I seem to have forgotten to post my Five Cool Things from a few weeks ago, so here it is. This one features the HBO series DTF St. Louis, a Spider-Man comic I’ve been trying to find for decades, a Batman comic, Stephen King’s The Running Man, Buckaroo Banzai, and the trailer for a fun looking film.
What a killer show opener.
Anthony Mann and James Stewart made a bunch of movies together. Many of them were westerns. Several are some of the best westerns made in the 1950s. Ben of the River is one of those. Stewart plays a man with a past who is trying to find redemption by leading a group of settlers to Oregon, where they will become farmers. He meets a lot of trouble on the way. Mann fills it with a lot of action and some beautiful scenery. You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.
Charles Bronson had such an interesting career. For a while, he was a terrific little character actor in films like The Great Escape and The Magnificent Seven, and then he became a star and for a time he continued making interesting (if not great) films, and then he got stuck making dumb action films that wasted his talents as an actor.
Rider on the Rain is a very interesting film. It starts out like a rape revenge film, then turns into a thriller, but it turns into something far more interesting. You can read my full review over at Cinema Sentries.
Hello friends, I’m back with another Five Cool Things. This time I’m talking about the Gillian Welch and Wilco concerts I attended, plus Twins of Evil, Anaconda, and Mudtown (so mostly things I already talked about in these pages) plus the new trailer for the new Resident Evil movie. Click here to read all about it.
I suspect if you were to run some statistics on The Midnight Cafe, you’d find that I’ve reviewed more movies from Hammer Studios than any other one, and that Peter Cushing would be somewhere in the top in terms of actors I’ve written about. He is my seventh most watched actor, with some 37 of his films having been watched by me. I’ve written about eight of those films, most of which were Hammer Horror films. I’ve written about 24 different films from that studio.
That seems weird to me because Cushing isn’t one of my favorite actors. I mean, I do love him, but if I were to make a list of my favorites, he wouldn’t be on it. And I imagine if you took my ratings of all the Hammer films and averaged them out, the number you’d get wouldn’t be that high.
I don’t know what that means. I don’t know why I keep watching these films. That’s not true. I do love me some Hammer Horror even while I can admit they aren’t always the greatest of films. It is interesting to me that I keep turning to them and that it’s only been the last decade that I’ve become a fan.
Anyway, Twins of Evil is pretty great.
Cushing plays Gustav Weil, a stern Puritan who leads a gang of dudes who love burning pretty young women at the stake. I mean, sure, they declare them witches first, and there does seem to be quite a few folks getting horribly murdered, lending credibility to some kind of ungodly horror going on, but really it’s just fun to burn girls out in the forest.
Up on the hill in his castle overlooking the village, Count Karnstein (Damien Thomas) dabbles in Satanism (and I absolutely love that all the summaries of the film use that language, “dabbles in Satanism.”) While doing a bit of pretty young woman sacrificing of his own, he accidentally awakens Countess Mircalla Karnstein (Katya Wyeth) from her grave. She immediately turns him into a vampire.
Meanwhile, two twin sisters, Freida Gellhorn (Mary Collinson) and Maria (Mary Collinson), arrive in the village due to their parents dying. They take up residence with the good Gustav, their uncle. Now Maria is a good girl who wants to please her uncle, but Freida is a bad girl. She likes to sneak out at night and get into trouble. When she meets the Count, she’s all over that stuff.
Because this is a Hammer film and one made in 1971, both girls love to show off their cleavage and spend a great deal of the movie in their nightgowns with strategically placed camera angles.
The girls are a pain in their uncle’s neck. He believes them to be evil (one might even say Twins of Evil, actually Gustav says exactly that at one point.) Slowly everyone realizes the Count is a vampire, and Gustav will finally use God’s name in the service of fighting actual evil.
As per usual with Hammer, the production design is impeccable. The sets and costumes look great; the lighting is gorgeous. Cushing is wonderful. Unlike a lot of characters in films like this, he isn’t driven by an insane need for power, but rather he is a true believer. He truly thinks Satan is out there destroying the world. That warped faith drives him to do mad things. One could probably say something about how his Puritanical sense of sex drives him to burn beautiful young women at the stake, but I’ll leave that be. The Collinson sisters are a delight. Madeline especially has a lot of fun as the wild Freida.
Also, as per usual with Hammer films, the script isn’t great. It introduces the vampire aspect but doesn’t do a lot with it. The vamps do recoil from crosses, but don’t seem to mind daylight. But the look of the film and the performances make it well worth watching.
Sorry for the lack of posts this week. I’ve been working on some music projects. I’ve shared them with some of you, and I’ll share with more of you in time. I’m trying to work the kinks out and figure out how I want to do it, so be patient.
Also, I just haven’t felt like writing or posting, and I’ve decided that there is no need to push myself. I’ll write when I feel like it and won’t when I don’t. There are some things I’ll still try to do, like Picks of the Week and Friday Night Horror Movies, but otherwise I do what I want.
Anyway, this week’s pick is three films from Nicolas Winding Refn. He’s the guy who made Drive. I loved that film. It is a loose trilogy about some criminals in Denmark. I’ve only seen the first two but quite liked them and am anxious to see the third. You can read about this release and everything else that came out this week here.
I wrote this yesterday (Thursday) but then IMGBox, the site I use to host my images was down, so there was yet another delay in posting.
