Unfaithfully Yours (1948)

unfaithfully yours

While trying to explain the type of film we were about to watch to my in-laws, my wife said it was a Rex Harrison film. I immediately began thinking that I would explain that it was a Preston Sturges film, starring Rex Harrison. Not really much difference there, when you think about it, especially since the in-laws have probably never heard of Preston Sturges or Rex Harrison, not being much for film watching.

It’s not that they are opposed to film, but rather they don’t ever go to watch movies, being too expensive, or read up on them, or study weekend grosses or any such thing. They don’t really go to rent them either. They are just not that type of folk.

I mean they still watch regular TV, no cable or satellite, and still use the internet via dial-up. They only have a DVD player because I bought them one, and only then because I was tired of watching the same old VHS tapes when we came down. And that’s just it, when we come down we watch movies, and they enjoy them. So, they aren’t opposed to movie watching, they just don’t go about seeking them out.

Anyways, I would have said it was a Preston Sturges film because when I think about movies I think more about directors than stars. Directors, it seems to me, have more of an effect on the final outcome of a film than an actor. If I had to choose, I’d go for a film with a bad actor and a great director, then a great actor and a bad director. Odds are a director can elevate a bad actor’s performance, more than an actor will elevate bad direction.

This isn’t always true, especially in older films, say starring Humphrey Bogart. I might be able to tell you who directed Casablanca if I thought about it (it’s Michael Curtiz right?) and I know that Howard Hawks directed The Big Sleep and John Huston did the Maltese Falcon. But still all of those pictures, and pretty much everything starring Humphrey Bogart is a Bogart picture to me.

This is all a convoluted way to say that I picked up a copy of Unfaithfully Yours at the library (man you’ve got to love a public library with a massive collection of excellent films) on the basis that it was a Preston Sturges film. Really, I only know Sturges because of the Coen Brothers. Their hilarious film, O’Brother, Where Art Thou? Gets its title from Sturges’s film, Sullivan’s Travels. Loving the brothers Coen and wanting to see their inspiration I rented Sullivan’s Travels and found it to be beautiful.

Preston Sturges is now on my list of directors to watch.

Unfaithfully Yours is an odd little picture. It starts out like a fast-paced comedy in the style of Bringing up Baby or His Girl Friday and then heads into surrealistic art territory before slipping over to a slapstick farce.

The plotting involves Rex Harrison starring as a celebrated English conductor, Sir Alfred De Carter, living in New York with his beautiful bride. Things are going pretty well for the old man, too. He has fame, fortune, success at something he loves, and a beautiful woman to fawn over. Sure he must put up with his petulant brother-in-law, but he’s got his wits and they are enough to take care of him.

Things turn upside down after he gets back from a trip abroad and finds out that when he told his brother-in-law to “look after” his wife, he was taken quite literally. The brother-in-law hired a private detective to look after the wife and the detective found out a few things. Mainly, that said wife spent some time in her negligee late one evening in Sir Alfred’s secretary’s bedroom.

This information naturally outrages Sir Alfred and moves our film into the surreal. During an evening concert, Sir Alfred begins to fantasize about what he will do. The camera moves into his eyeball, and into his mind.

Three fantasies of revenge, remorse, and self-loathing play out during the course of three songs that the actual Sir Alfred is conducting. During the interlude between each song, the real audience goes mad as if the music performed is the best Sir Alfred has ever conducted. Giving us some commentary on the passions and art.

When the concert is over, Sir Alfred rushes home to implement his first, and most devious fantasy – that of killing his wife and framing his secretary. But all does not go as well as the fantasy and we move into the final act, which is pure slapstick.

Nothing goes right for poor Sir Alfred, he cannot find anything, breaks everything, and is too inept to work a recording machine.  It is all perfectly paced and consists of the funniest parts of the movie.

In the end, misunderstandings are worked out and everything becomes a happy ending.

Unfaithfully Yours is an odd little film and not for everyone, as can be seen from a fairly dismal box office at the time of its release. The ever-changing tone of the film may turn some people off, but for those willing to stick it through and enjoy a film that is experimental but well made, the payoff is worth it.

Random Shuffle: Louis Armstrong, Bruce Hornsby, The Libertines, The Rolling Stones, The Blues Brothers

Originally posted on August 26, 2006.

“Kiss to Build a Dream On” – Louis Armstrong
From Sleepless in Seattle

I periodically think of myself as a great jazz lover. In fits and spurts, I try to be. Back about ten years or so I was with a friend at his friend’s house and the subject went naturally to music. Well, it went naturally there because I was checking out his CD collection. The discussion turned to jazz and I mentioned I liked Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, and Sarah Vaughan. Condescending with a whisper he said, “Oh so you like vocal jazz?”

