As we’ll no doubt be reminded when we see Amelia, which opens today, biopics are often a bummer. Just once I’d like to see the plane not crash, or the assassin miss, or Andy Kaufman not die of cancer. It can get depressing.
Still, I have a soft spot for these films. When an actor truly embodies the familiar figure who’s being, er, biopicked, there’s no doubt it can be riveting; I could watch Meryl Streep make boeuf bourguignon all day long. And biopics can even be fascinating when things go wrong, in a Bobby-Darin-must-be-rolling-over-in-his-grave kind of way.
I thought I’d revisit a few of both kinds in order to mentally prepare myself for the moment when Hilary Swank goes down over the Pacific. By the way, if I’m already dead when they begin looking for someone to play me in the story of my life, please tell them: definitely Zac Efron.
Since it was actually snowing (!) the day it came in the mail, I thought it only appropriate to offer a few remarks about the Bob Dylan holiday album, Christmas in the Heart. Actually, consider it a warning.
No, not that it’s bad – in fact, I think I may (dare I say?) love it, like a child loves a new toy or Santa loves figgy pudding. But I feel an obligation to warn you that if you don’t like the throaty croak of Dylan’s last few albums, this one may leave you scratching your head even more than this year’s Together Through Life. OK, much more.
Personally, I’m on the record as being a proponent of Dylan’s singing; his voice may be unconventional (OK, shot), but what he does with that battered old instrument never ceases to amaze me – think Clapton playing the hell out of an ancient, out-of-tune Stratocaster. And his recent material benefits from the weathered feel of his vocals, much more than his old nasally whine adapted to his less-than-well-remembered ’80s work.
But does Bob’s gravelly voice go with Christmas? Yes, there are times when it sounds patently, hilariously ridiculous, but for the most part, to me, it seems heartfelt, nostalgic, mournful, hopeful and funny – actually, sometimes all at once. Unlike some other holiday albums from singers with more traditional (read: good) voices, he seems to really be feeling “The Christmas Blues,” not just showing off his pipes. (more…)
One thing you learn pretty early on in Springsteen saxophonist Clarence Clemons’ memoir Big Man(Grand Central Publishing, 400 pages, $26.99, Oct. 21) is that you’re not going to be reading any of the real juicy stuff.
“Maybe I’ll write a book that has all the sex-and-drugs stories from the early years and publish it after all of us are dead,” Clemons writes. “Nah, I can’t do that either, ’cause now all of us have kids and grandkids.”
But beyond the fact that you know a lot got left out of Big Man — a nickname Clemons says came not from Springsteen but from a little old lady in Bloomingdale’s — there’s another complicating factor: A lot of the stuff in it never even happened. Clemons and his writing partner Don Reo label a good number of the chapters “Legends,” and promise that those sections include “some fact and a lot of fiction.” It’s unorthodox, but just think of the trouble James Frey could have saved himself if he’d included the same warning.
Still, you’ve got to read between a lot of lines to get the complete picture of Clarence Clemons from Big Man, since the way it’s written relies less on historical fact and more on the personality of its subject. Fortunately, Clemons has plenty of that to spare. (more…)
Brian Setzer doesn’t want your money. That’s the only possible explanation for all the banjo-plucking, yodeling, classical noodling and other activities guaranteed to keep his songs off the radio, not to mention most other places where people find music these days.
Setzer could have disappeared into the sunset after the Stray Cats went to that great feline rescue center in the sky, but he succeeded against all odds with his Brian Setzer Orchestra, first riding the unlikely swing craze of the mid-’90s and then with this decade’s Christmas records and tours. His most successful non-holiday effort remains 1998’s The Dirty Boogie, probably because that record stayed mostly true to his rockabilly roots while still swinging like a runaway big-band freight train.
Since then he’s experimented more – with hip-hop rhythms on Vavoom!(2000), and classical compositions on Wolfgang’s Big Night Out (2007) – and if record buyers haven’t responded as enthusiastically, Setzer certainly seems to be having a grand old time. But he takes a slightly darker turn on his orchestra’s latest, Songs from Lonely Avenue (Surfdog).
