As so many late night chat-show hosts are fond of saying, I'd like to "get right into it." Trevor Noah seemed to have spearheaded the charge of overusing this phrase, but he was enthusiastically reinforced by Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, Jimmy Fallon, and Conan O'Brian. Pretty sure that Jimmy Kimmel and James Corden also bandy the phrase about with reckless abandon, but I don't watch their programs enough to draw any conclusions.
That being said, I would like to try and create entries with more regularity, but just haven't seemed to be able to do so. In keeping with my "easy topics" lead-offs, here is what blurted out of my iPod during my last shower:
- Don't Try to Lay No Boogie-Woogie on the King of Rock and Roll, by Long John Baldry
- Cop a Plea, by Big Sugar
- Mad World, performed by Gary Jules and Michael Andrews (written by Roland Orzabal)
- Hey Bulldog, by The Beatles
What conclusions can we draw from the music? Well, there's certainly a fair share of Canadian content, what with Big Sugar being Canadian and Gordie Johnson being a good Medicine Hat boy, and Long John Baldry adopting Canada as his home country after finding little but rejection and despair in the UK. Nelvana Animation Studios still has much for which to thank dear Long John as the voice of all their sneering evil villains.
In other bits, "Mad World" was at once Roland Orzabal's greatest creation and greatest disappointment, since he was over-ruled by his producers and executives at every creative stage when he originally recorded the song as the lead singer of "Tears for Fears" but heard his true intentions manifested when he heard the arrangement with simply a piano, cello, and single track vocal that Gary Jules created.
Apple recording engineer Geoff Emerick has gone on record saying "Paul's bass line was probably the most inventive of any he'd done since Pepper..." but "Hey Bulldog" somehow ended up on some sort of list of B-sides and castaways within the vast Beatles catalogue. For most of my life, I always thought that the Beatles hated the whole Yellow Submarine project because it was carried out rather independently of them, and they had no creative influence. It wasn't until the release of the "Anthology" videos that I realized that they originally hated the film because they couldn't voice their own characters. That's reasonable. Who could do a better impersonation of a person than themselves? Anyone answering "Rich Little" gets a roundhouse slap to the ear for being a jackanapes.
In cinematic news, anyone interested in watching the quasi-biopic-western "Hickok" should probably save him or herself the time and effort. History buffs will be irked by the squirmy little liberties taken with documented fact, including some mysterious avoidance of some of the saucier details. Those preoccupied with the written word will find the dialogue predictable and pedantic, and cinephiles will see that this is a bland aping of 1993's "Tombstone" including an obvious nod, when the Hemsworth brother tells a character on a departing train to look for Wyatt. Bottom line: watch Tombstone, and leave this one be.
I'm fading, so I'll just say that I'll try and reinforce these positions of new releases with evidence later:
- Revolt - 1.8 out of 5. Thranduil tries to save humanity in a confused tale of alien invasion.
- Security - 4.1 out of 5. Antonio Banderas is average in an above average mall-cop shoot-em-up, featuring Sir Ben Kingsley and (spoilers!) a fantastic background character named Vance.
- Churchill - 3.2 out of 5. Brian Cox does Churchill as though he were Albert Finney doing King Lear in 1983's "The Dresser." Some historical inaccuracies, but Miranda Richardson is awe-inspiring.
My faculties betray me, but I'll try and get more thoughts cemented into the electromagnetic ether as soon as it becomes practicable.
Until then, good night England and the colonies.
—mARKUS
No comments:
Post a Comment