Loath to lead with ballads, I retreated before the frontal attack of Stevie Wonder’s “Lately,” one of those wounded torch songs written as if to remind fans that happiness is an option as much as a birthright. What I admire about Pirates is the scrutiny Rickie Lee Jones expends on memories — were they good […]
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Loath to lead with ballads, I retreated before the frontal attack of Stevie Wonder’s “Lately,” one of those wounded torch songs written as if to remind fans that happiness is an option as much as a birthright. What I admire about Pirates is the scrutiny Rickie Lee Jones expends on memories — were they good times or is she willing them to be? Anyway, I appreciate how she tugs at the piano melody in “A Lucky Guy” like she losing a war against grinning (I am grateful for the ILMers who pushed Pirates on me years ago).
The curiosities include Anne Murray’s Ferryesque attempt to lower the temperature on one of The Beatles’ most ebullient recordings, Sheena Easton waste a cool title, and John Cafferty fuck up the first time he released “On the Dark Side” before cable reruns turned his movie into a cult failure. Repelled by “Funkytown” since my childhood in disco-addled Miami, I tapped my foot reflexively to “Rock It.” Years before meeting Jam and Lewis, Janet Jackson already had the goods with “Young Love,” written and produced by Rene Moore and Angela Winbush. Steve Winwood took notes for his “While You See a Chance” when listening to the intro EW&F wrote for “Star.” Robert Plant plays it safe on a solo debut that rocks like a Presence outtake. And “You Are in My System” remains a marvel of twitch.
The Hague
Styx – Borrowed Time
Meh
Anne Murray — I’m Happy Just To Dance With You
Michael Stanley Band – Falling In Love Again
Sheena Easton – I Wouldn’t Beg For Water
John Hall Band – Love Me Again
John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band – On The Dark Side (1st release)
Saga – Wind Him Up
Cheryl Barnes – Hair (Original Soundtrack Recording)
Sound, Solid
Rick James – Dance Wit’ Me (Part 1)
Donnie Iris – Do You Compute?
Sister Sledge – Got To Love Somebody Today
Axe – Now Or Never
Prism – Turn On Your Radar
Tony Carey – West Coast Summer Nights
Good to Great
Stevie Wonder – Lately
Rickie Lee Jones – A Lucky Guy
ABBA – Angeleyes
The System – You Are In My System
Robert Plant – Burning Down One Side
Lipps Inc – Rock It
Janet Jackson – Young Love
Planet P – Why Me
Earth, Wind and Fire – Star
The nominees: Greer Garson – Sunrise at Campobello Deborah Kerr – The Sundowners Shirley MacLaine – The Apartment Melina Mercouri – Never on a Sunday Elizabeth Taylor – BUtterfield 8 Adducing her reputation for honesty, Elizabeth Taylor let it be known at the time that BUtterfield 8, an adaptation of a John O’Hara novel, was […]
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The nominees:
Greer Garson – Sunrise at Campobello
Deborah Kerr – The Sundowners
Shirley MacLaine – The Apartment
Melina Mercouri – Never on a Sunday
Elizabeth Taylor – BUtterfield 8
Adducing her reputation for honesty, Elizabeth Taylor let it be known at the time that BUtterfield 8, an adaptation of a John O’Hara novel, was a piece of crap. She won the Best Actress Oscar on her fourth consecutive try as, my god, a floozy named Gloria Wandrous who has to out-bitch Laurence Harvey, a feat that almost broke Frank Sinatra two years later in The Manchurian Candidate. “I thought, “fuck them!”—they made me do the film,” Taylor said with her usual delicacy. “I didn’t want to. I did it with a pistol at my head. The lines were so diabolical. It was such a piece of shit.” BUtterfield 8 is watchable shit, though, especially the first few minutes. If the camera were a man, it would have its mouth dangling open, drooling, as it stalks Liz around a swanky apartment putting herself together and realizing her dress is torn. Mike Nichols would later praise Taylor for her infallible instinct for understanding how she plays in front of the camera; BUtterfield 8 is dreck blessed with an actress who got what producers expected of her.
