| Pop Culture Gadabout | ||
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Wednesday, August 07, 2002 ( 8/07/2002 04:52:00 AM ) Bill S. “ALL THAT YOU CAN DO IS WATCH THEM PLAY” – Good ol’ Mark Evanier recently posted a link to a site devoted to a topic near and dear to the Gadabout: the use of pop tunes as background in commercials. The site works at being thorough, but it’s clearly an area that needs regular updating. Went looking for a listing to the Blur song, “There’s No Other Way,” that I’ve been hearing in the last month on a beer commercial (it sez a lot about the kind of pop nerd I am that I remember the song without remembering the specific item it’s supposed to be advertising!) but I couldn’t find it. Still, I’m glad to see these ads sparking interest in their background sounds. Though Nick Drake has always left me cold, for instance, I find it kind of cool that his vocal appearance on a VW ad breathed new live into his reissue catalog. # | Tuesday, August 06, 2002 ( 8/06/2002 10:31:00 AM ) Bill S. “THERE’S A LOT OF WALLS NEED TEARING DOWN!” – Been livin’ with Bruce Springsteen’s new post-9-11 release close to a week now. And while I’m not sure any album could’ve lived up to the hopes of the hard-core faithful, I’m beginning to suspect it’s equal to Tunnel of Love – in many ways, my favorite Springsteen album. How you respond to the idea of the man jumping feet-first into this quagmire of emotion-laden current events probably depends on whether you believe pop music even has a place there. (I’ve got no problem with it, but I’ve already read some contrarian rumblings.) Most of the focus of The Rising is on average Americans coping with a major moment in their lives. The album’s not a political screed (heaviest Bruce gets in terms of a Message is “Let’s be friends!”) But it does provide what he does best: a series of plain-spoken monologues from a series of believable characters. You could call it a kind of lyrical populism, but I think that unfairly pigeon-holes what Springsteen’s accomplished in The Rising. Bruce is a songwriter that American politicos have struggled to co-opt over the years (the most notorious instance being Ronald Reagan’s tone-deaf attempt to ride on the coat-tails of “Born in the U.S.A.”), and I expect that we’re in for an equal amount of such nonsense in the months to come. This shouldn’t diminish what the man and his band o’ cronies have created here: a darn good old-fashioned rock ‘n’ roll album. The disc shifts in tone seamlessly: wistful exultation in “Waiting On A Sunny Day” is followed by an effective evocation of survivor’s guilt (“Nothing Man”), for instance – held together by the singer’s trademark straight-on singing and his undeniably great back-up band. (New addition to the mix: violinist/singer Soosie Tyrell, who used to be in Buster Poindexter’s band!) Call me a folk-a-phobe, but I need to hear Bruce interacting with a band, not strumming his acoustic like some wannabe Woody Guthrie. Nowhere does this come across more clearly than on “City of Ruins,” the album’s capper. The presence of his band and a gospel backup makes the song genuinely stirring: the kind of unflinching, bald-faced statement of hope that only an artist as un-ironic as Springsteen could pull off. It’s possible I’ve responded so positively to The Rising as much out of need to like it as out of the disc’s own merits. But I don’t think this is something to apologize for. As a singer, Bruce has toned down much of his earlier bluster & bombast, but held onto his trademark straightforwardness. In an era exemplified by excess veneer and spin, an honest back-to-basics work like this can’t help but push my personal buttons. # | ( 8/06/2002 06:51:00 AM ) Bill S. I (USETA) DO THE ROCK – Don’t know about you, but I find the sight of Tim Curry flexing his eyebrows as Sebastian Cabot Two in the ads for WB's upcoming remake of friggin’ Family Affair demoralizing as hell. And much more decadent than any given moment in Rocky Horror . . . # | Monday, August 05, 2002 ( 8/05/2002 05:40:00 PM ) Bill S. WAKE ME UP BEFORE YOU – OH, NEVER MIND... – As the current run of Marvel’s Daredevil by Brian Michael Bendis and Andrew Mack continues to receive positive fan press, the team’s earlier debut run (Marvel Knights: Daredevil #16 – 19) has just been reissued in trade paperback. Wake Up is the story of reporter Ben Urich’s investigation into a young boy suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder after his abusive super-villain father has a rooftop confrontation with D-D. The boy, Timmy, is perpetually replaying the battle by drawing it in comics and acting it out (with the appropriate Stan Lee-ish dialog, of course). To break him out of this loop, Urich brings both the kid and Daredevil to the scene of the event. (Our title hero only has a limited role here: it’s mainly a story about aftershocks, not battles.) Naturally, this snaps Tim right out of it. Bendis’ tale is convincingly noirish and atmospherically presented (Mack’s painted panels could’ve come from Bill Sienkiewicz’s How to Paint Comics the Moody Marvel Way). But of all the storytelling clichés that I’m willing to swallow, I just can’t go along with the slam-bang quick-fix that so frequently passes for trauma treatment in genre entertainment. I’ll believe a blind man can be a super-hero, but I won’t believe that you can “cure” a boy’s disorder by taking him up to the spot where he caused his father to plummet off a building. That Bendis chose to rely on this device in a story that otherwise works at maintaining a stern psychological