The Cinema 4 Pylon

The 50 Something or Other Songs of 2017: Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Rik Tod Johnson) — Wed, 13 Dec 2017 23:10:00 +0000

In our last exciting episode, I reviewed tracks 50 through 31 on Rolling Stone's list of the Best 50 Songs of 2017. How did those 20 songs – all of which, in the first surprising turn of events, I had never heard previously – fare against a musical taste that, naturally, I consider to be pretty adventurous but willingly admit is lacking in even a small amount of respect sometimes for more current pop trends and styles?

Well, here's the scoreboard thus far:

Total number of songs: 20
Songs I had heard before: 2
Songs that I own already: A big fat 0.
Reactions: Loved: 7 | Liked: 5 | OK or Don't Care at All: 5 | Hated: 3Songs that I plan to purchase: 10

The second big surprise is that I came out of the round wishing to possibly purchase a full ten tracks in the bunch. Half the music appealed to me enough where I could own it, and that is a huge response on my part. Am I slipping in taste or expanding it? Or did Rolling Stone actually choose some pretty damn good songs this time? Well, I really hated three of the tracks, and five others registered as OK or less, so that still says that, as far as I am concerned, they are only doing their job halfway.

How will the second twenty tracks rate with me? Let's head straight into Part the Second of The 50 Something or Other Songs of 2017:

#30 - Jidenna, "Bambi"
Heard of the artist? I thought "No" but apparently have watched him on TV. I didn't really remember.
Own any of his music? Oh, he's a him?
Heard this song? Nope.
Would you purchase this song? Oh, no. Can't get past the whole Bambi thing.

Here's how I approach these songs: I click on the video that Rolling Stone provides but don't watch the video. I cover the window so that all I can hear is the music. On the second go-around, I search for the lyrics online and then read them along with a second playing of the song. On the third turn, I will watch the video, if indeed it is a video produced for the song and not just a music track playing as a video on YouTube. So, I hear these things two or three times before writing about them. And if the artist or band is someone or something I believe that I don't know at all, I first double-check my iTunes to make sure something by them hasn't slipped past me on a compilation or soundtrack. Then I look up their Wikipedia page to learn a little something about them.

Now, the reason I tell you about my process now is because of the strange case of Jidenna, an artist whom I thought going into this I had never heard of before. But in doing research, I realize that he performed in an episode of Luke Cage, the first season of which I have watched fully twice now. I also saw him perform on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah late in 2016. Before I knew that, I went into the song thinking that Jidenna was just going to turn out to be another Rihanna, and I got that thought stuck in my head. And then the music starts and it has almost a music-box quality to it as it eases smoothly into an Africa-inspired melody with layered harmonies. It sounds nice at the beginning. And then my head does a twist when I hear that it's a dude singing, and not some girl trying to sound like the next Rihanna by calling herself Jidenna. And Jidenna is a dude singing about a girl named Bambi. And not in a funny way. He's serious. The girl's name really is Bambi and he is singing about her in a serious way.

My brain gets confused. He sings, "My dear, my dear, my dear" and the back-up singers go "Ahhhh... Bam-Bambi" and all I hear is "deer" instead of "dear" and, with that name "Bambi," where do you think my mind goes? But then Jidenna switches it up by singing about jungles and lions and even eventually name-checking a cheetah, and I get tripped up, because here I was thinking about a more Eurocentric or North American forest setting because of Bambi the deer in the story. I had really forgotten this was a guy singing (seriously, I remind you) about a woman named Bambi. I was still stuck on a little deer whose mom gets shot by a hunter. And the backup singers and Jidenna keep doing variations on "Ahhhh... Bam-Bambi," and I giggle some more, and my mind goes back to Rihanna, and I start thinking "Um-ber-ambi-ambi-ambi"... And then I realize that there is no way I can ever accept this song with a straight face. He sure dresses nice, though...

#29 - J Balvin and Willy William, "Mi Gente"
Heard of the artist? Neither one. To prove it, I wrote Balvin's name as "J. Blabbin" at first.
Own any of their music? Ha ha ha!
Heard this song before this? I think that I have heard this as an intro on a couple of shows. It seems familiar, but I don't know where else I would have heard it.
Would you purchase this song? One of those earworm-type hooks, but I don't mind it. Just don't need to own it.

OK, I have a bit of a problem this year because there are a couple of Spanish-only tracks on this list (because, yeah, Despacito is coming up in the Top 10 songs), and I don't speak Spanish. I understand a bunch of words (more than when I moved down here to So Cal) and can even read a little bit of it here and there. But listening to an entire song in Spanish and figuring it out for myself? If I committed to learning Spanish, as I have said that I plan to many times over the past decade, I might use this song for a fun (if not exhausting) exercise. (Everything exhausts me these days...) I liked the beat and the music kind of clung to me after a while, and checking out a translation, it seems to mostly be party-based, and is really about nothing but a good time. It sounds like the exact sort of good time that I spend my time avoiding, but still. It sounds fun.

At least I can understand Beyonce's part on the remix version. She sings about her boobs...

#28 - Charly Bliss, "Glitter"
Heard of the artist? Nope.
Own any of their music? Not yet.
Heard this song before this? No.
Would you purchase this song? Pretty catchy, but want to hear more. Close to a buy.

Boy, is that a squeaky voice. I don't know if lead singer Eva Hendricks should be fronting a band or making a pitch to be a fourth Powerpuff Girl. This is not putting her down. I am just looking for other possible career opportunities for a voice like hers. Honestly, the band sounds like Letters to Cleo on helium, but with odder lyrics, and that's not a bad thing for me. There's a great hook in the chorus, and I like its lyric: "Am I the best? Or just the first person to say yes?" It's a putdown song, but one where the singer realizes that he's rubber and she's glue. Everything is attributable to both of them, and that's where the real hurt lies.

#27 - Calvin Harris feat. Frank Ocean, Migos, "Slide"
Heard of the artist? All three, and really like Frank Ocean.
Own any of their music? Just Frank.
Heard this song before this? Nope.
Would you purchase this song? Not sure it does anything for me.

Agggh... first crime straight out the gate: I have a very low acceptance barrier for obvious Auto-Tune (as I mentioned in the first part of this series), and it tends to drive me nuts (not in a good way) after about seven words. This song is triple-stuffed like a turducken with the accursed Auto-Tune sickness, but even with Frank Ocean on vox at large in this track, I just can't settle into the relaxed groove propelling the song. As these things go, it's pleasant enough, but the end product says and does absolutely nothing for me.

#26 - Tee Grizzley, "First Day Out"
Heard of the artist? Nope.
Own any of his music? Nope.
Heard this song? I didn't know this was the music from the LeBron James Challenge videos, but apparently it is.
Would you purchase this song? Oh, hell no. Still compelling though...

I will give Tee Grizzley this. At least he has an actual story to tell, in between the "n" words and threats of violence and the usual braggart's delight. This entire song is one long, breathless "fuck you, I made it despite of you" stance. Tee gets out of a prison stint and writes this song on the same day ripping apart everyone who didn't stand by him through his troubles with the law. There seems to be no downtime between verses as he ramps up the fury from section to section. There is a hook that appears briefly at the beginning and end but it barely registers, because once the flood of rage begins, the song just keeps building and building with no real chorus in sight. There is a section (after the halfway mark) where Tee decides he is done with rhyming for a bit and ends eight straight lines with the "n' word, and while that might seem lazy or overdone, the section is really to build the speed of his flow up even more. Practice makes perfect, I guess. Tee is apparently far more perfect at doing this than committing armed robbery, because he keeps getting caught at the latter. Stick to rap, Tee... I may not like your stuff enough to buy it, but you spin an interesting tale here. Sorry you can't trust anyone. (My guess is that lack of trust starts internally...)

#25 - Superorganism, "Something for Your M.I.N.D."
Heard of the artist? Nope.
Own any of their music? Nope.
Heard this song? Nope.
Would you purchase this song? Thought it had a chance at the beginning, but. it turned to hate.

This song seemed so promising going into it. What a wasted opportunity. The Flying Lizards without a sense of... well, anything. (And believe me... I still have The Flying Lizards' album from way back. So much more interesting than this...) It's a similar project, with a verse composed of non-sequiturs, tossed off and recorded by a supposedly stereotypical "bored teenager" and sent back to the band. (At least, according to the press that I have read.) I would be more accepting of the song if it actually had a killer chorus. and instead we get a dull delivery saying the title over and over again. Look, there's bored and there's dull. You can do the first one but still sound intriguing and clever, and then there's the other. Yes, it's an intentionally amateurish attempt, but that just makes it more phony. I don't think there's anything here that any mind needs. If you want a head trip without hitting the medicine cabinet, there are so many far better music choices out there, both in the past and today. I get more annoyed the more I think about this song.

#24 - DJ Khaled feat. Rihanna, Bryson Tiller, "Wild Thoughts"
Heard of the artist? Heard of 2 out of 3. Don't know Tiller.
Own any of their music? None of them.
Heard this song? Nope.
Would you purchase this song? Nah. Pretty sexy, but not my thing really...

It's a sexy sound on this single, but despite the naughty stuff in it, it's a little too tame overall. It only gets amped up by Rihanna's cleavage-teasing moves in the video, but that exists outside of the actual song. The Santana sample surprised me, but it is underused. Nice to see DJ Khaled involved in an actual song here, because before this, I thought he just did every single commercial and talk show out there. A lot of people out there seem to love him or at least give him a pass; I find him pretty dull as a personality. Then again, I think the DJ aesthetic is overrated in the first place. Nah... let's call it "DJ interference" instead... Imagine every single Beatles song with their producer announcing himself somewhere near the end. That obnoxiously popular airhorn sound goes off and then we hear a booming, echoey voice intoning "Yo, Sir George H. Martin, CBE in the house!" Yeah, it would be funny to hear once, but so is Khaled's turn at doing the same in his own song here. To me, it ruins the mood. After hearing Rihanna and Bryson coo and purr all over each other, no one wants to be reminded of the fat, sweaty guy behind the board. It's a toddler move. Khaled just wants you to know its his blankey, and he got Rihanna to roll around on it. (Not that I wouldn't do the same if it were my blankey...)

#23 - Charli XCX, "Boys"
Heard of the artist? Yes.
Own any of her music? Nope.
Heard this song? Nope.
Would you purchase this song? I have no use for it.

Another Charli on the second part of this list, only spelled a bit differently, and someone's actual name this time not a band name. Charli XCX thinks about boys, dreams about boys, and her head is busy spinning doing both. That's great. Nothing wrong with doing so if that's your angle. Me, I dream about having a pet great white shark that I ride around fighting crime, flying like Iron Man only the suit fails me every ten seconds and so I crash through everything constantly, directing Kristen Bell in an independent feature while kicking Dax Shepherd to the curb, taming an Ankylosaurus, staging a rebellion in a dystopian future, and the machineries of an invisible sky giant mutilating me into ground chuck because I refuse to believe in him. But go ahead, Charli, and dream whatever dull dreams you wish. Guys really aren't worth the trouble. Buy a "back massager" instead. Boys is an OK track. It has a simple but reliable hook, and I do like the part in the verses where she responds, "Didn't hit 'em back". But otherwise, just basic pop cuteness.

#22 - Spoon, "Hot Thoughts"
Heard of the artist? I own their entire catalogue.
Own any of their music? Oh, yeah!
Heard this song? Own this album already.
Would you purchase this song? Already got it.

Finally! It took 28 songs, but I finally ran into something that I own already. Then again, Spoon are one of the few groups that I tend to preorder, and this album fell into the range just before I stopped preordering things for financial reasons. Spoon has been a constant in my life for about 15 years and one of my go-to bands when I go out for walks and exercise. The off-kilter rhythms along with their quirky lyrical references make every Spoon track an adventure to dissect. The same goes for the title track to the latest album here, where singer-guitarist Britt Daniel weaves in small details from a walk through Tokyo as everything from the shine of his lover's teeth to her accent to a fantasy about "diamonds from space" only serve to elevate his arousal. It's less a direct rocker than an exercise in creating a guitar-driven dance space. And it's all the more groovy for that.

#21 - Arcade Fire, "Everything Now"
Heard of the artist? Yes.
Own any of their music? I own the four albums before this one.
Heard this song? Yes, on Colbert, where they branded the show with Everything Now.
Would you purchase this song? It seems inevitable.

Arcade Fire has never been a band that I could say I love overtly, but I somehow always get around to collecting their albums. And then I go back and listen to them and always wonder why I don't listen to them more. I think part of my problem is my general queasiness in getting involved with musical "collectives". There is always the sneaking suspicion to me that I am being tricked into Kool-Aid, and I hate Kool-Aid. Also, too often, Arcade Fire seems like the Cirque du Soleil of rock music, both being from Montreal and both graced with a quite recognizable strangeness. And yet, I really come out loving their music in the end.

For Arcade Fire's part, they seem prone to big statements and high concepts on their albums, even changing their band's image, costuming, and name from album to album. (They even took on a new name with the previous album.) For their latest, Everything Now, they pretended to be in thrall to big business, complete with a fake ad campaign that spilled over onto their appearances on shows like The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, who told everyone straight-faced that the entire show was being sponsored by Everything Now. (It was a little confusing to me at first, because I had avoided any of the press before the album came out.)

Now, I have not heard the whole album yet, but it sounds like Arcade Fire have stuck to the more dance-oriented mood of the Reflektor album, but advanced it even further. To my ears, the Everything Now title track may be disco-laden, but I feel like there are still the same traces of U2 (yet another band prone to Big Statements! High Concepts! and Neo-Disco!) that I have detected in the Fire's sound from before. And definitely with a solid chunk of ABBA snuck in there. The band seems, by this point, far more interested in being a theatre nerd company than dedicated musicians, but that has never been a problem with me. I have always been a sucker whenever rock crosses into mock theatrics, and probably always will.

#20 - Taylor Swift, "Call It What You Want"
Heard of the artist? Who hasn't?
Own any of her music? Nope. Just covers by others.
Heard this song? Not until now.
Would you purchase this song? I'm going to say no, but the experience was not unpleasant.

This is the first time I have purposefully sat and listened to Taylor Swift sing one of her own songs. Seriously... this is the very first time. I lauded a track by Big Little Town last year that Swift wrote for them, and I own the Ryan Adams version of 1989 (a track for track remake of Swift's huge album) and listened to it with great joy without having any real connection to the original except having heard snippets of a couple of songs in the media. I tend to go with comedian Ralph Garman's characterization of the girl as "Tay-dolf Swit-ler" because much of her behavior in public is just so obnoxious and grandstanding. And all of these stupid wars she has with other artists... I just get tired of hearing it. Also, her usual genre is definitely not in my wheelhouse. And my reaction to her "Girl Squad" was a whole lot of eye-rolling, but mainly because I am sick of the use of the word "squad" in hashtags on social media. But, then again, she is the by-product of her sorry times...)

Still, this exercise is meant for me to give everything a try to see if I have been wrong all along or correct in my completely unfounded assumptions about many artists. As I said, I have set a precedent by actually liking a song she wrote last year, so maybe Ms. Swift can prove me wrong directly with her own recording? Surprisingly, yes... I will admit that she has a certain facility with lyrics, whether or not I think most of them are barely past the level of a teen's crush diary. Still, you get from your audience what you give to it, and she certainly knows her audience. This is what they want. And Taylor is known for answering her critics or even straight on blasting them in her songs, and from what I am reading here and there, this song may have barely veiled references to her very public battles with the likes of Katie Perry and those West/Kardashian fools. (Really, if Taylor ever wanted to get me on her side completely, all she has to do is put out a full album of nothing but Kanye and Kim put-downs.) Musically, the first listen had me thinking it was only OK, but the next couple of tries suddenly had the meter of the lyrics setting up shop in my head. It started to make sense to me. Then, this morning, there was the moment where I was rewriting the chorus slightly to sing to my cat as I was petting her. That is the real danger sign.

You win this one, Swift. Your song is now about my cat in my head, but the tune is stuck there. You are a sneaky one, I grant you...

#19 - Diet Cig, "Sixteen"
Heard of the artist? Nope.
Own any of their music? Not yet.
Heard this song? Nope.
Would you purchase this song? I like this song more than anything else new on this second part of the list so far.

No, Sixteen is not a love song by Judge Roy Moore. He'd deny that he recorded it anyway (even though he really would have).

OMG, this band is adorable. Cute outfits, big smiles, and lots of hopping around. Two people: one is the very epitome of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, only with an occasionally filthy mouth and a guitar; the other, a skinny, scraggly drumming weirdo who seems pretty game for anything. Really, he seems pretty happy he is allowed to be in the same room as the girl. We aren't talking the bluesy howl of the White Stripes or the early Black Keys here. It's not about technical proficiency; it's all about a spirited, punky scruffiness that comes off more fun than political.

Not that there isn't some depth in Alex Luciano's lyrics. Sixteen starts off with a scenario where she is the age in the title, having sex with a boyfriend with the same name as her. "It was weird/In the back of his truck/Moaning my name/While trying to fuck". Then the boy Alex tells the whole town that the girl Alex is a slut. They break up, of course, but while preparing to throw a barbecue, she realizes that most of her friends are actually more his friends. Things get worse. In the chorus, girl Alex tells him: "And I/Think you're the kind of guy/Who would meet me at a party/And forget my name/And try to take me home/All the same".

I've since listened to about a half dozen other songs from their still pretty short discography, and I am pretty convinced that I will be adding them to my playlist. Call me just another guy, call it a character weakness, but I can't resist Manic Pixie Dream Girls. Especially the epitome of one...

#18 - Beck, "Dear Life"
Heard of the artist? Yes.
Own any of his music? So, so much of it...
Heard this song? I would have gotten to it eventually.
Would you purchase this song? Already on my list.

More Beck, more music for my collection from my favorite E-meter enthusiast. The guy is just solidly entertaining, album after album, through whatever phase he is in each time. This definitely has a Beatlesque feel to it with the rollicking piano and that guitar solo. And not to get maudlin but the chorus of this song – "Dear life, I’m holding on/How long must I wait/Before the thrill is gone" – could be the mantra for my own existence over the past five years. This is a must add for me.

#17 - Lil Uzi Vert, "XO Tour Llif3"
Heard of the artist? Yes.
Own any of his music? Nope.
Heard this song? Nope.
Would you purchase this song? Didn't hate it, but I have no use for it as finalized.

Without the extremely grating use of Auto-Tune, I actually might have come out really liking this track. It's a song that deals with threats of suicide stemming from a romantic break up. Lil sings "Shoulda saw the way she looked me in my eyes/She said: "Baby, I am not afraid to die." His response provides the main hook of the song, and it seems overbearingly callous on first look, like he is daring her to go through with it: "Push me to the edge/All my friends are dead". When you realize he has no real friends and that he only trusts his money, it gets even more callous. In fact, money is his real love: "Stackin' my bands all the way to the top/All the way 'til my bands fallin' over". The song really stuck in my brain for a while, but I just have such a problem with Auto-Tune when it is used as the main gimmick in a song. I at least like the appearance of authenticity in a voice, and I just want to hear someone on their own (or mostly on their own), not a mechanical construct. This came so close to winning me over. It is at the least a very interesting track. I may return to it.

#16 - Julia Michaels, "Uh Huh"
Heard of the artist? Nope.
Own any of her music? Nope.
Heard this song? I wish now that I hadn't heard it after I just listened to it the first time.
Would you purchase this song? Her voice got on my last nerve before the end of the song.

Let me state right out that I do not like the vocals on this song. I just really hate it every time she says "Uh huh" before heading into the next lyric. And if you can't stand to hear the two words of the title spoken in the song to which you are listening, then you probably are not going to like the song. And I don't. (But I won't write Julie Michaels off just yet. See track #12 below for a surprise.)

#15 - Drake, "Passionfruit"
Heard of the artist? Of course.
Own any of his music? Not yet.
Heard this song? Nope.
Would you purchase this song? Not bad. I am surprised.

Holy crap! Did Adam Schlesinger produce this? Drake actually sounds a little bit like Chris Collinwood from Fountains of Wayne on this track. (And yes, I am aware that Adam and Chris have had a split in recent years, even if their Wiki page is desperately behind the times.) It is clear that Drake is being Auto-tuned here, but the effect is slight and, in this case, bearable to my ears. It's a pretty sad tale he sings, about the lack of trust in a long distance relationship. He's saying goodbye, but it go down pretty smooth. I am going to put this on the "hold" list; I might not buy it, but it was catchy enough that I might revisit it in the future.

#14 - LCD Soundsystem, "Call the Police"
Heard of the artist? Geez…
Own any of their music? Oh, yes...
Heard this song? On Saturday Night Live last season.
Would you purchase this song? Gotta say once more... Inevitable.

Loved this. Love James Murphy already, and he just came back and delivered exactly what I wanted from one of my favorites: a politically edged epic that pisses all over 2017. A perfect song for the times. "Wear your makeup like a man," he seethes at one point, and we can't imagine who it might possibly reference. The taint of fascism is in the air and it smells awful. Murphy tells us, "The first sign divides us; the second is moving to Berlin".

Somewhere in the second verse, James almost sounded like Bono to me, and I realized this is the sort of thing that U2 used to do in their sleep before they wanted to become everybody's buddy. We aren't talking the random slogan here. This is meant as a battle cry:

"Well, there's a full-blown rebellion but you're easy to confuse
By triggered kids and fakers and some questionable views.
Oh, call the cops, call the preachers!
Before they let us and they lose
When (oh!) we all start arguing the history of the Jews,
You got nothing left to lose.

Gives me the blues."

Magnificent...

#13 - Ed Sheeran, "Shape of You"
Heard of the artist? Yes.
Own any of his music? Nope.
Heard this song? Yes. Everywhere I go.
Would you purchase this song? Don't need to. As I said, everywhere I go...

Despite my usual reticence towards huge pop hits, I do not hate this song. It has even gotten caught in my head a couple of times when I have crossed paths with it. It's truly an earworm, but that beat and that lyric in the chorus make it almost irresistible. In the bit about Taylor Swift's song above, I talked about the moment I knew that I was sunk, when I rewrote her lyrics to fit our cat. Well, I did that ages ago to the poor Blueberry with Sheeran's song. "Meow, meow, meow... I'm in love with the 'Berry" is how it goes now in our household. And this is a song that I have only crossed paths with in grocery stores. Imagine what would happen to a song that I would actually own?

#12 - Selena Gomez, "Bad Liar"
Heard of the artist? Who hasn't?
Own any of her music? Nope.
Heard this song? Nope.
Would you purchase this song? Very possible. I like this song very much.

"Dear Selena Gomez,

Thank you for stopping what you were doing two years ago. You had a song called Good for You on the 2015 Rolling Stone "Best 50" list, and all the showering and posing in tight this and see-through that like you were doing in the video made me feel like a dirty old man. Which I am, but that is beside the point. I don't like feeling like myself most of the time. Music is supposed to take me away from feeling like myself. It is supposed to take me away from worries and cares, not do weird things to my pants. And sure, I actually liked the song, and I guess your video did make me forget the rest of the world for three minutes and 14 seconds (maybe triple that), but otherwise I felt nothing but shame. SHAME, I tell you. 9 minutes and 42 seconds of SHAME. OK, maybe now multiple that by maybe 15 or 16 times more. We're now around (ballpark figuring) two hours and fifteen minutes or so of world-forgetting and SHAME.

This year, you got together with singer/songwriter Julia Michaels, who annoyed the crap out of me a couple of spots ago on this same list, and you deliver a doozy of a tune in Bad Liar. Thank you for sampling your bassline from the Talking Heads' Psycho Killer; you don't need to worry that I love that song so, so very much. It's just a coincidence. I just sometimes think the world has moved on too much and people have forgotten how great that band was. Of course, I don't know if either you or Julia was responsible for that touch, being so young and all, and maybe it was your producer Ian Kirkpatrick or third co-writer Justin Tranter... anyway, it doesn't matter. The Heads' bassline is in place and it grabbed my ear instantly when I started your song.

Of course, any song employing that sound had better deliver the goods otherwise, and thankfully, your vocals are spot on in this tale of romantic obsession, which actually fits Psycho Killer pretty aptly as far as the lyrics are concerned. Your gentle cooing and apprehensive singing are perfect here. Your character is as tense and nervous and can't relax as Byrne's original, if not for the same reasons. Another nice touch is that the song never goes overboard in its ambition, sticking close to its simple structure and just concentrating on telling its story.
Anyway, everything is good here because your video for this song kept you in your clothes the entire time (though you do dance seductively late in the game). It also helped that you played multiple roles, so that even though the main character is a high school student, you also played both your mom AND EITHER your dad (who is also a teacher at the school) OR a teacher who is dating your mom. (It's hard to tell which.) And the teacher has a mustache as well, so even though it is hard for you to hide your distinctive facial features behind any disguise, at least that element is in place to keep this whole affair tame. Except then you also play ANOTHER female high school student (this time in a blond wig), who is NOT ONLY having a fling with your teacher/dad/Mom's boyfriend (whomever he is), BUT SHE IS ALSO the object of your first character's obsession. Or is this all a metaphor for being in love with yourself?

OK, my brain can now not officially handle watching any of your videos. I have now discovered that I appreciate the craft behind at least two of your songs – and in fact, enjoy the songs unreservedly – and may now have to look into more of them. But damn it, I have to just listen to them. Your videos are either just too slinky or just too hinky. Either way, it's music from here on out.

Let me just sign this, Your pal, Me."

#11 - Tove Styrke, "Say My Name"
Heard of the artist? Nope.
Own any of her music? Nope.
Heard this song? Nope.
Would you purchase this song? Once more, very catchy and fun. Absolutely.

Just great. Not going to hold back. This song makes me happy. It's goofy, it's giddy, it's a bit sexy, and bouncy as hell. It's the song on this second part which I have now listened to the most. I know nothing about Ms. Styrke, but really like this song. It's a different pop style altogether, but there are similarities here to the music of Lykke Li, another Swedish songstress whose music won me over a few years ago. (Maybe it's my roots showing.) The weird rubber band guitar riff here is infectious as hell, and for whatever reason, brings to mind Jim Henson's Muppets. Seriously, I have no idea why...

*****

That's forty down, with ten more to go next time. It was looking grim for the first half of this bunch, but started to even out as we got further down. Still, my stats for this bunch come out as:

Total number of songs: 20
Songs I had heard before: 3
Songs that I own already: 1
Reactions: Loved: 6 | Liked: 5 | OK or Don't Care at All: 7 | Hated: 2

Songs that I plan to purchase: 6

Put together, my updated overall score reads:

Total number of songs: 40
Songs I had heard before: 5
Songs that I own already: 1
Reactions: Loved: 13 | Liked: 10 | OK or Don't Care at All: 12 | Hated: 5
Songs that I plan to purchase: 16

I apparently had a rougher time with the second twenty. But things are starting to even out like last year. But we still have a final ten tracks, the Top Ten of Rolling Stone's selections for the best of the year. There are few pretty big songs coming up, and I know that I have a big surprise in store for everyone in there as well.

See you in Part 3 in a couple of days!

RTJ

*****

PAST EXPERIMENTS

The 50 Something or Other Songs of 2015
Pt. 1: http://cinema4pylon.blogspot.com/2015/12/the-50-songs-of-2015-pt-1.html
Pt. 2: http://cinema4pylon.blogspot.com/2015/12/the-50-songs-of-2015-pt-2.html

The 50 Something or Other Songs of 2016
Pt. 1: http://cinema4pylon.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-50-something-or-other-songs-of-2016.html
Pt. 2: http://cinema4pylon.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-50-something-or-other-songs-of-2016.html

Pt. 3: http://cinema4pylon.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-50-something-or-other-songs-of-2016_8.html

The 50 Something or Other Songs of 2017
Pt. 1: http://cinema4pylon.blogspot.com/2017/12/the-50-something-or-other-songs-of-2017.html

The 50 Something or Other Songs of 2017: Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Rik Tod Johnson) — Sat, 09 Dec 2017 00:48:00 +0000

As I have for the past two years, I am continuing with an experiment of my own devising this winter with another ramble through the odd results of Rolling Stone's annual list of the 50 Best Songs for the current year. For the first out of the three times of which I have reviewed their list and then compared my personal reactions to each song (most of which I have never heard before), I am actually fairly close to the actual release date of the list. The magazine (with whom I have a love-hate relationship these days) posts each edition of their 50 Best Songs list online by the end of November of each year. The first time that I attempted this experiment, I reviewed their November 2015 list in January 2016. Last year, due to an ongoing hip injury that kept me from sitting at my computer for more than a few minutes at a time, I waited until deep in March 2017, after I started physical therapy, to tackle their November 2016 edition.

I will post the links to my previous editions of this experiment at the bottom of this post, but in case you just want to stick to this attempt for now, let me set the scene. This will also come in handy for novices to this site who may not know my tastes very well.

I turned 53 in September, and have a lifelong love of pop and rock music, to the point where it is sometimes a great distraction. If there has been a musical movement since the mid-'70s, with a handful of notable exceptions of course, there is a great chance that there is something or someone from that movement that I have followed either briefly or forever. I am fairly well-listened in swing, blues, jazz, vocal and novelty music from the pre-rock era; I have a pretty comprehensive knowledge of early rock 'n' roll from the 1950s, pop music and classic rock from the '60s and '70s, punk rock and heavy metal in the '70s and early '80s (but cutting off pretty much around 1985), the alternative scene from its earliest beginnings, and indie rock through today (but I consider myself rather picky about that). I also have a massive collection built around all of this, but also the novelty, comedy, kiddie record, holiday, and outsider music genres. And I have a special fondness for power pop that will never go away. On top of all this, I am also a Zappa fanatic, and own the bulk of his catalogue.

I own a hell of a lot of music, and if you think "Oh yeah, sure, we all do," I will ask you for the numbers. Counting LPs, CDs, several hundred cassette tapes (though I no longer have a cassette player) and albums purchased online, I have access to well over 3,500 albums and 100,000 separate music files in my own iTunes alone. Most of the music that I have purchased in the past decade has been online, so I tend to no longer buy physical media, but if I had a regular inflow of cash again, I would probably still be buying vinyl. As far as services like Spotify and Pandora go, I find both of them annoying for different reasons, but I do use them sporadically to hear new music. [For the interested, you can survey an incomplete but rather extensive list of my musical influences at https://cinema4pylon.blogspot.com/p/musi.html.]

One of the reasons I started doing this experiment two years ago was because I felt, as I have been getting older, that I have grown out of touch with current musical trends. Sometimes this is a very good thing; just like with movies, new trends and artists can prove to be exasperatingly annoying, especially as the everyday world insists on committing to getting dumber and dumber by the day. On the other hand, if something or someone truly innovative comes along that also proves to be worthwhile listening, I could easily miss out on it. The first year's list didn't really introduce me to Courtney Barnett, but it did remind me that I had crossed paths with one of her videos at some miraculous point, so finding her on the 2015 list led me back around to adding her music to my collection.

Another problem for me is the radio. Top 40 radio has not been my thing since I was 13, so I don't really grant myself access to hearing current popular music. Also, I don't drive, so finding such a station is not a priority with me. I tend to stick to the bands that I have always loved and just keep my eyes peeled to new artists that I find on iTunes or Spotify, or that my friends tell me about from time to time. One big problem in the past year especially is that I have been out of work, and thus, I have no personal income except for that of my wife's. (I am just about to begin a new job, so that will change in the near future.) Thus, no spending money for a frivolous pursuit such as music for the past year. I have compiled a list of numerous new albums by favorite artists throughout these 12 months, so perhaps once I get settled financially a tad, I can start to winnow down that list bit by bit.

The Rules Going In...

OK, the rules are that I listen to each song on Rolling Stone's 50 Best Songs of 2017 countdown, one by one. (Rolling Stone usually provides a handy video for each song when able to make this easier.) As I said, I am hearing most of these songs for the very first time. I then write a quickie review of my experience along with my first thoughts upon listening to them.

I further qualify my experience based on these four questions: 1) Had I heard of the artist before that listen?; 2) Did I already own any of that artist’s music?; 3) Had I heard the song before?; and 4) Would I ever try to purchase the song based on that initial listen?

There will be three parts to this article. At the end of each one, I keep a running tally of songs that I have heard before or own already or that I plan to purchase.

The Previous Results...

The final tally from my listen to Rolling Stone’s 50 Best Songs of 2015 went like this...

Total number of songs: 50
Songs I had heard before: 13, with 3 maybes.
Songs that I owned already: 6
Reactions: Loved: 10 | Liked: 18 | OK to Meh: 20 | Hated: 2
Songs that I planned to purchase: 14 definitely; 8 maybes.

So, how different were the results for the following year, now that I had been introduced to many more current artists? Surprisingly, the results for Rolling Stone's 50 Best Songs of 2016 were actually pretty close to the first time...

Total number of songs so far: 50

Songs I have heard before: 19

Songs that I own already: 5

Loved: 13 | Liked: 20 | OK to Meh: 11 | Hated: 5 | Couldn’t Rate: 1

Songs that I plan to purchase: 21

The ups and downs between variances (when combining maybes with yeses in the first year's results) makes me even more curious to see what will happen this year. Is this just the average range it will be from year to year? Will knowing these results make me more guarded going into the experiment? As with film, though, I will attempt to center my emotions and responses before I give an opinion on anything. Hopefully the same will prove true for this list.

And so here I go, as I tackle The 50 Something or Other Songs of 2017, Pt. 1:

#50 - 21 Savage, "Bank Account"
Heard of the artist? Yes, on last year's list.
Own any of his music? Nope.
Heard this song? Nope.
Would you purchase this song? Not a chance. Not a goddamn chance.

Well, we are starting things out with someone that I can hate just for being a useless douchebag. I prefer my hip hop to lean to the side of social concern and change, and I care not for braggarts of any stripe. The music for Bank Account has an ominous, pulsing groove that provides the only element of interest in the entire song. As usual in these sort of affairs, 21 (at least he isn't yet another "Lil") brags about his bitches, his guns, and his dick, but mostly about his bank account, hence the shockingly imaginative and accurate title. He provides a counting up of the millions in said account in what can only be described as "made for Sesame Street" style, though they would never approve of the material involving his dick or his bitches. This would all be fine if 21 Savage didn't sound like a humorless ass-wipe because he is too desperate to impart to us both how rich and how tough he is.

Hey, 21? How about shutting up about how much money you have in the bank, and then you wouldn't have to worry about keeping your Glock cocked or your cock Glocked or whatever it is that you fondle with your itchy trigger finger? And this song may contain the largest sheer number of repeated mentions of "God" in a song configured in direct opposition to any form of saintliness. Catchy pulse, but empty-headed and awful. Can't one just throw a rock in any direction in a room full of hip hop CDs and find umpteen similar tracks equally as vain and vapid? The credentials of the magazine's list title are already thrown into question...

#49 - Haim, "Want You Back"
Heard of the artist? Yes, for several years now.
Own any of their music? An EP and a single; so, 6 songs total.
Heard this song before this? Yes, on radio and on SNL, for starters.
Would you purchase this song? Don't know if I need to, since it is played in department stores now...

So, I have discovered in recent months that I cannot escape this song. It is getting played on the one radio station that my wife listens to, which itself plays very little in the way of current hits. Somehow, it made its way into the rotation. I have heard the song online, in Target, in Nordstroms Rack at the outlet malls, waiting for a movie to start, selecting soup at the grocery, and in a live appearance on Saturday Night Live. I first ran into the sisters of Haim in 2012, and was interested enough in their shimmery Cali pop-rock sound to give them a shot by grabbing the EP that was then their only available longer release, as well as their Don't Save Me single. The songs were all fine, but I kind of lost track of the band, as I expected to do.

Nice to see Haim is still around in 2017, but I don't know if I will join them any further. Want You Back is catchy and might make a fun singalong, but I also find it a little too repetitive. I would need to hear more of the full album to make it worthwhile to me. Plus, the bass-playing sister (Este), who is what one can charitably call "lightly expressive," kind of gets on my nerves after a little while, even if it is clear that she is just having a ball doing her job and putting the songs across to the audience or cameras. Let's put Haim and their latest album in the "maybe" category for now. The truth is they have the talent to possibly come out with the next pop-rock masterpiece album à la Fleetwood Mac, and for that I will wait and see. The video here, though, is kind of ramshackle fun, since if looks like they can't sing and dance at the same time (or especially because it looks that way).

#48 - YFN Lucci feat. PnB Rock, "Everyday We Lit"
Heard of the artist? Of course not...
Own any of his music? Ha!
Heard this song before this? Nope.
Would you purchase this song? Sorry, not my scene.

So, what is the difference between this song and the one I just heard at #50 by 21 Savage? Well, not much, except perhaps a little more gratitude and humor and less promise of violence. Still, it's all bitches, dicks, guns, and money, though they point out repeatedly how hard-earned it is. That's fine... you can be proud of your accomplishments. At least you guys aren't being in-your-face assholes about it like 21 Savage. YFN Lucci and his pal seem pretty stoked at suddenly being rich and just want to have a good time with all that money. But the song is a party to which I will never wish to have an invite; it just doesn't speak to me at all, even if I am happy that they are happy. We should all be so happy...

#47 - Willie Nelson, "Delete and Fast Forward"
Heard of the artist? Willie's the man.
Own any of his music? Yes, of course.
Heard this song before this? Nope.
Would you purchase this song? Yes, a more than excellent chance of it.

Given how most of my friends and family know full well my political inclinations (super progressive but with an eye towards the center), it must be that none of them have encountered Willie's sobering look at the threat for the world at the rise of Trump. What other explanation for their not having pointed my way to this most excellent song? Surely, they would have, yes? If I find out someone of my acquaintance was negligent on sharing this with me, there will be hell to pay. As sharp as ever with his songwriting (a credit shared with Buddy Cannon), the ol' Red Headed Stranger allows one to wallow briefly in the gloom and doom that we are feeling at his current moment, but still insists on raising the room's spirits a bit by raising the spectre of hope. Maybe we can get past all this divisive shit and do the right thing in time, he seems to posit, we just have to stop the media wars and sit down and talk things out like we used to do. Sure, that's pretty much a pipe dream right now, but coming from a man who has probably engaged in a great many pipe dreams, it still sounds hopeful.

#46 - Laura Marling, "Wild Fire"
Heard of the artist? I guess that I have. Won't forget her now.
Own any of her music? I apparently own an EP she shared with the Mumfords, but forgot about it.
Heard this song? No.
Would you purchase this song? Absolutely, without any hesitation.

