MOVIE REVIEW: Searching For Sugar Man

True story: in the early 1970s, two record company executives received a tip to go to a dingy club in downtown Chicago to see a musician perform, purportedly a creative genius and a promising new talent. Inside the small smoky club against the wall in the back of the room, they saw a guy singing and strumming an acoustic guitar with his back facing the audience, too shy to look at the audience directly. Believing they had discovered what could be the next big thing in popular music, or possibly "the next Dylan", they signed the artist, known only as Rodriguez, to a contract.

Rodriguez released a folk rock album, Cold Fact on a subsidiary label of a major recording company. It sold, as one company executive half-jokingly recalls "about six copies". After giving his budding musical career a fairly good shake (a second album, a tour of England, and a move to California) Rodriguez abandoned his career and faded into obscurity.

Meanwhile in South Africa, a bootleg copy of Cold Fact was smuggled into the apartheid country of the early '70s, becoming a major success. The bootleg and subsequent pressings of it were circulated and sold to an estimated half million copies. In the two decades since its unofficial release in South Africa, Cold Fact had reached platinum sales level.

With precious little information available on Rodriguez, South Africans living in the media controlled apartheid country, believed Rodriguez to be akin to other western musical imports like The Rolling Stones or Dylan. One South African of the era recalls that Rodriguez' albums (a second album soon found its way to similar success) were as commonplace as The Beatles' Abbey Road in any given record collection. The music was "the soundtrack to our lives" and was embraced by an oppressed generation who heard it as their own voice speaking out against Apartheid.

The Swedish/British documentary film Searching For Sugar Man, directed by Malik Bendjelloul, currently playing the indie movie house circuit, follows two South African fans of Rodriguez - Stephen Segerman and Craig Bartholomew - as they attempt to uncover what had become of Rodriguez, known as Sugar Man, from the title of one of his songs. With the unexpected realization that Rodriguez was unknown outside of South Africa, and nothing but a few albums as clues, the two fans, discovering each other searching for Rodriguez independently on the Internet, embark on a quest to find him.

                                                                      Rodriguez

One thing they were fairly certain of: he was dead. Rumors had long evolved into acceptance that in a state of severe depression Rodriguez had shot himself in the head on stage during a concert. Another story was that he had doused himself with gasoline and ignited. So solid was the belief in his demise that it was taken for granted by South African music listeners, that Rodriguez' death was one of the most sensational celebrity deaths ever.

But if you believe in music's ability to change the cultural landscape and pave the way to a brighter future, you'll want to see Searching For Sugar Man. The film is not only a quirky and impassioned detective story with a warm and wonderful payoff, but a joyous testimony to artistic triumph over adversity. After exhausting every avenue: record labels, retired executives, countless Internet inquiries, the two fans hit pay dirt from the music itself, after scrutinizing the lyrics of a Rodriguez song.

Rodriguez' haunting and uplifting music plays throughout the film and offers a gentle plea for tolerance in a hostile world. The film is often beautifully photographed with stunning vistas of South Africa's sunny blue skies and rising mountains, and raw and striking urban snowy landscapes of anonymous Chicago streets after dark.

The story of Rodriguez will leave you with a warm glow and a yearning to indulge in his once forgotten music.          


this review was first published by the author at blogcritics

DVD Review: 50's TV CLASSICS

This indiscriminate three-disc DVD package from Film Chest Media Group offers 14 copyright-free television episodes from the 1950s that are fascinating as broadcast and cultural history. Unfortunately, the programs are presented without any editorial or historical comment, and the product seems a hastily produced set of DVDs, similar to the one dollar copyright-free videos that once flooded bargain bins at places like Wal-Mart.

Given the impossibly poised and artificially mannered contestants on the game shows offered here, and the crude editorial removal of a racist segment from a 1956 episode of The Lawrence Welk Show (the edited song looks like it was cut out with scissors), 50's TV Classics would benefit from a higher regard for this era of television history and a brief but concerned commentary.

