Good Times Never Seemed so Good

Film: Song Sung Blue
Format: Streaming video from Peacock on Fire!

I’m extremely white. A few years ago, when it was the thing to do, I had my DNA run on 23 and Me and the results were than 99.9% of my DNA is from the British Isles, northern Europe, and Scandanavia. A substantial amount of my ancestry could chuck a rock into the Arctic Circle. What this means is that there are a few things I can count myself an expert in. One of those is white people music. The whitest music ever made isn’t country or bluegrass or polka. It’s Neil Diamond. That being the case, it was only a matter of time before we got a movie that featured Diamond’s music, and thus we have Song Sung Blue.

Song Sung Blue is a biopic, but it’s not a biopic of Neil Diamond himself. Instead, it’s about Mike Sardina (Hugh Jackman) and his wife Claire (Kate Hudson, who was Oscar-nominated for this role). The two made a living in part as tribute musicians, with Claire specializing as Patsy Cline. They realize that Mike, who calls himself “Lightning,” could probably pull off a Neil Diamond tribute band (what he styles instead as a Neil Diamond experience).

BTS, Eat Your Heart Out

Film: KPop Demon Hunters
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on Fire!

Based on the film’s almost immediate cultural impact, I suppose I wasn’t really surprised at the Oscar nomination for KPop Demon Hunters. When this hit NetFlix, it became a huge sensation. What better place to start going through Oscar movies than this, I thought. It’s not a movie I would normally choose to watch and I’ll knock it out quickly and move on. Honestly, my original plan was to watch One Battle After Another, but by the time I had a chance to sit down with a movie, it would have taken my past midnight to finish. And so, KPop Demon Hunters it is.

This is a film where I want to spend a lot of time on what it is and less on the plot, so I’m going to speedrun the story in three paragraphs. Years ago, demons plagued the Earth, collecting souls and feeding them to Gwi-Ma (Byung-hun Lee), the demon king. A trio of women rose up to stop the demons, and pushed them back both with fighting skill and with the power of song, which created a magical barrier called the Honmoon. As time progressed, new signing trios emerged to maintain the Honmoon and fight against the demons who managed to break through.

How Many Roads?

Film: A Complete Unknown
Format: Streaming video from Hulu Plus on Fire!

I used to be a music nerd. Before I was a movie nerd, I was very much the sort of person who would name a bunch of obscure bands. And, honestly, then I grew up and I stopped caring about knowing more about stuff than other people. I’m old enough that there’s a lot of music that I like that’s gone past the category of “oldies.” I’m a huge Beatles fan, I love Steely Dan, and most of my musical roots are in ‘70s prog rock and early ‘80s punk. I’m also a fan of Bob Dylan for his lyrics and because of, not despite, his voice. There’s a part of me that seems to love singers who can’t really sing. Anyway, A Complete Unknown just started streaming on Hulu, so I figured I’d give it a watch.

Like any biopic, or at least like most of them, this is going to cover a period of the person in question. For Dylan (Timothée Chalamet), this means from his beginnings in 1961, his rise to folk music prominence, and his controversial move to electric instruments at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. I mean, I get why folk fans were angry about the move to an electric guitar, but a ton of Dylan’s best songs were played on electric guitars.

Half a Story (Is Better than None)

Film: Wicked
Format: DVD from Cortland Public Library on basement television.

I knew a little bit about Wicked before I watched it in the sense that I knew the very basics of the story. I haven’t seen the musical (I don’t do a lot of theater), and I haven’t read the book on which it is based but just through osmosis and being alive in a society, you learn a few things. So I was prepared for a lot of what was to come even if I didn’t know the details.