A pair of TCM favorites inspired my selection, both as old-fashioned as covered piano legs. The Sundowners, directed by known plodder Fred Zinnemann, drags, one step up from a Disney film like Swiss Family Robinson: Deborah Kerr, Peter Ustinov, and her favorite screen partner Robert Mitchum cosplaying as Australians in the outback. But Kerr is broad and lusty like she rarely was before and would not be again, and she ogles Mitchum as if she wanted to jump him like a kanga. She stays in. Greer Garson does not for imitating Eleanor Roosevelt’s fluting tones through an ersatz overbite in Sunrise at Campobello. Ralph Bellamy makes a more convincing pre-polio FDR, but, goddamn, the thing looks as if the editor poured a bottle of Heinz 57 over the filmstock and moves like Ft. Pierce dinner theater.
My nominees:
Setsuko Hara – Late Autumn
Deborah Kerr – The Sundowners
Shirley MacLaine – The Apartment
Melina Mercouri – Never on a Sunday
Jean Simmons – Elmer Gantry
Yasujirō Ozu peaked as a filmmaker in the 1950s. Instead of playing the unmarried woman happy in her aloneness Ozu favorite Setsuko Hara plays the recently widowed mother whose unmarried daughter balks at the choices presented by three bumbling pals of her late dad’s; she prefers, in a gender variant of the situation in the 1949 Late Spring, to take care of Mom. Hara achieves new pinnacles of minimalism; this woman could wring as many gradations of feeling from a smile as FDR did waving a cigarette holder, an accomplishment beyond Bellamy in his imitation. She adapts to Ozu’s newly colorized frames.
An undiscussed actress who didn’t get the roles she deserves, Jean Simmons shows some of Deborah Kerr’s esprit as a backwoods preacher based on Aimee Semple McPherson who pairs up with Burt Lancaster in Richard Brooks’ Elmer Gantry: Lancaster promises hellfire, she eternal salvation. She’s the only character unblemished by cynicism; when she dies a martyr’s death she smiles like Joan of Arc. Dichotomizing the spiritual and the P.T. Barnum sides of evangelism, Elmer Gantry ends up nowhere as the end credits role; I suspect it would play better today.
Because I haven’t watched Never On Sunday in close to 20 years while I watched Sons and Lovers last December, I considered swapping Melina Mercouri in the former for Wendy Hiller in the latter. The Greek actress, directed by and costarring with husband Jules Dassin, plays the sex worker domesticated by the American Greco-Roman scholar — she is in the parlance of the time a “free spirit.” The film’s pokey and rather sure of itself in the manner of the time but I remember Mercouri as pure charm. Imagine Dassin dropping her into his 1955 blacklist-era masterwork Night and the City and Never on Sunday turns less treacly.
There are moments in The Apartment as poignant as Billy Wilder ever wrote and directed, and there are moments in this Best Picture winner where the actors hit notes as finely tuned and tinkling as any in a Lubitsch or Ozu picture. I think of the shades of embarrassment and regret on Shirley MacLaine’s face as she learns what she means to her longtime lover Fred MacMurray. I’m rare among film writers in not taking Wilder as seriously as most; his habit of setting up complex scenarios that he doesn’t have the guts to realize, then stapling a rancid one-liner to it, frustrates me. The Apartment ranks among his exceptions. Wilder neither leers nor condescends to MacLaine, an actor who wouldn’t have put up with it anyway. Her elevator girl is just hard-bitten enough to resist Jack Lemmon but not enough to mistake MacMurray’s intentions. She, Norma Desmond, and Barbara Stanwyck’s Phyllis Dietrichson are Wilder’s greatest female creations and MacLaine shouldn’t have had to wait until 1983 for her award.
The Oscar Goes To: Elizabeth Taylor My Oscar Goes To: Shirley MacLaine
“We all know that AI is the future,” avers a source cited in this article about the construction of an AI center in a predominately Black section of unincorporated Miami-Dade County. Who is “we”? Always uncertain the future, the wise Yoda once said. It may be a bright mauve balloon ready to go pop because […]
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“We all know that AI is the future,” avers a source cited in this article about the construction of an AI center in a predominately Black section of unincorporated Miami-Dade County. Who is “we”? Always uncertain the future, the wise Yoda once said. It may be a bright mauve balloon ready to go pop because old people who want to get hip with the kids massaged too heavily its surface.
Some concerns hinge around environmental impacts, as large data centers are resource-intensive, particularly in terms of water and energy.
