by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film Lifetime showed at 10 p.m. yesterday had the rather intimidating title Deadly Secrets
by the Lake but was actually pretty good,
effectively written by Roma Roth (also listed as one of the project’s four
producers) and Al Kratina, and directed by Don McBrearty with an effective
sense of atmosphere. Jennifer Riley (an actress saddled with the indigestible
name “Stefanie von Pfetten” — the sort of name that in the days of classic
Hollywood got changed: back then nobody thought anyone would go see a movie
billed as “The Wizard of Oz,
starring Frances Gumm”) is a New York City police detective who just arrested a
man she caught in the act of preparing to rape the woman he’d already
kidnapped, bound and gagged. She’s been in a relationship for two years with a
man named Santos Alvarez (played by an actor named Tahmoh Penikett — it almost
seems as if the casting director worked hard to find a co-star with as
ridiculous a name as the female lead, and despite the name of the character he
doesn’t look particularly Latino) but they’ve neither got married nor moved in
together, and her life gets upended when she receives a call from her father
back home in the small town of Thornwood Heights, where she grew up (and whose
precise location is unclear — I wondered if it was supposed to be a lakefront
community in upstate New York or a Midwestern town on one of the Great Lakes,
though of course this being a Lifetime movie the actual location was somewhere
in Canada!).
Her dad is the police chief of Thornwood Heights but an ambitious
deputy, Lewton (Dean Armstrong), is trying to push him out of that position. It
seems one of Chief Riley’s other daughters, Lauren (Ferelith Young), has been
arrested for murdering Victor Townsend, the owner of the blog for which she
worked and which was trying to expose the misdeeds of the town’s richest man,
coal magnate Connor Blake (Chris Gillett). Lauren was found next to Victor’s
corpse, with his blood all over her and the knife that killed him in her hand,
but of course Our Heroine Jennifer is convinced that her sister can’t have killed anybody, and she’s determined to
investigate the case herself even though she has no jurisdiction — as Lewton
viciously reminds her when he addresses her as “Ms. Riley,” she corrects him —
“That’s Detective Riley” — and he
fires back, “Maybe in New York City, but not here.” Jennifer is hated in
Thornwood Heights because 20 years earlier she was supposed to meet her best
friend, Connor Blake’s daughter Abby, for a platonic date — only she didn’t
show up because she was too busy having a decidedly non-platonic encounter with Abby’s brother Hayden (Steve
Byers). For some reason the police in general (other than her dad) and Lewton
in particular decided that Jennifer must have killed Abby, and while they had
neither Abby’s body nor any other actual evidence against her, she didn’t have
a provable alibi either. Hayden refused to say they’d been together that night
because his dad had previously lied and said the two had spent the evening
together — a double lie because dad had actually been cheating on Hayden’s mom
with another woman, and if Hayden had told the truth about his own whereabouts
he would have exposed his father’s lie. So he didn’t and let Jennifer take the
blame for Abby’s disappearance, and though Jennifer was never prosecuted she
was forced to leave town — whereupon she went to New York City, became a cop
and hooked up with the racially ambiguous Santos.
Meanwhile, back home Hayden
attempted to work in his dad’s coal business, decided he didn’t like it —
though it’s not all that clear how he did make his living — and he also got married, but by the time Jennifer
returns Hayden and his wife have separated. Jennifer is convinced that Abby’s
disappearance and Victor’s death are linked, and she investigates both crimes
despite the open hostility of Connor Blake, who warns her not to see any member of his family; Lucky Martin (Conrad Coates),
a nice-looking middle-aged African-American whose daughter was a co-worker of
Lauren’s at Victor’s blog (which had aroused the ire of Connor Blake by
printing material from an environmentalist organization challenging Connor’s
attempts to expand his coal mine); Jennifer’s sister Nova (Claire Rankin), who
works as a file clerk in the Thornwood Heights police department and is worried
Jennifer’s investigation is going to get her fired; and even Jennifer’s dad
(Fulvio Cecere), who tears into her one afternoon when he catches her with
Hayden Blake at their home and demands she never see him again. Needless to
say, she ignores the demand — Hayden and Jennifer become lovers (again) during
the course of her investigation — and Jennifer is torn at the end between New
York and Thornwood Heights and
between the two men in her life, dull, boring Santos and darkly fascinating
Hayden. While all this is going on Jennifer also realizes that someone in
Connor Blake’s operation had been leaking compromising financial information to
Victor’s blog, and she reaches the conclusion that the leaker was also the
murderer. Roma Roth and Al Krastina throw us a few red herrings along the way —
including Hayden’s cuter but far less butch brother Daniel (Jon Cor) — but the
real killer turns out to be someone we haven’t met before, Daniel’s assistant
at Blake Enterprises, Jamie Chen (an actor with yet another unfortunate last name, Shannon Kook), who was having
a Gay affair with Victor Townsend, got pissed at him when Victor refused to
leave his wife for him, killed him and drugged Lauren’s drinks at the bar so
her tox screen would be through the roof and the cops would believe Lauren
killed Victor in a drink- and drug-fueled jealous rage.
At the end it looks
like Jennifer has wrapped up the cases — she’s even found a skeleton in the
Blakes’ boat house she’s convinced is Abby (ya remember Abby?) — and is ready to go back to New York and her
boring boyfriend Santos, only she gets a phone call from a mysterious stranger
she becomes convinced is Abby, who we’re led to believe didn’t disappear at all
and who is still alive. The ending, which struck me as reminiscent of the “Who Killed Laura Palmer?” schtick on the original Twin Peaks and “Who Shot J. R.?” on Dallas, was written that way to set up a series, Thornwood
Heights, and the credits even invite you to
keep abreast of Abby’s mystery at the series’ Web site, www.thornwoodheights.com, indicating
that this is a co-production of Lifetime’s premium channel LMN (for “Lifetime
Movie Network”) and Harlequin, the romance-novel company, and it’s going to be
the start of a series. I could have done without the “teaser” aspect of the
ending, but for the most part this is actually quite a good program, rich and
redolent with atmosphere and genuine suspense (despite the killer being
surprise-revealed as someone we’ve never seen or even heard of before, which
breaks the first rule they teach you in Whodunits 101) and also ably capturing
the mephitic atmosphere of small-town life, the metaphorically incestuous
relationships that build up between all these people who have literally known each other all their lives, and above all in
the classism of the piece. At one point Connor Blake makes his objections to
Jennifer’s activities so clear he grabs her arm and says, in a low, threatening
voice, “I’m used to people doing what I tell them” — and though this movie was
probably made before the last Presidential election there’s certainly a lot of
Trump in his attitude, this whole sense of noblesse oblige that because I have more money than you I am a
naturally superior person and therefore I can demand your obedience and punish you however I see fit if I
don’t get it.
Sunday, July 9, 2017
Friday, July 7, 2017
Logan (20th Century Fox, Marvel Entertainment, Donners’ Company, Kinberg Genre, 2017)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Our “feature” was Logan, ninth and (presumably) last of the X-Men series movies in which Hugh Jackman portrays the character of Wolverine, a biologically engineered assassin whose big trademark is that when he needs an invulnerable weapon, claws made of a synthetic metal called adamantium emerge from between his regular fingers, and these are sharp enough he can literally decapitate someone with them. The film was released earlier this year, and if your idea of a superhero film is a joyous romp through various elaborate action sequences with clearly defined heroes and villains, this is definitely not your movie. Indeed, it’s so relentlessly dark that the Blu-Ray package includes three discs, alternate Blu-Ray and DVD versions of the film as theatrically released plus a third Blu-Ray disc with something called Logan Noir, which is the same movie in black-and-white. Of this smorgasbord of options we watched the color version of the Blu-Ray, and while much of it was in the dirty brown-and-green color scheme that seems to be modern-day cinematographers’ default look for virtually everything, a) there were a few shots that contained bright colors (including a sequence set at the “Liberty Motel” that seemed to me inspired by the “Victory Motel” climax at the end of L.A. Confidential) and b) the entire look of the film was so dark for once that dirty brown-and-green look was actually appropriate.
Basically, Logan is a “road movie” in which Logan, a.k.a. Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) is working as a limo driver just across the U.S. border in Mexico. He’s also taking care of Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), who since the destruction of his school for mutant kids in Westchester has been reduced to a pathetic existence living inside a giant oil tank and being kept shot up with drugs because he can no longer control his mental energies and unless he’s kept perpetually sedated he could send off “psionic” emissions that would be dangerous to anyone in his vicinity. In the opening sequence Logan is confronted by a Mexican street gang that wants to steal his limo, and he fights them off but in the process “outs” himself and reveals his whereabouts to the sinister corporate leader Donald Pierce (Boyd Holbrook), head of a company called “Transigen” (a marvelously evocative name suggesting “intransigent,” “transgenic” — a euphemism for “genetically modified” — and “transgender”). The film is set in 2029 (though, as a number of imdb.com contributors noted, aside from the specially modified Chrysler limo Logan drives in the opening scenes the cars shown are all modern-day models with no attempt to make them look like cars from 12 years in the future) and in the universe in which it takes place, no new mutants have been born in the last 25 years. Given how effectively the whole X-Men premise has been used in previous films as a sort of metaphor for the Queer experience — particularly the anti-mutant repression as well as the internal dilemma every mutant faces as to whether to remain closeted or come out — the situation in Logan reflects the fear of a lot of Queer people that scientific research aimed at finding out why people are Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual or Transgender could be used as a means to eliminate us altogether from future generations.
Our “feature” was Logan, ninth and (presumably) last of the X-Men series movies in which Hugh Jackman portrays the character of Wolverine, a biologically engineered assassin whose big trademark is that when he needs an invulnerable weapon, claws made of a synthetic metal called adamantium emerge from between his regular fingers, and these are sharp enough he can literally decapitate someone with them. The film was released earlier this year, and if your idea of a superhero film is a joyous romp through various elaborate action sequences with clearly defined heroes and villains, this is definitely not your movie. Indeed, it’s so relentlessly dark that the Blu-Ray package includes three discs, alternate Blu-Ray and DVD versions of the film as theatrically released plus a third Blu-Ray disc with something called Logan Noir, which is the same movie in black-and-white. Of this smorgasbord of options we watched the color version of the Blu-Ray, and while much of it was in the dirty brown-and-green color scheme that seems to be modern-day cinematographers’ default look for virtually everything, a) there were a few shots that contained bright colors (including a sequence set at the “Liberty Motel” that seemed to me inspired by the “Victory Motel” climax at the end of L.A. Confidential) and b) the entire look of the film was so dark for once that dirty brown-and-green look was actually appropriate.