What I knew going in was that this is the story of the Wizard of Oz from the perspective of the Wicked Witch of the West. I also knew that the witch, Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) was given that name specifically by the author of the original book because it would recall the name of the author of the Oz books, L. Frank Baum. I expected this to be a big, blustery, traditional Hollywood musical, which, of course, it is. I am honestly shocked that the controversies surrounding this were about Cynthia Erivo’s reaction to a fan poster and the fact that this ruined the marriages of Ariana Grande and Ethan Slater. I genuinely can’t believe that the reactionary bastards of the American right wing didn’t have an absolute conniption over how utterly “woke” this film is. I mean this in only the most positive way.

Change the First Letter to "C"

Film: Trap
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on basement television.

I wonder sometimes how many chances someone should get. I’ve given M. Night Shyamalan a bunch of chances based on the strength of a couple of his movies. The Sixth Sense was great for the time, although I have since discovered that I like Stir of Echoes much more. He’s had a few good movies, though, but has also had some legendary stinkers. I went into Trap knowing that reviews were mixed (at best), but having at least respected both Split and Knock at the Cabin. And, truthfully, any good will he earned from those movies he has lost with this one.

The set-up for Trap is an interesting one until you actually discover what the set-up is. The tag line is “30,000 fans. 300 cops. 1 serial killer. No escape.” What that sounds like to me is that there’s going to be some sort of massive concert (check) where a serial killer is operating, suddenly presented with a huge number of possible victims (not so much). That’s a movie I would find interesting to watch. Trap is not that. Instead, what this movie includes is a massive concert where a serial killer is in attendance with his daughter and somehow the cops know he’s there and are working to catch him while he tries to get out undiscovered.

Cartel Queenpin

Film: Emilia Pérez
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on Fire!

When you learn that the main actress in Emilia Pérez is transgender, you know immediately that this is a movie where you can’t really rely on the viewer reviews to get a good idea of what it’s going to be like. I guarantee that a bunch of the ½- and 1-star reviews of this film were written by people who haven’t actually seen the movie and are slagging it specifically because they don’t really know what pronouns are. Because of that, it becomes even more important to actually watch the movie carefully.

It’s also a movie where one has to be very careful in the criticism. I go into every movie hoping to like it and wanting to like it. I don’t want to spend my time watching things that I don’t like. So it’s frustrating when I don’t actually like a movie. When it’s something like Emilia Pérez, the worry is that the assumption will be that I didn’t like it because it’s largely about transgenderism, and that’s not the case. Emilia Pérez has problems that have nothing to do with the characters or the plot.

If Only, If Only

Film: David Byrne’s American Utopia
Format: Streaming video from HBO Max on Fire!

Ask people who watch a lot of concert movies and you’ll hear over and over that the single best concert film in history is Stop Making Sense, the Jonathan Demme-helmed film of the Talking Heads tour at the end of 1983. Honestly, it’s not a huge shock to me that what is probably the second-best concert film in history is another David Byrne project, this time produced and directed by Spike Lee. David Byrne’s American Utopia captures the same sort of lightning in a bottle, showing a display of music, dance, and art from front to back, covering Byrne’s Broadway show of several years ago, and nothing more (with a few minor exceptions).

It is very much like Stop Making Sense. What was unique about Demme’s film, or at least very different from a lot of musical documentaries and films is that there was nothing behind the scenes. It was just the concert, one song leading into the next, the band and the instruments coming out one by one as the show progressed and screens drop down so that images could be projected on them. American Utopia is even more stripped down. This is literally just the show, filmed from start to finish. The genius of the show, and the genius of the film is that it doesn’t need to be anything more than this.

Hail! Hail!

Film: Don’t Turn Your Back on Friday Night
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on basement television.

I think I’ve mentioned before that a lot of my musical tastes come from my older brothers. You pick up what you hear, naturally, and I grew up around a lot of prog rock and yacht rock from the ‘70s. What this means, though, is that the artists I discovered on my own are going to in many ways be much more important to me. Ike Reilly, and now the Ike Reilly Assassination, is one of those artists. I first heard him on the big Chicago alt-rock station, WXRT a couple of years after the release of his first album, Salesmen and Racists. I missed the name of the artist and had to call the station to find out who he was, and I’ve loved him ever since.

