And if I should change my mind and I do sometimes

Here's a song that Scott Miller rescued from obscurity on his most recent album with Anton Barbeau.



The original version was not a hit, but was featured in the movie "Bunny Lake Is Missing", which is well worth seeing (Sir Noel Coward and Sir Laurence Olivier in the same film), but remember to "come on time".

Storefront Hitchcock

I've included two songs the last two days, so I may as well dedicate today's entry to Storefront Hitchcock. This song ("Let's Go Thundering") is one that's never been released in studio form.



As big a fan as I am, I've never been a collector of Robyn Hitchcock live recordings. I like Gotta Let This Hen Out! and some other "official" live things, but his live concerts suffer from too much talk and not enough rock. This is okay while you're in the venue in the moment enjoying the show, but doesn't play well for me after I've heard it.

The actual performances on Storefront, with Robyn on guitar and Deni Bonet on violin and Tim Keegan on guitar, are some of my favorite versions of these songs, but his monologues drag the movie (and album) down for me. I made a tape of the LP with all the talking edited out, and it worked so much better for me than the actual disc (which has the introductions split as separate tracks, so we can skip them -- thanks Robyn!)

I saw a daytime matinee of Storefront at the Red Vic in SF a few days after it opened, and there were seven people in the theater! Still more than the four people I saw at showing of the Nick Drake film A Skin Too Few, but it was still scarily empty. That's the only time I've ever seen the film -- I've never seen it on IFC or PBS or anywhere else on TV, and don't have the DVD. I'd like to buy one, especially if they have the song introductions split as separate tracks.

Movies

This is the day I'm supposed to list my favorite movies of 2008, but I'm not really qualified since I only saw two films at the theater all year. The Dark Knight was excellent, but the best thing about Nick & Nora's Infinite Playlist was the playlist.

I watched Get Smart on an airplane. Steve Carrell was great as Maxwell Smart, but as much as I love Anne Hathaway, as an Agent 99, she's no Barbara Feldon.  Missed it by that much.

Except the dark knight always triumphs

From yesterday's op-ed review of "The Dark Knight" from
Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal.

There seems to me no question that the Batman film "The Dark Knight," currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war.

Okay, I saw "The Dark Knight" today at my local uniplex, and didn't see any parallels between Batman and Bush, but then I'm not a neocon wingnut who writes for Murdoch's WSJ.  

The main similarity I saw was that "The Dark Knight" was just as long and convoluted as Bush's "War On Terror". But Batman didn't start recklessly pursuing Picard (the villain who died at the end of "Batman Begins") after the Joker started terrorizing Gotham City, nor did he tell Gotham citizens to help fight the Joker by shopping and taking vacations, as Bush would have done.  This Batman was more like Bizarro-Bush from the alternate reality where GWB really does have fortitude and moral courage.

Worthy of Oscar Knight

One of the commentators in yesterday's Carling Cup Final between Chelsea and Tottenham said that the way Tottenham players "sold" the 70th minute penalty that gave them a tying goal was "acting worthy of Oscar Knight".



I thought Oscar Knight must be some British character actor famous for his dramatic roles, or some international footballer famous for "selling" penalties, but couldn't find anything about the mysterious Mr. Knight via google. Turns out the commentator talking about "Oscar night". It wasn't until much later last night that I finally got it.

That's "Oscar night" as in the 80th Academy Awards (which were last night). I didn't watch the Oscars, and have not see any of the nominated films, so I didn't see any reason to watch. Apparently No Country For Old Men is pretty good, since it won all the awards. I'm glad that "Falling Slowly" won best original song (Once was my favorite film of 2007) and would have liked to see Glen and Marketa perform it, but that's what
youtube is for.

By the way, after Dimitar Berbatov converted that 70th minute penalty to equalize, Tottenham went on to beat Chelsea 2-1 in extra time and win the Carling Cup. It was a second half performance worthy of Oscar Knight. The Carling Cup should not be confused with the FA Cup (which is still in progress and down to the final eight the boys from Barnsley now have to face Chelsea) or the Champions League (which is down to the final sixteen). And all these cup competitions are independent from their various leagues.

In movie terms, it's like simultaneously competing for the Oscars and the Golden Globes, if these movie awards were all knockout competitions. So even though Atonement won the GGs, it would still have to face the mighty No Country in the Oscar semis.

2007: The Year In Film

My five favorite movies of 2007.

1. Once
2. Knocked Up
3. Control
4. I'm Not There
5. The Simpsons Movie

These were the only five movies I saw this year.

