Bob Weir & Wolf Bros Announce Fall 2023 Tour

bob weir and wolf bros

My secret admission is that I prefer The Wolf Bros over Dead & Co. And while the latter is now officially retired it is pretty cool to see Bobby still out there playing music. They aren’t coming anywhere near me, but if they are close to you I recommend seeing them.

September 8—Park City Song Summit Festival—Park City, UT
September 10—FirstBank Amphitheater—Franklin, TN*
September 12—CCNB Amphitheatre at Heritage Park—Simpsonville, SC*
September 13—Ting Pavilion—Charlottesville, VA
September 15—Saratoga Performing Arts Center—Saratoga Springs, NY*
September 16—Xfinity Center—Mansfield, MA*
September 17—Forest Hills—Queens, NY*
September 19—The Green At Shelburne Museum—South Burlington, VT
September 20—Hartford HealthCare Amphitheater—Bridgeport, CT*
September 22—Pine Knob Music Theatre—Clarkston, MI*
September 23—Farm Aid—Noblesville, IN
September 26—Mershon Auditorium—Columbus, OH
September 27—The Met Philadelphia—Philadelphia, PA
September 28—Pier Six Pavilion—Baltimore, MD

*Willie Nelson’s Outlaw Music Festival 2023

Tickets are available here.

Cosa Nostra: Franco Nero in Three Mafia Tales by Damiano Damiani is the Pick of the Week

franco nero in three mafia tales

As I return from my vacation my mind once again turns to this blog. I really don’t know what I’m doing with it anymore. I love the idea of it being this eclectic pop-cultural thing where I share shows, review movies, talk about books and music, give details on upcoming Blu-ray releases and tour dates, and whatever else I find interesting. But that takes quite a bit of time to do and I don’t always have time, or I’m too tired to do anything, or I’m just lazy. So, it winds up being this really weird hodge podge. Which is maybe ok. But for now, I’m gonna make an effort to write about a lot of stuff.

Franco Nero is an Italian actor who has been in over 200 films in his long career. He is best known for playing Django in the classic spaghetti western from 1966, but he’s performed in just about every genre ever. Django was more or less a remake of Sergio Leonne’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964) which itself was more or less a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961), which if you want to get technical about it was more or less an adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s novel Red Harvest.

But I digress.

With his rugged good looks and his pale, blue eyes Nero made an excellent leading man in all sorts of Italian genre films throughout the 1960s and 1970s and beyond. I’ve only seen a handful of his films but I’m always excited to see his name in the credits. Radiance Films is putting out a three-film collection that stars Nero and was directed by Damiano Damiani entitled: Cosa Nostra: Franco Nero in Three Mafia Tales by Damiano Damiani. The three films in question are: The Day of the Owl, The Case is Closed, Forget It, and How to Kill a Judge. I don’t know a thing about the films except they all were made in the late 1960s to the early 1970s, are Italian, and fall loosely into the poliziotteschi genre of Italian crime films (and of course, they star Franco Nero) and that’s enough for me to make this set my pick of the week.

Also out this week that looks interesting:

Shaw Brothers Classics: Volume Two: I’ve written about the Shaw Brothers before in these pages. I’m a huge fan of their kung fu films. Shout Factory is releasing its second set of films from the studio. It contains 12 films (Lady of Steel / Brothers Five / The Crimson Charm / The Shadow Whip / The Delightful Forest / The Devil’s Mirror / Man of Iron / The Water Margin / The Bride From Hell / Heroes Two / The Flying Guillotine / The Dragon Missile) and is chock full of extras.

Asteroid City: Wes Anderson’s latest is possibly the most Wes Anderson film Wes Anderson has ever made. It is a movie within a TV show within a play, or something like that. It is weird, funny, and moving in the way his films usually are. It has a huge and magnificent cast. I can’t wait to watch it again. His movies usually (eventually) come out in deluxe sets from the Criterion Collection so I’ll probably wait on that, but it is worth checking out if you haven’t already.

