“The language of cinema is universal.” This is Landmark Cinema’s introduction to its movies - a contradiction, however, to how much of the American public seems to like its movie-watching. “Like” is a guess on my part; Jonathan Rosenbaum argues, in essence, that the weekly charts of top ten highest-grossing movies are more of a reflection of how producers, marketers and distributors view the American movie-going public. There’s no reason, for instance, that Park Chan-Wook’s satisfying but disturbing revenge flick Oldboy would not have cashed in at the box office - except for the fact that it has subtitles and, most importantly, was relegated only to limited film-festival or one-week runs in North America. (Okay, there are various acts of mutilation and torture, and an animal gets eaten alive—but surely Jackass Number Two had similar scenes, no?)

While we cultural anthropologists generally dislike so-called “cultural universals,” there are surely certain cinematic codes and conventions familiar to the movie-going middle class everywhere. Nobuhiro Yamashita’s Linda Linda Linda, a film about Japanese high school girls who form a band, is an excellent exemplification of that “universal language,” and therefore runs the risk of an American remake. Hollywood’s remaking of Japanese horror movies, for instance - perhaps testifying to its relentlessly acquisitive nature or its history of appropriating things in its own image - consistently removes the specific cultural context from which the film emerges, almost as if the American public needed to be shielded from hearing foreign languages or different cultures.

Let me illustrate this dynamic by posing something opposite. I encounter something similar in my introductory sociocultural anthropology classes, where a student would invariably say at the end of the semester that they learned a lot because they could “relate to the readings,” or that they could “see themselves in the situations,” or, my favorite, that they “learned more about themselves.” But my standards in this cinematic case are somewhat different: These lessons are absolutely commendable, but there is something to be said about a perceptual lens that enables one to recognize, appreciate, and understand difference, rather than simply projecting oneself onto the ethnographies. Surely film audiences can do the same, at the same time using those codes of the “universal language” to guard against archaic exoticisms.

(The fact that the band in Linda Linda Linda, called “PARANMAUM” - Korean, apparently, for “Blue Hearts,” the name of the ‘80s Japanese band whose songs they cover - is led by a Korean singer who can only speak halting Japanese, her second language, nicely entwines the twin themes of the possibility of intercultural communication with a nostalgia that cannot be shared; “Linda Linda” is not a song from the lead singer’s childhood, and despite this (or because of this) by the end she inhabits it and makes it fully her own.)

Linda Linda Linda isn’t perfect; it traffics in the usual stereotypes, none of them very deeply fleshed out - the tough one, the one with a crush, the hesitant outsider (played wonderfully here by my new favorite actress Bae Doo-Na). But unlike, say, Joan Freeman’s Satisfaction (terrible) or Alan Parker’s The Commitments (better - it’s based on a Roddy Doyle novel after all), there’s no anticipation of a big break, no big club date or audience, just a high school basketball court performance on a rainy afternoon. In this respect the dilemmas are charmingly small, but massive in its adolescent context: will they find a place to rehearse? Will they make it to the concert on time? Will they ever get those opening notes right? This is where Yamashita’s direction shines; when they finally get to sing their song, the crowd-pleasing scenes at the conclusion are genuinely earned.

It is in the film’s series of final frames - almost-still shots of empty courtyards and hallways - that the film acquires a particular gravity. With the mystic guitar chords of memory ringing in the background, the film tells us that the high school - surely one of the more emotionally charged locales, however one might repress it, in a typical viewer’s life - will always be there, even if its temporary residents will inevitably come and go. Spaces only become places once they are animated by the lives and recollections passing through it. The film works in the same way, a testament to the uncanny power of music to anchor the hearer in a fleeting temporal space through a brief, bittersweet burst of nostalgia.

A shout-out to Alexandre Aja’s High Tension, an absolutely nerve-wracking, taut thriller machine, told with minimal dialogue and an impressive narrative economy. It also boasts of one of the more malevolent villains in recent film history and surely the most gloriously horrific use of a rotary chainsaw in a film. Unfortunately it’s marred by a frankly insulting twist at the conclusion and appalling sexual politics. (Even more so, Aja’s gift for gore is squandered in his second film, an unnecessary remake of Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes.)

Apichatpong Weesethakul’s Tropical Malady, about the budding love affair between a Thai soldier and a country bumpkin, doesn’t exactly confound interpretation, as befuddled critics and audiences - including Quentin Tarantino, who spearheaded the Cannes jury that handed it the “Un Certain Regard” award that year - seemed to assert. The audiences at Cannes would be familiar with this sort of magic realism as it were—if not in their own national cinema, then at least through viewings of Hongkong martial-arts/fantasy films, or Japanese ghost stories that have been the staple of recent popular Asian cinema.

