YouTube Jukebox: The Who

By David Ross.The Beatles were uncanny craftsmen, but their music interests me almost not at all these days. I listen to a Beatles album once every few years. I invariably feel awed, bored, and irritated. The irritating part is the self-importance of the whole shtick (this self-importance later became fully obnoxious in John Lennon’s insufferable “Imagine”). Nobody can deny that the Beatles were peerless in their ability to craft albums, but the music itself, for all its endless melodic invention and vast tonal spectrum, so often seems hollow. The long suite that ends Abbey Road is at once the most amazing feat in the history of rock and the most abstract and elaborately empty.  In the end, the Beatles’ preeminence is a Baby Boomer phenomenon. I don’t believe it will entirely survive the transition to a post-Boomer culture.

On the other hand, I never tire of the Who. I love to feel the whiplash of their sonic overdrive: the skittering cannonade of the drums, the waves of guitar thunder, the endless frisky invention of Entwistle’s bass. In terms of instrumental prowess and cohesion, the Who far exceed the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and even Led Zeppelin. The band’s defining idiosyncrasy – in many ways the secret of its success – was the unique reversal of the guitar and bass parts. So often Townsend establishes the rhythm or adds tonal effects while Entwistle carries the melodic burden. Watching the Who play live, one realizes that what sound like guitar parts – power chords, dashing melodic runs – are actually bass parts. The primacy of the bass gives the Who’s music such underlying movement and momentum. The most dynamic aspect of the music is buried deep in the tonal structure and speaks to some primal lobe of the brain, the part that remembers the pulse of the womb. Jimi Hendrix was the greatest rock instrumentalist of all time, but Entwistle may be in his quiet way the second greatest.

Above, the Who perform a kaleidoscopic mini-suite as part of the Rolling Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus, a 1968 made-for-TV extravaganza that also featured John Lennon, Eric Clapton, and Jethro Tull. The Stones sat on the footage until 1996, allegedly because the Who so utterly upstaged them. We now know how long it takes the wounded rock star ego to convalesce: 28 years.

Equally magnitudinous is the Who’s performance at Woodstock (see here), which somehow manages to dwarf the audience of 500,000. The Woodstock version of the “See Me, Feel Me” sequence from Tommy is a career highlight. Rarely has a band been at once so powerful and so soulful. Like no British band before them, they here enter Otis Redding territory.

Posted on November 18th, 2011 at 1:46pm.

LFM Review: Kevin Smith’s Red State

By David Ross. I’ve always considered myself on Kevin Smith’s side. I love salty and unguarded talk. As a spigot of quotable material, Kevin Smith (see here) rivals John Mayer and Tarantino, whose brains likewise seem not to have evolved the internal p.c. censors the rest of us are equipped with. Though it may involve the lowest kind of potty humor, such talk is always close to literature in its impulse to amuse itself and flout any interfering proprieties. At the same time, I could bear only a few minutes of Smith’s stand-up film Too Fat for Forty (2010). I didn’t mind the anti-Bush jabs in concept, but I very much minded their pandering obviousness and staleness. When Red State came along soon after, I girded myself for the worst. I expected a muddle of hysterical smears: a Garafalo-meets-Tarantino gorefest.

As advertised, Red State tears into both evangelicalism and the post-9/11 security apparatus. The Reverend Abin Cooper is the leader of a small Branch Davidian-like flock whose services incorporate ritual murder of kidnapped sinners. The ATF and FBI careerists who raid his compound on trumped up terrorist charges are little better. Arguably they’re worse. Their own brand of murder is bureaucratic and amoral. They murder on behalf of their resumes and pensions. No surprises so far. Evangelicals – evil. Patriot Act and its enforcers – equally evil.

The weird swerve involves Smith’s sneaking admiration for Cooper, who’s suavely played by Tarantino veteran Michael Parks. Smith rejects the trustiest cliché in the anti-evangelical arsenal by declining to portray Cooper as a hypocrite. I was sure Cooper was going to be unveiled in an unsurprising ‘surprise’ ending as a homosexual, child molester, cross-dresser, or sex-crazed bigamist. But no! He practices what he preaches. Nor is Cooper a coward, a fool, or a monster, though of course he commits terrible crimes in the name of God. Against all odds and expectations, he emerges as a seductive anti-hero who recalls no less a figure than Francis Marion Tarwater, the backwoods prophet of Flannery O’Connor’s masterpiece The Violent Bear it Away. Cooper is impossible not to like, even as he’s impossible not to abhor. Continue reading LFM Review: Kevin Smith’s Red State

The New Iron Lady Trailer

By Jason Apuzzo. While we’re on the subject of major figures of the Cold War era (see the J. Edgar review below), a new trailer has just arrived for The Iron Lady, about Margaret Thatcher.