Is Paris Burning?: Rene Clement directs this World War II story from a script by Gore Vidal, Francis Ford Coppola, and Marcel Moussey about a Nazi general who is given orders to destroy Paris if the Allied troops make it into the city. It is chock full of stars (Jean-Paul Belmondo, Alain Delon, Kirk Douglas, Glenn Ford, etc., etc., etc.) but didn’t receive particularly great reviews.

The Lincoln Lawyer: Season One: I really enjoyed the Bosch television series and I’ve been enjoying the book series it was based on. The writer, Michael Connelly, also wrote the books this series is based on and that alone is enough to make me intrigued.

Audie Murphy Collection III: Audie Murphy was one of the most decorated war heroes to come out of World War II. After the war, he become a film star. He made a lot of different movies but is best known for his westerns. Kino Lorber is releasing three more of his films (Showdown, Hell Bent for Leather, and Posse from Hell) in this regular collection of the actor.

Welcome New Visitors

Recently, the excellent Bob Dylan site Expecting Rain linked to a couple of my posts (Fifteen Years of Bootlegs and my review of Pledging My Time). That brought a lot of new traffic to The Midnight Cafe which, in turn, brought in several new followers. I thought I’d take a moment to both say “Welcome” and to give the new folks a breakdown of what to expect.

Most days I provide a handful of links to downloads of unofficial and unreleased recordings of concerts. Those links come in two forms – links to the individual posts I previously did of each show, and for new shows, a direct link to Google Drive where you can download them. For many years I did individual posts for each show where I’d provide basic info about the show – location, date, setlists, source info, etc – and then provide a link. For various reasons, I recently stopped doing that. For new shows, I just provide a Google Drive link.

For years I used Amazon Drive to host these shows, but they recently dropped that service and I started using Google Drive. That left a whole lot of old shows with bad links and I’m slowly trying to reupload them to Google Drive. When I do so I provide a link to the original post, to let everyone know there are fresh download links. If you dig through those old posts and find something with a dead link that you are interested in, please leave a comment in the original post.

You will also find, on these pages, movie reviews, book reviews, and various pop cultural ramblings. I started this blog in 2004 as a way to journal the ten months me and my wife spent living in France. Eventually, I started writing about pop culture and that eventually led to me writing about concert recordings which led to me providing download links. At first, these download links were blended in with all my other writings, and then they took them over completely.

When Amazon crapped out I rekindled my love of writing about pop culture and here we are.

For reasons I won’t get into, all those old ramblings were put into a private mode so that nobody could read them. Now, I’ve decided to take them out. I’m slowly working my way through the old posts, doing some light editing, and then making them public again. When I do this you will get an email showing you those old posts.

This is a little confusing as you will get a new e-mail with things I wrote over ten years ago.

I try to pace all of this so that you aren’t getting a deluge of e-mails each day, but sometimes I get going and that will happen. I hope you enjoy everything I write, but I totally understand if you have no interest in stories about my life from years ago, or my thoughts on a horror movie from the 1960s. But that’s the way things go around here. If it gets to be too much you can always unsubscribe and just come in every day for the music links.

Anyway, welcome.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: House of Usher (1960)

house of usher poster

As a producer, Roger Corman helped launch the careers of Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Jack Nicholson, Peter Bogdanovich, and Jonathan Demme. His films were very low-budget, often exploitive, but they almost always made money. He famously developed a strategy as a producer and distributor that allowed directors to have full creative control (within budget, of course) as long as they had a scene of violence and/or sex every fifteen minutes.

He’s produced an astonishing 512 films in his life (and at the age of 96 IMDB lists at least one upcoming project with his name on it). And though with a few exceptions, he stopped directing in the early 1970s he managed to helm over fifty films.

The most famous of those films are a series of eight films (very) loosely based on the writings of Edgar Allan Poe. House of the Usher was the first of those adaptations. It is a good one.

