It’s a modern, changing world, everything is moving fast, but when it comes to love I like what they did in the past . . .
Sublime art.
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Monthly Archives: April 2014
ANOTHER AMAZON CUSTOMER REVIEW
Interesting And Unique Story
A western tale that will hold your attention from beginning to end.
Something new and different on each page. More westerns to read from this Writer.
Read the review and get book details here:
WHAT I’M SPINNING NOW
More Record Store Day booty — a repressing of Dream With Dean, and it’s pretty dreamy, with Dino singing in such a laid-back style that you think he might drift off to sleep at any moment, though that would not be cool, and Dino is impeccably cool here.
Backed up by a jazzy quartet featuring the impeccable Barney Kessel on electric guitar, the song selection is excellent, the interpretations quiet but emotionally convincing. It’s hard to think of any singer today who could pull off an album like this — getting the job done in spades without seeming to work at it at all.
We’ve all heard “Blue Moon” a million times, but when Martin just lets it roll off his tongue here, it sounds brand new, matter-of-factly perfect.
WHAT I’M SPINNING NOW
Record Store Day booty — a new pressing of the Everly Brothers 1968 album Roots. This is a pretty good record, though many tracks are spoiled by too much reverb on the brothers’ vocals, which makes it hard to appreciate the exquisitely precise blend of their voices singing in harmony. The standout track is “Sing Me Back Home”, where the harmony parts are clearer in the mix.
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WHY SEEK YE THE LIVING
. . . among the dead?
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BUT WAIT
. . . there’s more!
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A NEW AMAZON CUSTOMER REVIEW!
Drama and Romance Under the Big Top
“Circus” depicts the drama and romance, the triumphs and the tragedies, behind-the-scenes of a good old-fashioned American circus making its way through the midwest in 1935. Fonvielle immerses the reader in the unique show business world of the circus and provides a thrilling glimpse of the last days of the old-time traveling tent “Big Top” circuses that would disappear in the coming years after the story is set. The complex and colorful characters and evocative portrait of a time and world long-gone made this a highly enjoyable read.
Read the review and get book details here:
THE BOOK OF LISTS: HORROR
A book co-authored by Facebook friend Scott Bradley — endless hours of browsing fun within, for horror fans, or anybody!
CIRCA 1915
With thanks to Bryan Castañeda . . .
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REMEMBERING THE GOOD TIMES
SHORT TAKE: THE GREAT GATSBY (2013)
This is a Looney Tunes version of Fitzgerald’s novel, but it’s a pretty good Looney Tunes version of Fitzgerald’s novel, at least if you watch it in 3D — which is to say that it’s visually amusing and inventive, and possesses a delirious sort of momentum from shot to shot.
Baz Luhrmann has always aspired to the delirious visual style of a cartoon but his efforts have always fallen short to me — consisting mostly of lurid production design and hysterical, all-but-incoherent editing. 3D has gotten him to concentrate on making interesting, or at least diverting shots, playing with the possibilities of the format in a exuberant way.
It’s long for a Looney Tune, of course, but the acting is good enough and the story is good enough to keep your interest as you watch Luhrmann fiddle around happily with his new toy. I imagine it would be deadly dull in 2D — you’d probably have to force yourself to sit through what is, aside from the visuals, an over-long and fairly pedestrian adaptation of a classic.
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THE GHOSTS WE LIVE WITH
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THE LONE RANGER (2013)
Best described by one reviewer as “a film without a constituency”, The Lone Ranger works overtime to alienate any constituency it might have had in theory. Within the first fifteen minutes we are shown The Lone Ranger and Tonto robbing a bank, and the man behind The Lone Ranger’s mask is established as irreligious. Ha, ha! The filmmakers want us to know right off that this is not going to be “your grandpa’s type of Western” — which is, of course, the only kind of Western anybody wants to see.
We still long for the moral values, for the heroic role models, that Westerns once supplied, and whenever a modern Western mocks those things, it flops at the box office — just as The Lone Ranger flopped. (The film lost approximately $150 million dollars overall for Walt Disney Pictures.)
You can make a funny Western, a Western that pokes fun at Western clichés, without being cynical about the tradition, but being cynical about the tradition is the mark of hipness for a modern Western. The only people who find this sort of cynicism amusing are the Hollywood hipsters who make such films.
There are some funny things in the film. There are some beautiful shots that reference classic Westerns like The Searchers. There are some thrilling action sequences — or action sequences that would be thrilling if they didn’t rely so obviously on CGI. Directors with big budgets just never know where to stop with the CGI stuff — it’s like a drug. Watching a man sit a horse well as he rides through beautiful country is always exciting, cinematically. Watching a man sit a horse indifferently as he rides in front of a green screen is just not the same.
The people who made this movie made the delightful Pirates Of the Caribbean, which is also a goof on an old movie genre. The Lone Ranger must have seemed like a cinch follow-up, goofing on a different old movie genre. But people care about Westerns in a way they don’t care about pirate movies. It was a fatal miscalculation not to understand this.
Those who want to brave a viewing of The Lone Ranger should know that it’s one of those movies that gets worse and worse the longer it goes on, and it goes on for two and half hours — time enough to get really, really bad, swirling deeper and deeper into incoherence and silliness, all at a breakneck pace.
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AND GOD CREATED WOMAN
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BELLE KNOX TO STAR IN EMILY DICKINSON BIOPIC
Lars von Trier has signed Duke University porn star Belle Knox to star in his upcoming film based on the life of 19th-Century poet Emily Dickinson.
Knox will portray the reclusive spinster in a film without nudity or sex of any kind. “I want to make a prim film, a repressed film,” says von Trier. “I want to explore the mind of a quiet genius.”
The film, whose working title is Lap the Miles, will explore “the intersection of yearning and reticence” says the director. He thought of Knox because her first name reminded him of a one-woman play about Dickinson called The Belle Of Amherst. “I watched many pornos of Belle Knox and saw in her an inwardness, an intelligence, which I knew would be right for the character of my dear Emily.”
The film, to be produced by Marie Cecilie Gade and Louise Vesth, who also produced Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac, will be shot in Denmark.
Knox, who says she’s very excited and challenged by the idea of working in a serious dramatic film, was not familiar with Dickinson’s poetry until contacted by von Trier. “Then I read some of it and realized it was amazing. Quirky and funny and brilliant. I knew immediately I could relate to this woman and feel honored that I can help bring her story to a modern-day audience.”