Captive State is the latest science fiction epic from director Rupert Wyatt. Wyatt previously proved himself with Rise of the Planet of the Apes so I am looking forward to seeing what he can do with the story of an Earth that has been taken over by aliens. Captive State will be released in March of 2019.
Harmony Korine returns to the beach with The Beach Bum. Starring Matthew McConaughey, Zac Efron, and Snoop Dogg, this appears to be an unexpectedly light-hearted film from the mind behind Kids, Gummo, and Spring Breakers. The Beach Bum will be released on March 22nd.
Judging from the trailer, The Boat appears to be Christine-in-the-water. The Boat will be released on September 22nd.
Finally, a legendary punk rocker struggles to stay sober in Her Smell. Judging from this teaser, it does not appear to be working.
18 and Life was based on a true story, about an 18 year-old boy who accidentally shot his best friend with a gun that he thought he was unloaded and who was given a life sentence as a result. Did the video do justice to the real-life tragedy? Let’s break it down.
0:01 — The video starts in prison, with the usual tracking shot of men smoking behind bars. Ricky is already serving his sentence, thinking about how his life got so messed up.
0:27 — At the time this song was recorded, Sebastian Bach was Skid Row’s lead singer. In 1996, Bach was fired from Skid Row when he suggested they accept the opening spot on KISS’s latest tour.
0:45 — Ricky ends up on the patio, where his best friend is waiting for him. Fortunately, Ricky has not been injured by all of that broken glass so, after saluting his father, he and his friend go off to have some fun, 80s style.
1:16 — Secret handshakes, 80s style!.
1:27 — Hanging out, 80s style!
1:31 — Setting shit on fire, 80s style!
1:39 — Breaking and entering, 80s style!
1:46 — Shooting liquor bottles in an alley, 80s style!
1:51 — Not following common sense gun safety rules, 80s style!
2:00 — Wasting your life away in prison, 80s style!
2:09 — Vandalism, 80s style!
2:18 — Ricky is Tipper Gore’s worst nightmare.
2:23 — They’re back to playing with the gun. Will these youngsters never learn?
2:34 — Is his friend begging or daring Ricky to shoot him? This part of the video is open to interpretation. In real life, the shooting happened because the gun was believed to be empty but, in this video, they’ve both been firing gun so they both know it’s loaded.
2:35 — Ricky has obviously read Watchmen, but he probably still doesn’t understand why Richard Nixon was still the president.
2:53 — Ricky shoots his only friend. But why? Ricky does not look shocked and we saw him firing the gun earlier so there is no reason to believe that Ricky, unlike the real person who inspired this song, didn’t know it was loaded. Was Ricky crazy? Was Ricky angry? Or was Ricky just stupid?
3:13 — Ricky throws his gun into the fire, which has been raging for at least two days now.
3:26 — In 2017, Sebastian Bach announced that he was having a “singing-related” hernia operation because, in his own words, he literally “sang my guts out.”
3:37 — In prison, Ricky ponders how different his life would have been if he wasn’t an idiot.
3:49 — Did anyone ever put out that fire? It looked serious.
This video was directed by Wayne Isham, who has been everyone’s go-to video director for decades. The song was Skid Row’s biggest hit and it was also the most played video on MTV in 1989.
“It’s a subtle, political thing. Michael specifically mentions the term ‘bush-whacked’. But if you want to take it like ‘Stand’, that’s cool, too. You like to think that you can appreciate these songs on any level you want to. I have a lot of records I listen to when I’m just doing the dishes. Like Ride records. I really like Ride a lot. And I have no idea what the songs are about. And I really don’t care. I don’t even worry about it. Lyrics are the last thing I listen to, unless someone is hitting me over the head with it.”
— R.E.M.’s Peter Buck on Drive
Drive may have written to encourage young people to get involved in politics and to vote but I have always thought that the video was about the dangers of crowd surfing. The video was filmed over two nights at Los Angeles’s Sepulveda Dam. According to Michael Stipe, both Oliver Stone and actor River Phoenix showed up for the filming: “Oliver had been drinking and they got into a fight in my trailer. It was fun to watch. And it kind of fueled the energy that this video, from beginning to end, kind of carries through it.”
This video was one of several videos that Peter Care directed for R.E.M. Care also directed videos for Bruce Springsteen, Tina Turner, Depeche Mode, and Fine Young Cannibals. Care has also directed one feature film, The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys.
