Clark Gable and Joan Crawford starred in eight films together. This was their final film. It is a weird one. Part prison break story, part adventure, part mystical religious drama, and part romance. It’s actually pretty good, but one wonders what exactly they were aiming for. You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.
I’ve become a big fan of 1970s Italian crime thrillers. Italy was going through what they now call the Years of Lead back then, which was a period of high crime and political turmoil. Their films often reflect that in the best possible way. This film pushes the politics more than the crime or the thrills, which makes it just a little bit dull. But there is still some good stuff, as you can tell from my review.
Come Live With Me is a sweet little romantic comedy from 1941. It stars Hedy Lamarr as an Austrian woman who has fled the Nazis and is currently living in New York. When she is threatened with deportation unless she marries an American, she makes a deal with a down-on-his-luck writer. If he marries her, she’ll give him enough money to live on. But she doesn’t want anything more from him because she’s in love with another man (who is already married to a different woman, hence the reason he can’t marry her). Lamarr and Stewart are terrific, and the whole thing is very good light entertainment. You can read my full review here.
I’ve been reading a lot more comics lately. I’ve been reading a lot more books lately. At the beginning of the year, I decided to dedicate some time just before bed to reading, and it has been working. I generally try to read a couple of chapters of a regular book and then maybe a section of a comic book. I’ve been enjoying that, and as such I’ve started requesting some comics from Fantagraphics.
They don’t do a lot of superhero stuff or the type of book you’d find at a mainstream seller. They have a lot of weird, indie comics. Which is fun to read. It gets me out of my comfort zone.
Heaven is a slender little book about a teenage girl who discovers a strange strip club outside of town. She gets a job there and finds it liberating, until she discovers something else about it. It is a slight book, but a fun one. You can read my review here.
When I review discs for Cinema Sentries, it is by request. The owner of the site, Gordon, sends out emails from the PR people noting that they have discs for review. When I want something, I make a request, and if I’m lucky, I get a copy of the disc.
I don’t always know exactly why I request something. Sometimes, it is for a film that I already love and want to own on disc. Sometimes it is for a film that I’ve been wanting to see. More often than not, it is for a film I’ve never heard of, but that sounds interesting. I get a lot of films from Kino Lorber and the Warner Archive that are like that. They usually star actors I really like or are from a director I enjoy. I also often request films from the Criterion Collection or Radiance Films because I know they will be great releases, and usually the films are interesting.
And then there are films like Pretty Maids in a Row. This is a sleazy film about sexy teens getting murdered in a high school. It stars Rock Hudson as a football coach/counselor who’s sleeping with half the student body. Angie Dickinson plays a sexy teacher, and Telly Sevalis is the cop trying to solve the murders. It was written by Gene Roddenberry and directed by Roger Vadim. That’s a lot of talent for a skeezy film. Which I guess is why I requested it.
It isn’t good exactly, but it is a fascinating time capsule into a certain period of Hollywood film. You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.
Spencer Tracy gets top billing in this World War II epic, but this is really Van Johnson’s film. He plays a fighter pilot who volunteers for a secret mission to bomb Japan just weeks after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The title is apt as the actual bombing raid takes hardly any time at all. The film therefore focuses on the time before, when the men are training for the mission, and the time after, when Van Johnson’s plane is shot down on the Chinese shoreline, and they must find a way to escape to safety.
I wanted to love this film more than I did. Honestly, it is a bit of a drag as the training exercises are dull and the romantic engagements even more so. Things pick up once they crash, but by then I was just ready for the film to be over. You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.
Season one of The Terror is one of my favorite seasons of television over the last decade. It is a beautiful piece of historical fiction about a group of 19th-century British sailors trying to find a Northwest Passage and discovering something sinister in the frozen wasteland. I don’t think it was originally intended as an anthology series, but it became one. I have not seen the second season set in a Japanese internment camp during World War II, but they say it is very good.
And now, some seven years later, we are getting Season 3. I didn’t actually know this was part of The Terror until I started watching it. On their main screens, AMC+ just shows it as The Devil in Silver. But the opening credits do say The Terror. I don’t know why. Had I known, I would have watched Season 2 first.
