This was going to be a Music Monday. But it kept getting bigger and finally turned into a full-fledged album-length mix full of LA-based bands. Consider this a love letter to LA and the fantastic music scene I’ve found here. It’s literally possible to go to a show nearly every day of the week and find bands you like. Even going much less often than that (two or three times a month), I’ve discovered many bands that keep me coming back for their shows, opening bands that I seek out everywhere they play, and seen what a great and supporting music culture exists here (if you look at the band line-ups below, you’ll find several people who are in multiple bands – nearly everyone is involved in multiple projects, creating really interesting cross-pollination). I’ve arranged them roughly from lesser known to better known (sort of an opening band – second opening band – headliner sort of thing), but that’s not completely accurate. Just a general rule of thumb.

1) Hello from Reno – It Comes and Goes
2) The Sweet Hurt – Bright Ideas
3) The Belle Brigade – 4%
4) Eulogies – Eyes on the Prize
5) Local Natives – Airplanes
6) Obi Best – Swedish Boy
7) The One AM Radio – Old Men
8) Army Navy – Dark As Days
9) Earlimart – Face Down in the Right Town
10) Juliette Commagere – Overcome
11) Lavender Diamond – Open Your Heart
12) Munchausen by Proxy – Uh-Huh
13) Great Northern – Mountain
14) The Bird and the Bee – Love Letter to Japan
15) The Submarines – Xavia
16) The Airborne Toxic Event – Does This Mean You’re Moving On
17) Jenny Lewis – The Highs and Lows of Being Number One
18) Silversun Pickups – Substitution
19) Rilo Kiley – Somebody Else’s Clothes

You can stream the songs individually or as a playlist (starting the first one will play them all in order), or right-click-save any song to download it. Or you can grab the whole mix, including my hastily-thrown-together cover art based on a Silver Lake mural, with this zip file (a little under 100mb). If you like the bands, please support them.

You’re going to want to click through the jump – full mix details are under there, with info and photos for every band. And it took me all week to do. So please. Click through. :) Most photos are not mine. Promo-type photos obviously aren’t. Crappy iPhone-looking concert photos probably are.

Click here to read on!

What we’re reading May 26th from 17:09 to 18:34:

• Kotaku – BioShock 2 Dated, Coming First To Europe – bioshock 2 – BioShock 2 gets a date! November 3rd. In. Line. Now. Okay, not really. But close.
• Matt Brett » Hitting the WordPress Theme Market with a Vengeance – One of my favorite WordPress theme designers introduces a new premium theme, Black Aperature. Looks sweet!
• Glastonbury Festivals – Line-Up – Oh. Dear. God. It'd be faster to write up who's NOT going to be at this festival than who is. Lucky Brits.
• Getafilm: The Favorite Movie Period/Place Meme – Daniel Getahun starts a meme asking for your favorite cinematic time/place – what film has a specific temporal and spatial setting that you wish you could be part of?
• Doodad Kind of Town: Looking Forward to: "Nine" – Oh, I never realized that Nine was itself based on a stage play homage to Fellini's 8 1/2. I knew there was Fellini in there somewhere, but that explains a lot.

Apparently “Sick Muse” is the next single off Metric’s Fantasies, and I heartily support that decision. Actually, it’s my favorite song on the whole album. I posted the video for the previous single “Gimme Sympathy” over at Row Three, and Stereogum has the “Help, I’m Alive” video here. EDIT: I lied. Or, Stereogum lied. Here’s the little mini-doc Emily did about writing Fantasies in South America, which incorporates sections of “Help, I’m Alive”: Click here.

Incidentally, Emily at about 2:20 in the “Sick Muse” video? Totally what I do throughout the entire song.

All About My Mother, playing on Sundance at 3:30am on the 24th

Tuesday, May 19

3:00am (20th) – TCM – Blackboard Jungle
Glenn Ford is the teacher who takes on rowdy inner-city kids in one of the earlier “heroic teacher” films. A young Sidney Poitier is one of the students, and a scene in which a record of “Rock Around the Clock” is played is reputed to be the first time rock n’ roll appeared in a film.

Wednesday, May 20

6:30am – TCM – Anatomy of a Murder
From rock n’ roll to jazz – sure, this is a great courtroom drama with attorneys James Stewart and George C. Scott facing off in an attempted rape case, but what always sticks in my mind more than anything else is the amazing original jazz score by Duke Ellington.