I had never thought about it like that. Isn’t jazz jazz? I had just begun to listen to the likes of Miles Davis and John Coltrane, and by that, I mean I had heard talk about their frenetic awesomeness amongst deadheads. I got the knock of vocal jazz not being real jazz and split. I have since dug what this guy would dub real jazz, but it is a moderated digging. I whip out all that cosmic jazz once in a while, but I can’t take in more than smaller doses.

Louis Armstrong started in the real jazz category, being a trailblazing blower, but in the latter days became the unique voice singing such family hits as “Wonderful World” and “Hello Dolly.” This song falls straight in that camp, being off of the soundtrack to Sleepless in Seattle of all things. It’s a darn fine song though, and one I stuck on my wedding CD.

Most days I’ll take this version of jazz over the real stuff, hands down.

“Rainbow’s Cadillac” – Bruce Hornsby
From 11/06/98

There is a video on YouTube, but the embed has been disabled, you can watch it by clicking here.

I didn’t really get into bootleg trading until just after I graduated college. I had moved to Abilene, TX to start graduate school – start over really, as I didn’t know a soul. Actually I never really got to know many people and left after a semester. But while I was there my refuge was bootlegging.

During this time Bruce Hornsby played a long run at Yoshi’s in Oakland California to promote his album, Spirit Trail. The tour was highlighted by guitar work from Steve Kimock, and a couple of guest spots from Phil Lesh and Bob Weir. This was one of the few performances Lesh had given since Jerry Garcia’s death a few years back and really marked his return to music.

This run came out on tape quickly and with a fantastic sound quality. In those days we were still using analog tapes and the sound quality often degenerated quickly through each generation of recording (unlike CDs where you can get an exact copy of the music, with analog the quality of a recording digressed every time you recorded it). This was an amazing thing to me to have so much high-quality music so quickly after it had been performed.

Now that I’ve moved to the CD world and almost everything is high quality, such recordings are no longer rare. In fact, I’ve only got a couple of these shows on CD and the tapes have long since been given away. But it still brings fond memories. Some of the only ones from that small chunk of time I spent in Texas.

It’s a great performance too. “Rainbow’s Cadillac” is one of Bruce’s finest songs, and an excellent jamming song done live. He pretty much nails the sucker. The sound is great and there is an energy at these shows that this was a new Bruce. Great stuff folks.

“Can’t Stand Me Now” – Libertines
From the Libertines

Peter Doherty, lead singer of the Libertines, and now Babyshambles, is a pretty danged good musician/songwriter but has so thoroughly screwed up his life that it’s all kinds of sad. We don’t hear much about him on this side of the ocean, but in England, he’s all sorts of tabloid fodder, what with the heroin addiction, the multiple arrests, and his off-and-on relationship with Kate Moss.

The Libertines were an excellent British, indie rock outfit, that broke up in, well, tabloid fodder. This is a really great upbeat, heavy drum, pop song. Maybe that’s not very indie rock of them, but a good pop song is a good pop song. And 9 times out of 10 I’ll take a good pop song over a great classical, jazz, or obscure rock song.

“Dead Flowers” – The Rolling Stones
From Sticky Fingers

The first time I ever heard this song was through a live performance by Townes Van Zandt over the closing credits of The Big Lebowski. I hunted the song down and eventually got the Rolling Stones album. Yeah, I know I’m a little behind on the Stones, but I’m slowly catching up with them.

Great freaking song. What more can be said? One of my all-time favorites. It’s a favorite daydream to learn to play this song (when I learn to play an instrument) and please the crowd (for of course I’ll make it big as a musician) when I whip it out.

“Turn On Your Lovelight” – Blues Brothers
From Blues Brothers 2000

This is an old blues number, but I know it mainly through the Grateful Dead. Pig Pen used to do these half-hour rave-ups to it. He’d rap along about women and drinking and whatever while the Dead freaking took off behind him. If I could go back in time I’d go back to 1968-69 San Francisco and groove to Pig taking off on this song. The tapes simply can’t do him justice.

The Blues Brothers don’t do the song justice. Man I dig the Brothers, and the original movie is a classic. The sequel had some good moments but sorely missed John Belushi. I miss Pig Pen on this song. It’s got all kinds of cool bluesmen playing along, but it ain’t got no soul.

RIP Ron “Pig Pen” McKernan

Bootleg Country: REM – 06/09/84

I have somewhere around 1,000 CDs in my bootleg collection. I usually get one or two new shows a week. I simply don’t have the time to listen to all of this music. Because of this, a lot of bootlegs get lost in the cracks.

