 Eric Roberts had another good weekend with The Expendables, although everything I had to say about the movie was summed up with two posts on my Twitter feed . That even includes what I just said about Eric Roberts having a good weekend. I’m still reminded that I recently added some new pieces to the “Articles & Interviews” sidebar here, including the wonderful/horrible story of how Eric Roberts once used me as his inspiration for a film role.
In more recent writings, people might want to check out my article on 1955’s The Phenix City Story. The notoriously Southern-fried film noir was recently (finally) released on DVD. I visited the famously crooked Alabama town a few times in the ’80s, so I’m fairly qualified to recap some of the true story that emerged in the wake of the movie. Film historians, however, will notice that I give Jack Warner credit for a notion that should really be attributed to one of the Mirisch brothers. I don’t know how I forgot that Monogram Pictures became Allied Artists.
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 Sylvester Stallone finally won me over on the Rambo franchise, but he’s not the right-wing hero with a film opening tomorrow. That would be director Edgar Wright with Scott Pilgrim vs. the World . I have no idea if Scott Pilgrim is going to take off like Pulp Fiction or bomb like The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. All I know is that Scott Pilgrim can stand proudly alongside Wright’s Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz as great conservative filmmaking.
Wright better hope for younger conservatives, though. Scott Pilgrim is a rock ’n roll comedy with a dated slacker aesthetic and an overblown video-game mentality. Despite a nicely amiable set-up, the film quickly becomes a series of high-tech battles between Scott and the Seven Evil Exes of his new girlfriend Ramona. That’s still not nearly as irritating as the miscasting of Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s hair as the object of Scott’s affections.
The big redemption is Michael Cera being perfectly likeable as the title character. A lot of that can be credited to the screenplay by Wright and Michael Bacall. We first meet our heartbroken hero when he’s enjoying a carefully platonic relationship with an underage high-school girl. Scott’s still in recovery from being ditched by an old-girlfriend-turned-rock-star. The romantic triangle with Scott’s platonic pal and the ravishing new Ramona ends up being one of the more adult love stories of the year—and that’s even as Wright wraps his characters in an adolescent fervor.
Despite the constant promise of sex and violence, Scott lives in a world where the two most important laws are No Infidelity and No Guys Hitting Girls. It’s typical of Wright that the latter is casually broken by a self-righteous vegan musician. The character of Ramona isn’t idealized, either. By the end of the film, the hipster goddess is revealed as a bit of a mess who’s far too easily controlled. The final scene might not be as ideal as I’d like, but others could have perfectly valid arguments otherwise (although I doubt they’ve dated girls with hair like Ramona’s.)
In any case, Scott Pilgrim offers plenty of important lessons for adolescents. Smart parents should be buying tickets for their teenagers right now. It’ll be a good sign if all the screenings are sold out on Friday night.
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 He’s actually a paranoid Leftist, but this site happily endorses primal rocker Dan Sartain—to the extent that you can choose one of two interviews that I recently conducted with the guy. Also, it must take a shameless conservative to write a glowing review of the new Molly Hatchet album. I was the only person they could find to write the liner notes for the band’s Greatest Hits Live CD, too.
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 Finally another entry, and there’s going to be plenty more if August holds up like it will for the next two Fridays. Of course, all good conservatives should avoid the new Will Ferrell/Mark Wahlberg comedy The Other Guys. It’s directed by loyal liberal Adam McKay, and you can expect all kinds of snide attacks on conservatives throughout the movie. Probably more than usual, since Jim Treacher managed to piss off McKay via Twitter just as production was starting. For such a successful director, McKay sure is a bitter and small man.
The good news is a limited release title called Middle Men —which, sadly, will go ignored by sites like Big Hollywood because it’s the kind of movie that has boobies in it. There’s no getting around that Middle Men will be summed up by critics as the Boogie Nights of the internet age. Conservatives shouldn’t be frightened away, though. Middle Men is the kind of film where a starlet signs on to play an adult actress on the condition that her character never actually gets naked. The rest of the action is no worse than what you’d find in those erotic thrillers that the Playboy Channel showed back in the ’90s.
Luke Wilson stars as a (fictional) family man who stumbles onto a goldmine in the midst of the ’90s internet porn boom. His opening narration jumpstarts the film with all kinds of fun images. Interestingly enough, that includes a smear on conservatives in the film’s opening minutes. Wilson’s quick history of pornography has to invoke the terrible sin of hypocrisy—as illustrated by a moralistic politician who is carefully revealed to be both a Republican and a transvestite. (That image is made even weirder by the actor being manly exploitation veteran Martin Kove.)
