cooper long | thesil.ca

Each year, the Academy Awards celebrate the best recent cinema. But there are countless films from yesteryear that also deserve a little extra recognition. Here are five excellent films that I revisited recently. Some of them actually did win Oscars. Some of them had crew members named Oscar. In either case, they all deserve some kind of award.

Best Performance by a Mug in a Leading Role:

It Happened One Night (1934)
Director: Frank Capra

This quintessential screwball comedy was a favourite of Adolf Hitler, which is odd, considering that Clark Gable plays a hard-drinking, roguish reporter who is far removed from the self-disciplined Aryan ideal. Gable is perfectly paired with Claudette Colbert, as an equally acid-tongued heiress, and the two fall in love one insult at a time. Their cross-country adventure also offers an excellent primer on 1930s slang. Believe you me, whether you’re a dame or a mug, this classic will hit you like a Mack truck!

Special Achievement in Men’s Hairstyling:

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
Director: Philip Kaufman

It seems fitting that Hollywood insists on remaking a story about alien replicants over and over again. This is the best version. Donald Sutherland stars as a health inspector with a perm that looks like an angry restaurateur dumped linguini on his head. He attempts to halt an extra-terrestrial menace, which is overtaking the beautifully photographed streets of San Francisco. Jeff Goldblum co-stars as an ally of Sutherland, although no character that Goldblum has ever played seems qualified to judge who is a normal human and who is not.

Best Named Director:

Village of the Damned (1960)
Director: Wolf Rilla

The Millennial generation takes a lot of flak, but that is nothing compared to the treatment of the sinister, psychic children in this British chiller. Although the youngsters’ glowing eyes and blonde wigs may not be frightening to present-day viewers, the plot contains some startlingly contemporary elements of body horror. David Cronenberg has spent most of his career literally fleshing out these icky ideas.

Best Perfomance By an Actor Refusing to Even Attempt an English Accent:

The Guns of Navarone (1961)
Director: J. Lee Thompson

Long before George Clooney assembled his Monuments Men, Gregory Peck led a ragtag group of Allied commandos on a mission of destruction, rather than preservation. The middle-aged Peck is not entirely credible as the world’s greatest mountaineer. But Anthony Quinn is memorable as the Greek resistance fighter who both stares longingly at Peck and desires to kill him. Plus, even if you already know who won World War Two, the climactic moments are still suspenseful.

Best Supporting Corset:

Johnny Guitar (1954)
Director: Nicholas Ray

Frequently, the western genre confines women to bordellos and boarding houses. Here, however, Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge are far more active and threatening than the male gunslingers, who have names like “Johnny Guitar” and “The Dancing Kid.” The dialogue is also so thick with psychosexual undertones that almost every line lands like a double entendre. This undoubtedly would have been Freud’s favourite western.

Bahar Orang
ANDY Editor

So far, there have been two couples in my life that have made the strongest cases for marriage: my parents, and Beyoncé and Jay-Z.

The former has been an ongoing persuasion since as long as I can remember, where I grew up watching two people as they brought out the best in each other. The latter, however, were almost as swaying in a matter of moments and in a midst of smoke at the Grammys three nights ago. Although it’s true that what they offered was still part of their public image (it was on a stage after all), it was nonetheless a product I might someday be willing to buy.

They sang Beyoncé’s “Drunk in Love,” which is essentially an anthem for their fantastic and enthralling sex life. And their performance was definitely sexy – but also fun, playful, and showed a partnership that seemed adventurous and exciting and powerful. Rarely do we see a portrayal of marriage in this light. It’s often about settling down, slowing down, reorganizing priorities so you are no longer at the top, having kids, getting a mortgage, staying home from work – being responsible and respectable and wearing white.

Although there’s nothing wrong with any of those decisions, none of it seems particularly appealing to me. I found it refreshing to watch a performance celebrating marriage for the professional, sexual, and creative fulfillment it can offer.

Cooper Long
ANDY Editor

At this year’s Grammy Awards, the only thing bigger than Pharrell Williams’ hat was the social media backlash. I didn’t watch the whole ceremony, but I was frequently checking in through Facebook, and amid the deluge of posts about the awards’ outrageous irrelevancy, one in particular caught my attention.

Aside from some grammatical polish, the comment was essentially as follows: “The music industry has changed, it’s not the 1970s anymore.” A few others echoed this sentiment, although names have been withheld to protect the innocent.

