KATY PERRY'S MTV UNPLUGGED session is exactly what you'd expect of a young pop star with one album under her belt: it's a seven-song performance of her big hits, some nice acoustic ballads, an unreleased tune and a well-chosen cover.
Going acoustic may seem like an odd choice for a singer who's known for her big, brassy pop songs, but Perry did get her start in the singer-songwriter circuit at L.A.'s Hotel Cafe. So it's no great surprise that her mellower numbers here ("Lost", "Brick by Brick", "Thinking of You") come across quite well with an acoustic band.
But what is unusual is that she's also able to translate her more rambunctious numbers into an acoustic format.
"THE 2,000 YEAR OLD MAN" was never intended to last one year, let alone 60.
In the early 1950s, friends and fellow comedy writers Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks started doing the routine at parties: Reiner would play the interviewer and straight man, asking Brooks a series of questions that he would answer as the world's oldest man. For example:
» REINER: What was the means of transportation then?
» BROOKS: Mostly fear.
» REINER: Fear transported you?
» BROOKS: Fear, yes. An animal would growl — you would go two miles in a minute. Fear would be the main propulsion.
Neither had experience in stand-up comedy, and neither nursed ambitions in that direction, yet the private routine became such a hit among friends and party-goers that Steve Allen and Sid Caesar pushed them to introduce the 2,000-year-old man to a wider audience. Allen even offered to pay for the studio if they would make a record. It took them ten years to go through with it.
The rest is, ahem, history.
THE VISUALS MAY BE vaguely reminiscent of David Lynch's early work. But the world of Stingray Sam is culled entirely from the strange mind of Cory McAbee, the New York-based writer, director, actor and composer whose 2001 film, "The American Astronaut," premiered at Sundance to much acclaim.
Like "Astronaut," "Stingray Sam" is a space Western filled with insider humor, musical numbers and hand-painted special effects.
McAbee wrote, directed and stars in the film, and he wrote and performed all of the music. If this sounds like an exercise in self-indulgence, that's because it is, but it's the best kind. McAbee follows through on every creative impulse and explores his bizarre vision to the fullest. If you can accept his eccentric premise, it's a wild romp through the cosmos.
MOVE OVER, ERIN BROCKOVICH.
Ronald Craven is the new (fictional, but still) messiah of indignant environmental activists everywhere.
As portrayed by Bob Peck (a well-heralded British actor who us Americans only know as the guy that played Muldoon in "Jurassic Park"), Craven is the main character in "Edge of Darkness," a BBC mini-series from 1985 that focuses on an international nuclear conspiracy that forever changes Craven's life when his activist daughter Emma (Joanne Whaley) is murdered because of it. And now that the much-praised, six-part collection is finally available on DVD in the United States, we turncoats can finally be pleasantly surprised by what all the fuss is about before Mel Gibson's movie remake comes out in Jan. 2010.
Continue Reading "Don't Want to Believe: 'Edge of Darkness: The Complete BBC Series' DVD" »
SINCE KURT COBAIN'S suicide in 1994, widow Courtney Love has done pretty much everything in her power to sell out his memory — if you've seen the Converses with his handwriting on them or played as him in the latest "Guitar Hero," you know what we mean. For real fans, though, the "Live at Reading" DVD set featuring Nirvana's legendary 1992 performance will be more satisfying than sneakers, video games or anything else Love could get her money-grubbing hands on.
Nirvana's second performance at the Reading Festival was a much-talked about — and plenty bootlegged — affair, coming a few months after Cobain's marriage to Love in Hawaii and the birth of their daughter, Frances Bean. As the concert's headliners, Cobain and Co. ripped through most of the material from their debut, "Bleach," the ridiculously successful breakout album "Nevermind" and the then-unreleased "In Utero," and the performance was later ranked No. 1 on Kerrang Magazine's "100 Gigs That Shook the World" list and voted as the band's greatest moment in a poll by NME.
So, then, it's obvious that "Live at Reading" will be a much-needed addition to your collection if you're still living the grunge dream.
Continue Reading "No Apologies: Nirvana, 'Live at Reading' DVD/CD" »
WHAT EXACTLY IS a boosh, and what makes this one so mighty?
Those are two questions unanswered — nay, ignored — during the four series of the comedy television show "The Mighty Boosh," which is immensely popular in the U.K. and a cult phenomenon over here.
Reminiscent of "The Young Ones" and "Monty Python's Flying Circus," "Boosh" is known for its trippy set pieces, anarchic plotlines and wide cultural spray, not to mention the chemistry between its two leads, Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding.
