The Beach Boys, Then and Now

In 1967, Brian Wilson drove himself into a nervous breakdown trying to complete an album for the Beach Boys called Smile. Stepping away from the simple surfing and puppy love songs the Boys were known for, and feeling like they were in a contest with the Beatles for the next Giant Step Forward (after Rubber Soul and Revolver) this was going to be an Important Statement. "Good Vibrations" came out as a single and was indeed a huge smash and a Step Forward, but the album was never completed; had it been finished and released on time, in January of 67, it certainly would have been acclaimed as the 1st psychedelic masterpiece of the year--that summer would see the release of the Beatles Sgt. Pepper, perhaps the biggest single Giant Step Forward in all of pop music. Instead, it came out in the fall as a cobbled-together collection of songs called Smiley Smile.  Most of the songs meant for the original Smile were eventually released piecemeal on various albums over the years, and in 2002, Brian Wilson recorded an all-new version of the original Smile material. It was interesting  and weird and fun, though Wilson's voice wasn't at its peak, and as much as I love the Wondermints, the band that Wilson was recording with, the lack of Beach Boys harmonies hurt the album.

Last year, Capitol Records released The Smile Sessions, a newly edited compilation of original Smile material, put together following the order that Wilson established on his re-recording, and it's a revelation, even after hearing the 2002 version. Had this come out in 1967, it surely would have been a critical hit, and possibly a commercial one too, if it had been accepted as an album meant to be listened to all the way through in one sitting. There aren't many actual songs here, by which I mean songs of 2 or 3 minutes with a verse-chorus-verse structure. There are 19 tracks and only 11 of them are over 2:30 in length. 5 are a minute or less, just fragments or extended segues. Aside from "Heroes and Villains," "Good Vibrations," and maybe "Surf's Up" (all of which are songs made up of distinct sections or fragments) none of these pieces will stick in my mind as songs. But as a 50-minute album, it's a wonderful listen.

What will make me return to this album are the heavenly harmonies, the gorgeous arrangements (lots of tinkly keyboards), and the flow of the fragments as they've been pieced together. Apparently, Wilson (pictured above) says that this still isn't really Smile as he would have released it in 1967, but it sounds right. Unfortunately, the lyrics by Van Dyke Parks are a major sticking point. The Beach Boys went, perhaps too quickly, from surf, sun, and the girl next door to artsy avant-garde lyrics which make no narrative sense. Even "Heroes and Villains," which was a top 20 hit in 1967, isn't a straightforward lyric sequence. The songs give the impression of being about American history and Americana: "Rock, roll, Plymouth Rock roll over"; "Have you seen the grand coolie workin' on the railroad?"; "The Spanish and Indian home of the heroes and villains." There are references to barnyards, vegetables, Auld Lang Syne, and "home on the range," and "You Are My Sunshine" is directly quoted. Frustratingly, for those pop fans like me who read lyric sheets, there are damn few places where the words do more than just create an impressionistic haze--hence the psychedelic reputation. But if you turn off (or down) your left brain, it's a great pleasure to just let this album wash over you, beginning with the utterly beautiful wordless acapella chant, "Our Prayer," and ending with the sublime "Good Vibrations" in a version with a different last half than the one everyone knows.

The Boys have regrouped recently for a 50th anniversary album and tour, and it's nice to report that the new album, That's Why God Made the Radio, is a good one. Four of the guys who were on Smile (Brian Wilson, Mike Love, Al Jardine, and Bruce Johnston) handle most of the vocals and they still sound fine. Once again, lyrics can be a problem: "Spring vacation/Good vibrations/Summer weather/We're back together," in a song called "Spring Vacation." But at least the songs make sense, and the subjects are familiar Beach Boys touchstones: radio, summertime, romance, beaches, and good times. The lyrics of the last half of the album are of the sadder but wiser variety: "Summer's gone/It's finally sinking in." One of the prettiest songs, "Daybreak Over the Ocean," is essentially a Mike Love solo cut that he sings with his family. And, a bit like Smile, the album works well consumed in one sitting. Even better, they don't sound like a bunch of old guys making one last stab at working together. They sound like a fully functioning, fully engaged pop band.

