This probably only means something to you if you are either obsessed with music cues or as fanatical as I am about George Romero’s masterpiece Dawn of the Dead, but these guys have tracked down all the non-Goblin incidental tracks from the movie and thrown them onto an album. (And, incidentally, this may relate in part to the next Segundo show, which should go up tonight.)
Category / Film
Okay, Cigarettes Are Evil, But This is Getting Ridiculous
EXHIBIT A: Clement Hurd author photo retouched. “HarperCollins said it made the change to avoid the appearance of encouraging smoking and did so with the permission of the illustrator’s estate. But Mr. Hurd’s son, also a children’s book illustrator and author, said he felt pressured to allow it.” (See also Mr. Beck’s hilarious ode.)
EXHIBIT B: Reuters: “The attorneys general of 32 states are asking Hollywood’s major movie studios to place an anti-smoking announcement on DVDs, videos and other home entertainment products to combat teen tobacco use.”
Why should art and cultural heritage be modified or affixed with warnings to “protect” people? We have no problem accepting Falstaff as a loyal companion who has imbibed too much sack. We have no problem glorifying guns (which frankly I find more evil than cigarettes) in action blockbusters. No warnings there. No digital erasures of the bag of sack or the guns (well, save Spielberg’s “restored” E.T., but at least he was decent enough, unlike Lucas, to provide us with the original version).
So why should cigarettes be any different?
Not only does digital erasure or pre-movie warnings take away from a piece of art, but in some cases it utterly destroys it. Can you imagine, for example, Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party without the cigarettes? At one point, Beverly (played by Alison Steadman) browbeats the nonsmoking couple (Angela and Tony) to light up and it’s a brilliant revelation on how Beverly manipulates the people around her to serve her own ends and how susceptible the couple is when they’re trying, like most British middle-class people, to be polite at the most horrid party imaginable.
So leave the photos and the films alone. Let art go where it needs to go and stop imposing limits on what people can and cannot say. People can make those kind of decisions for themselves. Or is it now de rigueur to assume that most contemporary audiences are intellectually bankrupt?
Wells Done
I can’t find a specific permalink, but it looks as if Jeffrey Wells somehow scored an interview with the highly reclusive Terence Malick back in 1995 and he’s posted the results. If you thought David Foster Wallace was antsy about interviews, he’s got nothing on Malick.
Incidentally, this Sunday Wells is also starting up a live, twice-weekly Internet radio show called Elsewhere Live. Again, no direct link. But apparently there will be a red light that will permit visitors to listen. Wells insists that this isn’t a podcast (strangely enough, Dennis Loy Johnson also eschews that term), but I certainly hope Wells keeps some archives. It’s incredible to see so many figures embracing Internet audio like this.
Next Thing You Know, You’ll Find Them All Barebacking
Leave it to the trusted Mr. Sicha to report the astonishing developments of our time. Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain has been reducing steely septuagenarian critics to tears and that “one of New York’s most jaded reporters admitted afterward that he found it impossible to be cynical about the film.”
Three Word Film Review: WTF?
The Apple: The lyrics “It’s a natural, natural, natural desire / To meet an actual, actual, actual vampire,” a production number devoted to speed or (as, Catherine Mary Stewart sings it, “Speeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeed!” which, as foreshadowed, is apparently “what America needs”), a man on a scooter who circles around a secretary pool (all of them wearing see-through plastic and white) for no apparent reason at all, audience reaction measured in heartbeats, a musical number in an apartment where the singer stands in one place and consciously sings the cue cards for the vapid lyrics off camera, and weird Orwellian orders with a mandatory Bim Hour (part of the National Fitness Program where even doctors put down their tools in the middle of the surgery and begin moving their arms up and down singing “Hey hey hey”).
This movie is awful, but strangely mesmerizing in its badness. Who was the insane studio exec who green-lighted this thing?
[MORE HERE: “The Rise and Fall of Cannon”]