No time for love, Dr. Jones. The fakes await! As I mentioned last week, this post is devoted to the cinematic musical alter egos (and some non-cinematic ones as well) and as Jon Cummings mentioned last week, he did it first. Undaunted, I’m sending my posse over to his abode to knock ‘im into shape. Yes, my posse consists of a penguin, a rabbit and a cat that has used up one too many lives.
So Opus, Bill and all the rest never made it to the movies, but they should have, and considering how bankrupt Hollywood is for ideas, they may yet get there someday. In the meantime, we have volumes of Berke Breathed’s Bloom Countycomic strips and a flexi-disc with two of Billy and the Boingers’ (formerly Deathtongue) “hits.” “I’m a Boinger” is rather hard on the ears, the kind of sledgehammer comedy fans used to send to the Dr. Demento show after listening to too much “Weird Al” Yankovic. “U Stink But I Love U,” on the other hand, is obnoxious, but was performed by the very real hardcore band Mucky Pup. They even got the tuba in, so big points for that.
Last week, I gave credit to Bill Nighy for singing his parts in the film Still Crazy. This week, I’m doing the same for Hugh Grant. What an insane world we live in. Having never seen the film Music and Lyrics(2007), all I knew about it was that Grant played a former pop star from a band (loosely modeled on Wham!) called PoP! His forte was the music, but now as a writer for hire, he’s contracted to create a hit tune for rising pop music starlet and he’s in need of a lyricist. Enter Drew Barrymore, a lyricist on the rise. The rest is rom-com history. Now, there was no need for Grant to sing on the soundtrack, as I think an audience would have given him that latitude. I mean, it’s Hugh Grant. He’s not a singer and nobody really expects anything at all from him. To my shock, “PoP Goes My Heart” is a rather faithful approximation of ’80s synth-pop and I have to offer my apologies. What I will not apologize for is a Wiki blurb indicating David Hasselhoff covered the song and had a hit in Germany with it. I’m calling Bravo Sierra on that one… (more…)
Hey, you! You dig the Beatles, right? ‘course you do! That’s because you belong to some subset of the umbrella group Human Being With A Soul. So, enjoying the music of the Fab Four as you do, you rushed right out to theaters to catch director Julie Taymor’s gonzo Beatles fantasia Across the Universe, right? ‘course you didn’t! That’s because you also belong to some subset of the umbrella classification The Movie-Going Public; and nobody from that demographic appears to have bought a ticket.
Well, not exactly nobody. The movie, which cost $45 million to make, did a worldwide gross of $25 million, playing on les than a thousand US screens at the height of its release. So, at a guess, it managed to scare up an audience of terrifying Beatles lifestylers, the friends and families of its cast and crew, and possibly Ringo (although he’s been pretty busy of late, apparently). Peter Frampton was allegedly ejected from a matinee engagement for shouting at the screen: “Ha! It’s not so easy, is it?”
You see, Across the Universe is an attempt to uncover — or impose — a narrative thread on a string of beloved standalone pop songs. Or, as the DVD box coyly puts it, avoiding the B-word altogether, “Within the lyrics of the world’s most famous songs lives a story that has never been told… until now.” It’s a bit like Mamma Mia, or (God help us) that legendary, coke-addled career-killer that was 1978’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band.
It would be bad form to speculate on what kind of drugs Julie Taymor is on, but she is surely possessed of the kind of batshit visual imagination that gets a director labeled as “visionary.” She came out of experimental theater before being tapped to bring Disney’s The Lion King to Broadway; that show was a commercial and artistic triumph, assimilating the techniques of the avant-garde — masks, puppetry, mime — into a mainstream family entertainment. Her first film, Titus, was a bloody, perverse revenge tragedy with eye-popping visuals. (more…)
So Opus, Bill and all the rest never made it to the movies, but they should have, and considering how bankrupt Hollywood is for ideas, they may yet get there someday. In the meantime, we have volumes of Berke Breathed’s Bloom County comic strips and a flexi-disc with two of Billy and the Boingers’ (formerly Deathtongue) “hits.” “I’m a Boinger” is rather hard on the ears, the kind of sledgehammer comedy fans used to send to the Dr. Demento show after listening to too much “Weird Al” Yankovic. “U Stink But I Love U,” on the other hand, is obnoxious, but was performed by the very real hardcore band Mucky Pup
