November 2003 Archives

¶ After two episodes of ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT, we’re ready to give Liza Minelli the rebound award for “Best Save: Marriage and Career in Flames.” And she shouldn’t thank wardrobe, which hopefully is part of her character.

¶ Prison conversation between Spector and Jacko:
“What are you in for?”
”Murder…You?”
”It’s just a BIG misunderstanding…”

Could be rife with subtext about how Phil recognizes Michael, but Michael doesn’t seem to know who Phil is.

“Is that a toupe?” etc etc.
”Hey, you’re not one to talk about HAIR, my friend…”
or “No, is yours?”

"Hey Jacko, have any gangs approached you yet?"
"Is that what that was?

”Hey, Jacko, after we cut loose these chains, how’s about I do up your next album? I swear getting dissed by Paul McCartney after 30 years is worse than a murder rap…”
”Paul is such a sweetie, and his catalog performs so well…”

¶ Over the weekend I listened to selections from THE ESSENTIAL BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, remastered by Bob Ludwig, and the sound delivers wondrous funky detail, depth, and nuance--much of it even more revealing than his work on 1995's GREATEST HITS. The three DARKNESS tracks alone make you hope the whole catalog will get this treatment. After the Beatles remixes on YELLOW SUBMARINE and the 5:1 dubs for ANTHOLOGY, the Stones ABKCO SACDs, and the Dylan SACDs, it’s enough to make you curse the industry for coming out with CDs in the early '80s LONG BEFORE they figured out how to make’m sound decent. Now, with reluctance, we have to restock everything AGAIN. Still on the fence over SACD vs. DVD-A.

¶ If you liked W's weekend Air Force One theatre, scroll down and click on "Idiot Son of a Bastard." Then write a letter to your local newspaper about how such gestures are still meaningless since he's yet to attend a single soldier's funeral.

¶ My kids totally loved CAT IN THE HAT, and there are two gags that tip it into the plus column for me: the infomercial (“Anything…?”), and the petition dude who says “Okay, I have trouble with the term ‘dog’…”

¶ So here’s the Beatles story WBUR’s HERE AND NOW ran yesterday, I’m already getting mail on how I refer to the “Spector” “Get Back” incorrectly, when what I tried to say was the “radio” version of “Get Back,” the SINGLE, the version with the fake ending we’ve been hearing on the radio for 30 years. Do check out Magic Circles, wonderful read.

¶ Christgau posted his new Consumer Guide yesterday, and it really made me wonder: is he still writing for STONE? How can that be possible after stuff like this, on Lisa Marie: "The first surprise is that the Glen Ballard AOR isn't worse. The second surprise is that she wrote the intense if clumsy lyrics herself. The final surprise is that seven months after its No. 5 debut nobody remembers it ever existed except Elvis fan clubs, the Church of Scientology, the president of Capitol Records, and maybe, just maybe, Jann Wenner.”? Or does he just assume that Wenner doesn’t read his VOICE column?

¶ There’s a movie that’s been on my mind lately, we rented it a couple months back: Vince Vaughn with Julia Ormond and Ed Harris in THE PRIME GIG. A real sleeper. The ending is weak, but those performances have stayed with me.

¶ And one last thing: due to divided critical opinion, and the fact that we figured it would make a good “big screen” choice, we caught MASTER AND COMMANDER, and I liked it more than Sara. She decried the length, the pace, the number of clichés in relation to the amount of pretense, and the complete lack of subtext. I took my usual musician’s exception: as long as they’re chasing down all the historical particulars of detail in costume, shipping, ponytails and surgical procedures, can’t they at least get the violin and cello outfitted with gut strings? The “big screen” stuff was grand. But the more I think about it, the less it holds up. And Peter Weir is still going to have to do major time in a very dark place for DEAD POETS SOCIETY.

Now go: EAT.

Yes, ER is shamelessly incident-studded and catastrophe-driven, with mid-season cliffhangers the rule and doctors getting beat up in the bathroom almost as often as explosions rock the reception area. But last night’s chopper disaster was acutely observed, through characters old and new, in tiny moments that told you that Ol' Bullet-head was a goner. Favorite touch: Romano’s final elevator ride up with med student Neela Rasgotra to the sound of muzak playing Tom Petty’s “Freefallin’” (EERILY well-suited to muzak). Sure, Romano was a bastard, through-and-through. And yet he was oddly self-conscious, and the writers made him sympathetic at many key moments: in advising Lizzie on whether to reunite with Mark, who by then was dying of brain cancer; in his epic struggle as a surgeon who knew his faults yet knew he didn’t deserve a prosthetic arm. Talk about toying with the audience’s sympathies. Paul McCrane brought a wicked humor to the workday asshole repeatedly redeemed by his superior knowledge of science. In fact, he was about as sympathetic as his more “heroic” colleagues are flawed: think of Carrie Weaver’s self-righteousness and will to political power; John Carter’s denial and numbing sense of entitlement; Pratt’s scrappy machismo; Susan Lewis’s tendency to laugh it up in Vegas and come home married. Second favorite touch: that stoned intern, watching it all from his own private little hell. Third favorite touch: any scene involving Linda Cardellini as Nurse/mother/newcomer Samantha Taggart.

