Movies I Have Never Seen, Part 2

As I wrote a while back, there are lots of movies in the world, and lots of classics I haven't seen. Here's a few more I've checked out in recent months for the very first time:

IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT
Why it's famous: Won Best Picture Oscar of 1967 against contenders like "Bonnie and Clyde" and "The Graduate." Starring the great Sidney Poitier and Oscar winner Rod Steiger. Takes on tough racial issues.
What I thought: I'd been meaning to watch this for ages, especially after reading Mark Harris's superb book "Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood," which examines each of the five Best Picture nominees in this game-changing, transitional year for American film. It's a movie that can seem a tad hokey in 2009 -- black city cop helps solve a crime in backwards small town Mississippi, dealing with racists galore -- but all you have to do is remember how it really was a mere 30-40 years ago for black folks to know that Poitier's character's experience is no exaggeration. Poitier is wonderful as the tough talking "they call me MISTER Tibbs," adding a bit of necessary outrage to his typical near-saintly character repertoire. But Steiger is equally great in the harder role as the racist small town cop who starts to learn something about the wider world.
Worth seeing if you haven't: Well, I do think "The Graduate" and "Bonnie and Clyde" are, in hindsight, far more important movies, but I can see why this won the Oscar in turbulent 1968 (just after the assassination of Martin Luther King, too). The biggest problem viewing the movie today is that it's a bit of a fixed time capsule of the way things were then, but it still holds up pretty well. I found the major flaw to be that I never really cared about the murder mystery that is the instigator of the movie's plot, though. It fails as a detective story but is a great character study.
Grade: B+

THE STING
Why it's famous: Won Best Picture Oscar of 1973. "The Entertainer" jaunty piano tune that just won't get out of your head. Robert Redford and Paul Newman, together again and up to no good.
What I thought: I was expecting a classic buddy comedy with bite a la Newman and Redford's "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," but have to admit, I was a bit let down by this one, finding it a bit cloying and artificial. It's never a bad movie per se, but it seemed slight to watch Newman and Redford's grifter con Robert Shaw's gangster in the kind of hugely elaborate, over-the-top setup that movies of this nature seem to specialize in, and it all leads to an ending that's highly predictable. It's curious to watch a movie from 40 years ago that strives to be a homage to another era 40 years before that one -- it's kind of like a double negative, seeing movies from the '70s set in the 1930s, with the garish lighting and colours of the 1970s prevalent. But Redford and Newman are never less than charming, with Newman particularly solid, and they go a long way toward making the movie work. Perhaps I was just expecting something a bit more from it, but in the end it all seemed a bit too long and wrapped up in its own intricacies to mean much more than a con game gone supersized.
Worth seeing if you haven't: Sure, but in the end you might feel a bit conned if you're not in the right mood.
Grade: B-

THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE
Why it's famous: News of the recent remake of this with John Travolta got me curious to see the original, a gritty 1974 action flick starring -- Walter Matthau?!? The prospect of hangdog Walter Matthau, action hero, piqued my interest.
What I thought: There's something I love about almost any film set in New York City in the 1970s, dingy, sassy and multicultural (before there was such a word) and full of angry, shouting men. "Pelham" isn't any particularly deep movie but it's a very fun thriller about a subway train hijacking by a seedy bunch of criminals led by a great, sneering Robert Shaw (him again!). Matthau is the humble transit cop who gets wound up in the action. Matthau's character actually spends much of the movie just talking on a radio, but it works. A lean, mean ride - the characters basically have no interior life, and in its quasi-real time setting it's almost like a very special episode of TV's "24." Starring Walter Matthau as Jack Bauer, that is. Which would be totally awesome.
Worth seeing if you haven't: Some folks don't like watching movies set in an era when everyone wore bell-bottoms, but fashion aside, "Pelham" is a great little roller-coaster ride. It might seem a tad sedate in an era of CGI explosions (I'm sure the remake amps up the action approximately 1000 percent), but I loved it.
Grade: A-

Sunday shuffle: Long time ago when we was fab

Sunday morning newspaper-readin' music while waiting for my parents to ring us on Skype from sunny California...

