Comment Archives: stories: Movies
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: “Belcourt midnight movie Fight Club's rabid fan base doesn't understand it's taking all the hits”
Uhhh...what?
I'm pretty sure one can be a fan of Fight Club -- even a "diehard" fan -- and not necessarily qualify as "lame," "meek," or not a man. (And, yes, you have slighted my manhood.) But, needless to say, when I watch Fight Club, I am not unnerved; I am not inspired; and I usually do not sit back and bask in the fantasy of being Tyler Durden while wishing desperately that I could break out of the droning monotony of my suburban existence and kick as much ass as he does. At the same time, when I'm watching movies, I'm usually not spending my time thinking up dissertation topics revolving around "the derangement of penis envy."
Watching Fight Club can be a visceral experience, not because of the subject matter, but, because you are in the hands of a master director, arguably at his peak, making a very funny movie, perfectly cast, with a countless number of ridiculously inventive scenes.
Maybe I've missed the hordes of blockheads who loudly espouse Fight Club for its badassed asskickingness, but I've never quite understood all of the overwrought theorizing: this isn't Michael Bay; this isn't Mens Humor: it's Fincher, Pitt, Ed Norton, Helena Bonham Carter, and freaking Meatloaf in a movie about an underground fight club.
Get a grip.
Re: “Rediscovered singer-songwriter Sixto Rodriguez embraces newfound fame through the doc Searching for Sugar Man ”
Rodriguez never made a blip on the AMERICAN music scene. Rock and folk scenes in other countries can be totally different from the American scene. Do you know how huge the British performer Cliff Richard was, and retrospectively is, in Britain? Here he's a footnote at best. Certain American bands are much bigger in Europe--Nashville's own Lambchop is an example. Jim Reeves was and is certainly big in the U.S., but you might be surprised to find that he was "more popular than Elvis Presley in South Africa" in the 60s, and did some recording in Afrikaans. Sitting here I'm not coming up with an American performer similar to Rodriguez who was totally unknown in the U.S. but highly celebrated in some other country, as if by accident, but there are certainly those who had worshipful followings elsewhere whose devotion went beyond that of American vans--Gene Vincent in Britain, for example. And there are lots of interesting expatriates, like Rocky Roberts, an African American singer who moved to Italy and became very famous there. Here's a really hot record he and the Airedales made in English.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DRu1p47mTk
Re: “Rediscovered singer-songwriter Sixto Rodriguez embraces newfound fame through the doc Searching for Sugar Man ”
>>does not exist in your small world<<
You have no idea what size "my" world is, small or large, so keep your speculation on that to yourself.
Re: “Rediscovered singer-songwriter Sixto Rodriguez embraces newfound fame through the doc Searching for Sugar Man ”
@bobsguns. Hans Christian Andersen's fable -The Emperor's new clothes is very apt here.
The fact that "this Rodriguez guy" does not exist in your small world, or the rest of mainstream America for that matter, does not make him a lesser talent.
Re: “Rediscovered singer-songwriter Sixto Rodriguez embraces newfound fame through the doc Searching for Sugar Man ”
>>His "cult following" was in South Africa.<<
Yes, I saw the "60 Minutes" piece. No need to repeat it.
But the usual folk/protest singers never included this guy. Dylan, Baez, Country Joe, CSN (to an extent) & others, yes. But not this Rodriguez guy. He never made a blip on the music scene as far as I can tell/remember.
Re: “Rediscovered singer-songwriter Sixto Rodriguez embraces newfound fame through the doc Searching for Sugar Man ”
His "cult following" was in South Africa. I am guessing you did not get down there very often, though I dare wonder whether you might have found it congenial.
Re: “Rediscovered singer-songwriter Sixto Rodriguez embraces newfound fame through the doc Searching for Sugar Man ”
I saw his spot on "60 Minutes" last night. As much as I like to think myself as "in-tune" with 70's music, I have NEVER heard of this guy in any way, shape or form.
His "cult" following must've fit inside a phone booth......
Re: “Rediscovered singer-songwriter Sixto Rodriguez embraces newfound fame through the doc Searching for Sugar Man ”
Just saw the film last night, and I must say Rodriguez is now my role model for how I want to live life: not thinking of the future or what might or might not happen, but just enjoying the pleasures of the present moment.
Re: “Rediscovered singer-songwriter Sixto Rodriguez embraces newfound fame through the doc Searching for Sugar Man ”
Wow what an amazing story.!
Re: “Looper uncommonly crafty as action thriller, uncommonly exciting as art film — and great fun as both”
Obviously you'd know better than I, but isn't Joe ignoring "his relationship with himself" -- overcoming a lifetime of selfishness -- ultimately the point?
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".