'Time Thief' - The Legendary Mark Peter Savage

THE LEGENDARY MARK PETER SAVAGE

“TIME THIEF”

Here’s an album about work-life sung as sleazy and seductive synthpop. Mark Savage’s produced a previous album called ‘The Sex Singer’, and here are his musings on workaday life sung as sexily as he can. An example: ‘The Truant’ is spoken-word and slinky and should maybe something like the deadpan monologue of Grace Jones’ ‘Walking in the Rain’, but the defiance in the musings here are about avoiding work and responsibility. This is without the political edge of Savage’s ‘My New Boss’, but still raises an eyebrow at hierarchy and authority. This is for the proletariats living the dream of working with a secret agenda of indifference in capitalist mundanity. It sounds sultry, but the main theme is shirking work while on the job.

“I’m not here for the money/I’m not here for the show/ I’m here to mess around until it’s time to go,” he sings on ‘Time Thief’, the point where the album launches from low-key trip-hoppy ambience into full electropop vibe. He may be crooning “I’ve got gentle hands,” on ‘Gentle Hands’ but it’s alluding to the toll of chores rather than a come-on. It’s an amusing gag. There is always a little affectation to Savage’s work, a definite persona, but it’s knowing, smart and witty, full of literacy and as much self-mocking as self-regard in its pose. It’s the attitude of rebellion but kept under collar of the job attire.

Savage croons over the wide-open spaces generated by synthesisers and heavy reverb, the kind reminiscent of Suicide – but there’s more of a lounge lizard than punk agenda here. He often sounds as if he’s unexpectedly stumbled into the song and feels the urge to pontificate, pointedly but understatedly. It’s full of the beeps, pulses, keyboard crescendos and diminuendos that make electronic music so appealing. But there are also guitars underpinning ‘Captain of Storytime’. The album is an entire experience: let it ebb and flow for its full length. It often drifts off into keyboard ambience, but then it knows to launch into something like a seaside organ riff for ‘Gentle Hands’. And throughout, Savage pleasantly and drolly croons, verging upon and then sometimes fully committing to spoken word.

And so it ends with a wry, mostly spoken magic-realism tale of a character that retired as a boy – ‘The Retired Kid’ – that captures the sense of wanting to be older when you’re young and wanting to be younger when you’re old. Here’s a character that didn’t have to go through the games of shirking off work to kill hours until it’s time to finish. But then he says, “People tell me I might be tough when I’m twenty-one and all my friends are dead,” it brings into focus the kind of unquantifiable loss that defines old age.

It’s a delightfully surreal, unsettling and amusing finale to an album that shows a deft touch with its track listing, observations and genre form. The album as a whole feels lush, soothing, sardonic, entertaining, confident and demanding of your attention.

Attack on Titan

Attack on Titan

Attack on Titan II: end of the world

Andy Mashuietti, 2015, USA

Screenplay: Hajime Muschietti

IMDB says: “Feature adaptation of Hajime Isayama's manga about a monster hunter out for revenge.”

I haven't read the manga or seen the other anime adaptations of this.

The giant Titans are agreeably grisly, happily chomping on human victims amidst a conspiracy plot about incarcerating and oppressing the survivors of the original Titan attack in a walled city, etc. In the second film, we get to the Chosen One trope that typifies such scenarios. The characters are uninteresting, there’s a nominal romantic subplot, some dodgy acting, lots of screaming one another’s names, effects extravaganza aesthetic, fight scenes descending into unintelligibility  … and whenever the Titans storm in it’s a relief from the interminable exposition and characters’ inane emoting.

John Wick: chapter 3 – parabellum ... revisited: I came for the set-pieces

Chad Stahelski, 2019, 

English-Russian-Japanese-Italian

Original Review here.

So I watched ‘John Wick 3’ again just to see what I felt about it on a second watch. It’s not the usual thing that leaves a mark on me, and certainly the first two hadn’t, and it’s the kind of film I watch just to keep with trends and the mainstream.

What I first noted was that it seemed to me that the opening credits were the kind of montage and design that front TV action series. It’s a world of sicky green, velvety purple, smouldering orange and vivid red, despite a digression into the bronze of the dessert. It’s beautifully filmed by Dan Lausten, giving a little slick class. It owes a debt to ‘The Villainess’ with its ballet-and-wrestling-school-for-assassins, as well as it’s bike chase. The actors all ham it up shamelessly and I am inclined to treat it as a comedy, so silly and over-the-top and narcissistic are its narrative and character outbursts (and I’m still leaning towards Laurence Fishbourne as bad here). Halle Berry’s plays it straighter than the others, as if she’s come in from a more serious film and gives a little gravitas to proceedings. She proves a good foil for Reeves, who delivers his one-liners with his slacker drawl that undercuts some of the silliness in a way that a more lip-smacking performer wouldn’t.

But none of that drew me back in. It was those first twenty minutes that I couldn’t shake. The library fight, the museum fight and – quoting Reeves here – the horse-fu are three knock-out set-pieces in succession that still retained their effect on me. The fight choreography gave me the same buzz that I got from ‘The Raid’  films: fight scenes are as pleasing as dance-offs with the dubious punctuation of violence. It provides the same rush as good pop or rock music. But it was even more notable this time at how well the editing facilitated the action.

With the library scene: oh, that’s how you use a heavy book to fight? There’s the moment when you realise they have found a way to make books lethal, to give you that oh! gratification.

And then there’s that moment when, having been shooting and brawling, both Wick and his adversary take a second, look around the weapon museum around them, and think “Wait, we have an arsenal here!” and start smashing into the knife displays with desperate abandon. Then are the closing knife-in-the-eye and axe-to-the-head gags that are framed for maximum effect, both for squirm-inducement and humour (because there’s humour in outrageousness).

It's the same humour in outrageousness that gratifies when, pursued into a stable, Wick starts to use the horses as weapons – gloriously over-the-top. And when you think of the logistics of horse and bikes and crashes, all in the same take, the film-making skill is evident.

These are each great set-pieces that would have been peaks in other films. And then it gets bogged down in plot and world-building and the silliness takes over. But upon a second watch I enjoyed the shoot-out-with-attack dogs more than before because this time I could see the skilful editing, timing and framing. And boy, so many headshots. It’s a very violent film.

Sometimes I can take a film for it’s set-pieces: I have a friend that felt the uneven nature of ‘Ad Astra’  showed that James Gray failed at narrative, and that may be so, but again that film’s sci-fi set-pieces won me over despite the unevenness (well, that and Hoyte Van Hoytema’s cinematography wowed me). Tarantino’s films are often a sequence of grandiose set-pieces. Jodorowsky’s odysseys are built on moments and vision rather than coherence. If there’s inventiveness, skill and pleasing aesthetic, that alone can impress. But there are many superficial pleasures to be had and quite often the overall vision can compensate for narrative weaknesses.

So, those opening set-pieces of ‘John Wick 3’ still strike me as worthy and impressive in their talent, inventiveness and execution, and that half hour alone will still gain marks from me, although I may find it easy to b thee indifferent to the rest of it.