Watched this modern classic last night with the family. The parents were touched by the way the movie makes romantic teen cliches feel a little new. The teen felt the movie worked like all movies, predictably.
What struck this parent most was the way John Mahoney did an almost perfect imitation of Remnant Gene’s vocal inflection and, perhaps, parenting approach. Mahoney has just one kid to work with, but I get the sense Gene was half of a team (hi Vickie) that got them out the door and on the way, and then the rest of the way there. I couldn’t find a Mahoney clip from the movie worthy of Gene, the trailer uses Mahoney as a foil, not the much more interesting character he plays, but the connection is striking, if dubious.
This being a Cameron Crowe movie, there is music. Crowe’s wife, Nancy Wilson, is the musical director. Two songs that are awfully nice to wake up to. First an excellent Cheap Trick tune:
And a Replacements tune that presages Paul Westerberg’s solo career, but has a very quirky arrangement that is a quieter moodier Replacements.
In the midst of the Punkmania, a film was released called Rude Boy. It was kind of like the Clash’s Hard Days Night, about a roadie working with the band on tour. Except much more of the movie was about the roadie than the band. I haven’t seen it since seeing it in a theater in 1978 or so, but it was a rough movie with a pretty good heart. A rock movie about a band of stars that focused on the workers who supported them.
Good stuff, not hurt by the fact that the band was making great music. This is apparently a clip from the movie, though the production values seem stronger than I remember. Whatever. This song from Give ’em Enough Rope is epic and emotional (sentimental too) and rocks, as well.
I had a paper route through my neighborhood when I was growing up. I learned then that everybody watched the World Series when the games were played during the day.
I also learned that people other than I played this song really loud. This might be rock’s greatest song. Please argue.
This is the legendary MC5 rock doc, A True Testimonial. I finally watched it a couple weeks ago. It’s fantastic. I learned a lot, particularly about the end days of the MC5. In fact, I think this now tops It Might Get Loud as my favorite rock doc of all-time. I’ve heard it’s available from Netflix, but options are truly limited. Youtube is your quickest and easiest bet. Or you could buy the DVD on Amazon for $299.99 (I’m serious). My guess is you 1960s guys will get a big boner watching this. Kick out the jams, Barbara Stanwyck!
This month my favorite TV network, TCM, is having their annual “31 Days of Oscar” leading up to the actual awards ceremony (to which I am fairly indifferent). During that span every film TCM shows has at least been nominated for an Oscar, and most have won at least one.
TCM is a treasure trove of cinematic brilliance, with the bulk of their offerings focusing on the heyday of the studio system in the 30’s and 40’s.
One of the standards in those movies was to toss in a song. Which is why in the middle of a dark and brilliant Noir film, like The Big Sleep, we see Lauren Bacall singing at a speakeasy operated by gangster Eddie Mars (he is to this film, sort of what Jackie Treehorn was to Lebowski).
So, this morning I was working with TCM on in the background when Howard Hawks’ (who also made The Big Sleep, and my favorite Screwball Comedy, Bringing Up Baby) Ball of Fire came on.
Written by Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, the film is a great Screwball Comedy that deconstructs Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, placing the setting in Manhattan in the early 40’s, with Stanwyck playing the moll Sugarpuss O’Shea to Gary Cooper’s English professor Bertram Potts (Cooper is one of eight sheltered eggheads working on an encyclopedia).
A few other things:
Every great character actor and cartoon voice from that time are among the professors, so if you watch, you will suddenly hear Fractured Fairy Tales etc. in the back of your head.
This is the last script that Wilder and Brackett wrote before Wilder went on to his fantastic career as a director (Stalag 17, Some Like it Hot, Sunset Boulevard, and Double Indemnity are just a few).
One thing that stuns me about Wilder is that English was his second language, yet his writing in our language is so sharp. And, if you watch Ball of Fire you will get an idea of just that. This movie is as funny and witty as anything ever put on the big screen.
One other thing I love about Wilder is the apocryphal tale of when he premiered Sunset Boulevard for a cluster of Hollywood moguls, after the film Samuel Goldwyn got up and chastised Wilder for making such a dark portrayal of the industry that made him rich and famous. What was Wilder’s response to the most powerful man in his industry, in front of their peers? “Fuck you.”
Back to the movie, as part of the set-up, Cooper/Potts takes to the streets fearing his grasp of slang is already outdated, and happens upon O’Shea at a night club (he also goes to a ball game and gets some good slang there).
O’Shea is the singer at the club, and though her singing and the song are marginal, Gene Krupa and his big band are just deadly. So is the piano player and the guy who does the sax solo. Funny too, cos playing guitar was just a minor rhythm instrument, as you can see in most films of this ilk.
Anyway, Canned Heat et al all owe their boogie chops to this great scene.
And, just for fun, after the big number, Krupa and Stanwyck reprise the song with Krupa playing matchsticks instead of drumsticks.
While reading and listening my way through Lawr’s post, however, I thought of some songs that I thought fit. Here they are:
With a nice skit (featuring Bruce Dern as the director!).
