Day: May 16, 2011

LFM Review: Piran-Pirano @ The 2011 Bosnian-Herzegovinian Film Festival

By Joe Bendel. How better to start the 2011 Bosnian-Herzegovinian Film Festival than with a film about the arbitrary nature of geography? Antonio is Italian. Veljko is Bosnian. Yet both have only felt truly at home in a particular apartment in the picturesque Slovenian city of Piran. That is where their paths fatefully crossed during WWII in Slovenian filmmaker Goran Vojnović’s Piran-Pirano (trailer here), the opening film of the 2011 BHFF in New York.

Antonio was not a Fascist, but his father certainly was. A school teacher whose lesson plans were little more than hateful propaganda, he decides discretion is the better part of valor when Tito’s forces arrive. Only concerned with his own neck, he leaves his college-aged son behind in their flat. Through sheer fortune, Antonio eludes the Partisans’ initial sweep of the apartment, but he is caught flat-footed by Anica, a young Slovenian woman traveling with the partisans.

Mourning her entire family, the vengeful Anica is in no mood to show mercy to an Italian, yet they reach an uneasy truce of sorts for the night. It is there in the apartment that Veljko discovers them. Like Anica, he has also lost his family, but he is not inclined towards retribution. In fact, he is not much of a soldier at all.

Told in flashbacks when the two men meet again decades later, Piran’s themes of cruelty and compassion in times of war have obvious resonance for Bosnian audiences. It hardly glorifies Tito’s army either, clearly depicting the summary executions ruthlessly carried out by the Communist forces. The commander matter-of-factly accepts the brutal tactics, as well as the potential death of innocents, as the cost of waging war. However, some of his subordinates are more enthusiastic about the dirty business of war. Continue reading LFM Review: Piran-Pirano @ The 2011 Bosnian-Herzegovinian Film Festival

On Bob Dylan’s 70th Birthday

By David Ross. Rolling Stone has celebrated Bob Dylan’s seventieth birthday with a lavish spread featuring a list of his seventy best songs and a smaller list of the best Dylan covers (see here). There’s no doubt that Jimi Hendrix’s “All Along the Watchtower” is the supreme Dylan cover, turning a gnomic ditty into a sweepingly prophetic desert-vision with the tone quality of an LSD-fueled aurora borealis, but otherwise the list has little – in fact almost nothing – to recommend it.

Let me offer a sounder guide to the greatest Dylan covers:

  • Fairport Convention (Sandy Denny, Richard Thompson, et al.) were consistently masterful Dylan interpreters. Here they magnificently elevate two minor chestnuts: “I’ll Keep it With Mine” (from their 1969 album What We Did on Our Holidays) and “Percy’s Song” (from Unhalfbricking, also 1969 – they had a very good year). Dylan wrote and recorded the songs in the early sixties, but they saw the light of day only with the 1985 release of the compilation Biograph. Over and over again, Fairport fulfilled the highest function of the Dylan cover: drawing attention to the obscure wonders of the oeuvre.
  • Hendrix not only swallowed whole and fully metabolized “All Along the Watchtower,” but nearly gave the same treatment to a far bigger fish, “Like a Rolling Stone,” which he ripped through at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, and, as far as I know, never played again.
  • Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs and Englishman, a gypsy caravan of top-flight session musicians, lends a soulful huskiness to “Girl from the North Country” (from 1963’s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan), while Joni Mitchell and Johnny Cash capture the song’s tender and crystalline essence on the Johnny Cash Show. The Cash-Mitchell duet appears on the surprisingly nugget-filled album The Best of the Johnny Cash TV Show: 1969-1971 (2008).
  • The Band were not merely Dylan idolaters but Dylan collaborators and bandmates, protégés in the fullest sense. Their version of “This Wheel’s on Fire” – which Dylan co-wrote with Band member Rick Danko – appears on their 1968 masterpiece Music from Big Pink and distills the yodeling, yowling, jingle-jangle dustbowl America that Dylan somehow tapped into. Dylan’s own version of the song appears on The Basement Tapes (1975).
  • Gram Parsons of the Byrds and Flying Burrito Brothers – and brief solo glory before sister morphine escorted him to the next world – brings his particular wistful yearning to the Burrito’s fragmentary version of “I Shall Be Released,” an anthemic concert-closer of a tune that the Band had debuted on Music from Big Pink.
  • The Byrds were the greatest and most prolific Dylan interpreters and never more so than on their 1968 country-rock classic Sweetheart of the Rodeo, which features two standout, fully countrified Dylan covers: “You Ain’t Going Nowhere” and “Nothing was Delivered.” Dylan himself released versions of the songs on The Basement Tapes.

Posted on May 16th, 2011 at 8:49am.