“Large data centers can consume up to 5 million gallons per day, equivalent to the water use of a town populated by 10,000 to 50,000 people,” according to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. “With larger and new AI-focused data centers, water consumption is increasing alongside energy usage and carbon emissions.”
According to the World Resources Institute, data centers can also contribute to noise pollution and increased competition for land, and have frequently been situated in marginalized communities.
“A national review of roughly 700 data centers across the country found that nearly half are in census tracts with above-median environmental burdens, such as air pollution, park access and water pollution, as measured by the Center for Disease Control’s Environmental Justice Index,” according to the WRI article, written by Carla Walker and Ian Goldsmith. “Many were located in areas with social vulnerability indicators, such as poverty and lower education levels.”
The bill signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis last week prohibiting AI centers from passing the cost of utilities to residents looks fine in print, but look closer: these companies can still sign secret nondisclosure agreements with state agencies in addition to allowing data centers a year to keep their intentions quiet.
And on occasion I watch films my audience would think were Not For Me. Not as daft as Babe but almost as winning, The Sheep Detectives won me over thanks to the skill of the voice actors and its visual effects. This film for all ages directed by Kyle Balda follows a flock of sheep […]
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And on occasion I watch films my audience would think were Not For Me. Not as daft as Babe but almost as winning, The Sheep Detectives won me over thanks to the skill of the voice actors and its visual effects. This film for all ages directed by Kyle Balda follows a flock of sheep looking to solve the murder of their shepherd George (Hugh Jackman). Where do they get the smarts? George took the trouble to read books to them. Set in the fictional town of Denbrook, surrounded by English countryside greener and more bucolic than Pope and Wordsworth’s encomia, The Sheep Detectives itself comes across as a pop-up book with delicious illustrations that if you were five you’d tear out and put in your mouth.
Lily (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) fancies herself the smartest of the flock but knowledge hasn’t made her snotty. Besides, Sebastian (Bryan Cranston), George’s other favorite, is a loner who won’t take advice, not from a sheep who hasn’t dared to venture outside the pasture as he has. The town’s only policeman Derry (Nicholas Braun) seems like a well-meant buffoon, a point made by an out-of-town reporter (Red, White & Royal Blue‘s Nicholas Galitzine with classic Hollywood reporter’s glasses). When a solicitor with the Dickensian name Lydia Harbottle (Emma Thompson) reads the will, the beneficiaries become, according to the demands of the genre, automatic suspects. Lily, Sebastian, and Mopple (Chris O’Dowd) are on the case.
The getting there matters more than the destination. Balda and screenwriter Craig Mazin (Dune) add cool touches, like the sheeps’ ability to wipe memories, particularly bad ones, at will. Their detective skills, as Jill Lepore notes in a tetchily amusing article about what the film gets right, are undersung:
Peer-reviewed scientific studies have established that they can recognize and remember fifty different sheep faces for more than two years (they can probably recognize a lot more faces and remember them for a lot longer, but that’s all the scientists tested). A 2017 study published by the Royal Society went further, proving that sheep recognize and remember human faces, and not just the faces of their shepherds, but also photographs of the faces of their shepherds. These mad scientists then trained a small flock of sheep to recognize four celebrities—Emma Watson, Barack Obama, Jake Gyllenhaal, and the BBC newsreader Fiona Bruce—from their pictures on the internet.
“Do you know what humans call stupid people who can’t think for themselves?” a ram asks his brethren. Some questions deserve no answers. Lepore doesn’t much like The Sheep Detectives; she takes particular umbrage with the range of accents, general homogenization, and indifference towards its source material, the 2005 German novel Glennkill: Ein Schafskrimi. She has a point. The terms of the will are in dollars, not pounds. These things bothered me less than Derry’s let’s-explain-it-all monologue — another genre fixture, sure, but his audience stands around gaping as if they’ve never watched Knives Out, never mind Murder on the Orient Express.
Still, The Sheep Detectives made me smile a couple times. Thompson can play these big-suited snobs like a pro. Louis-Dreyfus and Cranston don’t press the baaah-thos. Look for the inevitable sequel.
