Happy Thursday, everyone! Let's dive into stuff I've found recently
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Götterdammerung is really one of the best German words. It's just what it says on the tin and really rolls off the tongue. This is a 1969 German-language film, directed by Italian Luchino Visconi, about a wealthy industrialist family that descends into backstabbing and debauchery as Hitler rises to power in early '30s Germany. It's a new one to me, but all the reviews make it sound like "what if Salo was made by someone with a sense of scale and appropriate restraint? And really, this has Charlotte Rampling. I'm always up for a Rampling performance that I've never seen.
Sadly, The Damned does not appear to be streaming anywhere, even for sale. Check your local library and they might have it on the shelf.
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Another Eclipse series from Criterion, this covers three melodramas from Gainsborough Pictures, which apparently bucked the general mode of '40s British cinema by instead of making realistic pictures going for over-the-top costume period pieces. So hey, time to watch James Mason and his delicious voice in something called The Man In Grey! I love how the description of this trailer refers to it as the original British bodice ripper.
All three of these appear to be available on the Criterion Channel as well as for sale/purchase at the usual places.
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Finally for this week, I'm shaking it up a little. As we settle in here in Richmond, I've been getting my library cards; sadly, the Richmond area doesn't have the equivalent of the SWAN system in the Chicago suburbs, where everyone is on the same catalog system and it makes it much easier for hold requests. So, at this point I now have three library cards, one for the Richmond system, one for Henrico County (for this unfamiliar, Virginia has a very weird systems where a lot of cities are independent and not part of counties, which seems insane to me) and one more for Chesterfield County, Maybe more to come. So when I was at Chesterfield on Tuesday and I was browsing around a bit, I was delighted to find this, the first two seasons of the BBC 1980s series Robin of Sherwood. What an odd and moody version of Robin this is, with a Clannad soundtrack, Celtic magic, lots of deep dark woods and everything seems covered in a layer of Nottingham Forest dew. It's what Prince of Thieves thought it would be instead of being just plain silly. It's right on the edge of being full of itself, but in my memory works really well and I'm very much looking forward to trying it again. And OH, this Clannad theme!
Robin of Sherwood is streaming on Pluto TV and Shout Factory TV.
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That's it for this week, no real recommendation right now as we've been kind of just decompressing from watching the end of Peaky Blinders with a a lot of Bake Off holiday specials. But hey, check those out on Netflix, they're a lot of fun. (Especially the one with the Derry Girls cast.)
In recent weeks, I've been posting an audio suspense story about a hard-luck woman from the southeast side of Indianapolis who's taking on her criminal uncle, who has armed insurrection on his mind. I do the voice of Bethany, who is both pretty overwhelmed by such a big challenge but also determined to head off a violent incident. Each episode has a slideshow to provide visuals during the YouTube video, but of course you can just listen if you prefer.
New to "Freedom Island"? Start the episodes HERE, keeping in mind that the first episode audio starts off with unusual audio quality. You'll figure out why.
Last week I mentioned my ongoing creative history project based in the 1940s and how including material about wartime is necessary. I got a four-DVD set of war "classics" at Goodwill and in the blog I've been including links to the films or the trailers for the ones I find most interesting.
"With the Marines in Tarawa": Ooh, Technicolor! And jolly martial music, of course. Tarawa, the internet tells me, is an atoll, part of a chain of rocky islands in the Pacific.
"Tunisian Victory" --I like the opening with the soldier in wire rim glasses reading and eating an apple as he finds out he's going to North Africa.
"Adventures of Tartu," with Robert Donat. Mr. Chips gets fierce!
"Flying Blind" (1941) -- One of those films where I learn nothing about the war, but which helps me fill in culture of the time. This could easily be a B picture at the movie theater my fictional character visits in the 1940s.
Next week: Stuff that's about neither war nor shoddy box sets from the thrift store!
