I'm really not too surprised about the Canadian Olympic hockey team's crappy result. The coaches had no plan, it seemed, and Staal/Crosby/Spezza should have been on the team. It wasn't Bertuzzi's fault they lost FTR.

I haven't seen much of the Olympics, but highlights for me include

Pavarotti's rendition of Nessun Dorma. Peter Mansbridge was crying when it was done.
The women's moguls. Jennifer Heil's incredible ability to thrive under pressure.
Crawford's cross-country sprint.
Women's hockey team dominance.

MUSIC

Feist: "Mushaboom (Postal Service remix)"

Non-shocker: In the Postal Service's clutches, Feist's dream of domesticity trades its jubilant bounce for a bubble-wrapped, stuttering glide. Dntel earns zero points for innovation here. The hyperactive pixels shuffling around the vocals sound like they were lifted wholesale from the back half of "The District Sleeps Alone Tonight", at least the superstructure if not the specifics. It's a little drowsier so as not to disturb Feist's stately vocals; otherwise, it's chunky midi biz as usual. Twee electro pulses swarm around deep bass tones; drums skitter in ornate Spirograph loops; Ben Gibbard chews scenery on the chorus in a glitchy one-man call and response. The original version's guitar line was like getting stung by bees if getting stung by bees felt really good; Postal Service swallows the prickle and pukes honey. It's formulaic, but the strength of the source material and the enduring eloquence of Dntel's increasingly rote algorithm rescue it from irrelevance.

NESSUN DORMA TRANSLATION:
The Prince
No one sleeps, no one sleeps...
Even you, o Princess,
In your cold room,
Watch the stars,
That tremble with love
And with hope.
But my secret is hidden within me;
My name no one shall know, no, no,
On your mouth I will speak it
When the light shines,
And my kiss will dissolve the silence
That makes you mine.
Chorus
No one will know his name
And we must, alas, die.
Vanish, o night!
Set, stars!
At daybreak, I shall conquer!



MOVIE REVIEW

The Intruder
Stylus

There’s a very specific sort of restlessness pervading the films of Claire Denis. In terms of subject, they’re all over the map—from cannibalistic sexual predators to Foreign Legion officers stationed in Eastern Africa to strangers connecting in the Paris night—but they’re all populated by lonely, fatally incomplete individuals attempting to make sense of the world around them. The calmness of these films’ surfaces and the lush sensuality of their images contrast hauntingly with the muted inner turmoil of Denis’s world-weary characters. “I’m not here / This isn’t happening,” sang Radiohead’s Thom Yorke. It could serve as a mantra for Denis.

The Intruder, adapted from Jean-Luc Nancy’s novel, L’Intrus, represents a bold apotheosis of this familiar theme. Denis’s relationship with conventional narrative form has long been, at best, tenuous, but here, she strays from it almost entirely. In the same interview I’ve quoted from above (conducted by Film Comment editor Gavin Smith), Denis noted, “…when you take away a scene in between two scenes that you were not sure of, suddenly, by contact, those two scenes become much better.” It’s a seemingly simple strategy, but one that few active filmmakers could pull off with any semblance of grace. Denis, with invaluable assistance from DP extraordinaire Agnes Godard and editor Nelly Quettier, makes it look downright easy. There isn’t another director in the Western Hemisphere making movies so richly fluid in their sense of possibility and wide-open spaces. A shot of a woman driving a pack of Malamutes across an Arctic landscape may follow the serene image of a ship floating on the Pacific. Watching a Claire Denis film feels less like trying to find your way out of a maze than traveling down every possible path, regardless of where it may lead.

The plot in Denis’s latest has something to do with an older gentleman (Michel Subor, who played a smaller role in Beau Travail) who lives alone with his dogs and hooks up with a local pharmacist for casual sex. Alienated from his son and daughter-in-law and troubled by physical health problems, he leaves his home near the French-Swiss border in search of a new heart and a son he may have fathered decades ago in Tahiti. He finds the former, receiving a transplant operation in Korea; the latter proves more difficult to locate.

That’s all good and well, but what The Intruder is actually “about,” above all else, is the deliberate progression of images and sounds. Even with content so obviously ripe for symbolic plundering, Denis opts for subtlety—for moments or, more specifically, the purposeful juxtaposition and carefully calculated rhythm of interwoven shots and scenes. A story such as this one would typically be played for straight, tear-jerking drama; Denis resplices it into genuine mystery. How, for instance, does Beatrice Dalle’s dog-breeder/sled-driver factor into the narrative? Don’t ask me. All I know is that IMDb credits her as “Queen of the Northern Hemisphere.”

The “intruder” of the film’s title is both Subor’s Louis invading the island paradise, and the new heart planted inside his body. In a broader sense, it may also refer to man’s relationship with the natural world. Like Terrence Malick, Denis is fascinated by the idea of sophisticated human existence penetrating the untapped harmony of nature, and after two consecutive films shot in urban locations, she’s clearly in her element here. Louis is Denis’s Odysseus (or Leopold Bloom), out to reclaim some fragment of his past. But it’s the trip, not the destination, that counts, and he never appears less than ill at ease, forced constantly to negotiate with his surroundings. As Sean Penn’s character observed in The Thin Red Line, “In this world, a man, himself, is nothing. And there ain't no world but this one.”

BASEBALL SEASON IS APPROACHING

Manny still wants out: The paper speculated that the fact Manny recently was granted a late report date, is a fairly good indication that he still wants to be traded. The last time the two clubs talked, a major roadblock presented itself in that the Red Sox asked for two of the Angels top prospects, reliever Scot Shields, and arguably the most versatile player in baseball in Chone Figgins. It wouldn't surprise us if the two team's continued to talk this spring, but the gap is wide between where they are now, and a completed deal.