Fab Four Fantastic

It’s been 50 years and one month since The Beatles played their last concert in public – a blustery night in Candlestick Park on the western shore of San Francisco Bay.  After five plus years of constant touring, the four musicians were hurried away from 50,000 screaming fans in the back of a van, their bodies heaving to and fro as the steel truck sped across the grass and through outfield gates towards the exit.  It was at that point, according to Paul McCartney, the four bandmates realized playing for crowds wasn’t worth it – the steady grind from city to city, the terrible sound systems and the constant din of teenagers shouting louder than the music they played convinced them to cease touring for good.  The world’s greatest band - the group that was and remains a cultural phenomenon like no other – called it quits, opting instead to pursue loftier goals inside the recording studio.

Ron Howard’s new documentary, The Beatles: Eight Days a Week, was released this month, both in theaters and online via Hulu.  The film focuses on the Fab Four’s touring years, beginning in their days in Liverpool clubs, through Hamburg, across England and Europe and as they arrived in New York City in February, 1964 to throngs of fans at the newly named Kennedy Airport.  Using still photos, news clips, handheld movies and newly found footage discovered by fans after Howard’s public plea for anything Beatles-related, Eight Days a Week captures the frenzied crowds, the crying girls, the bewildered police and the staccato voices of old fashioned radio reporters saying things like, “This Beatlemania has swept the nation,” and, “Why do your fans scream so much?”  To which the four Beatles replied, “We don’t know!” as they laughed and mugged for the cameras.

Much of the sound from those concerts was remastered for the film, and listening to performances of “She Loves You” from 1963 in London and “You Can’t Do That” from a show in Melbourne, Australia in 1964 are fascinating.  Ringo Starr, his suit coat still buttoned, slams away at a drum kit that looks like you’d find it near a dumpster after a yard sale in Penacook, and you can see the sweat running down John’s, Paul’s and George’s make-up caked faces as they wail away on “I Saw Her Standing There.”  I learned The Beatles’ refusal to play at a segregated concert at the Gator Bowl in Jacksonville, Florida had a lot to do with forcing large southern stadiums to rethink their segregationist approach, and hearing Whoopi Goldberg describe her surprise trip to see the band at Shea Stadium as a young girl obsessed with The Beatles is touching.

Howard does a skillful job of sharing something new about The Beatles, not an easy task for the most documented, filmed and dissected group in modern musical history.  I consider myself a true Beatles fan –perhaps not a Fab Four musicologist, but I know all the music, all the words and details about George’s love life that teeter on unnecessary.  My friend Sean and I would listen to hour after hour of the White Album, Revolver, Live at the Hollywood Bowl, Beatles for Sale and all the others from grade school up through high school and college.  I still listen to them at least once a day, and every song I hear – from “I Feel Fine” to “I’ve Got a Feeling” to “Tomorrow Never Knows” still makes me grin.  Watching this film showed me scenes I’d not caught before and outtakes of songs I’d never heard.  Watch when George holds a transistor radio to his ear in the Plaza Hotel or learn about how John felt about his career and the band’s trajectory while making the film Help – all of it compelling to any Beatles fan or fans of popular music and culture.

The four Beatles as well as their producer George Martin, their manager Brian Epstein and their road managers and roadies help paint a picture of the sheer speed at which the band went from a local favorite to a worldwide force in a handful of years.  Howard keeps the lens on touring and performances, showing their growing disenchanted with life on the road and how, only three months removed from their last concert in San Francisco, they started working on what many consider the greatest album of all time – Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a concept Paul created as a way to distance himself and the others from the idea of The Beatles as a thing bigger than themselves.

At one point in the film, a reporter interviews Paul, asking, “So what kind of impact do you think you’ll leave on Western culture?”  Paul stops, thinks for a second and responds, “It’s not culture – it’s a good laugh.”  I’d suggest it’s a lot of both – popular culture in its highest form and more than a good laugh – more like a smile ear to ear as we get to listen to what they left behind forever.

