Mostly Movies

Precious/Pirate Radio

2009-11-23T18:25:00.000-08:00

I'm late getting to Precious: Blah Blah Blah by Sapphire, and it seems that the critical consensus on the film has come down on the side of Oscar contender and Oprah-blessed transformative experience. I can certainly understand that reaction since Lee Daniels's film wastes no opportunity to share its love of its own heroine (Gabourey Sidibe). After enduring horrific abuse at the hands of her barely seen father (who rapes her) and mother (a genuinely terrifying Mo'Nique), Precious marches confidently out into the streets of New York at film's end ready to raise two children on her own and (in her fantasies) become famous. The eclectic ensemble Daniels assembled serves the film's blunt message well; in addition to Mo'Nique, Mariah Carey is nicely beleaguered as a civil servant and Sidibe plays Precious's inarticulateness with little sense of the technique that must have gone into the performance. I wish my satisfaction with the acting were matched by my feelings for the film as a whole, but there are troubling conflicts at work. The most obvious and much commented on is that everyone who helps Precious in the film is light-skinned, from Paula Patton's lesbian teacher to Carey's social worker to Lenny Kravitz's nurse. I don't know that I can or even should begin to comment on what this means, except that I sense a real anger at work in the film underneath all the self-expression and uplift.

Thanks to Patton's Blu Rain Precious is reading by almost an eighth grade level at film's end but I have my doubts about Precious's future since almost all of the classroom scenes involve journalling and look-at-me cutting contests between Precious and her lively classmates and not, you know, ABC's. Precious is an example of what I call the "special case" movie (a la The Pianist and Life Is Beautiful) in which everyone the main character meets exists solely to come to his/her aid. Precious talks of getting her own apartment in the closing scenes, but since she's got two kids (including a special needs child unfortunately named Mongo) the idea rings hollow. Daniels wants to have it both ways with his heroine; her knowing voice-over is years ahead of the girl who's scrawling in journals, and ultimately its that cheating that makes Precious feel more like a message movie and less like the anguished cry it should have been.

What a self-satisfied, baby boomer-centric piece of nonsense Pirate Radio turned out to be. Richard Curtis's tale of illegal 1960's British radio stations generically celebrates rock and roll as a cure for English stodginess while never bothering to settle on an interesting main character (walking semicolon Tom Sturridge plays the youngster whose eyes we're supposed to view everything through). Philip Seymour Hoffman, Bill Nighy, and Kenneth Branagh are stranded with little to do in a movie that needs a bunch of classic rock song titles ("for only $29.95....") to crawl across the screen.

Sunday Music: The Decemberists (w/ Gillian Welch & David Rawlings) - "Sin City"

2009-11-22T15:09:00.000-08:00

Had the pleasure of hanging out with old friend and co-blogger Rob last night; he tells me that Rawlings's new A Friend of a Friend is the "album of the year". Here's Rawlings and Gillian Welch joining in on an Emmylou Harris song. This continues my streak of good videos marred by lousy audience behavior, but from this vantage point the song wins....

An Education

2009-11-20T14:50:00.000-08:00

Two celebrated films with young female protagonists opened at my local theatre today, and while Lone Scherfig's An Education flies onto screens without the endorsement of Oprah Winfrey or Tyler Perry (more on Precious in an upcoming post) it is by far the superior film. This richly detailed story of a young woman's first love and her efforts to avoid being boxed in by society's expectations boasts the female performance of the year in Carey Mulligan's turn as the clever Oxford candidate Jenny. Nick Hornby's screenplay (based on a memoir by Lynn Barber) and a strong supporting cast make the future of one bright 16-year old in 1961 London a question of unsettling immediacy.

