Interview: Aaron Woolf, director of King Corn

The A.V. Club, Madison print edition, April 12, 2007 Link

Fields Of Green, Plates Of Beige

Corn products put the color in what Aaron Woolf calls “the big bad beige foods”—soda and chicken nuggets, for example. For their documentary King Corn, screening this weekend at the Wisconsin Film Festival, Woolf and friends Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis grew an acre of corn in Iowa, then tracked the product as it turned into some of the worst foods Americans eat, whether in the form of livestock feed or food coloring. Woolf spoke to The A.V. Club about the challenges and shocks of corn-centric filmmaking.

The A.V. Club: You moved from Baltimore to Iowa for college. What did you think of the cornfields then?

Aaron Woolf: I thought that those fields were so beautiful and otherworldly. To go from no knowledge of that landscape and that world to being awed and wowed by it, and then 10 years later to go back—we’ve denuded the prairie and created this very frightening landscape. It’s a massive swing in how you perceive those fields.

AVC: It must be hard to talk to a wider audience about all these ingredients that sound like gibberish on a food label, not to mention that it all connects back to corn.

AW: Oh my God, can you imagine? It was my job to go out and try to raise the money initially, and I went back to some of the people that had funded some of my previous stuff, and said, “Oh, there’s this incredible story, and we’re gonna make a film about agricultural subsidies and corn,” and you’d just watch their faces glaze over.

AVC: Do you find yourself trying to avoid foods that contain corn?

AW: Curt and Ian are always eating fast food throughout the film, I think partly to say that one of the great ironies is that you move to an area like the Iowa countryside, where so much of America’s food is grown, and it’s very hard to find anything to eat. You can’t eat any of the food grown in the fields, ’cause it’s all inedible until it’s processed, and the food in the restaurants is usually some re-packaged version of the commodity crops. It didn’t really change the way we ate too much, because that’s all we could eat. I think one of the scariest things that’s happening right now is that we’re growing into this two-food society. People who live on the coasts or in university towns have access to these co-ops and natural food markets and farmer’s markets and community-supported agriculture programs, and people who don’t don’t get fresh produce. They get all sorts of processed foods, and I think that’s the real tragedy.

AVC: So there’s no hope for a corn-free-food movement?

AW: Well, one of the things I also hope people take away from this film is that corn is not bad. Some corn does some things very well. It’s just that we shouldn’t be encouraging the over-production of corn year after year by subsidizing it this way, because that’s what makes the fast food so cheap. If a Happy Meal cost $4 or $5, then people might think, oh, I’ll get some broccoli tonight instead of eating McDonald’s.

Permanent Records: Beulah: The Coast Is Never Clear

The A.V. Club, Oct. 23, 2007 Link

The context: When it made 2001's The Coast Is Never Clear, San Francisco band Beulah had already proven that leaders Miles Kurosky and Bill Swan could make a pop song gleam without revealing too much information. Its 1999 breakthrough, When Your Heartstrings Break, hinted at Kurosky's bitterness as a songwriter, and on Beulah's final album, 2003's Yoko, he carved it in with all the grace of a rusty paper clip. In between, on Coast, the band's pleasant side struggled to make more room for a clearly difficult personality.

The greatness: When Kurosky's ego swells, the hooks push up against it. On "A Good Man Is Easy To Kill," he sings about his emotionally tricky father, obscuring the specifics with wordplay ("When they drilled holes in your skull / and screwed that halo to your head, did you think you could fly?") and keeping the universal in plain English ("Give, up, give up your love / I promise it's not gonna kill you, and I need you, lord I need you"). As he once told an interviewer, "There's a good Miles and a bad Miles," and they're both in this song—one just begging for relief and the other choking on his spite. Like much of the album, this song takes pride in wallowing, but Swan and the duo's collaborators give people choices: Whine along with Kurosky, or thump to the distorted bass riff and flute solo. Get sad, deliriously happy, or anything in between.