Such golden-age thinking should be familiar to anyone who has ever watched a Pink Floyd video on YouTube. Of course, the obvious rebuttal is that a lot of uninspiring music was also popular in the 70s. Over time, the chaff gets forgotten.

But this commenter’s paean to the music industry of yesteryear became especially ironic at the end of the evening, when the biggest award went to an album that sounds, for the most part, like it was recorded in 1979.

Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories won Album of the Year, and the helmeted duo shared the honour with a host of collaborators who rose to prominence four decades ago.

Before Nile Rodgers’ infectious strumming on “Get Lucky” made that song the official anthem of H&M change rooms worldwide, it could be heard on 70s disco chart-toppers by Chic and Sister Sledge.

Giorgio Moroder, in turn, was used to working with machines well before the robots recruited him. His synthesized backing tracks for Donna Summer laid the groundwork for electronic dance music in the mid-70s.

It is almost certainly true that the Grammys are irrelevant and pointless, although everybody who made this complaint online while simultaneously watching the telecast kind of undermined themselves.

But the stance that the awards somehow demonstrate the music industry’s fall from grace seems wrongheaded, especially in the year of the robots.

Jai Paul (Unofficial)
Jai Paul

Who is Jai Paul? His website (www.jaipaul.co.uk) does not answer this question; it is a blank, white page. His Twitter feed is equally unhelpful. Jai has tweeted once, only to announce that that he does not endorse this release. All other information about the enigmatic UK artist must be gleaned from his collection of self-produced demos.

As early as “Track 2” it becomes clear that Jai Paul is an extreme musical force. The song is a triumph of sonic fusion: electronic hip-hop meets Bollywood on an MDMA-fuelled dance floor. Jai Paul’s sensual vocals are complemented by Vani Jairam’s singing on the sampled, “Bala main bairagan hoongi.”

Two of the collection’s sixteen songs have been officially released. Track nine, “Jasmine,” is a subdued, pulsating slow jam. In the final track, “BTSTU,” Jai Paul alternates between haunting falsetto verses and a banging hook driven by electrified synth riffs. The music world has taken notice. “BTSTU” has been sampled by Drake and Beyoncé, and Jai Paul was signed to the British independent label XL Recordings on the strength of these two songs alone.

It is hard to believe that the other fourteen tracks are demos, for they sound no less complex or complete. Songs bounce across genres and moods. The cowbell-accented future-funky “Track 5” is worlds away from the undulating tropical vibe on “Track 15.” The album’s disparate sounds are made cohesive by Jai Paul’s vocals, which are at once distant and foreign, yet deeply intimate.

Some might argue that this leak deserves no place on a top ten list. Doubters, I bid you, listen to Jai Paul. His are among the most innovative sounds of 2013. Once you have listened through, relish the idea of an official debut album. Let us hope to hear it soon.

- Josh Spring

Trouble Will Find Me
The National

When life gets overwhelming, we reach for a security blanket. It may not be with the same consistency as Linus van Pelt, but sometimes the tumult of the everyday can prove to be too much (as wretch-inducingly Thought Catalog-ish as that sounds).

The National’s sixth album, Trouble Will Find Me, comes at the apex of their decorated career and provides the same wholesome comfort for the melancholy population as a tub of ice cream and shitty rom-coms do for spurned lovers. After suffering through relative obscurity and being pegged as sleepy miserabilist dad-rockers, all the acclaim the band has enjoyed in recent years could not be more deserved. In an industry saturated by one-hit wonders — Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, anyone? — it’s been refreshing to watch a band work their way up to widespread respectability.

I was surprised to face staunch opposition when I suggested this album for ANDY’s year-end list. Even though I’m a pacifist, I would have fought several bears or listened to Imagine Dragons to ensure its position. Though not as grandiose and immediately accessible as 2011’s stunning High Violet, TWFM is easily the most subtly brilliant record to come out last year.

It bears more of a sonic resemblance to 2003’s underappreciated Sad Songs For Dirty Lovers than its immediate predecessor. Although his young daughter Isla must be keeping it at its end, Berninger’s wit remains razor sharp. The baritone frontman will have you silently sobbing during the cathartic “I Should Live In Salt” (an ode to his younger brother) and laughing at the faux-morose lyrics on “Demons” (i.e. “When I walk into a room, I do not light it up”).