1. Alright 3:13 Electric Light Orchestra*
2. Godless 5:20 The Dandy Warhols
3. Rocket From A Bottle 3:30 XTC**
4. I Wish It Would Rain Down 5:29 Phil Collins***
5. Quiet Houses 3:32 Fleet Foxes
6. Beat Connection 8:07 LCD Soundsystem
7. When We Was Fab 3:57 George Harrison****
8. You Only Live Once 3:09 The Strokes
9. No Son Of Mine 5:46 Genesis*****
10. The Day The World Turned Day-Glo 2:52 X-Ray Spex ******
11. Loud Love 4:57 Soundgarden
12. Chills 3:50 Peter Bjorn & John

* No, no, Jeff Lynne, it's "all right," not "alright." This really bothers me.
** From XTC's ecstatic spaz-pop stage. Music for spasming to!
*** I maintain Phil Collins '80s work as a serious guilty pleasure. I'm not a big Eric Clapton fan, really, but his guitar solos in this tune are straight-up groovy.
**** I love this tune, one of the best evocations of the Beatles era by one who lived through it. Gentle and appreciative nostalgia.
***** What the heck, is it Phil Collins Sunday on my iPod? This song, not quite as good as the "Easy Lover" era Phil - in fact, this is probably a good turning point where Phil started becoming overly mawkish and sentimental as a writer. It's not a terrible tune, but the early 1990s mark a demarcation between "fun" Phil and "serious social issues and lots of lame Disney soundtrack tunes" Phil.
*****I don't think there's a better song title, anywhere, ever.

My Classic Comic ABCs: Kingdom Come

I'm of two minds about Alex Ross.

He's been probably one of the most-praised artists of the past 15 years or so in comics, with his distinct photo-referenced painterly style and undying reverence for the classic superheroes, on display in series like "Marvels," "Earth X," "Justice" and many more. When Alex Ross paints Superman, you can see why they call him the Man of Steel -- all granite jaw and stern power, done with a photorealistic detail that often leaps out of the pages.

Yet Ross's sheer talent and reverence also gives way to stiffness sometimes, and his affection for "revisiting" classic superheroes can start to seem a bit dead-end, endless nostalgia without much forward motion. I admire Ross tremendously as a technician – his coffee table art book "Mythology" is a gorgeous testament to his skill -- but I think as a storyteller, he's a bit hit or miss. The characters often pose rather than move with the fluidity of a Will Eisner or Frank Miller. To me, his work struggles to escape the frame of pin-ups.

Lest I sound like I'm bagging on Ross, I think his peak remains his collaboration with writer Mark Waid, 1996's "Kingdom Come," an epic tale of heroism and failure in the future of the DC Universe, featuring Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman and their various protege and successors in a twisting and bombastic morality tale. Ross has a lively power to his artwork here – I don't think I've ever seen Bruce Wayne's face seem quite so spot-on for the character, handsome yet a bit devious and scarred. Ross's aging Superman has also rightly become an iconic presentation. Waid's script is among his best work, too, and he doesn't succumb to the weaknesses that have marred some of Ross's other collaborations.

The whole "alternative dark future where lots of characters die" story trope has been done to death, but "Kingdom Come" succeeds because it touches some universal chords about what it means to be a hero. It nicely comments on the comic industry vogue for "grim 'n gritty" killers as heroes in the 1990s. There's a reason staid and steady Superman has remained in print for 70 years now, and Waid shows us what it is.

Many of these big everything-and-the-kitchen-sink tales haven't worked for me because they're so overstuffed, but despite the acres of capes and cowls on display in "Kingdom Come," there's a quiet moral center at the core, nicely portrayed in the humble human preacher Norman McKay. I find myself moved when I re-read "Kingdom Come," something that doesn't happen in a lot of the other big superhero pile-ons. Of course, DC has gone on to milk "Kingdom" for all it's worth, using its speculative alternative future as a basis for endless changes and permutations in the "real" universe. But the original is still a hell of a read, and marks Alex Ross' apex as a creator I think.

(*Previously in this series: A: Amazing Spider-Man, B: Batman, C: Cerebus, D: Doom Patrol, E: Eightball, F: Flaming Carrot, G: Give Me Liberty, H: Hate, I: Incredible Hulk, and J: JLA.)

Reviews: Auckland International Film Festival 2009

There's nothing better to do in the middle of winter than the New Zealand International Film Festival. More than 100 fine movies from all over the world are screening in Auckland, and poor old me only got to four of them -- but they were four terrific flicks, well worth seeking out. I do loves the film festivals!

