Hmm, not agreeing with no.12, though.

***

Inventory: 15 True Comeback Albums

Reviewed by Noel Murray, Keith Phipps
July 12th, 2006

1. Frank Sinatra, Songs For Young Lovers (1955)

A bobbysoxer idol, Frank Sinatra became a '40s icon, riding high on the adoration of young fans. Then the fans moved on. Sinatra worked steadily and unhappily through his down period, watching as his film work dried up, his radio shows fizzled, and Columbia music director Mitch Miller failed to get what made him Sinatra. Then Sinatra found his second act, appearing in From Here To Eternity, switching to Capitol, and hooking up with simpatico arranger Nelson Riddle to realize his musical ambitions. Everything that made Sinatra's second-phase career so remarkable is evident on the mini-album Songs For Young Lovers, which follows through on the title's theme, discards Sinatra-the-exuberant-kid, and reinvents him as Sinatra-the-unrivaled-song-interpreter: often sad, occasionally kicked-around, easily amused, and just a little distant.

2. Judy Garland, Judy At Carnegie Hall (1961)

Judy Garland spent the '50s doing European concert tours and reinventing herself as a sophisticated recording artist in the Frank Sinatra mold, but by the end of the decade, bouts of exhaustion and a case of hepatitis threatened to end her career. Then, on April 23, 1961, Garland put on a show at Carnegie Hall, covering the American songbook and her own MGM movie hits, and her depths of energy and passion stunned even her most devout fans. The double-album document Judy At Carnegie Hall won five Grammys, stayed on the charts for two years, and inspired a thousand drag acts.

3. Sonny Rollins, The Bridge (1962)

From a professional perspective, Sonny Rollins had no reason to pull the plug on his career in 1957. The prolific artist helped define the sound of '50s jazz—and what the words "post" and "hard" meant when they appeared in front of the word "bop." In 1956, he issued an album called Saxophone Colossus, and the name deservedly stuck. Nonetheless, Rollins walked away from it all, citing dissatisfaction with his craft. He didn't stop playing, however; he spent his nights developing his sound on the Williamsburg Bridge. His comeback: The Bridge, a loose, inventive album that sounds like the work of someone who had rediscovered the joy of simply playing.

4. Elvis Presley, From Elvis In Memphis (1969)

The king of rock 'n' roll mostly missed out on rock's most fruitful era, stuck as he was in campy movies while his disciples in the UK and San Francisco were turning pop into art. In 1968, an NBC television special reminded people what a force Presley could be when he stuck to his classic hits and stripped away the chintz. He followed up the special with arguably the best album of his career, From Elvis In Memphis, a set of gritty rock songs, contemporary R&B, and soft country-pop like "Gentle On My Mind" and "Any Day Now." The record also featured one of his biggest hits, "In The Ghetto," a swing at social relevance that, for the first time in a long time in his career, was tuned in to its time.

5. John Lennon & Yoko Ono, Double Fantasy (1980)

After publicly burning out during a "lost weekend" away from Yoko Ono, Lennon reunited with his estranged wife, a reunion that led to Sean Lennon and a long stint as a self-described house-husband. That ended with the recording of Double Fantasy, a Lennon/Ono concept album in which the duo alternate singing about their lives together—and apart. The Ono tracks can politely be described as uncompromising, and the production wraps Lennon's contributions in an unflattering soft-rock veneer, but songs like "(Just Like) Starting Over," "Watching The Wheels," and "I'm Losing You" confirm that Lennon had rediscovered his voice. Sadly, his murder three weeks after Double Fantasy's release transformed the album into a bittersweet epilogue.

6. John Fogerty, Centerfield (1985)

John Fogerty spent years bickering with his former label over whether he had the right to perform his old Creedence Clearwater Revival songs—or even new songs that sounded like CCR—and by the mid-'80s, the swamp-rock stalwart got sick of worrying about how to disguise his style, and just let rip with a set of classic, Fogerty-styled Americana. Only about half of Centerfield is all that good, but it's telling that pretty much every one of those good songs—the title track, "Big Train (From Memphis)," "Rock And Roll Girls," and "The Old Man Down The Road"—still get played on oldies radio, right alongside the Creedence hits. And while Fogerty was sued over the similarities between "Old Man" and his own "Run Through The Jungle," he prevailed in court, and officially got his voice back.

7. Neil Young, Freedom (1989)

A contingent of weirdo Neil Young fans will argue that he did some of his best work in the '80s, when he flitted from style to style and generally tried his best not to sound like Neil Young. But sometimes the conventional wisdom is conventional for a reason, and the chorus of relieved hosannas that greeted Young's Freedom in the rock press at the turn of the decade still resonates today. The record's signature song is the Bush-baiting "Rockin' In The Free World"—presented in acoustic and electric versions, just like "Hey Hey My My" on Rust Never Sleeps—but its more enduring tracks are the fragile acoustic ballads "Hangin' On A Limb," "The Ways Of Love," and "Wrecking Ball," all of which sound exactly like Neil Young.

8. The B-52's, Cosmic Thing (1989)

After becoming favorites to downtown types and in-the-know record buyers with a self-titled 1979 debut and the 1980 follow-up Wild Planet, The B-52's entered a creative and commercial slump through most of the '80s. Even worse, guitarist Ricky Wilson died of AIDS, a devastating loss for any band, and one that left singer Cindy Wilson without a brother and The B-52's without its signature surf-meets-sci-fi guitar sound. Rallying after some down time, the band resurfaced on the Earth Girls Are Easy Soundtrack in the summer of 1988, then owned the summer of '89 with the terrific comeback album Cosmic Thing and the hit single "Love Shack." As overplayed as "Love Shack" has become—does anyone still want to hear it?—the album holds up well, lending mature shades to the group's transcendence-through-trash-culture vibe. The only full-length follow-up to date—the Cindy Wilson-free 1992 album Good Stuff—failed to move the band forward creatively or commercially today, although it continues to enjoy success as a summer touring act.

9. Lou Reed, New York (1989)

It seems 1989 was a good year for comebacks: In addition to The B-52's, ever-cresting, ever-troughing Lou Reed crawled out of a mid-'80s slump to deliver a contemporaneous snapshot of his hometown. Reed discovers a city in which the gulf between rich and poor has never been deeper, he morns friends lost to AIDS, he considers fatherhood, and he contemplates the nature of Christ against a spare, fuck-the-glossy-'80s sound that emphasizes his strengths as a storyteller.

10. Johnny Cash, American Recordings (1994)

Of course, Reed wasn't the only performer who had trouble in the '80s. Virtually everyone more comfortable with a guitar than a drum machine had a rough time of it. And veteran country singers had it even worse than rock stars, after a new class of fresh-faced pop-striving stars virtually exiled them from country radio. Guided by Rick Rubin, Johnny Cash bucked the trend and simply sang. Discarding production frills, American Recordings lets Cash work through 13 tracks of originals, old favorites, and some truly odd covers (Danzig?) that sound like they were written for him. It set the pattern for his artistically triumphant final decade as a recording artist.

11. Steely Dan, Two Against Nature (2000)

Consummate studio rats, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker made a semi-shocking return to the road in the '90s before releasing Two Against Nature after a 20-year Steely Dan gap. They'd finally aged into the disaffected middle-agedom they'd long affected, and it sounded as if mere months had passed. The duo took Album Of The Year honors at the Grammys and released the even-better Everything Must Go in 2003.

12. U2, All That You Can't Leave Behind (2000)

It may seem that U2 only put fans through a one-album dip—1997's lumbering Pop—but some devotees of '80s U2 felt distanced from the band throughout the '90s, while Bono and company dabbled in electronics and irony. All That You Can't Leave Behind didn't generate much pre-release excitement until "Beautiful Day" started popping up on the radio, with its retro sincerity and soaring chorus. The album fulfilled the single's promise, restoring The Edge's trademark needle-threading guitar to the center of songs that spoke of pain and redemption, instead of postmodernism.