Ike (Michael) Reilly is one of those artists that has somehow managed to elude fame and popularity outside of a crop of dedicated fans. I have a fondness for songwriters who are storytellers more than anything else. There’s a lot of Tom Waits, Bob Dylan, Nick Cave, Woody Guthrie, and Warren Zevon in his work (as well as lesser known writers like Eef Barzelay, Freedy Johnston, and Dan Bern). He’s the type of artist who, if you ask 1000 people if they have heard of him, 999 will look at you with their head cocked like a dog hearing a sound it doesn’t know. But that one person who does know him is going to be someone who knows their stuff. His fans include people like Penn Gilette, David Lowrey from Cracker, and fellow Libertyville, IL alum, Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello, who is also the film’s executive producer.

The Music, Man

Film: Maestro
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on Fire!

Bradley Cooper appears desperate for validation. The man has 12 Oscar nominations, five for acting, but no joy yet. One has to imagine that there’s a part of him that is struggling mightily to live down his early years in front of the camera in some desperate attempt for legitimacy, but it’s not like other actors haven’t had to do this. Tom Hanks won consecutive Oscars, and the guy did Bachelor Party and The Money Pit. Maestro is Cooper’s latest attempt for Oscar glory, and while I’ve liked some of his work in the past, I’m unimpressed in general with this one.

The biggest reason for this is a variation of the reason I was so disappointed in The Theory of Everything. If someone is going to do a biopic of Stephen Hawking, you’d think that the focus would be on the man’s work—on the incredible things he was able to accomplish and the jumps forward he made in theory, but the film focused on his marriage. In much the same way, the biopic of Leonard Bernstein (Cooper) should focus on the man’s music—he redefined the American musical in significant ways—and it instead focuses on the fact that despite his marriage and three children, he evidently couldn’t get over his craving for “the d.”

Downbeat

Film: TÁR
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!

As seems to be happening lately, my life has spiraled out of control over the last two weeks. Primarily, these are health-related concerns of family members that have been taking up a lot of my time, combined with the holidays and increased duties at work. I’ve watched, and this is completely serious, a single movie in the last two weeks, and that movie was TÁR, one of the last two Oscar movies from last year left on my list. A few months ago, I was in great shape on Oscar movies, and suddenly it’s the end of the year and I’m not finished. Well, at least I got the long one out of the way.

TÁR is the story of Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett), the principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. World renowned on the classical music scene and wildly influential. As the film begins, she is being interviewed about an upcoming performance of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. Conducting this will give her all nine of Mahler’s symphonies with the Berlin Philharmonic, a true feat in the classical music world. As with any great tragic tale, we start with our hero at the pinnacle of her world and talent, poised for the fall that will take us to the end of the story.

Ten Days of Terror!: Horror Shorts

Film: Frankenstein (1910); Thriller; The Skeleton Dance
Format: Internet video on Fire!

In the early days of film, almost everything was an experiment. When you look at the earliest of the silents, they start by showing essentially real life to the audience. We slowly start to develop the idea of stories and doing something more than just showing people walking or dancing or trains pulling into stations. Frankenstein, very loosely based on the Mary Shelley novel, was produced by the Edison company, is a film that tried to advance the language of film. How successful it is, however, is not as easy to determine.

There’s honestly not a lot here that connects to the actual story. Oh, we’re going to have a guy named Frankenstein (Augustus Phillips) who is engaged to be married to a woman named Elizabeth (Mary Fuller), a ceremony threatened by Frankenstein’s creation of a monster (Charles Ogle). But that’s where the similarities end.

Girlfriend is Better

Film: Stop Making Sense
Format: Classic Cinemas Charlestowne 18

A lot of high schools have a tradition, looked down on by faculty, of Senior Ditch Day. All/most of the seniors essentially blow off school for a day, typically a Friday, to get a three-day weekend. For where I grew up, the tradition for many was to spend a day at the Indiana Dunes, about a 2-hour drive from home. My friends and I, though, went to downtown Chicago and saw Stop Making Sense at the Music Box Theater.

