2009 MovieTime

The following column is reprinted from the January issue of Providence Monthly (including the stuff my youthful editors somehow deem neccessary to leave out):


Eyes Wide Open
By Scott Duhamel

2009 Favorites(in no particular order)

The Hurt Locker. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow.
What distinguishes The Hurt Locker from checking in as a moral-parading exploration of our current Middle Eastern engagement, or simply another pop and crackle action ride covered up in a war movie uniform, is Bigelow’s acutely unique overview and her more-than-scrupulous technique. The movie really isn’t about Iraq, nor is it an excuse to trot out a newfangled formula for contempo action; it delves into the grace (and devastation) of heroism in war, and it rolls out like a kinetic art piece replete with spatial distancing and a visceral flair. Bigelow’s hard-edged film (choreographed with sinuous hand-held camerawork and accented with off-balance tilts, full speed zooms, and nervous editing) arches into a rigorous self-propellant, with style flash pointing into substance. Stripped bare, the movie contains no story arc, no character development, and no big or resounding (aka meaningful) finale. It’s a potent dip into the adrenaline of recklessness and disorientation of cinematic action, and not in the typical Hollywood manner which is usually merely meant to artificially simulate so-called real life action. Probably the best film of the year.

Up in the Air. Directed by Jason Reitman.
Up in the Air may indeed be George Clooney’s best performance to date, and it can certainly lay claim to be among his most affecting. Neither Clooney’s central figure or the film ever seeps into the redemptive mode, and both movie and performance benefit for their bold fence straddling, and refusal to wrap up near anything neatly. Vera Farmiga, as the fellow traveler and soul sister with whom Clooney’s fixer gets entangled with, is for once, an on screen feminine counterpart who seems truly adult and intoxicatingly equal. Up in the Air is a woefully sad sack economic fable for our times, but Total George ups the ante, making it a personal tale that belies its basic structure as a very dark social comedy. Director Reitman traffics in a shimmering and resonant ambiguity, and Clooney proves well more than able in delivering an incisive central performance that is exquisitely poised between acerbic disdain and lost boy soul searching. George Clooney is indeed a big screen rarity—the matinee idol that can act with the best of them.

Inglourious Basterds. Directed by Quentin Tarantino.
Inglourious Basterds was bound to a polarizing movie, rolling itself out as if derived from an aesthete’s blueprint, yet crafted with pulp cartoonishness, continually nudging the artful into the low-down, craftily airing out the florid excesses of melodrama and outright tawdriness. It is, without question, Tarantino’s ultimate video clerk film fantasia, a movie boiled in the oil of melted down film nitrate stock (unironically enough, also one of the movie’s plot points), a film that unequivocally operates in a readymade cinematic vacuum. Tarantino’s movies have never been intended to peel back the shell and reveal anything of moral or psychological import, and this—a Holocaust revenge fantasy—doesn’t even hint at any significance outside of tickling the pleasure sensors. It’s a wacked-out paean to the delirious beguilements of the cinema, happily self-indulgent and brazenly self-assured.

Where the Wild Things Are. Directed by Spike Jonze.
Jonze has managed to paint an impeccably textured cinematic fable, both sweet and sour, about the inherent implosion of childhood, with vivid brushstrokes given to the inflated traumas and tongue-tying complications of growing up, a just about perfect reinterpretation of Maurice Sendak’s modern classic children’s book that’s part idyll, part nightmare, part real, part fantasy, all of it with a subtle emotional underpinning. As we all know, the boychild Max’s pursuit, his self-inflicted adventure, his expressive search for self-control, ends with a return to a simple but deeply satisfying hot meal and the eternal nurturing of quintessential motherhood, and that’s just enough to probably bring a tear to the eyes of Sendak, Freud, even Walt Disney, and certainly myself.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. Directed by Werner Herzog.

Exquisitely gonzo, this non-remake, non-sequel of Abel Ferrara’s 1992 cult fave, substitutes a wickedly over baked Nic Cage go round for the unforgettable Harvey Keitel turn of the earlier film. A cop drama that dips and dives into hallucinatory flourishes with jangly oddball rhythms, also lets the wackadoo inner Cage loose, not the goofball charmer of big budget melodrama or the loony macho man of action movies, but a side-stepping, eye-popping, hilariously careening, barking-like-a-dog, performance artist playing a vile, viscous, and possible insane rouge copper. Herzog and Cage delight in the former’s faux documentary atmosphere, while the latter channels both John Barrymore and Crispin Glover, both of them sticking it right in yer face. While crispy and overdone, it’s still delicious.