From time to time when I am fingering my way through my collection I am completely surprised by something. Either I have forgotten that I owned a certain bootleg or the music contained therein, while previously dismissed, kicks the tongue to the back of my head.

One of the great things about this series is that I am forced to look closer at the music I may have previously ignored. I am a musical creature of habit. Even though I have thousands of CDs in my collection, there are maybe a few dozen that actually get any type of heavy rotation.

It’s not that I’m opposed to new music, for there is plenty of that rolls across my eardrums every week, but for certain moods or events, I have a select set of music that meets my needs. When I’m feeling sad or introspective I grab Willie Nelson’s Stardust. Or if I want something a little off-kilter that makes me smile I’ll grab some Wilco. In the mood? How about Norah Jones.

This rotation changes over time. New stuff finds its way in, while other music slips away to collect dust until I rediscover it.

With Bootleg Country, I’m continually walking outside my normal musical boundaries to find something different. One of my initial goals in this series was to show the diversity that can be found in the bootleg community. It’s not just a bunch of hippie, jam-band music, but jazz, folk, punk, and every other genre you can think of.

06/09/84
Capital Theatre
Passaic, NJ

My first full-length memory of REM is coming out of play practice in the eighth grade. It was well into dark and I was looking for my brother amongst all the headlights. A moment later he rolled up in his K-Car and as I opened the door “Stand” blaringly filled up the night air. I jumped in singing along at the top of my lungs.

I was not a popular kid in junior high and by singing along with such a cool song I felt that, I too, was cool. As by simply knowing the music, it’s popularity might somehow rub off on me. It was a perfect moment and I savored every minute of it.

It didn’t last, of course, the next day I went to school and I was the same pimply-faced shy kid. No one had even noticed, or cared that I dug REM.

Dig I did that band, for many years. They were one of my first true musical loves and I remained faithful up until a few years ago when they become so maudlin as to nauseate.

I’ve had this show now for many months and not given it much attention. When I would see it I would skip past it feeling it wasn’t worth any more listens. Thinking about that now I’m not sure if this is because of a general distaste I have for the band, or because I have another bootleg from 1995 that’s not very good at all. Whatever the reasons, I haven’t given it a spin in a long time.

Actually listening to it now, I don’t think I ever gave it a spin. The music is completely new to me, so it must have been something that was acquired and immediately put into my collection.

What a shame because the music contained here is as fresh and vital as it must have been when it was originally performed some 22 years ago. Wow, if that doesn’t make me feel old.

This is a band on a mission; they are on fire playing like Greek Gods before the Vestal Virgins. This is well before they become the biggest rock band on the planet, and a few years before “alternative” became an overused buzz word. This is indie rock at its finest.

They open with a sweet cover of the Velvet Underground’s “Pale Blue Eyes” which isn’t as pretty as the Velvet’s version but a lot tighter than REM’s drunken version on Dead Letter Office. Anytime you hear a band cover the Velvet’s first thing, you know you’re in for a good night.

Like a lot of early REM, the music is heavy on the lower end, and light on the high-end levels. Mike Mill’s bass trudges, and thumps along like a Chihuahua on sugar tablets, while Peter Buck’s guitar slithers like a snake. Michael Stipe’s vocals are as muddled as ever, but it all assimilates into a growling, beautiful piece of rock music.

Highlights include a howling “Hyena” that reverberates into my jowls and“Gardening at Night” for the ages.

It is a great bootleg, and one that I’m knocked out to have found again, for the first time.

 

You can grab a download of this show here.

TV Review: Vanished

vanished tv

Originally written on August 22, 2006. I have absolutely no memory of watching this show. I don’t think I watched another episode and it was cancelled not very long after. – Mat

Fox has been hyping their new mystery series Vanished for weeks. Hoping for something like 24 meets The Fugitive I stopped watching Italian maestro Dario Argento’s slasher epic Deep Red to watch.

The first episode of any series is difficult, double for an ongoing mystery series where presumably each episode will lead in the next without any loose ends being tied up until much, much later. With all of that introduction of characters and establishment of plot, it’s hard to really get into the meat of the show at first and create enough suspense to keep everyone tuned in next week.

By the midway point of the first episode of Vanished, I was ready to write the show-off and was missing my Italian blood bath.

We are quickly introduced to Senator Jeffrey Collins (John Allen Nelson), his wife Sara (Joanne Kelly), and son Max (John Patrick Amedori) before Sara gets a phone call and just like that, disappears. Just as fast an investigation is brought down and the poor Senator’s wife is suspected of being kidnapped.