The Beatles: Eight Days a Week is available on Hulu and is showing for a limited time at Red River Theatre in lovely downtown Concord.  The film is rated PG but should be shown to toddlers and infants so that they might develop an appreciation for the best music ever written, despite Ringo’s incessant cheekiness.

Do not go gentle into that Fall TV season . . .

As summer dissipates into fall, our televisions will soon fill up with crime scene romance, wise-cracking nerds, vapid hunks in need of a hug and Season 54 of The Voice.  We’ll be saturated with football from Thursday to Monday, suffer through another Kevin James laugh-track hideosity and witness so many election ads that we’ll beg for bleach and rat poison smoothies to end the misery.  But do not go gentle into that dark fall TV season – there is still time to enjoy what the summer has to offer.  Skip the sunshine and embrace two new shows that are sure to help your summer end on a high note.

Stranger Things is an eight-episode masterpiece of ‘80’s outfits and haircuts, a thoroughly entertaining series about a missing boy, a little girl with special powers, alternate dimensions and Winona Ryder in various states of panic, agony and terror.  Matthew Modine, he of such ‘80s classics as Vision Quest, Full Metal Jacket and Married to the Mob, plays a government scientist trying to keep his secrets intact before a group of meddling kids ruins everything.

Created, written and directed by the Duffer Brothers, watching Stranger Things is like slipping back into your parents’ basement in 1987 and getting that bag of new Cool Ranch Doritos scared right out of you.  From the theme music and opening graphics to the spot-on banter between the Dungeons and Dragons-playing kids to the ominous phone calls (from inside the house!), Stranger Things mixes a little Stephen King horror with ET-like wonder, then adds a dollop of afterschool special where the cool kids always ruin everything.  The end result is memorable television.

Winona Ryder is riveting as a distraught mom searching for her missing son, and the little girl at the heart of the story, Eleven, played by Millie Bobby Brown, evokes so much emotion by saying very little that you can’t help root for her escape.  By the time the last episode ended, I wanted another season to start immediately.  So as you reach for the remote to tune into that first episode of CSI Schenectady, pause and redirect yourself towards Netflix.  Stranger Things is there, waiting for you.

While Stranger Things should be watched with the whole family, the latest HBO hit series – Vice Principals – should not be viewed with spouses, partners, children, dogs, lizards, parrots, cats, siblings or other familial relations.  It should be watched alone with a cold beer in the dark with the door closed.  It’s that good.  Rarely has a show used vulgarities in such a creative, rapid-fire manner – listening to the two vice principals jaw at each other is like grabbing a front row seat at the Gutter Poetry Slam Olympics – never have adjectives been delivered with such debased grace.

Vice Principals follows two scheming colleagues at a high school in South Carolina, both devastated by losing out on the principal’s job, who team up to destroy their new boss.  Danny McBride, from HBO’s Eastbound and Down, created Vice Principals and plays Neil Gamby – divorced, lonely, angry and clinging to his role as school disciplinarian in the face of his crumbling life.  His counterpart, played by Walton Goggins, is Lee Russell, equally as awful and tortured as his co-worker Gamby.  From a nefarious friend in the TV series Justified to his turn as a plantation owner’s henchman in the Tarantino film, Django Unchained to this role, Goggins is remarkable.  He inhabits his character so completely- from his gait to his smarmy smile to the way the vitriol rolls off his tongue - Goggins makes us love Lee Russell.  Watch him handle a noisy neighbor or make a very special cup of coffee or try sabotaging the big game.   Goggins’ performance alone is worth watching Vice Principals again and again.  Never has such a terrible person been so fun to watch.

While the rest of your neighborhood says goodbye to summer with barbeques, lawn dart tournaments and yard work, you should instead hole up at home and watch Stranger Things and Vice Principals from start to finish.  You’ll feel better about the change of seasons and will learn a few new noun-adjective combinations in the process.