"It's not the Beatles playing alone live with no overdubs. That take of 'Don't Let Me Down' is very famous for Lennon flubbing the lyric in the middle. In the film, he sings a gibberish lyric in the middle verse and they just edit that out. So it's not naked; it's patched up.

"The original idea was to show them in rehearsal, get them on tape and on film rehearsing songs and then do a live set of songs. It was supposed to be, 'Look, this is how we sound when we don't have any fancy studio stuff.' And now, they're putting it out and trying to say, 'Well, this is how we sound with no studio stuff.' And there's all kinds of studio stuff on it. ...

"Any Beatle fan who knows these tracks will tell you exactly what's going on. They're trying to whitewash their legacy. That's what bothers me. They have a great legacy. There's no need to whitewash it."

plus a string of other quotes collected by Ed Masley in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Think about it: here was a chance for McCartney and Starr to release GET BACK, use the EMI terrace cover (from the "blue" album compilation), and win all kinds of praise for cunning and ingenuity. These folks used to EXCEL at packaging. Now we get "Fly on the Wall," which is totally lame on every level, and McCartney talking about overdubs as if they're a crime. These guys INVENTED overdubs. Hmph.

We had just run off a copy of Calvin Trillin's Charlie Rose show appearance from the end of last July when this appeared. It's everything Trillin said to Rose boiled down to a deep-fried crisp. And by the way, that news item a couple weeks back about how Bush doesn't read newspapers...he's married to a LIBRARIAN for pete's sake, what does she have to say about his information sources?

I've just been reading over Jan Herman's entry in his "Straight Up" blog, and it's a very good point to make about Polanski on several levels. For starters, it's far worse than the concluding scroll of AMERICAN GRAFFITI, where NONE of the female characters are mentioned -- a VERY telling oversight on Lucas's part, and a major feminist scandal of its day. Second, leaving the family's fate out of both the film AND the credits suits the reading of the flick as a vainglorious self-tribute. Polanski sees his fate as tied up with this pianist because HE got kicked out of Hollywood for stuff everybody else did (sleeping with minors), and he continues to see himself as a victim EVEN AFTER BEDDING HER YOUNGER SISTER. His concern for how he disrupted his girlfriend's family is NIL. And it fits into our larger dyslexia surrounding the Holocaust in that once we enter that highly-charged zone, reason slips away and we're grateful simply to sympathize with a single character instead of working to appreciate the enormity of it all. This makes the setup of the family and their trials all the more insulting: why introduce all these characters and their inter-familial politics if only to let them fade POOF into the air?

There's another angle on the PIANIST that deserves scrutiny: at the end, the main reason the German officer takes pity on "our hero" is that he's a pianist, and they both sit down to play for one another. The German plays Beethoven. Polanski's character plays Chopin's Ballade in g minor, and supposedly impresses the German into silence. And yet the lingering irony is that Beethoven still rules aesthetically, even if a passionate Pole can make the case the "Chopin was no slouch," or some such. I can't believe these were random musical choices.

Art Carney’s death touches a soft spot, not just for the obvious reasons, but for his later work in treasures like HARRY AND TONTO (1974) and THE LATE SHOW (1977) opposite Lily Tomlin. I remember watching HARRY AND TONTO at the Flatirons on the Hill, and where that Boulder line got a huge laugh. He was also a big sport in his last picture, THE LAST ACTION HERO.

Fun facts about Bush: On top of cutting military salaries, I really like the fact that W. has yet to attend a soldier’s funeral in this war. It’s really unforgivable, and the Dems oughtta jump on it and push hard.

I liked Sofia Coppola's LOST IN TRANSLATION almost as much as I hated Clint Eastwood's MYSTIC RIVER. Let's just spite industry anti-comedian prejudice and nominate Bill Murray for the Oscar, shall we? His caustic restraint is far more compelling than Sean Penn's grandiose suffering. Credulity shouldn't be a crowbar issue, but it has to count for something. I have two boys under 6, and I don't know how the novel might convince me otherwise, but there's no way I'm persuaded that a kid under 10 could FAKE muteness, never mind the shaky “accidental” motive. What would the moral of this flick be? Don’t get into a stranger’s car when you’re a kid or you might get molested and then, much later in life, killed by your best friend when he mistakenly blames you for killing his 19-year-daughter? Reminds me of the moral to AMERICAN BEAUTY, another “prestige” title that blew chunks: don’t buy pot from your neighbor’s kid, or you might get killed when the homophobic dad mistakes you for a gay pedophile.

LOST IN TRANSLATION is like BEFORE SUNRISE set in Japan, with the May-September romance all beneath the surface, something so rare in movies these days it’s almost unrecognizable. When Murray’s character says “It gets more complicated after you have kids,” lying on the bed with the babe, it has weight far beyond its immediate context. And the next line cinches it: “But your kids turn out to be the most delightful people you’ll ever meet.” And not in spite but because of all this understated heat, Scarlett Johansson becomes a STAR before the credits roll. (PS: Richard Linklater is in post-production on the sequel to BEFORE SUNRISE, the same two characters/actors nine years on.)