Austin City Limits: Kacey Musgraves, Lukas Nelson (Terry Lickona Productions, KLRU, PBS, c. 2018)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After midnight I watched a couple of music shows on KPBS that used to be perennial favorites of mine when I could still record them for later viewing onto physical media (now you can only do that digitally and it requires an extra charge on our already swollen cable bill). One was an Austin City Limits episode featuring Kacey Musgraves, who did a program of seven songs from her 2018 album Golden Hour (which won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 2019 – though I remember when I was watching that show thinking that if the National Association of Recording Arts and Sciences wanted to give Album of the Year to a country artist, it should have been fellow nominee Brandi Carlile) and Willie Nelson’s son Lukas Nelson with his band Promise of the Real. (Of course I couldn’t help remembering way back in 1975 when the very first episode of Austin City Limits debuted with Willie Nelson as the featured performer. When they say this is the longest-running live musical show on TV, I’m ready to believe them.)

The Wikipedia page on Golden Hour claims that Musgraves wrote the album (she has co-composer credit on all 13 songs) just after she got married, and quotes her as saying that affected the quality of the material: “I’ve never been one to write a love song and really feel it. That probably sounds like the most depressing thing ever. [But] I’m coming off getting married and being in this golden hour of my personal life, where all these things are finally coming to fruition.” The result was a set of pleasant and good-natured songs including “Velvet Elvis” (in which she compared her lover to one of those God-awful paintings of Elvis on velvet, saying it’s hunky but also soft to the touch), “Slow Burn,” “Butterflies” (in which her beloved gives her butterflies in her stomach – it’s hardly an anthem on the level of Mariah Carey’s “Butterfly,” but Carey wrote her song when she was coming off of a relationship and was expressing her sense of freedom that she was showing off what she could do without a man whom a lot of people had thought of as her Svengali) and “High Horse,” along with three songs she had recorded earlier: “Family Is Family,” “High Time” and my favorite, “Follow Your Arrow.”

That one is a typical follow-your-dreams-and-be-what-you-want-to-be number but I have a special affection for it if only because she sings that one of the things she wants her listeners to feel free to do is “kiss boys, or kiss girls if that’s what you’re into.” This is definitely not your grandmother’s country music! I like Kacey Musgraves but what I don’t hear in her voice is the kind of soul I hear in the singing of Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton (whom she name-checked in her brief interview segment and oddly talked about in the past tense even though they’re both still alive) or in the singing of modern women country artists I like better, including Brandi Carlile, Lauren Alaina, Maren Morris and the astonishing Tenille Townes; it’s just that little spark that’s the difference between goodness and greatness. Lukas Nelson followed with his band, Promise of the Real (which have got enough acclaim Neil Young has toured with them as his backup band), and on faster songs he pushes up his band, growls and sounds like a rock singer. On slower songs he drops his register and adopts the quiet, conversational tone that (let’s face it) made his dad a star.

He began with a song called “Gimme Something Real,” then ran back to his heritage with an oddball ballad called “Let Me Forget About Georgia.” Apparently the point of the song is that he was in a hotel room making love to a woman named Georgia while the song that was playing on the radio was Ray Charles’ version of Hoagy Carmichael’s “Georgia on My Mind” (a song Willie Nelson also recorded, by the way), only the relationship ended badly and now that song brings back unpleasant memories. Then Lukas Nelson sent his band members off stage for one song, “Just Outside of Austin,” and sounded even more like his dad – and let’s not get into the importance of Austin not only as the city where this show is based but how important it was for Willie Nelson’s career (it saved him and brought him to superstardom after Nashville had chewed him up and spat him out). Then he brought the band back with an odd song called “Set Me Down on the Plow (With My Soul Turned Inside-Out),” a truly bizarre fantasy of what Lukas Nelson presumably wants done with his remains when he croaks. Lukas’s last official number was “Turn Off the News” – a piece of advice to turn off the news and instead grow your garden (a piece of advice previously handed down by writers from Voltaire to The Hunger Games creator Suzanne Collins) – though over the closing credits he was shown doing part of another song, “I Hope You Find Yourself.” Despite the long shadow his father is inevitably (if unintentionally) casting over him, Lukas Nelson is a quite good singer, songwriter and bandleader, and at least one other of Willie’s offspring, Micah Nelson, is in the band as one of its percussionists.

