By David Ross. I notice that Carla Bruni-Sarkozy is slated to appear in Woody Allen’s next film, Midnight in Paris, due out in 2011. For the first time in about twenty years, I feel a genuine impulse to eavesdrop on the suffocating repetition and solipsism of Allen’s once great, now moldering career.
I keep my eye on Carla Bruni not only because she is one of the most beautiful women in the world and it’s hard not to keep one’s eye on her, but because the hint of wit and personality makes her beauty fascinating. Who can resist the Cleopatran glamour of a comment like this:
“I grew tired of rocks stars. I wanted a man with his finger on the nuclear trigger.”
Musically, she has been tasteful but not timid, turning, for example, an obscure Yeats poem, “Those Dancing Days are Gone,” into a creditable shuffle. Yeats delighted in beautiful women. I’m sure his shade is amused and gratified.
For the full effect, however, Carla must be experienced in French. Her first album, Quelqu’un M’a Dit (2002) is particularly fetching (you can see her perform Raphaël here). She delivers the entire album in a breathy purr, as if whispering in your ear.
Bruni is not a weighty or ambitious artist, but she is a completely feminine artist. In the American musical tradition, by contrast, even the most demure maidens – Norah Jones, for example – have inherited at least a suggestion of the old blues salt, a certain existential bone to pick in the gruff tradition of Robert Johnson. I would not trade this blues sinew for all the kittenish purring in the world, but Bruni makes for a delicious change, as well as makes clear what, in part, it means to be American.
In related news, widely reported rumors have it that Bruni’s marriage to the French president has become, shall we say, modern. Only in France could the first lady and the president simultaneously carry on affairs while the nation watches in a mood of mild titillation and amusement.
[Editor’s Note: rumors of the Bruni-Sarkozy simultaneous affairs remain unsubstantiated – although the folkloric appeal of these rumors seems potent to the French.]
By Joe Bendel. Life as the only admitted alcoholic in a small coastal Irish village is difficult for Syracuse (Colin Farrell), especially with his mean-spirited ex-wife constantly belittling him in front of his wheelchair-bound daughter, Annie. It is easy to see how both father and daughter would welcome a bit of fantasy into their lives in Neil Jordan’s Ondine (see the trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York, following its high-profile run at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. Syracuse made a hash of his life through binge drinking. Now on the wagon, he uses the church confessional as his surrogate AA meeting. Barely eking out a subsistence living, one day he pulls up his fishing nets and finds a beautiful woman tangled up inside. Adamant that she not be seen by anyone, Syracuse lets her recover at his recently deceased mother’s ramshackle cottage.
Though Syracuse tells Annie about the mystery woman calling herself Ondine as if it were a fairy tale, the bright young girl automatically assumes it to be the truth. Inevitably, Annie soon meets the woman she believes to be a ‘selkie,’ a mermaid like creature from Celtic mythology, half convincing her father and perhaps even Ondine herself with her ardent conviction. Yet, Jordan periodically drops hints that Ondine’s origins might be darker and worldlier than Annie’s romanticized version of reality.
The human need to believe in something good and edifying lies at the heart of Ondine, but Jordan also deftly incorporates themes of family and personal responsibility. Completely shedding his movie star persona, Colin Farrell is thoroughly convincing and undeniably likable as Syracuse, despite the character’s myriad faults. Indeed, he is the lynchpin of the movie, serving as the tragically flawed moral center of this emotionally deep film. Continue reading Review: Neil Jordan’s Ondine
By Jason Apuzzo. We’re all looking for signs of hope in the Islamic world – signs of liberalization, of Westernization, of modernity seeping its way through the cracks. Some of the most hopeful signs in this regard are starting to appear in the arts – and particularly in film. Recently here at LFM we’ve talked about films like Four Lions, The Infidel, No One Knows About Persian Cats, and the striking web series Living with the Infidel (my personal favorite). These are all projects that have either received mainstream distribution, have screened to critical acclaim at festivals like Sundance and Cannes, or have in some cases – particularly Four Lions – done killer business at the indie box office. [The weekend it opened in the UK, Four Lions actually had a better per-screen average than Iron Man 2, which opened that same weekend.]
Of all these films, No One Knows About Persian Cats may have surprised me the most (see my review) – in part because it revealed how deeply Westernized today’s Iranian youth already are. I hadn’t been aware that Iran’s young people already have a sound – a kind of pop music signature – around which they are rallying against the oppressive forces of religious conformity in their society. This is an extremely encouraging sign that leads me to believe that revolutionary change is coming to Iran sooner rather than later.