Horns, strings, synths, vocals harmonies, and guitars overload the songs, and they do need to be overloaded. Without its mournful trumpets—and its general sense that pop music is a distraction from life—closer "Night Is The Day Turned Inside Out" might still be a fearsome tearjerker, but harder to enjoy on repeat listens. "Popular Mechanics For Lovers" celebrates self-delusion following a breakup, and the piano traipsing around his words softens the resentment, or at least reminds that this is forgivable behavior.

Defining song: It'd be impossible to fill an album with open-wound epics like "A Good Man Is Easy To Kill," and the band finds more balance in "Gene Autry," a song that looks forward despite its anxieties. In the chorus, "The city spreads out just like a cut vein" and "everybody drowns, sad and lonely." Everything else about the song—the lazy gallop of the guitar hook, the affectionate Western fantasies, and one of the snappiest horn breaks ever played on a rock record—lets this drama queen bask in boyish optimism.

Interview: Bob Odenkirk

The A.V. Club, May 17, 2007 Link

The full version's long. Intro and excerpts:

Bob Odenkirk has never lacked an unmistakable comedic voice, but he'll admit that he's struggled to find the right place for it since he and David Cross finished with the sketch comedy of Mr. Show. It's been a treat whenever Odenkirk has popped up at all over the past nine years; he's taken small parts in TV shows and movies, directed several films that didn't satisfy him or his audience, and successfully mentored Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, the creators of Tom Goes To The Mayor and the new Tim And Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! Odenkirk recently told The A.V. Club why he thinks he's ready to rally with projects like Derek & Simon, a new series debuting May 16 on superdeluxe.com, and The Brothers Solomon, a film due for a fall release.

...

AVC: Since you've got such a writing background, it seems like it'd be pretty hard to get used to directing something you didn't write.

BO: Well, when I worked at Saturday Night Live and on Mr. Show, I worked with a lot of material that other people wrote, and I helped people develop pieces that they wrote, so I've looked at directing films that I didn't write in a similar way. "Look, I think I get your idea here, is this what you're going for? Well, I'll try to do that. I think I know how to do that." The problem is that when you're talking about sketches, it doesn't take so long to do, and it isn't so much pressure, and whether you fall short or not, you finish up and hope the writers are happy. That's how I feel about it. With a feature, to find yourself working as hard as you work and going under the stress you go through, and then going, "I didn't even write that, I'm only trying to help this be good. It's not necessarily something I would have done."

Obviously, if I had my way, I would've spent the last few years of my life doing a Mr. Show sketch movie, and doing my adaptation of The Fuck Up, or my movie [Kanan Rhodes: Unkillable Servant Of Justice] that I wrote with Scott [Aukerman] and BJ [Porter] and all that stuff. But to make my way into the feature-directing world, I have to make it any way I can. The first film I made was called Melvin Goes To Dinner, and it was a small movie that I co-financed that Mike Blieden had written, and I had a really good idea of how to shoot it, and had a great experience doing that. Still, again, nothing measures up to Mr. Show, even though I'm very proud of that and think I did a great job.

But in a lot of ways, I felt like I took someone else's vision and helped them to make it happen in a really strong way. And then I made two films that other people financed that they were auditioning people to direct, and I got those jobs: Let's Go To Prison and The Brothers Solomon, which comes out in September. I've gotten a lot out of those. To me, they're like film school—learning about running a set, learning about everything, and learning about the most important thing, which is dealing with the studios and the producers and the money people, and making a project go, and what makes something go for the business end of it, so that you can get to make the movies that you write.

AVC: So you're still learning to control the process.

BO: Yeah, absolutely. When it comes to features, if I have to do one to just make a living, I'll do it, but if I don't, I'm gonna try to do TV until I can find a movie that I think is extremely good. Either written by someone else or written by me, where I just really believe in it as much as I believed in Mr. Show or anything. I've done my service now. I've done my learning.

...

AVC: Does it surprise you that shows like [Tim And Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!] are attracting prestigious guest stars and a slightly wider audience?