Most of the programs here were originally broadcast live, and the frantic immediacy of the productions and hyper pacing of the performers still offer an entertainment that is as forgotten as S&H Green Stamps and gas station attendants who clean the windshield. Commercials are incorporated directly into the programs and often serve as a comedic element of a sketch or monologue. Camel Cigarettes, for instance, are hawked as if they are hot dogs at the ballpark in a sketch in The Ed Wynn Whow (1950), that dubiously boasts Camel to be "less irritating to the throat as other brands".

Surprisingly, what would seem to be the blandest and most cliched offering here, the Chevrolet sponsored The Chevy Show with Dinah Shore (1956) a then popular musical variety hour with celebrity guests and comedic bits, is a jewel of television history. It's an Emmy-worthy blueprint of the variety show format, so prevalent in the 1950s, with elements of the fiercely dominating new musical wave - rock 'n roll - neatly fitted into the traditional style of Shore's soft and safe crooning. Guest star Betty Hutton, a largely forgotten movie star with an enormous music and comedic talent, provides ample zing and swing to this exceptional hour of programming.

The three game shows included on the disc - two episodes of Do You Trust Your Wife (1957), and one each of Name That Tune (1955) and Beat The Clock (1950), are artificially contrived and seem only an arm's length away from the quiz show scandal of the 1950s . One suspects such cheating was an industry standard. The contestants recite obviously scripted verbal interplay with the host as if they were just yanked off an actor's unemployment line. Of these, Beat The Clock is the most genuine and the most fun with amiable host Bud Collyer, guiding at break-neck speed, contestants performing simple stunts for cash.


The Bob Hope Show (1957) finds Hope performing his show for American troops stationed in French Morocco, with the extremely likable Gary Crosby - Bing's son - singing and looking very much like his namesake and providing Hope with a flurry of  Hope-Crosby jokes. Three episodes of Death Valley Days from 1953, are fine western dramas depicting actual history of the western expansion of the continental U.S. The episodes include the original iconic 20 Mule Team Borax commercials.

                                                                
The Milton Berle Show (1956) offers an unlikely dramatic segment with guest star Mickey Rooney in a searing performance in a short boxing play reminiscent of Requiem For A Heavyweight. The Red Skelton Show (1954) finds the red-headed clown providing his own laughs to jokes that fall flat with the audience in a "Deadeye" cowboy sketch that offers an elaborate set design and complex stunts. Ed Sullivan guests doing a deadpan parody of himself.

No easy paycheck for The Three Stooges (Shemp, not Curly) as they guest and work hard for laughs in a workmen-like appearance on The Ed Wynn Show. They are as funny and seemingly spontaneous as they are in their classic filmed shorts. The Paul Winchell and Jerry Mahoney Show, a ventriloquist Saturday morning kids show from 1950, seems only a commercial advertisement for its sponsor - Tootsie Roll - interrupted by rambunctious stunts and gags. It is, however, touching, in the pre-civil rights era to hear the initiation pledge into the Jerry Mahoney club for kids, spoken quite earnestly - to be kind to all kids regardless of race, creed or color.

 

50's TV Classics offers 495 minutes of television broadcast history that should be a delight for students of American broadcast and as nostalgia, should warm the hearts and rekindle fond memories of those familiar with the era. I hope Film Chest Media continues with the series, and offers a less loosely organized and more detailed account of this often neglected time in American history.


this review was first published at blogcritics

POST-OLYMPIC BLUES - the summer's too hot to handle

Summer is baking away like my attempt at souffle.

I keep reaching for the remote thinking the Olympics is a regularly scheduled TV show.

When I was forced at gunpoint to read Thornton Wilder's OUR TOWN in high school, I scowled like the devil. What a pile of crap.

As a young more conscientious adult, I saw a televised production of OUR TOWN and hit the library the next day to secure a copy of it. I loved it. Oh impatient youth.

I spent the first half of the summer as Howie Newsome the milk man in The Amherst Players' production of OUR TOWN. It's a checkpoint on my bucket list - cast in "Our Town".

We had a great little run - two weekends - and I met a warm group of wonderful actors and theatre folk. Oh, and I won a bottle of wine in a basket raffle drawing at the theatre.

                                     The cast of "Our Town".  As always I am bottom left.

