Category Archives: Movies

Lunch Break: Invisible Sex, “Valium”

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I was watching clips from the punk/new wave movie Urgh! A Music War, a British movie that came out in 1982 that featured filmed live performances of a lot of bands you’ve heard of, and Invisible Sex.

According to the Urgh! Wikipedia page, this performance of Invisible Sex appears to be the only time they ever played live and they left behind no other released recordings. In 2008, however, a guy named Tom surfaced on the Urgh Yahoo page claim to be Gene Axe, the band’s guitarist. There is a page here, which features less than clear writing and a collection of known facts about the band. The most interesting is a list of the supposed band members names:

Gene Wow: Lead vocals
Gene Yus: Keyboards
Gene Axe: Guitar (Probably Tom Toomey)
Gene Machine: Female dancer
Gene I: Drums
Gene Junction: Female dancer
Gene Tee: Saxophone
Ranking Gene: Male dancer, fire blowing, percussion, “keeper of the stash”
Banana Gene, AKA Gene Banana: Bass

 

And then there is Valium, which is tons of fun.

Breakfast Blend: Jawbreaker

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I got an email from my friend Walker yesterday afternoon. He was walking in the East Village over the weekend and ran into the singer/songwriter Rachelle Garniez, with whom he’s friendly. She was with a woman who was in the band The Friggs named Palmyra Delran. Walker looked the Friggs up on Wikipedia. He found, he wrote to me, a prize-winningly unique line.

“The Friggs’ song “Bad Word for a Good Thing” appeared in both the films Jawbreaker and Fuck.”

I checked and am pretty sure he’s right. No other song can make that claim.

I happened to see Jawbreaker in a press screening before its opening in February 1999. The Friggs’ song has a good sound that Blondie got to 20 years earlier.

Another song from the Jawbreaker soundtrack is Imperial Teen’s winning confection Yoo Hoo, and it’s weird and vivid video, which is a lot more winning than I recall the movie to be.

 

LINK: We Are The Best!

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I wrote about this fine movie, sort of, back in April, but just came across this NME Exclusive clip today.

I’m a big fan of all Lucas Moodyson’s films, so it isn’t surprising I like this one. What is surprising is the light comic touch the story has, maybe because it is based on a graphic novel written by his wife.

What is paramount in all of Moodyson’s films is that Swedes like Rock, and that music is perhaps more important than wheat for life. Here’s the clip. See the movie. And see Lilya 4 Ever and Show Me Love and Together if you can, all fantastic movies about young people with music, though not music movies.

Night Music: X, “Breathless”

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The one cover song on X’s fourth album, New Fun In The New World, is their version of Otis Blackwell’s tune Breathless.

Breathless was a giant hit for Jerry Lee Lewis. One of my favorite songs of his.

But Breathless was also the name of Jean Luc Godard’s first feature.

And was also the name of a sort of remake by the once underground filmmaker Jim McBride, who turned a film about an American girl in Paris loving a French gangster into a film about a French girl in LA loving an American gangster.

X did the cover for the money and promotion, but as you can see in the clip, they perform it brilliantly. And differently. And this one of the great rock songs, no matter whose version you hear.

But we’ve opened up a can of it here. Godard meets McBride. Blackwell meets Jerry Lee Lewis meets X.

There is more to be said.

LINK: The Black Album

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enhanced-buzz-wide-1538-1405955330-7In real life Ethan Hawke made a mixtape of his favorite songs by the Beatles during their solo career to give to his daughter, apparently after he and Uma divorced.

At the same time, over the last 12 years or so, he was making a move with Richard Linklater called Boyhood, which is the story of a boy from the age of five to 17. The trick of the movie is that it was shot with the same actors over a 12 year period. Ethan Hawke plays the boy’s father, and he presents him with the Black Album after the fictional couple, the boy’s parents divorce.

This article at Buzzfeed publishes the song list for three disc worth of tunes (too many), and the liner notes that Hawke gave his daughter and rewrote for the movie’s purposes. Beatles experts may have something to say about its interpretation of history, but I would say the whole thing is kind of lovely. Much nicer than How Do You Sleep?

Seth MacFarlane Knows

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Life is busy.

That is my cheap shit excuse for neglecting to surrender my share of contributions to the Site here over the past weeks.

Truth is, my life is very busy, although I am in the process of transitioning from one of those more than demanding day jobs that really pays the bills and provides my health care, to the ranks of the retired. Although for me retired means writing four or five baseball columns a week, working on some fiction, being at the ball park, playing music, writing songs, and well, writing here too among other things.

Well, rest assured, just because I get distracted and forget to post stuff here, it doesn’t mean I am not thinking about it.

And, while I have a lot of fodder floating around in my grey cells, somehow when watching Family Guy a couple of weeks ago I saw this which demonstrates just how brilliant Seth MacFarlane and his mates can be.

I get if you hate Family Guy. Peter Griffin is as oafish and mostly offensive a character as we can imagine. In fact if The Simpsons has proved to be the best representation of American Family life ever recorded, the Griffin family has pushed that envelope by showing our basically soulless full of reality TV instant experts internet cell phone culture in an even more visceral way.

In other words, yeah: lots of fart and toilet jokes, too much blood and vomit, lots of gags that no one can let go of, and on and on.

However, if you can indulge creator MacFarlane just a little, when he is on, he is so on it is scary.

And, very often, that on is the result of some musical genius.

Not that we are talking Lou Reed or the Hellacopters or original music.

More like knowing that the ever-hot Lois Griffin banged all of Kiss as a young woman, something that makes her Trog husband Peter proud.

But, the show also riffs other songs and genres and stuff so brilliantly. As in the song/sequence below where MacFarlane and mates take on Disney, not only in song, but with just a few deft line changes from the animators, and a little creative use of metaphor, well, you get this:

OK, so it ain’t rock’n’roll, but it is funny and I do like it. It is also smart, which I also like.

When I think about it, in fact, most of my earliest exposure to classical music–aside from what my parents usually had going in the background–was the result of Looney Tunes, as in this great clip of Bugs playing Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody #2 (although when I first saw it, I had no idea what the music was):

To finish off, I am going back to Family Guy, again with a song and dance number that is so clever, and to pair with Bugs and his ilk, links back to the 30’s with the song Bag O’ Weed which totally riffs on the Marx Brothers and Duck Soup (I looked for a video clip of the brothers banging on the helmeted heads of the enemy Sylvanians with dubbed xylophone music that MacFarlane parodies, and could not find one).

However, if you watch carefully during the finale, you will indeed see a Groucho head spill out (at 2:49) among the images, giving credit where credit is due right after the Duck Soup riff (instead of helmets, Brian and Stewie are banging on bongs).

OK, so I got that out of my system, and I can start writing about some serious music. Like Foghat.

Happy and safe holiday to you all.

 

 

 

 

Godzilla

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It must have been Remnants movie night last night. Even though this kind of thing is not my normal cup of tea in flicks, I was persuaded by some new friends to see the new “Godzilla” Friday night. It wasn’t bad, actually. Not to spoil it for you, but history definitely showed us again how nature points out the folly of man.

So you get the Fu version. While the BOC version is happy and kinda poppy, Fu Manchu’s (a distant second all-time at covers to the mighty Hellas) is sluggish and menacing, like Godzilla damn well should be.

I’m drawn to a sweet singing lead guitar over slow crunchy chords like a fly to shit. I guess that pretty much sums up the Black Sabbath formula.

Oh, and the crazy bass solo during the break part.