Extraordinary forces — knee-jerk wariness of capitalism, ordinary standards of human decency in the face death — conspire to give This is It the stench of a robbed grave. A rushed release of footage documenting rehearsals for a series of concerts Michael Jackson was about to launch when he died in of a drug overdose in June 2009, bought in a bidding war by Sony for a reported $60 million and edited by concert director Kenny Ortega (whose most impressive cinematic credits heretofore consist of Newsies and all three widgets in the High School Musical franchise), This is It exists on this earth only because Michael Jackson no longer does.
The problem is not just that Jackson’s death has changed the commodity value of this material from questionable to infinite, but also that it’s so clear that the Michael Jackson presented in the footage would never have sanctioned this release. Depicted here as a gentle genius who insists on having the last word in every aspect of the massive production (even if that word sometimes takes the form of impenetrable similes such as “play it like you’re getting out of bed” — which takes on extra mystery coming from a man who apparently used intravenous anesthetic as a sleeping aid), it’s unfathomable that Michael Jackson would have allowed the world to see footage of him shuffling through blocking and stopping mid-number to nitpick, often dressed in mismatched layers (a bomber jacket and massive Ed Hardy sweats, a boxy silver lame blazer and orange jeans) that fail to obscure the boniness of his frame. How does he look? Like a 50 year old man who has had a lot of surgical procedures. This is not exactly a revelation, but it’s not flattering, either.
And so, it goes without saying that This is It is vile. But it’s also fascinating as a portrait of how far one man would go (and how many millions of dollars and thousands of workers and hours of labor he’d be able to employ) to restore his public persona in the image of his ego after years of undeniable damage.
Michael Bay is apparently a big fan of the 1986 animated cult classic Transformers: The Movie. Last month, he revealed his desire to get Leonard Nimoy, voice of “Galvatron” in the cartoon film, to voice a robot character in his latest live-action installment, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. And awhile back it was revealed that the sequel might have a new version of Stan Bush’s terrible ’80s anthem “The Touch” on its soundtrack. But are these the correct ways to pay homage to the old series/movie? Wouldn’t we rather actually have Transformers that look like the Transformers characters we remember from our childhood? And wouldn’t we rather have a good script and competent directing/editing? Okay, these last things might not be totally relevant to the 80s cartoon, but regardless they are elements that should be more attended to than any lame winks at members of the cult audience.
Anyway, I bring all this up because a music video for the remake of “The Touch” (titled “The Touch: Sam’s Theme”) has popped up online. Featuring both Bush and a Linkin Park-wannabe rapper in the recording and video, the new version — which still hasn’t been confirmed as being in the new film (don’t do it MB) — is undeniably worse than the original somehow. But it makes me wonder: in 10 years or so, when Boogie Nightsis remade and reset in the 2000s, should this be the version of the song covered by Dirk and Reed?
A few other bloggers and commenters agree that it’s a downgrade after the jump:
In the film’s climactic number, Beyoncé seals the deal with her rendition of “I’d Rather Go Blind”…as an actress and a singer, she finds ways to make her interpretation both faithful and fresh. Sung directly to an impossible, already-married love interest, label founder Leonard Chess (Adrien Brody), the performance begins from the point-of-view of the male, gazing at Etta from behind with his puppy-dog eyes. From the start, the pace and phrasing of Beyoncé’s vocals follow Etta’s with surprising fidelity. Then, as the camera inches forward, eventually framing the singer’s face in close-up, the scene builds in intensity, climaxing with a sneer at the corner of her mouth, and a few defiant, gut-wrenching wails. It’s clear her version is not the original’s moan of resignation, but an enactment of all the bitterness and resentment on which Etta James based her take-no-prisoners persona….
By the time Beyoncé is finished with “I’d Rather Go Blind,” she has achieved what neither Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles nor Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash could manage: a respectful embodiment as well an expansion of a mythic figure. She takes us across a curiously underexplored frontier, where the emotional and physical abandon of an R&B performance becomes both the means and the substance of great melodramatic acting.
Etta’s version of “I’d Rather Go Blind” is embedded above, and Beyonce’s is down below. Judge for yourself.
Tom DiCillo has been a Sundance mainstay for years, having had over five films in the festival since 1992. Some of the standouts include 1995’sLiving in Oblivion (a must-see for any aspiring filmmaker) to 2007’s Delirious, both of which star Steve Buscemi. This year he’s back with a documentary about The Doors, When You’re Strange. It’s a feature-length movie comprised entirely of never-before-seen archival film footage, consisting of rehearsals, concerts, vintage television appearances, and it also includes most of Highway, a student film Morrison made and stars in. While the documentary doesn’t offer us anything new about the band, it’s a unique look at one of the most famous American bands to emerge from the 1960s.
