Okay, as I've been gone for a while, here is some music I've enjoyed recently.
Van Lear Rose by Loretta Lynn & The Soul Sessions by Joss Stone. A comeback and a debut, both fueled by Jack White. Loretta Lynn is one of country's greatest, and with the help of producer Jack White and his garage band mates from Detroit she's crafted one of the best country albums I've ever heard. Joss Stone is a teenage soul singer from Britain with an amazing voice. With the help of Betty Harris & a swag of Chicago soul greats, she's come out with a great album of (mostly) soul standards; the single was a funked-up version of Fell In Love With A Girl by The White Stripes (the Jack White connection).
Vampyros Lesbos came out on dvd here. The movie is a surreal, spare lesbian retelling of Dracula set in present day (well 1970 anyway). The soundtrack is a mesmerising blend of lounge, jazz and experimental noise. Track down the CD.
Rejuvenation by The Meters contains the track Just Kissed My Baby, one of the sweetest, sexiest funk tracks I've ever heard. Kudos to Mike for turning me onto this one. Mick Jagger once called The Meters "the best motherfucking band in the world" and they're one of the best-kept secrets in music.
The Cure's new album is okay. The hard-rock sound is good, but the songs are just average. I wonder what Robert Smith would look like if he washed off his makeup & cut his hair short - probably just a pudgy middle-aged geezer.
Baby Snakes is a documentary/concert film by & about Frank Zappa. He bills it as "A movie about people who do stuff that is not normal." At 2 hours 44 minutes it's at least an hour too long, but the live footage (from Halloween 1977) is superb and there's some amazing, surreal and somewhat disturbing claymation from Bruce Bickford.
Back in 1977, a movie producer called Tony Didio noticed that The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was still making money three years after its initial release. Didio was not a fan of horror movies, but he was a big fan of making money so he sent a couple of writers to see it with instructions to write something like it. They did so in a somewhat unusual fashion; instead of copying the story and setting, they copied the structure and modus operandi. Thus both 'Saw and their imitation involved a killer who uses tools to kill various people in the first half of the movie, and who kidnaps and torments a single person in the second half.
Flash forward to 2003, and 'Saw get a big-budget remake courtesy of producer Michael Bay. Didio notices this, and decides the time is right to remake his own mini-masterpiece, and goes so far as to hire the director the the original 'Saw, Tobe Hooper, to helm the remake of The Toolbox Murders.
The remake stars Angela Bettis (May) as a young woman who's just moved into a scungy old apartment building in Hollywood with her med student husband. The walls are as thin as cardboard, and weird characters like her neighbour Saffron and the creepy handyman Ned lurk everywhere. The only nice characters she meets are an old man played by Rance Howard (Ron's dad) and a neighbour played by Juliet Landau (Dru from Buffy). However, unbeknownst to the other tenants, someone has decided to play with a claw hammer, and a nail gun, and a power drill...
This is a pretty silly movie in most respects, and suffers from a dumb script. Luckily director Tobe Hooper has returned to form after a run of embarrassingly bad movies (The Mangler, Night Terrors, Crocodile) and delivers the kind of stylish low-budget horror we all loved in things like The Funhouse. It's not another 'Saw by any means, but noone expects him to come close to that again.
He's aided and abetted (and perhaps saved) by a stellar lead performance by Angela Bettis. She isn't as good as she was in May, but she isn't given the chance to be - the script isn't good enough. But she's clearly a talent to watch, rising above the awful dialogue and the shaky acting of her co-stars. This girl is going somewhere, mark my words. (And go see May right now.)
In the end of the day this is just a supernatural-tinged slasher movie with stylish direction and an unusually good lead performance. It's not as splattery nor as suspenseful as it could have been, though it has its moments with both. It doesn't bear much resemblance to the original Toolbox Murders, and that's a good thing. The ending's a fizzer though.