Shenandoah (1965)

shenandoah <

I liked all kinds of movies, all sorts of different genres. I’ve recently come to really love old westerns. But sometimes Westerners are hard to watch through modern eyes. Their treatment of Native Americans is shoddy at best, and racist at worst. Shenandoah does ok by Indians, but its treatment of the Civil War and slavery is a little muddy.

I try very hard in this blog to not get political. I have political opinions, of course, but I want this site to be a place where all sorts of views can come and enjoy what I have to offer. This was especially true when I was just sharing live music. But now that I’m writing more reviews some politics will inevitably slip in. It is difficult to review certain types of art without letting some political opinions in. But I’ll try to keep it to a minimum.

That being said there are certain opinions that I will let out proudly. I think it is pretty safe to say that slavery was bad. It was a great evil in this country. That’s not controversial, and if you want to argue that point then you can just see yourself out.

A lot of westerns are set during the Civil War. Very few of them are pro-slavery, but their treatment of that institution, and of black people in general, can be suspect. The older I get the more difficulty I have watching Civil War movies that make folks fighting for the Confederacy into heroes. I know not everyone who fought for the South owned slaves or was particularly pro-slavery. Lots of young men fought for the South because that was their patriotic duty, many probably had no opinion on slavery whatsoever.

I don’t want to get too far into the weeds with this. Shenandoah is a pretty good movie starring James Stewart. He plays a character who wants nothing to do with the war. He has no love for slavery, but neither will he lift a hand to help fight against it. My review wrestles with what to do with a character like that. It is something I wrestle with every time I watch a movie with outdated stereotypes. Sometimes I love the movie, but it is difficult to parse that with the way the movie handles certain issues.

Anyway, you can read my review here.

Alien Nation (1988)

alien nation

It is interesting to me how there are movies that exist in my memory banks that I haven’t actually seen. What I mean is that there are some films that came out when I was young that were part of our collective culture. Maybe they were big box office successes, or maybe they were endlessly discussed in the media, or maybe they were just talked about over and over with my friends. Many of these films were actually watched by me, but some of them weren’t. Yet because they were discussed in my culture and clips were viewed in various TV shows, it feels like I’ve seen them.

Alien Nation was one such film. It is possible that I actually did watch it at some point, but I don’t have any specific memory of watching it and I couldn’t remember a single plot point as I watched it yesterday. The movie did spawn a short-lived television series so it is possible that I watched some of that. What I do remember is how the aliens looked with their big, bald heads, and the basic buddy cop banter the two leads regularly engaged in.

Within this world, an alien spaceship landed on Earth sometime in the recent past. It was filled with a race of aliens that were bred by another, unseen race of aliens, as a slave class. These aliens are known as “Newcomers” by polite society and “Slags” by the less polite. The world’s governments have decided to welcome Newcomers and the United States has made them citizens. However, a great many humans are disturbed by the Newcomers. They are disgusted by the way they look, what they eat, how they get drunk on sour milk, and don’t always speak good English, etc. Often Newcomers have to take lowly jobs and they tend to be poor and often live, grouped together in run-down sections of the city.

The metaphor is not hard to understand. The film is not too subtle in this regard. The Newcomers are stand-ins for any number of minorities and immigrants that have historically been mistreated over the years.

In the film, James Caan plays Det. Matthew Sykes, is good at his job, if a bit old-school at it, and quite bigoted towards the Newcomers. But when his partner is killed by some Newcomers he agrees to take newly promoted Newcomer Sam Francisco (one of the films recurring gags is that humans got bored naming so many Newcomers when they arrived that they started giving them joke names – Har Har). He’s played by the always wonderful Mandy Patinkin.

Naturally, over the course of the investigation, Sykes learns to respect and even care for his partner and thus learns the important lesson that racism is bad.

As I said the messaging is really heavy-handed. The Newcomers have a distinctive look (which basically amounts to some prosthetic headgear) and are given a few distinguishing traits like getting drunk on sour milk and eating uncooked meat, but the film doesn’t delve very deeply into who they are.

