Selected CD Reviews: Unforgettable Collections

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Saturday, 12 December 2009 21:55

Written by Lloyd Carroll

Michael Jackson
The Definitive Collection
(UME)
Universal Music Group holds the rights to the Motown Records catalog, so the term “definitive” here is a bit deceiving since it does not include any Michael Jackson recordings made after 1975. When Jackson left Berry Gordy’s company to join Epic Records, he went onto record the biggest selling album of all-time, 1983's Thriller. Of course it was at Motown that Jackson’s wondrous talent first discovered, initially singing with his brothers in the Jackson 5, then by slowly branching out to solo recordings.

Jackson’s young exuberant voice was a key reason that the Jackson Five’s first four singles (“I Want You Back,” “ABC,” “The Love You Save” and “I’ll Be There”) went to #1 on the pop charts. Sure, tales of puppy love in Top 40 songs are as old as the hills, but Jackson and his brothers made you forget that it was a pop cliche.

While nearly all of the songs here are old friends, it is fun to hear the tracks that didn’t get that much play at the time of their release or subsequent on oldies stations. You can put the lively “I Wanna Be Where You Are,” Michael’s superb take on Bill Withers’ “Ain’t No Sunshine,” and “Farewell, My Summer Love,” a tune that Motown kept in their vaults until after “Thriller” came out, in that category.

It is ironic then that Universal Music Enterprises had this CD on their release schedule even before Jackson’s untimely passing last June.

Gary Lewis & The Playboys
The Complete Liberty Singles
(Collectors Choice)
Gary Lewis & The Playboys will never be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. While snooty Rolling Stone critics would scoff at even the idea of including Gary Lewis and his bandmates in the same breath of such artists as the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen and U2, this two-disc collection shows that Lewis and Company made solid contributions to pop and rock.

Yes, Lewis, the son of Jerry Lewis, never possessed a great voice. The liner notes make it clear that his producer, Snuff Garrett, had to overdub his voice numerous times on nearly every recording and that he frequently had singing assistance from an uncredited Ron Hicklin, a well-respected L.A. studio musician. Hicklin was the American equivalent of England’s Tony Burrows who seemed to sing on every British hit not made by a super group in the late 1960s and early ‘70s.

Lewis’ limited vocal abilities actually proved to be an asset as he provided an everyman’s touch to breakup songs as “This Diamond Ring,” “Sure Gonna Miss Her,” “Paint Me A Picture” and “My Heart’s Symphony,” and it made it easier for the listener to identify with him on upbeat fare as “Green Grass,” a song that trumpeted the impending arrival of spring, “Count Me In,” and “She’s Just My Style.”

What is often overlooked by rock music historians is the level of sophistication in the Playboys’ records. Garrett consistently utilized the famous “Wrecking Crew” for his studio musicians who were led by keyboardist Leon Russell, guitarist Tommy Tedesco and legendary drummer Hal Blaine. These are the same folks that Brian Wilson turned to for countless Beach Boys recording sessions. The string, brass and woodwind work on Lewis’s hits were quite sophisticated for the time and could be described as pop symphonies.

Sweet
The Sweet Anthology
(Shout Factory)
A ‘70s quartet that could have been considered the British equivalent of the Grass Roots in that they made catchy hit singles but were considered lightweights by the pop cognoscenti, Sweet turned out a set of rockin' singles that made them more than just that. This 32-song collection basically confirms the general consensus that the band is a guilty pleasure.

Thanks to the work of producers Mike Chapman and Nicky Chinn, songs such as “Fox On The Run,” “Ballroom Blitz” (a tune that inspired Forest Hills’ own, the Ramones), and the nonsensical ditty “Little Willy” (which sears your brain with its hooky bass line and hand claps), made Sweet memorable. “Little Willy” was a big hit in both here and the UK but it was bigger there because the term had naughty connotations that it didn’t have on this side of the Atlantic.

Thanks to lead singer Brian Connolly’s cheerful vocals, one Sweet tune that has stood the test of time and has impressed even the band’s detractors is 1978's “Love Is Like Oxygen,” a song that would not sound out of place on an Electric Light Orchestra or Queen album.

A Musing on Miyazaki's "Ponyo on the Cliff"

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Saturday, 12 December 2009 15:59

Written by Eric Lurio

Much has been written about the Japanese "cult of the cute" -- ka-waii culture. Large dish-plate eyes and button noses in comics and cartoons are ubiquitous, and whether or not that's good or bad is neither here nor there. But the great animation director Hayao Miyazaki has used this cult's aesthetic to create one of the more disturbing monsters in cinematic history -- a fish-goddess named Brunhilde in Ponyo on the Cliff.

Bruni is being held prisoner by her father Fujimoto, who is the estranged husband of the goddess of the sea. He goes around in his submarine and pours his magic elixirs into the see to do something so horrible that it will destroy humanity and bring the world back into it's pre-civilized balance. He know about Bruni's potential power, so he keeps her in the form of a "goldfish" in a "bowl" located within the submarine, something she and her many sister/servants aren't to happy about.