The only thing standing between Jenny and a place at Oxford would appear to be the financial burden university would place on her money-fixated father Jack (an exceptionally nuanced Alfred Molina). In lesser hands Jack could have been an one-dimensional creation, but he is written as being very proud of Jenny despite his money worries and Molina gives him all sorts of complicated shades of doubt and inferiority. The scenes of Jack and his wife Marjorie (Cara Seymour) fawning over Jenny's cultured older "friend" David (Peter Sarsgaard) are made even more painful with the realization that in England at this time who you knew was still something to be proud of. It's Sarsgaard's David that provides the biggest potential obstacle to Jenny's Oxford plans. Handsome (but not ridiculously so) and seemingly able to afford a life of good dining and art buying, David is an almost too-perfect temptation for a teenager whose interests are already moving beyond the perfume and cigarettes she teases her girlfriends with before David whisks her to Paris. (Rosamund Pike is sad and very funny as the image of what Jenny might become) Hornby's script and Mulligan's tart performance always give Jenny her head though; the relationship with David isn't a schoolgirl crush, Jenny believes she's ready for this. Casting a poised 22-year old Mulligan as the 16-year old Jenny helps give the character an almost otherworldly maturity and when things go bad Jenny asks for help rather than break down.

Will the help come too late? The central irony of An Education is articulated by Jenny's headmistress (Emma Thompson), who thinks it's wonderful for young girls to study and gain admittance to Oxford but they'll probably just wind up running a school at best. It would be easier for everyone involved if Jenny would just accept David's surprise marriage proposal, but unlike her headmistress Jenny thinks of ideas, art, film, and education as the means and not the end. It's to the dour Miss Stubbs (Olivia Williams, where has she been?) and her exhortations to stay in school that Jenny returns; how appropriate that An Education ends with a beginning. The film's greatest gift to us is Carey Mulligan, who embodies all the contradictions that make Jenny a heroine for this year's crop of clever young women ready for the great leap forward.

Class struggles

2009-11-19T15:47:00.000-08:00

A whiny, vague post that goes off on perceived self-absorption in indie rock. Was the Garden State soundtrack really that influential? More importantly, did this post fall through a time warp from 2004? What does the following paragraph mean? (PopMatters)

But while Tommy NewYorkBigwig used to pimp people’s art from everywhere else, now he’s only invested in the kids down the street. The music sounds like it has nothing to prove because the kids making it have nothing to prove. It enacts leisure because its authors come from a background of leisure. And the kids performing onstage don’t care about earning your attention or respect because they’re not accustomed to earning anything. It’s an entire artistic movement of, for, and about the bourgeoisie at a time when everyone in America is living anything but the lifestyle of the rich, famous and bored.

Respect for enemies

2009-11-19T15:44:00.000-08:00

I'm of the mind that Palin isn't worth talking about. Andrew Sullivan disagrees, but I think the notoriety he gained last year questioning the parentage of Trig may have gone to his head. It's dubious to claim that Palin is the "likeliest nominee" for the GOP in 2012 and a 3rd party candidacy would ensure an Obama victory. Watching Sullivan do back flips should be entertaining for a little while anyway.

Eggers

2009-11-19T13:05:00.000-08:00

Dave Eggers has received the Literarian Award from the National Book Foundation, the people who give out the National Book Awards. The Literarian Award is given for "outstanding service to the American literary community" and the NBF website mentions Eggers's cofounding of the 826 tutoring center program as well as the these two other foundations for the advancement of human rights. Other National Book Award winners here. If you've got the time, here's a video of Eggers discussing the origin of 826.

Quick Reaction to Norah Jones's The Fall

2009-11-18T14:00:00.000-08:00

The expectations game can't be ignored when discussing Norah Jones's new CD The Fall since the album has been billed as her sort of gentle coming-out as a "rock" artist" (Jones has been playing guitar in concert for a little while now) and it has become cliche to dismiss Jones's previous work as reassuring Starbucksy fodder for mass consumption. For the record, I think Jones's second album Feels Like Home is her best since it features her singing with Dolly Parton and covering Tom Waits
and Townes Van Zandt.

But to business. I wish Jones's pleasantly affirmative voice had a bit more bite to it, because I think if it did The Fall would have a greater chance of being seen as an artistic reboot. Lead track "Chasing Pirates" bounces along on a cushion of keyboards and though the lyrics are at least nominally about worries caused by an absent lover ("And I don't know how to slow it down/My mind's racing from chasing pirates") the song never gets above the level of catchiness because Jones doesn't really sound all that worried. Ryan Adams cowrote "Light As A Feather," a rumbling tale of a relationship that deserves to be put out of its misery, and I could easily imagine Adams and Jones swapping vocals but alas there are no cameos here. Will Sheff of Okkervil River helps out with the writing on "Stuck," which could have been the soundtrack to Jones's lovelorn city dweller in My Blueberry Nights. "Too Damn Slow," another ostensibly angry song that needs a jump start, appears to be addressed to an ex but ambles along so indifferently it hardly matters. Closing track "Man of the Hour," performed on solo piano is a too late cry for fidelity - or maybe a song about getting a dog - written after the fact; could Jones write more lyrics as funny as these? (But I can't choose between a vegan/and a pothead/So I chose you") The Fall contains some welcome shots of musical energy and it's a good sign that Jones is working with new collaborators; if she overcomes her tendencies toward prettiness and cuts loose on guitar then her next album won't be anywhere near coffee shop material.

