I know, I know, the Beatles were better at the music, the Beach Boys were better at major sevenths, Chuck Berry was better at the lyrics, and Little Richard was better at falsetto. Carl Perkins was better at being down-home, Billy Lee Riley was better at crazed-cat rockabilly, Buddy Holly was better at bringing pop into his rock, and Bo Diddley had a better beat. Even among the Sun Records cats, Johnny Cash did more drugs, and Jerry Lee Lewis was more dangerous.
But Elvis was an amazing performer–the biggest shining personality of the fifties–with all the moves, lots of style, great looks, and a wild personality. The fact that he had bad management, mental problems, and an addiction to food and drugs shouldn’t tarnish that amongst modern myth-makers who tend to prefer the Bolans and Joneses to this man.
I mean, fuck, Elvis sang better than Frank Sinatra. Last night, to celebrate Elvis’ 74th birthday, my gal TiVo’d Fun in Acapulco. Goddam, could that boy sing! Listen to this shit!
Fuck all contenders! This man is the KING! F U C K !!!
Today’s re-discovery of the space-light phantasma-echo of Tycho Brahe’s supernova (originally discovered in 1572) has sent me into a whirlwind of post-mortem mania over Tycho’s total awesomeness! This is the Renaissance man for me!
Not only did he use meticulous observation (without a telescope) to determine that the stars were not fixed to celestial spheres and that the planets (aside from noble Earth, which he and the church never relinquished) seemed to revolve around the Sun, but he also hired a clairvoyant dwarf named “Jepp” to hang out under his table at parties, and had a tame elk as a pet (who died of a drink-related accident!). He also lost his nose in a drunken duel (his exumed body had green stains around the nose, suggesting he wore a copper replacement), and may even have been killed by Johannes Kepler, because his measurements of the stars were that fucking accurate.
And I haven’t even gotten to the Bob Dylan part yet! “Tycho’s Supernova” directly inspired the Edgar Allen Poe poem “Al Aaraaf,” which inspired Dylan’s 1966 poem-novel “Tarantula.” This same Supernova also likely inspired Shakespeare’s Hamlet (though hopefully had no impact on the band Oasis).
More importantly, the insight Tycho gleaned from his supernova informed all of modern astronomy, from Galileo’s elimination of the celestial spheres in the heliocentric model (though Tycho’s was geo-heliocentric, he was the first to give up the spheres!) to the Chinese calendar–it was the church-sanctioned Tychonic view of the heavens that Jesuits took to China in time for the Ming dynasty to enjoy it before they croaked. And of course, whether or not there was a murder, Tycho’s measurements inspired his sucessor Kepler to complete his work on the movements of celestial bodies.
Perhaps what I find most interesting though, aside perhaps from the drunken elk, is that when I was learning this stuff in school, they made it seem like there was a logical evolution from Ptolemy all the way to Galileo, and that Galileo’s theory of a heliocentric universe with no celestial spheres was the final vision in the evolution of astronomical thought until like Newton. Turns out that actually, Tycho’s vision had pretty long legs–the Tychonic vision of the universe was probably the preeminent one until it was finally disproved in 1729:
The tenacious longevity of the Tychonic model into the late 17th century and even the early 18th century was attested by Ignace Pardies who declared in 1691 that it was still the commonly accepted system and by Francesco Blanchinus who said it was still such in 1728.
Pretty nifty, I think, for a dude whose home life sounds a bit like Einstein-meets-Caligula, with a touch of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang!
This is a fantastic film, one of my faves, an adaptation of The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, the Peter Weiss play that provided Arthur Lee of Love for some of the lyrics for “The Red Telephone,” as you can see in this clip:
In particular, notice how hot Glenda Jackson looks as a narcoleptic thespian assassin! And Patrick Magee, the “Try the WINE!” dude from A Clockwork Orange, is particularly effective as a detached and mischievous Marquis de Sade, who watches over the inmates of this asylum as they put on his play about the assassination of French Revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat. And it’s a musical, no less, done almost purely as a stage-play on one set (in what seems to be the asylum’s bath-chamber) with the moviegoer sitting right next to the audience in the asylum itself! Goddam, it’s good.
This isn’t so much a blog as an endorsement. Go see this film, or you’re scum!