This is the first song on the list to not only have me anticipating my purchase of it, but also has me antsy to dig into the rest of the album, Semper Femina, as quickly as possible. Just like with Angel Olsen last year, hearing even the first notes from Marling's voice on this song was to fall in love instantly with her instrument, so lush I want to sink into it forever and forget this world. Sure, I hear a studied Joni Mitchell tone in that voice, just as Stone and others have pointed out, but there is a deeper soulfulness to her Marling's performance on this song. Most remarkable on this song are the lyrics, spoken by a character who is tired of bullshit from her lover...

"Chasing down a wild fire
Are you trying to make a cold liar out of me?
You want to get high?
You overcome those desires, before you come to me"

It seems at first we are being shown the relationship from one side, as it seems to be merely about one more rational partner trying to bring peace to the less stable personality in the pair. But it becomes clear that there is hurt and hesitation, and probably duplicity, on both sides. Regarding her lover's tendency to write out her feelings, Marling sings...

"Of course the only part that I want to read
Is about her time spent with me
Wouldn’t you die to know how you're seen
Are you getting away with who you’re trying to be?"

We start to see hints that perhaps the singer, despite her efforts, is equally irrational in dealing with this relationship, as she seems to get angered about trivialities and passing comments...

"You always say you love me most
When I don’t know I’m being seen
Well maybe someday when God takes me away
I’ll understand what the fuck that means"

She seems harsh at this point in their love, but this seems to be less a lament than a last ditch attempt to hang onto that love despite the odds. Wild Fire is the best song so far on this list. The top ten at the end of this list had better turn out to be magnificent, because Wild Fire would already be in mine. Of course, I don't know what is ahead of me...

#45 - Miley Cyrus, "Malibu"
Heard of the artist? I have even seen her live... accidentally.
Own any of her music? Nope.
Heard this song? Nope.
Would you purchase this song? It offends me in no way, but neither does it speak to me.

OK, let's not go crazy here. The song Malibu is nice, in the way that Cobie Caillat's Bubbly is nice, but it's not "Best 50 Songs of any given year" nice. Miley greatly tones down the ho-ness (while still wandering around a beach and grasslands in next to nothing), and hushedly under-sings simple words in the guise of a sweetly patient girlfriend. (She even forgives the male of her affection his moment of mansplaining about "the current".) She sings about sitting by him while writing the words to "this song" and I can quite imagine Miley at the beach with her beau writing the same words, none of them too difficult for the audience to understand. Again, it's all just so "nice" and accompanied by a predictably gorgeous-looking video with beach and bikini shots. For making me watch my first Cyrus video since Wrecking Ball, I thank Rolling Stone for the eye candy, but the song is too, too mild to make it past merely OK for me.

#44 - Carly Rae Jepsen, "Cut to the Feeling"
Heard of the artist? Of course... she's a better pitcher than a singer. And she's a shitty pitcher.
Own any of her music? One song on a Little Mermaid comp that I got free from Disney Rewards.
Heard this song? No, maybe, perhaps in a store... so tame and blank, who could remember?
Would you purchase this song? Not on a dare.

By the 1:50 mark of the almost 4-minute video, this song has said everything it can say in its empty little head, and cute little Carly Rae just spends the rest of the time repeating variations of what came before. Honestly, it ran out of ideas after the first words were sung, but I will cut her a little slack. Oh, Carly Rae, it's hard to cut to the feeling if all you feel is numb from dull commercialism. This is just absolutely, instantly forgettable product... bland, bland, blandness to match her blonde, blonde, blondeness in the video. I forgot it halfway through the video. What song is this video for anyway? Did I even just watch a video? What am I doing here?

#43 - Big Thief, "Shark Smile"
Heard of the artist? Nope.
Own any of their music? Nope.
Heard this song? Nope.
Would you purchase this song? Instant classic tune in my book. This album will be bought.

Wow. Stunning and heartbreaking, Shark Smile is exactly the sort of song I expect to find on such a list as this. With their sharp songwriting about a passionate pick-up that ends in a roadside tragedy, Big Thief surprised me, chiefly because (as per my habit) I watched the video accompanying the text before seeing what Rolling Stone said about the song. Given the name of the artist and even the title, I was half expecting this to be a hip-hop track (the genre is overloaded with Bigs and Lils, so c'mon on...), but I was surprised to find a true indie rock classic worthy of the Boss in its stark, black and white depiction of love scraping against the guardrails. This album will be in my collection someday. Woo, baby... take me.

#42 - Kodak Black, "Tunnel Vision"
Heard of the artist? Never heard of a camera with this name, but I am open to the company expanding their brand. But I ran into Kodak Black on last year's list.
Own any of his music? What do you think?
Heard this song? Nuh uh.
Would you purchase this song? Seems a waste of my time and money.

OK, so Kodak Black has a killer line that would make William Faulkner crawl out of his grave, build a time machine to go back in time and kill himself before he ever wrote a word because he knows he can never compete with the great Kodak Black. (Yeah, there's a time paradox at work there, but I don't care.) Kodak wants to make his new line fit his slinky rhyme scheme in order to pair up with the syllable "-cate" at the end of the previous line. (Most of the verse lines up with a series of syllables featuring hard "a" sounds.) So he takes what will undoubtedly go down as one of the classic quotes in music history – the line being "Uh, I'm the shit, I need some toilet pap-er" – and then rhymes "pap" (said "pape") with the "–cate" in "okay," and then drops the "er" in "paper" to the start of the next line. Bravo! Mad skillz, Kodak! A Pulitzer and a Peabody are surely on their way! (I'd mock his winning a Grammy, but seriously, the levels are low with that organization. He'll probably win one someday.)

Lest you think I am being harsh on his lyrics, the previous line with the "-cate" syllable was exactly what you might expect it to be. "That money make me cum, it made me fornicate"... Yeah, Kodak Black is telling yet another story about being true to himself and keeping focused on his goal of making millions of dollars singing about bitches, dicks, guns, and money. Oh, he does also add cars ("Kodak bought a Wraith") into the usual hip hop braggart's mix this time, so let's give him some credit for a widescreen vision. He wants to keep focused so that he knows his "bae" won't go "iggin'" him, but I could easily ignore him possibly for the rest of his career if all his tales are as dull and predictable as this Codeine-binging nightmare.

#41 - Kamasi Washington, "Truth"
Heard of the artist? Nope.
Own any of his music? Nope.
Heard this song? Nope.
Would you purchase this song? I think perhaps I will. I want to see how the rest of the suite sounds.

What a marvelous surprise to find not just an outright jazz track on the Best 50 Songs list, but a 13-minute-plus jazz track nonetheless. Saxophonist Kamasi Washington's name and music is new to me, but if I had wished in the past for an entry point into the current jazz scene – and I have a few times, being quite lost at this point – I think that I may have found my answer. This song is apparently the 6th and final part of an EP suite that seeks to bring an answer to our country's deep political divide. Truth builds slowly for its first five minutes into a rich tapestry of sound, and then Washington kicks in with his sharp soloing. Even when his riffing finishes a couple of minutes later, the song never loses its focus and carries strongly to its finish, where a choir joins in to help the song impart in gorgeous sound what its title promises. I have wanted something like this for a long time, but now I need to hear the rest. A promising first look at what appears to be a monstrous talent to me.

#40 - Fergie feat. Nicki Minaj, "You Already Know"
Heard of these artists? Sadly, yes…
Own any of their music? I thought not, but I have 2 BEP songs on CMJ collections.
Heard this song? I have now.
Would you purchase this song? I have no use for it musically. Unless I opened a strip club...

Man, I was expecting to hate this. After hearing the Kasami Washington track, my immediate thought was "Seriously?" Fergie? Nicki? And no, this song does not deserve to be placed one higher than the sublime Washington composition. Or even twenty below it. Hell, it really doesn't even belong on the same list, but I will make this admission: I didn't hate You Already Know. Much like the Ariana Grande/Nicki Minaj track for which I revealed a secret liking last year – Side to Side – I kind of came out of my first listen thinking it was pretty catchy. Which is how the pop music game is played, I totally understand. Most of the music on the Top 40 is catchy in some aspect; it's meant to suck you in so they can insert an earworm or two. The song didn't quite catch me, but the second go-around didn't repulse me either. I think the "Life's a movie/let the camera roll" junk, as trite a lyrical convention as anything, in the chorus still probably got to this film fanatic. And that's totally on me. However, it will not translate into a sale down the line, and I assume that the next time I hear the song will be during a timeout during a Celtics telecast.

#39 - Dan Auerbach, "Waiting on a Song"
Heard of the artist? Oh, yes.
Own any of his music? Yup.
Heard this song? How can you escape it?
Would you purchase this song? His new album was on my list already.

At this point, shouldn't we accept that the Black Keys' Dan Auerbach is the modern version of John Fogerty (minus the growly voice), a singer-songwriter with serious guitar skills who squeezes out one bluesy, soulful, slightly countrified rocker after another without seeming to sweat. Auerbach must be in a race to make us forget that he even has a regular band, forcing himself to put out as many side and solo projects as he can. I appreciate a guy who realizes he can score as much expensive studio time as he would like now that he is famous, but c'mon, Dan... take a break once in a while. I can't even keep up with your discography. Great to see him co-writing with the legendary John Prine, a personal favorite (thanks, Glenn!). Once I get firmer financial footing again, this one is mine.

#38 - Gorillaz feat. Popcaan, "Saturnz Barz"
Heard of the artist? The Gorillaz, yes. Popcaan... what a stupid name. I like it.
Own any of their music? All except the new album.
Heard this song? Hadn't gotten around to it yet...
Would you purchase this song? It was already on my get list.

So, you may have surmised from the past couple of years that I am not exactly a hip hop or rap guy. You would be right. And it might seem from my comments on this year's list thus far that I don't have much respect for a lot of what passes for hip hop lyrics today. Once again, correct-a-mundo. Oh, I respect some hip hop lyrics just fine; take a look at several of my reactions last year to prove this out for several artists that I lauded. (And there may even be more positive stuff to come on this list, though I can't know that yet right now.) I just get disappointed when rappers make it all about commercial success, and can't find lyrical content beyond telling me how their dick equals the size of their gun, and how many bitches they have back in their crib, trap, or whatever the term for shitty apartment is this week. I find it rote and lazy by this point, no matter how clever you think your rhyme scheme happens to be. (Sadly, it still sells millions of units.)

Damon Albarn's all-star cartoon band Gorillaz tends to straddle the hip hop genre for most of its tracks. And if you want to say that the band exists as an easy access point for white people to get into hip hop, I wouldn't dispute such a claim. It hasn't turned me into one, that's for sure, but I sure love what I have heard on their first three albums and a myriad of singles and EPs.

Part of this acceptance is because I am, without any reservation at all, a massive fan of Albarn's "day job" band, Blur, and go nuts for even the slightest hint they are going on tour or thinking of putting out a new single. Luckily, though, Albarn is as busy with side projects and bands as Dan Auerbach, and so one never has to wait too long for his next release, whatever it is. We had to wait seven years for the fourth Gorillaz joint following Plastic Beach back in 2010. I felt that last album was their strongest overall effort yet (though I will always hold the most love for the original Gorillaz). This was one of those times where I was quite aware the album was coming out this year, and I wrote it on my To Get list, but of course, still have to wait to grab it. I kind of avoided watching the video until this point because I was too butt hurt at not being able to buy Humanz.

As for the track itself, Saturnz Barz, dancehall star Popcorn is previously unknown to me, but I think his vocal tricks are pretty terrific on the song. Even if I can't understand a word he says without a lyric sheet. Apart from later choruses, though, Popcaan's part is mostly over by the time Albarn lounges in to stretch about and croon for the remainder of the surprisingly short track (just 3 minutes if you remove the video portions before and after). I really like what I hear, but its brevity only serves as an appetizer for the rest of the album. Sadly, I have to wait a little while longer to get it. And that's really just on me and my inability to bring home the bacon. I have definitely not run my recent life like a boss.

#37 - Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie, "In My World"
Heard of the artist? Part of my upbringing...
Own any of their music? Much, much, much...
Heard this song? Nope, but aware of it.
Would you purchase this song? A definite purchase is on the list.

Given my love of power pop, it should come as no surprise that I also hold onto an lifelong affection for all things Fleetwood Mac, most especially the slinky guitar lines, studio experimentation and nervous vocals of Lindsey Buckingham. From what I had heard, this team-up between Buckingham and his Mac compatriot McVie is, on some tracks, actually four members of the five-person Mac minus Stevie Nicks, who decided to concentrate on a solo album instead. Whatever the circumstances, I will take "close to full Mac" – which would include McVie's ex John on bass and Mick Fleetwood himself on drums – over "no new Mac at all" any day. Besides, sometimes I skip the Nicks songs on replays of the old albums to stick to the more upbeat tracks. From the start of this Buckingham-penned wonder, McVie's keyboards bring back old memories of those past albums, but Lindsey's lyrics are sheer heartache, as the fantasy he spins in the chorus is betrayed by the harsher reality of the verses. It's grand to hear the two of them at least making magic once again. Flexing the "Old Guy" rule here, this will be a must buy in my future.

#36 - Dvsn, "Mood"
Heard of the artist? Not at all.
Own any of his music? Nope.
Heard this song? Nope.
Would you purchase this song? Interested in hearing more from this duo, but no purchase yet.

Slow, sexy and seductive songs are not usually my sort of thing, and if you say, "Well, you aren't using them correctly," I would add that they aren't my wife's thing either. It's the same reaction I have when I tell people we don't celebrate Valentine's Day, and they give me crap because surely this is not her decision. And those people are dead wrong, and they don't know my wife at all, who mocks the day far more than I do. Still, I have enough Prince albums (and a bunch of old school R&B/funk ramp-ups from the '70s) to know sexy when I hear it, and this song has it. Falsetto vocals and a truly strange guitar solo deep in the proceedings lead to some nastiness in the bedroom by the end. It's a Maxwell song without the abs, and I'm not going to get in the way if someone wants to get down tonight. Have fun, kids...

#35 - Dirty Projectors, "Up in Hudson"
Heard of the artist? Yes. Great name.
Own any of their music? A quick check reveals a pair of songs via compilations.
Heard this song? Nope.
Would you purchase this song? Yes, and after listening to the other 2 songs I own, want to get more from these guys.

So I am really getting to the Dirty Projectors pretty late, after eight albums and having more than one shot at digging into their music but putting each attempt aside before I started. This song is about the relationship of the band's two vocalists (Dave Longstreth and Amber Coffman), one of whom is not on this album except as a subject. Boy meets girl, girl joins his band, girl moves on to a solo career, and boy hangs about attempting to convince himself boy and girl still have a connection through she is long gone. It's a love gone wrong album and Up in Hudson is its grand statement. He lyric-checks Roberta Flack, samples Peggy Seeger, mentions songs he wrote for her, and works in references to Kanye and 2Pac as their respective healing artists of choice. Over a burbling horn section, Longstreth sings wide-eyed about how their love "felt like it bore the impress of destiny" but later admits...

"This is how we saw the world
side by side from the road and the stage
So our lives were twined and curled
and mixed up like the code we obeyed
And that was basically my dream
and I dreamed it with you 'til we betrayed it"

Longstreth closes the 9-minute sprawl with a fuzz-soaked guitar solo that trips along lightly over the rhythm section and horns until he finally has nothing left to say about the whole affair. His brain seems spent, his guitar seems spent, and so does the subject. A most intriguing song, but one that makes me want to dig more into their past work when Coffman was there to see what the hubbub was about, rather than selling me the latest album.

#34 - Dua Lipa feat. Miguel, "Lost in Your Light"
Heard of the artist? Miguel, yes, but not Dua Lipa.
Own any of their music? Nope.
Heard this song? Nope.
Would you purchase this song? Probably not, but it's OK for what it is.

Just like the Haim video, more awkward walking down streets that turn into awkward dance moves. But I try to avoid the videos when listening to these songs, so I hide the video behind a window on my desktop just as the rather fetching Lipa is hoisted up into the air Harry Styles-, um... -style. And just before Miguel pops into the song to sing about "torture tempted with pleasure" and share the remainder of the vocals. The song is light dance simplicity, with romantic longing in the words, and nothing more strenuous than an old Anita Ward song. It's actually rather pleasant sounding, but also does nothing for me musically but fill space.

#33 - Lil Yachty feat. Diplo, "Forever Young"
Heard of the artist? Ran into both of them on the previous two years' lists.
Own any of their music? Nope.
Heard this song? Nope.
Would you purchase this song? It's kind of sweet, but not my thing.

Oh, boy... this song starts out using way too much Auto-Tune. Yeah, I know they were doing it on purpose, but my general rule is that my brain shuts out the rest of the song immediately when that is the case. If it is used for comedic purposes, I am a little more forgiving, but that is not the case here. And the Auto-Tune keeps coming, all through the rapped verses, and again, yes, I know that is the style here. I just don't have to like it. It's sad, because I actually think the chorus is pretty catchy, and when he Biz Markies the "forever young" part at the end, I think it's sort of cute. I also think it is funny when Yachty speaks in his bae's voice to call him "Boat". There is a video on YouTube about Auto-Tune where an L.A. producer is asked about the use of the program. He says, "When I can't hear it being used, it's great." That's me in a nutshell.

#32 - Margo Price, "Pay Gap"
Heard of the artist? Yes. Seen her multiple times on TV.
Own any of her music? Nope.
Heard this song? Not this song, but others.
Would you purchase this song? There is a good chance that I might check out one of her albums by this point.

"We are all the same in the eyes of God
But in the eyes of rich white men
No more than a maid to be owned like a dog
A second-class citizen"

Yeah, preach it, Margo. I've come around on the girl since I first heard her on Saturday Night Live a while ago. I dismissed Ms. Price in that way that I am generally dismissive of many populist acts on the interminable wait during the first music slot for Weekend Update to start. I listened to her, but didn't really listen to her. Then she started popping up on Colbert and Noah, and I became entranced by her voice and the increase of a political stance in her lyrics. Luckily, that stance seems to be on the same side of me, so... yeah, go for it, Margo. This is pretty good stuff.

#31 - Craig Finn, "God in Chicago"
Heard of the artist? Yes, via The Hold Steady.
Own any of his music? One album, and a couple of songs on comps.
Heard this song? No.
Would you purchase this song? Yes. Goddamned yes.

More of a monologue than a song, God in Chicago tells a story of delving into the dark side so rich in detail and desperation as to be frightening. The death and the drug deal that form the first half of the story are the easy part. It's the brief relationship that ignites during it in the second half that hold the real drama and sadness. The chorus is sung only once in the middle, and that's because it forms the transition between the parts. God in Chicago reminds me of some of the story-songs in the early Drive-By Truckers' albums, stock full of rich tidbits of character notes and just the right lines of dialogue. In a different way, it takes me back to the moody, character-driven tales that Stan Ridgway would spin after he soloed away from Wall of Voodoo, albeit with a markedly different musical style.

I really enjoyed the single Hold Steady LP I have, and had planned to hear more, and now that is probably going to have to happen eventually. Nice work, Craig. Along with Marling's Wild Fire and Big Thief's Shark Smile, Finn's dark tale becomes my third favorite track thus far on this list.

*****

Twenty songs down. More next time. For now, my score reads:

Total number of songs: 20
Songs I had heard before: 2
Songs that I own already: A big fat 0.
Reactions: Loved: 7 | Liked: 5 | Don't Care at All: 5 | Hated: 3
Songs that I plan to purchase: 10

So that's not bad for the first score. When I get up and running with the music factory again, it looks like I have lined up half of these tracks or artists to be added to my collection. I do worry when I find a handful of really excellent songs surrounded by chaff at the bottom of the list, because it says to me these things were not measured out by quality but rather some other system. But we can discuss that after we see what Part 2 brings me in a few days. See you then!

RTJ

[To be continued next week in Pt. 2, featuring Songs 30 through 11…]

*****

PAST EXPERIMENTS

The 50 Something or Other Songs of 2015
Pt. 1: http://cinema4pylon.blogspot.com/2015/12/the-50-songs-of-2015-pt-1.html
Pt. 2: http://cinema4pylon.blogspot.com/2015/12/the-50-songs-of-2015-pt-2.html

The 50 Something or Other Songs of 2016
Pt. 1: http://cinema4pylon.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-50-something-or-other-songs-of-2016.html
Pt. 2: http://cinema4pylon.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-50-something-or-other-songs-of-2016.html
Pt. 3: http://cinema4pylon.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-50-something-or-other-songs-of-2016_8.html

There Must Be Some Mixtape: Track #13 – "Great Pumpkin" by Mikey Mason

noreply@blogger.com (Rik Tod Johnson) — Wed, 01 Nov 2017 06:06:00 +0000

Yeah, I don't believe in a lot that is spiritually based. But, as a fan of Halloween, I still believe in the Great Pumpkin.

If Linus were my friend, I would probably be at the pumpkin patch with him regardless of whether I believed or not. Friends gotta stick to together, and Linus has a security blanket that he uses to perform pretty groovy tricks.

Sure, Linus is a pretty religious kid; he can spout bible verses like no one's business. But Linus also has this weird, darker side where he sits in pumpkin patches while all of the rest of his friends, except for the girl who crushes on him, run about having varied success trick-or-treating. (One kid, I hear, only seems to get rocks in his bag...)

I don't have a lot of time left on Halloween to get this thing knocked out, but I wanted to round out my 2017 mixtape to a perfect 13 songs. I got a little behind here and there; as a result, there were a few songs I selected to be used for this year that I didn't get to yet, so I have decided to save them for next year's mixtape. (I own them, so I can listen to them all I want already. I just won't tell you what they are until then.)

So, for my last selection, I ran into a song a few days ago on a site called The FuMP, which stands for The Funny Music Project. The FuMP has been around for a few years, and specializes in promoting comedy and novelty records. New songs are featured on the site every week, the 128k versions of which you can download for free for a short while or you can always purchase the larger, prettier sounding 320k files of the songs. I check in to The FuMP now and then to see what new comedy music is out there, and was surprised to find a couple of pretty decent Halloween tunes that had recently been released on there.

My favorite of the pair was Great Pumpkin by Mikey Mason, a professional standup comic who also has released a couple of geek topic-based comedy albums in recent years. I have sort of missed Mason's music to this point, but I really like this track. Perhaps it is because it is directly about Linus' thoughts as he spends yet another cold, fruitless Halloween night waiting for his other personal deity to arrive. And yet, he never loses his faith throughout the song. No, really... he will be proven right... eventually...

This is the point where I normally post a video of the song from YouTube so you can listen to the song while you read the lyrics below. However, there is no video as of yet for this song on either Mason's YouTube channel or The FuMP's, and while there is an embed code on The FuMP official site for this song, Blogger tells me the code is incompatible with my own site. It is probably bullshit, and there is likely a workaround out there, but I don't have time right now. Maybe I will experiment with it tomorrow. Maybe not.

In the meantime, you can follow this link directly to the song's page on The FuMP: http://www.thefump.com/fump.php?id=2251. You can listen to it there or download it (for the moment).

Great Pumpkin by Mikey Mason

"Tonight
It’s gonna happen tonight
I’ve waited all of my life
for this moment to arrive

I’m here
I’ve suffered all of the jeers
The Halloween sky is clear
I’ve never felt so alive

You can have your trick or treating
Keep your candy, you’ll be eating
Crow tomorrow
Anyway

So go
I think you already know
You’re gonna reap what you sow
You think this all is just some story but…

At last
All of October has passed
And here in the pumpkin patch
I’ll be waiting on his Glory

You can keep your masks and candy
I’ll be doing fine and dandy
As one of the anointed
on All Hallow’s Day

[Chorus]
When the Great Pumpkin comes
I will be the one
who finally gets to laugh at all of you
who think I’m crazy
When the Great Pumpkin comes
shining like the sun
I will choose forgiveness over vengeance
Okay maybe
Maybe not.

It’s here
And I can see it so clear
This pumpkin patch is sincere
and sincerely here I wait

Each Halloween
Waiting just to be seen
Just like I am in my dreams
chosen by his orange greatness

While you’re at your parties dancing,
Trick or treating or romancing,
I’ll be waiting chastely,
prostrate in my fear…

[Chorus]
When the Great Pumpkin comes
I will be the one
who finally gets to laugh at all of you
who think I’m crazy
When the Great Pumpkin comes
shining like the sun
I will choose forgiveness over vengeance
Okay maybe
Maybe not.

Maybe I’ll come riding in with him
in all his blazing orange greatness,
And all the infidels will flee
or fall beneath our justice!
And I’ll be laughing heartily
as all the unbelievers cry,
"Forgive us! Linus, please forgive us!"

What’s that?
I must’ve taken a nap.
And now my head feels like crap,
and out over the horizon is...

The sun
November first has begun
Another Halloween done
with nothing left to show for it

But just you wait until next year,
I’ll be waiting right back here
And next year he will visit,
and next year you will pay!

[Chorus]
When the Great Pumpkin comes
I will be the one
who finally gets to laugh at all of you
who think I’m crazy
When the Great Pumpkin comes
shining like the sun
I will choose forgiveness over vengeance
Okay maybe
Wait and see..."

Hope you had a Happy Halloween and a marvelous October. Halloween is never over in my world, but I hope to see most of you next year. Unless you stick around, then I will be glad to see you soon. :)

RTJ

P.S. Remember, if you like it, buy it at http://www.thefump.com/fump.php?id=2251.

There Must Be Some Mixtape: Track #12 – "Sea Monster" by Elephant Revival

noreply@blogger.com (Rik Tod Johnson) — Tue, 31 Oct 2017 02:10:00 +0000

In my post about the Eddie Noack song, Psycho, the other day, I went through various other versions of the same tune. One more recent attempt, that committed to recorded life by the husband-and-wife team of author Neil Gaiman and performer Amanda Palmer, rather annoyed me. First, the versions that I have heard (all of them live) were rather lackluster in performance, which disappointed me mainly because I thought the idea of Gaiman – an author and personality whom I admire most highly – striving to croak his way through a country song could at least have been a little fun.

The end result wasn't fun for me; it was clumsily staged and no two elements from the selection of the song to the pairing of guest musicians with star performers seemed to fit together at any time. I blamed it mostly on a rampant mood of unchecked hipsterism dominating the stage, replete with a group of weirdos delivering some OK singing saw atmosphere that might have worked just fine with this particular song had a little more thought gone into the arrangement and genuine interest in the actual audience bled through the whole affair.

Now, it might sound like I am playing Pick on the Hipster here, and maybe I was to a certain degree. It is, after all, kind of fun and easy to do. But I did state in my original post that I would, as an example, love to find an entry point into the music created by Ms. Palmer, but just haven't been given one yet. I don't want to go through life simply hating certain music without a very good reason; I would rather call a Nickelback a Nickelback, and be done with it. I would point to my forays in facing off with Rolling Stone's Best 50 Songs the past two years as further examples that I am willing to take a chance on music that I normally avoid or just don't encounter in my day to day life. (And there will be a new version of Best 50 Songs coming up in early December, most likely. Watch for it... I have been pleasantly surprised with the past results.) And maybe I went into Gaiman and Palmer's version of Psycho hoping too hard for a decent take on the song to come out of it, after having listened to four good to great versions before it. Still, that hipster vibe of insincerity, unchecked irony, and self-possessed cool just came at me too hard, and I couldn't let it pass with comment.

A slight detour...

Let's skip to archive.org for a moment. One of the things that I love most about this public domain website – aside from the easy access to just about every p.d. film in existence – is their Live Music Archive. There are thousands and thousands of free, accessible concerts available in their archive, many of them recorded openly by visitors to these concerts, and many also coming directly from soundboard recordings (much better quality in general, but I have heard some great ones made right in the crowd). Now, before you get on me about artists' rights and all that, there is one notable point to add about the Live Music Archive: to add any concert to the site, the user and/or the site must have published direct permission from at least one member of a band or the band's management to post said concerts. When one finds a Man or Astro-Man, Robyn Hitchcock, or Camper Van Beethoven performance available for legal download on archive.org, one does it with the knowledge on the artist's page that said performer has approved such posting and further sharing with their audience.

So, you won't find a Radiohead, Wilco, Muse or Red Hot Chili Peppers concert on there; most of the bigger name artists and groups don't allow such easy access. There are, however, some surprises to be found. Some in my list of personal faves do show up in the Live Music Archive, such as Warren Zevon, Cracker, the Drive-By Truckers, Smashing Pumpkins, Ryan Adams, Elliott Smith, and Ween. Mostly though, given the rather socialist notion behind the sharing of all information on the site, it is not surprising that the vast majority of bands to be found there are – ahem – ahem again – jam bands.

That's right... so many jam bands. Hippie jam bands. Stoner jam bands. Hipster jam bands. Psychedelic jam bands. Bluegrass jam brands. Electronica jam bands. Hippie stoner hipster psychedelic bluegrass electronica jam bands. Jam bands from just about every place in the world (but no strawberry jam bands... gotta go to Knott's to score some of that...) At the top is the biggest jam band ever of all time, the Grateful Dead, who have somewhere in the neighborhood of over 11,000 concert recordings ready for either streaming or download on the site. (They have a special page set up on the site.) And then, after the Dead, come all the Dead spinoff groups, many of them containing at least one or two members from the band's past (Phil Lesh, Bob Weir, Mickey Hart, etc., etc.) After that, you've got Disco Biscuits, the String Cheese Incident, moe., Umphrey's McGee, Yonder Mountain String Band, the Radiators, and eventually Little Feat and Blues Traveler. (Surprisingly, Phish is not on archive.org officially, and I find that a truly stunning fact.)

As it turns out, while I love 22-minute guitar solos and 12-minute drum solos if either the right guitarist or right drummer are performing them – I would never turn off an Allman Brothers album if given the choice – I am not really a jam band guy. The same way that Seinfeld wasn't an orgy guy; I'd have to go buy jam band clothes, get new jam band friends, and with them came new jam band drugs. Incessant noodling without real purpose except to stretch out an already long concert can often be annoying. I wouldn't mind being at any of these concerts, but that's not really what I listen to normally (with the open admission that some groups I adore, such as Built to Spill, Frank Zappa, Wilco, Cream, and early Pink Floyd – none of them on archive.org, mind you – are or were really jam bands at heart or started out that way).

Despite all that, I quite often check out concerts by any group that seems interesting to me, whether they eschew needless jamming or not. I've dipped a toe into the offerings of some of the jam bands I mentioned earlier and even partake of an occasional concert by the Dead, even adding some of the better shows to my own collection. At my collector's core, I have a basic urge to find new music constantly, and the Live Music Archive makes it easy to do at the only cost that I can currently afford: free. (And without annoying commercials like on Spotify or Pandora; I only have the free versions of those apps/sites as well.)

... eventually leads me to...

Elephant Revival. That was the name of the band I encountered on archive.org. A very simple name. The "elephant" part was attractive to me because I love those creatures dearly, and also because of some residual love for the Elephant 6 record label (home of Apples in Stereo and Of Montreal) from way back. "Revival" made me think immediately, of course, of CCR, and there is nothing not to love about that, unless it is a version not involving John Fogerty. The name "Elephant Revival" seems like maybe it is missing a couple of words in the middle, like their real name should be "Elephant Foot Massage Revival" – itself a dangerous proposition – the way that "Monty Python" is not nearly complete without the apostrophe and "s" and the "Flying Circus" part. But still, even the short name "Elephant Revival" intrigued me enough to make me click on the concert first over shows from other bands that had been uploaded that day.

Now, I was guessing that "jam band" would be the eventual outcome of my first listen to Elephant Revival. Past experience had given me a working knowledge of the basic audience on the Live Music Archive, including those who relentlessly tape and post new concerts. The law of averages sees to it that the majority of bands encountered on archive.org are jam bands, and I believe, by and large, that law still stands. And, of course, I always do some research first before digging into anybody's music. Before I even heard a note, I found out that Elephant Revival was a bluegrass/folk contingent, and while I do like bluegrass far more than I usually acknowledge, I still feared the "H" word in all of this. Folk hipsters are over the radio these days, and while I do like some of the sounds I hear, the songs quite often leave me pretty cold. I can find no connection to them. Most of the time, when a pack of Mumfords with crazy facial hair, antique instruments and toothy grins show up knocking on the door to my iTunes, I turn them away roughly 90% of the time.

The first listen to the band floored me. Absolutely floored me. At first, it was the lush instrumentation; the usual suspects as far as mandolin, guitar, and fiddle went, but even if they turned into a jam band, the assured picking told me they could keep up with just about anyone. But this was a hybrid that had bluegrass at its center but seemed informed by nearly every style of music available, including pop, reggae, jazz, and even the occasional electrified solo that rocked the house as assuredly as the sharpest axeman.

And it is of significant note that the first song I heard, Will Carry On, featuring vocals by one Bonnie Paine, who may be changing my listening life as we know it. Her quavering voice on this song seems so odd on that initial encounter, and I was slightly reminded of the first time I heard Katherine Whalen on a Squirrel Nut Zippers record doing her Billie Holiday riffing. (Not a dig, just a note.) But then, a few songs later, Paine lets loose with wailing along the lines of early Grace Slick, and then I understood that Bonnie Paine was capable of so much more. When I finally watched a few live clips, I realized that Paine is also the band's main (and sometimes sole) percussionist as well, thumping a djembe or stomp box while singing the band's introspective lyrics. (She also plays cello and musical saw at times.) She is not the only vocalist though; all five members split duties here and there, and all of them are multi-instrumentalists, easily and eagerly swapping the tools of their trade between songs.

The songs were largely original, but on that first concert listen, there was the remarkable inclusion of Pink Floyd's Have a Cigar, usually a rock monster of a song with heavy guitar licks. In the Elephant Revival version, Paine takes up the role of the sleazy record agent, and the song loses none of its nastiness in being transposed to the folk/bluegrass world. In fact, it seems rather... er... revived from it. And that comparison to Ms. Slick a bit ago? In listening to a second downloaded concert from archive.org, Elephant Revival launched into their own stab at Jefferson Airplane's White Rabbit, and I realized that I must not be the only one who stumbled into that comparison. And if it wasn't quite as surprising as their cover of Floyd, it was still really great.

But where is the monster stuff?

OK, Elephant Revival is not a band that you would immediately think would have some horror cred, but keep in mind their folk traditionalist roots and you realize that a walk along the dark side is not that far from their repertoire. I would not be surprised to hear them do a murder ballad or two in their career, but for now, they have a couple of interesting songs that nearly cross over to the Halloween path. The Paine-penned track, Raven Song (which they used to open at least one concert taking place on Halloween), takes on the notion of the raven as a presager and messenger of death, carrying loved ones to the great beyond. It's not necessarily dark in concept, though, and is more lovely than anything, but it still fits the mood.

The howling of wolves is also represented in their track, Sing to the Mountain. In the chorus, we are told "Go and sing to the mountain, go and sing to the moon". When " sing to the moon" is offered, other band members – and in live versions, the more than willing audience – howl wildly and without concern for stepping on the lyrics. I guess it is their version of making an impromptu shark fin on top of their heads while Jimmy Buffett sings "You got fins to the left, fins to the right". Despite being a huge shark fan, as you know, I will take the wolf howls over drunken island hoppers in this instance.

But let's get to the track I have chosen to be added to my Countdown to Halloween mixtape for 2017. The song is called Sea Monster, and immediately, it seems like, yes, such a song belongs here. One could easily read the lyrics and see little more than a purposefully vague imagery involving a possible siren of the sea, calling out to sailors to lead them to their doom. That is fine for any song with that title and surely belongs in any Halloween collection. But what if the monster is not what it seems at first?

Let's listen to the song and read its lyrics first before continuing...

Sea Monster by Elephant Revival

(Music and lyrics by Elephant Revival / ℗ 2016 Itz Evolving/Thirty Tigers, Elephant Revival Publishing]

I’m going out over the sea,
I’ve got a boat, I’ve got a dream.
I trim the sails with my own hands

The song Sea Monster can be
purchased on this album.

leave all my thought back on the land.

I’m going out over the sea,
I won’t be back until I’m free.

I hear a voice, a siren’s review,
I hear it calling out of the blue.
A song of a strange unbearable thing,
it grows in the water, it goes unseen.

I’m going out over the sea,
hearing the song I’ve come to see.

What is this monster in the gyre?
All that’s thrown over the side,
And I want to know…

How we live in a world that provides and expires,
How we grow, come to know our hearts desire.

I’m going out over the sea,
All I have heard, all I have seen,
We are all out, out in a dream,
We are a boat, we are the sea.

After all the rise and fall is all that still remains.

At the end of the second verse, there is the line, "A song of a strange unbearable thing, it grows in the water, it goes unseen." In the bridge, the singer has encountered what it takes to be the true beast and asks, "What is this monster in the gyre? All that's thrown over the side..."

Before you groan and think you are being lectured on the horrors of pollution when you thought you were merely delving into a folksy tune about a sea monster, keep in mind that Puff the Magic Dragon has already had his day. Mere child's novelty has given way to a darker turn of mood. I don't suffer gladly those who pretend that mankind has no sway over the destruction of the natural world, and I suspect that Elephant Revival doesn't either. In the introduction to this song on that first concert listen, Paine attempts to set up the song but encounters some slight difficulties in doing so: chiefly, the type of audience members who grouse when bands try to bring something deeper to the stage than the mere strumming of acoustic instruments. Paine said...

"The Sea Monster in some aspects is a collection of plastic bottles and trash that have accumulated in the gyre of the ocean, which is a large thing...(laughs)... not to cause boos or anything before you sing a song... (laughs)... but it is something worth bringing consciousness to."

That "something" is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a massive man-made "soup" that was discovered in the mid-'80s in a place known as the North Pacific Gyre. Not the only such vortex in the oceans of the world, just the most prominent in size, the "patch" is largely made up of minute particles but is thought in the public eye to be almost like an island or a creature made of garbage, though it is actually thin enough in most places (and chiefly under the surface of the water) as to be undetectable even from those floating through it, let alone be seen from space. This is not to say that there aren't vast areas where plastic is to be clearly seen. Whatever the imagery the patch invokes, whatever its true visibility, it is almost certainly a monster of our own devising, a Frankenstein's Monster of pollution that could be altered and even stopped if mankind changed its ways drastically.