Fantastic Mr. Fox. Directed by Wes Anderson
Strange as it is to be including two children’s film in one top ten, Wes Anderson’s stop-motion take on Roald Dahl’s 1970 storybook, is a delightful and intensely manicured effort. Deceivingly light, it’s woven together by Anderson’s wholly original sensibility, and easily seems at one with his other top notch work: The Royal Tenenbaums, Rushmore, and The Darjeeling Limited. It’s archness at its best, another compulsively nuanced offering, and of those movies that sticks to your craw long after having left the theater.

District 9. Directed by Neill Blomkamp.
Brainy, spine-tickling, deft, and imaginative, this sci-fi mocumentary is also subversively amusing. Reviewers made sacrilegious comparisons to the visceral art and craft of James Cameron’s The Terminator that were truly right on, while South African filmmaker Blomkamp and his co-conspirator and star (Sharlto Copley) confidently managed to immediately mount themselves on the list of Filmsters We Must Watch.

The White Ribbon. Directed by Michael Haneke.
I find Haneke’s filmmaking output continually mesmerizing: The Piano Player (’01), Funny Games (’97 and ’07), Cache(’05). This one is typically glacial (vaqueness is his means of tension building), so of course it is also typically gripping, on the surface a haunting fable set in a small village during pre-World War I Germany. Bleak and devastating, brimming with breathtaking compositions, it is relentless, chilling, but enthralling filmmaking.

A Serious Man. Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen.
The Coens, inscrutable as they may be, create films that are as cut and polished as diamonds, gleaming with precision. They make a living mocking, eviscerating, and savaging with deadpan officiousness, happily undercutting genre expectations along the way. As the title indicates, this provocative look into the state of Judasim in America in the ever changing 60’s, is as serious it is equally audacious---imagine Kafka traveling to the Midwest, hapless and unenlightened, yet with tongue-squarely-in-cheek. All in all, a remarkably self-lacerating modern day parable.

The Exiles. Directed by Kent Mackenzie.
This great lost film, partially revived by being referenced in Thom Anderson’s one-of-a-kind essay film Los Angeles Plays Itself, was released to obscurity in 1961 and brought back after a scrupulous UCLA restoration in mid 2008. I didn’t see it until last year, and it stayed with me until I felt forced to have a second viewing. A semi-documentary that follows a handful of Native Americans through their Los Angeles skid row environs through the course of one dusk to dawn day, its stark immediacy resonates deeply, like a neon-lit Raymond Carver short story that also sinks a dagger into your uncomprehending heart.

Just Below the Scoreboard: Big Fan, Adventureland, Me and Orson Welles, The Messenger, Public Enemies, Invictus, Up, Tyson, Drag Me To Hell, The Limits of Control.

RIP:Jenny and Jean

I’ve been dog sick (for real), and soul sick, thus the blog has laid moribund, gathering electronic dust and perhaps losing whatever miniscule (but committed) readership I have. A bug of sorts may have physically splayed me, and the political landscape around us has continually sickened me, yet I’ve vowed to keep politics out of it and stay within the pleasure confines of the culture zone. A place where one can opine with delicacy, an actual thought process, and with ready theorems and even actual supportive facts and examples.

I’ve also been kicking myself for not somehow finding the time to toss off a few words about the recent passing of Hollywood beauty Jennifer Jones, and now that the one and only Jean Simmons has joined her in the astral dressing rooms, I am compelled to make up for it. Jones and Simmons shouldn’t be consigned to one general mini-tribute, but, in fact, they did indeed share certain big screen qualities, and both had equally difficult times landing resonating roles and both had rather strange careers.

Jennifer Jones was born Phylis Isley in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1919, the daughter of a local showbiz type, and she eventually found her way to Hollywood as an ingénue in the late 30’s and married the troubled young actor Robert Walker. She soon came under the penetrative gaze of the all powerful David O. Selznick, and found herself contracted to him and eventually engaged in an affair which helped break up both of their marriages, leading to their own legal coupling. Renamed, she made her official debut, in 1943’s The Song of Bernadette, and won a thoroughly unexpected Oscar for best actress. After snatching the coveted crown so early into her career, it would be forever debated by both industry and critical mavens whether her undeniably big screen glow emanated from the pure magic of perfect casting or an acting sense that wasn’t quite formed or shaped. Jones continually conveyed a deep-seated earnestness in her work.

