How many dozens of times will McCartney 3,2,1 show us footage of these music industry legends — singer-songwriter Paul McCartney, 79, and hip-hop producer Rick Rubin, 58 — listening to isolated-track playbacks of Beatles songs from the ’60s and early ’70s, and particularly of McCartney lip-synching along and having fun with each tune?
I’ve just been watching teasers and trailers and I’m sickofitalready.
And I have to say this even if it doesn’t sound nice. I’ll hang with Macca anyhow and any way, but I don’t like the idea of spending several hours listening to old songs with a guy who looks like a cross between Moondoggy and a balding Santa Claus. Rubin has friendly eyes but the beard is way too big and bushy…later.
It’s basically footage of Wilson and Fine, a Rolling Stone editor and longtime friend of the 78 year-old musical genius and Beach Boy maestro, driving around Los Angeles and visiting locations from Brian’s past. And what it boils down to is an intimate portrait of a good, gentle soul, but one who is clearly a bit twitchy and beset by unruly currents.
Honestly? Long Promised Road felt a bit exploitive. It made me feel awkward, uncomfortable. I felt sorry for Brian. He’s a good soul but I felt as if he was being subjected to a fair amount of discomfort in speaking to Fine. There was a medium close-up of Brian performing that reminded me that he reads his own lyrics off a teleprompter. It’s good that he gets out and performs, but there’s something creepy about the film. I felt badly for him.
Friendo: “I met Wilson in 1995, and he could barely carry on a conversation — and that’s true in the film as well. And obviously, he can’t sing anymore. But I don’t find any of that creepy. That’s just who Brian Wilson is, and my honest feeling is: It’s good that he survived, and has a life. He hasn’t written a memorable song in decades, but ‘Smile’ — the 2004 version — is one of my all-time favorite records. I think even now, he radiates the energy of a good soul.
HE to Friendo: “Yes, a good soul. A good heart. I’m glad he’s still plugging away. But the doc still felt a bit cruel. Fine is a decent guy but the very act of training a camera lens on poor Brian flirts with heartless exploitation — I was saying to myself, ‘Jesus, they should leave the poor guy alone.’ A gentle soul but quite twitchy. Kid gloves.”
When the anti-disco revolt began in the spring of ’79, advocates were derided as both homophobic and racist. If you wore a “Death to Disco” T-shirt…if you liked The Who‘s “Sister Disco” or Bob Seger‘s “Old Time Rock ‘n’ Roll,” you were behind the curve and maybe a chip off the old asshole block**.
I explicitly recall my friend Stuart Byron, an “out” Village Voice columnist who later worked for producer Ray Stark, telling me to my face that I’d be wise to keep my loathing of disco under wraps lest I sound like a homophobe.
40-plus years later the disco haters have been totally vindicated by history and the tradition of good musical taste, and nobody even alludes to homophobia as any kind of lingering undercurrent.
This hasn’t stopped today’s reverse-racist wokesters from using the same bullshit against anyone who doesn’t fall into line in the movie realm. If you dare to apply seasoned judgment in the assessing of this or that film that happens to be POC-focused…if, say, you’re a devout admirer of Lakeith Stanfield‘s performance in Judas and the Black Messiah or Steve McQueen‘s 12 Years A Slave, Widows and Mangrove (as I am) but you have reservations about the late Chadwick Boseman winning the Best Actor Oscar for his “okay but no great shakes” Ma Rainey performance or Viola Davis‘s blustery, obviously supporting lip-synch fatsuit performance (as I do), you might have an attitude problem.
“The undercurrent of A Bigger Splash is gently mesmerizing, and that was enough for me. I can’t wait to see it again, or more precisely go there again. I felt like I was savoring a brief vacation. I’m not saying the dramatic ingredients are secondary, but they almost are.”
“You feel so nicely brought along by Yorick Le Saux‘s sun-speckled afternoon cinematography and Walter Fasano‘s disciplined cutting, and by the nostalgic Stones vibe (there’s a lip-synch dance sequence that made me fall in love all over again with ‘Emotional Rescue’) and especially by Ralph Fiennes’ giddy-ass, run-at-the-mouth, rock-and-roll madman performance that I was going ‘wow, I almost don’t even care what may or may not happen in this thing.’
“Well, I did as far as the plot unfolded. When the heavy-ass, third-act complications arrived I was…well, not uninterested. They’re definitely intriguing as far as they go, especially when the law steps in and starts asking questions. But I just liked being there.” — from “Much Better Splash Than Expected — Perverse, Noirish, High-Style, Sensual,” posted on 4.11.16.