The Devil in Silver follows Pepper (Dan Stevens), a guy who had the great misfortune of getting into a fight with his girlfriend’s ex, with the police nearby who were at the end of their shift. Rather than arrest him and deal with the paperwork, they take him to a mental hospital where he’s put on a 72-hour hold. If he behaves, they say, he’ll be released. As is the way with these things, he gets stuck there indefinitely.
New Hyde Hospital is a rundown, shabby place, and the series hits the state of our mental healthcare with a hammer. Hospitals are underfunded, understaffed, and tend to treat the symptoms with drugs rather than get to the heart of the actual disease. Also, there may be a monster. It might also be a scary patient they keep locked behind a silver door. But probably it is a monster since this series is all about the supernatural.
Our first two episodes introduced the situation and our characters: patients and doctors. It is a great cast, with Aasif Mandvi as the head administrator, CCH Pounder as one of the doctors, Stephen Root as the book club leader, and Judith freaking Light as one of the patients (I haven’t seen her in anything since Who’s the Boss, but one look at her IMDB page shows she’s kept busy – good for her.)
Pepper is angry and belligerent. He’s the McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in this scenario. Episode Three begins with the aftermath of Episode Two, where he was attacked by the monster. He awakes to find that the doctors are telling the story that he became belligerent and violent, and they had to get rough with him – hence his injuries.
He tries asking the patients who this patient is behind the silver door, but they give conflicting answers when they give answers at all. When he’s told that the patients are going to be taken to a pizza parlor for a treat in a few days, he decides that’s where he’ll make his escape. To keep the patients calm (and zoinked out of their minds), the staff gives everybody some heavy downers. Pepper doesn’t swallow it and tells his roommate his plan. The roommate tells someone else, and before you know it, all the patients are not taking their meds. The pizza party is a disaster with everyone acting, well, crazy, and Pepper ultimately decides he needs to stay to try to help them get real help.
He is once again confronted by the monster, who basically tells him if he doesn’t comply, he’ll kill everybody.
Ok, I’m once again rambling for too long. I really don’t want to do full recaps. I just don’t have the patience for it, but I’m struggling talking about single episodes without giving out quite a bit of information.
I’m struggling with this show. It has a great cast, and the story has potential. Though it does lean a little too heavily into the well-worn tropes of mental institutions. It’s lacking something. Maybe a specificity to the characters. The actors, especially Judith Light, give it their all, but I don’t find myself interested in them. And they’ve brought out the monster too soon. It’s not really that scary but keeps lurking about and doing stuff. I’d prefer a bigger mystery about what it is and what it wants.
The cast is good enough that I’m going to keep watching, but I truly hope it gets better.
I first learned of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire when the movie starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt came out in 1994. I remember there was great controversy over Cruise being cast as Lestat. Anne Rice herself came out against him. Cruise was a major star at the time, but wasn’t considered a great actor yet. My memories here are vague, but once the movie came out, everyone realized Cruise was wonderful.
I didn’t have an opinion. I’d not read the book. I did like Tom Cruise, but didn’t really care if he was in this movie or not. I was a freshman in college when the film finally came out. My girlfriend at the time was a big Anne Rice fan and was super excited about the film. She had opinions on Tom Cruise.
We watched the movie together, and I liked it. I must have liked it quite a bit because my mom bought me a boxed set of the Vampire Chronicles books. I read Interview with the Vampire over Christmas break and loved it. I think I started the next book, The Vampire Lestat, but couldn’t get into it. Partially, this was because that book focused on Lestat and not Louis, who was the protagonist of Interview, and partially it was because Lestat becomes a modern-day rock star, and that seemed ludicrous to me. Much of Interview is set at the turn of the century, so modernizing him felt wrong somehow.
I kept telling myself I should read it anyway, and I kept not doing it. Everyone says Queen of the Damned, the third book in the series, is terrific, and I very much wanted to read it, but I felt like I needed to read Lestat first, and that never did happen. Eventually, I moved completely away from Rice and vampires, and it all seems like a distant memory to me now.