Overkill

I loved comic books and science fiction in my youth, but in my middle age, I am generally not a fan of recent movies of these genres. 2001: A Space Odyssey is sci-fi's cinematic zenith and will never be bested. Comic book movies, which used to be low-budget serials and B-films, now have huge budgets so they can be fully realized on the big screen, but I find them mostly to be a lot of sound and fury over very little--oddly, perhaps, my favorite superhero films are the "dumb" ones, like Green Lantern and the Fantastic Four movies, which concentrate more on cosmic bad-guy bashing and less on personal angst and darkness. Having said that, it comes as no surprise that I'm not a fan of two big, recent examples of these genres, The Avengers and John Carter.

The most interesting thing about the Avengers movie is that the build-up to it was skillfully orchestrated, with entire movies featuring Captain America, Iron Man, and Thor seeming to exist primarily as feature-length appetizers for this main course. In a nutshell, a group of superheroes who don't exactly play well together are asked to band together to battle the evil Norse god Loki (introduced in last year's Thor movie) when he tries to take over the world. Generally, personality problems are downplayed here in favor of action.  But the action scenes are all terribly long and exhausting and incoherent in the way that most comic book movie action scenes are. At almost 2 1/2 hours, it could easily be cut to about 100 minutes, most of the loss coming from the battle scenes--especially the scenes in the middle that feature the heroes fighting among themselves, which really bog down the movie. I enjoyed some of the acting. Robert Downey Jr. continues to impress with his light touch as Iron Man/Tony Stark, and Jeremy Renner (pictured below) is nicely subdued as the archer Hawkeye. I also liked Scarlett Johansson, who I usually dislike, as Black Widow. But despite everything being done in supersized doses of action (and an unimpressive use of 3D), this one won't lose much at home on DVD.

The Avengers, distributed by Disney, has become a blockbuster, but Disney's other recent big action film, John Carter, bombed at the box office, at least relative to its cost.  A lot of people went to see it, but word of mouth was not good and there was not the repeat business it would have needed to make back its $250 million dollar budget. I was actually looking forward to this since in my youth, I was a fan of the John Carter of Mars pulp sci-fi books by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Sadly, this film, the first live-action work from Pixar director Andrew Stanton, appears to have killed off the franchise already.  A low-budget, direct-to-video version appeared a couple of years ago, and though it's cheap and poorly acted (see my review here), it's about as enjoyable as this bloated, convoluted film.

John Carter, a Civil War veteran, is wounded on Earth, stumbles into a cave, and finds himself inexplicably transported to Mars (called Barsoom by its inhabitants) where he winds up in the middle of a Barsoomian civil war between different races of creatures. He falls in love with a princess (the original novel, the first of several, is called A Princess of Mars) and helps her side in the planet-wide battle. To do Carter right, spectacular special effects are called for (Carter can leap huge distances, one race of beings is green and has 4 arms) and generally, this movie gets the look and feel of Barsoom right.  Below is one of the best effects, the lobster-like airship.

The convoluted pulp plot isn't handled very well, but that alone is not fatal--as long as we know the good guys from the bad, we can muddle through. But I failed to feel engaged with any character (except maybe for the giant cute alien dog that bounds after Carter throughout) and again, action scene overkill dully hammers out any enthusiasm I had worked up for the movie. Here, acting is not much of a  consolation: Taylor Kitsch is terrible and isn't muscled enough for the part, and the few actors who are good (Ciaran Hinds, James Purefoy, and Dominic West) don't get much screen time. Lynn Collins as the Princess Dejah Thoris is OK but she's not enough to make this movie interesting. Potential for a good series is wasted due to a bloated budget, unclear narrative, and an uninspiring lead actor.