The first BSO album to feature all Setzer originals, the bandleader says he envisioned it as the soundtrack to an unwritten 1940s or ‘50s film noir – but listening to it, it’s not just a soundtrack. It’s the whole darn movie. (more…)
Michael Moore’s latest, Capitalism: A Love Story, opens around the country today, and if the early reviews are any indication, it’s yet another cleverly executed and scathing reminder of how we’re all … wait, let me check my notes … ah, yes — majorly screwed. Taken as a whole, the Moore oeuvre seems dedicated to the concept that before we die we’ll all be laid off, betrayed by our government, shot, burdened by lousy, expensive heath care, and cheated out of our tax dollars and retirement funds, possibly all at once.
Moore’s latest is of course aimed at the business titans of Wall Street who let us have it twice, first by ruining our economy, then by wheeling and dealing the government into ponying up billions in public money so they could get started on ruining it again. I’m sure Capitalism is well executed but no doubt depressing, at least for those of us not on the receiving end of the aforementioned billions. I prefer my cinematic big business to be the fictional kind, where greed may be good but Michael Douglas still goes to white-collar jail at the end, or is at least sexually harassed by Demi Moore. Mrowr!
With that in mind, patch in to my conference call as I review my 300-slide PowerPoint presentation on five random business flicks that deserve the key to the executive washroom.
Jennifer’s Body, the first script of Diablo Cody’s to be produced since she won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for 2007’s Juno, opens today. It’s about a cheerleader played by Megan Fox who’s possessed by demons from hell and wreaks bloody carnage upon her male classmates. In other words, it’s about high school.
Of course there’s no shortage of movies that portray high school as a kind of hell on earth, both literally (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and figuratively (Election, Heathers, every movie to ever star Ally Sheedy). But in honor of Jennifer’s Body, I thought I’d re-enroll in a few other, more random cinematic high schools, if only to remind myself how happy I am to have left the real thing behind all those years ago.
Which reminds me — if I ever see the inside of a locker again, it’ll be too soon.
My Bodyguard (1980):Pre-adolescence is a very impressionable time for a young moviegoer. For some reason, two movies stand out from that period of my life. One is 1979’s Meatballs, which introduced me to “It just doesn’t matter!,” a mantra I probably leaned on a little too often in subsequent years. The other is My Bodyguard.
The Chicago high school that Clifford (Chris Makepeace) attends in that film is pretty tough, in that all it takes to get you roughed up by Matt Dillon’s Mike Moody and his cronies is to show up at school in a hotel limo. And having Ruth Gordon as your grandma back at home — or at least at the hotel where you live — only helps so much.
Fortunately for Clifford, he has Randy, the loner who may or may not have killed his own brother. Randy’s played by Adam Baldwin, who isn’t related to all those other Baldwins, which is a huge advantage in this particular role. Seems to me Clifford and Randy have one of the great movie friendships, and I’d go so far as to place the scene where Moody gets his as one of the top-five movie comeuppances. At least among those not involving an automatic weapon.
It’s worth noting that director Tony Bill also coproduced The Sting, which featured another great cinematic friendship but didn’t showcase Joan Cusack sporting the biggest hair of her career. So I’ll take this one.
The Open Road, starring Justin Timberlake and Jeff Bridges as an estranged son and father who struggle to reconnect during a cross-country trip to visit Timberlake’s ailing mother, opens in limited release today. Sure, it sounds like a downer, until you consider that the next road movie coming out is October’s The Road, where Viggo Mortensen plays a father struggling to protect his son from cannibals in postapocalyptic America. Suddenly the Timberlake flick seems pretty rompy!
The Open Road is a dramedy, supposedly, but I usually like my road movies to have a little more whimsy in the engine. You know what I mean — they should have things like bears in Studebakers and phantom truck drivers and Paul Giamatti freaking out like a tightly wound wallaby. With that in mind, hop in and let’s take a ride down the Random Road Movie Highway.
The Muppet Movie (1979): I wouldn’t know what to think about somebody who doesn’t love The Muppet Movie, other than that he or she is probably a sociopath. In fact, that’s the first question the authorities should ask suspected serial killers: Do you love The Muppet Movie? If the answer is no — BAM! Throw away the key.
