The Philter

Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen: a very close relationship.

Re the Tour de France, Merle Baggard writes:

OK, glad it’s over. Please get back to more important subjects.

Merle likes to push my buttons, but I take his point. I do want to make just one more note before moving on, though.

The one thing that seemed to get people really emotionally involved this year was only tangentially related to the race itself. This was what has become known as the “falling out” incident involving longtime Tour commentators Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen.
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That's not acting, that's squinting.

It was another slow day on the Tour, at least until the last few kilometers, when things heated up a bit. Alexandre Vinokourov, who had been in the breakaway all day, was one of two riders in front as they approached the top of the last climb of the day. It was generally assumed at that point that Alberto Contador would stay in the peloton and let his teammate Vino go for the stage win.

But no – with about 2k to go, Contador shot out of the pack followed by Joaquin Rodriguez and they quickly caught Vinokourov. It was never entirely clear if this was a planned move by the Astana team or just Contador freelancing as he is wont to do. Soon Vino dropped away and it was just Contador and Rodriguez sprinting to the line. Rodriguez took the win, but Contador was happy because he had gained some time on Andy Schleck, who was unable to match Contador’s acceleration. Vinokourov came in 3rd, pumping in his fist in what I thought was victory but could just as easily have been frustration.

After all that, Contador erased one-quarter of Schleck’s 41-second lead and is 31 seconds behind with 12 stages and almost 59 hours of racing in the can. With any luck, they will duel all the way to Paris. This has the chance to be the most dramatic Tour in many years; let’s keep our fingers crossed.

Meanwhile, I’d like to talk a little about the movie Inception. My one-word review: Disappointed.
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Over the last couple years I have made a careful study of the first few seasons of Saturday Night Live, by which I mean watched them on DVD late at night, sometimes while drunk. For the most part, they haven’t quite lived up to my fond memories; the writing is occasionally brilliant but uneven, and the musical guests in this early period are often questionable. One night recently, out of sheer stubbornness I sat through two long segments of Keith Jarrett playing tedious solo piano and making hideous, orgasmic moustache-faces—but I did not enjoy it, I can tell you that.

Last, night, though, I think I reached the turning point: the broadcast of April 22. 1978, with Steve Martin hosting and the Blues Brothers as musical guest. This episode had pretty much everything you could ask for: a lengthy Steve monologue of material not from one of his albums, “Theordoric of York,” Dan Aykroyd calling Jane Curtin an ignorant slut, a charming dance number by Steve and Gilda, Bill Murray giving Gilda noogies, a high-quality appearance by the Festrunk Brothers, the Brothers Blues¹ doing “Hey Bartender” and “I Don’t Know”……..and this:



The original Dingbat

Oh happy day. There I am flipping on Fox News for my daily dose of self-inflicted agony, and here’s Glenn Beck looking very serious with the Statue of Liberty over his shoulder, and he says something typically asinine. The camera cuts away, and sitting across from him is his network’s newest hire, HRH Sarah Palin. (Or as I prefer to call her, Dingbat. Is it sexist and wrong of me to call her that? Does it help that I thought our last president was also a dingbat?)

It’s pretty rare when I see something on Fox that I can 100% get behind, but this is an idea that has my full support. Clearly, this is where Dingbat belongs. It’s just like when Terrell Owens played for the Cowboys; a person I detest paired with an organization I loathe, giving me a convenient place to focus my dark energies. Honestly, I think this is going to work out great for everyone. She gets a job that plays well to her strengths, which are looking good and talkin’ funny in that scary/entertaining kind of way, and we get her on the TeeVee where we can keep an eye on her, instead of in an office somewhere fucking up the country even more. Beck gets to look positively statesmanlike next to Dingbat, who enthusiastically agreed with everything he said. (And that alone should disqualify her from ever again holding public office. Even the people who are on Beck’s side ideologically know that he is a dangerous lunatic, and palling around with lunatics is just not a smart political move.)

While we’re on the subject, I just had to post the following photo that I found while looking for Edith Bunker shots:

Doesn’t it kind of look like a publicity shot for a new Fox show with Bill O’Reilly, Sarah, and Beck? They could call it “Lunatic, Dingbat and Asshole.” Catchy, no?

With all due respect to Cecil’s one-word review of Avatar, my one-word review would be “tragedy.” And not just the intentional kind, though there is plenty of that, wrapped up with a tidy Hollywood ending. I’m talking about the other kind of tragedy: a gazillion dollars worth of beautiful technology being deployed in service of a 99-cent script. What is this terrible hubris that prevents tech wizards like Cameron and George Lucas from hiring a co-writer to add some small element of soul to their opuses?

Honestly, the luscious visuals of this movie were quite involving for about 30 or 45 minutes; after that it was a matter of waiting for the trite, clunky mechanics of the plot to get very, very slowly to the obvious places they were going. It’s doubly tragic that, while Cameron’s ostensible agenda is on the side of the groovy, holistic blue Pandorans, it is fatally undermined by Avatar’s apotheosis of technology and failure to connect with anything recognizably alive.

If this is the future of cinema, I’ll stick with the past, thank you very much.

"I am a trained actor reduced to the status of a bum!"

