I wandered into WandaVision on Disney a week ago with no clue about what it was, I just liked the look of an ad (not a trailer, just a still) which suggested some bizarro multimedia universe with heavy overtones of Pleasantville and maybe The Truman Show—a time travel of some sort through ’50s TV. Turns out it is some of those things and more (the ’50s is merely the start), but I’m so clueless I wasn’t even aware of Wanda’s origins in the world of Marvel superheroes. Oddly enough, the first two episodes didn’t make that at all clear (opening Marvel-themed credits notwithstanding). Continue reading “Wanda Watch”→
I was pretty taken by Jimmy Carter, Rock ‘n’ Roll President, a CNN production that played a few weeks back but which I just watched yesterday. My memories of Carter as President (I turned 12 in 1976) do exist but are dim. I recall more about his emergence as a surprise Presidential contender than I do anything in particular about his time in office. There’s a vague recollection, immediately following his victory, of a collective “who’da-thunk?” I know, sounds scarily familiar, but at the time this was a good thing, certainly from my perspective. My parents were down-the-line liberals, and Carter had an air of decency about him (a little cartoonish, too, which never hurts when you’re 12) that seemed slightly unusual, even to someone for whom Watergate was mostly just a weirdly compelling if largely incomprehensible TV drama. Continue reading “A Presidency that haunts my reverie”→
When I mentioned this commercial a couple weeks ago to Phil, I was stammering to remember what it was a commercial for. Which isn’t a surprise, given that it’s not so much touting a product as an annual event: Shark Week. (Oof—how on earth could I have forgotten Shark Week?) I might have neglected mentioning this spot entirely had Phil not cited “Kiss From a Rose” in his O.J. entry. Pretty far afield from “dreamily ornate,” but it’s a spot that needs to be preserved somewhere.
A friend of a friend (someone I don’t know, therefore won’t name) posted a funny (and insightful) comment on Facebook this morning re: Vinyl, which debuted on HBO last night: “What’s scary is that Scorsese actually lived through this era rather than learned about it from watching Scorsese movies. I found myself yearning for the Chekhovian delicacy of The Wolf of Wall Street.”
Is it really that bad? Not having seen Wolf, I can’t say for sure, but having sat through 75 minutes or so of the episode (the series kicked off with a two-hour intro, which leads me to wonder: how long will the finale be? five hours?) Scorsese-parodying-Scorsese seems pretty apt. In terms of pop, it’s Casino all over again: a non-stop polyglot of tunes, each one announcing itself with some authority (“oh, hey, it’s….”), each one disappearing soon enough into the overall blur of the thing. (That the show is about the machinations of a milieu I should care greatly about was depressingly inconsequential. And maybe it helps explain why the one moment I did find fairly thrilling was a flashback scene simulating an Otis Redding performance, all of it shot from behind and from the side. An effective piece of iconic cinematography, if nothing else.) With Hurricane Smith’s “Oh Babe (What Would You Say),” a K-Tel song I have plenty of residual affection for, the drama reached its all-too-gruesome and predictable Boogie Nights/Reservoir Dogs nadir, complete with a visually accurate bludgeon to the head. Sigh.
(Two caveats to all of the above: 1) I joined the show 20 minutes or so in, and therefore missed a New York Dolls scene that various people are citing. I will try to catch it at some point. 2) I realize I am using the term “Scorsese” indiscriminately here—he doesn’t actually direct any of the episodes—though I’m not sure how you can get around that; his stamp is on every frame.)
In the morning, however, Mary was back to her vegetative state, and Matt has spent every day since trying to replicate the circumstances that produced the miracle. He videotapes her sleeping every night, hoping for signs of consciousness. He plays the same song when she wakes (The Bellamy Brothers’ “Let Your Love Flow”), takes her for a walk to the same grocery story, and keeps to a specific routine. Rewind, do it again. And again. After awhile, “Let Your Love Flow” feels like “I Got You Babe,” and poor Rev. Matt is living the worst version of Groundhog Day a husband can imagine. Finally, one night, he cracks, pleading with his unresponsive wife to look at him: “Was it a test? You can’t give that to me and take it away from me.”
