BOOKS:

Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed: Four out of five stars for the whole ordeal, mostly because its ideas and its delineation of its main character’s loss of innocence (or multiple losses of multiple innocences!) are more or less timeless and will probably keep people reading this book for a long time (and while one can certainly figure out that the book is from a cynical early 70s period, the book doesn’t wear that on its sleeve.) I cannot quite call it a masterpiece, not just because of things like the premature-ejaculation scene we just discussed below, but because the plot peters out pretty badly in the last 80 pages or so. LeGuin handles the bit where the machine gunners in the helicopter fire on the protesters somewhat awkwardly and then the book just kind of limps to an end with everything past that. However few books have been better at showing people, even very intelligent people, being jerked back and forth between various ways of life and philosophies and coming to the conclusion that they’re unsure of what to really commit to. So in spite of its inconsistencies I would definitely put this ahead of The Left Hand Of Darkness and will continue to read more Ursula for the time being.

MOVIES:

Funny Games: I’m not much for Michael Haneke, but I hadn’t seen his most infamous film, and it’s not much to write home about. The first time Haneke really gives the audience the finger (the death of the child) it’s somewhat effective because you’re dazed and trying to figure out if the movie really did what it just did, but the second time (the silly remote-control bit) was far too obvious for me, or at least I’m just too old and jaded to be shocked by such plot devices. In all the time I spent reading reviews of this film, I don’t think I ever got an answer as to why the family in the film seems so weak and pathetic and helpless–the two invaders seem like scrawny weirdos more than a real threat. I can’t quite say I hated this, but it certainly doesn’t stand the chance of infuriating me that it would have 20 years ago.

Sharp Corner: A very recent suspense film featuring, once again, Ben Foster (whom I will be taking a break from for awhile), this has a strange conceit: a balding milquetoast white collar dad takes his pretty wife and child to a new house in the country, only for terrible car accidents to begin repeatedly happening at the sharp corner in the road near the home. This gradually screws the Foster character’s mind all up, as he begins obsessing about the lives of those who died and developing a bizarre savior complex, alienating his wife in the process. Foster is really good as usual but this film is long-winded and just sort of strange in terms of its subject matter; it doesn’t look like very many people saw it or cared about it, and I’m not sure I can really recommend it.

The Missouri Breaks: I’m going to try to sneak in The Fugitive Kind before the end of the year, but otherwise this is the last of the Marlon Brando films I was really eager to see. It’s about Jack Nicholson as a leader of a gang and Brando is brought in as an eccentric, British-accented bounty hunter who has to stop him, which the movie takes a ridiculously jagged path towards resolving. It’s also a piece of shit; there’s no interesting themes or 1970s “let’s demystify the Western” cynicism on screen, just Nicholson playing a typical Nicholson character and Brando deliberately fucking the whole movie up (which wasn’t much to begin with) like a complete asshole with all of his goofiness and eccentricities. Those of you who want to see the two big-name actors together on screen will be disappointed, and if you know all about how Brando started losing his mind after Last Tango In Paris and want to see evidence of that, stick to watching Apocalypse Now or his Dick Cavett interview (you know the one.) I came around to Night Moves, Arthur Penn’s previous film, but not this weird heap of crap.

GoldenEye (30TH ANNIVERSARY REWATCH): It’s been 30 years since I saw this, but I was really rewatching it because I’d just re-completed the video game. Most of the entertainment I gleaned from rewatching it came from spotting things that made it into the video game, or maybe from noting that Joe Don Baker’s CIA agent character is an homage to Baker’s work as CIA Agent Darius Jedburgh in 1985’s Edge Of Darkness, which was also directed, like GoldenEye, by Martin Campbell. The actual movie....well, I guess the tank chase through the streets is okay, but there are so many stupid moments in the film (Sean Bean falling several hundred feet only to cut to a closeup of a stuntman landing on his back, the stupid plot device involving the exploding pen, etc.) that it’s a bit painful, and the film is also something of a downer to the bloated body count (THREE gun massacre scenes?!?) Wasn’t this thing basically a Timothy Dalton Bond movie that Dalton bailed on? I never had a problem with Dalton, but this feels like the Dalton films, which I haven’t seen in ages…

