CK5
March 18th, 2008
From The Last Waltz to Shine a Light, most concert movies leave me wishing for a more democratic, inclusive view — even if they’re not directed by Martin Scorsese. Instead of focusing on faces and fingers, I find myself longing for wide shots, audience shots, the view of the stage and crowd as a whole. The usual approach implies that the camera is somehow superior to the regular flesh-and-blood attendee because it has VIP access to the close-ups. But the concert isn’t just in the guitarist’s fingers, and in my experience, the best bands know how to make the music fit the space and all the people in it. At the very best shows, it doesn’t matter where your seats are, or if you’re standing half a mile away.
More than any other band I’ve seen, Phish completely owned any place they found themselves in, from sweaty pubs to summer sheds, hockey rinks, Indian reservations, abandoned military bases, Madison Square Garden, and the top of air traffic control towers. There’s ample proof of this in a motherlode of videos I stumbled upon last night.
Among the stash of 300+ handheld clips (think Awesome! I Fuckin’ Shot That!) uploaded by YouTube user silverchair97, I want to draw your attention to a few choice tunes that emphasize the spectacular lighting design by Chris Kuroda, famous for improvising along with the band on the light board and sometimes referred to by fans as CK5 — the fifth member of Phish. (Once upon a time in downtown Prague, Kuroda paid Marcy a compliment — but that’s a story for another post.)
Who needs closeups of Mick Jagger’s cracked face (or Bono in 3D) when you can feast your eyes on Kuroda’s work, which manages to meld the sound, the crowd, and the stage into an oozing vessel of rock’n roll that can be appreciated from any angle?
Also Sprach Zarathustra (as always, a cover of the Deodato disco version from the Being There soundtrack rather than the Richard Strauss original Kubrick used in 2001):
The Velvet Underground’s Rock’n Roll in two parts:
The alien mothership has landed in this infamous jam out of Twist, from the Island Tour:
.. and a few more after the jump…
Macbeth
July 1st, 2007
The Internet Movie Database lists 48 adaptations of Macbeth–give or take a few TV versions–but Geoffrey Wright’s contemporary gangster take on the Scottish play doesn’t resemble any of them as much as a low-budget remake of Scarface. There’s lots of gunplay between drug dealers, the witches are a bunch of doped-up goth chicks, and some of the Bard’s best soliloquies are abbreviated in favor of extended orgies (some literal, some merely orgies of bloodletting.)
Fresh off of Slings & Arrows‘ pitch-perfect second season, in which the New Burbage Festival takes on the cursed play, Marcy and I were more than eager to see a fresh take on Mackers, but there’s precious little to praise here. In the title role, Sam Worthington gives most of his speeches in voice-over without changing his expression at all, and Victoria Hill looks like she would be more comfortable in a prime time soap than as literature’s most cruelly ambitious woman. She gets to do “Out, out damn spot” topless.
The contemporary updating–Duncan and his men are Melbourne drug lords–is supposed to make the drama more accessible but only distracts instead. (Macbeth’s gated estate bears a sign identifying it as Dunsinane, Banquo likes to ride motorbikes just so he can ride something when he gets whacked, and Burnham Wood is a logging company.)
Worst of all, the direction lacks the go-for-broke pomo gusto that made Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo & Juliet such a success: everything about this adaptation, including the slow-motion finale, feels unconvincing and lackluster, and the beauty of the language never takes wing. How could it if you cut “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” before the punchline? Stick with Orson, Roman, and Akira. Opens July 6.
Macbeth. Geoffrey Wright, 2006. *
Videos: Geoffrey Tenant takes on Macbeth at the beginning of Slings & Arrows S2E2, newsreel footage from Orson Welles’ 1936 all-black stage version, and trailers for Polanski’s 1971 and Kurosawa’s 1957 adaptations.
Sunshine
June 29th, 2007
Danny Boyle sends a group of astronauts–Cillian Murphy, Michelle Yeoh, and Rose Byrne among them–on a mission to deliver a giant nuke in order to restart our dying star and save mankind. Confined to a ship that instantly brings to mind 2001’s Discovery, they send video greetings to their families and tend to Silent Running oxygen gardens. But no matter how many millions of miles from home, when a distress signal arrives, it’s clear that we’re in some very familiar territory: lethal space walks, ticking countdowns, mysterious ghost ships, malfunctioning life support systems, a computer with a melodious voice denying urgent requests, tripped-out deep-space epiphanies. Nothing new under the sun.
At a post-screening Q&A at Tribeca Cinemas this week, Boyle (Trainspotting, 28 Days Later) made it clear that he is very much hip to the sci-fi classics. Like the crew of the Ikarus II hiding out behind their giant space umbrella, Sunshine labors in the shadow of Kubrick’s 2001 and Tarkovsky’s Solaris — and the books by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanislaw Lem they were based on — with some additional nods to Ridley Scott’s Alien. Perhaps it’s not even possible to send people into space without referring to these touchstone films, and yet, the question remains: why has it been decades since anybody managed to put a brand-new spin on the genre? Fox Searchlight respectfully asks critics to keep mum about the third-act revelations and reversals that work hard to keep Sunshine surprising, but really, there’s no need: if you’ve watched any sci-fi at all, you have seen it before.
Which is not to say Sunshine isn’t a handsomely crafted, engaging, even nerve-wrecking space adventure. The CGI sun, seen through the filtered glass of the ship’s observation deck or shooting over the edge of the heat shield, is a blast of glorious, almost supernatural light. Boyle also does an outstanding job at vividly rendering the astronauts’ extreme vulnerability to the elements. The burning heat of the stars, the razor cold of space, everything is orders of magnitude more threatening than on Earth. The plant life on board the ship in particular becomes more precious than ever. Surely, this heightened state of perception is one of the reasons we go to the movies in the first place. So what if Kubrick already said it all? Set the controls for the heart of the sun anyway. Sunshine will open in the US on July 20.
Sunshine. Danny Boyle, 2007. ***
Bonus videos: Pink Floyd at Pompeii, the trailer, and–just because he happened to turn up in the search–Bill Withers.
Bonnar007
May 25th, 2007
The grids are out, which means it’s time to get serious about Bonnaroo 2007. After the insane deluge of 2004, when Trey Anastasio fiddled with the Nashville Chamber Orchestra while Manchester drowned in mud, I took a little break. The festival is getting further from its hippie roots every year, but I’ve got friends who live down the road, Sector 9 and Galactic are playing late night sets, and hey, why not? In the run-up to the festival, I’ll post some of the music I’m most excited about, drawing heavily on the fine work by Some Dude at Bonnawho’s Who. We might as well start off with people I’ve never seen before:
Wolfmother
With an album cover like this, what could possibly go wrong?
Tea Leaf Green
This band is steadily building a reputation on the third-generation jam band circuit.
Damien Rice
Fun fact: even though he’s not in it, Damien Rice sounds even better if you’ve seen the movie Once.
Ornette Coleman
When I was twelve, I gave a presentation about Ornette Coleman for music class. It was all about dates and categories–”free jazz,” as if the label explained anything–but I don’t remember hearing any of the music. The smart money says this will be the most adventurous set of the weekend.
Lilly Allen
The beauty of Bonnaroo is that when you’ve had it with Ornette’s way-out squeaking, you can walk across the lawn and be greeted by Lilly Allen’s super catchy pop. I’ll be in the front row, screaming like a Beatlemaniac!
A few more after the jump….
