Now here’s a concept I can behind … old-school soul done garage punk style. From the now classic punk soul album “Ultraglide in Black,” Detroit’s Dirtbombs do a killer cover of my all-time favorite Stevie Wonder’ song, “Living for the City.” Very, very cool indeed.
Here is one of the best … and admittedly, most bizarre … couplings of the mainstream and the underground. This is the lovely ballad composed for Rob Reiner’s classic 1987 film “The Princess Bride,” written and soulfully sung by punk legend Willy DeVille of the band Mink DeVille. The song was later nominated for an Oscar and seeing Willy on stage crooning this in front of a billion plus viewers during the Academy Awards in 1988 was a very cool kick in the head indeed.
OK, ready to have your mind blown? Ever hear about a Detroit band called Death? Death was a band from the early-mid 1970s that was kicking out high energy punk rock long before the Sex Pistols were and long before punk was even called punk. Here’s the kicker, though … all the members of Death were African-American. Yes, I realize in a better world that shouldn’t be shocking, but it still kind of is. Here was a band in the midst of Motown taking their cues from Alice Cooper, Iggy Pop, and the MC5 and putting their own balls-to-the-wall spin on things.
While you may think “Keep on Knocking” is a really great song, it may not seem particularly significant … except when you consider that this was recorded in 1974 … not 1982 … and was faster and more aggressive than almost anything out at the time. Death attracted the interest of Clive Davis, who wanted to sign the band to Columbia Records … if they’d only change their name. The guitarist and leader, David Hackney, refused to compromise, the band lost their potential deal, and they faded into obscurity … until …
Death’s incredible story is now being told in the terrific documentary “A Band Called Death” (just released on DVD and Blu-Ray) which I’m going to talk about at length at a later date. But in the meantime, here’s a sample of what this completely kick-ass band sounds like and why discovering new music (even when it’s nearly 40 years old) can still bring a huge idiotic grin to your face.
More wonderfully nasty early 1970s punk rock … this time from England. Like the Stooges and the MC5 in America during the same era, the Pink Fairies were laying waste to the “good vibes” of other counterculture bands of the era and defining what would eventually be called punk rock many years later. “The Snake” sounds like Jim Morrison fronting the Stooges … but it’s actually so much better than that if you can believe it.
Before Brian Johnson took over as lead vocalist for AC/DC for “Back in Black” onward, he was lead singer of this 1970s hard pop group called Geordie. Incredibly crunchy, but also as hooky as any Top 40 hit … that is, when the Top 40 still had a place for hard rock. If you’re a fan of AC/DC, this is worth checking out, not only because it’s a great song, but because it’s interesting to hear Johnson when he had vocal chords … sort of. Even on this pre-AC/DC song, you don’t know whether to continue listening or send Johnson some lozenges stat.
Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor have emerged as America’s leading satirists of middle-class delusion. “Election,” “About Schmidt,” and “Sideways” were all critical (and sometimes) box-office hits roundly deserving of their universal acclaim. However, rarely mentioned is Payne and Taylor’s first film, the wonderfully acidic “Citizen Ruth.”
Ruth Stoops, the titular hero played by Laura Dern, is a drug-addict and petty criminal who finds out she is pregnant during one of her many stints in jail. Given the fact that she’s had four other children (all under foster care or under the care of ex-boyfriends/husbands), a judge offers leniency if she will abort her unborn child. This raises the attention of a local pro-life group called the Baby Savers who bail her out and try to use the judge’s offer as a call to arms for their cause. Through a series of circumstances, she then winds up under the care of a pro-choice group who want her to promote their cause.
Believe it or not, the degenerate Ruth winds up being the character you root for the most in the film. Dern pulls off the impossible in her characterization of Ruth. She manages to be sympathetic while still acting like someone you’d never even remotely think of inviting into your home.