Control

I saw Control, Anton Corbijn's new movie about Ian Curtis and Joy Division, last week in London. I don't watch many movies, so I feel the need to review all the movies that I do see.

I'm not a huge Joy Division fan (outside the four or five songs that almost everyone likes), so I didn't know a whole lot about Ian Curtis going in, but was completely drawn in by Control. Corbijn shoots the movie in black and white, and the visuals are amazing throughout. It looks like it was made in the late 70s. Sam Riley is quite convincing as Ian Curtis, both in looks and singing. I had trouble thinking of Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash or Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles, but Sam Riley seemed like Ian Curtis to me. His most famous pre-Curtis role was playing Mark E. Smith in 24 Hour Party People, which explained the meta-joke when his manager tells him that "things could be worse, you could be the singer for the Fall". That went completely over my head until I knew Sam's history.

Riley portrays Ian Curtis as a normal guy with problems instead of some mythical martyr. He led a fairly normal life before Joy Division, with a wife and a daughter and a job at the Macclesfield Employment Exchange. Most of Ian's problems started after he joined the band and their fame escalated: his marriage was falling apart, he was diagnosed with epilepsy and started suffering seizures on and offstage, it seemed like everything went wrong for Ian as Joy Division got more popular. Even knowing how the story ends, I found myself pulling for him to get it together before the end of the movie.

I'm more of a sound fan than a picture fan, so my favorite part of the movie was the musical performances. The actors performed all the music themselves, sounding like a fairly spot-on Joy Division tribute band. So much so that some people thought it was the real band. Someone at the U.S. distributor's office for Control apparently asked if Joy Division could reunite for the film's premier. Peter Hook replied "The last I heard, their lead singer was dead but I'll give them a ring and see if anything has changed."

Like, Ohmigawd!

Moon Unit Zappa turns 40 today.



After this song hit the charts in the Spring of 1982, my classmates in Singapore went from ridiculing my "California Speak" (I was from NorCal, which is a different sort of Val-talk, but I was fond of "bitchen","gnarly", and "bogus") to saying "grody to the max", "gag me with a spoon" and the rest. The whole Valley Girl phenomenon lasted less than one year, and had pretty much passed by the time the movie was released in 1983.

I didn't get around to watching Valley Girl until a few years later when it was a mainstay on HBO, and I was surprised at how good it was. The casting of Nick Cage as Randy, the "bad boy" from Hollywood, and Deborah Foremen as Julie the valley girl was inspired, and the soundtrack was great. It was such a low budget movie that they didn't release a soundtrack album, but Rhino licensed all the songs for an ex post facto soundtrack in the early 90s.

A few songs that appear on that soundtrack are still not available elsewhere on CD (like "Girls Like Me" by Bonnie Hayes from the opening credits), a few are "80s staples" like "I Melt With You" and "A Million Miles Away", and the live sequence with the Plimsouls is one of my favorite live sequences from a movie, like ever.

For Moon's 40th birthday, here are a few songs from the Valley Girl soundtrack. I tried to focus on songs by girls, but the Sparks contribution is one of my favorites by them, and largely unknown outside of their hardcore fanbase.

Songs from Valley Girl:

1. Bonnie Hayes & the Wild Combo - Girls Like Me
2. The Flirts - Jukebox (Don't Put Another Dime)
3. Josie Cotton - Johnny Are You Queer?
4. Sparks - Eaten By The Monster of Love

You can't blow out a fire.

On the list of tragic evens that happened this week in history, this is the 30th anniversary of the death of anti-apartheid activist Stephen Biko. South African police claimed his death was the result of his extended hunger strike, but it was later discovered to be the result of a beating by police. Like most people my age, I learned about Stephen Biko from the song by Peter Gabriel.

Last weekend I watched the movie Cry Freedom, which was adapted from the book Biko by Donald Woods, which was PG's inspiration to write the song "Biko".

There's a powerful scene at the end where "Biko" plays over a list of prisoners who died in police custody during apartheid alongside their "official" causes of death ("suicide by hanging", "accidental trauma"). It's still one of the most powerful scenes I've ever seen in a movie, and was even more powerful when Cry Freedom came out in the dying days of South African apartheid in 1987.

I'll teach you to laugh at something that's funny!

Just back from the local singleplex, where I sawThe Simpsons Movie (in 2D) tonight. Their show has been on a plateau for the last few years, not a decline just a plateau, but the movie takes me back to the early days of the series. It has a story arc instead of just being a series of gags, and the focus is more on the Simpson family than the supporting cast or celebrity guests, just like it was on the first few seasons of the show.