We will never find enough dipthongs to assemble into words eloquent to describe what Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliott pulled off between 1996 and 2005: whether solo or as producer-songwriter for hire, she was responsible for one of the most fecund bursts of imagination in pop history, up there with Stevie Wonder, Joni Mitchell, Taylor Swift’s, anybody’s […]
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We will never find enough dipthongs to assemble into words eloquent to describe what Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliott pulled off between 1996 and 2005: whether solo or as producer-songwriter for hire, she was responsible for one of the most fecund bursts of imagination in pop history, up there with Stevie Wonder, Joni Mitchell, Taylor Swift’s, anybody’s (I dare readers to deny me). With its three-note synth hook and undulating beat, “One Minute Man”s hows Elliott at her best, and Ludacris’ too, after “What’s Your Fantasy” and “Southern Hospitality” (“Ludacris balance and rotate ALL tires!).
Returning to “Through the Wire” doesn’t make me nostalgic for Old Kanye so much as wonder why he couldn’t have rapped with his jaw strapped up more often. Ying Yang Twins whisper sweet dirty things. Mary J. Blige appropriates the Young and the Restless theme, heard six thousand times during my childhood (my mom’s favorite soap). Daniel Bedingfield puts over acoustic twaddle that defeated James Blunt and Daniel Powter three years later and, well, defeated another person on this chart: steeped in the irked-white-boy riddims of “Semi-Charmed Life,” Jason Mraz’s “The Remedy” uses self-effacement to call shit on the woman he’s laying, a much-rehearsed singer-songwriter move.
Meh
Jason Mraz – The Remedy (I Won’t Be Happy)
Papa Roach – Scars
Eminem – Superman
Evan and Jaron – Crazy For This Girl
Sound, Solid
Ryan Cabrera – On the Way Down
Angie Martinez Featuring Lil’ Mo & Sacario – If I Could Go
Dem Franchize Boyz ft. Jermaine Dupri, Da Brat & Bow Wow – I Think They Like Me
Jessica Simpson – Irresistible
Britney Spears – Everytime
Good to Great
Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliott ft. Ludacris – One Minute Man
Kanye West – Through the Wire
Ying Yang Twins – Wait (The Whisper Song)
Mary J. Blige – No More Drama
Bubba Sparxxx – Ugly
Olivia – Bizounce
Daniel Bedingfield – If You’re Not the One
Lil’ Flip – Game Over (Flip)
Ashanti – Baby
Nelly – E.I.
G-Unit Featuring Joe – Wanna Get to Know You
Craig David – Fill Me In
As conscious of boring myself as I am of boring my students, I switch the movies assigned in Communication and Film every semester but keep a few touchstones: Le Bonheur, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Lady Bird. I treasure The Night of the Hunter most because it never fails to astound […]
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As conscious of boring myself as I am of boring my students, I switch the movies assigned in Communication and Film every semester but keep a few touchstones: Le Bonheur, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Lady Bird. I treasure The Night of the Hunter most because it never fails to astound the audience. Charles Laughton never directed another film again, and I would make the case that, however lively his work in Witness for the Prosecution and Spartacus, the fire went out of the acting hearth too. Working from a James Agee script he heavily rewrote, Laughton turns a fairy tale into backwoods Yoknapatawpha County-esque terror; the Englishman understood the violence, religious hypocrisies, and sexual contortions of rural American better than Elia Kazan, and his Expressionist visual style turns bedrooms and boats into dens of sin. The Night of the Hunter‘s oneiric tone extends to the work by a never scarier Robert Mitchum and, putting two decades of silent screen tactics at her service, a steely Lillian Gish; and to the sound mix, a congeries of nighttime critters like bullfrogs and cicadas that complement Mitchum’s version of “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” (the reverend sings it as well as Satan quotes Scripture).
The Night of the Hunter tops this tricky list of the best films directed by actors. “Tricky” because of the nomenclature. Sydney Pollack and Spike Lee are special cases: directors who have enjoyed careers as actors. Orson Welles, Clint Eastwood, John Cassavetes, Woody Allen, and Chaplin act in their own films and on occasion others; I’ve omitted their stuff. This list belongs to the actors with fecund directorial sidelines or like Laughton managed it once — take a bow, Steve Buscemi and Robert Duvall. I appreciate how Buscemi and Greta Gerwig and before them Elaine May wrote and directed films extracted from the tangles of their imaginings. Todd Field deserves the praise too. I did not figure the fellow who played the piano player in Eyes Wide Shut who directed In the Bedroom and Little Children had a Tár in him.