I was not expecting any of this when I encountered Elephant Revival for the first time. For all my wailing about millennials and annoyance and ironic stances, Sea Monster is a reminder that sometimes even possible hipsters can pass by and leave us something small, sad, and crystalline in its fragility. It's a crushingly lovely song with a hard truth buried deep within it. If the siren that sings to us from the depths of the ocean is merely a call to responsibility for our world, I can live with that. Until then, we have a monster on the loose, and the death of marine life from the increased ingestion of our plastics is a horror that I cannot accept. It's probably a horror more true than anything you would normally encounter on a mere Halloween mixtape, with its usual focus on silly supernatural things.

Elephant Revival. When I get into some spending cash again, I will own all of their available material in one fell swoop. Or one swell shop. Take your pick; I will make them mine. And I will order one Bonnie Paine to go, please...

RTJ

There Must Be Some Mixtape: Track #11 – "Werewolf" by the Violent Femmes

noreply@blogger.com (Rik Tod Johnson) — Fri, 27 Oct 2017 06:14:00 +0000

Only two of these three guys are still
with the Femmes...

I have mentioned the Violent Femmes a couple of times in these mixtape pieces this month, but only in speaking tangentially to the main subject at hand. However, I did so knowing full well that I had a Femmes song on tap for later as we neared Halloween. Well, that "later" is now...

The song is called, simply, Werewolf. It's not an original song by the band, but a classic folk tune that the Femmes have occasionally covered in concert. The original song is by Michael Hurley, a revered troubadour of our modern times (and still performing at age 76) who has recorded multiple versions of the song. (Hurley is also known for drawing his own comics and album covers featuring werewolf characters, so the creatures are a regular motif in his work.)

This song, as you will hear, is perfectly suited to lead singer Gordon Gano's voice, and given his penchant for off-kilter subject matter and dark humor, not really a surprise to hear coming from the band. I had first thought about including their original song Fool in the Full Moon, with its creepy lyrics about "following women after dark," until I decided that perhaps a full-on monster song was made to order after we just had five straight versions of Psycho in this countdown.

Let's have a listen, while you read the lyrics for this version below the video...

Werewolf [Live] by the Violent Femmes
(Music and lyrics by Michael Hurley; lyrics from Hurley's 1971 recording)

Oh the werewolf, oh the werewolf comes stepping along
He don't even break the branches where he's been gone
You can hear his long holler from way across the moor
That's the holler of the werewolf when the werewolf's feeling poor

Oh the werewolf, oh the werewolf, have sympathy
For the werewolf he's somebody like you or me
Once I saw him in the moonlight where the bats were a-flyin’
All alone I saw the werewolf, and the werewolf was cryin’

Eeeee Eeeee Eeeee…
Eeeee Eeeee Eeeee…

Michael Hurley

Crying nooo-body, nooo-body, nobody knows
How much I love the maid as I tear off her clothes
Crying nooo-body, nooo-body knows my pain
When I see that its risen, that full moon again

Eeeee Eeeee Eeeee…
Eeeee Eeeee Eeeee…

Crying nobody, nobody knows my pain
When I see that its risen, that full moon again

And ol' Igor, he said to me "man, its this little flute I play
But I never play in the light of day"
(spoken: Well, when you your flute, what do you play on your flute?)

Eeeee Eeeee Eeeee…
Eeeee Eeeee Eeeee…

The "Eeeee" moments in the lyrics don't really approximate the sounds that Gano is making onstage, but they were already in the lyrics for Hurley's version. "Ooooo", "Eeeeee", or even "Oo ee oo ah ah ting tang walla walla bing bang"... who cares? As long as whatever actual sounds the singer makes fit the mood of the song, I don't care how they are spelled out in the lyric sheet.

But do the words match the song? They matched the words that still hung in my head from hearing Gordon's brother Glenn, a close friend of mine, perform the song in coffeehouses around Anchorage and Eagle River, Alaska for many years. Glenn's performances of the song were my first exposure to Michael Hurley and many other folk artists, and strengthened my regard for others that I already knew, such as John Prine and Richard and Linda Thompson. On a side note, when I inadvertently published this post earlier this morning before it had fully baked, Glenn messaged me on Facebook to remind me that he used to play it – which he needn't have, for I did remember the song very well. As a Halloween fanatic, I rarely miss out on monster songs, and Glenn mentioned it was the only Halloween type song that he performed. (He would do a murder ballad here and there, such as the Femmes' Country Death Song, and I kind of count those.) He also added that he and Gordon learned Hurley's Werewolf from their older brother, Christopher, when they were growing up.

In looking up Michael Hurley's versions of the song, I found that the version I owned already had vastly different lyrics to it. It turns out, I owned Hurley's original 1964 recording, from his album for Folkways Records called First Songs. This version is where the "Eeeeee" noises didn't live yet, nor did the weird business with the flute-playing "Igor".

Here are the lyrics from Hurley's original 1964 version, then called The Werewolf Song:

Oh the werewolf, oh the werewolf
Comes a-stepping along
He don't even break the branches
Where he's been gone

You can hear his long holler from away across the moor
That's the holler of a werewolf when he's feeling poor

He goes out in the evening when
The bats are on the wing
And he's killed some young maiden before the birds sing

For the werewolf, for the werewolf
Have sympathy
Because the werewolf he is someone
Just like you and me

Once I saw him in the moonlight
When the bats were a-flying
All alone I saw the werewolf and
The werewolf was crying

The band's most recent recording from 2015.
Only two of these three guys are still with the Femmes
as well. I don't know about the giraffe...

Crying, "Nobody, nobody, nobody knows
How much I love the maiden as I tear off her clothes"
Crying, "Nobody, nobody knows of my pain
When I see it has risen that full moon again"

When I see that moon moving
Through the clouds in the sky
I get a crazy feeling and I wonder why

Oh the werewolf, oh the werewolf
Comes traveling along
He don't even break the branches
Where he's been gone

For the werewolf have pity, not fear, and not hate
Because the werewolf might be someone
That you've known of late

Oh the werewolf, oh the werewolf
Comes traveling along
He don't even crush the leaves
Where he's been gone

The concepts are generally all intact, except that flute-playing, and the words are a little fuller and seem in need of some pruning. The version that the Femmes play comes off of Hurley's 1971 re-recording, for his next album (and what some consider his "true" debut album), Armchair Boogie, where Werewolf has been greatly altered to its current, more streamlined but even stranger form. The song's reworking was obviously a deliberate effort by Hurley and important to me as well, for not only does it lead off the album, but the record's cover shows off one of his trademark werewolf art designs.

It's rather neat to see the song go through variations like this, seeing the songwriter rework the lyrics and elements of the tune over the years, almost like a painter reconsidering a stroke or a splash of color here and there further down the line. Does the creative process ever end for an artist's output? In this case, Hurley condensed a song written in his youth to its most impactful moments and was able to work in a new effect that made the song deeply stranger and more eerie.

If you can find this, good luck.
I can't...

Well, maybe reconsidering one's works is neat in regards to songwriting and painting, but not so much in Star Wars films. Let us please not go through that b.s. ever again, eh? :)

RTJ

[Note: The live recording of the Femmes' version of Werewolf was included on their 2001 E-Music compilation, Something's Wrong, but if you can find a copy, good luck. That company went out of business a while ago (and took my money with it). Oh, and go check out some Michael Hurley as well. His music is strange and wonderful. And sometimes quite beautiful.]

Countdown to Halloween: Cars Land "Haul-O-Ween" Part II

noreply@blogger.com (Rik Tod Johnson) — Wed, 25 Oct 2017 23:12:00 +0000

My trip to Cars Land at Disney California Adventure with my mother-in-law Sande last week resulted in a wonderful batch of pictures featuring many of the decorative changes to the area for what they are calling "Haul-O-Ween" this year. It is easy for me to get jaded by such things, but Disney has really done an incredible job of making the whole of Cars Land a truly immersive holiday experience for everyone.

[You can check out Pt. I of this piece here.]

However, I didn't cover the area as much as I had originally wished in the relatively short time we had to visit Cars Land that afternoon. Luckily, I knew that I would get to spend at least a couple more chunks of time there in the coming week. With my friend Janie (wife of one of my oldest friends in the world, Tony) in town as she stayed with us for the weekend on a business break, I knew that Saturday would be a great chance to collect shots of some of the missing details.

First stop was the billboard at the entrance to Cars Land. This feature was proving to be a difficult shot, mainly because Disney constantly keeps a cast member photographer in front of the sign to take pics of every family or group that stops there. On the previous Thursday, I had a couple of brief chances to get a photo of the billboard, but there were always six or seven people standing right there, with some of their heads etc, obscuring the text and other minor details in the artwork. Sure, I could have easily taken their photo and be done with it – they were paying full attention to the actual working camera person and not little ol' me – but I still feel uncomfortable in "accidentally" capturing those I don't know on film without their knowledge or permission. That's right: I do have some small sense of ethics.

Despite my hesitations, I am getting pretty good at snapping quick shots in the small gaps in time between the photographer switching from one group of people to the next. Saturday, I had a more leisurely pace to the day, and Janie was fine with me taking whatever time I needed to get my shots.

Me and Janie in the Spider-Car having a good time posing for
the Disney Photo Pass person working this area.

Flo's V-8 Café, while certainly not my favorite place to eat in the area (regular diner fare not necessarily being my thing), does have a really cool design to the place. I love the way it looks normally, but for "Haul-O-Ween" they added a pretty menacing Spider-Car to the environs. Since I am a spider-lover, I was overjoyed to see this, but somehow skipped it on my first visit. The story behind the Spider-Car is that she has taken over the café entrance by spinning webs (made out of chains) from canopy to canopy outside. It looks marvelous.

Why, yes, friends who have not seen me recently,
I have put on even more weight... Why do you ask?

Timing is a big part of visiting any area of the Disney parks in regards to seeing your favorite characters. Cars Land has several car characters that drive through the area, talk to the visitors, and pose for photos at the Cozy Cone Motel or in the town square area. Each of the main cars has a Halloween costume this year (I listed them in Part 1). I got a chance to see the newest character, Cruz Ramirez, dressed as a pirate last week, but failed to get a picture; I also briefly saw Lightning McQueen in his superhero cape, but again wasn't able to angle around for a photo. And I missed out entirely seeing Mater, DJ, and Red the Firetruck.

This time, I was a little more lucky, but thanks to the brightness of the sun and the surrounding lines, my pics for Mater (as a "van-pire" above, nyuk nyuk) and Lightning (below), didn't turn out as well as I wished. In both pictures, you see the back end of people leaving or the front of someone walking into frame, as I shot them in between groupings for the paid cameraperson. The Mater picture does have an odd effect from the sunbeams glancing just past the edge of the motel office roof, causing a weird spotlight effect with the sun that just wouldn't be healthy if he really were a vampire.

I had posted a picture last time of the double signs for Mater's little kid ride – turned into the Graveyard JamBOOree for "Haul-O-Ween," but I wanted to get another shot of the smaller sign for greater detail this time. It kind of got lost in the bigger picture of the sign area.

Of course, Cars Land does have the weird subtext of some vehicles being treated basically like livestock, in what I can only imagine is some weird slavery scenario. One of the funnier scenes in the Cars films is when Mater teaches Lightning about "tractor tipping". This trend is continued in Mater's attraction at the park where not only does he sing along while a couple dozen tractors serves as seats for the ride, but he also has a small "petting zoo" area at the front of the attraction. The cute, little tractor that has to pose with all manner of filthy, smelly children is all wrapped up like a mummy for Haul-O-Ween".

Another part that I skipped the first go was Fillmore's Taste-In, mainly because I already had a bottle of water in my hand, so I had no reason to visit it. This time I made sure to duck in and get a couple of snaps of the commune-like refreshment stand. The first was of this rainbow-colored windmill, slightly transformed with Jack-O-Lantern-style faces...

... and the second was of this lonely little ghost car, projected upward by a large spring set inside an old tire. I like the purposeful rust effect on the whole affair.

While I had a shot of one of the many Jack-O-Lanterns last time in my picture of the Horn o' Plenty over at the Luigi attraction, I somehow missed this entire garden full of Jack-Oil-Lanterns alongside Sarge's Surplus Hut. I get even more annoyed that I missed them because right to the left of them is the spot where I shot the photo of two large spiders (made out of assorted parts) crawling up the side of Sarge's quonset hut. Love this garden!

Finally, we come to the car below, which I think is a nod to the upcoming Pixar feature, Coco. Not that this car doesn't belong in this "Haul-O-Ween" update, since it ties into the Mexican Day of the Dead and all, the beginning of said celebration usually starting on Oct. 31. If you can get to the park soon, I highly recommend visiting the Paradise Pier Grill for another lovely area promoting the film directly. Well worth your time. (And if you can't, I will have more on Coco and the Paradise Pier Grill area in another post next week.)

This was yet another stop where a photographer made it difficult to get a simple picture of the car. Luckily for me, the person having their picture taken was a fairly comely lass partly dressed up (I think) like one of the monster cheerleaders from the Pixar Parade. As I was snapping a series of pics to capture the image below, she suddenly came running through the frame past my camera, so I did get her (fleetingly) on film. But, because I didn't ask permission from her, I have not posted those photos.

There are still some details for which I was unable to get decent photos. Mostly this was due to the sunlight being so bright, and those details being behind windows in the town, so that my photos were basically reflected shots of me taking pictures of something indiscernible behind the glass. I will be in the park again tomorrow, but whether I will have the time to get more taken is unknown. If I do get any more, I am not going to have Part III, but I may work a couple more into this post instead.

RTJ

There Must Be Some Mixtape: Tracks #6-10 – Variations on "Psycho"

noreply@blogger.com (Rik Tod Johnson) — Tue, 24 Oct 2017 23:10:00 +0000

In 1968, Leon Payne wrote a dark, little murder ballad called Psycho. According to Payne's daughter Myrtie Le Payne in an article on the Nashville Scene website, it was conceived out of a conversation with a fellow musician regarding the Richard Speck nurse murders that occurred in 1966, and then the talk continued to expand and include other famous killers throughout the century to that point. America's fascination with mass murdering fuckheads was still in the building stages – the term "serial killer" would not even reach the popular vernacular until the late '70s – and Leon Payne was simply as following suit. From out of that fascination, Leon Payne spun one of the darkest, strangest ballads ever put out as a single to the record-buying public. While the song has never gone on to be a real hit, it has been covered by a wide variety of artists, mostly due to the subject matter and the slyness of Payne's lyrics mixed with the song's oddly plaintive melody.

Leon Payne and his wife were both blind, but Payne had a long career as both a performer and a songwriter before Psycho came to him. Known as "The Blind Balladeer," Payne wrote hits such as I Love You Because and You've Still Got a Place in My Heart, but he is perhaps most famous for composing (and originally recording) a pair of songs that Hank Williams turned into huge hits: Lost Highway and They'll Never Take Her Love From Me. In 1968, he suggested his new song, Psycho, to his old friend Eddie Noack, who then recorded it as a single for K-Ark Records. The song really didn't go anywhere, but Noack's delivery made this the definitive version of the composition.

Have a listen while you read along with the lyrics below...

Psycho by Eddie Noack (1967)
(Words and music by Leon Payne)

Can Mary fry some fish, Mama?
I'm as hungry as can be
Oh lordy, how I wish, Mama
You could keep the baby quiet
'Cause my head is killing me

I've seen my ex last night, Mama
At a dance at Miller's store
She was with that Jackie White, Mama
I killed them both, and they're buried
Under Jenkins sycamore

[Chorus]
Don't you think I'm psycho, Mama?
You can pour me a cup
If you think I'm psycho, Mama,
You better let 'em lock me up

Don't hand the dog to me, Mama
I might squeeze him too tight
And I'm as nervous as can be, Mama
So let me tell you 'bout last night

I woke up in Johnny's room, Mama
Standing right by his bed
With my hands near his throat, Mama
Wishing both of us was dead

[Chorus]
You think I'm psycho don't you, Mama?
I just killed Johnny's pup
You think I'm psycho don't you, Mama?
You'd better let 'em lock me up

You know the little girl next door, Mama?
I think her name is Betty Clark
Oh, don't tell me that she's dead, Mama
Why I just seen her in the park

She was sitting on a bench, Mama
Thinking of a game to play
Seems I was holding a wrench, Mama
Then my mind walked away

[Chorus]
You think I'm psycho don't you, Mama?
I didn't mean to break your cup
You think I'm psycho don't you, Mama?
Mama, Mama why don't you get up?
Say something to me Mama
Mama?

I have a weird, knee-jerk reaction to most murder ballads when I first hear them; sometimes when I have heard them a thousand times. I laugh. I laugh despite myself. It doesn't matter how much gravity there may be in the singer's voice or how sombre the instrumentation. They sound odd to my ear, and part of this comes from a slight shock that someone would stoop to sing about such a thing as murdering another human being.

The second (and under-appreciated) Violent Femmes album, Hallowed Ground, has a tune titled Country Death Song on it, and I really love it. The title tells you exactly what you need to know before going into it and the lyrics do not hold back on the horror of killing one's own family to spare them the slow death of gradual starvation. And yet, when my friend Glenn asked me my thoughts on Country Death Song, I told him I thought it was hilarious. He seemed astonished by this and asked me to explain why, but I really had a hard time doing so. At the time, I just thought it was funny but hadn't carried through on examining exactly why I felt that way. I know now why I did.

I thought it was because I found, at the time, the lowbrow antics of what I considered to be hicks, bumpkins and poor white trash ridiculous. But I know full well that I am no better than anyone out there, and that are very few of us who know how we might react in similar, desperate situations. And following my first hearing of Country Death Song, I began to listen with greater interest to the murder ballad genre – mostly because of Nick Cave; hell, he eventually even did a full album called Murder Ballads – and it finally dawned on me that my early laughter was a cover for my own nervousness. I was uneasy about hearing such such gruesome detail via music, in a completely opposite reaction to how I feel about the same topics in film and books. Or even sexual details in music; totally fine with it. But such violence was different. For me, there is something more intimate when hearing the human voice confess to low, dangerous behavior on a record that makes it seem more real to me.

Eddie Noack, the singer of this original version of Psycho, also released two other songs about a year later with K-Ark that each had very dark premises to them: Dolores, another murder ballad in which the narrator is singing to the woman he loves after he has killed her; and Barbara Joy, in which Noack plays the part of a man accused of raping another man's wife after she went to him for comfort. He begs Barbara to help him, singing "Say that you were willing/Don't let me die". These last two songs were written by Noack himself, so to say he was like-minded with Payne in those years is an understatement.

Psycho by Jack Kittel (1973)

Noack's version of Psycho didn't really go anywhere, and it would be a while before his song took on a cult status of its own. Psycho was resurrected five years later in 1973 by an obscure Michigan singer named Jack Kittel. (I'm not being mean by calling him obscure. It's just that Kittel doesn't have a Wikipedia page nor a biography on AllMusic, and if you don't rate a bio on AllMusic, you are obscure...)

Kittel's voice in this version is almost too lovely to sell the notion that the character is as psychotic as he is telling us he is. At the least, it is far prettier recording than Noack's quite stark original take on the song. This guy doesn't sound like he killed anyone, most especially "Johnny's pup". He might be a guy down the road relating a story he heard form the neighbors, but I doubt he did anything but make sure he put the empty milk bottles out on the stoop. Still, it is a nice version of the ballad, if nice is what you are looking for from it. I am not.

Psycho by Elvis Costello and the Attractions (1981)

Apparently along the way, Elvis Costello, whose musical interests are about as wide as anyone's ever have been, revealed a great fondness for Psycho. He would do the song live in the '70s, and eventually, a recording of the song was released as the "B" side to his other studio cover of Patsy Cline's Sweet Dreams, itself recorded during the sessions for his Almost Blue album in 1981.

While it seems at first that Costello's voice is almost as sweet as in Kittel's version, Costello has that "extra gear," along with a true sense of nervous urgency, both of which have served him well over decades of singing about a wide variety of not necessarily all-upright types. He can go from measured to manic in seconds and back again, and it is possibly that his accent adds even greater to the delivery.

The hushed tone he starts with here, in concert with a steel guitar weeping in the background, almost makes the character seem like he is whispering straight into his mother's ear after he has already murdered her. The tentativeness of some of the lines he sings also lends a possible sense that he is crying during his confessions to his mother. While Noack's is the standard, especially for creepiness, this one is pretty good. It seems gentle, but there is a lot bubbling under the surface. Most surprisingly, this is a live track in front of an audience, but it sounds like a studio track for the bulk of it's running time. A terrific take on the song, and exactly what I except from Costello, one of my very favorite artists of all time.

Psycho by Beasts of Bourbon (1988)

The terrific Australian alternative band, the Beasts of Bourbon, released their own version of Psycho in 1988. I own a couple of the group's albums, and if it is good, sweaty, hard-edged swamp blues-rock (albeit a swamp from Down Under) that you want to hear, I can recommend them heartily. Some contingent of the band still exists today, but Psycho appeared on their very first album, when they were introducing themselves to the world as a kind of Aussie supergroup, featuring members from groups such as Hoodoo Gurus and the Scientists.

Highly charismatic, original lead singer Tex Perkins, who would go on to success in the '90s with The Cruel Sea, is the focal point of the video that was filmed for Psycho. With his mane of perfectly coiffed hair, his prominent brow, and his dark eyes pushed forward toward the camera lens, Perkins almost comes across in the video as a proto-troglodyte as he grimaces through the song. Are we really looking at a man or some monstrous creature as he sneers during some of the wickeder turns of phrase in the lyrics? This is a man we can fully believe is capable of the violence in the song.

But is this a trick of the video used to sell the song to the public? Do we only believe him because of Perkins' almost frightening conviction (i.e., overacting) into making the viewer believe he is insane (obvious twitching, sneering, smirking) along with the way he is filmed (lighting him to create those dark shadows over his eyes and having him lean forward constantly so that he utterly dominates the frame)? In the background, a father figure sits on a couch reading a paper, unaware that a domestic drama is erupting at the kitchen table between a mother and her son. As Perkins continues to sing and glare, the unheard drama becomes more and more heated – as other members of the band, playing their instruments, glide past on an unseen track behind the couch between the drama and the unaware father – eventually culminating in the son picking up an axe and swinging it at the mother. Has he killed her or is the drama just a manifestation in Perkins' mind of what he wishes he had the courage to do? (I ask, because if you look very closely at the corner of the frame, you can see the mother's leg sneaking back into the kitchen. Perhaps the drama is simply going to recycle itself?)

Listening to the song apart from the video, the Beasts of Bourbon deliver a faithful version of Noack's original, though updated to their style with bursts of wistful slide guitar accompanying Perkins' solid vocal turn. Perkins, who is definitely less monstrous-looking elsewhere and has been considered something of a sex symbol over the years, is given a fair shake by the recorded version of the song, delivering the dark threat of the narrator's words with the proper impact while still not denying the honeyed undercurrent in his voice as he relates his grim tale. I think this is a marvelous version of the song, and while the corresponding video is a lot of fun, give the song a listen apart from actually watching the video to hear it properly.

Psycho by Neil Gaiman, Amanda Palmer and the Grand Theft Orchestra with Adrian Stout and the Singing Saws (2012)

I have one final, rather prominent version of Psycho that I want to get to, and it is one from more recent years. If there is a properly recorded version done by this pair, I am unaware of it, but there are loads of live videos available online, which is how I ran across it...

I will state outright: I really, really like Neil Gaiman, but I hate this version of the song. This is along the lines of me really, really liking Stephen King, but wishing he wouldn't act or attempt to direct feature films. Stick to what you do best. If it turns out that you are also really good at doing another thing, that is fine too, but you had better be really good at it.

I know that Gaiman and his wife Amanda Palmer were regularly performing this song when they were touring both before and after they were married a few years ago. Gaiman would mainly do staged readings as his part of the pairing, but they would come together for the occasional song like Psycho. Whether the selection was a favorite of Gaiman's or Palmer's I have yet to find any proof, though I am sure Gaiman has an interview somewhere where he discusses it. (Whether I take the time to find it, I doubt it.)

As said, there were a lot of videos of the pair doing this song, but I selected the one that had the best sound to give the song half a chance. And it may turn out that this version is right up your alley. Not mine. To me it is a case of "hipsters ruining everything". Some people get into that "whatever happens is fine" aspect that seems to be at large in the videos I watched for the Gaiman-Palmer version of this song, but that is not my thing. Cabaret shows, saws as musical instruments, spoken word versions of country songs... all of those elements are just fine on their own. Here, the mix of those components just doesn't come together for me into anything I consider as memorable. Or as anything that I would like to hear repeated.

I have some friends who like Amanda Palmer, either with or without the Dresden Dolls. I have met others who really hate her. I have a couple of songs she has done, but I have to say I remain largely unimpressed with her. (Believe me, when I like something even halfway, I tend to stock up on it.) I am glad that these two weirdos found each other, because all of us weirdos need someone to love too, but that doesn't mean that I have to like everything they produce.

And I did not put their version of Psycho here at the end because I wanted to save up and give a bashing to Palmer – because I would if I really felt the need to – but only because it was the most current version, and I waited to write this bit about it until I had heard it several times over a couple of weeks. (I first heard them sing this a couple of years ago, which is how I remembered it.) I wanted to give the song a fair shake, but to me it is mere novelty, and really unworthy of any reverence.

I am sure now that I will hear from those who worship at Amanda Fucking Palmer's feet, and that is fine. Tell me song titles and albums; point me to videos where her talent is clear. I have looked and have thus far come up empty. I welcome your input as to why I should get into her music, but believe me, I have tried again and again to find that entry point.

I guess Neil Gaiman beat me to it...

RTJ

Countdown to Halloween: Shock Show Update Fall 2017

noreply@blogger.com (Rik Tod Johnson) — Thu, 19 Oct 2017 02:00:00 +0000

As ever, I am on a constant search for more horror host thrills on television and cable. I am not going to get into a debate by my use of "horror host" here; "shock show," my favorite term to use (which you will see in the title to this piece), serves the same purpose. But even that probably doesn't apply to those examples where horror or science-fictional thrills aren't the focus. Perhaps I should just broaden the definition to "movie host shows," though that hasn't nearly the ring that "shock show" or "horror host" do.

Chiefly, the definition must include any example of the genre of TV matinee shows where an old movie is shown that features introductions by a host or hosts – most often playing characters outside of themselves – who do something a bit beyond just talking about the movie. This could include comedic monologues, skits, interviews (in character) with directors or actors, original films, etc. Not just "Here's the movie... see you when it's done!"

THOSE "NOT QUITE HORROR HOST" SHOWS

And yet, there are shows I watch regularly which fall just outside the above definition for me, even if not being quite the correct focus. TCM has a still fairly new, regular show on Sunday mornings called Noir Alley that I have not missed since it started months ago. You could say that it is just another normal TCM feature show – like The Essentials, or, just any evening airing of a film on TCM where it has a host introducing and closing the film. But the host of Noir Alley, Eddie Muller, seems as no-nonsense and tough as any detective in a noir film, and you get the sense that he would love to live that life, even if he is standing on a set on the TCM backlot. It helps that he really is an expert on his preferred genre, and writes his own novels and plays in the form. He is 100% real in his passion for his subject and is just being himself, but he still feels like a character put on for the cameras.

On the opposite end is TCM Underground, which is a horror host show without a horror host. Every Saturday night, TCM airs a primary film under this title that is usually within that range known as "psychotronic" – generally cult films, most often science fiction or horror, but can really be any genre as long as the primary component is that they are weird or out of the norm somehow. A second film, often closely related to the first, is shown next. The series started ages ago with Rob Zombie as the host, which seemed like a perfect pick but he was gone after a year. The show has remained host-less ever since and seems unlikely to ever get one, though I have long campaigned for the return of Joe Bob Briggs or someone similar to give late Saturday evenings a little more zip. Even without a host though, I still save many TCM Underground offerings on my DVR, if only for the novelty of seeing the gorier or dirtier examples on the normally squeaky clean TCM. (Seriously, it's kind of a thrill with me, the modern equivalent of sneaking a peak at nudity-laden cable TV when your parents are asleep.)

EMBRACING WHAT I HAVE ALREADY...

With Elvira no longer doing her duties regularly, Mystery Science Theater 3000 is clearly the prime example of this type of show in the modern era. Even if the movies are not always horror or science fiction-oriented, the horror host model popularized in the '50s and '60s by the likes of Vampira, Zacherley, and scores of mostly local yucksters dressed up in monster trappings was clearly an influence when MST3K hit the Minnesota airwaves in the late '80s. In terms of scope and comedic chops, MST3K has a clear leg up on its predecessors – especially now that the new series has started to attract familiar celebrity names to both its roster and guest list – but at its core, it was basically a bunch of goofy guys making jokes about "Z" grade films. Which is all you really need. (And no, Andrea, I have not forgotten the fine fellows at Rifftrax; I figured that show gets packaged in with the other MST3K spin-offs. All groovy with me...)

With Noir Alley, TCM Underground and the revived MST3K (which I helped revive in my own small way), you might think, "Oh, that's not enough for you?" No, I want real horror host thrills and terrible jokes -- ON THE AIR. I want the fun of turning on a basic cable or even public access channel and finding an ultra-low budget show with a guy in weird makeup trying to make me laugh while showing me a terrible print of an awful film. That's like the horror movie version of a peep show. It will rot your brain. And you will love it.

Thankfully, these days, I have dear ol' Svengoolie to hang out with on Saturday nights on MeTV. Rich Koz has played Sven (originally the Son of Svengoolie) since 1979, after the original Svengoolie, Jerry G. Bishop, gave Koz permission to continue the character. (Koz used to write and perform on the original show, Screaming Yellow Theater, which ran from 1970-1973.) After a break when Son of... ended in 1986, Svengoolie has been a Chicago institution since its return as 1994, and went national in 2011 when he was picked up by MeTV.

I had seen clips of Sven online, of course – because I tend to seek such things out – but once he hit MeTV, I added him to my regular rotation. Naturally, the moldy puns that Koz employs by the dozens are right in my wheelhouse, as are most of his sound clips from radio shows and cartoons, and I am more than jealous of Koz as I watch because it appears he seems to love his job. It isn't all pretty – some of the original songs can be atrocious, especially when Koz has to sing just out of his range – but it is all rather endearing nonetheless. Pure monster antics... which might be the reason my cat seems to really like it when I play the show, too.

...BUT WHERE ELSE TO GO?

The internet seems to be a prime place to find a lot of local horror hosts in one place, such as on The Monster Channel website. I find having to catch specific hosts a little difficult with the website's schedule, which gives you the weekend's 3-day schedule but during the week you are on your own. Also, while I don't mind streaming video on sites like Netflix or Hulu, where you can stop, start, pause, and rewind as you please, streaming on The Monster Channel means starting the player and picking up whatever show wherever it might be in its airing. I tend to only put on The Monster Channel so I can play it in the background while I am writing. As a result, I don't pay as close attention to most shows or hosts as I should.

Cinematic Insomnia (one of the very best of the lot) on OSI 74's channel on Vimeo (sadly, I don't have Roku where I could watch the regular channel). Ms. Monster and Her Monster Melons on YouTube. (Is she doing shows anymore?) The occasional old Zacherley episode. You can find these and others online, but I still prefer watching such shows on television. I maintain there just has to be a place for these shows somewhere on a thousand-channel cable schedule, though maybe not in the places (such as Syfy) where one might think they would be a natural fit. I never give up looking though, and I will probably spend the rest of my days slowly flipping from channel to channel hoping in vain that that 3:00 a.m. showing of The Black Castle is accompanied by some strange horror host of whom I have never heard before.

LAMIA IS THE NAME-IA

Cut to last Friday morning, as I scanned the cable listings on my television and found a midnight showing of Man in the Attic, a 1953 remake of the story that Hitchcock filmed in his silent days as The Lodger. Man in the Attic features Jack Palance in the role of the suspected killer, and he is pretty damn good in it. I own the film on DVD already, so I didn't need to record it on my DVR, but I thought that perhaps I should check it out since it was airing on a channel called Retro TV. That's right... I was holding out hope there was horror host goodness to be had... and there was!

I have run across Lamia - aka actress Kristina Michelle – before on YouTube, but not on her regular horror host show, Horror Hotel Film Festival. She's pretty but not exactly my type, but I suppose she has a zillion guys stalking her constantly, dressed as she is in a revealing vampire costume, with just the right amount of cleavage and bare leg showing. Lamia, whom I assume is named after the Greek mythological figure (known for turning into a child-devouring demon), doesn't really go for the jokey, Elvira-style of entertaining that her obvious forbearer Elvira does. There is the occasional pun or interstitial in which she tries a little too hard to be sexy. Mostly, it seems Lamia likes to open her shows by telling us everything about the movie she can read off IMDb, and then reappears throughout the show to ask us how we are enjoying the show. Some pieces seem baked in, so that they can be reused from show to show; in fact, I saw the same clip at least twice during Man in the Attic, and twice more in the next evening's showing of Dementia 13. But each movie also had brief bits that corresponded directly to the movie at hand, and so it wasn't just a matter of her filming an opening and closing for each film only.

How this girl can speak that long with those fangs in her mouth is beyond me. I did not say "speak completely clearly" because it is quite noticeable she has to work hard to enunciate many of the words. Still, I admire her drive. I think that the long portion at the beginning where she reels off cast members and trivia would be better served being broken up into smaller bits throughout the show. (Svengoolie does this type of thing best, I feel.) I kept going, "Start the movie already!" during both films. I also wished that the print they used in the show was of a less shabby quality than the eyesore that I saw. But even if the opening drags a bit, Ms. Michelle seems to love playing Lamia, and I am not going to begrudge anyone from dressing as a sexy vampiress if that is their desire.

AND... BUT... ALSO... SOMETHING OFF BEAT...

After discovering that the seductive Lamia lurked within the copy of Man in the Attic on Saturday morning, I checked the listings for Retro TV for the rest of the weekend to see if they were showing other horror-oriented fare. That evening, they were airing House on Haunted Hill, the 1958 "B" classic starring Vincent Price and directed by gimmick-master William Castle. Never one to turn down some free Castle, I recorded it and the next morning, I cracked into it to discover yet another "movie host" show – not necessarily full "horror host" given the basic premise – Off Beat Cinema (from out of Buffalo, NY it seems).

Off Beat Cinema seems to specialize more in weird, cult cinema in general, though that will probably mean more horror and science fiction given what I have seen from the first two shows I've seen. The hosts are a trio of slang-spouting beatnik types named The Mysterious Zelda, Bird the Painter, and Theodore – Cinematic Theologian. (Well, I can get behind that last stance.) I don't really want to get into ragging on the hosts of these shows, because in many cases they are mostly doing these things on the fly and on the cheap, but... cue cards are not a bad idea. I thought there might be more of a cool vibe that existed between the hosts of such a show, but the feeling was more, for lack of a better term, "improv awkward". (You can append that phrase with the adjective of your choice...)

Still, I didn't entirely dislike my experience with the first show, even with the truly terrible (most likely public domain) print of House on Haunted Hill. (I had to skip from host segment to host segment because the film hurt my eyes too much.) In the second show the next evening, in which they aired Ed Wood's Bride of the Monster (which I watched today), the host segments were filmed live at a local comic convention, and had a little more pep to them. The dialogue is too close to modern speech and not strong enough on the beatnik vibe, though it is clear they are trying. (I do like the finger-snapping when they go into the movie or to commercial... reminds me of the beatniks from Happy Days.) It still might take me a while to warm up to Off Beat Cinema, but I am willing to give it a go. I would rather have the option to watch it than not. Keep kickin', cats...

FINALLY, A HARVEY THAT I CAN ACTUALLY LIKE**...

Then came Sunday evening, when I recorded the movie White Zombie, the 1932 Bela Lugosi classic. Once again, I didn't need to record it, but I had struck gold twice already on Retro TV. I was, of course, recording Bride of the Monster later in the evening (which would turn out to be the second Off Beat Cinema offering), but unlike the other shows, White Zombie was airing in prime time hours, so I didn't know what to expect. When I started the recording Monday afternoon, that is when I met Halloween Harvey for the first time.

Local horror hosts are fine, even when they mumble or forget their lines or trip over their tongues. But I admire true professionalism, even in a cheap horror host show. That is where Halloween Harvey comes in... With some clear thought put into tying the different segments together – it is the only one of the three main shows discussed here that tried to tell a story, however silly and trivial, between the chunks of movie – Harvey's Festival of Fear shows a confidence and zip that the other shows sorely lacked. Whether Harvey's almost screeching style of delivering hyper dialogue – he sounds quite like Curly from the Three Stooges – works for you is beside the point. It hit a sweet spot for me. As much as I was enjoying White Zombie again, I also couldn't wait to see the next bit with Harvey, if only to see if he could keep the rhythm going (which they almost did).

And so now, I have three new horror host shows, all producing episodes currently, that I can find easily in one spot each weekend on Retro TV. I noticed from their online schedule that the channel has another regular movie spot, Mondays through Fridays, for something called Retro Drive-In. I haven't checked to see if it is hosted yet, but judging from the movies promoted on their Facebook page the last couple of days – the Buster Keaton sound film (only OK), Speak Easily, and The Godson, the remake of Le Samourai – I am also not sure if the true drive-in aesthetic is being celebrated consistently or not.

Time will have to tell... like tomorrow night, Daddy-O...

RTJ

** You can ask me about the "Finally, a Harvey that I can actually like" title, but you won't get very far. Just accept that there is a Harvey in my past that I can't fucking stand. And Harvey, if you are reading this, rest assured it is you. I have only met one Harvey in my life (and, no, it was not Weinstein...)

There Must Be Some Mixtape: Track #5 – Scared by The Tragically Hip (1995)

noreply@blogger.com (Rik Tod Johnson) — Wed, 18 Oct 2017 16:30:00 +0000

Gord Downie fronting the Hip, 2009 | CC BY-SA 4.0 File:TragicallyGord cc attribution ScottAlexander.jpg

On my Facebook page about a year ago, I posted this short piece:

"Some of you may recall my making you play New Orleans is Sinking and other songs by The Tragically Hip in your cars around 1989 or so (on a cassette tape that I actually still own), and more of you will know their biggest American hit from being played on Anchorage rock stations for many years. I have no idea if the song is still played up in Anchorage, though I am pretty certain it is; I've heard it played on "oldies" stations down here in So Cal.

The point I am getting at is that The Tragically Hip are about to play their final concert in less than half an hour (5:30 ET) and it is being streamed live on YouTube at [link deleted here as it is no longer live].

The lead singer of The Tragically Hip, Gord Downie, has a form of inoperable brain cancer but was given permission by his doctor to undertake a farewell tour of their native Canada before calling it a day as a band. While I had the first three albums by the band back in the day, I lost touch with them over the years.