And now another new film is coming down the pike – not specifically dealing with Iran, but more generally with Islamic young people in America for whom music is their vehicle of protest. The name of this film is The Taqwacores (the title combines “taqwa” – the Arabic word for “piety” – with the English word “hardcore”). You can catch the trailer for The Taqwacores above – the film premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, and also ran at the South by Southwest Festival. The Taqwacores is about an imaginary punk rock band made up of disaffected young Islamic guys in Buffalo.
Does the subject matter sound obscure? It might, except for the fact that as The New York Times reports, The Taqwacores is based on a popular and influential novel – written by 32 year old Michael Muhammad Knight – that’s already become a kind of Catcher in the Rye for young American Muslims. Indeed, an entire music/youth sub-culture has apparently grown up around Knight’s novel in Islamic communities all across America – communities that are now eagerly anticipating the release of the film this autumn.
Here’s a synopsis of the film, provided by the Sundance film festival:
Yusef, a straitlaced Pakistani American college student, moves into a house with an unlikely group of Muslim misfits—skaters, skinheads, queers, and a riot grrrl in a burqa—all of whom embrace Taqwacore, the hardcore Muslim punk-rock scene. They may read the Koran and attend the mosque, but they also welcome an anarchic blend of sex, booze, and partying. As Yusef becomes more involved in Taqwacore, he finds his faith and ideology challenged by both this new subculture and his charismatic new friends, who represent different ideas of the Islamic tradition.
Just because these young Muslims embrace America’s punk-rock subculture, and reject more traditional modes of Islamic observance, don’t expect that they’re watching Fox News or attending Tea Partys. That’s not quite the vibe, if you know what I mean. It’s obvious from the reporting on this film that post-9/11 Islamophobia is a still a concern among young American Muslims, although one would hope that the election of an American President with the name ‘Barack Hussein Obama’ – with roots in the Islamic world – would have at least comforted them somewhat on this point. In any case, one senses that such anxieties will probably ease over time.
First time Director Eyad Zahra struck a very positive note in an interview he did several months ago:
Ultimately, we hope that this film can generate new kinds of discussion within America, for both non-Muslims and Muslims. This film is trying to crush all social barriers that have been thrown up in recent years. The hope is that Americans can truly see Muslims as Americans, and that Muslims can truly see themselves as American. We are tired of the ultra politically correct, sugarcoated community bridging that been going on lately, and obviously, we aren’t fans of the disgusting Islamaphobia that has been projected on the other side of the spectrum either. We want things to have more honest discussions about this kind of stuff, because that how things will really change for the better.
I think that’s just the right tone. And something that would really help matters in this regard would be if America’s more conservative-leaning media outlets would give this film a chance when it comes out this fall. Although I haven’t had the pleasure yet of seeing the film myself, The Taqwacores has gotten positive reviews, and could use the extra attention such media outlets would bring. It’s sometimes difficult to take seriously the incessant complaining about Hollywood from America’s right wing, when so little effort is ever made by them to positively promote the work of brave filmmakers who break from conventional Hollywood liberalism. We’ll see if this film gets the chance it deserves.
By David Ross.Here is Guitar World’s list of the fifty greatest guitar-oriented albums. Any list that prefers Blizzard of Ozz to Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland is, to say the least, mentally and emotionally defective.
We have still not caught up with Electric Ladyland. The twin monuments of “Voodoo Child” (the long version) and “1983” are markers of rock at its farthest extreme of creativity, expressive freedom and jazz-like virtuosity, but I am equally stunned by what seem – at first blush – the album’s more modest tracks: “Crosstown Traffic,” “Long Hot Summer Night,” “Electric Ladyland,” “Gypsy Eyes,” “Burning of the Midnight Lamp,” “All Along the Watchtower.” Each of these tunes is modest in comparison only to others on the album; on their own terms, they exceed in intricacy and originality and exuberant power just about anything ever done in the history of rock. The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Who never achieved anything like this dizzying, preternatural mastery.
