Winona Ryder and Christian Slater in Heathers

1989 – the year that gave us the superhero blockbuster with Tim Burton’s Batman (alas too flawed a film to quite make my final list) and a slew of Amerindie classics by future top line directors like Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch, Gus Van Sant and Steven Soderberg. Here, then, are the best 15 films of 1989:

1. Say Anything

If the 80s were the golden age of the teen movie (and trust me, they were) two of the absolute genre peaks occurred in 1989 with this film and Heathers. The two are diametrically opposed – despite some very funny moments this is a film that treats three-dimensional characters with a great deal of dignity and invests depth into the classic boy meets girl formula. Heathers on the other hand disembowels the entire cycle through satire. Cameron Crowe, who wrote the outstanding Fast Times at Ridgemont High, writes and directs here and shows a sharp eye for character and detail.

John Cusack plays the sweet, straightforward guy who is animal instinct to Ione Skye’s brainy Diane, a girl who looks to have a bright future thanks in part to her loving supportive father and his desire to see her succeed. John Mahoney is excellent as well in a tricky role, allowing Diane to see that as much as he loves her, he may not always know what the right thing to do is. The supporting cast is rounded out ably by John’s sister Joan and Lili Taylor in a hilarious turn. Then there’s the iconic scene when Cusack as Lloyd tries to win Diane over with nothing but a boombox over his head and a Peter Gabriel tape.

2. Heathers

Up until the very end Heathers is a take-no-prisoners satire of Reagan/Bush I America as embodied by the John Hughes film cycle, a deranged roller coaster that is full of sardonic humor and killer riffs. Winona Ryder was the dream girlfriend in this – sarcastic, sexy, and decidedly dark-edged like a film noir femme fatale. Yet the real tempter is her new boyfriend played by Christian Slater in full Nicholson mode, eyebrows arched and face twisted into a smirk.

From the chillingly flip conversations these kids have with their parents to the false grieving for dead students who were either picked on or despised the film seemed to welcome two fresh new voices, director Michael Lehmann and writer Daniel Waters. Their follow-up teaming on Hudson Hawk pretty much sums up what happened to them afterwards, not unlike the tacked on feel-good ending of Heathers in contrast to the “prom in heaven” that was originally written.

Still, this is a brilliantly caustic film about what happens when people subsume their identity too long to run with the herd and more to the point, how the same herd will always regroup despite outside danger.

3. Henry V

It’s hard to recall now but Kenneth Branagh was hotly tipped as the next Laurence Olivier, a young British actor/director who was finding a new slant on Shakespeare onstage and then onscreen. It was Olivier’s wartime version of this same play that catapulted him to worldwide stardom in 1944, and Branagh finds a different way into the same material, appropriate for  1989. A tour de force for actors like Judi Dench, Ian Holm and real-life Branagh squeeze Emma Thompson, this Henry V is suitably cinematic yet always focused on the nuances of the acting. Less triumphal than the 1944 version, it’s imbued with the spirit of sacrifice.

4. My Left Foot

Another talented actor from across the pond made a splash with American audiences in 1989 in Jim Sheridan’s retelling of Christy Brown’s life story. Though the temptation is to chalk this up as another Oscar-bating performance as critiqued in Robert Downey Jr.’s Tropic Thunder monologue (“Never go full retard!”)  Daniel Day Lewis gives a brilliant turn as an artist with cerebral palsy who is thought at first to be simpleminded and helpless. The portrait is rounded out by his working class family who both help him and hold him back, and his own substantial ego and doubts. His family and neighbors have to then adjust him as a successful artist, which is almost more alienating than the cerebral palsy. Lewis and Sheridan never succumb to easy sentimentalizing, making the portrait that emerges that much more moving.

5. The Killer

Before bringing his talent for balletic bullet slinging and operatic plotting to America John Woo was at the vanguard of Hong Kong’s action flick renaissance, and this re-imagining of Jean-Pierre Melville’s classic Le Samurai is probably the peak of Woo’s pre-American (and probably post-American career).  Woo’s favorite star, Chow Yun-Fat, anchors all the heightened tension and the relentless slo-mo acts of violence.

6. Do the Right Thing

Spike Lee’s masterpiece takes place on the hottest day of the summer in Brooklyn. While The Cosby Show existed in one fictional universe in the same New York borough Lee’s Bed-Stuy existed in another, one where racial tensions simmering just below the surface are ready to ignite at any provocation. Lee seems to say that though the fullscale riots and radical politics of the 60s and 70s appear to be over, the underlying issues remain and fester. In fact, New York would see outbreaks like the Crown Heights riot during this time of supposed quiescence and the Rodney King beating was a few scant years away. The controversial finale steal leaves audiences talking and has the power to divide opinion, just as Lee intended. The sweltering cinematography by longtime collaborator Ernest Dickerson should also be noted.

7. Sex, Lies and Videotape

Along with Spike Lee, Steven Soderberg helped tp define the new era of indie films in the late 80s starting with this Sundance award winning debut. James Spader is at his quirkiest, Peter Gallagher shows that he and his eyebrows have range and Andie MacDowell actually comes off as a fine actress in this story of a drifter who’s interest in talking about sex rather than doing the act gets women to open up on tape about their own sex lives and fantasies. Though it sounds like the plot of a Skinemax special the finely drawn relationships, particularly between sisters Laura San Giacomo and MacDowell, elevate this to the level of fascinating viewing. Spawned a legion of bad imitations.