It was a lot like a 3-part Simpsons episode where the first part sets the stage, the second part leads to the crisis point (the "To be continued" point if you've seen the film), rand the third part resolves the story. It follows a standard story plot, rather than the flow of recent Simpsons episodes, where situation A leads to unrelated situation B, and so on and so forth until situation Z, when the show ends. It takes good writing to do shows like that, but would grow tiring if the shows were 90 minutes long instead of 30 minutes long.

And the Simpsons Movie is even shorter than 90 minutes in length! I went to the 5:00 show and was home for dinner by 6:40, even with the previews and the ten minute drive home. There are some raunchy bits to give it the PG13 rating: casual drug use, frontal exposure, using the Lord's name in vain, but no one dropped any f-bombs, even if it would have been funny to see America's cartoon family cursing like the kids on South Park.

Knocked up with nostalgia

I finally made it out to see Knocked Up this week, and enjoyed it, but wasn't knocked out by it. It's a lot like Judd Apatow's first film The 40 Year Old Virgin, a series of funny scenes strung together by a fairly weak. Both movies are like early 80s teenage sex comedies updated for middle-agers who remember the time before AIDS and "Just Say No". I heard 40 Year Old Virgin referred to as a "middle-aged sex comedy", which is a pretty apt description of that film.

Actually, Knocked Up reminded me a lot of 1982's Fast Times at Ridgemont High. When it came out, Fast Times was perceived as another mindless teenage sex & drugs movie (Roger Ebert called in a "scuzz-pit of a movie"), but now it's seen as a classic of the genre. A raunchy teenage sex comedy with a heart and a mind. The cast included three future Oscar winners (Sean Penn, Forest Whittaker, and Nicolas Cage) and other actors who went on to greater things (Sean's stoner buds were played by Nic Cage, Eric Stoltz, and Anthony Edwards).

There was one part of Fast Times where Jennifer Jason Leigh's character Stacy gets pregnant and then decides to have an abortion. This was all handled completely matter-of-factly, like it was something that happened every day. Fast Times was the first R rated movie I saw in a theater (it came out right after I turned 17), and it's also one of the only times I remember a pregnancy being aborted in a comedy (this was before I saw Polyester).

In Knocked Up, Alison gets pregnant by some guy she barely knows, and then decides to keep the baby. It's all treated the same way that Stacy's pregnancy is treated in Fast Times, as something that needs to be taken care of. Some reviews have said that the values in the film "defy credibility". The story of the film is not really why she gets knocked up or decided to make a go with an aimless slacker, but how they both handle the situation of having a baby. Sometimes you need to suspend your credibility in a comedy. Just repeat to yourself "it's just a movie, I should really just relax... and remember to laugh!".

Bunny Lake is blown up

Sometimes when I'm looking for things to write about, out of things to post, I like to check wikipedia for today's birthdays and things that happened X years ago.

Among today's birthday boys are Jeff Beck, Colin Blunstone, Mick Fleetwood, and Arthur Brown (as in "The Crazy World of"), which sounds like a supergroup waiting to happen.

Blunstone's and Beck's bands (say that five times fast!) were both featured in cult movies from the mid 1960s. Colin (born in 1945, so he's 62 today) and the Zombies appeared in Otto Preminger's Bunny Lake Is Missing, which is about about a woman who reports that her daughter is missing, even though there isn't any evidence that her daugher ever existed. It's a strange premise for a movie, and I think Zombies appearance is the best thing about the film.

They perform on the television in one scene and play a few songs for the soundtrack ("Come On Time", "Just Out of Reach", and "Remember You"). The first two are the same song with different lyrics, which was one of the few Zombies songs penned by Colin Blunstone. There isn't any youtube footage of their performance, so I've ripped and uploaded the three soundtrack tunes. Anton Barbeau and the Loud Family covered "Remember You" on last year's What If It Works? album.

The Zombies (from Bunny Lake is Missing)
Come On Time
Just Out Of Reach
Remember You

Our other birthday boy in the spotlight, Jeff Beck, is 63 today, so he's one year older than Colin Blunstone and three days younger than Ray Davies. Here's a cool performance from Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up of Beck playing "Train Kept A Rollin'" with the Yardbirds (short-lived Beck, Page dual lead lineup) and smashing his guitar at the end, a la Townshend.


Blow-Up also doesn't have much of a linear narrative, but has lots of scenes of swinging London, and full frontal nudity, as well as this scene with the Yardbirds.