Best Worst Movie
A more charmingly offbeat documentary you won't see all year. Back in 1990, a really, really bad movie called "Troll 2" was made. It's late-night marathon horror movie schlock that in its sheer awfulness (no really, it's not good) has since gone on to become a cult hit of "Rocky Horror" proportions, with fans reveling in the terrible acting, story and effects. Fans hold "Troll 2" parties and re-enactments. Now, former "Troll 2" child actor Michael Stephenson has gone on 20 years later to make a documentary about the "Troll 2" comeback story, looking at how the amateur actors see it now. But "Best Worst Movie" doesn't just mock "Troll 2," and instead turns an eye on the whole concept of trash becoming treasure, of something becoming the object of cult adoration. Best of all is George Hardy, the square-jawed fellow who played the lead role in "Troll 2" who has since gone on to be a small-town Alabama dentist. Hardy is a delight, an outgoing, charmingly sincere fellow who still has affection for his brief moment in the spotlight (he even tells patients about "Troll 2" during cleanings!), and who sees in the "Troll 2" revival a last chance for fame. "Best Worst Movie" has a big open heart for eccentrics and oddballs and would-be stars, and is delightfully funny in the process without overly mocking anybody, even the pretentious Italian director of "Troll 2" who is vaguely offended how everyone is laughing at his movie, or the spaced-out actress who quite seriously compares "Troll 2" to "Casablanca." Like the best documentaries, "Best Worst Movie" takes you somewhere unexpected, and is well worth hunting out. Now I actually have to watch "Troll 2" sometime!

Big River Man
Like a cross between "Borat" and "Heart of Darkness," this amazing documentary tells the tale of Slovenian icon Martin Strel, a big-bellied, beer-drinking, horseburger-eating man who, remarkably, is an ultramarathon swimmer who bas become the first man to swim the entire length of the world's longest rivers -- the Danube, the Mississippi, the Yangtze. Strel doesn't fit anyone's mental image of an extreme athlete, but he's the toast of Slovenia in the endearing prologue to this tale of his taking on the Amazon River – his longest record yet, more than 5000 kilometers of swimming in piranha and bacteria-infested waters. He does it all to draw attention to the world's environmental woes. "Big River Man" moves from a kind of yokel comedy into something deeper and stranger as Strel's Amazon epic gets underway. Sometimes, I felt like the directors got a bit too into stylistic tricks rather than focusing on the story in front of them. But the sheer chutzpah of the subject matter outweighs a few flaws. Was it worth the staggering cost for Strel in the end? I don't really know. But his feats are amazing and this guy's name should be known by people in the same breath as Michael Phelps and Mark Spitz, and "Big River Man" is a worthy tribute.

Big River Man - Trailer from KNR Productions on Vimeo.

Moon
Imagine commuting to the moon. In this stunning little movie, Sam Rockwell plays an engineer named Sam Bell who works on the moon, manning mining stations that now provide much of Earth's energy needs. He lives alone on a moon base, with a contract of three years, spending much of his time making models, exercising and trying to keep sane alone. Now, Bell is just two weeks away from the end of his contract and can't wait to get back to Earth. But something very strange starts happening around the base, and Bell begins to think he's going insane. "Moon" is clearly indebted to classic brainy science fiction like "2001" and "Solaris" (Kevin Spacey voices the station's helper computer system, which ought to be called 'Son of HAL.'), but it's an impeccably done experience. It's directed by none other than David Bowie's son, formerly Zowie, now known as Duncan Jones -- and I tell you, Jones is a director to watch. He stages "Moon" with a combination of beauty and menace, utilizing very subtle yet perfect special effects, and has utter control of the production. But the movie's biggest star is Sam Rockwell, who is basically on screen carrying the entire movie by himself. I love Rockwell, who's been great in movies such as "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind" and "Matchstick Men," and he's the best he's ever been in "Moon" -- funny, heartbreaking and intense. I can't give too much away about the nature of his performance witout spoiling the movie, but let's just say he really deserves an Oscar nomination for his turn here. Genuinely haunting and beautiful, "Moon" is just about the best movie I've seen in 2009 so far. It's playing at small theatres all over now so go hunt it out.