BO: That's a strange thing, but I know all these people from a million places. I know John C. Reilly from Mr. Show, and then he was on Tenacious D, which I produced. There was one where I think Tim and Eric finally did cold-call people. It is a surprising and funny occurrence. Tim and Eric and I were saying how they went and saw John at the set he's on right now, and he can't wait to do Steve Brule again. Then you see the other side of that, which is all these celebrities did it because they love a chance to just be crazy. Tom Goes To The Mayor wasn't a hard production. You just walked in and went in the room and read your stuff and posed a few times, and it took a total of 40 minutes to do your guest spot, which is very rare and not how most things are done. I don't think there's a great proliferation of shows like that, so I don't see that things are too different overall.

I think the biggest change is the Internet and Funny Or Die and Super Deluxe, because Super Deluxe is not found video and it's not one-offs. It's not kids in their dorms eating as much baloney as they can, and saying, "Watch me change T-shirts 100 times." It's people making shows, and it's not just regular people, it's people in the comedy scene in L.A., and most are interesting people with funny, interesting points of view. That's the big new step, to me.

T.V. Club entry: The Boondocks: "...Or Die Tryin'"

The A.V. Club, Oct. 9, 2007 Link

Adult Swim has a habit of fattening its lineup with joyfully goofy, if often moronic, tidbits like Squidbillies, Assy McGee, and Frisky Dingo, and The Boondocks seems determined to wall off its own voice from all that. Even during its silliest moments, the adaptation of Aaron McGruder's comic strip gives its audience a stern stare.

The show also seems determined to bridge AS' comedy and anime audiences, tempering the strip's often explosive humor with a pacing that leaves a lot of room for emotional shifts. It doesn't force itself to be funny all the time, though its second season begins with a stinging, distinctly McGruder laugh, in a trailer for the fictitious terrorism thriller-cum-blaxploitation comedy Soul Plane 2: The Blackjacking! ("Come see why black incompetence is our funniest weapon in the war on terror!"). The hero? 50 Cent, voiced perfectly (kind of like a little kid mumbling a gangsta-rap fantasy to himself): "I'll stop those terrorists—or die tryin'."

Grandpa and Riley bounce off to the cineplex, dragging along Huey and the exceedingly innocent Jazmine. Huey keeps his mind on the wider struggles (inciting the theater's employees to unionize), while Grandpa continues his lifelong war against paying for tickets and overpriced snacks (oh, and having to butter your own popcorn). Soon, the satire gets almost too brutal to draw laughs--a pre-feature ad in the theater reminds that "Stealing movies is a felony. It's just like robbing the elderly--or murder," setting the message against a gruesome mugging-shooting scene. Again, The Boondocks doesn't insist on comedy--it's a collage of threats, fears, temptations, degradations, and obstacles a family faces (and sometimes brings upon itself).

The series felt a bit disappointing at first--narrow Adult Swim comedy-not-anime viewer that I am, I just expected more laughs--but now I'm actually grateful that the series is willing to do the things a strip can't. The strip needs punch, so the jokes and underlying pettiness tend to come out in neat, almost predictable jabs. The show lets you wallow in Huey's world a little longer, which actually makes it harder to, say, dismiss Grandpa as a jackass. Sure, he goes off on a needless rant about snack-counter service, making a scene in the theater lobby, but at least we see the filthy, disappointing condiments area through his eyes. All that uneasy space between the cruel laughs and the fight sequences? That's where this show thrives. This is the programming block that gave us Sealab 2021 and Tom Goes To The Mayor, so why not push the discomfort even further?

Grade: B+

Stray observations:

—"This is going to be the worst day of your life. I'm bringing nunchuks."

—Anime-styled crying children are the saddest crying children of all.

—Guest voices: Snoop Dogg and Mo'Nique, who appeared in the original Soul Plane.

—Really, whoever wrote this Soul Plane parody should've been born 15 years earlier and written parody bits for The Critic.