Sinking

2009-11-16T16:59:00.000-08:00

Five reasons Pirate Radio flopped. (I'm seeing it this week) (IFC)

1. No one cares about Richard Curtis in the US.

Richard Curtis did time on "BlackAdder" and "Mr. Bean." That means nothing in the US (sadly). He did, however, write the following romcom staples: "Four Weddings and a Funeral," "Notting Hill," both Bridget Jones films, the aforementioned "Love Actually." HOW HARD IS THAT TO MENTION IN THE TRAILER? Pretty freakin' hard, apparently: we get a voice-over informing us that this is from "the creator of 'Four Weddings and a Funeral' and 'Love Actually.'" Two mistakes there: assuming your target audience is old enough to remember "Four Weddings" (doubtful) and using the ever-nebulous "from the creator of" formula, which wary audiences are smart enough to distrust. Just say "From the writer of every romantic comedy you love" early on with a full resume count -- not in a perfunctory voice-over over a minute-and-a-half into the trailer, by which points the young romantic girls are all like "Old dudes! Ew!" and have tuned out.

It's list-making time

2009-11-16T15:36:00.001-08:00

Paste magazine listed its 50 Best Albums of the 2000s recently, and while I admire Sufjan Stevens (a little more than I actually like him I think) I can't quite get behind Illinoise as the decade's best. I also think the new Avett Brothers is fantastically overrated on this list; as you might guess my sympathies lie with the #2 choice.

By now, the story of this album has become rock ’n’ roll lore like Brian Wilson’s sandbox and “Paul is dead.” In brief: Once upon a time, the acclaimed Chicago rock band Wilco delivered an album called Yankee Hotel Foxtrot to Reprise, its longtime label, a subsidiary of Warner Bros. Terrified by the album’s squalling feedback and abstract songcraft, Reprise executives ran screaming from the room. Ultimately, they decided to let the band go. Soon after, Wilco streamed the record for free online. The album was met with raves from both fans and critics, and was eventually picked up by Nonesuch, an artier subsidiary of the same parent company. “There was a common perception and irony,” Nonesuch senior VP David Bither says today, “of one Warner label passing on the record and letting the band go out of its contract for very little cost, and another Warner label picking it up and putting it out. In other words, paying for it twice.”

Cormac speaks!

2009-11-16T14:38:00.000-08:00

What did the Wall Street Journal have to do to get Cormac McCarthy to sit down for an interview? He's pretty engaging on family life, work habits, and the upcoming film of The Road. (The film's director John Hillcoat joins in the chat)

WSJ: The last five years have seemed very productive for you. Have there been fallow periods in your writing?

CM: I don't think there's any rich period or fallow period. That's just a perception you get from what's published. Your busiest day might be watching some ants carrying bread crumbs. Someone asked Flannery O'Connor why she wrote, and she said, "Because I was good at it." And I think that's the right answer. If you're good at something it's very hard not to do it. In talking to older people who've had good lives, inevitably half of them will say, "The most significant thing in my life is that I've been extraordinarily lucky." And when you hear that you know you're hearing the truth. It doesn't diminish their talent or industry. You can have all that and fail.

Sunday Music: Neko Case - "Magpie to the Morning"

2009-11-15T17:25:00.000-08:00

Toronto, 4/09

Two Ladies

2009-11-15T17:02:00.000-08:00

Two profiles in today's Times: the long piece on Megan Fox spends a good deal of time recounting past controversies and is notable for Fox's apparent utter honesty and lack of affect about her own abilities and what's expected of her as a sex symbol. Jennifer's Body may well have made more money with another actress in Fox's role but it's message would have been diluted.