The Godfather Part III (REWATCH): I haven’t seen this in 20 years and forgot most of the plot entirely; I rewatched the other two films first, and astute Babblers may remember that back when I first saw the film as part of my first big viewing spree back around Christmas 2005, I inexplicably liked it more than Part II. Okay, thank God I’m nowhere close to feeling that anymore, but I cannot entirely write off Part III which most people do these days (I was unaware that it had a poor reputation twenty years ago.) Some of the things people have been ragging on about the film for years are indeed bad, but have been blown out of proportion; Sofia Coppola’s Valley Girl line readings do suck, but I think Keanu Reeves was probably worse in Dracula and Sofia isn’t in very many scenes. The Vatican-intrigue stuff veers between messy, hard to follow and just plain boring. Pacino does well in some scenes but by 1990 he’d settled into the mode we’ve all grown sick of since then. I sort of like the helicopter attack and the parade where Andy Garcia kills Joe Mantegna, but the opera scene at the end is silly with Eli Wallach flopping over all poisoned. Diane Keaton’s scenes are perfunctory and Talia Shire turning into Lady Macbeth is just odd. The last five minutes are all over the place, starting out bad (Sofia Coppola going “Dad?” when shot), then working really powerfully (Pacino’s “silent scream”), then a final shot of Old Michael Corleone which would work if it weren’t obvious that Pacino breaks his fall with his arm. It’s no secret that Coppola either never wanted to do a third film or just wanted this to be a “coda,” but he’d clearly never shaken off the trauma from Apocalypse Now.

ALBUMS:

Queens Of The Stone Age, Rated R: This was where QOTSA really started to get a lot of attention, and while it does expand on their 1998 debut album artistically, it isn’t really mathematically a better collection of songs, IMO. It was cool to hear the rhythms of the chugging “Feel Good Hit Of The Summer,” even if the lyrical joke of the song is pretty dumb when you’re 43, like I am. “Better Living Through Chemistry” is another classic, and the one I liked best of all was actually “In The Fade,” which does a lovely elegiac thing before turning into a reprise of “Feel Good Hit.” “The Lost Art Of Keeping A Secret” and “Leg Of Lamb” stand out too, but I didn’t get “Monsters In The Parasol” much at all, and then could only stand “I Think I Lost My Headache” for about three of its nine minutes. So the album just averages out to okay, like so many others I listen to, but still, you gotta hear their cover of the old Romeo Void song “Never Say Never.”

Bob Dylan, Desire: Pretty strong, I’d say–probably his third or fourth best album, actually. I’d say it goes neck and neck with Blood On The Tracks, and ultimately probably wins in my book, which isn’t intended as a hot take–I just always felt that BOTT starts out with four awesome songs before collapsing into a weak midsection that I felt people might have been overrating because of the whole subtext about Bob’s marriage breaking up. Well, this album is just as good for that–“Sara,” the song most obviously aimed at his wife (and he brought her into the studio to blast her with it!) is certainly one of the best songs, as is “Oh, Sister,” a beautiful little song that the reviews didn’t talk about because they were all too busy blasting Dylan for “Joey,” which ruins a powerful chorus by being 11 minutes long and glorifying a Mafia goon, which led to the funniest part of reading any of the reviews. Come to think of it, “Hurricane,” which I like now more than I used to, is the only good example of length handled well on this album–“Isis,” “Mozambique” and “Black Diamond Bay” are pretty good songs, but not because they’re so long! The violin girl adds a lot to these songs, but now I’m fearing the rest of the Bob albums I’m going to listen to; wasn’t this considered his last great album until about 1997? I know the Christian stuff is next and I plan on doing Bob stuff through about, indeed, 1997. But not for now, I want to finish Apples In Stereo.

