Check Book: Marie's Triumphant Return
Plus, lots of feelings about Bon Iver?
Surprise! Blank Check has started a newsletter! Your favorite connoisseurs of context are gonna go on even more tangents, commit to even more bits, and share opinions on even more pieces of entertainment industry news because - hey, why not. Thanks for joining us!
IN THIS WEEK’S EDITION:
THE BARDI PARTY REPORT
Hi friends. I just flew back from Japan last night and boy are my arms tired! But seriously, jet lag is a bitch when you’re going from one side of the world to another. Please excuse any half cooked thoughts here.
I had an incredible trip. My husband and I spent time in Tokyo, Kyoto, and Hiroshima over two weeks, had some of the best meals of our lives, took four trips on the Shinkansen, and spent WAY too much money on souvenirs and trinkets and treats.
Because this is ostensibly a movie-related newsletter, I will focus on the movie-related aspects of my trip.
Right off the bat, here are the most-frequently recommended things I did not do:
Studio Ghibli museum and Studio Ghibli park. I wanted to go to the museum and I attempted to get tickets when they went on sale for the month. I ended up being the 49,000 person in the online queue. Watch someone leaves a comment on this newsletter right now after I’ve already left being like, “Hey Marie, I’m a Blankie and I work at the Ghibli Museum and could have gotten you in!!” Just kidding, no one in Japan knows about Blank Check. As for the park, all the reviews I read said that it was just a lot of waiting in line for selfies in front of recreations and that was kind of the whole thing. I decided to skip. Speaking of Studio Ghibli, I learned that there is no way to stream Studio Ghibli movies in Japan. Grave of The Fireflies became the first Studio Ghibli film offered on a streaming platform earlier this year (Netflix Japan) and that is only because Ghibli doesn’t even own the rights to it. Kind of crazy, no?
Lots of folks recommended the movie-related bar The Whales of August in Shibuya. I didn’t go - my husband doesn’t drink, and it didn’t seem like sober culture really exists in Japan outside of hotel bars with mocktails.
DisneySea. Griffin really wanted me to go, I kind of wanted to go, but I couldn’t justify a Disney day when I had so many temples to explore and weird shops to visit. YES I KNOW DISNEYSEA IS SPECIAL. Maybe on the next trip.
My friend Gina recommended I go see a movie in theaters (she saw The Apprentice in Tokyo with a packed, silent house and said it was a surreal experience), but the only English-language films playing were Tron: Ares and The Roses. I would have liked to see some of the Japanese films playing, but you know, the whole language barrier thing.
And here are the movie-related things I DID do:
Jimbocho is the bookstore district of Tokyo, and I went expecting it to be a trip mostly for my bookish husband, but once we discovered store after store of film posters and programs, it became a trip for ME. Regarding Blank Check specifically, I bought movie programs for Sully, Titanic, and The Straight Story. All of them feature unique bits made for the Japanese audience - for Sully, an interview with the two Japanese passengers of the Miracle on the Hudson flight, for Titanic, a transcript of DiCaprio and Cameron’s 1997 Japan press conference, and for Straight Story, a handwritten note from David Lynch thanking his Japanese fans. Really cool stuff, and SO MUCH CHEAPER to buy these in Japan than to find them from US resellers. The store I really loved was called Kenju-Shorin, and should you find yourself in Tokyo, I highly recommend you check it out.
I did end up finding the Japanese Toy Story figures that Griffin wanted and I bought him Samurai Woody. I would have gotten all three of them but they were huge and also $50 each.
Kyoto was a mixed bag for me. Over-tourism is real, and the city doesn’t really have the infrastructure to support all of the people coming to create content at picturesque holy sites. My unexpected pro-tip? The temples that were filmed for the beautiful “Alone in Kyoto” sequence of Lost in Translation - Nanzen-ji and the gardens of the Heian Jingu Shrine - were comparatively quiet when we visited! Visit those! Everyone freaks out about the Kinkaku-ji golden temple, but real ones (Mishima-heads) know that the original golden temple was burned down by a crazy incel novice monk in the 1950s and what you’re seeing now is a recreation.
Not technically movie-related but because I brought it up in our House of Dynamite episode, my visit to Hiroshima was profoundly moving. The memorial and museum is really heavy and important, but I also found the resilience of the city itself so inspiring and joyful. Unlike Tokyo and Kyoto, Hiroshima uses streetcars as part of their transit system, and did you know that they were only down for 4 days after the bombing? Some of the train cars from the 1940s are still around! And the beloved Hiroshima Carps baseball team (who have never won a World Series) was founded only like 4 years after the bombing. I bought David a bunch of Carps merch, they’re so cute. Aside from their little Carp Boy, their other mascot Slyly is a very close relative to the Phillie Phanatic (designed by the same guy, obviously).
