Since the events in White Lightning, Gator (Burt Reynolds) has been released from prison and he’s now living in the Okefenokee Swamp. Other than running moonshine, Gator is laying low and keeping to himself. Gator may be done with the feds but the feds are not done with him.
Gator’s old friend, Bama McCall (Jerry Reed), is now unofficial boss of Dunston County and both the Department of Justice and the Governor of Georgia (played by talk show host Mike Douglas) are determined to take him down. Federal agent Irving Greenfield (Jack Weston) is convinced that he can get Bama on charges of tax evasion. But Irving’s from New York and he does not know how to talk to the good ol’ boys. He needs someone on the inside and that’s where Gator comes in.
Gator not only starred Burt Reynolds but it was his directorial debut as well. Though it’s a sequel to White Lightning, Gator feels like a very different movie. Whereas Joseph Sargent kept White Lightning relatively serious, Reynolds take a more jokey approach with Gator. Reynolds has his famous mustache and his hairpiece in Gator and the self-amused attitude that went along with them. Gator is full of car chases, fist fights, willing women, and corny jokes. It also has Lauren Hutton, playing a familiar character who would appear in all of Reynolds’s movies, the sophisticate who cannot resist Burt’s good ol’ boy, country charm. In the 1970s, audiences couldn’t resist Burt’s good old boy charm, either. Critics hated Gator but it made a lot of money.
Gator is dumb but fun. The most interesting part of the movie is seeing Jerry Reed playing a ruthless villain. Reed is thoroughly convincing as a Dixie Mafia crime boss, the type of redneck who earlier inspired Buford Pusser to pick up a baseball bat and destroy pool halls. One year later, Jerry would play Burt Reynolds’s best friend in Smoky and the Bandit so it’s interesting to see them playing deadly rivals in Gator.
For tomorrow’s movie a day, Burt’s a football player in jail in The Longest Yard.
Active since the 1970s, Ken Kelly is a fantasy artist. He’s the nephew of the wife of Frank Frazetta and Frazetta’s influence is obvious in his work. Check out some of Kelly’s work — full of muscular men, beautiful women, and flamboyant monsters — below.
For one thing, the lovely Ms. Phoebe Lucille was born on June 29th. 🙂
A two year old and a six month old do not make for many leisurely afternoons exploring new music, and besides that, my competing addictions to Forum Mafia and Overwatch have consumed virtually all of what little free time I have. Suffice to say, I’m not exactly well informed on music in 2016. In fact, I can’t name 10 metal albums that came out last year off the top of my head, so my traditional top metal list just isn’t going to happen.
But I’ve been posting some sort of year-end music list every year since 2002, and I’ll be damned if I let ignorance stop me. So here goes nothing:
10. Krallice – Prelapsarian
Prelapsarian was released on December 21st. I didn’t find out about its existence until quite recently, and like every Krallice albums, it’s going to take a good 30 listens to fully appreciate. But after a few early spins I can confidently say that it’s good, and because it’s Krallice, that probably means I’ll be kicking myself half a year from now for not giving it my #1 slot. My initial take-away is that the band has continued to pursue the more mathy/avant-garde approach they took on Ygg Huur in place of the progressive opuses of their first four albums, and while that might not make for the same degree of eternal replay value, they’re still the best in the business at what they do. I could argue that I liked the Hyperion EP released earlier this year more, but that’s hardly fair given the amount of time I’ve had to listen to Prelapsarian. I’m going to err on the side of reason here and say this album will be firmly cemented in my top 10 of 2016 a month from now.
9. Martröð – Transmutation of Wounds
Is it another cop out to include a 16 minute EP in my year end list? Maybe. Whatever the play time limits, Transmutation of Wounds takes me on a pretty diverse and chaotic ride. In a lot of ways it felt like a more complete work to me than many full length black metal albums I heard this year, because it’s always going somewhere. The destinations aren’t particularly inviting, but they’re consistently fascinating. A solid debut from a band that could really kill it if they put together a full length album.
8. Skáphe – Skáphe²
This one is a brilliantly discordant and meandering take on black metal. It borders on unlistenable for all the right reasons, and leaves me feeling a little sick to my stomach every time I give it a spin. I suppose that doesn’t sound like a compliment, but it’s an artistic accomplishment that really very few bands out there can pull off. I mutually adore and abhor it. On an amusing note, I just realized as I was writing this that the line-up includes members of Misþyrming and Martröð. Misþyrming’s Söngvar elds og óreiðu would have easily made my 2015 list if I hadn’t only discovered it this past January, and I placed Martröð one slot up, so at least my tastes are consistent. <_<
7. Sumac – What One Becomes
I need to get off my ass and buy a physical copy of this album. Post-metal god Aaron Turner finally found a worthy follow-up to Isis when he joined forces in 2015 with Nick Yacyshyn and Brian Cook to create The Deal, a sludgy masterpiece that might be what Isis would have sounded like had they tied a brick to every guitar string. The Deal has been my go-to album for car rides for quite a while now, and it’s hard for me to compare its quality to What One Becomes because I’ve only ever listened to the latter at home. But I’ve heard it enough to know it’s excellent, and it’s only going to keep on growing on me in years to come.
