| Pop Culture Gadabout | ||
|
Friday, March 02, 2007 ( 3/02/2007 01:53:00 PM ) Bill S. HELPING BEAGLE – Lookin' 'round the web for a birthday present for my lovely spouse, Becky, I found myself reading up on the legal shenanigans surrounding author Peter S. Beagle and the animated movie version of his classic novel, The Last Unicorn. Due to contractual hi-jinks, Beagle has received no moneys from the sale of the crummy 2004 DVD that was first released of the flick – and has been in extensive legal wranglings against Granada Media, the company which presently owns the film, for money contractually owed him as both the original author and writer of the movie's screenplay. (Why are we not surprised to read that the producer who originally reneged on the promise to pay the writer more than just a "consulting fee" for the Unicorn movie script was Saul "Can't Dance" Zaentz?) With a new 25th Anniversary Edition of the film being released on DVD, Conlan Press (in collaboration with Lionsgate, which is responsible for the new disc version) is offering copies of the DVD for sale with more than 50% of each sale going straight to Beagle and his projects. They're also offering autographed copies of the disc for $24.98. My wife's a big fan of the novel, and we both enjoy the 1982 limited animation flick, which – if memory serves – was the first time either of us got an extensive look at early Japanimation beyond the occasional half hour Speed Racer. (Many of the artists who worked for the Japanese studio which produced Unicorn would soon leave to work for Hayao Miyazaki.) Visually and dramatically, the movie did a smooth job capturing the essence of Beagle's novel, the only sticking point being the unnecessary addition of some thoroughly unmemorable Jimmy Webb tunes onto the soundtrack. (Hey, it's a cartoon feature – it has to have songs in it, right?) Still, the voice work is fun (Alan Arkin is Schmendrick), and there are some great, long-lasting images in it. A chance to get a decent copy of an early date flick, a purchase that actively benefits the author? . . . think I've found a birthday present . . . # | Thursday, March 01, 2007 ( 3/01/2007 02:07:00 PM ) Bill S.  "WE ALL DO WHAT WE CAN NOT TO THINK ABOUT LIFE!" – Francesco Dellamorte (Rupert Everett), the title hero of Michele Soavi's Cemetery Man (1993), is a busy guy. Hired as a "watchman" at the Buffalora Cemetery, it's his job to dispatch the pesky rising dead who persistently pop back up seven days after they've been buried. Confronted with a newly revived corpse, Francesco is almost apologetic when he's forced to kill 'em a second time. "I know you've heard this before," he says as he prepares to split the zombie's head, "but this time it's forever: Rest in Peace!"Based on a novel by Italian comic writer Tiziano Sclavi, Cemetery Man (a.k.a. Dellamorte Dellamore, though Anchor Bay's DVD uses the American title) is a serio-absurdist zombie flick which owes as much to Luis Bunuel as it does George Romero. In it, Everett's watchman (who other characters keep inexplicably referring to as an "engineer") sees his job as just another grind – like the intergalactic garbagemen in John Carpenter's Dark Star, his place in a fantastic setting is just one piece of a largely mundane life. "At a certain point in life," he notes, "you realize you know more dead people than living." It's his misfortune to've come that stage in life early. Assisted by a mute, seemingly retarded gravedigger named Gnaghi (Francois Hadji Lazaro), Franceso goes about his nights snuffing Returners until he meets a beautiful widow (Anna Falchi): "the most beautiful living woman I've ever seen," he says, and we can't help noting the distinction he's made. Giving her a tour of the cemetery's ossuary, he attempts to seduce her, first surrounded by piles of skulls and bones, then later atop the buried husband's grave as blue-flames dance around them. (A sign of the era in which this movie was lensed: you occasionally can see wires on the dancing igneous lights. Nowadays, the FX guys'd probably use cheap CGI.) But before the apparently impotent(!) Francesco can get too far, the pissed-off husband rises ahead of schedule and chomps on his widow. Though the bite appears fatal, Falchi's femme shows up two more times to befuddle Francesco in different womanly guises: there's more than one way to stay undead, apparently. Soavi's film shifts from Raimi-esque slapstick (a living severed head that's capable of propelling itself across the room) to existential dread and splatterific shocks with wild abandon. Holding it all together are Everett's lived-in hero and a gorgeously constructed cemetery set that is exploited for maximum visual potential. If a few of the movie's horror moments prove unbelievable even by the loose standards of zombie tales (e.g., a motorcycle-riding zombie who bursts from his grave like something off the cover to a crappy heavy metal elpee), there are plenty of convincing outlandish moments. My personal fave features a troop of zombie boy scouts who attack our hero while he's in the (of course!) shower, but the severed head that Gnaghi foolishly attempts to romance was a close second. Though he's our entry point to the world of Buffalora Cemetery, Everett's Francesco is a fairly