Steven Spielberg has now made five films about aliens. Four of them are actually really good (the less we talk about Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, the better). He’s clearly fascinated by extraterrestrial life. Disclosure Day isn’t as good as I wanted it to be, but it is an interesting film, and definitely demonstrates that Spielberg remains an incredible craftsman. Anyway, you can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.
Neil Young
Farm Aid
Walnut Creek Amphitheatre
Raleigh, NC
September 13, 2014
Setlist:
Intro by John Mellencamp
Heart Of Gold
Comes A Time
talk 1
Pocahontas
Standing In The Light Of Love
talk 2
Mother Earth (Natural Anthem) – with Mickey Raphael
Who’s Gonna Stand Up And Save The Earth?
Rockin’ In The Free World – with Lukas and Micah Nelson
Source:
Lineage: YouTube webcast audio (192 kbps AAC) > Audacity > WAV > TLH > FLAC 6 > foobar2000 > FLAC tags
Review:
In July of 1985, while performing with Keith Richards and Ron Wood at the Live Aid concert designed to help those suffering from famine in Ethiopia, Bob Dylan said something about how he hoped that maybe someone could help out American farmers. Small farms were getting eaten up by large corporations. They were losing their farms to banks.
Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp, and Neil Young took that message to heart, and they organized the first Farm Aid benefit. On September 22, 1985, those three and a host of others performed before a crowd of 80,000 people in Champaign, IL, and raised over $9 million for family-owned farms.
They originally thought it was going to be a one-off. They’d do this concert, help the farmers, and move on. But quickly they realized it was a much bigger problem. They’ve held a concert nearly every year since, raising hundreds of millions of dollars.
I’ve got a lot of copies of various performers performing at various Farm Aids over the years. I more or less randomly pulled this particular show out of a hat.
Since Farm Aid is a big show with a lot of performers, each act doesn’t usually get that long of a time slot to play. This year there were the usual performances by Young, Mellencamp, and Nelson, plus the Preservation Jazz Hall Band, Dave Matthews, Todd Snider, Gary Clark Jr and others. Neil only plays for about half an hour. I don’t have recordings of any of the other performers from this night. I don’t think I’ve ever watched an entire Farm Aid concert. I presume there is some kind of all-star jam at the end, but I may be wrong. Anyway, this is what I’ve got.
Neil mostly plays acoustic and solo. He is in fine form. I mentioned in my last Neil Young review that I don’t really know how to review him when he plays acoustic and solo. He’s fiery and chatty here. He goes on a couple of long rants about politics, voting, how commercial interests are ruining farming, and even names a specific politician from North Carolina. It’s one of those things that works well for this crowd, but after listening to it once, I imagine I’ll be skipping them from here on out.
After a nice intro by John Mellencamp, Neil does some lovely renditions of “Heart of Gold” and “Comes a Time.” Then he has a little chat and moves into what I’d call his Mother Earth section of the show. This begins with a very nice version of “Pocahontas.” Next comes “Standing in the Light of Love,” which is off of Toast, an album I’ve never listened to, was apparently shelved after it was recorded in 2000-2001 for being too sad, and finally came out in 2022 as part of Neil’s Archive series. Listening to it now on YouTube, it seems like a pretty good rocker – not amazing, but definitely enjoyable. But here it just kind of drones on and on.
After that, it’s another rant, and then “Mother Earth (Natural Anthem)” with Mickey Raphael from Willie Nelson’s band helping out on harmonica, and Neil on organ. It isn’t a bad version, but it seems like a strange choice for this crowd. Obviously, it falls neatly into the whole conservation movement theme of Farm Aid, but it is hard to imagine this crowd of thousands who, standing in the weather for hours, and may not be superfans being super pumped to hear a soft ballad with Neil Young playing the organ. But hey, we can hear it in the comfort of our own home, and it sounds pretty good.
“Who’s Gonna Stand Up?” is another odd choice. On his 2014 album Storytone, the song is played with a full orchestra; naturally, here it is completely stripped down. It is another Earthy song with Neil in full rant mode. Coming from a recent album, it does make sense that he’d play it live, but again it seems so strange to me that he’d do it at Farm Aid, when most folks would be pining for his hits. But Neil has always played by his own rules. The crowd does get into it at the end, doing a bit of a sing-a-long with Neil singing “Who’s Gonna Stand Up,” with the crowd finishing the lyric, singing “And Save the Earth.”
