| Pop Culture Gadabout | ||
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Saturday, August 10, 2002 ( 8/10/2002 09:14:00 AM ) Bill S. “AND HE LIKES TO SHOOT HIS GUN . . .” – Reading of Charlton Heston’s current bout with Alzheimer’s got me thinking about some of my favorite Heston performances:
Expect to see a lotta NRA/Alzheimer’s jokes in the next week. Unfair political pointsmaking, perhaps, but then that’s the risk any political group takes when it tries to pony onto fame in place of substance. I was critical of the man when he made his much-replayed appearance at the last NRA convention, waving a rifle and ostentatiously pronouncing that folks would take it out of his “cold dead hands.” Now I’m guessing that li’l film clip is gonna prove a major source of embarrassment for gun geeks in the weeks ahead. # | Friday, August 09, 2002 ( 8/09/2002 11:51:00 AM ) Bill S. TRAIN WRECKS & COW CATCHERS – My alter ego, Wilson Barbers, just posted a piece on The Anna Nicole Show for the Dimensions website. Yes, I know that half of the uncivilized blogosphere has already jumped on the "Let's Call Anna Nicole A Heifer" Express. But this is Serious Criticism! # | Thursday, August 08, 2002 ( 8/08/2002 05:33:00 PM ) Bill S. RAT TART – After reading of Britain’s burgeoning rat-infestation, I'm sure I'm not the only one flashing on James Herbert’s breakthrough horror trilogy. In The Rats, Lair and the post-nuclear holocaust finale Domain, the British horror novelist vividly imagined a series of rodent attacks in the most bereft areas of London. The first novel made an exceedingly tame B-movie (a.k.a. Deadly Eyes). But the books, while far from Herbert’s best (I favor later supernatural novels like Haunted or Ghosts of Sleath), remain entertaining worst case scenario quick-reads. I’m betting Herbert's feeling mighty prescient these days. . . # | 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? # | |
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