Luckily, about 7 years ago, I was partnered at my old job with Logan Johnson, who is severely and clinically Canadian. (And now, once again, geographically.) He also came equipped with a fervent love for the Tragically Hip, and so after we discovered that we had shared interests in music even though we had roughly 22 years between us, I was reintroduced to the Hip for good.

Also luckily for me, I am doing some work for Logan at the moment, so he gently reminded me with an hour to spare that the concert was coming on tonight. So I am passing this on to anyone that might be interested in hearing some pretty great music being played live for the very last time." - https://www.facebook.com/riktodjohnson/posts/10157343400450646

It is now just over a year later since that post. Last night, I received a text from Logan that Gord Downie died yesterday with his family by his bedside. Gord certainly made it a lot further than I and many other people thought, but the news is devastating nonetheless.

Without going too deeply into the band, its history, and Downie's prowess as a lyricist, I simply want to make a small tribute today to the man in regards to his passing. The song Scared, which was released in 1994 on the Hip's fourth studio album, Day for Night (itself a film reference), is not overt in its intent to frighten the listener, but is rather a thoughtful meditation on the subject of fear itself. The angle can occupy either the personal, political, or commercial, depending on the shifting balance of power for the song's narrator, and we are kept guessing as to the ultimate intent of the narrator.

Many of the best songs of the Hip, while filled with marvelously rendered details and crystalline caricatures of their denizens, still leave the listener wrestling with interpretation for days and sometimes years. In this, Scared is definitely one song that is a good deal harder to pin down, and most interpretations I have seen fall apart hard when the interpreter gets past a solitary verse.

But, first, let's listen to the song, and check out the lyrics below...

Scared by The Tragically Hip
[Robert Baker, Gord Downie, Johnny Fay, Paul Langlois and Gord Sinclair; Lyrics © Peermusic Publishing]

"I could make you scared, if you want me to
I'm not prepared, but if I have to
He said, I can make you scared, it's kind of what I do
If you're prepared, here's what I propose to do

You're in Russia and more than a million works of art
Are whisked out to the woods
When the Nazis find the whole place dark
They'll think God's left the museum for good

I can make you scared, if that's what I do
If you're prepared, and if I have to
If I make you scared, and you pay me to
That's the deal, now here's what I can do for you

Now there's a focus group that can prove
This is all nothing but cold calculation

Tests have shown that suspicious are hostile
Their lives need not be shortened
Truth be told, they can live a long, long while
Tickled to death by their importance

If you can make me scared, if that's what you do
If I'm unclear, can I get out of this thing with me and you
If you feel scared, and a bit confused
I got to say, this sounds a little beyond anything I'm used to

Now there's a precious few that can prove at the root
This is all nothing but cold calculation

Clearly entranced, you're leaning back now
Defanged destroyer limps into the bay
Down at the beach it's attracting quite a crowd
As kids wade through the blood out to it to play

Okay, you made me scared, you did what you set out to do
And I'm not prepared, you really had me going there for a minute or two
He said, you made me scared too, I wasn't sure I was getting through
I got to go, it's been a pleasure doing business with you"

The fifth of six singles off of that immensely successful Day for Night album, Scared only made it to #57 on the Canadian singles chart, but became a standard (and often an encore selection) at Hip shows thereafter.

The song starts out as if we are being talked to by a propagandist. There are impressions of Russians hiding vast stores of artwork, and of Nazis arriving too late to the scene. The narrator says that he can be paid to scare you, and then we get to talk of focus groups and the implication that fear is manufactured by "cold calculation". We told that the "suspicious are hostile"; is it the very taste of fear that keeps them going on for so long?

But then, with the second chorus, there is a seismic shift in the attitude of the narrator. Suddenly, he is the one who is to be scared, and then, in the turn of a line, both he and his subject seem to be dreading the same thing. The narrator admits that he is uncertain of where things stand. Is this suddenly a game where the participants take turns frightening each other, almost like a round of ghost stories around a campfire? Or perhaps the game is of a more sensual nature? Do you have a safe word?

In the final verse, the subject is "leaning back now," perhaps as if in a seat in a movie theatre. The last three lines of the verse could very well be a scene out of a war or horror movie, depending on how you interpret "defanged destroyer". The talk of focus groups earlier points to a possible cinematic pulse running throughout the song, though that could just as easily lead to the marketing of fear in the form of propaganda. The song was written 23 years ago, but it is hard not to think of our world today in relation to these lyrics, where every impulse is currently being led by fear, on both sides, real and imagined.

The narrator himself seems to be losing his grip throughout the song. While the lyrics (and Downie's delivery) remain tied to the rhythm of the music through the first chorus, with each succeeding version of the chorus, the narrator grows ever more nervous (or scared) and seems to try cramming ever more words into each line. By the third rendition of the chorus, he appears to have given up on meeting the original scheme and is almost babbling out as much as he can to complete his thoughts.

At its roots, though, Scared is a quiet tune with a gentle melody, hardly scary in its intentions, but definitely thought-provoking.

RIP Gord Downie. At least we still have your music...

RTJ

There Must Be Some Mixtape: Track #4 – October Night by Todd Chappelle (2014)

noreply@blogger.com (Rik Tod Johnson) — Tue, 17 Oct 2017 18:48:00 +0000

Oh, it's on, Hallmark Channel! It's fucking on!

For years on end now, the talking heads in the right wing media have been screaming and whining about a supposed "War on Christmas" propped up by liberals in this country. We have to hear their self-righteous talking points replayed every single holiday season. They get weepy when someone says "Season's Greetings" to them, and insist that people say the word "Christmas"... or else they will... well, you know... They seem to start up a nuclear countdown clock annually for when Starbucks rolls out their new holiday cups, and then go apoplectic when the cups don't don't have what they feel is the right amount of Jesus sprinkled on them. This is all the evidence we need to prove that this group – that thrills at calling liberals "snowflakes" because they are supposedly sooooo precious and breakable – are actually the biggest whiners and babies out there when they don't get a thing they want. If this were built into a Speak 'n' Spell, it would go "Sean Hannity says, 'Waaaaaaa... mama!!'"

The roots of this imagined "War on Christmas" are, when you dig to its deepest point, purely a racial thing. What these storefront white supremacists – you know, the prettier ones they can actually put before the public on display, as if the TV screen were a shop window – are really upset about is what they believe to be encroachment upon their precious Christmas Day by three of the four racial groups they hate and fear the most: the Jews with Hanukkah, African-Americans with Kwanzaa, and occasionally (but not this year and not for a good while, because the holy month shifts consistently on the shorter Islamic calendar), the Muslims with Ramadan. (The fourth group they hate and fear would be Hispanics, but they get Christmas right, as long as they say it in 'Murican.) These pinhead "Warriors for Christmas" bristle at the thought of their addled brains needing to be inclusive and consider everyone else that might be enjoying the same general holiday season with their families and friends, whether or not it involves Christmas.

Look, not everyone celebrates Christmas, and that is exactly what drives Warriors for Christmas batty. They hate that everyone is not the same as them, and not celebrating the same things the way that they determine is correct. Don't want to play by our rules? Fuck off! Everyone else that doesn't look like them to too scary, too foreign, and not 'Murican! Me, I'm an atheist and very open about it; I just don't pester people with it the way that Christopher Hitchens did while he was alive and Richard Dawkins still does before he is dead. That's not my game. I don't believe in your god, and you had better be fine with that, because I am just fine with your fairy tales. I want everyone to get along, and I want people to believe how they need to believe in order to find some form of solace with the endless, dark void that will, not so much confront them, but consume them at the ends of their lives.

This "War on Christmas" junk angers me beyond belief. As I said, I am an atheist, but I freakin' love Christmas, and I don't shy away from it at all. Jen and I like to take an afternoon and drive around to look at Christmas decorations on houses every year. My friend Adrian would say that I what I really celebrate is Saturnalia, and he is both wrong and right about that. The roots of what we celebrate today commonly are to be found partially in that ancient Roman celebration, but there is so much more from other pagan traditions and folk beliefs and also from, yes, Christianity, that it really is a separate thing from any ancient holiday that inspired it. There is a way into the holiday that is as open to almost anyone from anywhere as to be all-encompassing. Like other holidays, we pick and choose whatever trappings we wish to employ, and no one except a truly devout fundamentalist is going to whine about it. And if they want to whine about it, that's fine; just don't whine on my time.

But even with my rampant atheism, Christmas is not just a "presents, Rudolph, and Santa Claus" thing with me. I enjoy the trappings of the traditional Christian-based holiday as well, many of the hymns (along with the popular, secular carols), and manger scenes can be lovely when they aren't glowing in crazy-ass neon on someone's front porch. I may not say the prayers if I am in a situation where someone actually says prayers today, but I remain respectful, close my eyes, and let my friends or family have their moment with their deity. And then, pass those goddamned potatoes, please... that bowl needs to be emptied!

Out in the aisles of your local box store, it's a whole different matter to me. The stores jump to Christmas far too quickly, and they have since, well, forever. Personally, I don't ever think of shopping before perhaps mid-November, and hardly ever do it until early December anyway, so the shopping early thing is lost on me. I suppose there are true wackos out there who do these things early, especially moms if they have very large families. And if they are shopping early, they aren't even celebrating the "real Christmas" anyway, you know, the one where the Christ child is born (though most likely not on Dec. 25). What they are celebrating is the American commercial side of the holiday, where it is more important to get lots of prezzies than to not give giant corporations loads of money so they can merge with smaller companies and become ever more giant corporations. They are celebrating the secular side, not the religious version. So, what's their beef? Why do they have to get all up in arms if those who don't necessarily identify as "Christian" wish to say "Season's Greetings!" instead?

In the real world, I say "Merry Christmas!" equally as much as I say "Season's Greetings!" I like saying these things to people, even in just passing, and I do it just to have something different to say than "How are you?" or "Hello..." meekly as they go by me. But I try to size up the situation before I say either one. You might even say this sizing up of potential hearers of my greeting comes down to a form of racial profiling, an act which is bad in most cases, but I feel very apt when a "War on Christmas" is being fought by only the one side that perceives it as such. This is how I do it...

If I – a very blonde, white male myself – am speaking to someone who seems uptight about life in general, and they seem on the edge of pitching a bitch about whatever you say, regardless – which, the bulk of the time, means they are very clearly, translucently white – I say "Merry Christmas!" In ALL other cases, I say, with a sincere and very pleasant smile, "Season's Greetings!"

Because I know they aren't babies and won't cry about it later...

The Real War: The War on Halloween

Meanwhile, let's talk about the real war that has been occurring since time immemorial: The War on Halloween. Just like in the retail stores, Christmas tiptoes in ever earlier each year on television. And the first salvo was taken this year by the Hallmark Channel; you know, those creeps who prop up most of the major and some minor holidays just so they can increase their card, paper, ribbon, ornament, and stuffed animal sales. Hallmark Channel has the biggest boner for Christmas than any other channel on cable. They even program an entire month for Christmas in July.

The worst part though, is their annual Countdown to Christmas. During most of the year, in addition to their most banal, crappy movies (I've seen a few here and there in order to learn the truth, so I know), Hallmark likes to shoot down Thanksgiving altogether and push their Christmas movie programming to nearly two months ahead of the actual holiday. This puts them into late October.

Jen and I use the Hallmark Channel. Well, we only use it until their Countdown to Christmas crap starts, and then there is a reason we turn to something else. Seriously, we don't really watch it so much as we use it as a nightlight while we sleep, because they play reruns of Frasier, Cheers, and I Love Lucy from about 1:00 a.m. until 8:00 a.m. when we rise. Jen can't sleep without the TV on, and we have to find something comforting for me to be able to actually sleep at all. So we choose a channel that has something we both love, and all is well. However, I am often awake in the middle of the night, so I end up watching at least one episode of Frasier more often than not.

One night a couple weeks back, a horrendous Hallmark Channel ad came on during Frasier that almost immediately sent me looking for an axe to destroy the television. The ad starts out with what looks like a big, friendly house with pumpkins on the porch. (Naturally, the porch is painted white.) But then it becomes apparent that the scenes carved into the Jack-O-Lanterns are actually wintry, Christmas scenes. The last carving is of stockings hanging over a fireplace. Then two final pumpkins are shown as the camera pans upward. The first says "Countdown to Christmas" and the second bears the channel's name. A graphic then shows the date of October 28.. THREE WHOLE DAYS BEFORE HALLOWEEN EVEN HAPPENS!

This is the shit that drives me crazy! Why in such a rush to get to Christmas, a season that causes more depression than any other holiday? Can't wait to be upset and frustrated from shopping tension and a depleted bank account? What is the damn hurry? And things like this happen every year – for decades – with stores that start taking down shelves of Halloween stuff days before Halloween occurs, and with church organizations seeking to tamp down what they consider a "demonic" holiday (I wil have a piece on the vile but thoroughly entertaining Bob Larson in a few days).

Here's a fun and very clever song that ties in with my "War on Halloween". It is a parody of the classic hymn, O Holy Night, and is sung quite nicely by Mr. Todd Chappelle, a comic singer-songwriter from Pennsylvania. I have heard many of Todd's other songs, but when I heard this one on Ben's Wacky Radio, I just had to add it to my mixtape for this year. Enjoy...

October Night [A parody of O Holy Night]
Words by Todd Chappelle

Original Music by Adolphe Adam (1847)

"October night, we should be carving pumpkins
Instead the stores have their Christmas displays
Can't stand the sight of Santa and his reindeer
Please take them down, we still have 80 shopping days

No Christmas trees, no giant plastic snowmen
We don't need Santa on Columbus Day
Screw Halloween, and also screw Thanksgiving
I don't want to fight
I haven't even raked my leaves

This just isn't right

On this October night"

Todd's got the right idea here. Just take it right to 'em. Look, he even throws Halloween and Thanksgiving right under the bus tires just to prove how much of a social crime it is that Christmas is all over the goddamned place this early before the actual holiday.

Christians and right wing groups make themselves look like the victims by saying their rights are being trampled by political correctness and the expansion of civil rights to everyone else in America. I mentioned the four racial groups that make up what is considered the menace in the fake "War on Christmas", but in the "War on Halloween," the LGBTQ-plus-whatever-else crowd, by and large, has adopted Halloween as their special day of the year, with many people even calling it "Gay Christmas". I don't have a problem with this, because any day can be what you need it to be. Halloween is mine to celebrate my way, and anyone else can make it theirs, too, and do it their way. But, largely, the same groups that don't like Christmas being "Season's Greeting"-ed to death tend to not look too kindly on gay rights, marriage and whatever else they have fought for and rightfully won for themselves. So, why not silently and stealthily eat away at Halloween's exposure by lengthening Christmas' reach on television, in the stores, and in the public eye.

"What are you doing over there? Halloween? Look, we have Christmas over here! Shiny, glistening Christmas! Is that candy? Mere candy? Bah! We have presents over here... colorfully wrapped presents! You never know what you might get!"

Maybe all of this is Tim Burton's fault. He had Jack Skellington take over Christmas over twenty years ago, and the two holidays blended. That could not have sat well with the religious right, though most people don't have a problem attending the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland every Halloween and straight through December. Jack Skellington has taken that over as well, and most people seem fine with it. (Myself, I prefer the traditional Haunted Mansion, but I like both.) I am pretty certain a whole lot of the people riding it probably identify as Christians, and even if they don't like it, they seem to keep going in droves. On the flip side, I am 100% unlikely to ever ride anything at a theme park that denies evolution, so has the stronger sense of values?

So, maybe the real problem are the talking heads in the right wing media, tossing about barbed, farcical darts willy-nilly in order to hit anything that supports their dark agenda for America. Why not just make up and scream ceaselessly about an imagined "War on Christmas" just to get people riled up for no reason?

That's exactly what I am doing with this "War on Halloween" stuff... just 'cause I can...

RTJ

And, before I go, here's a video of Todd doing the song live on stage. The guy has some lovely pipes...

Buy Todd's music on iTunes and check out his website at http://www.toddchappelle.com/.

Countdown to Halloween: Cars Land "Haul-O-Ween" at Disney California Adventure

noreply@blogger.com (Rik Tod Johnson) — Sun, 15 Oct 2017 17:05:00 +0000

Making time to enjoy the Halloween festivities at Disneyland and Disney California Adventure has proven to be a little rough this year. Between my latest stupid, ongoing illness (a hard cough that won't go away, lasting well over a month), a short vacation away to La Jolla for a few days (way too short), and the generally busy activities in the household, we find spare moments to attend the parks when we can. The problem is exacerbated by Disney having added more dates for Halloween parties than ever before, and then cross that with even more dates being blocked out for cast members around those parties. To top it off, we have friends coming down in another week, and though they were able to score Halloween party tix, we were not alas, as they were completely sold out by the time we tried to grab some.

The spooky smile greeting you when you enter Cars Land this Halloween...

But, not to worry... we will still get into the park to have some Halloween fun. We just have to make a conscious effort to pick the right dates to go. Jen and I had managed to get to Disneyland mid-September to ride the reopened train, see the Main Street Halloween decorations and take a ride on the Haunted Mansion Jack Skellington-style. In keeping with our usual Halloween tradition, we would have liked a chance to ride all of what we call the "Skeleton Rides" (i.e. an attraction, with a ride component, that has a skull, bones, or skeleton built into its design; namely, the Jungle Cruise, Indiana Jones, Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, Pirates of the Caribbean, and the Haunted Mansion.) The Skeleton Rides is our own name for the collective group of attractions... Copyright Jen & Rik 2005-2017... that we quite often like to ride one after the other, especially on a Halloween trip. [Note: See more about the Skeleton Rides at the bottom of this post.] Unfortunately, we were in a time crunch and only managed to fit the little we could into the span.

Two of the attraction titles changed for "Haul-O-Ween": Mater's Junkyard Jamboree
is temporarily Mater's Graveyard Jamboree instead.

Not to worry though; our friends will soon be here and we have secured a hotel room for one night so we can stay up late and enjoy the Halloween atmosphere in the park about a week before the actual holiday. But until then, I just had to find a little time between the gaps. I had both a doctor and a dentist appointment last Thursday just down the road in Orange, so Jen's mom Sande and I found ourselves with the second half of the afternoon open. That gave us a couple or three hours of time to spend hanging out in Disney California Adventure waiting for Jen to get off work so we could go use a special employee discount coupon at Napa Rose for our dinner reservation that night. (The food? C'est magnifique!)

Weird spider thingy dangling above the street. All of the creature constructs are made out of car parts.

Because I was not feeling up to too much craziness given my cough, Sande and I decided that just casually strolling around and taking in the Halloween decorations was a solid plan. (We did sneak in a sit-down in the old Muppet Theatre to watch an extended trailer preview for Thor: Ragnarok. I won't say anything more except: Goldblum is hilarious as the Grandmaster.) Naturally, the decorations on Buena Vista Street hit us first – including my first glimpse of the new Headless Horseman statue – but I will touch on those later in the month. [I have posted a photo of the Horseman on my Facebook page. Check it out there if you missed it.] The focus this time is on Cars Land, which has gotten some heavy promotion for its holiday celebration lately, which they have titled "Haul-O-Ween".

More weird spider thingies on the side of Sarge's Surplus Hut; note the patch of Jack-Oil-Lanterns to the right.

From the outset, I have not been a fan of the Cars movies produced by Pixar and Disney. (And I have only seen the first two so far.) This is not to say that I don't like them. I just haven't been gaga over them like I have so much of the rest of Pixar's output. Part of the problem is that Pixar set such a crazily high bar for themselves from the beginning, that anything that doesn't quite hit that mark for me just looks OK. Just one element can be off the slightest bit in a Pixar film and that becomes the difference between genre-shaking, ground-breaking, top tier entertainment and a movie that is merely "good". The first six Pixar films, in my opinion, fell into that first definition (as did releases 8 through 11); Cars, their 7th release and Cars 2, their 12th, fell into the merely "good" category. For me, that is. Maybe you don't see it the same way and that is fine. I have said from the beginning that this is how the Cars films appear... FOR ME.

A quartet of pretty terrific fake horror movie posters are plastered along the side of a garage, my favorite being Escape to Hitch Mountain...

The level of quality in the Cars films is not being judged here; the craftsmanship, attention to detail and design, and sheer love of the animated form that seems to have gone into the other Pixar films is here in equal abundance in the Cars series. By every measure, these are entertaining films that please their audiences across the board. I was even entertained by them. But FOR ME, there is something out of place in the Cars films. At first I couldn't define it, but I finally figured out that the missing element was... me. My involvement. That is, a human touch. I have a hard time identifying with the world of Cars because it seems to be a place where mechanical constructs have come into being without the interference of humanity. If indeed humans were once a factor in their coming to life, it seems like they have replaced us. We may be dead as a species, and the entire series is a post-apocalyptic landscape where cars have somehow become sentient beings who have taken over the world.

First entrance to the Cozy Cone Motel section of Cars Land.
Note the Jack O'Lantern faces on each cone.

That is a little too chilling a premise for a series largely pointed at kids, so there has to be a different solution. I have two theories, but neither one of them allows me to warm up to the series any more than I am able to do. Theory #1) We are invisible to the cars. We exist, we work, we build them, and the cars achieve some form of sentience that is known only to them. Cars and humans are unable to talk to each other; humans see cars only as objects to be owned and used; cars, with a reduced form of intelligence and sensory apparatus, are unable to actually detect us. We are like ghosts to them – ghost riders in essence – and while we are actually the ones controlling and driving them, they believe that they are controlling themselves in the process.

My personal favorite of the cones at the Cozy Cone Motel: the Popcone booth.
I usually grab dill pickle-flavored popcorn and a wild grape tonic here (THE perfect combo),
but not this trip. The coolest new thing was that you can get "add-ins" for your
popcorn, i.e. various candies like M&Ms, etc. This will happen when I am
there next week.

Still, that is a bit too much for a kids film (and perhaps too trippy), and so my second theory involves kids in the solution. Theory #2) The world of Cars only exists in the minds of children. As a kid, my brothers and I would build elaborate worlds in our basement combining all of our toys into one huge conglomeration of playtime imagination. Our Fisher-Price Little People buildings and blocks and Lego sets would form a city, combine with Hot Wheel tracks for roadways, and all our army men, space aliens, monsters, stuffed animals, and whatever else would populate it. We each had collections of Hot Wheel and Matchbox cars, and they all had names and even voices, because we had them talk to the Little People, soldiers, aliens, etc. like everyone else. It could be that the world of Cars is part of some child's playtime, only – in a marked difference from the Toy Story series – the car toys have no recognition of their child controllers. They don't pretend to be asleep when their child enters the room or walks up to play with them. They just continue their storyline unaware and uninterrupted by concern for their controllers.

Of course, I have not tested these theories against more recent viewings of the films to see if either theory holds up, or to see if there is maybe an element that I am missing somewhere. As it goes for the moment, the Cars films stand – once again, FOR ME – as lesser entries in a series of films defined by consistent excellence in every department, and yet far better than the bulk of so-called "entertainment" which lies far below it. (For comparison, I place Monsters University and The Good Dinosaur, two more recent Pixar projects, in the same place as the first two Cars films. All are entertaining films, but just miss that high water mark Pixar has, perhaps unreasonably, set for itself. Or did we set it for them?)

Radiator Springs Curios had a huge amount of holiday-themed changes, which surprised
me because I tend to pass up the shops most of the time when I visit Cars Land.

And so, with what some would term my "Cars hatred" intact (just because I liked them a little less than something else better), one might assume that a section of a Disney theme park entirely geared toward the Cars franchise would be out of bounds for me. Why would I like something called Cars Land if I couldn't buy into the fantasy in the films which inspired its creation?

This is perhaps my favorite addition in the entire "Haul-O-Ween" makeover: a monstrous, screaming wreck
of an old beater with a tree growing right up through its chassis. The undead are alive and loose in DCA!

As I had noted, the missing element in the Cars films was my being able to feel a part of that universe as a human. From the moment that Jen and I got our first taste of the new Cars Land back in 2012 – when we got to attend an exclusive cast member preview – I was completely blown away by how completely immersed you become in the world of Cars... precisely what I needed to finally belong to it. As we walked through a doorway in a temporary construction wall and saw the Route 66 desert mountain vista for the very first time, where the Radiator Springs Racers zoom around a track designed to look like the open road, I was instantly won over by Cars Land.

Gas pumps in front of the curio shop, done up in Haul-O-Ween flair...

The retro feel of Cars Land was also a big plus, playing that nostalgia card for all its worth, and as a child of the '60s and '70s, it squared right in on my weak spot. Especially for the odd details of the period and the trivia that I love so much: parodic knockoffs of Burma Shave signs; giant traffic cones turned into a roadside motel (but actually serving as snack stands featuring a variety of goodies); a diner disguised as a gas station that serves classic diner fare; and the constantly spinning array of songs featuring lyrics about cars and assorted hot rods. In five years of regular visits to the area, I haven't gotten tired of looking about the place yet.

The leaning tower of tires in front of Luigi's Rollicking Roadsters – or Luigi's Honkin'
Haul-O-Ween for the moment – gets a more seasonal sort of tread...

The changes for "Haul-O-Ween", some of which I have noted in the captions, include the renaming of at least two of the land's trio of ride attractions. Luigi's Rollicking Roadsters is temporarily Luigi's Honkin' Haul-O-Ween instead, though from the brief glimpse I got in passing was that the ride itself remained the same. Sande thought maybe they might have spookier music on it, but it seemed we heard the same "Italian folk tunes" from before. However, promotion for the celebration calls our some new tunes on the ride that have Halloween themes, so perhaps I wasn't listening closely enough. As we passed the windows of Luigi's, there were a set of "pumpkins" designed to look like they were made out of tires, but the picture I took was not what I wanted. Perhaps if I ride it next week I can get a snap of the tire pumpkins window from inside, while I wait to ride it and hear the new Halloween music playing on it.

The Tow Mater Junkyard Jamboree attraction that sits at the very front of Cars Land's main entrance is briefly called the Graveyard Jamboree instead. Once more, I did not get a chance to ride it this time, so I didn't see inside to see if they added fangs to the cars or did some weird decorative changes. I took a quick look at the front of Radiator Springs Racers at the back part of town and, unlike the other two rides, saw no substantive changes to the signage or the attraction's name (apart from the usual Halloween decor). I suspect that riding one of the racers into the mountains and through the town inside will reveal some special "Haul-O-Ween" decorations, but once more, that is on hold until later.

Here's the Horn-O-Plenty that appears outside the area for the Luigi ride, Note, even more
"Jack-Oil-Lanterns" situated about the horn and sign.

As to the regular cars that roll through Cars Land and engage with the human visitors to the area, we saw Lightning McQueen at the Cozy Cone Motel. He was done up like a superhero, with a long cape-like appendage sticking off his normal spoiler. We also saw Cruz Ramirez, a new vehicular character from Cars 3, dressed up like a pirate. I did not get a picture of her because too many people were in line getting photos with her; plus, I had no idea who she was at the moment, not having done much research in the way of Cars 3 until now. As to the other area car characters, I did not see Red the Fire Engine or DJ (the one that shows up with the party music in midtown) in our walkthrough this time. The vehicle that I was most hoping to see, Tow Mater, was also a no-show, and I was pretty disappointed by this because he dresses up pretty goofily like a vampire. Who knew that one day I would saddened over a character voiced by Larry the Cable Guy not being around when I wished?

C'mon... c'mon... eat the baby... eat the baby... you know it will be both tasty and crunchy...

There is definitely a lot more for me to see in Cars Land for Haul-O-Ween. I did not get a good shot of the billboard sign at the front of the land (because a whole family darted right in front of me... stupid families; they should be banned from the park...), and I wanted to take more time at the actual attractions. I also did not get to check out the really cool spider car that has left webbing high up over Flo's V-8 Cafe, nor did I walk in the direction of the vista area for the Racers attraction. So, don't be surprised if I throw up another pack of Cars Land "Haul-O-Ween" pics closer to Halloween.

Until then, I'm up all night to get spooky,

RTJ

[More notes on the "Skeleton Rides": Jen and I also don't count Tom Sawyer Island, which has plenty of skeleton action, because it is all walkthrough for those portions. Technically, the Disneyland Limited, too, could be a skeleton ride because there are dinosaur skeletons during the Primeval World portion of the round trip, but we don't always find a good opportunity to ride it all the way around, so we don't count it as part of our regular "Skeleton Ride" rotation.]

There Must Be Some Mixtape: Track #3 – Goolie Get-Together by Toadies (1995)

noreply@blogger.com (Rik Tod Johnson) — Thu, 12 Oct 2017 06:00:00 +0000

It's 1995, folks, and I've got big problems. I love Saturday morning cartoons and I especially love Saturday morning cartoon theme songs. I have some of the songs in various places in my record collection. I have the original album by The Archies from my youth, and I also have a pair of 7" singles by The Banana Splits that I ordered from Kellogg's cereal boxes when I was five years old. In the mid-'80s, the wisely named TVT Records put out a series of albums called Television's Greatest Hits, that were completely comprised of nothing but TV theme song after TV theme song. I had a few volumes of Television's Greatest Hits, and included on there were a great many scattered songs from Saturday morning cartoons, but still it wasn't what I really wanted. There was just something missing...

It turns out that the "something missing" was a compilation album entirely made up of new renditions of some favorite themes and occasional "in-show" songs from cartoons of my youth, all performed by current bands who may or may not have ever heard the songs they were being asked to perform. (More on that notion later in the piece. A-ha!... Yay, foreshadowing!)

And late in 1995, that very album arrived in the form of a CD and long-form video called Saturday Morning: Cartoons' Greatest Hits. Cartoon Network, naturally, was involved in the promotion of it all, which included an airing – on a Saturday morning, nonetheless – of an 90-minute-long show (with commercials; the album itself it 65 minutes in total) featuring videos for the songs on the CD. Producer-composer Ralph Sall supervised the project, and brought in a lot of big names from the alternative and punk music worlds to take part. Somehow, most of the pairings of musicians to cartoon theme work out surprisingly well. At their worst, they are merely passable with nothing truly egregious to my ears (Collective Soul sounding like they are staring straight ahead having to do the theme to The Bugaloos; face to face basically walking through the Popeye theme); at their best, the matches seemed to have been made in some form of pop culture heaven.

The Ramones riffing perfectly through Spider-Man., with Joey closing the song by singing the last syllable of the hero's name as "Ma-yan". (No, not Mayan...) Helmet thrashing forcefully through Gigantor. The Reverend Horton Heat picking his demented way through that complicated and heart-pounding Jonny Quest jazz score before switching gears halfway through to get all yokel goofy by singing Stop That Pigeon! And do you mean to tell me that honey-throated Matthew Sweet didn't sing the original theme song to Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? You could fool me. I'd ask if we could go back and insert Sublime's dub remix of the Hong Kong Phooey theme onto the original cartoons, but it would mean wiping out Scatman Crothers' swell voice, and I couldn't bear a world with any less Scatman Crothers than we already have.

Deep in the Saturday Morning album, I discovered its true revelation. At the time, I and the rock radio world were in love with an eerie, hard-hitting song called Possum Kingdom from a band in Fort Worth, Texas called Toadies. (Not the Toadies...) Truthfully, when I first heard Possum Kingdom, the vocals reminded me so much of Robin Zander's way with a song that for about a month, I thought Cheap Trick was making a comeback. (The dynamic between rhythm section and guitar was very different than Trick's, so it couldn't have been. But still...) When I found out for real who the band was, I rushed out to buy their album Rubberneck, and if I haven't listened to the album around a thousand times, I must be pretty close. It is in regular rotation (if I really have a regular rotation anymore) on my music devices and computer, and I also follow the band's new stuff to this day.

But somehow, even with how much I enjoy Toadies' music – and with singing along to the repeated "Do you wanna die?" part of Possum Kingdom, a song that has served as the template for a hundred rumors – the band's cover of Goolie Get-Together just might be my favorite song by the group.

But first, for the uninitiated. the Groovie Goolies...

The success of transplanting the squeaky-clean students of Riverdale High from the comic pages to television meant that Filmation's The Archie Show (1968-69) would bounce around for another decade in one form or another. The show would stretch into The Archie Comedy Hour for 1969-70, and add Sabrina the Teenage Witch to its cast, giving her a showcase in her own segments within the hour. The following year, Sabrina got a title spin-off while the rest of the Archies carried on in their own series in other forms. But Sabrina shared the 1970-71 season with a gang of gag-spewing monsters called The Groovie Goolies. Once that show was a hit with the kiddies, in the following season, the Goolies split to get their own show for a single season, while Sabrina (like Archie before her) carried her own series for several years.

I said the Goolies had their own show for a single season, with only 16 half-hour episodes produced, but they were all over the Saturday morning schedule throughout most of the '70s in some form. It is always amazing how few episodes there are of some series that have carried on for decades sometimes. The Jetsons was a single-season show in 1962-63 with only 24 episodes produced, but that one season was shown for years on end. It wasn't until the mid-'80s that Hanna-Barbera finally produced another season of new stories, even with its continued success with a succeeding generation. Likewise, Jonny Quest ran its mere 26 episodes starting on September 18, 1964, exactly one week after I was born. If you are thinking, "Hey, Rik was a Saturday morning baby. No wonder he loves cartoons so much!", then you would be wrong. Jonny Quest premiered on a Friday night, facing a prime time audience with a focus on reaching adults, just as The Flintstones and The Jetsons did before it. That the kids lapped it up was pure gravy. By 1967, with the Saturday morning cartoon market finally in full bloom (it started small in the early '60s and built up stronger each year), Jonny Quest finally reached its long run before an audience mostly made up of kiddies, including myself.

Back to the Goolies, I probably watched every incarnation of every Archie series as a kid, and while the show is a little harder to watch today, I really loved the Groovie Goolies back then. Part of the appeal, of course, was my natural inclination towards monsters of all types. The Goolies were less of a family like the Munsters and Addamses, and more like a monster club operating out of a castle (Horrible Hall) on a desolate clifftop. That sounds ominous, and the trappings are meant to invoke a certain amount of spookiness, but the Goolies were just pure silliness. Even the name "Goolie" has been altered from that of "ghoul" – which means "An evil spirit or phantom, especially one supposed to rob graves and feed on dead bodies." [Oxford, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/ghoul.] Hardly the fare of Saturday morning TV where there were likely censorship boards who looked out for these sort of things, and I suspect the softening of "ghoul" to "gool" renders the original definition a more babyish appearance and sound.

The main characters were Frankie, an obvious nod to the famous monster of Frankenstein; Drac, the scariest of the bunch (even some of his closeups kind of get to me today), but who serves as the primary and mostly congenial host of both Horrible Hall and the TV show; and Weirdo Wolfie, a slang-spewing hippie-werewolf hybrid who who wears shorts and sandals and rides a skateboard. There a couple dozen other supporting characters who pretty much run the gamut of monster archetypes, outside of a zombie, which would fall into the ghoul category for kiddie television and pretty much off limits. (Also, the zombie renaissance was just in its earliest stage as Night of the Living Dead only came out roughly two years earlier.)

The Groovie Goolies show was also very current in its style, as it mostly operated like a kid version of the immensely popular Laugh-In, then still enjoying its original run on TV. There was little in the way of connective tissue from one scene to the next, with little to no plot at all. Largely, the show was one blackout gag after another, broken up by a couple of musical performances in each episode. There were even specific sequences devoted to Laugh-In-style gags – Weird Window Time – but then the rest of the show would be one joke after the other. Other segments would theme schoolhouse lessons and bedtime stories, but they really were just more scenes for a series of quick gags. Like viewing old episodes of Laugh-In today, the hit-to-miss ratio of the Goolies show is pretty heavy on the miss side, but then again, the Goolies get an excuse for being designed to appeal solely to 7-year-olds. I dearly loved the stupid jokes as a kid, and I can easily soak them in now in the same way that I look back at my old Topps monster trading cards and still have fun reading the lame monster jokes. Or even listening to old Lenny Bruce "Mama, Mama" jokes...

Then there was the Goolies' music...

As I said, each episode of the Groovie Goolies contained two songs. The first song would be "sung" by an all-star monster band that contained Frankie, Drac and Wolfie. Frankie played the drums and xylophones using bones for drumsticks, Drac played a pipe organ a la The Phantom of the Opera, and Wolfie strummed a lyre-designed guitar. However, most of the poses and animation were used from song to song, so is little to no attempt toward having either their lip movements or musical actions match whatever song was being played. In fact, there is so much reused footage that occurs from show to show that you can probably shuffle the episodes, select four or five, and it is likely you will have seen all of the actual animation used for the entire series.

There were several other bands that played within Horrible Hall, which is why I said it feels more like a club where all the monsters hang out than anything. One of the other bands would usually be seen "playing" the second song in each episode, though sometimes the vocals for those second songs would sound exactly the vocals for the main monster band (though not in all cases, such as with the mummies, who had distinct vocals at times). As to those other bands, they were: The Mummies and the Puppies (featuring, quite literally, three mummy musicians and four dogs who also play along; the name is an obvious rock reference and shouldn't need elaboration); The Rolling Headstones, which are three gravestones that somehow play musical instruments; a three-skeleton group called the Bare Boned Band (too bad The Grateful Dead was taken); and finally, the Spirits of '76, a patriotic trio of colonial ghosts.

Now, the theme song to The Groovie Goolies was very well-known to me, as it would be eventually to my two little brothers as well, as they grew up with year after year of some version of the show. Here's how the original tune went in this clip from the show...

But there were several other tunes from The Groovie Goolies that stuck in my head as I came out of childhood and grew to be, well, nothing but a larger child. The chief earworm in the group was the howling call of "... and Weird-o Wolf-ie!!" which sprang from a song about the main monsters on the show called Frightening Frank, Dangerous Drac and Weirdo Wolfie aka The Monster Trio. (Sadly or not, I am still prone to saying that phrase at any given moment should something trigger it in my memories.) Another strong contender for my favorite as a kid was the song Chic-a-Boom. I remember the puppet theatre that my father built which had enough room for all three of us to stand inside it. As a result, we would often turn the construct around and use it as a full stage on which to pretend to play rock band. I recall very clearly we Johnson Boys singing along with "Chic-a-Boom! Chic-a-Boom! Don'tcha just love it?" many times on that stage or just when we played in general. And I always really liked songs like Monsters on Parade and The First Annual Semi-Formal Combination Celebration Meet the Monster Population Party... look, if you are going to have a place full of every type of monster, you had either be ready for either a parade or party... or both. And you can bet there will be songs that come out of it.

