The Broadway Melody (Harry Beaumont, 1929)

I'm probably overrating this second Best Picture Oscar winner. But there's no use getting arrogant about the indifferent direction and the creaky story, not when the film features two dynamite performances from Anita Page and, especially, Bessie Love as the striving sister act Queenie and Hank Mahoney. Any hopes that silent cinema would remain the norm were dashed in the climactic dressing room scene when Hank breaks up the act. Sobbing as she slaps cold cream on her face, Love made such an indelible impression that it moved René Clair to opine "Bessie Love talking manages to surpass the silent Bessie Love whom we loved so well in the past." All that and several classic musical numbers including the titanic title song, a spontaneous outburst of "You Were Meant for Me," and an eerie "Truthful Deacon Brown" sung in falsetto by a guitar quartet. And it ends not with the formation of a heterosexual couple but with Hank's future left uncircumscribed out on the road where it's better to star in Oshkosh than to starve on Broadway. What's not to love?

Grade: A-minus

Four A-minus Best Picture Oscar Winners!

Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood, 1992)

On first viewing, I deemed this a masterpiece. Now I find it a bit sloppy in its revision of the American film western. As Alfred Soto asks, "would Bill Munny really become the Terminator after all those years of dormancy, and why the hell isn’t Morgan Freeman’s race mentioned once yet he’s lynched just the same?" That Munny wastes every Evil at the eleventh hour jibes with neither the narrative nor the revision. And Freeman's Ned Logan raises the eternal question concerning representation of the disenfranchised - do filmmakers hone in on the disenfranchisement or do they ignore it altogether so as not to mess with a good formula (leaving other options to independent cinema?)? Still, it makes up in academic flair what it lacks in dramatic urgency. Like Shania Twain's Come On Over, Unforgiven seems tailor-made for critics and scholars and as a film professor obsessed with the western, I find it irresistible. 

The Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler, 1946)

Not much to say about this one beyond something noncommittal like "I find much of it moving." I'm far more intrigued by the critical rings of fire through which it has jumped over the past 75 years. Jonathan Rosenbaum has a useful post on his site tracing the shifting responses, especially Dave Kehr's which went from dissing the film for "exuding a stifling piety at times" to calling it a masterwork. I want to think it a masterwork too. Will someone sit through all 172 minutes with me to help me get there? Sarah Kozloff's otherwise-fine BFI on it didn't help much. Maybe Alison Macor's new Making The Best Years of Our Lives: The Hollywood Classic That Inspired a Nation will. Until then, I'll retreat into history and posit that while 1939 may be Hollywood's greatest year, 1946 was the best year of Hollywood's life in terms of admissions, the apex before the Fall, before all the neos and posts (or the perception thereof since revisionism is never relegated to one post-WWII era). Wyler's film epitomizes that peak which no doubt has contributed to its chaotic critical reception. It stands in for that mythical everyone who went to the movies. For the entropy that followed (and if you want to simplify history further), check out two films that have meant much more to me: Daisy Kenyon (Otto Preminger, 1947) and It's Always Fair Weather (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1955). 

The Last Emperor (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1987)

Unlike so many of the bloated Best Picture winners of the era, The Last Emperor has an attractive perversity at the heart of its conception. The gargantuan scale, especially large masses of humanity effecting change, abrades against an ineffectual main character. Aisin-Gioro Puyi (played by John Lone as an adult) wants to put his mark on the world but he keeps getting tossed about by history. The resulting inertia diminishes the film's replay value. But it makes for a far more hypnotic watch than Chariots of Fire or Gandhi. And the poop sniffing scene, complete with judicious close-up, is for the ages.

Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962)

The 1962ness of this thing bowls me over. In its loonier moments (when Lean pauses the narrative to take a look around the deserts, say), you can feel the late-1960s/early 1970s head film on the horizon. 2001, El Topo, The Shooting, even Head itself can all be detected in those endless vistas and that Dune-looking sun. And I admire how Lean reserved some of his 227-minute running time to observe the effects of violence on random characters as when an unknown passenger from a derailed train walks off dazed into the desert.