Basically, Logan is a “road movie” in which Logan, a.k.a. Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) is working as a limo driver just across the U.S. border in Mexico. He’s also taking care of Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), who since the destruction of his school for mutant kids in Westchester has been reduced to a pathetic existence living inside a giant oil tank and being kept shot up with drugs because he can no longer control his mental energies and unless he’s kept perpetually sedated he could send off “psionic” emissions that would be dangerous to anyone in his vicinity. In the opening sequence Logan is confronted by a Mexican street gang that wants to steal his limo, and he fights them off but in the process “outs” himself and reveals his whereabouts to the sinister corporate leader Donald Pierce (Boyd Holbrook), head of a company called “Transigen” (a marvelously evocative name suggesting “intransigent,” “transgenic” — a euphemism for “genetically modified” — and “transgender”). The film is set in 2029 (though, as a number of imdb.com contributors noted, aside from the specially modified Chrysler limo Logan drives in the opening scenes the cars shown are all modern-day models with no attempt to make them look like cars from 12 years in the future) and in the universe in which it takes place, no new mutants have been born in the last 25 years. Given how effectively the whole X-Men premise has been used in previous films as a sort of metaphor for the Queer experience — particularly the anti-mutant repression as well as the internal dilemma every mutant faces as to whether to remain closeted or come out — the situation in Logan reflects the fear of a lot of Queer people that scientific research aimed at finding out why people are Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual or Transgender could be used as a means to eliminate us altogether from future generations.
In the early parts of Logan it’s a mystery why no natural mutants have been born in the previous
quarter-century, but midway through the movie Pierce explains that he and his
fellow corporate baddies have deliberately contaminated humans’ food supplies
with genetically modified corn syrup and other nasties that have prevented the
mutations that created the X-Men in the first place from ever happening again.
But that hasn’t been enough for the dark forces at Transigen: they’ve also
bioengineered their own mutants,
and one of them, manufactured from Logan’s DNA and therefore biologically his
daughter, is Laura (Dafne Keen), who looks about 12. Laura’s mother Gabriela
(Elizabeth Rodriguez) offers him $50,000 to take her and her daughter to North
Dakota, site of the fictional “Eden,” supposedly a place where mutants can live
unmolested by the forces of big government and big business that are out to
enslave and/or slaughter them all. Logan insists that “Eden” doesn’t really
exist — it’s just a fantasy created by the writers of the X-Men comic books (one of the things I like about this
movie is the metafictional way the X-Men comics are incorporated into the story, much the way Michael Connelly
incorporated into subsequent “Lincoln Lawyer” series books the fact that the
first one was filmed — the “real” character in the later novels even boasts
that Matthew McConaughey played him in the movie!) — but Laura insists that
it’s real and Logan must take her there even though all the money she has is
the $20,000 her mom gave Logan before she was killed. The film basically is a
race across country between Logan, Laura and Xavier in a variety of trucks,
each one seemingly skuzzier and more decrepit than the last; and the combined
forces of Donald Pierce and his big-government and big-business allies (Logan clearly has elements of political allegory, but like
a lot of other recent movies and TV shows it can be read either as a Left-wing
parable about the evils of capitalism or a Right-wing one about the freedom of
the individual against an oppressive government), who in order to trace Logan
have kidnapped Caliban (Stephen Merchant, looking a lot like the “Riff Raff”
character Richard O’Brien played in the original Rocky Horror Picture
Show), the fellow mutant who was living
with Logan in the Mexican desert and helping him take care of Xavier in the
opening scenes.
There’s a horrifying moment in which, in order to keep the
albino Caliban under his thumb, Pierce throws open a window in his enclosure
and exposes him to sunlight — and Caliban’s skin quickly turns red and blotchy,
a condition that’s obviously going to kill him if it’s allowed to continue. One
of the most fascinating aspects of Logan is the sheer extent of the armed forces Pierce is able to marshal
whenever they find Logan’s whereabouts — reason enough that it appears he’s in
league with the government, having already wiped out the natural mutants and
being committed to recapture his genetically engineered ones at their redoubt
in North Dakota, while they’re equally committed to sneaking across the border
into Canada, where they will at least theoretically be safe. (Of course, in
real life someone as unscrupulous as Pierce wouldn’t bother to stop his
military campaign just because a borderline was in his way.) What sets Logan apart from other superhero movies is its unrelieved
gloominess: we know that the good guys are being so relentlessly pursued by the
bad guys that there’s no rest for the non-wicked in this film, and even when
they appear to have found a temporary sanctuary — like the Vegas-style casino
to which they briefly repair (and there are marvelous shots contrasting the
bedraggled fugitives with the well-dressed tourists who are the place’s main
customer base — I had assumed they’d actually driven to Vegas but according to
imdb.com, the location is actually a Native American casino in Oklahoma) and
where Xavier has a psionic outburst that literally causes the casino walls, as
well as everyone inside, to shake (an effect created, according to an imdb.com
“trivia” poster, by shooting the footage hand-held, deliberately making it
shaky, and then using post-production technology to re-stabilize the frame,
disorienting the audience as well as the characters with the combination of
motion blur and smearing created by the effect) — their past and their uncertain
present catch up with them.
The film’s most tragic sequence is when Logan,
Laura and Xavier meet up with an African-American family, Will Munson (Eriq
LaSalle), his wife Kathryn (Elise Neal) and their son Nate (Quincy Fouse), when
their truck has been run off the road and the horse trailers they were towing
have come open, letting the horses out. Logan is reluctantly talked into
helping him by Xavier, not wanting to get involved and wanting even less to
inflict his rotten luck on yet more decent people who are just going to end up
as collateral damage (“Bad shit happens to people I care about,” Logan explains
to Laura) — as indeed they do, as Logan helps Will in a fight against local
rednecks who’ve just cut off the access to water he needs to run his farm. He
takes out some of the rednecks, slicing one’s head off in a gruesome scene that
would be even more horrific if director James Mangold didn’t get it on and off
screen in such a hurry, but this alerts Pierce and his minions to Wolverine’s
presence and the result is a bloodbath in which, this being an X-Men movie, the nice people all die. In the end the
“Eden” redoubt actually exists and Laura is reunited with her old friends from
the These Are the Damned-style
Transigen compound in which she grew up, but in the final scene they have to
make a run across the Canadian border and Logan [spoiler alert!] deliberately O.D.’s on the drug that potentiates his
super-powers and wards off the toxic effects of all that adamantium in his
body, thereby getting his young charges across the border at the sacrifice of
his own life. This doesn’t necessarily mean there won’t be another Wolverine film — not only is this a
fantasy, which means that just because you actually see a character die you
can’t assume you won’t see them again, but at least two other characters, Laura
and Pierce’s assassin, have the Wolverine mutation — though Hugh Jackman gave a
number of interviews when this film came out swearing up and down that this
will be, cross his heart and hope to die, his last appearance as Wolverine.
(Yeah, right, I thought: if the
producers dangle a check in front of him and the amount has enough zeroes at
the end of it, I’m sure he’ll play the part again.)
Jackman is one of my
favorite modern-day actors — though my support of him comes largely from his
brilliant performance in a tragically little-known film, Baz Luhrmann’s Australia (and even there he was playing a character similar
to Wolverine, a man of mystery who helps out a heroine in distress while
himself remaining forbidding and remote) — but I can tell he’s getting as tired
of the role as Lon Chaney, Jr. got of the Wolf Man (and there are similarities,
especially the growling noises Wolverine emits as he transforms from normal
human being into mutant killing machine), especially since about the only
emotions he can register in the part are alienation and angst. Still, even though much of Logan is pretty slow going, I really liked the film:
Mangold, who’d previously worked on the series in another Jackman vehicle, The
Wolverine, directs superbly — and the
script is also based on his story, though he directly collaborated with another
writer, Scott Frank, on turning it into a screenplay and a third scribe,
Michael Green, was brought in for subsequent revisions. Mangold’s résumé is
full of movies about people put in extreme circumstances, many times skirting
the thin edge of sanity — Girl, Interrupted, Cop Land, the remake of 3:10 to Yuma and the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line (in a sort of odd directorial trademark, the song we
hear during the first part of the closing credits is one of Cash’s last
records, “The Man Comes Around,” credited to Cash as songwriter but obviously a
variant on the old spiritual “There’s a Man Goin’ ’Round Takin’ Names”) — and
his two collaborations with Jackman as Wolverine are clearly in that line. The
acting in this movie is well done, despite Jackman’s occasional hints of
boredom with the role; Patrick Stewart plays well as a shrunken (literally;
director Mangold wanted him to lose weight to suggest the character’s decrepit
state — and also to make it easier for Jackman to lift him and carry him
around, which happens several times in the film) version of the once powerful
Master of the X-Men; and Dafne Keen as Laura is great, refreshingly unsentimental
(it’s taken decades for the
malign influence of Shirley Temple to wear off and allow filmmakers to depict
children as multidimensional characters instead of drowning them all in gooey
sweetness) and strong-willed. I’m going to make the same prediction about her I
made (accurately) about Kirsten Dunst after Interview with the
Vampire: she’ll have a great career as an
adult actress.
Free to Rock (PBS, Grammy Foundation, Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame, Stas Namin Foundation, 2017)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After the two presentations of A Capitol Fourth PBS showed a particularly interesting documentary on the Fourth of July: Free to Rock, an audacious film produced and directed by Jim Brown and Nick Binkley and dedicated to the proposition that the real force that brought down the Soviet Union and led to the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War was … rock ’n’ roll music. It’s one of those arguments that a case can be made for but this movie pushed it way too far. I’d seen previous documentaries about what life was like for teenagers in the Eastern Bloc in the 1950’s and 1960’s and how Western rock, to the extent to which it trickled through the Iron Curtain, offered youngsters in that time and place a sense of additional possibilities, the idea that there was this liberating energy out there that could be grabbed by teens in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and used as a way out of the stifling control the Communist Party bosses in those countries imposed on their people. I’d seen at least one previous film on this premise, How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin, and while the rock revolution as depicted in Free to Rock doesn’t begin and end with the Beatles, they were certainly at the epicenter. In the West the Beatles converted rock from a teenage cult item its audiences were expected to grow out of as they got older (reason enough why Elvis Presley’s manager, Col. Tom Parker, pushed him out of rock and towards middle-of-the-road crooning when Elvis got out of the Army in 1960) to a serious social phenomenon and an art form that could express as much, emotionally, socially and politically, as any other form of music. What Jim Brown didn’t really mention was that well before rock existed as a mass phenomenon in the West, the Soviets had already had to deal with earlier generations of their young people taking an interest in jazz, to the point where Edward R. Murrow once claimed that Louis Armstrong was America’s most effective ambassador.
Armstrong was actually offered the chance by the U.S. State Department to be the first American jazz musician to tour the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc — and he turned it down because he was worried he’d be expected to toe the American propaganda line that everything was hunky-dory in the U.S. and he wouldn’t be allowed to talk about segregation and racism. So it was Benny Goodman who became the first U.S. jazz musician to play the Soviet Union under State Department auspices in 1962, and he encountered some of the same bizarre restrictions Western rock acts would face later when the Soviets started letting them in. The Soviet teenagers first heard rock in the late 1950’s when it was broadcast on the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, and despite Soviet efforts to jam these broadcasts they not only got through (especially in the wee hours of the morning after the crews at the Soviet jamming stations went home for the night), they were sometimes taped off the air by Soviet teenagers and later shared with their fellows as so-called “bones” or “ribs.” These were amateur copies made on record-cutting booths (which were actually quite common in the Soviet Union as a way soldiers stationed thousands of miles from home and their families could communicate via audio letters) and etched onto discarded X-ray film, which meant they were pliable and could therefore be concealed on the person of the seller. People caught selling “bones” or “ribs” risked everything from a short prison sentence to a long stint in the Gulag, not only because they were distributing music the Soviet authorities considered subversive but also because they were selling the discs and therefore engaging in private enterprise. The market for “ribs” zoomed up when the Beatles hit — it’s not mentioned here but in How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin it’s shown that the Soviet government responded to the Beatles’ growing popularity by issuing a propaganda magazine denouncing them as a decadent act who had formerly performed wearing toilet seats around their necks (true, at least in their wilder upper-fueled nights in Hamburg in the early 1960’s) and their manager was a “London fairy” (half right: Brian Epstein was Gay but he was from Liverpool). The propaganda magazine was probably counterproductive in that it made kids who hadn’t heard of the Beatles before aware of them.