Last
week, I posted here the first of three posts I offered long ago at my
now-closed music blog, Echoes In The Wind, about the song “Don’t Try To
Lay No Boogie-Woogie On The King Of Rock And Roll.” Here, modified just a bit,
is the second of those three posts, telling what happened after that first post
went out in early 2009:
It’s so sweet when it works this way:
I write a post and share a tune (or several), hoping that
what I know outweighs what I don’t know. A reader (or more than one) shares
information, and that information provides me with both a lever and a place to
stand. Using those tools, I go out into the cyber-countryside and dig up more
information . . . and if I’m very fortunate, more music.
It went that way yesterday after I posted Long John
Baldry’s 1971 version of “Don’t Try To Lay No Boogie-Woogie On The King Of Rock
And Roll,” which includes Baldry’s tale about being arrested for playing for
pennies on the streets of 1950s London. Quite rapidly, a reader left a comment
that widened my eyes a little:
“Being from Minnesota, I’m
surprised you don’t remember that [the Minnesota band] Crow recorded this
earlier... I’m thinking fall of 1970, second single after ‘Evil Woman.’ It did
chart, no idea how high, though.”
The reader then pointed me to a discussion of the song at
a music board and added a comment about Tony Burrows, whom I’d mentioned in the
earlier post.
As I clicked the link to the discussion, which turned out
to be at a site called Prentiss Riddle: Music, I realized that – even
though the group was from Minnesota’s Twin Cities – all I knew of Crow was
“Evil Woman . . .” I did have a copy of the group’s first, self-titled LP in my
stacks of unplayed music, quite likely bracketed by the soundtrack to the 1970s
film The Great Gatsby and a box set of Russian folk music.
The discussion of the “Don’t Try To Lay . . .” at Prentiss Riddle: Music had taken place in 2005 and was full of
information and educated guesses from fans of the song and of Baldry, Crow and
a little-known early 1970s group called Gator Creek (more on that group later).
One of the most
valuable bits there was the full set of the song’s lyrics. The version I’m
posting is a little different, based on the later discussion at the board I was
exploring.
Don’t Try To Lay No
Boogie Woogie On The King Of Rock And Roll.
Don’t you tell me n-n-n-no lies woman ’cause
all you know I’ve told Don't sell me no alibi sister ’cause all
you’ve got I’ve sold You better leave that midnight sneakin’ to the
one who worked it out I don’t wanna hear no back talk speakin’ go on
and shut yer mouth And everything’s gonna work out tight if you
act like you been told So don’t try to lay no boogie woogie on the
king of rock and roll.
Don’t you feed me no TV dinners when you know
I’m used to steak I don’t need no rank beginners when it’s time
to shake that shake You better pull your thing together, reach in
and dust it out And if ya feel that you just can’t dig it then
I guess you know the route It ain’t a matter of pork ’n’ beans gonna
justify your soul Just don't try to lay no boogie woogie on the
king of rock and roll.
You weren’t alive when I started to drive, so
don’t put none on me You didn’t arrive ’til late ’45 but your
head's in ’53. You got what it takes to keep the heads
a-spinnin’ down by the old rib shack And you come across just like a fool grinnin’
in the back of a red Cadillac. You can't come across the Atsville bridge
until you pay the toll So don’t try to lay
no boogie woogie on the king of rock and roll.
The lyrics were posted by a Crow listener who said that
the song had been on Crow’s Mosaic album and had also been recorded in
1970 by a group called Gator Creek. The lyrics as posted called the “rib shack”
a “rim shack” and had “[inaudible]” for the name of the bridge in the
next-to-the-last line. Another reader soon corrected “rim” to “rib.” And the
fourth line in the second verse had been posted as “And if ya feel that your
ass can’t dig it . . .”
Someone posting as Prentice Riddle, the board’s evident
owner or moderator, noted that Baldry had changed that fourth line in the
second verse to read: “And if you feel
that you just can’t dig it you know you don’t know what it’s all about.”
But the name of the bridge stayed unknown for a time,
with readers offering their own decades-long guesses. Some of those guesses
were: Astro, Apsfail and Astral, which I quite liked. (My own guess? For years,
I’d been hearing John Baldry sing about crossing the Oslo bridge, which I
figured wasn’t quite right. But I’d never had the inclination to go find the
correct lyric.)