Phillip Winthrop (Mark Damon) travels to the titular House of Usher, a grand, decaying, gothic old mansion, to visit his fiance Madeline Usher (Myrna Fahey). He is told by the family butler, Bristol (Harry Ellerby) that she is very ill and bedridden. When he demands to see her anyway he is taken to see her brother Roderick (Vincent Price)

Roderick is afflicted with an illness that enhances all of his senses so that the slightest noise, or light, or rough surface drives him to near madness (well, as we’ll see later to total madness). He says his sister is afflicted with the same illness and tells a tale of their entire bloodline being infected with madness so intense it has affected the house itself.

He begs, no he demands that Phillip leave the house but he refuses. This only serves to drive Roderick further into madness and in turn, he drives Madeline to the very edge. Roderick is so intent in his belief that Madeline should not leave the house, nor marry, nor have children that he is prepared to murder her himself.

Corman makes great use of his sets. The mansion is sprawling with a seemingly endless set of rooms, hallways, and secret corridors. As Roderick’s insanity grows the house begins to crumble.

I’m used to watching gothic horror films being shot in stark black and white with great shadows overcoming the scenes, so it is surprising to see this in full, glorious color. It looks magnificent. There is a dream sequence toward the end that is saturated in color and even a bit psychedelic.

Mark Damon is a bit stiff, and Myrna Fahey is just ok, but good golly is Vincent Price great in this. I’m a huge fan of the actor and he’s full-throttling the role as only he can but it works oh-so-well here.

It is a bit slow to get going as these types of gothic melodramas can be, but once it gets into gear it’s a great deal of fun to watch.

The Movie Journal: August 2023

angels with dirty faces

I watched 52 movies in July of 2023. Only two of those were films that I had seen before. 27 of those were made before I was born. The Criterion Channel was showing a collection of British Noirs and I watched several of them. I love a good film noir and it was interesting to see that very American genre through a British lens. Towards the end of the month, I got a little obsessed with Italian Giallos and I watched several of them. I also continued my little experiment of watching a new movie from every year I’ve been alive in chronological order which has been a lot of fun. Especially as I’ve seen a lot of movies from the 1980s, it is probably the decade that I’ve seen the most films from. This means I’ve had to really look for films I haven’t seen in any given year. I also watched three films from 2023 which is a rarity for me. I tend to watch older films.

My favorite new watches this month were Angels With Dirty Faces, The Petrified Forest, The Small Back Room, and yes, we’ll go ahead and throw Barbie in there too.

We are currently halfway through 2023 so my stats are coming together nicely. I’ve seen 295 films to date. 85 percent of those were new to me. Thriller is my most-watched genre (128) followed by Drama (115), Crime (83), and Horror (80). 248 of the films I’ve seen were in the English language, 20 were in Italian, 10 were in French, and 7 were in Japanese.

My most watched actors of the year look a lot like last month. Wilbur Mack, Boris Karloff, Courtney Cox, Rogers Jackson, and James Coburn all starred in six movies. Mack and Karloff were part of the Mr. Wong series that I watched last month. Cox and Jackson were the Scream movies and I watched that entire thing earlier this year. James Coburn is just awesome.

Most watched directors are also the same. Sam Peckinpah leads the pack with six films. Wiliam Nigh and Fernando Di Leon follow with five films watched. And Peter Hyams, Wes Craven, and Martin Scorsese all had four films.

Did you watch anything interesting last month?