Unforgiven: A-minus

The Best Years of Our Lives: A-minus

The Last Emperor: A-minus

Lawrence of Arabia: A-minus

Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger, 1969)

Midnight Cowboy stands as one of the great phantasmagorias of 1960s Hollywood cinema. Visually and sonically, the film astonishes. It matters not a whit that Schlesinger interrupts the narrative with moments of short-shelf-life psychedelia (rapid editing, telephoto-flattened images, blue-and-white flashbacks, dazzling superimpositions) or that he puts them in the service of skin-deep critiques of consumerism or NYC savagery. They form little de facto avant-garde films that generate surges of jittery, intense excitement. And the music only heightens the effect. Listen to the record-scratch rhythms that overamp the sweetness in John Barry's "Florida Fantasy" or the eternally returning Nilsson version of Fred Neil's "Everybody's Talkin'" that drains the song of hope with each go around. Everything nags at you evoking both the energy and danger of city living. 

Then there are the myriad indigestible trills: a mother and son playing with a plastic rat in a diner; a bowl of matches behind a curiosity cabinet/color wheel; kids fishing off a bridge in Florida; radio voices linked miles away to the talking heads who own them; dozens of extras afforded a closeup. Rampant homophobia too, more an ugly part of the landscape than assurance that Joe Buck (Jon Voight) and Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman) enjoy a properly heterosexual bromance. In short, Schlesinger has expended a great deal of effort to fashion a complex outer and inner life for two (and more!) characters whom society would much rather sweep into a sewer. It's such a rich, surprising film that I might even claim it's the closest Hollywood ever got to Ulysses in deeming less-than-ordinary lives worthy of the highest art.

Grade: A

Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977)

Horizontally, I love it. The vaudeville structure prevents boredom from settling in as it moves from direct address to animation to Celine and Julie Go Boating-inspired interactions with the past. Vertically, it's the same old problem - the Woody Allenness becomes stifling. Alvy Singer, the de facto Woody Allen character played by Woody Allen, longs for control of every aspect of his life, to trot out le mot juste so as to devastate his intellectual opponent or to bring his romantic conquests in line. His spiritual descendant is Nathan Fielder in The Rehearsal, the meta-to-the-metal HBO Max series about Nathan Fielder rehearsing life to plan for any kind of contingency, of which Allen would say, "Boy, if life were only like this" as he does here when he trots out the actual Marshall McLuhan to win an argument. But the unintended irony is that Woody Allen the writer, director, and star is in control of every frame of this film. He already has what he wants so the staircase wit comes off as arch, the longing for control petulant, and each camera placement arbitrary. 

And while Allen makes a great deal of Singer/Allen's arty, inquisitive nature, he wasn't so curious as to figure out what Messiah of Evil (Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, 1973) was before writing it off in his own film. On a drive down La Cienega Blvd. in Los Angeles, he encounters the Tail o' the Pup hot dog stand and a 24-hour restaurant called Fatburger before passing a theatre marquee hawking Messiah of Evil along with Mario Bava's House of Exorcism. Christmas music chirps on the soundtrack in explicit contrast to the sunny climate. Nothing is natural here, Allen is telling us, in one of his many digs at the City of Angels, including films that exist on the same level as fast-food product (never mind that you could see such films in Times Square for decades). I'll let someone else defend Bava but unfortunately for Allen's argument, Messiah of Evil just so happens to be one of the most singular psychotronic films of the 1970s, a fresher, more inventive film than Annie Hall. So to Allen, I'll reverse my usual advice on student essays: back up your examples with specific assertions. 

Still, a much better film than Star Wars.

Grade: B+

Driving Miss Daisy (Bruce Beresford, 1989)

Typical Hollywood fundamental attribution error whereby race relations exist solely on the level of the individual, here a Jewish Southerner (Jessica Tandy) who overcomes her folksy racism by befriending her Black chauffeur (Morgan Freeman). The film has more trenchant things to say about aging than race. But it's all done up so politely, so anonymously that it's near impossible to remember even basic plot points a month later. 