The good, the bad and the Smash

Smash has ended its first season (and been renewed for a second) and so I will include spoilers here as I discuss the high and low points of the show.  I wrote about the first few episodes already here and will try not to repeat myself too much, but generally things went along much as I expected them to.  The soap opera drama carried the day over the potentially more interesting examination of what goes into the making of a Broadway musical.  Debra Messing cheated on her husband with a man from her past, the actor chosen to play Joe DiMaggio in Bombshell, and her husband found out and left her (briefly) until their teenage son got in trouble.  After the Bombshell workshop, which featured Megan Hilty as Marilyn, the producers decided to go for a big Hollywood name (played by Uma Thurman, and if she was channeling a specific real-life actress, it wasn't clear to me), though both Hilty and her rival Katherine McPhee were given roles in the chorus, with McPhee being made understudy.  On the opening night of the Boston tryout, someone spiked Thurman's smoothie with peanuts--she's allergic.  Over the objections of most of the creative team, the director (Jack Davenport) picked McPhee to go on rather than Hilty, and McPhee was a "smash," leaving Hilty in her dressing room contemplating a Monroe-like suicide with a bottle of pills.

The good:  Debra Messing and Angelica Huston (as the producer, pictured above with Davenport) continued to give the best performances, though Messing had a few too many teary scenes as her domestic drama developed.  Huston met a scruffy bartender whom she's sleeping with and who is helping to bankroll her show.  The Bombshell show numbers continued to be strong, though the single best number of the season was "A Thousand and One Nights," a Bollywood-style fantasy number performed by McPhee and featuring virtually the entire cast.  The music and costumes were fun and the number managed to comment wordlessly but effectively on almost every storyline in  the show.  After a shaky introduction, Thurman (below with McPhee) did a nice job as the obnoxious star who can't sing and tries to take over the production.  And Hilty remained strong, even as she was forced by the script to slip into the soap opera "bad girl" role--though to be fair, her character was given some sympathetic moments.

The bad:  Megan Hilty is still clearly the right choice for Marilyn, and the writers and the actor (Davenport) were unsuccessful at making us understand why the director chose McPhee for the starring role.  I appreciate McPhee's talents, though they seem limited, but her singing is almost always augmented by Auto-Tune technology to sharpen it up, whereas Hilty's big voice doesn't need gimmickry.  It feels like the writers knew the audience would be on Hilty's side, as they make Davenport's decision to use McPhee an unpopular one among the rest of the creative team.  Regardless, what should have been a sure-fire feel-good climax as McPhee plays Marilyn fell flat for me (and, according to the blogosphere, many other regular viewers as well).

They didn't seem to know what to do with McPhee's good-hearted boyfriend (Raza Jaffrey) so he had a one-night stand with Hilty, and now comes news that Jaffrey will not return next season.  Christian Borle, as Messing's songwriting partner (above in the Bollywood number), comes off well acting-wise, but his personal storylines have been boring and led nowhere.  Some of the dancers have been fleshed out a bit, and I hope will continue to add color to future episodes.  I'll watch next year, but I'll be looking for more fun, and fewer pre-existing pop songs done Karaoke-style by the stars--I hope they'll use Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, the writers of the Marilyn songs, more.  And I'll be waiting for Megan Hilty to get her reward.    

The Last Horror Movie

It's difficult to write meaningfully about The Cabin in the Woods, the new horror film from Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard, without using all kinds of spoilers.  To say that it isn't really a horror movie as much as a postmodern commentary on the horror genre, with tones of sci-fi, comedy, religion, and even Lovecraft thrown into the mix may be giving too much away, but most of the above becomes apparent to the viewer after only a few minutes into the movie.  Some critics have noted that this is the ultimate, as in last, horror movie, and while that is certainly not true, I understand the feeling: after watching this, I wondered, where else can the genre go and still move forward?

Two things are happening here (well, three things, but I can't reveal that third thing although you will find a couple of clues in this review):  1) five college students, the usual mix from shy girl to studly guy to stoned joker, head off for a weekend at an isolated cabin in the woods; 2) two white-collar guys in what looks like a small-scale Mission Control building, are observing the five all the way, from when they leave their apartments to their arrival at the cabin and beyond.  It soon becomes apparent that the two guys (and a large team of assistants) are to some degree controlling what happens to the kids.  The tone in the office is light-hearted, with bets going on as to what the kids will do and what will happen to them.  My first thought was that the kids were unwittingly either starring in a reality TV show, or participating in a secret scientific experiment, but things soon take a dark turn when zombies appear and people start dying--or do they?

