good luck with your experiment

I’m admittedly behind the curve on this particular trend, but lately I’ve done a little investigation into the phenomenon of Morrissey’s legions of Chicano (i.e. Mexican American) fans, particularly those living around his adopted hometown of Los Angeles.  There are numerous accounts out there of how Morrissey’s Chicano fans constitute an impressive share – sometimes the majority – of his audience when he plays shows in Southern California, and how they sustained him during the dark years of Southpaw Grammar and Maladjusted, before the career resurgence that began with 2004’s You Are the Quarry and has seen Morrissey return to prominence on the UK charts.  There is at least one Mexican American-fronted Morrissey tribute act, the Sweet and Tender Hooligans, gigging around LA, and you can find a number of interviews with LA-area Chicanos declaring their devotion to Morrissey and to the Smiths.  Morrissey has in turn written a couple of Mexican/Chicano-themed songs, including “First of the Gang to Die,” and has at least once played an encore wearing the full uniform (shirt, shorts, socks, etc.) of Chivas, one of Mexico’s famous soccer clubs.  (more…)

zach is a master of subtle musical suggestion.

vanished

This girl in the band is like, somebody everybody knows of but doesnt necessarily know.

As part of my ongoing effort to see every heist/cops & robbers/detective movie ever made, I recently checked out the classic police thriller Bullitt (1968), starring none other than Steve McQueen.  Watching this movie after having developed an obsession with Michael Mann’s crime epic Heat (1995) was an eye-opener: Bullitt comes off like the Ur-film of the detective genre – and an important specific source for Heat - from its portrayal of the psychological and relationship fallout of a detective’s life in the “sewer” (as Frank Bullitt’s impossibly attractive English architect girlfriend puts it), to McQueen’s endlessly detached professionalism, to the movie’s climactic shootout on an airport runway – a scene that I now know Heat quotes directly.

How good is Bullitt, you ask?  Very good.  Aside from executing the detective model to perfection and featuring one hell of a car chase (made even cooler by the movie’s San Francisco setting’s elevated potential for cars getting air), Bullitt benefits from Peter Yates’s innovative and stylish direction, as well as Lalo Schifrin’s ultra-cool sixties lounge jazz score (think the Mission Impossible theme, which Schifrin wrote, stretched over an entire movie).  Style-wise, it also helps that Bullitt was filmed in 1968 – not the ‘68 of college bohemian radicalism, but the ‘68 of mini-skirts, cocktail culture, high-fi stereos and suede shoes.  Literally everything McQueen wears in Bullitt looks cool and could be worn today by a guy and not look ridiculous or dated – from his tan car coat to his sweet brown blazer/blue turtleneck combo to his streamlined suit.  OK, Bullitt’s paisley pajamas look ridiculous, but that’s a minor style infringement for something filmed in the late sixties in hippie-dippy San Francisco, of all places. (more…)

Some thoughts on The Reader:  I went into this movie with high expectations.  The incredibly attractive Kate Winslet sans clothing plus extensive discussion of literature?  What could possibly go wrong?  Turns out the film is quite uneven, though it gains some depth after an initial focus on a rather inexplicable cradle-robbing affair between Winslet’s middle-aged municipal worker and a fifteen-year-old kid happy to be along for the sex-fueled ride.  

Literary snob objections: There is a lot of reading and recitation in this movie, but the books the allegedly “German” characters read and discuss are all in English, which is ridiculous, particularly in the case of German authors.  Why not show the German text and just read it in English?  I understand the director or whoever not wanting to mix the two languages, but it’s far less jarring to see written German in the film’s background even as the characters speak in English than it is to encounter “German” characters reading their own national literature in English in a film about Germany.  Having a copy of a Schiller play with an English title printed on its cover in a movie that takes place in Heidelberg and then Berlin is just silly.  

Also, the edition of The Odyssey used is the recent Fagles translation (you can tell based on the font), disguised behind an antiquated hard cover.  Amateur, anachronistic move…

The Reader picks up in its second half, where the WWII-era activities of Winslet’s character are explored, and her trial for alleged SS collaboration brings up some interesting questions of law vs. justice, of Germany’s attempts to come to terms with its Nazi past, of the moral failures of the WWII generation, and so forth.  Bruno Ganz, known to most American movie snobs for Wings of Desire and maybe Downfall, elevates the film in the closing stretch with a nice performance as a law professor  - though it’s weird to see the German-speaking Ganz give all of his lines in English in a movie that takes place in West Germany.  Obviously this linguistic inconsistency annoys me.  

Regardless, the protagonist’s confrontation with the Holocaust and with ethical questions in general serves as a sobering counterpoint to the weirdly aimless, lust-fueled first half, and retroactively explains some – but not all – of the behavior of Winslet’s character.  While we understand why Winslet was so intent on having a teenage student read to her, I for one didn’t figure out any logical connection between her participation in the Holocaust and her proclivity for much younger men.  Perhaps there isn’t supposed to be one.  

All in all, not the  blissful Winslet/Goethe & Co. masterwork I was hoping for, but not bad.