Nice Design, Empty Results

Little Steven Soderbergh is determined to experiment his way through the Hollywood gloss of his big budgets efforts like the Ocean’s 11 franchise, and for that we tip our hat to him. Last year brought The Good German (Warners, $27.98, 105 minutes) an admirable attempt to make 40’s styled studio film, utilizing a setting, a plot, and many of the visual and camera techniques of the past. The end result is a sumptuous black and white endeavor, chock full of clever camera movements, atmospheric lighting, evocative misc-en-scene, and wonderful set pieces, with George Clooney attempting go all Bogart and Cate Blanchett settling into the spiked heels of Marlene Dietrich. As well executed (and well-intentioned) as Soderbergh’s full-length homage is, it never comes close to approximating its models (Casablanca, The Third Man) in the categories of intrigue, plot layering, wartime atmospherics, or pure inexplicable movie magic---The Good German’s plodding plot, lifeless characterizations and the glaring lack of romantic chemistry between the leads absolutely drain the movie of any life, despite the heartfelt mechanics Soderbergh successfully brings to the making of it.

Surf's Up (and down)

David Milch’s Deadwood was HBO’s boutique offering, a wonderful side cart to the juggernaut that was The Sopranos, and a show mostly adored by its core fans and the nation's TV nitcrits. Deadwood was a sprawling, hard-to-define western, with a barrel full of colorful characters, a slow-to-go sense of story movement, all of it mixed and glued together by Milch’s language play, a halting, lilting, snaky, quasi-Shakespearean barrage of slang, obscenity, and flowery speech—a cadence as hypnotic as it was off-putting. Milch’s second outing for HBO, John From Cincinnati(full season available on HBO On Demand), is anchored around more of the same dialogue, albeit updated to California surf country, but still another onslaught of impenetrable squawking, inscrutable code words, high-falutin’ philosophical-speak coached in earthbound profanity, as irritating to some as it mesmerizing to others. The show, which just completed it's ten episode first season, centered around the Yosts (Bruce Greenwood, Rebecca De Mornay, Brian Van Holt) a fractured royal family of surfdom, and their golden boy, third generation surf prince Shaun (Greyson Fletcher). Into their volatile and largely sour mix comes the title character (Austin Nichols), a monosyllabic savant, who may be an angel, a looney tune, an alien messenger or, (gulp) the Son of God. The slice of California depicted is a mostly rotten one, a sun-drenched world of noir and misshapen spirituality (much of this derived from co-creator Ken Numm, the author of the seminal-surf-Zen-noir novel Tapping the Source), a world peopled by a passel of off center saints and sinners, including Vietnam Joe (Jim Beaver), ex-cop Bill Jacks (Ed O’Neill), Freddie the Hawaiian (Dayton Callie), filmmaker Cass (Emily Rose), café owner Jerri (Paula Malcomson), Doctor-in-flux Michael Smith (Garret Dillahunt), motel keeper Ramon (Luis Guzman), and surfing mogul Linc Stark (Luke Perry), among others (many of whom were Deadwood players). The series was despised by many as a pseudo, self-important metaphysical exploration of god knows what (no pun intended), yet I found myself captivated by its Godot-like situations and its haunted circle of causalities operating as characters. John From Cincinnati was a wonderfully immersive wooly and wild ride (with a perfectly evocative theme song taken from the late Joe Strummer), and once I clear my head I think I will go back and get wet again.

LONG LIVE THE GIZMOS (and me too!)