Stranger Things is available via streaming through Netflix.  Rated TV-14 for scenes of mild terror, telekinetic temper tantrums, lying to parents and government overreach.  Vice Principals is available on HBO and is rated TV-MA and should be viewed in a solitary manner so as to avoid embarrassment in front of church-going folk and your more decent relatives.

Do not go gentle into that dark fall TV season . . .

As summer dissipates into fall, our televisions will soon fill up with crime scene romance, wise-cracking nerds, vapid hunks in need of a hug and Season 54 of The Voice.  We’ll be saturated with football from Thursday to Monday, suffer through another Kevin James laugh-track hideosity and witness so many election ads that we’ll beg for bleach and rat poison smoothies to end the misery.  But do not go gentle into that dark fall TV season – there is still time to enjoy what the summer has to offer.  Skip the sunshine and embrace two new shows that are sure to help your summer end on a high note.

Stranger Things is an eight-episode masterpiece of ‘80’s outfits and haircuts, a thoroughly entertaining series about a missing boy, a little girl with special powers, alternate dimensions and Winona Ryder in various states of panic, agony and terror.  Matthew Modine, he of such ‘80s classics as Vision Quest, Full Metal Jacket and Married to the Mob, plays a government scientist trying to keep his secrets intact before a group of meddling kids ruins everything.

Created, written and directed by the Duffer Brothers, watching Stranger Things is like slipping back into your parents’ basement in 1987 and getting that bag of new Cool Ranch Doritos scared right out of you.  From the theme music and opening graphics to the spot-on banter between the Dungeons and Dragons-playing kids to the ominous phone calls (from inside the house!), Stranger Things mixes a little Stephen King horror with ET-like wonder, then adds a dollop of afterschool special where the cool kids always ruin everything.  The end result is memorable television.

Winona Ryder is riveting as a distraught mom searching for her missing son, and the little girl at the heart of the story, Eleven, played by Millie Bobby Brown, evokes so much emotion by saying very little that you can’t help root for her escape.  By the time the last episode ended, I wanted another season to start immediately.  So as you reach for the remote to tune into that first episode of CSI Schenectady, pause and redirect yourself towards Netflix.  Stranger Things is there, waiting for you.

While Stranger Things should be watched with the whole family, the latest HBO hit series – Vice Principals – should not be viewed with spouses, partners, children, dogs, lizards, parrots, cats, siblings or other familial relations.  It should be watched alone with a cold beer in the dark with the door closed.  It’s that good.  Rarely has a show used vulgarities in such a creative, rapid-fire manner – listening to the two vice principals jaw at each other is like grabbing a front row seat at the Gutter Poetry Slam Olympics – never have adjectives been delivered with such debased grace.

Vice Principals follows two scheming colleagues at a high school in South Carolina, both devastated by losing out on the principal’s job, who team up to destroy their new boss.  Danny McBride, from HBO’s Eastbound and Down, created Vice Principals and plays Neil Gamby – divorced, lonely, angry and clinging to his role as school disciplinarian in the face of his crumbling life.  His counterpart, played by Walton Goggins, is Lee Russell, equally as awful and tortured as his co-worker Gamby.  From a nefarious friend in the TV series Justified to his turn as a plantation owner’s henchman in the Tarantino film, Django Unchained to this role, Goggins is remarkable.  He inhabits his character so completely- from his gait to his smarmy smile to the way the vitriol rolls off his tongue - Goggins makes us love Lee Russell.  Watch him handle a noisy neighbor or make a very special cup of coffee or try sabotaging the big game.   Goggins’ performance alone is worth watching Vice Principals again and again.  Never has such a terrible person been so fun to watch.

While the rest of your neighborhood says goodbye to summer with barbeques, lawn dart tournaments and yard work, you should instead hole up at home and watch Stranger Things and Vice Principals from start to finish.  You’ll feel better about the change of seasons and will learn a few new noun-adjective combinations in the process.