The Academy’s list of 49 tunes deemed eligible for the Best Original Song Oscar this year seems like a lot for the Music Branch to pick through. That is, until you notice that more than one-fifth of those contenders are from the same film (High School Musical3, which, thanks to a new rule, is only allowed, at most, two nominations in this category) and you recall that last year’s list included many more songs (59) to choose from. The talent involved this year, however, is tremendous, at least in terms of those performers who sing the tunes on the soundtrack (many of whom had a hand in the songwriting). These artists include Mariah Carey, Etta James, Beyonce Knowles (who played Etta James), Norah Jones, will.i.am, Jack White and Alicia Keys, Danny Elfman, Emmylou Harris, Chaka Khan and Regina Spektor.
Add to those big names such heavyweights as Bruce Springsteen and Peter Gabriel, both of whom are locks to be nominated, as well as tween favorites Miley Cyrus and Zac Efron (along with the rest of the cast from High School Musical 3), and you could have one hell of a concert if the Academy simply turned its awards telecast into one big celebration of the year’s songs written for the screen. Unfortunately for ABC, the Oscars aren’t just about securing viewers, so there’s no promise that the most popular artists will be among the five nominees. Rather, the true Oscar-worthy songs are those tunes that serve their respective films best — in terms of context as much as in the quality of their songwriting.
Is it that odd to imagine a Waterworldmusical on Broadway? After all, Xanadumade it to the big stage, so anything is possible for infamous turkeys like this one. Sure, it looks rather silly in the video below, the way Patrick Warburton and company have made it, but with the right creative team Waterworld could really work as a kitchy cult attraction. Maybe team up two randoms, the way Marvel has with the upcoming Spider-Manshow directed by Julie Taymor and featuring music by Bono. Honestly, there seems to be nothing that Broadway producers could announce that’s any more ridiculous than what’s already been done there.
So, terrible movie-turned-musical ideas may continue to be easy gags, and they’re possibly even going to make me laugh, but ultimately I would like to go see Con Air: The Musical (from 30 Rock) and Planet of the Apes: The Musical (from The Simpsons) and musicals made out of Waterworld, The Postman, Battlefield Earthand especially Ishtar. Who would love you, Mariner? I would.
Check out the commercial for Waterworld: The Musical after the jump.
From left to right, Diablo Cody, Dana Fox, and Lorene Scafaria. Or, the “Femmepire” as they call it, a triumvirate of female screenwriters.
Lorene Scafaria has been toiling as a screenwriter for awhile, although her first produced film, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, is actually an adaptation of a novel by the same name. However, it manages to nail the “teen voice” without slapping a message all over it, and it should open up a few more doors for Lorene. Not that she needs them, since she’s already recorded an album of her own music, and has her next project already in the works.
Read on to find out how she tried to capture the New York City feeling in this movie, what she’s been doing with best friend and fellow screenwriter Diablo Cody, and what’s in store for her.
This week I wanted to make a simple point: Andrew Stanton’s WALL-E is a near-masterpiece of A.I. proportions and socio-political implications, reduced by its cloying musical score to just another ingenious Disney/Pixar heart-tugger. The most effective way to illustrate this would have been to create a video mash-up of the WALL-E score and an immersive philosophical sci-fi like 2001: A Space Odyssey, THX-1138 or Tarkovsky’s Solaris. But my laptop’s down, so I’m stuck here telling you rather than showing.
Bright Lights After Dark’s Tom Sutpen on a lesser-known earlyish work from Paul Thomas Anderson, starring then-girlfriend Fiona Apple:
“Across the Universe” is a music video produced in connection with an immensely obvious and stupid movie of the late-nineties entitled Pleasantville (a film Anderson otherwise had nothing to do with); and if you have to call it something…you could say that you were seeing the one perfect expression of post-Christian martyrdom our culture has seen fit to cough up.
(Please excuse the reblogging––I’m weeding through an obscenely overstuffed post-vacation feed reader with one lobe and making Comic-Con plans with the other. In order to add a tiny bit of value to this post, here are some lazy links to a few other videos that PTA made for Apple: Fast as You Can; Paper Bag; Limp. Servicey!)
Serge Bozon’s La France is a generic clusterfuck, but in the best way––a stunningly confident, category-defying, broken-down dream piece about loss and being lost. It’s a film about war in which soldiers are not only never seen actually fighting for their land, but in fact seem to have lost their way in vague and vain pursuit of a lost land to reclaim as their own. It’s a musical with just one song, performed by non-performers in a handful of mutations throughout the film. And it’s a love story, soaked in romantic delusion but ultimately fatalist in regards to the actual odds that love can overcome existential crisis. After a 14 month festival run (including stops at Cannes, New Directors/New Films and LAFF), it opens for a week in New York at Anthology Film Archives on Friday.
Although each clip has its nice moments of intertexual collage (I especially like the way the same footage from Royal Wedding is recycled to different ends: in “Billy Jean,” set to the line, “The kid is not my son,” it’s a contemplation of paternity; in “Brings SexyBack,” it’s a placeholder for seduction) “Smooth Criminal” really draws attention to this way this method of mashup makes the entirety of filmed dance history seem less like a timeline than a series of arrows pointing back to the same point. For all of their ability to tap into and inspire the zeitgeist of their respective heydays, dancers like Michael Jackson and Justin Timberlake resemble Astaire more than anything else in their contemporary cultures. For whatever reason, the iconography of the solo male dancer is always looking back, as if there’s nothing new do with the male body set to music that Fred Astaire hadn’t thought of.