In her next movie, “Jonah Hex,” which is based on a comic book, she plays a prostitute. “I had my first sex scene in that movie,” she said. “I had on underwear and silicone covers that you wear over your breasts. I would never be naked in a film. You should never say never, but my body parts are all I have left that are only mine. The world owns everything else.”

She paused. It was a little confusing to watch Fox’s former personality recede before my eyes. In a few short weeks, she had gone from happily outrageous to virginal and controlled. It was, perhaps, a healthier attitude, but pale by comparison. “I have to pull back a little bit now,” Fox said. “I do live in a glass box. And I am on display for men to pay to look at me. And that bothers me. I don’t want to live that character.”

Kristen Stewart, who has been acting most of her life, pulls the standard shy celebrity act with quotes that seem to suggest she has just realized people are interested in her.("I do wish people would focus more on the work...") Stewart is the far superior actress, but it's Fox who seems to be more adept at engaging the public sphere on her own terms.

A Serious Man

2009-11-14T14:51:00.000-08:00

The Coen Brothers' (mostly) black-hearted A Serious Man has been described in some quarters as their most "personal" film, as if all their previous work had been made from a kit. The late-1960's Minnesota setting and academic father do parallel the Coen's own childhood, but A Serious Man isn't some backward-looking ode to youth but rather an extension of themes explored in the Brothers' No Country For Old Men. Can one, in fact, stop what's coming, and what does it mean that it's headed for you in the first place?

A Serious Man would be much meaner without the presence of Michael Stuhlbarg as Larry Gopnik, the physicist and tenure candidate who learns early on that his wife (Sari Lennick) is leaving him for the older and wealthier Sy Abelman (played with wonderful passive-aggressive menace by Fred Melamed). Larry's children are only attentive to him when they need something and his career hangs at a precarious tipping point as he's up for tenure and the victim of an anonymous letter-writing campaign accusing him of "moral turpitude." Larry is in a state of flustered bewilderment throughout, but there's more to the character than just being a sad sack. There's a sharp intelligence at work in the performance that keeps Larry from becoming pathetic. As the bar mitzvah of his son (Aaron Wolff) approaches Larry is inspired to turn to local rabbis for the meaning of his trials. The first and youngest offers feel-good blather about "perspective," the second tells stories with no resolution, and the third won't even take Larry's call. While the successful bar mitzvah provides a moment of relief, the overall attitude towards religion in A Serious Man is one of frustration as Larry continues to find ritual and no meaning.

While Stuhlbarg's Larry takes up the bulk of the screen time (Larry also must deal with his no account brother played by Richard Kind, who seems to be in the movie only to make Larry seem relatively normal), I think it's important to consider the fate of Aaron Wolff's Danny since a "personal" reading of the film means that Danny is the boy one or both of the Coens will grow up to be. When Danny isn't bugging his Dad to fix the TV antenna or fighting with his sister he is at least nominally interested in preparing for his bar mitzvah, but what wisdom does that elusive senior rabbi finally hold? If you've already seen the film then you may be interested to know that the members of Jefferson Airplane are not Jewish. The rest of you will understand upon viewing. In a dream sequence earlier on, Larry explains the uncertainty principle to his class and says that even though no one knows what's going on his students will be "responsible for this on the midterm." A Serious Man ends on the same note of uncertainty that follows Larry and his family throughout the film. It's a probing and angry movie and I'm inclined to think it one of the Coens' best. The meaning that Larry seeks remains beyond his grasp, but in the Coens' moral framework the certainty of being held responsible is as final as the outcome of a visit from Anton Chigurh.

10 Years After

2009-11-14T14:37:00.000-08:00

How does Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore feel about the last decade? What decade? (Monitor Mix)

I don't even think of the 2000s or whatever it's called as a specific decade, really. The decades of the last century each had such significant cultural developments, I feel like there's some kind of worldwide exhaustion to event-charged identity. But regardless of that, I do feel like this past decade was really the birth of Internet culture, as lousy as that sounds. Everything everyone does in communication, music, art, literature and activism is part and parcel to the Internet. That's undeniably big. I think the overall sense is that it is still nascent, and that the forthcoming decades are going to look at this time as "quaint."

AC/DC - "Let There Be Rock"

2009-11-13T16:25:00.001-08:00

For Ben Brandreth - an actor, footballer (soccer), and classic rock fan who left too soon.