When Dad isn't looking, B-h sneaks out of the sub and hijacks the nearest jellyfish, where she starts lolling around the seven seas before coming close to shore, where she gets stuck in a bottle, and gets rescued by a five-year-old boy named Sosuke, who lives with his parents somewhere on the Japanese coast.

Now presumably, Miyazaki has made a study of the behavior of five-year old children, but that doesn't seem evident. A real Sosuke wouldn't act in the way he does. The little tyke puts B-h in a bucket and fills it with fresh water. Now, a little kid on vacation at the beach might do that if he had never been to the sea before, but our Sosuke lives there. Mommy and Daddy would have told him that in doing so he would kill the creature. But this doesn't matter, because what he has isn't any ordinary fish but a little goddess who has tasted his blood and fallen deeply in lust.

Now here's where we get into the Japanese Cult of the Cute. B-h, named Ponyo by Sosuke, accidentally escapes, and gets caught by Daddy. She escapes again, and in doing so, cracks the entire space-time continuum which causes hundreds of trillions of yen's worth of damage to the coast of Japan. Supernatural waves crash on the shore, turning into fish that deliberately try to drown Sosuke and his mother's car.

Our hero sees B-h/Ponyo in the form of a little girl, running on top of the water with a happy-go-lucky grin trying to say hello. Isn't that sweet? When I saw this for the first time at San Diego's Comic-Con 2009, the reaction was mostly, "Isn't that special? Isn't that charming?"

Miyazaki's design is perfect, and that's what's so scary here. If Ponyo wasn't cute, we would all be screaming at the screen "bang her on the head with that shovel!!!!" Of course the whole thing ends happily ever after. It has to. What we have is a total deus ex machina in what has to be the most random of Miyazaki's films to date.

The character of Ponyo is closest to the main character in the famous Twilight Zone episode, "It's a Good Life," in which a child, played by Billy Mumy, terrorizes a small town because of his god-like powers. The recently released horror film Orphan, also has a little girl as the villain (spoiler: she's a 35-year old midget), but in that case we know that she's evil.

On the other hand, Miyazaki wants us to love little Ponyo, because she's happy and adorable. His style of anime overcomes the astoundingly insipid plot. The question is: why didn't Miyazaki, who has been a master of plotting in the past, fall so flat here. His previous fantasies have been well thought out stories wit deep characters. This time, it's idiot plotting cardboard figurines. It's sad to see a great man jump the shark like that.

Burton at MoMA - a Multimedia Masterpiece

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Thursday, 10 December 2009 22:52

Written by Kevin Filipski

It’s not often that the Museum of Modern Art presents an exhibition of a film director that comprises more than mere screenings, but rarely has there been one as thorough (and thoroughly multi-media) as Tim Burton.

A director just outside the mainstream with his visually thrilling and fantastical tales of outsiders and misunderstood monsters, Burton has become a genre unto himself, from the willful silliness of Pee Wee’s Big Adventure and Beetlejuice to the fairy tale-like Edward Scissorhands and The Nightmare Before Christmas, with such splendid one-offs as his biopic Ed Wood and the surprisingly moving tragicomedy Big Fish thrown in for good measure. (Let’s ignore such lavish duds as Sleepy Hollow and the unnecessary Planet of the Apes remake.) His recent adaptations of the musical Sweeney Todd and Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory have divided fans; surely his next film, based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, will do the same.

The MOMA exhibit displays artifacts of all kinds from Burton’s long career. (He likens it to rummaging through his closet and discovering things he’d forgotten existed.) From his teenage days making 8mm shorts in his Southern California backyard—which we can watch—we are privy to the unending frenzy of Burton’s imagination.

There are innumerable photographs, paintings and drawings, including amusingly deadpan sketches that visualize his punning wordplay, with a whimsicality reminiscent of both Frederico Fellini and John Lennon. There are also many objects taken from film projects both made and unmade, like miniaturized Martians from the loony parody Mars Attacks! and wondrous stop-motion puppets from Nightmare and the more sinister Corpse Bride.

Of course, there’s also a full slate of film screenings of all the features and shorts that Burton has made (including the classic six-minute Vincent, narrated by Price himself).

For me, the must-see day is April 5, 2010, when both of Burton’s underrated but gruesomely entertaining Batman movies will be shown, along with the wondrously warped Frankenweenie.

There’s also a series of films chosen by Burton himself as an example of his influences, Tim Burton and the Lurid Beauty of Monsters, which run the gamut from James Whale’s original Frankenstein (with Boris Karloff) and F.W. Murnau’s silent classic Nosferatu to the likes of Plan 9 from Outer Space, Glen or Glenda and Bride of the Monster, all made by none other than—you guessed it—Ed Wood himself.

In its wide-ranging approach to a director who started out in Disney’s animation department and then went on to cult status thanks to fourteen feature films that could be considered anti-Disney as a whole, MOMA’s Tim Burton will please his fans and maybe even make skeptics reconsider their opinion of one of Hollywood’s true iconoclasts.

For more info go to: http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/313

Tim Burton Exhibit at the MoMA
Sunday, Nov. 22 - Monday, April 26
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street
New York, NY 10019
212-397-6980