Once in Dublin's fair city

"I do not look like that prat from Coldplay!" -- Glen Hansard

I went to see Once this weekend, as I threatened last week, and liked it a lot. For me, the film started off with one strike against it, because the lead actor (Glen Hansard of the Frames) looks and sounds a lot like Chris Martin from Coldplay. See side by side photos of both of them above.

After I determined that it really wasn't Chris Martin in the lead role, I was able to get over my "Oh no, it's that dude from Coldplay!" prejudices and follow the film with a clean head. I actually saw the Frames live many years ago (opening for the New Pornographers, I think) and recall that they did not rock very much, but they don't deserve Coldplay comparisons, because they've been around a lot longer.

In Once, Hansard plays a street musician and vacuum cleaner repairman who meets a young Czech immigrant (played by Marketa Irglova) selling roses on the same Dublin street where he's playing. She (their characters are unnamed) likes his songs and happens to be a musician, so they end up ... making music together. In real life, Hansard and Irglova are partners (musical partners), who collaborated on a project called The Swell Season, making an album that contains many of the songs featured in Once. Their album is on emusic, so if you're having trouble getting "Falling Slowly" or "When Your Mind's Made Up" unstuck from your head after seeing Once (like I did) the songs are easy to grab as cheap digital downloads.

Hansard played the guitarist in The Commitments, so Once was only his second movie role and Marketa Irglova's debut. They are both musicians and not actors, so the musical scenes are more realising then they'd be with actors playing musicians. Once actually reminded me of The Commitments, with a smaller budget and less of a "Hollywood" storyline. It's the movie making equivalent of a four track demo, shot with a single camera and a lots of rough cuts which gives it the look of a fly-on-the-wall rockumentary. Apparently director John Carney didn't get a permit to film in Dublin, so all the shooting in the city had to be done incognito.

Once has been getting great reviews, both from professional reviewers and my own friends, so I was pretty sure I'd enjoy it, and I did. Now I'm down to just three free Cinemark passes, and don't know if I want to use one one up on Michael Moore.

Multiplexed

Last month I won five free Cinemark theatre movie tickets from work for answering a film trivia question (imagine that!), and there are a bunch of Cinemark locations near where I live and where I work, but the passes are only valid for movies that are more than two weeks old, and it seems like they're all showing the same movies this summer.

The main batch are the sequels and three-quels (Oceans Thirteen, Pirates of the Caribbean 3, Shrek The Third, Spider Man 3, 28 Weeks Later). I used my first pass for Spiderman 3 a few weeks ago (suck-o-rama, and I liked the first two), and am not that interested in seeing the others. I haven't even seen most of the parts two of these movies.

The next batch are so-called "chick flicks" like Knocked Up and Waitress. I liked Judd Apatow's last film, 40-Year Old Virgin, so I'd like to see Knocked Up, and it opened on June 1st, so my passes are good starting this weekend . I've also discovered that Cinemark passes are also good at CinéArts theatres, so I could go see Once which is getting good reviews from people on my own blogroll. Once also gets the metacritic edge over Knocked Up (89 to 85), so I think that's the one I'll see first.

It's probably not big surprise to my readers that I'm not as up on the movies as I am on other things, so I'm open to suggestions for other movies to see. I'm open to anything more than two weeks old that's playing at a Cinemark cinema, at least until I use up all my free tickets!

We're gonna live forever (or die trying)

I saw the Britpop documentary Live Forever on BBC America over the weekend, and thought it was quite entertaining and hilarious, even though I didn't know a whole lot about the scene and the era. The movie frames the "Brit Pop Era" as the three years between the death of Kurt Cobain (Apr 1994) and Princess Di (Aug 1997), which isn't a very long era for something that claimed it will "live forever". It does for Oasis what The Filth & The Fury did for the Sex Pistols.

The story is told through interviews with the principals, including the Gallagher brothers (Noel comes off funny and intelligent, Liam as dumber than a bag of hammers), Damon Albarn of Blur (brooding and self-important), and Jarvis Cocker of Pulp (the most likable of the lot!). It touches on the Blur vs. Oasis "Battle of Britpop" in August 1995, when both bands put out new singles ("Country House" and "Roll With It") on the same week. This chart battle was seen as some large scale class-war in the tabloids, with the "gritty working class" (Oasis) against the "arty middle class" (Blur) and Noel quoted as saying he hoped Blur would "catch AIDS and die" for keeping Oasis out of the #1 spot. There's also a hilarious interview with the Oasis tribute band Wonderwall (who are stone serious in their laddism) , and an interesting look at how Tony Blair's New Labour movement won the general election in 1997 by aligning themselves with the "hard playing" Britpop generation.