– Jeff Labrecque, EW.com
This will mean nothing to anyone who hasn’t seen the show, or this particular episode, but I want to catalog it here, as the Bellamy Brothers moment was really great—as good as anything, maybe, in Reservoir Dogs or Boogie Nights. (That the episode — one of the show’s best — ended with a truly terrible modern pop track in the Joan Osborne vein was unfortunate, but not enough to spoil a good thing. I like where this show is going right now, a lot.)
I’m a fan of The Leftovers on HBO, despite the fact that season one was wildly erratic in its pacing and badly marred by a tiresome sub-plot (the entire Holy Wayne nonsense, which pretty much every commentator I read on the subject trashed). I recall there being some okay pop music around the edges of season one, some of it quirky (the baroque version of Metallica’s “Nothing Else Matters” was creepy and effective), some of it over the top (there’s a Sam Smith-type white gospel number that shows up more than once that I didn’t care for at all… hell, maybe it is Sam Smith, I’m too lazy to figure it out). But re-watching the final episode of the season recently, to prep myself for season 2, I was reminded of two musical bits I liked a lot.
1) A far-too-brief but nicely employed use of Al Green’s “Dream,” one of my favourite songs from The Belle Album, a sun-glinted moment of tranquility following a harrowing night of murder-suicide and confusion.
2) Max Richter’s pretty (Satie by way of Philip Glass?) soundtrack piano music, which runs through a bunch of episodes, I think.
It’s interesting to me that Dylan is developing a small body of work in advertising. The latest IBM-Watson commercial aired yesterday during Meet the Press. I laughed at the line, “You can sing?”
The playing of Dionne Warwick’s “Here I Am” while Ursula Andress falls from the sky by parachute into Peter O’Toole’s moving sportscar in What’s New Pussycat? is evidence of the almost Dadaistic basis of heaven rock and perhaps tragic rock as well. Following the lecherous plot of the movie up to this point, the viewer is likely jarred by the sudden juxtaposition of a heaven rock context; but when I saw the movie for the first time, solidly drunk, I personally experienced the heaven rock in its own context although this could only produce a complete discontinuity in the plot of the movie.
– Richard Meltzer, The Aesthetics of Rock, p. 63
I’ve been curious about this visualization of “heaven rock” ever since I first encountered that passage back in the ’80s, and though no one has uploaded to YouTube the particular scene in question, the whole movie (at least as of this posting) is available. It wasn’t hard to locate the parachute moment (it begins at 1:16:55), and even in less than ideal circumstances (fast-forwarding through a YouTube version of a 50-year old movie on a Sunday evening, hoping not to wake the kids, not even remotely drunk), it plays well—“jarred by the sudden juxtaposition” makes some kind of sense. Interestingly, my quick scan revealed that the Warwick tune appears at least two other times as well—an instrumental version appears around 26:35:00, and the song proper shows up at 1:01:00. It’s a fairly perfect song, so why not?
Guy Peelaert’s depiction of Brian Wilson, in his room. From *Rock Dreams* (1973, w/Nik Cohn).
Turns out that Love and Mercy is pretty great, as close, I imagine, as one can get depicting the inside of Brian Wilson’s brain without throwing too much psychoanalytical babble at you. Or maybe what it is is a cinematic version of Geoffrey O’Brien’s great book, Sonata for Jukebox, which is fittingly subtitled “An Autobiography of My Ears.” Indeed, the first shot in the movie is a deep zoom inside Wilson’s ear drum, though whether it’s his good or mostly-deaf ear, I’m not sure. Continue reading “In his room/ear/brain”→
This has the potential to be extremely terrible. Ominous early warnings:
1) The first person mentioned by name is Eugene Landy.
2) John Cusack (older Brian Wilson) from Paul Dano (younger Brian Wilson) is a real stretch. At first I couldn’t make heads or tails of this aspect, and thought maybe the premise was an Eternal Sunshine-like someone-imagining-themselves-to-be-Brian-Wilson kind of deal (and noticing BW himself on second viewing only enhanced the confusion), but apparently not. It’s straight-up pop bio-pic. Continue reading “Eternal Sunshine”→
You Should've Heard Just What I Seen 