I spent much of this week in recovery, in a sort of spiritual and mental hangover over the insanely busy stretch of work that preceded it. So I’m a little worried that my contributions to Spectrum Culture were a touch discombobulated.

On the music side, I wrote a piece on the new album from Montreal’s No Joy. It sounded pretty good to me, but I did struggle in the writing process to find the hook of the review. It’s definitely one of those times when I wanted to write, “It’s pretty good,” and be done with it. The chatting-with-buddies version of a review.

The new movie I drew for review this week was the latest from Olivier Assayas. I’ve seen a couple of the director’s prior efforts, but I kept feeling like it would have been helped had I seen Carlos, his acclaimed miniseries about terrorist Carols the Jackal. Given a slightly similar focus–acts of insurrection in the nineteen-seventies–being able to compare the two would have been helpful. The movie is okay, just missing a plot.

On the other hand, the other film I wrote on is lousy with plot. In the “Oeuvre” series, we’ve been tracking through the films of Brian De Palma. I took my fifth (I believe) and final turn in the series, writing about Femme Fatale, a film I’d heard and read good things about at the time of its release. I should have remembered that there’s a whole passel of critics–most of them proud descendents of Pauline Kael–who were always willing to grade De Palma on a curve. Like every other De Palma film I wrote on for this series, it’s quite bad.