And at that point, the discussion was helped greatly with
a post from W.C. Thomas. W.C. wrote: “My
brother Jeff wrote the song and I have a copy of the original demo with the
Ray-Lettes singing background. Jeff says it’s ‘you just can’t dig it’ and the
‘Atsville Bridge,’ based on the slang of the time, like ‘where it’s at.’ Also
it is the old rib shack.” W.C. added in a later note: “Jeff wrote the song for
Elvis but Elvis didn’t want to call himself the King of Rock and Roll.”
So that answered
the questions about the lyrics: But there were a whole lot of unanswered
questions: When did Crow’s version come out? Is there a copy of it out there
somewhere? Who was Gator Creek? And whatever happened to that demo by Jeff
Thomas with the Ray-Lettes?
Well, a few posts later, Jeff Thomas himself weighed in:
“I am quite flattered by the attention
given to my song. I thought it was good enough to record by myself. The late,
great, and dear John Baldry claimed the hit version, although Crow’s version
was charted. Another great version was done by ’Gator Creek (Kenny Loggins sang
the vocal). An unreleased version was recorded (produced by close friend Jimmy
Bowen) live in Las Vegas by Kenny Rogers and the First Edition (with
exceptional vocal by friend and fellow Georgian Kin Vassey).”
After learning
from another poster that Thomas’ version had been released in 1970 on Bell
Records, I went hunting. I went to one of the better blog search engines: Captain
Crawl. I entered “Gator Creek” and found a rip of that 1970 album through
the blog Rare MP3 Music.
By the time I’d
listened to Gator Creek’s version, I had an email from a fellow named Dave who
had been the original commenter here. He’d attached to his email a copy of
Crow’s version of “(Don’t Try To Lay No Boogie-Woogie On The) King Of
Rock And Roll,” which – as he’d thought – was from 1970. And then I stopped at
Ebay, where I found and bought a promo copy of Bell single 941, Jeff Thomas’
version of his song. So that’s on the way here.
(The names of a few of the folks who were on the Gator
Creek album stand out: Along with Kenny Loggins, who was a member of the band,
some of the folks who helped out on the sessions were guitarist Larry Knechtel,
horn player Chuck Findley and background vocalists extraordinaire Merry Clayton,
Clydie King and Venetta Fields.)
The last thing I
wanted to know was where Crow’s version charted. The group had a single titled
“Slow Down” sit just underneath the Billboard Hot 100 for three weeks in
late March and early April of 1970. Another single, “Cottage Cheese” reached
No. 56 in a fourteen-week sojourn in the Hot 100 in late spring and summer. It
turns out that “(Don’t Try To Lay No Boogie Woogie On the) King of Rock And
Roll” peaked at No. 52 during a nine-week stay in the Hot 100 that began in the
autumn of 1970.
So here’s Crow’s version of the tune and below that, Gator Creek’s:
Photoblog today. Greenville, SC. Visiting my hometown art museum. Only 2 floors were open today, so I missed seeing the Mule paintings that I l remember loving when I was younger. My grandmother and I loved the Wyeth Collection. Here are some photos: included are shots of works I neglected to notate the maker of, I apologize- Egads, and will try to research them later and add to the post. There are also some Jasper Johns’, and a Margaret Rowland.
Authors, poets, writers are all represented one way or another in the art world. There are lots of artworks of writers that are caricatures, ones that are clearly tinkered-with photos & to be honest, ones that are astonishingly primitive. I found no good ones of Irvine Welsh for instance. Some pieces of my favourite authors such as Annie Proulx or Keri Hulme are limited perhaps because the photo references available are limited or they’re not the types to commission portraits. Others such as Shakespeare are overdone & tedious or, god save us, WACKY. There are portraits of authors that are cartoons or made for book covers or newspaper reviews.
Some are great though & although this is a decent list, I could have done more with more time. Today, I’ve gone for writers who mean something to me, I have a little story for or that I’m completely obsessive about. It’s neither exhaustive artistically nor regarding my general book & reading obsessions (which are huge), but I’ve tried to at least go for something interesting.
e.e. cummings (1894-1962), Self Portrait (1958)
In complete fairness, I’m not as interested in e.e. cummings as in my story. Once I’d finished with my first Gerald Durrell book & mother realised I could handle that, she got me interested in other things, such as poetry. School managed to make me enthusiastic about reading playscripts later on. It was a simple trajectory really & I was an easy target. One of the poets I was given to read was cummings & of course, at a young age, you’re interested in how writers (or anyone) will subvert the language (or anything). Obviously NO CAPITALS as a policy was interesting. Come time, I’d also be like when writers messed with or omitted punctuation & form.