reality shows that even the most hard-boiled of current mainstream super-hero guys can possess a deadly sentimental streak. # | Sunday, August 04, 2002 ( 8/04/2002 09:07:00 AM ) Bill S. SHOW BIZ KID – Most weeks I work at home on Fridays, so if the weather’s cooperative I have three good mornings to do the dog park trip. (Most weeknights we tend to just quickly cruise the neighborhood.) That usually gives me three tapes to select from when considering the week's Primo Dog Walk Tape. This weekend’s winner is Fool Around: The Best of Rachel Sweet (Rhino). Miz Sweet was Stiff Records’ big bid for mainstream American pop acceptance in the late seventies: a fifteen-year-old Ohio girl with beaucoup show biz experience and a county lilt to her voice, wrapping her tonsils around songs by the likes of Elvis Costello and Graham Parker – plus oldies from the r-and-b giants like Carla Thomas. Add svengali Liam (“Walk Like An Egyptian”) Sternberg’s tuneful word salad into the mix, and you have one of the most entertaining misreads of the American audience that the new wave era has to offer. Fool Around focuses on the cuts from her quirky debut album (also teasingly entitled Fool Around), though it doesn’t forget to include her so-so collaboration w/ Rex Smith on “Everlasting Love” (#32 on the Billboard charts) and the 1988 theme from “Hairspray” (sung as an adult but still retro teen-pop). Nuthin' from her great voice-over songwork for John Waters' Cry Baby, however. Every once in a while I still catch a glimpse of Sweet – she was George Costanza’s cousin Shelly in one of the best-remembered Seinfelds, a supporting player in Bette Midler’s remake of Gypsy and a comedy vee-jay back in The Comedy Channel days. But even her big fan site doesn’t seem to know what she's up to nowadays. In this era of mega-successful manufactured pop teens, I can’t help wondering what the Fool Around Gal thinks about it all. # | ( 8/04/2002 06:09:00 AM ) Bill S. “THE NERDS WERE RIGHT!” – It’s a reflection of my generational blinders that when I saw the title for M. Night Shyamalan’s new movie, the first thing I thought of was the 1971 hit by the Five Man Electrical Band: a lumpen/hippie protest song (from Canada!) that opens railing against human presumptuousness and concludes on a hokey evocation of deity. Now that I’ve seen Signs, I’m not sure the writer-director wasn’t thinking of that lumbering pop hit: his movie ends on the same note of unconvincing spiritual elevation Signs is a middling scary summer film about a family stranded out in an isolated farmhouse in the midst of what could be a world-wide alien invasion. A solemnly paced melding of the best of early Spielberg with the worst of later-day George Romero, the flick aims to provoke chills as it simultaneously builds to an affirmation of God’s Mysterious Ways. That second thematic impulse winds up totally deadening the first: once we realize the writer-director is leading angst-ridden protagonist Mel Gibson to a renewal of his faith, the frights are sucked out of the film. (What gave flicks like the original Night of the Living Dead their nihilistic charge was the realization that, as Joe Bob Briggs once noted, “Anyone can die” – and to hell with Deeper Themes!) Still, for the first hour, I bought the set-bound pic: as former man-of-the-cloth-turned-farmer Gibson and dunderhead younger bro Joaquin Phoenix fend off unseen, possibly alien forces; as our hero’s two Spielbergian children (Rory Culkin and the very Drew-like Abigail Breslin) provide both the voice of innocence and the inevitable kid-in-peril scene; as the director makes maximum use of a night-shrouded cornfield – I was willin’ to go along with things (even if Gibson does emerge from a dash through the cornfield totally unscratched). I have no belief in the reality of crop circles, but then I don’t believe in flesh-eating zombies either. All I ask of my movies is that they make me believe for the space of a couple hours. And aside from some clunky phony TV footage designed to show us what’s going on the world outside the farmhouse (Romero did it better in 1968 with a few local Baltimore teevee personalities), the movie does successfully argue its pop sci premise. There are some funny scenes in the film revolving around the hokum that’s been written about crop circles and UFOs, including a laugh-out-loud moment involving tin-foil hats. But director’s trademark show-little/suggest-a-lot style of filmmaking feels needlessly constrictive by the second half of the film. We need to see whatever is responsible for all the unexplainable events in the film, and when we finally do, the reaction is more aw, c’mon! than goshwow. As a scriptwriter Shyalaman has an enviable ability to parcel out information that only makes sense when you think about things later – a scene where Gibson’s “Father” refuses to call the vet when one of the family dogs starts acting odd only makes sense once we realize that he holds the local vet responsible for the death of his wife – and he’s also grown better at adding lighter moments into his whispery world. But aside from Sixth Sense (the ending of which rested on what the writer was holding back from us and his protagonist), the man just hasn’t come up with a good way to finish his films. The mechanical climax of Signs rests on a series of contrivances that say nothing about the Unseen Hand of God – and everything about the Leaden Hand of the Writer. I had an okay time at Signs, though a part of me can't help wondering if its writer-director hasn't set himself on a sped-up version of the John Carpenter