“In short, Luca Guadagnino has made something rare and disconcerting: a genuinely pagan film. It rejoices not just in nudity, male and female, but in the classical notion of figures in a landscape, and of the earth itself demanding frenzied worship. That is why Harry (Ralph Fiennes), having put on a Rolling Stones LP, begins to dance to ‘Emotional Rescue’ and then, clearly fettered by interior space, bursts out onto the rooftop and continues his display under a scorching haze. Who would have thought that an Englishman, of all people, would prove to be such a natural Dionysian?” — from Anthony Lane’s 5.2.16 New Yorker review.
The Police’s Synchronicity popped on 6.17.83 — nearly 38 years ago. I used to listen to the cassette version on headphones, or via my little two-speaker system in my Harper Avenue apartment. I still listen to this album occasionally, and as I was driving to the market the other night I was feeling especially turned on by the perfectly mixed “Miss Gradenko.” And chuckling, I should add, at Stewart Copeland‘s nonsensical lyrics.
Please read them after the jump — you could call them a criticism of Russian Communism in the ’80s, but to me they’ve never amounted to a hill of fucking beans. But of course, what is rock music if not great-sounding songs with WTF take-’em-or-leave’em lyrics, and sometimes spazzy, dead-end lyrics that would anesthetize your soul if you paid them any mind? I’m intensely proud of the fact that I’ve been ignoring the lyrics to “Miss Gradenko” for nearly 40 years.
Name your favorite nonsensical rock-tune lyrics. And don’t bring up “Louie Louie” — that song is about a guy who wants to get laid and can’t stop dreaming about it.
Certain songs and experiences are sometimes welded together in our hearts and memories. For me, The Police’s “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” will always be the song I listened to in a London pub on the night of December 7, 1980 — hours before the death of John Lennon. “Synchronicity” is the soundtrack to my so-called West Hollywood + Hollywood Reporter life of ’83 and ’84. Chumbawumba‘s “Tubthumping” will always be the anthem of the 1997 Mill Valley Film Festival, which the boys and I attended start to finish. And Simply Red/Mick Hucknall‘s “Sunrise” will always always always be the theme song of the 2003 Locarno Film Festival — another great adventure shared by Jett, Dylan and myself
An hour ago I came across a photo of a guy I used to know in Westfield, New Jersey, a leafy and well-tended middle-class town that I struggled and suffered in for years before we moved to Wilton, Connecticut. And a couple of musty memories began to seep through.
The Westfield guys I hung with were into sociopathic group sadism asakindof macho-pecking-order thing — a way of separating the wheat from the chaff. Somebody was always getting picked on. It was a kind of hazing ritual, the idea being to put someone’s feet to the fire and see how they’d hold up. Or something like that.
I never understood this damn game, but mockery, isolation and occasional de-pantsing (a gang of guys would literally hold a victim down and pull his pants off and leave him to walk home that way) were par for the course.
Anyway, five or six of us were all crashing in a beach house one weekend, sleeping on side-by-side mattresses in an upstairs rec room of some kind. And I recall waking up around 5 am because a couple of guys had slipped a tray or two of ice cubes inside the sleeping bag of another guy, and when he woke up he was so cold his voice was shuddering…he literally couldn’t speak clearly because he couldn’t stop shaking and trembling. He was standing near the foot of my mattress and berating the assholes who had ice-cubed him. Believe it or not but this kind of thing was par for the course.
After a while I went back to sleep. It was around 8 am when I was awakened with a hot foot — two or three large kitchen matches had been placed between my toes as I slept and then lit. I woke up with a shriek. (Or was it a howl?) I literally levitated off the mattress.
Posted on 2.19.18: The Westfield High School climate was hellish, no question. I suppose on some level it sharpened or toughened my game, but I think I suffered from a kind of PTSD for a couple of years after our family moved to Wilton, Connecticut.
In ’06 I passed along a story of drunken teenage vomiting during a long-ago weekend party at a New Jersey shore vacation home. It belonged to the parents of Barry, a nice-enough guy I knew and occasionally hung with during my mid-teen years when I lived in Westfield, New Jersey. A bunch of us had driven down there and partied without anyone’s parents knowing, especially Barry’s. No girls, no music to speak of — just a lot of beer and ale and vodka and everyone stumbling around.
During this weekend a big, dark-haired guy named Richard Harris had been chosen as the latest victim. He had thrown up on the floor of Barry’s beach home, and so he had to be punished. Much later that night (around 1 am) we found a dead mouse in a mouse trap, so we threw the corpse into a pot of boiling water and put it under the sheets of a bed Harris was sleeping in. He woke up five or ten seconds later and bellowed “get the fuck outta here!”
A half-hour later we went outside and shifted Harris’s Chevrolet into neutral and pushed the car down the neighborhood street about three or four blocks. We were all sitting around the next morning. Harris walked in through the pantry door, glaring like a gladiator and saying “where’s my fucking car?”