FBI agent Graham Kelton (Gale Harold) is running the show and is, of course, as brash as he is awesome. He’s introduced with a flashback of doing some type of ransom cash handoff for a small boy. A sniper shoots the bad guy but not before the boy is blown to bits by the bomb planted on his body. This is supposed to give Agent Kelton a dark, somber side and an attitude that says ‘let me do it my way’ because he didn’t actually want the sniper there, and without the sniper, the boy would have been in one piece, not a thousand.

The problem, midway, was that we’d been introduced to the characters and the core problem, but I didn’t actually care about any of them. The show rests upon the fate of Sara Collins, yet we only actually see her for about 10 seconds, not long enough to develop any emotional attachment to her. The senator and his family are more developed, but in an attempt to make everything more mysterious (and presumably to add more plot twists later on) they don’t come off as too sympathetic. The agent’s back story was just kind of dumb, and there are so many obnoxious but genius crime fighters on TV these days that it’s hard to notice one more.

Ah, but in the back half of the episode, things got more interesting. It seems young Sara was previously kidnapped 12 years ago but the media coverage was covered up. She also apparently had another name as some stranger in a bar tells us after seeing her picture on the television.

The past is even more mysterious as Agent Kelton uncovers the body of a woman who was also kidnapped at the same time as Sara. Her body had been frozen since then and has now been thawing in the house registered to a man who happens to own the same type of gun that shot the waiter who told Sara about her disappearing phone call.

And the body has a card on it bearing the number 9:29. The number nine was also tattooed, post-mortem, on the waiter’s hand.

That’s suspense and has me interested in next week’s show.

While not exactly 24 meets The Fugitive, it’s more like a poor man’s Lost meets Matlock, it has enough juice to make me want to turn in next week. Unless Blockbuster sends me Dario Argento’s Suspira, then all bets are off.

Dirty Dozen Brass Band – What’s Going On

what's going on

Originally written on August 22, 2006.

It’s been a year since Hurricane Katrina blew away much of the Gulf Coast and pummeled New Orleans. There is still much work to do in the city to bring it back to its once renowned glory. To help benefit the clean-up effort, New Orleans’s own Dirty Dozen Brass Band has released a song-for-song covering of Marvin Gaye’s classic album What’s Going On.

It is more of a reimagining than a straight cover version for they have added in fatter beats punctuated by brass horns and brought in a number of guest stars including Chuck D, Ivan Neville, and G. Love.

My perceptions of this album changed during the course of the numerous listens I gave it in order to write this review. In fact, I wrote a totally different review before giving the album one last spin and deciding my initial thoughts were completely wrong.

That’s an interesting side thought, actually, how perceptions of something can change over time. I’ve been writing reviews for about 18 months and periodically I’ll go through my files and check in on what I thought of a piece. Generally, I agree with what I thought back then, but sometimes I’ll totally disagree with myself.

Case in point I wrote a review of the zombie spoof, Shaun of the Dead and I was rather unexcited about the whole thing. I didn’t give it a big jeer, but neither was I particularly enthused. Watching it again, recently, I found myself wondering how I could not have been bowled over by the hilarity within that film.

So many things can affect our consumption of an artwork, and then our own critique of that work, that a review – something set in stone for the ages – is an odd thing. Does Ebert ever go back and admit he’s wrong, I wonder.

For What’s Going On, I initially dismissed large parts of it as having hip-hop and rap roots. I am too old, too white, and too from Oklahoma to ever really get rap music, and it wasn’t pleasing to my ears to have rapping over one of the classics. In my mind’s eye, all of the songs had some kind of rapping going on over what was actually pretty good back-up music.

Listening to the album again, I realized that only the first and last songs actually had rap artists laying down rhymes over the music. The rest of the album is either instrumental, or has guest artists actually singing along. Some of the beats are deep and fat, and certainly there are hip-hop influences throughout, but very little actual rapping. I suspect the bookended rapping caused me to believe there was more on the album than there actually is.

So, my review changed and was updated to reflect the new reality.

Covering a well-known song, less an entire album, is a difficult task for any artist. If you stay too close to the original then critics will say it is frivolous and redundant. If you completely rearrange the song making it your own then fans will cry sacrilege and call out for the Inquisition. An artist must ride that line, staying close to what made the original a classic while still maintaining their own uniqueness in the song.

The Dirty Dozen Brass Band manages to find sublime methods of doing this. Often the horns will blow out the lines normally sung, and in the case of the titular track, Chuck D raps his own lyrics, while the musicians stay on track with the melody.

The title track is where I previously spent a lot of negative energy knocking the album. “What’s Going On” is a classic, beautiful piece of music. You can’t not like that song. In this reimagined version, Chuck D gets his rap on and throws down some hard political lines dissing the aftermath of Katrina and the US government’s response to it.