Bluegrass Underground: Vince Gill, Marty Stuart, Brothers Osborne (Todd2 Productions, PBS, 2020-2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Austin City Limits KPBS showed another country-themed music show, Bluegrass Underground, in one of the most fascinating (and preposterous) musical venues ever: an underground cavern through which both musical and TV equipment have to be pulled in on narrow-gauge railroad cars and the audience has to enter similarly. I’ve only seen a few previous Bluegrass Undergrounds and my recollection was that in those programs they mostly presented genuine bluegrass acts and avoided bands that needed electric amplification, taking advantage of the stunning acoustics of that underground space to create a live sound without electronics. This time, in a show celebrating the tenth season of this series, they went in the opposite direction and threw up three major stars of mainstream country: Vince Gill, Marty Stuart and the Brothers Osborne, who were only allotted one song on the show but did a nice job on a song called “Stay a Little Longer” (a good song, though not on the level of the old zydeco song “Dance All Night [Stay a Little Longer]” Willie Nelson covered on that first Austin City Limits) episode.

Then Marty Stuart came on for two songs backed by a band he called the Fabulous Superlatives – I loved that name! – in a fast song called “Let ’Em Make a Fool Out of Me” and a beautiful slow ballad called “Old Mexico” which describes the land south of the border as a refuge for an outlaw who’s made the U.S. (or at least the southwestern part of it) too hot for him to handle. Then they brought on Vince Gill, who looks more like a banker than a music star and who did three songs of widely varying quality. He started with a breakup song called “Take Your Memory With You When You Go” and then did a ballad about his long-term relationship called “Look At Us.” I’m glad Vince Gill has been able to keep his marriage going long-term (there was a woman sitting on a stool front and center doing nothing but singing backup, and I assume that’s Mrs. Gill, especially since she looks as old as he does), but this song tapped into so many of the tired old country-music clichés (lyrically and musically, including the nice little pedal-steel guitar breaks just when you expect them) I found myself thinking, “This is the sort of song people who say, ‘I don’t like country music,’ don’t like.”

Fortunately he redeemed himself through his last song, “One More Last Chance,” about someone (I’m presuming it is a relationship partner, though it might be a kid who’s turned to alcohol, drugs and/or crime) who’s shown up at the singer’s door and is pleading for a “last chance,” and the singer is pointing out how many “last chances” he or she has already had and why should the singer think this one will turn out any better than all the earlier ones. Though it was a pretty ordinary country-music TV program distinguished only by that visually (and no doubt acoustically as well, though I suppose you’d really have to be there to experience it fairly) spectacular location, nonetheless I liked this Bluegrass Underground even though I’d have liked it better if the music had been real bluegrass.

Live at the Belly Up: The White Buffalo (Jacob Smith) (KPBS-TV, 2015)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I watched a KPBS showing of the local music show Live at the Belly Up – an episode from 2015 featuring a band called The White Buffalo, a name that’s also the nom de musique of Jacob “Jake” Smith, who was born in Oregon in 1974 or 1975 (his Wikipedia page isn’t any more specific than that) and has been active in music since 2001. He says he didn’t get his first guitar until he was 20, though before that his parents had continually listened to country music almost exclusively and that became the formative influence of his career. He originally began as a singer-songwriter, performing solo and backing himself on acoustic guitar, but he took the name “The White Buffalo” because he thought “Jacob Smith” had no mystery or romance to it. So he started out as one of those people – like St. Vincent, The Weeknd, Fall-Out Boy and Bon Iver – who assumes a name that sounds like that of a band even though he’s only one person. Soon, however, he assembled a band – and a quite good one, too, featuring a drummer he calls “The Machine” – and it was that incarnation of The White Buffalo that was featured on this show.

Smith performed 15 songs (quite a large number for a Live at the Belly Up program; I’ve often gauged these shows by how many songs the bands or artists perform: bands into long-form jams can only crowd seven songs, or sometimes even fewer, into the 55-minute time slot; Smith’s 15 indicates he’s a highly disciplined musician and song constructionist whose tunes leave little or no room for long or semi-long improvisations). Smith has a haunting but sometimes annoying voice, a foghorn baritone that reminded me at first of the 1960’s Black folksinger Richie Havens (who opened the Woodstock festival in 1969 simply because he was the first musician to make it through the insane traffic jams and arrive at the venue). As the show progressed I found myself hearing him as a cross-breed between Richie Havens and Johnny Cash – though Smith’s songs seem trapped in an in-between world in which he indulges in the fancy language of a lot of singer-songwriters but the sentiments are pure country – particularly all the songs he writes about drinking to forget a lost love and the trouble he gets into therefrom.