Van Diemen's Land
In 1822, eight convicts in remote Tasmania escaped into the tangled bush. One walked out, and told a terrible tale of starvation and cannibalism. I recently re-read Robert Hughes' great history of convict Australia, "The Fatal Shore," and the episodes set in Tasmania -- then known as Van Diemen's Land -- rank as the most shocking of the sordid history of "transportation". It's inevitable that it would become a movie, and first time director Jonathan auf der Heide, a Tasmanian, does a fine job of exploring the story in a stark, lushly filmed drama with some stunning cinematography. You can see the influence of Terrence Malick in the filmmaking, which makes the endless green and grey forests of Tasmania seem quite foreboding and evil. The landscape plays a crucial part in the unfolding drama. There's a matter-of-fact approach to the violence that generally avoids horror movie shocks, which makes it all the more awful, and a nice brooding near-silent performance by the central convict Pearce (Oscar Redding). It also makes for a rather pitch-dark, harrowing movie, with a darkness that feels kind of grueling by the end, and sometimes "Van Diemen's Land" moves too slowly, with a few too many lingering tracking shots. But it's generally a gripping first feature, skirting the line between existential drama and horror movie. I tell you one thing -- I'm glad I'm not a convict in 19th century Australia. But then that goes without saying.

They Still Make Music Videos: MGMT, "Kids" (fan version)

I know, I'm like a year behind the cool people, but hey, I finally got around to picking up MGMT's hipster-tastic album "Oracular Spectacular" the other day and am really digging it, especially the bouncily joyful "Kids," which has a particularly swell fan-created video here (it's actually better than the real band video). I am it sharing with you in my self-proclaimed mission to revive the joys of the music vid in pop culture. Have a swell weekend!

You are now entering another dimension

So it's school holidays this week and on my turn, I took Peter for some daddy bonding with "Ice Age 3 in 3-D". I hadn't seen a 3-D movie in the theaters, oh, since, "Megaforce" back in the early 1980s (which now that I think of it, may not have actually been in 3-D). Anyway, "Ice Age" was all spiffy digital 3-D so it was a novelty to check out -- and while the story on these movies never quite grabs me the way the best Pixar or Disney can, it is, undoubtedly, an amazing technological achievement -- the razor-sharp clarity of the computer animation combined with pretty astounding 3-D is worth seeing at least once. A couple of scenes involving floating soap bubbles or falling snow were so remarkable that the illusion truly felt three-dimensional to me. That said, though, I still have trouble seeing 3-D as much more than a gimmick rather than a storytelling tool – yeah, it's an "Ice Age" movie so not Shakespeare, but I've yet to see 3-D be integral to a story. And the glasses, darn it, fancy as they are now they still get a bit uncomfortable after an hour or so I think. (Reportedly James Cameron's upcoming "Avatar" will take the medium in a whole new direction, though, which could be interesting indeed to see.)

Elsewhere on the internets:
• Marvel at the wooden iPod! I'd love one of these made of NZ kauri.

• If you haven't seen the newly famous "naked Air New Zealand safety ad," here it is. (Google Ads service seems to be frequently running it right here on this blog, which makes me feel kinda funny.) I just find it all rather odd, myself (the body paint is rather hard to see as body paint, really, so it's like they're just wearing tight clothes), but hey, 1,000,000 hits on YouTube can't be wrong, it's doing the job as publicity. (And what is it about New Zealand and naked advertisements, anyway? Mind you this one is a lot more, er, titillating.)

• We got an actual chain letter in the mail yesterday. In the year 2009! Don't they know that email spam is the way to go in our modern age? On the other hand, they are promising us $70,000 ***GUARANTEED*** income in six months.... Hm....

Complete Succinct Reviews of Stephen King, Part I

Whenever I'm asked about my favorite writers, the answers are different depending on what day it is. But there are constants, and usually, my favorite writers would have to include George Orwell, the late John Updike and Kurt Vonnegut, Haruki Murakami, Paul Auster, and... Stephen King.

That last one doesn't always seem to fit to everyone when I say his name. Unfairly, King has somehow been lumped in with the Wal-Marts and Starbucks as ubiquitous shorthand for American junk culture. I think King surely gets the short shrift as a writer; he isn't a literary gamesman like Auster or Updike, which he would gamely admit, but he is one heck of a storyteller. King's books to me have always brought to mind cheeseburgers -- nothing rare, nothing fancy, but done right it can be the perfect meal. He knows his strengths, and can tell a heck of a yarn to while away the hours with.

