When he told me this, I had to laugh, not because Pinkerton wouldn't have made a worthwhile academic excursion, but because it was confirmation that frontman Rivers Cuomo was, and probably always will be, winning the war on his art.

Pinkerton is commonly held as Weezer's masterpiece, a document so adventurous and so revealing of its author as to be a critical and commercial disaster upon its release 1997.  Like my good buddy M. Night Shyamalan, however, Rivers Cuomo ran screaming from the intimacy of his earlier work and into increasingly silly, frustrating territory, peaking with the nihilistic Make Believe.  As the critics see it, in both Cuomo's and Shyamalan's circumstances their falls have been so spectacular as to be tragic, even warranting a reassessment of their earlier work altogether. 

The tone of the criticism leveled at both of these men is astonishingly personal, isn't it?  As though malice is driving Cuomo and Shyamalan to confound audiences.

This is just a friendly reminder that movies and music are elaborate cons to begin with, and even when you feel that the author is laughing at you for indulging him, it's highly likely that his art does not originate from such a place.  When Shyamalan set out to make The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, he was making them for himself.  Just as he did with The Village and Lady in the Water.  They are all products of the things he cared about at the time that he made them.  Naturally, some of them are (vastly) better than the others.

With more time and distance, Pinkerton appears as an abrasion on Weezer's record rather than a crest, an album out of the band's character, as Cuomo has always insisted it was.  It's a singer-songwriter record of distorted grunge-punk anthems sprung from a distorted perspective (the themes are stridently adolescent, pubescent even, but in the hands of a ragged, near-thirty year old man singing the heck out of them, they become something much more insightful . . . and disturbing).

This is not to imply that the wholesale silliness of their new “Red Album” is the real Weezer but rather if Cuomo & Co. decide to make a record purely for their own amusement, it doesn't necessarily mean they’ve lost it or forgotten how to connect with their songs.  Maybe it means they never had what we thought they had, or they do still have it but aren't interested in recreating it just yet.

(Incidentally, if you're trying to understand what Weezer is about, I recommend Maladroit.  It's the perfect distillation of the themes, hooks, and eccentricities found on all their albums.  It's also unyieldingly fun.)

As droves of angry moviegoers flooded the exits after experiencing the thoroughly self-deprecating The Happening, a movie they were no doubt warned from seeing or at least intuited to be bad, I started to wonder why I enjoyed it so much.  I came to the conclusion that some cons are executed with such childish glee, you can't help but smile and nod and concede, “You got me,” even if you really don't appreciate it.  Three bad films in, Shyamalan is still winning the war.