What I thought was most jarring is this magic-realist combination with his fiddling around with narrative: the oneiric presentation of events in the first half, and the sudden split in the center. (I liked the plunge into darkness in the middle, as it was reminiscent of my early movie-viewing days at the Agrix Cinema in Los Banos, when the projectionist would take his sweet time switching the reels.) The romance of the first half gives way to… well, the same romance, though pitched on a dream-like mythological level, or retold on an allegorical plane. (Though as I type this, the words “though pitched on a dream-like mythological level, or retold on an allegorical plane” may in fact be erroneous, as the second half may be seen simply as a literal continuation of the earlier narrative.) There’s something genuinely risky with what Weesethakul accomplishes here, especially since the plot itself is almost nonexistent, but the viewer’s patience will be richly rewarded.

…although this was released in 2006, is MONO & world’s end girlfriend’s gorgeous Palmless Prayer / Mass Murder Refrain, a five-part chamber music suite, as it were, for string quartet and post-rock band. A collaboration between Japanese composer Katsuhiko Maeda and the thunderous Tokyo trio that is MONO, the album is surely going to be one of my favorites of the year (and it’s only January!).

Doubtless a lot of music fans more knowledgeable than I would point to music from a different tradition - say, Shostakovich, Pärt, or Gorecki - as more complex, more profoundly moving. But the difference is that MONO rocks: the moment in “Part Three” when MONO’s Mogwai-influenced wall of guitar comes crashing down on the orchestra is a cathartic sonic event, only made more poignant by the calm resignation of the finale.

It’s hard to describe the widescreen sorrow at the core of this music. It’s something as mundane as the inherent loneliness of automobiles stranded on the freeway at sunset. But the ineffable grandeur it evokes is not just exit music for a film, it’s Exit Music for real: ruined cities, a threnody for the broken earth, the dying sun’s last defiant flare before the beginning of a cold, dead universe. Or as C.K. Williams puts it in his poem “Light,” “…everything ends, / world, after-world, even their memory, steamed away / like the film of uncertain vapor of the last of the luscious rain.”

This isn’t exactly your traditional movie soundtrack, as there isn’t a traditional “score;” it’s a series of dreadful (in the good, literal sense) scrapings, bass rumbles, string quartet and prepared piano passages, and samples from Alan Lamb’s wires in the Australian desert.

My only disappointment is that some of the cover versions are somewhat safe and superfluous - do we really another version of “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue?” - but Sweet and Hoffs revel in harmony-filled power-pop goodness here.

I’m only really a casual fan of the women-with-acoustic-guitars genre, but there was something compelling about her 2005 self-titled album that made me take notice. There is nothing necessarily groundbreaking about it - nothing you won’t hear on a Lilith Fair compilation, perhaps, with self-confessional lyrics like “Oh I’m missing you / Or maybe I’m missing who I was when I was with you,” and an urban-glossy production - but there is an autumnal chill that runs through Suh’s songs that gives the album an edge. Most important, Suh is gifted with an incredible voice, all husky and soulful, which breaks at perfect moments (hear the chorus of “Light on My Shoulder”).

In concert that amazing voice is, unbelievably, even better, now embellished with a slight rawness that fits the emotional intensity of her lyrics. Indeed, the concert was completely stripped down: with her on guitar and vocals and another guy on drums. (You also get the chance to see how fine a guitar player she is.)

To my initial worry, Suh began the short set with four of my favorite songs on the album (“Won’t You Come Again,” “Your Battlefield,” “Harmony,” and “Lucille,” if I remember correctly). But this anxiety was dispelled with a couple of terrific new songs (“Canopy,” probably about her mother, and “Sweet Love,” which began with lines like “Clap your hands if you love someone in this room,” or words to that effect), and a few well-placed surprise covers (“Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” “Since I Fell For You,” “Is This Love”). All together a most excellent experience; I highly recommend catching her in concert if she comes by your town.

I’m scrambling for references here: early ‘70s AM radio, early ‘70s A&M, mid-’90s Elephant 6. How about that?

Dubbed-out reggae from Cebu City—not touristy Bob Marley stuff either, but cave-like bass and reverb set to sky-cracking levels. Their secret weapon is Budoy Marabiles, the rasta-tammed lead singer who exhorts the audience like a manic street preacher.

Experimental dance pop of extremely high quality—at least for the first half of the album, anyway.