9:30am – TCM – You Can’t Take It With You
Millionaire’s son James Stewart falls for Jean Arthur, the most normal one of her eccentric family – which isn’t say a whole lot. Frank Capra’s socially-conscious family-clash drama won Oscars film himself as director and the film as the best of the year.

11:45am – TCM – Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Stewart joins Capra again, this time taking Washington by storm as wide-eyed junior Senator Jefferson Smith, who isn’t quite prepared to take the corruption he finds in Washington in stride. Must See

2:00pm – TCM – Rear Window
Hitchcock and Stewart and Grace Kelly. MY FAVORITE MOVIE OF ALL TIME. Must See

4:00pm – TCM – Vertigo
Hitchcock and Stewart and Kim Novak. ONE OF MY OTHER FAVORITE MOVIES OF ALL TIME. Must See

6:15pm – TCM – Bell, Book, and Candle
Made the same year as Vertigo and also starring Stewart and Novak (as well as Jack Lemmon). There’s a touch of witchcraft in the air, but it’s all in good fun – a bit of a lighter, happier romp after the obsessive instability of Vertigo.

8:00pm – IFC – Elephant
Gus Van Sant’s thoughtful take on school shootings. I’m still trying to get around to rewatching it (I think I’ve taped it five times, only to have my DVR delete it before I get to it) and rethinking my dismissal of it as pretentious. Too many people whose opinions I trust rate it highly.
(repeats 1:35am on the 21st)

4:00am (21st) – TCM – Family Plot
Certainly not among Hitchcock’s greatest films, but it was his last. So there’s that.

Thursday, May 21

2:45pm – TCM – Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941)
And here’s a bit of a change for Hitch – a full-on screwball comedy with nary a crime in sight. Instead, Carole Lombard and Robert Montgomery play the titular couple, who swing between the poles of their love-hate relationship with alarming speed. Lombard’s worth watching in everything, and it’s interesting to see Hitchcock try his hand at something different.

4:30pm – TCM – Here Comes Mr. Jordan
Unassuming but delightful fantasy of a boxer who dies too early (his guardian angel jumped the gun a bit on taking his soul after a plane crash), and is given another chance in another body. Whimsical, I think would be an apt descriptor.

6:15pm – TCM – Lady in the Lake
A not-entirely-successful experiment in first-person filmmaking, Lady in the Lake casts Robert Montgomery as Raymond Chandler’s private eye Philip Marlowe, but shoots everything from his point of view. Meaning, we only actually get to see Montgomery when he’s looking in mirrors. :) It ends up a bit awkward, but hey – experiments are worthy, even when they fail.

8:00pm – IFC – Chasing Amy
(repeats 1:15am on the 22nd)

9:30pm – TCM – West Side Story
I unabashedly love musicals, Shakespeare, and stylized choreography. Hence, West Side Story was in my top five favorite films for a very long time (finally ousted when I got into Godard, I think), and I still love it. I wish Richard Beymer and Natalie Wood were a little more interesting as the leads, but the supporting cast is electrifying enough that it doesn’t much matter, especially with Bernstein and Sondheim music and Jerome Robbins choreography. Must See

Friday, May 22

10:30am – TCM – Rebecca
Not one of my favorite Hitchcock’s, but a lot of people like it, and it’s notable for being his first American film.

8:00pm – TCM – Marnie
Now this, on the other hand, seems to me to be one of Hitchcock’s most underrated films. ‘Tippi’ Hedren can’t act any better than she can in The Birds, but Sean Connery’s husband is fascinating, whether or not you agree with everything he does (and you probably won’t).

Saturday, May 23

TCM is running a Memorial Day marathon of war movies on both Saturday and Sunday. I only picked out a couple (mostly because I haven’t seen many of them), but if you like classic war films, just tune it in all weekend.

5:30pm – TCM – They Were Expendable
There are films that don’t seem to be all that while you’re watching them – no particularly powerful scenes, not a particularly moving plot, characters that are developed but don’t jump out at you – and yet by the time you reach the end, you’re somehow struck with what a great movie you’ve seen. This film was like that for me – it’s mostly a lot of vignettes from a U-boat squadron led by John Wayne, the only one who thought the U-boat could be useful in combat. But it all adds up to something much more. It seems meandering in the middle, but I think director John Ford knew what he was doing all along. Must See

12:00M – IFC – Blue Velvet

3:30am (24th) – Sundance – All About My Mother
A mother loses her son in an auto accident and goes on something of a personal odyssey back to her home town to find his father, who she hasn’t seen since before the boy was born. Like any self-respecting Almodovar film, there’s plenty of shocking material – pregnant nuns, transvestite prostitutes – but the film as a whole is one of the most human and most humane I’ve ever seen. It’s powerful and moving in an extremely visceral way, without being overly manipulative. Must See

Sunday, May 24

5:15pm – TCM – The Bridge on the River Kwai
British prisoners of war are commanded to build a bridge over the River Kwai for their Japanese captors – a task which becomes a source of pride for old-school British commander Alec Guinness. But American William Holden is having none of that and makes it his mission to blow the bridge up. One of the great war films.

