This was the movie people stayed away from in droves. They saw the commercials, and saw Mr. Scientology and Miss Incongeniality, and said, no way.

I, on the other hand, saw a playfulness and a whimsy, a twinkly retro treatment of themes from the european 50s, albeit with a bit more violence: the super secret agent (like the spoof OSS 117 Cairo Nest of Spies), i.e., someone who takes the “ordinary” girl on the adventure of her life, and then takes her home forever. Or, vice-versa.

Ok, I wanted to believe in this movie, and so I did. I admit to not disliking Mr. Cruise, despite his irreligion. I liked the way he acted crazy on Orpah, that he took on the psychology establishment that makes every psychosomatic ailment a registered malady worthy of Treatment, and, frankly, his well-known devil may care attitude toward those critics and viewers who just don’t like him (file under, “Tropic Thunder”).

But if you didn’t see this movie because of any of that, too bad for you. Or, if you saw and thought you’d just wasted 2 hours and the cost of rental, stay with me to the end, and consider thinking again. This movie is way better than it has to be (Thank you, Patrick O’Neill, screenwriter)!

First, you need to know right off that I buy and actually applaud the drug-triggered ellipses in the plot. As much as I would like to know how Roy gets from A to B between blackouts, I really don’t care. There has been enough of his character exhibited to believe in him, and to know that he is fully capable of escaping from danger unscathed, and taking June with him. (Besides, it provides wonderful symmetry for how the film reaches its climax under some uncanny role switching. This, to me, is clever scriptwriting, folks). Call this trusting the metonymy of the film.

Secondly, you also need to know that I am sucker for any dialogue or theme that suggests and then follows through to fruition any of the following narrative pathways: (1) coming back foolishly when it appears all is lost for a desperation rescue; (2) returning after death (or seeming death) to save the beloved, and “she knows he will come back for her”; (3) misdirection that allows the good guy to seem temporarily bad or seriously conflicted in order to keep the beloved out of danger; (4) suggestive phrasing that conveys to a perceptive audience that an accomplice has figured out what the hero is doing and how she can stay within the boundaries of the action so his plan can succeed; (5) sacrificing oneself for the beloved, yet still having a happy denouement. (Movies that do this for me include these disparate films: Back to the Future #I, Passion of the Christ (duh), Serenity, Redbelt, Return of the Jedi, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Unbreakable, Signs, The Book of Eli, It’s a Wonderful Life, Henry Poole is Here, Tangled, and, of course, True Grit.) Friends, I suggest to you that Knight and Day succeeds in possessing all five thematic features, not just one.

Finally, it is the great role reversal in the end that is so surprising and delightful and charming; she now becomes the resourceful if improbably adept consort who has figured things out and makes possible the happy ending that pulls everything, and I mean everything, in the movie, together (“It’s the little things, you know, Antonio; have you ever made a girl an omelette?” “I’ve got this.” “Your chance of surviving — with me (arms held high), without me (arms down low)”). Taken all together, it was the most delightful time I had in the theatre all summer. I walked out with tears in my eyes, made all the more meaningful because my beloved was with me.

So there, that’s my defense of Knight and Day.

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Oh, and one more confession. I am a sucker for any movie that reminds me of the greatest story ever told, the one, you know, about Jesus, which any movie that has those five thematic elements does, and it is still The One and Only Story that keeps getting retold week after week, day after day. We love this story despite ourselves, and even when we don’t intend to tell that story, somehow, 9 times out 10, we end up doing so. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. And as Roy Miller aka Matthew Knight says in this movie, “I don’t believe in fate.” Is this a stretch? Maybe. But if you aren’t seeking and finding the story of Jesus in everything you watch, what are you looking for, my friend, and why?

Jackson Browne (with David Lindley)

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The last time I saw Jackson Browne live in concert was in Austin TX, September 1980. It was an impetuous anniversary gift to us by a friend who knew we could not afford the ticket price, since our little boy Justin had been born months before and we were now a burgeoning family of five, three children 0-5 years old. Thirty years almost to day we saw him again, also on our anniversary. Back in 1980, he seemed captive of many movements and causes: no nukes, Central American liberation movements, and preserving the environment. I am sure he still has those affiliations and associations, if not formally, at least spiritually, but his sole, subtle sermon tonight would be about saving the oceans by not buying plastic. But I knew him first as a prophet of the road and the sky–a troubadour whose songs epitomized the cut-flower aspirations of a wandering generation.