8 .  Parenthood

Edging ever-so-close to sitcommery but still landing right side up this was the movie that helped tame Steve Martin, for better or worse. Once audiences accepted  the wacky funnyman as a normal suburban dad roles like Cheaper By The Dozen came calling and the template was set for others like Robin Williams and Eddie Murphy to become suitably defanged for general consumption. Which isn’t to say this film isn’t charming, because it is. While today this Ron Howard directed vehicle would slot in nicely on TV next to something like Malcolm in the Middle, at the time it was a sweetly poignant take on modern American family life. A great cast goes a long way here with Dianne Wiest, Rick Moranis and Jason Robards in particular standing out.

9. Parents

The flip side of Parenthood was this similarly-titled pitch dark satire directed by actor Bob Balaban. In a stylized suburban 50s a child starts to suspect that his parents are rather monstrous, and what’s with the cuts of meat dad Randy Quaid keeps bringing home to work? It’s a wicked dissection of the horrors which lurked beneath the gleaming commercial surface of atomic-age America – a time period further sanitized and pre-packaged as happy times by the outgoing Reagan administration.

10. Crimes and Misdemeanors

One of Woody Allen’s underrated best films, this superficially bears some structural resemblance to his great 1986 film Hannah and Her Sisters in it’s blending of comedy and drama and would later find it’s themes recycled in the less compelling Match Point many years later. The intertwined stories concern Martin Landau, a successful married man whose mistress begins to get out of hand. He turns to his brother, played by Jerry Ohrbach, who arranges to have her killed. But Landau is racked with guilt and suddenly begins to look for some divine presence in the Universe – in part out of fear and in part out of longing for the punishment he feels the crime warrants. This is contrasted with Allen who is hired to make a documentary on his smugly successful TV star brother in law, played by Alan Alda in one of  his best performances. Allen uses the role of filmmaker to exact a creator’s revenge on Alda, yet it’s a Pyrrhic victory. Similarly Landau begins to realize that the punishment he fears is simply never going to happen. To the contrary his life is better than ever. It’s an alternately very funny and deeply felt film.

11. When Harry Met Sally…

Little did Rob Reiner know that he would set off an entire revival of romantic comedies with this gem of a film. More to the point, very few of them hold the faintest of candles to this clever, funny, and touching film that asks the question, “Can men and women ever just be friends?” The cast is at it’s best – in fact all of the actors here have yet to surpass their warm, funny work in this film toplined by Billy Crystal and a career making performance by Meg Ryan. Ample support is given by the wonderful late Bruno Kirby and Carrie Fisher, both of whom transcend the dregs of the best friend roles that were cloned out in the thousands of knockoffs that followed.

12. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

Steven Spielberg has some set of balls. The third Indiana Jones flick makes up for the overstuffed second film with crackerjack pacing and introducing brilliantly the father/son relationship between Harrison Ford and Sean Connery. The interplay and timing between the stars gives the film an extra lift and the story a welcome level of tension that propels it neatly until a typically Spielbergian ending that’s one part mysticism to two parts sentimentality. The cojones come in with the Monty Python-esque object of pursuit, the cup of Christ, which for Spielberg is no more a real or religious relic than a spaceship or an Indian cult. It all gets subsumed as the latest magical mumbo-jumbo Indy has to come across at the adventure’s end.

13. Mystery Train

Jim Jarmusch was one of the directors that helped  nurture the American indie film movement during the 1980s with gems like Down By Law.  Mystery Train is a love letter to Memphis as seen through the eyes of characters who inhabit three separate but overlapping story arcs. As is his wont, Jarmusch peppers his cast with actors and amateurs and gets standout performances from two guys better known for the contributions to the world of music – a hilarious Screaming Jay Hawkins and The Clash’s Joe Strummer.  Don’t miss the moody evocative cinematography by Jarmusch fave Robby Muller.

14. Meet the Feebles

Before there was Avenue Q and before Peter Jackson  became the go-to director for big Hollywood epics he cut his teeth on delightfully subversive fare like this send-up of the Muppets. This could fairly be said to be the Bad Lieutenant of puppet flicks chocked as it is with sex, violence and gore galore. Darkly funny it is, but it’s also surprisingly human for a film populated by puppets.

15. Drugstore Cowboy

This may still be Gus Van Sant’s best film, despite helping to kick off the heroin chic trend that blighted early 90s pop culture. Matt Dillon showed he had star material as the head of a band of junkie thieves which included Kelly Preston and Heather Graham. Evocatively shot and imaginatively edited, you’ll never throw a hat on a bed again after seeing this.

A proper video game for real Beatles nerds might go something like this:

Level One:

You have to successfully play for 8 hours straight for bored German lechers who just want to see the naked girls at the Reeperbahn in Berlin’s red light district circa 1961.

Level Two:

Successfully dress in outfits that most give off a “rough trade” vibe while simultaneously thrilling crowds at Liverpool’s Cavern Club in order to attract the attention of closeted record shop impresario Brain Epstein. Remember he has to be besotted enough to neglect his family business and manage you full time!

