People love a contrast in proportions. That’s why so many great comedy teams consist of a fat guy and a skinny guy. And that’s why some entertainment stories have legs and some don’t. When a big-budget summer tentpole picture makes fistfuls of money, it’s of interest primarily only to the investors — it’s not a story of cultural importance. Same thing when a modest little indie movie underperforms at the box office; that’s business as usual. When your no-name indie quirkfest rakes in mad cash, though, it’s a heartwarming underdog story. And that’s nice. But when your super-ambitious would-be blockbuster goes down the hopper, maybe taking the studio with it — now that’s a story that people want to hear. Waterworld, Heaven’s Gate, Ishtar — these are films that have become legends, cited as cautionary tales by people who often haven’t seen a single frame of them.
Now, I have seen Delgo, to my sorrow — a movie which seems destined for a place in the same malefic pantheon — and while I have neither interest nor the expertise to discuss the financial implications of the movie, I do have to say: It’s ambitious, all right. Hugely so. You can see where all the money went. And you can also see exactly why it tanked. Delgo is a movie brimming with ideas, every one of them utterly boneheaded. It is that rare film whose aesthetic failure is nigh-absolute. There’s a horrified fascination to the spectacle, as you think of the smart, highly-skilled, well-intentioned people who made it, certain that they were leaving their mark on film history, that they were trailblazers, pioneers — and that the end result could be so fundamentally Wrong, in so many ways. All that hard work and talent, expended to create something so butt-ugly and unlikeable and morally dubious; forty million dollars to create a bold, exciting, immersive new world that looks like nothing so much as a series of screen caps from Fate. The sheer scale of the self-delusion is breathtaking. (more…)
It’s barely gone September as I write this, but already in the place where I live the nights are growing cold. The sun, which all summer long took its sweet time to slide away behind the hills at the close of day, drops now like a quarter into a jukebox. Autumn is not here yet, but it’s close enough that it’s time to think about taking the boots and the barn coat out of storage. It’s time to think about building some cold frames and covering the garden. It’s time again to play Acadie.
Marking Daniel Lanois’s recorded debut as a singer-songwriter after serving production duties on some of the biggest records of the ’80s, Acadie was largely unencumbered with the weight of expectation. Oh, it was a given that the thing would sound great, would be charged with the same blend of ethereal atmosphere and smoky groove that characterized Lanois’s work with U2, the Neville Brothers, Robbie Robertson, Peter Gabriel, and Bob Dylan — projects that saw Lanois becoming, in effect, a member of the band. But as anyone who ever paid full price for a Davitt Sigerson album will tell you, it’s no good being the name above the title if you haven’t got the songs to back it up. And it’s the songs that make Acadie such an endearing (and enduring) record. (more…)
My head jerks so hard that the pencil falls out from behind my ear. “Jesus Fuck,” I splutter. “You’re fucking dying? Fuck, Yancey — ”
“Naaah,” she says. “I just haven’t got time. You know, for the book. Good thing it’s a quick read.”
She smirks. Last thing I need is Yancey giving me a hard time. But she’s a fictional character I created to act as an interlocutor for my review of Joe Pernice’s debut novel It Feels So Good When I Stop, so there’s not much I can do about it.
I’m a sheep at the card table, just waiting to be fleeced. I’ve got no poker face, for starters — everything comes out in the eyebrows, and in the smirk I simply cannot erase. Add in a general fogginess on the actual rules of most card games, and you can see how I’d spend a rainy afternoon getting fearsomely bluffed by a five-year old in multiple hands of I Doubt It.
But as a writer, I’m in love with the language, with the music of the games, with double down and shoot the moon, with five-card charleys and busted flushes and inside straights, with one-eyed jacks and suicide kings. There’s romance in that language, and it has run like an underground river through folk and popular song for centuries before Lady GaGa was born.