Selznick was obsessed with Jones and her burgeoning career, eventually causing both directors and production types to hope against her landing a role in their upcoming production, fearing the flurry of memos and continual suggestive interference that was sure to come from Selznick. Ironically enough, despite his purest desires, he also seemed devoid of good judgment when choosing her roles. She is so magnificently miscast in 1946’s Duel in the Sun, that her misplaced ferocity as a tempestuous bad girl, in a luridly technicolored western sudser, made it one of the greatest Hollywood camp pleasures of all time, and a pivotal film for such latter-day biggie directors as Pedro Almodovar and Marty Scorsese. She is memorable in Carrie (’52), Ruby Gentry (’52), Beat the Devil (’54), Love is a Many Splendored Thing (’55), A Farewell to Arms (57), and faded out in rather high ((and campy) style in The Towering inferno (’74). Ethereal, severely limited in range, she was, for a time, one of those unadorned 40’s screen goddesses, yet she always stood out as a slightly off-the-mark type, one whom emanated definite vibes of peculiarity.

Jean Simmons, born in London in 1929, was a successful and extremely popular actress before she entered her twenties. A porcelain vision throbbing with inner vibrancy she couldn’t be missed in Great Expectations (’46), Black Narcissus (’47), and Hamlet (’48), all exemplary British films. She wound up in Hollywood at the tender age of 22, signed to a contract with the notorious producer and skirt-chaser Howard Hughes, who seemed not to care that Simmons was newly betrothed to British matinee macho man Stewart Granger. Punished by a petulant Hughes after she (one of the few it seems) turned him away, he forced her into a role that seemed ill-suited for her, as the angelic psychopath opposite tough guy/ patsy Robert Mitchum in Otto Preminger’s 1952 Angel Face, in which she turned in perhaps one of the most hypnotic and memorable woman’s roles in all of film noir, and forever created her own little filmic undercurrent. She was strong in The Actress('53), good in The Robe ('53), stood up to a grandstanding Brando in Desiree('54), and absolutely hit the mark, both singing and partnering again with Brando as Sister Sarah in Guys and Dolls (’55).

By now she had turned into an absolutely versatile leading lady, the aging process melting her otherworldly air of perfection by maturing into an unexpected vivacious, even salacious side. She did noteworthy work in The Big Country ('58),Elmer Gantry ('60), and The Grass is Greener('61) and then never again regained her spot at the top as the tumultuous (for the movie industry also) decade tumbled on. Simmons was indeed a radiant beauty but onscreen she learned to convey a decidedly feminine luminosity and sharpened sense of inner being, with nary a drop of sweat ever showing.

The Clooney Factor

The following column is reprinted from the January issue of Providence Monthly (including the stuff my youthful editors somehow deem neccessary to leave out):

Eyes Wide Open
by Scott Duhamel

It’s an age-old parlor game, known to certifiable cinephiles and those who kinda dip their toes in. What contempo actor or actress best represents, substitutes, replicates, approximates, conjures up, pays homage to, works within the shadow of, or maybe even directly connects to which iconic screen star of the past? Are Jack Nicholson or Robert DeNiro or Sean Penn legit Sons Of Brando? Is there a thin line that connects Veronica Lake to Angie Dickinson to Ellen Barkin to Sharon Stone to Vera Farmiga? Did James Dean begat Paul Newman who begat Brad Pitt? Is there really a logical connection between Jimmy Stewart and Tom Hanks? Is Cate Blanchett the new Katherine Hepburn, Johhny Depp what Monty Clift could have become, Liam Neeson hovering between becoming the second coming of Richard Burton, Albert Finney or Richard Harris? And, of course, is George Clooney the new version of Cary Grant?

Clooney, who by the way, is enjoying one hell of year-end showcase with the recent roll out of The Men Who Stare at Goats, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and the just released Up in the Air, seems to me, to be very worthy of comparison to the consummate Grant. Both exhibited a unique blend of pure good looks, gentlemanly sophistication, and an overriding mix of worldly irony, inner charm, and a genuine sense of remarkable self-depreciation. Grant, like Georgie Boy, made himself equally at home in screwball comedies, romantic sudsers, suspenseful pieces, and out and out actioneers. Both actors seem consummately masculine; yet exhibit a heightened sense of sartorial style, the smart comic tendency to lean into a clueless subterfuge of overconfidence, and (when playing it tough, haggard, or cool) an alchemic air of brilliant nonchalance.

