Moog, dir. Hans Fjellestad: I started to watch another film today, but it was a little too heavy for my mood, so I watched this documentary about Bob Moog, the creator of the Moog modular synthesizer. An engineer by trade with only a passing interest in music at the time of his invention, Moog arguably revolutionized popular music more than anyone has since the guitar went electric. It was cool to trace the history of this man and his great contribution, but the truth is, Bob Moog isn't a very interesting individual, and Hans Fjellestad clearly didn't know how to handle making a film with a central character whose invention far outshines him.Moog talks a lot about how we're all tied to our surroundings and how his garden full of sweet peppers makes him feel at one with the Earth and how there's things that we can't explain and that the way musicians feel when they play their instruments may be an act of God. It's a load of rambling nonsense, for the most part. The film is at its best when Moog takes part in awkwardly staged meetings with musicians who are humbled by his presence and indebted to his synthesizer's contributions to their craft. Rick Wakeman, Keith Emerson, DJ Spooky and others pay tribute to the man while sharing a room with him, and there's several moments where I grinned in spite of myself to see these legends meet a man who should have no link to them but through a happy accident became integral to their lives.
I also thought it was interesting that the often critically reviled English progressive rock genre was responsible for the first integrations of experimental electronics into popular music. Their works might not hold up in the pages of SPIN or Rolling Stone today, but the beloved ambient, trip-hop, post-rock and any other movement that employs electronics owe them a debt for figuring out how to use synthesizers to their advantage before anybody else.
So Moog stands as a somewhat entertaining way to spend an hour and ten minutes (it's a short one) but ultimately fails as a documentary. There's a lot more to electronic music than this film lets on, and a wider scope would have served the material well.
Inquisition, Ominous Doctrines of the Perpetual Mystical Microcosm: An album likely meant to be nothing more than a fun, rockin' black metal romp probably shouldn't make me question notions of the value of originality in art, but hey, I'm a critic, so here goes. Ominous Doctrines of the Perpetual Mystical Microcosm (hereafter Doctrines) is a very enjoyable hour of music. It's also a shameless ripoff of everything Immortal has done since 1999. It's better than Damned in Black and All Shall Fall, worse than Sons of Northern Darkness and At the Heart of Winter, and every song on it sounds like it was cut from the sessions of one of those albums. This presents a problem. Imitation isn't usually considered a very high form of art, but what happens when that imitation is actually better than some of the art it's imitating?
Ultimately, I can't enjoy Doctrines as much as I should because of how intimately familiar I am with what it pays such direct tribute to. Immortal is one of my favorite black metal bands, and in a universe where they don't exist but Doctrines comes out and sounds exactly the same way it does, it would probably be one of my favorite black metal albums. That isn't the universe we live in, though. Like Louis C.K. berating Dane Cook for even subconsciously stealing his material thus invalidating its worth, I can't take Inquisition seriously enough to call Doctrines great. Even as I bang my head along to it and get its (highly derivative) riffs stuck in my head, I can't get around what had to happen so it could exist, namely, the release of a handful of very similar albums by a superior act.
Apparently, Inquisition has been going for quite some time and didn't always sound this way. It's disappointing to know that they're finally getting international acclaim coinciding with their shift to the sound of a glorified cover band. If Inquisition was playing on a tour that I was already going to be attending, I'd enjoy their set, because when I saw Immortal in February, I enjoyed their set. But taken as a work of art, Doctrines doesn't hold up. Originality isn't everything, but there is a line somewhere between homage and plagiarism, and Inquisition doesn't straddle it with nearly enough care.
"On the cutting room floor: a century of film censorship," The Guardian: This piece by Andrew Pulver that appeared in last Friday's edition of the Guardian is an fascinating look at the differences between British film censorship in wartime (no "scenes calculated to afford information to the enemy" allowed), around the time of the release of Last Tango in Paris, and today. As it's easy to imagine, standards have been becoming more lax, but controversies still arise and advocacy groups still demand certain films receive certain ratings or even be banned in the United Kingdom.
What struck me most is that I'm actually rather impressed (and, as an American, annoyed) by the pragmatism of the British censors. The King's Speech, for example, was given a 12A rating without any cut because of the nature of its F-bomb sequence, whereas the hardline MPAA gave it an R rating and released it later with a PG-13 only after the speech therapy scene in which Colin Firth swears was cut out. It was a stupid debate that we had on American shores that, while slightly controversial in the UK, was solved in a sensible manner. As the 21st century proves itself to be more accepting of violence than swearing or sex, I only hope that the MPAA can be a bit more reasonable and begin to model itself after Britain's BBFC rather than Tipper Gore's PMRC.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/09/century-film-censorship/print
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