6:15pm – IFC – The Proposition

After what seems like YEARS of waiting (okay, MONTHS), there’s finally a trailer out for John Hillcoat’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer-winning The Road. And here it is. Strangely, it seems a little brighter than I would’ve expected, but maybe I was reading too much darkness into the book. Aside from that, it looks great, and I can’t wait to see it. The Road opens October 16th.

The Third Man, playing on TCM, May 15th at 10:45am

As always, if I didn’t write anything for a film, it’s usually because I’ve pitched it in earlier posts. Use the tags at the bottom to find earlier posts regarding the same film if you so desire.

Monday, May 11th

4:15am (12th) – TCM – Network
Newscaster Peter Finch is as mad as hell and he’s not going to take it anymore. To see why, watch this incendiary unmasking of the ruthless world of network television. And this was 1976. Think what it’s like now!

Tuesday, May 12th

6:30am – TCM – Little Women (1933)
Katharine Hepburn is Jo March in this early adaptation of Alcott’s classic novel. There’s a bit of creak to this one, but Hepburn is luminous. I grew up with this one, so I have a special place in my heart for it, as well.

9:45am – TCM – Holiday
Kate Hepburn teams up with Cary Grant for their second film (TCM is playing all their pairings except the first, Sylvia Scarlet, for some reason) – this is the same year as Bringing Up Baby and has been overshadowed by it, but Holiday is also well worth a look.

11:30am – TCM – Bringing Up Baby
Must See

1:15pm – TCM – The Philadelphia Story
Hepburn here is Tracy Lord, a spoiled socialite about to marry Ralph Bellamy when ex-husband Cary Grant turns up. Throw in newspaper columnist James Stewart and his photographer Ruth Hussey, along with a bunch of great character actors filling out the cast, and you have both rollicking wedding preparations and one of the best films ever made.
Must See

5:30pm – TCM – The Lion in Winter

Wednesday, May 13th

10:45am – TCM – I Know Where I’m Going!
This is one of those films you probably haven’t heard of, doesn’t get much press, is very quiet and unassuming, but once you watch it you won’t easily forget it. Wendy Hiller is a confident young woman who knows exactly what she wants and where she’s going – that is, to meet her wealthy fiance and marry him on one of the Scottish Hebrides. But when a storm strands her on the way, she finds herself thrown off-course in more ways than one. There’s nothing wasted here, and I Know Where I’m Going! stands as one of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s crowning achievements, even if it’s not as well-known as Black Narcissus or The Red Shoes.

5:45pm – TCM – I Could Go On Singing
I haven’t actually seen this one, but it’s Judy Garland’s final film. So there’s that. Also, TCM is apparently doing a series of films today that start with “I” – which is just an interesting approach to programming. :)

Thursday, May 14th

5:00am – TCM – Dinner At Eight

7:00am – TCM – Remember the Night
Not a great film, this one, but it has Barbara Stanwyck, who always managed to transcend her material and make whatever she was in worth watching. This is no exception.

8:45am – TCM – The Letter
Bette Davis shoots a man on her front porch. But…is it self-defense? Murder? Something else? Classic melodrama on display here.

12:45pm – TCM – Anna Christie
Garbo Talks. And thus, silent screen superstar Greta Garbo leapt into the sound era. (Disclaimer: I haven’t seen this one, either. But it has the tagline Garbo Talks. I have to work that in.)

