MOVIES:

Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex* But Were Afraid To Ask: Minor early Woody Allen movie that probably got more attention because of its title (taken from a bestselling psychology book…and the guy who wrote it was not pleased, apparently) than its actual content. From 2006 I remembered the giant breast balloon (were Woody and Philip Roth thinking along the same lines that year?), the opening credits with the big pile of rabbits sniffing around, a segment where Woody inexplicably plays a romantic Italian director and Regis Philbin turning up. I also never thought it was a terribly great film. It still isn’t, and I’m starting to wonder if Bananas is the only one of these early Allen films that I like. Sleeper and Love And Death are coming soon!

Mystic River: You know who actually gives the best performance in this film? Kevin Bacon. The bit with the phone calls to his wife, whose face we don’t see until the end of the movie, isn’t a very good device, but Bacon handles it better than Sean Penn handles the infamous “IS THAT MY DAUGHTA IN THEEHHH” scene or Tim Robbins handles his big finale, I thought, and those two guys were up for Oscars that year. It deserves credit for having less rushed/hammy scenes than a lot of Clint Eastwood movies seem to, mind you, and it’s still generally a decent film, but I don’t think I have much to add from last time. Has anyone read the book? I have heard that Dennis Lehane’s books (which I have not read) handle the mystery aspect of his work better than any of his film adaptations do.

Million Dollar Baby: Eastwood’s other big Oscar-bait movie from that era now strikes me as a minor miracle–because it’s still good, and it damn near shouldn’t be, because it’s hovering about one inch over a big boiling pot of pabulum the whole way through. And if Clint and company weren’t as good as they were, it would easily have crashed in. I always used to complain about the scenes with Jay Baruchel as the retarded redneck boy, the scenes with Hilary Swank’s cartoonish trailer-trash family, and the truly heinous scene where Morgan Freeman beats up Anthony Mackie as being stinkers that almost ruin the movie, but I have a new candidate for the shit crown: the scene at the end with Eastwood and the priest, before he makes the decision to give Hilary Swank her fatal shot. Eastwood handles his tearful lines really well, but not only is the priest the unfortunate casting pick for the obligatory bad amateur actor in every Eastwood movie, and not only does he not react to Clint Eastwood crying like an actual person, but he even SAYS “forget about God and Heaven and all that, you will be lost if you do this!” I’m paraphrasing, and I know we heard the priest drop an F-bomb earlier in the movie so as to establish that he’s not a very good priest, but if Eastwood (or maybe the whole goddamn thing is Paul Haggis’ fault–hey, this is the same guy responsible for Crash, so you never know!) really, truly expects me or anyone else to swallow that a priest would actually say that (thus letting Eastwood off the hook for the real moral responsibility of what he’s about to do) then he also must have some nice beachfront property to sell me. Aside from all this shit I’m complaining about, it’s not a bad movie, but I really wish something else had won Best Picture that year, like The Aviator, a film nobody but me still talks about.

My Best Fiend: Werner Herzog’s documentary about working with Klaus Kinski, released in 2003. Fascinating subject to be sure, and it’s not a bad documentary per se, but watching actual compilations of Kinski-rage footage (as well as some funny Kinski skits done by a German comedian named Max Giermann that I found on Youtube), which I’ve done many times over the years, conveys the point well enough that I don’t really need to rewatch this. One big plus is that you get to see not only the opening to Aguirre The Wrath Of God yet again, but you get to see Herzog sitting in the foreground in front of the filming location of that majestic shot, so that you can see that camera placement was employed to make it look a lot more dangerous than it actually is. Or at least that’s what it looks like. On the negative side, for all the stories Herzog tells about Kinski’s crazy behavior (like helping Kinski look up dirty words to call Herzog in Kinski’s autobiography), he leaves out the truly heinous stories about Kinski abusing his daughters, which are not exactly secrets nowadays. Oh well…

24 Hour Party People: One of the better “punk” movies to be made, this film is probably full of bullshit and exaggerations, some of which the film itself openly admits to while you’re watching it, but I’m going to forgive that because it does a terrific job of making you feel like you were there, regardless of the era being portrayed–Sex Pistols, Joy Division, Happy Mondays, The Factory, whatever. The sense of anarchy and you-had-to-be-there is so pervasive that it’s amazing to think that the movie also conveys a strong sense of the passage of time, thus forcing you to think about the different ways UK culture fostered rebellion in different eras. Not that I was there. Steve Coogan is also in really fine form throughout, which is hilarious because he looks nothing like Tony Wilson, though it’s possible that Sean Harris may look more like Ian Curtis than Sam Riley later would. Look out for Mark E. Smith, too.

