Category: Pop

Album Reviews 23/01/05

Winery Dogs, III (Three Dog Music)

On Feb. 26, 2023, The Winery Dogs will be at Tupelo Music Hall in Derry, New Hampshire. They’re something of a rebirth of the hard rock superband Mr. Big, which older people will remember as an act whose main spotlight was on former Talas bass player Billy Sheehan. I remember seeing them in the late ’90s and thinking Sheehan was a little overhyped, but he’s good, whatever. Also on board is frontman Richie Kotzen, who, after graduating from Mr. Big, played guitar for Poison for a bit, and rounding things out is former Dream Theater drummer Mike Portnoy. Lot of borderline-interesting Guitar Player magazine-level wonkiness here, which usually spells bad songs delivered with panache. As far as that goes, album opener “Xanadu” (not a cover of the Rush song, point of order) is a lot of lightning-fast notes trying to find a purpose in life, but Kotzen’s David Coverdale impression makes it interesting. And so on and so forth, self-indulgent butt-kicking and etc. B

The Bombadils, Dear Friend (Epitaph Records)

Influenced by classical, jazz, bluegrass, Celtic music and various singer-songwriter traditions, this Canadian couple (Luke Fraser and Sarah Frank, FYI; their band name came by way of a Tolkien character) were nominated for a Canadian Folk Music Award for their sound, which, taken as a whole, tends to evoke John Prine/Emmylou Harris duets tendered with a Loreena McKennitt edge at its best moments (“Bicycle” for starters, which stumbles upon some really pleasant moments of contrapuntal vocals, a thing I’d really like to hear from more indie bands). “Tell Me I’m Not Dreaming” sounds simultaneously Fleetwood Mac-ish and like top-drawer Americana; the sturdy, vocally adventurous “Through and Through” gets even more Appalachian, so much so that you can practically smell the campfire cooking whatever’s going to be dinner. Fans of Bela Fleck and that sort of thing would be quite pleased with this, I’m sure, and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear these two on a soundtrack or three in future. A

Playlist

• Finally everything is sort of normal again, now that the holidays are over and there’s nothing left to do but ignore the voices in your head, as the winter starts getting worse and worse. It’s that time of year when you try not to end up turning into a snowbank-ghost like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, yessir, it’s all downhill from here, guys, my favorite is when some dude in a pickup truck tailgates you during a crazy snowstorm because he figures everyone has chains on their tires, just like him, same as they do in Siberia (or northern Maine, same thing). But keep it together, all you’re really supposed to be doing while we wait for the annual thaw and flooded streets is go buy some albums, and that’s what we’ll talk about in this section of the newspaper, the new albums scheduled for release on Jan. 6. First up this year is famous stage-diving violence-clown Iggy Pop, with a new LP called Every Loser. I hope you’re as excited as I am for this new set of tunes, and I’m sure you are, because let’s face it, Iggy is the last hope for cool in America. I recently saw a really nifty video of Iggy, with his pet parrot/cockatiel/whatever hanging around on his arm, and there was a sort of trip-hop/African tribal tune playing. So slowly but surely the parrot got more and more into it and started bobbing its head up and down, and then it got really into it and was totally hypnotized and danced, and Iggy was cracking up over it, anyway where were we, oh yes, there’s a new single from the Ig-Man, called — wait a minute, the Igster put the whole album up on YouTube, so we can just listen to the opening track, “Strung Out Johnny,” and bag this. Ha ha, this is so cool, like the guitar part is something Stiv Bators would have written, like borderline goth ’80s dance. I’ll make it short and sweet, just buy this album, OK, that’d be great.

• Anti-Flag is a roots-punk rock band from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which you whippersnappers would already know if the establishment hadn’t done away with punk years ago and replaced it with stuff like Green Day and whatnot. Lies They Tell Our Children is their new LP, and the rollout single is called “Laugh. Cry. Smile. Die.” And wait a minute, these guys put out their first album in 1996, so they’re just basically Green Day except from Pittsburgh! Whatever, they were kind of rough-ish and punk in 1996, and this new song is pretty fast and punk-ish. That means they’re basically like Panic! At The Disco, but whatever, Anti Flag everyone, don’t forget to wear a helmet or mom won’t let you try any funny business trying to skateboard through the half-pipe with your homies or whatever you people call “friends” nowadays.