13. Electric Light Orchestra, Zoom (2001)

The recent revival of interest in Electric Light Orchestra came a few years too late to save Zoom, Jeff Lynne's barely heard attempt to revive the classic ELO sound. Beginning with the revved-up "Alright"—a "Don't Bring Me Down" for the '00s—Zoom brought back all the rockabilly twang and disco sparkle of the late '70s, and with songs like "State Of Mind" and "Stranger On A Quiet Street," Lynne produced a couple of gems worthy of inclusion on any ELO mix. The album made little impact commercially, but it was part of an early-'00s wave of albums by exiled-from-radio classic rockers (most notably Fleetwood Mac) who abandoned contemporary relevance and returned gleefully to the style that made them stars.

14. Mission Of Burma, OnOffOn (2004)

Plenty of modern rock legends have regrouped after a long layoff to play for the young fans who missed them the first time, but Mission Of Burma is one of the few that returned even stronger than it was in round one. OnOffOn featured scorching new recordings of songs that had popped up in demo form on Burma rarities collections, but the fresher songs were just as good, and surprisingly loud, given that the reason the band broke up in the first place was because of Roger Miller's chronic tinnitus. Mission Of Burma repeated the trick this year with The Obliterati, another excellent album of beautifully noisy art-rock, as bracing now as it would've been 20 years ago.

15. Loretta Lynn, Van Lear Rose (2004)

Following the Johnny Cash/Rick Rubin model, Jack White shepherded a long-overdue comeback for Loretta Lynn in 2004. Country purists might argue with some of White's musical choices, but the heartfelt sentiments and unmistakable personality are pure Lynn. As with the best comebacks, it's an album that sounds like she'd wanted to make for years, and she didn't miss the opportunity to make it right

Inventory: 11 Films That Responded Well To National Crises

Reviewed by Keith Phipps, Nathan Rabin, Scott Tobias
August 9th, 2006

1. My Man Godfrey (1936)

No one's going to mistake this consummate screwball comedy for a protest film, but it makes no bones about putting class differences on the front burner right from the credits, which pan from the bright lights of an Art Deco Manhattan skyline to the city dump, home to its titular protagonist William Powell and other victims of the Depression. There, Powell first meets Carole Lombard, part of a high-spirited scavenger hunt whose items include a "forgotten man." Powell pushes Lombard's sister into a pile of ashes, then plays along long enough to call the high-society types "nitwits" for treating the poor like objects. Then the hilarious twists and turns kick in, but the film never loses sight of the fact that since 1929, the distance between Park Avenue and the dump has shrunk considerably.

2. The Best Years Of Our Lives (1946)

After World War II ended, many veterans were reticent about the horrors they'd witnessed. Some had been irrevocably changed physically or mentally by their experience; others had a difficult time getting back into the fold. By even broaching the subject, William Wyler's Oscar-winning The Best Years Of Our Lives was an act of courage, but more than that, it was a cathartic expression of feelings that had simmered under the surface of American life. In its story of three servicemen returning to small-town Boone City after the war—one having lost his hands, the others struggling to adjust to their jobs and changed families—Wyler's moving drama acknowledges that the process of coming home doesn't end with the ticker-tape parade.

3. Medium Cool (1969)

Few narrative films have the fortune, good or bad, to wind up in the middle of history, but it couldn't have taken cinematographer-turned-first-time-feature-director Haskell Wexler by surprise. He decided to shoot Medium Cool in Chicago in 1968 in part because of predictions that the protests and uprisings sweeping the world would hit the Democratic Convention that summer. The convention violence serves as the climax of a film that documents the volatile social climate of the day—racial unrest, social inequality, and a free-floating fed-up feeling—while critiquing the very process of capturing reality on film. The good vibes have given way to anger and discontent, and there's no solid ground on which to stand. It's 1968 boiled down to two hours.

4. Hearts And Minds (1974)

Decades before Fahrenheit 9/11 and An Inconvenient Truth, Peter Davis' controversial Vietnam essay Hearts And Minds proved that it was possible for a documentary to go from reporting news to becoming news. Davis' wide-ranging film explores the roots of American imperialism in Vietnam and the consequences for Americans and the Vietnamese alike, sketching a line between the excesses of the military-industrial complex and the winner-takes-all hyper-aggression of high-school football. Also like Fahrenheit and Truth, Hearts And Minds became a flashpoint in a culture war. After co-producer Bert Schneider read a "Greetings of friendship to all American people" from the North Vietnamese government during his acceptance speech for the film's Best Feature Documentary Oscar, his actions were denounced by Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope, John Wayne, and other members of Hollywood's old guard.

5. The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

Though a decade removed from the McCarthy folly, America was still entrenched firmly enough in the Red Scare that John Frankenheimer's political thriller The Manchurian Candidate caused a major stir. The story concerns a Medal Of Honor winner who's captured and brainwashed during the Korean War. He returns home as a "sleeper agent," triggered into action through hypnotic suggestion and manipulated into assassinating a senatorial candidate who's running against a McCarthy-esque figure. The film's politics are a matter of some debate—though any reading that pegs it as anything other than a critique of McCarthyism faces an uphill battle—but it had the courage to ask previously taboo questions. Jonathan Demme's underrated 2004 remake cleverly updated the premise for the times by substituting corporations for Communism, speculating about who's really in control in the 21st century.

6. Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb (1964)

Based on Peter George's novel Red Alert, Stanley Kubrick's devastating Cold War satire was initially intended to be a deadly serious cautionary tale about two nations on the brink of nuclear disaster. (Presumably, that movie would have looked a lot like Fail Safe, which was released by the same studio eight months later.) However, a short ways into the writing process, Kubrick and his collaborators started to see the bleak irony in concepts like Mutually Assured Destruction, an idea that the United States and the Soviet Union would never engage in nuclear warfare because both sides would be demolished. In the film, the arms race comes to its natural end with something called the "doomsday machine," a Soviet device that automatically retaliates a nuclear attack by basically destroying every living thing on the planet. The film reaches absurd heights in the War Room, when lunatics like George C. Scott's boorish general start throwing out sunny-day scenarios like one that would only leave 10 to 20 million Americans dead: "Now, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed."

7. Gimme Shelter (1970)

The flip side to Woodstock, 1970's Gimme Shelter revealed the hangover that followed the hippie bacchanalia only four months earlier, and bought a decade to a grim conclusion. In December of 1969, an ill-planned free concert featuring Jefferson Airplane and the Rolling Stones was staged in front of 300,000 people at Altamont Speedway in California. Put in charge of security, the Hell's Angels spent much of their time brutalizing attendees. On top of that, bad acid circulated in the crowd, and the audience-reaction shots could be inserted into a George Romero movie without anyone telling the difference. The event reached its tragic end when a Hell's Angel guard stabbed a spectator, an incident replayed before an ashen Mick Jagger in the final scene.

8. The Parallax View (1974)

The Watergate scandal sparked a series of first-rate '70s thrillers, none better than The Parallax View, which hinted at a powerful new strain of disillusionment and paranoia about government's omnipresent reach and sinister intentions. Director Alan J. Pakula would tackle Watergate directly two years later with All The President's Men, but this fiction film allows for a more free-floating expression of conspiratorial dread. Warren Beatty stars as a journalist who pokes into a senator's assassination and soon gets immersed within the shadowy organization that orchestrated the killing. Beatty's infiltration of the group leads to the signature scene, in which he views a recruitment film filled with disturbing associations about American life. But more importantly, the film suggests that citizens no longer have control over their government and are doomed to suffer injustices under its thumb.

9. Do The Right Thing (1989)

Not long after white locals assaulted three African-American teenagers (and killed one) in the Howard Beach section of Queens, Spike Lee registered his disgust with Do The Right Thing, his landmark statement on race relations. The film itself was an historic event, drawing several short-sighted editorials that criticized Lee for inciting black people to riot, as his Right Thing character does. There were no post-screening riots, of course, but the film served as a litmus test for racial views in America, and based on the contradictory quotes from Martin Luther King and Malcolm X that appear when the screen fades to black, any conclusions Lee has to offer are pretty open-ended.

10. 25th Hour (2002)

Hollywood movies shot in New York around 9/11 went out of their way to avoid talking about the elephant in the room; several even digitally removed any footage of the Twin Towers. It was a missed opportunity to capture a moment in time that needed documentation apart from the nauseating replays on CNN. But New York is Spike Lee's town, and in one of those miracles of timing that can lead to great art, he bravely decided to put his broken city front and center in 25th Hour. The opening-credit sequence alone is as beautiful an elegy for 9/11 as anyone could possibly imagine, with Terence Blanchard's score swelling over a slow reveal of the Tribute In Light. A montage of Ground Zero itself comes in later on, but the film more subtly incorporates the tenor of the times into its story of a convicted drug dealer's last day in the city before he heads off to jail. The feelings evoked by his dilemma—of regret, of reckoning, of loss—are impossible to extract from those that haunt his native city.