5:45pm – TCM – The Women
Only the cattiest, most man-less film every made. :) Several of Hollywood’s greatest female stars, from established divas like Norma Shearer and Joan Crawford to up-and-comers like Rosalind Russell and Joan Fontaine to character actresses like Mary Boland and Marjorie Main (and even non-actresses like gossip columnist Hedda Hopper), give their all to one of the wittiest scripts ever written. It’s tremendous fun every time I see it. And I’ve seen it like ten or fifteen times.
Must See

10:00pm – IFC – Blue Velvet
(repeats at 3:15am on the 15th)

Friday, May 15th

7:15am – TCM – Shadow of a Doubt
Must See

9:25am – IFC – Primer
(repeats at 2:35pm)

10:45am – TCM – The Third Man
Carol Reed directs Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten in a Graham Greene script with a film noir style that seems to point directly toward European filmmaking styles of the 1950s and 1960s. Can’t be beat, I tell you. Can’t.
Must See

9:30pm – IFC – The Proposition
Australia’s answer to the western; Guy Pearce must hunt down and capture his brothers for the law in order to save his own skin. Gritty and violent almost to a fault, but it definitely brought new life to the Western genre – maybe it’s finally due to recover in the 2000s?
(repeats at 3:00am on the 16th)

Saturday, May 16th

6:00am – TCM – Murder!
Best.Title.Ever for a Hitchcock film, right down to the included exclamation point. :) It’s an early Hitchcock, one of his first sound pictures.

Sunday, May 17th

9:45am – IFC – Far From Heaven
Director Todd Haynes homages 1950s melodrama king Douglas Sirk with this film, loosely based on Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows. I don’t think he succeeded as well as he might’ve (Sirk’s sort of in a class by himself), but he and lead Julianne Moore make a darn good attempt.
(repeats at 2:15pm)

11:30am – TCM – Double Indemnity
Must See

6:00pm – TCM – In the Heat of the Night
Northern police officer Sidney Poitier is brought in to aid racist small-town cop Rod Steiger. It’s 1967. You think sparks aren’t gonna fly from that? Come on. Steiger won an Oscar.

Look, it’s not a scheduled series post! Didn’t know I could still do those, didja? I had to write this down, though, while I was thinking about it. A compulsion, you might say.

My friend Lis and I have a sort of ongoing casual conversation regarding our likes and dislikes of different media. We both love television and similar music, but she can take or leave film (while I obviously cannot) and I can take or leave theatre (which she loves with pretty much the same intensity that I love film). We went together to watch a play tonight, and though we ended up agreeing fairly well on what we liked and didn’t like about the individual play, I had a few sudden insights into my preference for film and hers for theatre that I hadn’t had before.

She’s really interested in acting and how actors convey emotion. She’s also a big fan of writing, so for her, a medium of the stage is very close to perfect. The stage highlights the work of writers and actors perhaps more than any other craft. (My dad would say lighting design, but he’s an engineer. Heh.) Plus, in live theatre, the actors are RIGHT THERE, providing an instant and visceral emotional connection. But even in film, she’s similarly more drawn to acting, script, and story than anything else.

If I ranked what’s most important to me in a film – in other words, what things are more or less likely to make me enjoy or fail to enjoy a film – it goes like this: 1) direction, 2) cinematography, 3) editing, 4) story, 5) script, 6) acting and probably 7) music and 8) other concerns like set design and costumes. In other words, I’d rather watch a film that looked gorgeous and had interesting editing and mise-en-scene but mediocre acting than one with great acting that’s shot in a hamfisted manner. There are exceptions, of course – there always are. But IN GENERAL.

During the play tonight what interested me the most was the set design – how you take a play with at least six or seven different places and depict them all in such a small area with a minimum of changes. Where do the actors come in, and where do they go when something else is commanding our attention? That’s fascinating to me. Manipulation of space. The stage is a great place to examine mise-en-scene, because that’s WHAT IT IS. And filmmakers that understand space are usually much more competent than those that don’t, but they also add editing and perspective. I enjoyed figuring out the set design and marveling when a new way to set it up is revealed, but I got bored very quickly looking at it from the same perspective all the time. I wanted to see what it would look like from a low-angle shot, or an oblique from behind those curtains at the side. When I say my number one most important thing is direction, that’s what I mean – how does the director manipulate the cinematic space and our view of it? Directing the actors is secondary, except insofaras the actors are part of the frame.

A great example of this was when Lis and I watched Doubt (the film) together. She liked it a lot more than I did, because the acting is so strong. And I recognized the strength of the acting, but I thought the direction was incredibly dull. And when the director tried to make it interesting (the canted shots depicting doubt), he was inconsistent and illogical, which threw me right out of the story. She came out thinking it was really powerful; I came out wondering who decided to let a playwright direct a film.