Sometimes the past just sneaks right up and smacks you straight on the ass. Received a batch of CD’s in the mail this week via an old pallie named Eddie Flowers I found through internet connections and, lo and behold, everyone of ‘em hadda a version of one or another song co-penned by me in my 16th or 17th year. Yeah, yeah, yeah, back in 1972/73 I was no budding teen lyricist, but more of a wanna-be rock critic, with 2 separate letters published in Creem, a ton of rejection letters filed in my top desk drawer, and a newly discovered frontier in what were called fanzines or rock zines, discovered through an article or two in places like Fusion and Crawdaddy. I submitted my adolescent attempts to a guy named Bob “Mr. Bear” Richert in Bloomington, Indiana, and to my astonishment they started to appear in his rag, then called Beyond Our Control, later called Gulcher. Through those first writings I found a batch of like-minded teens and other wanna-be nitcrits, many of who had their own, mostly mimeographed and stapled together zines. The most charismatic (and wildest) of the bunch was Krazee Kenne Highland, from Brockport NY, the teen-addled mind behind a zine entitled Rock On, and a hyperactive motormouth who sent me cassettes of his 2 minute rock riffs, called me long distance on the phone and babbled on about Iggy and the Stooges, Lou Reed, The New York Dolls, and The Dictators, and even showed up on my front porch in East Providence, RI, dirty, sweaty, and hulking in the corner with a duffel bag. Eventually somewhere in 1976 I received an EP in the mail by The Gizmos, a four-song mishmash that had a pic sleeve of Kenne with a bunch of Hoosier hippies and some weird toad named Ted Neimiec waving a top hat. The songs were stop-and-start, out-of-tune, imitative train wrecks, far too unsubtle and crudely adolescent for me, now in my know-it-all 20th year, but, oh yeah, one of them “Mean Screen” was scripted by me, in my best teenage approximation of Igster lyrics, with a chorus that was a blatant attempt to match the pop cult referencing of Andy Shernoff (Dictator songwriter and singer, editor of the one and only Teenage Wasteland Gazette, and, most importantly, a bonafide rock critic-turned-rockster), “I wanna love American Bandstand/ I wanna live American Bandstand/Dick Clark outta be my poppa”. Sometime later I received a full length LP from a New York band dubbed The Afrika Korps, which contained another Duhamel-Highland nugget, entitled “Juvenile Delinquent” (“Did a Bo Diddley jive when he graduated/Walked on his hands when he went to work”) in which Kenne inserted his own reference, gleaned from his RI visit, to a “Portuguese bouncer” which made me laugh out loud each time I listened hard enough to discern it amidst the Dolls-like caterwaul it’s buried within. Listened to it again yesterday, some 30 years later, and I laughed harder than ever, and I continued to smile as I buzzed thought the CD ‘s (which include yet another tune, “Hot Shot” for which I am co-credited and don’t remember one thing about), including both Music To Kill By and Live at Cantone’s 1977 by The Afrika Korps, and 1976/77 The Studio Recordings, Live in Bloomington 1977/78, and Demos & Rehearsals 1975-1977 by The Gizmos, all of course available on Gulcher Records. Listening to this pile of earnest, hilarious, and pure barrage of garage rock, and remembering that I actually was a (small) part of it, made my ego swell with nostalgic pride, made me feel (suddenly) decades younger and temporarily higher than a kite. Long Live The Gizmos (and me too!)

TV EYE 8-24-07

The Bronx is Burning
ESPN, Tuesdays 10:00 PM

This eight-part retelling of the events of the summer of 1977 in New York, based on the 2005 book by Jonathan Mahler, Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City, is ambitious as that title, neatly intermeshing archival footage with fictional stuff as it jumps from a Mayoral race, a black-out, the Son-of-Sam killings, and the high drama soap opera antics of the New York Yankees. Almost predictably, this being ESPN, the Yankees story is that one that captures your interest, and the wild and wooly behind-the-scenes and between-the-lines antics of that championship team are both hilarious and resonant. John Turturro displays a fine mix of cockiness and insecurity as the one and only Billy Martin, Kevin Conway as Gabe Paul, Erik Jensen as Thurman Munson, and Leonard Arnold Robison as Mickey Rivers are on the money, and while Daniel Sunjata’s Reggie Jackson and Oliver Platt’s George Steinbrenner both miss the mark a little, the overall depiction of baseball-from-the-inside is first class and a whole lotta fun.

Flight of the Conchords
HBO, Sundays 10:30 PM

Somewhere in that strange, largely unexplored netherworld between The Monkees and Spinal Tap, lies the newest HBO half hour comedy, Flight of the Conchords, featuring New Zealand musicians/comedians Jermaine Clement and Bret McKenzie of the duo of the same name. The show, a minimalist, low-key, thoroughly deadpan, weekly adventure in absurdity features the hapless folk/pop duo and their clueless manager Murray (Rhys Darby) going through the slowest of motions as residents of New York waiting for the next gig. The bulk of the show runs just this side of irritating, until the next fantasy music video is unveiled. These interludes are absolutely hilarious, poking fun and utilizing nearly every musical video cliché that exists while the songs are adept parodies of an array of genres. Recent highlights have included an episode that featured both a fantasy David Bowie with songs done in a few of his changing styles, and a laff riot hip-hop shout out entitled “Hiphopotamus vs. Rhymenocerous” worth the price of admission alone.

Snatchin'

The soon-to-be-released The Invasion (with Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig) will mark the fourth movie version of the Jack Finney sci-fi novel, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. While Don Siegel’s 1956 original still garners much deserved kudos and Abel Ferrara’s 1993 take has it’s share of cult followers, it is Phillip Kaufman’s 1978 movie, just out in DVD Collectors Edition form (MGM $19.95), that remains seared into my brain. Kaufman, a vastly overlooked and underrated American filmmaker (The Right Stuff, The Wanderers, The Unbearable Lightness of Being) set his pod takeover movie in the laid back Bay area, in a place and time when the good vibes of Woodstock Nation had mutated into Yuppie self-satisfaction, a setting where every other Me Decade participant might as well have been body snatched. Kaufman’s version is a sleek and taut thriller, more Hitchcockian then sci-fi allegorical, peppered with an overall sense of paradise lost rather than paranoia fought. Well cast (Jeff Goldblum, Brooke Adams, Leonard Nimoy, Veronica Cartwright), it also boasts a few cheeky doses of humor spread throughout, including cameos from Don Siegel and the star of the original film, Kevin McCarthy. It was well-received film upon it release, yet it has somehow sunk into undeserved obscurity.