The Beatles and the growing “psychedelic rock” movement that followed them from the U.S. in the mid-1960’s inspired Soviet musicians to take up rock — there’s a fascinating, almost sexual sequence in this film showing a man who became a major Russian guitar builder practically going into orgasm at the sight of a Fender Stratocaster and determining to build a replica (he got his pickups by stealing them from pay phones in Moscow) — and among them was a man who’s listed as a co-producer on this show as well as being extensively interviewed: Stas Namin. In 1967 he founded a rock group called Flower that built enough of a following that the government-owned monopoly record company, Melodiya, actually signed them. Their first Melodiya album sold 500,000 copies and their second sold a million — but after they’d sold 12 million records the government reversed itself, suppressed his band and canceled his contract. The show begins with Stas Namin playing a concert inspired by the arrest under Vladimir Putin’s Russian regime of the women’s performance-art and musical group Pussy Riot; amazingly the writers of this documentary try to present that as a triumph — saying that Russians were able to demonstrate publicly and openly today in a way they couldn’t under the Soviet regime — but the truth, of course, is just the opposite: Putin’s government is just as authoritarian as its predecessors and just as committed as the Soviet regime was (and the Tsarist regime before them!) to keep tight controls on Russia’s artistic community and enforce, sometimes brutally, their standards of what’s considered “acceptable” art and culture and what’s considered beyond the pale and therefore a matter for the police. One of the quirkier aspects of Free to Rock is the if-you-can’t-beat-’em-join-’em attempts of the Soviet cultural bureaucracy to sponsor “rock” acts of their own. They officially authorized groups in a genre called “Vocal-Instrumental Combinations,” or VIA’s for short after the initials for those words in Russian, and judging from the clips presented here the politically correct VIA’s played in a soft pop-rock style musically and sang about hard work, Soviet discipline, building the socialist state and the other propaganda points the Soviet government was trying to instill in their youth.
One of the quirkier figures portrayed here — though the brief depiction of him really didn’t do justice to his remarkable story — was Dean Reed, a U.S.-born rock singer who attempted to make it in the U.S. in the late 1950’s and got precisely nowhere (he got a one-single deal with Imperial and a major-label contract with Capitol, but the one record he made that ever charted in Billboard, “The Search,” only got as high as #96. Nonetheless, his record “One Summer Romance” was so popular in South America that he settled there in the early 1960’s, settling in Argentina, fronting a rock band otherwise consisting exclusively of Argentine musicians. He lived in Chile for a while and apparently it was there that he was first exposed to socialist politics, eventually becoming a committed Leftist and running afoul of the Argentine military junta that took over in 1966. The Right-wing junta deported him and he went to Europe, settling for a while in Rome and appearing in spaghetti Westerns like Adios, Sabata. In 1973 he was invited to relocate to East Germany, where he lived for the remaining 13 years of his life and became known as “Der Rote Elvis” (“The Red Elvis”). Publicly his statements on politics were down-the-line doctrinaire Communist — he denounced Alexander Solzbhenitsyn for having “slandered” the Soviet Union and he defended the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and the building of the Berlin Wall — but there were enough East Germans unsure of where his real loyalties were he was often accused of being a CIA agent, as well as an agent of the East German Stasi secret police. Reed also never turned his back on the U.S. — many of his songs from his East German period reflected his homesickness — and in 1986 he gave a controversial interview to 60 Minutes. His defense of the Berlin Wall on the program got him hate mail from the U.S. denouncing him as a traitor, and six weeks after the interview aired he was found dead in a lake near his home in East Berlin. The authorities officially ruled it as an accidental drowning, but his friends in Germany suspected he had committed suicide (especially after a note was found among his effects expressing regrets over the foundering of his marriage) and his relatives in the U.S. thought he’d been murdered. Reed’s peculiar story seems like one of the great unmade movies (ironically among Reed’s 20 films were one in which he wrote, directed and starred as Victor Jara, the Chilean radical poet killed when that country’s military, with the full support of the U.S., deposed President Salvador Allende in 1973 and started a reign of terror, and whom Reed had known personally during his days in South America) and it’s given oddly short shrift here.
The next phase of Free to Rock depicts the trickle of American and British rock bands that were actually allowed to perform behind the Iron Curtain, starting in 1969 when — a year after the liberal Communist government of Alexander Dubcek in Czechoslovakia was overthrown by Soviet tanks and soldiers — the Beach Boys were invited to play in Prague and frontman Mike Love (whom we’d just seen as leader of the current edition of the Beach Boys at the Capitol Fourth concert) announced he was dedicating their song “Break Away” (actually written in collaboration between Brian Wilson and his father Murry, the only time the Wilson brothers’ dad wrote for the Beach Boys himself) to Dubcek. There are interviews with members of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, which wangled an invitation to play in Moscow because they were officially considered a folk ensemble instead of a rock band, and folk was considered the music of the oppressed American working classes. The first major rock star to play the Soviet Union was the young Elton John, but he wasn’t allowed to bring his full band — the only instruments he was allowed to use was his own piano and a pair of conga drums played by his regular drummer, Nigel Olsson. I remember seeing the TV special from this concert when it originally aired and hearing Elton John explain to an interviewer that throughout the concert he’d tried every trick in his book to get the audience out of their seats and dancing, and was frustrated that he couldn’t. Later he found out why: the authorities had minders patrolling the aisles throughout the concert, and every time someone was moved by the spirit of the music to get up and move, one of the minders shoved them back down into their seat.
It wasn’t until Billy Joel came in 1987, after Mikhail Gorbachev had become the Soviet leader and proclaimed his policies of glasnost (cultural freedom) and perestroika (economic freedom), that a major Western rock star was permitted not only to play the Soviet Union but bring along his full band and use electric instruments — and Joel responded by covering Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changing,” playing guitar on the song instead of his usual piano, for a double-edged message: a song that Dylan had written to celebrate America’s turn to the Left in the 1960’s became an acknowledgment of the new freedom that would eventually bring down the Soviet Union altogether. (Of course the producers of this program couldn’t resist the temptation to include a clip of President Ronald Reagan confronting Gorbachev in Berlin and saying, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” This is one item that plays very differently in the Donald Trump era than it would have under any previous President, Republican or Democrat: as I joked when Trump was still a candidate, today he’d be saying, “Señor Peña Nieto, build up this wall!” It’s nice to be reminded of a time not so long ago when Republicans actually believed that the barriers between countries should come down.) Free to Rock is an interesting documentary even though I suspect it way overestimates the role of rock music in bringing down the Soviet regime — Charles watched part of it with me and said it was full of post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacies — and I also was annoyed that it didn’t mention that well before rock, the Soviet government had felt similarly threatened by their citizens’ exposure to American jazz (while the Communist Party U.S.A. blew hot and cold — pardon the pun — over jazz, at some points regarding jazz as a form of bourgeois social decadence that would be swept away when Communism took over, while at other times they hailed jazz as the authentic voice of African-Americans expressing their determination to combat racism). The Soviets even had their own “safe” jazz musician, Leonid Utyosov (that’s what the Wikipedia page on Soviet jazz musicians calls him; when I read about him decades ago I remember seeing the last name rendered as “Utseyev”), who was able to stay in business for decades by carefully calibrating his music and pushing it just to the farthest edge of hotness the Soviet authorities would then allow.
The lesson essentially is that authoritarians of all stripes, Left, Right or nonideological, always seek to control the popular culture, not only to make sure subversive or anti-regime messages aren’t secretly being communicated to the masses in the form of “entertainment” but also because authoritarian regimes seem to want their people to be grim automatons committed to the greater glory of the Leader and whatever his social project is. The worst examples are the fundamentalist Islamic regimes like Afghanistan’s Taliban, who banned music, sports and virtually all other forms of popular entertainment, and instead expected people to get their mass jollies by being ordered into Kabul’s former soccer stadium to watch enemies of the state get beheaded. One partial counter-example was Nazi German propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, who seemed to understand — as his Communist counterparts did not — that truly apolitical light entertainment was actually good for a dictatorial regime: if you gave people harmless ways to amuse themselves and have fun, they’d be less, not more, likely to rebel. This point was made in one of the most engaging documentaries I’ve ever seen about cultural repression in the Eastern bloc during the Cold War, East Side Story, which was about the surprisingly few musicals produced during the Soviet period in the U.S.S.R. itself and its dependencies. Made by Dana Ranga, who herself grew up behind the Berlin Wall in East Germany, East Side Story referenced the 1934 Soviet musical Jolly Fellows (in which Leonid Utyosov played the male lead and became a star), directed by Sergei Eisenstein’s former assistant Grigory Alexandrov. When Charles and I watched East Side Story I commented, “At first the Soviet censors refused to allow this movie to be released on the ground that it was too frivolous — indeed, the theme of super-serious Communist censor boards barring the release of innocuous entertainment precisely because it was innocuous entertainment becomes a leitmotif through this film — but Alexandrov managed to sneak a print to Maxim Gorky, who in turn showed it to Stalin personally; Stalin loved it and ordered it released.” But it remains true that authoritarians of all stripes tend to hate the whole idea of “culture” and try to keep their citizens from having access to it — as we’re seeing from the Trump administration’s proposal to eliminate all funding for PBS, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts from the federal budget.
After the two presentations of A Capitol Fourth PBS showed a particularly interesting documentary on the Fourth of July: Free to Rock, an audacious film produced and directed by Jim Brown and Nick Binkley and dedicated to the proposition that the real force that brought down the Soviet Union and led to the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War was … rock ’n’ roll music. It’s one of those arguments that a case can be made for but this movie pushed it way too far. I’d seen previous documentaries about what life was like for teenagers in the Eastern Bloc in the 1950’s and 1960’s and how Western rock, to the extent to which it trickled through the Iron Curtain, offered youngsters in that time and place a sense of additional possibilities, the idea that there was this liberating energy out there that could be grabbed by teens in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and used as a way out of the stifling control the Communist Party bosses in those countries imposed on their people. I’d seen at least one previous film on this premise, How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin, and while the rock revolution as depicted in Free to Rock doesn’t begin and end with the Beatles, they were certainly at the epicenter. In the West the Beatles converted rock from a teenage cult item its audiences were expected to grow out of as they got older (reason enough why Elvis Presley’s manager, Col. Tom Parker, pushed him out of rock and towards middle-of-the-road crooning when Elvis got out of the Army in 1960) to a serious social phenomenon and an art form that could express as much, emotionally, socially and politically, as any other form of music. What Jim Brown didn’t really mention was that well before rock existed as a mass phenomenon in the West, the Soviets had already had to deal with earlier generations of their young people taking an interest in jazz, to the point where Edward R. Murrow once claimed that Louis Armstrong was America’s most effective ambassador.