No matter where you stand on the abortion issue, “Citizen Ruth” mercilessly attacks both sides. While I don’t think Payne and Taylor are saying that all pro-life or pro-choice people are like the characters in this film, they illustrate what happens when activists use people as symbols to “send messages” instead of actually doing something to help the people they’re exploiting.
In addition to Dern, the rest of the cast, which includes Kurtwood Smith, Burt Reynolds, Swoosie Kurtz, Kelly Preston, Mary Kay Place, M.C. Gainey, Tippi Hedren, Kenneth Mars, David Graf, and Diane Ladd (Dern’s real-life mom), all deliver terrific career-best performances.
A wonderfully brittle and nasty skewering of an extremely sensitive topic. If you have a brain, a heart, and a very dark sense of humor, you’ll hopefully find this film as hilarious as I did.
One of the best indie films from a time when indie truly meant “independent” is the 1988 comedy-drama “Patti Rocks.” The film is about a married blue-collar f–k-up named Billy (played by co-writer Chris Mulkey) who is in a jam when he finds out he has impregnated a girlfriend he has on the side named Patti (played by co-writer … and Mulkey’s wife in real life … Karen Landry). Billy enlists the help of good friend and former employer Eddie (played by co-writer John Jenkins) … with whom there is bad blood … to travel hundreds of miles to meet with Patti and help Billy through his crisis.
During the journey to see Patti (which takes up more than half the film), Billy talks a lot of s–t, not only about Patti, but about pretty much any subject you can think of. Billy is obviously an idiot, but despite the X-rated dialogue and s–t talking, he has the maturity of an 11-year old. Eddie is not too far behind Billy, but is definitely the “adult” of the two. Of course, when we finally meet Patti, she is not how Billy has described her and is far more aware of the dynamics between the two of them than Billy is. The result is a sad and poignant tale of a pathologically dumb man-child who sadly, doesn’t have the sense and maturity to grow up.
“Patti Rocks” was extremely controversial when it was released, because the dialogue was too raw for an “R” rating and went out unrated instead. Though, arguably, had it been a major studio release, the film probably would’ve gotten an “R.” In any case, “Patti Rocks” is a profanely funny and cringe-inducing comedy about male sexuality.
When I finally saw it, it was in college during a sponsored event by the campus Women’s Center. I must say, given the politically correct tenor of the times (late 1980s) and the content of the film, it was a ballsy choice on their part and a nice reminder that sometimes a sense of humor prevails among organizations that stereotypically don’t seem to carry such traits.
Some of the X-rated language and humor the film is controversial for is featured in the attached clip. It is not safe for work or kids.
The film is a sequel of sorts to a mid-1970s film called “Loose Ends” (featuring Billy and Eddie) which I’ve never been able to track down. If you can direct me to this film, I will be eternally grateful.
One of the best satirical films of the last 25 years, Mary Harron’s and Guinevere Turner’s adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s notorious novel “American Psycho” is an excellent mix of comedy, horror, and social satire.
Originally written in 1991, Ellis’s novel was so controversial that the original publisher, Simon and Schuster, decided to let Ellis keep his $300,000 advance for writing the novel and shelved it. The rights were eventually picked up by Vintage (Random House’s highbrow quality paperback division) who published it in paperback. Unfortunately, many of the book’s early critics focused solely on the graphic murder scenes, which … while they are indeed disturbing … only comprise a small percentage of the actual book. A New York Times critic called it “a how-to manual on the torture and dismemberment of women.” Yes, it’s true that the lead character Patrick Bateman hates women. He also hates homeless people, homosexuals, Jews, African-Americans, prostitutes, his fellow privileged white friends, bartenders, waitresses, his fiance, his mistress, dogs, rats, dry cleaners, live concerts, etc. Just because a book’s lead character is a misanthropic, misogynist a–hole serial killer, doesn’t mean the story, let alone the author, supports that viewp… ah, what’s the use in even explaining this? Look, many people don’t like Ellis’s book for a variety of reasons, but the hysterical overreaction (and sole focus on Bateman’s misogyny, which again, is just one component of his overall misanthropy) was completely misguided and a product of the ultra-politically correct early 1990s. The fact that “Psycho” is now considered a literary classic bears this out.