Jaded detractors have long labeled the National as overtly solemn, but they’re missing the obvious tongue-in-cheek nature of the music. Guitarist Aaron Dessner described the offerings on TWFM as “songs you could dance to—more fun, or at least The National’s version of fun.” After all, how could you insist that these guys take themselves seriously when the best song on their latest record is named after a nauseating cocktail, “Pink Rabbits,” and full of lyrics like, “I was a white girl in a crowd of white girls in the park”?

- Tomi Milos

Woman
Rhye

Sometimes I repeatedly write the word “Rhye” in the margins of my notebooks. Mike Milosh and Robin Hannibal have refused to reveal the meaning or origins of their musical project’s name, and I am not even confident that I know how to pronounce it properly. But I just love how those four letters look together.

In this way, it’s the perfect name for a duo crafting soulful R&B music that, while perhaps not complex or profound, offers immense sensory pleasure. Horns, harps, and pianos are perfectly placed across Woman. Yet these flourishes always leave ample space for Milosh’s sublime vocals, which do not definitively register as either male or female.

His delicate, unplaceable voice enables Woman to deftly sidestep the hyper-masculinity and sexual aggression that frequently surfaces in male-fronted R&B. The cover art for R. Kelly’s recent record Black Panties, in which Kelly plays a naked woman like a cello, pretty much encapsulates this tendency. In contrast, when Milosh cries out “make love to me,” it’s a desperate plea, not an order. Of course, there is nothing wrong with sexual confidence, but Milosh’s style invests all the familiar pillow talk on Woman with a universal and somewhat subversive twist.

It’s true that a lot of other artists trade in similarly wounded, brooding R&B. In 2013, Autre Ne Veut, The Weeknd, and even Drake released albums in this vein. There is also some darkness on Woman. But perhaps better than any of their counterparts, Rhye balances such angst with the joy and jubilation of deep intimacy, even if there’s just “three days to feel each other.”

Woman opens with the couplet: “I’m a fool for that shake in your thighs/I’m a fool for that sound in your sighs.” It may not be subtle, but what else is there to say?

- Cooper Long

Yeezus
Kanye West

To call Yeezus an album seems to do it a disservice – it is a scattershot of punk, a flurry of electric, and a hard-hitting pulse of hip-hop. It is a political statement, a diatribe on the overinflated monstrosity of celebrity status, and a lyrical tornado scathing a music industry that produces pop tunes that leave a listener feeling diabetic. Misogynistic slurs, challenges to racism, and helter-skelter screams pepper the measures. It is disorder. It is calm. It is everything and anything in between.
And that’s just the first song.

Kayne West’s Yeezus is an exhausting, powder keg of music, if it can even be called that. Unlike Kanye’s other six albums, the classic soul sounds are almost entirely absent. There isn’t the vintage word flexing or pencil pushing to produce smooth beats. Instead a progression of dissonance with shrieks and deep bass lines, chaotic melodies and emotional layers grate the ears for forty minutes.

Listening to it all in one go is a marathon. The tunes come in torrents, thud after thud after thud, and just when it feels like it’s too much, when you can’t take the discord, jerkiness, and sudden tiredness, the song ends and the next one ambles on with shrill screech.

This is not to say the album is bad. It isn’t. The greatness comes in exactly what makes it disconcerting: a reversal on the perceptions of regular musical composition, as well as the artist’s ironic assault on himself and everything that has made him.

That, or the album could just be the loud grumbles of a narcissist parading as complexity. Like the album’s title suggests, God only knows, and I’m sure even he has trouble listening to some of the fubar ricocheting throughout the songs.

- Kacper Niburski

Modern Vampires of the City
Vampire Weekend

Whatever you call it, Vampire Weekend’s third record is one that defies both labels and my writing ability to express how fucking amazing it is. It is both the ambitious conclusion of a coming-of-age trilogy as well as an impressive sign of things to come.They were originally pegged as just another buzz-band when they arrived in a musical landscape replete with twee and lazily ironic acts. But Ezra Koenig, Rostam Batmanglij, Chris Baio, and Chris Tomson have proven their critics wrong at virtually every turning point in their careers. 2008’s self-titled debut was a buoyant amalgamation of classical influences Batmanglij picked up at Columbia University (no one ever said a V-Dubs song needed more harpsichord) and African-pop. 2011’s Contra built off the debut’s inventiveness while remaining accessible even when making references to typography (re: the oxford comma). As Pitchfork put it, the band was “in an enviable position: semi-popular and sincerely idiosyncratic.”