The Tubes, Genius Of America: The final Tubes album is from 1996. It was made with several key members not wanting to return after the band’s shitty 1985 breakup (Fee Waybill is still singing though), and features a few attempts on the part of this 70s-80s band to “get with the times.” It ought to completely blow, but God help me, it’s not half bad. The elegiac closer “Around The World” is the lone classic, but for a total dinosaur album, there really are about six or seven other catchy choruses to be found here–“Genius Of America,” “Say What You Want,” “Arms Of The Enemy,” “How Can You Live With Yourself,” “Fastest Gun Alive,” “Big Brother’s Watching You,” “It’s Too Late.” Some were written with…well, Toto’s Steve Lukather, and obviously there’s not going to be any conceptual pretensions like when the Tubes worked with Todd Rundgren, but hey, if you want to just hear some cute plain-vanilla pop-rock songs…? This gets an okay rating, with the Tubes’ discography on the whole consisting of one masterpiece (Remote Control) two other really strong albums, and a few wavy-handers. So yeah, these guys kept their heads above water. Too bad so few were listening.

Longpigs, Mobile Home: The second and to this day last Longpigs album after the understandably overlooked minor classic The Sun Is Often Out came out in 1999, and the band were signed to U2’s label, so they abandoned derivative Britpop to do…well, I guess Achtung Baby style dance-rock stuff, but circa 1999? Almost nobody cares about this album at all–few external reviews are to be found, and what there is isn’t positive–but I for one am glad to have heard it. Have you ever heard “Dance, Baby, Dance”? I for one would take it over any dance-rock experiment Blur or Oasis tried around the same time. There’s also a strong melodramatic ballad “I Lied I Love You,” and a few other strong songs to pad out the album (there were two or three tracks I couldn’t find anywhere, actually.) One of the best songs I heard this year was, in fact, the obscure Japanese B-side “Headaches,” which I will happily lap up many times again before I die. These poor bastards just couldn’t catch a break, I guess, but I liked them.

Jimi Hendrix, Songs For Groovy Children: The Fillmore East Concerts: Actually, this is a 2019 box set containing the vast entirety of Jimi’s 1969-70 Fillmore East concerts (earlier releases of those concerts were, of course, severely cut down.) I didn’t listen to the whole thing, just two discs’ worth of it, a 16-track version available on Youtube. I’m content with that; I’d rather listen to this than Hendrix at Monterey or Woodstock, though I’m not sure I’d be able to explain why, or if my opinion of Hendrix’s live performances really matters, since I’m not much into long-form guitar wanking. Still, I did like the 13 minute “Stone Free,” “Earth Blues,” “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” and “Stepping Stone,” but you should probably take his “Auld Lang Syne” and throw it off a moving train, and at this point I’m very much “Machine Gun”-ned out. And Hendrix-ed out, really–I never found anything truly wonderful in all the live OR studio junk of his from that 1969-70 period, and there’s still two or three MORE outtake collections from that fourth album! Well, at least there was “Angel”…

Pere Ubu, Carnival Of Souls: Noirish 40s-50s-60s themes again, like most Ubu albums from 2006 onward. This is an average album on the whole, but if you like Ubu being creepy (“Codex,” “Dub Housing,” “Humor Me,” etc.”)–and I very much do–some of their creeping weirdness works here, like “Visions Of The Moon” and the sickly “Dr. Faustus.” Two other good songs are the barn burning opening rocker “Golden Surf II” and best of all, the pretty dream-pop ballad “Irene,” or at least as close to “dream pop” as David Thomas’ singing voice can get. Well, I liked those songs at any rate. But, it’s late period Ubu, so you have to take what you can get, because The World Isn’t Listening.

Frank Zappa/The Mothers Of Invention, Roxy & Elsewhere: I’m going to listen to the rest of the Love discography in Zappa’s slot to finish out 2025, if you all don’t mind. This album really pissed me off–it’s supposed to be his best live album, with every reviewer except Christgau commenting on how much skill must have gone into performing this material live! But…God, the style! I’m just into it! I guess I sort of liked “Son Of Orange County” and “More Trouble Every Day,” but I didn’t even get into “Echinda’s Arf” which all the reviews claimed was some sort of Zappa-prog highlight! Rococo stuff, jazzy stuff, dumb humor…I’m getting sick of Zappa world, man. I have nothing to say to back my opinion up and I’m going to shut up and go listen to Love. I can’t take this anymore, at least for now.