Level Three:

Paradoxically one of the hardest levels – keep from getting sacked as The Beatles drummer a la Pete Best on the eve of their first recording session.

…and so on. Of course the new Beatles edition of the popular game Rock Band has a sanitized fantasy version of the Beatles ascent free of band acrimony, romance managerial or otherwise, and a chronology that makes the aforementioned Beatles nerds wince as the final level is a version of the concert on the roof of Abbey Road studios during the Let It Be sessions (which everybody knows happened before they even recorded their last album, Abbey Road).

Of course how marketable or fun would a game be if the last level was pitting your lawyers against the other players to decide what terms the band’s partnership would be dissolved on?

More to the point, the game is a hoot for fans and newbies alike. It’s easy to play but hard enough if you set the levels properly, and it does give a renewed wonder and awe for the intricacies of their arrangements and the awesomeness of their talents.

For those preferring a more old fashioned evaluation of the Fab Four there are also the remastered albums available separately or in recession busting stereo and mono box sets. The sound is revelatory – the rhythm section re-emerges as an underrated marvel first, then the gorgeous inventiveness of George’s guitar playing and finally the singular nature of John’s voice and Paul’s amazing vocal range and the harmonies they all made together.

A friend of mine wrote me via Facebook in response to a message I’d posted there about the power of hearing George’s perfect guitar solo on “Nowhere Man” revealed in all it’s glory, the final note shimmering and clear. He wondered if it was wrong that he’d never paid attention to the Beatles and owned none of their albums despite being a music fan.

It reminded me of a girl I once dated who was also very passionate about music but had more than a blind spot for the Beatles – she disliked them. I was fairly outraged by this – disliking the Beatles is like saying you’d prefer no oxygen please, or that chocolate tasted like dog crap.

I think what happens with the Beatles is a resistance based on the fact that you are supposed to like them. When you are told that they are the greatest band in the world I think it’s easy to get the sense that there is nothing to hear in them that already hasn’t been heard and if so many people like them, how can they possibly be that good?

The answer is that there is no one Beatles but many – many styles, songs, and four distinct personalities that allow very different sensibilities to connect to them. I watched a snippet of a documentary the other night on Cirque Du Soleil‘s Vegas Beatles extravaganza Love in which Yoko took the troupe to task for their staging of “Come Together.” Her insistence was that they had missed the message of it being a political song.

Watching it I thought “Shit Yoko, you missed the message, it’s not political at all!” In fact, Lennon has said that the song is actually based on a dream he had about his own funeral and everyone “coming together” to view the body – “over me” as it were. This is especially chilling when you know that the weird echoey plosive whisper that sounds like “shooptuh”  throughout the song is actually Lennon murmuring “shoot me.”

Really though neither of us is wrong in our wildly divergent experience of the song, nor was the Cirque Du Soleil in viewing it in an orgiastic manner (come together indeed.) The songs are elastic enough to contain many layers of meaning from “Please Please Me” which is seen in some circles as a  coded ode to mutual oral sex to “Back in The U.S.S.R.” which some Nixonites took as a bald-faced declaration of  support for the Soviets (“I’m backing the U.S.S.R.” to their paranoid eardrums)  rather than a tongue in cheek goof on The Beach Boys clean cut celebrations of Americana.

Perhaps the most poignant part of the renewed focus on the Beatles this year is that the album, the format they raised to the level of ultimate artistic musical expression, has been diminished in relevance to pre-Sgt. Pepper‘s levels. I pass no judgment on this – their singles were as magnificent as anything they did and the rise of MP3′s and downloading has given me more access to new music than ever before – perhaps too much more.

It’s fitting then that they also stand at the cusp of a new era – with a game. They may not be the first to have done so but simply in taking the plunge the boys from Liverpool once again prove their power to legitimize and popularize a format. I expect a Rock Band:  Rolling Stones in..oh…6 months?

1979 was one of those amazing years in music that just makes the jaw hit the floor. When it comes to albums the year was chock full of stone cold classics. At the end of the seventies music was perched on the edge of the great fragmentation that would take hold in the eighties and especially the nineties – punk, funk, disco, pop all rubbed shoulders along with the first stirrings of hip-hop (see my 1979 songs playlist for the full melange).

This is not to mention the themes that cut across the songs in a year that saw the a rising conservative movement regain power in Britain and begin to assert itself against the doomed Carter administration in the United States. Underneath was the roiling racism and anti-immigration of a resurgent fascist National Front in the UK and an America that wanted to put Watergate and all of the conflicts of the 60s behind them, as they would in 1980 by electing Ronald Reagan president.

Musically punk was becoming post-punk, reggae, dub, krautrock and even disco were becoming influences across the spectrum and even if rap was yet to make itself known on the album charts – it was out there being formed. These are my favorites – what are yours?