Armstrong was actually offered the chance by the U.S. State Department to be the first American jazz musician to tour the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc — and he turned it down because he was worried he’d be expected to toe the American propaganda line that everything was hunky-dory in the U.S. and he wouldn’t be allowed to talk about segregation and racism. So it was Benny Goodman who became the first U.S. jazz musician to play the Soviet Union under State Department auspices in 1962, and he encountered some of the same bizarre restrictions Western rock acts would face later when the Soviets started letting them in. The Soviet teenagers first heard rock in the late 1950’s when it was broadcast on the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, and despite Soviet efforts to jam these broadcasts they not only got through (especially in the wee hours of the morning after the crews at the Soviet jamming stations went home for the night), they were sometimes taped off the air by Soviet teenagers and later shared with their fellows as so-called “bones” or “ribs.” These were amateur copies made on record-cutting booths (which were actually quite common in the Soviet Union as a way soldiers stationed thousands of miles from home and their families could communicate via audio letters) and etched onto discarded X-ray film, which meant they were pliable and could therefore be concealed on the person of the seller. People caught selling “bones” or “ribs” risked everything from a short prison sentence to a long stint in the Gulag, not only because they were distributing music the Soviet authorities considered subversive but also because they were selling the discs and therefore engaging in private enterprise. The market for “ribs” zoomed up when the Beatles hit — it’s not mentioned here but in How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin it’s shown that the Soviet government responded to the Beatles’ growing popularity by issuing a propaganda magazine denouncing them as a decadent act who had formerly performed wearing toilet seats around their necks (true, at least in their wilder upper-fueled nights in Hamburg in the early 1960’s) and their manager was a “London fairy” (half right: Brian Epstein was Gay but he was from Liverpool). The propaganda magazine was probably counterproductive in that it made kids who hadn’t heard of the Beatles before aware of them.
The Beatles and the growing “psychedelic rock” movement that followed them from the U.S. in the mid-1960’s inspired Soviet musicians to take up rock — there’s a fascinating, almost sexual sequence in this film showing a man who became a major Russian guitar builder practically going into orgasm at the sight of a Fender Stratocaster and determining to build a replica (he got his pickups by stealing them from pay phones in Moscow) — and among them was a man who’s listed as a co-producer on this show as well as being extensively interviewed: Stas Namin. In 1967 he founded a rock group called Flower that built enough of a following that the government-owned monopoly record company, Melodiya, actually signed them. Their first Melodiya album sold 500,000 copies and their second sold a million — but after they’d sold 12 million records the government reversed itself, suppressed his band and canceled his contract. The show begins with Stas Namin playing a concert inspired by the arrest under Vladimir Putin’s Russian regime of the women’s performance-art and musical group Pussy Riot; amazingly the writers of this documentary try to present that as a triumph — saying that Russians were able to demonstrate publicly and openly today in a way they couldn’t under the Soviet regime — but the truth, of course, is just the opposite: Putin’s government is just as authoritarian as its predecessors and just as committed as the Soviet regime was (and the Tsarist regime before them!) to keep tight controls on Russia’s artistic community and enforce, sometimes brutally, their standards of what’s considered “acceptable” art and culture and what’s considered beyond the pale and therefore a matter for the police. One of the quirkier aspects of Free to Rock is the if-you-can’t-beat-’em-join-’em attempts of the Soviet cultural bureaucracy to sponsor “rock” acts of their own. They officially authorized groups in a genre called “Vocal-Instrumental Combinations,” or VIA’s for short after the initials for those words in Russian, and judging from the clips presented here the politically correct VIA’s played in a soft pop-rock style musically and sang about hard work, Soviet discipline, building the socialist state and the other propaganda points the Soviet government was trying to instill in their youth.
One of the quirkier figures portrayed here — though the brief depiction of him really didn’t do justice to his remarkable story — was Dean Reed, a U.S.-born rock singer who attempted to make it in the U.S. in the late 1950’s and got precisely nowhere (he got a one-single deal with Imperial and a major-label contract with Capitol, but the one record he made that ever charted in Billboard, “The Search,” only got as high as #96. Nonetheless, his record “One Summer Romance” was so popular in South America that he settled there in the early 1960’s, settling in Argentina, fronting a rock band otherwise consisting exclusively of Argentine musicians. He lived in Chile for a while and apparently it was there that he was first exposed to socialist politics, eventually becoming a committed Leftist and running afoul of the Argentine military junta that took over in 1966. The Right-wing junta deported him and he went to Europe, settling for a while in Rome and appearing in spaghetti Westerns like Adios, Sabata. In 1973 he was invited to relocate to East Germany, where he lived for the remaining 13 years of his life and became known as “Der Rote Elvis” (“The Red Elvis”). Publicly his statements on politics were down-the-line doctrinaire Communist — he denounced Alexander Solzbhenitsyn for having “slandered” the Soviet Union and he defended the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and the building of the Berlin Wall — but there were enough East Germans unsure of where his real loyalties were he was often accused of being a CIA agent, as well as an agent of the East German Stasi secret police. Reed also never turned his back on the U.S. — many of his songs from his East German period reflected his homesickness — and in 1986 he gave a controversial interview to 60 Minutes. His defense of the Berlin Wall on the program got him hate mail from the U.S. denouncing him as a traitor, and six weeks after the interview aired he was found dead in a lake near his home in East Berlin. The authorities officially ruled it as an accidental drowning, but his friends in Germany suspected he had committed suicide (especially after a note was found among his effects expressing regrets over the foundering of his marriage) and his relatives in the U.S. thought he’d been murdered. Reed’s peculiar story seems like one of the great unmade movies (ironically among Reed’s 20 films were one in which he wrote, directed and starred as Victor Jara, the Chilean radical poet killed when that country’s military, with the full support of the U.S., deposed President Salvador Allende in 1973 and started a reign of terror, and whom Reed had known personally during his days in South America) and it’s given oddly short shrift here.
The next phase of Free to Rock depicts the trickle of American and British rock bands that were actually allowed to perform behind the Iron Curtain, starting in 1969 when — a year after the liberal Communist government of Alexander Dubcek in Czechoslovakia was overthrown by Soviet tanks and soldiers — the Beach Boys were invited to play in Prague and frontman Mike Love (whom we’d just seen as leader of the current edition of the Beach Boys at the Capitol Fourth concert) announced he was dedicating their song “Break Away” (actually written in collaboration between Brian Wilson and his father Murry, the only time the Wilson brothers’ dad wrote for the Beach Boys himself) to Dubcek. There are interviews with members of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, which wangled an invitation to play in Moscow because they were officially considered a folk ensemble instead of a rock band, and folk was considered the music of the oppressed American working classes. The first major rock star to play the Soviet Union was the young Elton John, but he wasn’t allowed to bring his full band — the only instruments he was allowed to use was his own piano and a pair of conga drums played by his regular drummer, Nigel Olsson. I remember seeing the TV special from this concert when it originally aired and hearing Elton John explain to an interviewer that throughout the concert he’d tried every trick in his book to get the audience out of their seats and dancing, and was frustrated that he couldn’t. Later he found out why: the authorities had minders patrolling the aisles throughout the concert, and every time someone was moved by the spirit of the music to get up and move, one of the minders shoved them back down into their seat.
It wasn’t until Billy Joel came in 1987, after Mikhail Gorbachev had become the Soviet leader and proclaimed his policies of glasnost (cultural freedom) and perestroika (economic freedom), that a major Western rock star was permitted not only to play the Soviet Union but bring along his full band and use electric instruments — and Joel responded by covering Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changing,” playing guitar on the song instead of his usual piano, for a double-edged message: a song that Dylan had written to celebrate America’s turn to the Left in the 1960’s became an acknowledgment of the new freedom that would eventually bring down the Soviet Union altogether. (Of course the producers of this program couldn’t resist the temptation to include a clip of President Ronald Reagan confronting Gorbachev in Berlin and saying, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” This is one item that plays very differently in the Donald Trump era than it would have under any previous President, Republican or Democrat: as I joked when Trump was still a candidate, today he’d be saying, “Señor Peña Nieto, build up this wall!” It’s nice to be reminded of a time not so long ago when Republicans actually believed that the barriers between countries should come down.) Free to Rock is an interesting documentary even though I suspect it way overestimates the role of rock music in bringing down the Soviet regime — Charles watched part of it with me and said it was full of post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacies — and I also was annoyed that it didn’t mention that well before rock, the Soviet government had felt similarly threatened by their citizens’ exposure to American jazz (while the Communist Party U.S.A. blew hot and cold — pardon the pun — over jazz, at some points regarding jazz as a form of bourgeois social decadence that would be swept away when Communism took over, while at other times they hailed jazz as the authentic voice of African-Americans expressing their determination to combat racism). The Soviets even had their own “safe” jazz musician, Leonid Utyosov (that’s what the Wikipedia page on Soviet jazz musicians calls him; when I read about him decades ago I remember seeing the last name rendered as “Utseyev”), who was able to stay in business for decades by carefully calibrating his music and pushing it just to the farthest edge of hotness the Soviet authorities would then allow.
The lesson essentially is that authoritarians of all stripes, Left, Right or nonideological, always seek to control the popular culture, not only to make sure subversive or anti-regime messages aren’t secretly being communicated to the masses in the form of “entertainment” but also because authoritarian regimes seem to want their people to be grim automatons committed to the greater glory of the Leader and whatever his social project is. The worst examples are the fundamentalist Islamic regimes like Afghanistan’s Taliban, who banned music, sports and virtually all other forms of popular entertainment, and instead expected people to get their mass jollies by being ordered into Kabul’s former soccer stadium to watch enemies of the state get beheaded. One partial counter-example was Nazi German propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, who seemed to understand — as his Communist counterparts did not — that truly apolitical light entertainment was actually good for a dictatorial regime: if you gave people harmless ways to amuse themselves and have fun, they’d be less, not more, likely to rebel. This point was made in one of the most engaging documentaries I’ve ever seen about cultural repression in the Eastern bloc during the Cold War, East Side Story, which was about the surprisingly few musicals produced during the Soviet period in the U.S.S.R. itself and its dependencies. Made by Dana Ranga, who herself grew up behind the Berlin Wall in East Germany, East Side Story referenced the 1934 Soviet musical Jolly Fellows (in which Leonid Utyosov played the male lead and became a star), directed by Sergei Eisenstein’s former assistant Grigory Alexandrov. When Charles and I watched East Side Story I commented, “At first the Soviet censors refused to allow this movie to be released on the ground that it was too frivolous — indeed, the theme of super-serious Communist censor boards barring the release of innocuous entertainment precisely because it was innocuous entertainment becomes a leitmotif through this film — but Alexandrov managed to sneak a print to Maxim Gorky, who in turn showed it to Stalin personally; Stalin loved it and ordered it released.” But it remains true that authoritarians of all stripes tend to hate the whole idea of “culture” and try to keep their citizens from having access to it — as we’re seeing from the Trump administration’s proposal to eliminate all funding for PBS, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts from the federal budget.