Stop Making Sense is a concert film, and it’s nothing more than a concert film. It doesn’t need to be anything more than that, though, because this is a Talking Heads concert, and David Byrne’s style (and less so the rest of the group) is as much about the visuals as it is about the music. It’s about the full experience, something that shouldn’t be too surprising coming from a musical group where 75% of the core members met at art school.

...and the Spiders of Mars

Film: Moonage Daydream
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on basement television.

As a casual fan of David Bowie, I wasn’t really sure how to approach Moonage Daydream, the approved documentary film on Bowie using a substantial amount of archival footage. It’s nearly impossible to be my age and not know at least something about Bowie, of course. In terms of my musical tastes, Bowie was less important to me early on than the other prog rock acts my brothers listened to when I was very young. It was probably around the Let’s Dance era that I listened to him more in earnest, despite knowing the earlier work through my brothers to some extent.

It's hard to say that Moonage Daydream is a warts-and-all biopic, because it’s not really that sort of movie. It’s a movie that is very much from Bowie’s own point of view. So, while this is going to provide a particular perspective on his life and work, it’s also going to be a perspective that feels honest and important. Much of what makes this interesting is the fact that David Bowie reinvented himself regularly; the same guy who did Ziggy Stardust also did Modern Love and further reinvented himself into a Nine Inch Nails-like band with Tin Machine.

I'm Going to Graceland

Film: Elvis
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on basement television.

This year’s Razzie nominations were interesting. While we frequently see a lot of famous names in mix, it’s not often that we see this many high-profile names in the mix. Tom Hanks has been nominated for both Worst Actor and Worst Supporting Actor for films from 2022, in the second case for Elvis, which also happens to be nominated for Best Picture. It’s an interesting situation, because it’s hard to overlook Tom Hanks in Elvis since, as Colonel Tom Parker, he narrates the story.

I have to admit that I went into this with a great deal of trepidation, not because it was about Elvis Presley (Austin Butler), about whom I am pretty ambivalent. It’s the length. Critic Mark Kermode, in his epic takedown of Sex and the City 2 commented that in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick took us from the birth of the human species to the birth of the next species in 2 hours and 29 minutes, while SatC 2 is 2 hours and 26 minutes and goes essentially nowhere. Elvis is 2 hours and 39 minutes.

Dare to be Stupid

Film: Weird: The Al Yankovic Story
Format: Streaming video from The Roku Channel on basement television

I’ve been looking forward to Weird: The Al Yankovic Story since I heard that Daniel Radcliffe was going to play the title role. Radcliffe is having the best career possible; he’s doing only what he wants because he doesn’t need the money. It’s allowed him to just have fun with the movies and shows he’s doing. Weird is tremendous evidence of this, because this movie is not based in reality and doesn’t pretend to be.

This is, ostensibly, the story of Weird Al Yankovic, song parody master. There are minor elements of this movie that are based on Yankovic’s actual life (he got his accordion from a door-to-door salesman, for instance), but none of this is accurate. Instead, this is a story of tropes and cliches dialed up to 11 and made ridiculous. According to this film, Yankovic was repressed by his father, who wanted young Al to come work in the factory with him—a factory where no one knows what the actual product is.

Little Wooden Boy

Film: Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on Fire!

It was always going to be a case of “when” when it came to Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio. I will watch anything that del Toro does, and at the very least, I needed to keep my streak of seeing everything the man has written or directed alive. I also knew that this has been a passion project of del Toro for years, and if nothing else, that’s going to make it worth seeing.

On the surface, this version of Pinocchio would seem to be just another version of the story that everyone knows. That truth doesn’t go beyond the surface, though. This is a complete reimagining of the basic Pinocchio story. The basics are still the same—an old man carves a wooden puppet that, through some magical means, the puppet is granted life. Through a series of Cmisadventures, and guided in some respects by a cricket that acts as his conscience, the puppet learns life lessons on his way to becoming a real boy.