I watched Hara-kiri on my flight to Japan and Godzilla Minus One on my flight back. Both were incredible. Hara-kiri definitely deserves the “highest rated film on letterboxd” reputation.
Thanks to JJ for really holding down the fort on Check Book in my absence, and to Minick for handling a lot of our social posts. I love my Blank Check team and I’m excited to finally listen to the Llewyn Davis episode!
LET’S CRACK OPEN THE DOSSIER
Hollow Scene (Bon Iver Pun)
Remember, I’m saying this as a Wisconsin native who went to three of the four Eaux Claires festivals and counts 22, A Million as one of the very best albums of the 21st Century: it’s been a rough year for my guy Justin Vernon. After an extended time away from the Bon Iver moniker that made him famous, Vernon returned in 2024 with a stellar three-song EP, paired with an honest, soul-searching interview with The New Yorker’s Amanda Petrusich. But, as Ryan Dombal detailed over at Hearing Things, Vernon has spent much of this next year flattening his legacy, leaning into the “sad boy” reputation that never really applied to his post-Emma work in an effort to make his latest album—Sable, Fable—feel like the dawning of a new, happier, sexier, regrettably funkier era. But his pioneering sound—now in the hands of Jim-E Stack, who is no Brad Cook, that’s for sure—has curdled into cringe, and the mantle’s been taken by a new generation of artists like Mk.gee and Dijon. Cringe—unfortunately—comes for us all. (My millennial ass knows it, too.)
But nothing Vernon has produced this year—not the Bon Iver-branded smoked salmon or even his embrace of artificial intelligence—has been quite as cringe as the Inside Llewyn Davis story he told on the Handsome podcast in April. As Joel Coen told The New York Times in 2013, he and his brother Ethan initially thought that Llewyn Davis should be played by a real musician, given that the Coens wanted to record the bulk of the movie’s songs live on set: “After we wrote the movie and we started casting it, we knew that there was going to be a lot of performance in the movie, and that actually when you heard a song in the movie, we really wanted to hear the whole song. And it’s also a story where we felt like there’s got to be something about the character that you only know through his performance and his music — you know, like a real musician. So we only auditioned real musicians.”1 Soon, however, the Coens realized this probably wasn’t a feasible idea, per Joel: “People would come in and just kill the song ‘Hang Me, Oh Hang Me.’ Then we’d ask them to do a scene, and then you’d go, ‘Um, yeah, this isn’t gonna work.’ You can get almost anybody who’s got a modicum of talent through a scene, or two, or three, but you can’t do that for an entire movie. For that, you need a real actor.”2
Justin Vernon, it turns out, was decidedly not a real actor. While touring his second Bon Iver album, 2011’s Bon Iver, Bon Iver, with an expanded band in 2012, Vernon received an email from the Coens’ reps asking if he would be willing to read for their next movie. This was a big deal to Vernon: his hometown of Eau Claire is only about a 90-minute drive away from the Coens’ hometown of Minneapolis, and he considers himself “the biggest fan of their movies.” Initially, Vernon knew he wasn’t that kind of performer: though Vernon grew up making backyard movies with his friends, he “was never allowed to be on camera because [he] was so bad at acting.” And when the Coens’ email first arrived in his inbox, he thought, “there’s no way in high hell that I can do this.” But he had captured the attention of Midwestern royalty, and the mind naturally wonders: “I started getting really confusing thoughts, like, maybe this was something I was meant to do, or maybe I need to grow into this. It’s the Coen brothers, you know?”3
A month later, Vernon had read through Inside Llewyn Davis’s script just one time, but he now found himself in Joel’s apartment on the Upper West Side of New York City. Here’s what followed, in full, per Vernon: “I was there with my brother, and they asked my brother to wait outside and I thought that was kind of weird. And embarrassingly now, I said, ‘Hey, I’m such a huge fan, it’s so great to meet y’all, I’ve been really thinking about this.’ I worked myself into such a tizzy that I went in and said, ‘I’m totally willing to move my Australia tour to do this part and really make this happen.’ I was trying to talk to them about Minneapolis, and they were kinda like, ‘Hey man, why don’t we just sit down and read a little bit.’ In that moment, it was the most dun dun dun moment in my life. In that moment I realized that I was in an audition and I didn’t know that. And I was completely paralyzed.” Normally—as we’ve learned over the course of this Coen brothers miniseries—it’s a good thing when Joel and Ethan laugh at a performance, but in the case of Vernon’s audition, the singer says that they laughed because he “was so bad.”4 The Coens turned their attention to actors—as Ethan said in 2013, “[W]e’ve been doing this like, 30 years. You’d think we know something as basic as this, that you need an actor.”—and Vernon has still yet to make his film acting debut. He did, however, recently throw a basketball tournament with Taco from Odd Future.
