The Awl

Beirut, "Santa Fe," And The New Movie "Bombay Beach"

Dave Bry — Fri, 13 May 2011 09:50:23 +0000

Do you like that guy Zach Condon's band Beirut? I sure do. He wrote a very nice new song recently (with especially nice horn parts, as you might expect), and played it in Norfolk, Virginia on Monday. (It's funny that a band named after city makes a song named after a different city. Beirut has done this before, though with a less famous city for the song. Some other band must have done it, too. But can't think of any other examples. Does Boston have a song called "Helsinki?" Did Berlin ever cover Seger's "Katmandu?") Oh, Beirut has a new album coming this summer, which is exciting, and also wrote (along with Bob Dylan!) music for a new movie directed by Alma Ha'rel called Bombay Beach. It's a "documentary-record-cum-drama with dreamlike musical dance numbers" about people who live in a very impoverished area in Southern California, and to judge from the trailer, it looks like it could be really, really good.

But also maybe overly intense and emotionally sadistic? The scenes with the little kid and his mom tear your heart out in six seconds. Hmmm. It played for a week in New York last month. Here's what Eric Kohn said about it in his review in Indiewire:

The small, impoverished community where the movie is set – buried in the heat of the Colorado desert in Southern California, on the cusp of the man-made Salton Sea – brings to mind the remnants of a vacation resort in a post-apocalyptic world. These are real people living in an abandoned fairy tale, with little to do besides stare into the horizon and sigh.

Jesus. And then with dreamlike musical dance numbers, too? I'm not sure I want to see this. But I might want to a lot.

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Kanye Rocks Facebook HQ A Capella

Dave Bry — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 09:10:21 +0000

Wow! Interesting things are happening at Facebook. First, the trailer for The Social Network, the movie about how Mark Zuckerberg started the website as a student at Harvard looks way, way more compelling than something with that title and subject matter seems like it would. (It stars Jesse Eisenberg and Justin Timberlake and was directed by David Fincher, who is most famous for making movies about serial killers, so, that's really funny!) Now, or yesterday actually, Kanye West comes to Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, stands up in front of group of employees and gives what is probably the greatest rap performance ever staged in a corporate conference room. With a nice suit, too, and without any musical backdrop (and so a little too spoken-word style for my personal taste.) But it should really lay to rest any remaining doubts as to Kanye's talent with words. He is not just a good writer of rhymes. He is great one. As was indicated earlier this summer by the great single, "Power," the half a year he spent out of the public eye seems to have been a fruitful time for him, artistically.

Here's the Social Network trailer. The stunning version of Radiohead's "Creep" that plays behind it is performed by Belgian woman's choir called Scala, conducted by Stijn Kolacny, with the piano accompaniment of his brother, Steven Kolacny. (Older readers will recall Scala's excellent cover of Divynl's "I Touch Myself.")

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Extremely Grumpy Old Man Goes Out On A Violent Robbery Spree

Dave Bry — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 11:40:55 +0000

"About two weeks later, on July 1, a man wearing a hat and a bandanna entered Family Loan. 'He was kind of running in and carrying a gun, and told my employees that he didn't want to kill anybody, and for them to get on the floor, and they followed his instructions,' Mr. Chamblee said. 'He asked the young lady for the cash, and she gave it to him.' The gunman ordered the three employees into a bathroom and barred the door with a chair. Then he needed to rest."
-The amazing story of 63-year-old Arthur Williams, who was convicted of committing 134 crimes in the 1970s and spent 33 years in prison before being released last year, only to go on a ten-day robbery spree that ended with his death the Sunday before last in a car accident resulting from a high-speed police, seems to speak to a disturbing addiction to the thrill of breaking the law. That or Williams was auditioning for a role in the new Bruce Willis movie, Red, which I want to see.

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Why Can't America See 'The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus'?

Dave Bry — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 10:45:57 +0000

Here is the UK trailer for Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, which, insanely, still does not have a US distributor. How can that be? We are expecting a purchase at the Toronto Film Festival next month-or you will have to go to Europe in October to see it. There are very many reasons that we are getting on the bandwagon for a US release.

1) The story, of a man who has sold his soul to the devil for immortality and the power to cross into parallel dimensions, seems particularly well-suited to Gilliam's darkly comic psychedelia.

2) It is Heath Ledger's last work. He died part way through filming.

3) Along with Heath Ledger, it also stars Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell-making it a sort of big-screen menagerie of Hollywood hot boys.

4) Along with them, it also stars Tom Waits and Christopher Plummer-who own two of the English-speaking world's greatest speaking voices.

5) Tom Waits plays the devil, which is basically a role that's been waiting for him to play since the bible-or at least since he wrote and recorded "Way Down In the Hole" for his 1987 album, Frank's Wild Years. (That song, of course, was also the theme song for The Wire.)

6) "I don't know why he thought of me," said Waits, of Gilliam, in an immensely enjoyable self-interview Pitchfork's report sends us to. "I was raised in the church."

Besides the movie, in the interview, Waits discusses everything from his favorite songs to obscure word origins to the scariest things he can think of. To the question of how he'd compare two guitarists he's worked with, Marc Ribot and Smokey Hormel, he answers: "Octopus have eight and squid have ten tentacles, each with hundreds of suction cups and each have the power to burst a man's artery. They have small birdlike beaks used to inject venom into a victim. Some gigantic squid and octopus with one hundred foot tentacles have been reported. Squids have been known to pull down entire boats to feed on the disoriented sailors in the water. Many believe unexplained, sunken deep-sea vessels, and entire boat disappearances are the handiwork of giant squid." Oh yes. It is well-worth reading the whole thing.

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