Do the Shuffle #42

2009-11-13T10:33:00.000-08:00

The Jam - That's Entertainment

Drive By Truckers - Feb 14

Elvis Costello - Jack of All Parades

New Pornographers - Mystery Hours

Spinanes - Sunday

Husker Du - How To Skin A Cat

Silver Jews - San Francisco BC (I accidentally hit the back button on this one halfway through and then decided to go on to the next track)

Delta Spirit - Strange Vine

Bon Iver - Team

Monsters of Folk - Losin Yo Head

Pavement - Stereo

Bill Frisell - Goodnight Irene (live)

Total Songs/Minutes (approx.) - 11.5/41
Miscellaneous Fact - Last time I posted a question about which artist on the list might make my 10 Best list for the year. Since they popped up again this time I'll reveal the answer is Monsters of Folk, that surpisingly winning Jim James/M Ward/Bright Eyes hybrid. Rob, you're correct to point out that I am an Alejandro Escovedo fan; unfortunately he didn't release anything this year.

Do I need...

2009-11-12T21:57:00.000-08:00

...to add the movie Next Day Air to my Netflix queue? In Armond White's review of Precious he compares Next Day Air to the plays of August Wilson. Thoughts?

Me Me Me Me Sonny Rollins

2009-11-12T14:24:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking about an artist's work habits lately, inspired by the fact that I am appearing in a production of As You Like It at my alma mater and everyone else in the cast is an undergraduate. It occurred to me that I really have no memories from my student days of doing shows there; that is, I remember being self-conscious about what was required of me as far as hair and costumes but no memory of actually being on stage. There isn't just one reason for this, but I'm thinking that part of this memory gap has to do with the fact that it's only since leaving school I've acquired a set of tools for my job that allow me to come out the other side of a rehearsal process with a three dimensional character. That is, I'm aware of the work that I'm doing and of what it feels like to be finished (as much as one can "finish" in theater). Back in the early '90s being on stage at night was just one more thing I did during the day, and even though I was saying someone else's words I wasn't really doing anything other than marking time. Who knows where it will all go from here, but these thoughts collide with my reading of this interview with 79-year old saxophonist Sonny Rollins. The subject of how artists of any stripe work on their craft throughout their lives will always be fascinating to me, and it's heartening to read that Rollins isn't anywhere near finished. (Guardian)

"Let me tell you what I do want to do," Rollins says, warming to his theme. "If you've ever heard any Native American music, there's a repetitive sort of a beat to it, but paradoxically it's very freeing. It's different to what we know from jazz. It's not a loose, swinging beat; Native American music is solid, not so expansive. I like that feel. It's giving me more ability to express myself, and I'm trying to get my band to feel it. I'm interested in the social context of it, too, in Native American culture. I hate the word 'spiritual' because it's been so overused, but I've always wanted something beyond the secular in music. This has it." His plan is to have his rhythm section play with a Native American beat, while he improvises over the top. That's the plan for now, anyway.

Brooklyn's the borough

2009-11-12T13:45:00.000-08:00

40 Songs That Define The Brooklyn Sound (NY Mag)

Couldn't this also be titled "40 Songs To Help You Decipher What Music Blogs are Talking About," or something similar? At least we finally have a way of understanding what cause so many celebrated young bands to cohere in such a small place. That is, until we come to the passage below. Specific, isn't it?

No. 8
Vampire Weekend
“Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa”
They forged their Calypso-meets-Graceland sound at Columbia, but front man Ezra Koenig has roots in the grimy Brooklyn underground

Heavenly

2009-11-12T12:08:00.000-08:00

I like this appreciation of Malick's Days of Heaven so much I might go home and pull out the DVD tonight. There is much love for the narration of Linda Manz and of course the famous cinematography. (Sheila Variations)

Her voice is so distinctive. So her own. It is wise beyond its years, and feels "caught in time", rather than "acted", in any way, shape or form. That is tough for an adult to pull off in a narration, let alone a child. It feels improvised, like she really is calling up her own memories. She is articulate in the way children can be, with a bluntness of expression that is in stark contrast to the painterly beauty seen in shot after shot of the film. "He was pretty close to the boneyard," she states about Sam Shepard's Farmer. Or: "They pretended they was brother and sister. I guess it made it easier for them, because people like to talk," she says about the relationship between Gere and Adams. There is no affect in her voice. It's perceptive, this is a child who sees a lot, and maybe doesn't understand all that she sees, but she understands enough.