He did two songs just by himself, voice and guitar like in his older days – “Wish It Was True” and “The Highwayman” – and they were the best songs on the show, particularly “Wish It Was True,” in which he assumed the pose of someone who’s become disillusioned about everything, from love to war. The final verse casts him as a returning veteran, disgusted at the lies he was told to get him to fight in the first place – a very 1960’s-ish mix of sentiments! I also quite liked a couple of songs which he began acoustic and then brought the band in after the first chorus, “Darkside of Town” (that’s how the Live at the Belly Up chyron spelled it) and “Into the Sun,” and I also enjoyed “This Year” (a song about New Year’s Day and how the optimistic projections of what’s going to happen in the New Year will or won’t be fulfilled) and “Love Song No. 1” (which he said he wrote for his current partner just two weeks after they met – he compares himself to a piece of paper that blew towards her, one of the odder metaphors I’ve heard for romantic attraction, but the song works and apparently the relationship did, too, since they’re now married and have kids).

Smith called up a couple of friends to join in on a song called “Bar and the Beer” – with a title like that you could practically write it yourself – and he closed with “The Highwayman” (a song I suspect is a cover rather than a Smith original) and a scorcher called “The Pilot.” Overall I quite liked the show but I’m not sure how much I could take of that sometimes overbearing voice – though he’s mostly a baritone he started one song, “Good Old Day to Die,” in so deep a bass range at first I wondered if someone else in his band was singing, and when I realized it was indeed Smith it reminded me of Elvis Presley’s bass extension. (Elvis’s voice was naturally tenor but he could drop it, and like a lot of untrained voices it deepened and lost its top over time, so in his later years he was decidedly a baritone.) Overall I like Jacob Smith, both with and without his fellow White Buffaloes, but I was starting to get a bit worn down as the show rolled on at the sheer relentlessness of his singing; he said in one of the interstitial interview segments that he wants his show to be liked equally by the hippie, the Marine and the woman who’s out with both of them, but he comes across to me (especially in the haunting “Wish It Was True”) like a Marine who got disillusioned enough that after he was discharged he became a hippie.

Midsomer Murders: “Harvest of Souls” (Bentley Productions, Independent Television Service, PBS, 2016)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s “feature” was an episode of the British TV crime show Midsomer Murders – the name, with its offbeat spelling, represents the fictional (but based on real ones) county in central England where the stories take place – and the show has been running for 22 seasons, as long as Law and Order: SpeciaL Victims Unit. This particular episode (actually two parts, like most of the shows in this series, though PBS blessedly shows them consecutively so you can absorb them as a single story) was called “Harvest of Souls” and was unusually good even by the generally high standards of this show. It begins with a quite electrifying scene staged by director Nick Laughland to look like a nightmare in which a horse glows phosphorescently, which turns out to be a drug-induced hallucination the murder victim, Jasper Wyham (David Yelland), has just before he is killed. It’s only later that we learn just how he was killed – not by a rampaging horse, as we’re led to believe by that spectacular opening sequence, nor by a gunshot even though a bullet is found lodged into the wall of the barn where he died, but by an injection of the drug ketamine, used as a horse tranquilizer (and also as a “party drug” by clubgoers, especially Gay ones, who call it “Special K”).

The show’s dramatis personae include Wyham’s parents, Harry (Andrew Alexander) and Serena (Helen Schlesinger); the Nevins family – father Butch (Michael Higgs) and sons Dale (Rory Fleck Byrne) and Sean (Sean Delaney) – who run a traveling carnival featuring an attraction called “The Original Wall of Death,” which turns out to be a motorcycle track so steeply banked it’s almost cylindrical inside which the varioius male Nevinses ride on and have to maintain their speed to stay on the track; local pub owner Rod Barkham (Sean Gleeson) and his long-suffering wife Geri (Emma Rydell); the local veterinarian, Dr. Klara Karimore (Manjinder Vick) and her daughter Jessica Meyerscough (Amber Rose Revell), who was briefly married to Jasper Wyham but went through such a bitter divorce that the Wyhams not only got custody of their daughter Amy (Nikhita Essex) but have forbidden Jessica ever to see her; and also Jasper’s sister Beth Wyham (Daisy Whalley), who’s having an affair with Sean Nevins.

Inspector John Barnaby (series star Neil Dudgeon) and his younger, hunkier partner Charlie Nelson (Gwilym Lee) investigate Jasper’s killing and soon learn that the Wyhams had purchased the village green and were planning to build a state-of-the-art equestrian center – which would mean disposseing all their tenant farmers as well as barring the Nevins’ fair from ever playing there again and forcing Dr. Karimore to move her practice elsewhere. Midway through the story five of Wyham’s horses are stolen, though four of them are rather quickly recovered safe and sound, and the Wyhams’ trainer turns out to be implicated – but the bodies start piling up as Dr. Karimore is first hit over the head with a cattle prod, then shocked with it and finally placed in a chamber in her office and drowned with water. Then Dale Nevins is also found murdered, and the final solution turns out to be [spoiler alert!] that before she married Harry Wyham, Serena briefly had an affair with Butch Nevins and got pregnant by him, then told everyone that the baby had died while in fact he was alive and was secretly adopted. The payoff is that the pub owner Rod Barkham was the unwanted child of Butch Nevins and Serena, and he didn’t try to search for his birth parents until his daughter got kidney disease and needed a transplant.