1. Talking Heads – Fear of Music

Talking Heads were in the midst of an amazingly fertile creative period which Fear of Music sits smack in the middle of. This was their third LP and their second with Brian Eno as co-Producer. Opener “I Zimbra” is a glorious red herring, a slice of afro-funk that marches on in like a refugee from the next album they’d do, Remain in Light, which was suffused with African rhythms from stem to stern. Fear of Music was a whole other bag – like a lot of 1979s best, the re-heating of the cold war brings a dread and an exploration of themes of totalitarianism on tracks like “Life During Wartime” and “Electric Guitar”. As usual though David Byrne’s lyrics bring a distinct New York art fried sensibility whether trying to decide what city to live in: “…how about Memphis, home of Elvis and the ancient Greeks?” or railing against the smugness of animals: “..they don’t even know what a joke is!” All of this is brought to jumping, nervy life by one of the all-time great rhythm sections, Tina Weymouth on bass and Chris Frantz on the drum kit and some of Eno’s most spectacular soundscapes. One of the best albums from one of America’s best ever bands.

2. The Clash – London Calling

I mean, duh. I did my college history thesis on this album’s distinct confluence of musical influences that include (as Robert Christgau and others have pointed out) various permutations of the 100-year old myth of Staggerlee, a black man who shot a white man just because he could. The Clash find the resonance of this in Jamaican rude boys, Rastafarians, working class Brits and losers of all stripes who try to break their losing streaks – all to often with violence. Punk wasn’t supposed to last past album one and the Sex Pistols had the good grace to implode in a blaze of bad karma. The Clash followed up their classic debut with a solid but unsurprising second record and by all rights should have been looking for a way out. They found one by expanding their musical palette and worldview, creating a rare double-album where every single song is spectacular including the unlisted bonus “Train in Vain”, which yielded their first US hit. The dumb asses at Sony music think that exposing people to great music for free is bad for sales so I have no official video to embed. Thus, Sony continues to demonstrate the marketing acumen that has led their entire industry into the crapper.

2.Joy Division – Unknown Pleasures

Joy Division was a band that marked the place where punk became post-punk – aggression curdled into depression and introspection and rhythm sections began to incorporate the mechanisms of krautrock and even the elongated bounce of Jamaican dub. You can still hear echoes of The Stooges and New York band Suicide in there too – like Suicide the synthesizer tones give the barest hint of new wave and alternative music to come – much of which would be pioneered by Ian Curtis band mates after he killed himself and they formed New Order.  In the Nazi sourced band name there is also the fascination with totalitarianism that was rampant at the time and found it’s counterpart in the revival of the National Front in Britain.

3.Neil Young and Crazy Horse -  Rust Never Sleeps

Rust Never Sleeps is the blueprint for a classic album by Neil Young and Crazy Horse, one half acoustic laments and the other half blazing rock anthems, with much of the record recorded live and sounding it. It helps that this might be his strongest set of songs on any single album, from the acoustic and electric “Hey, Hey, My, My” and “My, My, Hey, Hey” later infamously quoted in Kurt Cobain’s suicide note to the fantasia of “Pocahontas” where Neil imagines hanging out with the titular native American princess and Marlon Brando, the heartbreaking “Powderfinger” which feels like a scene out of a Herzog film, the outrageous randy boast of “Welfare Mothers” and on.  “The king is dead but he’s not forgotten, is this the story of Johnny Rotten?” Young wonders, neatly conflating the 1977 death of Elvis and rise of the Sex Pistols in one verse. Utter genius.

5. Gang of Four – Entertainment!

Gang of Four’s debut LP took the politics and punk snarl of The Clash and married them to scouring brush guitars that were close cousins the scratchy style found on old 60s soul records, plus a pinch of reggae styled deep bass. Among the many highlights is “I Found That Essence Rare” a slice of deconstructionist Marxism that you can shake your ass to:

“Aim for the body rare, you’ll see it on TV
The worst thing in 1954 was the Bikini
See the girl on the TV dressed in a Bikini
She doesn’t think so but she’s dressed for the H-Bomb”

6.Wire - 154

Wire’s third album in under two years put a definite exclamation mark on their first incarnation, giving the impression that the band was striving for this mixture of electronics and melody even from the short sharp guitar based songs they had started with. 154 can be uneven but it contains thrilling melodies and surprising soundscapes, plus the band’s typical disdain for ceremony typified by singing the word “Chorus” with an audible smirk just before the, you guessed it, chorus of the indelible “Map. Ref. 41 N. 93 W.”

7.Elvis Costello and the Attractions – Armed Forces

Armed Forces sometimes gets short shrift but to me it’s the Costello record par excellance – his best set of songs and lyrics and some of the Attractions most inventive arrangements. Costello wittily and perhaps too-blithely sends up the resurgence of National Front activity in Britain by making a theme record about “emotional fascism” where lovers are really “Two Little Hitlers.” Nick Lowe lends a dynamic production palette and the gem “What’s so Funny About Peace Love and Understanding” which would forever be associated with Costello afterward. Lyrical gems like “I’m in a chemistry class/I want a piece of your mind/You don’t know what you started/When you mixed it up with mine/Are you ready for the final solution?” are backed up by muscular playing and witty touches like the faux-fouled up vocal dub in “Accidents Will Happen”.

