Edgy MD

I'm always freaked out stumbling across THERESA RUSSELL in WHORE A Ken Russell Film

Not good. Really ambitious, and I wanted to like it, but a plot that is retrofitted onto songs that aren't contextually connected, at least in a literal sense, just challenges my credulity. Nice performance by the guy who played Jude. Makeup and costume did what they could to make him look like a young Paul McCartney, but he seemed to get more Lennon songs to sing, and his dichotomous Lennon --- the annoying smartass Maxwell --- got more Paul material. Psychedelic film-making just bores me, and it gives them an out for not constucting a coherent plot. I actually thought Bono was fine --- agree on Izzard --- but going from one acid guru to another is just an excuse to get another psychedelic song in there, while they neither took the effort portray these guys as visionaries or exploiters on the same level that the anti-war radical leaders or the record company execs were. They really challenged themselves musically, expanding on the songs' arrangements, changing the tempos (and therefore moods for some) but mostly leaving the vocal readings the same, in that they have the actors respect old Beatle improvosational vocal flourishes as sacrosanct parts of the composition. ("Hey Jude" includes the actor screaming, "Ju Jude and Judey Judey Judey Judey! Ow! Wow") They also tried hard to never change or drop lyrics to suit the plot --- Izzard's scene, again, is an exception --- or even change gender pronouns. "With a Little Help from My Friends" morphs about 60% of the way through from a variant on the 2/4 Beatles arrangement to a version of the 3/4 Joe Cocker reading. Cocker himself appears and sings the hell out of "Come Together." All the beautiful design work and technical execution is something that they should be proud of, but it all meant nothing to me (in fact, the color intensity had both Mr. and Ms. Edgy leaving with headaches) because it was in the service of a plot that felt insincere and incoherent. After all the exposition is seemingly in place, we get a non-sequiter flash out of nowhere to the Detroit riots, where a little boy is taking cover and singing a beautiful version of "Let It Be." Who is this boy that's breaking our heart? Turns out the scene is just to introduce an Ike Turner/Jimi Hendrix-cross character whose relationship to the boy is never made clear, who joins the other characters and never mentions the boy or the riot that launched him into the plot. Prick. Not him, the writer. I went to see it because of Roger Ebert's rave (his favorite movie is A Hard Day's Night), but have read mostly negative online reviews since then. One review wondered at the material and the budget and quoted William Hurt's line in A History of Violence: "How do you fuck that up?" Then I realized it was previously fucked up over a generation ago with Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. At day's end, we just have here an artier and less linear version of Forrest Gump a manipulative and mythmaking arc through a tumultuous time in US cultural history, that impossibly manages to brush all the touchstone moments of the era, while getting you over the speedbumps with an expensive licensed catalog of music, worth every penny to the director because it's all been fieldtested to produce the exact effect in the audience she wants. Ugh. I don't mind the revisiting of the catalog --- some fine readings there --- but just do it as a review next time; don't insult me and suggest you've got something to say through these songs about the meaning of the Vietnam War and the generation that fought it.

Vic Sage wrote: ending is ending. climax is climax. 2 different things. Of course, though sometimes it's the same. Payoff, curtain. North By Northwest, for instance, includes the climax and the brief cut afterwards to the train. But I understand the rule here, even if NxNW kind of breaks it..

Does a climactic point count as an ending if there's a brief denoument after it? Is the end of Star Wars, for the purpose of this exercise, Luke and Han riding off yee-hah like the Duke boys, or is it everybody giggling at R2 in the awards ceremony?

Kingdom of the Spiders.

Yancy Street Gang wrote: Bogie made the list, Heston didn't. Then I ain't clicking. God damn that list to Hell.