In response to the stupidity of Guitar World, let me offer a brief list of guitar-related movies and concert films that are bound to interest the aficionado:
• Wes Montgomery: In Europe 1965 (1965) • Devil Got my Woman (1966), featuring Skip James, Son House, etc. • The Jimi Hendrix Experience: Live at Monterey (1967) • Jimi Hendrix: Live at Woodstock (1969) • Jimi Plays Berkeley (1971) • Jimi Hendrix (1973), the standard biopic • Joe Pass 75 (1975) • John McLaughlin, Larry Coryell and Paco De Lucia: Meeting of the Spirits (1979) • Leo Kottke: Home & Away Revisited (1988) • Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble: Live at the El Mocambo 1983 (1991) • The Search for Robert Johnson (1992) • Paco De Lucia: Light and Shade (1994) • Led Zeppelin (2003), featuring a mélange of concert footage • Tom Dowd and the Language of Music (2003) • Jeff Beck: Live at Ronnie Scotts (2007) • Les Paul: Chasing Sound (2007) • It Might Get Loud (2008), featuring Jimmy Page, Jack White, and the Edge • Remember Shakti: The Way of Beauty (2008), featuring John McLaughlin and Zakir Hussain
Here is Jimi Hendrix in a unique performance on an acoustic twelve-string, from Joe Boyd’s 1973 documentary Jimi Hendrix.
I should particularly mention Meeting of the Spirits, which offers more or less undigested footage of Larry Coryell, Paco De Lucia, and John McLaughlin in concert at the Royal Albert Hall. Those who associate the acoustic guitar with Peter, Paul, and Mary are in for a surprise: imagine instead a trio of F-22s engaged in precision maneuvers at multi-mach speed. Coryell and De Lucia are consummate musicians, but McLaughlin, who is all but nerve-connected to the guitar, his left-hand so economical that it seems not even to move, is something else entirely. During the long title cut – a version of the Mahavishnu Orchestra standard – he seems to enter a trance and channel strange melodies from beyond the realm of logic and reason. Meeting of the Spirits leaves no question that only Jimi Hendrix has more deeply plumbed the possibilities of the guitar, and that McLaughlin belongs with John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Charles Mingus in the starriest pantheon of post-bop jazz. Meeting of the Spirits, by the way, was merely preparatory. There followed an even more impressive McLaughlin-De Lucia-Al Di Meola collaboration, captured for posterity on the classic concert album Friday Night in San Francisco.
LFM’s Steve Greaves reviews the award-winning web series satire about the fictional, 70’s progressive rock band, “Gemini Rising.”
By Steve Greaves. Before there were hair bands, there were hairy bands. Yes, the heather was high and across the mythic plains there were hairy, sensitive barbarians in hordes of typically five, but growing in might at times to numbers almost unimaginable. Few live to bear witness. Quite often the drummer would don an afro though he be of the Celtic dynasty.
There are niches within niches, and Koldcast.com’s web TV series Gemini Rising picks up the musk of a very specific kind of band at a very specific juncture in popular (or not) music culture. For a while in the early 70’s, after the Summer of Love sounds had burned out and UK and NY punk were not yet kicking, there was a lot of soul-searching and cosmic exploration informing the kinds of themes and approaches to being a “rock” band. Much of what emerged at that time was amorphous, exploratory, meandering, melodramatic and self-indulgent schlock. It is to rock what “fusion” is to jazz – i.e., technically impressive, but virtually hook-free and generally leaves you in a worse mood than before.
The term coined was Progressive Rock, and while there are many, many great songs and bands in the genre when it began through today, one has to laugh at the inherent ridiculousness of the original trappings: grown men in tights and scarves singing operatically and emoting in a quasi-Shakespearian manner about wizards and astrology. It was one big hairy Renaissance Pleasure Faire and an aural gateway to the ages for those willing to explore the far edge of listenability.
Before there were hair bands, there were hairy bands.
Allrighty then Shackleton, let’s talk bands. Experience the nerdy wrath of names like Uriah Heep, Marillion, Pendragon, Hawkwind, Elf and Rainbow (Ronnie James Dio is a movement unto himself too vast to explore here, all you need to know is he’s slain many a hydraulic dragon in as many middle-earthly bands, and is a powerful elvine singer who also fronted Black Sabbath post-Ozzy Ozbourne).
The common thing about bands amid this subterranean niche in “hardish” rock is not so much what they are but that what they’re not: not hard enough to be metal. Not catchy enough to be pop. Not light enough to be jazz. Too noisy to be opera. These are broad strokes to draw admittedly, but this is the kaleidoscopic point of entry into fully grasping the modest genius of Gemini Rising.