6. Radiohead – A Moon Shaped Pool
I don’t suppose this needs much explanation. Half a year ago, I might have considered it for my top choice of the year. Sitting here right now, I can’t honest remember any of the songs besides “Burn the Witch” and the absolutely beautiful revision of “True Love Waits” without putting the album on to remind myself. That’s been the simple difference for me between post-Hail to the Thief Radiohead and all that came before. I love it when I’m experiencing it; I can’t really remember it a few weeks removed. But it’s more a testimony to Thom and company’s longevity that the music they released in 2016 still earns an easy placement in my top 10 of the year.
5. Run the Jewels – 3
This is where my list is going to start getting a little unconventional to people who’ve known me for a long time. I was really into Anticon back in the early 2000s (I gave Buck 65’s Secret House Against the World my #1 slot in 2005), but by and large hip hop has remained one of those genres I massively respected but never really got around to expansively engaging. Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly in 2015 hit me hard enough to affect a more lasting change in my listening habits. I listened to more hip hop than metal in 2016. So there’s the preface.
When I say I don’t know hip hop though, I mean it. El-P and Killer Mike were nothing to me but names I’d heard people mention a million times before I picked up this album. I can’t compare this to their past albums. I can’t speak from experience. I can’t even talk about its appeal over time, because this album just dropped on Christmas Eve. But it hit me for all the reasons I was digging Aesop Rock this time 15 years ago, and in a year when hip hop was my go-to genre it was the perfect album to close things out.
4. Danny Brown – Atrocity Exhibition
That was the easy part. Now it gets hard. The rest of these could go in any order. They’re so mutually different that I don’t really know where to begin in ranking them. So I’m going to do the stupid thing and put the album I’m most likely to love longest at the bottom of the pile.
Is this the most intelligent album of 2016? Probably. I don’t have to be well versed in a genre to recognize a piece of art when I see it. Atrocity Exhibition shows extreme attention to lyrical and musical detail in crafting its grim cautionary descent into drug abuse and street violence. Brown pulled together a collection of sounds that projected his vision in astoundingly visual ways. No one should ever realistically be able to rap to this, but he managed to lay his eccentric and expressive voice over top of it anyway. It’s one of those packages that takes extreme care to ensure that it’s barely holding itself together at any given moment. If I was strictly picking the “best” album of 2016, Brown would be my boy, but what good is a year end list if I can’t kick myself for how stupid my ordering was afterwards?
3. Deathspell Omega – The Synarchy of Molten Bones
Besides, metal has always hit closest to home for me. It’s the sound I find easiest to embrace, whatever its abrasiveness, and once again France has served as the source of its finest cuts. For better than a decade, friends whose tastes I trust have been praising Deathspell Omega, but I could never quite catch the hype. That changed this year. Far and away my favorite metal album of 2016, The Synarchy of Molten Bones is a complex and captivating black metal masterpiece that’s really perfectly mixed to bring out the robustness of their sound in a full and fleshy way. The song progression is delightfully abstract without ever teetering into the abyss of wankery. A lot of its success stands on their ability to remain relentlessly aggressive no matter how far they delve into experimentation. Too obscure for me to ever fully wrap my head around, I’ve put it on more than 50 times expecting the sort of bore that excessively abstract metal tends to convey on me, and every time I’m just immediately swept away, not fully cognizant of what my ears are hearing but thoroughly in love. These guys crafted an exceptional album on their own, but they owe their studio staff a lot of respect for delicious production too.
2. Bon Iver – 22, A Million
From here I’ve got to vote with my heart, and that begins with the 34 minute heartbreak that is 22, A Million. This album reminds me more of Lost in Translation than of any particular album. It’s packed with disjointed vignettes that don’t serve an apparent purpose towards progressing the album. They often start or end abruptly. It almost comes off as a compilation of half-finished works that got mashed together in an abbreviated 34 minute package with all the meat left behind, but I think it works well that way. Fleeting moments of digital indie folk that always manage to feel simultaneously depressed and comforting–the end result is something beautiful. I put my kids to sleep with it at night.
1. Chance the Rapper – Coloring Book
I’ve been trying my hardest to overplay this album for ten months now, but it just won’t grow old. I don’t know if past artists have incorporated gospel into hip hop to this extent or not, but if they’re half as effective at it, lead the way. I don’t have to share Chance’s religious beliefs to find this album entirely uplifting from start to finish. It beams positivity from end to end without any of the pop sunshine and flowers that turn me off to the vast majority of “happy” music. Chance is at his best when he’s passionately and arrogantly busting out religious lines (and he kills it just as hard on Kanye’s “Ultralight Beam”, whatever I think of the rest of that album). That’s the focus for the grand bulk of this work. It’s not perfect by a long shot. Where he diverts to more worldly themes, he’s often shallow and cliche. “All Night” for instance is really fun to jam along to but leaves me feeling more than modestly cheated on the lyrical front.