11. Elephant (2003)

Gus Van Sant's rapturous, terrifying memorial to Columbine was criticized in some corners for moral vacuity and exploitation, because it really didn't add anything to the discussion on high-school violence. Yet it's valuable for that very reason: Rather than speculating about causes or solutions, or otherwise engaging in the facile politicking that followed in Columbine's wake, Van Sant provides a meditative space for viewers to contemplate this event on their own, just as he did with his previous film, Gerry. Elephant does the important service of wresting Columbine away from the pundits and artfully returning to what evolved into a not-so-ordinary day in high-school life. Van Sant doesn't bother with characterization, but he succeeds in simply acknowledging the existence of victims and perpetrators with dignity and without contrivance.

Inventory: 15 Book-to-film adaptations that live up to the source material

Reviewed by Tasha Robinson
July 19th, 2006

1. The Godfather (1972)

It's rare for a book-to-film adaptation to actually be as good as the original work, let alone better. By the time cinematic conventions, run-time limitations, special-effects budgets, nervous studio types afraid of deviating from formula, and filmmaking teams eager to put their own imprints on a project have all had their way with a story, the things that made it unique have often been leeched out. Possibly the best way to go about making a film that more than lives up to its inspiration: Start with a book that isn't all that great to begin with, like Mario Puzo's pulpy, florid novel The Godfather. Then add evocative direction, iconic performances, and memorable music. People will still read the book, but the film version is the one they'll remember.

2. The Princess Bride (1987)

Still, an excellent book can sometimes be adapted well too. William Goldman's novel The Princess Bride is still a little funnier, and a little more expansive, than the film. But he wrote the screenplay himself, preserving all the best bits of business and humor. Robin Wright Penn is a bit stiff as the heroine, but director Rob Reiner recognized that this love story is more about the colorful characters than the romance, and he made them as memorable as they are quotable.

3. Charlotte's Web (1973)

E.B. White's children's classic remains a terrific read, while the animated 1973 adaptation is visually dated and makes the common kids'-movie mistake of packing in songs. But the film preserves the book's story as well as its tender, emotional tone, and even some of the songs are sweetly memorable, with an eye toward fleshing out characters and moving the action along instead of slowing it down. Any bets on whether the 2006 version will hew as close to White's story? Judging from the fart jokes and gibbering in the initial trailer… oy.

4. The Lord Of The Rings trilogy (2001-2003)

Sticklers will point out the things that writer-director Peter Jackson cut (no Tom Bombadil? Uh, alas?) or made up himself as evidence that his massive film trilogy doesn't quite compare to J.R.R. Tolkien's books, but surely even the most nitpicking fanboys were gaping over the way Jackson filmed the battle of Helm's Deep, or Bilbo's explosive going-away party. Jackson managed a double miracle: He brought out the spectacle of Tolkien's work while keeping in all the politics that made it meaty.

5. Jane Eyre (1944)

Jane Eyre is one of those classics that gets remade for every generation, sometimes multiple times, but while there have been more faithful adaptations, none has quite captured the book's spirit like Robert Stevenson's 1944 version, in large part because of Orson Welles. Most filmed versions seem to forget that Jane is supposed to be a plain woman, and her explosive employer Edward Rochester is supposed to be scary and ugly as well as compelling, but Joan Fontaine fits the Jane Eyre bill reasonably well, while Welles could have been born to play the storming, brooding Rochester. Their performances carry the film version more than the elided script does.

6. American Psycho (2000)

Writer-director Mary Harron should be placed atop a pedestal in film classes and looked to for a classic example of how to pare the unnecessary verbiage off a novel and polish up the core until it gleams. Her take on Bret Easton Ellis' blithery gorefest follows its lead for a viciously dark, satiric look at the '80s, but she parts company with Ellis when he wallows in lengthy descriptions of torture and torturous descriptions of '80s pop. She keeps just enough of both for flavor without getting her hands dirty or making her film unbearable, instead of mesmerizing.

7. Jaws (1975)

Another classic case of a pulpy novel turned into a cinematic gem, Peter Benchley's book is dry and simple, with a thoroughly unnecessary extramarital-affair plotline that he ditched for the film version. His spare writing translates brilliantly to film, where it seems economic instead of anemic. Steven Spielberg's savvy in knowing what to show and what to conceal from the audience certainly didn't hurt, either.

8. 25th Hour (2002)

David Benioff's novel 25th Hour is similarly lean, though in his case it's still an excellent read—it just seems like a screenplay in novel form. Still, unusually taut direction from Spike Lee and terrific performances from Edward Norton, Brian Cox, and—well, the whole cast, really, though particularly Anna Paquin—make the film version the better bet.

9. Rashômon (1950)

The two stories that became Rashômon contain much of the basic substance of the film, but director Akira Kurosawa and his frequent star Toshirô Mifune get the credit for giving them the vivid flavor of real events, instead of subdued literary experiments. Which, of course, heightens the "What really happened here?" quality immensely. Mifune is even more over-the-top in this film than usual, but that's part of the fun too.

10. The Silence Of The Lambs (1991)

Another pulpy thriller elevated by terrific performances and a hushed, serious tone that doesn't wallow in the bloody details, The Silence Of The Lambs won a pile of well-deserved Oscars, including the Best Adapted Screenplay award. Too bad the follow-up, Hannibal, wasn't nearly as good—but then, neither was the book it was based on.

11. Fight Club (1999)

Another for the Mary Harron school of adaptation, David Fincher's Fight Club dredges all the plot and resonance from Chuck Palahniuk's book and leaves behind the amateur gimmickry of a young man's first novel: the stylistic tricks and gimmicks and the repetition in particular. Another strong Norton performance and the palpable chemistry between Norton and Brad Pitt livens up the proceeds considerably.

12. The Thin Man (1934)

Dashiell Hammett's snappy detective novels are still a pleasure, and The Thin Man is no exception, but where it lunges right into the action on page 1, the film adaptation—the first of six Nick-and-Nora detective movies—gives the story a little more room to breathe. Mostly though, W.S. Van Dyke just does a fittingly elegant job of bringing Hammett's book to life, complete with a perfect cast that make his quippy dialogue sparkle.

13. The Iron Giant (1999)

Ted Hughes' 1968 children's classic The Iron Man doesn't actually have that much to do with Brad Bird's animated adaptation—for instance, the movie version features a notable shortage of Space-Bat-Angel-Dragons attacking Earth. The book has charmed generations of British youngsters, but Bird's funny, clever, and gently pacifistic take on the story makes it more personal and more resonant, particularly for kids growing up in a heavily armed and hawkish America.

14. The War Of The Worlds (1953)

H.G. Wells and Jules Verne were both full of brilliant ideas that didn't quite pop off the page, thanks to frequently leaden writing. The 1953 adaptation of Wells' War Of The Worlds compensates by nearly popping off the screen with vivid cinematography and state-of-the-art-at-the-time effects that still look surprisingly eerie today. The movie can be stilted and awkward in places, with all the goofiness of '50s science fiction, but it's still thoroughly enjoyable, in a gawky kind of way.

15. Howards End (1992)

The Merchant/Ivory/Jhabvala team did some terrific work with novel-to-film adaptations (A Room With A View, for instance), though clunkers like The Golden Bowl prove that not all their adaptations were magic. And while The Remains Of The Day was exquisite in its way, it just couldn't live up to Kazuo Ishiguro's fantastic novel, which got inside its protagonist's head in a far more visceral way. But they made cinematic gold with the heartbreaking Howards End, based on E.M. Forster's elegant book. Sometimes the movie and the book it was based on are both truly enjoyable. Too bad it doesn't happen more often.

Initially, I found Tom Petty a bit creepy. But this is one great list to explain who he is and what's the man capable of.