The Muppet Movie — directed by TV veteran James Frawley, who, frankly, Jim Henson should’ve kept around for the rest of the Muppet movies — is a lot of things: a musical, a comedy, and the best repository of cameo appearances since It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963), but at its heart it’s a road movie. It’s even — dare I say it — an odyssey. (And unlike It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, which I suppose could fit the same description, it’s aged beautifully. Even the Hare Krishna bits are still funny.)
This week will see the release of The Time Traveler’s Wife, a movie about a man with a genetic disorder that causes him to time travel involuntarily, and the problems that causes for his marriage. I say, if your genes are turning you into a time traveler, your marriage is the least of your problems. I’d be worried about what other genes I had wandering around in there, and whether any of them might cause me to turn into a dinosaur or a walking nuclear reactor, which seems equally feasible. No matter what happened, I’d blame exposure to cleaning products.
Regardless, it joins a fine tradition of time travel movies, which all share one remarkable characteristic: If you think about them too much, your brain will explode. (Which is not necessarily unique to time travel films – I find I have the same problem with Meg Ryan movies.) Still, it’s a worthy genre; if you don’t believe me, go back in time and review these classic examples.
12 Monkeys (1995): Would it be going out on a limb to call this the last great time-travel movie? OK, how about the last great Bruce Willis movie (the one with the dead people notwithstanding)?
Willis had quite a trifecta in 1994-’95 with Pulp Fiction, Nobody’s Fool, and then this film, which strikes just the right note of off-kilter paranoia and impending, unchangeable doom that marks more than a few sci-fi classics. I mean, it’s nice that Marty McFly winds up rich with better-looking parents, but wouldn’t that movie have been even better if he’d caused the whole planet to be wiped out by a killer virus? Wait, scratch that — then we wouldn’t have had the sequels.
More than 25 years ago, Steven Spielberg and a talented group of puppeteers and craftsman worked painstakingly for months to create E.T. the Extraterrestrial, who would become perhaps the most beloved non-human movie character of all time. If those people knew that their efforts would eventually lead to Aliens in the Attic, they would have probably just given up and done a sequel to 1941 instead.
Now, I have not seen Aliens in the Attic yet; I say “yet” because it strikes me as one of those movies my kids might convince me to take them to in a weak moment, like on a Sunday afternoon after it’s been raining for days and there stands a good chance that if we don’t leave the house, someone will actually commit violence.
But even if it’s not a pained, derivative cross between E.T. and Gremlins (my God, I think I just channeled the pitch meeting), I still say there are plenty of other aliens-among-us movies that are probably better – even if they’re worse. Here are just five:
There is a new Harry Potter movie out this week, which millions of fans are extremely excited about, even though they’ve all read the books and know exactly what’s going to happen. Also, they don’t seem to mind that it’s based on the one that was mostly flashbacks, meaning there’s less Harry than in the other movies – although we do get to see young Dumbledore, who, rumor has it, looks exactly like Chris Pine.
I’ve read all the books, and one thing I enjoyed about them was the way J.K. Rowling wove the world of magic so cleverly in with our own. Somehow, the wizardry practiced and taught at Hogwarts seems to make logical sense – it propels the story while at the same time serving as a sharp satire of academia, and as an added plus it steers unsuspecting young readers toward godless occult practices. Wait, wasn’t that the idea?
Regardless, in the Harry Potter films, such a rich and layered portrayal of the existence of magic is unusual for cinema – mainly because the role magic usually plays in movies is, of course, the handy plot device. With that in mind, here’s another look at five movies that, if it weren’t for magic, would have ended after 12 minutes. (And in some cases, we would have been better off.) (more…)
As we’ll no doubt be reminded when we see Amelia, which opens today, biopics are often a bummer. Just once I’d like to see the plane not crash, or the assassin miss, or Andy Kaufman not die of cancer. It can get depressing.
Since it was actually snowing (!) the day it came in the mail, I thought it only appropriate to offer a few remarks about the Bob Dylan holiday album, 
One thing you learn pretty early on in Springsteen saxophonist Clarence Clemons’ memoir 
Brian Setzer doesn’t want your money. That’s the only possible explanation for all the banjo-plucking, yodeling, classical noodling and other activities guaranteed to keep his songs off the radio, not to mention most other places where people find music these days.
Michael Moore’s latest, 
This week will see the release of 
More than 25 years ago, Steven Spielberg and a talented group of puppeteers and craftsman worked painstakingly for months to create 
There is a 