Neil Young & Crazy Horse -- Live at the Fillmore East 1970

My pal Mike asked me how I ranked Neil Young's Decade. Oddly enough, I'd been thinking about another one of Young's albums -- Live At Fillmore East. When I first heard about the release I was very excited. Here was Young in one of his prime moments, playing some classic songs -- Down by the river, Cowgirl in the sand, and Everybody knows this is nowhere -- with Crazy Horse and Jack Nitzsche thrown in for good measure. Sad to say, but the album is a rather big disappointment. "Everybody knows" is perfunctory. "Winterlong" stumbles along. "Wonderin" is trying to figure out how to be more than half a song. The Danny Whitten penned "Come on Baby Let's Go Downtown" is a fun ride with a rollicking push and pull feel. There's a briskness to the playing on this song which I'd hoped would have been evident on "Everybody knows." That leaves "Down by the River" and "Cowgirl." Both can be found on the Everybody Knows album (and Decade), clocking-in, respectively, at 9:13 and 10:06 minutes. The live versions add, respectively, 3 and 6 minutes. For "Down by the River" this extra time dooms the song. There is far too much 4/4 drumming and plodding bass to listen through. (Molina, a pretty straightforward drummer to begin with, never pushes the band into being more aggressive by using some of the rhythmic ideas that can be found on the studio versions of the songs.) The song grinds to a halt for a long section. It feels like Young and Whitten and the boys are trying to explore the central musical ideas of the song rather than attack them ferociously as they do on the Everybody Knows album. Hell, even CSNY rips-up the song better on this live TV-show version (check that host!). "Cowgirl" escapes this problem, thanks to some shredding guitar work. Maybe it's just the lack of creativity on Molina's part, but I also think the long format of these versions don't play to Young's and Crazy Horse's strengths. I'm sure there are more live treats in the vaults, and I'm looking forward to them.

I watched Juno at a 10:05am Tremont Street showing, hoping I'd be the only person in the theatre. I was one of two. Roger Ebert and Andrew Sarris (yes, folks, the auteur of auteurism Andrew Sarris is still alive and you should be listening to him – just not this time) have claimed Juno is the best film of the year. It is not. Instead, if Dana Stevens' piece in slate.com is any guide, it seems that my reaction was similar to most viewers: the first 20-30 minutes of the film were practically unbearable, while the rest of the movie was a quiet pleasure. But that first 20-30 minutes! Given my cultural sympathies and aversions, I thought someone had gone out of their way to make me submit to cinematic hell. Juno (Ellen Page) is that non-existent teenager a certain class of thirty-somethings love to project all their hipness onto; sadly, she's the coolest high school-version of themselves they can imagine. Arch. Wry. Ironic. These words don't do justice to the absurdly truncated and supposedly hip teen-speak Juno is made to spit-out at every moment. Given the film's narrative, a defense could be mounted for the hyperbolic nature of the first 20-30 minutes. On this reading, Juno's way of talking is a defense against the complexities of life, and as she matures physically and emotionally throughout the pregnancy she progressively drops the hipster defense pose. Sentiment and substance replace ironic distance. I don't know if that reading is valid or grants the film's screenwriter too much credit, but I know I'm not buying it. The biggest problem with that line of argument is that it ignores that everyone in the movie talks like this for the first 20-30 minutes. But there is another issue here. By making Juno, specifically, talk like she does for that first section of the film, the screenwriter (Diablo Cody) lessens Juno's intelligence -- for would a teen as smart as Juno obviously is talk incessantly like Diablo writes? -- and denies the audience the pleasure of watching a whip-smart yet fragile teen drop the occasional liberating rhetorical flourish on unsuspecting adults and peers. She drowns Juno and the audience in quips rather than let Juno and the audience swim in that rough sea of high school life. Put another way, in those first 20-30 minutes Cody denies Juno her youth and the pleasures of transcending that youth during those brief, delicious moments of superiority certain high-schoolers seem to attain. Thankfully, this overbearing writing style gives way to something more generous and open.

Zabriskie Point

Thank god Michelangelo Antonioni has a profound cinematic imagination, for if it weren't for the many purely cinematic pleasures of Zabriskie Point, there would be almost no reason to talk about the movie. The dialogue of the two main protagonists careens between the incoherent and inane. We might generously call this living-in-the-moment speech, for neither character is written as though even the most minimal consensual bounds to conversation are to be accepted. It is as though after the "revolutionary meeting" free for all in which whites, blacks, men, and women talked over one another, Antonioni just wants to see how far two symbols of pure will and imagination can take us. (And, of course, until the last glorious bit of wishful thinking in which the female lead imposes her will upon the elite's desert getaway house, it is a man who is willful and a woman who is imaginative.) And that's a shame, for Daria’s (Daria Halprin) counterculture idealism and Mark’s (Mark Frechette) post-liberal any means necessary desperation deserve better than what they get here. (For a far more astute treatment of these late sixties groups and issues and a radically different depiction of California's deserts, run immediately and rent Peter Watkins' Punishment Park.) But if Antonioni and the other screenwriters can't seem to think outside of clichés about students and elites, at least Antonioni can perform a series of wonder works with the camera. I am particularly fond of an early section when Mark is driving through the city and Antonioni masterfully plays with space, reflections, close-ups, different film speeds, and editing. During this scene he also uses the soundtrack to amp up the alienating omnipresence of capitalism as a built urban environment of endless advertisements. The utopic libido-fest in the desert is justly famous – it’s a joyous wish-fulfillment of physical intimacy and delight, with Jerry Garcia’s lyrical close-reading providing poignancy and extra verve to the entire affair. While Antonioni’s camera is more static in this long scene, he still has a keen eye for gesture and touch and the right editing moment. (I think there are problems with his valorization of the desert, but I believe the incarnation of eros escapes the organizing and mechanistic dialectic which Antonioni seems to want to articulate between the desert and the city.) There is a long tracking-in camera movement over the desert towards Daria and that old Buick that deserves mention. Antonioni has the camera glide in on Mark and Daria. He gets fairly close to the car, then we hear Daria laughingly say to Mark “stop it.” At that moment Daria and Mark start to giggle and Antonioni slowly pulls away from the car, letting it move on towards Zabriskie Point. The on the wind tracking shot here is distant and yet tenderly playful. While I can’t say that the last scenes of destruction are a stunning rebuke of all things capitalism -- it’s almost like Antonioni had a rather large budget and said, Fuck It, let’s destroy a really large something or other, and the first half of the Pink Floyd-scored second half of the destruction (writing school, must go to writing school) is just too ethereal and mesmerizing to be thought of as any sort of critique of capitalism or consumerism -- I gotta admit that when the Floyd starts screaming, I want to kick down some doors with Daria.