A few seconds later, Wilson is talking about how all men masturbate, That notion is accompanied by a photograph of Richard Nixon. This is particularly weird, since Wilson’s narration is leading to 1995. It takes a special kind of baby-boomer obliviousness to throw back to Nixon when we’re getting to a year when our nation had a notably notorious Horndog-in-Chief.
Keep watching, though, and Middle Men becomes the most stirring tale of Texas morality since The Blind Side. The film is pretty unrelenting in showing Wilson’s hellish descent into massive rationalization and lowered personal standards. You also get a cameo by Kelsey Grammer where he seems to be paying tribute to Fred Thompson, and Kevin Pollak as an FBI agent who turns out to be the film’s most moral character—all leading to a closing scene that’s corny enough to be worthy of the Hallmark Channel.
The big caveat is that you can never trust the film’s narrative. Wilson’s errant family man never explains exactly how he started out in life working for a mobster, or how he happens to have a best friend who comes with a small army of gun-happy associates. Middle Men might ultimately be a detached meditation on Goodfellas and other crime sagas where the source material can’t be trusted. That overblown ending could be meant to be more sardonic than satisfying. It still seems awfully sincere, and a big part of what keeps Middle Men going as an enjoyable and overblown romp.
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 I don’t know who put the time into making The J.R. Taylor Story for YouTube, but if the idea was for nobody to tell me until I stumbled across it as a fairly impressive W.T.F. Moment—well, yeah, mission accomplished.
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 How did I manage to disappear from here for over a month? Well, my recent post linking back to all my Law & Order write-ups became pretty popular. That might have triggered my well-documented fear of success. It sure hasn’t been summer fun keeping me away. Still, I am about to attempt some kind of vacation, so I might as well just shut down for the rest of June. At least I’ll have some articles published that I can link back to at the start of July.
Meanwhile, since I’m writing this on Father’s Day, I’ll also note that Chuck Barris has just published a very sad memoir entitled Della . It’s the story of his doomed daughter, whom folks of my age might remember as a cute kid introducing her father on The Gong Show. I also remember People doing an article that noted how Della had chosen to stay with her father after Barris’ divorce. The book reveals the lie behind that story, and is a torturous look at progressive parenting gone wrong—culminating with Della’s overdose at the age of 36.
Della is a touching work that is both unbearably honest and creepy. That won’t be a surprise to anyone who’s seen how much Barris exposed of himself in 1980’s underrated The Gong Show Movie. Now the guy deserves to dwell on happier times. I’m hoping for a book about his long and lasting friendship with fellow good guy Dick Clark .
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 I’ve caught up on a lot of films over the past weeks, including 1973’s Ricco the Mean Machine—also known as just plain Ricco, or Cauldron of Death, or a particularly bizarre title as seen in this Italian-language trailer . The DVD got a nice repackaging from the Dark Sky label, with bonus features that include an interview with star Christopher Mitchum.
The star of Ricco—and the spawn of Robert Mitchum—had a busy early career that included roles in Chisum, Rio Lobo, and Big Jake. Those were three John Wayne films. Mitchum would win the Photoplay Gold Medal Award for Best New Actor in 1972. As the amiable actor notes in his Ricco interview, that would mark the end of his American stardom:
The
phone never rang. I couldn’t get an interview, nothing. I
finally—months, months later—went on an interview for a thing called Steelyard Blues,
and the casting director took one look at me and said, “I’m sorry, I
can’t interview you.” I said, “Why?” He said, “Well, you starred with
John Wayne. I can’t interview you.” And basically, what it was, because
Duke was very outspoken against guys burning the flag and the people
throwing urine on our troops when they came back from Vietnam—it’s not
that he was pro-war, but these are American kids dying for their
country. He felt that we should support our boys. Because he was so
outspoken about that, liberal Hollywood didn’t want anybody else with a
strong voice. So anybody who starred with Duke, that was it. They were
blackballed.
Mitchum is probably being polite by not noting that Steelyard Blues starred Jane Fonda.
He would later find work by doing foreign exploitation films like Ricco.
A lot of those were huge hits, but that only helped to make Mitchum an
instant B-lister in Hollywood. Of course, those who watch Ricco
might have their own suspicions as to what stalled Mitchum’s career.