***

Inventory: 14 Classic Tom Petty Opening Lines

Reviewed by Noel Murray
August 2nd, 2006

1. "She was an American girl / Raised on promises" (from "American Girl," Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, 1976)

It'd be hard for any lyric to live up to the instant excitement of the instrumental opening of "American Girl," with its loud, chiming guitars and locomotive percussion. But on the first great song of Tom Petty's great career, he showed off his gift for fixing a character, a moment, an image, and a feeling, all in just one sentence.

2. "It's all right if you love me / It's all right if you don't" (from "Breakdown," Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, 1976)

The other timeless single from Petty's debut album represents the flipside of his songwriting personality. He isn't sketching a scene here, he's speaking in the voice of a so-cool-he's-almost-inert lothario, talking directly to the woman who'd probably be better off without him, if she could resist his apathetic bad-boy charm.

3. "You think you're going to take her away / With your money and your cocaine" (from "Listen To Her Heart," You're Gonna Get It!, 1978)

The rock community wasn't sure what to make of Petty in his early days, since the name of his band and his hooky, simple sound had a lot in common with the contemporaneous punk and new-wave movements. Songs like "Listen To Her Heart" clouded the issue. Its sturdy Roger McGuinn-styled riff evoked the garage rock and AM Top 40 of the decade before, but its opening line spoke to the clubby decadence of that very moment.

4. "Well, the talk on the street says you might go solo" (from "I Need To Know," You're Gonna Get It!, 1978)

Another nod to the modern, with a self-aware lyric that mimics insider music-biz talk, but turns it into an almost desperate romantic come-on. The fact that this song was among the most driving and punky of Petty's career only confused the issue of who he was trying to be.

5. "We got something / We both know it / We don't talk too much about it" (from "Refugee," Damn The Torpedoes, 1979)

By the time Damn The Torpedoes came out in 1979, album-rock radio was starting to fill up with regional roots-rockers and power-poppers, which gave Petty's straightforward sound more of a musical context. He seized the moment with his most completely realized album yet, and started it off with a tense midtempo rocker, clouded in danger, and introduced with a line that splits the difference between Petty the shiftless rogue and Petty the vivid image-maker.

6. "Well it was nearly summer / We sat on your roof / We smoked cigarettes / And we stared at the moon" (from "Even The Losers," Damn The Torpedoes, 1979)

One of Petty's most evocative openings fits cleanly with one of his most evocative songs, all about the painfully clear memories of a relationship recently dissolved. At the time, everything was so perfect that no one needed to say anything. Now, all he wants to do is talk.

7. "Oh baby, don't it feel like heaven right now / Don't it feel like something from a dream" (from "The Waiting," Hard Promises, 1981)

Petty's follow-up to Damn The Torpedoes took longer to come out than it was supposed to, because he fought with the record label over the record's list price, even threatening to title it The $8.98 Album to prevent anyone from charging more. So "The Waiting" had a double meaning when it became Hard Promises' first single, though now it's mainly noteworthy as one of Petty's most unreservedly happy songs.

8. "You've got a dangerous background / In everything you dreamed of" (from "Insider," Hard Promises, 1981)

Petty had one of his biggest hits by proxy, when Stevie Nicks recorded her lead vocals over The Heartbreakers' instrumental track for "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around." But Petty originally wanted Nicks to record "Insider," the heartbreak ballad that gives Hard Promises its title. Instead, she sings it with him as a duet, making the target of its elusive lyrics all the more shadowy.

9. "You better watch what you say / You better watch what you do to me" (from "You Got Lucky," Long After Dark, 1982)

This is the song where Petty discovers synthesizers, but it also marks the return of The Bad-Ass Troublemaker, who gives some unfortunate gal the kiss-off via some of the most amusingly pissy lyrics this side of Bob Dylan's "Positively 4th Street." Or maybe he's just repeating what was said to him first.

10. "Honey don't walk out / I'm too drunk to follow" (from "Rebels," Southern Accents, 1985)

Petty conceived Southern Accents as an ambitious double album that would explore his Southern upbringing and Southern music in general, but he got frustrated in piecing it together, and eventually only salvaged a handful of tracks from the original concept. This is one of them: a perverse redneck-pride anthem that recasts Petty's standard couldn't-give-a-shit character as a trailer-park-bound misfit.

11. "She's a good girl / Loves her mama / Loves Jesus / And America too" (from "Free Fallin'," Full Moon Fever, 1989)

Petty begins his best overall album with a kind of sequel to "American Girl," where the heroine moves to Los Angeles and starts to lose sight of the promises she was raised on. It doesn't help that she's apparently run into one of Petty's scoundrel types, who lets her go and "don't even miss her."

12. "She grew up in an Indiana town / Had a good-lookin' mama who never was around" (from "Mary Jane's Last Dance, Greatest Hits, 1993)

And here's the mirror image of the American girl from "Free Fallin'," less fresh-scrubbed and apple-cheeked than sullied. It's possible to read the first 15 years of Petty's songwriting career as one long description of the young men and women he knew (and sometimes was) growing up in Florida: all the couples dancing around each other laconically, then inevitably letting each other down.

13. "I remember / When you were his dog / I remember / You were under his thumb" (from "Free Girl Now," Echo, 1999)

Prior to Echo's release, Petty talked a lot about how the grunge revolution—and Nirvana in particular—made him feel simultaneously obsolete and invigorated. He responded with his most hard-rocking album since the '70s, and another super single, making direct reference to its own place in rock history, via The Stooges and The Rolling Stones.

14. "I'm passing sleeping cities / Fading by degrees / Not believing all I see to be so" (from "Saving Grace," Highway Companion, 2006)

Petty's latest album is one of the best of his career, because it explores a single theme—traveling as a metaphor for aging—in a way that the restless younger Petty could never realize. As always, it kicks off with a great single, and a line that describes the feeling of driving at night with a clarity and poetry that's easy to plug into.

Inventory: 14 Truly Sexy Sex Scenes

Reviewed by Noel Murray, Keith Phipps, Tasha Robinson, Scott Tobias
July 26th, 2006

1. Love on a real train, Risky Business (1983)

To celebrate the success of their suburban brothel, Tom Cruise and Rebecca De Mornay hop on the Chicago el and wait for their car to empty. While Tangerine Dream plays on the soundtrack and the city lights flicker through the windows, they grind against each other, enjoying the feeling of power and abandon that comes with being flush with cash and in the know. Is it any wonder that the younger brother in last year's The Squid And The Whale listened to the music from this scene while he gazed at himself in the mirror, concocting his latest masturbation fantasy?

2. Friends with benefits, Y Tu Mamá; También (2001)

At the end of a long road trip, the simmering sexual tension between older woman Ana López Mercado and teenage buddies Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal spontaneously breaks down in a small room, as the boys simultaneously strip and caress Mercado. Briefly, she seems eager to accommodate them simultaneously, but then she gently guides them together and slips downward out of the frame. Their initial awkwardness with each other rapidly gives way to the same eagerness they approached her with, and both awkwardness and eagerness are sweetly charming but rivetingly intense.

3. Dare or dare, Secret Things (2002)

In Jean-Claude Brisseau's art-smut favorite Secret Things, stripper Coralie Revel teaches bartender Sabrina Seyvecou how to own her sexuality so the two of them can embark on a campaign of man-baiting vengeance. But first come the training exercises, starting with a scene in which Revel commands Seyvecou to masturbate to orgasm, with step-by-step instructions. By the time Seyvecou throws back her bedspread and emits her last breathy moan, she isn't the only one completely enthralled.

4. Love and the Mona Lisa, Betty Blue (1986)

Say what you will about Jean-Jacques Beineix's tale of doomed love—that it's shallow, that its characters change from scene to scene, that it prioritizes visual snap above all other elements, that it's the perfect example of an art film successful only because of its sexual content—there's still no denying that its first scene is a grabber. Stars Jean-Hugues Anglade and Béatrice Dalle make loud, passionate love as the camera slowly draws closer, never cutting away in spite of the 1980s' stylistic trend for sex scenes filled with gratuitous music-video-inspired cuts. It feels like the scene will never end as the pair find levels of passion rarely reached by human beings. Meanwhile, a print of the Mona Lisa looks on from above.