Black Swan casting

2009-11-10T15:04:00.000-08:00

The cast for Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan (NP as ballet dancer, sex scene with Mila Kunis, etc.) is getting bigger and better. (/Film)

Ryder will play Beth, Nina’s “sorta friend” who has been the school’s running lead in all the productions, but who is nearing the end of her career. All the dancers are aiming to take her place as Odette, the Swan Queen, in the next big ballet: Swan Lake. Cassel will be playing the ”handsome but sinister Yevna,” the director of the new stage production. And Hershey will play Nina’s mother, a role which was at one point Meryl Streep was rumored to be in talks for (my source says that Streep was never offered the role however).

Forty bucks for this?

2009-11-10T14:33:00.000-08:00

The 10 worst Criterion DVD's. The choice of the two Michael Bay discs is obvious, but the list also points up Criterion's tendency to pick lesser films by hip directors. (Viceland/Kottke)

6. The Last Days of Disco – Director Whit Stillman, 1998

Really? This thing? All of Stillman’s films revolve around the “urban haute bourgeoisie,” AKA self-absorbed cokeheads in pleated khakis who are afraid of black people and never shut the fuck up. Stillman directed three films and this one differs from his others (Metropolitan and Barcelona) as being the one where the protagonists dance to Sister Sledge and get herpes. It takes place in 1981, roughly two years after the actual last days of disco, but that’s a minor quibble in a film whose script includes lines like “I think Scrooge McDuck is sexy.”

NP goes vegan

2009-11-09T12:33:00.000-08:00

Celebrity eating habits aren't exactly huge news even when the celeb is NP and the place is this blog, but NP took to the Huffington Post recently to discuss her newly fervent veganism. The new Jonathan Safran Foer book Eating Animals was a catalyst is opening her eyes to the dangers of factory farming and the moral implications of eating meat. I (a meat-eater) actually agree with some points made in this response at the conservative Big Hollywood blog, but the author goes too far into the realm of culture-war broadside. Judge for yourself. NP in HuffPo:

And as we use food to impart our beliefs to our children, the point from which Foer lifts off, what stories do we want to tell our children through their food?

I remember in college, a professor asked our class to consider what our grandchildren would look back on as being backward behavior or thinking in our generation, the way we are shocked by the kind of misogyny, racism, and sexism we know was commonplace in our grandparents' world. He urged us to use this principle to examine the behaviors in our lives and our societies that we should be a part of changing. Factory farming of animals will be one of the things we look back on as a relic of a less-evolved age.

In other news, NP has a bunch of projects in the works and oh, she's sexy. (MSNBC)

Doctorow on YA sex

2009-11-09T12:19:00.001-08:00

I wrote about Cory Doctorow's novel Little Brother a while ago here. It seems the sex scene in the book offended some more than the idea of a teen outwitting Homeland Security with hacked Xboxes; here is the author's vigorous defense of giving teen characters the license to experiment. (Locus)

I've spent enough time explaining what this "plot-sense and story-sense and character-sense" means to enough people that I find myself creating a "Teen transgression in YA literature FAQ."

There's really only one question: "Why have your characters done something that is likely to upset their parents, and why don't you punish them for doing this?"

Gulity Pleasures Abound

2009-11-08T17:21:00.000-08:00

Thoughts on Scarlett & Pete Yorn's new single, which I can't help but like. (Singles Jukebox)

In everything she has ever done, Scarlett Johansson says “Hey boys! Make me the repository of your fantasies!” Perhaps her entire career represents a model of culture in which the line between “muse” and “whore” is erased. Nevertheless, it is also possible that she has kept something in reserve over the past decade, something that she refuses to give up to the men who spend their time fixedly gazing at her beauty. I’ve usually sided for the first option. But Yorn gives her a wonderful role in this indie-hootenanny anthem that is best likened to a pop version of a Lorrie Moore short story. ScarJo’s a woman with a taste for melodrama looking for meaning with a man equally in love with drama for its own sake. In the last minute, when he sings “You don’t relate to me, no girl”, she softly coos “You can leave whenever you want out”, showing that she’s been gazing at and wisely judging him the whole while.