Far more fascinating is the abyss of a career that is Bruce Beresford's filmography. Driving Miss Daisy was the first Best Picture winner since (coughs) Grand Hotel (Edmund Goulding, 1932) which did not receive a Best Director nomination. The slight seems appropriate given how Beresford never rose above hackdom. He managed a romantic comedy called Her Alibi starring Tom Selleck and Paulina Porizkova (which Maltin called "amiable but awkwardly directed") the same year Daisy was released. But I have not even heard of a single one of his post-Daisy titles, from 1990's Mister Johnson all the way up to 2018's Ladies in Black. And even though Daisy cleaned up at the box office in a big way ($145.8 million on a $7.5 million budget according to Box Office Mojo), almost every one of these films lost money, sometimes lots of money. Sole exception: 1999's Double Jeopardy, an Ashley Judd vehicle lost in the morass of thrillers she was starring in at the time.

Grade: B 

Two Capra Oscar winners

It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, 1934) 

It Happened One Night reminds me of Some Like It Hot, another putative comedy that isn't all that funny. As the AWOL socialite and the street-smart reporter chasing her, Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable are sexy, natural, and even deserving of their Oscars. But the only time they generate spasmodic laughter is when they're not playing themselves, i.e., the scene when they're posing as bickering husband and wife to hoodwink detectives. The hilarious moments belong to tertiary characters such as the oily Oscar Shapeley (Roscoe Karns) trying to pick up Colbert on a bus and, especially, Danker (Alan Hale) who turns everything Colbert and Gable say into a song. The chief value of It Happened One Night, then, is how it puts a later Colbert comedy into relief. One of the many reasons why The Palm Beach Story (Preston Sturges, 1942) is the greatest classical Hollywood comedy is that Sturges ceded much of his story to secondary characters, draining the exigency from the central heterosexual romance and fashioning a more inclusive universe. 

You Can't Take It with You (Frank Capra, 1938)

Anyone upset with Beyoncé for telling the masses to quit their jobs on "Break My Soul" will loathe this film. As per Richard Dyer's famous dictum, You Can't Take It with You tells us what utopia feels like but not how to organize it. Poppins (the perfectly named Donald Meek) is our surrogate. Early in the film, he leaves his position as an accountant for the nasty banker Anthony P. Kirby (Edward Arnold) to join the eccentrics at Grandpa Martin Vanderhof's (Lionel Barrymore) home, an artist and inventor utopia threatened by Kirby's desire to tear it down and expand his empire. We want to be like Poppins and join this collective. But how will we sustain ourselves? How do they sustain themselves? Does Spring Byington's typing bring any money in? Ann Miller's dancing? What about all those inventions blowing up in the basement? Is this the Empire Records of 1938? 

It Happened One Night: B+

You Can't Take It with You: B+

Grand Hotel (Edmund Goulding, 1932)

In 1938, F. Scott Fitzgerald was tasked by MGM to write a screenplay for Joan Crawford. The film, Infidelity, never got made (although you can read the screenplay here). But Fitzgerald screened Chained (Clarence Brown, 1934) in order to gain a deeper understanding of Crawford on the screen and jotted down these notes:

"Why do her lips have to be glistening wet?... Don't like her smiling to herself--or such hammy gestures that most actresses get away with....Cynical accepting smile has gotten a little tired....She cannot fake her bluff, or pretend to.... Her smile brighter in outdoor situation than in drawing rooms...Outdoor girl better....Hearty laughter rather good....A sad smile not bad, but the serious expression best....Absolutely necessary that she feel her lines. Must be serious from first. So much better when she is serious. Must have direct, consuming purpose in mind at all points of the story--never anything vague or blurred. Must be driven."

Ever perceptive, Fitzgerald is anticipating the hard-as-nails Crawford of the post-WWII years, the Crawford MGM would not allow to blossom, especially in the wake of the lukewarm critical and box office reception of Rain (Lewis Milestone, 1932). Apart from maybe The Women (George Cukor, 1939), Rain was the only time in the 1930s that Crawford approached the kind of character Fitzgerald called for in his notes. Audiences of the time did not want to witness Crawford as the trashy, fiery Sadie Thompson and so for the rest of the decade, she evinced a coquettishness that cloaked her more independent instincts. But give or take the 1947 Possessed, it's her greatest performance. 