Perhaps that’s why the band’s utter domination of 2013 wasn’t surprising. Although Batmanglij was the sole producer of the first two albums, the band enlisted Ariel Rechtshaid to lend his deft touch and fresh ears to the proceedings. To call the resulting fruits of their labour “magical” wouldn’t be hyperbolic.

MVOTC is a barbaric yawp proclaiming the virtues of America and a brave confrontation of solemn issues like mortality and religion. “Step” functions in the same vein as Kanye West’s “Homecoming” as a clever love song about a city, with the metropolis in question being poignantly depicted in its accompanying video. The number of references to fire that pepper Koenig’s lyrics on tracks such as “Unbelievers” and “Don’t Lie” makes one wonder whether he was reading Dante’s Inferno in the booth. The songs are as grave in subject matter as the epic poem, but with the band’s trademark tongue-in-cheek still shines. “Ya Hey” is an ethereal conversation with a higher power, but that doesn’t make it any less fun to gyrate your hips to. Considering the sheer infectiousness of the remaining songs on the album, the sparse and intimate “Hannah Hunt” is certainly not the one you’d pick for radio play, but it’s easily their best yet. The sheer ecstasy it induces during its final minute is enough for anyone to produce a full-fledged Patronus.

No words of mine can really do this immensely important album justice, so I’ll just stop here and give you a chance to listen to it.

- Tomi Milos

An inventive and often ingenious futuristic sci-fi/romance that’s subtle with the sci-fi, but a little heavy with the romance. From the design to the concepts, it really delivers on creating its world and in evoking thoughts with its many “what if” scenarios.

Scarlett Johansson’s voice-acting, Jonze’s directorship, and the way Joaquin Phoenix interacts with the Artificial Intelligence all come together to convincingly humanize something that doesn’t have a body, and is present mostly as just an earpiece.

Although it’s a bit too long and begins to lose sight of its central ideas, the relationship drama was always at the forefront. It’s a love story that’s not unlike many we have seen for decades on the big screen, but this man is in love with his computer. It’s a frightening, disturbing, but nonetheless heartfelt, moving, and an utterly original account of loneliness in the modern age.

Marie has asked her ex-husband Ahmad to come to Paris from Tehran so that they can have a proper goodbye and finally some closure. To Ahmad’s dismay, and for unexplained motives, she hasn’t booked him a hotel but instead offers him space in her own home, where she lives with her three children. The film carefully unravels a web of complex relationships – each one tragic, confused, and compelling in its own right. Director Ashghar Farhadi unearths a vast and intricate mosaic of details, stories, and emotions. Each moment feels purposeful, but not contrived. Farhadi is a brilliant and skillful storyteller, and some of the themes from A Separation carry over in this film – themes about marriage, domesticity, family, and where and how we place our various histories. The Past is compelling on every level – entertaining with all its plot twists, intellectually engaging with all the questions it asks, and emotionally moving with its beautifully and honestly drawn out characters.

I prefer the French title of this film, La Vie D’Adele: Chapitres 1 et 2, because to me, this was not a film about Emma’s blue hair, but instead the story of Adele, a story that has only just begun. We see her as a shy, confused, and frustrated teenager. We see her as a lover, filled with desire, intensity, strength, and compassion. We see her as a teacher, quiet, patient, careful. The film is composed almost entirely of close-ups of Adele’s face – her blushed and embarrassed cheeks, her loving smile, her tearful eyes. The camera follows her through every little moments – and while some details prove immediately important, others are just part of a larger landscape of her life that is constantly, shifting, growing, and becoming more complete.

There is the moment when she first catches Emma’s eyes on the sidewalk, there is the moment where she leads her students in a dance, when she sits around the table with her parents discussing her future plans. Things happen, the movie, ends, Adele walks away, and we know that she will keep walking and her life will keep going even after we’ve turned away from the screen.

