Comment Archives: stories: Movies
Re: “To Sergio with love: The Belcourt salutes the spaghetti Western's (other) master”
Even before DJANGO UNCHAINED, it's notable how much Tarantino lifted from these films, especially their sudden, bizarre spurts of violence and mix of carnage and humor.
Re: “Talking with Life of Pi director Ang Lee about big cats, huge risks and the 3D canvas”
Great stuff Jason!
Re: “Read this review of Twilight: Breaking Dawn — Part 2 — but only after you've seen the movie”
The first four-fifths of this 115-minute movie seemed longer than GONE WITH THE WIND. Worst thing I've seen in a theater all year—abysmal acting and writing, purely functional direction. But the shriek of outrage that went up when [REDACTED] was worth the whole thing. You'd've thought they were field-dressing Bambi's mother.
Re: “Talking with veteran director Ted Kotcheff, whose rediscovered classic Wake in Fright is the movie of the moment”
Wonderful interview... and a great, one-of-a-kind film. Thanks.
Re: “Stacy Peralta's Bones Brigade doc celebrates skateboarding's first Dream Team”
Some great zorlac decks from Donny ...
http://i1014.photobucket.com/albums/af261/GatorALLin/Non%20Ripper%20Deck%20Pics/fe41faca.jpg
Thanks also to Sam...
http://s1014.photobucket.com/albums/af261/GatorALLin/Non%20Ripper%20Deck%20Pics/#!cpZZ8QQtppZZ28
Re: “The 50th New York Film Festival offers a seasonal forecast for Nashville movie lovers”
Agreed on SPEED RACER. I often cite it to my students as probably the only big budget film that takes the shift to digital as an occasion for a sea change instead of business as usual. I hate it, but I think that's the point -- it spits in the eye of my outdated modernist aesthetics. Like Straub used to say about his films, SPEED RACER is for a spectator who doesn't exist yet.
Re: “The 50th New York Film Festival offers a seasonal forecast for Nashville movie lovers”
"the most visually adventurous film to emerge from Hollywood's mainstream.".... I'd still give this one to SPEED RACER.
Good to hear there are some great female roles coming at us soon. It's been a terrible year for female actors, aside from ELENA, Rachel Weisz and Hushpuppy...
Re: “Splatter that matters: Belcourt's horror-movie marathon 12 Hours of Terror sets the gross-out bar throat-high”
I’m not very good at watching horror movies in theaters (people get annoyed with my screaming) but I plan to check out a couple of these at home this Halloween. Demons and Society are available from Blockbuster @Home, and should ship fast enough that I’ll have them by the 31st. I’ll just have to make sure a few friends I work with at DISH can come over. I hate watching scary movies alone. And good luck to everyone going to the 12-hour marathon, you’re braver than me!
Re: “Belcourt midnight movie Fight Club's rabid fan base doesn't understand it's taking all the hits”
Props for the Patrice reference.
Re: “Belcourt midnight movie Fight Club's rabid fan base doesn't understand it's taking all the hits”
As Dr. Freud (I hope I speeeled that right...I'm on my first cup of cafe) would say:
"Sometimes a movie is just a movie."
Just be thankful the Belcourt is still open and perhaps the writer should pray for the reshowing of "Orlando".
Re: “Belcourt midnight movie Fight Club's rabid fan base doesn't understand it's taking all the hits”
"Needs to stay this wake"? What a dumbass.
Re: “Belcourt midnight movie Fight Club's rabid fan base doesn't understand it's taking all the hits”
Worst post I've ever read here. I thought the Nashville scene was suppose to promote things going on around Nashville, not bad talk a movie that obviously wasn't meant for the person who wrote this 100% trash talking article. If you like the movie and love the Belcourt go see it. Don't listen to this guy, feel sorry the Nashville Scene. They pay this chump haha.
BTW I hope this isn't actually published in the Nashville Scene. This is internet garbage and needs to stay this wake for the sake of this magazines reputation.