It’s not that I’m against political statements in art, or even specific words towards specific situations, it’s just that Marvin Gaye created a song that is universal. Though he was speaking about the Vietnam War and the political, racist environment of his time, his lyrics maintain a resonance today. His statement speaks out against our current situation and will continue to speak to generations to come. I’m not sure Chuck D’s words will hold up as well.

However, what the Dirty Dozen Brass Band lay down behind the rhymes shakes me inside and out. Like their name implies they hit some brassy, dirty beats with a little Dixieland thing thrown in for fun. They aren’t afraid to lay down deep, heavy beats either, and I’m not afraid to like them.

I can see myself cranking this disk at full volume and shaking my middle-aged-white-boy arse all night long (or at least until 10:30 which is still past my bedtime.) What’s Going On won’t make you throw out your original copy, but it stands enough on its own to find itself in party rotation or anytime you just want to groove.

Bootleg Country: Jimmy Cliff – Towson, MD (12/17/01)

Before I begin talking about Jimmy Cliff I must first admit I know none to very little about reggae music. Sure, I’ve got Bob Marley’s greatest hits package, Legend, and do dig it from time to time. That live version of “No Woman No Cry” is a marvel to hear. I’ve got a couple of other Marley bootlegs that are also quite awesome. But other than those, I’m pretty useless when it comes to Jamaican music.

This is most probably because of the sheer crappiness of the non-Marley reggae music I’ve heard. Anytime I’ve heard reggae music being played on the radio or some city festival somewhere it’s all heard like generic, worthless garbage. It all has the same monotonous, rhythmic beat that makes everyone in the near vicinity move up and down like ducks on a pond. It’s just inane and annoying.

I realize that’s not particularly fair to reggae music. It would be like writing off pop music after listening to nothing but Top 40 radio, or 70’s rock from the Classic Rock stations that play the same four Led Zeppelin songs over and over again.

I only happen to have this Jimmy Cliff bootleg due to Nick Hornby’s book, High Fidelity (or maybe it was the movie) where the main character notes he would like Cliff’s “Many Rivers to Cross” played at his funeral. I quickly found a copy of the song and came to realize he was right – that is one danged fine song to go out on.

From the single, I put myself on a bootleg vine for this very recording.

12/17/01
Recher Theatre
Towson, MD

Coming into this bootleg I thought “Many Rivers to Cross” was the only song I knew of Jimmy Cliff, he quickly finds fault in that belief, running through a stream of familiar songs. I have multiple recordings from a series of shows in the early 90s with Jerry Garcia and David Grisman playing “Sitting in Limbo.” I dug the song enough to include it on a Christmastime mix tape for my wife, and never even knew who wrote it. Cliff shows me who is the master of that song and performs it beautifully.

Later he rises up for “Many Rivers to Cross” and brings it to the people on a hymn. It lifts and praises this beast called man as we journey to our final destinations. He then tears through a version of “The Harder They Come” that leaps and roars across the land. Coming but three months after the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers there is both a somber and angry political tone attached to many of the songs. His song “Terror,” written specifically about those attacks, speaks out against both the acts of terror by Osama Bin Laden and the retribution from the USA. Terror, he says, comes from every side, and must end for there to be peace.

With other songs he finds hope. With “Wonderful World, Beautiful People” he sees the beauty in all people. Covering Johnny Nash’s “I Can See Clearly Now” he seems to point to a brighter future for us all.

And with that, I think I’ll go back to the record bin and find some more reggae music. For if this is the sound of Jamaica I need to do some exploring.

Set List:
Samba Reggae
Sitting in Limbo
You Can Get It If You Really Want
The World Is Yours
Many Rivers To Cross
Terror
No Problems, Only Solutions
Wonderful World, Beautiful People
I Want, I Do, I Get
The Harder They Come
I Can See Clearly Now
War in Jerusalem
Black Magic
Vietnam

Poison – 20th Anniversary Remasters

poison remasters

Originally written on August 15, 2006.

Slide into your leather pants. Strap on your stiletto boots. Fray your hair out with 12 gallons of hair spray. That’s right boys, it’s hair metal time.

Hair metal, or glam metal as many like to call it, arose in the late 1970s but became the dominant form of rock music in the 1980s. Equal parts heavy metal and glam rock, hair metal ruled my school for many a year.

Mötley Crüe has been cited as the world’s first hair metal band, and certainly, they brought it to the masses. With the Crüe reaching sales in the millions many bands soon followed with wild hair, more make-up than a cheap hooker, and plenty of loud cock rock.  Oh, and let’s not forget the power ballads.

Ah, power ballads, the way for the tough, ultra-manly boy bands to show their sensitive side (for what better way to get some nookie than show your feminine side – besides the mascara I mean)? I recently made a hair metal mix tape and was kind of shocked to find that the vast majority of it was made up of power ballads.

