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Daniel Boyd (1066 KP) rated The Dirt (2019) in Movies

Apr 4, 2019 (Updated Apr 4, 2019)  
The Dirt (2019)
The Dirt (2019)
2019 | Biography, Music
Decent cast (0 more)
Feels false (0 more)
Brainless Fun
The Dirt is a Motley Crue biopic that debuted on Netflix last month. It is Jeff Tremaine's, (the director of the Jackass movies,) first narrative feature film. This should maybe give you some idea of what to expect within the movie. If Bohemian Rhapsody, Wayne's World and Jackass had a baby, this would most likely be the result.

Your enjoyment of this movie will probably depend on what you are wanting out of it going in. I am a casual Motely Crue fan, I only know a few of their songs and have a very surface level knowledge of their history. I was watching this movie for a bit of dumb fun after I had seen the trailer and it delivered exactly what I expected it to. If however, you are a die hard Motley Crue fan looking for an in-depth biopic with a sense of grit and realism, you will most likely be sorely disappointed.

The plot to this thing plays out like a Wikipedia article, in the sense that it hits all of the major beats of the band's history, but glosses over so much more and leaves any sense of nuance at the door. It is also incredibly cartoonish and cheesy, at no point in the film do you ever feel that you are watching the actual members of Motley Crue and it is always painfully clear that you are watching a group of actors in bad wigs playing faux, characterture versions of real people.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think that the cast have anything to do with how shallow or glossy this thing is. I think that Daniel Webber did a decent job as Vince Neil and Douglas Booth is okay as Nikki Sixx. For some reason, Machine Gun Kelly plays Tommy Lee as a goofy, lovable rogue, as apposed to the aggressive violent abuser he is in real life. Iwan Rheon is by far the stand out as Mick Mars, the older, more jaded member of the group who totally dismisses the immature 'sex drugs and rock and roll,' bullshit mentality of his band-mates and comes away with some of the driest, funniest lines in the movie.

Overall, I gave this a 7 based on the brainless fun I had watching it, but it by no means feels accurate or realistic, nor does it feel like it's trying to be. Hardcore Motely Crue fans will probably feel like they were let down by this biopic, but I got exactly what I wanted out of it and enjoyed it for what it was.
  
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Kirk Bage (1775 KP) rated Ghosteen by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds in Music

Mar 3, 2020 (Updated Aug 6, 2020)  
Ghosteen by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
Ghosteen by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
2019 | Alternative, Indie
8
8.5 (2 Ratings)
Album Rating
My intention was to listen to this twice through and then tell you what I thought about it. In the past, I have always admired Nick Cave more in theory than in practice. Finding his heavier touches a little too “noisy”. Typified by the 2004 release Abbatoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus, where I listened to the latter, gentler side over and over, and largely left the more raucous tracks on the former alone.

Because of this personal preference, I have ended up virtually listening to Ghosteen on loop for a full week, as it leans very definitely towards the softer side of his soul – at times almost ambient dreamscape, washing over you like tired thoughts just before sleep. And, often, that is what it became for me: a night album to drift away to.

It is an album about grief, regret, spirituality and humanism. There is a misconception that it is wholly inspired by the death of Cave’s son Arthur, but, in his own words, it was more the death of band member Conway Savage that allowed the themes and lyrics to become the work.

As always, it is Cave’s poetry that emerges as the backbone and soul of every song. The melodies wash over you, at times indistinguishable as separate tracks, and you begin to feel invited into a man’s heart and mind as he explores mortality, shifting between anger, acceptance, fear and hope, in a segue of sound that feels ultimately like a mood painting, defying criticism.

At times listening feels like an intrusion; like these thoughts are too personal to eavesdrop on. At other times, you feel taken by the hand and invited to look at something beautiful. If you allow yourself to be taken on this journey willingly, your empathy will be coaxed and encouraged, and it will be safe. Sadness is only one part of grief, seems to be the message, and it’s a message I relate to and adore.

