Springtime is the season of renewal. Like all slumbering beasts, eventually a taste for blood will drive them back into the light of day, and Good Is The New Bad is no different.  After a winter of hibernation, perhaps we are back - renewed, refreshed, and with a recharged agenda.

For the record, the reasons for the extended hiatus are much more mundane. Days after the last substantial posting, I took a job editing a reality show which hit me like a ton of bricks. Combine that creative exhaustion with the most dismal Oscar season in history and suddenly burrowing underground until movies become fun again seems like quite a reasonable option.

Regarding the 2009 Oscars - when almost everything nominated was about impotent, aging, or emasculated men staring down the barrel of ruin, what’s the point? Quickly - can you name three of the five nominated films for any category? Or any of the winners? It was an awards season of eminently forgettable and pompous garbage and we’re all better for it being consigned to the dustbin of history.

But now the sun is out, and the creative & critical muses are starting to sing. Comments and feedback are always welcome, as I’d much rather argue then preach. The world of filmmaking is in big trouble, when the most engaging thing I’ve seen in months is a bootleg of Crank, but hey, we can always enjoy the ride to the bottom. While I finish sorting through the ashes of the newest Star Trek, enjoy some commentary from Aaron Shay, a purveyor of sincerity at it’s finest.

By Aaron J. Shay            There are a number of things that are boons to creativity, and depending on which creator you speak to, you’ll get a different answer as to what provokes the proverbial spark.  But historically, what one finds is that there are three abstracts that have always stimulated the brain of the creator: 1) diversity, 2) competition, and 3) community.  And these three things, once combined, have the ability to incite brilliant creations from the hearts of their makers.  But they do have their dangers.

            Diversity is a key component in the creative process because it challenges the brain.  If there were no Haight-Ashbury, there would have been no CBGB’s.  Artists and writers and all kinds of creators need to remember that the creeds, opinions and cultures they are used to are not the only ones that exist.  Just so, these creators need to remember that their creeds, opinions and cultures are not necessarily superior to others.  Diversity allows the creator to meet those of different aesthetic and perhaps even to respect them.  This can only challenge them to create beliefs which are strong; for that creed which is untested is frail, easily blown over in the wind. [Read more →]

After a false start and a major overhaul,  ABC has finally rolled out their version of Life On Mars, and it has about as much life as, well, Mars.

The original is some of the best television you’ll never get to see. It’s the story of Sam Tyler, a tightly wound police detective who gets hit by a car and wakes up in 1973. There he comes face to face with  markedly different attitudes toward policework, feminism, popular culture, and civil rights. His primary foil in 1973 is DCI Gene Hunt, a leonine blowhard who doesn’t care for DI Tyler’s fancy modern methods at all. After all, “Gene Hunt smashes doors down. He does not pick girly locks.”

The BBC iteration felt bold and new. Sly cultural jokes deftly danced with moral dilemmas, manly camraderie, and engrossing mysteries. The American iteration feels like nothing at all. It suffers from a complete lack of distinction; the copy is  featureless Xerox, where all the engaging nuances are wiped out in the imperfect act of copying. It looks like television, it sounds like television, and at its best, it merely resembles routine television.

The good news about the American iteration is that it’s not the absymal failure the David E. Kelly version was rumored to be. The bad news is that it’s plodding and generic, unable to walk and chew gum at the same time. Jason O’Mara’s Detective Tyler is a loose-limbed vacancy. He doesn’t seem focussed enough to be a sitcom character, much less a brilliant police detective. Harvey Keitel  does a lounge-act Harvey Keitel impersonation as Chief Hunt. He comes across like a leprechaun with a mullet, or an incarnation of the Fighting Irish logo, all fists and sweat. The only actor to escape reasonably unscathed is Michael Imperioli, who appears to have entered the witness protection plan where he was promptly given the world’s most horrible mustache. [Read more →]

Chris Rock’s new stand-up special Kill The Messenger is a puzzling disappointment.

The HBO special is assembled from live performances on three continents - Johannesburg, South Africa; London, England; and New York, New York. Rock’s production company has thrown tradition and continuity out the window by attempting to seamlessly splice together performances from all three locations into one cohesive whole. Sentences that start in Johannesburg finish in London. Punchlines that start in London are delivered in South Africa with a repetitive echo in New York to drive the point home.

It’s impossible to say why the production company chose this approach. Were they unable to get a full, satisfactory perfomance in any single location? Did unforseen technical issues destroy some tapes?  Could it be an avant-garde stylistic decision? Whatever the reason, the execution is startlingly poor and fatally undercuts Rock’s shrill performance.

The first time the show jumps mid-sentence from one continent to another, the timing of the dialogue edit is flawless; unfortunately that only makes the sudden jump of wardrobe, lighting, and audio presence even more jarring. One of the cardinal rules of editing for performance is to never make an edit that calls attention to itself. A corollary to that rule would be that if you’re going to make an edit noticeable, you swing for the fences. Anything less than total commitment is going to feel like a mistake. It’s common practice to assemble a concert film from multiple performances across multiple nights. This feeble multi-city approach is the worst kind of aesthetic decision because it a) calls undue attention to itself, and b) measurably detracts from the subject.