The Nelson brothers come out for the last song, “Rockin’ in the Free World,” and it rocks. Neil is a very good guitar player, obviously, but solo acoustic, there is only so much he can do. With more guitars on stage, one person can play rhythm while others solo. A very nice way to end the performance, indeed.
The more I listen to and review these Neil Young shows, the more I realize how much I don’t know about the man or his music. I’ve listened to quite a lot of Neil Young in my day, but the man is so prolific that there is still tons of stuff I’ve never heard. This is a perfectly fine performance. It is mostly Neil and his acoustic guitars, sometimes playing relatively obscure songs. Sometimes he is accompanied by his friends. You gotta dig it.
Remember when Facebook used to be enjoyable? You’d log in, and your feed would be nothing but what your friends had posted in real time and in chronological order. These days, it’s nothing but ads, viral posts from people you don’t know, and stuff from groups you don’t belong to. Every once in a while you’ll see something from an actual friend, but it’s usually a post from two weeks ago.
I hate it, but yeah, I have to admit I still log in. I look at Facebook on my phone when I’m at the doctor’s office, or waiting on my wife, or just bored before bed. I’ve started following lots of different groups that spark even the smallest amount of my interest. I figure the more stuff I follow, the more likely I am to get at least some of it in my feed. That way, it is at least something I’m interested in instead of something I’m not.
It has mostly worked. My feed is now filled with movies and music posts. I still don’t see my friends much, but at least I’m not throwing my phone across the room like before. A lot of my movie groups just post stills from different films. Today I saw some stills from this film, something I’d never heard of before.
But it looked interesting. Well, it looked like a cheesy early 1980s horror film, but there was some nice blocking in those stills and good lighting. But mostly I was interested in it because it starred John Cassavetes. He, of course, was a titan of independent cinema in the 1970s. He directed award-winning films that are beloved by critics and cinephiles. He starred in movies like Rosemary’s Baby, The Dirty Dozen, and The Killers. So, what was he doing in this thing?
I don’t really know the answer to that question. My guess is he needed the money. He often financed his own films, so presumably he used the paycheck from this film to make something he was really interested in.
Wikipedia notes that it was financed through some sort of Canadian tax shelter, so the whole endeavor seems to have been about money. They did hire real filmmakers, though. Besides Cassavetes, you have John Ireland and lots of other working actors, and it was directed by John Hough, who made films like Twins of Evil and Escape From Witch Mountain.
It was based on a book and had a complete screenplay by Sandor Stern, but they say Cassavetes rewrote something like 80 percent of it, causing Stern to remove his name from the picture. You can feel Cassavetes’ hand in the script. You can see where he was trying to make it a more human picture, trying to give his character some real depth. But you can also see where the final cut was out of his hands, and the director and likely the producers/money men pushed it into more provocative territory.
As such, the script feels very truncated, and there are numerous dropped threads. It never quite decides whether it wants to be a mystery, a supernatural thriller, or a slasher. Still, I quite liked it.
It begins like the low-budget horror that it is, with a young woman in a bikini bathing by a quarry pond. She jokes around with her boyfriend, and then he’s brutally murdered, and she’s horrendously raped. At the same time, Tim Galen (Duncan McIntosh) experiences a terrible nightmare where a woman is tortured by a mysterious figure.
Dr. Sam Cordell (Cassavetes) is the small town’s surgeon and head doctor. He’s prone to talking about things like dry intercourse, ruptured uteruses, and the massive amounts of sperm the rapist is leaving behind. Yeah, the dialogue seems to have been improvised by Cassavetes and is very weird.
More rapes and more murders occur. Some of these are staged quite well. There is one murder inside a gothic museum that is particularly well done. Cordell does most of the investigating. I love it when movies have doctors, or journalists, or anyone who isn’t the actual police do murder investigations. There are cops, but the local sheriff tends to bring Cordell into the crime scenes and lets him ask lots of questions.
There is also a journalist/love interest. Laura Kincaid (Kerrie Keane) is new to town, and she doesn’t like it much. She does love journalism, though, and she used some inheritance money to buy the local paper. She’s also invited into crime scenes and the like. Cordell also has a daughter, Jenny (Erin Noble), who is dating Tim.