This is the power of the film: its incredible vitality. The stories are honest, the relationships are present and real, the characters are complex and flawed and lovable. It’s gained a certain amount of backlash for the long and explicit sexual encounters, but I defend those scenes. They are not the crux, the pinnacle, or the main event of the film. Nor are they meant to be visual signifiers – telling the audience that they slept together. The sex is a part of her life, and we see it in the same full and unadulterated honesty as we see the way the lovers meet, fight, fall apart, move on, and then look back. Perhaps the sex scenes are not necessary, but then nothing is.

I left the theatre feeling both empty and fulfilled; elated by the film’s ability to express my human longings, but my head was clouded as I wondered, inevitably: what is the meaning of all this – Adele’s life and my own life?

Upstream Color takes place in what the French impressionist filmmaker and theorist Germaine Dulac called “the realm of nature and dream.” Writer-director Shane Carruth’s elliptical screenplay bridges images that are beautiful, disturbing, and inexplicable. Frequently, the film is all three at once.

Carruth imagines a mysterious, multi-stage ecological cycle that ensnares two ordinary people, Jeff (Shane Carruth) and Kris (Amy Seimetz). The film is a love story in the sense that they develop a profound, metaphysical bond. But Upstream Color is the antithesis of a romance like Before Midnight, in which the characters expound on their love and life together. Instead, Carruth proposes that it may be impossible to unpack a relationship in long monologues. Sometimes the forces that draw people together defy description or comprehension.

Even when Jeff and Kris try to engage in the obligatory banter of a new couple they are foiled. At one point they exchange childhood stories, only to realize that they hold the same overlapping, fragmentary memories.

This blurring of identity feels at once deeply erotic and disquieting. Yet true intimacy necessarily involves exactly this type of shared experience and loss of self. Any pair of lovers could be seen as a microcosm of the complex ecosystem that links Jeff and Kris’ consciousnesses.

Rather than verbalizing these themes, Carruth paints them. In a series of striking shots, Jeff and Kris argue over whose memories are whose, while black birds fill the sky. As the flock makes tightly coordinated loops and arcs in the twilight, the individual birds seem guided by some collective intelligence or invisible hands. Jeff and Kris are similarly subject to unseen powers. They too are flying wingtip to wingtip, but they cannot understand how or why.

Carruth’s first feature was the labyrinthine time-travel story Primer. The 2004 film felt like a puzzle that could eventually be solved with enough viewings and maybe some flow charts. It is not clear that Upstream Color has the same entirely coherent internal logic. Regardless, it is a dream that still cries out to be experienced more than once.

I morbidly expected the movie to mirror in hipster style (the film is in grayscale) my own sense of uncertainty and aimlessness in life, to draw on some profound, abstract philosophy too deep for my meagre mind, and then to end cynically as if celebrating the process of being lost.

Instead of caricaturizing an empty girl obsessing over unattainable dreams, Greta Gerwig beautifully portrays the everyday self, full of desires, contradictions, and expectations. I was taken with the desperate curiosity in Frances’ eyes, her languid but graceful posture, her wanderlust, her unintentional awkwardness and how she embraces that awkwardness. I love the way she inexplicably pushes people away when she all wants to do is pull.

The movie doesn’t excuse wantonness or laziness. It doesn’t celebrate the indulgence in staying lost or unknowing. Instead, it offers hope. It tells me that it is ok to be lost, for a little while. To want something but not know how to get it, or to get something even if I don’t know if I want it. To be free. To not be ready when society relentlessly demands for you to “settle down”.

Frances Ha (both the movie and the character) never pretends to be bigger than itself. It is bold but unpretentious, it is honest, it is raw, it is charming and it is so satisfyingly humorous. I recommend it to every lost soul out there.

One of the great mysteries of ANDY is our best-of-the-year list selection process. No more. In the interest of transparency, the formula is revealed here for the first time.

In order to keep up with the best of world cinema, our foreign correspondents attend many far-flung film festivals. We also take notes on countless films in the Silhouette screening room. While most theatres offer oversized cardboard soft drink cups, our private auditorium is equipped with graduated cylinders so we can catch our reviewers’ tears and quantify their emotional response.

ANDY is equally obsessive about tracking the year’s biggest and best albums. We don’t just sift through the endless stream of promotional copies that pour into the Silhouette office. When Kanye premiered the video for “New Slaves” by projecting it against a wall in Williamsburg, our reviewers were on an adjacent rooftop with a pair of binoculars. When Beyoncé abruptly dropped her latest album at midnight on Dec. 13, a lot of people stayed up late to listen. Our writers haven’t slept since her last record came out.