The audio in all three concert halls has a jarringly different ambience, and the video from the New York City performance has the high-shine, poor contrast look of old video cameras. It’s almost painfully apparent that this production wasn’t originally designed as a 3-location montage, which makes the awkwardness even more evident.

Worst of all, the jumping locations undercuts Rock’s strength as a performer. Marquee comedy like this isn’t a weekend comedy club performance, in many ways, it’s live theater at its finest. Rock is a dedicated comedian, who could have spent a year or two honing the material for Kill The Messenger. This is a performance as polished as anything on Broadway. Needlessly leaping through time and space, changing inconsequential elements like audio reverb and wardrobe, fractures any kind of performance continuity.

Rock is a strong presence, constantly prowling the stage, contorting his face into a shrill rictus, and controlling the audience’s focus, but the inconsistent mix-and-mash performances become unsettling as the show progresses. His discipline and skill as a performer becomes evident, as the leaps across location show us how polished and rehearsed his performance is. However, the translocating robs us from seeing one continuous performance. Part of the intense, peculiar magic of stand-up comedy is that it’s dangerous. It’s one man on a stage without a safety net. Puncturing that illusion fatally wounds the comic energy, and it’s unforgiveable that every time the show jumps across the globe, you’re left asking “why?”

It’s a small blessing, then, that the material of Kill The Messenger is his weakest stand-up outing  yet. Rock is becoming a voice without a message. The ferocity of his breakthrough special Bring The Pain is still present, but the relevance has faded. Much of the race- and gender- based humor here feels like leftover material from Bring The Pain and much of the topical McPalin/O’Biden humor is too perfunctory. Rock is a funnier and harder-working comedian than almost anyone else headlining today, but he’s like a fire running out of fuel. Does Rock feel trapped by his prior success? Or does he have nothing else to say?

A lot of his material this time out settles for easy punchlines instead of pushing into new ground. His opening bit about being tracked like a wild animal starts like a Borscht belt routine, then leaves a lot of ground unturned. The punchline involves Rock on a safari, being photographed by white people also on safari. There’s a moment of ambiguity, an implication that the bush-guides are tracking Rock himself like a jungle papparazzi, before the joke collapses onto the old black people vs. white people stereotypes. It’s lazy humor, not only because finding black people in South Africa isn’t so hard as to require a safari guide, but because Rock pulls himself out of the line of fire. How much more interesting could the material have been, had Rock turned on the savage nature of papparazzi photographers, or the disparities of his own fame?

The highlights of the material are the truest bits. Rock talking about the differences between having a job and a career, his early job washing dishes at a Red Lobster, and the racial makeup of his neighborhood are hilarious. Unfortunately, he pulls himself out of the spotlight too quickly, in order to fall back into jokes of racial stereotypes and gender differences.

Artists cannot succeed if they keep repeating themselves, and Rock is going to have to break new ground if he’s going to stay relevant. His success as an outspoken black man has had to change his life in unmeasurable ways. Much like Metallica can’t keep manufacturing outrage now that they’re multi-millionaires, Rock can’t stay relevant by wallowing in the indignities of racism. Kill The Messenger isn’t a career-ender. It’s a testament to Rock’s gifts as a stand-up performer that it won’t damage his headlining status, nor the impression that he’s the current champion of comic outrage.

Audiences first flocked to him for his vision; like all great stand up comics, he rose to fame showing us a world that’s right in front of us that nobody else could see. Rock’s success has lifted him to a new vantage point now, and if he can’t start showing us what he’s seeing from up there, we’ll shortly start to tire of him telling us what he saw five years ago.

Craptallica has just released their most craptacular album to date.

Metallica has been dead for years. Sometime after their late 80’s epic …And Justice For All, the members of Metallica took their epic metal noodlings out behind the woodshed and shot them dead. Then they came back into the studio, and wrote an album of interstital music for sporting events. That album made them unfathomably rich, and Craptallica was born.

Craptallica has gone on to release several more albums that were barely worth downloading. Their idiot drummer flew into rage at their fan base for stealing. Then their idiot leader went into rehab, and they made an movie that played like an epic two and a half hour therapy session. The album, and its “anger from a positive place” , all but vanished.

In the face of epic failure, they hired uber-guru Rick Rubin to produce a “comeback” album; which is a misnomer, since Craptallica hasn’t succeeded at anything, they have no place to “come back” from. Mr. Rubin encouraged the band to get back to their roots, and Craptallica happily complied.

That album is Death Magnetic, and it’s positively craptastic.  From the get-go, it simply sounds horrible. Numerous audio engineers complain that the album is overly compressed, giving it a high, thin tone. It sounds like you’re listening through an empty can of soda. The low end of the audio spectrum has a spectral presence at best. The airy whump of the drums doesn’t move a thing, and provides a vaporous foundation for the rest of the music. Similarly, Kirk Hammett’s guitar soloing has never been weaker. Even with a full stomp of wah-wah pedal, there’s no bite behind it.