When taking those notes, Fitzgerald may as well have been watching Grand Hotel, a far less inventive film than Rain. As the plainspoken stenographess Flaemmchen, Crawford coos and giggles and flirts, frustrating the de facto Fitzgeralds in her fan base who know she's capable of embodying a self-actualized character. Then again, she doesn't fare any worse than the other stars on display here. The purpose of so many MGM properties of this ilk is to place John Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore, Wallace Beery into the film as one would set a diamond into a ring rather than string a pearl into a necklace. So the narrative has a lumpy frontality to it with forward motion halted by sloppy matches, jarring inserts, and an interminable scene in which Lionel Barrymore returns to his room drunk, shot in one lazy take. I do, however, still admire a moment when Crawford's cutesy demeanor contrasts with her blithely ordering absinthe (blech!).

Much more fascinating, and elegant, is the newsreel of the Hollywood premiere of Grand Hotel at Grauman's Chinese Theatre. Dozens of stars step up to sign their names in a oversized hotel register (does this register still exist?!?!). Crawford is there with a "nice sunburn." So are Mayer and his friend "Eddie" Goulding. And I'm in awe of the mahvelous accent of New York gal Lilyan Tashman who would be dead in two years of cancer at the age of 37.

Fittingly, Grand Hotel is the only film to date to have taken the Best Picture statue without being nominated in any other category. And this in a year going up against titles directed by Frank Borzage, John Ford, Ernst Lubitsch (two of his were nominated), King Vidor, and Josef von Sternberg. And yet the thing still has a hold on moviegoers. Leonard Maltin gives it four stars, the only Crawford film to receive that honor. Do you think this is Crawford's only four-star film?

Grade: C+ (docked a notch for overshadowing Rain)

Going My Way (Leo McCarey, 1944)

In Leo McCarey's best films, his penchant for sentimentality or right-wing sermonizing is kept in check by the profound respect he holds for his characters. Going My Way upsets that balance, tipping over and flailing in a jar of schmaltz. Most of the scenes between Father O'Malley (Bing Crosby) and Father Fitzgibbon (Barry Fitzgerald) are tenderly observed. But McCarey's characteristic digressions get the best of him including an eleventh-hour church fire pushing the running time past two hours, a night at the opera (would it were A Night at the Opera), and too many songs, almost all of which are sung by Bing and the group of street urchins he's gathered into a wince-inducing boys' choir. Clearly, the musical brought out McCarey's worst tendencies which would be reversed the following year in the infinitely superior sequel, The Bells of St. Mary's.

Grade: C+

The Cincinnati Kid (Norman Jewison, 1965)

It's easy to figure out what went wrong here. Despite the wattage in front of the camera (Steve McQueen as the titular kid, Edward G. Robinson as a well-manicured poker genius, Karl Malden as a put-upon card dealer, Joan Blondell as the brassy Lady Fingers, Ann-Margret and Tuesday Weld as arm candy, Cab Calloway surprisingly effective as a fellow player, and Rip Torn on board for sleaze) and behind it (Sam Peckinpah fired early in production, screenplay by Ring Lardner Jr. and Terry Southern, music by Lalo Schifrin, edited by Hal Ashby), no one knew what to do with a story in which a mammoth poker game is its sole raison d'être. The poker scenes are fantastic. Even if you don't understand every filigree of the game, Jewison revs up the tension so that the stakes are never in doubt. But it takes about an hour to get there. Before then, it's deathly dull despite a gnarly chicken fight scene. Most of the screen time dwells on romantic foibles that Jewison et al. should have breezed through if not ignored altogether. And the prodcution design offers no compensations. The only way to tell the story takes place in the 1930s is by the cars and a National Recovery Administration poster in the background. Does the film end when the poker game ends? Of course not because you need the Formation of the Heterosexual Couple stamp to bring the thing to its quick, clockwork conclusion. 

Grade: B-minus

Olivia Newton-John (1948 - 2022)

Olivia Newton-John was the first artist who sparked completist tendencies in me. With Grease injected into my arteries, I needed her all. I owned every one of her (USA-released) albums up to and including Olivia's Greatest Hits Vol. 2 (MCA, 1982). What I couldn't find as a cut-out at K-Mart my mom ordered for me at Rose Records, the anticipation of finally getting to hear Let Me Be There and If You Love, Let Me Know unbearable. In this obsession, I was not alone. My fellow ONJ fiend Carolyn and I would write our favorite songs on our folders, sing "Making a Good Thing Better" sitting in the school entranceway during recess, and single out deep cuts like "I'll Bet You a Kangaroo" or "Crying, Laughing, Loving, Lying" for ridicule, less out of conviction than a longing for any modicum of authority.