• LOL, look, it’s RuPaul, with their new album, called Black Butta, and it’s on the way! Get over here, horrible new album, lemme give a listen to this new song, called “Star Baby,” before I change my mind and go drinking or whatnot. Hm, the tune is basically like the last million Britney Spears hip-hop-ish songs, except there’s some wub-wub. Is it catchy? I don’t know, you tell me, what am I, some sort of music expert or something? I don’t like it at all, if that gives you any idea.

• Finally, yikes, I may have spoken too soon, because there aren’t as many albums coming out as I’d thought. Like, there’s nothing left for me to write about except for some hip-hop person named Venus Da Kid, whoever they are, and their new album, um I mean mixtape, Dreams: The Mixtape Of Life. Actually, the tune “Apartheid” is kind of cool, like this dude sounds like a young DMX, and there does seem to be some substance to it. You might like it, and you actually should, but it sounds like he recorded it on a boombox (which makes it even better, just saying).

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Two Old Broads, by M.E. Hecht and Whoopi Goldberg

Two Old Broads, by M.E. Hecht and Whoopi Goldberg (Harper Horizon, 222 pages)

There is no topic so grim that it can’t be lightened by humor. And with America seeming to be graying at light speed, a wickedly funny book on the subject of aging by comedian Whoopi Goldberg (co-written with a physician friend) seemed just the prescription, promising to reveal “stuff you need to know that you didn’t know you needed to know.”

Unfortunately, Two Old Broads does not deliver on its promise and more realistically could have been titled “Two Old Broads Stating the Obvious in a Vanity Book.” It’s that bad.

It’s hard to see how this collection of platitudes and painfully useless advice made it through an agent, let alone a major publishing house. It’s the sort of book that is usually self-published and foisted onto friends, who have to invent creative ways to praise the book without selling their soul. Worse, this yawner comes from accomplished women who should have more interesting things to say.

Mary Ellen Hecht was an orthopedic surgeon with degrees from Columbia and Yale, who died at age 93 just before the book’s publication. She had been friends with Whoopi Goldberg since they met at a fashion show in 2010. Goldberg, of course, is a talented comedian and actress who has won a Grammy, an Oscar, an Emmy, a Tony and a Golden Globe award.

With Goldberg at the shallow end of the aging pool at age 64, and Hecht at the deep end, the friends decided to share their collective advice on various aspects of aging, from skin care to exercise, from medication to wills, from sex over 60 to being “crochety with charm.” All of this is done under the “old broad” rubric, (e.g., “dress like a broad’) which gets tired after the second page.

Here is a sampling of some of their advice:

“Arthritis is a killer when it comes to style, but lift up your head, look the world in the eye, and say internally, Ready or not, here I come — someone to notice and admire!”

“Believe it or not, sweaty feet are an invitation to medical problems including fungal infections.”

“Under normal circumstances, it’s a good idea to get a second opinion.”

“Try not to go through your day with anything that causes discomfort, like a dress or slacks being too tight or shoes that cause pinching.”

Lines like this are not only boring, but they are actually insulting to readers, as if Hecht and Goldberg are speaking to geriatric kindergarteners unable to comprehend basic aspects of life. Is there an 80-year-old alive today that doesn’t know they should get second opinions on serious medical matters? Is there a 70-year-old alive who doesn’t know that if pants or shoes hurt, they should take them off?

The book disappoints, not only because it’s not remotely funny or wise, but also because it skips lightly over things that aging people care a lot about — skin care, for example. For that matter, it’s hard to find a person over 40 who isn’t concerned about how their face will look as they age (hence the trend of people in their 20s getting Botox). Yet on the subject of “senior skin care,” Hecht and Goldberg offer a total of three pages. Three pages in which readers are told they should drink water, apply face cream and wax facial hair — and are given a mind-numbingly juvenile pep talk: “ … Remember you’re the CEO of your own body! So behave like one!’