Interestingly, Ellis later admitted Bateman WAS based on him, but only because like Bateman, he was obsessed with buying and consuming things, which made him miserable instead of happy. From an interview Ellis gave to “The California Chronicle” in 2010 “[Bateman] was crazy the same way [I was]. He did not come out of me sitting down and wanting to write a grand sweeping indictment of yuppie culture. It initiated because of my own isolation and alienation at a point in my life. I was living like Patrick Bateman. I was slipping into a consumerist kind of void that was supposed to give me confidence and make me feel good about myself but just made me feel worse and worse and worse about myself. That is where the tension of ‘American Psycho’ came from. It wasn’t that I was going to make up this serial killer on Wall Street. High Concept. Fantastic. It came from a much more personal place, and that’s something that I’ve only been admitting in the last year or so. I was so on the defensive because of the reaction to that book that I wasn’t able to talk about it on that level.”
Bateman is someone who knows he’s not normal … knows that he is, in effect, a psycho. So he overcompensates by aggressively trying to fit in. Like an alien studying what it’s like to be human, he obsesses over all of the material possessions in his life and others: clothing, cars, food, restaurants, business cards, workout machines, audio-video equipment, pornography, etc. He reads obsessively and expresses all the so-called popular viewpoints in public (anti-nuclear weapons, anti-racism). Yet inside he hates everything and everyone around him, including himself. As Bateman explains, “…there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there.”
Christian Bale delivers, in my opinion, his all-time best performance as Bateman. Leonardo di Caprio and Johnny Depp were once slated to play Bateman. And while I think they would have done a good job, Bale is the perfect choice. Not only is he a terrific actor, Bale is British playing an American with an American accent. While Bale’s accent is impeccable, there’s still something slightly off about it. Since Bateman is a monster pretending to be a human being, Bale’s characterization is frighteningly perfect. Bale said that a large part of his characterization was based on watching Tom Cruise being interviewed on talk shows. According to Harron, Bale told her he was struck by Cruise’s “very intense friendliness with nothing behind the eyes, and he was really taken with this energy.”
The idea of having a female director and screenwriter behind the film version of “American Psycho” may seem like a cynical ploy to keep feminist critics at bay. But Harron has always been a terrific director (“I Shot Andy Warhol,” “The Notorious Bettie Page”) and Turner struck the correct balance between the novel’s humor and horror. Overall, the two created a classic and a film, while it got some respectful notices when released, remains severely underrated to this day.
The attached 20-minute plus summary of clips contains many spoilers and also very disturbing violence, sexuality, and language. It is not safe for work or children. But if you have a strong stomach and a highly evolved sense of humor, “American Psycho” is one hell of a movie. It is one of those films that you will not have an indifferent reaction to.
David Bowie’s 1971 homage to Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, from the classic (and eclectic) “Hunky Dory” album. One of Bowie’s best balls-to-wall rock songs and one that never fails to have me bouncing around the room. Brilliantly used on the trailer for Jason Reitman’s painful and acidic 2011 comedy “Young Adult.”
I’ve been on a J.D. Salinger kick recently based on my total absorption into the new 12-pound David Sheilds / Shane Salerno Salinger bio that came out last week. At some point, I may give some thoughts on this book and Salinger, but in the meantime, here’s a terrific critique on Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye” delivered by one of the characters from the film adaptation of John Guare’s “Six Degrees of Separation.” Will Smith plays the character giving the analysis and it’s a nice reminder that Smith is a very good actor when he’s not playing some variation of the Tom Cruise-inspired cocky jacka– that sadly makes up many of his more, um, renowned roles. Playing the other roles here are Stockard Channing, Donald Sutherland, and Ian McKellan. A damn fine and sadly ignored film if I do say so.
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