Thursday, July 6, 2017
Austin City Limits: Eric Church (KLRU/PBS, 2015)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched a two-year-old Austin City Limits from the DVD backlog featuring country singer Eric Church, whom I had mixed feelings about: I basically liked him but as the show progressed I started to get worn down by the sameness of his material. Musically he’s able to ring a lot of changes on the basic 1970’s Southern-rock style that’s become the default setting for today’s “country” music (especially for male artists) — including one beautiful song, “Put a Drink in My Hand,” which began with a shiveringly beautiful blues-style slide guitar intro from one of his two lead guitarists. (Church himself occasionally plays electric guitar but usually plays acoustic rhythm parts the way Elvis did in the early days.) One expects to hear a pedal steel guitar in country music but not a blues-style slide! It’s Church’s lyrics that are the problem: just about all his songs are about drinking, coming back to your home town after a long absence, drinking, breaking up with your girlfriend (probably because she got tired of his drinking), drinking and drinking some more. I found myself wondering if Church’s drinking would get to be so much of a problem he’d have to join Alcoholics Anonymous, whereupon he’d make a concept album about not drinking. Just the song titles — at least as far as I could make them out, which wasn’t easy because Church announced nothing (he assumed his audience would be familiar with all his songs, and given how often they were singing along with him, he was probably right) — indicates the sameness of the material and how he kept going to the same subjects in song after song after song: “Creepin’,” “Guys Like Me” (as in “guys like me usually don’t end up with girls like you”), “This Is My Home Town,” “That Was a Cold One” (as in how dare his girlfriend leave him when he had just one beer left with which to drown his sorrows), “Sinners Like Me,” “Come On Home, Boy” (in which the singer is lamenting that his son is wearing hip-hop gear and “pants on the ground” and wants him to get back to those good ol’ Southern home values of small-town life and small-town drinking), “Put a Drink in My Hand” (no thanks, Eric, I think you’ve had enough already), “These Boots” (for which a woman in the front row actually handed him one of her boots and let him use it as a prop), “Drink a Little Drink, Smoke a Little Smoke” (well, he’s a country artist and he’s not Willie Nelson, so the “smoke” is undoubtedly just tobacco), “Soundtrack to a July Saturday Night,” “The Outsiders” (a quite good piece of material musically), and his closer, “I Was Gonna Die Young,” in which the singer expresses his surprise that he’s outlasted Hank Williams and Jesus (mentioned in that order, by the way). I really like Eric Church’s music but just wish he’d write songs about something else — and I was also amazed that, unlike a lot of other modern country stars (especially the men), he doesn’t insist on being the cutest person in his band: there’s a tall, stocky, heavily tattooed guitar player whom I thought was sexually hotter than the star!
I watched a two-year-old Austin City Limits from the DVD backlog featuring country singer Eric Church, whom I had mixed feelings about: I basically liked him but as the show progressed I started to get worn down by the sameness of his material. Musically he’s able to ring a lot of changes on the basic 1970’s Southern-rock style that’s become the default setting for today’s “country” music (especially for male artists) — including one beautiful song, “Put a Drink in My Hand,” which began with a shiveringly beautiful blues-style slide guitar intro from one of his two lead guitarists. (Church himself occasionally plays electric guitar but usually plays acoustic rhythm parts the way Elvis did in the early days.) One expects to hear a pedal steel guitar in country music but not a blues-style slide! It’s Church’s lyrics that are the problem: just about all his songs are about drinking, coming back to your home town after a long absence, drinking, breaking up with your girlfriend (probably because she got tired of his drinking), drinking and drinking some more. I found myself wondering if Church’s drinking would get to be so much of a problem he’d have to join Alcoholics Anonymous, whereupon he’d make a concept album about not drinking. Just the song titles — at least as far as I could make them out, which wasn’t easy because Church announced nothing (he assumed his audience would be familiar with all his songs, and given how often they were singing along with him, he was probably right) — indicates the sameness of the material and how he kept going to the same subjects in song after song after song: “Creepin’,” “Guys Like Me” (as in “guys like me usually don’t end up with girls like you”), “This Is My Home Town,” “That Was a Cold One” (as in how dare his girlfriend leave him when he had just one beer left with which to drown his sorrows), “Sinners Like Me,” “Come On Home, Boy” (in which the singer is lamenting that his son is wearing hip-hop gear and “pants on the ground” and wants him to get back to those good ol’ Southern home values of small-town life and small-town drinking), “Put a Drink in My Hand” (no thanks, Eric, I think you’ve had enough already), “These Boots” (for which a woman in the front row actually handed him one of her boots and let him use it as a prop), “Drink a Little Drink, Smoke a Little Smoke” (well, he’s a country artist and he’s not Willie Nelson, so the “smoke” is undoubtedly just tobacco), “Soundtrack to a July Saturday Night,” “The Outsiders” (a quite good piece of material musically), and his closer, “I Was Gonna Die Young,” in which the singer expresses his surprise that he’s outlasted Hank Williams and Jesus (mentioned in that order, by the way). I really like Eric Church’s music but just wish he’d write songs about something else — and I was also amazed that, unlike a lot of other modern country stars (especially the men), he doesn’t insist on being the cutest person in his band: there’s a tall, stocky, heavily tattooed guitar player whom I thought was sexually hotter than the star!
Wednesday, July 5, 2017
Macy’s Fourth of July Fireworks Spectacular (NBC-TV, July 4, 2017)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
This year the Macy’s Fourth of July Fireworks Spectacular was scheduled for a full two hours — indeed, there was a listing in the Los Angeles Times TV section for another hour from 10 to 11 p.m. after the two-hour show from 8 to 10 — and it was on up against the PBS Capitol Fourth program from 8 to 9:30 p.m., with a repeat showing from 9:30 to 11. I chose to watch the first hour and a half of the Macy’s show (missing the actual fireworks but seeing all the performers) and then switch to PBS for the Capitol Fourth — Charles returned home from work at 10:30 and got to see the fireworks on TV at the end of the Capitol Fourth program. The Macy’s Fourth of July Fireworks Spectacular began with a preposterous performance by Jennifer Lopez, doing the silly “Jenny from the Block” song I’d already heard once before — ironically also on an NBC telecast (one of the Friday morning mini-concerts they show on the Today program at the end of the week), dressed in a weird outfit that showed off her (surprisingly thick) legs: she wore nothing below the waist except high-heeled platform shoes (which would seem to make it difficult to dance with her chorus boys, one of whom was clinging so closely to her it seemed like they’d have to scrape him off) and a preposterous codpiece that looked like something Wonder Woman would wear if she were having problems with incontinence.
Then came the song that I liked best of anything performed on the show, “Most Girls,” recorded by Hailee Steinfeld and written by her with Jeremy Dussolliet, Tim Sommers, Asia Whiteacre, Ryan Tedder and Zach Skelton (I guess these days it takes a village to write a song!). Hailee Steinfeld is one of these petite junior divas in the mold of Ariana Grande, singing in outfits that look like pajamas, but the song is not only infectious, it’s an anthem of feminist empowerment that basically tells young women that they can remake their bodies — or not — because inside they’re “smart and strong and beautiful/Most girls work hard, go far, we are unstoppable/Most girls, our fight to make every day, no two are the same/I wanna be like most girls.” Right on, Hailee Steinfeld; your song is an especially needed message in light of all the anti-women hatred in this country right now coming from the White House (with that bizarre image President Trump recently tweeted of Mika Brzezinski allegedly dripping blood from her plastic surgery all over the pristine precincts of Mar-a-Lago) and filtering down through society. The bulk of the Macy’s concert took place in New York but there were cut-ins from Camden, New Jersey, where Lady Antebellum were performing — they did a song called “You Look Good” that unfortunately featured their male lead singer, Charles Kelley (I like them better when frontwoman Hillary Scott sings lead). Their name still gives me the creeps (when I first heard of them I joked, “What are they going to call their album — Slavery Was Cool?”) but I like their music even though I’m not exactly battering down the doors of the world’s few remaining record stores to get their CD’s. Then came a reasonably talented country singer named Charlie Puth doing an O.K. tears-in-my-beer song called “We Don’t Talk Anymore,” and after that a better known country singer, Brad Paisley, did a song called “Today” posed in front of a lightboard that broadcast op-art patterns behind him that made it difficult to tell where he was. He was cut in from a concert date in Mountain View, California.
Then Sheryl Crow, the oldest performer on the program, did one of her early hits, “Soak Up the Sun,” which was better than anything I’d heard on the program other than the Hailee Steinfeld “Most Girls,” and after that the show cut back to New Jersey for Lady Antebellum singing something called (at least as best as I can make out my hastily scribbled notes) “Shake My Downtown.” Then Charlie Puth returned for another O.K. country piece, “Attention,” and the show cut back to Mountain View for a more visible Brad Paisley doing a nice piece called “Last Time for Everything.” Then they brought back Sheryl Crow for a quirky song called “If I Can’t Be Someone Else,” after which Hailee Steinfeld came back for a much less interesting song than “Most Girls,” something called “You Do Things to My Body,” a provocative song about lust but considerably less appealing than the feminist anthem she’d performed earlier. The show closed with Jennifer Lopez doing a song in Spanish — I think I caught the words “matador” and “picador” and assumed it was a song about bullfighting, perhaps using it as a metaphor for a troubled relationship. This time she was dressed in an even weirder outfit than the one she’d worn for “Jenny from the Block,” a black thing with a long drape that hung over her crotch so her legs would still be exposed (why so many women singers these days feel they have to dress like high-end hookers is beyond me). Lopez’s outfit made her look like a representation of an Egyptian goddess from a Valley of the Kings tomb-wall painting, but the song itself wasn’t bad at all — I suspect that she brings more passion and soul to her singing when she can do it in her native tongue than when she has to sing in English. Overall, the program was a pretty good précis of what’s happening in American pop music today — though the only flirtations with EDM and rap were in Lopez’s opening number — and the relative youth of the performers here (Sheryl Crow, who started out in the early 1990’s, was the oldest singer on the program) indicated the demographic NBC was going for when they booked this show.
This year the Macy’s Fourth of July Fireworks Spectacular was scheduled for a full two hours — indeed, there was a listing in the Los Angeles Times TV section for another hour from 10 to 11 p.m. after the two-hour show from 8 to 10 — and it was on up against the PBS Capitol Fourth program from 8 to 9:30 p.m., with a repeat showing from 9:30 to 11. I chose to watch the first hour and a half of the Macy’s show (missing the actual fireworks but seeing all the performers) and then switch to PBS for the Capitol Fourth — Charles returned home from work at 10:30 and got to see the fireworks on TV at the end of the Capitol Fourth program. The Macy’s Fourth of July Fireworks Spectacular began with a preposterous performance by Jennifer Lopez, doing the silly “Jenny from the Block” song I’d already heard once before — ironically also on an NBC telecast (one of the Friday morning mini-concerts they show on the Today program at the end of the week), dressed in a weird outfit that showed off her (surprisingly thick) legs: she wore nothing below the waist except high-heeled platform shoes (which would seem to make it difficult to dance with her chorus boys, one of whom was clinging so closely to her it seemed like they’d have to scrape him off) and a preposterous codpiece that looked like something Wonder Woman would wear if she were having problems with incontinence.