Labels such as “art-rock” and “post-punk” get thrown at Cave, in futile efforts to pin him down. I think it best not to try. For me, he is truly one of a handful of musicians alive who can be called an artist without hyperbole. His work has texture and emotion that goes beyond how we normally judge music. Making it ok to not “like” a song, as long as it tells part of the story.

For sure his best work for quite a while. At times, so perfect it seems churlish to judge it at all.
  
Cloudcuckooland by The Lightning Seeds
Cloudcuckooland by The Lightning Seeds
1990 | Alternative, Indie, Pop, Rock
6.0 (1 Ratings)
Album Favorite

Pure by The Lightning Seeds

(0 Ratings)

Track

"I think “Pure” is a song that changed my life more than any other. I’d never really sung before or written any lyrics entirely by myself and it was kind of a first attempt. “To put it into context, at that time in Liverpool loads of bands were being signed by record companies and being given big deals. Bands like The La’s were all doing gigs and that’s how they got signed, but I couldn’t really do a gig because I didn’t have a band, so I just had my tunes. “I recorded about three or four tunes at home and during bits of downtime in a studio I produced in. It was a very tentative try, but there was a publisher guy who said, ‘I’d love to hear those songs’ and I played them to him and he said ‘We should put this out’. I said, ‘I don’t have a group and we haven’t got a label’ and he basically got some copies printed up and put it out. “We had 500 copies pressed and released it through an indie label called Ghetto and nobody expected much to happen. I thought at least I would be getting a song out there, so it was very much an underdog type thing. “Pure” just hung around and then people started noticing it - we’d sell a few hundred copies and then they’d get some more made. Then DJ’s on stations started playing it and it was a very word of mouth thing. In the end John Peel played it a few times and spoke about it, but nobody really knew what it was, because nobody had seen us play. “It culminated in me getting a call from someone in America. This station in LA called K Rock phoned me in my Liverpool flat and said, ‘Your record is the most requested record in California for the last two months.’ It was like fairy story, and then they pressed up a load more, we finished the album and it was the start of The Lightning Seeds. “That song had a massive part to play for me in the whole way my life and career went. It was a brilliant moment and it started everything. I’d always thought that music was a form of magic, or alchemy or something and the idea that I could record this song in the top room of my house on a tape machine and that it could go out across the world seemed mad to me. I couldn’t believe it."

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Tom Chaplin recommended Retriever by Ron Sexsmith in Music (curated)

 
Retriever by Ron Sexsmith
Retriever by Ron Sexsmith
(0 Ratings)
Album Favorite

"He’s one of those people, once you get into it, it’s very hard to listen to anything else for a while. I used to hear the name, and people would recommend him but once I got into him it was like finding a treasure trove with all these amazing albums. Retriever’s probably my favourite, his lyrics are so conversational, they reflect everyday life, the difficulty of navigating it, so perfectly. We met a few years ago, he’s real hero of mine but I think he’s quite used to lots of people, way more successful and lauded than I will ever be, people like Macca, Chris Martin, Elvis Costello, coming up and praising him. He is a bit of an artists’ artist in a way. So I got the sense that he thought, “Oh great, another person in a band that likes me but why doesn’t the public-at-large like me!”. I just don’t understand it, myself. Maybe this is the problem, he’s got a straight, almost pub rock sound to what he does, maybe that puts people off, but it’s much more layered and intricate. That, for me, is often the mark of a great songwriter where you’re lulled into thinking the songs are simple or superficial but when you really listen to them, you realise it’s articulating something way more profound. in fact that reminds me, when I finally got into him, it’s because I went to Glastonbury five or six years ago as a punter. I’d had a really shit time, it was a bit of a complicated time in my life, I kept having to go to the American embassy to do all these blood tests and piss tests to try and get into America, because things had got out in the press that I’d had a few issues with alcohol and drugs and the American embassy had said, “You’re not coming in”. I remember feeling so fucking miserable and then I turned up at Glastonbury and I just walked into this tent and he played a song called 'All In Good Time', it’s all about how what you consider to be a big deal is insignificant when you look back at it with hindsight. I heard this song for the first time and it was so resonant and potent in that specific moment, it was like, “Wow, this is exactly where I’m at”. It was like he was telling me, “Don’t worry, it’s going to be alright!”."