The truth of the matter is that I could pick any of the thirty-plus songs that were played on The Groovie Goolies show and place them on one of these mixtapes, and no one would blink about it, nor would I. The show was about monsters that (mostly) sang about monsters or monster-related activities. But the song that stuck with me the most over the course of the past 40 years was that damned catchy theme song. However, which version should I use. The actual show version of the theme song is less than a minute long, which just never felt long enough. The album version released in 1970 – which featured three guys in really bad monster makeup on both the front and back covers, but still had images from the TV characters too – has a much longer version of the TV theme (at 3½ minutes) and it is one of the rockier songs on the record, even if it is really only a country rock rave-up that turns into a sing-along. But it was the only version I had for a long time. And I didn't know I needed another one.

Enter... Toadies

When Saturday Morning: Cartoons' Greatest Hits came out, I went hardcore into pushing it on my friends. It became part of an all-night animation fest that I held at my apartment in 1995, in which the plan was to end up on Saturday morning having to watch the promotional special while we all ate breakfast cereal. This is after we spent about a dozen hours watching all manner of Walt Disney, Looney Tunes, and other cartoons through the night. (Most slept through a chunk of it, of course... we were all working people and many were college students in those days.) The reaction to the show itself in the morning was tepid at best, mostly because it was ruined by host Drew Barrymore and her friends doing the same thing we were doing, by breaking into the middle of the individual videos in the special with their own giggling and dopey commentary. Dammit, we were trying to do that, Drew! Get your own animation festival! Or at least one that doesn't intrude upon mine! I know the intent was to be post-post-post-everything and oh so cool by laughing at popular culture and nostalgia, but all it really did was piss off the people who legitimately wanted to hear the music (and possibly buy it). And for Drew Barrymore-hating me, it just made her look like that much more of a self-absorbed asshole.

Regardless of stupid interruptions, the Saturday Morning special did have some pretty groovy videos within it, Most often, the best videos were the ones where the songs were already the more successful translations from past to present. The Violent Femmes' video for Jet Screamer's classic Eep Opp Ork Ah-Ah (Means I Love You) (from The Jetsons) was favored over most of the other, with the jumpsuit-wearing Femmes pretending to play in front of rear-projected Jetsons footage and looking like they having a great, goofy time while also looking just about as uncomfortable and out of place as they did when they made a cameo on an episode of Sabrina the Teenage Witch a few years later. Helmet does a fantastic video for Gigantor, and the appearance of the band (in muted color) playing in front of the black and white cartoon explosions from the cartoon make their video arguably the most dynamic of the bunch. Liz Phair looks like she is genuinely having a ball doing The Banana Splits theme, all while wearing a go-go dress. Juliana Hatfield was pretty much born to sing Josie and the Pussycats. And as always, the Ramones have the superpower of being... well, the Ramones, and thus they are able to team up with a certain web-slinger to make sure that their video for Spider-Man becomes a hell of a good time.

And then we come to Toadies covering the Groovie Goolies. But first the video...

Toadies
Goolie Get-Together
(Written by Linda Martin and Janis Gwin)

[Chorus 1]
"Everybody shout!
Come on now, sing out!
It's time for the Goolies get-together!

They got jokes for everyone
With laughter, songs, and fun
So let's go to the Goolies get-together!

Come on, everybody
Join the Goolies
They're gonna do their thing for you
They're kinda strange
But they're real funny
You'll be glad to know
They love you too!

[Chorus 2]
Everybody shout!
Come on now, sing out!
It's time for the Goolies get-together!

You're gonna see
How funny they can be

'Cause it's time for the Goolies get-together

[Guitar solo]

[Chorus 2 repeat]
Everybody shout!
Come on now, sing out!
It's time for the Goolies get-together!

You're gonna see
How funny they can be

'Cause it's time for the Goolies get-together

Come on, everybody
Join the Goolies
They're gonna do their thing for you
They're kinda strange
But they're real funny
You'll be glad to know
They love you too!

[Chorus 2 repeat]
Everybody shout!
Come on now, sing out!
It's time for the Goolies get-together!

You're gonna see
How funny they can be

'Cause it's time for the Goolies get-together!

[Chorus 1 repeat]
"Everybody shout!
Come on now, sing out!
It's time for the Goolies get-together!

They got jokes for everyone
With laughter, songs, and fun
So let's go to the Goolies get-together!

Everybody shout!!!

The words to Goolie Get-Together are devastatingly simple, but after all we are only being invited to join a bunch of monsters at a party. You don't want to make the invitation too complicated or nobody will show up to the gig. The single verse is repeated twice in the song, and there are two variants on the chorus; the first one is only repeated at the tail end of the song, and we get version 2 of that chorus thrice overall. Also note that while the song is titled Goolie Get-Together, the words "Goolies get-together," with the name of the group pluralized, is actually sung in the song (and appear on the official lyric sheet that way too).

It is the performance by the band Toadies that is the remarkable thing here. While, of course, the recording of the song took place in a studio (Planet Dallas), the sound of the song has a true live feel to it. I have heard full, actual live albums that sound less "live" than this track. Adding to this feel is the video, which is one of the few (if not the only one) in the special that incorporates stage footage of the band actually performing the song they are covering in the special. The footage is edited into the video, naturally, so you don't see an unaltered performance; instead, in the MTV style, it is chopped up and lightly tossed with footage of the Goolies mucking about and causing all sorts of chaos. The Toadies stomp about on stage and work the song hard, while the screen seems to ripple and flash as if being threatened by a lightning storm.

And in the song, lead singer Todd Lewis imparts almost as much passion into singing about a cartoon monster party as he does to singing about coming from the water, swearing he won't backslide and become the hypocrite he seems to fear becoming, or convincing a girl to self-immolate to join him in the afterlife. Dare I say he brings the song actual gravitas? He makes it sound like his band really is performing at Horrible Hall and have committed to coaxing a crowd inside to join in all the ghoulish, silly fun. You can almost feel the sweat and hum of the club, and as Lewis grips his guitar and dives into another chorus, you think, "Yeah, I wanna join the Goolies at their get-together..." The song hypnotizes me nearly every time into believing that I am at that clubhouse, ready to become one of the crowd. It's the best rendition on the album, built out of what might be one of the lightest, simplest songs covered on it.

Even Eep Opp Ork Ah-Ah (Means I Love You) has more lyrical depth to it than Goolie Get-Together, and half the song is just "Eep Opp Ork Ah-Ah" sung relentlessly. Getting back to what I said at the beginning about the bands participating in this album not necessarily being fans of the songs they are covering, I had the pleasure of being allowed to hang with the Violent Femmes in the green room of their show during one of their appearances in Anchorage, Alaska. Singer-guitarist Gordon Gano asked me if there were any particular songs or rarities that I would like to request that evening, and I said, "Maybe it's a longshot, but Eep Opp Ork Ah-Ah?" Gordon gave a sly smile, shook his head, and said, "Man, the last time we played that song was when we recorded it for that album."

He told me later that he really didn't know the song or the show growing up, and that they selected the song from a list of potential songs for the album. I asked him to play T. Rex's Children of the Revolution instead (which the Femmes had released as a single off their third album, The Blind Leading the Naked, in 1986). They did, and I was happy; it was really a killer show. But the crowds would really go nuts if they ever did play Eep Opp Ork Ah-Ah.

If only they understood the power of the animated side...

There Must Be Some Mixtape: Track #2 – "Laughing Over My Grave" by Ray Stevens (1958)

noreply@blogger.com (Rik Tod Johnson) — Sun, 08 Oct 2017 20:30:00 +0000

Boy, you think that you know a guy...

For a long time, I thought that I knew Ray Stevens. Just before I turned ten years of age, I delighted in a ridiculous song that played on the radio constantly called The Streak. Stevens' strange novelty tune was the #1 song in the nation, and streaking – that is, running buck ass nekkid through an area in which one normally didn't run buck ass nekkid – was the big craze of 1974.

Streaking was everywhere in those days. My little brothers streaked around the house, giggling like little maniacs. (Sadly and scarily, there is photographic evidence of my own turn at childhood streaking through our household as well, but it was from several years earlier. Once more, I beat a trend.) Tuning into the news on a regular gathered one the latest on streaking at public venues. Time and again, crazy people showed up at sporting events to run across the field of play completely naked. The "art" of streaking even made it to the Oscars that year (one of the earliest ceremonies I remember watching). The appearance of a nude weirdo zipping across the stage afforded host David Niven which a prime opportunity at droll commentary: "Isn't it fascinating to think that probably the only laugh that man will ever get in his life is by stripping off and showing his shortcomings."

Most ironically, the image of the streaker was especially alive on the radio. Singer Ray Stevens – who was by then very well known not just for a series of novelty record hits since the early 1960s (Ahab the Arab, Harry the Hairy Ape, Gitarzan) but for his serious, spiritual, Grammy-winning song, Everything Is Beautiful, which proved to be his first #1 Billboard hit. Stevens attacked the charts in '74 with a truly goofy song featuring the odd combination of "Action News" reports, spot interviews (the same guy over and over), fake audience laughter, and a nonsense phrase ("Boogity-boogity") into an international sensation. (The song topped the UK charts as well.)

I recall some brief discussion in our house between my parents over whether it was appropriate for me to be so obsessed with the song at my tender age, but like all such arguments regarding free speech in our family, I won out eventually. I would have sung along with The Streak whether it was on the radio or not, so why not just have a good laugh? Within the next couple of years, my brothers and I obtained a copy of a K-Tel collection called Looney Tunes, and featured amongst its 24 tracks was Ray Stevens singing The Streak. I still loved the song, but I suddenly had 23 other goofy titles to completely memorize and so it tended to get played a little less than the others. My Old Man's a Dustman, Dinner with Drac, Haunted House, Little 'Eefin Annie, Alley Oop, Transfusion, They're Coming to Take Me Away, Hello Muddah Hello Fadduh, My Boomerang Won't Come Back... too many great tunes for me to concentrate on a single one, especially one that I had already sung a thousand times.

And yet, there was one song on the collection that got a special amount of attention regardless. It was The Hustlers singing their rendition of the singalong classic Shaving Cream, in which the threatened implication of the word "shit" at the end of every verse would be replaced with a long "Shhhhhh..." sound and then "...aving cream/Be nice and clean/Shave everyday and you'll always look keen." (The song has had something of a revival this year as the regular intermission act on the new version of The Gong Show.) If you thought there was discussion before between my parents regarding an entirely clean song about people running around nekkid, just think about what this one did. And yet, once again, free speech took the day.

Cut to a couple of years later, my parents were divorced, and my father had his own place... well, a house that he split with an old buddy from work. He had his own record collection as well, and one of the first albums I remember was a compilation from 1977 called The Many Sides of Ray Stevens. When my brothers and I discovered this double album, it pretty much became the most played LP in my dad's house when we were over every other weekend. Well, the second record in the set, that is. We had little use for Sides A and B. The reason for the Many Sides in the title was to imply that Ray had a serious side as well as a more goony side. Really, the set should have been called "The Two Sides of... But Ray Would Like You to Forgot the Second One and Concentrate on the First One" Those first two sides were composed of recognizable Stevens hits like Everything Is Beautiful, his relatively recent (then) countrified smash version of the standard Misty, Turn Your Radio On, America Communicate with Me, and then a bunch of other nicely sung but fairly bland songs.

But on the second record in the compilation, nine of the ten songs were pure Ray Stevens goofy gold, and just made for me and my brothers. This is where I really got to dig into his classic novelty tunes. In addition to the four mentioned already in this piece, I got my first taste of Bridget the Midget (The Queen of the Blues), Freddie Feelgood (and His Funky Little Four-Piece Band), the fabulously (and then record-breakingly) titled Jeremiah Peabody's Poly-Unsaturated Quick Dissolving Fast Acting Pleasant Tasting Green and Purple Pills, and my surprising favorite of the group, The Moonlight Special. I was then getting regular late-night viewings of Wolfman Jack on The Midnight Special, and so finding a song that sent up the show with a character named "The Sheepdog" – who howled along in his intros to the musicians – really got me laughing hard. Stevens also had his own version of The Coasters' Along Came Jones, which was OK, but nowhere near the original (which I got to know intimately on that same Looney Tunes compilation from earlier). Stevens had a whole lot more silly songs that could have closed out Many Sides (I wish Santa Claus Is Watching You was included) but they chose to go with another serious song called Nashville, which is a very pleasant song even today, but which kind of ruined the comedy rush for me as a kid.

After that point, apart from his great chicken-clucking In the Mood single, Stevens kind of disappeared for me. I got into rock 'n' roll as a teenager and didn't look back. I still saw him hit the charts from time to time, especially when MTV started. I would get occasional glimpses of a Stevens video for his latest single on one video show or another, since every network and channel seemed to have started up their own pocket versions of MTV at the time. Goofy tunes like It's Me Again, Margaret or The Mississippi Squirrel Revival would get caught in my sights from time to time, especially if they ended up hitting The Dr. Demento Show (which I listened to avidly for years and years), but I never had any real impulse to follow through with getting one of Ray's newer albums.

This is a good thing, because the one aspect that I surmised from his continued single releases was that he was more intent on building his country music following than he was continued fame on the pop charts. His humor seemed to be growing ever more cornpone, sometimes to sub-Hee Haw levels, and that pursuit just didn't interest me. Eventually, I heard Ray remake a couple of his earlier hits, but his voice was deeper and the updated comedy came off as too stilted. Adapting the old material with new jokes just didn't wear well on my ears. I did appreciate that he continued to release new novelty records on a regular basis, mixing them with his "straight" stuff, but I just wasn't his crowd anymore. For funny songs, I had "Weird" Al, who had (and still has) a much higher ratio of quality to fluff.

We are going to leap a whole lot of time to the past couple of years, where on a whim, I decided to check out what ol' Ray had been up to lately. Sadly, his comedy has grown almost completely reactionary, as befits his political leanings. Intent on making clumsy party points in his dotage, he now has songs that will seek to make statements by prefacing them with lines like "...But if Obama gets his way..." And I get enough of that shit from certain members of my family. I don't need it on my iTunes, especially when the songs are simply knee-jerk responses to things propped up by Fox News and the alt-right that were only meant to rile up their homegrown audience in the first place.

As to whether he actually voted for Volde-Moron or not, I have not seen definitive proof, but many of the songs Stevens has been releasing of late seem to prop up various horrid talking points echoed by the Angry Orange. And so it seems that Ray and I would probably be unlikely to ever be friends if we ever met. It's sad, because I still do love many of Mr. Steven's older songs – and will continue to play and sing along with them (even Ahab the Arab, which pretty much introduced the notion of white Americans saying "Ay-rab" instead of "Err-ub"), much in the way that I will never get Bill Cosby's standup albums out of my system. Plugged in since youth and I cannot divorce myself from them. Besides, there are probably even some gems hidden in Ray's discography that I would find interesting if only I took the time to search for them.

So, what about the mixtape?

Now, one might think that my reference at the beginning of this piece to "you think you know a guy" might refer to Mr. Stevens' current far right leanings. You would be very wrong. After all, I suspected from the glimpses I had of Stevens in recent years, especially already knowing his main audience, that he was exactly the sort who would fall for the snake-oil jive of the current administration. He bent over and they have had him time and again. And I am not surprised by it at all. That's where a good portion of his older audience is now as well. Who wants to stop a good rogering once it has started?

What I was really referring to was the genuine joy and surprise I had in finding one of those hidden gems in his discography that I mentioned, in particular, a certain genre of song that I was very surprised to find he had recorded in his early years. The song I am adding to my mixtape today – Laughing Over My Grave – pretty much keelhauled me when I first heard it. Dating to 1964 (as far as I can tell), when it was released as the B-side to one of his "normal" novelty singles, Bubble Gum the Bubble Dancer (which didn't chart), Laughing Over My Grave is a revelation on more than one front, especially if you have even passing familiarity with Ray Stevens' catalogue.

First, it is a surprisingly soulful, bluesy number with a large dose of eerieness, which allows Ray to purely "sing" more than he often does on his earlier stuff before he broke through on the pop charts with his completely straight-laced composition, Everything Is Beautiful. His voice, however, still has that rock 'n' roll growl to it as he snaps out the lyrics. Second, while the song is paired with an outright novelty number, and is also within that subgenre as well, Laughing Over My Grave is not outwardly funny. There is not a true, intentional joke within the lyrics or the final production, even with Laughing in the title and the additional of maniacal jags of shrieking madness throughout the song. Laughing Over My Grave is a straight up murder ballad, told from the point of view of the victim of a love affair gone truly, truly insane.

Such a simple murder at the end of a gun may also not seem like normal Halloween fare, but the fact that it is a murder ballad and the macabre twist of the story being told while the singer lies "dying in a pool of blood" certainly lends a spookier mood to the song than it normally warrant. Especially surprising is that it comes from the generally happy go lucky, nonsense heavy Ray Stevens just after he has already attained some small measure of fame.

The song starts out as seeming like just another silly tune. To the beat of a slowed down mambo groove, an eerie mood is set instantly by the inclusion of what seems either like a recorder or a slide whistle making a ghostly intrusion. But that same eerie mood, probably due to the instrumentation, and given the fact of who sings the words, makes the listener expect the song is going to have a goofy twist near the end, that will make everything sunnier. And you couldn't be more wrong...

Laughing Over My Grave
(Ray Stevens)

"When she looked at me just now,
I had a horrible feeling.
It made me shiver at the thoughts
Of what I might have driven her to.
I know I've cheated and lied,
I know I just used her,
And now I'm suddenly afraid
of what she might be planning to do.

[Chorus] I can hear her laughing over my grave
Raving like a maniac raves!
Laughing...
Laughing over my grave
Over my grave

Now, get that wild, wicked look
Right out of your eye
'Cause baby don't you know
That I'm too cool to die?
I'm sorry for the wrong i've done.
C'mon, honey,
L-let's just put down that gun!
I'm begging you, please...
At least give me a chance to run!

Well, I felt the floor come up and
Hit me with an empty thud,
And here I lie
Dying in a pool of blood
I know I've tortured her
And treated her wrong
And laughed at her misery
For so long,
But I guess she's the one
Who'll be laughing from now on.

[Chorus]
I can hear her laughing over my grave
Raving like a maniac raves!
Burning all the money I saved
And laughing over my grave.

I can hear her
Laughing over my grave
Raving like a maniac raves!

Burning all the cash I saved...
[FADE OUT]

And there you have it... Ray, I didn't know you had that in you. Sure, it was recorded a hell of a long time ago, but I just heard it in the last couple of years. What makes the listener understand how insane the murderer has been driven by the narrator is that she apparently spends part of her time "burning all the money" and "cash" that he has saved. Well, I guess that would be insane from his angle... she must be a maniac for doing so, and this really points out how Ray's conservative leanings were there in his music all along (as if I had a doubt anyway).

Which makes me wonder how an updated version of this song would go were Ray to remake it today. He would be singing the same lyrics for the most part and then get to the line where she starts to burn his money. And then he would kick in with this instead...

"...But if Obama has his way...!"

RTJ

The Monkees in Monstrous Peril #3: "I Was a Teenage Monster!"

noreply@blogger.com (Rik Tod Johnson) — Sat, 07 Oct 2017 01:47:00 +0000

Last year, we visited the Monkees as they ran amok in a haunted house (Monkee See, Monkee Die) and had to fight off an entire castle of Universal Monster knockoffs (The Monstrous Monkee Mash). But the Monkees had several other flirtations with the supernatural and the macabre in the short run of their popular series, and so let's pick up the ball yet again for this year's Countdown to Halloween for more silly hijinks with one of my favorite groups.

One thing that I really admire about the plots of Monkee episodes (if plots they be indeed) is that they waste little time in jumping straight into the goofiness. After all, the boys have to cram a zillion one-liners, a song or two, flirting with whatever girls are at hand, and lots of scenes of them running about like crazy into a mere 25 minutes. It helps a great deal if they walk into a scenario and all of the major players are ready to get going straight away.

So it goes with I Was a Teenage Monster, the 18th episode of the first season of The Monkees TV show, which aired originally on January 16, 1967. True to form for a horror-centric Monkees story, the episode starts with the requisite castle shot and the brief eerie wail of a theremin, before we cut to the wise-cracking Monkees approaching the front door. Micky Dolenz comments that the place "looks like it was condemned before it was built" and Mike Nesmith backs that up by saying it looks "like a high-rise garbage dump." Mike knocks on the door and the group is met by a man wearing a white lab coat who is quite clearly expecting the band to arrive. He even says so. The actor playing the doctor is John Hoyt, a character actor long familiar to fans of TV from the 1950s through the 1980s, but who started out on Broadway in the early 1930s and began a film career in the late '40s.

The Monkees try to introduce themselves, but the doctor, last name Mendoza, doesn't even shake their hands. The band is confused, because they thought there was a party going on at the castle for which they were to provide the entertainment, but the doctor has seemingly tricked them into coming. He has other plans, you see... he wants the Monkees to... TEACH!

Mendoza convinces them to help by saying they are to teach a youngster, for whom "we have such HIGH hopes!" Before the first minute has even passed, the mood is interrupted by the doctor's assistant, who leads the doctor downstairs into the castle's laboratory. Referring to the doctor as "master," the toady named Groot (that's right... Groot) informs the doctor that "everything is in readiness," to which Mendoza replies, "Good! Good! We shall create the greatest rock 'n' roll singer in za world!" (Mendoza has a slight accent.) The doctor pulls aside a sheet that is draped over a huge slab, and on that slab is revealed a huge monstrous creation, much akin to Frankenstein's monster.

The monster is played by the late Richard Kiel, the acromegaly-plagued 7'2" actor who was exceedingly memorable in a wide variety of roles throughout his career. For me, this has been somewhat of The Year of Kiel at the movie theatres, as I not only got to see him in his arguably finest moment as Jaws, the steel-toothed villain who battles James Bond in 1977's The Spy Who Loved Me, on the big screen again this past summer, but I also saw him play the titular caveman Eegah when that film was shown during the recent live tour for the new Mystery Science Theater 3000 series. And here I get to see Kiel once again (albeit only on my computer), essaying a comedic take on his usual role as a heavy, with a much more mod-looking, shaggy haircut than a monster usually gets in these sorts of affairs. (Most definitely a sign of the times in which the episode was filmed.)

Oh, but first, we have to play the Monkees' opening theme song...

After the theme song and a quick plug for Kellogg's cereals, we dive right back into the story. Mike questions the doctor about teaching rock 'n' roll, and Mendoza reacts, "That's right! Rock 'n' roll really appeals to the little monsters!" Asked if the youngster is the doctor's son, he says "Yes, you could say he is my own... flesh and blood" and then laughs uproariously at his own comment. The doctor decides that the boys need to meet "his son" and toddles off to prepare the meeting. Mike, ever cautious, stops Davy and says, "You know there are overtones to this that I don't like!" but Davy says, "Don't ya get it? Flesh and blood... it's a joke!" Both laugh in the manner that the doctor did before, but then both turn to the camera and grimace, knowing full well that the band is once again in deep trouble.

In the basement lab, the band asks to see the little monster, and the doctor obliges, once more pulling the sheet off the slab. The boys are horrified – Micky cries out, "The little monster... is... a little monster!" – and try to come up with reasons why they should leave right away. Peter, meanwhile, goes up to the creature to study him more closely. Mike tells the doc, "You can't really expect us to teach a monster to sing?" but Mendoza reasons that "He's not a monster... he's a machine." Mike's quick retort is "Well, we can't tutor a computer!" But Peter cuts in, "I find it hard to believe that he's dangerous" and the monster opens his eyes and groans deeply. Peter tickles the creature and says "He wouldn't hurt a fly!" and the monster puts on a smile and groans again.

The other three try to leave but the doctor stands in their way, claiming that "Science must be served!" Mike says that he "can't risk the lives of me and my men... for such a foolhardy experiment... and for such a pittance of a sum of a hundred dollars!" The doctor doubles their money and the next shot shows the four Monkees wearing lab coats – Davy and Micky even have crazy wigs on their heads – and each one holds a beaker containing some chemical or another. They say in tandem, "SCIENCE MUST BE SERVED!"

The doctor claims that his "android" already knows how to sing, and when he claps his hands, the monster goes, "Goo-ra! Goo-ra! Goo-ra!" The doctor explains it as "an old Transylvania folk song." Asked to translate, Mike offers up, "Jimmy crack corn and I don't care!" The doctor unbuckles the monster, which makes the Monkees nervous, and Micky expresses worries that "his pants will fall down," not wishing to make the doctor think he is actually scared. The doctor leaves his creation with the boys alone, and the monster reaches out his enormous hand in friendship. Micky, Mike and Davy all shake the hand in unison nervously, but when Davy sneezes, the monster says perfectly politely, "Gesundheit!" The boys are shocked to hear this and it calms them down temporarily, but then the monster follows it up with a huge roar which makes them freak out anew.

Peter, however, really likes the monster, and as many things with Peter go, his reaction reverts to that of a child. "You said that if I made dinner every night and made my bed, that I could have a pet!" and the boys agree that such was the deal. Mike says, "Alright, but the first night you don't feed it, back he goes!" Micky has other things on his mind, wondering aloud about how amazing it is to think that this monster was created in the very lab in which they stand, but absentmindedly almost knocks an entire beaker full of some concoction onto the floor. Luckily, Mike catches it in time, and says, "You almost dropped his mother!" to which the monster looks sadly.

Later, in the music room, the boys try to work with the monster to turn him into a rock 'n' roll star. They decide to name him, to which Mike offers up "Frankie Frankenstein." "I can see it now in lights... all... around... the mausoleum." Davy rejects the name for a singer, because he "doesn't even sound Italian." Micky taps the monster with his drumsticks, and the monster spits out a very clear, non-monster-like "Don't do that!" He decides to change the monster's look, starting with "a Beatle haircut," and the monster's hair switches to a mop-top, "then dark glasses," and he is suddenly wearing dark, rectangular-lensed wireframes, "some groovy clothes," his outfit changes, "and a guitar." The monster strums the instrument awkwardly, and Micky asks Mike how he looks. "He looks like a long-haired, near-sighted monster with a guitar."

The Monkees decide to teach the monster how to move onstage, but when he swings to the left, he sends Peter and his bass flying away, and when he switches to the right, Davy goes sprawling with his tambourine. Micky has the monster try the drums, telling the creature that the trick is to "very gentle... veeeeerrrrry gentle." On the count of three, the monster jabs the drumsticks straight through the skins on the tom-toms while kicking a hole through the bass drum. "Some style!" says Micky, "Where d'ya keep your brains?" The monster smiles widely and holds up his hands, snapping the sticks into pieces as he does.

A little bit later, the monster is shown strumming the guitar and yelling out, "Goo-ra! Goo-ra!" again. The boys, still trying to escape the castle, decide that he doesn't sound half bad and tell the doctor they will be back in the morning to work on his voice. The doctor says the mountain road is too treacherous at night, and calls Groot to prepare their rooms for the night. As the boys split the room, the doctor has the monster play "Goo-ra!" again and seems pretty pleased with the result. Once the boys are gone, the doctor talks to Groot about the rest of his plan... to switch the voices of the Monkees into the monster. Groot asks how this is to be done, and Mendoza says, "It's very simple. We merely unite the frontal lobe with coaxial conduits and force the cerebellum to proliferate to the reflexes. Do you understand?" to which Groot replies, "All except the last part, master!" 'What last part?" "The part after 'It's very simple...'"

In their room, the Monkees continue to try and look for a way out of their predicament. Micky opens up the closet door and finds a gorgeous, blonde woman standing there. They ask who she is and she tells them she is "the doctor's beautiful daughter." When she is asked what she has to do with "all of this," she replies, "Nothing. I'm the sequel." They close the closet door and Mike expresses worry that "200 dollars isn't going to do us any good if we're dead." Micky says, "Yeah, we should have asked for 250."

They decided to try to calm themselves down with a little television viewing. The program on the tube is a mad scientist movie where the doctor is discussing an operation with his doctor. Davy tries to stretch out on a couch, but he falls through the back cushion and disappears through a trap door. Mike calls out to him and realizes that his friend has gone missing. He sits down on a chair against the wall, but the wall spins around and Mike disappears, replaced by a second empty chair. Micky then seeks out Mike but is pulled feet first through the curtains. Finally, Peter has a bag thrown over his head by Groot the henchman.

In the laboratory, the four Monkees find themselves strapped onto a large, rectangular slab with helmets on their heads attached via electrodes. The doctor tries to assure them that this sort of experiment need not be fatal, but then shocks himself when he is handed two wires. Soon, the experiment begins, but while the machinery starts pulsing, Davy expresses concern over getting a headache. "Oh, don't worry," says the doctor, "there won't be any headache. But you won't be able to make a fist for three weeks!" and then he laughs crazily again. Davy continues to panic, and the doctor tells him to relax. He turns to the camera in the manner of a medicinal advertisement and states, "My electricity gets into the bloodstream seconds faster than aspirin." The doctor shouts out ever more ridiculous orders to Groot: "Turn the coaxial knob to full!" "Set the input output to whatever!" "Move the quasar to mellow!"

With such orders, even the bound Monkees are starting to doubt the science behind the experiment, but then the doctor throws the last switch. There is a series of four explosions, one behind each Monkee on the large slab. He orders the boys to sing, and Micky starts out meekly and unsure of himself with "Here we come... walkin' down the street...," Mike joins in on "We get the funniest looks from... everyone we meet..." and then Peter comes in on "Hey, hey, we're the Monkees." Davy joins the rest on the rest of the chorus, and the monster listens with great interest, taking in every note. Finally, the monster's voice seems to start up like an old cranked Victrola, and the sound coming out of his mouth is that of the four blended voices (along with the music) of the Monkees themselves. In the middle of the room, Doctor Mendoza and Groot dance together in victory while the Monkees, still strapped to the slab, look on with shocked faces.

Mike warns the doctor that he will be sorry when the police hear about it, but the doctor has a plan for this as well. He hypnotizes the boys by holding a device to their heads, one at a time, and telling them "You will remember nothing" to which they each reply "I will remember nothing." However, he goes one body too far and does the same thing to Groot, whom he then slaps and says, "Not you!" He then discusses with Groot their final experiment for the next day: whether the monster can fool an entire audience.

The next day, as said, the Monkees are preparing their instruments onstage for the experiment. Mendoza asks the boys how they are feeling, and they all seem to be feeling fine but very confused when the doctor refers to an experiment. They attempt to start playing Tomorrow's Gonna Be Another Day, but the instruments are all out of tune and none of their voices can get anywhere near harmony. The doctor demands his money back, saying that the band told him that they were trained musicians. Mike coughs up the dough and hands it over and the band, still under hypnosis, try to depart. But the doctor stops them, wishing them to see his new discovery, The Swinging Android. The monster steps onto stage in his "cool" regalia and starts to strum his guitar. He plays the same song perfectly and exactly like the Monkees.

Afterward, the Monkees are confused as to why the monster played and sounded exactly like them. Suddenly, Micky remembers something about a laboratory, and then all of them start to be flooded with memories of what happened to them. They check the closet where the doctor's beautiful daughter was kept, and Micky tells her, "Your father stole our voices and gave them to that monster. Now what do you think about that?" The girl is shown reading a script with the Monkees logo emblazoned across the front of it, and says, "Just wait until the sequel. A vampire turns Davy into a werewolf." Micky closes the door on the creepy girl, whining "I don't wanna hear it!"

In the lab, the quartet find the monster strapped back into his normal place, and Micky attempts to reverse the experiment. With the boys moving at high-speed, they try every knob on the machinery, and then strap themselves back onto their slab and helmets. However, when it comes time for Micky to throw the final switch, he can't quite reach it from his position. The machine starts to wind down and they have to start all over again. Meanwhile, the doctor and his toady stroll the halls in triumph, and the doctor can't resist stopping at a magical mirror on the wall. Asking "who is the evilest one of all?," the doctor is disappointed to find out another doctor in Dusseldorf, Germany is the truly evilest one. The mirror, who is voiced by James Frawley, who directed the vast majority of other Monkees episodes (Sidney Miller did the honors here), says, "You are only second best. You vill have to try harder. And don't yell at me; I only vork here."

Back on the slab, Micky figures he has the wiring straightened out now, but Mike says he isn't worried because he "is very fatalistic. I figure either an electrode has my name on it or it hasn't." Micky has by now employed the crook end of a cane to help him reach all of the knobs and switches, but is very nervous about hitting them. He rattles the cane wildly as he hits everything in sight, and the machinery starts to smoke and overreact. The monster starts to speaker like a hippy, saying "Groovy, man. That's not my bag. Don't get uptight." Davy notices the change, and the monster says, "Let's split... go to my pad. That's where it's at. Groovy? You dig?" Mike rolls his eyes and says, "Oh, great. Now we've got a super hippy on our hands."

Micky figures that they have corrected themselves, but we see Mike have a strange reaction and he starts saying, in Kiel's deep voice, "Kill! Kill!" Micky adjusts the dials and pops the switch again. The monster comes loose and immediately says, in a lisping voice, "I would do this room in French provincial!" He follows that up with "The color scheme should be lavender and puce... or this." The monster picks up a vat containing something or other, but Micky takes it from him, saying he has one more adjustment to make. He sets the formula down, but it falls and crashes to the floor, alerting Doctor Mendoza upstairs. He runs down and has Micky taken captive by Groot. Micky yells "Curse you, Red Baron!" in a nod to the popular Snoopy oath of the day. The doctor orders the monster to kill the rest of the Monkees, but Peter stops him briefly by calling him "Andy" (short for "Android").

He tells the monster that the doctor is out to exploit him, "You're only a pawn in his hands, a tool for his avaricious ambitions!" When Mike asks where Peter got words like that, Davy says "It's in the script. On page 28." Peter continues, claiming the doctor wants 60% of his income. The monster says "60 per cent?" and turns on the doctor, who says he only wants 25% and orders him to "Kill that Peter!" But Peter turns the monster around again by simply saying, "He's a bad man!" The monster keeps turning back and forth from Mendoza to Peter over and over again, and the strains of the song Auntie Grizelda being to play. With the music on, the monster starts to dance instead.

As the creatures spins and twirls, the Monkees free themselves from the slab and start to run all over castle while the song continues to play. The monster chases them at one point, but so too do a pack of villagers with torches, who appear from out of nowhere. Micky stops to drink a potion and starts to act like he is being transformed. He turns his back on his friends and the audience, but then turns around and he is fine, if not a little disappointed. Mike flips a switch on the lab equipment, and we see a quick clip from the old crappy Danish monster flick, Reptilicus, where the giant reptile breathes a quick snort of fire. Davy leaps into the monster's waiting arms and at first it looks like a cute move. But then Davy punches him with a boxing glove that suddenly appears on his fist. (At least he barely taps the monster, who lets Davy go without a fight.)

Mike plays the surface of the lab equipment like the Phantom of the Opera would play a pipe organ, but is chased away by Mendoza. Micky plays a rack of equipment and beakers like a xylophone and convinces the monster to take over, which he does happily. The Monkees form a football huddle but stop the monster from joining in, so he and the doctor and toady wait patiently. Davy opens the closet door and finds the doctor's daughter. She grabs him and kiss him. Davy then reaches for a sign that says, "A sequel? You better believe it!" At another point, the monster is seated in a chair while the boys give him a manicure and brush his hair. Reptilicus is shown attacking the Netherlands again for no real good reason but for kicks. The monster sits around a campfire roasting marshmallows with the villagers. Finally, the Monkees capture the doctor and strap him to his own slab as Reptilicus seems to either lie down for a nap or die. The song ends.

In the epilogue, Mike is shown talking to the police on the phone. "That's right, Officer. It's the big scary-looking house at the very top of the hill." He has to stop to ask the doctor for directions, but the doctor has been completely tied up by the other Monkees. He tells them the name of the street is Rosebud Lane, and Mike says, "Rosebud? I thought that was the name of a sled." Micky insists he got the wiring correct and that they shouldn't have lost any musical abilities. "We didn't have any to spare," replies Peter. To put them to a test, Mike and Peter pick up guitars while Davy picks up maracas, but on the count of three, the maracas and guitars shatter into pieces while the amps behind them short out and catch on fire. Cue closing credit sequence.

This is a really fun episode of the Monkees, chiefly for the game performance of Richard Kiel. Yes, he finds himself typecast in the role of yet another monster, but he gets loads of little opportunities during the episode to step outside of the character and act against type. He also gets to dance with great abandon, try on cool clothes, and switch personas more than once. It is actually a pretty full role for the length of a sitcom, and I think that Kiel seems to be having great fun being so silly throughout the show. Hoyt, too, seems to be having a ball playing a part that is really far beneath his talent, but then again, so were many of the parts he ended up playing in his long television career.

As promised by the doctor's beautiful doctor, there was a sequel to this, only the details got shifted slightly. The episode was the already discussed The Monstrous Monkee Mash, which aired almost exactly a year after this episode. While there is a vampire villain who turns a Monkee into a werewolf, Micky is the victim, while poor Davy is selected to become a new vampire instead. It hardly matters; like most of the details within a Monkees episode, they are only there for fleeting reference, nothing sticks forever, and the only important thing was record sales. And being truly, truly silly, something which this episode does in spades. As one expects from the Monkees...

RTJ

*****

And in case you haven't seen it...

Other titles in this series:

#1 "Monkee See, Monkee Die"
#2 "The Monstrous Monkee Mash"

There Must Be Some Mixtape: Track #1 – "The Rockin' Ghost" by Archie Bleyer (1956)

noreply@blogger.com (Rik Tod Johnson) — Thu, 05 Oct 2017 21:40:00 +0000

When I was a kid, I was told that Steve Allen was a genius. I was told this by Steve Allen himself. And I believed it.

In the ‘70s, the first things I knew about Steve Allen were those tidbits that my parents told me about him. He was a comedian, he started The Tonight Show in the 1950s and he also wrote the show’s theme music. (Being told this, I thought for years that Allen had written the music for the Johnny Carson version of the show, when in fact, that was Paul Anka.) After their input, I had to figure Allen out on my own, gathering information from his numerous guest appearances all over television. I would have to admit that I was usually entertained by him. Mr. Allen would take part in skits on variety shows or act in small roles on dramas and sitcoms, and I always liked him. He would show up on the Dean Martin Roasts and throw out a bunch of insults in the network-acceptable style and I would laugh along, whether I got the jokes or not. I thought Steve Allen was a pretty swell guy.