—Somehow, it's always satisfying when Huey's idealism meets not just frustration but true spite. When a ticket-taker tells Huey the theater's employers formed a union (on Huey's advice), and promptly got fired, this exchange follows:

"Well, uh, power to the peop--"

"Fuck you."

Album Review: Amiina: Kurr

The A.V. Club, June 19, 2007 Link

When backing fellow Icelanders Sigur Rós on strings, the four women of Amiina add to a surging muscle mass; Amiina's own work crafts a deceptively delicate frame. The group's color-coded dresses and effortless instrument-switching reinforce attention spans live, as strings join tuned wine glasses, hand bells, musical saw, harmonium, laptop, and much more. But when reduced to modest melodies, the songs on the group's debut album, Kurr, share warmth without trying to force a Sigur-style epiphany. Songs like "Seoul" don't wallow in the novelty—even the most unlikely instruments align in patient, twinkling patterns, contained like a storm in a snowglobe. Amiina's mystical patience makes Kurr decidedly non-overwhelming, and that's its victory. It proves that one of the world's strangest bands can also be one of the most approachable.

A.V. Club Rating: A

Album Review: Patton Oswalt: Werewolves And Lollipops

The A.V. Club, July 10, 2007 Link

Jon Voight's scrotum, megalomaniac chefs, and the epic flash-frying of a heckler—it all folds comfortably into Patton Oswalt's geeky warmth on his second stand-up album, Werewolves And Lollipops. As on his 2004 debut, Feelin' Kinda Patton, the bits swoop in for multiple kills, obsessing over absurd realities and morbid parallels. And again, this yields enough phrase-nuggets to rival Oswalt's collection of Star Wars memorabilia—"goof juice," "courtesy fat," "broods of failure." If Oswalt has a shtick, it's exhausting the crowd, propping it up, and wearing it out again, all without trying its patience. Playing Feelin' and Werewolves back to back has the same effect, in spite of the albums' similarities. From Oswalt, "more of the same" is never exactly that.

A.V. Club Rating: A

Album Review: The Fiery Furnaces: Widow City

The A.V. Club, Oct. 9, 2007 Link

Widow City is as much a trip to a musical rummage sale as any previous Fiery Furnaces album, and siblings Eleanor and Matthew Friedberger wrap their finds together with growing efficiency. In fact, the hints of clumsiness and chaos save the Friedbergers from getting too cocky. The bouncy "Ex-Guru" gives way to a lurching mutant orchestra for about 30 seconds, and then much of the mystery is gone again. As on previous records, The Fiery Furnaces earn repeated listens on hooks and convoluted storytelling alone, though 2003's Gallowsbird's Bark and Bitter Tea hold more surprises. They group still creates songs that constantly attack themselves with new sections and rhythms—"Cabaret Of The Seven Devils" finds an especially strong balance between "irritating" and "loveable"—but something's easing the transitions here. Maybe it's Eleanor's vocals, which relish love, bitterness, and fear alike with the flip tone of a big kid telling the younger kids a ghost story.

A.V. Club Rating: B

Interview: Robbie Fulks

The A.V. Club, Madison print edition, May 31, 2007

Click image for full-size print version; an extended version ran online.

Album Review: Grinderman: Grinderman

The A.V. Club, April 17, 2007 Link

If Nick Cave's last album with The Bad Seeds, Abattoir Blues/The Lyre Of Orpheus, was an opera triumphing on closing night, Grinderman is a smoke break during rehearsal, a place where Nick Cave can just be Nick Cave. (That's "Nick Cave" as in a character who already contains more personas than a loony bin.) It's also supposed to be a place where Cave and three Bad Seeds can write spontaneously, as the typewriter noise at the beginning of "No Pussy Blues" deliberately reminds the audience: Right as the drums kick up, the typewriter dings, and Cave presumably dashes over to the mic with his still-drying lyric sheet in hand.