So will this be the hit job many people are fearing, or something more complex and true-to-life? Judge for yourself.

Posted on November 14th, 2011 at 11:26am.

Clint Always Gets His Man: LFM Mini-Review of J. Edgar

Leonardo DiCaprio & Armie Hammer in the lead roles.

By Jason Apuzzo. THE PITCH: Director Clint Eastwood and star Leonardo DiCaprio bring the colorful and controversial life of legendary FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to the big screen, in a sprawling and complex biopic covering some 50+ years of American domestic history.

THE SKINNY: Eastwood’s relaxed, naturalistic directing style combines with a charismatic performance from DiCaprio to create a mostly sympathetic portrait of Hoover, albeit one that traffics in shopworn clichés of ‘50s anti-communist ‘paranoia’ and Kinsey-style sexual repression. J. Edgar bites off far more history than it can chew in 2 1/2 hours, however, and suffers mightily from its slow pace.

WHAT WORKS: • Leonardo DiCaprio has finally begun to hit his stride as an actor, delivering a voluble, eccentric take on Hoover – treating him as a dapper, genial workaholic with an occasional tendency to overstep his bounds. DiCaprio’s enthusiasm for the character is palpable, however, and mitigates the film’s sporadic tendency to belittle Hoover’s accomplishments.

• Eastwood’s direction softens some of the sharp edges in Dustin Lance Black’s script, keeping the focus on the characters rather than on Oliver Stone-style political showboating. Ideologues of both the left and right will not get out of J. Edgar what they want; the film is much more a Citizen Kane-style character study (complete with flashback structure) than a referendum on the anti-communist cause or the legacy of the FBI and its methods. The film is far too fond of Hoover to be considered left wing, yet too ambivalent toward Hoover’s politics to be considered right wing.

• The question of Hoover’s sexuality is broached tastefully, basically depicting him as too tightly wound for relationships of any kind. In fact, throughout the entire film he receives a grand total of one kiss – forced on him awkwardly by his friend, Clyde Tolson. As presented in the film, Hoover’s greatest passion is quite obviously his work.

• J. Edgar otherwise features strong supporting performances by Armie Hammer as Hoover’s colleague and companion Clyde Tolson, Naomi Watts as Hoover’s long-suffering secretary Helen Gandy, and Judi Dench as Hoover’s mother – the steel in J. Edgar’s spine.

Arriving at the Lindbergh estate.

Continue reading Clint Always Gets His Man: LFM Mini-Review of J. Edgar

Labyrinth of Woe: LFM Mini-Review of Immortals

Henry Cavill in "Immortals."

By Jason Apuzzo. THE PITCH: Commercial and music video director Tarsem reinvents the ancient Greek Theseus myth in Immortals, featuring rugged Brit star Henry Cavill (the new Superman) and coming from the same producer, Mark Canton, who revitalized the Sword & Sandal genre with 300.

THE SKINNY: Jettisoning any actual Greek mythology from his story, Tarsem repurposes Theseus’ ancient heroics into a violent, vacuous cross-cultural mash-up for the video game/UFC generation – a stylized ballet of severed limbs, senseless plot devices and wild costuming. Immortals – which likely deserved an X rating – is a film neither for the faint of heart, nor the lively of mind.

"No, John Galliano didn't design my helmet!"

WHAT WORKS: • Although the film’s costumes and production design – which extravagantly blend North African, Indian, Persian and occasionally even some Greek influences – make little sense in the context of the story, they bring a visual novelty to the film that grabs one’s attention. The garb of the Olympian gods, and the armor of the Titans, deserve special praise.

• Years of bizarre behavior and dissipated living have made Mickey Rourke into a good hire to play a wicked tyrant. His King Hyperion, who bears no connection to any Theseus myth I’m aware of, is nonetheless a formidable and interesting villain – a kind of Colonel Kurtz of the ancient world, decked out in bronze bunny ears. As an interesting side note, the disjointed terrain of Rourke’s face has begun to resemble a Paul Klee painting – fascinating to look at (particularly in 3D), even for long spells of time.

WHAT DOESN’T WORK: • Having drained the story of any meaningful connection to Greek mythology or history (which, one assumes, he finds dull), Tarsem has nowhere to go with the Theseus story excerpt to turn it into a generic, head-chopping ‘hero’s journey’ like a thousand similar films before it. Immortals, trite in the extreme, shows less respect to the core cannon of Greek myth than your average comic book movie shows toward comic book lore.

• Outside of Mickey Rourke, Immortals features not a single noteworthy performance – including those of Henry Cavill and Freida Pinto, who make for a handsome but pitifully dull couple. And although Luke Evans is passable as a young Zeus, the rest of the Olympian gods are almost laughable, like something out of a high school performance of Godspell. Continue reading Labyrinth of Woe: LFM Mini-Review of Immortals