Supposedly, Adam Scott is an extra in the video. I have yet to spot him.
Not even Beck seems to be sure. According to Songfacts, Beck has offered up several different interpretations. He’s said that the song was an updated version of the American folk song, Stagger Lee:
“I don’t know if I ever HAD any youthful purity, but I can understand that you might be tempted to make commercial shit and compromise to do it. I try not to compromise on anything. I think we associate becoming an adult with compromise. Maybe that’s what the devil is. In ‘Devils Haircut’ that was the scenario. I imagined Stagger Lee… I thought, what if this guy showed up now in 1996. The song had this ’60s grooviness, and I thought of using him as a Rumplestiltskin figure, this Lazarus figure to comment on where we’ve ended up as people. What would he make of materialism and greed and ideals of beauty and perfection? His reaction would be, ‘Whoa, this is disturbing shit.'”
He’s also said that the song is simply about the evil of vanity (literally a devil’s haircut) or a song about being on tour (hence, the briefcase blues). Beck has also said that, while writing the song, he thought that “Devil’s haircut was a really bad lyric. If I can’t finish a song, I’ll just put in something temporary. That’s what ‘Loser’ was. Then the temporary one always becomes the best one, because it wasn’t all thought out.”
As for the video, director Mark Romanek claims that it was inspired by both Midnight Cowboy and The 400 Blows. Beck, wandering through New York City with his cowboy hat and his radio, was meant to be a modern-day Joe Buck while the freeze frames were inspired by the end of Truffaut’s portrait of alienated youth.
Two of the videos most memorable moments were accidental. When the car nearly runs over Beck, it is meant to recall the “I’m walking here!” scene from Midnight Cowboy but the car’s driver didn’t hit the brakes soon enough and Beck was actually hit by the car and injured his leg as a result. The other unplanned scene was when the pigeons took flight just as Beck approached them.
The video for Devil’s Haircut would go on to win two MTV Music Video Awards, one for Best Editing and one for Best Male Video.
The biggest trailer that was released this week was the trailer for the latest Halloweenreboot.
Here’s the best of the rest:
From the director of The Lobster, Yorgos Lanthimos, The Favourite is a satirical portrait of intrigue and betrayal in the 18th century court of Queen Anne. The Favourite will be released in the U.S. on November 23rd and in the UK on January 1st.
Actor Paul Dano makes his directorial debut with Wildlife. This drama, which is based on a novel by Richard Ford, stars Carey Mulligan and Jake Gyllenhaal and will be released on October 19th.
From director Julian Schnabel, At Eternity’s Gate features Willem DaFoe as the tragic and celebrated painter, Vincent Van Gogh. At Eternity’s Gate will be released on November 16th.
Anna and the Apocalypse is a music holiday comedy about zombies. Of course, it is. Anna and the Apocalypse will be released on November 30th.
Finally, in this trailer for the sixth and final season of Netflix’s House of Cards, Claire Underwood says goodbye to Frank while the show says goodbye to Kevin Spacey. The season drops on November 2nd.
There was once a speed metal band out of Texas that played music that was loud, aggressive, fast, and definitely not radio friendly. The name of that band was REO Speedealer and they had a strong cult following among metal fans across the country. In 1998, after they had released their third CD under that name, REO Speedealer received a cease-and-desist letter from REO Speedwagon.
As REO Speedealer’s bassist, “Hot” Rod Skelton explained it to MTV, “”They’re worried about our name being close enough to their name that it would be a conflict in stores. I think it’s silly, but there have been a couple of people who supposedly thought they were buying their record and they bought ours. They e-mail us and say, ‘I think your band sucks shit.’ I think that’s hilarious. We consider that a compliment.”
‘In the same MTV story, REO Speedwagon’s manager, John Baruck argued, “We spent 30 years developing the name REO Speedwagon and promoting their career. To have another band come out and take three-quarters of the name didn’t seem right.”
In hindsight, I can see where REO Speedwagon was coming from but a cease-and-desist letter still doesn’t seem like a very “sex, drugs, and rock and roll” thing to do. Of course, just listening to any of REO Speedwagon’s songs will reveal that they were never about any of those things. REO Speedwagon’s music was the epitome of soft rock. While REO Speedealer was performing songs like Double Clutchin’ Finger Fuckin’, REO Speedwagon was best known for Keep on Loving You and Can’t Fight This Feeling.