To be fair, it is possible, not being in my 80s or 90s, that I’m bringing the jaundiced eye of (relative) youth to the book. Maybe our elderly relatives and friends who have been living in caves for the past 40 years will benefit from the simplistic style. And yes, there are a few takeaways that might be helpful for people struggling with the indignities of old age, such as the authors’ “three-look method” of avoiding falls and accidents (look low, look level, look up) and there’s surely a benefit (though this could be intuited) to their advice to thoroughly stretch before getting out bed at any age.

Moreover, Hecht, who wrote most of the book, with Goldberg chiming in, throws out the occasional charming tidbit in musings on her life. I will not soon forget her Aunt Grace, a gourmet cook who, late in life, always ate dessert before the main course. (“For her, all food led to dessert,” Hecht writes.) As a fellow dessert fiend, I grudgingly enjoyed that story.

But the rare paragraphs that weren’t insulting (“I’m sure you are familiar with a well-known saying: ‘You are what you eat.’”), aren’t good enough to justify this use of your time.

There are genuinely funny books about aging (Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck comes to mind) and inspirational books about old women (Two Old Women by Velma Wallace). Two Old Broads offers little to recommend it other than the fame of one of the authors. Don’t gift it to anyone that you like. D

Album Reviews 22/12/29

Justin Courtney Pierre, Permanent Midnight (Epitaph Records)

If you’re going to sound like a male version of Mazzy Star — I mean the full Monty of that vibe, the aural equivalent of sipping a vodka drink while floating around in a luxury pool and feeling the tremors as the earth collapses — your lyrics might as well be so maudlin and psychologically adrift that people would worry about you a bit if they cared enough to try to grok your intentions (not that I detect any in the tune we’re discussing right now, “Used To Be Old School,” other than reflections on trite, Freudian little boyhood/adulthood reminiscences, but whom did that ever stop?). On and on Pierre warbles in his helium falsetto throughout the opening track of this listenable-enough five-songer, after which he tables a bunch of mid-Aughts noise-ish rock recalling Dandy Warhols and all that, exploring aging, fatherhood, family, longing and whatnot. Nothing wrong here, but by the same token there’s nothing that hasn’t been attempted by literally thousands of bands. A

Various Artists, This Ain’t Your Mama and Papa’s Holiday Music: A Compilation of Holiday Favorites for the Weirdo in Your Life (Island House Recordings)

You have about 20 seconds left to get this downloaded and prettily packaged so you’ll have a nice, edgy, indie collection of holiday tunes for your edgy indie holiday feast, which, if you’re like most people trying to get by during this corporate-greed jubilee that’s being blamed on “inflation,” will consist of buns, with actual hot dogs if you’re lucky. I got dragged into this set of 17 songs when someone clued me in to an upcoming EP from the New York City-based Royal Arctic Institute, a five-piece all-instrumental band that contributes to this compilation a sloshy, dreamy version of “Christmastime Is Here,” you know, the maudlin melody from the old Charlie Brown Christmas cartoon. It’s fine for what it is, but there are plenty of edgy indie things from which to choose here: a giggling, sample-soaked “Deck The Halls” from Synthetic Villains that didn’t upset my stomach, and so on. I’m already out of room for this shtick, but do keep in mind that all the proceeds from this one go to benefit the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, so you should buy it just to be nice. A

Playlist

• Icky and gross, it’s the least wonderful time of the year, because as far as I can tell, there are almost no new albums due out tomorrow, Dec. 30, a Friday, which is of course the traditional day of the week on which to release new albums. Let’s face it, the holidays are over, no more plastic Halloween skulls everywhere, the Thanksgiving-flavored turkeys are all eaten up, Christmas and all its good will toward people and whatever is but a memory, and all that’s left is New Year’s Eve, the night we married couples stay up late to watch a bunch of people who’re immune to frostbite make out in Times Square after an electronic ball drops, and then, if we have any brain function remaining, we stay up another 15 minutes to catch up with all the latest new corporate rock acts (“Wow, honey, I didn’t know Florida Georgia Line actually had a catchy song!”). Then, of course, we ceremoniously clink our Coke glasses together and try to herd the cats up to bed. See, that’s what happens when you grow up enough to realize that New Year’s Eve is a plot to sell you cheap liquor, and that nothing really magical ever happens on that holiday, that is unless you get engaged to someone you can actually deal with as the clock strikes Bedtime. Have you ever gotten engaged on New Year’s Eve and broken up with that person two months later? I have. Have you ever gone bar-hopping and been stuck driving in a car when the clock struck midnight? I’ve done that one too. They should make a movie about New Year’s Eve that exposes the potential horror of it, like someone being stuck in an Uber at the stroke of midnight and they get sent back in time to the day before Thanksgiving, and they have to relive the whole holiday season, and if they don’t get it right and have an incredible moment of New Year’s Eve wonderfulness in which they smooch with their Twitter crush or whatever, they have to go back and do it all again. No? What about if there are velociraptors to deal with too?