And all this before the twin miracles of Xanadu, the summum of 1980s preteen cinema, and "Physical," the top single of the decade according to Billboard. By this point, I could watch Xanadu on VHS which I did dutifully, daily, until a fault line formed in the cassette. But that was a more private obsession, bewitching me throughout my near constant occupancy of the den while the neighborhood boys played dice baseball across the street. The ubiquity of "Physical" meant you had to take a stance and it marked any boy who held even mild affection for it as queer. MTV cut out the gay ending to the video but the repressed returned in my flouncy behavior whether I wanted it to or not. And given the homophobia surrounding me, I didn't. A few years later, my mom took me to see Culture Club at Poplar Creek where she bought me a t-shirt. I never wore it, especially not to school. I would have sooner gone naked. 

But market forces caused me to abandon ONJ around 1983, the year of her last top five single, "Heart Attack." MTV and The Rock Yearbook gave me the new wave flu. I discovered The Turntable, an independent record store in Schaumburg where I bought imports like the 1982 Cherry Red compilation Burning Ambitions: A History of Punk. And by the end of high school/the 1980s, I was diving into the canon of which ONJ was decidedly not a part. I don't recall hearing 1985's "Soul Kiss," her last top 40 single, at the time and didn't listen to the accompanying album until this century. 1988's The Rumour I heard for the first time Tuesday night. These are decent, painless releases you need not bother with (check out Chuck Eddy's appraisal where he compares it favorably to Patti Smith's Dream of Life). After that came albums of lullabies, covers, and Christmas songs as well as something called Gaia: A Woman's Journey, none of which I've heard and likely never will. So when I learned that she died on August 8th at 73, I was embarrassed to discover some basic facts from the inevitable Wikipedia run, namely, that her grandfather was physicist Max Born, who won a Nobel Prize in 1954, and that she was born in England, not Australia (her family moved to Melbourne when she was six). 

Nevertheless, I always held on to my affection for ONJ. She evolved into a queer materfamilias appearing in the underseen AIDS drama It's My Party (Randal Kleiser, 1996) and the overseen Sordid Lives (Del Shores, 2000) as well as two episodes of Glee. For years at my New Year's Eve parties, I timed my DVD of Xanadu so that her appearance as the space queen towards the end happened right at the stroke of midnight. But until her death, it never occurred to me to dive back into her discography.

Too much is made of the country/pop bifurcation of her career. It didn't take much of an adjustment for her songs to sound like one or the other, both or none. Add a steel guitar here, remove a bass vocal harmony there, and she could capture whatever demographic suited her masterplan. Sculpted by her canny producer/songwriter John Farrar, the early smashes hit higher on Billboard's Hot 100 than they did on the country chart save for "If You Love Me (Let Me Know)" which did #5 pop and #2 country. 1978's Totally Hot is supposedly where she went pop/rock. But you could hear her sound get less twangier before then, especially on 1977's Making a Good Thing Better where she essays "Ring of Fire" and "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina." And after my pal Jody taught me to hear Alicia Bridge's "I Love the Nightlife" as country rather than disco, I now perceive Totally Hot's "A Little More Love" and "Deeper Than the Night" as country songs in pop/rock drag, both of which hit low on the country chart. 

Uniting it all is what John Darnielle calls, in a phrase I never tire of quoting, "the endless mercy of pop music."* In ONJ's songs, a cruel world is always standing by, even for the singer as witnessed by her decades-long battle with cancer. Her interlocutors are a distressing lot - people who have never been mellow or who think the world should see things their way. Sometimes she's the one in need of her own brand of Downy-drenched therapy. Listen to her go full-tilt Yoko as the wronged siren of "Please Don't Keep Me Waiting," the Totally Hot opener used to devastating effect by Crispin Glover and Sean Penn donning Olivia drag in The Beaver Trilogy (Trent Harris, 2001). But with a voice free of Celine Dion-grade will to power, she radiates motherly, if not grandmotherly, acceptance and patience. On Xanadu's "Magic," she holds out her hand while telling no lies about the evils surrounding us. As the song opens, it could be ending or beginning. Depends on if we take her hand or not. "We have to believe we are magic," she implores, because there are so many people who think the worst of us. And if we believe them, then the alternative that awaits us is almost too grim to ponder. 