Here are a dozen:
1. The Night of the Hunter (dir. Charles Laughton)
2. The Hitch-Hiker (dir. Ida Lupino)
3. Quiz Show (dir. Robert Redford)
4. Little Murders (dir. Alan Arkin)
5. Dead Man Walking (dir. Tim Robbins)
6. Trees Lounge (dir. Steve Buscemi)
7. Away From Her (dir. Sarah Polley)
8. A New Leaf (dir. Elaine May)
9. The Apostle (dir. Robert Duvall)
10. Tár (dir. Todd Field)
11. Lady Bird (dir. Greta Gerwig)
12. Eve’s Bayou (dir. Kasi Lemmons)
An R&B single re-purposed into a UK garage hit two years after its release, Tina Moore’s “Never Gonna Let You Go” is one more insistent contribution to the moment when Crystal Waters, Jody Watley, and Dionne Farris sang over jaunty beats and melodies whose commitment to an emotional pluralism the singers embodied as naturally as […]
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An R&B single re-purposed into a UK garage hit two years after its release, Tina Moore’s “Never Gonna Let You Go” is one more insistent contribution to the moment when Crystal Waters, Jody Watley, and Dionne Farris sang over jaunty beats and melodies whose commitment to an emotional pluralism the singers embodied as naturally as accepting a glass of prosecco.
The mystery: why Grand Puba’s woozy “A Little of This” didn’t cross over.
Next to these entries Pearl Jam and Matthew Sweet seem not to have stood a chance; but two of the former’s angriest churns and one of the latter’s jangliest admissions of equivalence hold up. But don’t ask Annie Lennox about her Procul Harum cover.
“I know her and I don’t,” Magnus (Sverrir Gudnason) confesses to one of his fishermen colleagues late in The Love That Remains. His wife Anna (Saga Gardarsdottir) may not know him as well as she thought either. For reasons never articulated the high school sweethearts have split up but not moved on. Magnus, called Maggy […]
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“I know her and I don’t,” Magnus (Sverrir Gudnason) confesses to one of his fishermen colleagues late in The Love That Remains. His wife Anna (Saga Gardarsdottir) may not know him as well as she thought either. For reasons never articulated the high school sweethearts have split up but not moved on. Magnus, called Maggy in terms affectionate or truculent depending on Anna’s mood, sometimes sleeps on the sofa or in a house in the woods surrounded by equally truculent cocks. Their two boys and a girl function as supporting cast and Greek chorus, alternately shooting arrows into a suit of armor they have tethered to a beachside log and commenting on their parents’ sex lives.
Hlynur Pálmason has cast his own children in The Love That Remains; he also wrote, directed, and shot it. Set in rural Iceland what looks like a grim year, the film is a discursive and at times unfocused family comedy-drama indebted to antecedents like Shoot the Moon (1982) that depicted affectionate but not smothering parents whose children and their own careers command their time more than their marriage. The Love That Remains has less vitriol: Pálmason rarely shoots scenes with Magnus and Anna together. Only in its apt final sequence does the audience understand what this cycle of reconciliation and recrimination has done to Magnus.
The lack of intrafamilial violence at times places Pálmason’s films in a fairy-time context; keeping the exposition to a minimum helps. The kids ice fish, ice skate. Anna, an artist, paints wall-sized murals. She has a lover so into her that he bleets “pussy, pussy, pussy!” like a child over a sundae. Magnus spends days on ship with crabby mates who bitch about The Kids with their attention spans and their TikTok; when he’s not he’s in that cottage figuring out a humane way to kill a rooster (NB: he does not wring its neck). By the sheer number of scenes Magnus earns he seems to command more of Pálmason’s sympathy; perhaps blame an unconscious gender bias. But Pálmaso compensates with a series of dream sequences: the murdered rooster, now ten feet tall, takes revenge on Magnus; the empty armor the kids used for target practice visits the home (Magnus offers him water).