Back then, it was hard for me to separate the songs (Oasis, Blur, and Pulp were all decent bands) from the obnoxious singers, so I gave the whole Britpop scene a wide berth. I think the music itself has aged a lot better than post-grunge squall. In hindsight, I've gained an admiration for early Blur (thanks to Graham Coxon's solo work) and the first two Oasis albums, so maybe Britpop will live.. at least longer than I thought it would.

And I only missed one question on BBC America's BritPop Quiz.

We are your insect uncles

I was finally able to watch John Edgington's Robyn Hitchcock documentary Sex, Food, Death…And Insects over the weekend.

The movie shows Robyn and his band the Venus 3 (Peter, Scott, Bill) rehearsing new material at his house in West London then playing a couple of shows at Maxwell's in Hoboken and the Crocodile Cafe in Seattle. The sessions feature guest appearances by Morris Windsor ( Soft Boys/Egyptians drummer), John Paul Jones (of Led Zep fame), Nick Lowe, Gillian Welch & David Rawlings, and Robyn's niece Ruby Wright (playing the musical saw). It's a fascinating look at Robyn and the Venus 3 writing and recording, interspersed with interviews of the participants.

It's also interesting to note that these sessions for his next album (the one after Ole! Tarantula) were filmed in the summer of 2005, nearly a year before Tarantula was released. Also during the tour footage, Robyn and the band (Peter Buck, Scott McCaughey, and Bill Rieflin) are riding together in a small van, and seem to be having a blast scaling everything down and breaking away from the R.E.M.-level excess. It's also great to see music legends like Nick Lowe and John Paul Jones let down their (gray) hair and just being regular guys.

The movie itself is highly recommended, but won't win any wardrobe awards. Unlike Stay, the clothing in Sex, Death.. and Insects was "worse than almost any other film". For Robyn Hitchcock and Peter Buck, every day is ugly shirt Friday (check out that polka-dot monstrosity that Robyn's wearing in the photo above)

Update: looking for when this movie is playing again, I came across this review:

There was a time in the 1980s and 1990s when mentioning that you listened to Robyn Hitchcock was the easiest way to score a date with the artsy college girl of your choice.

The easiest way? I need to travel back in time to the 80s and 90s and try that line out on artsy college girls!

Classic rock cinema

I saw two Rolling Stones movies on TV last weekend: Gimme Shelter (on the Sundance Channel) and Rock and Roll Circus (on PBS). Very interesting to compare and contrast the two shows, which were recorded a year apart from each other.

My interest in the Stones tends to ebb and flow, but I’ve started listening to them more lately. I’ve watched Gimme Shelter a few times, but normally only watch for the twenty seconds of the naked hippies dancing to Gram & the Burritos playing “Six Days On The Road”. The rest of the movie is (to paraphrase Jerry Garcia and the Rubinoos) a "bummer", especially when you know how it ends. How did a free concert by the biggest band in the world get approved just two days beforehand? Who thought hiring Hells Angels for security was a good idea? Were people really that stupid back in the 60s?

For late 60s Stones footage, Rock and Roll Circus is a lot more fun. It’s been out on video tape and DVD for awhile, but I’d never seen it before, except the Who’s performance of "A Quick One While He's Away" on The Kids are Alright, which has to be one of their finest moments as a band.

According to the R&RC wikipedia entry, the Stones withheld its release for 20 years because they felt their performance was substandard, but I thought they sounded great. This was Brian Jones’ last performance as a Rolling Stone, and he looks a bit lost for most of their set, but the rest of the band were on, and they played some of my favorite rarely-played tunes from Beggar’s Banquet (their brand new album): “Parachute Man”,”No Expectations”, and “Salt of the Earth”.

The show also shows a pre-Sabbath Tony Iommi playing with Jethro Tull, and a pre-junkie Marianne Faithful. This concert was a holy grail for rock collectors for a long time before it came out because it had the Rolling Stones, the Who, and one Beatle (John Lennon’s Dirty Mac) on the same stage. I don’t know if I need to buy the DVD, but it’s entertaining to watch once or twice.

Oscar talk

Why does the telecast run long every year? It's a TV show, not a sporting event! Can't they either schedule each segment to fit within the allotted time or schedule a longer time period? And why am I watching? I don't even like movies! Hey, Scorsese finally won best director (and also picture, but he's probably done that before). Cool!

Addendum: Al Gore's best documentary award for An Inconvenient Truth has to be the first Academy Award by a former US Vice President.