I’m realising this isn’t much of a story now as I’ve built it up, but the upshot was that when a teacher who had told my parents at a meeting that I’d fail Sixth Year Studies English once presented the class with e.e. cummings. The supercilious fool thought we’d all be amazed that a poet that wrote with NO CAPITALS would even get published & archly asked what on earth we thought was going on.
As witheringly as I could manage I replied, “Because it’s what he always does.”
The teacher was less sure of himself now. “Does what?” he wheedled through gritted teeth.
I may have sighed or I may have been pleased with the attention I was getting from my classmates.
“cummings doesn’t use capitals.” I definitely sighed then. “I’ve read a fair bit,” I sort of lied.
He looked at me with new, suspicious eyes but never tried to pull a fast one like that again.
Plus I passed SYS English so hahahaha.
Davie Levine (1926-2009), Portrait of Joseph Heller (1992)
Tom Bachtell, J.D. Salinger
For said SYS English I’d written some drivel in the form of a dissertation on the collapse of the American Dream. I compared two of my favourite books at the time, “Catch-22” & “The Catcher in the Rye” (lots of catching) to help make my point. I mean it probably was drivel, but once again I say, I PASSED.
Anyway, these portraits were two of the better artworks depicting Heller & Salinger in the form of cartoons/caricatures. Though very different in style, they do capture a likeness as well as attitude.
Leib Chigrin, Hermann Hesse
This vaguely Pop Art portrait is a clean, crisp depiction of a man of philosophies. As with other writers with at least one Big Idea such as Huxley or Pirsig, his appearance belies the esoteric & more mind-blowing aspects of his writing.
Frank Larson, Mark Twain (1935)
I’ve seen Mark Twain described as one of the most quotable writers of our age & they’re not talking about his books. What I like is there are umpteen photos of Twain with CATS & he says good things about CATS. I was struggling to find information about this painting & it might be a painting of a painting, I’m not sure…but the signature is on the work, so I’m going with this credit.
Esther Green (b. 1969), SK70 (2017)
Yes, once again I impudently include my own work but Stephen King has been a lifelong literary obsession. This was made as thanks on the occasion of his seventieth birthday.
Ralph Heimans (b. 1970), Margaret Atwood: “The Abysm of Time…” (The Tempest) (2016)
I was pretty late finding Margaret Atwood & I first started reading her work when Stephen King mentioned her in a speech – something else I can thank him for other than a lifetime of scares. Although this is a stunning painting, it does give me the feeling that she’s a potions teacher at Hogwart’s.
Louis le Brocquy (1916-2012), James Joyce (1981)
I’ve a strong hunch that le Brocquy painted this amazing piece from Joyce’s death mask, although there are other paintings clearly made from photographs. Le Brocquy’s was a style as unique as the writing style of his fellow countryman Joyce.
Federica Masini, Albert Camus
I’m also a fairly recent convert to Camus & I have to say, I’ve fallen hard. One fun thing to do whilst struggling with Covid, was to read “The Plague.” & when I say “fun,” I mean “terrifying.” Despite the book actually being about Nazi invasion, what happens to society & authority in the face of the plague was incredibly prescient. As for Albert, when someone dies so young, there are only so many existing reference photos for artists to use & this quickly becomes obvious when you do a search. I’ve not yet found a credit for the beautiful painting above. Artists have a tendency to make Albert look like James Dean or Humphrey Bogart, both of which are understandable from the available photographs…yet not quite right.
Alasdair Gray (1934-2019), James Kelman (1977)
Here we have two Scottish citizens who were friends, sharing politics, a city & a vision. One of Alasdair’s artistic devices was to use brown paper pasted on to white, which gave his drawings depth & a distinctive look. James’s books are deceptively simple in style but take the side of the underdog & the oppressed.
