Two Great Post-Hardcore Shows and Some Movies

I've been bad about posting, so to update, a couple of weeks ago my girlfriend and I found a place and moved in together. We've been together 10 months and it's about time we get to see each other every day. Life couldn't be better than mine is with her in it.

A couple of weeks ago, we also went to see Circa Survive play at Port City Music Hall, a small(er) club in Portland. What a great show. It was the 3rd time seeing them for me and they were amazing in this smaller setting.

This is their setlist from the next night in Cambridge at the Sinclair, and it looks pretty close,

1. The Lottery 
2. Strange Terrain 
3. Sharp Practice 
4. Living Together 
5. The Glorious Nosebleed 
6. Holding Someone's Hair Back 
7. In the Morning and Amazing... 
8. Birth of the Economic Hit Man 
9. Glass Arrows 
10. Jimi 
11. Get Out 
12. Suitcase 
13. The Greatest Lie 
14. In Fear and Faith 
15. Stop the Fuckin' Car 
16. The Difference Between Medicine and Poison Is in the Dose 
17. Encore:
17. Semi-Constructive Criticism 
18. Brother Song 
19. Act Appalled

A couple nights later, I went to see Touche Amore at the same club and they were great as well. I actually saw them open for Circa Survive in Boston last year, and this was a headlining show for them. They didn't disappoint, except for the fact that they only played for about an hour, with no encore, but with the energy they spent performing, it was worth it. 

1. Amends 
2. Art Official 
3. Steps 
4. Just Exist 
5. Pathfinder 
6. Kerosene 
7. Praise/Love 
8. Anyone / Anything 
9. And Now It's Happening in Mine 
10. Uppers/Downers 
11. Adieux 
12. Honest Sleep 
13. Harbor 
14. Home Away From Here 
15. History Reshits Itself 
16. Nine 
17. DNA 
18. The Great Repetition 
19. Condolences 
20. ~ 
21. Gravity, Metaphorically 

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"Swerve"
starring: Jason Clarke, Emma Booth, David Lyons
written and directed by: Craig Lahiff

This is Australia's attempt at a thriller/pulp kind of film, and much like the country's take on the horror genre, they succeed, even given all the typical staples of such films. Here we've got a hot, blonde girl, guns, a stranger in the mix, a crooked cop, and a mysterious suitcase full of cash. There's a great opening scene involving high-speed cars and collisions.

Jina (very attractive Emma Booth) is the distressed blonde who gets help from the stranger, Colin (played by David Lyons). He decides to do the right thing and hand over the suitcase to his buddy, Frank (played by Jason Clarke) who is the police boss and the big man in town that seems to run the town, even if he's slightly crooked. Jina, of course, starts to fall for the handsome stranger, Colin; and her husband, which happens to be Frank, the crooked cop, gets extremely jealous. Jina plays each man perfectly as she wraps them around her fingers and the chase that ensues makes for a great thrill ride.

Much of the movie’s punch is derived from the elusive nature of Jina and Colin’s relationship. Booth’s fine-tuned perf keeps auds guessing as to whether the suffering wife is playing the angles on every man around her, and Lyons adroitly portrays the nice guy who apparently wants to help Jina but not bed her. Clarke ramps things up impressively as control freak Frank loses his grip when past misdemeanors come back to haunt him.

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"Bad Milo"
starring: Ken Marino, Gillian Jacobs, Mary Kay Place, Patrick Warburton, Steve Zissis
written and directed by: Jacob Vaughn

You definitely have to give filmmakers credit when they base a satirical and metaphor-fueled, silly-if-not-serious film on a man's stress-induced hemorrhoid that looks like a cross between a hairless Gremlin and an alien with disgusting teeth and a habit for killing the people making his male counterpart's life miserable. It's gory when it needs to be and sweet and enduring when it can be.

The filmmakers link the much-dreaded proctologist exam with the general feelings of metaphorical castration that so many working-class drones feel as their employers ask more and more of them for less and less in return, and then the filmmakers funnel all of that bitter subtextual detritus through a parody of the platitudes offered in a traditional man's-best-friend story. The film is perfectly timed for the age of the breathless hourly reports of a government that would prefer to close shop rather than actively combat certain increasingly unstable and Draconian practices: It's hard to read the paper without wishing the wrath of a little butt goblin on somebody.