Making It Real
The reason—as mentioned earlier—that the Coens initially searched for a musician to play Inside Llewyn Davis’s title role was that they wanted the film’s songs to be captured in full live on set. This was an ambitious undertaking, even after finding the unbelievably talented (and beautiful) punk-ska singer/guitarist Oscar Isaac.
As sound mixer Peter F. Kurkland shared with Sound and Picture in 2014, the Llewyn Davis shoot was preceded by a week of pre-recordings in the studio. But because all but one of the film’s songs were captured live on set, this was less a typical studio session than it was a series of practice sessions: “They had a week of pre-recordings scheduled, but it turned out they weren’t really pre-records, but more rehearsals. It still was an opportunity to see how the pieces were going to be arranged and how all the elements were going to sound, which was very important to find out.”5 It was during those rehearsals, Isaac told Variety, that the great T Bone Burnett helped the singer really find his own voice, not just Dave Van Ronk’s: “[T-Bone] actually dropped this little bit of wisdom that unlocked not only the music for me but also the character. This is really what stopped me from thinking that I should try to mimic a growl. I was playing a song and he said, ‘Sing it like you’re singing it to yourself.’ And that just registered so strongly, and that’s how I did the whole performance. (Davis) is going through this world, completely dislocated, and he just sings these things for himself.”6
While that unlocked the tone and meaning of Isaac’s performance, the actual mechanisms required to pull off the shoot required many other considerations. As Burnett told The Hollywood Reporter, shooting Inside Llewyn Davis like a concert documentary with multiple takes required absolute precision from the performers: “If the tempo varies even a little, even a millisecond, you can’t cut [in postproduction] between takes because you lose sync.” So Burnett sat near the camera with a stopwatch in hand, and, miraculously, “Oscar never varied [song length] the whole time.”7 It was quite the feat, per the legendary music producer: “Oscar was able to perform what was probably 15 minutes of music live, and he was able to play a song at the same tempo and the same intensity for 30 takes in a day. Just like that. It’s extraordinary. It takes extraordinary resilience and confidence and concentration. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”8 Ultimately, all of the film’s performances—aside from “The Auld Triangle,” which was aided by studio-recorded backing vocals from Justin Timberlake and Marcus Mumford—were captured live on set.9
God’s Greatest Gift — The Cat
As Joel told Vulture in 2013, Inside Llewyn Davis didn’t exactly have the kind of easily digestible logline that captures the attention of studio execs and billionaire financiers: “There’s not a lot of plot. In the middle of it, we thought, ‘Okay, we’re writing something that doesn’t have the usual engine in terms of forward momentum or narrative drive.’ It’s just not a ‘plot movie,’ and to insert plot elements in any conventional sense into a movie like this would be wrong. It’s a movie about following a guy for a week or so, to whom not very much happens.”10 As a concession to the demands of classical cinematic storytelling, the Coens added a feline friend: “The film doesn’t really have a plot. That concerned us at one point; that’s why we threw the cat in.”11 Joel later labeled this comment a “half joke,” clarifying to Time Out that, “Unlike a lot of the stuff we’ve done, there isn’t a plot. The question was: what gives the movie its momentum? We were like: he’s got a cat. What happens to the cat? So there’s another thing you follow. Also, we’re telling a story about a character who has a difficult time with humans but has to relate to an animal. That reveals things.”12
But if writing a cat into the screenplay helped the Coens in the development phase of the picture, it created all sorts of problems once the brothers arrived on set—problems the Coens, per Ethan, should have known to avoid: “When we were making the movie we were thinking more about we have to deal with a cat again like we did in The Ladykillers!”13 Though “[m]uch of what was scripted is a scary thing for a cat,” according to animal trainer Dawn Barkan—yes, the animal trainers last name is Barkan lol—the Coens previous experience proved helpful: “[Ahe Coens have] worked with animals in just about every film they’ve done, so they had an idea of what it takes.” Still, they pushed the limits: “For weeks, I said it wasn’t a good idea to shoot in a live subway station. An actor getting scratched, I don’t ever want that to happen.”14
Barkan was not alone in those fears, as Isaac had once had a bad run-in with a perfect little boy who would never hurt anybody, don’t listen to him: “I was living in New Jersey, and I was reading a book on my porch there. And [Oswald] came up to me … he was the sweetest little cat, and he started rubbing on me and purring. And then at one point, he just bit my hand, out of nowhere! I walked away and I went to sleep, and I woke up the next morning, and I had a red line going all the way up my arm. … They were pumping me with antibiotics, because it got in my lymphatic system.”15 Though Isaac had some troubles with one cat who “didn’t like his involvement in the movie and rebelled against it; which included rebelling against the person holding it,” the actor emerged unscathed—and unhospitalized.16
The three angels who appear in the movie, by the way, were named Tigger, Jerry, and Daryl.17 To close this section, here’s a picture of my own beautiful orange boy Ricky:
WHAT IS THE TEAM INTO THIS WEEK?
