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. (more…)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

(more…)

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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.]

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That’s right. Instead of appending a roman numeral or a pretentious under-title, this time the filmmakers are going the other way… by dropping the “the”s out of the title. This time, it’s just Fast And Furious. The surviving cast from the first film are all back - Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Michelle Rodriguez, and Jordana Brewster, plus the super cool Sung Kang from Tokyo Drift. And I’m not ashamed to admit it, but this excites me much more than many of the bloated, faux-profound slam-bang offerings we got at the multi-plex this summer.

When I saw this on the big screen, I was so excited, I started texting my motor-head friends from the theater, mid-trailer. This is a true teaser trailer. No “voice of god” intonations, no anticipatory title cards to start with. The first :75 is all one continuous action scene from the film, and while it lacks the power-slide stunt driving of Tokyo Drift, it’s still full of hard-nosed driving and more than a little gunplay.

Watch it here: Fast And Furious

Comments? Reactions?

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Frenchman Philippe Petit is a hyperactive Frenchman who’s as self-affirming as a kindergarten teacher; all wide-eyes and excited gestures. He sees an artist’s rendering of the towers in a newspaper while waiting for a filling, and is so smitten that he steals the image and rushes home to begin planning. To him, crossing the towers is an inexplicable poetry, and by the time he is on the wire between the towers, we will come to understand it intimately.

The footage of Petit walking between the spires of Notre Dame and crossing the bridge at Sydney Harbor is incredible. The wire disappears into the film grain, leaving just the shape of a man, floating high overhead. There’s no pretension of being a magic trick, just the incredible grace of a man floating gently in the air. The clean geometry of the still photographs, too, are marvelous. The balancing pole, the wire, and the girders of the World Trade Centers intersect at hard right angles while Petit stands in the center of the axes, triangulating himself into the center of attention. (more…)

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Sometimes, when one digs through the dung pile long enough, a nugget of gold can be found.  This is the only way to describe the experience of watching Hamlet 2.
The story: Failed actor Dana Marschz (Steve Coogan) has taken up the job of a stereotypical drama teacher in Tucson, Arizona, a land of drive-thru liquor stores and large Mexican populations.  Vaguely described complications enlarge his drama class of normally two students to about twenty, 18 of them being Latino “jocks” and/or stoners.  After being notified that drama was about to be canceled, Marschz decided to write a play that will save the department class.  That play is Hamlet 2, an idea offensive to theatre aficionados, with such sexual/political/spiritual content to offend anyone else.  Wackiness ensues. (more…)

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Today is that day, gentle reader.  Today is the day I write of my cinematic disappointment.
Stoner films have a proud history, though not a credited or cultured one.  Cheech and Chong are the collective Orson Welles of marijuana films, giving one an idea of the quality stoner films aspire to.  Unfortunately, Pineapple Express fails to live up to even this low-bar ideal. (more…)

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