I'm a big King fan, and although not quite in the "superfan" realm of having to read every vowel the man has ever typed, I have read pretty much all of his books, under his own names or pseudonyms. And King can soar or he can slum it -- but I don't feel like he's run out of steam yet. While his books aren't quite the "event" they once were, some of his later works stand up there with his best earlier ones. Here's part one of an occasional series of Complete Succinct Reviews of Stephen King:

PART ONE: 'Carrie' to 'The Stand'
Carrie: King's first book is gimmicky and raw, but the story of doomed Carrie has all the hallmarks King would develop -- empathy, gruesome gore and propulsive momentum. It's interesting how this one uses some experimental storytelling techniques (letters, newspaper accounts) to flesh out the story. However, I've always felt like it kind of lacks real character definition -- even Carrie, for all her sad drama, is a bit sketchy. Grade: B-

Salem's Lot: Still finding his way, but this spin on the vampire legend is starting to feel more like "classic" King. A big sweeping cast of characters, grim creatures from the past coming back to haunt a small town, and nasty deaths and carnage galore. It's also extraordinarily bleak, a tone King would come back to in later work such as "Pet Sematary." Evil in King's books is rarely truly defeated for good, and "Salem's Lot" gives us a glimpse of how dark it can get out there. Grade: B+

The Shining: And here King truly explodes forth. Sure, we've seen the movies (both versions) but the original book is still the best take on Jack Torrance's endless winter in the Colorado mountains. Rich with detail and moody feeling, I feel this is the first time King really manages to break beyond pulp fiction and tap into something primal (the thing in the bathtub -- brr!). It's hard to read this now without summoning up Kubrick's wonderful but very different movie, but the original book is still one heck of a fine ghost story. Grade: A-

Night Shift: King's short fiction is sometimes overlooked except as raw material for some truly terrible movies, but the early stuff has the pulpy horror of the EC classic comics -- nasty monsters, twist endings and horrible ironies galore. This was one of the first King books I ever read, and I still remember the horrible queasy chills I got reading "Graveyard Shift," a tale about... well, giant rats infesting an old mill. There's a gritty charm to this first collection of his short terrors, even if a few fall short of the mark. Grade: B+

The Stand: The first "800-pound gorilla" of King's career, and arguably, his best (tied with "It" for myself). It can be said that King's tried to top this one ever since, with lengthy quest sagas such as "The Dark Tower." While there are bumpy bits for me in the narrative (Nick's sudden fate, the rather clunky ending), the characters here are rich and likable, and King summons up one of the most captivating "end of the world" narratives I've read. If you pick it up now, it's all a bit dated but the top moments -- almost anything involving laconic Stu, the scorched-earth evocations of a dead America -- still ring with a bright passion. Be sure to read the "uncut" version which adds a mere few hundred pages more than the original edition. Grade: A+

What a maverick!

How do you show leadership potential and your suitability for the presidency in 2012? Well, by quitting in the middle of your term, for no apparent reason.

The Sarah Palin roadshow -- you can't make this stuff up anymore. Reminds me a bit of John McCain "suspending" his campaign to deal with the economic crisis, because politicians surely can't be expected to deal with more than one thing at once. Big gestures, empty substance. I found it hard to believe I'd find a politician more loathsome than Bush Jr, but wow, Palin's naked cynicism and pandering knows no bounds, does it? One would hope she does run against Obama, just to see him wipe the floor with her.

Every time I think the current state of the Republican Party in the US can't get any more comical, they manage to top themselves. The Dems are hardly perfect, but honestly -- it's just getting absurd on the red team.

Happy Fourth of July, all y'all.

Michael Jackson redux, robots and Oscars

• Michael Jackson, part 2: It's hard to explain, for those who weren't impressionable teens in the 1980s, how utterly everywhere MJ was there for a few years. "Thriller" was in the air, inescapable, in a way that pop music doesn't quite penetrate these multimedia days. I couldn't hum a Kanye West song today to save my life, but in 1983 my brother owned a red Jackson zipper jacket, the cassette of "Thriller" was played every time more than two people got together in a room, and everyone had to try to moonwalk at least once. Nobody these days has an album that stays at #1 for weeks, months. Even parents knew the songs. Even if I really liked Men At Work and Prince a bit more, MJ was in the air, always.

