The week (well, past few days) in review.

U.S. Go Home (Claire Denis, 1994)
I’m not a huge Denis fan, but this might be my favorite of hers. She likes diffuse tangents, not for contemplation of drama so much as willful disengagement from it. In other words, every once in a while, her inner Warhol takes over. This can have a really satisfying effect: when Gregoire Colin rocks out for three solid minutes to (The Animals’ (?)) “Chevrolet,” for example (pictured above), is the otherwise constricted character’s necessary moment of private glory. And there’s lots of well-considered character stuff here: in this supposedly autobiographical work, Denis ruminates on her own passivity and the sorrow of men she let down, whether handsome and rakish or decent-looking and spirited. Her own (i.e. protagonist Martine’s) sorrow is expressed in a half-laugh, half-cry, and an attraction to Vincent Gallo at his most whiny. Not all of it works for me, but I’m glad I saw it.

Keep It for Yourself (Claire Denis, 1991)
… which I can’t say for this one, in which self-effacing Denis either lets things get excessively vacant or lets Gallo shtick carry the day. Didn’t help that the print was burnt, and that the burn looked like a vibrating, Antonio Gaudi-designed UFO gracing the top of each frame, especially apparent against blacks and dark grays.

Heavenly Creatures (Peter Jackson, 1994)
I’m watching this again in a couple weeks. That’s right, I’m in two separate classes screening Heavenly Creatures. (Not to mention two separate classes featuring The Castle of Otranto.) Jackson’s overemphatic style is just as painful to take as it was a few years ago in the LOTR movies, and I don’t have much to say about him besides that I’m baffled he’s taken seriously in some circles.

Deep Crimson (Arturo Ripstein, 1996)
Not exactly riveting, but I sort of enjoyed this. Ripstein’s sequence shots, which might have some Ophuls or Sirk influence behind them, given the melodrama theme, actually feel less like either of those guys to me than Gaspar Noe on downers, roving miserably about rooms at random. The acting is too big for my taste, but there’s an inherent sense of mystery to the material. What remains unspoken—what the killers can’t say to the victim and Coral’s mistrust in Nicolas—blurs the traditional boundaries of killer/victim identification, particularly because the killers have a sorrowful, insecure streak and their victims, however doomed, get righteously vindictive.

Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1949)
Lean and sometimes expressive, but I can’t help but feel that Lewis’s commitment to the dichotomy between nervous, trigger-happy Annie and sensitive Bart is limiting. He also lets genre conventions blunt characterizations: what, for instance, is up with the third act’s cheery amusement park montage, in which neither Peggy Cummins, screaming joyously in the same way an actor in a Six Flags commercial would, nor Lewis, editing smoothly and playing happy music, shows knowledge of the tormented, murderous Annie we know?

The Thing From Another World (Christian Nyby [Howard Hawks], 1951) [third viewing]
Albeit anchored by an efficient, terse protagonist, I find this an exemplary Hawks lesson on how to use a crowd: everyone, even the effete, anxious scientist, is trying to contribute, which means engaging in the art of contradiction, and to observe them crowd the frame is to take in an overload of rational energy.

Waverly (Walter Scott, 1814)
Very enjoyable, even if I had a hard time keeping up with the background material. As historical novelists go, I think Tolstoy’s better at avoiding generalizations or phraseology, keeping things human and making drama stem organically from situations rather than ideas, but Scott is better at resisting the impulse to toot his own apolitical horn, and even goes to the point of ending on a note of near-embarrassing humility. He (Scott) is a bit like Edward Waverly himself, actually, who often makes strained attempts to express big emotions with tact.

Sister Carrie (Theodore Dreiser, 1900) [second reading]
This feels more like a masterpiece than it did the first time. Dreiser is an amazing writer of dialogue: his characters’ speech is wholly independent from their inner lives. Hurstwood, whose fall from grace leaves him a self-loathing, desperate fool, musters extraordinary strength in resisting alliance with strikers or policemen; Carrie, talented, modest, and kind, is avaricious in a way invisible to everyone but herself. Perhaps Dreiser explains too much of these contradictions away, but they’re also evidence of a sensibility forever fixed on the contrast between the workings of the mind and the body.

Adam Elk – Labello (1999)
Not as good as the two preceding Mommyheads albums, but few LPs are. First two tracks are terrific, as well as “Ripple Effect,” in which Cohen “runs away from the ripple effect” with a chord mimicking a sudden distance from natural progression.

Marshall Crenshaw – Downtown (1985)
Crenshaw is always at least a little interesting, and terrific about a quarter of the time. Highlights here are “Little Wild One (No. 5),” “Yvonne,” and “Lesson Number One.” “(We’re Gonna) Shake Up Their Minds” has a nice melody, but it’s also exactly the same one Crenshaw would use in the 1991 Kirsty MacColl song, “All I Ever Wanted,” which I prefer.

Jackie Greene – “About Cell Block #9” (Somewhere Sweet Bound, 2004)
This song is vivacious and dynamic and really pleasing, but all the other Greene stuff I’ve heard is pretty bad.

The dB’s – The Sound of Music (1987)
It’s no Stands for Decibels, but it’s still a masterpiece anyone interested in pop music should seek out immediately.

Graham Parker – “And It Shook Me” (Struck by Lightning, 1991)
A lot of later Parker suffers from smugness, so perhaps this song is an anomaly for making vague, residual pain its subject.