Then came the song that I liked best of anything performed on the show, “Most Girls,” recorded by Hailee Steinfeld and written by her with Jeremy Dussolliet, Tim Sommers, Asia Whiteacre, Ryan Tedder and Zach Skelton (I guess these days it takes a village to write a song!). Hailee Steinfeld is one of these petite junior divas in the mold of Ariana Grande, singing in outfits that look like pajamas, but the song is not only infectious, it’s an anthem of feminist empowerment that basically tells young women that they can remake their bodies — or not — because inside they’re “smart and strong and beautiful/Most girls work hard, go far, we are unstoppable/Most girls, our fight to make every day, no two are the same/I wanna be like most girls.” Right on, Hailee Steinfeld; your song is an especially needed message in light of all the anti-women hatred in this country right now coming from the White House (with that bizarre image President Trump recently tweeted of Mika Brzezinski allegedly dripping blood from her plastic surgery all over the pristine precincts of Mar-a-Lago) and filtering down through society. The bulk of the Macy’s concert took place in New York but there were cut-ins from Camden, New Jersey, where Lady Antebellum were performing — they did a song called “You Look Good” that unfortunately featured their male lead singer, Charles Kelley (I like them better when frontwoman Hillary Scott sings lead). Their name still gives me the creeps (when I first heard of them I joked, “What are they going to call their album — Slavery Was Cool?”) but I like their music even though I’m not exactly battering down the doors of the world’s few remaining record stores to get their CD’s. Then came a reasonably talented country singer named Charlie Puth doing an O.K. tears-in-my-beer song called “We Don’t Talk Anymore,” and after that a better known country singer, Brad Paisley, did a song called “Today” posed in front of a lightboard that broadcast op-art patterns behind him that made it difficult to tell where he was. He was cut in from a concert date in Mountain View, California.
Then Sheryl Crow, the oldest performer on the program, did one of her early hits, “Soak Up the Sun,” which was better than anything I’d heard on the program other than the Hailee Steinfeld “Most Girls,” and after that the show cut back to New Jersey for Lady Antebellum singing something called (at least as best as I can make out my hastily scribbled notes) “Shake My Downtown.” Then Charlie Puth returned for another O.K. country piece, “Attention,” and the show cut back to Mountain View for a more visible Brad Paisley doing a nice piece called “Last Time for Everything.” Then they brought back Sheryl Crow for a quirky song called “If I Can’t Be Someone Else,” after which Hailee Steinfeld came back for a much less interesting song than “Most Girls,” something called “You Do Things to My Body,” a provocative song about lust but considerably less appealing than the feminist anthem she’d performed earlier. The show closed with Jennifer Lopez doing a song in Spanish — I think I caught the words “matador” and “picador” and assumed it was a song about bullfighting, perhaps using it as a metaphor for a troubled relationship. This time she was dressed in an even weirder outfit than the one she’d worn for “Jenny from the Block,” a black thing with a long drape that hung over her crotch so her legs would still be exposed (why so many women singers these days feel they have to dress like high-end hookers is beyond me). Lopez’s outfit made her look like a representation of an Egyptian goddess from a Valley of the Kings tomb-wall painting, but the song itself wasn’t bad at all — I suspect that she brings more passion and soul to her singing when she can do it in her native tongue than when she has to sing in English. Overall, the program was a pretty good précis of what’s happening in American pop music today — though the only flirtations with EDM and rap were in Lopez’s opening number — and the relative youth of the performers here (Sheryl Crow, who started out in the early 1990’s, was the oldest singer on the program) indicated the demographic NBC was going for when they booked this show.
37th Annual A Capitol Fourth (Michael Colbert's Capitol Concerts/WETA/PBS, July 4, 2017)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
A half-hour before the end of the NBC Macy’s Fourth of July Fireworks Spectacular I switched to the 37th annual A Capitol Fourth on PBS — thereby missing the actual NBC fireworks but catching all the musical performers — and what was immediately apparent from watching the two shows back to back was how much older the PBS demographic is and how much they were trading in nostalgia. Not all the PBS program was older artists — there was an opening performance of “America, the Beautiful” by Chris Blue, the 2017 winner of the NBC singing contest show The Voice — though it seemed to me he was a high-voiced Black male singer with an uncanny resemblance, physically and vocally, to Johnny Mathis (close enough he’d be good casting for a Mathis biopic if anyone ever makes one) — and after an instrumental performance of John Philip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever” by Jack Everly conducting the National Symphony Orchestra (just the usual name for Washington, D.C.’s symphony), a woman named Sofia Carson came on to do “The Star-Spangled Banner” (and do it quite soulfully without overusing the “soul” tricks).
Then the oldies-but-goodies got trotted out: the Beach Boys (the rump version thereof with Mike Love, who ended up owning the name after all the legal tsuris between him and Brian Wilson, the only original member) did four songs, starting with “Surfin’ Safari” and then, to my astonishment, bringing out the show’s MC, John Stamos (an amateur drummer as well as an actor), and Mark McGrath from Sugar Ray (well, they needed someone who could sing Brian’s parts … ) for what Mike Love introduced as “our new single” but which turned out to be Brian’s great song “Do It Again,” the lead track from the 20/20 album in 1969, in which the Beach Boys were already milking their audience’s memories of “the sun-tanned bodies, the California girls and the beautiful coastline” as elements of a bygone style they were already retrospecting about. Then they did “Help Me, Rhonda” and “Surfin’ U.S.A.” — I was a bit disappointed that in introducing the latter they did not pay tribute to the recently deceased Chuck Berry, from whom the Beach Boys originally ripped off the melody (when Chuck Berry did it, it was called “Sweet Little Sixteen” and it’s one of his greatest songs); Berry and his publishing company, Arc Music (a subsidiary of his record label, Chess) sued and got his name on the songwriting credits as co-composer: on my notes, after the title “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” I wrote, “R.I.P. C.E.A.B.”). At least the current Beach Boys have one of the original lead singers; they were followed by a rump edition of the Four Tops with one guy at the end who looks old enough to have been in the original group — but their lead singer, Levi Stubbs, died in 2008 and without him the alleged “Four Tops” simply don’t sound the same. Ironically, their current lead singer is a young, attractive African-American with a nicer voice than Stubbs’, but without the Levi Stubbs growl in front the rump “Four Tops” are hardly going to sound like the originals. (Motown did the same trick with The Temptations, billing a rump group that had one of the original five, backup singer Otis Williams, long after the original lead singers, Eddie Kendricks and David Ruffin, had passed.) The alleged “Four Tops” did a medley of the original Four Tops’ hits — “Baby, I Need Your Lovin’,” “Bernadette,” “Reach Out (I’ll Be There),” “It’s the Same Old Song” and “I Can’t Help Myself,” also known as “Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch” (the latter was the title used by Jimi Hendrix when he covered it with singer Curtis Knight in his pre-Experience days).
Then came a Broadway star named Laura Osnes who supposedly starred as Ensign Nellie Forbush in the recent revival of South Pacific — apparently the first time the stage version had been revived on Broadway since the original production with Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza — though it’s hard to imagine her rather lightweight voice making it at Martin’s level. (Julie Andrews, cast as Maria von Trapp in the film of The Sound of Music — a role Martin had “created” on stage — was superb, grabbing hold of the part and making it her own, but no one else I know of has managed to surpass Martin in one of her signature roles.) Osnes did a self-consciously “patriotic” medley from her current show, Bandstand (not a bio-musical about Dick Clark, as I would have imagined, but about a group of World War II veterans who form a band once they’re mustered out of the service at the end of the war), including a rather silly song called “I Want to Hear a Yankee Doodle Tune” coupled with two genuinely good slices of patriotic Broadway, the George M. Cohan classics “Yankee Doodle Boy” (though she didn’t sing that one: her male chorus line just danced to it as an instrumental) and “You’re a Grand Old Flag” (which, fortunately, she did sing). The next singer was country star Trace Adkins, who seemed unable to decide whether he wanted to be the sort of country crooner Eddy Arnold and Hank Snow were in the 1950’s or emulate the rougher, craggier voice of Johnny Cash that knocked them off the top of the country charts in the late 1950’s, but his song “Still a Soldier” — about a veteran leaving a not particularly interesting life but still remembering his years of service and the love for his country that led him to serve in the first place — is quite beautiful and moving.
Then came one of the highlights of the show: modern-day gospel star Yolanda Adams with Patrick Lundy and the Ministers of Music giving the full gospel treatment to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” For sheer emotion and commitment Adams made mincemeat of just about everyone else on the program, though she might have had some competition from the next act, Kellie Pickler. Alas, Kellie got sick overnight and had to miss the concert, so they showed two songs she’d taped at the dress rehearsal the night before, “Small Town Girl” and a superb cover of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” — alas, she only did the “safe” verses, but she sang with such intensity and feeling I suspect she could do justice to the subversive ones. Then the National Symphony Orchestra did a Star Wars medley, with C-3PO and R2-D2 in attendance, and after that Charles arrived just in time to hear the Blues Brothers introduced (more nostalgia!). “You mean Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi are going to sing together?” he said incredulously. “No,” I said, “Dan Aykroyd and James Belushi are going to sing together.” The substitution of James Belushi for his long-deceased brother John worked considerably better than the substitution of whoever that nice-voiced Black singer was for Levi Stubbs, though that was probably because neither Belushi ever had much of a voice (though I remember the Saturday Night Live program on which the real Joe Cocker was followed by John Belushi doing his Joe Cocker impersonation on the same song — and Cocker’s voice had so thoroughly self-destructed by then John Belushi actually out-sang him!), and they cranked their way through Solomon Burke’s “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love” and “Land of 1,000 Dances” — originally a piece of laid-back funk by New Orleanian Chris Kenner until Wilson Pickett grabbed hold of it and turned it into a piece of scorching soul. Then one veteran who is still alive, Sam Moore of Sam and Dave, joined the Blues Brothers for “Soul Man,” and while he was under-miked and his voice wasn’t what it used to be anyway, he was still great and left those two pathetic white boys in the dust.
Then it was time for the fireworks — literally — accompanied by the National Symphony Orchestra cranking out the usual patriotic classics, including the last four minutes of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture (Charles kvetched that it’s a piece celebrating the victory of an autocratic government, though since the nation they won the war against also had an autocratic government — the Czar’s Russia versus Napoleon’s France — that didn’t particularly bother me), Laura Osnes getting trotted out again for something called “This Is My Country,” Trace Adkins doing “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” (and doing three full verses of it, which was nice), Yolanda Adams doing “God Bless America” (alas, she did not include the rarely performed verse that begins, “While the storm clouds gather”) and the orchestra taking out the program with Sousa’s greatest hits, “Stars and Stripes Forever,” the “Washington Post March” (Charles asked me if I could think of any other song that paid tribute to a periodical, and I couldn’t think of one offhand) and “Semper Fidelis” as the credits rolled. The show was reliable fun, and despite the “rump” aspects of their lineups the Beach Boys and the Four Tops were more than that, while Yolanda Adams was “killer” and the rest of the acts were serviceable — and of course the fireworks were spectacular, especially outlined against the Washington Monument, whose rather odd symbolism (paying tribute to the Father of the United States of America, a democratic republic, with a shape originally cooked up in ancient Egypt as a tribute to absolute monarchs!) both literally and figuratively loomed over the proceedings.