• OK, I have no bloody idea what I’m going to do to fill the remainder of this space. Want to hear about the worst-ever meal I cooked on New Year’s Eve, of course you do, one time I was dating a vegetarian and I spent the entire day of New Year’s Eve making this disgusting tempeh-meatball dish with sauerkraut. The recipe required all sorts of stupid ingredients, like ginger root and sesame oil, all sorts of things that would have been great by themselves but which together made for a dining experience so unpleasant that I should make a short horror story out of it, to horrify people. But oh look, I’m saved, because some U.S. band called Bandit is releasing an album of “grindcore” (actually overly polished emo) tuneage, titled Siege of Self, on — oops, it was Dec. 29, but close enough. It’s stupid, and everyone’s calling it a worthless pile of Pig Destroyer worship. In other words, the only people who might like it are grindcore dudes who’ve never heard Pig Destroyer before. (No, don’t bother.)

• On New Year’s Eve day, some American metal band called Bayonette will release a new single called “Grógaldr.” No one knows anything about it, not even the Album Of The Year site, which means either that it doesn’t exist or that the band doesn’t understand that record releases need to be announced so that people know they exist. I don’t care what the case is, let’d just wrap up this dumb year with one more thingie.

• Finally we have DaniFighter, apparently a Turkish artist who, like Bayonette, has absolutely no idea how to announce an album. This dude has been known to put out Gorillaz-influenced noise-hip-hop that really sucks, and his new album/EP, Lecsavarlak, will be out this Friday, Dec. 30. Have a great New Year, folks!

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

A Christmas Memory, by Richard Paul Evans

A Christmas Memory, by Richard Paul Evans (Gallery, 183 pages)

Thirty years ago, Richard Paul Evans was 29 years old and working for an advertising agency in Salt Lake City when he decided he’d try his hand at writing a book. He didn’t have a Haruki Murakami moment, when he suddenly knew he could be a novelist while sitting in a baseball park; rather, he had just run for a statewide political office and lost, and needed a new goal to fill the void.

In his spare time he spent four weeks writing a novella he called The Christmas Box and then made 27 copies at Kinko’s and gave them out as Christmas gifts. Family and friends loved the story, which was about a young couple who become caretakers for a widow who has a mysterious box full of letters that (spoiler alert) turn out to be life-changing for the man and his wife. A couple of publisher rejection letters later, Evans self-published the book and eventually it hit No. 2 on The New York Times self-published bestseller list. Shortly thereafter, it sold at auction to Simon & Schuster for $4.2 million. It wasn’t a bad investment.

Evans has gone on to write more than 40 novels, most of them bestsellers, many of which have something to do with Christmas. His latest is A Christmas Memory, which steals a title from Truman Capote. (Disclosure: Capote’s poignant reflection about making fruitcake with his elderly cousin was published in 1956 and is a staple in my annual holiday reading.) Capote, the author of In Cold Blood, would no doubt be amused that two writers with such different trajectories and styles converged in this way.

Like Capote’s A Christmas Memory, Evans promises, in an author’s note, that his story is a lived experience, or more accurately, a collection of lived experiences woven into one narrative memory. It is a “composite of childhood experiences,” he says, without detailing which parts of the book, if any, are fiction.

Despite the title and festive cover, A Christmas Memory is disappointingly not really a Christmas story. It’s a story about a friendship that develops between a young boy and his elderly neighbor.

It opens with a family tragedy in 1967: the loss of the narrator’s older brother, who was killed in the Vietnam War. “He had promised to be home for Christmas. He kept his promise. Just not in the way we hoped.”