Mostly the film is a typical 1980s buddy-cop action flick with an alien as the straight-laced foil to the wild, no-nonsense partner. It more or less works as that. I have great nostalgia for those types of films and this one landed neatly in that category. It disappoints because it could have been so much more interesting, but if you take it for what it gives, it isn’t bad.

Murder, He Says (1945)

murder he says

The Criterion Channel is featuring a number of lesser-known screwball comedies, and I randomly picked out this one to watch this afternoon.

Fred MacMurray stars as Pete Marshall who works for the Trotter Poll company, which he says is the “same as the Gallup Poll, only we’re not in as much of a hurry.” He’s polling people in rural areas to see how they live in modern life. One day he comes across a redneck family called the Fleagles. Ma Fleagle (Marjorie Main) carries with her a bullwhip which she uses to keep her twin boys Mert and Bert (Peter Whitney) in line and to catch flies. The boys tend to carry shotguns and aren’t afraid to “splatter” folks who come around getting nosey with it.

As it turns out Bonnie Fleagle (Barbara Pepper) robbed a bank some time ago and left $70,000 stashed away somewhere before she got hauled off to jail. She’s not too keen on the rest of the Fleagle clan and has not told any of them where the money is hidden. She did tell Grandma Fleagle the secret, but she ain’t talking.

Grandma is close to dying and her head ain’t screwed on so good so they figure Pete can pretend to be Bonnie’s boyfriend and get the secret out of her. What she tells him is pretty cryptic and doesn’t make much sense, and she’d only tell it to him when the rest of the family was out of earshot.

Just as the family is trying to get the secret out of Pete a woman claiming to be Bonnie shows up. She’s really Helen Walker (Claire Matthews) and she has her own reasons for wanting to get that money.

There is also Mr. Johnson (Porter Hall), Ma Fleagle’s third husband who is a scientist working with some experimental radioactive materials which makes people (and dogs) glow in the dark.

Like all screwball comedies Murder, He Says is very silly. At times it is also very funny, but mostly it stays in the entertaining and silly category. Fred MacMurray is always fun to watch and Marjorie Main is a hoot. The gags come fast, and the plot doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but it is quite enjoyable.

It makes for a perfect Sunday afternoon movie which is just how I watched it.

Bloggy Blog

I started this blog in the Autumn of 2004. That was when blogs were first becoming a very big thing. In those days it seemed like everyone had a blog. There were music blogs and movie blogs, political blogs, and book blogs. There were blogs about just about anything you could imagine. But mostly, people were just blogging about their lives. They’d share pictures of their families and pets, and they’d talk about their everyday happenings. Then Myspace happened, and then Facebook and social media took over. There was no reason to blog about your life when you could just post things to your social media of choice.

Blogs are still around, of course. But they mostly seem to be about something, people don’t blog so much about their personal lives but about their hobbies. When I started this blog I was journaling the year my wife and I spend in France. Eventually, I started writing reviews of movies, music, and books. By the time we came back to the States, I was a full-on pop culture blogger. Every day I would talk about various artistic endeavors that I had enjoyed (or not enjoyed as the case may be) but I was also finding odd little things on the Internet and blogging about them. Whether it was the world’s highest bridge or what Michael Jackson would have looked like without plastic surgery, I was regularly posting all sorts of stuff.

Eventually, that included writing about bootlegs and then sharing them. Over time that overtook pretty much everything else and for years that’s all I did. I loved sharing all that great music with you all.

Then Amazon Drive told me they were shutting down a few months ago and I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with this site ever since. Truth is I think I’d like to go back to those old days.

The thing is I haven’t really used Facebook in ages. I gave up on Instagram a couple of years ago. Up until recently, I’ve been a big user of Twitter, but there has been a big dustup in ownership over there and things are becoming a lot less fun. Especially since most of the cool people I followed over there are jumping ship. There are a few sites that are vying to be the new Twitter but the thought of moving to a new platform and trying to build a following just sounds exhausting.

But here I am with a blog that already has something of a following. Why not treat it like my own personal social media site?