That’s the phrase I used for an unpublished essay that I later reworked under a pseudonym for illustrative use in a composition textbook I published in 1987. It was a clandestine way to get readers to listen to Jackson Browne and to understand a bit of his unusual gravity as a songwriter. The prophet of the road and sky. There were always two kinds of songs Jackson Browne could write and perform with sincerity: (1) the dark, diagnostic and brooding apocalyptic anthem that decried our materialism and its devastation, not only upon the earth, but upon our souls; and (2) the melancholy, wistful love song of missed or exhausted opportunities. His effect then and now on me was this: thank God I am not Jackson Browne, for I have love, I have loved ones, I have anchors, I have hope.

The first song of his I ever heard was not performed by him: “Take It Easy,” by the Eagles, a song so drenched in listless longing for something permanent and endearing it jumped out of the radio and grabbed one by the throat: “Don’t let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy. . . we may lose or we may win, but we’ll never be here again” — this tells me all I need to know about the rock prophet’s life—alluring and lurid, ephemeral and evaporating. Somehow, even in “running down the road, trying to loosen my load” I could hear something else, something that Jackson himself could not escape saying: I wish it were otherwise. I wish there were something called hope.

His voice, compelling and petitioning, but never adversarial or shrill, seemed then too young to be so world weary and so famished: the sentiments of “These Days” somehow had not yet been earned. But I, callow youth that I was, still identified with that, the too-wistful-for-our-own-good melancholy, the baleful, feigned ignorance of the world-to-come in favor of a this-world cynicism. When you are young you can come to prefer alienation a little too much, so that it leaks when you walk, dribbling down in public, and you’re embarrassed when it shows itself.

Nowaways, the mileage on Jackson’s voice bears well, bear felicitiously the years of campaigning on the road. And that’s what performers of a certain conviction are, campaigners who not only want to sell records, but want to embody dissent. And those songs that once seemed premature are now full-grown. When Jackson now sings The Pretender, the all-time great ballad of compromised motives (“caught between the longing for love and the struggle for the legal tender”) and resignation to selfishness in place of long-sought dreams (“I want to find myself a girl who can show me what laughter means. . . and then we’ll put our dark glasses on and make love until our strength is gone. . .”), he possesses the enhanced integrity of having passed through and lived through the geography of the heart that maps his loneliness and afflicts his soul.

When he took the stage in Detroit’s Fox Theatre—on time and without an opening act—I did not know what to expect, nor how I would react. I was hoping that his stage presence and his songs would not seem, now, anachronistic or mawkish. I did not want to be embarrassed for him, nor for me, who’d loved his songs and, indeed, loved him for his perceptive wit and bracing indictment of our collapsing culture, despite our personal worlds being so far apart in temperament and “doctrinal commitments.”

Here, still, was that clear as a bell, unmistakably searing voice that exemplified a different California from Brian Wilson’s, a much more twilight world, vistas not of sandy beaches, but of concrete highways and vacant lots, and of apartment dwellers who stared blankly out to a red sky at morning.

As he cycled through his set list, perhaps for the 30th time through on this tour, now reaching its final few stops, I heard my own biography being scaled, but in reverse. Tracing his recent catalogue back through time to older tunes that bore unique significance to me in time and place, he held me in suspended animation and perhaps adoration. These were impeccably played and passionately sung; he knows how intimate his audience is, fragilely so, and yet respects them, rewards them, perhaps in a way that few artists can any longer afford to. The show’s own climax is “Running on Empty.” And it is indeed fitting as a climax, despite the encore that inevitably follows.