The narrator — presumably Evans, or some version of Evans, as he is called Richard or Ricky throughout the book — is “an awkward boy of eight with Tourette’s syndrome” who suffers 20 different kinds of tics. The family’s troubles get worse after the brother dies. The father is unemployed, the narrator’s grandmother dies, the family moves from California to Utah and then Richard’s parents separate.

The boy takes all of this hard. One day, while he is outside sobbing, he is comforted by a dog, which turns out to belong to a neighbor he later learns is named Mr. Foster. Mr. Foster is Black, which is unusual in Utah, which is “homogeneous as whole milk.” The man keeps to himself, for reasons that gradually become clear.

One day, Mr. Foster rescues Richard from bullies, and the two develop a relationship. At first, it seems mostly business. Mr. Foster hires the boy to shovel snow and to walk his dog, Beau, a deal they consummated with (possibly the most Utah thing ever) a snack of hot croissants with strawberry preserves. The two grow closer, with Mr. Foster gradually revealing parts of his life as the boy’s visits become more regular. At Thanksgiving, Mr. Foster invites young Richard and his mother to his house for the holiday meal, and there is finally a hope that with the start of the Christmas season, something Christmassy might ensue.

Alas, no.

The story culminates in December, that is for sure. There is a subplot about a cruel public school teacher who, for reasons that are not fully explained, basically ruins Christmas for her whole class with an angry tirade about Santa Claus. But there are also tragedies of mental health and physical health that, for all Evans’ narrative gifts, make this a bit of a downer to read, especially around the holidays. That’s not to say that depressing circumstances don’t make for a good holiday story; the travails of Jim and Della in O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi” make one of the most beloved Christmas stories despite its soul-crushing ending. And for anyone suffering the loss of a loved one at Christmas, this little book might be a comforting read.

As Mr. Foster tells young Richard, “We hate grief because it hurts. Not everything that hurts is bad. Whatever grief may be, it’s one thing for certain. Grief is the truest evidence of love.”

Reader reviews warn that Foster, who is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is heavy-handed with Christian imagery and themes, but this is not the case in A Christmas Memory, aside from a few references to resurrection and an afterlife. For anyone who celebrates Christmas, this certainly wouldn’t be off-putting.

It’s tempting to compare Evans’ Christmas titles to the mauldin “Christmas Shoes” song and movie, which grew out of a story that circulated on the internet and has, at least in my house, become a subject of mockery. But Evans is a much better storyteller than that, and his commercial success shows that there is an appetite for these sorts of books, particularly since major publishing houses have lately failed to deliver any intellectually stimulating holiday titles, instead concentrating their efforts on cheesy Christmas romances and Hallmark movie fare.

A Christmas Memory is no A Christmas Carol, and Evans is no Charles Dickens. But it is a holiday bonbon of a book in a genre with disappointingly few choices, and it’s a serviceable and poignant story, particularly for anyone tending more toward misery than merriment this Christmas season. B

Album Reviews 22/12/22

Sarah Pagé, “Méduses” [single] (Forward Music)

You might remember this Montreal, Canada-based harp-experimentalist from her 2019 album Dose Curves, or, more likely of course, not, but as avant-music goes, this is something that might interest you, as she’s been working on a new record titled Voda, and this single is intended as a teaser for that. This bizarre piece features cellist Vera Ronkos, bassist Jonah Fortune, and Pagé on bowed harp, all working to create a sound triangulation that bespeaks weird undersea goings-on. “Méduses” is French for jellyfish, and they’ve nailed the vibe, I’d say; the seven-minute study shimmers and floats like an incidental bit that escaped from the soundtrack for The Abyss, if you remember that movie. The album will include a limited-edition set of art prints comprising “a visual for each movement of the album, along with album credits and interpretive texts.” I know I’ve written up a good chunk of oddball ambient music on this page over the years, but very few have been so, well, accurate as this. Gets a little gloomy here and there, but it’s pretty friendly drone overall. A

Nyte Skye, Vanishing (Sonic Ritual records)