Here’s my idea:

I will still post music. I’m still holding off until April when my Amazon Drive account will deactivate and I’ll hopefully have all my shows listed and sorted (I’m doing good on that front and I think I’m still in line to complete that project in April). But when that time comes I’m thinking about once a week I’ll do a post where I’ll share a bunch of shows from a tour or a venue or something. I’m not quite sure how the post will look but hopefully, you’ll have a way to both look at setlists and sources and then download what you want.

I’ll post movie reviews and continue to do things like the Friday Night Horror. I like the idea of doing daily posts about interesting things. I could link to other blogs and sites that put up download links to music, but also link to interesting articles and setlists, kind of like Expecting Rain does now.

But then I also might post a picture of a beautiful sunset that I took that morning or be excited about some TV show I just got into, tell a funny story. This will become my personal space. Hopefully you all (and others) will enjoy it too.

That’s the idea anyway. Truth is I’ve had this thought rattling around in my head for weeks and I’m just now posting about it. Actually doing this is another thing altogether. I have to get into a groove in order to post random things every day. I don’t know if I’ll find it again. Maybe I’ll just write the odd review now and again until I start posting live music again. Maybe once I do, I’ll wind up just posting music and nothing but music.

Or maybe this idea will take off. If it does then you are now forewarned that I’m gonna be posting all kinds of stuff, whatever floats into my brain as interesting.

The Hour 2

the hour 2

One of the things I used to do at Cinema Sentries is review television series that were made in countries not named The United States of America. I love movies from around the world, and I’ve learned to love television from across the globe as well.

The Hour was a British series about a news show from the 1960s, and the struggles it undergoes trying to report hard news rather than fluff pieces. That sounds rather boring, but the series is excellent. Reading my review just now reminds me of how much I liked it and makes me want to watch it again.

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)

the man who knew too much

I suppose for those who are not Alfred Hitchcock aficionados the version of The Man Who Knew Too Much they know is the one with James Stewart and Doris Day. That’s a fine film in its own right, but most people don’t realize it is a remake of a film from 1934. Both films were directed by Hitchock making him one of the few directors to ever remake themselves.

The earlier film was from the director’s British period and stars Peter Lorre in his first English language movie. It is an excellent film and a few years ago Criterion gave it a humdinger of a Blu-ray release. I reviewed it for Cinema Sentries and you can read that review here.

Casino Royale (2006)

casino royale

One of the fun things about going through my old Cinema Sentries reviews is reading some of my old work. Ok, sometimes it is less fun than it is cringe-inducing, but I still enjoy reading what I wrote many years ago. I wrote a review of the first of Daniel Craig’s James Bond outings back in 2012. Truth be told I have no memory of writing this review. I thought I had only written a review of Octopussy for the Cinema Sentries Bond-a-thon, but I guess I wrote this too.

Weird.

Sometimes reading my old reviews sends me back to when I wrote them, but not this. It is literally completely lost to my mind. But hey, you can read it now too, if you like. Just click here.

Octopussy (1983)

Octopussy

Sorry I haven’t posted anything in a while. I have these ideas of posting things every day. Of turning this site into an old-school blog where I write movie reviews, casually talk about the music I’m listening to, and maybe tell stories about my life. But when it comes to actually writing I get distracted and nothing comes out. Maybe this week I’ll get better at it.

Until then we’ll talk about James Bond. Several years ago the folks at Cinema Sentries got together and reviewed all of the James Bond movies. I got to talk about Octopussy, a movie I hadn’t seen since I was a kid (and haven’t seen since I wrote this review). It wasn’t as good as I remembered, and it certainly didn’t live up to that ridiculous title, but it was still kind of fun.

Anyway, here’s my review.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Down (2001)

down

Friday night comes and I need a horror movie to watch. I really want to watch something I’ve not seen before, but scrolling through my current streaming services doesn’t turn up much. I start to put on The Ring (2002) the American remake of the excellent Japanese film Ringu (1988) with Naomi Watts, but I’ve seen it before, and as I said I’m wanting something new. I land on this film which also stars Naomi Watts. It is about an evil elevator in a New York skyrise and that sounds like fun.