It was his appearances on talk shows like Carson, Cavett, or Griffin were where you could get to know an artist a little more personally. It was on talk shows that I first heard the term “renaissance man,” and it was always in conjunction with Steve Allen’s name. I would learn that he had written thousands of songs and put out dozens of albums. He had written numerous books, none of which I had ever seen in a bookstore. (But then again, I wasn’t looking for them there, was I?) And time and again on many of these talk appearances, I would be reminded that Allen was a true genius and, yes, a renaissance man.

The moment where the genius label really stuck in my mind with Steve Allen was from watching a show on PBS called Meeting of Minds. Created and written by Allen, Steve served as the congenial host to three or four historical figures each episode (played often by well-known Hollywood actors, including Allen’s wife, Jayne Meadows... yay, nepotism). Allen and the historical figures would cross the barriers of time to discuss all manner of subjects, always pertaining to the areas for which each respective figure on the show was famous. The show was smart, very informative, and Allen was quite wise to never allow a character to get too far from their own quotes when discussing their beliefs and philosophies. I not only watched the show on my own when it aired on PBS, but even watched a few episodes in Social Studies at school, as I had a teacher who thought the series was a marvelous teaching tool.

How could I not be impressed by a man who supported his own bid as a genius by surrounding himself with those of a like mind from past centuries? Steve Allen seemed a pretty sharp cookie to me. By all accounts, he probably was the genius that he and his wife liked to convince everyone he was, but then I discovered his one fatal flaw... He liked to disparage rock ‘n’ roll lyrics.

Allen used to do a bit back in the 1950s during rock ‘n’ roll’s original heyday with various songs, where he would read out the lyrics, sometimes doo wop-oriented so that the lines were comprised of nonsense syllables, and make the tongue-in-cheek case for rock ‘n’ roll being the reason that there were no longer any great poets at large at the time because they were all employed as lyricists. Given that this time was also that of the beat poets, and that Allen's musical playground seemed to belong at least tangentially to that of cool school jazz, I can't imagine he had not been exposed to the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and others of the time. Sure enough, he not only had Jack Kerouac as a guest on his show in the late '50s, but he also recorded an entire record album with the man, where Jack read his own poetry while Allen tinkled along on piano. I'm not trying to say the beats and rock 'n' roll were inexorably entwined (they weren't; the beat movement was an intellectual exercise chiefly created by elitists, whereas rock 'n' roll was its exact opposite), but there was enough crossover in attitude that some common ground was quite apparent.

And yet, Allen was a real square, daddy-o, when it came to the rock 'n' roll of his time. It didn't matter that he premiered many famous rock artists on his shows; he accepted them as acts, but like to put them through the ringer, especially Elvis Presley. His disdain is most apparent in a clip from his show where he reads the words to Sweet Gene Vincent's seminal rockabilly hit, Be-Bop-A-Lula. Allen launches into the lyrics, but somehow gets the actual title to the song incorrect each time he pronounces it, saying "Be-Bop-A-LUBE-A" instead, over and over. That single slip of a syllable reveals the errant man behind the genius label, a man who decided to take a swing at a supremely easy target but displayed his own prejudices and ignorance at the same time. Not that his audience of the time cared; they laughed along all the same, each one probably attempting futilely to come to grips on their own terms with the teenage delinquent madness that was overtaking pop culture in the late '50s.

Back to the late '70s...

I did not see any of Allen's 1950s performances of this routine until years later, but I did grow up seeing him perform variations on his popular music bit on several shows in the '70s and early '80s. He went after Donna Summer's Hot Stuff when he was given a new shot at a variety show in 1980 (that only lasted 6 episodes, which is possibly telling that his style no longer matched that of the times). Most memorable to me was his appearance on the Sha Na Na show, which my brothers and I watched fairly religiously on Saturday afternoons when it aired on KTVA, our local CBS affiliate. Surrounded by the members of the famous band actually named after the lyrics within the song he was roasting (which was meant to be ironic on some level), Allen set about reading off the words to Get a Job, a '50s doo wop stable originally released by The Silhouettes. He would steadily and emotionlessly read out each “mum mum mum,” "sha na na" and “yip yip yip” to make his case, and then solemnly closed his book almost like a hymnal when he was finished.

At the time, I was wrestling with whether I actually found the antics on the Sha Na Na show funny anymore, my comedic tastes having jumped to George Carlin, Richard Pryor, and Steve Martin somewhere in the middle of the show's run. (Call it the Saturday Night Live Influenza...) As a teenager, I was drifting away from the complacency that allowed me to accept the first few years of Garry Marshall's Happy Days as solid entertainment into a rebelliousness that would not allow me to accept the last few sorry (and too self aware) seasons of the show. (The same went for Laverne and Shirley, but I really wrestled with the last couple of seasons of Mork and Mindy, which had the same expected Marshall drop in quality, but did have both Robin Williams and Jonathan Winters making things worthwhile in the fourth and last season.) In the end, my taste for the bland humor of the syndicated '50s greaser show with Bowser and his buddies was waning by the time Allen showed up in 1979.

For me then, around the general time that I was getting hard into rock music myself, to see a man in his late fifties – a man that I had otherwise been convinced was no less than a genius not long before – to take a dive into such an unfunny and out of place bit was astounding to me. I started to doubt his once formerly divine status in my mind. Was he really a genius? How could someone so smart be so utterly blind to how great that early rock ‘n’ roll music was? What was his problem? What did he do when Bob Dylan went electric a few years later and there was a genuine poet at play in the fields of rock? Did he ever do the same routine to All Along the Watchtower or Tangled Up in Blue? But while it seems like overnight now, it took a few times for me to see Allen repeat this routine on other shows (it was one of his standard bits) before I pretty much wrote off Mr. Steve Allen as any sort of a genius.

And so it went until the early ‘90s. Steve Allen was no longer much of anything in my mind; just another actor, like so many others, trying to hang on in a decade far past his prime. He had squandered his genius on pettiness, I thought, though I was the one who had not followed through on my own research. I had not taken into account the man's own discography. I had not sought out any of his records to find out if he had a leg to stand on in this debate. Or whether he had created music equally as insipid (on the surface) as the rock songs he was mocking.

In those early '90s, Comedy Channel (soon to be Central) began running old episodes of his original TV series, The Steve Allen Show, I finally got to see the man in his prime, and I was deeply impressed. He was truly original in his comedy and broke incredible ground with his gags, stunts, writing, and the format of his show. He surrounded himself with incredible, (then) young comedians like Louis Nye, Don Knotts, Tom Poston, and Pat Harrington, and many bits on the show became national water cooler fodder. And as I mentioned earlier, Allen also broke many early rock artists first on his show, despite how he felt about the music himself. Most of all, there was a steady air of cocksureness about his demeanor; the type of attitude that allows a performer to consistently walk a tightrope when performing for the public, often trying new and astounding things before their eye. (However, it is the same demeanor that allowed him to pull his creaky rock lyrics routine in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, so there is a downside to such bravado.)

Let’s cut to today...

Now, I did not want to start my new Halloween mixtape – that I am calling There Must Be Some Mixtape this year – with a full bio of Steve Allen, and I don’t believe that I have gotten anywhere near that at all. Rather, I felt it was important to set the stage for how the man once deeply impressed me in my youth, then broke my heart (and mind) with his truly dopey reaction to another art form, but then started to crawl back into my good graces for the rest of eternity. And that spot within my good graces was all because of one song...

No, it was not This Could Be the Start of Something Big, perhaps Allen's most famous composition of his supposed 8,500 songs, and the one that became (in its instrumental version) the original Tonight Show theme. Over the past couple of decades, I have come into the possession of a few of Allen’s old LPs, and I found out what he preferred over the too childish rock ‘n’ roll of his day. The music is uniformly jazzy and it swings, and the pervading sense is one of '50s suburban cool, even if there was nothing remotely cool about suburbia in the '50s. That is, unless you were three martinis in at a cocktail party, and then you were probably having a pretty good time. And that is kind of where Allen's records end up for me, stacked up next to Ferrante and Teicher and The Three Suns. (And I have a lot more albums by those last two groups now than I do of Allen.)

But nowhere on those albums resides the song in discussion (finally) today... The Rockin' Ghost. For that song, we have to go to another figure, one Archie Bleyer, a bandleader whose career began in the 1930s and ran up until his days as a record executive in the mid-1960s. Bleyer's band had a few big hits, like the original version of Hernando's Hideaway (which peaked at #2 on the charts) and a cover of the Ames Bros.' The Naughty Lady of Shady Lane (which hit #26). He became Arthur Godfrey's right hand guy in the late '40s and started his own label, Cadence, in 1952. With Cadence, he broke the Everly Brothers, who went on to massive success, and he was also the first producer to record Link Wray, though he only ever released the amazing, feedback classic Rumble before send Wray on his way to other label.

The nice thing about having your own studio is that you can release your own music if you are so inclined. In 1956, Archie Bleyer took a song written by Mr. Steve Allen and Ira Lee (I am unable to find confirmation of which one wrote the music or the lyrics), put it through his own arrangement with his big band, and inadvertently released one of my very favorite Halloween songs of all time... The Rockin' Ghost. In fact, it may be in my Top Five...

The Rockin’ Ghost
(Steve Allen – Ira Lee)

“On a night when you
Are out on a lark
All alone and so
Afraid of the dark
That's the time you may
Encounter your host
(Who?)
The rockin’ ghost!

When the winds are
Blowing up in the trees
And you're feeling
Kind of weak in the knees
Gloom will follow you
From pillar to post
(Who?)
The rockin’ ghost!

Luckily if you
Want him to get going
All you do is say
‘I dig you the most,
Ghost!’

Then you'll notice
He'll be tipping his hat
'Cause he really is
The swingingest cat
When he hears you say
‘I dig you the most’
(Who?)
The rockin’ ghost

The rockin' ghost
The rockin' ghost

[whistle break]

The rockin' ghost
The rockin' ghost
The rockin' ghost
The rockin' ghost

[horn break]

The rockin' ghost
The rockin' ghost
The rockin' ghost
The rockin' ghost

[horn break 2]

The rockin' ghost
The rockin' ghost

Luckily if you
Want him to get going
All you do is say
‘I dig you the most,
Ghost!’

Then you'll notice
He'll be tipping his hat
'Cause he really is
The swingingest cat
When he hears you say
"I dig you the most!"
(Who?)
The rockin’ ghost!

The rockin' ghost
The rockin' ghost
The rockin' ghost...

Now, if you were not grooving in your seat, wiggling around and tapping your toes and fingers to The Rockin' Ghost, then there is nothing that I can do for you. If you were not caught up in the smooth vocals delivering those charming lyrics, then you need a blood transfusion and probably some form of brain surgery. You are clearly broken inside. You need to be expunged from the records and put out of your utter misery.

When I first encountered this song a few years ago when I ran into it by accident on a mixtape dropped by someone else on the WFMU website, my jaw dropped. If raised the question that comes to me so often when I find something that so perfectly captures my mindset and my own musical tastes... "How have I lived this far without this song in my life?"

Well, the song was then in my life, but it wasn't until I decided to find some artwork for the song to go with my file in iTunes that I saw the songwriting credits for the song: Steve Allen and Ira Lee. Searching about find several other references to Steve Allen having co-written the song, and so until I find a master list of all his compositions that can prove it otherwise, I am assuming it is the same man. But the style of the music is certainly within Allen's own range, and the cool jazz leanings of both the music and some of the key words within speak to Allen's sensibilities. The phrase "Gloom will follow you from pillar to post," certainly the most deftly descriptive line in the lyrics, certainly has a sense of Mr. High-IQ Allen about it.

The questions that the song leads to further down the line, though, make me wonder at Allen and Lee's intentions with the song. If Allen was such a hater of rock music, why would he try so hard with a title that had Rockin' in the title when so many current songs of the day (1956) were reaching for the audience in the same way? Was it for an easy hit? The song itself is nowhere close to rock 'n' roll, so the title itself is unnecessary in that regard, expect perhaps to set the record purchaser off balance. It could have easily just been called (and more accurately) The Swingin' Ghost, as the song is quite clearly a jazz swing tune delivered by a big band orchestra, and has the horn charts and breezy singing to mark it as such. And yet, The Swingin' Ghost just doesn't quite have the right sound to it, especially when sung in quick succession several times, whereas The Rockin' Ghost does swing a bit more in repetition.

Besides, the real strength of Bleyer's arrangement of the music is that the whistle motif established early on in the song gives a real sense of ghostliness and comedic lightness that play very well with the listener. Leading into this is a pulsing organ sound creating the effect of a spooky walk through the dark. The song builds through a pair of repeated horn breaks leading to the song's climax but never lets us escape from the meeting with the ghost and its odd whistle effect and the pulse of the organ. Compare this to a later version by the popular singing group, The Modernaires, where the whistle is replaced by a lighter flute sound and the organ is non-existent, though the arrangement there leads to a much larger and more traditional big band climax with vocals and horns blaring to the last note. It's still a fun, fine version of the song, but has nowhere near the appeal or the fun of the Bleyer version (even when they pull out a not entirely successful Boris Karloff imitation late in the song).

But the key side effect of discovering this song was co-written by Steve Allen was that I finally had my real proof that there was a real genius within him after all. The song may not have lyrics sharp enough to pass a lampooning from Mr. Steve Allen himself, but the words flow easily and set the character up in a minimalist fashion that tell us what he is (a ghost, who may appear when you are out on a lark in the dark) and how to get him to leave you alone in a polite fashion (tell him that you "dig him the most" and then he tips his hat and is on his way). What doesn't get imparted is exactly why he is "rockin'" or "the swingingest" but what is a ghost without a little bit of mystery left over? And everything is made perfect when there is that slight pause after the vocalists sing "I dig you the most..." and then punctuate the bridge by almost shouting out the final word, "Ghost!"

And what is a genius without the ability to occasionally get a little too comfortable with that status now and then and really stink up the joint? I saw Steve Allen do that in my teenage years and wrote him off for a while, but then I came around to him again in my later years. And all it took was a little rockin' ghost to float into my ear canal and never freakin' leave for the next dozen years...

It's Countdown to Halloween Time!!!

noreply@blogger.com (Rik Tod Johnson) — Sun, 01 Oct 2017 12:30:00 +0000

Taken on the Haunted Mansion (sans flash – I don't break the rules) this month
at Disneyland when the ride stopped momentarily.

Yes, once more – I believe for the fourth time – I am taking part in the annual online Countdown to Halloween festivities. To put it as simply as possible, if you have a website that specializes in articles, photos, how-to activities, cosplay, videos, etc. related to Halloween or the horror genre, you get in touch with the Countdown to Halloween website (http://countdowntohalloween.blogspot.com/), and then your site gets added to a handy list that people can reference throughout October (and the rest of the year, really). They promote you, they give you nifty badges you can use on your site or on social media to draw people to your sites, and thereby help promote Countdown to Halloween in general. Fun and free, with the only real consequence being that you will find out exactly how many people are really interested in whatever crap you have to say (if that is something that will bother you in the end).

I posted a hell of a lot last year as part of the 2016 Countdown. I not only had articles here on the Pylon, but also on Cinema 4: Cel Bloc (my animation site), on The Shark Film Office (self-explanatory), and on my then-latest site, V for Voluminous, C for Cinema (my book review site). My buddy Aaron and I also had a couple of posts we promoted on our Stephen King site, We Who Watch Behind the Rows. In fact, I posted so much material last year, that I probably set a high bar for quantity (let's not even get into quality) that I will probably not be able to meet this year (or ever again).

There are just too many things going on with me in a physical sense, too many personal things going on, and too many distractions from the real world for me to keep up that pace this year. To say my mind is split a thousand directions right now is an understatement, and so I have decided that I need to calm down a little bit and just get done what I can get done. I will not be driving myself crazy trying to keep apace with anyone else or some imaginary publishing schedule that I have created in my head. Last year, I had something posted every single day in October on the Pylon; sometimes, more than one thing. At a point late in the month (specifically, the 26th), I suffered a hip injury that made it difficult to sit or stand for long (and which would haunt me for basically the next 8-9 months). I also had friends and family in town (in different groupings) and so my time was of a premium leading up to the actual day of Halloween. Despite all this, I still managed to post at least once every day on the Pylon, in addition to writing and publishing everything else on my other websites.

This year will be different. I am starting out the month away from home and away from my computer (this is a prepared, pre-scheduled post itself). Later in the month, I will again have various friends coming to town, and with that will be visits to Disneyland and Disney California Adventure and probably the beach. At those moments, I really won't care if I get anything posted in time.

But away from those moments, I hope you will enjoy what I will be publishing this month. Here on the Pylon, I will have a couple of articles in my The Monster's on the Loose! series – which concentrates specifically on formative moments in my horror movie upbringing – in which I will delve into a couple of monstrous documentaries from my youth and also one of my favorite all-time monster flicks, The Monster That Challenged the World. I am planning the third installment of my annual look back at Topps monster trading cards from the 1970s, and also the third piece in my recap of episodes from the old Monkees TV series that involved supernatural themes. There will probably be a couple of pieces of my Halloween visits to Disneyland, including checking out the new stuff they have added to California Adventure for the season. I am thinking of taking a stroll through some old, creaky horror comics that I own. There will probably be some mixtape tracks added to my collection for the Halloween season. And a whole lot of stuff that will work out as things pop up throughout the month. Don't want to give away everything. Or promise too much... I also have a lot of monster movies to watch this month as well, you know...

On Cinema 4: Cel Bloc, I have a half dozen (and possibly more) scary cartoons lined up for discussion, including a couple of Disney classics late in October. The Shark Film Office will finally see me tackle the two films that got cut last year when I got injured: my reviews of the atrocious Sharkenstein (that's right: basically, Jaws crossed with the Frankenstein Monster) and the absolutely mind-destroying Shark Exorcist, one of the absolute worst pieces of cinema I have ever encountered (and that is saying a lot). It is a film so painful that it nearly made me give up writing about shark films. Over on We Who Watch, Aaron and I will start out this month with our review of the new It movie, then a review of Mike Flanagan's new adaptation of Gerald's Game on Netflix, and we are planning to reread King's 'Salem's Lot during the month to also review, And if we can, we then want to do separate reviews of the 1979 Tobe Hooper TV movie and the 2004 mini-series remake.

OK, I have a lot to do this month. I hope that you will return here through the month (and afterward) to check out the fun on my various websites. And feel free to drop a comment or two while you are here. I love to talk to other fans of the stuff that I love.

Happy Halloween (in advance)!

RTJ

This Week in Rixflix #20: August 25-31, 2017

noreply@blogger.com (Rik Tod Johnson) — Thu, 07 Sep 2017 23:30:00 +0000

There's just no way around it. In order for me to post this recap within the timeframe I have set for my regular This Week in Rixflix pieces, I need to post it today. The problem is that my body and mind are nowhere in the vicinity of where they need to be to do it any justice.

Illness has taken me under again. This time it is some sort of flu or flu variant, possibly a stomach bug but I also have an ongoing headache and my throat is slowly getting rawer over the past 36 hours. As I posted on Facebook, nightmares have come with the illness, and they have been pretty severe on their own, let alone having to also feel completely shitty while dealing with monsters and murderers. As a result, this post is going to consist of this lead-in and a single review of the new American version of Death Note. I had planned capsule reviews of several other films that I viewed in the previous week: Cher and C. Aguilera in Burlesque (2010), Greer and Garson in Adventure (1945), J-Law and galaxy guardian Chris Pratt in the gorgeous but vapid Passengers (from this year), Ida Lupino and Joan Leslie as an odd sister pair in The Hard Way (1943), and Elvis himself in Easy Come, Easy Go (1967).

It's a shame, because I had a few things to say (as I usually do) about all of these films, but the way I am feeling, it would be eons before I got the thing written. This is primarily due to my having some other topics I hope to write about this weekend, and I don't want to shift ever more projects to the back burner. (It is already a horrid habit of mine that I need to overcome.) And my reason for choosing Death Note as the single review this time is because I had already written three-quarters of it. It too was intended as a small, capsule review but turned a bit larger as I got going on it, so now my inability to edit myself down for once has turned into providence.

One note that I should add for the films that appear in the header image for This Week in Rixflix this go-around: most of the films that I watched over the past two weeks were an attempt to catch up on films from TCM's Summer Under the Stars, an event they hold annually each August. The 24 hours within a single day are used to focus on a particular star, and I love to use the event to catch up on films that I have missed in the filmographies of certain actors. This year, Summer Under the Stars overlapped with my attempt to finish the Hitchcock film course, and so I pretty much ignored the first week of SUTS, and really only came into it near the end of the second week. But I was able to knock out several titles each from Barbara Stanwyck (three films), Glenn Ford (two films), Greer Garson (six films), Ricardo Montalban (another six), and Dennis Morgan (never big with me, but I took advantage of it and saw a whopping eight films, most of them co-starring screen partner Jack Carson). When I drink, I drink deeply.

The Numbers:

This week's feature-length film count: 28; 23 first-time viewings and 5 repeats.
Highest rated feature-length films: The Getaway (1972) – 8/9
Lowest rated feature films: Easy Come, Easy Go (1967) and Texas Terror (1934) – 4/9
Average films per day in August: 2.77
Average films per day in 2017 so far: 3.00
Consecutive days with at least 1 feature-length film seen per day: 261

The Reviews:

Death Note (2017) Dir.: Adam Wingard – Did we need another one? Look, a few years ago, against my better judgment, I decided to delve into the whole Death Note thing after all the initial hype burned itself out in the manner of most pop culture. Not the manga though; I had pretty much taken myself out of the comic buying game by the time Death Note started being available in the U.S., and so I went straight to the anime. I went into Death Note with some serious qualms about being sucked up in yet another "phenomena," but then it turned out that I quite enjoyed watching the series. It took me a little while to warm to the concept, but eventually I got caught up in the cat-and-mouse between the holder of the death note, Light, and his pursuer, L. Still, even with liking the series (but not loving it), I had serious doubts about the live-action version I had also heard about it. I been through a few other anime series that had been transfered to live action, and in most cases, the results were rather tepid overall. Did I want to waste my time?

And so I watched the live-action films, Death Note and Death Note 2: The Last Name. While my main interest was to see just how faithfully they would reproduce the story away from animation, once more, I was pleasantly surprised with how much I enjoyed them. In fact, I liked the films better than the series, and even rewatched both of them pretty quickly after I finished them. So, was I a Death Note convert? Not exactly, but I could not claim to not have found enjoyment in the property. Even with that, I had even more reservations when I discovered there was a third Japanese live-action film that had been produced, which was titled L: Change the World. The film had nothing to do with the Death Note series apart from the main character of the Holmes-like detective, L, who delves into one final case at the end of his young life. Since L is the most intriguing persona in the series, I naturally had to watch that film and once again enjoyed another piece of the Death Note property, though it was not nearly the same level of quality as the first two.

So, I had success after success after success (however qualified) in watching the various pieces of Death Note; surely this could carry over into the new American version? Especially when the director is Adam Wingard, a young talent for whom I have developed a high regard over the past few years, chiefly due to You're Next and The Guest. I wrote last week about my disappointment in another Wingard project, his sequel-cum-remake (for hire) of The Blair Witch Project. I felt that his direction was fine, but he was simply overwhelmed by the necessity of both slavishly replicating the mood of the original while also creating yet another chapter in a property that really had seen its day about fifteen years ago.

Here, in Wingard's version, that disappointment is mirrored, as over-familiarity is a definite factor, but the real problem is that Death Note, unlike TBWP, is still a live property in its native land of Japan. [*See note below this review.] Wingard's direction can be as taut as ever (which it is) but the film just kept nagging me with questions over its necessity. Much of the bad press surrounding this new version has been about possible "whitewashing," in replacing formerly Japanese characters with mostly Caucasians. I don't really have a problem with that since the locale is now in the U.S. (Seattle), and so a greater diversity of races becomes more possible, but the character of Light could (and really should have, in my opinion) have easily remained Japanese. (L., always the most fascinating figure in any version of Death Note, is African-American in the Wingard version.)

My real problem with the film, apart from its ridiculous finale (which differs greatly from other versions), is the question of why couldn't the Japanese versions just stand as the versions seen in the U.S.? The originals are both well-shot, high quality productions with some excellent acting and solid action sequences. I ask this not long after having already derided the American remake of the Argentinian Oscar-winning film, The Secret in Their Eyes. The American version was not bad overall as a film on its own; it was just completely unnecessary, as were many changes to the story to try and make the film more topical in the current American climate of terroristic fear. I felt even stronger almost 25 years ago when an American studio decided to do a remake of George Sluizer's incredible The Vanishing (Spoorloos). At least they hired the same director to screw up his own remake (coincidentally also shot in Seattle) just five years after the original. I know people who loved the American version at the time, but to a person, not one of them had seen the Dutch version, which differs greatly in style and tone from the one with Jeff Bridges and Sandra Bullock.

Of course, I don't hate all American remakes of foreign films. We wouldn't have Some Like It Hot, 12 Monkeys, The Magnificent Seven, and The Departed without some things being remade. (These are just a few brief examples; there are many others.) Closer to the subject at hand, speaking of U.S. remakes of J-horror properties, I loved Gore Verbinski's American update of Ringu back in 2002, a case where an already terrific Japanese horror film was arguably equaled (if not bettered) in effectiveness. So, this is most definitely not a call for American studios to stop remaking foreign films. People love to point out trends, but I feel each film project is unique unto itself. Some movies work and some movies just don't, and for me, as long as the creators of the new version have an interesting or original approach to even an old, crusty idea, wonders can often come out of that. That is part of the beauty of filmmaking, and art in general. So, I say let the sequels and remakes continue to come; I will find the ones worthy of my time eventually. And a small portion of them might turn out to be spectacular.

But the new version of Death Note? Not so much. It looks like product and it feels like product. I love Wingard, and still have hopes for his Godzilla vs. Kong film in 2020 (and contrary to popular opinion, it is no mere remake), but this film just has the sense of a job for hire. He's treading water here waiting for the big money down the line. I will give the writers some credit for attempting something different from the originals with the flashy ending, but as I mentioned before, it comes off all wrong, and every step taken along the way to get the story to that ending cheapens the overall film. It is really the second half of the film where the new Death Note truly goes awry. I don't hold this against Wingard as he had no credited hand in the screenplay, but he is still the boss in the end. The film's failure as a novel production unto its own is his failure as well. Why couldn't the series just stay in Japan? – TC4P Rating: 5/9

This Week in Rixflix #19 : August 18-24, 2017

noreply@blogger.com (Rik Tod Johnson) — Thu, 31 Aug 2017 04:30:00 +0000

OK, let's get this ship righted... I have missed a few weeks in-between my last supposedly weekly installment of this series and this post. I am not going to go into the hows and whys, apart from saying that I, for the last week of July and the beginning of this month, decided to concentrate full-time on the TCM online course on Alfred Hitchcock in order to complete everything before the course's expiration date (August 5th). That's my excuse for the first couple of weeks I missed for This Week in Rixflix; the rest is my own concern.

But complete the TCM course I did, and not only that (as I posted on Facebook a while back), between July 6th and August 10th – a span of 36 days – I watched 42 of the 56 feature-length films that Hitchcock directed in his lifetime. Twelve of those movies (about half of them silent features) were first-time views for me, of which I will speak more on The Cinema 4 Pylon in coming weeks. (If you think this isn't going to turn into a couple editions of my All or Nothing series, you'd better rethink your position...) Most amazingly to me, in that group of 42 films, I never got around to watching some of my favorite selections of The Master, such as Psycho, North by Northwest, The Birds, To Catch a Thief, The Wrong Man, and my #1 Hitchcock film overall, Strangers on a Train. So now I have decided to casually play catch up with the rest of the films, so I can say that I have watched as much of his available oeuvre as I could within the same year. The Birds was the first film in that follow-up, and I plan on relaxing with NxNW this coming weekend, if not more.

I just couldn't stop at 42, you know...

The Numbers:

This week's feature film count: 21; 15 first-time viewings and 6 repeats.
Highest-rated feature-length film: The Birds (1963) – 9/9
Lowest-rated feature-length film: Toxic Shark (2017) – 4/9
Average films per day in August so far: 2.4167
Average films per day in 2017 so far: 2.97
Consecutive days with at least 1 feature-length film seen per day: 254

And, to finish off the course, here is the list of the 42 Hitchcock films that I watched from July 6, 2017 to August 10, 2017. I have lined them up chronologically by release year (but not necessarily in order of release) so you can get a quick snapshot of the breadth of the man's career. The list covers 49 years of the man's work, extending from the silent era all the way up to Family Plot in 1976, the only Hitchcock film I saw in a theatre within the same year of its release:

1927
Downhill (1st time)
The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog
The Ring (1st time)

1928
Champagne (1st time)
The Farmer's Wife (1st time)

1929
Blackmail
The Manxman (1st time)

1930
Murder!

1931
Mary
Number Seventeen (1st time)
The Skin Game (1st time)

1932
Rich and Strange (1st time)

1934
The Man Who Knew Too Much
Waltzes from Vienna [Strauss' Great Waltz] (1st time)

1935
The 39 Steps

1936
Sabotage
Secret Agent

1937
Young and Innocent (1st time)

1938
The Lady Vanishes

1939
Jamaica Inn

1940
Foreign Correspondent
Rebecca

1941
Mr. and Mrs. Smith
Suspicion

1942
Saboteur

1943
Shadow of a Doubt

1944
Lifeboat

1945
Spellbound

1946
Notorious

1947
The Paradine Case

1948
Rope

1950
Stage Fright

1953
I Confess (1st time)

1954
Dial M for Murder
Rear Window

1955
The Trouble with Harry

1956
The Man Who Knew Too Much

1958
Vertigo

1964
Marnie

1966
Torn Curtain

1972
Frenzy

1976
Family Plot

This Week's Reviews:

Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (2016) Dir.: Edward Zwick – I would ask "Did we need another Jack Reacher film?" but then I would have to also ask "Did we need the first Jack Reacher film?" No, and no, would be my hard answers. This is not Tom Cruise hate, because as my wife will tell you, he is my boyfriend. Or at least she loves to say that because I seemingly have no qualms about going to the theatre to see the latest Mission: Impossible installment or the latest big-budget sci-fi or action flick featuring him in the lead. (There is a huge story behind all of this Cruise discussion between my wife and myself, only some of which I have made clear on Facebook; maybe in the near future.) Despite my dislike for his weird religious cult (sorry, but until their practices are more open to the public, that's what they are), I think Cruise is just fine as an action star, and even a pretty good actor in the right role. (And he is dead on hilarious in Tropic Thunder...)

So, I do see nearly everything that Cruise puts out eventually, though I don't necessarily see many of them in theatres apart from the hugest blockbusters. And then there are these Jack Reacher films, based on an extremely popular series of books that I cannot (and possibly never will) ever fathom. Of course, people I knew made a lot of jokes when the first movie came out about "Jack Reach-around," and other people told me how fantastic the books are but that Cruise was the completely wrong choice for the titular role. Part of this attitude is pretty easy to understand: Cruise is very nearly a foot shorter than the six-foot-five Reacher in the books, and at least 75-80 pounds lighter. And I totally understand that if you read the books and envision this Paul Bunyan of a man battling against the world, and then you go to the movies and see what amounts to a pipsqueak – a very muscular pipsqueak, but a pipsqueak nonetheless, I can understand your disappointment. I am not going to rip on the books only to say, "Not interested" because from the plots of the two films that I have seen, they would not be my thing at all. It doesn't matter who is in the role. Seems more like a thing for people who enjoy JAG or NCIS. I liked the first film a little bit more, which surprises me, because this sequel has Cobie Smulders in it, whom I like in everything. (Sometimes, she is the best part of that "everything," but you know what I am saying...) I just found myself mired in a pool of general annoyance at the absolutely incoherent and unbelievable plot line – especially the parts involving a girl who may or may not be Reacher's daughter – which itself has found praise in its book version.

So that's the split line between me and the book-reading world right now. (OK, there are actually a great many places where I am divided against the rest of the book-reading world, but this is the one under discussion right now.) I am not going to hold forth further until the day that I, out of sheer desperation in an airport somewhere, decide to actually read a Jack Reacher novel. Perhaps I will get swept up in Lee Child's prose and find a way to buy into this world of a brooding drifter who gets caught up in conspiracy after conspiracy against him; perhaps I won't. For now, I will just say that I am not fond of the movie series, but apparently, neither are many fans of the books. On this, we can at least currently agree. – TC4P Rating: 5/9

Blair Witch (2016) Dir.: Adam Wingard – Why? I am a horror movie fan of longstanding, but even I did not want to see another iteration of The Blair Witch Project come around at all. Do I still like the original film? Well, I did when it came out even though many people of my acquaintance claimed they got sick from the whirling handheld camerawork or just thought the movie was a dumb idea and poorly acted. I thought the original film was pretty spooky, was a clever way to transfuse some new blood into what at that point was a fairly stale horror environment (in my opinion, though I am sure you can always find others who professed the same at the time), and yes, was amateurishly acted and produced but with a huge amount of chutzpah. That chutzpah got its creators, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, a ton of box office and critical buzz, and even put them on the cover of Time, and that was pretty remarkable at the, ahem, time. I saw it a couple of times in the theatre in 1999, bought the DVD, and watched it twice more trying to convince people they should also "at least see it" before badmouthing it. Then I saw Joe Berlinger's cranked out sequel in 2000 on DVD instead of the theatres because of poor word of mouth, though I did watch the phony documentary promoting the second film at the time it appeared on TV. At that point, I then promptly set the Blair Witch story aside, possibly even to shut it away forever. I just no longer cared. Stand me in the corner.

It's 18 years later, and there is a whole new generation of suckers, er, young millennial horror fans out there that may not even know that The Blair Witch Project was ever even a thing. The found footage device that served as the original film's gimmick is now done practically everyday on YouTube and other sites, and there have been innumerable feature films since released in the style (the bulk of them in the horror genre), many of them quite successful. While The Blair Witch Project was nowhere near the first such film to use found footage, it was certainly one of the biggest in terms of the cultural impact it had almost immediately. I am also pretty sure that someone more knowledgable on the entire subject than I probably has connected all the dots between TBWP and the Creepypasta phenomena that we must suffer through today.

If there were a chance for a remake/sequel (because, come on, the new film really serves as both) of TBWP to be pulled off even halfway decently, I would think that director Adam Wingard would be in the list of those who could do it. A hugely prolific talent, Wingard tends to work mainly in horror, but also has a foot in the supposed "mumblecore" genre (a term that I hate). While I did just finish watching his new Netflix version of Death Note and was mildly disappointed in the result (possibly more on that film next week), WIngard has, in recent years, directed two of my favorite recent horror films – You're Next and The Guest – and I am also excited about his involvement in the eventual production of Godzilla vs. Kong (to be released in 2020). As for the movie at hand, I will say that he is the perfect pick for someone to replicate the look and feel of the original film, which is what Blair Witch tries and mostly succeeds at artistically. The film builds up some decent atmosphere, and the house they find (c'mon, you know they have to find her house eventually) is a good deal more extensive and the action there more explicitly detailed than in the original. While I never agreed with those who ripped into the amateurish acting, I will say that the cast in the new film are all most likely professionals (hey, the girl with the purple hair plays Arthur's sister Dot in the new Tick series on Amazon), but the downside to that is the original amateur feel is what I liked in the first film. The people in this film, girls included, all seem to have boners over having as many cameras as possible on them.

Now about those cameras... For me, not being a video game player of any real account, when the film starts revving up and looking more like a first person shooter being attacked, I kind of tuned out of the whole thing. I also felt, despite being told how everybody had body cameras and whatnot filming the affair that some of the angles still did not make sense to me. I am certain someone out there will protest that the angles all made sense – "You're forgetting about the crotch cam she crammed in her shorts, dude!" – but to me, that is always an annoyance in found footage films. (The only thing more annoying is when someone doesn't just drop the goddamned camera and just fucking run for it...) Me? I don't care if I saw film footage of my long lost sister (Heather Donahue, the girl from the first film) in window of the house where the evil witch supposedly lives (the premise of this film), I'm not going out in those stupid woods. I don't even believe in the supernatural at all, but if I found evidence, however sparse, that my sister is where many people are rumored to have gone missing over the years, I will hire every private detective in the book to go do the dirty work. When they don't come back, well, gather everything you have and bring it to the cops. Fuck those woods. As for the film, I am not going to tell it screw off, but I have seen it, and now I have seen two Wingard films in two weeks that have left me mostly cold. Not what i was expecting from someone that I thought had caught fire. – TC4P Rating: 5/9

Dude Bro Party Massacre III (2015) Dir.: Tomm Jacobsen, Michael Rousselet and Jon Salmon – I completely stumbled upon this film by absolute accident, and then I spent a couple of wild hours early that morning reveling in sick, gory effects and an almost completely unrestrained comic sensibility. I laughed so much that I couldn't believe it, and then I had to keep stopping the video so that my brain could catch up with the flurries of rapid fire gags and insults via a great many replays of scenes. The third in a series of films that don't really exist, Dude Bro Party Massacre III operates somewhere in the vicinity of South Park as far as humor goes, and if that is not your cup of tea, please move it along, because we won't be friends. As I said, this is supposed to be Part III of a series, and the first two non-existent films are recounted at the very beginning, much in the style of the Friday the 13th series. But the film is far more than a mere slasher parody; it acts like a lost VHS tape of a film that would have disappeared altogether if some über-geek hadn't plopped a tape into his deck and captured the thing for his own collection. (It seems an impossibility that anything could disappear like that, but there are still some obscure films from the '80s that I have on tape that I have yet to see on DVD.)

