I watched 38 movies in September. Eighteen of them were made before I was born. Thirty-five of them were new to me.
It must have been a pretty good month, as I handed out a lot of four-star ratings. Or maybe I just got lazy with my ratings.
I only went to the theaters once, and that was for The Killing. Well, actually, I went to the theater to see the new Resident Evil movie, but something went wrong, and I went home with a refund. I meant to tell that story, but I guess I forgot.
I reviewed quite a few films for Cinema Sentries, and I’m still enjoying the Kino Film channel. Once again, there was no theme this month. But October is here and I plan to watch lots of horror movies and write about them. If that goes well I hope to reinstate the monthly themes.
Lino Ventura and Tom Baker remain number one on my most-watched actors list. Charles Bronson has jumped onto the list, tied at number two with seven films. He’s one of those actors who I liked a lot. I loved him in films like The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape when he felt more like a character actor. Then he became a major star and played in a lot of dumb action films in the 1980s. I still kind of love those films, and I’ve been watching a lot this year.
It is good to see Martin Scorsese on the list again. He’s my favorite director, but I’ve seen almost everything he’s made. At least his narrative films; I still have quite a few documentaries I haven’t seen. Anyway, when I first started this list, he seemed to make it onto my most-watched directors, but I try to watch more new films than ones I’ve seen before, and so I’ve kind of stayed away from him. But now I’m coming back to him.
The Rolling Stones Western Australia Cricket Ground Perth, Australia February 24, 1973
and
Royal Randwick Racecourse Sydney, Australia February 26, 1973
Disc 1 (Perth)
01. Brown Sugar 02. Bitch 03. Rocks Off 04. Gimmie Shelter 05. Happy 06. Tumbling Dice 07. Honky Tonk Women 08. All Down The Line 09. Midnight Rambler 10. Little Queenie
Disc 2 (Sydney)
01. Brown Sugar 02. Bitch 03. Rocks Off 04. Gimmie Shelter 05. Happy 06. Tumbling Dice 07. Love In Vain 08. Sweet Virginia 09. You Can’t Always Get What You Want 10. Honky Tonk Women 11. All Down The Line 12. Midnight Rambler 13. Little Queenie 14. Rip This Joint
The first Bob Dylan tapes I ever obtained were from his 2010 Japan tour. They were audience recordings, of course, and I thought they sounded terrible. The thing is, I came to recordings of independent origin through the Grateful Dead – a band that has a seemingly infinite supply of superb soundboard recordings. Slowly, I obtained tapes from Grateful Dead-related and adjacent bands like Bruce Hornsby and David Grisman, but they were still nice-quality soundboard recordings.
At some point, I connected to the old Phil Zone site and all of their various vines. This opened my world up to all sorts of bands I didn’t know had recordings of shows available. But again, most of these were soundboards. Now, I certainly was aware of audience tapes. I had numerous audience recordings for the Dead and others. But they were much rarer than the soundboards I had collected up to this point, and generally went unlistened to.
I was excited to get those Dylan tapes, at least until I listened to them. I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to listen to such poor-quality tapes.
Years have passed, and I’ve since listened to a great many audience recordings of all sorts of bands, including more than my fair share of Bob Dylan tapes. I’ve come to enjoy audience recordings in all their shapes and sizes. I can’t remember the exact date of those Japan shows, but I’ve listened to that whole tour and enjoyed them.
Of course, those recordings haven’t changed. It is the same sound as always. My sound equipment hasn’t gotten better either. It is me that has changed. I’ve learned how to enjoy an audience recording with all its flaws.
Now you may be asking yourself, why is he talking about a Bob Dylan show during a review of a Rolling Stones bootleg? The answer is that I’ve plugged this boot into my system on several occasions, only to turn it off after the first few songs. The sound has always seemed off to me.