He tracked down both his birth parents and tried to get them to acknowledge him and get tested as possible kidney donors for his daughter, but both the Wyhams and the Nevinses ignored his letters and his daughter died of kidney failure. So he hatched a revenge plot to kill both their first-born children so they, too, would know the anguish of losing a child prematurely. Though this show has some of the problems of previous Midsomer Murders episodes – notably plotting that doesn’t reveal the motive for the murders until about two-thirds of the way through the show – and there’s also something of D. H. Lawrence’s equation of aristocracy = impotence and proletarianism = potency (especially the way director Laughland keeps giving us mid-shots of the actors playing the Nevinses, with their big baskets clearly visible through their jeans), it’s an artfully constructed story (Caleb Ransom was the writer), well directed and movingly told – and without the torpor that often afflicts British mysteries. It’s also noteworthy is that there’s no trace of Christieism; instead of St. Agatha’s cardboard characters, the people in “Harvest of Souls” (a title which makes the story seem a bit more macabre than it is) have mixed motives and real emotional backgrounds, and the fact that the killer has a noble – though twisted – motive helps make the story live. And I liked the fact that the cute second cop has nearly the same name as my husband, Charles Nelson!

Marian Anderson: The Voice of Freedom (WGBH, PBS, aired February 15, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I screened for Charles and I a recent (February 13, 2021) PBS American Experience show called “Marian Anderson: Voice of Freedom,” written and directed by Rob Rapley and first aired last February. (One wonders how PBS decides who gets to be an “American Experience” and who gets to be an “American Master.”) Marian Anderson was an African-American contralto from Philadelphia, born in 1897, who is best known today for two legendary appearances that broke the racist barriers that had kept prevous Black classical and opera singers from stardom. On April 9, 1939, she gave a free concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial after she had been barred by the Daughters of the American Revolution from appearing at Washington, D.C.’s Constitution Hall, virtually the only venue of sufficient size and quality for the kind of audience she could be expected to draw. The concert was arranged by Eleanor Roosevelt, who had been admitted to membership in the D.A.R. even though she had zero interest in the organization or its activities, and Franklin Roosevelt’s Interior Secretary, Harold Ickes, both of whom were appalled not only that Anderson had been barred from giving a concert in the nation’s capital (Anderson herself was not noted for making anti-racist comments in public, but she did issue a rather testy statement – almost certainly drafted for her by her manager, the legendary Sol Hurok – to the effect that she found it shameful that she was banned from singing in her own country’s capital after having performed in many foreign countries’ capitals) but the adding-insult-to-injury irony that the people banning her were the Daughters of the American Revolution and the venue she was prevented from performing in was called Constitution Hall. (Unmentioned in this show, but noted on Anderson’s Wikipedia page, is that in 1943 she finally got to sing at Constitution Hall before a racially mixed audience.)

Anderson’s other anti-racist breakthrough came on January 7, 1955, when at the age of 57 she sang Ulrica the fortuneteller in Verdi’s opera Un Ballo in Maschera (“A Masked Ball”) on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City and thereby became the first African-American to perform there – even though she had never sung in a staged opera performance before (nor had she particularly wanted to – her chosen vocation was the now virtually nonexistent one of “concert singer,” performing as a soloist, usually with just a piano accompaniment, in concert halls and singing art songs, light semi-classical pieces and, since she was Black, a group of highly arranged Black spirituals that usually ended her programs; future African-American artists like Leontyne Price, Grace Bumbry, Shirley Verrett and Jessye Norman would also be forced to sing spirituals at their concerts and record albums of them whether they wanted to or not) and by then she was already past her vocal prime. The documentary was a fascinating study of a woman who became a civil-rights icon almost in spite of herself. Marian Anderson was the daughter of a man who sold ice, coal and liquor at the Reading railroad station in Pennsylvania. Her mother had been a schoolteacher in Virginia, but because she had never completed an official teachers’ training course she was prohibited from teaching in Philadelphia under a Pennsylvania state law that, according to Anderson’s Wikipedia page, was applied only to Black teachers, not white ones.