Re: “Rediscovered singer-songwriter Sixto Rodriguez embraces newfound fame through the doc Searching for Sugar Man ”
Yeah, Northern Soul is a weird thing. Alice Clark's "Don't You Care" is a fairly classic example of the...whatever it is, style, genre, umbrella term. And some things like the Parliaments' "Look at What I Almost Missed" are undeniably great songs that do fit into the, er, uhm, rubric. As a critic and writer, I'm not a fanatic--fanatics don't make sound judgements about things-- but I do take the time to wade through a lot of stuff just to say I've heard it, and I have a friend who has, like, a 12-hour documentary on Northern Soul! he watched it all, I didn't.
"Obscure" is a funny word. If something is in the '70s Christgau book, I think it wasn't all that obscure, altho there are some very odd little records in there--ever heard of Soup? William Truckaway? Remember Genya Ravan? Joel Zoss? If anyone can dig up those Hirth Martinez records, I'd be a happy man. Crowbar's "Bad Manors" LP? Southwind, who featured former Beau Brummels singer Dino Valenti, and who did a nice version of the Kinks' "Rainy Day in June"? It's one of the pleasures of being a Nashvillian--finding great old vinyl at next to nothing. There's one very unlikely place in town that is a repository of such treasures, mostly sealed and brand-new, and I ain't telling you where it is.
Re: “Rediscovered singer-songwriter Sixto Rodriguez embraces newfound fame through the doc Searching for Sugar Man ”
The Northern Soul thing certainly has a tendency to run away with itself, but there are some genuinely great records out there.
Light In the Attic, Numero Group, Now-Again... the reissue market is full of possibilities at the moment.
That movie was fantastic, but I definitely remember hearing that "Sugarman" song on 91.1 quite a bit around the turn of the century.
Re: “Rediscovered singer-songwriter Sixto Rodriguez embraces newfound fame through the doc Searching for Sugar Man ”
You certainly do know a lot of obscure rock records, Edd!
Re: “Rediscovered singer-songwriter Sixto Rodriguez embraces newfound fame through the doc Searching for Sugar Man ”
and Pete, right, Lambchop is more popular in England than they are here. Gene Vincent. Lots of people. for that matter, the entire weird "Northern Soul" scene in England is a perfect example of this syndrome. Take any moderately talented African-American soul singer whose records were not hits, and therefore obscure in country of origin, and presto--you have the very strange and rabid English soul fans jumping all over themselves to call them "great." there are millions of those strange Northern Soul hits and you'd have to be a fanatic to name one of them. OK, I'm a semi-fanatic, I can name one that should've been a hit in the US and is better than anything Rodriguez ever cut: Nolan Porter's 1972 single "If I Could Only Be Sure," an amazing record. Out of print at the moment.
Re: “Rediscovered singer-songwriter Sixto Rodriguez embraces newfound fame through the doc Searching for Sugar Man ”
Awareness of Rodriguez in the Anglo-American world of rock enthusiasts began with an article in "Mojo" magazine in 2002. Rodriguez had toured both Australia and South Africa by then. As I say in my article, he had even released a live album for the Australian market, and had toured with the band Midnight Oil. So he wasn't exactly unknown in those places.
But then, Rodriguez was perhaps just a little more obscure than any number of similar '70s artists I could name without consulting a reference book or my record shelves: Nolan Porter, Thomas Jefferson Kaye, Charles Bevel, Hirth Martinez, Stormin' Norman and Suzy, Elliott Murphy. Apart from Hirth, whose records I can't find, I've found records made by every other artist on that list, and they all have as much claim to be recognized as does Rodriguez--perhaps even more. And that's not to mention such artists as Karen Dalton, Collie Ryan and Linda Perhacs. The artists in the first list are all included in the standard reference book on the '70s, Bob Christgau's "Rock Albums of the '70s." Dalton, Ryan, Perhacs, Caroline Peyton and many, many others whose music has been rediscovered by such labels as Light in the Attic and Numero Group--Darondo is another American soul artist now being rediscovered--do not appear in the Christgau book, which does cover an awful lot of now-obscure music.
So "Cold Fact" and "Coming from Reality" must have been pretty obscure, or deemed by the obsessively complete Christgau as not worth mentioning, derivative, etc. I never read a single review or mention of those records before about ten years ago, myself. One thing that the current boom of reissues teaches us is that there was an awful lot of pretty good music being made in the '70s that virtually no one heard, from Marie Queenie Lyons to Perhacs' "Parallelograms" to the excellent, and still non-CD, efforts by Nolan Porter, who if anything is even better than Rodriguez, and still alive.