8.Public Image Ltd. – Metal Box/ Second Edition

Neil Young may have sang “The king is gone but he’s not forgotten/Is this the story of Johnny Rotten?” on Rust Never Sleeps but for some observers Rotten’s new band PIL was exceeding the promise of The Sex Pistols with their new music. After all the Pistols were merely supercharging the template set by The Stooges, New York Dolls and Ramones. PIL were doing something else entirely, with Jah Wobble’s gonad shaking basslines lifted from stoned-out underwater Jamaican dub records and Keith Levene’s guitars similarly tuned in by way of surf rock and Richard Dudansky’s drumming like a disco record sped up. On top of it all was Rotten’s chanting, moaning, cajoling. It’s an extraordinary record that sounds both timeless and unrepeatable and it proved to be both – PIL would never reach these heights again nor ever revisit the sound as the core group imploded. Originally the record was issued, appropriately enough given the cinematic sweep of the sound, in a metal film canister filled with three discs – hence the title. Second Edition was the conventionally-sleeved re-issue.

9. The Jam – Setting Sons

The Jam was too retro to be punk but too edgy to be hard rock. Instead they got tagged as Mod revivalists, a scene which they would remain the only relevant members of despite spawning several other Who-inspired bands. In hindsight they were a crucial link between the Britpop of the 60s and the resurgence of the same in the 90s – showing that the elements that made The Kinks and The Who local treasures could still be tapped in the midst of punk and new wave. Setting Sons was a concept album of sorts about war, set both in an apocalyptic future foretold by The Clash in “London Calling” and the near past of British colonial warfare that sent local boys home in boxes. Yet the record is anything but somber with crackling arrangements and killer songs like “Wasteland” and “Smithers-Jones” and detours like the marvelous “Girl on The Phone” with only a misplaced cover of “Heat Wave” to spoil things.

10. Stiff Little Fingers – Inflammable Material

The last gasp of British punk’s first wave came by way of Belfast, Ireland with a band that was uncompromisingly critical of the warring factions that continued to tear their country apart, calling them to task with brutally hard anthems that shone with a rare combination of hope and anger on tracks like the classic “Alternative Ulster” where they exhort listeners to “Alter your native land…”

11. The B-52′s – The B-52′s

Like Stiff Little Fingers, this was a gem I first discovered in my older brother’s record collection but there’s where the kinship ends. The B-52′s resembled a John Water’s film more than anything else happening musically at the time, mining garage sale kitsch and pop-culture avant-garde to come up with a debut that was stunningly original. Even better, you could dance to it. Named as much for the giant beehive hairdos of singers Cindy Wilson and Kate Pierson as for the warplanes, their 50s and 60s in a blender ethos was trotted out at a time when this stuff was not seen as being cool at all. Of course, they didn’t give a shit and their highly original songs, killer guitar playing by the late Ricky Wilson and blend of vocals both electrifying and campy have made this a classic. Bonus points go to the indelible “Rock Lobster” which John Lennon heard on vacation deep in the middle of his house-husband phase. Zeroing in on the band’s reclamation of Yoko Ono’s most outre vocalisms Lennon declared the world ready to hear new music by both he and she, and the comeback Double Fantasy was born.

12. Swell Maps – A Trip to Marineville

The world is awash in lo-fi indie experimenters, from No Age to Deerhunter to the late great Guided By Voices, but Swell Maps set the template for sprawling, fascinating messes. To hear them tell it a total lack of musical training led them to put art over chops and belch out this remarkably tuneful, shambling, and noisy debut. “Do you believe in art?” they ask and it’s hard not to grin back and say “fuck, yeah!”

13. Linton Kwesi Johnson – Forces of Victory

Just as reggae, dub and ska were becoming a major influence on musicians across the color and sound spectrum, the golden age of Jamaican music was on the wane. Linton Kwesi Johnson’s life mirrored the migration of the music he would leave a lasting mark on, born in Kingston Jamaica he was raised in London’s Brixton district. Johnson considered himself a “dub poet”, concentrating on delivering socially conscious lyrics that cut to the heart of the black British experience. Luckily he fell in with Dennis Bovell and his band who provided a taut and hooky musical bed o all of Johnson’s classic albums. Forces of Victory is album number 2 for Johnson and quite possibly his best with track after track of great songs like “Want Fi Go Rave” and “It Noh Funny.”

14. Supertramp – Breakfast in America

Supertramp are about as uncool as a band can be but Breakfast in America is a soft rock classic as well as their commercial and artistic peak. Though the band started out as British prog rockers backed by a mysterious Goldmember-like Dutch millionaire, they developed a taste for pop success with hits like “Give a Little Bit” and “Bloody Well Right.” Much of the record is devoted to the lament of rock stars who have reached a certain station – the touring, the whoring, broken marriages, breadheads who don’t get them, and of course the joy of discovering America. The songs are leavened by a British tongue and cheek sensibility, particularly the title track. Guilty pleasure or not, Pink Floyd took all these themes and inflated them over two discs, a lot more misogyny and a lot less humor for The Wall this same year. I find this much more listenable.

15. Cheap Trick – At Budokan

After three brilliant but underachieving albums it was hard to see Cheap Trick as anything other than a cult band. Their particular melange of influences, The Move, The Who, The Beatles (especially but not limited to the hard rocking stuff) made them come off almost as punks when they debuted in 1977, compounded by their subject matter which took in suicide, murder, and lust in every permutation. In Japan however they were treated like gods, leading to this live album which unexpectedly made them stars in the US as well. Oddly enough, stripping off the production gloss that had accumulated on albums two and three allowed the killer hooks and raw riffs of songs like “I Want You to Want Me” and “Auf Wiedersehen” to breathe and emphasized the punkier hard rocking aspect of the band to positive effect. Though today we would call what they do power pop, they would have an influence on both the hair metal that would follow them through the 80s and bands like Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins who supplanted them in the 90s.