Ken (Ken Marino) is a vaguely defined financial adviser who works for Phil (Patrick Warbarton), a broad caricature of the kind of asshole who routinely lines his pockets at the expense of our national economy, and gets away with it. Phil temporarily assigns Ken to human resources, which comes with a new office in the old bathroom and the plum new job of firing people while offering them amusingly absurd severance packages that include rabbit's feet as a gesture of goodwill for their future. Ken unsurprisingly chafes at the new role, but he can't afford to lose it, particularly with his wife, Sarah (Gillian Jacobs), on his case about having a child, a wish that reaches a perverse and premature fruition when Ken's troublesome polyp detaches from the inner recesses of his ass and goes on a killing spree.

Bad Milo would be too obvious if it were merely a revenge-of-the-repressed horror comedy, as Vaughan refreshingly understands that Ken, a stand-in for most middle-class audiences, is every bit as culpable for his dire straits as his tormentors. The film is ultimately a comedy of conformity, and it's all the more disturbing for its sheen of good-natured pluckiness, which allows the outrage to hit you on the rebound. Milo couldn't give less of a shit about conformity, and his ultimate taming is brought about forcefully by Ken, who elects to hobble his id with an ax rather than risk enough of himself to institute any real social change.

This is a fun film, albeit a little gross and messy, with a message. It's nice to see Gillian Jacobs slightly escaping her comfort zone of "Community" which will be coming to an end soon, anyway. These independent films are right up her alley.
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"Don Jon"
starring: Joseph Gordon Levitt, Scarlett Johansson, Tony Danza

I can commend Joseph Gordon-Levitt for stepping outside the role of just being a reliable actor with his directorial and writing debut, "Don Jon." It offers a simple and surface-level look into the mind of a (stereo)typical Italian Jersey boy who can't get enough of his online porn (addiction). And it's safe to say his upbringing (thanks to a father, played by Tony Danza, looking rather old) has harmed him psychological because Jon clearly views women as sexual objects to be admired and judged (the bar scenes with his buddies where they rate women on a scale from 1-10 is rather telling and I wonder if it really happens, having never been a club-scene kind of guy).

Gordon-Levitt attempts to situate his own lead character's porn obsession within a very specific context: a working-class Italian New Jersey home life whose patriarchal structure perpetuates the view that women are little more than objects of desire and a media environment that echoes these same ideas.

As such, the film is both blunt to the point of redundancy and unnecessarily one-note (and thus inevitably condescending) in its portrayal of a stereotypical Italian family. "Don" Jon, as his friends call him, has little difficulty picking up attractive women at the club. But while he regularly indulges in this practice, no sexual experience can compare for him to the pleasures of porn, a world of pure fantasy where women do things they won't do in real life.

Things change when he begins dating the gorgeous, elusive Barbara Sugarman (Scarlett Johansson), who declares Jon's porn habit "disgusting" and forbids him from looking at any of his online skin flicks. The introduction of Barbara serves several purposes. It allows the viewer to see the other side of Catholic-boy Jon's virgin-whore fixation, as he continually refers to her as a "beautiful thing," an object to be worshipped. The couple's visit to Jon's parent's home also hammers home the harmful effects of his family's traditional ways of thinking. While Jon's father, Jon Sr. (Tony Danza), leers perpetually at Barbara and is moved to wax "poetic" about the time he first met his own wife and mentally declared, in what he views misguidedly as a bit of romanticism, "That's mine," Jon's mother, Angela (Glenne Headly), is simply thrilled that he's found someone who can provide her with grandchildren.

Finally, Barbara's role is to provide an unforgivable stereotype of the material-obsessed Jersey princess who symbolically castrates our hero, bossing him around and pushing him to get a better job than his current bartender gig, not because she cares about his well-being, but because she doesn't want to be with someone in the "service industry." While things don't last long with Barbara, she's a central enough figure in the film for her to help Gordon-Levitt undermine his own point. If she's the representative "real-life" woman, then isn't everything Jon thinks about women and about the superiority of porn justified? I think so. 

Fortunately, both for Jon and the movie, Gordon-Levitt introduces another character, an older woman that Jon meets at a college class he's taking. Played by Julianne Moore, Esther sets about schooling Jon in the realities of sexual behavior. As such, she's both a refreshing presence in the movie, someone who talks and acts like an actual adult, and a character thanklessly tasked with delivering the film's blunt message about porn. Ultimately, she teaches Jon that porn isn't "real" sex and that the reason he's dissatisfied in the sack is because he never takes the actual presence of his partner into account, treating her strictly as a living masturbatory aid.

The problem I have with a film like this, that ends as it does, is simply that there is no real redemption of the main, male character. You don't really know if he's actually learned a lesson that he'll take with him into another relationship. I mean, it's clear that he and Barbara just are not meant to be together, because Barbara is a stereotype of a certain woman, as well. 

That being said, I think Joseph Gordon-Levitt did a decent job in his first attempt to write something meaningful and his direction works, for the most part.