Once each writer’s best-of-the-year ballot is complete, they are sent in individual, sealed envelopes to the Silhouette’s auditor. The ballots, not the writers.

Just kidding. Obviously that story has more loopholes than the plot of Gravity. In reality, these rankings were decided over dinner at the Phoenix, using a napkin-based tabulation system. Like all best-of lists, our picks are hardly authoritative. These are some of the films and albums that affected our writers most in 2013. Feel free to agree, disagree or scribble your own napkin.

You might not read this fact in any recruitment brochure, but the most distinctive feature of McMaster’s campus is presently a gaping hole in the ground. This state of affairs will likely persist until September 2015, when construction on L.R. Wilson Hall is scheduled for completion.

Even though the new Humanities building is not yet standing, the emerging superstructure does stand for something. The site symbolizes the convergence of several different kinds of creativity. The engineers who designed the new building and the musicians who will someday perform in its 450-seat concert hall are bound together by their common creative spirit.

I started seeing the girders and concrete forms this way after reading Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class, Revisited (2012). According to the author, the titular class is a fundamental driver of economic growth and anyone who creates new ideas or engages in complex problem solving is already a member.

Florida also offers a compelling vision of how universities fit into this creative economy. Although he never specifically mentions Hamilton, Florida’s observation that many cities have transitioned from manufacturing to “meds and eds” sure sounds familiar. Yet Florida cautions that educational institutions should not be viewed as self-contained and inexhaustible economic engines. Universities don’t just “crank out research projects that can be spun off into companies.”

On the contrary, universities have the potential to play a much broader role in growing prosperous communities. By fostering technology, talent and tolerance, universities can contribute to “quality of place.” This encompasses all the characteristics that define a place and make it attractive, from architecture to art crawls.

In this way, Florida argues that universities and their surrounding communities are profoundly interdependent. Universities bring together talented people who generate new ideas and knowledge. Vibrant communities, in turn, encourage these individuals to pursue their projects locally and attract still more creative types. Thus, the benefit that a university brings to its community is less a straight line than a self-reinforcing circle.

From this perspective, helping to organize an artist’s talk for the Spotlight on the Arts festival, an activity that improves quality of place, is arguably as important to regional growth and vitality as programming the next Tinder.

Not all of Florida’s theories are so persuasive. He acknowledges that creating quality of place can sometimes resemble gentrification, but fails to elaborate. Furthermore, his concluding argument that all jobs can ultimately be made creative seems like tacked-on panacea for any accusations of elitism. I am also mystified by his guess that “if Bob Dylan were to come along today, his agent would probably send him to the weight room.”

Nevertheless, the model of the university as a “creative hub,” rather than just an assembly line for patents and spin-off companies, remains powerful.

With this in mind, the Wilson Hall construction does not have to be an eyesore for the next year and a half. Rather, the site can be seen as a reminder that all students, regardless of their faculty, are connected by the camaraderie of their creativity and can contribute to a community as vibrant as the brightly painted slats of the construction fence.

During the 1990s, the Chapel Hill, North Carolina band Superchunk put out an album of sturdy pop-punk virtually every year. Swearin’ not only carries forward Superchunk’s fuzzy sound, but also seems poised to become similarly prolific. Surfing Strange arrives a little more than a year after Swearin’s auspicious debut LP and it is a satisfying second lap.

Despite their first album’s strength, Swearin’ has not recorded a complete retread. The hooks are harder to come by on Surfing Strange and the tone is less rambunctious overall. The highest-energy cuts, like the standout “Dust in the Gold Sack” and “Young,” are clustered at either end of the album. Ballads and lumbering, mid-tempo riffs dominate the album’s, nonetheless enjoyable, middle stretch.

Bassist Keith Spencer also contributes vocals for the first time on Surfing Strange, but Allison Crutchfield’s voice, alternatively plaintive and barbed, remains the band’s signature asset. Somewhat disappointingly, Crutchfield, Spencer and guitarist Kyle Gilbride rarely exchange vocals on the same track. Crutchfield often sings of lost love and “grudges unrequited.” It could have been compelling to hear one of her bandmates chime in from the perspective of either an ally or antagonist.