As
is likely the case for many of you, I'm walking that line between
trying to stay informed and not wanting to become uselessly depressed.
To that end I scrapped my original opening paragraph early Friday morning, just before sending this to publish. Not wanting to overly distract by references to the nearly daily revelations and underlinings from and surrounding the January 6th commission hearings, emphasizing and re-emphasizing how it came down to the actions of a few, principled people that ended up standing between us and Trump's coup. Nor wanting to dwell, here, on the various woundings handed down this week by the Conservative-packed U.S. Supreme Court. Now that they've dropped the bomb with the overturn of Roe v. Wade, I decided to at least add some version of my original opening back. Not as to drag the debates into a blog post on entertainment, but even just simply to time-stamp this piece. To give it the context of this historical backdrop.
That said, for now, we'll
dive into the potential entertainment.
(As ever, each link here pops open as a new screen, so you can take a look, close it, and you should end up back here.) There's
plenty to watch and be entertained by. At the moment it's almost an
embarrassment of riches even just with shows I've already written about
on recent Fridays. To
quickly hit some of the current/recent highlights, grouping them by
where they're streaming. If you have the service in question, check them
out. If you don't then make a note that they're there for you to check
out if you decide to take a free or reduced-cost trial period with that
streamer.
Amazon Prime: The Boys
(Fridays) hyper-violence and twisted sexual elements abound, but it can
also be entertaining and engaging, with more than a little contemporary
social commentary. This week's episode, "Herogasm", is particularly
twisted. Easily NSFW, or pretty much anywhere. The
most recent bit of fun and puzzlement with the series, though, have been
various reports of right-leaning fans flipping out upon realizing what
pretty much any rational person knew from the get-go: Homelander's the
central villain of the piece. Extremely
dangerous, powerful narcissist who realized he gets even more popular
with a given demographic the more he self-aggrandizes, talks about
violent resolutions to conflicts, and runs un-apologetically roughshod
over anyone in his path -- it all seems oddly familiar, doesn't it? FX/Hulu: The Old Man
(Thursday nights on FX, on Hulu the following day). I enjoyed the heck
out of the first two episodes last week, and am looking forward to this
week's. Jeff Bridges and John Lithgow head a solid cast. This includes
flashback scene performances by Bill Heck and Christopher Redman as
Bridges and Lithgow's characters, respectively, 30 years ago; Heck's
gotten Bridges' mannerisms down, and Redman does a superb job of
Lithgow's cadence. While at the time I didn't have much more to go on than the trailer, I first mentioned it back on the 10th. This first season will be seven episodes, so after this week we'll still have four to go. Disney+: Ms. Marvel
(Wednesdays) Certainly there will be some limited appeal, especially if
one's uninterested in or just feeling glutted by comics-derived,
costumed content, but so far they've done a nice job of bringing a
modern, teen- and family-centered show with a culturally-diverse cast in
a way that helps expand representation but still manages to feel oddly
relatable to a 61 year-old, white dude. We're all looking for friends
and a place in the world. Paramount+:
The star attraction there for me this week was the recently-wrapped,
10-part dramatization of what went in to getting a screen adaptation of Mario Puzo's The Godfather
made. Centered on Al Ruddy, a former computer programmer for The Rand
Corporation who wanted to make something happen with his life, he angled
his way into the entertainment biz. A deserving brand of chutzpah
that's a combination of balls and brains. It's The Offer. I'd
held off on watching it until all parts were available, and having
binged through it in about three sessions I'm very happy I waited to
have it all handy. It's a stirring tale, well-told, and full of
characters nearly all of whom are or were very much real people, and
every bit as colorful. (Among the main cast there's only one character
who turns out to be an amalgam of various people.) Outside of the
actors, several of the behind-the-scenes people I knew about before, but
others were mostly new to me, and I enjoyed researching some of them --
mostly after the fact. It's worth it even just to start to dig into
producer Robert Evans
(played with mesmerizing intensity by Matthew Goode) and his deservedly
deeply-storied career. If you watch, let it run through the credits at
the end of each episode and watch the few minutes they take
deconstructing some elements of the episode you just watched. Paramount +
also has The Godfather movies, too, so you can roll into them -- well,
at least the first two -- sometime after having lived through the fight
to make that first one.