It’s not a particularly dynamic performance. Just keep in mind that Ricco is really Hamlet vs. the Mob,
and Mitchum’s blonde prince doesn’t have much enthusiasm for anything.
You can find the actor having a lot more fun going after a mad doctor
in 1987’s Faceless .
Also
consider that there were plenty of other John Wayne films from the ’70s
with promising young actors whose careers suddenly stalled. Bruce Dern
did okay, but that’s probably because he killed Wayne in 1972’s The Cowboys.
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 I’ve wanted to write this article for a while, but everything would seem redundant after I’d start with the headline, “When Did Everyone I Used to Know Turn Into Prudish Leftists Trying to Impress Each Other?” Fortunately, some pandering creepiness from the New York Times recently gave me a decent hook. There’s even some film content with a reference to the upcoming Leftist fantasy of Fair Game. The piece won’t change anything, of course, except maybe I’ll get less e-mails from old acquaintances telling me to visit their Facebook page.
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 With the show denied its record-breaking 21st season, everybody now bids farewell to Law & Order. It’s a real blow to Leftists who need weekly assurances that they’re the true good guys. I’m pretty sure they still have Cold Case on CBS, though, as well as pretty much everything else on network television. Anyway, I'm linking here to three L&O entries from this site’s olden days: 1) a fumbling attempt to address Islamic terrorism; 2) an attack on an ersatz Ann Coulter; 3) the show's truly defining meta-moment. Some of us will certainly miss Law & Order as a situation comedy.
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 I’ve never been a fan of summer songs, and I’m certainly no fan of
“Walking on Sunshine.” Still, the story of Kimberley Rew and his big
hit with Katrina & the Waves is pretty interesting. This article is
running in the current issue of Atlanta, GA’s Stomp and Stammer,
but also reprinted here since the article isn’t likely to end up on the
website. No real political content, but there is a reference to the Iron Eagle soundtrack…
Waved Out
Kimberley Rew celebrates the 25th anniversary of his Summer of Hit
There
are a lot of good songs by Katrina and the Waves. There are even good
songs by The Waves, who made their debut in 1982 with Shock Horror! Katrina
Leskanich’s didn’t get top billing on that one, but her vocals would
convince The Bangles to cover “Going Down to Liverpool” in 1984. By
then, Katrina and the Waves were signed to a Canadian label, and the UK
act had already released 1983’s Katrina and the Waves (aka Walking on Sunshine) and 1984’s Katrina and the Waves 2.
The band wouldn’t sign an international deal until 1985—long after any
hipster cachet remained from songwriter Kimberley Rew’s work with the
Soft Boys.
The good news is that the international deal provided
exposure for Kimberly and the Waves’ most brilliant moment—that being
the bluesy AOR stomp of “Maniac House,” which survived from Katrina and the Waves 2 to make it onto the soundtrack of 1986’s Iron Eagle.
That alone would warrant the new CD reissues that cover all the band’s
Canadian releases. But if you ask Rew about “Maniac House,” he’s
suspiciously quick to bring up a different song.
“When you’re
a new band on the scene,” Rew explains from his English home, “people
will start sniffing around and be keen to put your songs on their
films. They want to seem up to the minute. Of course, ‘Walking on
Sunshine’ has been in lots of films, too, and keeps being played on the
radio. I think it’s nice that people like to still hear it. It makes
people feel good and happy, and I’m sort of proud to be associated with
that. It’s a positive thing. It’d be great if that success was repeated
ten times over with ten different songs, but having one hit is a lot
better than having none at all.”
“Maniac House” should’ve been
the first song to fill up the Top Ten all by itself. Still, since Rew
mentioned it, “Walking on Sunshine”—which hit America in 1985 as a
rerecorded (or remixed) tune—remains Katrina and the Waves’ most
beloved hit. The current reissue campaign is built around the song’s
25th anniversary on the US pop charts. Rew is certainly correct about
the terminally bouncy tune being in plenty of soundtracks and
commercials. You’ve heard it on American Idol, and the cast of Glee
recently returned the song to the UK charts. That’s kind of
unfortunate. “Walking on Sunshine” swamped the band’s later singles,
and nobody noticed that Katrina and the Waves were still making good
music by the time of 1993’s Edge of the Land.