Her family regularly attended the Union Baptist Church in Philadelphia in a building that had been funded by the congregants themselves, so like so many other great Black singers in all genres of music, Anderson got her start (and her initial vocal training) in church. When her dad died in a work injury while Marian was 12, she was forced to go to work to help support her mom and two younger sisters, but she continued to aspire to a musical career. The show details her attempt to enter the Philadelphia Academy of Music, where she waited for an entire day while all the white girls there were permitted to enroll, and only at the end of the day, when everyone else had been called, was she told that the school didn’t accept Black pupils. She was able to study music only through a collection taken up in the Black community, and she found a music teacher named Giuseppe Boghetti, who taught her not only vocal technique but music theory and languages – though for some reason he did not teach her German, ironically because German art songs (Lieder) would become her favorite form of music and the songs she most liked to perform. Anderson pursued a career in churches and small halls in the Black community, and she was scared (with good reason) the first time she had to travel to the South. In 1923 Anderson recorded for the first time, doing Harry T. Burleigh’s arrangements of the spirituals “Deep River” and “My Way’s Cloudy” for the Victor company, though they were released on Victor’s black popular-music label instead of the classical Red Seal division that would be her recorded home for most of her career.

In 1924 Boghetti booked New York’s Town Hall for a recital that was supposed to launch her into the big time, but the concert was a dismal failure: the hall was only about one-tenth full (the way it’s depicted in this documentary makes it seem very much like Greta Garbo’s performance as the ballerina in Grand Hotel, where she’s assured her performance is a sell-out until she walks on stage and can see only a handful of people in the hall). Anderson pulled out of music for several months, with no clear idea of what else she might do with her life, until she was rescued by an offer to go to Europe. She toured all the major countries and was a sensation, especially in Scandinavia, where (according to Rapley’s description) she received the sort of adulation usually reserved in the 1920’s for movie stars and more recently for pop-music divas. Anderson also had to deal with less of the piss-ant racism she’d had to cope with in the U.S. – though she still had incidents like the time in which the main hall of the Salzburg Music Festival refused to allow her to perform there and she had to find a smaller venue, not officially connected with the festival, for her concert. But there was an unexpected silver lining in that anti-fascist and anti-racist musicians like Arturo Toscanini and Bruno Walter were drawn to hear her, and were moved not only by her story but by the sheer artistry and power of her singing.

Toscanini called her “the voice of the century,” and he was such a superstar in the emerging market for classical music on radio that his endorsement was a powerful promotional tool. She also acquired the most famous manager in classical music then, Sol Hurok, after she returned to the U.S. in 1934 – largely, at least according to this program, because with the rise of Nazism racists throughout Europe felt encouraged to target not only Jews (the principal hate objects of the Nazis) but also Blacks. The Nazi regime actually cited U.S. racial segregation laws as models for what they hoped to do to Jews in the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which systematically denied Jews equality, barred them from many professions and were the first step towards the Holocaust. (U.S. policies were models for quite a lot of the horrors of Nazism, including eugenics and genocide; I’m fond of quoting Hitler’s comment to Edward R. Murrow in a 1940 interview, “I don’t know why you Americans are so upset about the Jews. I’m only doing to the Jews what you did to the Indians.”) Anderson returned to the U.S. as an internationally acclaimed singer, but she still had to deal with the usual racist nonsense.

Her 1939 Washington, D.C. concert began as an attempt to do an Easter Sunday benefit for Howard University, the first and most important of the historically Black colleges and alma mater of some of the greatest minds in African-American history, including Thurgood Marshall and all the other lawyers who won the Brown v. Board of Education cases at the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954. When the Daughters of the American Revolution barred her from singing at Constitution Hall, she and Hurok tried to book the big hall at Central High School – and they wouldn’t let a Black singer perform there, either. Eleanor Roosevelt managed to make the ban on Marian Anderson a cause célèbre through her newspaper column, My Day, and she got her husband and his interior secretary, Harold Ickes, to approve Anderson’s free concert at the Lincoln Memorial. There’s a fascinating sideline story in Rapley’s script on the Lincoln Memorial itself and its dedication in 1922 – a totally segregated affair in which the few Black people invited to attend were shoved off to one side and forced in a section near the mud, and the one African-American speaker, Robert Russa Moton – who had taken over as president of Tuskegee University after the death of its founder, Booker T. Washington, and had mostly continued Washington’s policy of accepting segregation (all that “we can be separate as the fingers and united as the hand” stuff) – wasn’t allowed even to mention the contradiction between President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the second-class citizenship enforced on African-Americans in 1922 (and still, albeit far less extensively and systematically, today).