Career Trajectory. (Caught a piece of The Fog on cable the other day – and you can see elements of that flawed film here, too.) But if that's the case, where's his Adrienne Barbeau? # | Friday, August 02, 2002 ( 8/02/2002 10:00:00 AM ) Bill S. “THAT’S SO SILVER AGE!” – Well, the concluding chapter of Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Strikes Back came out just in time to spark a rally of fannish indignation at this year’s annual San Diego Comic Book Convention. (You just know the book’ll be subjected to dozens of cheesed-off slams at the con panels, right?) After one quick read-through – and zip time for critical reflection – my first thought is that Miller did precisely what he intended: he took the Silver Age DC World and blowed it up real good! Took me more than one try to read the book, incidentally. First time I picked it up, I was in bed; I gave up after five pages – visually, the book is like glutting on a densely frosted & filigreed wedding cake and washing it down with Code Red Mountain Dew. The cover looks like something Gary Panter might assay in the midst of a profoundly debilitating hangover. Finally read it this a.m. in the tub and found it easier to make my way through the volume. Having gone through all three chapters only once – as they were released – I have no idea if Miller’s work hangs together. That’s for another day and more intensive examination. For now, though, I’m more than a little in awe of the guy’s willingness to so cavalierly screw with the fantasies he grew up on. # | ( 8/02/2002 07:41:00 AM ) Bill S. PLAY IT SAFE – Jim Treacher links to an ongoing blogosphere discussion of which superhero/ine would be the hottest one to, um, do it with. But, really, in this day and age, isn’t it just as important to know which ‘un would provide the safest sex? My vote would be for Sue Richards, Invisible Girl/Woman. She could use her mental powers to provide her own condom – and rib it for her own pleasure! (Come to think of it, what does she need Reed for?) # | Thursday, August 01, 2002 ( 8/01/2002 08:14:00 AM ) Bill S. BROOOOOCE! – Kinda fun to see all the media attention that’s been lavished on The Boss this week: boomers struggling to take back the pop light and say, “Yes, our music still matters!” I admit I made a point of buying The Rising (Columbia) this week: while I’ve never been a Springsteen fanatic, I nonetheless enjoy the man’s rock ‘n’ roll releases. Still, the amount of attention that his return to E Street has engendered can’t help but recall the days when Broooooce was the Future of Rock ‘N’ Roll. I guess the future is what it used to be. # | ( 8/01/2002 08:08:00 AM ) Bill S. IT’S A SMALLVILLE, AFTER ALL – This summer I’ve been availing myself of its twice-weekly broadcast schedule (Mondays & Tuesdays) to catch up on eps of WB’s Smallville. As pure television goes, the series is moderately successful: not as crisp as Buffy (with which it shares obvious similarities – Sunnydale’s plot-spurring proximity to a Hellmouth serving the same function as Smallville’s kryptonite-dotted landscape) or as darkly humored as the best X-Files, but still entertaining thanks to a game cast that’s usually able to pull us through the show’s drippier teen angst moments. As for its merits as a comic book adaptation – well, how you respond probably depends on which generation Clark Kent is most familiar to you. Depending on when you started reading the books, Superboy is a.) the hero of Smallville, who regular traveled into the future to play with the Legion of Super-Heroes; b.) a clone created in the days when Superman was supposed to be dead; or c.) non-existent. How close Smallville gets to your memories of the Boy of Steel depends on which version is closest to your heart. Me, I grew up with “The Adventures of Superman as A Boy,” so I had to do some mental adjusting (Martha Kent, a still-hot Annette O’Toole? Jonathan, one of the Duke boys? Lana Lang brunette? Pete Ross black? And who’s that irritating Chloe chick, anyway?) But Tom Welling makes a convincing nascent superman – and Michael Rosenbaum is even better as Anakin Luthor. In fact, it’s not stretching things to note that some of the better eps I’ve seen have been more Lex’s shows than Clark’s. Alternately arrogant and whiney, powerful yet desperate for emotional connections he’s never been taught to make, Luthor is the show’s most complicated character. (And if I use a Darth Vader comparison, it's because the ongoing series has given writers Mark Verheiden, Alfred Gough and Miles Miller room to flesh out Lex in ways that have eluded George Lucas.) Lex also got the season’s most unforgettable scene: an FX-laden premonition that had him standing in a field of death, being showered in blood. As appealing as the character can be, Smallville never lets us forget what a scum-wad he’ll become. Monday night’s ep was from early in the season – I’d missed it the first time, but that’s what reruns are for, right? Best bit of the show revolved around our hero Clark’s acquisition of x-ray vision: one of the show’s premises is that Clark’s powers don’t fully blossom until adolescence. (In this, the series seems to’ve taken a page from Marvel’s X-books.) Our hero’s new powers flash on and off uncontrollably. But happily for Clark one of the first times he gets to use his improved eyesight, he’s close to the girls’ locker room. The look on Clark’s face as he realizes what he’s seeing brought back every fifth grade conversation about the character I can remember . . . # | |
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