Your Head a-Splode!

There's something to be said for a band that sounds nothing like anything else out there. It raises them up where other shortcomings might drag them down - Disturbed, for example, in their genre have an absolutely unique sound.

I'm here to talk about A Place to Bury Strangers, specifically their album Exploding Head. Yeah, yeah, welcome to last year, whatever. APTBS is one of those bands who sound nothing like anything else out there - further to that, they are outstanding and should be checked out immediately.

Their sound is like surf-rock played at the bottom of an elevator shaft - the riffs grate and twang like steel reeds and bring to mind visions of beaches of brass shavings, where waves of mercury lap the shore and all the surfers wear respirators.

The album roars to life with It is Nothing, the guitar starting up like a motor and the vocals a broken, echoing lament. It clocks into my personal favorite track - In Your Heart - a track sure to boil your blood an spread through your body like ink in water. The rhythm-guitar crashes back and forth like echoes in an abandoned hospital. It shakes you down at high velocity, it makes you run, man. Keep Slipping Away amps down the tempo and makes me feel like I'm sitting in a Tiki bar on some Venusian shore. Just alien brilliance. It takes noise-rock to a new level.

Just lend an ear and fly into space.

Really.

Savage!

I'm going to take a minute to talk about Savages, Oliver Stone's latest. When it comes to Stone, I recognize competence and occasionally brilliance and will doll out credit where due. I loved Platoon and I loved Born on the Fourth of July, despised Natural Born Killers and half mixed feelings towards Alexander.




Savages is a hell of a ride, though. I remember seeing the trailer and thought little of it - just another shitty revenge movie, good director or no. A friend of mine suggested we go see it - he'd read the book and knew the source material enough to give it a chance, and we agreed. What I found watching the movie was a splendid exercise in subtlety. You wouldn't think it, from the gore splattered framework of the trailer and the big-name actors headbutting each other for screen time, but the movie is constructed to the minute detail and what I'm going to attempt to illustrate here is what I think worked, and what I think Stone was trying to do.




I learned a long time ago to dismiss the whole book-film relationship and weigh them one against the other on some kind of scale. Film and literature are two completely different narratives. They are two completely different ways in which to convey story, plot, theme, message, and tripping one over the other is going to be like trying to run with your Sperrys tied together. If anything, O's blustering narration throughout the film accentuates just how grating it is to read a movie over watching one. Ridley Scott stripped the narration from Blade Runner for a reason - it was fucking retarded. What Stanley Kubrick did with The Shining was take the bare-bones story of a horror novel and make it a visual experience that conveyed all those feelings of unease and morale bankruptcy frame-by-frame.




The first thing the viewer might notice about Savages is that the protagonists are a bunch of fake fucking morons who are impossible to like. O is about as mature and intelligent as a parking meter and everything she says is stupider than the last, like trying to get a conversation from a stoned High School beauty-queen. I don't even remember the names of the two men she's banging. One if an absolute pastiche of every ex-military protagonist every created - he borrows from so many stereotypes he isn't so much a character as a walking kaleidoscope of cliches. Every now and then some real characterization shines through, like pearls through muck or silt - you get the sense the only thing he really enjoys is killing and mayhem and high-stress. You get the sense he really doesn't give a shit about O, either, other than that he feels he should give a shit (and that her lips look just as good around her bong as they do around his dick). He doesn't really care about [insert name] either, but enjoys taking him under his wing all the same. Especially when the killing starts. It's like he's a Bigger Brother, only finger-painting with blood and cordite. In a way, he's like Tommy Lee Jones in Rolling Thunder. Oliver Stone served two combat tours in Vietnam, and has a very good grasp of military characters - of traumatic stress, of their motivations, of all that. Every time our character (John?) talks about Iraq he talks as if his dialogue was written by every hoagie-eating, ignorant, fat McDonald's Monopoly-playing dipshit who's ever slapped a cowboy hat across his knee, and then edited by the first batch of University students protesting their increased tuition rates to discuss moral ambiguity. It's cardboard, but there's a reason for it to be cardboard. The other of the two men is a "Buddhist", "cares for people", "wants to help the unfortunates", all while selling weed. The man's head is so big I'm surprised it can fit up his own ass. I'm digressing, here - the three protagonists have about as much collective depth as a gasoline puddle in a supermarket parking lot.




The villains, however, the Cartel hooligans, the Mexican Cartel Queen, the crooked FBI agents... all of them have superb dialogue, are excellent actors, deliver where it counts... they make this movie. Thematically, the films begins to work -as the audience (an intelligent audience, anyway) begins to side with the villains. We basically cheer when O gets kidnapped because quite frankly, she's an idiot and deserves to be kidnapped. We cheer the way audiences cheer for Jason when he slashes up college kids in the abandoned campground. The "savage" nature of the movie begins to reveal itself, like the first flakes of ringworm. We might as well be watching gladiators hack each other apart on the sand.




I'm not going to delve into the characterization of the villains, Salma Hayek and Del Toro as always deliver, as does Travolta. The protagonists make stupid decisions and get lucky with a few good ones. The Buddhist starts killing people and John is happier than a pig in shit that he can share his favorite hobby with his best friend. The masks worn throughout the movie are strangely familiar to Army of Two, yet another modern videogame glamorizing amoral, private military contractees running around killing foreigners for no reason other than to do it in bullet-time. I'm going to refrain from spoiling the movie, although halfway-through the viewer can flesh out the finale himself. The film ends, and then ends again. It ends the way Oliver Stone would have ended it, most likely, it ends the way things peter out in the book, no less. But that can't be the real ending! It isn't a happy ending!




I don't think Oliver Stone ever forgave American audiences for their reception of Alexander, and who would? American audiences are retarded. It's why George Lucas is still making money. Stone uses Savages as a means to show those audiences just what he thinks of them, and the result is very entertaining. Thematically, the line between good and bad guys blurs very meticulously until at the finale - who cares who wins? Although the unlike-ability of the protagonists may tip the scales. All in all, good flick.