Watching The Love That Remains I thought often of Le Bonheur, Agnès Varda’s cheerful sunlit depiction of a family about to disintegrate at the point of peak joy. Its series of compositionally fascinating vignettes reminded me of Ron Andersson’s last couple films. But The Love That Remains‘ easeful ramble is Pálmason’s own. Every character breathes, including family dog Panda (he won the Palm Dog Award at last year’s Cannes ceremony). I had forgotten aboutWinter Brothers, shown at Miami Film Festival a decade ago before its blink-and-you’ll-miss-it American distribution. Pálmason has a talent for how topography shapes personality — the only way topography matters. Hence the poetry of the aforementioned final sequence.
The Love That Remains is streaming on Criterion Channel.
You’d think the era of British one-off oddities folded in 1992, but here were Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt, shimmying gracefully into the top two thanks to Todd Terry’s remix of a ballad of unusual desolation. Boy, did it work: “Missing” camped out in the Hot 100 more weeks than any single since Soft Cell’s […]
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You’d think the era of British one-off oddities folded in 1992, but here were Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt, shimmying gracefully into the top two thanks to Todd Terry’s remix of a ballad of unusual desolation. Boy, did it work: “Missing” camped out in the Hot 100 more weeks than any single since Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” (a record since broken). The revenue saved Everything But the Girl, who recorded 1996’s marvelous Walking Wounded and 1999’s Temperamental, both boasting some of the sharpest late night-at-the-club ruminations I’ve heard, for when the drugs wear off and the guy you thought you had something going with has disappeared the ruminations begin.
The high vowel-to-consonant ratio of “Return of the Mack,” the low-key melancholy of “Red Light Special,” the Crawford-level melodrama of “Not Gon’ Cry” — these singles have aged so damn well.
The Hague
Jewel – You Were Meant for Me
Meh
Meredith Brooks – Bitch
Nicki French – Total Eclipse of the Heart
LeAnn Rimes – How Do I Live
R. Kelly – I Believe I Can Fly
Sound, Solid
Candy Rain – Soul 4 Real
Usher – You Make Me Wanna…
Donna Lewis – I Love You Always Forever
Boyz II Men – Water Runs Dry
Céline Dion – It’s All Coming Back to Me Now
Keith Sweat – Twisted
Good to Great
TLC – Red Light Special
Everything But The Girl – Missing
Mark Morrison – Return of the Mack
The Notorious B.I.G. ft. Faith Evans and Mary J. Blige – One More Chance
Monica – Don’t Take It Personal (Just One of Dem Days)
Mary J. Blige – Not Gon’ Cry
Adina Howard – Freak Like Me
Brandy – Sittin’ Up in My Room
Backstreet Boys – Quit Playing Games (with My Heart)
The Tony Rich Project – Nobody Knows
“You treat me like a dog, get me down on my knees,” Dave Gahan intoned in 1985, a half-decade before Depeche Mode crushed the synth pop game led by Pet Shop Boys, The Cure, and New Order with hip thrusts. But, no, he referred to S&M, which, if anyone expressed confusion, songwriter Martin Gore’s exposed […]
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“You treat me like a dog, get me down on my knees,” Dave Gahan intoned in 1985, a half-decade before Depeche Mode crushed the synth pop game led by Pet Shop Boys, The Cure, and New Order with hip thrusts. But, no, he referred to S&M, which, if anyone expressed confusion, songwriter Martin Gore’s exposed nipple was prepared to remind them.The star of “MAHSTER and Servant” is the programmed sound: a chorus of whistles and hisses and gurgles. Gore adds complementary harmonies to remind listeners that, as Ronald Reagan’s national security team understood, domination’s the name of the game (“It’s a lot. LIKE LIFE”). This was the closest pop music got to evoking a PG-rated version of what New York’s The Anvil must’ve been like if you weren’t getting Krisco kisses.
Otherwise, Whodini’s early double-sided rap hit would’ve dominated this game along with Mitch Ryder’s crunchy cover of Prince’s own Gore-worthy sexual glasnost. Maybe Atlantic Starr’s “Touch a Four Leaf Clover” too, later remade famously by Erykah Badu. I’d rather hear Sylvester blast “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real),” one of those miracles of church, falsetto, and sequencers that compose disco and gay culture’s gifts to humanity, than Jimmy Somerville, but he acquits himself fine.
Several acts earned their only Hot 100 appearances: Boston band The Del Fuegos with the midtempo “I Still Want You,” Transvision Vamp’s bratty but not intense enough cover of Holly and the Italians’ “Tell that Girl To Shut Up,” and pink-haired horrors Gene Loves Jezebel (“Motion of Love”).