5. Dressing with their clothes off, Don't Look Now (1973)

In the middle of a terrifying psychic thriller, director Nicolas Roeg presents an utterly convincing portrait of how married couples interact behind closed doors, ending in a love scene that develops as naturally as the next breath. As a precursor, Roeg shows Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie in a Venice hotel room, joking and casually padding around the bathroom, with Christie poking fun at Sutherland's love handles. Once in the bedroom, they reading the newspaper together, she starts caressing his back, and things… just… happen. Always one to experiment in the editing room, Roeg intercuts their vigorous lovemaking with shots of them getting dressed afterward, looking sated and ready to carry on with the evening. He finds eroticism in the ordinary.

6. Who's seducing who?, The Hunger (1983)

Catherine Deneuve is a beautiful, immortal, apparently powerful vampire. Susan Sarandon… well, isn't. But when Sarandon enters Deneuve's lair, it's suddenly unclear who's in charge. Acknowledging Deneuve's intent even before Deneuve is ready to admit to it, Sarandon responds with an "Oops, I have somehow spilled wine on my nice white shirt, I guess I'll have to take it off now" routine that would seem ridiculously contrived in a porn movie. But she executes it with languid, knowing desire, making it entirely clear that the subsequent gauzy but graphic encounter is a meeting between sexual equals, not a simple horror-movie predator-prey clinch. In the film version of The Celluloid Closet, Sarandon takes direct credit for that reading of the scene and her character; in the original draft, she was supposed to be very drunk and drawn in against her will, but Sarandon correctly estimated the effect that a more deliberate, calculated sensuality would have on the film.

7. Triple exposure, Grand Prix (1966)

Though best remembered for the brilliantly conceived and executed racing sequences—created in a collaboration between director John Frankenheimer and designer Ron Bass—Grand Prix also contains a tasteful but surprisingly frank love scene between Yves Montand and Eva Marie Saint. As light bachelor-pad music plays, Montand shows Saint around his elegant apartment. He asks whether she's tired, she pointedly says "No," and then Frankenheimer superimposes a blurry shot of them caressing each other's naked bodies in bed. Then, over that, he superimposes a shot of them buttoning up their clothes and smoothing out the sheets. Talk about speed.

8. Hot monk-y love, The Name Of The Rose (1986)

In this adaptation of Umberto Eco's medieval murder mystery, young monk Christian Slater gets an argument against chastity when a never-named girl (Valentina Vargas) wastes no time in rescuing him from virginity. Having sneaked into a monastery as part of a regular exchange of sexual services, she's delighted to find the teen Slater in the place of her usual older, hairier customers. She asks nothing in return and leaves him with even more questions than those presented by the mystery at hand.

9. Rah rah rah, A History Of Violence (2005)

David Cronenberg devised two sharply contrasting sex scenes for A History Of Violence, one in which Viggo Mortensen has no past and another in which his past casts an awfully dark shadow. The first finds Mortensen and his wife Maria Bello filling in that gap in their history, and it's only ironic after the fact. "We never got to be teenagers together," Bello says with a sly smile. "I'm gonna fix that." Cut to the bedroom, where Mortensen shoves a pile of stuffed animals and other domestic clutter off the bed, looking like an overeager adolescent as he waits for Bello to emerge from the bathroom. When she does, she's wearing a cheerleading uniform, and she even gives a spirited cheer ("Ready? Okay! Goooooo, Wildcats!") before leaping into the sack. The fantasy continues, but what gives the scene an extra charge is how smoothly and vigorously they attack each other's bodies. When's the last time you've seen a married couple 69-ing in a movie?

10. "Gary" and "Celeste," Out Of Sight (1998)

First, the ambience: a luxury hotel bar in Detroit, snow flurries drifting down outside an expansive window, light caressing every interior surface, and David Holmes' synthesized score pulsing insistently on the soundtrack. The last time the two principals met, they were covered in grime and smooshed into a car trunk; needless to say, George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez, two of Hollywood's most glamorous stars, clean up nice. Since he's a thief and she's a federal marshal, they meet on the sly like strangers, as "Gary" and "Celeste," and their role-playing develops into a foreplay that leads seamlessly to the bedroom. Paying homage to Don't Look Now, director Steven Soderbergh layers two different time frames, only here, the couple undresses—facing each other across the bed, removing one article at a time as if upping the ante—instead of putting their clothes back on. And the beautiful freeze-frames suggest a chemistry that not even stars of this magnitude could develop on their own.

11. Shattered glass, Body Heat (1981)

How do you update the noir classic Double Indemnity for the modern age? For director Lawrence Kasdan, the solution was to make explicit the murderous lust that the original film could only imply by having Barbara Stanwyck descend a flight of stairs. It helps that Kathleen Turner, then a complete unknown, turned out to be a worthy successor to Stanwyck, a sultry, dangerously opaque screen presence with that now-famous husky voice. Her extramarital coupling with small-town lawyer William Hurt, whom she later ensnares in a plot to kill her rich husband, is a scene of sheer carnality, set in the middle of a Florida heat wave. In the signature moment, Turner looks like a caged animal locked up inside her husband's palatial home, and Hurt, overcome with desire, prowls around the outside, smashes through the windows with a patio chair, and seizes her. There's no question from that point on that he'll do her bidding.

12. "Have you done this before?", Mulholland Dr. (2001)

After a particularly nasty shock, actress-wannabe Naomi Watts and amnesiac Laura Elena Harring seek comfort in each other's company, as they've been doing throughout the film. But this time, comfort leads them to wind up in bed and naked together. Their steamy make-out session features just a little comedy, as Watts asks whether Harring has had previous lesbian experiences, and Harring realizes that she has no idea. Director David Lynch, generally more inclined toward the unpleasant aspects of sexuality, mostly sticks to very intimate close-ups throughout the scene, practically letting viewers share the air passing between the lovers' gasping, exploratory mouths.

13. Candles, guitars, and a single spur, Desperado (1995)

When Antonio Banderas enters Salma Hayek's one-horse town at the beginning of Desperado, they share a look that seems to say "Hey, someone who's actually as attractive as me! About time!" But it's another hour before a medical intervention becomes a guitar lesson that then becomes a glossy erotic gymnastic session. Director Robert Rodriguez films the whole thing a bit like a music video, with lots of skin, enough fast cuts that it's sometimes hard to tell who's touching (or licking, or mouthing, or running a spur along the surface of) what, a poster-pretty room full of candles, and music that threatens to make the whole thing entirely silly, but he keeps the proceedings graphic enough to titillate while leaving enough to the imagination to let viewers fill in their own blanks.

14. Any given 10 minutes, Street Of A Thousand Pleasures (1970)

For every teenage boy who's ever been desperately certain that there were naked women behind every closed door, the trashy sexploitation picture Street Of A Thousand Pleasures is a fantasy fulfilled. The plot is simple—an American businessman saves an Arab sheik from assassination, and in return gets full run of the sex-slave market—but the execution is sublime, as director William Rotsler uses the innovation of "girl-a-vision" to put viewers behind the businessman's eyes, wandering from stall to stall in a sexy bazaar where buxom, completely nude women dance and roll around with strangers in a softcore way. Every now and then, a hand emerges from the edge of the frame and does a little groping, or a bare breast descends into the camera lens while the businessman narrator makes slurping noises on the soundtrack. This goes on for more than an hour, but really, how much pleasure can one man take?

FEMME MENTALE
San Francisco neuropsychiatrist says differences between women's and men's brains are very real, and the sooner we all understand it, the better
- Joe Garofoli, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, August 6, 2006

Louann Brizendine's feminist ideals were forged in the 1970s, so the UCSF neuropsychiatrist is aware that some parts of her new book, "The Female Brain," sound politically incorrect.

Such as the part about how a financially independent woman may talk about finding a soul mate, but when she meets a prospective mate her brain is subconsciously sizing up his portfolio. Or the part describing the withdrawal pains moms feel when they return to work and can no longer cop a hormonal high from breast-feeding their babies.

Women have come a long way toward equality over the past 50 years, but the Yale-trained Brizendine, 53, says her research indicates that human brains are still wired for Stone Age necessities.

Male and female brains are different in architecture and chemical composition, asserts Brizendine. The sooner women -- and those who love them -- accept and appreciate how those neurological differences shape female behavior, the better we can all get along.

Start with why women prefer to talk about their feelings, while men prefer to meditate on sex.

