Beltmann

I tried to locate this last month after reading a write-up in London's Sight & Sound, but it's not yet available in the U.S. and my region-free player hasn't been unpacked since we moved. I'm eager, but I can wait. Last night I watched the first half of Monte Hellman's Road to Nowhere. Fascinating so far.

Some memorable openers: Heartless Bastards (for The Gaslight Anthem) New Pornographers (for Belle & Sebastian) Crooked Fingers (for Neko Case) St. Vincent (for the National) Fruit Bats (for Son Volt) Dr. Dog (for Wilco) The Dodos (for New Pornographers) The Greenhornes (for the White Stripes) The Antlers (for the National) Merle Haggard (for Bob Dylan) Riviera (for Jeff Tweedy)

Salt of the Earth / dir. Herbert J. Biberman / USA / 1954 Biberman was one of the Hollywood Ten jailed for contempt of Congress and then blacklisted. Made outside of the Hollywood system, Salt of the Earth features real workers and their families in a fictionalized recreation of an actual miners' strike in New Mexico. (The backstory of its production and distribution would make for a terrific film, too.)

Never heard of that before, but just looked it up. Sounds incredible. Thanks for the tip!

Welcome! This is a great place.

I plan to wait it out, too. What's a few more weeks?

In A Screaming Man, which is set in Chad as civil war and globalization tear apart the country, the screaming is almost exclusively internal--the rage simmers underneath the characters' wounded eyes.

In my house, that JHamm DVD has received more play than any other.

I liked that one, too, but not quite as much as Ceylan's earlier Distant. Have you seen that? If not, let me rave: Out of obligation, a professional photographer invites his unrefined country cousin to stay with him in Istanbul, and we watch, slowly and silently, as these two spinning wheels fail to connect--to each other, to others, to anything beyond their apartment walls. You've seen Climates, so you are already primed for Distant's unrelenting mood of melancholy and loneliness. Frankly, the tone is borderline inhospitable, but I was still engrossed by the way Ceylan contrasts the grung

Don't sell Joe Dante short--underneath the familiar genre trappings, his movies often contain a genuinely subversive, sharply satirical intelligence. Consider something like Small Soldiers, which on the surface appears to be a commercial for toy tie-ins yet still scorns the practice of selling war toys, or more specifically, the practice of selling war imagery as spectacle. By exploring the relationship between violence and entertainment, Dante suggests that sometimes the "play wars" boys play turn out to be real wars, like the first gulf war. He suggests that in terms of motives and lies,

I was at the Friday show, too. Those shows were indeed recorded for the aborted concert DVD. The director, Sam Jones, gave me a dollar for looking cool while standing in line on the sidewalk.

I've spent a lot of time with By Brakhage: An Anthology Volume Two over the last few weeks. Experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage is a particular favorite of mine, especially the hand-painted films that look like dancing Pollock canvases. (Boulder Blues and Pearls and… (1992) really sticks to the ribs.) Of the films with regular live-action footage, I most admire The Wonder Ring (1955), which studies how light functioned in an elevated train system that was about to be torn down.

Eels in Milwaukee.

I feel the same way. I'm willing to buy the deluxe CD without even thinking about the price, but I don't want to have to re-purchase a lot of songs just to get the one song needed to complete the set. Give me an option to buy all of the songs under one umbrella, and I'll gladly pay for it. I'm not glad to buy things twice. When I buy The Whole Love, I want to know that I got the whole Whole Love.

That was my first, too! If I remember right, they were preceded by Fountains of Wayne, which made for a strange yet totally enjoyable pairing.

I had a Sega Master System, and wore out Great Baseball and Reggie Jackson Baseball. Spent hour after hour jotting down stats, too. I still have that system packed in a box in the basement. Wonder if it still works...

Reading through that, I kept feeling skeptical. Still, as a massive, lifetime fan of the Brewers, I hope (and will pretend) that every word is factual.

Glad you liked it! So far, it's probably my favorite movie of the year. Earlier today I watched two movies: White Material / dir. Claire Denis / France / 2009 Isabelle Huppert stars as the fearless French owner of a coffee plantation in a West African country collapsing under the weight of civil war. It's a war movie as envisioned by Claire Denis, which means that it is impressionistic, elliptical, savage, and completely engrossing. Union Station / dir. Rudolph Mate / USA / 1950 Tough railroad detective William Holden investigates a kidnapping. It's a decent, twisty example of f

I watch that performance often--that version might be my favorite incarnation of "Handshake Drugs."

1. I think I became aware of Wilco around the time of Being There, but didn't really jump on board until Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, which blew me away. Almost immediately I went back and bought the earlier albums. YHF and Being There remain my favorite Wilco records. 2. My first Wilco concert was July 3, 2003, at Summerfest in Milwaukee. During the distortion of "Poor Places," my wife leaned over and asked, "Is it supposed to sound like that?"

Count me in. I had never heard of this band, but your exchange in this thread sent me to eMusic to check it out. Downloaded immediately.

In Marcel Carne's Port of Shadows (1938), Jean Gabin plays an Army deserter who winds up meeting other lonely souls at a bar run by a man named Panama. He falls in love with a local girl whose godfather (Michel Simon) is a cultured shopowner who may also have a shocking propensity for jealousy and violence. It's a brutal yet graceful, beautiful example of poetic realism.

Point of trivia: I watched the most recent episode of the NBC run of Friday Night Lights tonight on the DVR, and was pleased to hear "Runaway" heavily featured in the closing scene. It reminded me, too, that the show also used "Start a War" earlier in the season (in the same episode that featured Son Volt's "When the Wheels Don't Move"). Listening for the soundtrack choices has always been one of the great pleasures of Friday Night Lights. Besides the numerous Wilco appearances in Season 2, I think my favorite was the Season 4 on-stage inclusion of Heartless Bastards in one scene.