I had ended my pseudonymous essay on Jackson Browne this way: “Throughout his career, Browne has been preoccupied vocationally as the poetic chronicler of a thwarted generation now bereft of their dreams of freedom and of their responsibility, a reader of the signs of the times, a pop prophet of the road and the sky. He leads us through the graveyard of American optimism, singing that we are a people ‘running on empty,’ ‘running behind,’ unable to catch up to, or reach out for, ‘the changes we waited for love to bring.’”

He may not have known, or maybe he does but can’t exactly say it, that those changes have come, and Love has brought them. But we need eyes to see and ears to hear, to embrace them. Once upon a time, Jackson Browne’s songs helped to unclog my ears and purify my vision, reinforcing my transchronological beliefs in Another World, amplifying how much we are desperate to drink living water that flows from springs that are everlasting. In “Rock Me on the Water,” Jackson says just that, telling us more than he knows, or perhaps as much as he can, this far in his journey through the road and the sky:

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Note:
David Lindley accompanied Jackson on his acoustic set and himself on two individual songs, and joined the stage band for the rest of the songlist. It was his piercing, soulful slide guitar on Jackson Browne’s releases that so enraptured me in the 70s and 80s on album after album, and so it was a pleasure and an honor to listen to him play a number of stringed instruments and to perform his own songs and a stirring cover of Blind Willie Johnson’s What is the Soul of a Man?

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Jackson Browne Set List
9-18-2010

Acoustic with David Lindley
1. Seminole Bingo (Warren Zevon cover)
2. Brothers Under the Bridge (Bruce Springsteen cover)
3. For Everyman
4. Looking East

David Lindley solo
5. What is the Soul of Man? (Blind Willie Johnson cover)
6. Meth lab boyfriend

Band Set
7. Off of Wonderland
8. Giving That Heaven Away
9. Just Say Yeah
10. In the Shape of a Heart
11. Your Bright Baby Blues
12. Fountain of Sorrow
13. The Pretender
14. For a Dancer
15. Rock Me on the Water
16. My Problem is You
17. Too Many Angels
18. Late for the Sky
19. Doctor My Eyes
20. Running on Empty

Encore:
21. Mercury Blues
22. I Am a Patriot (Little Steven cover)

The first listen to any Brian Wilson record (I insist on using that retro term, even though what I am listening to is technically a CD) is a singular, momentous experience for which one sits down, full concentration, quiet please, and a self-surrender into the world he creates by sound. I confess there is no parallel music experience to it in my audio biography that so captures my complete attention and reverence.

Brian is on record as citing Bach, Gershwin, and Phil Spector as his mentors—and what do they have common? The so-called the “wall of sound,” but, specifically, for Brian, the wall of harmonies he has infused into anything he creates or “reimagines”; this is what is distinctively transformative and enrapturing in his music.

Whether his own creation (“Smile”) or one reimagined (“Lucky Old Sun”), each work christens its own audience with new musical meanings and greater reflection on its enacting as an event—not just a “listen.” I haven’t paid enough attention to Bach (and won’t have time today or tomorrow or anytime soon); I do appreciate what I know of the genius of George Gershwin; and I grew up impressed by the musical landscapes invented by Spector (“You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feeling” cannot be topped in over the top production)—but all things considered, I’d rather be listening to Brian on any given day.

On any given day, Brian Wilson’s reimagining of any kind of music would be worth our time to consider. And the plan is for Brian’s second task to be a “reimagining” of Disney’s catalogue of children’s songs (here’s hoping they leave out “It’s a Small World,” but maybe Brian’s magic would even work on this). But for the moment, Brian Wilson Reimagines Gershwin is plenty to ponder and enjoy.

» » Read the rest! » »

The Pseudobook Review readership may know that my musical tastes tend towards the folksy side of the indie spectrum, but probably doesn’t know that when I’m alone in my car I scan the airwaves for a mainstream country station. I don’t own many country albums that aren’t by Garth Brooks, but I’ve always felt at home with the fiddles and slide guitars and drawled out vocals. And every once in a while I hear a track on the radio that gets me curious.