"Women have an eight-lane superhighway for processing emotion, while men have a small country road," she writes. Men, however, "have O'Hare Airport as a hub for processing thoughts about sex, where women have the airfield nearby that lands small and private planes."

Untangling the brain's biological instincts from the influences of everyday life has been the driving passion of Brizendine's life -- and forms the core of her book. "The Female Brain" weaves together more than 1,000 scientific studies from the fields of genetics, molecular neuroscience, fetal and pediatric endocrinology, and neurohormonal development. It is also significantly based on her own clinical work at the Women's and Teen Girls' Mood and Hormone Clinic, which she founded at UCSF 12 years ago. It is the only psychiatric facility in the country with such a comprehensive focus.

A man's brain may be bigger overall, she writes, but the main hub for emotion and memory formation is larger in a woman's brain, as is the wiring for language and "observing emotion in others." Also, a woman's "neurological reality" is much more deeply affected by hormonal surges that fluctuate throughout her life.

Brizendine uses those differences to explain everything from why teenage girls feverishly swap text messages during class, to why women fake orgasms to why menopausal women leave their husbands.

So the next time parents scold their daughters for excessive text messaging, consider Brizendine's neurological explanation:

"Connecting through talking activates the pleasure centers in a girl's brain. We're not talking about a small amount of pleasure. This is huge. It's a major dopamine and oxytocin rush, which is the biggest, fattest neurological reward you can get outside of an orgasm."

Part road map for women looking for scientific explanations for their behavior, part geeky manual for relationship woes, "The Female Brain" already has become fodder for the morning chat shows. On the "Today" show this week, one critic downplayed the book's explanation of gender differences, saying men and women are "more like North Dakota and South Dakota."

Brizendine's goal isn't man-bashing (despite snippets like "the typical male brain reaction to an emotion is to avoid it at all costs"). Instead, she celebrates the differences.

"There is no unisex brain," Brizendine writes. "Girls arrive already wired as girls, and boys arrive already wired as boys. Their brains are different by the time they're born, and their brains are what drive their impulses, values and their very reality."

Brizendine's book offers a 2 1/2-page appendix on the female brain and sexual orientation, but she doesn't mention transgender folks. Sexual orientation, she writes, "does not appear to be a matter of conscious self-labeling but a matter of brain wiring." All women are wired for a sexual orientation during fetal development, and "the behavioral expression of her brain wiring will then be influenced and shaped by environment and culture."

That's not to say either sex is more intelligent. Just different, Brizendine said. Nor do she or other scientists who study the brain, like Bruce S. McEwen, a Rockefeller (N.Y.) University brain researcher, dismiss the role that parenting and environment and experience play in shaping a person.

"The basic idea is that men and women approach the same problems in somewhat different ways, at least in part because of the biological differences in the brain, which in turn interact with experience -- the nature-nurture story," said McEwen.

"This does not imply whether either sex is superior ... but it does provide the basis for such cultural sayings as 'Men are from Mars, and women are from Venus.' "

Indeed, "The Female Brain" covers ground that has been tilled, to various degrees, in books from 1993's "Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus" to 1999's "The First Sex," to last year's "The Mommy Brain: How Motherhood Makes Us Smarter." Brizendine takes the research a step further and stretches it to cover a female's life from womb through menopause.

Katherine Ellison, author of "The Mommy Brain," said Brizendine represents a trend among neuroscientists who have been inspired by their experiences as parents to investigate what scientists have recently dubbed "the maternal brain."

"It has become more OK to talk about brain differences between genders over the past few years, whereas before, if you said men and women were 'different,' it seemed to imply women were at a disadvantage," said Ellison, who lives in San Anselmo. "Now scientists are pointing out some clear advantages of the female brain, and in particular the 'mommy brain.' "

Among the more controversial subjects addressed in Brizendine's book is: Can new mothers successfully juggle career and family life?

Perhaps not, writes the onetime single mother. And that's OK, Brizendine said, if the workplace can be reshaped to better accommodate new mothers.

"This book is a call-to-arms for women and society to rework the social contract that women have with employers throughout their childbearing years," said Brizendine, while sitting in the Sausalito home she shares with her second husband of 10 years and teenage son. "We cannot afford to lose half the brainpower in this country. Our intelligent women are getting completely out of the loop for five to 10 years, and they cannot get back in.

"The message is that women can't stay at home 100 percent of the time and cut themselves off from their careers. The workplace should realize that women are wired to take care of children, and they want that time and need that time."

It is a sentiment that wasn't around when she was born in Hazard, Ky., a poor Appalachian mining town, where her parents, Protestant missionaries, were stationed. Her father, a minister, was active in the civil rights movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s, often appearing as a guest preacher in African American churches throughout the South. Despite Brizendine's mother being the valedictorian of her high school class, Brizendine's maternal immigrant grandparents believed that women should not be educated and refused to give their daughter any money for college.

"One of the things that has been passionate in my life is to have a profession that would allow me to support myself," Brizendine said. "Watching my mother, an intelligent woman, have limited choices because of the culture -- and because she was married to the typical male of that time in the 1950s in this country -- it was clear to me that I had to find a different way myself."

She attended UC Berkeley on an academic scholarship, initially in the nearly all-male world of architecture majors. But in her junior year, she switched to neurobiology, fascinated by experiments where manipulating the hormones of an animal produced different behaviors.

"To me, that hit pay dirt," Brizendine said. "To have that kind of explanation for behavior that wasn't based on how your family raised you -- or how the stereotypes of society were set on you."

From there she went to Yale Medical School, less than a decade after the undergraduate campus went coed. One day in class, Brizendine asked the professor why females weren't used in the study they were reviewing. She recalled him saying, "We don't use females in the study because their menstrual cycles would mess up the data."

"To be honest with you, the reason that this astounds me to this day," said Brizendine, "is because I didn't argue with him." But back then it was unthinkable to say, "Well, how can you then make medications, and how can you make assessments that you'll apply to female patients when you don't really know?"

Next, Brizendine hopes to expand her clinical work.

In the next month, she will open a satellite branch of the Women's and Teen Girls' Mood and Hormone Clinic at San Francisco General Hospital, which will focus on issues of most concern to African American women, Latinas and lesbians -- a further attempt to see how cultural issues affect the female brain.

For all women -- and those who love them -- she offers a tip.

Research shows that the female brain naturally releases oxytocin after a 20-second hug. The embrace bonds the huggers and triggers the brain's trust circuits. So Brizendine advises, don't let a guy hug you unless you plan to trust him.

"And if you do," she said, "make sure it lasts 20 seconds."

***
Head cases

A few neurological differences between women and men from Louann Brizendine's "The Female Brain":

Thoughts about sex enter women's brains once every couple of days; for men, thoughts about sex occur every minute.

Women use 20,000 words per day; men use 7,000 per day.

Women excel at knowing what people are feeling; men have difficulty spotting an emotion unless someone cries or threatens bodily harm.

Women remember fights that a man insists never happened.

Women over 50 are more likely to initiate divorce.

E-mail Joe Garofoli at jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com.

Page A - 1
URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/08/06/MNG3HKAMVO1.DTL

©2006 San Francisco Chronicle

Aku termasuk salah satu orang yang akan mengatakan: 'bener banget' ketika ada yang mengatakan atau menulis: 'they don't make movie stars like they used to'. Entah apa yang hilang. Apakah itu lapisan karakter mereka yang menipis, atau karena kita jadi tahu terlalu banyak tentang mereka, atau standar kecantikan yang berbeda dari masa lalu, atau old-fashion glamour dan kelas; aku cuma bisa menebak-nebak.

Maksudnya gini, aku ngeliat foto-foto Ava Gardner dan bakal selalu terkagum-kagum di tiap foto yang aku lihat. Tapi sekarang siapa yang secantik Ava? Mungkin ada, tapi...entah, terasa berbeda aura glamournya. Marilyn? Saat melihat Marilyn, aku merasa, even a sex symbol back then, still have some soul. Gene Tierney, Marlene Dietrich, Katherine Hepburn, Rita Hayworth, Sophia Loren...mereka benar-benar terlihat seperti putri raja dari dunia antah-berantah.

Atau mungkin karena saat itu dunia film masih lebih sebagai dunia impian dari film dilihat pada masa sekarang?