Something that you might not guess about me (or maybe you would; you ‘re an exceptionally clever bunch) is that I loves me some Jesus. I try not to be an asshole about it — I’ve got no use for WWJD wristbands or cruciform bling or “John 3:16” bumper stickers, and I regard faith and science as, in Stephen Jay Gould’s lovely phrase, “non-overlapping magisteria.” But I do spend time thinking about virtue, and about living with kindness and humility, and I find my Christian practice to be a useful roadmap in that regard. No big deal.
Obviously, I’m not one of that stripe who shun “secular media” out of some need or desire to exist within a bubble of cultural product that only confirms my religious beliefs. It’s fair to say, though, that I have a pretty high tolerance for overtly Christian content in pop culture, and that a lot of my favorite movies and much of my favorite music tend toward the overtly spiritual. The Mission, for instance, still moves me to tears after 23 years and countless viewings. (more…)
A friend of mine, listening to an embryonic version of this mix — a sort of imaginary soundtrack to The Originals, the graphic novel by Dave Gibbons — described it as being “Ready Steady Go! in Hell.” And I thought; Yeah, I can work with that.
In a way, this was meant to be the missing half of my Hannah Montana piece from some months back. Astute readers pointed out that my take on the multi-hyphenate one-woman omnimedia engine phenomenon was incomplete, because it skipped any analysis of the teenpop music that ostensibly drives that engine. Now, obviously, Ashley Tisdale is Ashley Tisdale and Hannah Montana is, well, Miley Cyrus — but it’s Ashley Tisdale who recently dropped a new and much-hyped album, Guilty Pleasure, so it is she who goes under the lens today.
A late-inning defensive substitution? Sure. But Tisdale is something of a professional second-stringer anyway. Before her star turn in the straight-to-the-B-list Aliens in the Attic, she specialized in wacky sidekick roles, most notably on Disney Channel’s Suite Life [sic] of Zack & Cody, where she was billed below the Sprouse twins, talent-free muppets whose adorability quotient — never particularly high — has plummeted with encroaching adolescence. She’s best known as the would-be diva Sharpay Evans in the High School Musical series, playing comic foil to the earnest, dull lovebirds Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens. Notionally, she’s the Rose Marie of Disney Channel (which would make Corbin Bleu its Morey Amsterdam, I suppose).
I’ll be honest with you — the High School Musical movies are a hell of a lot more fun than they have any business being (thanks, in part, to Robbie Nevil’s songs), and Tisdale is pretty terrific in them. She’s an able comedic actress, nailing Sharpay’s essential comic paradox — she’s both vapid and scheming — with nimble timing. To the standard of The New California Beauty as laid down by the likes of Paris Hilton and Hayden Panettiere (i.e., salon blonde, orange tan, squishy nose and a general softness that renders her cute rather than actually pretty), the Tiz adds a pleasing mobility and expressiveness, along with a willingness to pull goofy faces. (more…)
My usual modus operandi with this column — and the reason why its title is phrased as a question — is to look for signs of quality in cultural products for which I have no reasonable expectation of finding it. I’m not even necessarily expecting that Hannah Montana DVD to be bad — I’m just not expecting it to be very good. My hope is always to be pleasantly surprised. Oh, I hear the same word-of-mouth that you all do, and I know the received wisdom as well as anyone else; but usually I can shrug them off and try to approach the work with an open mind, hoping against hope for something good.
There are times, though, when my own prior experiences lead me to approach my subject with a pre-existing anticipation of its crapulence, and that shit is hard to shake. Such is the case with Star Trek: The Animated Series, released in 2006 in a handsome boxed edition, which I have just re-encountered for the first time since seeing it in its original run. (more…)
If we have learned one thing from the Senate hearings surrounding the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court, it is that years of pandering to the worst instincts of its base have left the Republican congressional delegation with no guiding principles save for free-floating xenophobia and an aggrieved sense of entitlement. If we have learned two things from the Senate hearings surrounding the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court, the other one is that a compelling biography in itself is no substitute for excellence in one’s chosen field. It’s the latter point that I want to look at this week, particularly as it relates to Happy Returns, the upcoming album by London-based punk-popper Livan, which is — let’s get this out of the way right now — currently rockin’ my world down to a nub. (more…)
Marking 
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