I rewatched the movie a couple of years ago. It’s not great. It has some interesting stuff going on in it. Tom Cruise is quite good. As is Brad Pitt. And a young Kristin Dunst is terrific. But I find chunks of it rather dull, and I don’t find the way that it plays with vampire lore nearly as interesting as I once did.
When they announced AMC was making a TV series out of Interview with the Vampire, I wasn’t particularly interested. It was the sort of thing I thought I might check out at some point, but really, I knew I’d be too interested in other things to bother.
But then the same people adapted The Vampire Lestat, and I got a really good price on an annual subscription to AMC+. Suddenly, Lestat was being advertised to me all the time. Suddenly, I started noticing people in my social media feeds saying good things about it. And now here I am watching it and talking about it.
The original story has a vampire meet with a journalist whom he tells his story to. This adaptation is set in modern times, but it does a neat little trick. The vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Andersen) meets with a journalist, Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian). But the twist is that they previously met decades ago and had the original interview. But it ended badly, and nothing was ever published (I believe in the book Louis winds up killing Molloy). Now Louis wants to try it again. Molloy now has Parkinson’s, is a cynic, but is much tougher than he was the first time. He’s no longer scared and, as such, can push past some of the vampires’ BS.
It is a bit of brilliant casting to put Andersen as Malloy. He brilliantly portrayed a shock jock in Oliver Stone’s Talk Radio. He brings some of that cocky energy here.
This first episode follows Louis from just before the time he meets Lestat (Sam Reid) until he is turned into a vampire. From the start, this series isn’t afraid to mess with the story. For starters, Jacob Andersen is black, and in the book, he is white. The book sets his origin story in 1791. The series moves that up to 1910, so that slavery is a thing of the past. Louis is now a successful brothel owner. He’s rich, and that brings him a certain amount of power, but he’s still a black man living in the very racist South. The white people he hobnobs with never let him forget he is lesser than they are. He never forgets to call them “sir.”
Race becomes a central theme of the episode. When he meets Lestat, the vampire is appalled by how the whites treat him. Part of the appeal of Lestat and his call to become a vampire is how he is treated with respect.
Vampire stories are often laced with eroticism. There is a natural sensuality in the way a vampire bites the neck of their victims and sucks. There is an innate homoeroticism in Anne Rice’s story that was only hinted at in the 1994 adaptation. This series leans hard into that.
I watched the extended cut, which runs about an hour and ten minutes. Honestly, that was a little long. I don’t need my TV episodes to be nearly as long as a movie. It packs an awful lot into those minutes, and it is very well done. Reid and Andersen are both very good. It digs into Louis’ family situation. How they pretend to not know what he does for a living, how they pray he’ll earn enough to get him out of that lifestyle, and how they enjoy the fruits of his labor. There is a religious brother, a sister who is about to get married, and a mother who sees all and knows all.
I loved how the relationship with Lestat builds. It begins with a bit of jealousy as Lestat has better luck with Louis’s girl than he does. But there is also a sense of awe and desire. Louis admits that he both wanted to kill Lestat and be him. Then they become friends, and Lestat shows him some of his power. Lestat can talk to a group of people yet still communicate with Louis telepathically. He moves so fast that time almost seems to stop. This is all really well done.
All of that being said, there is something about the show I didn’t love. Part of it is that this story is too familiar to me. I don’t know that I need another telling of it. I think it feels a little too drawn out as well. There are seven episodes in the first season, eight in the second, and I don’t know that the book has enough in it to make it worth all of that. Obviously, the series is going to add to the story. Hopefully, that will be in interesting ways. There is nothing in this first episode that doesn’t make me think they will be successful. I know I will watch more of it, but I don’t think I’ll be binging this one.
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Hi, and welcome to my Interview with the Vampire recap. I’ve been thinking a lot about doing some of these. I watch a lot of TV, and it always seems like a good idea to talk about it. At the same time, I don’t know that I have the skills to do it. Or the time. Or patience. Doing recaps takes a lot of time. There is a skill to detail the plots of individual episodes, and I’m not sure that I have that. My idea is to maybe just give the most basic plot summation and then add in a few thoughts on what I liked or didn’t like. I meant to do that with this episode. I thought I’d write a couple of paragraphs and be done with it. But I have a hard time just writing a couple of paragraphs about anything. Which winds up making it exhausting. Which means I have a hard time doing this sort of thing.