I can enjoy live theatre, no problem. And I love seeing musicals (and music) live – the immediacy of music affects me more strongly than the immediacy of actors. But it’ll never mean as much to me as film does, because it lacks the elements that most make me love film. Not that that’s bad – obviously Lis is the opposite, and that’s fine. I just feel better knowing that I can now verbalize my hesitation to rush out to the theatre with her, which matches her hesitation to rush out to the cinema with me. :)

Incidentally, there are plays that I don’t think would work as films, and not just because they’re talky and film would be boring. Into the Woods I can’t see as a film at all, because the staging is so perfect that trying to do almost any part of it without having the rest of the stage (and the inactive-yet-still-active portions of the story on it) visible would lessen the counterpoint and interconnectedness of Sondheim’s score. But it would be very awkward and stagy to film it that way. In that case, adapting it to film seems almost sure to flatten it rather than add depth. Maybe some brilliant filmmaker can prove me wrong, and I’d love to see one try. :) But again, exception to the rule.

Time to start a new series! I love that time. This series has come about because a few people who have been finding my Film on TV series useful have recently decided to cancel their cable – making recommendations from TCM, Sundance, and IFC less useful. So I’m going to supplement that set of recommendations with a series that highlights films available to watch online.

This comes with its own set of caveats. The online streaming service with the largest library is Netflix, and you have to be a Netflix subscriber to use it. Still, I imagine a large portion of film lovers already have a Netflix subscription – if you do, hopefully I’ll be able to highlight some things on Instant Watch that you may not know about or didn’t realize were available to stream. I know when I was initially researching for this, I found a TON that I had no idea were available.

I’ll also throw in a few films from time to time that are available on hulu, which is completely free (aside from having to watch periodic brief ads). The overriding downside to both hulu and Netflix Instant Watch is that they are only available in the United States. I apologize for that, but as far as I know, there are no sites offering legal free (or subscription-included) streaming movies worldwide.

Casablanca

Available on Netflix Instant Watch.

I decided to kick off the series with one that most everyone knows and has probably seen, but it’s always worth seeing again. I promise I’ll get into more eclectic stuff soon, but I didn’t want to throw something super-obscure out there the first time. ;)

Casablanca tells a simple story of a world-weary American ex-patriot making a living off the masses of people escaping Europe through Morocco in the midst of World War II and the woman he never expected to come into his life again, pleading with him to help her resistance-leader husband fleet to safety in America. It sounds like any other war-time story – a touch of romance, a touch of intrigue, a bit of cynicism, a bit of nobility. Not much seems to set it apart from the dozens of other war-inflected films made in the early 1940s. It’s based on a play called “Everybody Comes to Rick’s” that, in its original incarnation, proved to be ironically titled – it was never even produced.

Bought by Warner Brothers as a vehicle for their then-major star George Raft, it eventually went to the less-proven Humphrey Bogart (his breakout roles in High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon had come only a year or so earlier – prior to that he’d been knocking around Warner’s backlot playing two-bit gangsters and villains). Bogart’s sad eyes and sardonic line delivery gave Rick Blaine a depth that Raft could never have managed. The cast filled out with Swedish beauty Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid, and wonderful supporting staples Claude Rains, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, and S.Z. “Cuddles” Sakall. Warner’s sturdy and reliable Michael Curtiz took the directing reins, but most people agree that producer Mervyn LeRoy was really the strongest driving force behind the film – even possibly adding the famous final line (“Louis, this looks like the beginning of a beautiful friendship”) himself late in the editing process. For a very complete and accessible look at the production of Casablanca – which was so chaotic it’s amazing the film got completed at all – see Aljean Harmetz’s great book Round Up the Usual Suspects: The Making of Casablanca.

The success of the film, though, is centered on the perfect combination of the film’s brilliant dialogue (by Julius & Philip Epstein and Howard Koch) and all of the actors’ flawless delivery of it. Lines like “We’ll always have Paris,” “Here’s looking at you, kid,” and “Round up the usual suspects” (not to mention the misquote “Play it again, Sam”) have entered the common lexicon not only of film buffs, but of the cultural at large. In less capable hands, Rick’s ultimate noble decision could seem corny or self-righteous, but Bogart’s performance and the character given him by Koch and the Epsteins doesn’t allow that to happen. Rick remains a difficult-to-decipher, complex character to the end – a character full of both nobility and cynicism, both love and guardedness. I’m not always wholly convinced that his final act is not one of self-protection rather than self-sacrifice.

Here’s a bit of the scene where Ilsa requests Sam to play “As Time Goes By” and she and Rick first see each other again. The whole thing is available to stream from Netflix Instant Watch.