unreliable guide. At one point, for instance, he tells Falchi's widow that he has a degree in biology, only to later confess that he never even graduated high school, and what starts out as simple shaky background info ultimately turns into whole scenes where we're not entirely sure if what we're watching is even happening or not. Later, our hero is visited by a personification of Death who chastises Dellamorte for taking away his job. "If you don't want the dead coming back to life, why don't you just kill the living?" Death noodges. "Shoot them in the head!" Our hero seemingly takes this strange advice to heart, driving into town to shoot a bunch of local layabouts in the town square, but since no one seems to accept his later admissions of guilt, we start to doubt if what we saw really happened. (There's a surgery scene in the latter part of the movie that most males in the audience definitely wanna place in the didn't-really-happen category.) By movie’s end, when Francesco & Gnaghi depart their village for the literal End of the World, Dellamorte Dellamore has become so slippery that even our duo's identities prove malleable . . . and the only thing we know for certain is we've seen a whole lot more than just another cheesy Euro zombie flick. # | ( 3/01/2007 05:45:00 AM ) Bill S. "FIVE YEARS . . . MY BRAIN HURTS A LOT!" – Wulp, today's the day the Pop Culture Gadabout celebrates a complete five years of existence: the past year's been a somewhat rocky one at the old homestead, but as I type this tiny celebratory note – with a cuppa coffee and a package of cheese crackers w./ peanut butter by the keyboard – the world feels cautiously okay. Got some reviews in the hopper (including – choke! – at least one comics piece), some non-blog writing projects initiated, two goofy dogs sitting and watching me at the keyboard and a recuperating wife sleeping in the bedroom. Not a bad place to be, early on a Thursday morning . . . # | Wednesday, February 28, 2007 ( 2/28/2007 01:31:00 PM ) Bill S. "PURE FICTION: YOU'RE PUTTING ME ON!" – Was originally gonna put up a Sloan video from the new elllllpee for this week's music vid, but I couldn't find any yet on YouTube. So instead I went with the Elephant 6 Collective (from whence came last week's Apples in Stereo) and picked a vid of the title track from Dressy Bessy's Electrified disc. Singer/songwriter Tammy Ealom is just plain fun to watch . . . # | Tuesday, February 27, 2007 ( 2/27/2007 12:31:00 PM ) Bill S.  "PLAYING YOURSELF MIGHT LEND SOME CRED" – You can call Sloan a lotta things, but stingy isn't one of 'em. The Canadian foursome's new Yep Roc release, Never Hear the End of It, is a whopping 76-plus minutes of slickly produced power-pop: thirty songs in all, even if a few of 'em are more like fifty-second snips than fully fleshed-out verse/verse/chorus/verse exercises. When every man jack in your quartet is capable of carrying the singer/songwriter flag, I supposed that makes it a tad easier to stuff your disc to the bursting point. Still, the last Sloan disc I know, 2001's Pretty Together, had almost as many bland tracks as rousers, so it clearly isn't that easy.Six years later, though, you can't accuse this disc of being short on pop ideas: if anything, the plethora of hooks works against the neophyte listener. Listen to a great song like "I Understand," which sounds like something Pezband could've concocted back in the skinny tie era, and before you know it you're three tracks further in, mentally meandering and wondering if you need to check your online bank account. Slap yerself once to pay close attention to the hand-clapper that's now rolling, "Can You Figure It Out?" and, damned if it doesn't turn out to be a fine track, too. More than once I found myself thinking of Hüsker Dü's 1987 masterwork Warehouse – another brimming collection that initially came across overwhelming but has since lodged every track in my pleasure lobes. (The Dü comparison isn't arbitrary, since the boys themselves name-check that great gone band in their witty Ideal Gurl song, "Someone to Be True With.") Sometimes too much of a good thing is just the right amount. So if I don't have hold of the whole thing yet, just gimme another six months. Those songs that immediately leapt out at me – "Who Taught You to Live Like That?" (great glammy group chorus on this 'un), the sweet harmonic entreaty "Listen to the Radio," the Who-like moaner "Something's Wrong," the woozily dB's styled "I Know You," or "Fading into Obscurity" – remain such smoochable samples of hard-working pop-rock that I know this disc'll remain in regular rotation for quite a while. At times, Sloan's bright sonics are superior to its lyrics – which can occasionally get a trace clunky (the cake line in "Obscurity" has to be the lousiest use of a baked goods metaphor since "MacArthur Park"!) – but more often the band's canny blend of mod moves with new wave flavorings that owe as much to Mike & the Mechanics as they do the Cars provides beaucoup bouncy pleasure. I'm especially enthralled with "Set In Motion," wherein bassist Chris Murphy (at least I think it's Murphy: the band is coy when it comes to parceling out individual credits) grouses about the filming of a biographical movie that he doesn't remember