So, I have no idea if I’ll write about episode two or three or the entire series. I don’t even know when or if I’ll watch them. But for now, I enjoyed the first episode, and now you know why.
Since I’m attempting to review all of the Grateful Dead’s Dick’s Picks series, I thought it would be fun to review some of the Jerry Garcia solo releases as well. Ultimately, I’d like to do reviews of officially released live albums from all my favorite artists (plus some unofficially released ones). I’m still trying to figure out how best to do that. I originally thought I needed to give each performance a good listen three different times to properly review them, but that is taking too long. As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t listen to music like I used to. It is mostly done in the car, and I don’t spend that much time in the car to be able to listen to a show three times before I review it. Not if I’m going to do more than one review a month anyhow.
These reviews won’t necessarily be proper ones then. More like impressions. I’ll just tell you what songs I enjoyed, and maybe a few that I didn’t.
I more or less randomly picked up After Midnight: Kean College, 2/28/80, a few weeks back, intending it to be the first Garcia review. I listened to it a couple of times – it is a great record – but then my sister came in from South Korea for a visit. I made her a playlist of songs I figured she’d enjoy because I knew I’d be driving her around a bit. To make things easier to play, I removed the Garcia album (and all other music) from my phone and added all her songs. When she left, I couldn’t remember which Garcia album I had been listening to. I wanted to give it one more listen before I wrote a review. I knew it was from a performance in 1980, saw that this GarciaLive disc was from that year, and I added it to my phone. Pretty quickly, I realized I had the wrong disc, but I just went for it.
Which is just another example of why I won’t be listening to these albums multiple times before I write my own thoughts.
I don’t know why the Garcia releases changed their name from Pure Jerry to GarciaLive (or why they are sometimes called something completely different). The first volume of the GarciaLive came after a four-year gap between official releases, one of the longest gaps since they started releasing them regularly.
Jerry Garcia’s main band, of course, was the Grateful Dead, but nearly from the beginning, he was doing side projects with lots of different people, under a variety of names. This more or less coalesced into the Jerry Garcia Band by the mid-1970s, though the band members regularly changed. 1980 is a really interesting period as it has Johnny d’Fonseca, who only lasted a few months on drums, and Ozzie Ahlers, who didn’t last much longer on keyboards.
One of the things I love about the Jerry Band shows is that they regularly played smaller venues than the Grateful Dead. While Jerry’s solo audiences did grow over time, they were routinely still smaller than what the Dead were playing to. In 1980, the Grateful Dead were playing coliseums and civic centers with capacities in the tens of thousands, while the Jerry Garcia Band was still gigging in small concert halls. On tour, he often played places with capacities of a couple of thousand, but in the San Francisco Bay area, he still often performed in places like The Stone or the Keystone in Berkeley that could only fit a few hundred. How amazing would it have been to see Jerry Garcia in a place like that?
I also love that the Jerry Band allowed Garcia to play lots of songs he wouldn’t necessarily be able to perform with the Dead. While they usually would play one or two Dead tunes in a set, and sometimes something from one of Garcia’s solo albums, they mostly did cover songs. They’d play old Motown tunes, reggae, jazz, early rock and roll, and so much more. Bassist John Kahn’s wife once noted that it was Kahn who often brought Garcia songs to play.
Which finally brings us to this show. This was the closing performance of a multi-week tour for the Jerry Garcia Band on the East Coast. It opens with an excellent version of the Grateful Dead classic “Sugaree.” Garcia takes a nice solo early on, then Ahlers gets his turn with some synth-heavy keys, and it closes out with another boisterous solo by Garcia.