A half-hour before the end of the NBC Macy’s Fourth of July Fireworks Spectacular I switched to the 37th annual A Capitol Fourth on PBS — thereby missing the actual NBC fireworks but catching all the musical performers — and what was immediately apparent from watching the two shows back to back was how much older the PBS demographic is and how much they were trading in nostalgia. Not all the PBS program was older artists — there was an opening performance of “America, the Beautiful” by Chris Blue, the 2017 winner of the NBC singing contest show The Voice — though it seemed to me he was a high-voiced Black male singer with an uncanny resemblance, physically and vocally, to Johnny Mathis (close enough he’d be good casting for a Mathis biopic if anyone ever makes one) — and after an instrumental performance of John Philip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever” by Jack Everly conducting the National Symphony Orchestra (just the usual name for Washington, D.C.’s symphony), a woman named Sofia Carson came on to do “The Star-Spangled Banner” (and do it quite soulfully without overusing the “soul” tricks).
Then the oldies-but-goodies got trotted out: the Beach Boys (the rump version thereof with Mike Love, who ended up owning the name after all the legal tsuris between him and Brian Wilson, the only original member) did four songs, starting with “Surfin’ Safari” and then, to my astonishment, bringing out the show’s MC, John Stamos (an amateur drummer as well as an actor), and Mark McGrath from Sugar Ray (well, they needed someone who could sing Brian’s parts … ) for what Mike Love introduced as “our new single” but which turned out to be Brian’s great song “Do It Again,” the lead track from the 20/20 album in 1969, in which the Beach Boys were already milking their audience’s memories of “the sun-tanned bodies, the California girls and the beautiful coastline” as elements of a bygone style they were already retrospecting about. Then they did “Help Me, Rhonda” and “Surfin’ U.S.A.” — I was a bit disappointed that in introducing the latter they did not pay tribute to the recently deceased Chuck Berry, from whom the Beach Boys originally ripped off the melody (when Chuck Berry did it, it was called “Sweet Little Sixteen” and it’s one of his greatest songs); Berry and his publishing company, Arc Music (a subsidiary of his record label, Chess) sued and got his name on the songwriting credits as co-composer: on my notes, after the title “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” I wrote, “R.I.P. C.E.A.B.”). At least the current Beach Boys have one of the original lead singers; they were followed by a rump edition of the Four Tops with one guy at the end who looks old enough to have been in the original group — but their lead singer, Levi Stubbs, died in 2008 and without him the alleged “Four Tops” simply don’t sound the same. Ironically, their current lead singer is a young, attractive African-American with a nicer voice than Stubbs’, but without the Levi Stubbs growl in front the rump “Four Tops” are hardly going to sound like the originals. (Motown did the same trick with The Temptations, billing a rump group that had one of the original five, backup singer Otis Williams, long after the original lead singers, Eddie Kendricks and David Ruffin, had passed.) The alleged “Four Tops” did a medley of the original Four Tops’ hits — “Baby, I Need Your Lovin’,” “Bernadette,” “Reach Out (I’ll Be There),” “It’s the Same Old Song” and “I Can’t Help Myself,” also known as “Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch” (the latter was the title used by Jimi Hendrix when he covered it with singer Curtis Knight in his pre-Experience days).
Then came a Broadway star named Laura Osnes who supposedly starred as Ensign Nellie Forbush in the recent revival of South Pacific — apparently the first time the stage version had been revived on Broadway since the original production with Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza — though it’s hard to imagine her rather lightweight voice making it at Martin’s level. (Julie Andrews, cast as Maria von Trapp in the film of The Sound of Music — a role Martin had “created” on stage — was superb, grabbing hold of the part and making it her own, but no one else I know of has managed to surpass Martin in one of her signature roles.) Osnes did a self-consciously “patriotic” medley from her current show, Bandstand (not a bio-musical about Dick Clark, as I would have imagined, but about a group of World War II veterans who form a band once they’re mustered out of the service at the end of the war), including a rather silly song called “I Want to Hear a Yankee Doodle Tune” coupled with two genuinely good slices of patriotic Broadway, the George M. Cohan classics “Yankee Doodle Boy” (though she didn’t sing that one: her male chorus line just danced to it as an instrumental) and “You’re a Grand Old Flag” (which, fortunately, she did sing). The next singer was country star Trace Adkins, who seemed unable to decide whether he wanted to be the sort of country crooner Eddy Arnold and Hank Snow were in the 1950’s or emulate the rougher, craggier voice of Johnny Cash that knocked them off the top of the country charts in the late 1950’s, but his song “Still a Soldier” — about a veteran leaving a not particularly interesting life but still remembering his years of service and the love for his country that led him to serve in the first place — is quite beautiful and moving.
Then came one of the highlights of the show: modern-day gospel star Yolanda Adams with Patrick Lundy and the Ministers of Music giving the full gospel treatment to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” For sheer emotion and commitment Adams made mincemeat of just about everyone else on the program, though she might have had some competition from the next act, Kellie Pickler. Alas, Kellie got sick overnight and had to miss the concert, so they showed two songs she’d taped at the dress rehearsal the night before, “Small Town Girl” and a superb cover of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” — alas, she only did the “safe” verses, but she sang with such intensity and feeling I suspect she could do justice to the subversive ones. Then the National Symphony Orchestra did a Star Wars medley, with C-3PO and R2-D2 in attendance, and after that Charles arrived just in time to hear the Blues Brothers introduced (more nostalgia!). “You mean Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi are going to sing together?” he said incredulously. “No,” I said, “Dan Aykroyd and James Belushi are going to sing together.” The substitution of James Belushi for his long-deceased brother John worked considerably better than the substitution of whoever that nice-voiced Black singer was for Levi Stubbs, though that was probably because neither Belushi ever had much of a voice (though I remember the Saturday Night Live program on which the real Joe Cocker was followed by John Belushi doing his Joe Cocker impersonation on the same song — and Cocker’s voice had so thoroughly self-destructed by then John Belushi actually out-sang him!), and they cranked their way through Solomon Burke’s “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love” and “Land of 1,000 Dances” — originally a piece of laid-back funk by New Orleanian Chris Kenner until Wilson Pickett grabbed hold of it and turned it into a piece of scorching soul. Then one veteran who is still alive, Sam Moore of Sam and Dave, joined the Blues Brothers for “Soul Man,” and while he was under-miked and his voice wasn’t what it used to be anyway, he was still great and left those two pathetic white boys in the dust.
Then it was time for the fireworks — literally — accompanied by the National Symphony Orchestra cranking out the usual patriotic classics, including the last four minutes of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture (Charles kvetched that it’s a piece celebrating the victory of an autocratic government, though since the nation they won the war against also had an autocratic government — the Czar’s Russia versus Napoleon’s France — that didn’t particularly bother me), Laura Osnes getting trotted out again for something called “This Is My Country,” Trace Adkins doing “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” (and doing three full verses of it, which was nice), Yolanda Adams doing “God Bless America” (alas, she did not include the rarely performed verse that begins, “While the storm clouds gather”) and the orchestra taking out the program with Sousa’s greatest hits, “Stars and Stripes Forever,” the “Washington Post March” (Charles asked me if I could think of any other song that paid tribute to a periodical, and I couldn’t think of one offhand) and “Semper Fidelis” as the credits rolled. The show was reliable fun, and despite the “rump” aspects of their lineups the Beach Boys and the Four Tops were more than that, while Yolanda Adams was “killer” and the rest of the acts were serviceable — and of course the fireworks were spectacular, especially outlined against the Washington Monument, whose rather odd symbolism (paying tribute to the Father of the United States of America, a democratic republic, with a shape originally cooked up in ancient Egypt as a tribute to absolute monarchs!) both literally and figuratively loomed over the proceedings.
Monday, July 3, 2017
The Wrong Crush (Hybrid LLC/LIfetime, 2017)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
My “feature” last night was one of the very best movies I’ve ever seen on Lifetime: The Wrong Crush. The omens for this one weren’t good: it was another production of the folks at Hybrid LLC, who’ve also given us “Wrong _____” series films like The Wrong House and The Wrong Roommate (which, like The Wrong Crush, was directed by David DeCoteau from a script by Matthew Jason Walsh, though the original story for The Wrong Crush came from co-producers Jeffrey Schenck and Peter Sullivan, who also wrote the original story for the recently aired and unimpressive The Wrong House), and the plot line followed familiar Lifetime clichés. The central character is a teenage girl named Amelia Cross (Victoria Konefal), who in the opening scene is shown on a hospital gurney being wheeled into an operating room for emergency surgery following a car accident. Just before they put her under she babbles incoherently about a friend named Joy who was in the car with her when it crashed, and the hospital workers’ silence about Joy’s fate let both Amelia and us know that she was killed in the crash. Then there’s a chyron title reading, “Two Years Later” — itself a surprise because usually these days Lifetime movies begin with the climactic crisis and the chyron title thereafter announces that the film is flashing us back to a time days, weeks or months earlier — and it turns out that two years later Amelia has re-established herself at the local high school. In a series of flashbacks intercut with the main action we realize that Amelia had a serious problem with alcoholism and drug abuse, to the point where she not only continually lied to her mom Tracy (a nicely hard-edged performance by Lesli Kay) but once actually assaulted mom with a bottle. Joy’s death shocked Amelia into getting clean and sober, and she hasn’t either drunk or took drugs in two years, but the cold war between mother and daughter has continued to such a level that Tracy regularly works double shifts at the nursing home that employs her rather than have to confront her daughter at home. Amelia is dating a young man named Scott Bradley (played by an actor named Pedro Correa, though he’s sandy-haired and light-skinned and doesn’t look at all Latino, as his name would suggest) who’s on the high school football team — Amelia herself is the school’s track star and has run the 400-meter dash with a time just four seconds off the world’s record for women — and he’s also in a band, which naturally makes Amelia’s mom Tracy suspicious that he’s doing drugs himself and will lead her back to that lifestyle.
One day Amelia and her friend Lauren (Natalie Haro) meet a hot new guy on campus, Jake Jarrico (Ricardo Hoyos); Lauren immediately has the hots for him but he’s only interested in cruising Amelia, who begs off on the ground that she already has a boyfriend. Amelia is still being haunted by her guilt feelings over Joy’s death — and she’s also being hounded by Joy’s parents (Jon Briddell and Meredith Thomas), who show up at her track practice and angrily chew her out, saying that they intend to do everything in their power to make her life miserable and keep her from getting the college track scholarship she’s counting on because they blame her for Joy’s death and will never forgive her. It turns out that Joy died because she and Amelia went out one night in Joy’s mother’s car, both drunk and stoned to the proverbial gills, and they made a dare that each would drive at night for 15 minutes without the car’s headlights on. Joy went first and drove the car off the road into a ravine — Amelia, on the passenger’s side, lucked out because her window was open and she was thrown clear, but Joy was killed in the ensuing crash. Amelia was given probation because she was still a juvenile, but it was made clear to her that she would do jail time if she were ever caught drinking or using drugs again. In the present, Amelia goes for long jogs, not only to keep her running skills up but because running is the only thing she can do that gives her peace, and she’s torn between Scott’s increasing suspicions of her and Jake’s creepily unwelcome attentions. The plot turns when Jake breaks into Scott’s locker and plants a large quantity of steroid pills therein, then calls in a tip to the school, leading to Scott’s suspension and pending charges against him for dealing drugs. Amelia is also caught up in the investigation because one of the things the school authorities and the cops suspect was that Scott was slipping her steroids to boost her performance on the track.