In retrospect, it feels as though big albums with even bigger marketing campaigns dominated 2013. Yet, Surfing Strange was not teased in 15 second increments on Saturday Night Live, like Random Access Memories, or released early via app, like Magna Carta Holy Grail or ARTPOP. Swearin’ has crafted a straightforward, thirty-three minute volley of unpretentious guitar rock, and its modest ambitions are actually refreshing.

If Swearin’ drops an album as enjoyable as Surfing Strange each year for the next decade, I will buy every one.

When I was in fourth grade, I missed almost a year of school. My classmates were simply told that I was sick, and they all wrote kind letters wishing me a speedy recovery from my ambiguous illness. Few would have guessed that it was not my physical health that was keeping me out of the classroom. I was too anxious.

Even though I was not in school for several months, I was doing a lot of learning. For instance, I learned that I had Generalized Anxiety Disorder. I received cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) and for many years I took the anti-depressant Paxil. Eventually, I was well enough to return to school and thank my classmates for their letters in person.

Today, I no longer take medication and I am quite practiced at handling my anxiety. Yet, one of my newest and most reliable anxiety management techniques was not prescribed by a doctor, or learned in a CBT session.

In conceptual art, ideas take precedence over aesthetics. A representative work is Catalysis, a series of performances from the early 1970s by Adrian Piper, which I studied last year in an art history course. Each performance involved Piper distorting her physical appearance and violating certain social norms in public.

In Catalysis I, for example, Piper soaked her clothes in a mixture of vinegar, eggs, milk and cod buy levitra liver oil for a week, and then wore them on the subway during rush hour. For Catalysis IV, she travelled around New York City with a large red bath towel bulging out of her mouth.

If these acts seem disruptive and confrontational, that was Piper’s intention. As a black female, Piper was already accustomed to being treated differently based on her body. The artist hoped to provoke a complacent public and force people to be more conscious of how they react to “otherness.”

I have never walked around with a bath towel stuffed in my mouth, but I do think of Catalysis sometimes when I experience mild social anxiety. When my jokes are met with silence, for instance, or I misuse an ungainly, pretentious word like “potent” in a class discussion, I imagine that I am a conceptual artist like Piper. I focus on the idea that both my gaffe and people’s responses are part of an elaborate performance art piece.

Obviously, reflecting on conceptual art is not a solution for severe anxiety, or other serious problems related to mental illness. Far superior resources are available at the Student Wellness Centre. Yet, I genuinely find that playing pretend in this way can occasionally help to quell some of my social anxiety and embarrassment.

Conceptual art is often denigrated as frivolous or foolish. Indeed, some may dismiss Catalysis on these grounds. These people might be surprised to find out that Piper also has a doctorate from Harvard University, where her supervisor was the legendary political philosopher John Rawls.

To me, however, my relationship with Catalysis absolutely affirms the value of conceptual art. Piper’s work has changed the way that I see the world around me, and I don’t think that there is anything more one can ask from a piece of art, be it a painting or performance.

This is a very quiet film. Most of the story is told through careful glances, silent movements, and even an inaudible whisper at the end between Bob and Charlotte. Everything is undramatic but still feels fragile.

Both of them are adrift in different age-specific life crises, and the bond they form is based on shared feelings of displacement and dissatisfaction in their lives. I don’t feel that Coppola ever tries to analyze or unpack these characters. She only finds honest ways to show two people who are bored and restless, and we never find them boring. I could identify with both of them. Charlotte, the young woman who doesn’t know who she is supposed to be – and even with Bob, the older man who is lost and weary.

Despite an intimate kiss at the end, in the middle of the Tokyo streets, they aren’t lovers. The physical attraction between them doesn’t really matter. Their friendship is a kind of nothing – talking, laughing, lying down beside each other – but the longing and the loneliness of it all is so relatable that each time I watch the film I feel strangely fulfilled by the end.

He spies the audiobook case on her cluttered hotel room table and picks it up. “Whose is this – A Soul’s Search: Finding Your True Calling?” he asks.

Suddenly, her smile vanishes. “I don’t know,” she answers, with a playfulness that does not match her darting, downcast eyes.

Even though he cannot see her face, he senses her embarrassment and masterfully pivots the conversation. “I have that,” he says.

This exchange between Bob (Bill Murray) and Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) occurs at the midpoint of Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation. To me, it is the linchpin of the entire film. In only five shots and five lines of dialogue, Coppola defines the ineffable bond between her two protagonists.

