Beach House's "Teen Dream" is beautiful, comforting

Beach House, “Teen Dream” (Sub Pop, 2010)

           

“Teen Dream,” Baltimore dream-pop duo Beach House’s third LP, their first with indie-major label Sub Pop, is more refined and structured than their previous work while being both more and less intimate. The music is essentially beautiful and each individual element is aesthetically appealing. These are whimsically infectious songs to sing along to like a fool. Beach House no longer hides behind so much fuzzy electronic noise but proudly present their well-rehearsed parts. The expression is clear, but they are performers now with their inner selves projected unfettered by effects even as they are obscured by their own omission. The composition is still dreamlike, but as figments of that dream, the band seems more awake, more energetic than before.

            The delicately rhythmic guitar of Alex Scally advances through the first two tracks as a pernicious idea of creation amidst adark void. One by one the other elements, backing vocal loops sans consonants, Victoria Legrand’s lead vocals and organ, keyboard, drums, electronic effects and tambourine, attach themselves to the growing sound like layers in a dream. And operating as if in a dream where the smallest inconsistency can destroy the illusion, Beach House only rarely, carefully strips away an element and never changes the thrust or feel or an individual song. Rather than change direction, tracks typically build in intensity until just before the end.

Lyrics to opening song and single “Zebra” are sung to the fictionalized animal, “You know you’re gold/You don’t gotta worry none/Oasis child/Born and so wild.” The album art is a slew of decontextualized zebra stripes, perhaps beckoning listeners to ponder some greater meaning and metaphor about the potentially deceptive “black and white horse” as the choice of subject seems equally important to what’s said about it.

            There’s more experimenting of styles throughout the middle of the album in tracks such as “Walk in the Park” which features a Stereolab lounge vibe punctuated by rapid guitar melodies and vocal eruptions of joy. Simple electronic beats coarse through “Used to be” and “Lover of Mine,” the latter with bright treble keyboard riffs glistening above—reminiscent of female trio Au Revoir Simone. Just as their songs are juxtaposed deep rhythmic beats and ornate flourishes, Legrand’s typical low alto vocals are enhanced by soft, lilting diffusion. Each syllable she sings starts and ends delicately, partially obscuring her core strength.

            The beginning of the end of the 10 track, near 50 minute album, “10 Miles Stereo” is an existential, vacuous ballad of anxious excitement that creates space so real you can see the silent stars. It begins with a drum kick followed by a looping guitar melody played at different pitches. Enter Legrand explaining, “They said we would go far, but they don't know how far we'd go/'Cause this heart is a stone, and this is a stone that we throw,” and finally, soft electric waves. Then it slowly builds in stages, with full drums, backing male vocals, cymbals crashing stealing the show and then even bigger drums. The penultimate track “Real Love” features minimalist piano and a varied vocal performance from Legrand culminating in her cooing “I met you” in beautiful, soft, fuzzy falsetto. Her voice is like the warm glow of static from an analog TV set with the volume turned low. This comforting sentiment is brought to the forefront in the last track, “Take Care” featuring the lyrics “I’ll take care of you/Take care of you/That’s true” repeated over and over. It’s a tempting offer that may have some playing this beautiful album on repeat.

"It's Kind of a Funny Story" Is Kind of Awful

“It’s Kind of a Funny Story” is the latest feature from the writer/director team of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, adapted from Ned Vizzini's 2006 novel. It’s hard to believe this is the same team that brought us the indie darling “Half Nelson” for under a million in 2006. “Funny Story” has a reported budget over 10 times greater and manages to do less than half as much.

And what it does do is nothing to celebrate. It seems that for a crack at a bigger market, the filmmakers have given up on taking risks. The result is trite if not offensive. Keir Gilchrist stars as a New York City prep-school kid who cracks under pressure and checks himself into a hospital psychiatric ward. Comedian Zach Galifianakis plays his friend and fellow patient. Don’t let the trailer fool you, this isn’t a comedy. It’s yet another vomit-inducing story about how being white is hard.

There’s no tension and barely any plot. Everything taking place in the present is meandering and meaningless—doubly so as Craig first lives an experience and then talks about it to his therapist. With as much time as they devote to voice-over and backstory, they might as well have just set the film a year earlier. The entire film is built on the ridiculous premise that the suicidal teens are getting therapy with old schizophrenics because the youth ward is under renovation. That sounds more like the set-up for a comedy sketch than a feature film. 

It seems like the actors dictated the plot, and not the other way around. You can imagine a meeting at MTV Films where the producers demand a role for golden boy Zach Galifianakis. They probably didn’t call co-star and love interest Emma Roberts by name, instead referring to her character as the eye-candy or pretty face. This is nothing against Roberts—who is absolutely gorgeous as Noelle—but if she wants to be taken seriously, she had better look for more meaningful parts.