What was interesting was the reaction in the newsroom Friday – one journo, when I told him the first reports came over the wire that Jackson was hospitalized, reacted with "Good. I hope he's dead." A few people gasped when news of the death came out but they were all 30somethings like me. Another in his 20s couldn't see what the big deal was. Journos are a hard-bitten cynical lot so the jokes started circulating almost immediately too. The few folks who actually seemed shaken up by the news were kind of laughed off. Again, as I said Friday, I'm by no measure a huge Jackson fan, but I can't ignore the impact he made on my and everyone's lives, just through the strange and singular story of his existence. Of course we're all well and sick of the Jackson memorial coverage (this is why I get almost all my news from newspapers and online; I can't stand television's incessant need to babble and fill the airtime with vapor), but in the end, you can't deny the sudden death of the creator of the best-selling album of all time is news.

• TEN nominees for Best Picture? No, I don't quite get what the Academy of Motion Pictures is thinking by doubling the nominees for best picture starting next year. Six, sure, maybe eight I could see, but this just seems like a shameless grab for ego, ratings and dollars rather than any sense of the Oscars actually failing to reward the finest in film. I don't think you're suddenly going to start seeing more obscure indie movies nominated. They saw "The Dark Knight" make zillions, realized they didn't nominate it and the Oscars had lousy viewers.

• No, I don't plan on seeing "Transformers 2" any time soon. I did see the first one and I guess I liked it OK at the time although I've never felt any need to watch it again. It's a shame to hear this one relies on a lot of crude and bawdy humor, as it'd be nice if they made a movie my Transformer-obsessed 5-year-old could watch. But it's great fun reading the eviscerating reviews this one is getting – the New York Times gets the word "cretinous" in the very first sentence, while Roger Ebert has a marvelous essay contrasting the "painful" movie to other far better robots in film. I agree one of the more irritating things about director Michael Bay's design is its sheer frenzy; I can barely tell where these robots' faces are supposed to be. Another reviewer's quote which perhaps is a wee bit over the top: "It represents every single vile, puny thing that's wrong with the United States." Worse than "Paul Blart: Mall Cop"?

Michael Jackson 1958-2009

Good god, what a morning to work in a newsroom. There was a lot of last-minute shuffling, rearranging and shock as there is only when the biggest news stories happen. There is no charge like it and despite my occasional grumblings about the state of journalism in 2009, it's a hell of a place to be when big things drop. Michael Jackson is one of those stories, and while we'll all get well and truly sick of the endless tributes, analyses and blathering over the coming days, his sudden death is an event, capital "E."

I'm still processing the fact of Jacko's sudden death -- but my first instinct is to call it a tragedy in the big old broad Shakespearean sense. He may have been a freaky creep, and I can't say I was a gigantic fan, but he was a creature warped and created by many others, by greed and by abuse and in the end I can't help but feel a little sorry for the guy, who hadn't really had the chance of a normal life since his bullying dad heard him sing for the first time. Like Elvis, who he will be compared to a lot, he was chewed up, and weak, and was no innocent, but his story is still a sad and all-too-common one. He mutated long ago into a carnival freak, and while the actual death is a shock, can anyone say they really expected this eternal boy to make it to his 60s and 70s?

Like pretty much any pre-teen in 1982, I listened to "Thriller" a heck of a lot, and have to admit that even now when I hear the familiar thump-thump of "Billie Jean" or the unfaltering drive of "Beat It," it gets my pulse up a bit. Jackson's early chipmunk-voiced boy rock didn't do much for me, and around the time of "Bad" he fell victim to believing he was some kind of twisted messiah, but "Thriller" -- well, despite all that's happened since there is a reason it sold a bazillion copies. For someone with such a big, universal voice and sound once upon a time, it's sad to see him ending so very small.

'Hey, um, so, I made you a mix tape...'

So the faithful Subaru is off at the panel-beaters' for a few weeks getting repaired from teen driver trauma, but they were kind enough to give us a loaner vehicle to use in the meantime. I ain't car-picky, so as long as it gets us around, fine, but I was a bit aback to realize it lacked a CD player. I do need my music to drive; without the sounds of Bowie and Neil and Wilco and the like I cannot navigate, it's a proven fact. But the loaner does have a tape deck, so I reeled into the way-back machine and dug my box of cassettes out of the garage to hold me over. Took me a while to remember the whole rewinding-fast forwarding business, but it all came back.

Strange, to go back to a medium that was once so ubiquitous, but has been gone a good 10-12 years now. I grew up on cassettes, rather than vinyl; clunky and awkward and prone to breakage a medium as tapes were, they were the first sound to me. What I have left of my tape collection now as the clock nears the year of 2010 isn't much, about 30 "mix tapes" and a dozen or so bizarre comedy tapes friends and I made as teenagers. The mix tapes haven't been played in several years now, but through the 1990s the mix tape was where it was at, brothers and sisters. I'm in weird time warp as I drive around a country I never imagined I'd be living in when I made most of these tapes, listening to the music I loved in '92 and '95 and so forth.