In spite of the growling green monkey on the cover, Cave isn't satisfied with just being his primal self. Instead, he's at his best when making windy melodrama sound crude, and most trustworthy when he's most artificial. Instead of repainting for Grinderman, he's gotten hip to exposed brick and scraped down in a hurry, leaving a few remnants for good measure. "(I Don't Need You To) Set Me Free" could be a leftover from Abattoir Blues, and "When My Love Comes Down" recalls the slow burners of Let Love In through a sheet of static.

Spontaneous or not, Grinderman forces Cave to summon his basic strengths and little else. It favors the songwriting foundation that connects all of Cave's best albums, and—again, deliberately—downplays the tinkering that kept those albums from sounding alike. The result is a thorough reminder of what's majestic, funny, bizarre, and poetic about Cave. Which means it's probably the most redundant album this frequently repetitive artist will ever make, but life inside the loony bin never grows stale.

A.V. Club Rating: B

Album Review: Ted Leo And The Pharmacists: Living With The Living

The A.V. Club, March 20, 2007 Link

Nobody will ever be caught just picking a Ted Leo song at an open-mic. Leo's songs can't exist without his unflagging, youthful conviction, and unlike many equally good songwriters, Leo can produce that reliably. In other words, it'd be hard for him to put out an unexciting album right now, so excitement alone wouldn't cut it. After a short sound collage, Living With The Living announces itself as another fiercely satisfying Leo record with "The Sons Of Cain," but as on his previous albums, Leo is at his best when he holds off on gratification. Living takes up plenty of room for that, running at a full hour—the longest Leo/Pharmacists album yet, and 20 minutes longer than his last, 2004's Shake The Sheets.

When Leo wants to moralize, he's admirably direct, but he also chooses the most vulnerable moment possible: "Bomb. Repeat. Bomb," more violent than anything on Sheets, comes right after the wistful lull of "A Bottle Of Buckie." Leo's become something of a leader at a time when dissent has become its own form of instant gratification. "Bomb. Repeat. Bomb" turns it back into a challenge—Leo isn't just shunning the bomber pilot who doesn't see or care about his victims, he's trying to level with him, while showing listeners images that they haven't seen either.

Leo and producer Brendan Canty have brightened and polished the scruffy punk that worked so well on Sheets, easing shifts like the one between "Bomb" and the more plaintive "La Costa Brava." They also don't hide the ever-increasing tightness Leo, bassist Dave Lerner, and drummer Chris Wilson have forged on Sheets and Hearts Of Oak and at countless shows. With interruptions like the short "Annunciation Day/Born On Christmas Day" and the reggae bum-out "The Unwanted Things," the album doesn't seem to flow comfortably, probably because Leo isn't interested in comfort. Sure, he still offers sympathy in dark times, but he knows that's nothing without restlessness.

A.V. Club Rating: A

Album Review: Of Montreal: Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?

The A.V. Club, Jan. 23 2006 Link

It's not like Kevin Barnes has never written sad songs with coherent lyrics—he lurched in and out of good moods between his acid-fueled romps through the thesaurus on Of Montreal's last two albums, The Sunlandic Twins and Satanic Panic In The Attic—but it's a little surprising to hear nearly an entire album of them. "Suffer For Fashion," the first track on Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?, throws up a swirl of lo-fi synths and power chords, and for a few minutes, it seems it might continue the Satanic/Sunlandic party. It's clear that isn't the case by the end of the third track, "Cato As A Pun," when Barnes tells a friend, "I guess you just want to shave your head, have a drink, and be left alone," locking in the frustration and resignation that grips most of the rest of this album.

Still, it's all darkly beautiful, because Barnes continues to emote more through the music than through his words; "Cato" follows that stark message with close to 60 seconds of icy keyboards, as if to ease people into accepting that they're getting a newly unadulterated, prolonged taste of his personal life. The real test comes on "The Past Is A Grotesque Animal," which includes nearly 10 minutes of Barnes' plainspoken tales of failed relationships and self-loathing. As the track drags on, Barnes' directness cuts through much of the mystery and sheer weirdness that made his previous records so enjoyable, exchanging it for a single, rambling catharsis.