While there is a surprising amount of variety among episodes in the series, what holds it all together is the lack of anything much ever really happening. Like their own music and that of their “contemporaries” cited previously, the act never really lands because the band itself is never grounded and always in juvenile crisis. As a caricature, Gemini Rising is the spawn of other “rock mockumentary” bands that are perpetually stuck in a rut even when opportunities to show off their cosmosonic magic arise … anywhere from within recording studios, to the Gong Show-styled Larry LaMay variety hour – and all guaranteed to bring a yellow and orange glow to your 14-inch Zenith.
Comparisons to This is Spinal Tap and Bad News are a given anytime a hard “rock mock” shows up, but the idea is again fresh and the large, funny and clearly dedicated cast and varied settings put an original and enthusiastic spin on the typical flailing band situations. The genius is in being so confidently loose within a sub-genre that can only be recreated through the pains of extreme specificity. The look and feel of the people, the places and the music videos and media within the environment are spot on. Lead singer Robert Mckenzie is perfectly cast in east coast actor and Syrrah vocalist Righteous Jolly, who sounds not unlike the formidable Geoff Tate of neo-prog metal icon, Queensryche.
The sheer dumpiness of the era and the fringes of the midwest and rustbelt provide plenty of deadpan juxtapositions, as well as a textural approach to the film that flatters its efforts – nay, its quest to be vintage ’74 in flavor. Fake hairs on the projector, low lighting, and other distressed effects add to the smutty visual character of the series. Clever use of graphics and exacting font choices complete the whole wood-paneled non-spectacle. You’ll be craving a Tab and a stick of Big Red in no time.
Shot on a shoestring or merely made to look that way, the expansive cast and at times spacious outdoor locations (“We’re going to bring birds into the studio?” “That goose is an artist!”) go a long way to make this production feel bigger than it is. Part of the charm of this effort is that the “young underdog band” is mirrored to an extent by the obvious “let’s put on a show” ethic of everyone involved, a sort of lo-fi equilibrium between the filmmakers and the subject matter that allows for enough discipline to stage something inventive and funny without taking itself too seriously in the process. Overthinking this material would suck the spontaneous life right out of it. All in all this is a great example of the kind of fun, affordable, collaborative art filmmakers can actually create and get seen today with little more than talent and imagination.
Highlights include the extra episode “Amphibian Liberation Army” (the star of whom is an activist who goes by the handle “Che Johnson”) and song performances including “Lady of the Lake” and “Star Child.” A good place to start your zodiacal rock odyssey is the Gemini Rising trailer above.
“This is a more complex story. The story is so much larger. The Spartans in ‘300’ were being enclosed by the page as the world got smaller. This story has truly vast subjects. The Athenian naval fleet, for instance, is a massive artistic undertaking and it dwarfed by the Persian fleet, which is also shown in this story. The story has elements of espionage, too, and it’s a sweeping tale with gods and warriors.”
Story’s lead characters are Themistocles (builder of Athenian navy) and Xerxes, whose quest for godhood drives the story. Xerxes climaxes with massive naval confrontation between Greeks and Persians, ends on the same day as the events of 300. It sounds fantastic. Best wishes to Frank on this.
• James Cameron meets with feds to brainstorm over oil-spill cleanup. Cameron has, admittedly, spent a great deal of time at the ocean depths working on The Abyss, Titanic, Aliens of the Deep, Ghosts of the Abyss – not to mention the ‘seminal’ film Piranha 2: The Spawning, which finally gets a Criterion DVD and Blu-Ray release next month. Just kidding. [But you weren’t sure there for a moment, were you?]
Paz da la Huerta is apparently the latest actress to figure this trick out, both for HBO’s Boardwalk Empire and the Sundance hit Enter the Void and a string of other films.Extraordinary that these long-hidden secrets of showbiz success are finally getting some attention!
And that’s what’s happening today in the wonderful world of Hollywood …
By David Ross. I notice that Carla Bruni-Sarkozy is slated to appear in Woody Allen’s next film, Midnight in Paris, due out in 2011. For the first time in about twenty years, I feel a genuine impulse to eavesdrop on the suffocating repetition and solipsism of Allen’s once great, now moldering career.
Bruni is not a weighty or ambitious artist, but she is a completely feminine artist. In the American musical tradition, by contrast, even the most demure maidens – Norah Jones, for example – have inherited at least a suggestion of the old blues salt, a certain existential bone to pick in the gruff tradition of Robert Johnson. I would not trade this blues sinew for all the kittenish purring in the world, but Bruni makes for a delicious change, as well as makes clear what, in part, it means to be American.