Indeed, the whole event presented the Civil War as exclusively a struggle between whites over national unity vs. “states’ rights” and left slavery out of it atogetherl – even though, as late-night TV host John Oliver pointed out in a segment about a year ago I saw on YouTube, if you don’t believe the Civil War and the formation of the Confederacy were about preserving slavery, all you have to do is read the actual ordinances of secession, where the real Confederates made it clear what the war was about to them. Rapley portrays Anderson’s 1939 concert at the Lincoln Memorial as a sort of re-sanctification of the Lincoln Memorial, bringing it more in line with Lincoln’s actual legacy and the real history of the war he led. He also makes the point that when Martin Luther King, Jr. – who as a boy of 10 had listened to NBC’s national radio broadcast of Anderson’s 1939 concert – was involved with the March on Washington, its program began with Marian Anderson, standing on the same steps from which she had sung 24 years earlier, performing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” She also had an odd run-in with the NAACP, who had taken a major role in the Constitution Hall controversy, when in 1951 she defied their call for African-American performers to boycott segregated venues – though she relented four years later.

Anderson emerges from this program as an unlikely civil-rights activist, someone who mostly wanted to be left alone and pursue her art free from racial politics – which proved impossible – and other things I’ve heard about her include that though she felt compelled to perform them, she really didn’t care for the Burleigh arrangements of Black spirituals; her favorite composer was Schubert and she was proud of her ability to perform music of all cultures instead of being pigeonholed by her ethnicity into “Black music.” And as I noted above, though Anderson was the first African-American singer to perform at the Metropolitan Opera, she hadn’t been interested in opera as a career path (there were all-Black opera companies which performed standard operas with all-Black casts and orchestra members in Black venues, but Anderson never sang with them) and had wanted instead to be what she became quite successfully: a concert singer of classical and light-classical music to mostly middle-class audiences. Just a few more thoughts about her: she really had a quite remarkable voice and a gift for phrasing, and she was also lucky to live in a time when there was a market for contraltos even though she had enough of a high register she could probably have “pushed up” to mezzo-soprano if she’d wanted to – today singers who show up to voice teachers with contralto voices are usually “pushed up” to mezzos, and singers who show up as mezzos are “pushed up” to soprano because that’s where the money is for a female classical or opera singer.

Wonder Woman 1984 (Warner Bros., DC Comics, DC Entertainment, Atlas Entertainment, The Stone Quarry, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Charles and I watched the other Blu-Ray disc I’d bought at our last Vons run along with Soul: Wonder Woman 1984, or as the film’s logo abbreviated it, WW84. As you’ll probably recall, Wonder Woman the character was created in 1941 by a psychologist, Dr. William Moulton Marston, as a sort of morale booster for women doing defense work, including such heavy-duty and traditionally male jobs like welding and riveting, while the men were off actually fighting the war – though her first comic-book appearance was in October 1941, before the U.S. was actually involved as a combatant in World War II. Before the current series started in 2017, Wonder Woman had appeared in a 1974 film starring Cathy Lee Crosby and a subsequent TV series with Lynda Carter (who appears in WW84 as Asteria in a post-credits sequence); there have been a number of cartoon adaptations but those were the only live-action movies until the current series kicked off in 2017 with Wonder Woman, directed by Patty Jankins from a script by three men: Zach Snyder, Allan Holmberg and Jason Fuchs.

In fact, it’s my understanding that the script was completely written before the executives at DC and Warner Bros. decided the project should really have a woman director, and they signed Jenkins on the strength of her film Monster, about Lesbian serial killer Aileen Wuornos. The film got excellent reviews and won an Academy Award for Charlize Theron’s performance as Wuornos, but I had problems with some of Jenkins’ decisions regarding the story – particularly her changing Wuornos’ girlfriend (and principal witness against her once she was finally caught) from a biker chick as hard-edged as Wuornos herself to a little teenage Lesbianette who was more “questioning” than actually “out.” When Jenkins’ first Wonder Woman movie was released in 2017, it got hailed as the superhero movie that would revive the flagging fortunes of the DC characters on film (which it largely did) and establish the superhero comic-book genre as one in which it would be possible to make Grand Statements about war, peace, humanity and the extent to which we owe each other support in our shared lives on Earth. I found the 2017 Wonder Woman good entertainment but weighted down by its pretensions, and I also wondered why the three male writers had decided to set this story, originated during the Second World War, in the First World War and include real-life characters like the German general Erich Ludendorff while giving him a personality and plot functions very different from his real ones.

What’s more, at the end of the movie they decided to have Wonder Woman time-travel and end up in the U.S. in the 1980’s – I can’t for the life of me remember how they explained that, not that it matters – and though Wonder Woman is supposed to have spent the intervening 66 years mourning the death in combat of her lover, fighter pilot Steve Trevor (Chris Pine), it’s not clear what else she’s been doing or even if she was conscious of the passage of time between her two appearances. This time Patty Jankins not only returned as director but was given a hand in writing the script, along with Geoff Johns and Dave Callaham, but just because the woman director was also a co-writer this time does not mean this movie is any more sensitive to the feminist aspects of the character than the first one. Frankly, though I can see why Warners and DC wanted a woman director to do the Wonder Woman movies, there are better ones around than Patty Jenkins – and not only the two women who’ve actually won the Academy Award for Best Director, Kathryn Bigelow and Chloe Zhao, but some of the people Lifetime has been incubating, including Christine Conradt and Vanessa Parise.