I'm cast as "Factotum" - all the bit parts - in The New Phoenix Theatre's Curtain Up production of Mr. and Mrs. Nobody, by renowned British writer Keith Waterhouse (novel: Billy Liar), and directed by his son, New Phoenix's Artistic Director Robert Waterhouse. I'm privileged to be part of the production.

My bro wires me shows he thinks I will like. He sent me HBO's Luck and I savored each of the nine episodes. I don't see a lot of tee-vee programs, but I loved this horse racing drama that was cancelled after one season when a third horse died during the production of the series. I'm fan-boy.

Is there any one else in all the world who can not find a reason to like Entourage?

I was crawling through the second floor of a junk store (a rapidly disappearing enterprise) when I found a rolled up tube of cardboard underneath a pile of rubble and reached in it to find a beautiful Van Gogh print of The Bridge in pristine condition. The cashier charged me 50 cents for it. I put it in a green frame and it is  -

I went to a lecture on antique glass bottles at a local library and afterwords they had a drawing for an antique milk bottle. I wish I was as lucky with Mega Millions.

Watched another Norwegian documentary about 1990s black metal music. Until The Light Takes Us is dark and cool and grim. It's available on Netflix instant viewing.

I'm listening to Saint-Saens' Carnival of The Animals.

And reading recently resurrected Magnet magazine issues.

And thinking about a quote from the recently passed Phyllis Diller: "I am such a bad cook, my TV dinners taste like radio."

Close 'er up big dummy.

Book Review: THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT PLAYS 2010-2011, edited by William W. Demastes

The latest in a long line of collected short plays of a given theatre season The Best American Short Plays 2010-2011 (Applause Theatre and Cinema Books) offers 21 short dramatic and comedic plays by generally unknown playwrights that all evolve - according to the editor, theatre writer William W. Demastes - around the theme of love. An argument may be offered that all literary work is thematically based on love. A bad pun may be suggested that given this diverse collection, love is a many splintered thing.

If love is in the air throughout these 21 works, it is coy in Lorin Howard's slight The Subtext of Texting, in which lovers fail to communicate their true feelings while texting cute cliches and smiley faces to each other. It is neurotic in G. Flores' The Coyote Stratagem, in which a chalk circle with imaginary barbed wire is drawn on a garage floor as a means of creating boundaries and communication between two parties in a dissolving relationship.

Love is strange in Janet Alward's amusing Creatures, in which a man confesses to his girlfriend at a drive-in movie (showing a horror film) that he is indeed a werewolf. And it is perverted, if not entirely absent in Lindsay Marianna Walker and Dawson Moore's creepy Six Dead Bodies Duct-Taped to a Merry-Go-Round, in which two guys traveling in a truck with a cargo of human corpses contemplate a lewd act.

Lisa Soland's Thread Count successfully bridges a modernist narrative with an old-fashioned corny tale of a country bumpkin on a sightseeing tour of New York City. It offers zippy Neil Simon-like exchanges between her and a Macy's Department store sales clerk. It's unabashedly romantic, while chartering a satisfying and emotional drive that proves a play need not be sappy to be wholesome.

The crowning offering is Gabriel Rivas Gomez's Scar Tissue. In this psychological, minimally staged extravagance - it includes percussive sounds, projected images and several scene changes - a renowned heart surgeon, coping with the death of her soldier daughter in Afghanistan, plans a life-saving and complicated operation on a returned soldier who suffers from post traumatic stress. The taut play reaches a fever pitch of emotion that is disturbing, even heart wrenching.

For a theatre director or producer looking for plays to fill the gaps in a production of one-acts, this collection is a bountiful of pleasing oddities. Each work offers something worthwhile, if at times only an amused notion. The collection runs the gamut of the most serious drama to the most irreverent topical trinkets like text messaging and active profiles of deceased people on Facebook.

While some come dangerously close to sitcom level, others may very well be the early work of an exciting new voice in the theatre.


this review was first published at blogcritics.

ONE IN 20,000 MOVIES - #2

I take nearly 20,000 movie titles and I have a computer choose a random title, and then I seek that movie out and watch it. Why? No reason.

Drum roll, please ...