Here are the big rockers, with the three neck guitars, the heavy riffs, the super-powered machismo, and the songs that I remember are the slow, sappy ones like “Every Rose Has It’s Thorn,” “Home Sweet Home” and “Heaven.” Mary Louise Parker, what the crap is up with that?

My favorite hair metal band has always been, and will always be, Poison. They didn’t have the cops of Mötley Crüe or the longevity of Bon Jovi, but they sure beat the spiked boots off of Warrant.

With the 20th anniversary of their first record, Look What the Cat Dragged In, Poison have re-released their first three albums (Look What the Cat Dragged In, Open Up and Say…Ahh!, Flesh and Blood) in souped-up remastered versions with bonus tracks.

If that doesn’t make you want to tease your hair and put on heavy mascara, I don’t know what will.

The disks all sound great; this is Poison sharper and more glammed up than you’ve ever heard before.

1986’s Look What the Cat Dragged in fell in the middle of the hair metal glory days. Everywhere you turned it was nothing but heavy metal and big hair. Poison maximized everything that was right about the genre. The guitars were loud, the drums were pounding, the lyrics were juvenile, and the music was all metal all the time.

You really can’t blame young men in metal bands for singing about what they want. With songs like “I Want Action” and “Talk Dirty to Me” Poison left little to the imagination in terms of what they wanted, and how they wanted it.

With their first album, they immediately established their mastery of the genre with balls-out rock followed by a big power ballad du jour.

The bonus songs on the disk include two 7” singles of “I Want Action” and “I Won’t Forget You” which, honestly, I can’t tell the difference between this and the regular album cuts. There is also an electrified, hair metal cover of Jim Croce’s “Don’t Mess Around with Jim.”

In the 20 years that have passed between the release of Look What the Cat Dragged In and Open Up and Say…Ahh! the differences in those two albums have blurred significantly. I’ve been a fan of Poison since their first beats hit the Top 40, but I really can’t remember hearing Open Up and Say…Ahh! for the first time.

I remember quite fondly the heavy rotation of “Nothing But a Good Time” on MTV with its slave-to-the-grind restaurant dishwater beginning, but in my memory “Every Rose Has It’s Thorn” and “Mama Don’t Dance” were already big hits, and they were not released until afterward.

This is it for me. This is the cream of hair metal. Give me Open Up and Say…Ah! Along with Dr. Feelgood and you can put me on a deserted big hair island forever.

“Nothing But a Good Time” is cock rock at its finest. It’s sing-along party music and there ain’t anything wrong with that. “Every Rose” is the greatest power ballad ever written, period. I mean, Brett Michaels has it tattooed on his arm, and he’d never do anything stupid.

In 9th grade, a long-haired student pulled out his acoustic guitar and lipped-synched himself a performance of “Nothing But A Good Time” for drama class that left us all teary-eyed. You can’t do that with “When the Children Cry.”

The disk’s bonus tracks include a previously unreleased track “Living for the Minute” and an interview with Brett Michaels.

When Flesh and Bone came out in 1990 I wrote it off pretty quickly. It seemed to me like a couple of hit singles thrown in with a lot of lousy filler material. I wondered if the band wasn’t falling back on its hit-making formula for a few numbers and then just throwing together any old crap to fill out the album.

Listening to it again I can’t believe how wrong I was. This is a band at its most mature. They have grown as songwriters and musicians. The music here is more than just cock rock, it’s infused with the blues and incorporates a range of styles and musicianship.

I can see why I didn’t like it to begin with, for it is quite different from their previous outings. And different is no good to a 14-year-old boy who wants to rock.

Sure the cock does peek its head out to rock here and there and especially on the hit single “Unskinny Bop,” but they also play with odd experimentation, (“Strange Days of Uncle Jack”), bluesy acoustic instrumentals, (“Swamp Juice (Soul-O”)), and Eagle-esque harmonies, (“Let It Play”).

Together it makes for their best album to date and a movement away from the shallow depth of hair metal and into something, if not exactly deep then a more mature musical entity.

The extra tracks include a blazing instrumental, “God Save the Queen” and an acoustic take of “Something To Believe In” with a few different lyrics.

With the re-release of their first three disks, Poison is giving their fans a better sound than they’ve ever had before, and a pristine example of why they were the kings of hair metal to those who’ve never heard them before.