16. Fleetwood Mac - Tusk

Tusk had the unenviable task of following up Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 juggernaut Rumours which at the time was the best-selling album – ever. Lindsey Buckingham’s brilliant songs and arrangements sprawl all over what was a double-album – one that flopped in comparison to its predecessor and the amount of label money spent on it. Nevertheless it is chock full of jaw dropping songs and performances as well as weird detours, making it the apex of the 1970s California sound embodied by the Mac, The Eagles, James Taylor and others.

17. The Slits – Cut

This record is about a million miles removed from Tusk, The Slits were three British women who were among the last in the punk scene to put a record out. This gave them time to pick up a lot of the Reggae and dub cues that were permeating the best records of the time, putting their own distinctly female point of view on great songs like “Typical Girls” and “Love Und Romance.” The amateurish singing and playing at times adds to the charm and the songs are sturdy enough to shine through the occasional bum note. A catchy treasure.

18. Tom Verlaine – Tom Verlaine

After a disappointing second album Verlaine’s band Television, one of the pioneers of New York’s legendary CBGBs scene, were no more, and he duly set off on a solo career. Though his profile would never be particularly high the quality of his work was often the equal of his original band, certainly on this debut which featured a number of songs originally meant for Television. His vaunted guitar playing blisters as always and his vocals, while characteristic in their warbly-ness, are also distinctive. It’s a great set of songs – good enough for Bowie to crib “Kingdom Come” the following year.

19. The Cars – Candy-O

Like Fleetwood Mac, The Cars had the task of following up a widely admired hit record, in this case their debut. Though Candy-O wasn’t as big a hit, it showed that The Cars stardom was no fluke and cemented their status as leaders of the burgeoning new wave sound (despite being from Boston and not England.) “Let Go” supplied the brilliant hit single quota but the insistent Bowie-esque groove of the title track, “Dangerous Type”, “Double Life” and “It’s All I Can Do” would become radio staples. An under-appreciated grower.

20. Iggy Pop – New Values

Iggy roared back to life after the Stooges implosion in the early 70s just in time to be hailed as a punk godfather, with a little help from his old buddy David Bowie. New Values was already three records deep into his comeback and if the energy was beginning to flag just a tad Iggy showed he still had something to say. The title track and “Five Foot One” are tough, vintage fare but tracks like “Endless Sea” added a surprising and not unwelcome touch of synthesizer.

John Hughes

If you didn’t sprout boobs or grow body hair in the 1980s the death of John Hughes likely leans little to you. Let’s be blunt, he was neither a great director or writer and to my critical faculties won’t allow me to rate any of his films at the top of the 80s teen flick heap on artistic merit (you have to get past Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Say Anything and Heathers to get to that summit).

Yet when I was 13 all anyone could talk about at school was a movie called 16 Candles. Had you seen it? How many times? Wasn’t it hilarious? Wasn’t Molly Ringwald hot? At his best Hughes was able to uncannily write with the worldview of an adolescent, with all the pitfalls and positives that come with it.

It’s hard not to be struck by the essential shallowness at the core of a film like The Breakfast Club which purports to eschew stereotypes and yet forces it’s characters to pair up and change in ways that make little sense outside a ninth grader’s diary (Ally Sheedy’s character in particular has an arc that defies logic.)  In Hughes’ world adults were clueless, teens were deeply profound, and every heartbreak lasted forever.

Hughes also caught the rhythms of teen speech, the awkwardness of their interactions, the easily bruised feelings and nurtured crushes.

He did direct or write several early films that were aimed at a wider audience, beginning as a part of National Lampoon’s set of stock writers with the awful Class Reunion, and very funny Vacation, which introduced the world to one of Hughes stock players Anthony Michael Hall. He also would follow-up a string of teen flicks with the charming Planes, Train, and Automobiles but She’s Having a Baby would prove to be an ominous flop.

As the 80s became the 90s Hughes stopped directing and started regressing. If his hits began with the mid-life crisis of Vacation and segued into the teendom of films like Pretty in Pink, his focus worked steadily backwards to pre-adolesence (the Home Alone films) before settling for the infantilized dreck of Baby’s Day Out. Don’t get me started on the Beethoven films.

Hughes had a great eye for talent, launching John Cusack, the aforementioned Hall and Ringwald, Eric Stoltz, James Spader, Jon Cryer, Andrew McCarthy, Robert Downey Jr. and others. He also had an ear, bringing several British post-punk and new wave bands such as Simple Minds (with the classic “(Don’t You) Forget About Me” and Orchestral Manouvers in the Dark their first taste of American stardom through his soundtracks and even titling Pretty in Pink after one of Psychedelic Furs’ best songs (sadly re-made in an inferior version for that particular film).

Hughes’ dialogue also had a way of lodging in the brain. To this day I say the phrase “Hot hot very hot” because of 16 Candles. Hughes died unexpectedly today of a heart attack.