This was the Clash movie song that I thought of first, maybe because Brooklyn native son Monty Clift is buried just up the street here in Greenwood Cemetery.
Okay, a bit of a stretch. This beautiful song tells the story of an imaginary film, but it’s the language of film that structures the lyrics, just as much as Leslie West’s beautiful guitar makes me want to play it over and over again (as I did in high school). The sound on this clip is pretty bad, but the performance comes through anyway. I chose it because I think this was the same concert, later broadcast on NBC, that I watched for Mountain and Sly and the Family Stone, but which most memorably introduced me to Iggy and the Stooges.
This one, too, is the story of a movie that doesn’t exist. Cut to the baby taking off her clothes, close up of the sign that says we never close. Indeed.
A while back, when I wrote about Garland Jeffreys and his great song, Wild in the Streets, I made mention of Jeffreys’ other killer song from his Ghost Writer album (look below to see which one).
Well, that got me to thinking about the best songs written about the movies–note, not from–so I started a list. I have to think there are more, but, well, everything has to start somewhere.
By the way, tunes like Billy Joel’s (ugh) We Didn’t Start the Fire, or The New Radicals You Get What You Give don’t count. They just name people in a sort of rhyme, dropping names left and right. None has anything to do with loving film.
My Baby Loves the Western Movies (The Olympics): Released in 1958, kind of a gimmick song as were several of the tunes by the Olympics, but, hey, funky gun shot sounds, and pretty good doo wop. I confess: I bought the 45 (record, not gun).
Candle in the Wind (Elton John): Actually about Marilyn Monroe, unlike the title track which has Wizard of Oz allusions, but is not really about the movies at all. And, ok, I will take a sentimentality hit for picking an Elton song, although Rocket Man, Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting, and Burn Down the Mission are great tunes. Candle is really a pretty sweet homage.
Celluloid Heroes (The Kinks): Maybe the most sentimental pop song about film, but no one delivers such sweetness like Ray Davies. Period. I just love this song. I saw the band tour behind this album at Winterland (with Dan Hicks and his Hot Licks opening) and they were just stupendous. It is my fave on this list.
35 MM Dreams (Garland Jeffreys): The song that started this mess, and like Celluloid Heroes, just a great song. Sweet, sentimental, but never tawdry, like the Kinks tune.
James Dean (Eagles): This song rocks, whether you like the Eagles or not. I view the Eagles kind of like Elton John: no question talented, and some of their songs I like, but, well, we all have our lines. James Dean is a solid song, though I still think Dean remains a vastly overrated actor, having played basically the same character in the three films in which he starred. Had he lived, well, I doubt he would have remained iconic.
The Ballad of Dwight Fry (Alice Cooper): From Love it to Death, this is about a guy who goes mad watching late night movies. Dwight Fry is the character actor who plays the attorney bringing documents to the Count (Bella Lugosi) early in the film, and then becomes the vampire’s gofer. Fry is the guy walking around saying “yes master” and “we can eat spiders, and big juicy flies.” Got to love it to death, no?
The Magnificent 7 (The Clash): I would be ostracized if I missed this one, right? And, well, it is tough to not like anything the Clash did anyway.
Actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, the chameleon of contemporary actors, was found dead Sunday, ostensibly the victim of a self-inflicted heroin overdose.
At age 46, this is a sad loss as Hoffman was just a great talent, so able to look and act differently depending upon the role.
Hoffman did win an Oscar for his role as writer Truman Capote in the 2005 film, Capote.
But, there are basically three films Hoffmans, I really loved, all three of which had great music floating around in a direct or indirect fashion.
Boogie Nights-Hoffman played the sexually confused Scotty J, a sort of Gaffer in the world of porn film: an insecure nerd who has somehow stumbled into the dream world of the repressed voyeur.
The Big Lebowski-This time Hoffman plays Brandt, instead of a Gaffer, he is a gopher for David Huddleston’s other Lebowski, a wonderfully restrained brown-noser. My favorite line of Hoffman’s is “Well Dude, we just don’t know.”
Almost Famous-My favorite of Hoffman’s roles, as he plays the great–and also sadly late and nihlistic–rock critic Lester Bangs. Bangs, who penned the iconic definitive rock critique book Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, died of alcohol and drug abuse, and now Hoffman has followed.
I did not know about DA Pennebaker’s Ziggy Stardust movie until yesterday. Poor me.
It seems that Bowie had plans to retire the The Spiders from Mars as his backing band after these very shows, as well as Ziggy Stardust as his stage persona. He invited Pennebaker to record a couple of songs, for posterity, but the legendary director of music films (Don’t Look Back among others)ghby saw a bigger chance, and recorded the weekend of shows at the Hammersmith Odeon.
With word out that the Spiders were done, many took that to mean that the willful Bowie was retiring from the stage himself. I watched half of this today and it is so fine, a mixture of fab musical performance and just enough verite color to make it all feel immediate and up close.
There is a DVD of the whole show that surely has better pictures and sound, but this clip will give you an indelible taste.