I don't know which channel that makes its hay by selling advertising would have shown this film uncut back then, but we get flashes of fake advertisements intermittently throughout Dude Bro III that, even at a mere second or two are pretty entertaining. (The feeling is that the taper paused the tape at each commercial break and then started it again at the end of the break.) In one ad is Matt Oswalt, brother of Patton Oswalt, and that is more than mere coincidence, because Patton shows up in a supporting role (as a favor) in the main plot of the film (as the sheriff). We also get a brief flash, most surprisingly, of Larry King – yes, that Larry King – in another intentional cameo. The people behind the film are a comedy troupe called 5-Second Films, who are pretty well known on the interwebs for their long-running site of the same name. I have been to the site off and on over the past decade, but it had been long enough (certainly more than five seconds) that I was completely unaware they had sprung this film upon the world. I think that I may have enjoyed it even more the way that I did discover it, rifling through archive.org that morning. (Yes, I found it because someone posted it illegally; no, I did not download it for myself.) This one will definitely get added to my collection once I start buying discs off Amazon again, but if they don't put this out as a collector's item on VHS, I would be really upset. A must watch for me again (and again) in the very, very near future. It may become a perennial. – TC4P Rating: 7/9

Last Girl Standing (2015) Dir.: Benjamin R. Moody – Longtime followers of this site might recall that over the past couple of years, I reviewed two different titles based around the popular slasher movie concept of the last survivor who fights the villain/monster to the death known as the "final girl". I hated one of those films, that being Final Girl (with Abigail Breslin) but loved the other one, the far more intentionally comedic and dimension-warping The Final Girls (with Taissa Farmiga, Vera's little sis). Of course, just like slasher films themselves, those two films weren't going to be the only films that would dabble with the fringe concept outside of the normal run of slasher films. At the same time as those other films were released in 2015 came Last Girl Standing (though I have only discovered its existence recently), yet another variation on the final girl trope. While I still feel The Final Girls is the most fun and accomplished of the three films, but Last Girl Standing has plenty of spunk – and loads of great gruesome gore – of its own.

Just like Dude Bro Party Massacre III, this film is technically a sequel to a movie that does not exist. The difference in tone is one of awareness. Dude Bro is completely aware of its existence as a winking and more than nudging comedy in a completely ridiculous film universe; it never allows for reality to step into it in any way, not even in its fake commercial breaks. Not so with Last Girl Standing, where its heroine, Camryn (an excellent Akasha Villalobos), is the lone survivor of a horrific attack on herself and her fellow campers by a serial killer known as The Hunter. That set-up may be a basic one for a slasher scenario, but for Camryn, the horror is all too real. This film is no tongue-in-cheek affair; Camryn has PTSD from what occurred, and it is affecting her life from every possible angle. She shuts herself down from the world and hides behind the counter and clothes at the dry cleaning establishment that has hired, where the owners have special rules where she doesn't interact with customers. Camryn is haunted by constant flashbacks of The Hunter, to the point where she starts confusing reality and what both she and we first think are hallucinations. Or is she being stalked by someone posing as The Hunter, the killer she herself dispatched by hand? Or is The Hunter really back in her life? And then stuff starts to get really weird, and bodies start piling up...

Last Girl Standing is a bare bones production, filmed in Austin, Texas with a mostly local cast and crew. (Villalobos' husband plays her love interest; that's how tight-knit the work is.) This is not to say that there isn't production value on display in the film, especially in relation to the rather extensive gore effects, all practical and mostly terrific. Don't be fooled either... the film looks and feels like an earnest drama (which it is) that takes a deeper look into a stock slasher character than we normally get to see, but it doesn't, to paraphrase Mr. Creosote, skimp on the pâté. And yet, for much of its running time, it is not a normal genre film either, though it does take a turn deep in the second half where it goes full bore towards its grim conclusion. I was more than pleasantly surprised by the film, though it certainly has some areas with which I found fault. Since I first watched the film, I wavered a bit in my feelings for it, and felt I was a bit stingy in my initial response when I added it to my film diary on Letterboxd. But after thinking about it for over a week and also watching a big chunk of the film a second time to get the mood back, I finally settled on 6/9.

The Big Sick (2017) Dir.: Michael Showalter – You know, sometimes you just need The Big Sick to clean out your system. I love the summer movie season. I love the middle months of the year where giant action blockbusters all try to outdo each other for the weekly box office take. And you will never hear me cry about there being too many superhero movies, because they are exactly the movies I wanted to see when I was a kid but were rarely made because the effects just weren't there. But even I long for the occasional break from BIF! POW! WHAM! KA-BOOM! and that is where The Big Sick came to our rescue today.

Jen and I had been planning to see if for a good while now – pretty much since its creators hit the talk show circuit – but just hadn't made it. The Big Sick is a marvelous comedy-drama about the beginnings of the real life relationship between comedian Kumail Nanjiani and his wife, writer and producer Emily V. Gordon. They meet cute, they fall in love, they break up, and then he ends up having to sign as her husband (even though they weren't married then) to induce a coma to possibly save her life. It's quite funny and adorable, but becomes almost entirely a drama for a long chunk of the film as he not only juggles possibly losing the women he loves, but also dealing with her initially surly parents and with his own family, who want him in an arranged marriage with someone else from Pakistan. Kudos to Michael Showalter, Nanjiani, Gordon, and Judd Apatow for bringing this story to the big screen. It's a pretty satisfying, small film, and I hope it gets some recognition come awards season. – TC4P Rating: 8/9

Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016) Dir.: Mike Flanagan – A while back, my pal Aaron mentioned to me via Facebook Messenger that the Ouija sequel was, in his words, "surprisingly enjoyable". We had been discussing numerous other items of worth (to us, at least) and so I rather passed by his statement without comment. I hadn't the inclination to watch the sequel, as I had leapt on the first film, mostly out of loyalty to Olivia (Bates Motel) Cooke, and found it severely lacking apart from her participation. And so I wandered for weeks after that, secure in the knowledge that I would probably avoid the sequel for a good while, but Aaron's words kind of nagged at me. Our viewing tastes are fairly similar, and even when we don't agree on a project, we still are able to see what it is the other one found intriguing in a film. Seeing the film pop up on Cinemax one evening, I recorded Ouija: Origin of Evil and when I started watching it the next day, I found the opening of the film a lot of fun and pretty captivating. As the film rolled on, I continued to enjoy what I was seeing, and it was only in perhaps the final half hour that I finally wearied of the story they were telling me, which was that of the fate of a family that occupied a house visited by the characters in the original film. There was also the use of an effect that I am not especially fond of in films today, something I will refer to as the "Black Hole Sun effect" (after the Soundgarden video) that really takes me out of nearly any film that employs it (which, today, is a lot of horror films).

Still, even after tiring of the story and that stupid effect, I felt the film was pretty taut and sharply directed, and a damn sight better than the original. About halfway through, I decided that I needed to look up the director and found out it was Mike Flanagan, who had already delivered the truly excellent Hush a couple years ago as well as the really spooky mind-bender, Oculus. (I also liked, but not to the same degree, Absentia, from 2011.) It seems, with the recent loss of Romero and even more recent loss (this past weekend) of Tobe Hooper, that perhaps there are some openings in the ol' Masters of Horror lineup. It might be a little premature, but might I offer up Flanagan's name to the list? II feel like Wingard will eventually hit that list as well with a couple more solid films.) Flanagan has an adaptation of Stephen King's Gerald Game, in the works as a major release, so maybe his time has come. We shall see. – TC4P Rating: 6/9

Until next time,

Jon Spencer Blues Explosion Meets Rik Johnson Brain Explosion...

noreply@blogger.com (Rik Tod Johnson) — Thu, 17 Aug 2017 06:21:00 +0000

This afternoon, as I was listening to some of my go-to "concentrate on writing" music, that being the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, I found myself getting a little more immersed in the lyrics than I expected.

Part of why I am able to write during Spencer's music over many other artists is because the main thrust of his music is not the lyrics. His songs tend to be exercises in style and rhythm over saying anything even remotely profound. His music is based in rhythm and blues, but with a very punky edge, a massive dose of ironic detachment, and a wild, often non-PC sense of humor. Spencer often makes grunts and crazed noises into the microphone (a la Lux Interior) just before whipping off another frenzied run of squalling, squealing guitar notes.

When I listen to music casually, I tend to concentrate first on the lyrics over the music in most things that I listen to in my collection. But when I listen to lyric-heavy music while I write, I get easily distracted when I find myself singing along instead of focusing on my own words. This means that I needed to cultivate a certain portion of my collection that leans more towards the instrumental. And I now have a lot of options, running from Beethoven symphonies all the way to Man or Astro-Man (who have very few songs with actual singing in them), the group that is possibly my favorite all-time for this very purpose.

But Spencer also counts in that area, even though he does have lyrics in most of his songs. The thing is, Spencer's lyrics are often hard to discern, chiefly due to the wild roar he uses to shout over his most often very loud music. He growls, he grunts, he groans, he whoops, and he whines, and every third word or so on every other song, you might make out a line or two clearly, most often a joke that he really wants to sell you. I own several of his albums, and have listened to at least three of them probably umpteen dozen times or more, and I am still working my way through some of his lyrics.

Then there is History of Lies, one of my favorite tracks off his Extra Width album from 1994. (I maintain this album is probably the best entry point into his music, but others would probably point to 1996's Now I Got Worry, which featured the song "Wail" (which actually got some airplay and also some time on MTV. Or you can just listen to Spencer's wonderful song Bellbottoms, which is used in a major scene in Edgar Wright's terrific Baby Driver.)

While listening to History of Lies for what may have been the 300th time (but the first time in the Trump era), I was supposed to just let the heavy, rumbling blues riff that anchors the song wash over me and not think about anything being said while I attempted to concentrate on a piece I was writing for The Shark Film Office. But Spencer got the best of me, because History of Lies had some hidden stuff that was going to come back to bite me. And once that got started the writing stopped...

I was struck near the end of the song when Spencer invokes the number "45" in his final go at the song's brief chorus. Then I started thinking about the song's title, and then the lyrics where he says "You're still talkin' all that shit out your mouth," and then what mostly amounts to a series of insults, calling the target a "vampire," and then telling that person that he is "gonna treat you... like a stepchild."

I am still pretty certain Spencer was either putting down a past romantic partner or just somebody with whom he had a falling out or a long dispute. And the opening verse with the insults could be made worse if there something misogynistic in his threats. But there are no clues as to the gender of the target, apart from Spencer singing "between you and I, son" during the bridge before the brief guitar solo. The "son" part could even potentially make Spencer himself the target, as if this were his father talking to him. The song was released at least 23 years ago, possibly more, and so it has to either be about someone in Spencer's life or just in his imagination.

But then I got to thinking: so many of the lines in this song are almost directly applicable to "45". The constant yelling about lies over and over, having a veritable history of lies (no one lies more bigly), growing so ugly that the narrator can't even "look at you," and having bad blood within. BUT then Spencer invokes "45" right at the end of the song (though he is likely talking about a gun... or maybe even malt liquor). Whatever the "45" is, it is hard for me to not to think of the current ill wind blowing hot air in the White House.

What if, 23 years ago, Jon Spencer was actually a political prophet? Did he smell the foul stench of the rise of Trump from the distance of almost 2½ decades?

Of course not... I don't believe in that junk. I'm just having fun. But if you have never heard Jon Spencer (while knowing it was him) and his terrific band, here's the song on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctsJ3Pf8jQI

And here are the lyrics, so you can play along at home:

History of Lies
by the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion

"You're still talkin'
All that shit out your mouth
Come home
I been a fool too long
There's blood within
That's bad
You grown so ugly
Vampire
I can't even look at you
Stupid child
Why do you lie?
I'm gonna treat you
Treat you
Like a stepchild
Watch it!

You and I
That's a history
Of LIES

Late night
Hollywood
You're so alone
Baby, angels
In the sand
I'm on high
Where you goin’?
Understand
Let me tell you about it
It's hot
It's cold
It's hot and it's cold
And it sucks
At the same time

You and I
That's a history
Of LIES

Our bodies
Are made up of
Like molecules
Between you and I, son
There ain't much difference
You still got to choose

Come on!

You and I
That's a history
Of LIES!!

You and I
Forty-five
Sssh…"

This Week in Rixflix #18: July 7–13, 2017

noreply@blogger.com (Rik Tod Johnson) — Tue, 18 Jul 2017 18:27:00 +0000

So, I am finding that I am far more interested at this point in just watching all of Alfred Hitchcock's film than in taking the TCM online course about them. I thought that once I got through the silents and early talkies, that I would leap into online modules and first couple of tests, but I was wrong. I feel no drive toward doing it right now, and frankly, just want to dive into ever more Hitchcock films.

Part of this comes from my general dislike of schooling in any form, especially in taking time on my own to go back to doing it, and the other part is probably due to my belief that I am not going to really learn all that much more about The Master's work than I already know. (Certainly I have forgotten more than I remember, but I still feel like I have pretty good recall on the important stuff.) This is sheer arrogance and bullshit on my part. What it really comes down to is that I am a lazy bastard who believes deep inside that the really important part of all this is actually watching the films. And I have done that part already.

Inside, though, I know that I really would benefit from hearing someone else reliably explain the history behind the films and their director, so the problem now is to convince myself that cutting some time out in the next couple of weeks to really knuckle down and complete this project would be a desirous thing. After all, I have been working on convincing myself that perhaps I should go back to school to get a journalism degree. Completing such a course as this, on even a small scale, could do wonders in showing myself that I am capable of sustaining focus long enough to bring such efforts to a satisfying close. Let's see if I can...

The Numbers:

This week's feature-length film count: 22; 14 first-time viewings and 8 repeats.
Highest rated feature-length films: The 39 Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938) – 9/9
Lowest rated feature films: Scared to Death (1947) – 4/9
Average films per day in July so far: 2.69
Average films per day in 2017 so far: 2.84
Consecutive days with at least 1 feature-length film seen per day: 212

The Reviews:

When Animals Dream (2014) Dir.: Jonas Alexander Arnby – If one reads through the capsule reviews about this Danish fantasy-horror film, submitted by users of IMDb – and I highly recommend that you don't, for the most part; it can be as bad an experience as reading random anonymous comments after any story online – one would gather that When Animals Dream is not only excruciatingly dull but also NOT a werewolf movie. They seem to be especially loud on this last point, that the film, which features a young woman slowly discovering she is starting the process of turning into a creature not definably in the realm of appearing human, is not a true werewolf film. Well, yes, When Animals Dream is not full of the usual talk of silver bullets and full moons that we see in the usual sort of "B" pictures featuring lycanthropes and the stilted mythology that has grown up around how to deal with them, most of which was largely instilled in us by Hollywood. Forget all that, though... this is a movie where a human female transforms into an altogether different creature, which is recognizably lupine (or even vulpine) in basic nature, the townsfolk have an awareness of her potential for violence, and go about attempting to torment her and ostracize her from the community because of this. The results might be different from what you think is a "werewolf" movie, but since when is experimenting with form a bad idea, especially when everyone yells about seeing the same old stuff over and over again?

Me? I'd make friends with the cute shape-changer and get her on my side, because you never know when you will need her in a scrap. Especially with the awful people who populate the small fishing town in When Animals Dream. These people are fuckers, and a bunch of glum ones at that. I will say, there is some history on their side, as the girl's mother – who appears as a mere invalid (and almost catatonic at that) from the start of the film – has previously run amok in the town. Still, throwing fish at the girl and attacking her on the job at the canning factory are pretty stupid ideas if you think she is capable of turning into something horrible and killing you. What a bunch of dopes. However, the film goes no place that you really think it is, and this too might be why so many people on IMDb are critical of the results. Geez, first they swear it is not a werewolf picture, but then they get surly when it doesn't turn out the way a werewolf picture should. What a second bunch of dopes. – TC4P Rating: 6/9

Our Miss Brooks (1956) Dir.: Al Lewis – Eve Arden's comic timing and sarcastic edge were the saving grace of many a tepid comedy from the Hollywood studio factories throughout the late '30s and through the '40s. I chiefly know her from the television sitcom version of Our Miss Brooks, a character which she first made famous via the radio series, which ran from 1948 through 1957. The TV series ran concurrently for several years (1952-1956) with the radio version, and was the one to which I had access in my youth. The basic set-up of the show had high school English teacher Connie Brooks constantly trying to snare Philip Boynton, a fellow teacher, while also having to save the school from the self-serving whims of its blustery principal, Osgood Conklin. Sometimes, the show could get truly odd, which caught my eye as a teenager, as I always appreciated a show which could get away with parodying other shows and genres (on occasion) within the context of its own style. (What can I say? Maxwell Smart, along with Bullwinkle and Rocky, opened that door early...) Gale Gordon, who played Conklin, was also a favorite of mine on reruns of The Lucy Show that I saw some afternoons, so Miss Brooks gave me a double dose of his adept second banana skills. To be fair, the show wasn't exactly at the top of my watch list, and still isn't, but I really enjoyed the show then and now.

I found out over the years since that there had been a movie version of Our Miss Brooks, released in 1956, the final year of the show's existence, but I never got the chance to see the film until recently when it aired on TCM. Using most of the television cast and having it directed and co-written by Al Lewis, who served as head writer on the TV series, seemed like it would just continue the wacky fun by jumping it over to the big screen. But this Our Miss Brooks almost feels like the life has been drained out of it. To be sure, Arden is spot on as always, and Gordon is his usual loud, quick-fuse self, but in ignoring the TV series altogether and basically doing a reboot instead (long before anyone ever really said "reboot"), the movie uprooted what was fun about the show – its fast talking, manic sensibility – and mires it squarely in a dull romantic plot and some sporadic slapstick by Gordon. If I had seen the film first as a kid and found out there was a TV connection, I would have never watched the series as a result. – TC4P Rating: 5/9

This Week in Rixflix #17: June 30 – July 6, 2017

noreply@blogger.com (Rik Tod Johnson) — Mon, 10 Jul 2017 05:41:00 +0000

As far as I can see, the real problem with TCM's online course this summer is timing. They have secured two days a week throughout July on their network in order to showcase just over 40 films directed by Alfred Hitchcock, but they started the online course that corresponds with the films well over a week ahead (in June instead) of the first night's viewing. Unfortunately, the course started out diving right into Hitch's numerous silent features, movies with which even longtime aficionados of either classic film or Alfred Hitchcock may not have much experience. I fall into both categories and I have only seen The Lodger (1927) from his silent days. Well, until this week, when I snuck in an iPad viewing of his boxing romance, The Ring, while visiting my father up in Idaho (where I am currently).

I had planned to dive right into the Hitchcock course from the start, and while I read through the materials thoroughly more than once, games come up in the course where they ask questions using images from films I have yet to see because they haven't aired yet. Yes, I can take things over and over again as much as I want to get the score I wish, but it is a matter of pride that I do things right from the beginning. The first night of TCM's airings of Hitch's silents and early sound films wouldn't happen until July 5th – when I would already be in Idaho – and so I decided that I would use my time up here to work on the module for the silent part of the course on either my iPad or iPhone. Now, it has turned out that using the Canvas app to do the online course is pretty damn tedious and more than a little annoying. Also, TCM only about half selection of the evening's eight aired films up on their Watch TCM app, so I can't even see everything I would rather see before taking the first week's exam.

As a result of all of these problems, I have decided on the following plan: 1) watch the films I can on the Watch TCM app in my remaining days in Idaho, 2) watch the other films (that I don't already own) on my DVR when I get home, 3) don't do anything with the course until I get home, where I can use my computer and not have to worry about a creaky, unreliable app, and 4) make sure everything is watched before preceding with the testing. I may have to cram most of my work into a couple of weeks, but I think it will go smoothly.

The Numbers:

This week's feature-length film count: 18; 15 first-time viewings and 3 repeats.
Highest-rated feature-length films: Loving (2016) and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) – 8/9
Lowest-rated feature-length film: The Sand [aka Blood Sand] (2015) – 3/9
Average films per day in June: 3.1667
Average films per day in 2017 so far: 3.03
Consecutive days with at least 1 feature-length film seen per day: 205

The Reviews:

Secret in Their Eyes (2015) Dir.: Billy Ray – I filed this one in my entirely too massive folder titled Completely Unnecessary Remakes, the contents of which billow out of the confines of my head's filing cabinet like a mushroom cloud looming above a South Pacific atoll. I am sure it must have seemed like a can't lose proposition to do an American remake of the 2009 Argentinian thriller, El secreto de sus ojos, which took the Best Foreign Film Oscar at the 2010 ceremony. They lined up Chiwetel Ejiofor, Julia Roberts, Nicole Kidman, Alfred Molina, Dean Norris and Michael Kelly to beef up their cast dramatically, and then took a rather complicated, non-linear story structure spanning a quarter of a century and, surprisingly, only made it slightly less confusing by dropping the element of a novel within the film telling part of the story and cutting down the story gap to just a mere 13 years. But even with that cast and that nod towards not dumbing something down for an American audience, they still gave us no real, compelling reason to make us want to watch the new version over the original, itself only six years old at the time of this film's release and completely available on the DVD and cable markets. And the performances and direction are just fine in the American version, but only hardcore subtitle haters would prefer this over the first one. The original has an extra layer of depth to it with the element of one of the characters using a novel to tell the story, and the Argentine locations add even more mystery to the proceedings. Here, the American version is just another serial killer story that takes place in Los Angeles and New York, and then they had to somehow tie it to 9/11 as well. I'm over it. I want to watch the original again. – TC4P Rating: 5/9

Deepwater Horizon (2016) Dir.: Peter Berg – I really did not want to see this film when I saw the trailer the first forty dozen times in theatres and on TV. The overly cute scenes between Mark Wahlberg and his family just kind of set off my "too saccharine" alarms, but there was something else bothering me. I knew Peter Berg was directing, and while I still like him just fine from his acting days (the highly underrated Late for Dinner, a film that I outright LOVE) and for directing at least four films that I really enjoyed (Very Bad Things, The Rundown, Friday Night Lights, and Hancock), I had a sense that there might be the slight possibility that he would go easy on the oil companies involved in this issue. He is fairly outspoken on a variety of topics, and though he is known to lean left politically, many of his films tend to be quite patriotic, which has also gotten him a conservative fanbase. And he also takes some odd stances on things on social media that garner some controversy, so I thought the chance was there I might not enjoy the tone of this picture. And with the star being Mark Wahlberg, the man who disdains political talk from celebrities but has walked right into playing golf with Donald Trump in years past, I thought the potential that they might wander smack into a scenario that goes too light on BP and Transocean might be valid.

I needn't have worried. Right now, I am just mad that I didn't see this film on a big screen, because it would have wowed my socks right off my feet. Berg conveys such a slowly tightening and eventually crushing sense of suspense to this terrible disaster upon nature and our oceans that I am kicking myself that I didn't pay closer attention to everything related to the film on its release. Wahlberg himself is spot on as the rig tech who finds himself in the middle of an increasingly dangerous situation, as are Kurt Russell as the rig supervisor and John Malkovich as an especially slimy oil company exec who ignores necessary testing early on and wants operations to continue despite warnings. Also from the trailers, which added to my initial negative reaction, I had a sense that this would turn into just another action thriller, where Marky Mark would rip off his sleeves and save everybody on the oil rig. Again, if I had just trusted that they were going more towards telling the story as accurate as possible (by Hollywood standards) then I needn't have worried. Yes, there is action aplenty and Wahlberg does have to do some rescuing, but it is consistent with the tone of the picture and it never turns into a John McClane-style film. I look back now and realize my initial reactions were a bit flip, and hadn't taken into account that there was a very real loss of life on the Deepwater Horizon and that Berg would care more about honoring their deaths than in amping up the action quotient to sell movie tickets. That's on me for not thinking more seriously about this at the top. In the end, I really enjoyed this tough as nails film. This rating for Deepwater Horizon may go up after the next time I watch it. – TC4P Rating: 7/9

Bang Bang Baby (2014) Dir.: Jeffrey St. Jules – Sometimes nothing is more painful than watching someone try to intentionally create a cult classic. And if you are going to take a shot at using the most obvious gimmick to shortcut your project to this status – making your sci-fi/monster film a musical – then there really needs to be something special at the core of your story. Director Jeffrey St. Jules has a great assist in the lead role from actress Jane Levy, who really does have an Emma Stone thing going at times, though not all the time. (In some shots, she really reminds me of classic noir actress Jane Greer.) As a skirt-wearing auto mechanic living in an idealized late '50s/early '60s setting who is only able to escape her humdrum small town existence via her dreams to became a singing star, Levy is quite engaging and deftly juggles both the more comedic and dramatic moments in the script equally well. As the father who consistently gets in her way, all-star character actor Peter Stormare is perhaps miscast but I think that he brings his usual pro reliability to his role, and even gets his own country-flavored song, which surprised the hell out of me. (I didn't say it was any good, but the scene is funny.)

The film itself has many humorous moments, but there is another darker level to this film that lends the film a quality which takes it out of the normal horror-comedy range (besides the musical element). Levy's character is not the simple, goody two-shoes character you expect from the way the film opens. She drinks like a fish when she is sad, she relies a bit too much on a fantasy life built around her romance with an Elvis-like pop idol, and endures abuse and rape from an obsessive creep in her town. Meanwhile, unspecified medical experiments are taking place in the town that is turning much of the populace (and the local wildlife) into mutated freaks. The more horrific elements of the story are pretty much tamped down until late in the film, and while they never go quite as far as I'd like, their impact is felt pretty hard when they finally appear. Having the villain grow a second mouth in his neck so he trades off lines in his big song with himself is a pretty neat idea, and the scene featuring townsfolk gathering to down "suicide drinks" en masse is heavy stuff for a musical. The film itself has a thick edge of surreality to the proceedings, so that it becomes hard to tell which of the heroine's lives is the fantasy and which is the reality. Or if either (or any) of them are at all.

I run hot and cold with the musical score, which I feel plays it too safe and low-key much of the time. I kept waiting for one of the earlier numbers to really kick it into high gear. Even the title song, which occurs at the halfway mark of the film and is an uptempo song with a big dance break and wacky sound effects, looks too much like a rehearsal done at half-speed and never really takes off like I wish it would. (It should be the big, goofy, joyous center of this film.) I could not help the feeling that the storytellers never really commit to the notion of a full musical. There are several scenes that could have benefited from being told in song instead, and would have livened the film immensely, but St. Jules settles for more exposition via dialogue in its place. Still, there is an overall weirdness that I find quite compelling and whatever doesn't work in the film is outweighed by the things that do. And I really like a couple of the lines from the score, such as "So, marry me; there's worse things you can do/In a quarantined town of freaks, choices are few." Who hasn't thought that about their own hometown? – TC4P Rating: 5/9

American Anarchist (2016) Dir.: Charlie Siskel – I remember reading portions of The Anarchist Cookbook back in the '80s and getting a good laugh from it. We carried the books at the chain of bookstores in Alaska for whom I worked for two decades, and they were mostly kept under the front counter to keep them out of the hands of juvenile delinquents. We knew the Cookbook had bits about making homemade explosives in it, but really, I remember placing it in my mind alongside the Foxfire series and the Carlos Castaneda books and other alternative/hippie/folk culture stuff we carried in those days. (All of that stuff sold like crazy too...) I remember thinking back then that The Anarchist Cookbook was just a funny book that talked about smoking banana peels to get a minor high and other goofy junk like that. I remember reading the section with home bomb-making and thinking “Who would really take the time to do this?” It just seemed too complicated and, frankly, dangerous. Believing it would be used by homegrown terrorists to do harm against the general populace was unthinkable to me at the time, even though I had friends who delighted in using small explosives to blow up toilets at school.

All that has changed. If you put something stupid on YouTube, scores of absolute dopes will try to replicate or even outdo that something stupid. (As I heard recently on the news, stupidity is quite catching... and yes, it was about you know who and his goons.) If you put out a book that tells readers how to build simple bombs and grenades and any number of other things that could help you in waging a revolution against a government or protecting yourself and your family against armed insurgents, some of those readers will apparently make real, definite use out those instructions. Documentarian Charlie Siskel – the nephew of the late film critic Gene Siskel – has built American Anarchist around his interviews with William Powell, a professor who was only 19 years of age when he wrote The Anarchist Cookbook in 1970. He spent the last 47 years of his life hiding from his legacy (he died this year in March), living in a deep state of denial over what his book brought to the fore in our society. Siskel doesn't mince words and goes after Powell (and his wife) hard, giving him opportunity after opportunity to explain his actions and outright apologize for them as well. Powell mostly tries to evade Siskel's traps, and gets very angry a couple of times over the filmmaker's persistence on this one question. In some ways, the film does get a tad one-note with this repetitive stance, but in telling us the story surrounding the infamous book and its creator, Charlie Siskel has given us a fascinating look into the power of words to do real harm; sometimes, even murder. – TC4P Rating: 7/9

This Week in Rixflix #16: June 23-29, 2017

noreply@blogger.com (Rik Tod Johnson) — Fri, 07 Jul 2017 01:49:00 +0000

I am not sure if I am more excited about getting a chance to take TCM's online course about Alfred Hitchcock throughout the month of July, or the fact that they are showing over 40 of his films on their network around the same time. Granted, I do already own the bulk of his films from 1934 (starting with the original version of The Man Who Knew Too Much) through his final film in 1976 (Family Plot, which is the only Hitchcock film that I got the chance to see in a theatre upon its initial release). The other thing to take for granted is that I have seen most of his films in that span as well, with just a couple of outliers (having only missed 1937's Young and Innocent and 1953's I Confess, which I do own but haven't watched).

But they are showing most of his extant silent films and the bulk of his early British sound films, and that is where I really need to do a bit of catching up, as it were. Of his silents, the only one that I have ever watched all the way through is his breakthrough in 1927 with The Lodger, his tale of a Jack the Ripper type on the loose and the suspicions of the denizens of a boarding house over whether an odd man staying there might be the suspect. I am really excited to see the films just before The Lodger to see just where the Hitchcock style truly got going; The Lodger definitely shows him to already have developed some of the weapons in his arsenal, though he was still just under a decade away from his first great period, and he really hadn't truly settled on the thriller as his primary canvas.

In the meantime, I did finish going through the films from the Western course, which I wanted to get out of the way before I began the Hitchcock thing this week. Within this time, though outside of the course's range of interest, I watched two more John Wayne films I had not recorded yet as having seen: The Comancheros (1961) and The Undefeated (1969).

Let me restate that: I thought that I had not seen either one before, but in watching each one, I am not so sure now. Seeing Stuart Whitman's Southern gentleman in the first film, and the quite similar role played by Rock Hudson in the second, both men sparked recognition in my soul. Entire scenes seemed to trigger a sense of deja vu in my mind whenever they were on screen, and I am now pretty certain I must have encountered both films in my childhood. I have said before that it is unusual for me not to remember a film that I saw in my youth, as I am crazily connected to cinema as my chief means of true escape from the world. However, I did not really come fully into that sense until I was around thirteen or so, and I also did not really start paying attention to the western as a genre of interest for myself until even later. I remember numerous Wayne westerns fondly from those days, but these two were apparently not amongst them. However, since I pretty much enjoyed both films equally and felt that pull of recognition, now I am not so sure. There must be more cinema buried in my head from that time than I first thought.

The Numbers:

This week's feature-length film count: 21; 14 first-time viewings and 7 repeats.
Highest rated feature-length film: Fort Apache (1948) – 9/9
Lowest rated feature film: Jem and the Holograms (2015) – 4/9
Average films per day in June so far: 3.10
Average films per day in 2017 so far: 3.05
Consecutive days with at least 1 feature-length film seen per day: 198

The Reviews:

Jem and the Holograms (2015) Dir.: John M. Chu – Am I wasting my time even writing about this film? Probably. Most people aren't going to bother trying to watch it, and honestly, except for the fact that I was passing by HBO one day and ran into it just as it started, I most likely would have never even though about it. But I do remember the cartoon show from the '80s, even if I only saw it once or twice, and so I did have a passing interest in wondering how they would adapt it for today. I needn't have bothered. This film is not the cartoon show at all. Sure, there is still a story about an up and coming pop-rock band, but most of the sci-fi trappings from the show, where the lead singer wears a pair of earrings that connect to a robot that creates a holographic persona that disguises her true self from the public, are missing here. There is still a really stupid robot, but all he does is trigger... a scavenger hunt! And there is a mystery in the film, but all it does is lead to... a pair of earrings that her dad left her but which never set off a helpful disguising hologram. If the film is just setting us up for a sequel where the original concept from the toy-selling show is actually used, it pays terrible service to it by, at the very least, ending with those elements fully in play. It's a shame, because the film does have some true style to it in the costuming and the cinematography, and the dramatic parts were actually played fairly well by the mostly young cast. Even Juliette Lewis is kind of fun in the evil manager role of Erica Raymond (the original character was named Eric), but wasted by film's end. I also didn't mind some of the music even most of it was fairly rote. I know the show was pretty much junk but it has some devoted fans, and I am sorry they weren't treated better by this film. – TC4P Rating: 4/9

Eat That Question: Frank Zappa in His Own Words (2016) Dir.: Thorsten Schütte – Sure, I get it... Zappa isn't for everyone. Zappa wouldn't give a shit whether you liked him or not. That's kind of the thing with him. You either got his music or you didn't, and even if you did, he probably didn't really care. He was going to create music whether you were around to hear it or not. For me (and for many people), Zappa fandom for me has been a "warts 'n all" affair; there is a lot about the man's character (and some lyrical elements of his music) that I may (depending on the day) find misogynistic, homophobic, politically suspect (his negative attitudes towards unions), and downright racist on a surface glance. (You should note that I did not say "obscene"; I find nothing in this world obscene except for our current president and his cronies...) But each negative element was usually counter-balanced by often gorgeous melodies, a high level of instrumental aptitude, and satirical jabs that could be devastating in their ability to cut deeply to the core of the issue. It's the satirical element that is Zappa's saving grace in regards to charges of the crimes above, as it can be argued that each outrageous negative portrayal of certain societal groups was meant to provoke the listener into paying attention (though sometimes just to sell a juvenile joke or two). But don't get me wrong: my intense regard for Zappa's craft does not mean I love him without limits; there are moments where he does get to my own personal sense of morality. But rather than cast him aside, it just makes me want to understand him more.

Eat That Question is going to allow you to fully understand Zappa far less than owning more than 90 albums of the man's work (as I do) is going to allow for closure, but it will give you a sense of Zappa's place in entertainment and the culture of his time. It consists mainly of news clips, film clips, videos, slices of interviews and live performances, and other various Zappa ephemera, all arranged in mostly chronological order to allow for historical context. It carries right up to his death in 1993 from prostate cancer. The documentary, however unintentional, all ties in perfectly with Zappa's "conceptual continuity," where each element of his music and art, and even outside interviews, were as integral to his overall narrative as the rest. Most of his albums are each connected to the rest by recurring motifs, self-referential in-jokes, and connecting musical phrases or call-outs to previous material. Obscure characters from far older songs may suddenly burst back to life in the middle of an unrelated piece, as if dropping by for tea. Even watching many of these old clips brings his music to life – especially to a long-time fan – which is further proof that as long as the man's legend continues to bring fascination (there are numerous Zappa docs already), his music will never die. (However much his son Ahmet wants to chain it up... sorry, taking Dweezil's
side in that battle...) – TC4P Rating: 8/9

Morgan (2016) Dir.: Luke Scott – Forgive me if I kept flashing on the superior techno-horror flick Splice from a few years back while watching Morgan. Once again, we have a genetic engineering company operating in a highly creepy fashion in a remote lab with human hybrids that age rapidly, when one of their experiments not only goes well beyond what they had envisioned, but also escapes. Unlike Splice, things are kept mostly at the human level here as far as mutations are concerned... well, human-looking but definitely super-powered. No wings sprouting out of the back here. Kate Mara plays a risk management specialist tasked with keeping things under wraps when things start to get out of hand at the lab (pre-escape) and with tracking down the hybrid girl afterward. The real remoteness of the lab surrounded by forest (filmed in Northern Island) also brings to mind some similar scenes in Ex Machina (Norway, standing in for my home state of Alaska in that one), though the intellectual head games of the latter film are not to be found here in Morgan, which survives mainly on pure action. There is a big twist in the plot here, which I will not reveal, but it somehow came off as being both pretty obvious and weirdly satisfying at the same time. Not sure how it happened, but it ended up being my favorite part of the film. Apart from that though, while Mara is good in her role, the film is just OK. And now all I want to do is watch Splice again. – TC4P Rating: 5/9

If You're Not in the Obit, Eat Breakfast (2017) Dir.: Danny Gold – For the last few years, I have found it quite amusing and fascinating that the great Carl Reiner, now 95 years of age, has taken so well to adopting social media. I am not surprised to hear when someone's older parents (including mine) are always on the computers or their iPhones, or emailing or playing games. I know it used to be a running joke about the elderly not being able to connect a VCR or getting lost trying to get on a computer, but those days really are past. The elderly today were only a short while ago using those VCRs and computers, and thus, we have an advanced age population who are more comfortable with succeeding technologies, especially as the ease of general use of these products opens up further. In the Reiner-hosted If You're Not in the Obit, Eat Breakfast, the filmmakers gather the collective thoughts of numerous celebrities above or around the 90-year mark and have them muse about life. Reiner's longtime friend and sometimes partner Mel Brooks is here, as well as Kirk Douglas, Tony Bennett, Norman Lear, Dick Van Dyke, Stan Lee, Betty White, Dave Grusin, and many more. The chief thing you may notice amongst this group, and they discuss it at length, is that many of the participants are still quite actively creative in their lives. It's a lovely if not light documentary with some terrific performers in it telling us anecdotes about their careers and what keeps them going day to day. A charming show overall. – TC4P Rating: 7/9

Lawman (1971) Dir.: Michael Winner – This is yet another film that I am fairly certain I must have seen at some point in my childhood. It's not that I remember any scenes from it, but I was a big Burt Lancaster fan in my youth, and watched nearly anything he was in when I crossed its path. And the image of Lancaster as the aging bounty hunter who enters a small western town intent on bringing to justice a murderous gang of locals certainly registers with my catalogue of remembered images in my mind. He will not be swayed by his task – not by bribery, threats, gunfire, or the fact that his ex-lover is currently involved with one of the gang – and in the usual manner of these affairs, very few in the town are willing to lend even casual assistance to him, thinking more of themselves than of the common good. Lancaster is as tough as usual here, if not a little more one-note than I would prefer, and he has a terrific supporting cast behind him: Robert Ryan, Robert Duvall, Albert Salmi, Lee J. Cobb, John Hillerman, Sheree North, Joseph Wiseman, John Beck, Ralph Waite, and in his very first big screen role, Richard "Logan's Run" Jordan. Director Michael Winner would make a western the following year with Charles Bronson called Chato's Land, and then Winner and Bronson would move to the present day with the original The Mechanic. Both were three years away from making their biggest splash with the all-time, bona fide revenge classic, Death Wish. While it is easy to use hindsight to make connections that may or may not have been intentional, it is not hard while watching Lawman to squint a little bit – to eliminate the genre trappings of the western – and see the same style of tough guy in those films captured here on the screen with Lancaster. Lawman didn't pay off as much as I had hoped, which might be why it didn't stick with me if indeed I did see it as a kid, but it is still a strong enough '70s western to warrant a second look... if it wasn't my second one already. – TC4P Rating: 6/9

You Get Me (2017) Dir.: Brent Bonacorso – Oh, the dangers of trying to keep up – even ever so briefly – with the latest original films on Netflix. Sometimes, the results are just dandy, but more often, as it is with all things, you end having dabbled in the mediocre for 90 minutes. So, bright and early one morning, looking for a relatively short film to fill a gap in time, I went with You Get Me. I will admit that I chose You Get Me solely because the poster had a pretty girl in a blue bikini floating in a swimming pool on it. (Blue, especially in lighter tones, is a trigger color for me.) So, yeah... you can call me a perv. I let my guard down and I paid for it. In the film, a dopey high school senior breaks up with his girlfriend (Halston Sage) at a party, gets really drunk, and then leaves the party with a hottie (Bella Thorne, kind of an "it" girl right now). From there, it is nothing more than Fatal Attraction with millennial teens (and sans boiled bunny, thankfully). The girls are cute but bland, the boys are the usual dopes that boys are, every succeeding plot twinge is ever more unbelievable, and my interest wore off after the swimming pool scene. If things with both the girls and the movie had gone more into the area of Wild Things (a far better if not equally unbelievable film), then I might have forgiven You Get Me. And I learned that just because Netflix has a new original film on there every fourteen minutes, I don't need to pursue watching all of them. – TC4P Rating: 5/9

This Week in Rixflix #15: June 16-22, 2017

noreply@blogger.com (Rik Tod Johnson) — Wed, 28 Jun 2017 23:48:00 +0000

As I predicted in last week's column, my revived interest in westerns due to the online film course in which I was taking part found me continuing my deep plunge back into the genre. While I purposefully avoided them for the first three days of the week in question, six of the last eleven films I watched were in the western genre, including my 84th John Wayne feature, Dakota, as well as The Hangman, The Last Frontier, Comanche Territory, and The Kentuckian. I had planned to watch the Duke in The Undefeated (and had announced it last week too), but it fell by the wayside at the tail end of the week when I ran into a 1946 Jacques Tourneur film called Canyon Passage.