From the glorious Ferris Bueller’s Day Off:

The 16 Candles trailer:

Capaldi and Gandolfini have it out in In The Loop

There’s a scene in In The Loop in which the “crossest man in Scotland” is introduced. Up until then you can be forgiven for thinking that you have been spending most of the film with that very man, Malcolm Tucker, a fixer with a penchant for four letter words that would make Deadwood’s Al Swearingen blush. Sure enough though, the man in question is revealed and it’s one of the film’s many insights that behind every angry man is a smaller, even angrier man waiting in the wings.

In The Loop is an unsparing farce, a thinly veiled account of the run-up to the Iraq war from the vantage point of government bureaucracy’s nether regions.  The “special relationship” between the United States and Great Britain is revealed to be nothing so much as that between a ‘master race of toddlers” and the frustrated parents they’ve subjugated.

Along the way there are some wonderfully visceral one-liners and plenty of inter-office blood drawn, and some outstanding performances by Peter Capaldi as the aforementioned Tucker, James Gandolfini as a cautious American General, Anna Chlumsky who may have said too much, too insightfully for her career’s own good, and Mimi Kennedy as her dentally-fixated boss.

Saying too much and to whom is a constant theme running through In The Loop, as a casual observation by Tom Hollander as a low-level cabinet minister leads to an escalating series of consequences. Hollander is excellent in showing how this man is both intelligent and naive, pumped up by the attention and fearful of the fallout.

This is a brutally funny movie that would be ridiculous were it not so sadly close to the truth. David Rasche as a State Department operative has several wonderful scenes in which he deconstructs facts to create the version of events he would like to be true, another recurring motif. It’s the kind of parsing the Bush administration dealt out as a matter of course.

In The Loop is shot in appropriate pseudo-docu style, a look that is becoming a bit clichéd but works perfectly in this context. The rapid-fire screenplay and performances make everything zing like a screwball comedy up until the inevitable end. Unlike Bringing Up Baby the uptight professor here is the British government and the nutty heiress is the United States and when they get together the consequences are very bad indeed.

This is a spinoff of a BBC series The Thick of It which I haven’t seen but will be sure to seek out solely based on sharing writer/director Armando Iannucci and the openly  festering Malcolm Tucker as a character.

Here’s the crossest man in Scotland:

At the end of the seventies music was perched on the edge of the great fragmentation that would take hold in the eighties and especially the nineties – punk, funk, disco, pop all rubbed shoulders along with the first stirrings of hip-hop. It’s also the year Sony‘s Walkman would hit the market, revolutionizing the way people would enjoy and consume music with it’s portability and the rise of mixtape culture. This playlist of some of my favorite songs from 1979 captures a little bit of the essence of a great year for music. So hit play, kick back by the pool, at work with your headphones on, or even while operating heavy machinery, and enjoy!

It’s hard to write anything called an “appreciation” for Allen Klein, as he was more a creature to be feared, reckoned with, and noted for historical significance than appreciated. Klein, who died of complications from Alzheimer’s over the July 4th weekend, is one of the great characters (some might say villains) of music history. He was a guy who, in the guise of the defender of the artist, stood up to the record companies to deliver “full accounting” and unheard of sums of money to the artists he managed like The Rolling Stones, The Animals, and Sam Cooke.

On the other hand, each one of those artists found their recorded material had become the property of a little record company called ABKCO – Allen B. Klein Company.

The Stones were one of the few groups who learned the painful lesson of losing their 60s masterpieces well, starting their own label after 1971 and ensuring that they would own all of their post-Klein masters, as well as suing the man himself and settling for an undisclosed sum in the mid-80s. Keith Richard’s would later famously describe the loss of their early catalog as “the price of an education.”

Klein also holds the dubious distinction of being a contributing factor to the breakup of The Beatles. As the greatest band of the 60s began to unravel after the death of their original manager Brain Epstein, Paul McCartney turned to his then-girlfriend Linda Eastman. Her brother John was a prominent entertainment attorney and Paul pressured the other Beatles to allow him to clean up their increasingly tangled business affairs. Not one to be dictated to, John Lennon retorted by bringing in Klein, who had been angling for an entree to the biggest group in the world. George Harrison would end up siding with Lennon and the rift between the rival factions proved to be fatal.

In the end Klein would end up managing Lennon and Harrison for several years post-breakup, and eventually went on the film production as well as acquiring the entire catalog of Phil Spector‘s defunct Philles label in the 1980s.

As a special tribute, here are two clips from the George Harrison produced Beatles satire The Rutles featuring John Belushi as the Allen Klein stand-in Ron Decline. Also note the current junior Senator from Minnesota in a cameo.

Malden with Micheal Douglas on Streets of San Francisco

The fact that a younger generation has no idea who Karl Malden was brought home today by the many blank stares from co-workers and at least one name pronunciation that suggested the attemptee thought Malden was a star of the German cinema. What Malden was, was an Oscar and Emmy winning actor whose blunt face and bulbous nose fronted a series of grit-filled humane performances on stage and screen.

I knew him best as the guy who’d pop in at the of newsbreaks on TV to scare you at the consequences of traveling without American Express – “Don’t leave home without it” was his tagline. As I got older I saw him in such classic films as Patton, playing Gen. Omar Bradley as the level-headed counterweight to George C. Scott in the title role, or his Oscar-winning turn in Streetcar Named Desire, or paired again with Brando as the neighborhood priest in On The Waterfront.