A Message from Jordan Fish of To The White Sea: Your friends Ray Tintori and Jordan Fish of the TO THE WHITE SEA podcast are putting together an evening of close listening and cinematic revelation at LIFE WORLD on November 15 at 8pm. The event is called COENS SECRETS UNLOCKED. If you’re in or around NYC you won’t want to miss this—all will be revealed! This will be a live recording featuring audience participation and surprise special guests—one of whom we can exclusively reveal here to be one Downtown Griffy Newms! Tickets are on sale now, so come on out and enjoy the new freedoms!
Alan Smithee, Pseudonymous Editor: “I’ve spent a lot of the last week absorbing people’s (justifiably, in my opinion) frustrated reactions to A House of Dynamite, and I’m going to RE-RECOMMEND Annie Jacobsen’s excellent 2024 nonfiction book Nuclear War: A Scenario, which is like if A House of Dynamite had the courage of its convictions to carry through on what it promises.”
Ben Hosley, Producer: “I recently just got back from my honeymoon in Italia. I’m still lagged af and am finding it hard to put into words my overall experience but here it goes: holy fucking roman shit! WHAT A COUNTRY!!! It’s so damn beautiful! Full of ancient wonders! And my god the food and wine what the literal fuck?! I can go on and on but before I make the trip my entire personality for the foreseeable future I wanted to share my recommendation for the Venice Biennale. For those unfamiliar, it’s an annual international arts, culture, and design festival where countries from around the world curate an exhibition showcasing new ideas curated around a theme. For the 61st edition the theme was Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective. Which I’m not gonna begin to try to unpack for you but you can read the curator’s mission statement here.Now it might be the most obvious thing to recommend visiting Venice maybe of all time? But I really cannot stress how incredible this event was. I saw so much great visionary stuff but the highlight was America’s contribution which was EXTREMELY my shit: “PORCH: An Architecture of Generosity”. Y’all, it was an entire exhibition devoted to the motherfuckin porch! Not only was it look at the history of the porch BUT there was a construction of the porch of the future. I was in porch heaven. I left feeling inspired. Normally, I’m anti homework but when it porch learnin I’m ready to open my mind.SO in conclusion, go to Venice if you can for Biennale or even sit on a porch and watch a dang movie.”
AJ McKeon, Editor: “Recommendation: walkie talkies, we got Hayes a walkie talkie and told him that instead of coming up into our room at night before he goes to bed to tell us ‘I can’t fall asleep’ or ‘I’m bored’ he can just call us on the walkie for us to tell him ‘yes you can, just go to bed’ it’s worked pretty well so far.”
JJ Bersch, Researcher: “To the surprise of absolutely no one, I fucking love the new album Snocaps, by the new band Snocaps. In my estimation, Katie Crutchfield is the best songwriter of her generation, and I’ll treasure any new music we get from her. But the main draw of this band, I think, is the return of her twin sister Allison, whose 2017 solo album Tourist in This Town is probably the most underrated album in the extended Crutchfield-verse (and whose most recent album, the 2018 Swearin’ reunion Fall Into the Sun, also kicks major ass). The songs on Snocaps—which also feature the great MJ Lenderman and the great Brad Cook—blend many of the various sounds the sisters have developed over the last decade and a half—the hyper-literate ramble of P.S. Elliott, the guitar-driven indie rock of Surfing Strange and Out in the Storm, the Southern anthems of the last two Waxahatchee records—into something that is both comforting and refreshingly its own thing.”
THIS WEEK ON THE PODCAST
The First Lady of Argentina, Rachel Zegler, and the First Dog of Blank Check, Lenny the Wonderdog, return to discuss the Coens’ 2013 masterpiece, Inside Llewyn Davis (and also burn Jack Antonoff on main).
Read Jack Antonoff’s slander in print
Watch Carey Mulligan in 2015’s Far From the Madding Crowd
Listen to the penultimate episode of WTF
SOMEEEEEBODDDDDYY once promised that we would continue our 90’s Indie Comic Series and that is what we are doing as we discuss king-o-commercials Kinka Usher’s 1999 film Mystery Men.
COMING SOON:
New York Times, September 4, 2013.
Rolling Stone, November 21, 2013.
Ibid.
Sound and Picture, February 3, 2014.
The Hollywood Reporter, December 6, 2013.
Washington Post, December 13, 2013.
Sound and Picture, February 3, 2014.
BBC, January 26, 2014.
The Hollywood Reporter, December 6, 2013.
The Snocaps album rules.
I do kick myself for not making the trip up to Eaux Claires before the 2010s festival bubble burst. glad our resident Wisconsinite made many appearances. I DID see the hometown For Emma anniversary show in Milwaukee, that rocked. (22,A Million is still their best, go JJ)