Barnes stops short of forcing people to feel his pain for 50 minutes: The bedroom-Funkadelic layers of vocals on "Faberge Falls For Shuggie" and "Labyrinthian Pomp" make it mercifully impossible to tell what he's talking about for most of eight minutes. The uneasiness lingers even on those tracks, but—in case his mastery of lo-fi delight made anyone forget—Barnes' melodic imagination doesn't stop at euphoria.

A.V. Club Rating: B

Interview: Ricky Gervais

The A.V. Club, Jan. 10 2007 Link

This one's long, so just click the link for the whole thing, but here are some highlights.

AVC: Do you think people sometimes laugh at things for the wrong reasons?

RG: I just don't think there's any pleasure in getting an easy laugh. There can be no reward. You stand at the back of a chain comedy club, and those guys come out and they're going, "Ha! What's going on with Scooby-Doo? A talking dog!" And I want to shout, "It's a kids' program!" What vein of comedy gold have they really hit upon there? Then some other guy goes, "Ugh, the '70s, haircuts were different, weren't they?" I want to go, "Well, yeah, but I don't know what you've done there." I don't get observational comedy. It's observational, but they've just left out the comedy bit. And these people are cracking up! They couldn't laugh any more. So you think, "Why would I try and make those people laugh? I don't need to make them laugh. They're happy enough. I'd probably just spoil it for them." I'm aiming at someone else. I'm not uptight about it. I don't want to close those comedy clubs down, I just don't want to play them.

....

AVC: Is Andy's disastrous sitcom, When The Whistle Blows, your nightmare show?

RG: I just wouldn't do it, and I know that I wouldn't be happy doing it, because it's too easy. There's nothing wrong with it. Those shows still exist in England, they have for 30 years, there's no change there, but you know what? On one side, there's people wearing wigs and doing smutty innuendo and shouting a catchphrase, and on the other side, there's Curb Your Enthusiasm and Arrested Development and Larry Sanders and Christopher Guest. I don't sit through shows and go, "Damn them, why do they put that on?" I just don't watch them. It's not a crusade. It's a source of comedy for me. That those shows exist is better for me, I think. That's great. Long live them!

Unfortunately, I'm compared with The Office. I can't win. That's what's unfair. I want Extras to be compared to When The Whistle Blows. For every wacky postcard, there's a million people waiting to buy it, and for every $10 million of those things, there's one Rembrandt. Purposely, I think I want to aim at doing something that a lot of people won't like. You want a door policy on your club. It's as simple as that. I'm just worried that it looks like I've compared my work with Rembrandt. "Gervais says he's better than Rembrandt!"

AVC: Don't worry, this isn't the British press.

RG: Oh, fuckin' tell me about it. There's not a day goes by when I don't go, "You fuckers!" And I've had a really good ride with them. And The Office is better than Shakespeare as well, by the way.

...

AVC: You didn't have any problem getting Diana Rigg to get a condom thrown on her head?

RG: That's a day's work, isn't it? I remember it. It was a really hot day on the bus, and I remember laughing while I was going, "Can you just hang it over the right eye a little bit more?" And I was thinking, That's a weird job. Asking Dame Diana Rigg to wear a condom hanging over her eye a little bit more. "What did you do at the office today?" "I hung a condom off Diana Rigg's head. What did you do?" But no, she was fine. It was in the script. She was a good sport.

AVC: One of the funniest scenes in season two is when David Bowie writes a song about you in a bar. Did he write that himself?

RG: He wrote the music, [but not] the lyrics. I sent him the script and I said, "We thought maybe it could be quite retro, something off Hunky Dory, with an anthemic chorus, like 'Life On Mars.'" He went, "Oh, sure, I'll just knock off a 'Life On Mars.'" And I laughed and went, "Oh, yeah, that did sound quite insulting, didn't it?" He knew what to give us. He gave us über-Bowie. [Sings.] "See his pug-nosed face…" The crew was singing it for about a week.