In the 70s Malden starred with young Michael Douglas in the cop drama The Streets of San Francisco, a big hit that made him a household name despite his indifference to the television medium. Later, Malden would become  President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and was a driving force behind the controversial Oscar handed out to Elia Kazan, who directed him in Waterfront and Tin Roof, not to mention the winkingly overheated Baby Doll.

Malden, who was born Mladen George Sekulovich, was 97.

Hoffman, Noonan and Williams

It’s hard for me to remember a film with as divergent a critical response as Synecdoche, New York which made many reviewers best and worst films of 2008 lists at the end of the year. I can sympathize with those who didn’t enjoy the film – to its credit it never even tries to meet a mainstream audience halfway. Though it’s production values are on par with the best Hollywood has to offer this bears as much relation to a Summer blockbuster as as orangutan does to an aphid.

Instead what we get is a delightfully rich, touching, funny and tragic exploration of what it means to be alive and to create. It’s a surreal and magic world of that comes from the mind of acclaimed screenwriter and first-time director Charlie Kaufman. In tone it’s a mixture of Kurt Vonnegut‘s wry desperation and Thomas Pynchon‘s matter-of-fact abstraction and head-case humor.

Kaufman has already shown himself to be a screenwriter with a rare vision, and the themes he explores here have their roots in his breakthrough films Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind, all of which asked similar questions on the very nature of why we are who we are. Not bad for a guy who started out writing episodes of the Thomas Haden Church/ Deborah Messing sitcom Ned and Stacey.

A synecdoche is a figure of speech that uses a part of something to represent a whole (ie saying “I count ten heads” rather than “ten cows”. ) It’s what Kaufman tries to do with his film, represent the whole crazy quilt of life for 2 hours onscreen. It is also, in turn, what Philip Seymour Hoffman tries to do as playwright and stage director Caden Cotard.

At first I felt dread at seeing Hoffman give a mumbly deadened portrayal of a man ground down by life – I’d seen it already in Happiness. Yet Hoffman adds layer after layer until his character becomes moving in his lostness.

“I will be dying and so will you, and so will everyone here. That’s what I want to explore. We’re all hurtling towards death, yet here we are for the moment, alive. Each of us knowing we’re going to die, each of us secretly believing we won’t…”

This is what he becomes obsessed with, particularly after winning an unexpected MacArthur Genius Grant after his wife (played with her usual whip-smart edge by Katharine Keener) decamps with possible lover Jennifer Jason Leigh and young daughter Olive for Berlin.

He uses the grant to build yet another synecdoche, a replica of New York City inside an enormous warehouse which eventually includes another warehouse within which resides another replica and so on. He similarly populates his replica city with replicas of himself, and his would-be lover played by Samantha Morton in a breakthrough performance.

So used am I to seeing Morton’s big eyes and delicate features to project gloom in such films as Minority Report that seeing her as a flirty, implusive fun-lover comes as a revelation.

It’s important to note that the movie starts off somewhat realistically with a painfully real accounting of Hoffman and Keener’s marriage and becomes more and more unhinged in time and reality once she takes off.

17 years pass in the blink of an eye, and not even Hoffman seems to realize it. There are hints that what transpires might all be his fantasy of his life while he waits for his wife’s return – A Wizard of Oz like ascent to unreality where the needy female lead of his revival of Death of a Salesman (a tricky role effortlessly handled by Michelle Williams) becomes his second bride, and his couples therapist morphs into an oddly omniscient self-help author (Hope Davis, with a  twinkle in her eye.) There are also hints that he may even be dead already.

It can be hard to tell since all linearity is seemingly throw out the window. Scenes that play as funny and offbeat have payoffs deeper into the movie as you realize that some of the odd disconnect comes from descriptions of later events.

On the other hand, the film is entirely linear. The early scenes are poop, piss and blood obsessed, a Freudian glossary of childhood. Appropriately enough they often center around Cotard’s daughter Olive who is alternately fearful and fascinated by what goes into and comes out of the human body.

As the film progresses so does decay – Hoffman’s body, the giant sets he creates, even Morton’s house. It’s an inspired and for some, off-putting touch of surreality when she buys a new house that comes complete with fire – but not in the fireplace. It’s the kind of visual wordplay Kaufman revels in – she is something of an old flame after all. It’s also a visual link to site specific artwork like that of Andy Goldsworthy who creates things like symmetrical leaf trails knowing that they will decay and return to nature. Part of the art is the transience of it.

So rich and loaded is Synecdoche, New York with symbols and meaning that it seems churlish to try to capture it in a mere blog post, just as Cotard and no doubt Kaufman strain against the limits of their means of expression to represent the fullness of what it means to be alive. I’m painfully aware that I’ve barely hinted at the great performances within from the likes of Tom Noonan (more than 20 years after his brilliant turn in Michael Mann’s Manhunter), Diane Wiest, and Emily Watson.

Then there are the special effects that create a warehouse big enough to house a dirigible in the sky, and the breathtaking cinematography by Frederick Elmes who also shot Blue Velvet.

This is a film that may be seen as a flop and even a career killer for Kaufman, one that didn’t even make back half of it’s paltry $21 million box office. Twnety years from now however I predict it may very well be remembered as one of the best films of the century’s first decade.