Artist: Max Richter
Album: The Blue Notebooks
Label: Fat Cat Records, 2004
While Max Richter released The Blue Notebooks in February of 2004, I didn’t have the pleasure of hearing the album in its entirety until just a few weeks ago. To be honest, my first listen was actually quite underwhelming. I was impatient with Richter, unable to take the time to let his genius unfold in its calm and unhurried way. Now, weeks later, I can’t stop listening to The Blue Notebooks. This is music for thinking, music for wishing, music for early mornings and quiet evenings.
Richter himself originally hails from Germany, but his immediate family moved to London when he was a young child, leaving him with a definite sense of rootlessness. If the mood of this album is any indication, the gifted composer lives a very pensive and thoughtful life.
On this, his second solo album, Richter instinctively charts a haunting and understated path through familiar musical territory as he intertwines piano, strings, poetry, and the occasional found sound together to create a rich but unassuming whole.
The Blue Notebooks munches on melancholy and dips its feet into gloom, then observes delicate beauties and examines quiet joys. Set primarily in minor keys, the album runs the risk of becoming a total downer. However, Richter skillfully turns the tone toward sunnier shores just enough to avoid this danger.
The album’s strength lies in its uncompromising simplicity. Having been influenced by such minimalist composers as Steve Reich and Philip Glass, Richter intentionally limits each song to a few short but meaningful melodies. These play themselves out repeatedly with slight but gorgeous variations.
Underneath these melodies, Richter spreads a heavy atmosphere of electronic and environmental sounds. Richter himself has spent a lot of time tinkering with old electronic equipment, and he uses these sonic textures to root his songs and give them their unique character.
In addition, Richter enlisted British actor Tilda Swinton to read short passages of literature in several of the songs. Her relaxed and well-enunciated readings manage to avoid slipping into either cheap poetic passion or its deadly cousin, deadpan emotionlessness. Richter extracted these short passages from Franz Kafka’s The Blue Octavo Notebooks as well as from several pieces of Czseslaw Milosz’s poetry. They are mostly snapshot-like in content and theme, much like the sonic texture of the album itself.
A sense of steady movement characterizes most of the songs on the album. For instance “On The Nature of Daylight” begins with slow strings, then slowly builds in speed and mood until it reaches an almost visual intensity that threatens to transcend the sonic realm altogether. Later in the album “Iconography” feels like a religious free-fall through a church organ, while “The Trees” gathers momentum like an avalanche of strings and piano arpeggios.
What really holds The Blue Notebooks together is Richter’s delicate ear for pacing. Melodies repeat themselves enough, but not too much. The tempo is relaxed and methodical, but not agonizingly so. As I listen, I imagine Richter has taken hold of my hand and is leading me through a calm land of ghostly beauty. I want to stay here forever.
February 20, 2010
February 11, 2010
Edge of Darkness/Taken
To truly appreciate Edge of Darkness—and by no means do I believe anybody should feel obligated to—you have to understand how well it works within the confines of its genre: the forgettable crime drama. Its anti-thesis would have to be something exceedingly similar, except shoddily done. A recent fine example of such an antithesis would be Taken.
Both are rousing tales of vindictive ass-kicking by a haunted parent. In Edge of Darkness, Mel Gibson plays Boston cop Tom Craven who is driven to find out why his daughter is murdered by his side, at his front door. In Taken, Liam Neeson plays Bryan Mills, an ex-spy who must rescue his daughter from Albanian sex traffickers in Paris.
I don’t need to tell you who plays anybody else, because they aren’t important or you won’t recognize them. The one exception is Maggie Grace, playing Mills’ daughter Kim. As an avid viewer of Lost, where she played Shannon, I had trouble taking her for the 17 year-old she is supposed to be.