* John Darnielle, "Dionne Warwick - Legends," in Marooned; The Next Generation of Desert Island Discs, ed. Phil Freeman (Da Capo, 2007), 160.

Monthly Top Ten July 2022

1. Denton Welch, In Youth is Pleasure (Routledge, 1945). "Parents should understand that their young kids are not like them and need to have the privacy to fantasize both their good and bad desires," wrote John Waters in Role Models about In Youth is Pleasure, "maybe...no better novel in the world." Welch allows his fifteen-year-old protagonist, Orvil Pym (an obvious stand-in for Welch), that privacy. On a summer vacation in a small English town, Orvil gives vent to an indelibly etched queer disaffection. He engages in perversities that render the novel just as shocking today as it was 80 years ago. But to catalogue those would be to ignore his vivid interior life where he holds forth on the superiority of stairs over elevators and feels "small and lectured" when in contact with humanity's impoverished life options. Best line: "He hated the man because he had talked to him." A true punk in the making. 

 

2. Henry James, Washington Square (1880). James burrows deep into the psyche of his characters because that's the battleground where this story plays out. A man of unimaginable disagreeableness who would be diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder today, Dr. Sloper wants to control the very thought processes of his nondescript daughter Catherine so that she forsakes her happiness by rejecting marriage to the attractive but irresponsible Morris Townsend. This is a novel in which keeping things to yourself can get you only so far. With a bit more antagonism, anyone can access and thereby exploit your dignity or locate the reproachments behind the veil of your silence, especially James himself who can detect even what you're not thinking. And even though James can come off as nasty as Dr. Sloper in his assessments of Catherine's average-at-best intelligence, she gets her revenge by refusing Dr. Sloper's demand that she never marry Morris even after the doctor's death. Single and comfortable with her mother's money, she self-actualizes at last and gains stature as a den mother to younger women. I can feel her influence on the 1993 Joan Jett/Kathleen Hanna summit "Spinster" which realized the punk potential in spinsterhood.  

3. Hal Clement, Mission of Gravity (Doubleday, 1954). If you're one of the eggheads who get off on hard science fiction, "a category of science fiction characterized by concern for scientific accuracy and logic," then bless your heart. This gave me flashbacks of my Mac geek friends discussing BinHex at dinner or my grad school days when stats bros would talk about slapping a P value on something. My eyes glassed over about 80% of this although I did chuckle at such representative science-before-character-and-story passages as, “Say, what did you mean a little while ago by that remark about permanent seas? What other kind do you have?” Oh please don't ask. 

 

4. Henriette Martin and Gita Lewis, The Naked Eye (1950). This was misdescribed on an intriguing ILX thread about obscure books as a "[w]eird hardboiled sci-fi novel...that won't stay on track, like they want to talk about fine art or something instead of write a hardboiled (sci-fi) novel." First of all, it's not sci-fi. Second, it's not weird but rather, a cookie-cutter whodunit. Third, the fine art diversions are brief. I grant that "Far from recalling the appealing grace of the post-Rosetti era, a woman seated at a harp usually epitomized the vapid hypocrisies of Victorianism to me" aches for something beyond pulp fiction. But the main character making such an observation is an artist so the swerve seems apt. And once expressed, it's back to the dreary mystery. Will fans of detective fiction not countenance any diversion from the path towards solving the crime? P. S. Henriette Martin and Gita Lewis have got to be pseudonyms, right?

 

5. G. S. Marlowe, I Am Your Brother (1935, Valancourt reissue, 2016). Now this is a book of diversions. In a sense, it's nothing but diversions. Cover and title will trick you into thinking it's a horror novel. And indeed, for the first forty pages or so, a woman feeds offal to her botched experiment of a son hidden in the attic. But mom gets hit by a bus and dies and Marlowe (né Gabriel Beer-Hoffman, pix below) forgets the monster upstairs for a good 100 pages to focus on his brother Julian, a vaudeville pianist longing for a more elevated career as a composer. At which point the novel cannot sit still, floating from stream-of-consciousness eroticism to thick, staccato descriptions of grimy London life to walk-on characters who seem to know Julian's thoughts to an almost comic pileup of narrative roadblocks. It's possible that all of this takes place in Julian's head with the monster-brother symbolizing his unconscious drives. The result may be dollar-store Freud. But Marlowe's florid flights and unprincipled sense of structure make I Am Your Brother the fiction equivalent of that dorky kid eating alone in the high school cafeteria who proves far more intriguing than the popular kids will ever be. 