And that's about all I can say about the plot mechanics.  Not only would more detail spoil the twists, it would spoil the fun.  And despite the blood and gore, this is a fun movie, though ultimately, it really isn't.  The apocalyptic tone that takes hold near the end cancels out some of the fun.  This movie is not about the actors, though they all do OK, with Bradley Whitford and Richard Jenkins standouts as the two white-collar guys.  It's not even about the effects:  there aren't many effects in the first half, and the last half is filled with CGI, but I think the movie would have worked even with a lower budget.  It's about the ideas: about the horror genre, about human nature, about our mythologies.  And a little bit about what scares us in the dark.  The two best scenes in the movie: 1) early on, when the five kids go down into the cabin's dark basement and find, well, every possible spooky artifact that could ever set a horror movie's narrative in motion; 2) a scene near the end which I can't describe except to say it happens when a bunch of elevator doors all open at once--I was scared, I laughed, and I was in awe all at the same time, three feelings that this movie conjures up regularly.  It's not perfect--a more detailed backstory would have filled in some glaring plotholes--but it's damn fun, and a little scary, and kinda awesome.  

Walter Pidgeon?!?

According to his memoir, Full Service, Scotty Bowers, a Marine in WWII, spent a good chunk of his life as a pimp and a whore to Hollywood stars and celebrities, male and female. The subtitle of the book, My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars, pretty much sums up its appeal. I love a gossipy tell-all as much as the next bitch, but this one leaves a lot to be desired.

It opens with a bang, so to speak, as young studly Bowers, a gas station attendant in Hollywood, is hit on by Walter Pidgeon, taken to a Hollywood mansion swimming pool, and has a three-way with Pidgeon and a non-celeb. Starting with Pidgeon is a good move to establish your credentials; he's not the biggest name these days, and he's not someone about whom I've ever heard many gay rumors. (I almost titled this post, "I Blew Walter Pidgeon," but that would have been too scandalous even for me.) But most of the rest of the parade of celebs (mostly gay or bisexual) that pass through this book are the usual suspects: Charles Laughton, Rock Hudson, Anthony Perkins, Katherine Hepburn, Errol Flynn, Ramon Novarro, Cary Grant & Randolph Scott (pictured below) and many more. It's a hopping busy gas station.

The problem with this book is that it is terribly written. The style, construction, and narrative flow are all just awful. Bowers apparently (with his co-author Lionel Friedberg) didn't want this to be pornographic--there is almost no graphic sexual content--but there's no other reason to read this book than to be titillated. The simplistic style apes that of porn fiction, but without the porn all you have is deadly dull prose. It's also repetitive; all of the stars are his dear friends (except for Roddy McDowell, with whom he apparently didn't get along), and he uses the word "trick" and its variations constantly--he sets up tricks for Hepburn, he tricks with Perkins, etc. Despite all the tricking, he insists he wasn't a pimp because he didn't take money, he just made arrangements for others for fun, or out of the goodness of his heart, but still, a pimp's a pimp for all that.

Bowers rarely come to life in these pages. I believe he's real and his adventures are probably real, but we get very little sense of any inner life. Every so often (too often, in fact), he notes that he's not one to judge the morality or kinkiness or his "friends," and his background story is moderately interesting, but there is absolutely no reflection or philosophizing that goes any deeper than, "To each his own."

If you're willing to brave bad prose and a couple of fairly standard coming-of-age chapters, you will get to a few juicy stories. Most interesting to me is his claim about Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. I've read that their much-vaunted romance was more an intense friendship than a love affair, but Bowers claims that they didn't even like each other very much. There's also a three-way with Errol Flynn and a young lady that sounds like it really happened, and he tells us that Tyrone Power was into watersports and scat (check Wikipedia). J. Edgar Hoover, Brian Epstein, Cole Porter, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor--Eddie and Wallis--all get a few paragraphs, but honestly after a while, it all sounded either fake or exaggerated. Bowers should have taken some hints from Xaviera Hollander (The Happy Hooker) and at least made the book a hot read. But it's not.

Broadway on TV

The new show Smash is about the making of a Broadway musical; though hit musicals still tour the country, the audience for such a show would seem to be fairly small, especially in terms of audience size needed for a network hit (at least 8 million, I think), but recent programs like American Idol and (especially) Glee have made its appearance possible. As a theater fan, I was looking forward to this show, and the pilot episode was promising, but that promise is being squandered.