Casting aside an almost criminally trite portrayal of human trafficking, one of the major problems of Taken is how it mishandles the daughter character. I wasn’t nearly as concerned about Kim as Craven’s daughter, Emma. Taken goes out of its way to paint Kim as virginal (a dubious proposition to begin with), supposedly to increase the tension when she is about to be deflowered by a heavy-set Arab sheik at the end. I was more concerned about Kim’s bad-seed friend, with whom she traveled to Paris, who discreetly disappears by the end of the film, dead or lost in the maze of a seedy Parisian underworld. [Ed. Note: I have been informed that this is not so. She does show up in the movie, but still--not taken to safety by Mills on screen.]
Emma is shot within the first twenty minutes of Darkness, so the audience can stop being ‘concerned’ for her, and start actually caring about her. I think this plot decision helps us empathize with Craven better than we can with Mills. The anonymous Bojana Novakovic, who plays Emma, has a simpler part, because we’re only supposed to see her agitated, but she does more with it than Grace.
I also appreciated how Darkness is, well, darker than Taken. That Darkness ends with tragedy makes it all the more poignant and believable. It’s also satisfying, if you can take satisfaction with the ending of Hamlet. The very end of the movie is maudlin and unnecessary, more cinematic and easily discarded by the audience if desired. The tail end of Taken is jaw-droppingly stupid.
The only real problem I have with Darkness is Mel Gibson’s terrible Boston accent. Obviously, everybody is aware that we’re watching Gibson, who is notably not from Boston, and could have easily suspended our disbelief if he had stuck with his naturally mild Australian. I mean, this isn’t a Dennis Lehane adaptation after all.
Edge of Darkness is rated R for strong bloody violence and language. Taken is rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence, disturbing thematic material, sexual content, some drug references, and language.
Both are rousing tales of vindictive ass-kicking by a haunted parent. In Edge of Darkness, Mel Gibson plays Boston cop Tom Craven who is driven to find out why his daughter is murdered by his side, at his front door. In Taken, Liam Neeson plays Bryan Mills, an ex-spy who must rescue his daughter from Albanian sex traffickers in Paris.
I don’t need to tell you who plays anybody else, because they aren’t important or you won’t recognize them. The one exception is Maggie Grace, playing Mills’ daughter Kim. As an avid viewer of Lost, where she played Shannon, I had trouble taking her for the 17 year-old she is supposed to be.
Casting aside an almost criminally trite portrayal of human trafficking, one of the major problems of Taken is how it mishandles the daughter character. I wasn’t nearly as concerned about Kim as Craven’s daughter, Emma. Taken goes out of its way to paint Kim as virginal (a dubious proposition to begin with), supposedly to increase the tension when she is about to be deflowered by a heavy-set Arab sheik at the end. I was more concerned about Kim’s bad-seed friend, with whom she traveled to Paris, who discreetly disappears by the end of the film, dead or lost in the maze of a seedy Parisian underworld. [Ed. Note: I have been informed that this is not so. She does show up in the movie, but still--not taken to safety by Mills on screen.]
Emma is shot within the first twenty minutes of Darkness, so the audience can stop being ‘concerned’ for her, and start actually caring about her. I think this plot decision helps us empathize with Craven better than we can with Mills. The anonymous Bojana Novakovic, who plays Emma, has a simpler part, because we’re only supposed to see her agitated, but she does more with it than Grace.
I also appreciated how Darkness is, well, darker than Taken. That Darkness ends with tragedy makes it all the more poignant and believable. It’s also satisfying, if you can take satisfaction with the ending of Hamlet. The very end of the movie is maudlin and unnecessary, more cinematic and easily discarded by the audience if desired. The tail end of Taken is jaw-droppingly stupid.
The only real problem I have with Darkness is Mel Gibson’s terrible Boston accent. Obviously, everybody is aware that we’re watching Gibson, who is notably not from Boston, and could have easily suspended our disbelief if he had stuck with his naturally mild Australian. I mean, this isn’t a Dennis Lehane adaptation after all.
Edge of Darkness is rated R for strong bloody violence and language. Taken is rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence, disturbing thematic material, sexual content, some drug references, and language.
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