This northern California-based shoegaze/’80s-technopop duo is a father-and-son band in the most endearing sense of the phrase: It consists of vocalist-guitarist-dad Nyles (who came to this project after a stint with psychedelic-shoegaze band Film School, which released a good handful of records in their day) and his son Skye, who was 12 when this album was recorded. Admit it, that’s kind of cute, and the kid does like to take glam shots while wearing knockoff Ray-Bans, but the punchline is that they do look like some kind of quintessential ’80s band. That fits, given that dad Nyles is an unabashed Cure fan, as most of these tunes would attest. And we’re talking early Cure, too, the stuff that was on Standing On A Beach. But the beats aren’t about the old-school 16-bit drums Robert Smith favored; somewhere along the line, young Skye found an old Slingerland marching drum from the 1930s, which makes for some pretty wide timekeeping sounds. Anyone who loves ’80s stuff, this is all you. A

Playlist

• So this is Christmas, and what have I done? Another year older, and there’s more snark to come. You know? Hey gang, I’m supposed to talk about albums coming out on Dec. 23, because it’s a Friday, but guess what, there aren’t any! Yes, this week’s pretty much a wash, I doubt there’ll be many albums to talk about, but do any of you older people remember Gail Savage, the seacoast New Hampshire singer who used to play Pat Benatar cover tunes in all the local bars during the 1980s? Well, the other day, I accidentally found out she lives forever on YouTube, like, she recorded an EP with her long-haired androgynous tattooed love boys in 1985, titled Swedish Eyes (can I get a nudge-wink?), and it really wasn’t all that bad at all. In fact, the four songs were actually kind of good! She played basically every weekend at local places like the Kahala restaurant in Nashua and the Meadowbrook in Portsmouth, and all that stuff, and she sounded exactly like Pat Benatar. Oh come on, boomers and Gen X-ers, don’t look at me like “Hurr durr, geez, Eric, I have no idea what you’re talking about, I had chores to do at my family’s chicken farm, and I sure wasn’t out and about at all those rock clubs, with all that sin, and girls who looked and sang exactly like Pat Benatar!” Riiight, if you so much as set foot in New Hampshire during the ’80s, you couldn’t help knowing about her! If you ever stayed up past your bedtime, you probably heard her singing someplace, like, she and her band were probably singing some awful Steve Winwood cover tune while you were trying to eat your chicken wings or eggs Benedict at Howard Johnson’s, or — what’s that, you’ve never heard of Howard Johnson’s? It had an orange roof. Not a typo. Anyway, Gail Savage, everyone, the former queen of New Hampshire’s rock ’n’ roll scene. I’d love to dish some info about her current whereabouts; some former guitarist of hers is on some music-gear chat site, and I asked him where she was, but he never wrote me back (yes, he dared to ignore me) and no one else seems to know. Boy, it’s too bad clubs are no fun anymore, like, I went to one in Manchvegas a while ago and everyone was just standing around playing with their phones, except once in a while someone would start getting all weird and loud and performative, like they owned the place. Well, I suppose some things never change then, am I right? Someone please kindly get in touch with me this instant if you know where she is, that’d be great.

• Oh, the horror, what do we even have to talk about in this column this week? Ack, Weezer put out an album titled SZNZ: Winter a few days ago, but I can’t really deal with millennial-centric nerd-rock right now, folks, I just can’t. Let’s not. Wait, here’s one, from Viper The Rapper, called You’ll Cowards Don’t Even Smoke Crack II, but guess what, it comes out on Christmas Day. Whatever, there’s the title track on YouTube, and it’s such a funny song, ha ha, listen to this guy, sounding like Biggie after guzzling an entire gallon of Robitussin. This may be the most awesome thing I’ve heard this year. Merry drugs, everyone!

• We’ll end this week’s torture with Sonic Speed’s Sweet And Subtle Toxins, which looks like another hip-hop album. Funny, it used to be that the only things I had to write about during the Friday closest to Christmas were metal albums, but nowadays it’s hip-hop. This one comes out on Christmas Eve, and their Bandcamp page is useless, but I found one older Sonic Speed tune on YouTube. It sounds homemade, and they admit the band is a joke band, but it’s awesome, Kool And The Gang meets Usher or something, probably produced for free using a Disney Princess beat from a Fisher Price toy gizmo.

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

At the Sofaplex 22/12/15

Lady Chatterley’s Lover (R)

Emma Corrin, Jack O’Connell.