That’s another thing I love about the Jerry Band – it is very much Garcia’s band. While Jerry was the biggest star of the Grateful Dead, the band was truly a cohesive whole. They played together. They listened to each other and had an uncanny ability to intertwine their individual notes into something singular. Garcia often soloed, but the band wasn’t just backing him up or playing behind him; they were making music together. From everything I’ve read, Garcia treated everyone in the JGB kindly – he paid them well and listened to their ideas – but there is no doubt this was his band. His name was on the marquee, and the audience was there to listen to him play. For the most part, the band is there to back him up. But Garcia also gives them time to shine. The keyboards often get a solo part, and sometimes even John Kahn will get a solo.
For the first few songs on the early show, Garcia’s guitar has a strange tone. I’m not a musician, I don’t have the technical knowledge to explain it, but it sounds a little high at times to me and screechy. By the time they are playing Bob Dylan’s “A Simple Twist of Fate,” it has gotten better, warmer somehow. The performance of that song is very emotional. You feel the sadness of the song in Garcia’s playing. He absolutely nails the final solo.
Ozzie Ahlers has a beautiful solo at the beginning of Jimmy Cliff’s “Sitting Here In Limbo,” and then the band really pulls together with a wonderful bit of cohesive jamming in the middle. When I was listening to After Midnight: Kean College, 2/28/80, I fell in love with that performance of “That’s What Love Will Make You Do.” It is a brilliant version. This one isn’t nearly as good, but it’s still pretty damn great. Kahn’s basslines really stand out. The keyboards get a little crazy with it. The cover of Jimmy Cliff’s “The Harder They Come” is super fun with some good funky riffs.
Robert Hunter was the opening act for this show. He opened most shows on this tour. Apparently, Rachel Sweet was scheduled to be the opening act for this tour. She did perform a couple of shows, but then disappeared, and Hunter replaced her. I wasn’t able to find any information on why she left. The Hunter set is not included in this release, but he did come out and play with Jerry on two songs, “Tiger Rose” and “Promontory Rider.” I love Robert Hunter. He wrote some of my favorite lyrics. But he is not a great singer or guitar player. I have some unofficially released recordings of his solo shows, and they aren’t great. I mean, they aren’t bad, and it is cool to hear him perform the songs that he wrote. Those shows are mostly him by himself on a guitar, and they do not blow my mind. But these two songs with the Jerry Band backing him are terrific.
It all concludes with a scorching cover of Peter Rowan’s “Midnight Moonlight’ and a soulful rendition of The Beatles’ “Dear Prudence.”
If I’m being honest, I think After Midnight: Kean College, 2/28/80 has the edge over this release. It has more fire in it. Maybe the band was just tired after a long tour. I don’t know. But this is a very good show. I’ve not spent a lot of time with the Jerry Garcia Band in the early 1980s, but these two releases are definitely going to change that.
Here’s the track listing
Jerry Garcia Band
Capitol Theatre
Passaic, NJ
03/01/90
Disc 1
Early show:
Disc 2
Early show continued:
Late show:
Disc 3
Late show continued:
“Dear Prudence” (John Lennon, Paul McCartney) – 10:22
“Russian Lullaby” (Irving Berlin) – 15:39
“The Harder They Come” (Jimmy Cliff) – 11:47
“Tiger Rose” (Robert Hunter) – 4:10
“Promontory Rider” (Robert Hunter) – 6:10
“Midnight Moonlight” (Peter Rowan) – 8:39
Over the last few months, I’ve been trying to up my review game over at Cinema Sentries. I seem to not be writing as much strictly for the blog, so this seems like a good way to keep me in the game. As part of that, I’ve been dipping my toes into other media. CS has a relationship with Fantagraphics, a comics company that puts out a lot of independent stuff. That mostly means books by folks I’ve never heard of, and lots of kind of weird stuff.
I’m not opposed to any of that, but in the past, I’ve been a little reluctant to dive right in because I don’t write a lot of book reviews, and writing about comics is a little bit different. I actually was aware of this one, as my wife is a French nerd and she knows a lot about French books, movies, and culture. They actually made a movie about Adèle Blanc-Sec a few years ago, and I’ve seen it. So grabbing this comic was a no-brainer.
And I quite liked it, and now you can read my review.
themidnightcafe.org 