Earthbound

Stardust, Neil Gaiman’s 1999 adult fairy tale may have worked its magic on the written page, but it’s screen transformation
is as un-enchanted as can be. An over-baked mix of fantasy, action-adventure, and romance, the movie, despite it’s strong cast (Michelle Pfeiffer, Claire Danes, Charlie Cox, Sienna Miller, Peter O'Toole, Ricky Gervais) misfires from beginning to end. Director Matthew Vaughn seems to think he can bring the prickly feel of his own Layer Cake to this antithetical genre, but the whooshing camerawork and derivative musical cues only bog the film down under an ever obvious tone of smug and eye-winking irreverence. Eventually, the movie will be a classic cable-watched guilty pleasure, solely for the wack-jack Robert DeNiro scene-stealing turn as a closeted pirate named Captain Shakespeare. Our Man Bobby D hasn’t had this much fun (or been this flamboyantly hammy) since he wielded a baseball bat as Al Capone in Brian DePalma’s The Untouchables.

Growing Up in Public

The following column is reprinted from the August issue of Providence Monthly

Eyes Wide Open
by Scott Duhamel

I am not, typically at least, a huge follower or fan of the following: fantasy films, film franchises, or effects-laden movies, but for some reason I find the Harry Potter series quite appealing. Having never read any of the books, I still find myself wholly immersed in the self-contained cinematic world of Harry, Hogwarts, and the shadowy Lord Voldemort. (Although I do, admittedly, have a tough time writing a fanboy sentence like that.) The newest Potter entry, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, neither elevates or deflates the series, yet it remains a satisfying installment, and gets points for attempting to head further towards the dark side.
Each of the four prior Potter movies boasted distinct authorial voices as directors like Chris Columbus (responsible for the first two, Sorcerer’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets, replete with his neo-Disney, energized irreparably American point-of-view), Alfonso Cuaron, (behind the third, Prisoner of Azkaban, with it’s gritty, magical realism) and Mike Newell (responsible for number four, Goblet of Fire, bringing to it an emotional grounding that hovered been whimsy and the portent) came and went. The time around the Potter assignment finds itself in the hands of British TV director David Yates, the man behind the BBC political thriller State of Play. It’s an apt choice, for the Order of the Phoenix, spends much time dealing with the secret politics of recrimination, accusation, trust, and mistrust.
Of course the movie also sets it’s course on the growing pains of it’s three primary figures, Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), Ron Weasley( Rupert Grint), and Hermione Granger (Emma Watson), who are all in their fifth year of study at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardy. In the course of the film, Harry, beefed-up, hormonal, in a seeming constant state of self-turmoil, is labeled a liar, almost expelled, and beset on at school break by the dangerous dementors, all the while experiencing disturbing visions connecting him to the malevolent Voldemort, nicely brought to dark life by Ralph Fiennes. We also meet new characters like Bellatrix Lestrange (Helen Bonham Carter) a goth’s wet dream Azkaban escapee and Luna Lovegood (Evanna Lynch) a new ally to Harry with empathic powers, while Harry deepens his dealings with his godfather Sirius Black (Gary Oldman).
The movies archest move is the introduction of yet another new member of the Hogwarts staff, Dolores Umbridge, a dowdy, starched matron bent on choking the lifeblood of the student body in the name of terrifying order. British character stalwart Imelda Staunton does an impeccable job as the embodiment of ordinary evil, steely insides covered up by pink clothing, a Queenly-hairstyle, girlish giggles, and a grade school teacher’s singsong delivery. In the otherworldly environment of the Potter series, her middle-class fascist may be among the scariest sights ever.
As always the other sights are a treat in this fifth time out, with Stuart Craig’s delightful production design both artful and evocative, first class special effects that manage to feed the story and not wind up as the movies’ first course, and a couple of dazzling flying sequences that manage to truly soar. Much of the film, as crafted by Yates, pushes close to the feel of the horror genre, utilizing slashing cuts, shock visuals, and an air of impending doom. If the film wilts at all, it stems from Yates inability to successfully shift back and forth between the delicate balance of internal fear and external doom, the sumptuous visual scheme always seeming to favor the latter. Still, the film moves well, and boasts the typical Potteresque pleasures, and, despite its predictable oncoming automatic hold on younger audiences, never dumbs itself down. It’s a worthwhile outing, and, yeah, yeah, yeah, I welcome the next one.