                                                      The Matrix Revolutions (2003)
                                                         A Warner Brothers Picture
                                                   Directed by The Wachowski Brothers
                                                Cast: Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne

The Matrix Revolutions, the third film in The Wachowski Brothers' Matrix trilogy was critically slashed, bashed and run out of town upon its release in 2003. It's outrageous $110 million budget yielded a slow and dismal return. Film critic Leonard Maltin smugly said of it: "BILL AND TED'S BOGUS JOURNEY should not be the better sequel on Keanu Reeves resume.".

Being unfamiliar with the first two Matrix films - The Matrix (1999) and The Matrix Reloaded (2003) - I sort of enjoyed this third Matrix entry, a futuristic sci-fi thriller about a race of humans at war with a mechanized world (the "Machines"), for the rule of sacred but never clearly defined Zion. Apparently Zion is like the bar at the end of the universe where all the humanoids hang out.

While the good vs. evil simplicity is overly complicated by a league of sci-fi clutter, it's best to just go with a Flash Gordon mode of mind and enjoy this ride. The special effects are magnificent. The "war" in the second half of the film is dazzling in its claustrophobic vista of biological, mechanical and human warfare battling in a struggle for dominance.

Keanu Reeves as Neo sends this "man" to apparent fiery Hell with little more than a sucker punch in The Matrix Revolutions.


Elsewhere there are intriguing stark, mundane images of an abandoned subway station in glaring porcelain white, earthbound domesticated and hollow suburban homes with rooms that look like something David Lynch might feel comfortable lounging in, and a dormant industrialized nighttime world of skyscraper human design void of human existence.

As a visual palette it's like a good modern art gallery. As science fiction it's like Buck Rogers re-booted.

The eye-popping Monica Bellucci and some French guy prepare for battle in "The Matrix Revolutions".


There is an army of look-a-like clones dressed in business suit and tie savvy, who may or may not be the "Machines" posing as humans. I was a bit confused by who exactly they were, but certainly the "bad guys" given their habit of draining blood from a person with a single squeeze of their fist. I think you may have to be eight years old and big on Transformers to understand what is going on at any given point of the film.

There is an all-knowing mystical human known as "Oracle", a black woman who can be found smoking cigarettes in her ridiculously earthbound suburban kitchen baking cookies, as space travelers pop in to ask her vital "meaning of life" questions. Actress Gloria Foster played Oracle in the first two Matrix films but died before completion of The Matrix Revolutions and is replaced here by Mary Alice.

An army of clones gather to watch one of their own dancing in the rain in "The Matrix Revolutions".


My favorite quote of the movie comes from the evil leader of the look-a-like clone men who approaches Oracle in her strange kitchen and takes a plate of freshly baked cookies and smashes them against the wall. He then says: "Maybe you knew I was going to do that, maybe you didn't. If you did, that means you baked those cookies and set that plate deliberately, purposely, which means that you're sitting there also deliberately, purposely. Cookies need love like everything does."

Indeed.

Book Review: Abbey Road To Ziggy Stardust, by Ken Scott and Bobby Owsinski

Abbey Road To Ziggy Stardust is a fascinating rock 'n roll first person account by a guy who not only engineered The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour and The Beatles (The White Album), but as if that isn't enough crowning achievement, went on to produce some of the most highly acclaimed music from rock 'n roll's most exciting era, including David Bowie's The Rise And Fall of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars, and George Harrison's All Things Must Pass.

Ken Scott's contribution to engineering and producing some of the finest music of the 20th Century is staggering. Add these titles to his resume: Bowie's The Man Who Sold The World, Hunky Dory, Aladdin Sane and Pinups; Elton John's Madman Across The Water, Honky Chateau, and Don't Shoot Me I'm Only Piano Player; Jeff Beck's Truth; Lou Reed's Transformer; Supertramp's Crime Of The Century; The Rolling Stones' Sticky Fingers; the list goes on.

It's an inside "hands-on" book which offers casual and candid impressions of John, Paul, George, and Ringo bustling about Abbey Road Studios as if it's just another day at the office. The rock 'n roll dignitaries breezing through the pages of Scott's volume is like a stroll through the history of modern rock music. Any given page may find Elton John ringing up the author asking him to meet him in France to produce his next album. Frank Zappa knocks on the door to offer access to his home-built recording studio while he's away on tour. George Harrison calls just to chat and to persuade Scott to re-master All Things Must Pass.