The plot revolves around a Broadway musical about Marilyn Monroe: the songwriting team working on it, the producer trying to raise money for it, the hopefuls auditioning for it, the director putting it on, and various tangential folks (assistants, friends, family). When the (TV) show sticks with the (Broadway) show, it is great fun. As song and dance numbers are rehearsed, we see the actual bare-bones rehearsal intercut with the full-fledged vision the creators have for the finished numbers, and these usually wind up the best parts of the show. The original songs, by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, co-writers of the musical Hairspray, are quite good and feel like authentic show tunes.

At least two of the actors are very good: Debra Messing as one-half of the songwriting team and Angelica Huston as the producer. Both are saddled with soap opera plots: Messing and her husband are trying to adopt a baby (though why, when they have a teenage boy, is never explained) and Huston is going through a messy divorce from her former co-producer. The best running gag involves Huston tossing a martini in her ex-husband's face. Every time a drink and the husband are in the shot, you know it's going to end up splashed across his face. For some reason, I haven't gotten tired of this yet--in fact, I look forward to it.


That's the good. The rest is not so good. There's the gay composer who is given little to do, his straight assistant who started out sweet and is becoming a creep, and the somewhat slimy director who sleeps with his leading ladies. The main focus is on the two women vying for the lead role of Marilyn. Katherine McPhee (at the top of the pyramid in the logo photo) is the nice girl from the sticks trying for her first role outside of the chorus. We seem to be steered toward favoring her, as she is pretty, pleasant, friendly, and of course, the underdog. But her personality is bland and her voice is plain and overprocessed, making her sound like a mid-range "Idol" contestant. Megan Hilty, the other hopeful (pictured above), has played supporting roles on Broadway and has the advantage of already being blond and fairly buxom, and her voice is far more of a natural "Broadway belter." What I like is that, in some ways, we root for both of them; neither one has been demonized (yet). But Hilty is so clearly the better option for the role of Marilyn that there was very little suspense in the first few shows--SPOILER!: Hilty gets the role, though I'm wondering if what's in store for McPhee is to be the understudy who gets to go on in the lead at the last minute.

My biggest problems with the show so far involve the soap-opera elements, and I guess that's not fair because it really is a soap opera. I was hoping for more color, more fun, more larger-than-life personalities, or conversely, more reality about how stage actors struggle against the odds. The show is pitched in the middle right now and, though I'll probably stick with it, I'm feeling like an opportunity for a really interesting and enjoyable show on this subject has been lost.

Macca the jazzbo

Well, it's been a while. I used to post to this blog when I had a reference desk job in a library and I had a fair amount of time on my hands in front of a computer. Now my library job is in Technical Services, which means I'm not in the public eye, but I'm busy in front of the computer all day long, hence fewer posts here over the past year. I'm still consuming media, but I have less time to think and write about my consumption. So in order to reboot my blog, I'm going to try and write shorter posts.

I'll start with Kisses on the Bottom, the new Paul McCartney album. I love Paul, but he's largely a spent force on the music scene. He gets an album out every few years, there are usually respectable reviews, it hits the charts for a few weeks, then disappears. This new one is a collection of standards, or at least older songs. Some truly are standards ("Bye Bye Blackbird," "It's Only a Paper Moon") and some are songs that are less well-remembered ("Get Yourself Another Fool," a cute novelty song called "My Very Good Friend the Milkman"). He performs them in nightclub-jazz style--subdued vocals, brushes on drums--and he has some musicians with true jazz chops, including Diana Krall and John Pizzarelli, backing him.

But Paul is not a jazz singer, and he strains to sound like one. For most of the album, he sounds like a very old man half-whispering the songs. My first thought was, Oh, poor Paul, he can't sing anymore. But on a handful of songs, including the upbeat "Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive," he sounds like the same old Paul. So I'm guessing on the other songs, he was trying on the "jazz singer in a film noir nightclub" suit. It doesn't fit well. As an experiment, it was fun to listen to once, but the album is not a keeper. The odd title, by the way, comes from a line in "I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter" about putting XXXs at the bottom of a letter.