Self-Reference

Film: tick, tick…BOOM!
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on Fire!

When I was an undergrad, I was an English lit major, and a lot of the people I hung around with were also English lit majors. There are few students at any college more pretentious and up their own ass than English majors. Once, at a party, a poet friend of mine had a fight with his girlfriend, and when she stormed out, I watched him count on his fingers for the right aesthetic moment to chase after her, into the snow barefoot, without his coat. I also dabbled in theater for a semester and even acted in a play. I say this to show that there are students who are more up their own ass than English majors; they’re all in theater. This is important, because tick, tick…BOOM! is very much about theater people.

I also need to say that when I started this blog a really long time ago, I was not shy about the fact that I’m not a huge fan of musicals as a genre. It’s probably still my least favorite genre of film in general, although I have mellowed on them in general. There is a subgenre of musical that I really don’t like a lot, though, and that’s musicals about musicals. This is important, because tick, tick…BOOM! is absolutely that.

The Measure of a Man

Films: Cyrano
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on the kid’s television.

When I first saw that there would be a new version of the story of Cyrano de Bergerac, I was intrigued. It’s a hell of a good story, and I’m always a sucker for a sad romance. The story of Cyrano is one of the truly tragic romances. The basic story is that a truly great spirit, guardsman Cyrano de Bergerac, is a true Renaissance man, a warrior poet as gifted with the pen or wordplay as with the sword. But, the story goes, he is cursed with a giant nose, which prevents him from being loved, or so he believes. The twist in 2021’s Cyrano is not that the story has been turned into a musical but that the title character is played by Peter Dinklage.

And that really is the story. We open with one of the classic scenes of the Cyrano story. We are introduced to Roxanne (Haley Bennett), who is both poor and beautiful. She is being wooed—unsuccessfully—by Duke De Guiche (Ben Mendelsohn), who has a great deal of money to waste on her. He takes her to the theater to see Montfleury (Mark Benton), the most celebrated actor of his day, but the performance is interrupted by Cyrano (Dinklage), who dislikes him intently. While the actor runs off, Valvert (Joshua James) challenges Cyrano to a duel. Cyrano humiliates him, chants at him in rhyme, and eventually runs him through.

The Key of L Sharp

Film: Studio 666
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on basement television.

I have to admit that I didn’t expect a great deal out of Studio 666. This is clearly something that Dave Grohl wanted to do and figured he could. In that respect, Dave Grohl is a lot like Snoop Dogg. Both of them have essentially won life and are now just playing through the side quests. So why not make a horror movie?

Of course that’s what Studio 666 is. With that name could it really be anything else? It’s going to feature the members of Grohl’s band Foo Fighters as movie versions of themselves, more or less. I honestly don’t know enough about them to know how much their portrayals are exaggerated for the film. I imagine, like many instances like this, that these are intensifications of who they are.

We Need to Talk About Bruno

Film: Encanto
Format: Streaming video from Disney Plus on laptop.

When you think of Disney animated films, there is a particular sense that you almost certainly have in your head. A lot of that is going to be the basic Disney Princess story. We’ve got a naïve (often) young girl who has some magical powers in one way or another, or who is special in some meaningful way and is going to spend the bulk of the film essentially finding the guy she’s going to marry. Disney has honestly gotten better at this in the last decade and a half. A film like Tangled, for instance, follows that traditional Disney pattern on the surface but gives our heroine a lot more agency. That’s more the case in Frozen. With Encanto, we’re changing a lot of the script, and the movie is all the better for it.

When I say that Disney is changing a lot of that script, I mean that almost all of the things that you associate with a Disney Princess movie are not here to the point where I’m not sure that our main character would even qualify as a Disney princess. In fact, she is the one person in her family who doesn’t have special powers. But I see I’m getting ahead of myself, so allow me to take a step back.