WW84 is reasonably entertaining as it stands, but I can see why it got a lot of adverse comments on social media when it was in its first run, mostly on streaming platforms since so few theatres were open during the pandemic. Not only is it one of those annoying fantasy stories in which the writers make anything happen just because it can, it tries to make Big Statements about the human condition and misses points that got nailed in Marvel’s Black Panther – which still remains my touchstone for attempts to use the comic-book superhero genre to deal with deep emotional and dramatic truths. The principal villain is Maxwell Lord, a character I first encountered in the Warners-DC Universe on the Supergirl TV series, where he was played by Peter Facinelli and emerged as a kind of wicked parody of the Ayn Rand capitalist superhero who regards himself as superior and entitled to rule over everyone else because he’s got more money than God. In this incarnation, Maxwell Lord is played by Pedro Pascal, who seems to have got the part largely because of his resemblance to pre-Parkinson’s Michael J. Fox and who’s drawn as a Trump-style figure (this movie is definitely a product of the Trump, not the Biden, Zeitgeist).

Diana Prince (Gal Godot) – Wonder Woman’s non-hero identity – works at the Smithsonian Institution cataloging historical relics and rare gems. She meets a rather ditzy colleague named Barbara Minerva (a typically quirky performance by Kristen Wiig) who insists on wearing stiletto heels to work even though she can barely walk in them. (I’m old enough to remember when the early second-save feminists denounced high heels as inherently sexist, a torture device to make it harder for women to function.) The two find a relic varioiusly referred to as the “Wish Stone” and the “Dream Stone,” which grants its holder one wish but at the cost of unforeseen consequences – much like the title object in W. W. Jacobs’ story “The Monkey’s Paw,” which actually gets referenced several times in the film. Eventually Max Lord (the shorter form of his first name is the one most often used here) buys access to this item via a major contribution to the Smithsonian, steals it and his one wish is that the stone be incorporated inside him, so now he has the power to grant wishes and, by doing so, enslave the people who make the wishes. Even Our Heroine makes a wish – she wants her hunky pilot from World War I back, and she gets him, setting up some bizarre fish-out-of-water gags in which he expresses amazement at the sight of subway trains, bicycles and escalators (all of which existed in 1918) and feels up the sight of a giant passenger plane out of amazement at its size compared to the dinky kites-with-motors he flew in “in the day.” (Charles joked, “It’s not as big as the starship Enterprise” – and I said, “I knew one of us would make a Star Trek joke,” referencing what’s probably become Pine’s most famous role as the young Captain James Tiberius Kirk in the current cycle of Star Trek films.)

The bulk of the film consists of Max Lord’s growing attempts to enslave the whole world in his web of wishes, including nearly starting World War III when he takes over the mind of a rather ineffectual President of the United States in exchange for granting his wish that the U.S. double the size of its arsenal of nuclear missiles – which causes the Russians to threaten to launch World War III. In the end Our Heroine realizes that the only way to restore the world to normal is to kill Max Lord, whereupon the wishes he’s granted will no longer be operative and the world will revert to normal – presented by some unintentionally funny shots of mushroom clouds de-exploding, missiles flying backwards and a woman whose husband wished her dead coming back to life in a tacky diner. I think there was a good movie hidden somewhere in this story premise, but it didn’t end up on the screen – and though it’s become a staple of the DC Universe I didn’t like the way one of Max Lord’s wish-grantings turned nice little Barbara Minerva into a super-villainess and Wonder Woman’s bitter enemy. I wouldn’t say WW84 is a bad movie; not only does it have a lot of the superhero action and violence people go see movies like this for (and Charles and I were impressed by the huge number of stunt people credited on the final roll; this is not one of those modern movies where they did almost all of it with CGI!), but it honorably tries to combine the superhero genre with screwball comedy – though even that was done a good deal better in the film that kicked off the modern superhero cycle, the 1978 Superman with Christopher Reeve. I’m probably coming off as a good deal more negative towards WW84 than I was while watching it, but in attempting at once to be a classic superhero movie, a dramatically serious one and a campily comic one, it seems to fall between all those cracks and not be all that satisfying as any of the above.