There is a slight inclination toward incest between Jenny and her father. He’s jealous of Tim. In an early scene, he walks upstairs, and Jenny has left the bathroom door open while she showers. Later, she’ll give him a kiss that is slightly more than a peck. But the film doesn’t really do anything with this; it’s just weirdly hinted at. Similarly, Sam has a backstory about a dead wife and how he basically ignored Jenny when he remarried a much younger woman. But then that whole thread is dropped.
It rushes toward its conclusion in the last fifteen minutes, picking up some goofy supernatural pieces. I’m making it sound terrible, but it’s not that bad. Cassavetes gives it some grounding, and he really does seem to be trying hard. Hough’s direction is also quite good. So, it is a very watchable early 1980s horror film, but also plenty dumb and a bit goofy.
George Franju made Eyes Without a Face and Spotlight on a Murderer, two very good French films (which I have reviewed for Cinema Sentries, but apparently haven’t ever posted here). This was his very first narrative film.
It isn’t great. Franju is too good of a director for this to be bad, but it definitely feels like a first film. Radiance has done their usual outstanding job of making it worth your money, and if you are a fan of the director, then this is definitely worth getting. You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.
Jinsei was written, directed, scored, and animated by first-time filmmaker Ryuya Suzuki. That’s an impressive feat, and this is an impressive film. But also a very confusing one. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. I’m still not sure. I’ve sat here for quite a while trying to figure out what to say for this little blurb. It isn’t a bad film; in fact, it is quite interesting. I’m definitely glad I watched it, but I can’t say I have any interest in watching it again. So, yeah, anyway, come read my review.
A new Spielberg movie used to be an event. But the days of him making a colossal blockbuster seem to be behind us. Disclosure Day seemed like it might be one, but it seems to have just kind of come and gone. Maybe. I could be wrong; I don’t really pay attention to box office receipts.
I missed it in the theater, but now it’s getting a physical media release and I’m excited to see it. You can read about it and everything else coming out this week over at Cinema Sentries.
Norah Jones
2004-06-12
Kongresshaus
Zurich, Switzerland
SETLIST:
Disc 1
Turn Me On
Nightingale
Those Sweet Words
What Am I To You
Something Is Calling You
Stay With Me [Keith Richards]
In The Morning
Carnival Town
Don’t Miss You At All
Painter Song
The Long Way Home
Don’t Know Why
Creepin’ In
Above Ground
Sunrise
I’ve Got To See You Again
Come Away With Me
What Would I Do [Ray Charles]
Encore
Seven Years
Life Is A Carnival
The Midnight Cafe’s Notes
Norah Jones’s debut album Come Away With Me was a surprise smash hit. It was a beautiful mix of jazz, soul, folk, and the blues all entwined in Norah’s stunningly beautiful vocals. Her next two albums followed suit with lush productions and a gorgeous sound. For my money, Not Too Late is one of the prettiest albums ever made.
In 2009, she released her fourth album, The Fall, and with it she changed her signature sound. She strapped on a guitar for some songs, played an electric piano for others. The beat was more danceable, the songs more pop-oriented. She’s continued this trend, more or less, for the rest of her career (so far)
I’m not against an artist chasing their muse and going in different directions, and I do like a lot of those songs, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss that early sound. Truth be told, I’ve kind of lost sight of what she’s done lately. I didn’t even know she released Visions in 2024. She does have a podcast I like, where she plays along with various artists she likes and has lovely chats.
I’ve seen her in concert a couple of times. Both shows were wonderful, but definitely well into her more “pop” phase. This show was recorded just a few months after the release of her second album, Feels Like Home.
This is with the Handsome Band, and they sound really good. I can already feel some strains of her longing to branch out from the gorgeous piano jazz she’s locked herself into for the time being. On several songs, the band stretches out just a little bit, doing little jams before returning to the song. There are some nice guitar solos and big drums, but it still maintains that beautiful sound.
It begins with a lovely “Turn Me On.” It isn’t quite as gorgeous as the studio cut, but it’s still spellbinding. From the first notes, you can tell this is a band really gelling. They are locked in, totally in sync.
“Nightingale” and “Those Sweet Words” continue the magic. That later gives us a lovely little jam.