AMC/AMC+: A crime thriller centered on a Navajo reservation, set in 1971. It's Dark Winds. That was one of the shows I mentioned last week.
New episodes land Sunday nights on AMC, and if you have AMC the cable
provider likely has an On Demand access to past episodes. You'll need
that, because AMC is clearly pushing this as part of their AMC+ content,
so - unlike, say, the Walking Dead shows, where they'll frequently
rerun earlier episodes during the week, giving ample opportunities to
catch up, they pretty much run and rerun that week's episode only, then
move on to the next. This is combined with them always letting you know
that you could be watching the next episode now, rather than having to
wait a week, if only you were an AMC+ subscriber. The
AMC marketing schemes aside, I've been enjoying it so far and was
pleased to see this week that the response had been strong enough
they've already renewed it for season two. Given all of the novels they
have to draw on, this could have serious legs.
Netflix: Also part of what was mentioned last week, is the much-anticipated return of The Umbrella Academy, back with its third season. Between bring busy and so fully drawn-in to The Offer
(see above) -- and having semi-trapped my OCD self by having started a
rewatch of show from the start (about 70% through season one) I've
surprised myself by not having dived in to the new material yet. Still,
the weekend's here, and I'll likely fold soon.
Newly-arrived on Disney+ is the Marvel's most recent big screen addition, Doctor Strange In the Multiverse of Madness
(2022 PG-13 2h 6m), which had hit U.S. screens back on May 6th, so
pretty close to the rumored 45 day span between theatrical release and
arrival on Disney+. As someone who's not only steeped in most of the
source material (severe gaps with much of the newer print material,
though), but closer to home is up on the movies and Disney+ series, it's
obvious that with each new item in the past year or so it's gotten a
little less accessible to casual and first-time viewers. I'm not sure
what someone who hadn't seen Spider-man: No Way Home and Disney+'s WandaVision
series would make of some of the details and references, for instance.
That's the trick of continuity, as while it invests the long-term fan
ever more deeply in a series -- or, in this case, a universe of
characters -- it potentially dissuades others from jumping on board
because they're wrestling with the desire to know it from the ground up,
but to do so presents them with an every-growing stack of homework.
This movie is formally the 28th feature film in the Marvel Cinematic
Universe, stretching back to 2008's Iron Man. That alone would be
daunting to anyone approaching it, and in the past two years Disney+
has been pumping out series that are woven directly into the same
tapestry has a growing number of series to take in if they want to be up
to date on it. The marketing aim is not only to
get fans to line up for each new theatrical release, but to see the
Disney+ subscription as essential. It would be all nearly perfect -
well-curated in various ways - if not for the messy legacy of the
long-lasting effects of some rather old business deals made by Marvel
years before the House of Mouse gobbled them up. For now, at least, this
means that Disney+ gives someone access to most of it, but (for now)
that doesn't include the MCU-connected Incredible Hulk (2008) nor the three most recent Spider-Man films starring Tom Holland. They're working on that, though. Anyway, since the outbreak of COVID-19 I've only gotten out to see a couple films in theaters, and
those
weeks after they premiered, hitting particularly ill-attended weekday
showings. I'm still not anywhere near the comfort level of looking to
get back into a theater with more than a well-scattered handful of
strangers. This Dr. Strange sequel was one of those, though. While
undeniably a Marvel film, it's also very much a Sam Raimi one, with a
restrained form of his brand of horror imagery. I enjoyed it well
enough, though the past two years have seen me get very accustomed to
watching things at home, where I have the captions on, can pause the
film, and generally be much more comfortable. I was getting a little
antsy in the old-style stadium seats at the Regal where I watched it.