Here’s the complete list:

Thank you, Mr. Moto (1937)
Everly (2014)
To Catch a Killer (2023)
Ishtar (1987)
Asteroid City (2023)
Barbie (2023)
Wagon Master (1950)
The Editor (2014)
The Brides of Dracula (1960)
Nine Guests for a Crime (1977)
Delirium (1979)
Night School 1981
Eyeball (1975)
Bullets or Ballots (1936)
The Time Machine (1960)
Duel in the Sun (1946)
Lured (1947)
Juggernaut (1974)
Meteor (1979)
The Last Gangster (1937)
Short Night of Glass Dolls (1971)
The Hunt (2020)
Each Dawn I Die (1939)
Angels with Dirty Faces (1938)
Journey into Fear (1943)
The Petrified Forest (1936)
Marked Woman (1937)
Think Fast, Mr. Moto (1937)
Lifeforce (1985)
Amityville 3-D (1983)
Amityville II: The Possession (1982)
Runaway Train 1985
Assault on Precinct 13 (2005)
Dreamscape (1984)
See How They Run (2022)
Yield to the Night (1956)
Silkwood 1983
Hanky Panky (1982)
Five Dolls for an August Moon (1970)
The Whip and the Body (1963)
The Night Eats the World (2018)
Nightmare Castle (1965)
Ghost in the Shell (2017)
Independence Day (1996)
Outland (1981)
Nine to Five (1980)
Pool of London (1951)
The Woman in Question (1950)
Dark Star (1974)
The Small Back Room (1949)
Obsession (1949)
Green for Danger (1946)

Dreamscape (1984)

dreamscape poster

I’m watching one movie from every year I’ve been alive in chronological order. We’re now up to 1984. I’m also running behind on writing these things as I watched this one a couple of weeks ago. I also skipped ahead and already wrote about my 1985 entry, Runaway Train. As such my brain is already a little foggy on this film, so this will be short.

Dennis Quaid plays Alex Gardner, a psychic who used to get probed and prodded by some big government agency, but then ran away to pursue gambling by way of the ponies. When he runs afoul with a gangster, he joins back up with the feds (run by Max Von Sydow, slumming).

They’ve got a big new project where psychics can link with a sleeping person and interact with their dreams. Alex uses it to help people. In one of the film’s best and dumbest sequences, he joins up with a kid who has nightmares about an awesome-looking cobra-man and teaches him not to be afraid anymore. There’s a nice touch inside that dream. As Alex and the kid are running from the cobra-man they see another man in a suit sitting at a table, the kid says something like “That’s my dad, he won’t help.”

Kate Capshaw is the love interest. This is the type of movie that finds it funny for Dennis Quaid’s character to invader her dreams and try and get sexy with her.

Christopher Plummer is the government agent who figures they can use this dreamscaping to assassinate undesirables. Which includes the President of the United States (Eddie Albert). The President has been having nightmares about starting World War III three and Plummer’s character is afraid that’s gonna turn him into a peacenik. Seriously.

It gets dumber from there. One would hope a film about dreams would be more interesting visually, but other than the cobra-man it is all pretty boring looking. The rest of it doesn’t fare much better.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Brides of Dracula (1960)

brides of drcula

Some of the best Hammer Horror films are the ones where they essentially remake the classic Universal Horror movies. Remake isn’t really the right word for the Hammer versions of the classic Universal Monsters (Frankenstein, Dracula, The Mummy, and the Wolfman) often differ greatly from their Universal origins. The Hammer films were much more violent and sexual than the original films, and just as stylish. They all appear a bit tame by today’s standards, but realizing that many of them were made in the late 1950s and early 1960s it is fairly astounding that they got away with so much.

The Brides of Dracula is the first sequel to Horror of Dracula (1958) (they made several more). Christopher Lee was great in that one as Dracula, but he died at the end so they couldn’t put him in this sequel (he is very much missed here and so he shows up again, despite being dead, in the next movie). Peter Cushing does return as Dr. Van Helsing.

A French school teacher, Marianne (Yvonne Monlaur) takes a position at an all-girls school in Transylvania. She takes the usual rickety coach through the usual creepy woods in the usual middle of the night. When they stop off at a little village for a bite to eat, the coach driver gets spooked and abandons her.

The innkeepers fret about, warning Marianne that she can’t possibly stay the night in their village alone. Just about that time in walks Baroness Meinster (Martita Hunt). She’s old and creepy but kindly offers to put Marianne up for the night in her castle. Despite the innkeeper’s warnings, she agrees.