Zach Galifianakis is supposed to be the comic relief, and somehow also the emotional core. But all we get is the same old routine he’s worked out in his stand-up and on the internet. It’s a lot of yelling, and shades of sarcasm until you can’t tell what’s real. Originally this was Galifianakis’ way of parodying himself and the act of performance, but now he’s using the same techniques for conventional acting, and it doesn’t work. The only things new to his performance are the camera angles.

Far more to blame than the actors for the characters’ shortcomings is the horrendous writing. It’s not Jeremy Davies’ fault that his character Smitty has no proper introduction, instilling an awkward feeling in the audience whenever he enters the frame. But as the film progresses and some things start to click into place, there’s something to be said for the incomprehensible first act. The characters keep re-hashing the same conversations over and over. Inexcusably, they don’t even waste our time with original material. They go on and on with hackneyed celebrity quotes and unselfconscious new age drivel. In the famous words of Samuel Clemens, “It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid, than to open it and remove all doubt.” That probably doesn’t work when you charge admission.

Independent movies need to find new and interesting angles for telling stories to survive. When they are homogenized like this film, they become a mere shadow of Hollywood and hardly worth the time of those involved, much less the audience’s. I give it 1/5 stars.

Check out my Q n A with Zach Galifianakis, Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck and Keir Gilchrist.

"The Social Network" succeeds with tight script

Directed by David Fincher from Aaron Sorkin’s adapted screenplay of Ben Mezrich’s nonfiction book.

 

Is Jesse Eisenberg a nerd, or an a**hole? That’s the question posed by Roony Mara as Erica Albright about his character, inventor of facebook, Mark Zuckerberg in “The Social Network.” He was an a**hole pretending to be a nerd in “The Squid and the Whale” (Noah Baumback, 2005), a nerd pretending to be an a**hole in “Zombieland” (Ruben Fleischer, 2009) and a mix of both in “Adventureland” (Greg Mottola, 2009). As someone who can’t be disturbed when “wired in” on computer code-writing marathons, he is definitely a nerd here. But how much of an a**hole he is and how either attribute effects his relationship with women is significantly more complicated.

This question comes at the end of the first scene, which—spoiler alert—is their breakup and Erica’s opportunity to share her opinion on the subject (she thinks he’s an a**hole). Their witty repartee flies back and forth like the ball in a championship ping-pong match. The dialogue is layered with coded meanings, and then the characters address and analyze those meanings. This is a masterfully crafted script by Aaron Sorkin of television’s “The West Wing.” Following this exchange, Zuckerberg enters the night air outside the Boston bar and jogs his way through campus to Kirkland House. The words, “Harvard, 2003” materialize and in less than a second are gone. This is a fast film, tightly knit at an even 2 hours. If the first scene was the warm-up, demanding audiences’ full attention after fifteen minutes of previews, then the second is a controlled come-down. Classical violin wafts from a sidewalk performer complete with stand and music, but is underscored by the dark, sobering tones of composer Trent Reznor. And it is night time, as it is 90% of the time in this film, because night time is the right time, or something.

The film continues in this stylized and highly structured way with only a couple hiccups in form of a forced point or some extended expository dialogue. The narrative structure is technically non-linear as we jump around between two separate lawsuits against Zuckerberg and scenes about the drama behind and creation of facebook. But rather than confound, this device eases the viewing process and provides perfect segues between scenes otherwise separated by space and time. “The Social Network” is much more standard fare than Fincher’s 1999 release “Fight Club”, and is more in line with his 2007 film “Zodiac.” It differs from the latter in its speed and versatility, as well as the plethora of simple pleasures it offers. Both were very well made films—“The Social Network” is outstanding.

But the most impressive aspect of this film is its ability to operate on different layers. It’s all but hackneyed to portray facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) and Justin Timberlake as Napster co-founder Sean Parker (a hilarious and ironic role for a musical icon to play, though Timberlake is out acted at every turn) as the angel and devil respectively atop Zuckerberg’s shoulders. This is especially true as Saverin served as consultant on the book this film is based on. But at least Fincher doesn’t belabor the point. In fact, he actually attacks it from within. After a day of depositions, a female junior lawyer tells Zuckerberg that in these situations the truth isn’t as important as what can be heavily implied. She is talking about going to trial and how everything would look, but isn’t this film a sort of trial? And she, the jury expert, is at once telling the audience what to think, and how easy it is to get us to oblige. Until this point she had been a passive listener, along for the ride just like the audience and maybe now serves as our stand-in. Add that she is a woman fitting with the central struggle for Zuckerberg, and that’s at least 4 layers. It’s that self-awareness that could make this one film that’s significantly smarter than the book. 5/5 stars.