In fact,
enough Americans had forgotten Katrina and the Waves—if not their
biggest hit—that a younger generation was amused to learn there was a
band with that name after New Orleans flooded in 2005. In truth,
though, Rew is being modest in claiming the one hit. Katrina and the
Waves scored a worldwide comeback in 1997 when the band won the
Eurovision Song Contest with a Rew composition called “Love Shine a
Light.”
“That was only in the UK,” says Rew, “so I didn’t think
you’d know about that one. Factually, there you are. It was strange.
We’d had our one hit, and we were just making music and doing shows all
the time. We were aware that our career was on a downward trajectory,
but we just kept doing it. We love making music, basically. If you’d
asked me in 1995 if I was planning to enter the Eurovision Song
Contest—and even win it—I would’ve explained how that’s not the natural
career progression. But the system in those days was that anyone could
send in a tape of a song and get a chance to represent the UK. There
was nothing else going on with us at the time, so we did it. Funnily
enough, winning made it easier for Katrina and the rest of us to move
on to other things.”
Those other things would include Rew renewing the solo career he’d begun with 1981’s The Bible of Bop—which
was essentially a Waves album without Katrina, and is also part of the
reissue campaign. Rew has released several more fine albums over the
past few years, while Leskanich has pursued a solo career. (Legal
objections prevented her from performing as Katrina and the New Wave.)
She’s pushing the 25th anniversary of “Walking on Sunshine” with a live
album.
Leskanich is also spared Rew’s place in the pop and/or
punk pantheon. He’s one of the few musicians with both cool cult status
and an embarrassing pop hit. It was probably his Soft Boys lineage that
got “Walking on Sunshine” into a scene from High Fidelity. The song was used as a gag, though, and wasn’t hip enough to make the soundtrack album.
Strangely, Rew hasn’t given any of this much thought.
“There
may be a difference in perception,” he acknowledges. “So many things
come of just meeting people over the years. I knew [Waves drummer] Alex
Cooper before I met Robyn Hitchcock, when we were all in my hometown of
Cambridge. Alex and I were already The Waves before I joined with
Robyn. Then Robyn went on to his next phase, and I got back together
with Alex. Robyn and I are both very creative people, but we’re very
different. That’s why we get on. I met Katrina and [Waves guitarist]
Vince de la Cruz and [bassist] Bob Jakins, and suddenly I was the
songwriter for a new band. That’s the way it came out—at least, at
first. The fact that the Waves weren’t anything like the Soft Boys is
neither here nor there. It all makes sense in my head, but I can’t
expect the rest of the world to fall in line with what’s inside of my
head.”
There are some fun bonus tracks of The Waves in 1976 on the Shock Horror!
reissue. Still, a misinformed music geek would easily contrive a
simpler scenario. That would involve Rew having an officially
acceptable heyday with the Soft Boys, and then awful commercial years
with Katrina and the Waves. Rew is secure enough that he doesn’t mind
an interviewer spelling all that out for him.
“Oh, yeah,” he
muses. “I think I see what you mean. Oh, man. The Soft Boys were left
alone as a band, ultimately. Robyn’s went on to do fantastically well,
but it’s taken a long time, and all on his own terms. What you get is
not in any way diluted. It’s the Hitchcock experience. When I signed to
Capitol with the Waves, it was really new to me to be working for a
large organization that wanted to have an affect on your work. I could
never stand outside myself and see that we were going in a wrong
direction. If you listen to something like Edge of the Land,
you can hear how it’s more of that rock sound of the time. There’s that
kind of feeling where we were blown hither and thither by circumstance.
Of course, we’d break up in a couple of years, anyway, so not to worry.
It turned out all right in the end.”
Besides, as noted, Edge of the Land
was a pretty good album. Rew’s solo albums have been plenty catchy,
too. With that in mind, it seems harmless enough to close things with a
nod to a real low point for Katrina and the Waves—that being Break of Hearts from 1989, when the band were label mates to Vanilla Ice and Wilson Phillips.
“Glad
you mentioned that,” replies the relentlessly mannered Rew. “That was
the point where Katrina and the Waves sounded most like the year they
were in. In 1985, we sounded like 1965. In 1989, we sounded more like
adult-oriented rock. I’m 58 years old, and I’ve been making music for
about 35 years. I suppose it’s only natural that some has been more
successful than others. But I’m here in Cambridge in the house that I
bought in 1985 when we had the hit, and it’s very nice to have a roof
over your head.”
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