After multiple listens, the songs simply fail to make an impression.  They’re weightless grab-bags of guitar riffs, tied together seemingly at random.  Hetfield’s lyrics have the authenticity of a Prada bag in a Chinatown market. The only thing that sticks to Death Magnetic is boredom.

The root of the problem isn’t just Metallica, it’s our culture as a whole. We’re a culture of zombies, refusing to let anything die. Metallica shouldn’t have existed beyond 1990. If they stopped at the ‘black’ album, few people would begrudged their cashing in on their legacy. But everything beyond that is reprehensible, and should never have existed.

The things that fuelled Metallica’s greatness in the early albums died with the success of the ‘black’ album. Alcohol fuelled twenty-one year olds with anger issues are primed for crafting angry music. Forty year olds who are wealthier than Croesus cannot do it. Until we are culturally primed to accept death with dignity, we’re going to be stuck with these endless, pointless retreads.

Because it’s the next film from the Rian Johnson, the writer/director of Brick.

A very cool website for the film, created by the director and not the studio, has gone live here.

Brick was a hard-boiled noir detective story transplanted to an Orange County high school, and populated with burned-out teenagers. The incongruities work beautifully, and the film is one of the most engaging and auspicious directorial debuts. Johnson has an ear for dialogue that rivals the early Coen brothers work, and a sense of cinematic fantasy to match.

His new website has a lot of engaging background on The Brothers Bloom and what’s he’s attempting with his new project. It opens with a limited release on December 19th, and will open coast to coast a few weeks later. Keep an eye out for it, Johnson is one of the few interesting, young American directors; more interested in cinema as an art form and not an over-inflated music video.

If you enjoy being smothered to death with a pillow, then Traitor is the movie for you. Ostensibly a thriller about an American Muslim who has gone deep undercover into an Islamic terrorist cell, it turns into a case study for the failure of good intentions.

The film follows Samir (Don Cheadle), a vagabond arms dealer/bomb maker from a Yemeni prison to the heart of a conspiracy to bomb the United States. Cheadle speaks in a tortured whisper and has a mortally wounded sense of morality, which can only mean he’s a double-agent. He is a deep, deep undercover operative – so deep that only his handler Jeff Daniels (still sporting his haircut from Dumb & Dumber), knows that Samir is really fighting for the good guys. Hot on his trail is the pointy-jawed Guy Pearce, an upright FBI super-agent who is slightly less complex than Dudley Do-Right.

[Read more →]

Music review by Aaron Shay

Imagine that Van Morrison is singing in a band with Lou Reed and that they’re playing songs that Neil Sedaka wrote while drunk and manic depressive.  Now imagine that this event was recorded.  In 2008.  Also, imagine Morrison with a heavy Bronx accent.  That’s what Vic Ruggiero’s solo album “Something in My Blind Spot” sounds like.

The album was recorded in Germany and released by the German record company “moanin’ music,” and has seen a limited release, making it difficult to find.  It features Lisa Müller from the German ska band Black Cat Zoot on a handful of songs, doing adorable duets with a spotless American accent.

Vic Ruggiero is best known for his keyboard work and singing for popular ska band The Slackers, and has also performed with the legendary Rancid on two albums.  We’ll try to ignore his participation in the rock-rap travesty known as The Transplants in light of his relatively honorable history and apparent awesomeness.

This solo album is extremely well-done.  The instrumentation isn’t intricate, but it’s impressive due to the fact that Ruggiero played all of the instruments - save the horn section, courtesy of Fanfare Kalashnikov, and the drums, provided by Andrei Kluge, another ska musician.  That leaves guitar, banjo, bass and keyboard.  That’s a pretty good repertoire of instruments to be skilled with.

Listening to this album is an eerie experience.  The composition, the singing… so much of this album sounds like it should have been recorded some decades before.  The biggest problem with that perception is the good recording quality, and also the song, “Is It You?”  This one’s taken straight out of Tom Waits’ 2004 album “Real Gone.”  The rest of it is a big old throwback.

The best thing, though, is that the throwback nature of the album fits the music contained therein.  The songs don’t sound like they were written to appeal to the modern kitsch market, but just written, and the composition came afterwards.  With such bands as Wolfmother (circa 1973) gaining notoriety these days, it’s a wonder Ruggiero’s album hasn’t flowered.
The problem is that the distribution is entirely German.  Whether Ruggiero is searching for a release in the United States is unknown.  What is known (by me) is that he damn well better be or I’ll have to write a strongly worded letter to my congressman.

My favorite song on this album would have to be “Lovely Beginning,” which is a very 60’s pop samba song about a bizarre, violent relationship between the two singers.  The chorus sounds trite if heard isolated, but when heard in the context of the song, the words suddenly jump out evocatively.  It doesn’t hurt that there’s a beautifully lopsided harmony, as well.

My hope is that, someday, Ruggiero will get this released where I can buy it without having to fear for my budget.  God damned imports.

 [editors note:  Something In My Blindspot is available on iTunes and most other digital download services. It is also available from the American distributor Cobra Records.]