I doled out many a mix tape to girls and women I adored, like any sensitive '80s/'90s lad. Most disappeared into the void of vanished hopes, although heck, I've still got quite a few tapes I made for my darling wife, shipped all the way from Mississippi to New Zealand back in the day. I'm glad now of the ones I remembered to keep copies of. Mix tapes were great because you turned them into found art, customizing the labels and carefully parsing the song mix for the proper effect (should I segue from Peter Gabriel into Concrete Blonde or the other way around?).

Revisited today from the perspective of a *cough cough* nearly-40 something dad, it's weird to hear these little time capsules of my musical taste. In the 1990s I was heavy into Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Everclear, Sebadoh, Jane's Addiction and the like. Certain songs tended to pop up a lot on different tapes; you can use Elvis Presley's "Hurt" for anything, darn it! But there's also at least one tape with an embarrassing amount of Phil Collins-era Genesis. One of my prized tapes is from a long-since vanished high school love, who gave me a mix of Crowded House and Roy Orbison songs that still kind of tingle with an strange and nostalgic energy. The girl is gone, and where I'm at is great, but it's fine to have a little piece of gone history to listen to now and then. I even made a few mix tapes for my male friends, which might indeed have taken the concept of "bromance" a hair too far, now that I think about it.

You can make mix CDs now with the click of a few buttons and I've done that, but the tape had a tactile, creative thrill that was its own, the pushing of stop and start recording buttons, the clipping out of collage art to make quirky covers. The car accident kind of sucked, but it's good to have a reason to dig my mix tapes out of oblivion for a spell.

In which the years weigh heavy. Damn you, Weird Al!

Oh my God. Weird Al Yankovic's magnum opus movie "UHF" is 20 years old this year.

It's just the trigger, really. I keep having this sensation a lot lately. A heck of a lot of "20 years since..." moments so far in 2009, each of which makes me feel crepuscular and stunned. 20 years since Michael Keaton "Batman"? 20 years since the Berlin Wall? Since the Pixies' "Dolittle" and Elvis Costello's "Spike"? Next year is my 20th high school reunion which is likely no big thing to those older than I, but in my own little wee brain, egad, I am so old.

Twenty years since "UHF!" Geezus!

What's in the box?

(It's by no means a great movie but it is an eminently silly, amiable one, and I fondly recall seeing it back in the theater with my old pals in the Tomato Warriors™ back in the day. While Weird Al's music is kind of hit-or-miss, and really, you can't keep that parody thing fresh forever, "UHF" still brings back fond memories of road trips to Santa Cruz, "Wheel of Fish," the immortal "Spatula City" and more. Godspeed, Albert.)

[Weird fact: Apparently in New Zealand it was titled "The Vidiot From UHF." No foolin'.]

Friday shuffle: You gotta call me man, I'll be the biggest fan you'll ever lose

Three mildly vexing things about living in Auckland:

1. I liked the cows on Mount Eden. I shall miss them. Something charmingly Kiwi about climbing the city's highest point and looking down at the skyscrapers while being surrounded by bovines.

2. One of the things about Auckland that is disappointing is the bungled potential of its waterfront, which fails to truly show off its marvelous environment like, say, San Francisco or Sydney. Lots of locals carp about our cluttered downtown, which has some fine old buildings and an awful lot of bland gray boxes and too many ghastly apartment buildings that are an abomination against nature. And the waterfront, which is shamefully cut off from pedestrians by ugly shipping cranes and huge fences. Hopefully, this might be changing, eventually, but it's a shame Auckland's space has been allowed to just develop willy-nilly rather than planned with a sense of, well, feng shui for lack of a better term. Not to fire up the NZ-Aussie rivalry too much, but Sydney manages to incorporate its waterfront into a fine touristy open waterfront, while much of ours is off limits. A shame.

3. For a country that's not really tropical and whose nearest neighbour south is Antarctica, boy do we have a lousy standard of home insulation. Our home gets lots of sun which is great, but the insulation is nearly nonexistent which can be chilly and extraordinarily expensive to add. And central heating? In New Zealand? Don't make me laugh!