Although they attempt to stifle their feelings with alcohol, cigarettes and karaoke, Bob and Charlotte are profoundly aimless. Her vulnerability and self-doubt are exposed when Bob spots the audiobook case. Yet, rather than questioning Charlotte or changing the subject, Bob outs himself as similarly adrift.

Bob and Charlotte’s mutual ennui binds them together, and I would argue that this type of willingness to appear vulnerable in front of another person is essential for deep and lasting friendship off screen as well.

The tenth anniversary of Lost in Translation’s release is an admittedly esoteric topic for an entire issue of ANDY. Indeed, I sometimes questioned whether Sofia Coppola’s accomplishments truly warrant such a retrospective. Certainly, there are many other young writer-directors with similarly sized, but perhaps more consistently impressive filmographies. Paul Thomas Anderson, Jeff Nichols and Ramin Bahrani come to mind.

But then I think back to Charlotte’s face in the scene that I just described, and how the essence of an entire relationship is inscribed in the rise and fall of her lips. If one scene can define a film, then one film can certainly define this issue.

Star Trek’s optimistic vision of interstellar travel is said to have inspired countless young people to pursue careers in space exploration. Indeed, Mae Jemison, the first African-American female astronaut, has specifically cited the original television series as an inspiration.

With Gravity, director Alfonso Cuarón has crafted a science fiction film that has precisely the opposite effect. Not only did Gravity make me never want to become an astronaut, it even made me hesitant to look up at the night sky outside Westdale Theatre.

The film opens with a title card that declares, “Life in space is impossible.” For the next 90 minutes, astronauts Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) and Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) desperately attempt to defy this proposition. During a spacewalk, the two are separated from their shuttle by a fusillade of debris and sent careening into darkness. Although space is a void, however, it is nonetheless filled with dangers. Suffocation, incineration, freezing and drowning each come to threaten the duo.

Cuarón and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki film the wayward astronauts with a breathtakingly mobile camera. As in Cuarón’s previous film, the wrenching dystopian thriller Children of Men (2006), these sweeping camera movements are also coupled with long, seemingly unbroken takes. Gravity’s opening sequence is so dynamic that it makes Orson Welles’ famous tracking shot at the beginning of Touch of Evil (1958) look like an amateur home video.

Sadly, Gravity’s script is not quite as fluid as its cinematography. The astronauts’ struggle for survival contains a few predictable moments, and both characters seem a tad too archetypal. Kowalski is an unflappable veteran on his last mission, while Stone is a nervous new recruit, which makes them an unfortunately clichéd combo.

There are several haunting scenes in the film where spacecraft are silently shredded in the vacuum of space. During these moments, I began to wish that Gravity would abandon Stone and Kowalski’s clunky, faux-profound dialogue altogether and transform into a silent film.

That said, in her most compelling moments, Stone does succeed in channeling the relentlessness of science fiction cinema’s greatest heroine, Ellen Ripley. The two women also seem to prefer a similar wardrobe underneath their spacesuits.

In addition to continuing Children of Men’s virtuoso use of long takes, Gravity carries forward that film’s preoccupation with ideas of fertility and rebirth. In Gravity’s eeriest shot, Stone’s levitating body is clearly posed to resemble a fetus, complete with an insulated hose in place of the umbilical cord. Later imagery likewise suggests a life form crawling out of the primordial soup.

Despite its imperfections, Gravity’s screenplay resonates with such visuals. The astronauts’ plight vividly demonstrates how the desolation of outer space can reduce human beings to a childlike state of clumsiness and vulnerability.

Yet, Cuarón complicates this reading by setting up a fascinating tension between the powerlessness and the agency of the astronauts. The debris that strands the pair is the result of an accidental chain reaction, and Stone was driven into the space program by a similarly fluky personal tragedy. These events point towards a random and uncontrollable cosmos. At the same time, however, they are able to repeatedly stave off death through careful problem solving and deliberate action, which suggests a universe ruled by order, not chaos.

The success of Gravity certainly owes little to serendipity. In an interview with Wired, Cuarón revealed that production took an arduous four and a half years. Audiences should be grateful for his dedication. Cuarón has delivered a technical masterpiece that is so suspenseful and intense that it has a physical impact.