RAMBLIN; Donna Jean Godchaux with the Grateful Dead: Singing in the band: McAlister News
Billy & The Kids | The Rooftop at Pier 17 | 8/18/23: Grateful Web
Pontiac by Lyle Lovett: Pitchfork
Fargo Season 5 Posters Introduce John Hamm, Juno Temple’s Characters: Republic World
Stream Grateful Dead’s ‘Wake Of The Flood: The Angel’s Share’ Outtake Collection: Jambase
One of the perks of writing for Cinema Sentries is that I sometimes get free Blu-rays and books and things. The owner of the site offers things up and I request anything that looks interesting. I usually choose things that I’ve seen before and really liked, or that I’ve heard good things about. Sometimes I’ll offer to review something I’ve never heard of and know nothing about. When I’m lucky that things turn out to be really good and I’ve added to my collection of wonderful things.
Such was the case with Enough Said a lovely little comedy/drama starring Julia Louis Dreyfuss and James Gandolfini. It wasn’t a major piece of work, it didn’t redefine cinema or even make it to my best films of the year list. It was a small little film with some good writing and terrific performances. We need more films like that.
It was directed by Nicole Holofcener who has a new film out, You Hurt My Feelings and from everything I’ve read, it has that same vibe, that same low-key goodness. It also stars Dreyfuss who plays a novelist with what she thinks is a pretty happy and fulfilling life. Then one day she overhears her husband (Tobias Menzies) discussing her latest book in none-too-flattering tones. Delving into the feeling this creates is the plot of the film.
That’s a pretty small plot to base a film on, but if Enough Said is an example of the kind of work Holofcener makes then I’m looking forward to seeing how it plays out.
Also, out this week that Looks interesting:
Coma (1978)(Special Edition): Michael Crichton wrote (along with Robin Cook) and directed this film about a bunch of hospital patients going into comas and the horrible conspiracy behind it. It is not a great film, but it is a lot of fun and it’s got some really creepy images to back it up.
A Moment of Romance (1990): A triad gangster is forced to take a young woman hostage. When his bosses tell him to kill her he refuses setting up all sorts of problems. I love this period of Hong Kong cinema so I’m looking forward to checking this one out.
Unman, Wittering and Zigo (1971): David Hemmings stars in this mystery about a school teacher that learns his students may or may not have murdered the previous teacher and he sets out to find the truth.
Hardcore (1979): George C. Scott stars in this Paul Schraeder-directed drama about a deeply conservative and religious man discovering his daughter has run away and is starring in porno films.
The Night of the Hunted (1980): French director Jean Rollin made a name for himself making beautifully shot, erotically charged horror films. I’ve only seen a couple of them but I really want to see more of them. This one is about a woman taken to a mysterious clinic whose patients have a mental disorder in which their memories and identities are disintegrating as a result of a strange environmental accident.
The Rape of the Vampire (1968): The first film from Jean Rollin is about four women who are led to believe they are vampires and are held hostage in a beautiful chateau.
Bo Widerberg’s New Swedish Cinema Blu-ray: I don’t know anything about these films, but it is being put out by Criterion, and that always makes my list.
I’m watching one movie from every year I’ve been alive in chronological order. We’re now up to 1986.
Harrison Ford is such an iconic actor, he’s portrayed so many characters that are a part of our cultural consciousness – from Han Solo and Indiana Jones to Rick Deckard and Richard Kimble that it is difficult to remember just how much of an interesting actor he was. I don’t mean to take away from anything he’s doing now, but there was a time when he took risks. He made movies with some of the world’s greatest directors – Roman Polanski, Mike Nichols, Alan J. Pakula, and Peter Weir. He was so much more than the icon he has become.
In 1986 he made The Mosquito Coast with Peter Weir and it feels so many lightyears away from the types of films he’s known for, the types of films people dress up as at cons, that he’s almost unrecognizable.
He plays Allie Fox, a brilliant inventor who is what we now might call a kooky conspiracy theorist. He’s lost his faith in the American Dream and its consumerism, and undying thirst for the almighty dollar. He thinks the government is out to destroy everything good in the world. He fears an oncoming nuclear holocaust.
So, he sells everything he has and moves his family to Belize. There he buys a small village on a river in the middle of the jungle. There he tries to set up a utopian society. It kind of works for a while, especially when he invents a machine that makes ice – a novelty in the isolated village. The machine is huge and lingers over the village like a giant, metallic god. When missionaries visit the village he kicks them out. When three rebels visit…well, things don’t go so well.
The jungle and the isolation don’t alleviate any of Allie’s fears. His madness only grows worse. Eventually, he destroys nearly everything he cares for, even as he slowly stops caring for just about everything.
Harrison Ford is magnificent in this. It is so fascinating to watch him play what could only kindly be called an anti-hero, and might more correctly be called an outright villain. But he’s never intentionally terrible. Allie is a man who knows down to his bones that he is righteous, but everything keeps getting in his way. Hellen Mirren, as his wife, is good as well, but she’s not given much to do. River Phoenix reminds us of what a wonderful young actor he was and makes me wish he’s lived longer.
