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Category Archives: Music
Metallica: Some Kind of Monster (2004).
This type of music is not really my cup of tea, save the band’s forever catchy ‘I Disappear’ from Mission: Impossible 2 (2000). I was expecting a sort of This Is Spinal Tap (1984) farce but what I found was an endlessly rewarding slog, and it is that exhausting, through the Dr. Melfi-infused (yes, the band hire a therapist) sessions of a troupe in full-blown crisis, trying to wrestle with a monster bigger than its human components.
It’s a document of the creative process – you actually see how music is made collaboratively, the hours that go into four minutes of a completed song, and the constant bickering that accompanies the undertaking. The chief treat here is drummer/co-lyricist/band founder and victor of Napster Lars Ulrich, who seems beguiled by most of the nonsense spewing from the therapy sessions, one step ahead of the psychobabble. He’s a totally self-aware uber-brat and utterly hilarious.
I’ve never listened to the album (St. Anger). This doc will suffice.
Watch the Throne (2011) – throwback to this masterpiece.
The best collaborative album, and Kanye West at his peak. Apparently, he lost his mind or something recently.
Yes:
The Thing (1982) is a riot and defines John Carpenter.
There exists an incredible canon of Carpenter movies from the ’70s and ’80s – Carpenter pulling out one sublime picture after another. A wee bit of snobbery swirls around commentary on him, that he can’t do a period drama or handle anything another other than horror and thrills, which is making an obvious point. And I keep referring to him in the past tense. Because I haven’t seen a new movie from the lad for decades.
As much as I would ascribe the term ‘auteur’ to the truly multi-skilled Carpenter, folk read way too much into these films, always seeking for the allegorical or the profound statement. They are all cult B-movies where very little acting nuance is needed, high-concept affairs elevating the primacy of the image and the economy of the edit. You’re in it for 90 minutes and then afterwards that’s that. It’s not Antonioni.
And to The Thing (1982) and that score, the landscape, the constant menace, and yet with the wackiest visual effects, brilliant for their time and curiously not dated at all.
The Thing is his peak.
My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy – a decade on.
22 November, 2010 and this ridiculous … thing came into the world.
For me, it’s the Greatest Album Ever Made. And I find Kanye West nauseating, an attention-seeking baby who needs muzzled. Not the tunes, though. These are simply glorious, the album track-for-track mastery without equal. It’s the production, the melodies, the bombast, the deep thinking at work. Like all art, you can appropriate the material and line it up with something personal.
The (Stranded in) Belgium Odyssey of December 2010. Everything that could have gone wrong went wrong, but it was all very life-changing and I’ll never forget some of the epic moments. And no one died, which is also great. This album was played quite literally 125 times in 11 days and every track I associate with an image.
Once again:
The Last of the Mohicans (1992). Wow.
This blew my mind it was so good. On a simple action-adventure level it’s pure Mann, the framing and the cutting all signature style. What further distinguishes it are the connotations, though, the other world beyond the landscape. Mann always does this, always a subtext in the works. He makes deceptively uncomplicated yarns, but look closer and you unearth what he’s getting at.
This is pre-Revolutionary War (1775–1783) sparked by a Boston Tea Party. Get your head around that. The ending is magisterial, a literal crescendo of dimensions. The last shot – old America, current America, future America. It conveys more about American history than thousands of movies.
On a personal aside, I once synced the incredible Trevor Jones score to a panning shot of Edinburgh taken on a VHS-C camera from the top of Hillend. It was fucking pathetic but we can’t all be Michael Mann.
Essential cinema.
Just dropped in (to see what condition my condition was in).
The recently departed Kenny Rogers will for me always be synonymous with The Big Lebowski (1998) and that triumphant dream sequence.
Yeah, yeah, oh-yeah, what condition my condition was in ….
Rock on, Kenny.
The Irishman (2019) is extraordinary.
I finally signed up for the Netflix 30-day free trial – just for Scorsese. The three-and-a-half hour running time was well worth the two nauseating minutes it took to register. Bloody hell is it sublime. Scorsese pulls out all the stops in his … Scorseseness, yet the movie is something more than a swansong to the gangster epics that have served him so well.
De-ageing VFX.
Elegiac, somber, the last half-hour is a strong contender for most tragic epilogue of the 2010s. It reminded me a bit of Once Upon a Time in America (1984) but without the sprawling romanticism shaped mainly by Ennio Morricone’s iconic score. De Niro here gives his best performance since Heat (1995), which is understandable since he’s spent two decades being Dirty Grandpa or Paul Vitti or tormenting a pratfalling Ben Stiller.
More importantly, Joe Pesci is back and he is majestic. You need to see him in this. You need to see this film.
Writing anything is torture.
Writing is waterboarding of the mind, such is the rolling artillery barrage of stimuli out there. As a part-time aspiring Gonzo in the knock-off Hunter S. Thompson mould (I don’t do drugs for fear of dying before the real-life Matt Damon lands on Mars), I cannot construct a sentence if there is a Wi-Fi connection. Why pen anything when there is Wikipedia and a mammoth page dedicated to the Battle of Austerlitz (1805)?
One must be unplugged from The Matrix.
Here is my photographic … representation of even an attempt to write anything with a correctly placed comma. And all music must be Enya or Enigma or any other kind of chillout music, nothing too high-tempo.
This photo ripped an hour from my life, by the way.
It’s how I imagine F. Scott Fitzgerald carved his stuff when Zelda was out in Lalaland off her tits on cocktails galore.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 