The Hague
The Monkees – Heart and Soul
Eric Carmen – Reason To Try
Meh
Gene Loves Jezebel – Motion of Love
The Tubes – Piece By Piece
Kissing The Pink – Maybe This Day
Eric Martin – Information
Grayson Hughes – Bring It All Back
The Jets – The Same Love
Eric Carmen – I’m Through With Love
Sound, Solid
Level 42 – Hot Water
Luther Vandross – Superstar/Until You Come Back To Me (That’s What I’m Gonna Do)
Jennifer Holliday – No Frills Love
Jody Watley – Precious Love
Baltimora – Living in the Background
Night – Love on the Airwaves
Samantha Fox – Do Ya Do Ya (Wanna Please Me)
Ratt – Wanted Man
Good to Great
Depeche Mode – Master and Servant
Whodini – Friends/Five Minutes of Funk
Mitch Ryder – When You Were Mine
Atlantic Starr – Touch a Four-Leaf Clover
The Del Fuegos – I Still Want You
Jimmy Somerville – You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)
The Streets – If Love Should Go
Insofar as my critical brethren have paid attention to Ashley McBryde it was with the release of two of her dullest albums: the sorts of statements praised for detail and all that stuff beloved by lyric fetishists. Give me attitude, vocal choices, toss-offs, and sloganeering. Hey, guess what — Wild has these things and detail […]
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Insofar as my critical brethren have paid attention to Ashley McBryde it was with the release of two of her dullest albums: the sorts of statements praised for detail and all that stuff beloved by lyric fetishists. Give me attitude, vocal choices, toss-offs, and sloganeering. Hey, guess what — Wild has these things and detail too. I’m less sure about Isaiah Rashad’s return. I’d appreciate the messing around with his sexual chemistry fate with results less sluggish and musically opaque.
Ashley McBryde – Wild
The songs on her last two albums miniaturized themselves into ably stroped creative writing assignment A+s — no fun at all. I worried the title would be at my expense, but she’s right. For the first time since the pandemic began, Ashley McBryde records an album-length demonstration of why her big, broad voice deserved electric guitar accompaniment, complement, and astringent. Key collaborator John Osborne handles most of the plugged-in six-strings; “Arkansas Mud” and “Lines on the Carpet” go for stadium-level sonics without sacrificing the portraiture in which McBryde excels: the riffs even answer each other on the latter. But Osborne situates her voice in the mix so that observations like “He ain’t changing, she ain’t leaving/Because he doesn’t hit her and the kids are sleeping” have deeper resonance than how many brands she can name per verse. McBryde can do still portraiture: the Lori McKenna co-write “Behind Bars” is a small masterpiece of double entendre. Here’s hoping she turns into young Tanya Tucker or any-age Nancy Wilson on the next album: McBryde can out-yowl any guitar.
Isaiah Rashad – It’s Been Awful.
Two official studio albums between my beloved Cilvia Demo mixtape and this latest, plus drug addiction and a sex tape that resulted in an admission of fluidity — it hasn’t been awful but it looks shitty from my end. Murky by design, torpid by accident, his third major label album records the musings of an imagination clouded by years of bad habits and a conscience blemished by who knows how many transgressions; the minor key synth lines and sampled opera vocals promise no interference. He raps better (“719 Freestyle”) than he sings but it’s not as if he wants precision in either mode. In the SZA duet “Boy in Red” he wants to her boyfriend and, if this fails, her girlfriend. He craves a blunt he’s given up but can’t find his water in “Scared 2 Look Down.” Rashad’s pained gravelly growl would have more resonance if It’s Been Awful had been shorter than its 54 minutes; he intended to include therapy sessions like “Nuthin 2 Hide,” for better and often worse.
Their name is Roxy Music. Thanks to payola or dumb luck, they watched as the Ferry-McKay composition called “Love is the Drug” peak at #30, their only top 40 breach. Jimmy Buffett (contributing his only winsome tune) and Ohio Players boasted surfaces this clean, but only Roxy understood the bleakness of the pickup scene. I […]
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Their name is Roxy Music. Thanks to payola or dumb luck, they watched as the Ferry-McKay composition called “Love is the Drug” peak at #30, their only top 40 breach. Jimmy Buffett (contributing his only winsome tune) and Ohio Players boasted surfaces this clean, but only Roxy understood the bleakness of the pickup scene. I don’t know what a “singles bar” is — I tend to think every bar pre-COVID was a place to to pick up singles and STDs.