It is clearly a soundboard, so there is none of the audience noise or distant sound you get on an audience tape. But it does sound slightly cold. In my notes, I tried to explain it by the stadiums they are playing in. The Western Australia Cricket Ground is a big stadium. Wikipedia says its capacity is 10,000, but that’s for when they are playing cricket – a sport that needs a big ground to play on. One presumes that for the Stones concert they had loads of seats on the grounds. Playing in a big stadium takes a different kind of performance and sound than playing in an intimate club.
The band is playing for a stadium crowd. This is big, loud rock and roll. The guitars thunder. Mick doesn’t exactly shout his lyrics, but his singing isn’t subtle. It is an assault on the ears. Or as a commenter noted on my old blog, “the band is feral.”
I have a hard time listening at first. On other listens, I turned it off and found something else to listen to. But this time I kept going. And like those Dylan audience recordings I found, I got used to it. Then I enjoyed it.
I don’t know what was going on with the band in Perth. The band had planned a 13-night tour of Japan and Australia. Japan got cancelled because they wouldn’t let Mick Jagger into the country due to his prior drug convictions. The Perth show was their seventh gig in Australia, so it wasn’t jet lag as I had thought it might have been. Maybe they partied too hard the night before. Or maybe they got some bad drugs just before this gig.
Who knows, but they play like mad men. Keith Richards and Mick Taylor light the place up with dual guitars. Mick Jagger sings like a man strung out.
The Sydney show does settle down a bit. They sound more relaxed. The songs have more nuance and detail.
They brought additional musicians with this tour. There is Nicky Hopkins (whose birthday was the 24th, prompting Mick to lead the audience in a sing-along and giving this boot its name) on piano, as well as Ian Stewart on keys and Bobby Keys on saxophone and Jim Price on trumpet and trombone. Those horns really add a lot to these shows. The keys are great when they aren’t being drowned out.
“Gimme Shelter” from Perth is awesome. It rages like the storm it is. Keith sings on “Happy”; his vocals are worse than Mick’s, but the song rocks. “Tumbling Dice” finds the band finally finding its stride. “Midnight Rambler” has a killer middle section where they slow everything down and it gets real bluesy. “Little Queenie” lets the pianos be heard, and it’s quite nice.
Though they play some of the same songs, the Sydney show is by far the better gig. I always wonder about boots like this: why they include both shows like this. I get that these are soundboard recordings from the Australian tour, but is anyone really wanting to hear the same songs again within the same boot?
I imagine when I listen to this again I’ll just skip to the Sydney performance.
The performances of the songs shared on both nights sound much better in Sydney to my ears. I do think the Perth show is worth listening to just for how energetic (and yes, feral) it is.
“Love in Vain” is pure blues. Mick’s vocals are soulful, full of hurt and loss. The guitars are beautiful. “Sweet Virginia” is one of my favorite Stones songs, and it’s really good here.
“You Can’t Always Get What You Want” is a showstopper. The entire band completely gels. This is the nuance I was talking about. “Honky Tonk Women” is tons of fun. The horns really kick off here. Ditto with “All Down the Line,” with big guitars and big horns.
“Midnight Rambler” slowly builds into a righteous fury, then slows back down into a soulful blues riff before ramping back up again.
My brain is an idiot. While listening to “Little Queenie,” I thought, ‘man, they are really ripping off Chuck Berry with this song.’ Friends, it is a Chuck Berry song. He wrote it; the Stones covered it. I knew that, but forgot, I guess.
“Rip This Joint” ends the tape on a high note.
This is a great bootleg. Terrific sound and fantastic performance. I was listening to this on my phone in my car. When the show ended, it naturally started back at the beginning. It’s weird, but I suddenly didn’t have the same problems I did on my first listen. It didn’t sound as distant as I first thought. Mick’s vocals didn’t bother me. I guess I really did get used to it. The music didn’t change, but it changed me.