FORTY-TWO YEARS AFTER it first aired, "The Prisoner" remains one of the strangest and trippiest television dramas ever produced, blending the paranoia of "The Invaders," the fixed setting of "Gilligan's Island," the plot machinations of Kafka and the surrealist imagery of a painting by Dali or, more fittingly, De Chirico.
It has become a cult institution, its 17 episodes passed around on bootlegged VCR tapes, then finally released as one of the earliest DVD box sets in 2000, and finally given a polishing on A&E's new five-disc Blu-Ray set which will no doubt inspire media upgrades among diehard fans.
Playing off the success of James Bond and other romanticized Cold War spies, "The Prisoner" twists the concept by making the man of action into a victim of an organization that can neither be beaten nor outsmarted. Co-creator and lead actor Patrick McGoohan had played a spy on the immensely popular British "Danger Man" series in the mid-1960s, and he devised "The Prisoner" to play subtly and deviously off that role.
After abruptly resigning his job, McGoohan's unnamed secret agent is gassed and imprisoned on a remote island that acts as a sort of retirement center for other decommissioned agents. Number Six, as he becomes known, won't be so easily silenced, and each episode finds him devising some new means of resistance and escape. "I am not a number," he declares repeatedly, often to shocking derision or laughter from other characters.
Continue Reading "Existential Bars: 'The Prisoner' on Blu-Ray" »
THE GREAT THING about the Monty Python sketches and films — besides how funny they still are, 40 years later — is how much of an inside joke they've become. Ask a group of people about the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow — or start to sing about cross-dressing lumberjacks — and you'll be met with either whooping enthusiasm or blank stares. It's comedy that's almost as polarizing as the "Three Stooges": there's a very distinct and passionate cult of Python, and then there's everybody else.
"Almost the Truth — The Lawyer's Cut" (Eagle Rock) is a six-hour documentary that aired earlier this month on IFC and is out now on DVD. It includes recent interviews from the five surviving members of the group (John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones and Michael Palin) as well as archival interviews with the sixth founder, Graham Chapman, who died in 1989.
Still, "Almost the Truth" isn't really a great place for a Python neophyte; better starting points include the group's work itself, from the complete "Flying Circus" DVDs to its films ("Monty Python and the Holy Grail" chief among them).
Continue Reading "Documenting Hilarity: 'Monty Python: Almost the Truth — The Lawyer's Cut'" »
THERE ARE A LOT of great quotes in "Hori Smoku Sailor Jerry," zero of which are fit for newsprint. That pretty much sums up the ethos of the great tattoo artists of the 20th century. Ribald, crude, devil-may-care, rules-shunning brawlers who meticulously honed their craft in private — often in secret — these men (always men) behaved like brutes but worked like artists, and were always entertaining.
Erich Weiss' short documentary focuses on one, Norman Collins, who adopted the moniker "Sailor Jerry" and plied his trade in the rough-and-tumble port of Honolulu during World War II. Collins, a rabid libertarian of the nationalist bent, put aside his hatred of the Japanese only to borrow elements of the exquisitely inked and colored Japanese tattoo tradition with the clean, bold-lined playfulness of American skin art.
Along the way, he influenced, feuded with and inspired a generation of greats, many of whom provide the charming tough-guy commentary: Don Ed Hardy, Mike Malone, Zeke Owen, Lyle Tuttle, Philadelphia Eddie Funk (who is, the ending credits note, "still crazy") and Bob Roberts.
Less a straight biography of Collins than a wistful travelogue through the development of 20th-century tattooing and the rough-and-tumble times and men that drove it, "Hori Smoku" — the name is a pidgin honorific — is rather niche but wildly entertaining. Nowhere else will the curious viewer find so vivid a window into a world in which death loomed daily over the helplessly young, while they grasped with both hands all the gallows humor, resignation, bravado and lust the likes of Sailor Jerry could provide.
Photo courtesy Mike Malone Collection
SO IS IT wrong that we're totally underwhelmed by the repackaged box set for "Homicide: Life on the Street"?
David Simon fans, don't get offended — that's not any kind of slight on the man now best known for "The Wire" and whose nonfiction 1991 book, "Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets," inspired "Homicide," one of the best cop shows of all time.
Instead, it's more of a dig against A&E Home Video for repackaging the complete series and releasing the set without any new features or extras that separate it from the exact same product that came out in 2006.
Yup, that's right: The exact same thing — totally and completely identical, just with less-cool packaging.
Continue Reading "No New Clues: 'Homicide: Life on the Street' Complete Season DVD" »
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