It was Oprah on the TV show, she told me so!

What a weekend! Nothing happened, and yet here I am, ready to talk about not one, not two, but THREE movies, and not three, not two, but ONE album that I have since become acquainted with. I also did a painting (that one) and began reading Goethe's Faust for real this time. Here's a quick quote before I move on:

FAUST: Where can I grasp you, never-ending Nature?
Breasts, where? You founts of all of life,
That earth and heaven hang upon with love
And where the parched soul craves to be,
You flow, you give drink, but not to me.

I shouldn't have to explain that one to y'all.

First up: let's do the album.

So I was in Everyday Music with my mom (she was picking up the Alison Krauss and Robert Plant album, which is actually pretty good despite how I can't get it out of my head that one of the songs might, might be a sonic ripoff of Tom Wait's "Underground") and I passed by this album on the "new releases" shelf. I'd been meaning to look into her, since she did such great work on the Leonard Cohen documentary I'm Your Man, where she did an ethereal cover of "Tower of Song", among others. Since then I've been familiar with only one of her songs; the intense hate-on song "Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole", about her father Loundon Wainwright III.

So anyway, I saw the album, and fell in love with the title (in case you can't read it, it's called I Know You're Married But I've Got Feelings Too), and now I've listened to it and I'm not disappointed. The production is smooth, her voice is wonderful, and the lyrics are coarse enough to keep me interested; they seem to fit somewhere between "You Oughta Know" Alanis Morrisette and "Horse and I" Bat For Lashes: Wainwright holds her ground as a jilted woman and as an artistic personality without getting too bemoaningly bitchy on one end nor too shut-the-fuck-up on the other.

Have you ever listened to The Red Shoes by Kate Bush? It's this album that she put out after she had an apparently nasty breakup with her longtime boyfriend. Before that time, Kate Bush hadn't really had any need to digress into writing love songs, not to mention rejected love songs, and really we should be grateful that she didn't. She's not good at it. The album also was written for a live band, so it lacks the production and depth of something like Hounds of Love, which is about twenty times better. It's poppy, it's sappy, it's like Kate had to roll out of bed and wipe off the salty mascara tears before she crawled to work and slumped over the microphone, smelling like anything but soap, naming each tile on the studio floor for something that makes her miserable. And you know what? We all know Kate was better than that. Hell, he was the ugly one, she's Kate Bush. She's talented and musically brilliant, she could have taken that relationship and turned it into something spectacular, but instead it's tired and self-pitying.

So here's my point: I Know You're Married But I've Got Feelings Too is what The Red Shoes should have been. Hell, half the reviews I've read say that Wainwright evokes Bush on at least one or two tracks. "In The Middle Of The Night" sounds like something right out of The Dreaming or the better parts of Never For Ever. It seriously does, you'd think that it was a cover. All in all, I liked I Know You're Married But I've Got Feelings Too on the first listen, and right now I'm on listen number two and I'm still liking it. I should point out that it is definitely an album for women, or at least men who aren't completely ignorant. There's definitely a note of Lilith Fair in there, only less unshaved-armpits and more patent-leather heels, which I think we can all be thankful for.

Okay, next up: the movies! The weekend was a B&W triple-feature. First on the list:
The upside:Peter Lorre. The downside: Mary Astor, the script. The stupid, stupid script. I know that at the time it was hailed with an Oscar nod, and that since then it's been put on every goddamn AFI list ever made, and that Roget Ebert thinks it's top shit, but to my modern ears, the overly-explanitory script makes the Da Vinci Code adaptation look like To Kill A Mockingbird. Humphrey Bogart's apparently irresistible Sam Spade is a decent enough character, but seems a bit dumb in the way that he sets himself up for, well, any kind of physical pain. And he's not very nice to all those women who can't resist him. 1940s tough guy dilogue is tossed around so much it's like the characters are playing for points. This worked well enough in the darker and more claustrophobic The Big Sleep or in films like The Thin Man, but either I'm getting bored with it, or it turns into a joke after too long. Bogart is plain terrible at laughing on command, instead of the slower, thoughtful guffaw that would suit the role, he starts giggling like he's being tickled with an ostrich feather. And Mary Astor. Mary Astor. Maybe it's the character, I don't know. But it's possibly the worst femme fatale type that I've seen in a while. Yeah sure she's a murderer, but she doesn't have the attitude of a dangerous woman, she just runs around saying that she's dangerous: "I haven't lived a good life. I've been bad, worse than you could know." Puh-lease. She just pretends to be helpless but never shows the wolf under her wool, at least not on-camera. And she just annoyed the shit out of me. And all the "aha, you're lying, but guess what, i was lying to you, so we are all liars, haha! That was a lie!" stuff was grating, like bad guys and P.I.'s only have one trick up their sleeves. Guess what it is: lying. Like a lying liar. The cinematography was pretty decent, though, and Peter Lorre, who played Peter Lorre, was fun to watch in his role as Joel Cairo, also known as Peter Lorre.

Second up: More Bogart/Huston!

You'd think; same director, same actor, similar result? Not in the least. This one is a Western, but only so much as it takes place in the West (Mexico, to be exact). The film is almost flawless, actually: the script, performances, cinematography, pace, settings, so forth. Even Bogart is good, and usually I don't like him too much (it's the voice, really). The story, basically, is about a few homeless Americans who decide to go prospecting for gold, led by an older prospector. They begin with confidence and friendship, then descend into greed, mistrust, and eventually madness. Nearly every element is treated with maturity; from the depiction of the men's poor lives in the small hole-in-the-wall Mexican town where they're stuck to the reading of a letter in the pocket of a man who they had planned to kill, to the prospector's rescue of a young indian boy that saves him from the misery that the gold brings them. There is one drawn-out section of Bogart talking to himself that isn't the easiest thing to watch for lack of finesse, but other than that I can't find any criticism. Yeah, it's just that good.

And finally, something completely different:

Madcap screwballery that is wonderful to watch, but gets a bit too screwballed toward the end. Katherine Hepburn as a spunky young woman is surprising given what I'm used to from her, but she still completes the role perfectly, I can't imagine anyone else pulling it off. Likewise Cary Grant as an uptight scientist is delightful, since if you put him thick-rimmed glasses, he does look so awkward and boyish that you forget, for a moment, that under that he's Cary Grant. The scenes of just the two of them are the best, or better, the two of them with the leopard. The inclusion of other silly characters makes the film too loose and gets in the way of the developing love story between the two leads (though I adore the line "He can't do that, he's the only man I've ever loved!"), especially when it results in everyone getting thrown in jail, which is, um, clichéd. But if you have a free afternoon, watch it, it's one of the first movies that I've genuinely laughed at this much in a long while.

By the way, I'm listening to Martha Wainwrights eponymous debut, and it is quite good. Also, I'm tired, which means that I should get off the blog and go to bed. So here I go, off the blog, into bed.