01. Roving Gambler 02. Tomorrow Is A Long Time 03. It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Bleeding 04. Tangled Up In Blue 05. This World Can’t Stand 06. Dignity 07. Tell Me That It Isn’t True 08. Things Have Changed 09. Not Dark Yet 10. Highway 61 Revisited 11. Love Sick 12. Not Fade Away 13. Blowin’ In The Wind
Late Show
01 I Am The Man, Thomas 02 My Back Pages 03 Desolation Row 04 Mama, You Been On My Mind 05 This World Can’t Stand Long 06 Dignity 07 Country Pie 08 We Better Talk This Over 09 Things Have Changed 10 Not Dark Yet 11 Highway 61 Revisited 12 Ballad Of A Thin Man 13 Not Fade Away 14 It Ain’t Me, Babe 15 Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat
Bob Dylan (vocal & guitar) Charlie Sexton (guitar) Larry Campbell (guitar, mandolin, pedal steel guitar & electric slide guitar) Tony Garnier (bass) David Kemper (drums & percussion)
I can’t remember when I first started listening to Bob Dylan shows from 2000. I’m guessing I posted some shows on the old blog, and some people highly praised them. That caused me to give one or two a listen, and I found I liked them, so I uploaded more. Those got praised. I listened to more; I collected and shared some more.
It has become one of my favorite years. I know some folks prefer 1999, and I have nothing bad to say about that, but I’m all about 2000. That may be because I listened to it first, or I’ve listened to it more. It doesn’t matter; both years are terrific.
I love that they almost always start with an old traditional song. Bob is steeped in the folk tradition; he got his start there, and starting his shows like this seems to call back to his early days. I love that there is so much acoustic guitar in these shows. I love that they often do a little jamming.
Really, I just love this band. This lineup is something special. Larry Campbell and Charlie Sexton on dual guitars is my jam. When I listen to these shows, I wish he’d kept this band forever. But that wouldn’t be Bob Dylan. He’s a changeling. Constantly on the move and constantly doing the unexpected. Besides, to have kept this band would have let us miss so many other great lineups.
So, I thought it would be fun to go on tour with Bob Dylan and his band in 2000. I’m not sure if I’ll cover the entire year or just the Spring Tour. I might get bored of this after a while and want something different. But for now, I’m excited to see where Bob will take us. And on to the show.
I always find it strange when an artist does two shows in one day. I generally assume it’s because tickets are selling fast, but the rest of the tour is booked, so they can’t add a second night at the same venue, so they just double-book the day. But I have no idea if that’s really true.
I also feel like the early shows are a little shorter and not as good. Like the band always seems to be saving their energy a little bit for the second show. But again, I might just be talking out of my arse.
The early show on this day begins with “Roving Gambler,” a traditional song that dates back to the earliest part of the 20th Century. It is wonderful, with some terrific harmonies. Next comes “Tomorrow is a Long Time,” which sounds like an old traditional but is actually a Dylan original.
This is where I admit I have no idea how to tell Charlie Sexton’s guitar parts from Larry Campbell’s. I like them both. “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding” has some great guitar work, whoever it is.
For “Tangled Up In Blue,” it seems like Bob is taking a deep breath before each line, or something. He’s always just slightly late coming in. That’s probably intentional, and Dylan has always had a very interesting delivery. He also screws up one of his lines, which seems unusual to me.
Their cover of Roy Acuff’s “This World Can’t Stand Long” is just lovely. “Things Have Changed” is one of my favorite late-period Dylan tunes, and the band just nails it here. Ditto for “Not Dark Yet,” a song I find myself listening to a lot these days, and it usually makes me tear up.
Some dude near the taper gets super excited when they play “Highway 61 Revisited,” as he hoots and hollers when it begins. He sings the first verse really loudly, and you can hear someone clapping along on this tape.
So many of these shows sound very light and warm to my ears. A lot of that comes from the choice of songs, especially the fun cover songs, but it’s also the use of acoustic guitars and vocal harmonies. It sometimes feels like some fellas sitting on their front porch just having fun.