In this adaptation of a book that I feel like I should have read but probably won’t ever, dissatisfied Lady Chatterley, a.k.a. Connie Reid (Corrin), starts an affair with Oliver (O’Connell) the groundskeeper at her husband’s, Lord Clifford Chatterley (Matthew Duckett), big family estate. The pair got married during what sounds like a brief mid-World War I romance, after which Clifford returns to the front. After the war, he comes home paralyzed from the waist down and drags Connie from London out to the family’s country home. She seems initially interested in making the best of things, but Clifford is not interested in finding new ways to, uhm, show affection. He is, however, interested in having an heir — so long as Connie doesn’t catch feelings for the guy she chooses to hang out with for just long enough to get pregnant. Connie is actually appalled by this idea and increasingly annoyed by Clifford himself — first with his dumb literary friends as he tries to be a writer and then by the businessmen who appear when he decides to take over the running of the local mine. By the time we get to the “workers should be grateful for whatever crumbs we brush their way”-type discussion, we’re well out of sympathy for Clifford and just fine with Connie pursuing her affair with the kindhearted Oliver, who made it to lieutenant in the war but just wants the peace and quiet of groundskeeping.

This movie is very pretty and filled with lots of scenes that I think are supposed to be steamy and romantic of the pretty Corrin and the very pretty O’Connell in various states of undress. But the movie, which takes nearly 50 minutes of its more than two-hour run time to get to the Lover part of things, feels like it is running at .75 speed. We get a lot — A Lot — of scenes of people walking through fields at less than a brisk pace or just staring off into the middle distance or looking after someone who is leaving the shot. It’s maybe supposed to help build tension but mostly it made me want to fast-forward.

Joely Richardson shows up as a character who seems mainly like she’s supposed to deliver information but she does help to highlight some of the more interesting aspects of the movie. There is this whole post-war labor-management tension that runs through the story as well as some nods to the idea that, after the calamity of the war, maybe some prewar societal conventions are just less important to some people (Oliver seems to represent, to a degree, the idea that after the battlefield people might be less willing to just “know their place”). But the movie doesn’t do much more than present these ideas — you know, between long walks. B- Available on Netflix.

Descendant (PG)

This documentary from Higher Ground Productions (the Obamas’ production company) looks at the current residents of Africatown, a neighborhood near Mobile, Alabama. The community was founded by people who had been enslaved and transported to Alabama from Africa shortly before the start of the Civil War. The trip, which was an illegal smuggling operation some 50 years after the international slave trade had been outlawed in the U.S., ended with the people being offloaded from the ship, the Clotilda, which was then burned to hide the crime. After the Civil War, many of the Clotilda survivors and their families moved to Africatown, which is still home to many of their descendants. The documentary follows both the rediscovery of the Clotilda and the attempts by community members to memorialize their families’ histories and place them in the larger context of the calamity of slavery in the U.S.

The movie serves as a nice companion piece to Zora Neale Hurston’s book Barracoon, which was published in 2018. It features her 1927 interviews with Cudjoe Lewis, one of the last living survivors of the Clotilda. The movie focuses not only on the stories of the Clotilda survivors but also the way land grabs and indifferent zoning have led to Africatown’s being surrounded by industry and to the hollowing out of the area’s main street. As much as its story contains an important slice of American history, the community is shown as a vibrant, energetic and hopeful part of the present. A Available on Netflix.

Sr. (R)

Robert Downey Jr. makes a documentary about his father, the filmmaker Robert Downey Sr., who died in 2021. The movie features interviews with Sr. starting in about 2019 — and while Jr. put together his film, Sr. worked on his own cut. He also dealt with worsening health due to Parkinson’s disease, a situation that pushed Jr. to learn and discuss as much as he could with his father while they could still be together. While giving us the professional life of Downey Sr. (an idiosyncratic filmmaker in the 1960s through the mid aughts),the movie also tells an intergenerational story of a son (Jr.) attempting to embrace the good and make peace with the bad from his childhood while also raising his own children. The movie reminded me a bit of Dick Johnson Is Dead, another documentary about a filmmaker coming to terms with a father’s mortality. Sr. is incredibly sweet with Robert Downey Jr. being shockingly vulnerable and honest as he examines the relationship with a father he clearly loves and admires. A Available on Netflix.

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