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    Mad Skills BMX

    Mad Skills BMX

    Games and Sports

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    CLEAR YOUR SCHEDULE: MAD SKILLS BMX IS OUT! Updated to make full use of the iPhone 5 screen. The...

Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020)
Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020)
2020 | Comedy, Fantasy
Back in 1991, I thought that Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey was the greatest movie of all time. Sure, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure was pretty incredible too, but with the addition of Death… Station… evil robot Bill & Ted… it was all just genius as far as I was concerned. My movie watching habits since the nineties have shown me that neither of those films is actually the greatest of all time (well, maybe top 50), but that certainly didn't stop me from getting ridiculously giddy with excitement at the prospect of a third outing. Even more so after successfully introducing my youngest daughter to both movies recently, at which point I also concluded that Excellent Adventure was, in fact, the better of the two!

So, here we are. 29 years on from Bogus Journey, and we find Bill & Ted at a very difficult time in their lives. Dwindling popularity and record sales mean that their destiny of uniting the world with a single song is now becoming increasingly unlikely. A wedding reception where Bill & Ted are unveiling their latest musical creation to a less than lukewarm reception gives us a nice nostalgic chance to see some familiar faces from the previous movies and also brings us quickly up to speed on the lives of our two heroes. Still married to the medieval princesses (Jayma Mays and Erinn Hayes), they now both have grown-up daughters, Thea (Brigette Lundy-Paine) and Billie (Samara Weaving). Both girls are like younger versions of their fathers, making heavy use of the word ‘dude’, and with extensive musical tastes and knowledge. They worship their fathers though and truly believe in their music.

Following the wedding reception, a trip to couples therapy shows us that it's not just their music career that's heading for the rocks. There's even talk of breaking up the band - “We’ve spent our entire lives trying to unite the world. And I’m tired, dude” Ted confesses to Bill. And as their destiny begins to fracture, reality also starts to unravel, with historical figures randomly being sucked from their own time and dumped into another.

Arriving just in the nick of time is a traveller from the future. Kelly (Kristen Schaal) lands in an egg-shaped time machine and whisks the boys into the future where they find that they are now no longer being worshipped in the same way as they were before. They are told in no uncertain terms that they have just 77 minutes to come up with the song they were destined to write, or the past, present and future are all going to collide, resulting in the world collapsing in on itself. Whoah!

Resigning themselves to the fact that if they haven't been able to come up with the song in the last couple of decades, they're unlikely to come up with it in the next 77 minutes, Bill & Ted land on the genius idea that they can simply go to the future and steal the song from their future selves. So, they begin jumping forward to various points in time and meeting up with different versions of themselves. We get overweight rock star Bill & Ted, complete with dodgy British accents, muscular prison inmate Bill & Ted and even OAP nursing home Bill & Ted.

Meanwhile, daughters Thea and Billie come up with a slightly more solid plan of action that involves picking up prominent musicians from history and forming them into the ultimate band, in the hopes that their combined talents will come up with the song that saves the world. It's a race against time as both missions play out simultaneously, taking in a trip to hell, recruiting ex-band member Death (William Sandler) and trying to outwit a robot who's out to kill them. It's basically a greatest hits remix of the first two movies.

It took some time for me to adjust to seeing Keanu Reeves outside of his role as John Wick, clean-shaven and considerably less dangerous. Both he and Alex Winter are obviously much older than when we last saw them as Bill & Ted, but it was surprising just how well they slipped right back into the roles. It honestly felt so good to be back in the company of these guys. The daughters are also a welcome addition, although they feel underused, and being separated from their fathers for much of the movie means that everything feels a lot more chaotic than we’re used to.

Bill & Ted Face the Music rattles along at a fairly brisk pace and the ending felt very rushed and abrupt. Something about the whole thing just doesn’t feel right and I didn’t feel as though we were ever getting very much time to explore or experience a particular scene before we were straight onto the next. It’s funny at times, but with most of it essentially reworking themes and ideas from earlier movies it ends up as the weakest of the trilogy, which is a real shame.