This theory does give short shrift to Gene Kelly, who had a distinct style and presence that was not chiefly Astairean, but for whatever reason, the evidence suggests he’s been less influential on pop stars of the future. Maybe it’s because, compared to someone like Timberlake, he was built like a boxer, and with the exception of Singin’ in the Rain, his characters were often (gasp!) working class, or at least certainly not the blinged-out party crashers that Astaire tended to play, which make his images so compatible with lines like “VIP, drinks on me,” never mind lyrics that equate seduction to some kind of surreptitious crime. Does Gene Kelly have an analgous modern pop star? And if so, where’s that mashup?
The theme song for the Sex and the City Movie, performed with heavy pitch-shift assist by the girl from Kids Incorporated who wasn’t Martika, is the embodiment of everything that has become loathsome about the franchise.
The aesthetics are godawful––the theme song from the television show is injected with helium and then laid over a beat borrowed from various hip hop hits of the early oughts, then finally zapped with that radio-friendly glitter sound that I think has been scientifically proven to melt brains––but it’s the vapid lyrics, and Fergie’s roboticized delivery of them, that truly turn the song into a celebration of the zombification that the show devolved into celebrating in its last few years. It’s straight-facedly about consumer gluttony in place of human connection, a fashion-forward Dorian Gray story in which women appear younger as they become richer and actually older. Life as a VOGUE spread with no end is a fairly sick fantasy, but at least in terms of “women’s pictures”, it has historical precedent (The Women, anyone?) and is thus cinematically tolerable. But you’ve got to wonder what’s on the screen if the brand geniuses think they need a plot song dance anthem to drive the message home.
The neatest formal trick in Throw Down Your Heart, Sascha Paladino’s somewhat overlong but surprisingly moving document of his brother Bela Fleck’s journey to Africa to sort out the roots of the banjo and record an album with native musicians, is the employment of selective translation. Fleck, a celebrity in his bluegrass/jazz Americana niche, is a wide-eyed total outsider in Uganda and Tanzania, where even those who speak English have thick enough accents that their words need to be subtitled. But Paladino only translates African song lyrics and conversations between locals when the content within is essential to understanding a scene. This forces us to really contemplate the imagery and the sound of the music––elements that are so universal they need no translation––to pick up most emotional cues, and for the most part, it works beautifully. For a film about the power of music to shatter cultural and historic barriers and unite people based on pure feeling, I can’t imagine a tighter welding of form and content.
Zooey Deschanel is so adorable that even I––usually such a knee-jerk skeptic when it comes to Things People Think Are Adorable––have to just give myself over to her absolute adorability. The indie actress, who sang in Elf and recently in a teeny role in The Assassination of Jesse James, is releasing an album with M. Ward under the name She & Him this March. The two will be playing at SXSW on March 14; in the meantime, Stereogum has an MP3 from the album, for a track called “Why Do You Let Me Stay Here?” It’s totally 60s, like something Serge Gainsbourg would have produced, but a little less breathier and a little more garage-ier. Above: She and Him perform the Ricky Nelson classic, “Lonesome Town.”
Above: a video for Sonic Youth’s “Jams Run Free”, from their Rather Ripped album, shot by French cinema bad girl Claire Denis. Daniel Stuyck writes about this, and the four other videos Denis has made for the band, in the new issue of Film Comment:
The antecedent to these pieces is not so much Denis’s previous films as Bruce Conner’s Cosmic Ray. Conner’s 1961 short, an essential demonstration of the maxim that pop songs are teenage symphonies to God, reads like a list of chemical ingredients for any of these videos: rock and roll; erotic tension (as P. Adams Sitney is at pains to point out, Cosmic Ray predominantly features the “irreverent dance of a naked woman, which he [Conner] photographed himself”); bland images of daily life and consumer culture (Mickey Mouse, hitchhiking Indians, neon signs, the H-bomb) transformed into something surreal. In other words, a strange alchemy—an area where science and religion meet, not unlike drugs. And that ultimate drug state—ecstasy—is what Conner and Denis are ultimately fixed on: Denis’s unfocused whip pans as Sonic Youth slams into its chorus create the same sensation as Conner’s image of skulls birthing from crotches in an instant between two shots, a revelation of new meanings created by a strange combination of elements.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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Michael Bay is apparently a big fan of the 1986 animated cult classic Transformers: The Movie. Last month, he revealed his desire to get Leonard Nimoy, voice of “Galvatron” in the cartoon film, to voice a robot character in his latest live-action installment, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. And awhile back it was revealed that the sequel might have a new version of Stan Bush’s terrible ’80s anthem “The Touch” on its soundtrack. But are these the correct ways to pay homage to the old series/movie? Wouldn’t we rather actually have Transformers that look like the Transformers characters we remember from our childhood? And wouldn’t we rather have a good script and competent directing/editing? Okay, these last things might not be totally relevant to the 80s cartoon, but regardless they are elements that should be more attended to than any lame winks at members of the cult audience.
Is it that odd to imagine a 