Wilco is one of my favorite bands. I’ve seen them more times in concert than any other artist by far. Not that this is a great accomplishment, I don’t actually go to that many concerts. But I catch Wilco every chance I can.
They seem to love playing at the Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa. We’ve seen them (or Jeff Tweedy solo) there half a dozen times. When they announced their most recent tour a few months back, they did not list Tulsa as a stop, but they were playing Bentonville, which is only about a two-hour drive from where I live. I immediately bought tickets. Naturally, about two weeks later they announced they were playing Tulsa in July.
I looked at my wife and asked, “Are we going to see Wilco twice this summer?” We bought tickets. My sister and her husband will be in town then, flying in from South Korea, and we bought them tickets too.
The Bentonville show was an outdoor gig and general admission. There was a time when I’d show up to a show well before the doors opened, hoping to score those great seats. But I’m old now, and the idea of standing for two hours before a show and then another couple during the show is just too much for my back to take.
We left about five for a show that started at eight. I figured that would be plenty of time to get there and even have a bit to eat on our way. We arrived about 7:30 and found a great long line. That was annoying because we had three lawn chairs, just as many blankets, plus a pillow, and some other stuff. Security was nice, but they made us open up our lawn chairs and open up my wife’s purse.
Because everyone brought their own chairs, things were a little haphazard. Mostly people put them in straight lines, but there were large gaps and spaces everywhere. This meant we had to sit quite a ways into the back. We were maybe twenty yards behind the soundboard and off to the side. Behind us was a small hill, which meant there was a walkway between it and us. The rest of the venue was pretty flat, which made it hard to see the stage.The sound back that far wasn’t great. It was really kind of distant, making the show sound like it was taking place someplace else.
I set all that up to say that the crowd was kind of obnoxious. I understand people are going to talk at a concert. I mean, I don’t get it, I don’t know why anyone pays a lot of money to see a band and then acts like they are just background music for their stupid conversation. But I understand that’s just the way it is. But this show was out of hand.
There were two dudes behind us, sitting on that hill, that loudly talked through every song. One lady came in late and sat beside my daughter. She literally turned her seat away from the band so she could chat with her friend. A whole gang of folks gathered behind the soundboard, acting like they were at a bar, not a concert.
I do think the outdoor venue, the way we were all haphazardly positioned in our own chairs, and the poor sound quality at that contributed to all of this.
The music was good. The setlist was great. They opened with “Via Chicago” and then went into “Handshake Drugs.” The first set was a nice mix of newer songs and some old ones. Bassist John Stirratt even sang “It’s Just That Simple” off of their first album, AM. It ended with “California Stars”, one of my favorites.
I did my best to enjoy the music and not be annoyed by the talkers. Sometimes I’d close my eyes and just try to listen. It didn’t always work. I remember thinking this might be the worst concert I’ve ever been to. Which sucked, because, like I said, the music was good.
At the set break, my daughter went to the bathroom, bought a drink, and then looked at the merch. On our way back to our seats, we noticed some open spaces much closer to the stage. We grabbed our chairs, explained everything to my wife, and, like the Jeffersons, “moved on up.”
What a difference that made.
The sound was so much better. The audience was much more into it. There were still a few talkers, but the sound drowned them out. The band was on fire. The setlist was off the charts good. They played songs from just about every album they’ve made and concentrated on the older ones.
“Impossible Germany” was impossibly good. I’m a Nels Cline maniac. When we see them at Cain’s, I always stand on the Nels side of the stage. There is always a point where I turn to my wife and go, “Nels Fucking Cline!” On songs like “Impossible Germany” he tends to go crazy. He’ll launch into these frenzied solos where he just strums super fast and the band creates feedback behind him. I love it. But this time he played real solos. It reminded me a lot of the Jerry Garcia Band, where he was jamming, but it was still within the rhythm of the song. It was fantastic.
Jeff seemed in good spirits. He chatted amiably and even had some short convos with the crowd. The crowd was pretty laid-back. There wasn’t a lot of whooping and hollering. During “Kingpin” there is a section where the crowd usually screams in response to Jeff singing “How Can I?” but here they were silent. Jeff even joked with them about it, but it was a no go.
I suspect the cold had something to do with that. It was quite chilly, and most of us were huddled under blankets. And the crowd seemed like they were maybe not huge fans. The big songs off of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot got a lot of cheers, but the rest of the songs got claps, but nothing super enthusiastic.
But I was loving it. This show went from one of my least favorite concerts ever in the first set to one of my absolute favorite gigs in the second.
If you are a fan I highly recommend checking them out this tour.
Here’s the setlist:
Set 1:
Via Chicago
Handshake Drugs
If I Ever Was a Child
Cruel Country
Forget the Flowers
Evicted
Bird Without a Tail / Base of My Skull
I’m Always in Love
Everyone Hides
Hummingbird
It’s Just That Simple
You and I
War on War
Falling Apart (Right Now)
California Stars
Set 2:
Box Full of Letters
Annihilation
I Am Trying to Break Your Heart
One Wing
Either Way
Love Is Everywhere (Beware)
Impossible Germany
Jesus, Etc.
The Universe
Hate It Here
Walken
Kingpin
Heavy Metal Drummer
I’m the Man Who Loves You
Encore:
The Late Greats
I Got You (At the End of the Century)
Outtasite (Outta Mind)
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