Chris Matthews to Vanity Fair‘s Joe Hagan on why he resigned early last month: “I didn’t argue about it, I didn’t deny it. I accepted the credibility of the complaint in the article. I didn’t want to challenge the person that made the complaint and wrote the article. I thought it was very credible and certainly within the person’s rights to write that article, of course. That was highly justified. Basically, as I said, to repeat myself, it’s inappropriate in the workplace to compliment somebody on their appearance, this is in the makeup chair, and I did it.”
Key Matthews excerpt: “On the matter of Biden’s vice-presidential pick, Matthews thinks Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar is the ideal choice for helping Biden grab the center, especially in the Midwest.
“‘It looks like she could be president if necessary, but not determined to have the office right away kind of thing,’ he said. ‘It’s very tricky when you have a president who will be in his 80s [for] half his first term or his only term perhaps. To pick the other person that’s too ready to be president, you want somebody who’s willing to be vice president for a while. Be vice president and not look like the guy’s a lame duck and I’m ready to take over.’
Embed code for Hive podcast insisted on including a large blank space so I trashed it. Click here for podcast.
“At the same time, Matthews sees the recent leadership of state governors like Gretchen Whitmer, Andrew Cuomo and Gavin Newsom as a preview of what national leadership in a post-Trump era might look like. ‘I think that’s a pretty good indicator what normal will look like when we get back to it,’ he said. ‘One of these governors may be the next president.'”
Vanity Fair‘s Joe Hagan: “[To me life is currently feeling like] Groundhog Day as written by Dostoevsky…we’re in a Russian novel that’s never going to end.”
Before introducing his Matthews discussion (which doesn’t happen for a good 10 or 12 minutes), Hagan sounds like a quivering p.c. candy-ass when he says he initially felt a little funny about even talking to Matthews, given his controversial canning from MSNBC for making a sexist comment to a Hardball guest in a dressing room, and for being generationally out-of-synch with the New Stalinism.
Hagan is right. Matthews is generally out of synch and he did say the wrong thing to the guest in question. But for decades he was a hotshot talk-show host, a veteran political news guy and Washington insider (and still is the latter two)…and Hagan feels funny about even talking to him?
Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson believes that the Oscar race or perhaps the show itself needs to somehow raise the general consciousness by focusing on raising money to support the industry. (And particularly exhibition, I’m thinking.) The ’21 Oscars need to become a spiritual fundraiser thing….the ultimate Night of a Thousand Stars.
The Academy should probably “step away from ABC,” Thompson suggests, as the network’s typical demands are not in synch with the existential pandemic reality that the industry is facing.
The Oscars, in other words, should be a little more about celebrating the industry itself and make the whole shebang into a kind of fundraiser, and the awards should perhaps be more about commercial potency and a little less about effete criteria. Or something like that. Maybe the Oscars need to delay a month or so? Sidenote: “The small indie films are going to get hurt.”
Will the 2020 Telluride Film Festival in fact be adding an extra day because they’ll have many more films to show this year than they’ll know what to do with? If so I need to reserve an extra day at the Mountainside Inn, the poor man’s Telluride lodging option. If this happens they’ll probably start a day early rather than a day late.
Last night I finally caught Danny Boyle and Richard Curtis‘s Yesterday, which is mostly a likable but harmless so-whatter. Alternate title: “I Was A British Beatles Admirer Who Managed To Become Them When They Were Erased From Memory (and Managed to Live High On The Hog For A While Until I Was Overwhelmed By Guilt).” I actually found it mildly diverting in the early stages. But I can’t say I loved or even really “enjoyed” it all that much. Well, I did here and there. And the audience seemed happy.
I hated the fact that the producers chose only the most banal, saccharine and/or over-played Beatles standards to populate the soundtrack with. I despise “Let It Be.” All my life “The Long and Winding Road’ has made me want to throw up. If I never hear “A Hard Day’s Night” again, it’ll be too soon. (I liked it when young but it gradually wore out its welcome.) But I love “”Happy Just To Dance With You” — why didn’t they use that one? Or “Things We Said Today”? Or “A Day in the Life”? Or “Cry Baby Cry”? Or “Here, There and Everywhere” or “Good Day Sunshine”?
I did, however, like one thing about Yesterday. Tremendously, I mean. Around the two-thirds or three-quarters mark comes a scene that I hadn’t read about in reviews, and it totally blew my mind. Because of this one passage (and BE WARNED because I intend to discuss it, which will mean nothing because everyone is writing about it) I was suddenly very happy that I was watching Yesterday. Because of a certain fellow’s return to the planet earth.