But I don’t really care. I fell in love with the spirituality of this album right from the get-go, and close to a year later it still brightens me up every time I put it on. It won’t go down among my top albums of all time, but it earned its place as my favorite of 2016.
Well, here’s the time that I know we’ve all been waiting for! It’s time for me to reveal my picks for the 16 worst films of 2016!
(Why 2016? Because Lisa doesn’t do odd numbers!)
Now, I should make clear that these are my picks. They do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other writers here at Through The Shattered Lens. In fact, I know that a few of them most definitely do not!
What type of year was 2016? It was a pretty bad one. There weren’t many memorable films released but there was a lot of mediocrity and disappointment. Do you know why 2016 was so bad? I think it’s because, if you add up 2 plus 1 plus 6, you end up with 9, an odd number. For that same reason, 2017 is going to be much better. If you add up 2 plus 1 plus 7, you end up with 10, which is an even number that can be cleanly divided.
So fear not! 2017 is going to be a great year!
For now, however, here are my picks for the 16 worst films of 2016!
Seriously, Hardcore Henry is one of the few films that I have ever had to walk out on. I literally got physically ill while watching the film, largely due to the nonstop shaky cam. Seriously — when your film’s selling point is a technique that literally induces nausea, you’re going to have some problems. Now, before anyone leaves any angry comments, I did make it a point to go back and watch the rest of Hardcore Henry before making out this list. Not only does Hardcore Henry feature a nausea-inducing gimmick but it’s also a rather uninspired and dull action film.
Yay! A good ABBA song, with a good music video to go with it! I forgot these existed after the last few that I did.
The music video starts off and immediately introduces us to one of the running things in this video. That’s the use of different techniques to obfuscate or generally distance things from each other. In this case, it’s that funhouse mirror effect that distorts what you are seeing without necessarily destroying it beyond recognition.
We then cut to Agnetha for a long take where she even reaches out to us like the song says. I love this shot not only because of its apparent isolation, but because we will see a tiny detail added to this later on in the video that is the reason I used the word “apparent”.
Then we see this kaleidoscope effect. This time around it spins before settling on one of the guys. In some cases, it will keep spinning without stopping. Sometimes it acts as a transition, and other times it reinforces the lyrics.
Then we get the shot that is easily the most iconic for the video. The band on what looks like a rocky beach looking upward almost as if they are asking for divine intervention.
There are some close-up shots and a repeat of the kaleidoscope effect before we settle on Agnetha again. Look over her left shoulder. It is what appears to be Benny and Björn walking into frame. They are in the background and out of focus, but are still just a little ways behind her like the lyrics she is singing say: “You seem so far away, though you are standing near.”
Then we get this shot where they do the outside shot, but from what looks like the set of the video from Mamma Mia. It may be the same set, but they are wearing different costumes. My best guess is contrast. The outside where they look sad with a shot from the typical set of one of their videos where they look happy.
Another time we get a short shot of them lying on grass. Maybe contrast again since it does cutaway from that back to the straight-up shot quickly.
As the song comes to a close, the video whips out all the distortion effects. This one, to the point where you know it is Agnetha, but you can’t even see her face anymore. It’s interesting to note that these distortions are used to either merge someone’s face or pull it in two–both of which are still a distorted view. The wheel can give a clear shot or something that is a swirling blur–its all or nothing. I have no doubt that this is another one of the many ways in which Hallström created visual contrast to go with the song. He also increased the frequency of the distortions at the right time as the video works towards the separation shot below.
Before we return to the piano, we get another straight-down shot, except this time the two guys are looking down while the two girls look upwards. I know I will mention it in the future, but I really like how Hallström made use of the fact that he had two straight married couples. If even one of those things was changed, then I’m sure the videos would look different or wouldn’t be as effective. It allowed him to do Busby-Berkeley-like things by taking advantage of their inherent contrast, sexual attraction, and real world connections beyond just friendship–working and otherwise.
All these things stitched together, and you get a visual representation of a relationship that is falling apart without ever having to show them walking away from each other. I will sing the praises of the video for Knowing Me, Knowing You till the day I die. However, that used them actually walking away. Sure, it did other clever things such as visually representing fluid relationships within the band and regret for failed relationships, but I still find it impressive that this video didn’t make use of two people walking away from each other. That would have been so easy, but it does just the opposite. The group is shown together again and again. We can see from their perspective and the inner turmoil within them, but there isn’t any literal distance. Even one of Agnetha’s solo shots has the guys pop-up in the background to remind us she isn’t really alone.
One last thing I want to mention is that the working title for this song was Turn Me On. That is a bit more literal and helps me grasp the song better, but I like the desperation SOS conveys.
Gator McClusky is back!
Through the Shattered Lens 