One of the many, many, many films I saw while sick for a week was Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, AKA The Young Girls of Rochefort, a highly colorful French musical choreographed by Gene Kelly and starring Catherine Deneuve and her sister Françoise Dorléac, who play fraternal twins trying to find love and a ride to Paris over the course of two days in a small seaside French tourist town.
For me, watching the movie the first time was fun, but a little arduous. The songs never stopped, allowing only one or two lines of dialogue to separate one song and dance number from the next. And though filmed in an actual city square and other on-location sites, it felt a bit like a stage play, with lots and lots of lighthearted dancing and singing in one general spot, and all the characters color-coordinated in bright pastel colored shirts and dresses.
But it was an investment well made, since after the movie was over, I actually found myself turning it back on and watching it over again! The songs are so fast-paced and jazzy that you don’t realize how catchy they are until you find them burrowing giant wormholes in your brain later. It’s a “light-hearted romp” for sure, not a Cabaret or West Side Story, but you find yourself longing to be there, to be a part of the spectacle and the fun.
And let’s not forget that the performances by Deneuve and her sister will hypnotize the shit out of you. This one here was stuck in my brain for an hour last night as I tried to sleep:
P.S. Kudos to my gal-pal for finding this on DirecTV! And kudos to Michel Legrand for composing the songs!
UPDATE: I found a fascinating review on Salon, written ten years ago, when this thing was remastered/revamped/re-released on DVD. The author is Stephanie Zacharek, and she points out far better than I did (but hey, I was sick!) how balls-out amazing the color is, as well as Gene Kelly’s performance at the age of, gulp, 55! I don’t look that good now, at half his age.
Cabaret is one of the best musicals ever made–and that’s saying a lot, even coming from me. The Seventies were notoriously tough on old Hollywood methods of movie-making (as Paint YourWagon can attest), and unsentimental realism became the hallmark of the day. So, how to make realism out of a genre that specifically calls for your characters to drop out of normal conversation and croon their dialogue? Set your film in Weimar-era Berlin, and have your lead sing in a cabaret that pokes fun at the joys and perils during the tide before the Nazi storm.
Of course, I know that the musical was a stage-play before it was a film, but Bob Fosse (as always) did a great job of adapting it to the tough, gritty world of Seventies cinema. Gritty, and yet still very camp–but whereas an earlier Fosse musical, Sweet Charity, was a campy look at a gritty sexual lifestyle (and even then toned down from its source material, Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria), Cabaret goes further.
Some of the fun of the film comes with the tawdriness that seems silly yet sexually liberating on stage (“Two Ladies” comes to mind). Joel Grey as the “Master of Ceremonies” wears ambiguous make-up, appearing sometimes in drag as a put-on (think Bugs Bunny with a mop on his head). Yet his sinister leering and groping in quick jump-cuts behind the stage, sometimes interspersed with scenes of early Nazi street-thug violence, lets you know that all vice reaps its just reward, and everyone there will pay the piper very soon.
Perhaps the most diabolic part of the movie, though, comes not in the dank cabaret but in a bierhaus in a golden field, when an angelic cherub starts singing. Capturing the rise of Nazism better than most historical dramas, Fosse illuminates us when his Hitler Youth leads his call to arms, a chant about taking the future for a better tomorrow. It’s a real battle hymn of the reich, and when his sonorous angel voice is suddenly joined by an ever-growing chorus of voices young and old, some adamant, some proud, some angry, you know it’s the beginning of a terrible juggernaut of destruction.
It’s horrifying and grim, yet the movie motors it way back to the relationship between two people caught unaware and unable to change much of anything in the world around them–a nightclub dancer and an English Tutor. She’s promiscuous, he’s unsure of himself sexually, but when we find out Michael York’s character has shagged a Baron–well, that’s the gayest thing to ever hit cinema since The Boys In the Band. And yet it all falls apart into confusion, pregnancy,and regrets, it picks you up and reminds you that life is a game, and at it’s worst, sometimes you just gotta rail against the darkness and say “fuck it, I’ll be the grandest flop ever to wallow in obscurity!” Like at the end of The Seventh Seal, sometimes you just have to stand up to death, eyes wide, and bask in your aliveness.