Then we get a cut-in scene in which Jake is shown inside an SUV being driven by Joy’s father, and it turns out Jake isn’t a high school student at all, but a 20-year-old private investigator Joy’s father hired to get Amelia in trouble and get her probation revoked. In a scene that wasn’t nearly as surprising as the writers intended it to be because it was used in the trailer, Jake tells Joy’s father as they’re sitting in the car together, “We’re both obsessed with her, but I’m the only one who’s willing to kill for her” — and then he fatally stabs Joy’s dad and leaves him in the car to die. It seems that Jake bailed on the plot because he fell genuinely in love — or at least the twisted version thereof most good-looking guys on Lifetime feel towards the movies’ heroines — with Amelia, and determined to eliminate the competition. Amelia agrees to take Jake jogging on her preferred route, which goes by the site of Joy’s death, only Jake makes a crude pass at her, she turns him down, and he says, “You’ll be sorry.” Since Amelia isn’t old enough to have a child of her own Jake can kidnap for the obligatory climax, Jake kidnaps Scott and demands that Amelia join him at the site of Joy’s crash, where he will release Scott if Amelia agrees to run off with Jake. Amelia’s mom figures out what’s going on and uses the tracer app she previously installed on Amelia’s cell phone to find her, then goes out there with Joy’s mom (who seems to have been convinced by her husband’s death pursuing a plot against Amelia she’d tried to talk him out of that continuing her vendetta against Amelia is a bad idea and will only prolong her grief, not resolve it), confronts Jake and surprises him by bashing his head in with a rock, assaulting him twice and knocking him down the hill so he dies from the fall about where Joy’s car went off the road.
In summary, this doesn’t sound different from the plots for a hundred other Lifetime movies, but where The Wrong Crush scores is in the peculiar emotional intensity of Matthew Jason Walsh’s dialogue and the multidimensionality he brings to the characters (something we’re not used to seeing in Lifetime movies, especially ones Christine Conradt didn’t write). The scene between Amelia and her mom Tracy in which Scott’s arrest on a set-up charge of drug possession with intent to sell convinces Tracy that Amelia has relapsed and is drinking and/or using again is particularly intense; one understands where both the characters are coming from and also gets a sense of tragedy that try as she might to be good and competent, Amelia can’t escape her past or the damage she did during it. The characters are drawn as real people, not stick figures in a Lifetime thriller: Amelia is someone we’re obviously supposed to like, and yet we get a sense of the tortured past she led and how it’s come back to haunt her in the present, and just how flimsy her “recovery” is and how hard she continually has to work at it. (I’ve talked with people in 12-step programs and got the impression that the way the 12-step system constantly forces you to dwell on your substance-abusing past makes you feel like you’re still an addict even if you’re currently clean and sober.)
Scott seems like a decent boy but also a wretchedly unsupportive one, “reading” Amelia’s confusion about their relationship as rejection and outright accusing her of cheating on him. Jake is a quirky character who’s several cuts above Lifetime’s usual villains: he’s got his own tumbled past (he was thrown out of military school for beating up on his fellow students, though he made up a cock-and-bull story about being responsible for the death of his brother that got him into the support group Amelia was obliged under her probation terms to attend) and he becomes a real flesh-and-blood character in his yearnings, even though he’s also despicable — though Schenck, Sullivan, Walsh and DeCoteau pull the old trick of making us not feel too bad about him committing murder because the person he killed was a bastard whom we don’t feel all that sorry to see go. (If anything, we feel for Joy’s mother first for having lost her daughter, then for her husband hatching this crazy scheme against Amelia she tried to talk him out of, and finally for her losing her husband when his co-conspirator kills him.) The Wrong Crush builds a peculiar level of emotional intensity rare for a Lifetime movie — indeed, rare for any sort of movie in this weird age in which film directors and writers seem to want us to observe the characters as if they were lab rats and not get too emotionally connected with any of them — and manages to be both entertaining and deeply moving in a way that embraces the Lifetime clichés and yet transcends them.
My “feature” last night was one of the very best movies I’ve ever seen on Lifetime: The Wrong Crush. The omens for this one weren’t good: it was another production of the folks at Hybrid LLC, who’ve also given us “Wrong _____” series films like The Wrong House and The Wrong Roommate (which, like The Wrong Crush, was directed by David DeCoteau from a script by Matthew Jason Walsh, though the original story for The Wrong Crush came from co-producers Jeffrey Schenck and Peter Sullivan, who also wrote the original story for the recently aired and unimpressive The Wrong House), and the plot line followed familiar Lifetime clichés. The central character is a teenage girl named Amelia Cross (Victoria Konefal), who in the opening scene is shown on a hospital gurney being wheeled into an operating room for emergency surgery following a car accident. Just before they put her under she babbles incoherently about a friend named Joy who was in the car with her when it crashed, and the hospital workers’ silence about Joy’s fate let both Amelia and us know that she was killed in the crash. Then there’s a chyron title reading, “Two Years Later” — itself a surprise because usually these days Lifetime movies begin with the climactic crisis and the chyron title thereafter announces that the film is flashing us back to a time days, weeks or months earlier — and it turns out that two years later Amelia has re-established herself at the local high school. In a series of flashbacks intercut with the main action we realize that Amelia had a serious problem with alcoholism and drug abuse, to the point where she not only continually lied to her mom Tracy (a nicely hard-edged performance by Lesli Kay) but once actually assaulted mom with a bottle. Joy’s death shocked Amelia into getting clean and sober, and she hasn’t either drunk or took drugs in two years, but the cold war between mother and daughter has continued to such a level that Tracy regularly works double shifts at the nursing home that employs her rather than have to confront her daughter at home. Amelia is dating a young man named Scott Bradley (played by an actor named Pedro Correa, though he’s sandy-haired and light-skinned and doesn’t look at all Latino, as his name would suggest) who’s on the high school football team — Amelia herself is the school’s track star and has run the 400-meter dash with a time just four seconds off the world’s record for women — and he’s also in a band, which naturally makes Amelia’s mom Tracy suspicious that he’s doing drugs himself and will lead her back to that lifestyle.
One day Amelia and her friend Lauren (Natalie Haro) meet a hot new guy on campus, Jake Jarrico (Ricardo Hoyos); Lauren immediately has the hots for him but he’s only interested in cruising Amelia, who begs off on the ground that she already has a boyfriend. Amelia is still being haunted by her guilt feelings over Joy’s death — and she’s also being hounded by Joy’s parents (Jon Briddell and Meredith Thomas), who show up at her track practice and angrily chew her out, saying that they intend to do everything in their power to make her life miserable and keep her from getting the college track scholarship she’s counting on because they blame her for Joy’s death and will never forgive her. It turns out that Joy died because she and Amelia went out one night in Joy’s mother’s car, both drunk and stoned to the proverbial gills, and they made a dare that each would drive at night for 15 minutes without the car’s headlights on. Joy went first and drove the car off the road into a ravine — Amelia, on the passenger’s side, lucked out because her window was open and she was thrown clear, but Joy was killed in the ensuing crash. Amelia was given probation because she was still a juvenile, but it was made clear to her that she would do jail time if she were ever caught drinking or using drugs again. In the present, Amelia goes for long jogs, not only to keep her running skills up but because running is the only thing she can do that gives her peace, and she’s torn between Scott’s increasing suspicions of her and Jake’s creepily unwelcome attentions. The plot turns when Jake breaks into Scott’s locker and plants a large quantity of steroid pills therein, then calls in a tip to the school, leading to Scott’s suspension and pending charges against him for dealing drugs. Amelia is also caught up in the investigation because one of the things the school authorities and the cops suspect was that Scott was slipping her steroids to boost her performance on the track.
Then we get a cut-in scene in which Jake is shown inside an SUV being driven by Joy’s father, and it turns out Jake isn’t a high school student at all, but a 20-year-old private investigator Joy’s father hired to get Amelia in trouble and get her probation revoked. In a scene that wasn’t nearly as surprising as the writers intended it to be because it was used in the trailer, Jake tells Joy’s father as they’re sitting in the car together, “We’re both obsessed with her, but I’m the only one who’s willing to kill for her” — and then he fatally stabs Joy’s dad and leaves him in the car to die. It seems that Jake bailed on the plot because he fell genuinely in love — or at least the twisted version thereof most good-looking guys on Lifetime feel towards the movies’ heroines — with Amelia, and determined to eliminate the competition. Amelia agrees to take Jake jogging on her preferred route, which goes by the site of Joy’s death, only Jake makes a crude pass at her, she turns him down, and he says, “You’ll be sorry.” Since Amelia isn’t old enough to have a child of her own Jake can kidnap for the obligatory climax, Jake kidnaps Scott and demands that Amelia join him at the site of Joy’s crash, where he will release Scott if Amelia agrees to run off with Jake. Amelia’s mom figures out what’s going on and uses the tracer app she previously installed on Amelia’s cell phone to find her, then goes out there with Joy’s mom (who seems to have been convinced by her husband’s death pursuing a plot against Amelia she’d tried to talk him out of that continuing her vendetta against Amelia is a bad idea and will only prolong her grief, not resolve it), confronts Jake and surprises him by bashing his head in with a rock, assaulting him twice and knocking him down the hill so he dies from the fall about where Joy’s car went off the road.
In summary, this doesn’t sound different from the plots for a hundred other Lifetime movies, but where The Wrong Crush scores is in the peculiar emotional intensity of Matthew Jason Walsh’s dialogue and the multidimensionality he brings to the characters (something we’re not used to seeing in Lifetime movies, especially ones Christine Conradt didn’t write). The scene between Amelia and her mom Tracy in which Scott’s arrest on a set-up charge of drug possession with intent to sell convinces Tracy that Amelia has relapsed and is drinking and/or using again is particularly intense; one understands where both the characters are coming from and also gets a sense of tragedy that try as she might to be good and competent, Amelia can’t escape her past or the damage she did during it. The characters are drawn as real people, not stick figures in a Lifetime thriller: Amelia is someone we’re obviously supposed to like, and yet we get a sense of the tortured past she led and how it’s come back to haunt her in the present, and just how flimsy her “recovery” is and how hard she continually has to work at it. (I’ve talked with people in 12-step programs and got the impression that the way the 12-step system constantly forces you to dwell on your substance-abusing past makes you feel like you’re still an addict even if you’re currently clean and sober.)
Scott seems like a decent boy but also a wretchedly unsupportive one, “reading” Amelia’s confusion about their relationship as rejection and outright accusing her of cheating on him. Jake is a quirky character who’s several cuts above Lifetime’s usual villains: he’s got his own tumbled past (he was thrown out of military school for beating up on his fellow students, though he made up a cock-and-bull story about being responsible for the death of his brother that got him into the support group Amelia was obliged under her probation terms to attend) and he becomes a real flesh-and-blood character in his yearnings, even though he’s also despicable — though Schenck, Sullivan, Walsh and DeCoteau pull the old trick of making us not feel too bad about him committing murder because the person he killed was a bastard whom we don’t feel all that sorry to see go. (If anything, we feel for Joy’s mother first for having lost her daughter, then for her husband hatching this crazy scheme against Amelia she tried to talk him out of, and finally for her losing her husband when his co-conspirator kills him.) The Wrong Crush builds a peculiar level of emotional intensity rare for a Lifetime movie — indeed, rare for any sort of movie in this weird age in which film directors and writers seem to want us to observe the characters as if they were lab rats and not get too emotionally connected with any of them — and manages to be both entertaining and deeply moving in a way that embraces the Lifetime clichés and yet transcends them.
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