Otherwise this Boyle-Curtis concoction kept boring or bugging me in little ways. I always feel put off when movies “try” to be charming or cute or huggable. I really hate it when they’re selling that shit. But Yesterday is passingly or momentarily saved from this self-defeating approach whenever the camera is on Himesh Patel, whose performance is — this is highly unusual — winningly one-note.
Patel plays Jack Malik, an adept singer-guitarist from northeastern England who becomes a worldwide phenomenon when the Beatles are suddenly erased from memory after some kind of cosmic EMP blackout, which allows Malik to begin performing the entire Beatles catalogue as his own songs because no one knows any differently. What I loved about Patel is that he plays almost every scene with the same vaguely glum, vaguely stunned “uhhm, wait, hold on…what the fuck?” expression. “One-note performance” is always a negative judgment, I know, but not this time. I seriously loved Patel in this thing, and I’m not being facetious. “This guy’s on my team!” I kept saying to myself.
Whenever a good thing happens to Jack, he kind of half-smiles but blends it in with a vaguely glum, vaguely stunned “uhhm, wait, hold on…what the fuck?” expression. Whenever something draining or dispiriting happens, he responds with what can best be described as a vaguely glum, vaguely stunned “wait, hold on…what the fuck?” expression. And so on and so forth. Nothing shakes him out of this default attitude about life, about everything.
In my head I began to believe that Patel was speaking to grumpsters like myself with this expression. He seemed to be saying “Look, I’m just playing this guy, right? I love the money and the promotional boost that this film is giving my career, but c’mon…this movie is piffle! And here I am sort of half-behaving in a piffly fashion on its behalf. Except I’m not because of my nonstop ‘what the fuck?’ expression. Which you understand.”
I could understand roughly 20% to 30% of the dialogue spoken by Lily James, who plays Jack’s manager and secret romantic admirer. She’s about as understandable as any British working-class character in a Ken Loach film, and before you start in with the cracks about my hearing understand that I’ve seen many British films in Cannes that were shown with English subtitles. There’s a reason for that.
In a run-up piece on Rocketman by Variety‘s Mark Malkin, producer Matthew Vaughn recalls how Tom Hardy was attached to play Elton John in an earlier incarnation.
Vaughn scoffed at Hardy’s idea to lip-synch John’s singing. Vaughn: “I feel like an idiot saying it now, but I said, ‘Nobody is going to watch a movie where the lead character is lip synching.’ Cut to Bohemian Rhapsody and me being proven wrong.”
Taron Egerton, who plays John in Rocketman (which is screening here on Friday morning) is a first-rate singer, but his John imitation (to go by the trailer) doesn’t quite get it — close but a degree or two removed from take-it-to-the-bank authenticity.
“I knew how well Taron could sing and musicals are like action movies,” Vaughn tells Malkin. “If you look at Tom Cruise, you know he’s doing it. I’m hoping people are going to lose their minds for Taron when they hear him sing.”
A new trailer for Alan Elliott‘s Amazing Grace popped earlier today. There were hopes late last year that the doc, technically directed by the late Sydney Pollack, might land a nomination for a Best Feature Documentary Oscar, but that didn’t happen. Neon plans to open it sometime during the first quarter. (I think.)
Filmed over two nights (Thursday, 1.13.72 and Friday, 1.14.72) inside L.A.’s New Temple Missionary Baptist Church (So. Broadway near 87th Place), Amazing Grace became an unfinished calamity when it became clear that director Sydney Pollack and his crew shot had captured 20 hours of footage without shooting clapper boards at the start of each take, which in the analog era made the footage impossible to synch in post.
Amazing Grace is just as spirit-lifting as the early-birds have been saying. Classic rhythmic bass-throbby gospel, churning and turning and cranking it up…”Oh, my…oh, yeah! Oh, my…oh, yeah!” (That might have been my own private chorus.) I’ve been listening to Franklin’s singing all my life, but to watch her improvise and embroider and work through a song top to bottom, little beads of sweat covering her face and neck, her concentration fierce and joyous — pure flight, pure emotion, pure reach-for-the-skies.
Franklin is supported by top-tier pros…maximum energy, discipline, coordination. The barrel-chested Rev. James Cleveland (who died at age 59 in 1991) at the piano. The Southern California Community Choir, led by Alexander Hamilton. And Franklin’s superb backup band — guitarist Cornell Dupree, bassist Chuck Rainey, drummer Bernard Purdie, organist Ken Lupper, conga player Pancho Morales — is as good as it gets.
The bass-heavy soundtrack sounded analog-y. You could almost hear the tape hiss. It did wonderful things to my rib cage.
Oh, and there are two or three shots of Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts clapping along from behind the back row. Exile on Main Street had been recorded at the time, but was yet to be released. Sticky Fingers had been in circulation for eight or nine months.