It is an odd little film, not really fun to watch, but interesting nonetheless.
When I moved back to the States from France I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what to do with this blog. I knew my life back in Indiana would be pretty boring so I wouldn’t have so many interesting stories to tell, but I wanted to keep writing. I’d been writing movie, music, and book reviews for a while so I knew I’d keep doing that, but I wanted more. I wanted to make my mark.
You’ve already seen some of that in the things I’ve recently reposted, and you will continue to see how the blog changed and grew. By this point, sometime in 2006, I’d been collecting bootlegs for about a decade. At first, it was cassette tapes and then CDRs. If memory serves by this point things had already started moving towards digital files – SHN and FLAC – but there wasn’t really enough hard drive storage to keep everything on a computer. So I’d download and then burn to disk.
Torrents were readily available but this was just the beginning of folks beginning to use cloud storage sites to share the music. I certainly didn’t know anything about that stuff. But bootlegs were a big part of my life and so I naturally began writing about it.
I decided it would be fun to review the bootlegs and I created a little series entitled Bootleg Country. At the time it seemed like there were a lot of things being called something-Nation – Live Nation and the like, and I originally wanted to call my series Bootleg Nation but I was afraid that would sound too cliche so I switched it to Bootleg Country. That seemed to tie in well with my love of country, folk, bluegrass, and what at the time was called alternative country.
I immediately regretted the name, but since I was posting it to Blogcritics I was stuck with it.
If you receive my e-mails then you’ve already seen my first entry into this series – a review of a David Nelson show. It is funny to read now, all these years later. I made a big deal about how bootlegs were perfectly legal, which of course isn’t true at all.
Bootlegs, of course, really only apply to music that is illegally being sold in stores and other sordid places, but when I speak of bootlegs I’m really talking about what is sometimes called ROIOs (Recordings of Independent Origins) that is music that is taped by audience members or otherwise acquired through unofficial channels. While sometimes this is perfectly legal, when bands allow the taping of their shows, etc., it is more than often more of a gray area, if not outright illegal.
I really don’t remember now if I decided to make a big deal out of it being perfectly legal because I didn’t want Blogcritics to shut down my articles, or if I really wasn’t aware that illegal bootlegging existed. I entered this little fandom of ours through the Grateful Dead and other bands that were pro-trading. For years I wasn’t aware that so many shows from so many different artists existed. I had no idea that many of those artists frowned on recording and trading their concerts.
Anyway, I don’t need to tell you all any of this. But in those early days of writing, I thought it was important to preface each review with a little insider knowledge of this hobby.
It is also amusing to me that my first article was a review of a David Nelson show. No disrespect to Mr. Nelson, but he’s such an obscure artist it seems hilarious to me to start out a series with him.
I really should start reviewing bootlegs again, that was fun to do.
Grabbers is a horror comedy about a bunch of squid-like Alien face-huggers that land off the coast of an Irish island. They live off of water and blood but seem to be allergic to alcohol. To survive the townsfolk must stay as drunk as possible as that makes their blood poisonous to the creatures. That’s a great premise. One the film struggles to live up to. It is a throwback to those old 1950s science fiction films like The Blob (1958) or The Giant Claw (1957). It takes its monsters seriously while also winking at the audience.
Garda Lisa Nolan (Ruth Bradley) volunteers her time on the remote island to allow the chief a couple of weeks off. She’s a workaholic and initially takes offense to Garda Ciarán O’Shea (Richard Coyle) who comes to work half-drunk all the time. But mostly she figures it will be a quiet stay and will impress her bosses for working on her vacation time. When some mutilated whale corpses wash up on the shore she gets a little worried, but Dr. Smith (Russell Tovey) a marine ecologist assures her that while unusual such things are not unheard of.
Then the aliens attack.
Well, first the town drunk, Paddy (Lalor Roddy) captures a small “grabber” and our heroes all have a good look at it. When it lays some eggs they realize it is a female and figure there must be a male version somewhere on the island. He’s the big one and soon enough he’s attacking everybody.
Eventually, they realize the whole blood alcohol thing and then they hustle the town into the local pub and have a big drunken party to keep everyone safe.
The film reminded me quite a bit of Tremors (1990), a movie I loved as a kid. It has those same comic horror sensibilities. But Tremors had Kevin Bacon, Fred Ward, Michael Gross, and Reba freaking McEntire. While the cast of Grabbers holds its own, they don’t have the same charm, nor comic timing. None of the jokes are as good either. I was mostly mildly amused throughout, but rarely did I really laugh. Made in 1990 Tremors used all practical effects too, while Grabbers uses the same CGI sludge we see in everything now. The Graboids in Tremors might not look as “real” as the Grabers but they sure do look cooler.
There’s quite a bit of Slither (2006) DNA here as well, and one scene is quite reminiscent of Gremlins (1984). All of those are better films than Grabbers. But the thing is, Grabbers isn’t a bad time at the movies. It is an entertaining hour and a half. It just could have been so much better.
It is a beautiful, sad song and I just love it.
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.
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.
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.
themidnightcafe.org 