Grant, long overlooked by critics yet embraced by audiences, marked his greatest achievements under the steadfast tutelage of Howard Hawks (Only Angels Have Wings, Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday) and Alfred Hitchcock (Notorious, To Catch a Thief. North by Northwest), Clooney, who seems to bring forth a nitcrit-penned essay following him every few films with a title like “The Last of the Movie Stars?” has been best utilized by smart-aleck filmmakers Steven Soderbergh and The Coen Brothers. Both men sport pasts that to some diminish their later achievements; with Grant (born Archibald Leach) beginning his showbiz career as an acrobat in a traveling troupe, and Clooney starting out as infamously unlucky TV participant in a multitude of failed television pilots. Both also engage their big screens roles with a seeming modicum of effort, and their respective sweat less role-playing does not bring forth the typical critical hosannas.

A recent Time magazine piece by Richard Corliss divvied up Clooney’s performances into three simple categories: Serious George (The Perfect Storm, Solaris, Syriana), Glorious George (Out of Sight, Ocean’s Eleven, Fantastic Mr. Fox) and Spurious George (O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Burn After Reading, The Men Who Stare At Goats). Corliss also claimed that Clooney’s turn as Ryan Bingham, the seemibly smooth operator who blissfully flies the friendly skies in Jason Reitman’s adaptation of Walter Kirn’s 2001 novel Up in the Air, before touching ground to execute the vagaries of his one-of-a-kind-job---firing unsuspecting corporate day workers—is among the first roles that the actor can be seen as Total George, utilizing aspects of all three of his well known big screen personas. (Anthony Lane, in the New Yorker, made much the same point, while labeling Clooney’s division of roles as “cranky stiffs, troubled defenders of honor, and gossamer smoothies.”)

Up in the Air may indeed be Clooney’s best performance to date, it can certainly lay claim to be among his most affecting. Neither Clooney’s central figure or the film ever seeps into the redemptive mode, and both movie and performance benefit for their bold fence straddling, and refusal to wrap up near anything neatly. Vera Farmiga, as the fellow traveler and soul sister with whom Clooney’s fixer gets entangled with, is for once, an on screen feminine counterpart who seems truly adult and intoxicatingly equal. Up in the Air is a woefully sad sack economic fable for our times, but Total George ups the ante, making it a personal tale that belies its basic structure as a very dark social comedy. Director Reitman traffics in a shimmering and resonant ambiguity, and Clooney proves well more than able in delivering an incisive central performance that is exquisitely poised between acerbic disdain and lost boy soul searching. George Clooney is indeed a big screen rarity—the matinee idol that can act with the best of them.

Yup, a Resolution

It’s a universal ailment, a constant source of personal dissatisfaction; yet another incremental dollop coagulating in that big ol’ fifty-gallon drum of all pervading ennui. Ain’t no way around it---one’s ambitions always seem to exceed one’s actual capabilities. Intentions, however sincere, somehow become thwarted, and then it’s throw-away-the-list time, or let-me-downgrade-my-goals time, or even. let’s-have-a-few-drinks-and-obliterate-it time.

I’m right there with the stumbling herd, jotting to-do lists down with pent up ferocity, modifying mental notes all the livelong day, awakening daily with a new found and etched-in-sincerity pathway. Then, of course, I really wake up.

Ironically enough, one of the more pleasant aspects of the whole holiday season –the reception of presents—has made me somewhat blue, bringing into sharp focus yet another of misspent endeavors. Try as I might, with the noblest of intentions, to read more books, and get my nose outta the dozens of publications I subscribe to, or the three daily newspapers I peruse in hard copy, never mind the predictable daily attention-grabbers like the Internet, the television, the radio, the CD player, at the end of the proverbial day the unread books seem to gather around me, much like the silent and predatory winged creatures in Hitchcock’s The Birds, piled above my shoulder on the end table near the couch, loosely placed on the outer edges of the built-in book shelves, artistically splayed throughout various nooks and crannies of the house and office.