And “The Killing of Georgie” acknowledges this reality. I don’t get criticism accusing it of biting “Walk on the Wild Side” cynically. Despite the basing of a narrative on the death of an out gay man, Rod Stewart’s performance implies he’s totally cool with his mate: this is not a song tracing a latter-day awareness of closeted sexuality, but a song written and sung from the POV of a straight man reckoning with the legacy of a beloved friend. This was remarkable for 1976, and Stewart earned the credit. Yet he was more open about sexual ambivalence than his mate Elton John because Rod was straight.
The Hague
Benny Bell – Shaving Cream
Meh
Carole King – Hard Rock Cafe
Jigsaw – Love Fire
Cross Country – In the Midnight Hour
Flash Cadillac & the Continental Kids – Did You Boogie (with Your Baby)?
Sound, Solid
Isaac Hayes – Joy (Pt. 1)
The Salsoul Orchestra – Nice and Nasty
Melissa Manchester – Just Be Good to Me
Al Wilson – La La Peace Song
The J. Geils Band – Give It to Me
The Brothers Johnson – Get Da Funk Out My Face
Olivia Newton-John – Let It Shine
Roberta Flack – Jesse
Good to Great
Roxy Music – Love is the Drug
Rufus featuring Chaka Khan – At Midnight (My Love Will Lift You Up)
Rod Stewart – The Killing of Georgie (Parts 1 and 2)
Jimmy Buffett – Come Monday
The Ohio Players – Fopp
The Chi-Lites – Stoned Out of My Mind
Ted Nugent – Cat Scratch Fever
Mocked as a nepo baby making films about airheads, Sofia Coppola has has to live down her casting as Michael Corleone’s daughter in a redundant Godfather chapter. Which goes to show how feebly our culture is equipped to deal with a sensibility that cannibalizes itself. She doesn’t judge her characters and their privilege; she realizes […]
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Mocked as a nepo baby making films about airheads, Sofia Coppola has has to live down her casting as Michael Corleone’s daughter in a redundant Godfather chapter. Which goes to show how feebly our culture is equipped to deal with a sensibility that cannibalizes itself. She doesn’t judge her characters and their privilege; she realizes that, in the case of Marie Antoinette and Priscilla Presley, larger forces rescinded their agency as young women; how they resist or even whether they acknowledge paths to resistance gives their respective films their tension and their sorrow. The Virgin Suicides strikes me as one of the new century’s most assured debuts: a fairy tale seen through the filters of cigarette smoke, shag rugs, and 10cc’s “I’m Not in Love.” I don’t cry for what happens to these girls as they take their own lives: the voice-over and the film’s aqueous rhythm suggest the workings of an immutable fate stronger than the Christian god over whom parents Kathleen Turner and James Woods obsess. I had a similar response to Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI as their arranged marriage and their arranged reign lead them to the guillotine in 1793. Douglas Sirk was also undervalued in his time. Max Ophuls not so much.
Of her hotel room diptych I prefer Somewhere to the breakthrough Lost in Translation. Using a doltish third-rater like Stephen Dorff as a study in third-rate doltishness struck me as more poignant than better actors like Bill Murray and Scarlet Johansen “humanizing” their characters onscreen (Lost in Translation is also one of the few Coppola films which I can criticize for exoticizing strangers and customs like Mary Corleone would’ve).
Nevertheless, Coppola needs fresh material: The Beguiledwasn’t as amusing as Clint Eastwood’s version, On the Rocks a gormless attempt at Wes Anderson that evaporated in the COVID year. I’m sorry her adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country got sandbagged by Apple. Wharton’s novel addresses how interior design is a manifestation of personality in a milieu where a woman suppresses her feelings, and Coppola would have understood. Imagine had Coppola worked with a character named Undine Spragg.
I rank her films:
1. Marie Antoinette
2. The Virgin Suicides
3. Somewhere
4. Lost in Translation
5. The Bling Ring
6. Priscilla
7. The Beguiled
8. On the Rocks