Cries And Whispers: I remember thinking this was pretty good 20 years ago, but now that I’m older I feel like I’m watching the precursor to a terrible genre, the big Oscar bait movie where a family full of people who hate each other simmer and simmer and simmer and then explode into big melodramatic Oscar clip scenes. Okay, yeah, obviously Ingmar Bergman is better than that, but I keep going back to one thing: the scene where the one sister (the one who isn’t Liv Ullmann) sticks a piece of glass between her spread-open legs, cuts herself somewhere, then smears red goop all over her face and smiles disturbingly. This is easily the most memorable (and explicit) scene in the film, and yet it seems to come from a different movie altogether, and it’s jarring. I don’t think the setup to the film, where we find out what the sisters’ lives have been like and what their problems are, isn’t terribly interesting either, so most of the fascination in Cries And Whispers now comes from it being a movie made by an atheist where the Christian maid comes out looking good and selfless and the materialistic bitch sisters don’t…like he’s jealous of Christians for being able to do that, as Ebert claimed. I wonder if this film is slowly being forgotten–it was obviously a huge critics’ hit in 1973, but nowadays it doesn’t even have all that many IMDb external reviews, and I’ve never seen that glass-cutting bit mentioned in any “all time most shocking movie scenes” Reddit polls or anything else like that. I hope I’m wrong, but I still like The Seventh Seal, The Virgin Spring, Fanny & Alexander and Scenes From A Marriage better than this for sure.

Close Encounters Of The Third Kind: I rewatched both the theatrical cut and the Director’s Cut, and took a few minutes to watch Richard Dreyfuss (who seemed to age about 35 years between this and Down And Out In Beverly Hills nine years later) enter the alien ship at the end of the Special Edition. Whatever the case, this film has never entirely gripped me–I feel about it pretty much exactly as I did when I first watched it; it’s okay, but it’s got a bit of a lack of…uh, great scenes, I’d say? The special effects have aged really well and it’s obviously historic for being the first Wide Eyed Spielberg Wonder Movie, but subtext-wise all I really get is a reminder of alien-conspiracy culture being on the rise in the cult-friendly 1970s and the strange way Dreyfuss leaves his wife and kids behind completely to get on an alien ship, something Spielberg certainly wouldn’t have tried even five years later. This is usually thought of as one of Spielberg’s best (and of course, for some, it’s THE Spielberg movie, the one that defines him best) but all I personally can say is that at least it’s better than Disclosure Day.

Jackie Brown: Quentin Tarantino has two wonderful films by me, Kill Bill and Pulp Fiction. Then he has two okay films, Reservoir Dogs and The Hateful Eight. His other films are all disappointments, and I’ve never been able to shake this after watching them all numerous times; I can only cherry pick scenes I like from the others. This film, heavily hyped in 1997 as the followup to Pulp Fiction (and coming on the heels of about three years’ worth of Tarantino ripoffs and Tarantino himself becoming an annoyingly ubiquitous and over-discussed public figure) and seemingly barely talked about today, hovers on the borderline between acceptable Tarantino and shit Tarantino. It was cool of QT to try something more adult, more personal and less violent (or maybe it was just an obxious choice after all the godawful 1995-97 ripoff movies that nobody talks about or likes anymore) but it’s way too obvious to me now that this is the beginning of QT getting long-winded and indulgent and losing his way somewhere along the line, resulting in a film that I can only watch about once every 15-20 years without getting bored. (And the one time since 1994 that he hasn’t been long-winded is Death Proof, his worst film!) The big heist/switcheroo mall set-piece isn’t anwyhere near as interesting as it should be, the final confrontation with Samuel L. Jackson fucking sucks, and the whole thing hinges on a silly scene where Robert De Niro (in what is bizarrely one of the least-discussed performances of his career), playing the one total dipshit in the main cast, kills Bridget Fonda for obviously stupid reasons. Scenes that I like? Uh…the opening credits maybe? Because if Tarantino is gonna rip off The Graduate, at least he could steal a cool song (“Across 110th Street”) to play over it?