In 1998, it was easy to cast REO Speedwagon as a bunch of bitter has-beens but, to their credit, their music epitomized an era. Can’t Fight This Feeling is one of the essential songs of the mid-1980s. It was also one of their biggest hits, spending three weeks at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart. When REO Speedwagon appeared at Live Aid, Can’t Fight This Feeling was the song that they performed.
(Their Live Aid performance was introduced by someone else who epitomized an era, Chevy Chase.)
Two music videos were releases for Can’t Fight This Feeling. One was a simple video that featured the band performing. The second one, which is also the one at the top of this post, began with a baby and ended with an old man and was supposed to be about the life-cycle.
Can’t Fight This Feeling continues to be one of REO Speedwagon’s best known songs. It’s another song that I automatically associate with Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. It can be heard on Emotion 98.3. It was playing the night that I first drove my car into the ocean and discovered that Tommy Vercetti couldn’t swim.
REO Speedwagon is still together and, this summer, toured with Chicago. REO Speedealer is also still together, though they are now simply known as Speedealer. According to their Facebook page, they should be releasing their new album, Blue Days/Black Knights, in early 2019.
Earlier today, Burt Reynolds died of cardiac arrest at a Florida Hospital. He was 82 years old.
How do you sum up a career as legendary as the career of Burt Reynolds? It’s not easy. Burt Reynolds always used to say that he couldn’t act but his fans knew better and the critics sometimes knew better too. Burt Reynolds always said that most of his film were terrible but, for every Stick or Malone, there were movies like Sharky’s Machine, The Longest Yard, and White Lightning. Burt always joked that he might never win an Oscar but he had plenty of People’s Choice Awards to make up for it. Burt did deserve an Oscar nomination for Deliverance and he received one for Boogie Nights. Reynolds lost to Robin Williams but it does no disservice to Williams’s performance in Good Will Hunting to say that the Oscar should have gone to Burt.
Despite having been born in Michigan, Burt Reynolds was often viewed as being the archetypical good ol’ boy. He first found fame as a jock, playing football at Florida State University. After injuries ended his college football career, Reynolds considered becoming a police officer but, at his father’s suggestion, instead transferred to Palm Beach Junior College. That was where an English professor named Watson B. Duncan heard Reynolds reading Shakespeare in class and was so impressed that he pushed Reynolds into trying out for a play that he was producing. Reynolds was cast in the lead role and soon had a new career.
As Reynolds would often recount, he didn’t become a star overnight. He did a few plays in New York and he worked odd jobs. He auditioned for a film called Sayonara and impressed director Joshua Logan. Logan said he couldn’t cast him because he looked too much like the film’s star, Marlon Brando, but he still encouraged Reynolds to move out to Hollywood. Still not feeling confident enough to attempt the transition into movies, Reynolds remained in New York and became a mainstay in TV westerns, including Gunsmoke, where he played Quint Asper. He also appeared in an episode of The Twilight Zone, playing a pompous method actor who was clearly modeled on Marlon Brando.
Like his good friend Clint Eastwood, Burt used his television fame to secure low-budget film work in Europe. He even starred in a Spaghetti western, playing the lead role in Navajo Joe. Reynolds appeared in several forgettable B-movies before his performance in the Oscar-nominated Deliverance made him a star. His performance as Lewis Medlock dominated the film. When Lewis suffered a compound fracture while trying to navigate a raging river, audiences knew that if the river could take down Burt Reynolds, it could take down anyone. Around the same time, Burt would earn lasting fame (or perhaps infamy) by appearing as the centerfold in an issue of Cosmopolitan. Reynolds would later describe that as being his biggest mistake, saying that it made him a star but it also prevented him from being nominated for an Oscar but it also kept people from taking him seriously as an actor.
But if Burt never got the awards or the acclaim that he deserved, audiences loved him. Smoky and the Bandit was his biggest hit. The critics may have hated it but audiences love it to this day and they know that only Burt Reynolds could have played the Bandit. When the Bandit looked straight at the camera after escaping police pursuit, that was a move that only Burt Reynolds could have pulled off. Burt made it look easy.
Burt started off the 80s with one of his best films, Sharky’s Machine. Unfortunately, the rest of decade saw his career in decline. No longer getting good scripts and starting to show signs if the ill health that would plague him for the rest of his life, Reynolds became better known for his sometimes messy personal life than his films. Reynolds eventually returned to television, winning an Emmy, in 1992, for starring in the sitcom Evening Shade.