I’ve got so much love for these characters and movies that I feel bad about being negative in any way. However, I can’t help feeling that Face the Music teeters on the edge of ‘maybe they should have just left alone with the last movie’ a little too often. At the end of the day though, I can't really knock a movie that's essentially all about harmless fun and, more importantly, carries with it a message about uniting the world, being excellent to each other. I think we all could appreciate that philosophy in our lives right now.
  
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Lee Ronaldo recommended Kollaps by Einsturzende Neubauten in Music (curated)

 
Kollaps by Einsturzende Neubauten
Kollaps by Einsturzende Neubauten
1981 | Rock
8.0 (1 Ratings)
Album Favorite

"At the end of 1980, Glenn Branca had a tour booked so I quit my day job to go on it, so on the one level it was kind of this fulfillment – ‘wow I’m actually going to go on a fucking rock & roll tour, how great is this?’ And I think it was the end of me having day jobs in New York, which was kind of also an amazing thing to think about. The first tour was in the US and it was wrapped up in all this kind of weird stuff. We were on the West Coast when Lennon was shot. He was one of my great early heroes and one of the reasons why I was involved in any of this stuff to begin with, and he gets shot while I’m on my first rock & roll tour. It felt kind of heavy in a certain way. A few months later we went to Europe and when we played Berlin, Neubauten was the opening act and it was their second ever gig. So I got to see them at the very beginning and meet all those guys. Sheet metal music on cymbal stands - they were really just putting it together at that point, their music also progressed really fast in the early period, but this was just an early primitive version of what they were doing. I met all of those guys, Mufti and Blixa and Alexander and Alex and I some German relatives so I had an affinity with Germany to begin with, and we became friends right away, so I’ve known them since the early 80s, when they really started doing their thing it was this parallel rise to what Sonic Youth was doing. We came out of New York, out of the stuff that was coming out of New York and Black Flag and Minutemen the West Coast stuff, but at the same time all this stuff that was going on in England – the Birthday Party, was there at that point and we had met them, and in that same early period Lydia Lunch had taken us to one of the last Birthday Party shows in New York and we met Nick, Rowland (S. Howard), Mick Harvey and all those guys. Shortly after that when Sonic Youth first started coming to England, the Bad Seeds wanted Sonic Youth to be their opening act. Those early Neubauten records were just so impressive in what they were doing because again Blixa comes out of all this Germanic Berthold Brecht art music as well as this extreme stuff, and they took their extremism to welding torches and grinders on stage. It’s all music on a certain level, didn’t John Cage teach us that, or Stockhausen or Varèse? What Neubauten was doing was really coming out of this same climate of ‘we’ve got electric guitars on stage but we’ve also got noise-makers that could tie our music back to futurist music of the 20s’. I think the really dominant thing about all these groups from that period was that these were no longer kids that grew up in middle America that heard rock & roll and put a band together in their garage after high school and just went out and did their thing, these were all people that were arts educated and went to university and were steeped into 20th century art making practice whether it was music, or visual art or experimental theatre. For me I grew up with pop music on the radio in the kitchen of my house every morning before school, there was an AM radio blasting the latest 7” singles, you couldn’t get away from it, but at the same time I got educated in all this other stuff so all these people wanted to combine this stuff, they didn’t want to leave their education behind and pretend they were ruffians in the garage that were uneducated and idiots savants – kind of like the Stooges were a real version of that, although I couldn’t say enough about Iggy and his smartness. When Neubauten was doing that stuff it wasn’t tongue in cheek but it was marshalling a lot of different influences, not just simple pop influences. This is some of the most remarkable music ever, and the shows they put on, they were dangerous in an extreme way with sparks flying off the stage. Sonic Youth played this famous show in the Mojave Desert in 1984, and Neubauten did one in the same series, within 4 or 5 months of our show. We had a lot of early symbiotic relationships with all those groups."

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