I'm looking forward to giving it a rewatch at home, where I'm expecting I'll be more focused on it. The next MCU film will be Taika Waititi's Thor: Love & Thunder,
set to formally land less than two weeks from now, on July 8th. I
suspect that'll be another weekday matinee affair for me after it's been
out for a little. I continue to play that by ear. I doubt I'll just
wait until (presumably) late September for it to arrive on Disney+. These days I think the thing I miss most about going out to the movies is going to see something new with someone. At home I think that for the most part it's a mercy for all potential parties that I'm taking in most of what I am solo - the past dozen years in particular have spoiled me such that joint tv viewing decisions and sleep schedules alone be issues to kill the domestic arrangement (or one of the participants) - but going out the movies, it's considerably less than half the fun doing that alone. This weekend (Sunday) HBO sees the return of the sci-fi series Westworld,
back for its fourth season. This reminds me that I eventually have much
catching up to do. When the series began early October 2016 I was
largely bowled over by the overall quality - everything from the
performances and explorations of what we identify as human behavior and
recognize as intelligence, to the musical score - and continued to watch
through that first season, even as our own, so-called real world took
dark and surreal turns. That season ended on interesting notes, but for
whatever reasons, when it returned in late April two years later,
repeated attempts to climb aboard that second season failed for me. It
was a weird thing, as if the content refused to load in my head despite,
technically, watching it. So, I set it aside for some other time, and
am yet to get back to it. For those of you who're caught up, here's the
trailer for the new season: I
know I neglected to do it last week, too, but I haven't lined up
suitable free film to recommend either because it's simply good or it's
bad enough for the excesses or deficiencies to be an entertainment on
its own. When next we get together it'll be July 1st! How did that happen?! - Mike
Happy Thursday, everyone! It's a misty day here in Richmond after a day of quick thunderstorms where we had 80 MPH wind gusts, which is really exciting to watch from my home office window. I took a trip back to Chicago last weekend and hit a bunch of my favorite thrift stores, so I have actual stuff to talk about this week!
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If you've never seen The Great Dictator, a quick recap; a Jewish barber in a fictional country, 20 years after a losing war, ends up swapping places accidentally with a rising dictator who looks exactly like him and who is trying to consolidate power and rule with an iron fist over his European country. Oh, and he has this little moustache. So yep, Chaplin is...well, he's playing Hitler and savagely mocking him at a time (1940) when the US was still technically not at war with Germany and there was still a decent amount of brownshirt support for Hitler in the USA. So yeah, it's a big swing. And what a swing this is, Chaplin's most commercially successful movie and one that never stints on the satire and emotion while also at times being legitimately lovely and funny as hell. If you've never seen it, this absolutely should be a priority.
Part of the reason I picked this up was this fantastic cover, which you can flip and it works either way. Olly Moss is a fantastic graphic designer known best for his reimagining of movie posters and I simply love his work. For instance, his posters for Star Wars I-III.
The Great Dictator is currently streaming on HBO Max, the Criterion Channel and Kanopy.
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One of the things that Criterion has been doing, outside of their usual one-movie sets, have been their interesting Eclipse sets, which are more themed around a certain director or studio or theme. This set is all new to me, since somehow I have only seen Ingrid Bergman's acting work in her Italian and US movies. I've always loved her work and I'm very curious to see more of it in her native language. In particular, The Count of the Old Town is her first speaking role and I'm very curious to see her in a purely comic role. It looks light and charming.
These all appear to be available on The Criterion Channel.
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The other Eclipse set I found, When Horror Came To Shochiku, is the product of a very weird, brief period in the history of Japanese film studio Shochiku, which is one of the oldest of the Japanese film studios (and predates film, having started as a kabuki production company). For a long time in their history they were kind of...stately. Ozu was their showpiece director, for instance. It's like one studio distributed all of the Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala films, for instance. But for this very brief period, they got onboard with '60s Japan schlock and made magic. Here is where I'm going to use Criterion's blurb for it, because I can't do any better:
Following years of a certain radioactive beast’s domination at the box office, many Japanese studios tried to replicate the formula with their own brands of monster movies. One of the most fascinating, if short-lived, dives into that fiendish deep end was the one by Shochiku, a studio better known for elegant dramas by the likes of Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujiro Ozu. In 1967 and 1968, the company created four certifiably batty, low-budget fantasies, tales haunted by watery ghosts, plagued by angry insects, and stalked by aliens—including one in the form of a giant chicken-lizard. Shochiku’s outrageous and oozy horror period shows a studio leaping into the unknown, even if only for one brief, bloody moment.