Brr. Can you tell it's been freezing lately here in the South Seas? Music warm. Put iPod on and hide under blankets until September or so.

1. Stan [Live] 6:20 Eminem Feat. Elton John*
2. Temptation Inside Your Heart 2:33 The Velvet Underground
3. Date With The Night 2:35 Yeah Yeah Yeahs
4. Bust A Move 1:57 Richard Cheese**
5. I Want Candy 2:35 The Strangeloves
6. Butterfly 3:23 Screaming Trees***
7. I Can't Make It On Time 2:33 The Ramones
8. Magic Toy Missing 1:22 Meat Puppets
9. Nehalem 1:54 Everclear
10. Crackity Jones 1:24 Pixies
11. Teardrop 5:28 Massive Attack
12. The Ways Of Love 4:29 Neil Young
13. How To Fight Loneliness 3:53 Wilco
14. Come Crash 3:03 A.C. Newman

* Have to admit I prefer the album version with Dido. Eminem and Elton John just sound weird together, man.
** Richard Cheese is the best lounge act cover singer of rock and rap tunes you will ever hear. A small niche, admittedly, but still...
*** Screaming Trees remain one of the great underrated grunge bands, I think, IMHO more interesting than say Alice In Chains or Soundgarden even.

Harlan Ellison: Dreams With Sharp Teeth review

Harlan Ellison is a loudmouthed, righteous man. This few who know of him will argue. But he's also a fiery, wonderful writer, one of the best authors of essays and science fiction I've ever read.

Ellison has written dozens of fantastic stories, novellas and screenplays, such as the famous original "Star Trek" episode "The City On The Edge of Forever." He leaves his unmistakable mark all over evocatively titled tales like "I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream" and "The Beast That Shouted Love At The Heart of the World", and his epic, impassioned nonfiction could give a lot of writers lessons on how to persuade and antagonize with mere words on a page. At age 75, he hasn't mellowed one bit.

One of my favorite Ellison quotes is "We are not entitled to our opinions; we are entitled to our informed opinions." That kind of sums up his eternally boat-rocking view of the world. He doesn't care about the feathers he ruffles, having been described as "possibly the most contentious person on Earth."

Now finally out on DVD, the labor-of-love documentary "Harlan Ellison: Dreams With Sharp Teeth" is a movie that attempts to explain Ellison to the world. Filmmaker Erik Nelson assembled it from years of footage dating back to 1981, and spent a great deal of time interviewing Ellison – which is mostly a case of just standing back and letting the man talk. It's Ellison warts and all, without apology or canonization. We see his friends (including famous names like Robin Williams and Neil Gaiman) and his legendary house, a gloriously overstuffed fanboy's paradise of 70+ years of toys, books and memorabilia.

"Dreams" rises above just being one man's monologue by showing some of the pain that shaped Ellison, a short, scrawny, wise-mouthed kid who got beat up "every single day," whose father died gruesomely in front of him when Ellison was just a teenager. Ellison is one of those people who believe too hard, and who when wronged react with a fire that scorches the very earth. At one point, in mid-rant, Ellison kind of breaks off, and admits he doesn't want to just be the angry guy, the ranter, but he simply can't bear being taken advantage of, being mocked or made a fool. It's a telling, honest moment, one that helps humanize him as more than just a shouting voice.

Nelson also gives a lot of time to Harlan the writer, with Harlan storming through a series of lively readings from his work. His readings aren't just recitations, but dancing, vivid recreations of the passion that exists in every syllable. While "Dreams" is more about Harlan as personality over his literary worth, it gives you enough to make you want to re-read your old paperbacks and hunt out new ones.

"Dreams" doesn't touch on some of the many, many controversies involving Ellison in immense detail, but it does enough to give you the picture -- if he's a friend, he's a friend, but if you piss him off, lawyers are standing by and he's more than willing to bash a skull or two. (Among his victims/enemies are Fantagraphics Books, the Terminator franchise, Walt Disney, the I, Robot movie and many more.) Tellingly, Harlan's enemies aren't really given a chance to tell their side here, but that's not really the point.

I wouldn't want to live with Harlan Ellison, but he's been an immense influence on my own writing and how I view the world. I admire his strength and his voice, even when it's a bit too sharp and certain for his own good. An entertaining rant of a film, "Dreams With Sharp Teeth" is the portrait he deserves, for better and for worse.

The trailer, which gives you a taste of Ellison's distinctive voice: