Edgy MD

I had figured Joe Pesci was living in a nursing home with Gene Hackman and Jack Nicholson.

Vic Sage wrote: He's certain that the menage a trois song would've gone top 40! Damn you, McGuinn! "Triad" did eventually get it's shot, performed by Jefferson Airplane on Crown of Creation in 1968, and by Crosby Stills, Nash & Young on the live album, 4-Way Street, in 1971. Vic Sage wrote: Having just seen it, I can't disagree with anything Edgy says, but i think there is a bit too much damning of the project for what it isn't and what it didn't (and chose not to) do. I liked what i saw more than i didn't like what wasn't there, if that makes any sense. That's true and my comments are largely informed by Ms. Edgy being disappointed by the film early. That said, do you not agree that the live performances of the latter-day artists added little to the film, or the understanding of the music and artists? The best track is a studio recording of Dylan remaking Stills' "Questions." Without the signature CSN(Y) harmonies, and Dylan tracing the lowest vocal line, which I never really thought of as the melody, the underlying composition really shines through. The rest, though ... let's just say that I'm not in a rush to buy any Cat Power recordings.

Seems brutal. Did Ladybucket endorse?

I would like to talk to the person who told you that. ----------------------------------- MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW ----------------------------------- . . . . . . . . . . . . . A few things shine through: (1) This is a vanity project for Jakob Dylan, in that he wants to record songs from this era, so the movie promotes that collection of music. Rather than a broad sample of who and what Laurel Canyon was about, we only feature the songs and artists he's covering. I kind of like Jakob's sound but that's what the deal is. (2) Jakob Dylan is friends with a lot of singers who — and I don't want to be ungenerous here — did not impress me as singers. Young Fiona Apple sure was a powerhouse, but these days she has a jarring tremolo that makes your eyebrows go up. Regina Spektor still has her power but punts on melody and hunches and sways in distractingly inappropriate stage-theatricality. Jade Castrinos seemed to think it was peachy keen to wear sixties looks and belt out Cass Elliott parts, but her pitch didn't match her enthusiasm. Cat Power growls like Bonnie Raitt when she was in the bag. Maybe all these folks make great records (Beck certainly has), but they (Beck included) don't have a surfeit of skills coming through live in person. But Beck's singing felt honest, at least. Norah Jones isn't a favorite of mine, but she's a pro and it came through. When I'm listing Jakob Dylan (and his very narrow range) as one of the better singers here, that's saying something. And him trying to sing "In My Room"? Bad idea. (3) They really avoid the dark side of Laurel Canyon. Where are The Doors? Where is Phil Spector? Where is Charles Fucking Manson? How do you tell a story that's not only about Laurel Canyon in the mid-to-late sixties, but largely focus on The Beach Boys and The Mamas & The Papas, but leave out Manson? No mention of Roman Polanski or Sharon Tate, either. (4) Michelle Phillips is a bad person. Her Lori Partridge hair and cute overbite may have looked adorable, but she was a Machiavellian backstabber, and considering she has to be one of the four or five least qualified people in The Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame, she gets a lot of screen time here to justify her bullshit. That would be alright, if they immediately cut from her to John Sebastian or somebody saying, "Michelle Phillips is a really bad person," but they didn't. (5) Steven Stills seems like he's recovering from a stroke, but I get the idea that he's simply drunk. And not like having-a good-time drunk. More like I'm-so-saturated-on-a-daily-basis-it-only-takes-a-few-sips-to-get-me-drunk drunk. That's just sad but impossible to ignore. If I paid money to see him in this condition, I'd be embarrassed. Stills is (or at least was, the last time I heard him) a GREAT guitarist, but he fumbles around on his acoustic in the interview in his house like he's not sure what he wants to do with it, and his fingers are turning into thumbs. Later, he's invited into the studio to lay down an electric solo, and while he seems more lucid and solid in his playing, he's playing his solo UNDERNEATH Eric Clapton's, and as if that wasn't perfectly clear, the sound board behind him explicitly shows Clapton's level at around an 8 while Stills is at a two. And I kid you not here, when he's finished, you can explicitly see Jakob take the guitar back and point to him where the door is. Good God. (6) Impossibly, Joni Mitchell's name is not mentioned once. Judy Collins and Jakob's dad only come up once each in passing. But Joni was the queen of Laurel Canyon, and if you go looking for photos of these musicians in that era, they're all at Joni's house. They seem to claim they were limiting their scope to 1965-1967, and Joni arrives in 1968, but cutting from the story Joni, Manson, the wave of cocaine that would snow down on the valley, and for that matter, Crosby introducing heroin to half of LA, really bowdlerizes things. They don't really want to talk about the seventies Canyon generation, but they allow Tom Petty and Jackson Browne to speak liberally about the era that preceded them. (7) They attempt to take this (typically) boring French Nu Wave film as their inspiration, and as a metaphor for the era, it just points out how sickly doomed the whole idealistic thing is. (8) Crosby, Stills, and Nash are interviewed at length, but separately. Crosby is the most interesting, because he admits he was an asshole, but he seems to think he was in the right when The Byrds didn't want to record his song about a menage-a-trois. Neil only appears at the very end, as a ghostly figure filmed in the recording studio, through the glass from the control room. His guitar and his sound are totally him, but it's weird how apart from laying down this one track he distanced himself from the project. It's like at the end, somebody realized they were unable to get any footage of Neil so they shot him through a keyhole and showed it during the closing credits. (9) This is some of the last interview footage of Petty you'll find, and he says some illuminating stuff, but he also says some stupid stuff. There's a sub-theme running through it that would have made for a better angle for the whole story, and that's the Rickenbacker 12-string. John Lennon had a 3/4-size Rickenbacker, and when the Beats were in California, a representative of the company tried to give John their brand new second-ever-made 12-string. But John, Paul and Ringo had gone out that night while George stayed in the hotel sick, so George got the guitar, and the sound of him playing it just woke up Roger McGuinn and John Sebastian — like it made the crossover of folk and rock possible. It's impossible to listen to TP & the Heartbreakers do "The Waiting," for instance, now and not think of it as as song born out of 1966 in Laurel Canyon. That would have been a better movie. Instead we get a combo of Jakob ego-stroking a bunch of old hippies, and rounding up his friends to put on a show that seems to want to celebrate the great records by demonstrating how bad some of these songs might otherwise sound. It gives me no pleasure to write that, and the backing band and sound were mostly solid or better. I also might have wanted to hear from the kids who grew up in all this madness: Sonny & Cher's kids and the Wilson Phillips girls. They might have a more measured sense of what the culture of this crowd cost everybody. Jesus, let's hear about the wreckage from MacKenzie.

Jakob Dylan talks with veteran folk rockers from California's Laurel Canyon scene, meanwhile bringing performers from his own generation to LA to soak up the vibe and cover songs from the Echo Canyon artists, on stage and in the studio. http://prod3.agileticketing.net/images/user/capri_3986/Echo_Agile_Wide.jpg>

Glad the Buckets enjoyed.

If anything, she liked it more than I did, but (1) she's uncharacteristically and almost inexplicably a sucker for almost any puke gag, and (2) her brother is a metuhl musician living the life (see below) , so the relatability of it all was even keener for her. She actually wants to own it, and owning films isn't her thing. http://petesrocknewsandviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/18425057_201311230378914_2181772786996813466_n.jpg>

No dix. No bewbz. Occasional F-bombs, a brief implied zex scene with a lothario ham of a musician banging a groupie. A few jokes about the matter-of-factness of metalheads being diabolists, animal butchery gags, and puke gags too. An unexpected death of a likeable character. And a little BREAKIN' THE LAW! BREAKIN' THE LAW!. Maybe the odd grave-robbing. In other words, a bunch of stuff 13-year-olds LOVE in their movies. Not so much stuff that moms love about what 13-year-olds love in their movies. Surprisingly follow-able, despite being subtitled, because Finnish is allegedly so different even from the other Scandanavian languages, that when they converse even with Norwegians, the common language is English. Might be even a little more fun for a family to enjoy after a trip to the low countries. Though I don't want to oversell it and have Ms. Bucket and the Bucketheads hate me forever. I'll try to get Ms. Edgy to weigh in.

No Mets on tonight? What a good night to take in a viewing of Heavy Trip.

=whippoorwill post_id=20184 time=1567023308 user_id=79] Sounds cute, as long as no wedding iccurs

A struggling street photographer, living with multiple roommates and pressured to marry by the grandmother who raised him, finally sends her a letter to announce his engagement, and encloses a picture of a young woman whom he had photographed, but who ran away before collecting her photo or paying him. Grandma decides to head to Mumbai to see for herself, and so the plot is set in motion. [FIMG=600]https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMjMzNDMzMTU0NV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwNDI5NTYyNzM@._V1_.jpg[/FIMG]

I certainly enjoyed it more than I thought I would. You'll love the protagonists. Also, they also have several shots that baldfacedly reference famous scenes from the English-language films you know and love, but they're placed in there oddly enough that you don't feel pandered to. They play fast and loose with jokes at the expense of animals, though, and you may subtract a star if that's the sort of thing that makes you subtract a star. Some occult jokes too, naturally.

In a Finnish backwater where apparently nobody ever escapes their provincial isolation, a local death metal band is in their 12th year of rehearsing in the basement of a reindeer slaughterhouse, still unsure about what direction to take the band. Though their dark and diabolical grind, ethic, and aesthetic leads to alienation and antagonism from the local citizenry, the band is clearly a collection of the most genial, decent young men in town. After finally creating their first original song, they commit to journeying out of town and into Norway (!) for a high-profile death metal festival, despite being unable to get a booking. Hi-jinx cannot help but ensue. And ensue they do. https://66.media.tumblr.com/fdfb1e98b33c71e310b41f5512726b74/c031c93745fd649d-4a/s640x960/31d7a759ece4fed6ca473b043fbcef912d1899c8.jpg>

Quinn is a beneficiary/victim of the Stanford philosophy, which holds that there is one platonic ideal for a baseball swing, no matter what your specific skills or body type, and so all are carefully instructed to fine-tune their swing in exactly the same way. Matt Winaker, chosen by the Mets two rounds later, shared the Stanford outfield with him, and is now on the interstate with St. Lucie.

Turning Bo into a Disney action princess kinda kinda kinda feels a little forced.

A collection of toys, now in the possession of a younger child and taking an RV trip, go on an adventure to reunite with one of their lost companions. https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/iDIAAOSwMRJckPyg/s-l640.jpg>

Does it have to be in Vonnegut's style?

I could have sworn one of his early hits went: Double Switch, Double Switch, Double Switch is back! Stone cold sober as a matter of fact Double Switch, Double Switch, he's much better than you! He moves like Bruce Lee, 'cuz he's the king of kung fu, OH-OO-OH!

Double Switch wrote: Having seen EJ in person back in the day and having known him since his very first album, I don't plan to see a biopic about him. His music was the background of my life for decades and I'm glad for him he's still standing. Wait a minute. Tell your story.

No, I think that's a great angle. Ryan saved a lot of lives. Ryan and Reg. I'm greenlighting that at Crane Pool Studios.

Frayed Knot wrote: All that aside, while there's no specific climax to build to ... If you were commissioned to write a biopic about Elton, what climax would you build to? Elton's Central Park concert? Elton's successfully exiting rehab? Elton's knighthood? Elton's Live Aid set? Elton's set at the Freddie Mercury tribute show? Elton's same-sex wedding with David Furnish? His initial embrace of his orientation? Elton's performance at Princess Diana's funeral? Elton's auctioning off of his most outrageous costumes and deciding to perform in merely fabulous clothes from that point onward, rather than leaning toward the outrageous? Elton's entering the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame? Tony for Aida? Lifetime achievement awards? His recovery of his voice? His advocacy for LGBT rights in Putin's Russia? A lot of drama in the guy's life. Depending how your map the script, though, it's hard to choose any of it as broadly defining his story.

I was thinking the same thing. The Kenye biopic would be called I, Branding.

Yabbut, today's top acts suck. And even for contemporary biopics, they've found more dough in going back four decades (Elton, Queen, Bowie) than two (NWA? um...). Maybe Amy Winehouse will make a marketable movie subject, because like Selena, she dead. But so many contemporary acts are built to be disposable, that it's really hard to imagine a legacy that will conjure anything in 20 years. will.i.am? But what do I know? In 20 years, maybe we'll all be walking around watching movies on our goggles, or participating in them through sensory immersion hardware.

Yeah, but that's the Oscar-bait, because who knows if Shailene Woodley is really evoking Tami Oldham in Adrift. But we have a good idea about how well Jamie Foxx captured Ray Charles in Ray because we have have a long lifetime of Ray Charles footage to compare it to. So Rami Malek must be great, or something. What troubles me about biopics of rock stars remains that they've found one more way to milk enormous money out of the classic rock canon, but it's still nearly Herculean for a contemporary rock act to make two dimes from their original music. So, rock and roll is still big business, but only legacy rock and roll that's under glass, and owned by suits, septuagenarians, and heirs. And that's as culturally stale as it is economically unjust.

Doesn't gloss over some of the low points -- the disastrous, disco Victim of Love album even gets a scene. The weird thing is this barely qualified as an Elton John album. Apart from it's disco-ness, which certainly wasn't beneath Elton John, the album featured: No original Elton John compositions. No Bernie Taupin lyrics. No Elton John piano or keyboards. No members of the Elton John Band. No tour. Only 36 minutes of music. No performances of any of these songs on subsequent tours. The Waters Family and Michael McDonald on vocals, L.A.'s most relentless session singers. An eight-minute version of "Johnny B. Goode." A title track that somehow reached #31 on the pop charts, despite it's complete forgettableness. It's like he had to settle a debt, and came in and added vocals in a day and then got out of there. Fun fact, EJ hit the singles top 40 chart in the US for 16 straight years, from 1970-1985, then took a year off in 1986 by peaking at #55 with "Heartache All Over the World," hit the top 40 for nine straight years after that from 1987-1995. All told, that's a man charting in 25 of 26 years, and many of those years featuring multiple charting singles. And he still had a few hits, including a #1, ahead of him. It seems to me, he lived his life with his finger to the wind.