Thomas Jefferson Kaye's "First Grade" is a classic album and it's never been reissued on CD. For that matter, the Nashville-recorded albums by Larry Jon Wilson have been reissued by Australians who didn't bother to interview Rob Galbraith, who produced them, and who lives in Nashville. I met Rob last year and he didn't even know about the reissue!
But there are actually very few unjustly uncelebrated popular artists--I know soul fans who claim that, say, the obscure '70s soul singer Alice Clark is "great." As good as Aretha. She's not.
Rodriguez has probably now reached more people in 6 months, with the movie, his Letterman appearance, television spots, and the Light in the Attic reissues--and appearances at Newport and other high-profile venues--than he did in the 30-odd years of his career up until that "Mojo" article.
Re: “Belcourt midnight movie Fight Club's rabid fan base doesn't understand it's taking all the hits”
I think this piece misses something about Fight Club. Like a lot of the best satire, it lets the target do some speaking for itself, and while the target's discourse is ultimately contradicted it is not NEGATED. There's a difference.
Randy Newman's "Rednecks" lets the narrator, however unreliable, put some real wit and punch into his dismissals of "a smart-ass New York Jew." I remember that when Newman played Nashville many years ago, one guy stood up and enthusiastically urged that song on, seemingly without irony--I think he was even singing along. When Scene veteran Michael McCall wrote up that show, he claimed that the guy got all meek and embarrassed on the line about "keeping the niggers down," but honestly I don't remember that--I recall that he was just about as pumped up about that as he was about everything else. There may have been some facetiousness in his reaction but he was clearly carried along by the strength of the narrator's resentment. Similarly, people have said that the Velvet Underground's song "Heroin" is the best anti-drug song ever BECAUSE OF its unabashed representation of the heroin experience's seductiveness.
Fight Club takes an unorthodox cure for anomie and suggests it inevitably becomes dehumanizing fascism (the individuals are nothing while Project Mayhem is everything--only in death does Bob have a name). Ebert is incontrovertibly correct about Project Mayhem. BUT: don't many of us wonder what a life bought out of an IKEA catalog is (or would be; I certainly don't own any IKEA) worth? Don't many of us now and then conceive ideas, however fleeting, that are much like pinning an executive to a bathroom floor and threatening to liberate his testicles? Don't many of us wonder what Talking Heads' "Life During Wartime"--a life in which there are no givens, no paper advantages, no phony obligations--would be like? I won't ask whether many of us want to form clubs in which we bash each other's heads against the ground, because while some of us may, that has absolutely no appeal to me. I am a wimp whose last fight was in fifth grade (I lost). But still, there's a visceral thrill to the scenes that are literally about Fight Club.
Fight Club makes no effort to make the devil look dull or the urge to creative destruction look like a childish aberration. It tells us a possible outcome when a deranged, solipsistic masculinity, self-uprooted from connection and empathy, guides the impulses. But it represents the impulses attractively and with obvious relish, and if it didn't it would be a much poorer movie.
The New York subculture now remembered as the Bowery Boys (not Huntz Hall and Leo Gorcey, but the actual folks) used to go to the theater a lot. Someone inevitably came up with the bright idea of putting on stage a character based on them. As described in (I think) Luc Sante's book Low Life, this character strutted out on stage, looked around, and spat out, "I ain't runnin' with that mercheen [i.e., fire company; volunteer fire departments were a huge part of Bowery social life] no more!" The audience sat stunned for a moment and then totally erupted. Turn the naturalism of that play into the psychodrama of Fight Club and you've got a similar phenomenon. The movie turns this phenomenon back on itself, and that's good, but it doesn't scold like the above blog post does, and it's a far better movie for it.
Re: “Powell and Pressburger's beautiful Life and Death of Colonel Blimp an audacious epic vision of 20th century warfare”
Colonel blimp is one great hero and if you like blimps, take a look at Gasbags lighter than air comedy web site: www.hybridblimp.net
Re: “To Sergio with love: The Belcourt salutes the spaghetti Western's (other) master”
Did you catch the screening of DJANGO UNCHAINED in NY, Steve?