Well, nggak tahu, itu juga cuma wild guess. Tapi, Monica Bellucci, menurutku masih punya that kind of old fashioned glamour. Dan, in some ways, perempuan yang satu ini juga. Setidaknya ketika dia bekerja dengan Pedro Almodovar.

Tapi sebelum membaca, abaikan saja komentarnya tentang Scientology atau tentang Tom Cruise. Dan sisanya, tulisan ini membuatku mendapat kesan, she's an interesting character. But hey, it's a good writing indeed.

***
Homecoming queen

She's spent nearly a decade in Hollywood, but it's Almodóvar's new movie, set in Spain, that has marked the coming of age of Penélope Cruz. She tells Simon Hattenstone about playing a real woman, politics and - despite herself - about Tom Cruise

Saturday August 5, 2006
The Guardian

Seven years ago, Pedro Almodóvar told Penélope Cruz he had the perfect role for her. He was planning to write a film about a woman married to an abusive loser who molests their teenage daughter. Almodóvar told her that, even though she was in her mid-20s, she was made to play the daughter. He then put the project to one side. In between times he made a series of wonderful movies that established him as one of the world's great film-makers, while Cruz became the first Spanish actress to conquer Hollywood, made a series of disappointing films and had a famous relationship with Tom Cruise before appearing to settle down to life in Los Angeles with actor Matthew McConaughey.

Last year, Almodóvar got back in touch with Cruz to say he had the perfect role for her. He had finally written the screenplay about a woman married to an abusive loser who molests their daughter, and Cruz was made to play the mother. As so often with Almodóvar, she couldn't believe what he was proposing. After all, Cruz is only 32, and could easily pass as 22. And it does take some believing the first time you see Cruz on screen as Raimunda, the sexy, tough, mendacious, vulnerable, melodramatic mamma. But by the end of the film, Volver, she has given the performance of her life.

Cruz calls the part a coming-of-age gift, and says it is the first time she has been allowed to play a real woman. Which is appropriate because, she says, for the first time in her life she feels like a woman rather than a girl.

It's a long time since the camera has made love to its star with such abandon. Almodóvar tracks longingly down her cleavage as she does the washing-up, stalks her padded-out bottom as she struts through town, flirts with her lips as she talks. The film is a raging love letter to Cruz. Almodóvar, who is gay, sounds as if he's on the turn when describing Cruz. ("Those eyes, her neck, her shoulders, her breasts! Penélope has got one of the most spectacular cleavages in world cinema. Looking at her has been one of the great pleasures of the shoot," he writes lubriciously in his notes to Volver.)

We meet in Cannes, where Volver opened the festival to brilliant reviews but failed to win the Palme d'Or. It's a blindingly sunny day and Cruz is sitting with friends in the garden of a hotel, having a bite to eat. She wanders over, her understated elegance (jeans, flesh-coloured Dolce jacket) set off by Louis Vuitton superstar shades. When she takes off the glasses you realise how exceptionally beautiful she is. In a way, her face doesn't make sense. Her exaggerated features - huge brown eyes, great gash of mouth, long slope of nose - sit in a tiny head. She could be a cartoon character, and yet at the same time there is great delicacy to her beauty. She wears no make-up, and looks all the better for it.

She smiles when I mention Almodóvar's adoration, and says, yes, it is a love affair of sorts. "You don't have to have sex involved in a love story for it to be a love story. When I'm at the end of my life, thinking about the most important people in my life, people I have loved the most, Pedro will be one of the main people."

Volver means "return" in Spanish. There are several kinds of return for Almodóvar in Volver - the film is set in La Mancha, his home town. In the film, Raimunda's mother returns from the dead. But perhaps the most important homecoming is that of Cruz. It's six years since she and Almodóvar last made a film together. Over the past decade, Cruz has largely made Hollywood or US-backed movies providing exotic love interest - she is Nicolas Cage's Greek sweetheart in Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Tom Cruise's girlfriend in Vanilla Sky, and Johnny Depp's coke-addled lady friend in Blow. Almodóvar says she has become "stylised" in the US; he believes Volver shows "she has more force in plebeian characters than in very refined ones".

Cruz made her movie debut in Bigas Luna's mad-cow movie Jamón Jamón 14 years ago. It was a typically Spanish affair - surreal, dark, erotic, bonkers. She then worked with Almodóvar on Live Flesh and All About My Mother. Cruz was perfect for Almodóvar with her unlikely beauty and dazzling contradictions, segueing from Mother Teresa to voracious sexual predator, sometimes within the one scene. She could play restrained naturalism one second, then crazy melodrama the next - just what he needed for films that took the most unfeasible stories and somehow made them first believable then unbearably moving. In Live Flesh, she played a prostitute who goes into labour and gives birth on a bus. In All About My Mother, she is a nun who has been impregnated by a transvestite and is dying of Aids. When Almodóvar described the latter part to her, she thought it was ridiculous. "I said to him, 'I have no idea how I am going to make this believable'. And he said, 'You just have to trust me', and he was right."

As I talk to Cruz, I begin to realise why she can make these outrageous narratives work. She belongs to Almodóvar's world of ghosts, coincidence, superstition and sexual ambiguity. In fact, she says that is the appeal of working with Almodóvar. "I spent a lot of nights with my trailer full of transsexuals, and they told me stories about their life, how they had suffered a lot, trying to find their truth. Some were working as prostitutes, others had normal jobs. I got along with all of them."

When she talks of her childhood, she sounds like a character in a Gabriel García Márquez novel. As a little girl, she says, she used to go to bed and dream her destiny into existence. "My dreams felt almost too big... about being an artist... an actress or a dancer - I was dancing since I was four. It was my every night ritual, going to bed and dreaming about my future, and I feel that's how I created what I'm doing now. So now I'm dreaming about what I'll be doing when I'm 40 and 60 and 80." She won't say what those dreams conjure up, for fear of tempting fate.

Did she dream of success and being feted when she was a child? She looks appalled. "No, no, no, I dreamed about how I would feel doing these things." And how did she feel? "Free. Free, waking up every day and doing a job that I loved." She looks at my chewing gum on the table. "May I have one?... No, it wasn't about being famous. I just wanted my life to be about hard work and feeling creative every day."

Penélope Cruz was born in Madrid to working-class parents. Her mother was a hairdresser, her father a car mechanic. The family loved films and music. "In my house there was always opera playing as we cleaned the house on Sunday. We were all a little bit hippy. Naked. Cleaning the house listening to Bizet or Prokofiev."

Cleaning and singing opera, naked? Even Almodóvar wouldn't risk a family scene quite so outré. She grins, and blows a bubble. "I don't mean naked like that. I mean naked, very free. We were one of the first families to have a video machine, so my dad was always making movies at home, and we could rent movies. We didn't have much money, but the money we did have we put into things like that." The family watched European films - she reels off the great directors she grew up on, mainly Italian - Fellini, Rossellini, De Sica.

She remains extremely close to her family. Her mother complains that whenever she is in Madrid she finds an animal in the street and brings it home for them to look after. How many has she brought home? She pops another bubble. "Two cats and one dog, and then I have my other dog with me in LA." Her siblings have followed her into the arts. Sister Mónica, three years younger, is an actor and flamenco dancer. Her brother Eduardo is 21 and a musician. She tells me he has just released his first album, that he's written all the songs and played three instruments, and that it's brilliant in a punk-rocky way - and she heaves with pride.

It's eight years since Cruz first headed for America. She never moved over as such, always followed the work - in this case The Hi-Lo Country, a western made by British director Stephen Frears. But the offers kept coming, and she kept packing her bags. By then she was a huge star in Spain, and seemed to like the relative anonymity of America.

Frears was struck by her exuberance. "She was just a girl then, and in the evening she'd go to sing in the karaoke bar with the rest of the crew. Very touching really. When we were shooting I just sat there, gobsmacked."

At what?

"Well, her beauty. She does have that European thing, doesn't she? The first time I saw her she reminded me of the whole history of European cinema - you know, all those great actresses like Loren. And in Pedro's films you've seen her grow into a woman over the years."

Where does he think she has done her best work?

"Oh, that's easy," he says. "Spain. Immodestly, I also think she's very good in my film, The Hi-Lo Country. But that whole business of people acting in a language other than their own is very complicated. Language is so germane, and unless film deals with the issue actors often end up looking rather beached."