Blog Type Announcements

Originally posted on August 15, 2006.  Almost everything I talk about in this post no longer exists – Blogcritics is a shell of its former self, The Mondo Project only lasted a few months, I deleted Bootleg Nation, and all of my old writing buddies no longer write or have a blog.  For a brief time, I also did some gossipy news-type writing about celebrities misbehaving.  I mention that here, but I couldn’t stomach that work for very long and I’ve decided to never make it public again – Mat

The few of you who regularly read Brewster’s Millions (This blog used to be called Brewster’s Millions – I can’t remember when I changed it to The Midnight Cafe). have probably noticed a few changes. I’ll now explain why.

Some Bblogcritic writing buddies of mine and I have created a brand new super-cool blog, The Mondo Project. We were all lamenting the fact that our own personal blogs get very little in the way of hits, and that a big part of this is our inability to create regular content.

This has always been my number one problem with my own blog. I think I do a very good job of writing interesting pieces, but I am only able to once or twice a week – a very small amount for your average blog. Blog readers are used to daily updates, with brand-spanking new information all the time. Time constraints have always kept me from being able to do this.

So me and the boys, plus one gurl, decided that with the eight of us, we should be able to do regular updates if we pulled our resources. Thus we created the Mondo Project.

A little history on the name. My good friend, and writer extraordinaire, The Duke de Mondo created a little Yahoo group ages ago. This was a place designed for him to be able to let his fans know when he had published a new piece. It was also a cool place to hang out and talk pop culture.

The group, like the Dukes site, was called “Mondo Irlando” having something to do with the pseudo-documentary style gore flicks of the seventies and the Dukes homestead in Northern Ireland.

I joined about a year and a half ago and have immensely enjoyed hanging out with a diverse group of folks able to discuss everything under the sun. We dubbed ourselves the Mondo Gentlemen’s Club, that is until a girl was introduced into our midst, one Mary K. Williams.

The group has changed over the last many months, with only me, the Duke, his UK compatriot and NME writer Greg Smith, and Sir Eric Berlin lasting through it all. To balance out the UK side of things the Duke invited his friend, Aaron Fleming to the game.

Keeping up with the Americas, our long lost lover, Bennett Dawson invited Mark Saleski who in turn brought with him fellow music lover DJRadiohead. Together we brought total coolness and a mutual cultural extravaganza called The Hot Topic.

Amongst our many discussions was this concept of creating a single site where we could both write extraordinarily awesome essays on pop culture, but also banter about whatever crosses our mind. See, the cool thing about Blogcritics is that we can fine-tune our excellent writing and get a big stinking audience. But at the Yahoo group we often had a conversational thing going about on all sorts of gnarly subjects, but ones that wouldn’t quite fit into your typical professional blog type deallie. Thus with the Mondo Project, we have created a place where we can both display the most professional of pieces and righteous convos and what pleases us most.

The Mondo Project is now my place to hang out, write, and wax poetic. It is also an opportunity to write a little more personal stuff, like my recent escapades with the iPod.

Not to be outdone, I have also started a new blog called Bootleg Nation. In my research, I have come to realize that to have a successful blog you need a pretty narrow niche. Being diverse is actually a sure way to drive people away unless you are super prolific. So I started a niche blog all about my obsessions of live music. It has just started going, but it should be a very cool place for bootleggers to hang out.

Also, with my recent unemployment (Oh I haven’t mentioned here that I was recently laid off) I realize I now have more writing time on my hands. One of the producers of Blogcritics has asked that I write some fresh news stories with a fun bloggy bent. I’ve started writing a few (as you can see from my recent postings here) and am finding it a fun thing to do, and it brings a lot of traffic to Blogcritics. It’s the least I can do for a site that has helped me so much.

All of these things are now also converging here at Brewster’s Millions. I’ve decided to make this blog kind of a melting pot of all the things I write. That will make it a little mismatched, but you’ll learn to love it.

Dark Water (2005)

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In certain places around the world wide web, there are debates raging about the Hollywood craze of remaking films, especially those of the horror variety, and more specifically the Asian horror variety. For years those crazy Asians have been making twisted, bloody, and freaking scary horror films. Recently Hollywood has realized there is a market for such a thing and has been remaking them ad nauseam.

Scanning the Internet Movie Database you’ll come across all kinds of debates on such a thing, most of them beginning with:

“Why are Americans so dumb?”
Or
“American movies suck, all they do is remake other better movies. Can’t they think of anything original?”

Or my favorite

“Can’t Americans read? Why can’t they just read subtitles and stop remaking perfectly good non-English cinema?”

The fact is Hollywood has been remaking films almost as long as they’ve been making them. The third funniest movie ever made (His Girl Friday) was a remake of an earlier film, The Front Page, and it was released in 1940!

Do the majorities of Americans watch foreign language films? No, probably not. Do the majority of the French, German, and Japanese people watch non-dubbed, foreign-language films? I suspect not. It doesn’t seem that unusual for people to want to watch what is essentially a passive medium, passively.