6. Akiyuki Nosaka, The Pornographers (1963). Dispassionate accounts of violent pornography and abortion mitigated by the attention paid to secondary characters left behind in the Japanese economic miracle, even if their stories turn out to be lies as they frequently do. 

7. The Pornographers: Introduction to Anthropology (Shohei Imamura, 1966). The subtitle is more appropriate to Nosaka's studious novel since Imamura approaches his adaptation as if he were in a food fight. Drunk on new wave possibility, he splatters the celluloid with freeze-frames, gorgeously cramped compositions, and a dead husband reincarnated as a huge carp that keeps popping up in the frame. 

8. The Bear, "Season 1, Episode 7: Review" (Christopher Storer, 2022). Yet another television serial that loses sight of its larger narrative arc. Renowned chef Carmy (Jeremy Allen White, a doe-eyed wonder) returns to Chicago to take over his recently deceased brother's beef sandwich shop. He cannot get his ragtag crew to work in sync and the enterprise reaches destruction with this climactic episode. 20 minutes where the other episodes are 30, shot mostly in one take with Wilco's "Spiders (Kidsmoke)" motoriking on the soundtrack, every person is for themselves and they fail to open the restaurant for the day. It's a masterpiece of tension; 20 minutes is about all anyone could take. But then, in the next and final episode of the season, the blows are absorbed and it's as if the meltdown never occurred. How they still have customers at this point is never made clear. Why don't the creators take these moments as opportunities to generate more stories rather than inconsistencies to ignore?

9. David Hepworth Deep 70s (Underrated Cuts From A Misunderstood Decade) (Edsel, 2022). This four-disc, 71-track box comes from a bad place. Born in 1950, author of 1971 – Never a Dull Moment: Rock's Golden Year, Hepworth in his godawful liner notes claims he's not nostalgic for the 1970s. But several paragraphs of generalizations and strawmanning about this "uniquely febrile period of popular music" prove that nostalgia is exactly what he's pimping. He doesn't even explain why the decade is so misunderstood, his only argument "some kind of counter-argument against those who think the 70s were just about flares and long guitar solos." Next time, he should forego liners because he's managed to fashion a consistent compilation that makes its own argument. Listen as capital-R Rock settles into maturity with all the compromises and minor drama that implies, instantiated here by well-made songs from mostly white singer-songwriters which must be why the worst track of the 71 is by a Black artist (Valerie Simpson, far from the greatness of Ashford & Simpson, although a plodding Montrose horror provides serious competition). Peaceful, easy feelings abound with country and blues usages in service to self-expression and women shunted off to the fourth disc. As befits someone who treats "indie" and "alt" as dirty words, Hepworth has little use for post-Velvets critics' bands. The canted angles of Big Star are ironed out by the Loudon Wainwright and Crazy Horse songs surrounding it and the punkiest moment comes courtesy of poseurs Eddie & the Hot Rods. But the most decisive factor in the comp's consistency is that these cuts aren't all that deep. Almost every track started life as a single or some sort of focus cut, whether a side opener/closer or a cover. If that means the Hall & Oates or Ellen Foley selections won't tempt you further, then stick around for those that will - Tony Joe White, Freddie King, Bridget St. John, more.

10. "Energy," from Beyoncé: Renaissance (Columbia, 2022). With the initial shock of Beyoncé's best album worn off, it's time to dive deeper and get shocked anew. At 1:57, "Energy" transcends its function as a transition between the P-Funky disco of "Cuff It" and the flagship single "Break My Soul." It extends the warm, summery feel of "Cuff It" on the strength of Beam's calm rap before it moves into an unexpectedly creepy chorus with distorted horns blowing like elephants in the background. Bey's next verse is spiked with demented radiator pings which foreground the references to voter suppression and terrorist Karens on subsequent listens. If the sun is still up during "Cuff It," it's definitely setting during "Energy" and fully down as it slams into "Break My Soul." Oh and even though my copy has the Kelis sample, I still can't make it out through the murk.