authorizing. If any single popster can be nailed as the overriding influence on this disc, it's the Paul McCartney who worked on such sonic collages as "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey" and "Band on the Run" (and was arguably the prime mover behind Abbey Road's suite of Side Two songs). Never Hear regularly deploys a similar strategy with its shorter tracks, bundling two to three of 'em together so that the casual listener doesn't even notice when one cut ends and other begins – and it usually works, even if you sometimes wish that the earlier song would return to resolve itself. Only time I found myself getting really caught up short was when the Posies-styled "Living with the Masses" was succeeded by a track which sounded like it'd slipped onto the disc off a Bad Religion session ("HFXNSHC") – but I'm pretty sure this blip o' sonic dissonance was intentional. Never Hear the End of It? That's not a warning; it's a promise . . . # | Monday, February 26, 2007 ( 2/26/2007 02:25:00 PM ) Bill S. DANCING 'ROUND THE FIERY FLAMES OF FALTINE – Happy Se7en-Year Anniversary to the redoubtable rage-free Neilalien, unabashed Ramones fan and one of the comics blogosphere's bedrocks. Looking forward to seven more, Neil! # | ( 2/26/2007 02:17:00 PM ) Bill S.  "YOU THINK THAT I DON'T EVEN MEAN A SINGLE WORD I SAY!" – This is an odd one: picked up a copy of Rhino's 2nd Bee Gees' reissue last week (Horizontal, the one without a Klaus Voorman cover!) and after playing both it and the bonus disc several times, I find myself much more enamored with Disc 2 than the official original release. Typically, my reaction to these extras disc is rather muted. But this time I found the bonus tracks to be more varied in style – closer to the boys' first ace pop-rock release, in fact – than Horizontal, which emphasizes the quavery slow stuff over sparkly bouncing Beatlesque pop-rock (one notable exception, "Harry Braff," which sounds like it could've appeared on an early Who album). Disc 2 has some great pop tracks: "Sir Geoffrey Saved the World," "Mrs. Gillespie's Refrigerator" (howzat for a Pop Art title?), the psychedelic raga rocker "Deeply, Deeply Me" and "Barker of the U.F.O.," in particular. Sure, there's still a slow drippy 'un – the single "Words," which apparently wasn't released as part of a studio album, appears on Disc 2 – but as whimpering Beeges cuts go, it's not the worst of 'em. Could do without the Xmas tracks from some long-forgotten teevee special that are tacked onto Disc 2's end, but at least they're placed where you can hit "Eject" easily . . .# | Sunday, February 25, 2007 ( 2/25/2007 07:26:00 AM ) Bill S. WORKIN' ON OUR NIGHT MOVES – Last night, as we were hunkering down to stay in out of a rainy, sleety Saturday night, the electricity went out. Most bad winter nights, you can count on at least one quick brown-out here in Central Illinois – if you're lucky, it isn't even enough to mess up your clocks – but this 'un was a keeper. It conked out at 7:10, and we sat in the dark for a few minutes, waiting to see if the lights would quickly return. When they didn't, Becky started lighting the tea-light candles we have set around the living room and I went to look for the flashlights. The latter were exactly where I expected 'em to be, but neither one had fresh batteries. Fortunately, I thought, we had some spares in a plastic battery holder that we’d gotten for free at Menard's one year, but none of these worked in the flashlights either. Twenty minutes later, the lights and the television flickered back on, much to my relief. I went about the task of resetting the clocks, but before I could that, the power went down once again. Another quick, teasing flicker and we were out again for real. (Fortunately, we hadn't yet blown out any of the candles.) Tried phoning the electric company, but, of course, got a recorded We're working on it, already! message; pulled out the easiest to unplug boombox, but it didn't seem to have any batteries in it at all. Realizing I had to bite the bullet, I put on my coat and drove through the sleet to the Kroger two blocks away (though the store had electricity, we could see that most of the neighborhoods east of us were also suffering from the outage), where I quickly plunked down cash on two packs of alkaline C's. Got enough to power the radio and a large flashlight. Becky and I spent the night, talking and playing Scrabble by candlelight: not much different from a lotta nights in our home, except the teevee wasn't running and we had to squint real hard to look at our aged tiles to make sure we weren't putting down the wrong letter. The lights came back about three-and-a-half hours after they'd first blanked, but we didn't do anything immediately, keeping the radio onto our local NPR station (WGLT, which plays blues over the weekend) and sitting back until we were sure this wasn't just another temporary thing. Finally, at around 10:45, I got up and started resetting the appliances. At eleven, we flicked on the tube to watch a Monty Python rerun on PBS (the Spanish Inquisition ep!) Just a night's inconvenience, really, though it's nice to know we're still able to entertain ourselves. And I went four whole hours without clicking on my email once . . . # | |
|
|