Deliverance: The book is better, and deeper, and I don’t even consider the book that big of a classic any longer, though I did the first time I read it. The setup, before the guys actually go on the river-rafting trip, is significantly more interesting in the book than in the movie (it’s like 50 minutes before the rapist hillbillies show up), as is the big set piece where the Jon Voight character has to go kill the toothless hillbilly that got away and gets all crazy with blood lust and masculinity and survival instinct and whatnot. This is partially because Jon Voight gives a rather weak performance, the first of many Voight performances where he overdoes a hammy accent. Furthermore, you can take most of the movie after they save Burt Reynolds and toss it in the trash; the adventure’s over, except for a hilariously misguided cameo by James Dickey himself, overacting as a suspicious sheriff. I suppose this has still aged better than a lot of 1970s thrillers, and it’s very well shot and makes good use of its wooded locations, but I never thought it was a classic, and let’s face it, people watch it for the Dueling Banjos bit and the pig squeal scene (which is far more embarrassing–and ham-fisted, so to speak–than I remembered–poor Ned Beatty, laying there with his face in the dirt and his bare ass in the air!)

ALBUMS:

Bruce Springsteen, Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ: Bruce’s 1973 debut album is the music equivalent of watching Scorsese’s Who’s That Knocking At My Door?, the feel of everything he’d do in the future is already well in place, but it’s still just a proto-work for the big masterpieces to come; Springsteen had grown by fucking leaps and bounds by the time his far better sophomore album (E Street Shuffle, still his all-time best) came out before the end the year. “Blinded By The Light,” still better as a Springsteen tune than a Manfred Mann synthfest, starts things off on easily the best note; after that, you’re best off with the short “Does This Bus Stop At 82nd Street?” the simple night-jazz “Spirits In The Night,” the urgent “For You,” and the best ballad here, “The Angel.” Still, this is just very simple proto-Springsteen and I’m unlikely to revisit it much in the future; retrospective reviews that claim it’s a masterpiece on the level of his big later albums are delivering a really hot take.

The Band, Stage Fright: The Band’s reputation rests mostly on their first two albums and The Last Waltz because all three of those things are Big Fat Deals. Their third album is a lighthearted bauble, running barely a half-hour and containing no epic ballads like “Whispering Pines” or “I Shall Be Released” whatsoever; the closest thing to that is the deep, elegiac piano that opens the pleasant “Sleeping”. The songs are mostly lighthearted, humorous, and old-timey cutesy; “The Shape I’m In” could be a sequel to “Up On Cripple Creek,” the title track (the closest thing to a “classic” song here) rewrites part of the verse of “King Harvest (Will Surely Come)” effectively, and “All LA Glory” could be used to put your five year old kid to sleep. I remembered all the songs I’ve listed; one cute rediscovery was the nice closer “Rumor.” So I like the majority of the songs, and there’s only nine of them…but, see, it’s a significant step down in quality from those first two albums, because The Band kind of NEED to be a Big Fat Deal (and if you don’t believe me, read the unbelievably fawning liner notes to their CD reissues.) It’s not that they CAN’T be lighthearted–but you can tell that these songs are secondary tier compared to the huge stuff on their first two.

Mike Oldfield, Tubular Bells: This isn’t a 20th anniversary relisten; I’ve done all the stuff from 2006 already. I don’t remember what year I heard the Oldfield bestseller, but it wasn’t 2006, probably more like 2012 or something. I was definitely more impressed with it then than now, having picked up a CD copy for about $5 in some Library Free Shelf or something like that. It’s nothing short of stunning that Mike wrote this when he was 17, recorded it (and played and overdubbed the vast majority of the instruments) when he was 19 and released it right around the time he turned 20, and it’s pretty damn cool that the second-most-talked-about album of 1973 after Dark Side Of The Moon, a 48 minute instrumental prog-rock album, hit #1 and got Virgin off with a bang…but listening to it with fresh ears, it sure does peak early, with the Exorcist bit–and that bit, I noted even then, has little to do stylistically with the rest of the album, which is mostly folky and even Jethro Tull-ish in places. Large parts of this amount to likable novelty music at best–I mean, I like the part with the dude announcing the instruments, but isn’t it also an excuse for Mike to repeat himself and fill out a few minutes on the album? Or the “Piltdown Man” bit, mostly memorable for being weird and silly? The thing closes with a doofy Irish jig and the downbeat, “dark” sections are mostly repetitive and simplistic. So maybe I shouldn’t be so impressed with it (and unless someone wants to tell me otherwise, I never bothered to hear any of Oldfield’s others.) Do YOU like it?