There she finds a strange servant and the Baroness’s son Baron Meinster (David Peel) locked in his room and chained to the wall. The Baroness warns that he is ill and maybe a bit crazy, but he’s nice to Marianne, and handsome so she unlocks him.

Of course, he’s a vampire. Of course, he pretty quickly starts turning the pretty ladies of the village into his brides and has his eyes on Marianne.

This is where Van Helsing comes in. He does his usual thing which eventually leads to a showdown with the vampire. I won’t spoil it but it has one of the best vampire kills in all of vampire moviedom.

The thing is I generally find Hammer Horror films to be slightly tedious in terms of plot and pacing. The Brides of Dracula is no different. The plot just kind of plods along. It takes ages for a vampire to show up and ages still for Van Helsing to come along. Even then the action is often broken up by too much talking.

But the real thing is that I don’t ever really mind. I love Hammer Horror movies. They always build these incredible sets and costumes. They light it spectacularly with all of these lovely reds, blues, and greens. Their films always look amazing. The men are always dressed in these fabulous suits and the women are draped in the most marvelous flouncy gowns.

I love Peter Cushing (he is so much more than Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars. He’s surprisingly athletic in this film, running and jumping all over the place. I love Christopher Lee, too and he is greatly missed in this movie (try as he might but David Peel is the palest of imitations).

So, yeah, plotwise The Brides of Dracula isn’t great, but it is so much fun to look at and watch I don’t really mind.

Runaway Train (1985)

runaway train

I’m watching one movie from every year I’ve been alive in chronological order. We are now up to 1985.

I live in a small town that has two major train lines running right through the middle of it. I don’t know how many trains pass through our little burg on any given day but it is a lot. You can hardly drive from one side of the town to the other without getting stopped by a train. Sometimes two. Or three. It is very annoying. I used to carry a book with me in my car and whenever I was stopped waiting on a train I’d read a few pages. I finished more than one novel that way.

Despite this, I still love trains. I remember the first time I ever rode a train. We were riding across France. I sat in my window seat with my headset on, listening to music and watching the beautiful countryside glide by.

Trains are so much better than planes. They might not be as fast, but they are much more comfortable and pleasant. I wish we had more trains in the USA. I’d take them everywhere.

I love movies about trains. I’ve watched Westerns where they are building the first train lines out west. I’ve seen horror films with some crazed killer stalking prey on a train. There are mysteries and thrillers set on trains. One day I’m gonna make a huge playlist of all the movies that have trains in them. That would make a fun viewing.

Not all train movies are good, of course. There isn’t anything special about a train that makes your story interesting. Runaway Train is a good example of this.

Jon Voight plays Oscar “Manny” Manheim a ruthless convict being held in Alaska’s Stonehaven Maximum Security Prison. He’s so terrible the warden has had him locked away in solitary confinement for three years. When the courts say he can’t do that, Manheim is released into general pop.

Though the prison is supposed to be some kind of Alcatraz-like inescapable place, Manheim easily gets out by having fellow inmate Buck McGeehy (Eric Roberts) roll him out in a dirty clothes hamper. Inside the laundromat, they grease themselves up and slip out through a sewer tunnel. From there they hop aboard the titular train.

Darn their luck, the train conductor has a heart attack and falls off the train. In doing so he destroys the brakes and sends the train heading down the line at full speed. Rebecca DeMornay plays a train employee who is pretty useless, honestly.

There are some dispatchers back at the base, who have computerized systems to track where the train is going. They call upcoming stations to try to stop the thing, but they are pretty useless as well, honestly.

The film periodically attempts to ring some tension out of the speeding train, but this is no Speed (1994) and they mostly fail at it. Every time they cut to the dispatch station

Voight is sporting some godawful facial hair and an even worse accent. Everyone else seems to be trying their best, but it all just falls sort-of flat. It is the type of film where after watching it I just kind of shrug my shoulders and go, “that was something,” and the look for something else to watch.