Ken Scott grew up in a working class London family with a fascination for recording devices and a healthy lust for the girl singers on British TV. After a university stint, he secured an assistant sound engineer position at recording giant EMI, which led to his long association with The Beatles. Beginning with "pushing buttons" as assistant engineer on the soundtrack for A Hard Day's Night, Scott's relationship with The Beatles continues long after their breakup and is climaxed by his stay in George Harrison's castle during the final days of Harrison's life.

His wonderful fan-based story, which first finds him as an impressionable young lad encountering The Beatles in the hallways of EMI studios, where he is tempted to "scream like one of the girls" at the sight of them, is merged with his knowledge of sound technology which is as telling as his personal narrative, if you care to know, for instance, how they got that garage rock hollow sound in The Beatles' "Yer Blues". For true sound buffs, a more specified "tech talk" is included on separate highlighted pages of the book.

His anecdotes on the legion of rock 'n roll royalty offer a brand new history which finds Yoko Ono and Linda McCartney's presence in the Beatles' recording studio welcome and passive. He can't recall a single incident of agitation regarding the Beatles' wives. It is no surprise that John Lennon is depicted as a wonderful guy who could be a bit of an "arsehole".

My enthusiasm for the book is curbed a bit by the second half which isn't nearly as thrilling as the first, as Scott takes his career into the 1980s and '90s. Peculiar anecdotes still abound as Devo is described as "standoffish", Duran Duran are seen as foolishly extravagant with money, and medical emergency personal are summoned to Scott's posh Los Angeles pool party when a guest gets his "thingy" stuck in the Jacuzzi suction cup.

Far too many chapters (three!) are devoted to L.A. new wave band Missing Persons, a band that Scott managed, who scored a hit record with "Words" and quickly faded into obscurity. There is a significant number of testimonial letters from record label executives, musicians, and fellow producers and engineers, pasted throughout the book, attesting to Scott's value as a producer, that is gratuitous and leaves an air of insecurity.

But the importance of this documentation of the creation of such monumental music is not to be underestimated. It helps that Scott was strictly anti-drug while working, and his vital recollections are vivid and studious. His song for song account of The Beatles' White Album is historical.


this review was first published at blogcritics.

Music Review: Jim Coleman, TREES

Jim Coleman's Trees is a bit like those meditative "sounds of nature" CDs, wherein the sound of a babbling brook or the love call of a mating whale is intended to cleanse the mind and soothe the soul. This Coleman release, however soothing, is not quite tranquil, as there is an ominous and foreboding measure to the sound of trees, perfectly captured in this music that is omnipresent, lumbering and eternal. It is neo-classical Brian Eno-esque music for mood mongering.

Often, the music composes the spaces between trees as the wind gently passes through them. Soft percussive wind chimes via piano and keyboard, tinkle and glisten in a forest glade and a cello anchors the very breath and weight of an aged tree. The human voice morphs with violin and wind instrument to create an eerie sound as if ancient Druids are present to offer homage.

These ten tracks of meditative music is post-industrial noise with a hint of jazz accents. The sonic landscape paints a picture of nature repossessing an apocalyptic catastrophe. A synth keyboard crawls over a desolate landscape as the occasional horn, violin and voice enhance the emergence of the majestic trees. More like one piece of music over 10 tracks, the theme-titled songs - "Rain", "Dawn", "Summer Heat", etc - differentiate only slightly.

This is the first release from Coleman's own Wax and Wane recording label. It rises above the legion of independent, ambient, producer-on-a-laptop CDs that flood the market, by creating a distinct sound that is as intriguing as it is relaxing. In composing music encompassing the life history of trees, Coleman nails what a tree might convey in a musical language. Like the numbered rings designating age in the trunk of a fallen redwood, the music encircles and solidly defines its subject.

Interpretation aside, Trees is simply a pleasing sound experience. Meditative like a mantra, it is also thoughtful in its imagery of an ancient forest boldly advancing into the unknown. Or if you just want to kick back and groove to some cool sounds, it is absolute.


blogcritics.org/music/article/music-review-jim-coleman-trees/