurent's A.  It's a shame that the director's attention - embodied/consumed by Hans Landa's SS Sherlock - only teases toward her.  It's fine for everyone else to be a cartoon - and so effectively does Pitt malign both Southern and Ayetalian dialects that he could have been dubbed by Mel Blanc - but there's a dimension to Shoshanna Dreyfus/Emmanuelle Mimieux that feels left on a floor.  Perhaps Tarantino felt he'd spent his blonde revenge chick wad on Beatrix Kiddo/The Bride.  But there's a lot of time wasted elsewhere (when storylines converge it's more redundancy than overkill), and Shoshanna deserves more than a moment of glamour and a cut from the Cat People soundtrack.

Tarantino baits/switches expectations of violence by giving us a film-within-a-film, Nation's Pride (Has there been a worse idea for a movie?), that fulfills the worst scenario one could have had for Basterds - celebrated serial rampage - and a worst case audience full of giggly ejaculators.  He then dares you to mimic that audience when he interrupts/upstages Pride with his own grotesquery.  The usual have/eat-cake accusations are valid (Tarantino typically overindulges, includes friend and torture porn posterboy Eli Roth in his cast, punctuates the work with nudge/wink self-critique), but violence does both excite and disgust.  Without creating a work that wallows in the creation and effect of it (and Basterds, aside from its scalping, is not a particularly gory film) he considers urges about violence.  By framing Basterds as a revenge flick and adhering to old school revenge flick conventions within its A-story, Tarantino undercuts the touted Jewish catharsis angle.

I am angry about what the film does to the heroine, but I suppose I am meant to be.  By keeping its sad clenched fist in your face and by being so obvious about its historical falsehoods, the film's overlong running time seems dedicated to reminding you that there will be a time when the lights will come up and when we will have to exit the theater and deal with the uselessness of old anger.

Going in and coming out, I thought of a scene toward the end of Sam Fuller's The Big Red One where the squad we've been following throughout the war liberates a Nazi prison camp in Czechoslovakia.  Mark Hamill's Griff - who has had trouble pulling the trigger all film long - finds a German soldier hiding in one of the ovens amidst the ash and bone.  The German is armed but seems to be out of ammunition.

Griff points his rifle and starts firing.  And keeps firing.  For ninety long seconds.  When he runs out of bullets, his sergeant taps him on the arm.  He says, "I think you got him."  And hands Griff a few more rounds.

There are some cutaways during the sequence, but for the most part Fuller holds on that shot above, a POV from inside the oven.  And Hamill is, surprisingly, excellent.  There is an unnerving smile, a shifting anguish in his eyes.  It has been a harrowing, dehumanizing campaign, there has been so much death, so much lost, now this, for what, how can there ever be any kind of justice for this?

tags: vulture whale  concert reviews  movie reviews  inglourious basterds  samuel fuller  

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