This is only tangentially Beatle-related, but last night marked my n-teenth viewing of Withnail and I, one of the great cult films of all time. The Beatles connections are that:

• George Harrison was the executive producer of the movie, which was financed by his company, Handmade Films.
• “Richard Starkey, M.B.E.” is credited as “Special Production Consultant.”
• “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” is on the soundtrack when the main characters return home to find the drug dealer Danny occupying their flat and Presuming Ed in the bathtub.

I’m proud to say that I saw Withnail in the theater back in 86 with my friend Tom. I think I understood about a quarter of it the first time around, but that was enough to let me know that something special was going on. Richard E. Grant’s performance as Withnail—vain, flamboyant, self-absorbed, and utterly charming, the sort of man who stands in his living room shouting “I demand to have some booze” as if that were enough to make it so—is the stuff of legend. But he is nearly upstaged by Ralph Brown as Danny, the philosophical drug dealer with sunken eyes, an unidentifiable accent, and a babydoll possessed of “voodoo qualities.” The “I” character played by Paul McGann, a very thinly disguised version of writer/director Bruce Robinson, mainly serves as comic foil, but does get some good lines:

Withnail: I dislike relatives in general and in particular mine.

I: Why?

Withnail: I’ve told you why. We’re incompatible. They don’t like me being on stage.

I: Then they must be delighted with your career.

Well, I don’t want to get into reciting favorite quotes from this movie, because we’ll be here all day. After languishing for years in a poorly mastered, inexplicably incomplete VHS version, Withnail and I is now available on a lovely Criterion Collection DVD. If you haven’t seen it lately, why not have a viewing? And if perchance you’ve never seen it, well, you are living in a world of dangerous ignorance, and I suggest you do something about it.

Usually I only write about movies to point people toward the really great ones or to warn them away from the really awful ones. I had hoped that today’s entry would be one of the former, but instead it must be the latter.

After ducking it for two years, I finally summoned the courage to view David Lynch’s most recent film, Inland Empire. I had been afraid of it because a) I worried it would continue the accelerating downward spiral that had afflicted Lynch’s work ever since Wild at Heart, and b) it is a big film, almost three hours long.

But after revisiting Twin Peaks my affection for Lynch was restored to such an extent that I approached Inland Empire with cautious optimism. The cast includes a number of old-timey DL favorites such as Laura Dern, Harry Dean Stanton, Diane Ladd, and Grace Zabriskie, as well as Jeremy Irons and Nastassja Kinski. In interviews, Lynch waxed enthusiastic about the possibilities digital filmmaking had opened up for him, and about the positive impact of transcendental meditation on his creative life. It seemed just possible that Inland Empire would mark a return to form for a filmmaker whose work once brought me a great deal of pleasure.
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As I mentioned in the last entry, I’ve been devouring the DVDs of Twin Peaks, and today I reached the bonus features. A lot of cool facts and factoids there, but I was especially struck by one anecdote related by composer Angelo Badalamenti. It has the whiff of being perhaps apocryphal, but it’s at least true enough to be repeated here.

According to Badalamenti, he was hired to do an arrangement for Paul McCartney. As he was rehearsing the orchestra, McCartney pulled him aside and told him the story of a great disappointment in the ex-Beatle’s career.

Paul, it seems, had been invited to perform for the Queen of England at a birthday celebration at Buckingham Palace. He was asked to prepare 35 minutes of his best music, and so he rehearsed his band and was quite excited about the gig. Just before he was scheduled to go on, he was greeted by the queen, and the dialogue between them (as related by Badalamenti) went like this:

Queen: Oh Mr. McCartney, it was just so lovely to see you tonight.

Paul: Well, your highness, I am so delighted that you invited me to help celebrate your birthday. And I’m now going to perform for you 35 minutes of my best works.

Queen: Oh, Mr. McCartney, I’m sorry, but I can’t stay.

Paul: (crushed) But your highness….

Queen: Mr. McCartney, don’t you see? It’s five minutes of eight. I must go upstairs and watch Twin Peaks.

I am saddened to learn of the death yesterday of Ricardo Montalban, by all accounts a class act. William Shatner was probably not at his bedside in a Starfleet uniform, and his last words were probably not “From hell’s heart, I stab at thee. For hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee.” But I prefer to picture it that way.

And considering his diverse and accomplished career, he’d probably be annoyed at my fantasy of him walking through the gates of heaven saying “Smiles, everyone, smiles!” But still—I prefer to picture it that way.

Today I’d like to give thanks for possibly the greatest movie ever made. No, scratch that; you can’t call Beyond the Valley of the Dolls great, or good; neither can you accurately call it bad or terrible; it is simply…beyond. Bourgeois categories such as good or bad, comedy or drama, legitimate cinema or exploitation, simply do not apply to Russ Meyer’s 1970 masterpiece.

Almost 40 years later, it is difficult to conceive of the circumstances that could have led to the existence of this movie. The story goes something like this: In 1967 20th Century Fox adapted Jacqueline Susann’s showbiz melodrama Valley of the Dolls into a successful movie starring Patty Duke and the soon-to-be-late Sharon Tate. This predictably led to a decision, more financial than artistic, to make a sequel. However, the studio had trouble finding an acceptable screenplay; Susann did not want to write it and two versions by other writers were rejected. Desperate for some kind of new wrinkle, they finally decided to turn the project over to the notorious Russ Meyer, a former Playboy photographer who had made a number of odd but profitable low-budget films filled with big-breasted women.
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