Anyway, somewhere in the midst of all the Nazi imagery and decadent thirties Jazz and cross-dressing, the budding minds of glam rock got a huge kick out of this film. I mean, did you ever hear Lou Reed use a tuba before this movie came out? Tell me this song isn’t ripped right out of the Cabaret template:
We got cable at the ol’ homestead a couple months back, and despite my best intentions, I’m watching a shitload of it. But it’s hard to resist when my DirecTV records stuff for me like Twin Peaks reruns.
Last time I saw most of these episodes, I was in college and hosting a Twin Peaks party, where we spent about 24 solid hours watching all the episodes and the movie, all the while imbibing cherry pie, coffee, doughnuts and, ehem, other things. But I was surprised how much of the oddness and strange beauty I still remembered.
In particular, the music, by parts New Age and retro fifties rock, really impressed me, and it continues to do so as I re-watch all the episodes. It’s an integral part of the show as well, adding to the dread and horror of scenes like this:
Apparently the etherial, oddly sad-looking singer is none other than Julee Cruise, and despite the fact that nobody knows who the hell she is, she still holds the record for the highest-charting television theme ever with the theme from Twin Peaks, “Falling.” She also had fifteen minutes of fame when she performed on Saturday Night Live on the same episode with Andrew Dice Clay (which Sinead O’Connor turned town in protest). But I think she may win the award for bookending the best scene ever from the Twin Peaks series (give or take a backward-talking little fellow or two):
Before all this mess started, she did music for Blue Velvet. But what I’d really love to see is the play she appeared in, a Lynch production called Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream of the Broken Hearted, a play loosely based on Laura Dern’s character from Wild at Heart, who has a musical dream involving Julee in several places, as well as people sawing logs and instrumental tunes by Angelo Badalamenti. It’s not available on DVD, but apparently it was once available to see on VHS, which is where this comes from:
I’m kind of obsessed with Gene Kelly right now. I revisited Singin’ in the Rain a few months ago, then I saw him in What a Way to Go, and now I can’t get enough of him. He makes singing and dancing seem so easy, so joyful, like anyone could do it, despite the fact that he’s an athletic, acrobatic dancer who can sing as well as anybody in the Rat Pack. His smile, the way his eyes light up, and the way he coos while he talks just make the whole world cheer up a bit (And no, I’m not gay. I think.).
So I let my girlfriend talk me into watching Xanadu last night, the insane musical from 1980 that featured him, Olivia Newton-John, and Michael Beck (the dude from The Warriors). I guess every great star caps their career with a weird half blunder (think Bela Lugosi in Plan 9 from Outer Space, or Robert Preston in The LastStarfighter), and Xanadu was no different–a neon-infused cavalcade of colors and rollerskates that’s part Tron, part 1980 Floor Show, part Superman II, part Starlight Express, and one of the most over-the-top movies ever to barely break even. As Michael Beck put it once, “The Warriors opened lots of doors for me that Xanadu closed.”
Gene Kelly was around seventy at the time, but he performed with as much vim and vigor as he ever had. I was obsessed with how well he’d preserved his voice all those years, so that it still sounded light as a feather–my girlfriend was more impressed with the fancy footwork he could still do. Both are great achievements for a senior citizen, though perhaps his greatest achievement in Xanadu was a constant look of delight that in hindsight must have been an utter fabrication. I mean, look at this scene, and tell me the man dancing and smiling was really convinced this movie was a good idea:
Despite the fact that this movie is just so, so wrong, I loved it. Olivia Newton-John is cute as a button and sings and dances pretty damn well, and a lot of the music is done by ELO (you know, Jeff Lynne’s pre-Wilburys project). And a lot of the scenes are filmed in Santa Monica (one at the very same bluff used in Lovedoll Superstar). My only regret is that the movie didn’t end ten minutes earlier than it did, before the opening of Gene Kelly’s club resulted in a never-ending rollerskating ruckus that left me yearning to see more tap-dancing Gene. My galpal liked it, though, because they let Olivia go through six or seven costume changes in a row real quick, and she gets to sing an ELO song. They used the ELO version, not hers, on the official Xanadu soundtrack, so you can only hear her sing the title track in the movie itself.
Update: For a more thorough history of the production, check out wetcircuit.
Recent Comments