And yet, they handle the darkness of “Love Sick” really well. You can really feel the heartache and pain of the lyrics.
Then we get “Not Fade Away,” the Buddy Holly song that’s played with utter joy. The early show closes out with a nice version of “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
The late show opens with another cover, “I Am the Man, Thomas,” which I believe is an old Ralph Stanley song, but it sounds like it could have come from a thousand years ago. It is a wonderful performance. Dylan played it something like 60 times from 1999 to 2002, and then I think he dropped it completely.
I’m usually not a big fan of “My Back Pages,” but this version is just lovely and tender. “Mama You Been On My Mind” gives us that back porch feel. It is so casual-sounding. They make it sound so easy.
“Dignity” is great; it reminds me of his performance on that MTV Unplugged thing.
My thoughts on most of the rest of this show are a little hazy. I typically listen to shows I’m going to review on my way to and from work, or maybe to the post office or whatever. These are relatively short trips. Ten to fifteen minutes, maybe twenty at the maximum. That gives me time to listen to two or three songs before I stop. While I’m listening, I make little mental notes, and then when I stop, I jot them down on a notepad.
I have a terrible memory, so if I don’t jot my thoughts down, they disappear. I listened to the back end of the late show on my way to a movie in downtown Tulsa. That’s more like a thirty-five-minute ride. When I got there, I thought I was late, so I rushed in without jotting anything down. When I got home, it was late, and I was tired, so again I didn’t jot anything down.
Guess what? My thoughts on those songs are gone. I very much liked them, but I have nothing specific to say. The only other notes I have are that “Not Fade Away” is spirited and that “It Ain’t Me, Babe” is tender and goes down easy.
In general, I’d say this is a very good show, but not as good as I remember this tour being. The start of the tour is often a little rough, and I feel confident we’re gonna get blown away soon.
For the early show, I listened to LB-440, which Lossless Bob rates an “A.”For the late show, my notes just say it is from a CDR and is probably not the source for an LB. I should note that this is the first review I’ve done on this Substack that is taken from an audience source. Previously, I’ve only done audience recordings. I’ve certainly listened to plenty of AUDs, so that’s no big deal, but I should make a note of it.
These two recordings are quite nice. The late show has a bit of crowd noise, but it isn’t too distracting.
It turns out trying to run two blogs is more difficult than just running one. I’m putting all of my energy into the new Substack, so I forget to post anything here. But we have now entered spooky season so I hope to do a bunch of horror movie reviews.
But for now I’ve got another Five Cool Things.
This time I’m talking about The Big Caper – a fun little noir, a couple of films I’ve already written about in these pages, The Golem – an excellent German silent film, and watching The Killing on the big screen. You can read all about it over at Cinema Sentries.
I’ll have more to say about this in this week’s Five Cool Things article, but I wanted to show off some swag I got this weekend. To celebrate Jim Thompson’s birthday, the Circle Cinema showed Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (which was partially written by Thompson). They gave away free T-shirts, some postcards from the upcoming Criterion Kubrick box set and a cool little Thompson pin.
This has been a long week. Friday was a long, exhausting day. By the end of it, I had no energy and no brain power for much of anything. I sat down last night and watched Mad Love, a 1935 film starring Peter Lorre as a mad doctor who operates on a famous pianist’s hands and replaces them with the hands of a knife-throwing killer. It’s a good movie, and Lorre is wonderful in it.
I had intended to make that my Friday Night Horror movie. It was a pretty straightforward film, and I figured it would be easy to write about. Then I watched Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. That is not a straightforward movie, and it will be difficult to write about. But I really wanted to write about it. I found it to be a fascinating watch.
I could have still made Mad Love my Friday Night Horror film and then written about this one later on. But I’ve gotten very lax about writing about movies on this site, and I was afraid that if I put it off, I’d never get around to it. But the way my brain works is that I feel this real need to write my Friday Night Horror articles every single week. If I don’t, I feel actual guilt.