Cruz soon lost her anonymity in America when she got together with Tom Cruise on Vanilla Sky, the confusing remake of the already confusing Spanish film, Open Your Eyes. It seemed too good a story to be true. Spain's most famous actress and Hollywood's most famous actor were an item. They looked a little like each other, and what's more they shared the same surname. If the relationship hadn't been for real some marketing guru would have had to invent it. And, of course, there were those who suggested as much - that Cruz was raising her profile in America, and Cruise was bolstering his image as an irresistible Hollywood hunk. I'm very curious about him - is he as weird as he seems, with the Scientology and the he-man act? On the other hand, Cruz is known for guarding her privacy. That, she's said, is how she holds on to herself and her sanity.

I begin circumspectly. Is she still with Matthew McConaughey?

"Yeah. I don't wanna talk about my private life."

Is he as lovely as he looks?

"Amazing person. Great, great person. Very, very good company. But I'm just not going to talk about it."

"Matthew seems so much nicer than Tom?"

She gives me a look and blows a contemptuous little bubble before letting fly: "I am friends with all the people I have been with, I am very good friends with the people who have meant something in my life, and I am so protective to the people who have been good to me, so I'm like a lion with that, and Tom is a very good man, and I am close to his whole family, his children. I love his children, and his mum, and all of his family, and he's a great man. The people who have been good to me, they are untouchable, I am very loyal to the people who have meant something to me and have been good to me, very, very loyal. And I don't like..." She finally runs out of breath.

Cruz is fearsome when she gets going, so different from the easy, giggly, hippy-dippy girl she can be. "Nobody with common sense talks about their private life. It's easy to say, 'OK, I give you a little bit,' and then you feel horrible with yourself. And I've been working hard since I was 16 and I've never talked about my private life, and I'm not going to change it now." She makes a disapproving kissing sound with her lips.

That's a good noise, I say.

"That's a very Spanish thing."

How would she describe her character? She relaxes. "She's a lion, too."

No, not your character in Volver, your own character.

"I would use similar words to describe myself - strong, vulnerable, stubborn, hopeful and, how d'you say it when somebody worries too much?"

Neurotic?

"No, not neurotic. A worrier. I could find any reason to worry about something right now."

Little things or big?

"Both. Sometimes I wake up at 7am to pee and in those two minutes I'm already trying to find out why we're here and what we don't know, and what I'm going to do in terms of having children, and I'm like, 'No, shut up, think about it later, go back to sleep.' "

Cruz would like children, lots of them. She says that it would be too risky just having one or two because she'd worry so much for them, it would make their lives a misery, so best spread the worry.

Is she aware of the biological clock ticking? "No, because I've just turned 32, and I still have a few years to do it, and when I do it I want to do it really well. I want it to be my best project in life."

The thing I like about Cruz is her capacity to surprise - as an actor, and in the flesh. On children, for example. "I would love to have my own," she says, "but I don't think I'd feel fully completed as a woman until I can also adopt."

Cruz recently bought a house in Los Angeles. Does she consider LA to be home now? "Madrid and LA. My main home is Madrid, but I also live in LA. It's a more normal life than in the beginning. At first, I would go to pick up the phone but there was nobody to call because everybody I knew was thousands of kilometres away." That sounds lonely? "Yes, of course, but I don't want to complain about it because it made me strong and it taught me a lot of things. It taught me how to be with myself, with no fear. I've been creating a normal life there, taking my rituals from Spain. Even now that I have a house there, I always know when I'm going to come back home to Europe and that's the way to protect myself."

Had she always wanted to work in America? "I don't know, because it hadn't happened before to an actress from my country; that she worked there with continuity. So I didn't have a reference. I thought it was almost impossible. But then I got a movie, and then I did a casting and got another movie. All my movies were castings." Her parents had always told her it was good to strive, to exceed expectations.

Was it a political household? "It was very free. We were raised Catholic, but it was free religiously, too. Since I was a little girl I felt, in terms of politics, I was more going to the left."

How does she identify with the left? "Well, I like a lot of things about our president now."

Bush? She opens her mouth in horror, and her already huge pupils appear to dilate. "No. Our president. In Spain. Who's my president? Zapatero ... If I talk about our government, I talk about my country. I am a Spanish resident."

What about Bush? "I have always been against war. But I was particularly upset by the Iraq war. Every day you see 60 more dead, 80 more. You know when we were saying you create your future by imagining the future? When I dream about what the world will be like in a couple of centuries, it's always terrifying. We are getting to a point where war could mean something else - something even more horrific than what it meant before. I mean, I am a person with a lot of hope, but trying to picture this world even one century from now, that is really scary."

I ask her if she takes comfort from religion. "I don't call myself one thing. I like to study many religions." Has she ever been attracted to Scientology, like Tom Cruise? "I have read a lot of books about it, and some of those things I have studied have helped me with things in my life. I would feel bad with myself if I didn't say that I was grateful to it because of what I've learned about it. A lot of my friends have been helped by their programme - they have got the most successful anti-drug programme in the world and they deserve a lot of credit for it." The Scientologists' detoxification programme, personally developed by founder L Ron Hubbard, has been criticised for its lack of scientific basis.

How does it work? "They have places everywhere. It is amazing because it is about helping the person find the reasons why they started in the beginning instead of creating guilt. So they have helped a lot of people I care about."

Do you have to be a Scientologist to do their courses? "No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. So many of these things are misunderstood. You can be from any religion. I have done some courses, and I didn't have to leave anything else or call myself one thing. A lot of Buddhist monks go there and do courses. I wish more people knew about that."

Mostly Cruz is too maverick to fit neatly into Hollywood, despite her considerable success in America, and despite the relationships with celebrity A-listers. She has, almost wilfully, refused to lose her accent, which means that she always has to play outsiders. She's said that it would have been easy to talk "American", but she has never wanted to.

For all that, in the past few years it looked as if Hollywood was likely to become her first home. But it seems less so now. When we talk, she reminds me repeatedly that her roots are in Spain. A few days after we meet, she and McConaughey announce they have split up - the time apart had taken its toll, they say.

Cruz likes to think of herself as an actor who works in four languages - Spanish, Italian, French and English - rather than a Hollywood actor. When she talks about the work of which she's most proud, she invariably mentions her Spanish work - though there's no denying she is best known for her Hollywood movies, simply because more people see them.

I tell her I much prefer her European work. Initially she demurs: it's been a privilege working on any number of American movies ... Well maybe, I say, but you are so much better in Volver than in anything I have seen you do in America. She bursts out laughing. "It is Volver," she says, "not Vulva." And she gets the giggles. "I agree with you, this is the most demanding character and I want challenges like this. But I don't compare Pedro with anybody else, he's unique, and he writes character for 80-year-old women. Who else does that?"

Almodóvar has reclaimed Penélope Cruz. He talks about her in terms of Anna Magnani and Sophia Loren. In Volver he includes a clip of Magnani and has Cruz dress in the type of straight skirts and cardigans Loren used to wear, just to drive the comparison home. He is making a statement - here is a new screen goddess, a new muse, he is saying, and she's not Hollywood's, she's Europe's, she's Spain's and she's mine.

For Penélope Cruz it's crunch time. She says she will continue to divide her time between America and Europe. But you sense she feels the need to choose where she really wants to be - in Hollywood and risk churning out lucrative mediocrities or in Europe with the chance of establishing herself as the queen of quality cinema. Fortunately for us, it is beginning to look as if home is where her heart is. "I always told Pedro he was my priority," she says, "and right now we are already talking about our next movie together."

Bahasa memang tak pernah lepas dari propaganda politik. Tapi baru pertama kalinya aku mendengar sushi, latte, Volvo, dan New York Times menjadi simbol pemberontakan (Gimana bisa Volvo jadi lambang pemberontakan? Itu kan mobilnya kelas mapan...). Dan cap apa yang akan ditempelkan untuk 'la vie boheme' kalau begitu? Ah, just read on.

***
Talking right

If the Democrats want a chance in the next election, they must change their language. Paul Harris considers how Republicans have hijacked the notion of 'values' and demonised such innocuous-sounding words as latte and sushi

Wednesday August 9, 2006
Guardian Unlimited