With but a single viewing, I already have to count Canyon Passage amongst my favorite films in the western style (though it is more of a "pioneer" film and mostly takes place in a forest area). Tourneur, who directed many of my favorite horror films from the Golden Age such as Cat People, Night of the Demon, I Walked with a Zombie, and The Leopard Man, as well as the noir classic Out of the Past, is always on my must-see list, and being able to track down another one of his westerns had me diving into the film the moment that I found it online. For that matter, being a fan of Dana Andrews' acting too, it was grand to see him outdo himself in one of his finest performances here. Helpful, too, was the inclusion of Susan Hayward in the female lead, in a place where I would not have expected her. The best role was that portrayed by songwriter Hoagy Carmichael as a neighboring business owner who seems to end up in the middle of everything while roaming about playing his ukulele and singing songs (and getting an Oscar nomination to boot). Fully loaded with tough guy fist-fighting, swirling gun action, sordid business dealings, a romantic triangle bound for trouble, and those swell Carmichael tunes, I am most certain that Canyon Passage will get watched again by me rather soon.

I found myself with some unexpected downtime this week, and as a result, my numbers were really up overall. I had hoped by this time of the year that I would be tailing off and perhaps get down to just one or two films per day, but I have been far more focused on watching things lately than writing about them, or even in doing other projects. That will have to change – in fact, I rather demand that I change it by force – but with the TCM Hitchcock online course just starting (as of this writing), in which I will be most likely attempting to watch all 42 features (and two short films) of Hitch's they are spotlighting through the month of July, it will be interesting to see what happens. I also have some time on the road to see family coming up soon, and thus I will have no access to my normal channels for viewing in that span (though I will have an iPad with me). The two events should even each other out, but then again, with my ability to cram in film viewings at any given opportunity, you never know. (Hmm... maybe I will get my dad to watch Canyon Passage with me. That's right up his alley...)

The Numbers:

This week's feature-length film count: 26; 19 first-time viewings and 7 repeats.
Highest rated feature-length film: The Big Sleep (1946) – 9/9
Lowest rated feature films: Howard Lovecraft and the Frozen Kingdom (2016) – 2/9
Average films per day in June so far: 3.13
Average films per day in 2017 so far: 3.03
Consecutive days with at least 1 feature-length film seen per day: 191

The Reviews:

Raiders from Beneath the Sea (1964) Dir.: Maury Dexter – I record an awful lot of films simply because I hope that there will be a shark scene or two inside one of them. Quite often it is because I have heard there might be such a scene, but mostly, I look at the premise of the film or the shooting location or, in the case of this film, merely the title, and see promise that I might be graced with the presence of toothy, finny friends. A low budget creaker from "B" movie vet Maury Dexter (The Day Mars Invaded Earth, Surf Party, Hell's Belles), Raiders from Beneath the Sea is a true snooze-fest about four Neanderthals planning the dumbest armed robbery in the history of dumb armed robberies, specifically, holding up a small bank on Catalina Island while walking all the way from the pier and back in full scuba gear. Yeah, it doesn't go smooth, and while you only have to wait about an hour to get to the heist, that hour seems to take about fourteen. Sure, these raiders do indeed come from beneath the sea to do their crimes, but they barely hit the water in the buildup to those crimes. The bad guys certainly talk about diving a lot, but most of their time on the water is spent timing out their trips to the island via its famous ferry and working out how to make off with the loot afterward. (As it turns out, a magnetized plate that they slap to the underside of the ferry.) When they finally do get in the water, it is for the briefest, murkiest underwater footage this side of Catalina Caper, another 1960s heist flick that at least made some attempts at intentional humor, however hackneyed. (And if you've watched Caper as it was tortured on MST3K, it then became truly fantastic.) This one, though, has no such such saving grace; poorly made, poorly filmed exploitation, but apart from some peeping tom shenanigans on the part of the lead character's creepy, drunken brother as he gets off to Merry Anders, Raiders' tank barely allows it to make it offshore. And by the end, there is not one damn shark to be seen. At least Catalina Caper had an animated one in its opening credits. – TC4P Rating: 3/9

S if for Stanley (2015) Dir.: Alex Infascelli – Hardly a week goes by that I am not surprised by the appearance of some new documentary on Amazon Prime, Hulu or Netflix about the making of a particular film or the work of a filmmaker. Last week, it was Becoming Bond; this week, there are two such films that I will cover, the first being S Is for Stanley, the story of Emilio D’Alessandro, Stanley Kubrick's driver and personal assistant for a thirty-year period beginning in the early '70s when Kubrick was making A Clockwork Orange. It seems that Kubrick was impressed by Emilio's demeanor when he showed up as the delivery man for that certain, massive ceramic phallic piece that is used in one of the attack scenes in that epic of ultra-violence, and instantly hired the man to be his Man Friday. The film takes us through each Kubrick film all the way through Eyes Wide Shut and Kubrick's death in 1999, mostly told by Emilio himself, a former race car driver who suddenly found himself immersed in Kubrick's obsessive nature. (His wife also plays a big part in relating events to us.) It is clear, at least from the material given here, that he and Kubrick formed a close bond that could not be shaken, even when Emilio left his employ for a handful of years. Usually, I find that a film documentary that is not rife with clips from the films under discussion is usually to be found lacking in flavor, but that is not the case here. There are enough behind the scenes details and set photographs to keep one interested throughout, and it is almost enough that Emilio has plenty of marvelous vignettes about his life spent catering to Kubrick's every possible whim that the film never gets tiresome. D'Alessandro is an engaging interviewee with a rather introspective way of looking at life, and it is perhaps that very quality that kept him at Kubrick's side for so long. I do wish someone from Kubrick's family had weighed in here and there, but overall, an enjoyable look at a side of filmmaking well off the set most of the time. – TC4P Rating: 6/9

A Canterbury Tale (1944) Dir.: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger – With every film by the Archers that I check off my list, I feel my cinematic knowledge and eye becoming purer and sharper. Such is the way that the films of Powell and Pressburger play off of me, always elegant, always studied, always balanced deeply with wit, irony, grace and heart. In A Canterbury Tale, while it starts out with a visual nod to the older work by Chaucer, this tale swiftly transports itself to then-modern times – during World War II in the British countryside – as we are introduced to a trio of "pilgrims" all making their way to the same location, or thereabouts, for differing reasons. We are given army sergeants both British (Dennis Price, the lead from one of my all-time faves, Kind Hearts and Coronets) and American (actual U.S. Army sergeant John Sweet) and a "Land Girl", a term used for women hired during the war to replace men on farms who were off serving in the army, here played charmingly by Sheila Sim. The three bond almost instantly over a mystery that they encounter when they reach the fictitious town of Chillingbourne (though supposedly set near Canterbury), when Sim has glue poured into her hair by a shadowy assailant. The mystery will consume most of their time and direct their actions during the film, during which they encounter the fourth major character of the film, the local magistrate played by Eric Portman, who will prove both daunting and helpful in turn during their investigations. Films by the Archers are almost always more than merely the sum of their parts, and that is the case here. There is so much going on in every scene, that it is easy to lose the plot because the characters and scenarios are each individually engaging enough to make you want to live inside the film for days. Especially effective is the non-actor Sweet, whose off-the-cuff but oddly effective delivery of his lines make you wish he had found greater acting opportunities on the screen elsewhere. (His IMDb resume only lists one other film, both biographical details do say he did some theatre in the ensuing years before he died in 2011 at the age of 95.) A very worthwhile and lovely experience, as is nearly every film by Powell and Pressburger. – TC4P Rating: 8/9

Unearthed & Untold: The Path to Pet Sematary (2017) Dir.: John Campopiano and Justin White – This is the other film documentary that I mentioned briefly above in the S Is for Stanley review. Popping up on Amazon Prime at the exact moment that I really needed this type of film to fill some open time, Unearthed and Untold is a pretty detailed look at the production of the late '80s horror classic (yeah, I said it) Pet Sematary. While I was never a huge fan of the film at the time (though I liked it just fine), I have grown fonder of it over the years, during which I have had the opportunity to see it a couple of times more. Unearthed and Untold gathers just about any artist and actor who worked on Pet Sematary that was willing to recount their tales of working on the film, and despite there not being any actual final film footage from the production (probably because they didn't have the budget for it), this film is pretty thorough with its excellent use made of behind-the-scenes photos and video that gives us a neat glimpse into how it all went down on the set. Visits to the location sites in Maine are an added and sometimes rather creepy bonus. Even Marky Ramone, the sole main member of the Ramones left alive today, gets in briefly to talk about how they were brought in to provide songs on the soundtrack and record the title song. The big question is whether tiny Miko Hughes had turned into a murderous psycho after being subjected to some truly horrific scenes as a two-year-old (they even talk about being worried about at points in the film), but no... Miko is just fine and still acting at age 31, and seems a normal guy here in his interview scenes. The doc is sorely missing the inclusion of a fresh interview with King himself about the film, but I don't know that they didn't try to get one, so I will leave that as a stray thought. I am certain that somewhere in the near future, my writing partner Aaron and I will be re-reading Stephen King's original novel and watching Mary Lambert's film freshly to review and compare both for our Stephen King site, We Who Watch Behind the Rows. (Yes, this is an unabashed and unashamed plug.) – TC4P Rating: 6/9

Howard Lovecraft and the Frozen Kingdom (2016) Dir.: Sean Patrick O'Reilly – There are many things that I really hate in films, but two of them are very evident here in Howard Lovecraft and the Frozen Kingdom. First, I hate badly done computer animation. I can live with a single bad CGI shot or two in a larger film if their harm to the film is contained to a few seconds, and I can be accepting of a limited animation budget if the film in question is a mere few minutes and at least has a clever premise or voice performance to counter it. The other thing I hate is "Muppet Babying," where a franchise or character is cleaned up and/or dumbed down from its original form to appeal to a younger audience. This video feature is pretty much just "What if H.P. Lovecraft was a kid?" and has him having all sorts of misadventures on another dimensional plane with a monstrous tentacled pal that he names Spot, not knowing the creature is actually a younger form of the Elder god Cthulhu himself. I am a fan of Lovecraft's writing, but I am fairly certain that I am happy with the proper age for discovering his writing being approximately around the same as when I did, as a middle teenager, and not when young readers are six or seven, which seems to be the target audience for this film. It's not so much the existential dread and horrific implications of his words that causes me to state this, but rather the more than casual racism that also lurks within his stories, perhaps not in all of them but lightly throughout most and pretty hard in some. Such words might fly over the heads of many younger readers, especially since the style of his writing is itself antiquated enough by today's standards that his stories may seem rather dull to a generation that banks upon immediate thrills and not slow-boiling suspense and atmosphere. This is all for the better, and I find it fairly hard to believe that watching this animated crap pile will inspire anyone to seek out anything written on paper except perhaps to carefully edit their own self-penned suicide note.

This video pretty much jettisons anything worthwhile in Lovecraft's writing and mostly co-opts character and place names along with the occasional magical spell and slams them into a stiffly animated, witless, cliched children's film. The look of some of the goblin guards from Disney's version of Sleeping Beauty are also swiped for that of the villainous henchmen throughout the film as well. I have not read the graphic novels that form the basis for this film (nor for the planned sequel and the inevitable third production, since there are three comics in total), but taking a quick look at the first few pages of the Frozen Kingdom volume reveals that hewing closer to the style of the comic would have been a far more intriguing direction. At least in a visual sense, the comic doesn't look half bad (though a little generic). Instead, in the film version we get a design that pretty much made me feel like I was watching the truly atrocious Food Fight again, and goddamnit, I never needed to have that feeling! I've lived through it once. The only compliment I can give is that at least the story made a little more sense scene to scene than Food Fight, and for that I am truly thankful. The other thing that got my notice in Frozen Kingdom is that there are hammerhead sharks in the tank of the villain's fortress. Sure, they swim the same exact way, over and over again, in every single shot in which they appear, but there are at least sharks here. Otherwise, this video is a bloody mess. But without the blood, of course... this is for the kiddies, after all. Poor, poor kiddies... – TC4P Rating: 2/9

Attack of the Lederhosen Zombies (2016) Dir.: Dominik Hartl – Oh, it is Wednesday? Must be time for yet another goddamn zombie movie... OK, despite my living dead ennui here in 2017, I will say that if I had encountered Attack of the Lederhosen Zombies in 1988, I would have loved it without any reservations. However, it is 2017 and I am where I am at currently, having seen so many zombie films by now that I think I might be one. Sure, Jen and I love iZombie and watch it reverentially (it thrills me to no end that Jen loves a zombie show), but for me, that reverence might be mostly out of obeisance to Ms. Rose McIver. And I still love all the old zombie flicks that I grew up with in the '70s and '80s, and even many of the newer ones, but there are just so many out there now, and they just keep coming... almost like a zombie apocalypse. And everyone thinks they have the greatest, newest twist on the genre, and really, nearly all of them don't. But would I want everyone to stop trying? Of course not. That would block even the occasional innovation, and I don't want that. Lederhosen Zombies is a full-on slapstick gore comedy filmed at a ski resort in the Alps of South Tyrol where someone stupid has the idea to use this untested formula to create instant snow, but of course, what the formula really does is make someone sick enough to turn into an instant zombie instead and the fun begins. Crazy, non-stop action, Rube Goldberg-style gags involving snowboards and skiing equipment, a genuinely insane Austrian barmaid with a fully stocked arsenal for fightin' the undead, and some pretty noxious moments that even had me thinking about blowing chunks early on in the action... that sounds like fun to me. However, many of the jokes are too stilted and don't land with the impact that the filmmakers thought, the editing is pretty haphazard, and the (dubbed) acting is fairly wooden on occasion. Still the insanity is as infectious as a zombie plague, and the film goes by incredibly smoothly at under 80 minutes. A good film for a party night of horror heads. Not that I have been around one of those for, oh, far too many years. (I miss my horror peeps...) I can't rate this one too highly due to its many faults, but I will no doubt watch it again for kicks. – TC4P Rating: 4/9

This Week in Rixflix #14: June 9-15, 2017

noreply@blogger.com (Rik Tod Johnson) — Fri, 23 Jun 2017 06:30:00 +0000

Going into this week, there was just one film on my mind: the new Universal version of The Mummy. I had a sense going in that it was probably not going to be great, and in a way that is quite unusual for me, I did not prepare for the film by watching a marathon of the original Universal Mummy flicks (all six of them, including the Abbott and Costello one), nor did I wade into the later Universal Mummy series with Brendan Fraser. (And don't even get me started on The Scorpion King spin-off series... to be fully honest, I am no fan of the Fraser films either.) Instead, I concentrated on other films and just waited for The Mummy to arrive. Jen had no interest in all with it and told me to "go see your buddy Tom" (a running gag that I must explain fully at some point in the future).

And yeah, the result was rather tepid. I did manage to have fun enjoying the film as a straight ahead monster flick, and enjoyed some of the character and set design. But I am so confused as to why Universal dropped the Universal Monsters label they had been pitching and keeping alive (like the truly undead) for so many decades. Now I can't, officially, say that I am going to the latest Universal Monsters picture, and am instead told that this is the first film of their – big fucking yawn – DARK UNIVERSE series, a title that has already supposedly been co-opted by Warner Brothers and DC Comics for their adaptation of Justice League Dark, which I guess is their own stupid move to not burning out the Justice League brand (even though they put out a comic and an animated film (this year nonetheless!) called Justice League Dark (which I will get to next week). So, now instead of a Universal Monsters series and Justice League Dark live-action, we have two stupid things called Dark Universe from different studios, neither of which has anything to do with the other except for shared elements of basic horror.

I have so much more to gripe about how Universal is screwing up the use of their monster franchises, especially at their theme parks. (You know how annoying it is to walk through Universal Studios in Hollywood and not find a single Dracula shirt in their gift shops? And yet, you can walk straight past the Universal store in CityWalk and go to Things from Another World and find scores of monster t-shirts. The company itself, though, doesn't care for selling its own creations.) Once I saw the new Mummy, apart from watching Svengoolie have fun with The Mummy's Tomb on his show the next day, Universal went away almost immediately in my mind. The film did not propel me into maintaining the mood because there was no real mood to maintain. (Honestly, the films it really reminded me of were Van Helsing and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, both huge disappointments in my book. I thought the new version of The Mummy was much better than both of them however.)

I instead spent the week concentrating on classic western films. Five such films to be precise, starting with Stagecoach, and then plowing through They Died with Their Boots On, Red River, Winchester '73, and High Noon throughout the remainder of the week. The reason? An online course on the History of the Western that I found while signing up for TCM's upcoming course on Alfred Hitchcock. I decided to take the Western course to see if I would enjoy and benefit from the experience, and while I still have a few last items to complete, I have passed all of my tests and found it to be great fun. (I still have to watch Fort Apache this weekend, which I don't own anymore but is showing on TCM; Turner Classic Movies isn't hosting this particular online course, so it is complete coincidence that it is airing.) Mostly, I enjoyed simply watching each of these films again, even the one that I don't like all that much (the Custer one starring Errol Flynn).

Next week, you will notice that the aftermath of taking this course has done something the new Mummy movie couldn't. It inspired me to do an immersion in a bunch of westerns over a couple of days, including one this morning (the day of this writing). I have more lined up for this weekend, including two more John Wayne films, that should be the 86th and 87th films of his that I have seen in my lifetime. (Just writing that last part exhausted me...) I may not enjoy the western genre as much as I do classic horror or film noir, but I have always had more than a quiet appreciation for the genre, and taking this course has truly made me remember my roots in film, having watched a great number of western films and shows growing up in the '70s.

The Numbers:

This week's feature-length film count: 24; 13 first-time viewings and 11 repeats.
Highest rated feature-length film: Red River (1948), Stagecoach (1939), Out of the Past (1948), Winchester '73 (1950), High Noon (1952), and The Lost Weekend (1945) – 9/9
Lowest rated feature films: Island of Lost Women (1959) – 4/9
Average films per day in June so far: 2.86
Average films per day in 2017 so far: 3.02
Consecutive days with at least 1 feature-length film seen per day: 184

The Reviews:

Becoming Bond (2016) Dir.: Josh Greenbaum – Riding to physical therapy on the bus towards Riverside, I looked out the window at one of the bus stops and saw the smirking face of George Lazenby staring back at me. I was absolutely not expecting it, and in my half-awake daze, I started to wonder if I had really seen the poster that I had or if I had some strange daydream in which Lazenby popped in for a non-sequitur cameo. Riding on the bus back, I managed to look across the several lanes and see the poster at that stop. Then I started wondering if it was a film playing at a theatre at the mall next to that bus stop. Looking up the Jurupa Valley theatre there, I found no such reference to such a film as Becoming Bond. Riding the bus two days later (once again to PT), I took a longer look at the sign as we stopped to pick up a couple of passengers. Ah, so it is a Hulu documentary! The second that I got home, I fired up the Hulu page and found myself watching a most surprising and entertaining look at the most unlikely and oddball career of the guy who played James Bond once and lived to tell about it... almost 50 years later. And it is hard, even with it being so entertaining (or especially because of that) to believe many of the stories that spill out the corners of Lazenby's still charming, wide, handsome smile.

This film may contain some of the best and most imaginative dramatic reenactments that I have ever seen in a supposed documentary, and the use of prime cameos by the likes of Jeff Garlin, Jake Johnson, Jane Seymour, and especially Dana Carvey (doing a full-size Johnny Carson impression) make this film a bouncy, fun trifle. Some names do get changed to keep off the lawsuit monsters, and so those not already aware at least lightly about Lazenby's story coming in may be confused about who is who behind the scenes on his single Bond effort, On Her Majesty's Secret Service. It is no secret that OHMSS is my personal favorite of the entire Bond series, so I had no problems. In fact, this film goes down so smoothly, I don't care at all if ol' Georgie Boy is stretching the truth a little bit here and there. You know, just like the best spies do... – TC4P Rating: 7/9

Phantom Lady (1944) Dir.: Robert Siodmak – One of the joys of watching TCM's Noir Alley show on Sunday mornings is not necessarily discovering obscure film noir gems but actually speeding up the inevitability that I will get to each of these films on my own naturally. I am so attuned to tracking down as many of these films that I can that I really begin to surprise myself more and more when I watch a truly incredible example that has largely slipped by my notice to this point in time. Such is the case of the truly insane drumming scene by Elisha Cook, Jr. midway through this film as he practically drools over the prospect of an evening spent with the admittedly smoking hot Ella Raines. Cook bashes the drums in a sweat-filled jazz room in such an increasingly rabid manner that you swear he is going to collapse in post-orgasmic exhaustion. In the words of Doug Stanhope: "Blort!!!" (Raines is definitely blort-worthy, and is she ever gorgeous throughout this film.) Phantom Lady is soaked in noir atmosphere, and boy, is the villain (I won't say who) an utter creep every second he is onscreen (and they give it away fairly early anyway). I am not so big on the set-up of the film involving the lady in the outrageous hat who becomes the catalyst to the mystery, but I believe a viewing down the road may relieve me of my initial reluctance to accept this film wholeheartedly. With noir, familiarity only breeds greater obsession. Once you are in, you can never get out... – TC4P Rating: 7/9

The Strawberry Blonde (1941) Dir.: Raoul Walsh – When I saw this title pop up on TCM one afternoon, it was a total impulse watch for me. Deep in my movie history is the knowledge that The Strawberry Blonde was the very first film featuring James Cagney that I ever saw as a kid, and I had not really sat down to watch it since then. The real coincidence though comes from the fact that this film was directed by Raoul Walsh in the same year in which he lensed They Died with Their Boots On, one of the six classic westerns I watched this week for the Western Film History course. On a personal level, I enjoyed this film much more, especially as a showcase for Olivia de Havilland, who may play second fiddle to Rita Hayworth as the titular character, but who is (eventually) first in the heart of the film's main character. Cagney's tough guy dentist is by turns blustery and amusing, and well matched by de Havilland's slightly more intentionally modern (and shocking to others) version of a female at the turn of the 20th century. The film is caked thick in nostalgia for a bygone era but also is just spry enough to know that wallowing in it too long is no good for anyone. Cagney's dentist realizes he must move forward and so must the viewer. A far more rewarding return to this film for me than I expected. – TC4P Rating: 7/9

Girl of the Port (1930) Dir.: Bert Glennon – A guy wallowing in self-pity and clearly suffering from PTSD from his World War I experience loses himself in the Fiji Islands. He falls in love with a barmaid who works in the saloon where he has chosen to drink himself to death, but he doesn't let on that he is a British lord who is hiding out from his family and peers. And it is an appropriate thing that his war scars are embodied by a crippling fear of fire (from being surrounded by enemy flamethrowers) because the natives of the island practice the art of fire-walking. Eventually, all of this is going to work out exactly as you suspect from the start, and the film is fairly creaky as it glides by rather mechanically. But Sally O'Neil is pretty charismatic as the love interest, and the war scenes are well sketched (if not nearly on the same battlefield as All Quiet on the Western Front artistically). Intriguing enough for a quickie talkie but no more. – TC4P Rating: 5/9

The Boy (2016) Dir.: William Brent Bell – There are just so many of these types of horror films today that it becomes hard to recall which ones one has seen or not. Luckily, the inclusion of Lauren Cohan (The Walking Dead) was pretty much the only catalyst I needed to allow this one into my life. We have here another creepy doll movie, and I must say that this is not my favorite subgenre of horror. Fine with the Chucky series and a few other examples of the ventriloquist dummy variety, but I just really don't clamor for them when we start talking porcelain or baby dolls. Sure, I find them equally creepy -- all dolls are that way naturally -- but the films using those types usually are too far out of my disbelief range. The doll here is a boy who may or may not contain the black-hearted soul of an elderly English couple's son, who died mysteriously decades earlier. The couple insist on treating the doll like their dead son, Cohan is hired as an au pair to spell them for a short vacation, and all sorts of madness begins. The film had me until about halfway, until coincidence and logic refused to play together nicely any longer. Cohan is good in the role, though, as is Rupert Evans as the local delivery grocer who develops a more than slight interest in Cohan's well-being and other parts. Overall, the film is well filmed with an interesting score by Bear McCreary, but I can only give it a TC4P Rating: 5/9.

This Week in Rixflix #13: June 2-8, 2017

noreply@blogger.com (Rik Tod Johnson) — Thu, 15 Jun 2017 06:00:00 +0000

Boy, did my movie count dip the week of June 2-8, and if I had not watched a slew of films those first four days (13 of the 18 films overall), it probably would have been even less. The reason? The buildup to the James Comey testimony, then the actual sessions, and the discussion in the aftermath ate up so much of my spare time on the weekdays that it was really hard to think about anything else.

This year has been so dominated by news about He-Who-Must-Be-Orange that it is no wonder that I have smothered my senses so intensely in movie after movie after movie. It's not the real reason that I watch so many films, but an outsider, knowing at the least of my political leanings, could only surmise that the continued presence of President Rage Toddler has me in such a deep depression that I can only find solace by immersing myself in film history. Well, he does not. He annoys the hell out of me every time I even think about his voice or face, but he has no effect on my film viewing habits. Except when there is the possibility of hearings that will hopefully lead to exposing his criminal ways once and for all on legal grounds – not just on social media, though he does a fine job of that himself – that will – hopefully – eventually get him and his graceless family expelled from the White House.

No, I just naturally watch film after film – I have done this for most of my life, and will continue to do so because for me it is simply a part of breathing. I wake up, I put on a movie, I watch a big chunk of it, maybe I will stop it to write for a while, grab some breakfast, watch another 40 minutes of the film, or maybe I finish watching it instead and then write... it really depends on where the day takes me. Not having regular work has made it even easier to immerse myself in these activities, but even when I did have a solid gig, I still managed to average 2-3 films a day. As I said, it's how I breathe...

[Note: the above was written today during the news of the Washington shooting at the baseball field. There is a lot of talk about how deeply divided we are today, and I have always agreed that bipartisanship is the only way to get things done for this country. However, the White House is going to use this opportunity to try to distract us and pave over the investigations going on currently involving Drumpf and his toadies. However much I want peace and harmony in this country and especially the world, I also want the Angry Orange permanently away from any shiny, candy-colored buttons in the War Room. This must be achieved lawfully and correctly, and without any violence, as the use of violence in our democratic process degrades us all.]

The Numbers:

This week's feature-length film count: 18; 12 first-time viewings and 6 repeats.
Highest rated feature-length film: The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) – 9/9
Lowest rated feature film: Shark Babes (2015) – 2/9
Average films per day in June so far: 2.37
Average films per day in 2017 so far: 3.0063
Consecutive days with at least 1 feature-length film seen: 177

The Reviews:

The New Land [aka Nybyggarna] (1972) Dir.: Jan Troell – A couple of years ago, I watched the first of two films by Jan Troell about Swedish immigrants in the United States trying desperately to survive as they traveled through a strange new world in the mid-19th century. That film was called The Emigrants, and it was a remarkably vivid portrayal of people who could lived hardscrabble lives that were likely quite similar to those of my own Swedish ancestors at the same time. That the location of the land where the main characters set up their farm in Minnesota is less than an hour by car today from the county where my father grew up just across the border and north a bit in Wisconsin drives the point home even harder. The follow-up film, The New Land, based like The Emigrants, on the same series of novels by Vilhelm Morberg, is like its predecessor in that it is intricately and lovingly detailed with period touches and also glacially paced. (Both films are well over three hours in running time, so the easily bored should endeavor to avoid this pair.) But slow going does not mean the films weren't completely spellbinding to me, if not a little off-putting at times in how the immigrants react to their new surroundings and its inhabitants. This film in particular has the main characters, played by Bergman regulars Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann, learning to deal with the native Sioux in the area. The use of indigenous peoples in The New Land is certainly far different than most American portrayals on film, and it will prove most effective when the story contains elements of the Sioux Uprising of 1862, which leads to some of the more jarringly graphic imagery in the film. I am not sure that I would wish to take this journey on film again, though if I did, I would prefer to watch both films back to back. And maybe with some of my older relatives to dig into their memories of our ancestors' corresponding experiences. Fascinating films overall. – TC4P Rating: 8/9

Yentl (1983) Dir.: Barbara Streisand – There has not been a moment since 1983 where I haven't been prone to suddenly singing in mock fashion the words "Papa can you hear me?" And yet, I have never actually seen Yentl, the film musical directed, produced and starring Barbara Streisand from which the song that carries that line is derived. I had tried to watch it on VHS and cable back in the day but always pulled out of it, and in recent years had recorded it on DVR a handful of times but never quite watched it. Now, I tell you this because your first thought is going to be "Well, yeah, you're a guy (and presumably straight)... why would you want to watch a Barbara Streisand film, especially where she sings?" Well, I grew up with Streisand played in our house, and one memorable evening, I watched a network TV showing of What's Up Doc?, her 1972 Peter Bogdanovich romantic comedy with Ryan O'Neal. The film became a favorite, I came to understand that she was a terrific comedienne and actress, and accepted her from that moment onward. Sure, her music is not my thing normally, but she has that incredible voice, which is featured prominently in Yentl, though I found the music to really be secondary to the story in the film. It's big and brash and lovingly filmed (the heart is quite apparent in the storytelling), but wondered if maybe the musical portion of it wasn't really necessary. Of course, if you take the music out of it, then there is really no reason for a then-40-year-old Streisand to be in the film playing a teenage girl posing as a boy, but if you take her out of it, then the movie doesn't get financed. (The production history is quite convoluted, and really, the more you know about it, the less it looks like a Streisand vanity project in casting herself.) The film is at a tad overlong, and my patience for it actually ran out late in the film, but still I stuck around. It's a pretty film, has some lovely moments, Mandy Patinkin really is a force of nature, and Streisand does just fine despite the whole age thing. And I have checked off another Oscar nominee. – TC4P Rating: 7/9

Joyride (1977) Dir.: Joseph Ruben – I sometimes wonder if people who actually live in New York and L.A. get upset these days when so many productions are filmed in Vancouver, even when the shows and films sometimes take place in N.Y.C. and L.A. Do they gripe about the minutiae as much as people in other places? Ah, studio filming... Me, I grew up in Alaska, and have had to deal most of my life with things being not quite right in the details when productions filmed elsewhere are supposed to take place in Anchorage, Fairbanks, Nome, Barrow, or some other (often fictional) Alaskan town. While trying to track down a different film from 1977 a couple of weeks back, a search on YouTube gave me a list of other productions from that year, some of which I had never heard before. One of those titles was named Joyride. Seeing that the film had Robert Carradine, Desi Arnaz Jr., and a young Melanie Griffith in it, a quick look at IMDb revealed that the film is supposed to be about three teenagers taking a literal joyride on the lam as they head up to Alaska. Count me in, if only to see if they actually get anywhere near my home state. Nope... I should have just assumed it was so. Joyride was instead shot in Washington, much like Northern Exposure and many other things with supposedly Alaskan locales. I was expecting typical teen prank antics and low grade sleaze, but the film was far grittier than I expected, with some surprisingly dark turns hidden inside. The watch, however, was lessened by the low quality version that I had found. Still, there was enough that I found of interest that I came away knowing I would like to track down a decent copy in the future. So, did anything in the film seem like the actual Alaska at any point? Only fleetingly, but I figured it was probably accidental, though I am not going to hold it against the film. You do what you can with what you've got... – TC4P Rating: 6/9

The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) Dir.: Lewis Gilbert and For Your Eyes Only (1981) Dir.: John Glen – Roger Moore died recently, and while he has never quite been my favorite Bond (I was too influenced by the Connery films early on), Moore had been a constant presence in my life beyond Bond. I grew up watching Moore on two different series: Maverick, where he filled in for a season as Beau, the smooth English cousin of the Maverick brothers after James Garner left the series in 1960, and as The Saint, Simon Templar, on repeats of his 1962-1969 British series. By the time I was twelve, Moore was already established as the new James Bond, having appeared in Live and Let Die and The Man with the Golden Gun by that point. As I did with the Bond films with Sean Connery, I grew up seeing the films on the occasional Sunday night on ABC, where they were all regularly shown in the '70s. But it wasn't until 1977's The Spy Who Loved Me that I saw a Bond film in the theatre. With my parents' going through their divorce and me at the age where I was incessantly annoying about everything, but going to see movies was becoming most special of all to me (once more, we did not have a movie theatre in our small Alaskan town and had to drive to "big city" Anchorage to see them), my mom left my still too young little brothers with my dad and took me to see Bond on our own. It was showing in a double feature with Won Ton Ton, the Dog Who Saved Hollywood (more on that at another time), and we sat in the front row with a Ziploc bag of popcorn that we popped and buttered at home, Doritos that my mom sneaked inside of her bag, and a can of spray cheese in a can to load up the Doritos. It was magnificent!

Moore's death a few weeks ago coincided with the 40th anniversary celebration of the release of The Spy Who Loved Me, which served as arguably the high water mark for his series of seven Bond films at the time (I prefer Golden Gun overall now). I knew it was the anniversary, but hadn't really considered that I might have the chance to see it again on the big screen. Surprise! While we were at the AMC Dine-In Theatres getting ready to watch Wonder Woman on the day it opened, there was a special event advertisement for a double feature showing of Spy and For Your Eyes Only, but the first date (May 31) had past, but the second was in two days (June 4). I didn't really think about it that moment, but by that evening, I had determined that I was going to get to that double feature rain or shine. It meant going by myself since Jen worked, but nothing would stop me. That Sunday, I found myself in Orange, settling in for an afternoon double at the AMC at the Block, and had a terrific experience with the dozen or so other people in the theatre.

A big thing for me was that these were two of the five Bond films that feature sharks in them (and Spy also has Richard Kiel as the metal-mouthed assassin "Jaws," who quite literally bites a shark to death in the film), but halfway through Spy, while Moore and the gorgeous Barbara Bach are wandering around the Egyptian pyramids, the projector totally stopped, and my fellow patrons and I found ourselves cloaked in darkness for almost 15 minutes. Part of the time, we discussed the film lightly – everyone was greatly enjoying seeing these films on a big screen again – but of course, a couple of us, myself included, ran out to talk to the management, and finally got someone to check on the problem. After the second film was over, the manager was standing by the side as we were exiting and handed each of us a free entry pass for another film, telling us that they didn't know what happened except that the projection system just completely shut down. I will take a free movie ticket any day, and since we saw the whole of the film regardless, no harm, no foul. I got two Bonds, I got Jaws, and most especially, I got tiger sharks. I also saw Alien: Covenant again right before the Bond flicks. That's a full, grand day at the movies for me. – "Spy" TC4P Rating: 7/9; "Eyes" TC4P Rating: 6/9

The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) Dir.: James Whale – No review here, just some quick editorializing and plugging. My love for the Universal Monsters films goes back ages to my very youth, when I saw most of the original films in my early teen years (with a few exceptions, like the later Mummy films featuring Kharis). I have also owned many of the films on VHS, all of them on DVD, and jumped a good portion of them up to Blu-ray a few years ago. That they are a constant presence in my life is to never be doubted. So, why is it that I still watch them on television every time that they cross my path? I don't mean just on Turner Classic Movies, where a handful of Frankensteins may show up from time to time, and not necessarily just in October when they usually hold special events for horror films. I refer to when something like The Bride of Frankenstein – arguably the most accomplished, giddiest and purest example of the Universal monster film – pops up on MeTV on the Svengoolie show on Saturday nights.

Well, the answer is that I rarely skip out on watching ol' Sven even if I have seen all of the films he shows dozens of times outside the show. It is no surprise that I have a great fondness for horror host shows (especially if at least mildly professionally executed) and while I did not grow up with Svengoolie as a regular showcase like many others in different parts of the country did, I certainly wish to take advantage of him now, especially since Elvira's latest series only played for a short period and we have to wait a bit for the next MST3K season. (Yes, it has mostly sci-fi trappings, but I still count it in the same vein; they do show a lot of movies with monsters in them.) Me, I don't mind the commercials (if you DVR it, even better, but I like to watch it live) and the 12-yea-old in me still enjoys the intentionally lame jokes and interruptions. I am just happy knowing that someone is still putting Dracula, Godzilla, Frankenstein, and the rest of the gang on TV so that newer generations can discover and enjoy these films for themselves like I did as a kid. And when Rich Koz stops doing the show (he is now 65), hopefully someone else will come along to take up the cause. The monsters must live on! – TC4P Rating: 9/9