But I was way too exhausted to put anything together about this movie last night. So, I could have written about Mad Love, but that would have completed the Friday Night Horror task, and I would have never gotten around to writing about Camp Miasma. Instead, I didn’t write anything last night, and now I still feel obligated to write a Friday Night Horror movie. So here we are, Saturday afternoon, completing the article.
Truth be told, I still don’t think I’ll be able to write all that I want to about this film, but I’ll try.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is this wonderful homage to 1980s slasher films viewed through the lens of pop culture-obsessed, weirdly repressed Millennial eyes.
Kris Williams (Hannah Einbinder) is a young, intellectual, somewhat pretentious filmmaker who is in the process of rebooting the Camp Miasma franchise. This is a Friday the 13th-esque slasher series that started in the 1980s and spawned numerous sequels before finally rendering itself irrelevant.
She is someone who says things like, “My work explores the intersection of queerness and cultural depictions of monstrosity,” and whose earlier film basically remade Psycho but from the point of view of the shower curtain. She’s also someone who, while watching the original Camp Miasma, sees a shot using a split diopter and joyfully says out loud, “split diopter.”
Which is to say, this is a film about and made for film nerds. People who grew up watching slasher flicks, put their Letterboxd details in their social media profiles, and run blogs dedicated to obscure films. Which is to say, this is a movie made for me.
For inspiration, Kris reaches out to Billy Pressley (Gillian Anderson), the final girl of the first Camp Misma film, who became something of a recluse after that film became a success and who now lives in the abandoned summer camp that the original film was shot in.
Anderson and Einbinder are incredible in this movie. Anderson turns Billy into this sweet, weird stoner who sounds like a horny Dolly Parton. Einbinder makes Kris into a nerdy bundle of nerves who has substituted cinema for real life.
All of their scenes together, I just loved. I didn’t so much love scenes in which she’s video chatting with her girlfriend or her agent or the movie studio people. There is some funny, satirical stuff in those scenes, but through it all, I just wanted to get back to the central relationship between Billy and Kris.
There are a ton of references to old slasher films throughout this, and even direct references to Sunset Boulevard, and probably a thousand things I missed. The opening credit sequence shows us paraphernalia from all the Camp Miasma films, which make great references to the Friday the 13th films and Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and so much more. I loved that stuff.
There are loads of flashbacks to the original Camp Miasma movie and even long sequences where Billy and Kris watch it together. Again, many of those scenes are throwbacks to real movies from the 1980s. There is one long shot, set to Counting Crows’ “A Long December,” that follows Camp Miasma’s killer – called Little Death, who wears a box mask that looks like a ceiling vent – as he kills half a dozen teens with a spear. The scene looks nothing like anything ever seen in an ’80s slasher; the kills spill CGI blood like a geyser, and “A Long December” came out in 1996.
All of those things were definite choices by director Jane Schoenbrun. I don’t see them as mistakes or some kind of budgetary decision. I think they meant it to come out the way it appears on the screen. Reading other reviews, a lot of folks seem to love that scene. It really took me out of the film. So much of the other scenes we see from the Camp Miasma films look and feel like a real 1980s slasher, so I was really thrown by the intentional decision to make that scene so not like the others.
In a similar way, Schoenbrum gives a very artificial feel to the sets. Many of the outdoor scenes have these glossy, classic movie-looking backdrops. It is a very intentional look and decision by Schoenbrum. This time I wasn’t thrown off and rather loved it, but I still am not smart enough to understand exactly what he was trying to say with them.
It has a lot to say about living inside your own head. Kris talks to Billy about how she has difficulty enjoying sex because she can’t allow herself to just live in that moment. To have an orgasm, she has to leave her own body somehow. The film plays with these ideas in some really fascinating ways. Again, I’m not smart enough to understand all of it. But I will say the villain’s name – little death (or le petite mort in French) is slang for orgasm in France.