How I Met Your Murderer (Imoto Productions, Daro Film Distribution, Lifetime, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I watched two Lifetime movies in succession, and the first was actually pretty good: How I Met Your Murderer, directed by Emily Dell from a script by Kat Hess and Megan Yoon. (There are quite a few Asian names in the film’s crew, representing its origins with a company called Imoto Productions, distributed by Daro Film Corporation.) The central character is Mackenzie “Mac” Meyer (Rachele Schank), who along with her producer June Kim (Nicole Jia) has created a true-crime podcast called How I Met Your Murderer, which takes on famous cases, usually of serial killers. Mac mentions early on that her inspiration was true-crime writer Ann Rule, who got into the business when she realized that the nice young man she had dated earlier was later exposed as the notorious serial killer Ted Bundy – she wrote a memoir called The Stranger Beside Me about her relationship with Bundy, and spent the rest of her life dredging up notorious murder cases and making them even more notorious by writing about them.

Of course the writers are invoking this history to set up their heroine for a real-life relationship with a serial killer, and they duly deliver as Mac and her husband, an incredibly busy attorney named Henry (Billy Armstrong, considerably hotter than the milquetoast guys who usually play husbands on Lifetime movies – obviously casting director Lindsay Chag picked him because, with the usual Lifetime iconography that the hottest guy in the cast is the villain, she wanted us to be suspicious of him from the get-go). When the film begins Henry’s mother has just died and the couple have decided to relocate to Henry’s old home town, West Clarksville (did they take the last train there?), and live in his family’s old house. Only a woman mysteriously died there 15 years earlier on prom night at West Clarksville High School, and we see this happen in a prologue that shows her taking drugs and washing them down with alcohol, making it look like she was contemplating suicide and about to go through with it when a mysterious male figure came upon her and confronted her, with the result that she ended up face-down in the pool. The authorities back then ruled it suicide but many of the townspeople suspected Henry Meyer of murdering her because they had dated until prom night and they thought he had terminated an inconvenient relationship with extreme prejudice.

Following that might, three other West Clarksville women were found murdered – all of them young, all dark-haired and all winners of blue ribbons for something or other, which meant that authorities dubbed the murderer “The Blue-Ribbon Killer” and he was never caught. As a true-crime podcaster Mac finds the story of the “Blue Ribbon Killer” irresistible and decides to research it for her next episode, even though she gets mysterious texts, signed “dejavu49,” on her phone warning her off the case and someone throws a football through the window of her home with a message tied to it referencing the murders and the townspeople’s suspicions that Henry killed his high-school girlfriend. Then a young man named Oliver Turner (Chris Zylka) turns up; he’s the Meyers’ neighbor from across the street and he tells them he’s a police officer and also an amateur photographer.

He offers to help Mac with her podcast both as technical advisor and promotional photographer, but though he’s decent-looking he’s wearing dorky glasses that make him look like Drew Carey’s slenderer brother and he’s so twitchy we – or at least I – are certain from the get-go that he’s going to turn out to be the killer. He does, of course – he had an unrequited crush on the original victim and accidentally killed her when he confronted her on prom night after Henry dumped her, then reproduced the scene and killed three other women who looked like her (and as they’re moving our suspicions from Henry to Oliver they have Chris Zylka lose the glasses and shoot him to look much hunkier, once again fulfilling the Lifetime iconography that the hottest guy in the cast is the villain) – but in the meantime Hess and Yoon build up Henry Meyer into a formidable red herring, suggesting that his late “work” nights are really not only because he’s working hard on a case that will make him a partner in his law firm but he’s having an affair with his assistant, a woman named Evelyn whom we never see.

There’s also a chilling scene in which Mac looks at a photo of the murder victim who was Henry’s high-school girlfriend and notices how much she and Mac looked alike – which does at least briefly suggest Henry married Mac in the first place because of some sick attraction to that body type and hair color. Also Henry gives Mac a pair of earrings identical to the ones the victim was wearing when she was killed – though it turns out Henry didn’t give them to Mac after all; Oliver sneaked them into their home and she put them on without knowing what they were. Mac gets worked up into such a lather about her husband’s straying (which he’s doing) and his being a serial killer (which he isn’t) that she actually has sex with Oliver – the writers and director Dell blessedly give us really hot soft-core porn scenes between Mac and both of the men in her life (many of Lifetime’s movies derive much of their entertainment value from the soft-core porn, and it’s distressed me that they’ve cut back on it in recent years) – and of course he becomes obsessed with her and at the climax locks her in the same big room with the school’s swimming pool where he killed his first victim – only Henry figures it all out and summons the town’s police in time, and Mac manages to grab Oliver’s gun and shoot him in a nicely staged death embrace. How I Met Your Murderer isn’t exactly ground-breaking storytelling, but it’s a well-done thriller and one case in which Lifetime’s efforts to promote women directors paid off.