I finally get through one, energized again by the extended and engaged experience of reading, yet there is always three or so (ever-changing it seems), in the on deck circle, and a heap more crowding the edge of the dugout bench, all vying for a brief spot in the to-be-read line-up. (I think I’ll call my team the Sisyphean Nine.) Having just finished Frankly My Dear: Gone With the Wind Revisited by Molly Haskell (Yale University Press, 2009), I easily transitioned into Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master by Michael Sragow (Pantheon, 2008), and then, came the thrill (and burden) of the Christmas deluge. My challenge for the months ahead (couldn't make this up):

A New New Deal: How Regional Activism Will Reshape the American Labor Movement by Amy B. Dean, David B. Reynolds, and Harold Meyerson (Cornell University Press, 2009)

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, by Lydia Davis (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009)

Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon (Penguin, 2009)

Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression, by Morris Dickstein (Norton, 2009)

Cooperstown Confidential: Heroes, Rogues and the Inside Story of the Baseball Hall of Fame, by Zev Chafets (Bloomsbury, 2009)

Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend, by Larry Tye (Random House, 2009)

The Greatest Game: The Yankees, the Red Sox and the Playoff of ‘78, by Richard Bradley (Free Press 2008)

Baseball Americana, by Harry Katz, Frank Ceresi, and Phil Michel (Smithsonian, 2009)

Frank Sinatra: The Family Album, by Charles Pignore (Little Brown, 2007)

Big Man: Real Life and Tall Tales, by Clarence Clemons and Don Reo (Gran Central Publishing, 2008)

High on Rebellion: Inside the Underground at Max’s Kansas City, by Yvonne Sewell Ruskin (Thunder Mouth Press, 1998)

The Authorized and Illustrated Story of The Stooges, by Robert Matheu (Abrams, 2009)

The Velvet Underground: New York Art, Edited by Johan Kugleberg (Rizzoli, 2009)

Warren Oates: A Wild Life, by Susan Compo (University Press of Kentucky, 2009)

Tell Me How You Love the Picture: A Hollywood Life, by Edward Feldman with Tom Barton (St. Martins, 2005)

Robert Altman: The Oral Biography, by Mitchell Zuckoff (Knopf, 2009)

Whew, wow, damn, I just, well, … don’t know. Maybe I can conveniently break my leg, that oughta truly free up some time. My kind of resolution.

Merry Drinking

Way back in 2000 or so my long time pallie Mark Cutler extended to me an offer I truly couldn't refuse, which was to collaborate with him both lyrically and (gulp) thematically, on a potential full length album about the fine art of drinking. Mark had written untold songs for the likes of RI legends The Schemers, Atco recording artists The Raindogs, and others bands formed by him as well, so I considered this a unique and truly special opportunity, and also a great chance to have some creative fun with my other pallies, jazz-guitarist-turned-rock-and-roll-bassist Mike Tanaka, and drummer and motormouth extraordinaire Bog Guisti. (Later on, Marks trustiest of sidekicks, ex-Schemer and ex-Raindog guitarist and vocalist Emerson Torrey, would join what was to become The Dino Club, a name derived from our collective fascination with American showbiz legend Dean Martin, and the brilliant, best showbiz book evuuuuh, the 1992 Nick Tosches penned Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams.)

Our concept album, self-released in 2002, was called Hey! Drink Up, and I have to say I'm quite proud of our efforts, and many of the songs still kick it hard and strong delivered live or as listened to in the orginal recordings. All of this comes to mind, since Mark suddenly put togther a self-made video to accompany the CD's anchor song, "Drinking in the Afternoon", so many years down the road. Well, drinking, my friends, is still drinking, and "The Day After", will forever be indeed the day after. Merry Drinking, watch and enjoy, these might be the best Christmas cards I've ever sent out...

Bar Talk # 2

Overheard Friday Night (12-4-09) at Nick-A-Nees ,

Providence, Rhode Island

(Purty much reported as close to verbatim as possible.)




“I went from apocalyptic Christian to aspiring Jew to semi-agnostic to a possible Wiccan.”

“Can I come over to your house tomorrow and use your computer to pay my gas bill?”

“I had a thoroughly unproductive night Tuesday. I just kept drinking and listening to music and sitting on my couch. By the end of the night the notes were just hovering over my head.”

“My Mom and Dad adore this dude ( as Dylan’s “Mississippi” plays in the background) , but he always sounds like an escapee from Area 51 to me.”