Sometimes when you randomly watch something after flipping through the streaming channels you discover something really good. Sometimes, like tonight, you realize you’ve made a terrible mistake.

Down is a remake of a Dutch film called The Lift which is something of a cult classic. Dick Maas directed both of them. I haven’t seen the original but if the remake is anything like it I won’t be bothering with it at all.

It seems to be trying for some sort of blending of horror and comedy but it fails at both. The comedy is broad and bad and not all of the actors seem to understand they should be going for laughs, while others seem to think they are in a Marx Brothers film. It was made just before Watts became a star so while she is featured prominently in all the promotional material she actually isn’t the lead. That role goes to James Marshall who, if you are like me, you’ll stare at for a long time trying to remember where you know him from before you finally look it up and realize he was in Twin Peaks. He plays everything quite straight whereas Naomi Watts seems to have walked in from some SNL skit from the early 1990s. She lays it on thick and broad and sports the worst Brooklyn accent I’ve heard in a while.

The film has great character actors like Dan Hedaya and Michael Ironside, Ron Perlman and Edward Hermann in small roles, all of which seem to be playing in different movies.

This is a movie that begins with two security mooks looking through those tourist telescope things on the observation deck of this big skyscraper. They are looking into the window of a nearby window watching a couple of prostitutes get sexy with some dude. It is played for laughs like it’s one of those low-budget comedies the USA Network used to play on Friday nights. It goes downhill from there.

While the comedy is bad the horror is worse. It builds very little suspense, the deaths are sometimes gruesome but never effective. I’d say it was more of a supernatural thriller instead of horror but it isn’t very thrilling either. In the last 15 minutes or so it does switch from just bad to so-bad-its-good territory but by then I was just ready for it to be over.

As an interesting bit of trivia, the film was scheduled for a 2001 release but then 9/11 happened and for obvious reasons, it got pushed back into oblivion. At some point, they think the elevator mishaps are caused by terrorists. There are actually characters who talk about how Bin Laden tried to take down the twin towers which is now kind of creepy. And that’s about as creepy at the film gets.

Lone Star (1996)

I have a very distinct memory of watching this movie. I saw it with my mother. This isn’t the sort of movie we’d normally watch together which means there must have been a good review in the local paper. I think we showed up late because I remember we had to sit up close. We were maybe in the third row and off to the side. It was very uncomfortable watching from that spot.

I remember liking the movie, but not much else about it. Except for the crick in my neck. It wasn’t like any movie I’d ever seen before so my feelings were skewed. Or rather I didn’t know exactly why I liked it, except that it was really interesting. In my memory, I’m in high school, but by 1996 I would have been in college, so I must have been home for winter break, or maybe the summer.

A corpse is discovered in the desert outside a small border town in South Texas. It has been there so long nothing is left but bones, a Mason’s ring, and a sheriff’s badge. The current sheriff, Sam (Chris Cooper) determines that the dead man was Charlie Wade (Kris Kristofferson) the former sheriff. He went missing decades ago after getting into an argument with Sam’s father, Buddy (Matthew McConaughey). Buddy then became sheriff and was and is beloved by the town.

On the surface, the film is a murder mystery. But there is so much below the surface. As Sam searches for the killer (who he thinks just might be his father) he digs up the past. His past, his father’s past, and the town’s past. As a border town sitting right on the river that divides Mexico from the US the town is full of whites, blacks, Indians and Mexicans. Racial relations have changed over time as well.

The film moves between the present and the past in a most interesting way. The camera will move in on one character, say Sam talking to someone about Charlie, then it will slowly move away and the characters from the past will be there acting out the scene. It blurs the lines between the past and present, memory and history.

Sam runs into his high school sweetheart and they rekindle their relationship. An Army Colonel is transferred to a nearby base. His estranged father runs the local bar, the only place blacks felt welcome in the town for decades. The past meeting the present again, and again.

Director John Sayles weaves this tale full of side stories and numerous characters like an enormous tapestry. Long after watching the film I’m still thinking about it. I don’t know why it took me nearly 25 years to watch it a second time, but I’m quite sure I’ll see it again before another quarter century rolls around.