Hollywood remakes films, and specifically Asian horror films because there is money in it. Let’s face it, if The Ring was a total bomb we wouldn’t have seen The Grudge or Dark Water. But it made a bundle and so more Asian horror remakes came. And they’ll continue to come until they stop making money.

For my money ($14.95 a month for 2 movies at a time via Blockbuster) they can keep on remaking J-Horror. Even when they are less interesting than the original (which is most of the time) they are still generally entertaining.

Dark Water, the American remake of a Japanese film of the same name starring Jennifer Connely is about 3/4th of a good movie. I haven’t managed to catch the original, so I came into the remake fresh, which probably helped me to like it more. Watching a remake when you’ve seen the original is a bit like watching a film when you’ve read the book. You always want the current bit to act more like the images in your head.

So, by not knowing anything about the original I could take on the remake without any preconceived ideas. Turns out it’s not a bad film at all – lots of good imagery, some good acting by great actors, and a rather unconvincing plot.

Jennifer Connely plays Dahlia a soon-to-be recently bitterly divorced mother. Dahlia and her young daughter move into a run-down high-rise apartment that has constant leaks.

Water permeates this picture. It is everywhere. In the constant rain, in sinks and baths, running down the walls and spilling over into the floor. It’s as if the water is a living thing and it wants to be the star of the show.

The real stars include a bloody good cast including John C. Reilly, Tim Roth, and Pete Postlethwaite. Connelly, who can usually hold her own, is completely outdone by her supporting characters. Both Reilly and Postlethwaite turn creepy, simmering, unhinged performances as the manager and caretaker of the apartment. Tim Roth takes a good guy role as a divorce lawyer with a heart of gold.

The direction draws out the suspense and creepiness very well. The apartment is filmed in dim light, with lots of scary shadows overcoming everyone. There is a real sense of dread throughout as we wrangle over the drama of Dahlia’s impending divorce, struggle with her child who seems to be going crazy and an apartment that just might be haunted.

As with many films of this type, Dark Water can’t sustain its premise for the entire length of the film. About the ¾ mark, many of the supernatural activities are oversimplified, and the ending is less than satisfying.

But up until the end, it is a pretty good flick. Not bad for a remake.

The Continuing Adventures of Me and My iPod

Originally posted on August 8, 2006.

It’s just that I know the smaller-sized iPods would only frustrate me, as 512 megabytes is simply not enough to cover a fraction of the music in my collection. And who wants to constantly be deleting and adding in songs? The larger 40 gig pods are more to my liking, but I just can’t talk the wife into letting me spend the hundreds of dollars it takes to purchase one.

For my birthday I finally talked her into letting me buy an iPod on eBay. After looking for weeks I finally found an older model 40 gigabyte pod for the low price of $118. I researched the company (it was one of those companies that only sells things on eBay). They had hundreds of positive reviews with a nearly impeccable rating. I laid down my cash and received it in the mail shortly thereafter.

Upon unwrapping my self-bought gift, I realized that my oldish laptop did not have a firewire connection, and the iPod did not come with any USB cables. A quick trip to Best Buy and $30 later, I had a new USB cable and immediately hooked my iPod up, nearly salivating at the thought of uploading all my choice tunes.

Headed to the local bookstore I had my laptop set to transfer hundreds of songs over to the iPod. Upon our return, I noticed a slight problem – the iPod was off. After fiddling with the nobs and controls I realized the batter was dead. Hmmmm, I thought the USB cable connected to the computer also charged the battery.

Another quick trip to Best Buy and another $30 bought me a direct iPod battery charger. I plugged it in and went to bed frustrated over a day with the iPod and not a single song listened to.

Waking the next morning I rushed over the my charging batter only to find that there was still no juice. Frustration had turned to anger and I ruminated my troubles over with a coworker. We decided that the battery must be completely dead, so I ordered a new one online. Another $30 was spent on an increasingly expensive device.

Many days later the batter came and I nearly broke the dang thing trying to get it open. New battery, dead iPod. Curse, don’t they charge these things before they send them? Another night of charging my battery. Another morning awaking to find a dead iPod.

Not knowing anything else to do I complained to the company that sold me the iPod. No response. A week later I sent another letter to the company this time demanding they refund my money or send me a new iPod. Days later they responded that it had been 30 days since they sold me the device which eliminates their responsibility in the matter.

I have now spent nearly as much money as I would have for a new one, and I still have not heard a single song. A friend of mine thinks he might be able to fix it. Having nothing to lose I’ll let him try. While I wait I think I’ll curse Apple, Ebay, and sob into my morning cereal.