In the 90s, Reynolds struggled to transition into character parts. A new generation, including myself, first discovered him when he co-starred in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights. Reynolds gave one of his best performances as porn director, Jack Horner. Reynolds invested Horner with what can only be called a wounded dignity. When Dirk Diggler abandoned him, the betrayal felt as real as Horner’s angery when he was eventually reduced to filming sleazy limo ride hook-ups on video tape instead of his beloved film. Reynolds received his first and only Oscar nomination for the role of Jack Horner.
Sadly, Reynolds’s poor health kept him from capitalizing on his comeback and he was soon back to appearing in small roles in films that weren’t worthy of his talents. Quentin Tarantino cast him as George Spahn in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood but Reynolds passed away before filming his scenes. His final film appearance was as the lead character in the fittingly titled The Last Movie Star.
Burt Reynolds may be gone but his films live on. Burt may have said he wasn’t a good actor but we all know better. The outpouring of grief at the news of his death is proof that Burt Reynolds was more than just a movie star. He was an American icon.
“I was homeless at the time, and I was living in a rehearsal place in Vernon, California. I was seeing a girl, Diana – there were a lot of songs I wrote about her. I actually wrote the lyrics to that song on the wall, in that building. I didn’t have any paper in the studio, but I had a Sharpie, so I just wrote on the wall. Whoever inherited our rehearsal room after I moved out, saw the original lyrics to ‘Peace Sells’ on the wall. They probably painted right over it and didn’t even know it.”
— Dave Mustaine on Peace Sells
The video for Peace Sells was directed by the painter, Robert Longo, and is probably best known for the cut scene that features a teenager in a Slayer t-shirt telling his angry father that the video and the news are one in the same. Among Longo’s other videos: R.E.M.’s The One I Love and New Order’s Bizarre Love Triangle. He also directed the regrettable cyberpunk movie, Johnny Mnemonic.
If the opening bass line sounds familiar, you may have heard it used as the opening theme for MTV News. Or maybe, like me, you spent an early being chased by the police in Vice City while listening to Megadeth on V-Rock.
In 1982, ABC News produced a documentary called Vietnam Requiem. Directed by Bill Couturié and Jonas McCord, Vietnam Requiem deal with the post-traumatic stress disorder that was suffered by many veterans of the Vietnam War. During the documentary, it was stated that the average of the soldier in Vietnam was 19.
Among those who watched the documentary when it finally aired in 1984 was musician Paul Hardcastle. Struck by the contrast between his life at 19 with the lives of the soldiers in Vietnam, Harcastle created a song called 19, which heavily sampled Vietnam Requiem‘s narration, which was provided by veteran announced Peter Thomas.
The song became an unexpected hit in both the UK and the US. In fact, it was so unexpected that no one had even planned to produce a video for it. When 19 reached the top of the UK Singles charts, McCord and Couturié were asked to quickly assemble a video for it.
The majority of the video is made up of clips from Vietnam Requiem. The journalist who is seen reporting on the war is Frank Reynolds, who was the notoriously prickly anchor of ABC News from 1978 until 1983. (Reynolds is best known for shouting, “Let’s get it nailed down … somebody … let’s find out! Let’s get it straight so we can report this thing accurately!” during coverage of the attempted assassination of then-President Ronald Reagan. All in all, that’s not a bad thing for a journalist to yell.) ABC news later objected to the use of their footage in the video, claiming that being associated with MTV would “trivialize” the news. A second version of the video was produced, using public domain stock footage but ABC did allow Reynolds’s voice to continue to be heard in the song.
Now considered to be a classic one-hit wonder, 19 briefly entered the UK charts again, in 2011, when Manchester United used the song to celebrate their 19th Premier League title.
In an interview with Songfacts, drummer Neal Smith had the following to say about I’m Eighteen:
“It was a song about growing up in the ’60s, with lines in it like you could go to war but you couldn’t vote. We had no idea it would become an anthem; we were just thinking it would be a cool song.”
I’m Eighteen was not only Alice Cooper’s first big hit but it also played an important role in music history when, in 1975, a nineteen year-old John Lydon auditioned for the Sex Pistols by miming along to the song. Lydon’s audition took place at a pub and Lydon later explained that the jukebox was filled with “that awful 60s mod music” and I’m Eighteen was the only song in it that he could tolerate.
Through the Shattered Lens