I've seen half of these movies so far. The X From Outer Space is a lot of goofy Japanese 1967 sci-fi fun where a spore comes back from a mission to Mars (one that has stewardesses and a frankly popping '60s lounge music soundtrack and, well, of course it becomes a kaiju and attacks a random city. It's a ton of fun and a very Saturday afternoon movie.
But WOW, Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell. This movie is insane in all the right ways and if you told me this was a favorite of Takashi Miike (Audition, Zebraman) I would not be surprised at all. A plane has to crash land somewhere remote and the crew and passengers slowly find themselves possessed by an alien force. It gets gross and grisly and weird and I cannot recommend it enough.
These are also on the Criterion Channel! I love that they've embraced the weird and schlock a bit.
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My recommendation this week is an odd one. Jenny Nicholson is a very accomplished YouTuber who delivers deep-dive essays on pop culture subjects, sometimes celebratory and sometimes annoyed about them. She took some time off this last year and then last night made a triumphant return with this look at the weirdly well-done Easter plays/musicals from a Canadian megachurch, many of them saved on the Internet on all their copyright-violating glory (and I'm not talking about other people; I'm talking how much the church uses pop culture references and apes character names, costumes, scenes, songs and it's all amazing). It's about 90 minutes, which might seem long, but I cannot recommend this enough. Especially the part where Iron Man gets crucified by Loki.
Washington
D.C., June 17, 1972. A group of men age caught breaking in to the
Watergate Hotel. J. Edgar Hoover had just died, leaving a power vacuum in the
FBI, and Nixon was facing reelection.
Turmoil is
everywhere and it would have been so easy for editors at the Washington
Post to simply turn away a story on something as insignificant as a
burglary. Except. The Democratic National Offices were the units being
burgled inside the Watergate Hotel.
So would begin a
set of career-making stories by a duo who are the proverbial Odd Couple.
Woodward was well-connected with an honorable discharge from the Navy.
Neat, tidy, and logical to a fault, Woodward's sniff test was key to any
story the pair would write together. Bernstein had worked his way up
from a copy boy to a reporter's desk. He rode his bicycle in to the
office most days, and was the impulsive one who jumped on leads.
Both
young men were cunning, suave even, when the situation called for it.
And it definitely took the both of them working together to uncover
what they did.
I first tried to read this book more
than a decade ago, and set it aside after the events covered in the
Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman film. I just did not have a lot of the
context to know who was whom and why this other person was a big deal.
This time I had a U.S. history course that used Billy Joel's "We Didn't
Start the Fire" as a syllabus. I also had all of this great information
fresh in my head from fellow Washington Post reporter Betty Medgar's The Burglary. I had so many of the names and positions in my head it
was easier for me to know what was going on, and to pick up some nuance
of the situation.
This book I would reccommend to
anyone with an interest in 1970's America, Richard Nixon, or even the writers of The
Washington Post. It was definitely written for the folks who lived
through it. If you're only an honorary child of the 70's like me, you
may have a difficult time.
I've got a long-term creative history project going which has a heavy emphasis on the 1940s. And there's really no way to sidestep the Second World War, which affected the lives of millions, here and abroad. So when I came across this bundle of "classics' for $1 per disc for a four-disc set, I bit. I thought people might find it interesting if I dug up a few trailers based on the list on the back of the box.
The set includes a couple of films from the "Why We Fight" series, starting with the first one, "Prelude to War."
The Library of Congress has a good article on the "Why We Fight" series, and you can find that HERE.
I was pleased to encounter "Report from the Aleutians." Like many people, most of the Second World War campaigns and battles I know are from Western Europe, with a bit about Italy thrown in. But this was true global warfare, and to do an accurate historical survey, I need to know the places in the world where people of the 1040s were taken via newspaper, radio, and newsreels.
Another film from Capra's "Why We Fight" series: The Battle of China. Since my creative project concentrates on the years 1938 to 1952, this topic is of particular interest to me. The struggles with China would continue after the Second World War, when troops went to Korea.
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