This time it was the title track from the new Dierks Bentley album: Up on the Ridge. The locomotive strumming, swaggered picking, and easy rolling vocals carried my right past my exit and as far away from town as I could get. I made a mental note to check out more of the album, but forgot until I was blindsided by “Love Grows Wild”. At the words “Oh I think it don’t need a lot, it just grows on what it’s got” I tried to calm myself down. Surely the rest of the album would let me down. I took the plunge, purchased the album, and again was blown clear out of town.

I’ve since been listening to Dierks and a phenomenal supporting cast on my morning runs, on my drive to work, and anytime I can find an excuse to get in my car and turn up the Ipod. Do you need a ride to the airport? I hope you like Dierks Bentley! Can I give you a lift to the store, Dad? Why don’t I just run that bill down to the post office and stick it in the mail there. And my windows will be down; anyone walking down the street will “hear the banjos ringing through the air” as Dierks sings on “Fiddlin’ Around”, “there’ll be mandolins and guitars everywhere/ Now don’t you want to be there!”

Sure I could lounge around my bedroom and play it over my speakers, but it’s not that type of music. This album literally moves me, it propels me forward into the wilderness, into my relationships, into church, and onto The Pseudobook Review to proclaim my newfound motions. “Down in the Mine” and “Señor (Tales of Yankee Power) are haunting histories, “Bad Angel” and “Bottle to the Bottom” are thoughtful, bordering on metaphysical, songs of personal struggles, and “Draw Me a Map” is simply a genuine love song. There is even a brilliantly bluegrassy cover of “Pride (In The Name of Love)”! There is so much on there that I will certainly move to and be moved by Up on the Ridge for the rest of the summer, likely longer. Will you join me?

Before watching this movie, I’d never heard of Sophie Scholl. She was one of the remarkable young leaders of the White Rose movement, which urged non-violent resistance to the Third Reich in the last years of the war that Germany was now losing.

She was caught distributing leaflets at the University of Munich with her brother, Hans, in February, 1943, jailed, interrogated, tried, and executed by guillotine, all within a few days, unjustly, brutally, swiftly, breathlessly. This 2005 film depicts the heroism and determination of a small band of students and their willingness to put their lives in jeopardy for the sake of their fellow citizens, including the dispossessed, the mentally ill, and the Jewish people still alive within their borders.

What is remarkable about the film is its open and authentic evocation of Sophie’s Protestant faith as the motivation and foundation of her stand. She is a devout Lutheran. Once she is detained and then subjected to the repeated interrogation of the Gestapo, her faith grows and you are enthralled as her voice becomes bolder and bolder. This is faith in context, faith in action. The tone in the movie is neither condescending nor ironical toward Sophie’s faith. Her prayers, her defiance in the face of the demigoguery and madness all about her, is presented organically and natural. It is who she is.

But now I can be condescending and ironical—but not about this movie, or Sophie. I am glad this was not made by Christian auteurs with an evangelical “interest” in the movie. The “witness” in the movie that they surely would aim to exploit would tower above the storytelling in a way that destroys its power. Sophie’s death compels us not to look only at her prayers and last words, but at her whole life, lived in integrity and by principle.

The scriptwriter, Fred Breinersdorfer, and director, Marc Rothemund, clearly stand in awe of Sophie, and well they should. As the movie unfolds and as we get to know Sophie, the true drama is in the Nazi’s perplexity at why this young woman has such deep conviction, and reverence for life. Has she not been well-schooled by the Nazi re-education efforts? Has she not the basic pride of the good German to see all the order and compliance the Fuerher has brought to the Fatherland?

She cannot be diminished by attention to her faith, only further enobled and graced by it. In her defense of herself, her family, her leafleting, she is called upon directly to defend the dignity of all humanity, all life, and does so on the basis that we are made in God’s image. She directly address the courtroom, shaming them, damning them by her stalwart defense of liberty, and life. Her valediction to the court room is chilling: “Where we stand today, you will stand soon.”

I urge you to Netflix this film. I have not given anything away. I have only pointed you to a courageous Christian whose story is compellingly told in thoroughly engrossing terms, simply, poignantly, bracingly. It’s subtitled in English, and Sophie’s words will haunt for you a long time.

Her last words: “How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause. Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go, but what does my death matter, if through us thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?”