First guy: “ I’d like to see her do the old school twist.” Second guy: “I’d like to see her in a cat suit.” First guy: “You ought to borrow one from your mother and give it to her.”

“Everyone constantly talks about rich kids and I am not one, but right now I am so one.”

“I gotta learn how to operate a vacuum cleaner real soon.”

“The thing about drinking is the thought of drinking precipitates the act of drinking which is often more glorious than the end result of drinking, and a lot less thinking seems to go with a lot more drinking.”

“If I have any more of this buca I’ll probably try to screw some of those ants that keep pouring out of my kitchen cupboard.”

“Deval Patrick tipped the scales in the wrong direction. All the blue New England states must have a Republican Governor. It’s all about balance, man.”

“They talk about Alice Cooper and Marilyn Manson and that GG something guy but I think Lady Gaga is scarier that all of ‘em.”

“Whenever a stable boy pops up in a western, he’s a goner for sure.”

“Text me in a half hour to remind me I’m long, gone, and done.”

SHELF LIFE # 5

(As monomaniacal as I might truly be, maintaining a blog of this high degree of purity and insight (heh-heh) gets wearying. I realize I have enough know-it-all-pallies, informormed buds, and sharp hipster connections, that I oughtta let one or two of you bring it on home occasionally. Here’s the basic premise: 1-3 concise paragraphs about a CD (or as we old schoolers still refer to it-an album) that wasn’t necessarily an all-timer, a Blonde on Blonde or a London Calling. Instead, spotlight a possible peripheral release that stands the test of time and delivers on its small promises, or simply executes succinctly and manages to remain on yer personal playlist--- a sideways record, an overlooked effort, a self-contained minor gem, ya know, a record that’s got Shelf Life. Send me your brilliant overview in simple Word form, and I’ll post ‘em up, giving my avid and obsessive readers (heh-heh-heh) an occasional breather from the sound of one man pontificating. Weighing in this time is Robot A. Hull, one of the all time great Rock and Roll nitcrits, and the man behind the curtain at PopKrazy.)


The Hombres--Let It Out (Verve/Forecast FTS-303,1967)

This is one of the great American garage albums that just don’t give a hoot. A Memphis combo, the Hombres opted for the lighter side of garage-punk. The Hombres’ album cover (which is their only album cover since no record label was brave enough to release another record by them) is an obvious reference to the Trashmen’s Surfin’ Bird LP, released in ’64, which shows the infamous surf band from Minneapolis clustered around a garbage truck.

Ironically, the Hombres had originally intended to be a surf band. In 1967, they traveled through Houston posing as a pop version of a West Coast surf group and somehow got tangled up with Texas producer Huey Meaux. In ’65, Meaux had already transformed a band of San Antonio punksters into an ersatz British Invasion act, the Sir Douglas Quintet (featuring a very young Doug Sahm). And so, with the Hombres, Meaux saw an opportunity for reshaping the rebellion of a garage band into a comedic sensibility.

With Huey at the helm, the Hombres’ first 45 was “Let It All Hang Out,” a clear parody of Bob Dylan’s vocal style. It is still the only pop hit that’s ever begun with a raspberry. In late ’67, the single went to #12 on Billboard’s pop chart—but only after the title had been censored to “Let It Out.”

This irreverent album includes all of the Hombres’ self-penned attempts to follow their initial punk/novelty hit—“Am I High,” Mau Mau Mau,” and “It’s a Gas.” (The latter song is not to be confused with Mad’s Alfred E Newman’s infamous song of the same name.) The Hombres’ gas record features the inspirational verse: “Don’t worry about the future, forget about the past/Whether it’s good or bad, its’ a gas!”

Most of the material on this album is marked by an offhand good heartedness as if the group is perfectly aware that their own musical ineptitude is beside the point. Meux’s typically lackadaisical production-style only enhances the sound of the cheesy organ and sloppy guitars.

Perhaps the most telling moment on the album occurs during the middle of yet another garage version of Van Morrison’s “Gloria.” It is a remarkable version. The song is untamed and yet focused, but it remains remarkable because it appears, suddenly, all six (6) minutes of it, out of context in the midst of a Southern-punk work of utter buffoonery. And then, right at the heart of the song, the Hombres forget—or seem to forget—the tune they’re playing, detouring into a charming, albeit primitive, stab at the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High.”

With warmth and spirit, the Hombres album seems to explicate Alfred E. Newman’s famous maxim: “What, me worry?”