It isn’t a perfect film. I’m perhaps a little too old to understand some of what the film is doing. And I grew up in spaces that were very far removed from the queer experience, something this film is very much delving into. But it is a very good film. One I like more the more I think about it. I’m very much looking forward to watching it again. I will very soon be watching Schoenbrun’s other films.
My site isn’t very big. I do a lot of my movie writing for Cinema Sentries, which isn’t exactly a big site either. I do it for fun (and the occasional free Blu-ray). I’m not particularly well known in film critic circles. That’s ok. But every once in a while something kind of cool happens.
This week, Boots Riley, the writer/director of this week’s pick, retweeted Cinema Sentries tweet about my article. I didn’t actually write that much about the movie, and he may not even have read that. He’s probably in promo mode for the Blu-ray release, but its still kind of cool.
You can read the full article with that move and more here.
On Halloween night 1992, the BBC aired Ghostwatch, a scripted television movie that had been shot a few months earlier. It purported to be a live event – an investigation into a paranormal occurrence at a house in London. They did an amazing job at it.
They hired Michael Parkinson, a real-life TV presenter and journalist, to host the show. He sits in the studio with Dr. Lin Pascoe (Gillian Bevan), who is a true believer in the paranormal. Also in the studio is a phone bank where they take phone calls from folk who have also experienced strange activity in their lives. This is something real news programs did at the time on the BBC. They say the real phone number was inundated with calls from actual viewers. You might call this the English version of the War of the Worlds radio program Orson Welles did many years prior.
On location is Sarah Greene, also a real television presenter at the time. Her crew is portrayed by real BBC crew members. The house is owned by Pamela Early (Brid Brennan), who lives there with her two daughters, Suzanne (Michelle Wesson) and Kim (Cherise Wesson).
They get all the details right. I remember watching similar shows when I was growing up in the late 1980s/early 1990s. There were lots of pseudo-documentaries on during the Satanic Panic, and folks like Geraldo Rivera were always doing paranormal specials. It feels very real.
Parkinson is perfect for this type of thing. He sits and talks to Dr. Pascoe for a bit, then he’ll throw it to the phone or the location shoot. It all feels like a live shoot, as if he’s working off the cuff just a bit. Sarah gives her part a nervous energy, like someone who doesn’t really believe this stuff, but is still just a little bit scared at first.
The film starts off a bit slow. There is no indication that any of it should be taken seriously (the ghost stuff, I mean; the movie is deeply serious in its setup). But then weird things start to happen, but slowly. Some viewers call in saying they saw a shadowy figure in the girl’s bedroom. In the studio, they play the clip again. Something is visible for just a second. It looks like a man standing by a curtain. But the hosts say they see nothing. They look at it again, and the figure we saw is gone.
There are several moments in the house where we see flashes of something or someone. Stranger things happen. Loud noises occur. Tensions build. And build some more. I know this thing is fake, but it still got me. It took me a little while to get into its groove. Because they got the production values so perfect for an early 1990s TV show, I was taken back to my youth. This is exactly the sort of thing I would have watched as a teenager, for real. But it’s now the sort of thing I’d scoff at. But once it got going and I fell into its lure, I absolutely loved it.
Kinji Fukasaku had a mad career, making all sorts of pictures, including loads of crazy yakuza flicks and a movie about teenagers killing each other. This is a rather bleak, but still wild and wooly crime drama. I reviewed the new Blu-ray from Radiance over at Cinema Sentries.
Hello friends, it is time for another Five Cool Things. This week I’m talking about The White Lioness (which I already reviewed for this site), Once a Thief (a groovy thriller where Alain Delon speaks English), The Outside Man (where Roy Scheider plays a hitman), One Cut of the Dead (which I already reviewed for this site), Point Blank (where Lee Marvin plays – what else? – a cool badass), and the new Godzilla movie. You can read all about it at Cinema Sentries.