Norah tries a little German but mucks it up. She’s quite chatty throughout the proceedings but doesn’t seem to get much response from the crowd. I may be wrong in that, as this is an FM source and maybe the mics just didn’t pick up much crowd noise. But her responses to them do seem to indicate they aren’t very responsive. Admittedly, her chatter is pretty awkward, something she admits at one point, noting she’s a musician, not a conversationalist. Which is charming in itself. She does seem to be having a good time.
“What Am I To You” is a rollicking little number. She’s brought out that electric piano, and the guitar is really good. It has an incredible groove and the whole band is really into it. This is pure joy to my ears.
“Carnival Town” and “Don’t Miss You At All” come back to sounding like the albums. Norah calls this the piano bar section of the show. “Painter Song” has this wonderful Spanish-sounding guitar.
They then move into what Norah jokingly calls her “cowboy songs.” “Creepin’ In ” is one of my favorite Norah songs, and she plays it with gusto, and it is so much fun. “Sunrise” is terrific. “Come Away With” is so sultry it makes my knees weak.
She does a lot of cover songs throughout, from Ray Charles to The Band to Tom Waits’ “The Long Way Home.” They are lovingly played. I especially like the Waits cover, and how she replaces his gruff vocals with her beautiful ones, yet still maintains the song’s integrity. She’ll close the show out with The Band’s “Life is a Carnival,” which she calls “About as rock and roll as we get.”
This show has been bootlegged a few times. This is the source that I have.
Source: Swiss analog FM broadcast (SR DRS 3)
Equipment: Technics Tuner ST Z55L
Transfer: Creative Sound Blaster Extigy > Exact Audio Copy > Trader’s Little Helper
Generation: WAV (16bit/44.1kHz) > FLAC (Level 8)
Some notes:
– Live broadcast, complete
– Normalized
I watched Her Private Hell, the new Nicolas Winding Refn film, expecting it to be tonight’s Friday Night Horror Movie, but it is a mess. I don’t know what it is, but I definitely wouldn’t call it horror, despite there being a serial killer called ” The Leatherman.” I like some of Refn’s films, but sometimes he can crawl so far up his arse that I have no desire to try to figure out what he’s up to.
So, instead of an impenetrable arthouse film, I went with a big, dumb monster movie.
Primate is really a slasher movie, a throwback to 1980s horror with an excellent score that wouldn’t be out of place in a Dario Argento film.
A bunch of dumb college kids travel to Hawaii to spend some time at Lucy Pinborough’s (Johnny Sequoyah) big, modern, and totally secluded house. Her dead mom was a linguist, and she kept a pet chimpanzee that she taught sign language to (and possibly lip-reading). Lucy’s Dad (Troy Kotsur) is deaf, so Lucy and her young sister both know sign language. Something that will sort of come in handy when the chimp goes crazy and they need to keep quiet. Except that concept is only used once, and that barely.
After some rather dull exposition, the chimp gets out and starts attacking our heroes (such that they are). This is where the film gets good. The violence is pretty thrilling (and blood-soaked – this film isn’t afraid of some good, old-fashioned gore). There is a long set piece with the kids inside a pool. The chimp can’t swim and is afraid to jump in the pool, so they are safe there. But the pool isn’t that big, and there is only one way out. This gives us plenty of thrills and scares, and some gnarly kills.
The characters are mostly unlikeable and not that interesting. And they make a lot of ridiculously stupid moves. It is a very dumb movie, but also a lot of fun. It does have that 1980s slasher vibe to it, and you know I am a fan of that.
I’ve writtena bout a bunch of these noir sets from Kino Lorber. I love them because they bring us some underseen and rarely heard-of low-budget film noirs. The three in this set are all from Poverty Row studio Republic Pictures. Two of them are quite good, and the other has Raymond Burr. You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.
How have I gone almost this entire week and posted nothing here? That happens more often than I’d like. I get busy and distracted. I’ve been working hard on sorting a large collection of Van Morrison shows that need sorting, and trying to sort some other stuff for some friends. We went to a concert last night, and today was my kid’s first day of school. I’ve also had lots of writing to do for Cinema Sentries…etc., and so forth. I do all these other things and forget that I haven’t posted here.
But here we are, and I’ve got another Five Cool Things for you. This week I’m talking about Manhunter, a cool manga called Homunculus, a French noir, a German TV series, and Richard Linklater’s love letter to the French New Wave.
You can read all about it here.
themidnightcafe.org 