Stranger Things is available via streaming through Netflix.  Rated TV-14 for scenes of mild terror, telekinetic temper tantrums, lying to parents and government overreach.  Vice Principals is available on HBO and is rated TV-MA and should be viewed in a solitary manner so as to avoid embarrassment in front of church-going folk and your more decent relatives.

Only the Popcorn is Free . . .

“It’s no secret our world is in darkness tonight.”  I heard those U2 lyrics for the first time in late 1991, Bono singing them in a static monotone over driving bass, howling guitar, and a frenetic beat.  We had ample reason to believe him.  The first Gulf War ended a few months before, the Soviet Union crumbled from within, and LA police officers beat Rodney King for the world to see. IRA bombs exploded in downtown London, and a lunatic with a grudge and two handguns killed 23 people at a Texas diner.  I’d just finished college and was teaching fifth graders about medieval England, struggling to pay my bills, wondering where I’d find the cash to buy a ring and convince my girlfriend to marry me.  Things felt precarious and unsettled, aided in no small way by the first airing of Barney and Friends in early ’92, a sure sign of societal chaos.

Twenty five years later, things are no less precarious.  The news is a steady swirl of war, upheaval, financial meltdowns and Caillou reruns.  We careen from one disaster to another, often from our own hands.  Our institutions and leaders struggle to feed our fix for immediate answers, and we’ve lost the collective patience to trust anyone who doesn’t watch our Snapchat stories within the hour.  Spend enough time watching TV or pecking at your phone, and you’d think the darkness Bono sang about over two decades ago is deeper, inkier and scarier than we’d feared.

Then along comes an artistic expression to capture this mood and reflect it back like a funhouse mirror of our collective neuroses.  Mr. Robot, a TV show like no other, hits our basic cable screens next week with its second season.  Season One was a ten-episode force of nature, taking a slice of that darkness and dissecting it through the eyes of Elliot Anderson, a troubled, drug-addicted IT worker in Manhattan who spends days working on cybersecurity and nights hacking into people’s lives in a twisted effort to make sense of his own.  He knows more about his therapist than she does and keeps secret tabs on his childhood friend and co-worker, knowing her boyfriend’s a lout, and a gullible one at that, well before she draws the same conclusion. (Note to self – always cover up your laptop camera . . .)

Elliot, played by Rami Malek (with the most expressive cinematic eyes since Marty Feldman), stumbles into a hacker collective, hidden away in an abandoned arcade in Coney Island, whose mission is to bring down the mega-bank E Corp, a symbol of all that is amiss in corporate America.  Led by an anarchistic enigma in the titular role, Mr. Robot, (played by Christian Slater, in an award-winning effort) pushes Elliot to open his eyes to the mess all around him, soliloquizing about the miserable state of society as he munches on free popcorn, manipulating his hackers into halting the gears of American finance by pulling an intricate series of intertwining, morally ambiguous levers.

As Elliot begins questioning his grasp on reality, his newfound mentor thrusts the doubt back in his face, saying, “Is any of it real? I mean, look at this.  Look at it! A world built on fantasy. Synthetic emotions in the form of pills. Psychological warfare in the form of advertising. Mind-altering chemicals in the form of food! Brainwashing seminars in the form of media. Controlled isolated bubbles in the form of social networks. . . You have to dig pretty deep before you can find anything real. We live in a kingdom of bulls**t.  A kingdom you've lived in for far too long.”  The show is filled with poetic ruminations on the world around us, and as Elliot slips deeper into the darkness, I found myself hanging on every moment of each episode as they crescendoed into a riveting ending.

               Elliot’s world is in darkness, and he doesn’t embrace it as much as he seeks survival, fighting his own monsters along with the corporate demons of greed, ambition and soulless profit.  Mr. Robot is not a whimsical, laugh-track wild ride about crazy nerds and their kooky lives – it gives us one man’s desire to make sense by taking action to bring about change, regardless of the consequences.  

That song from 1991 – U2’s “The Fly,” ends with the line, “There's a lot of things if I could, I'd rearrange.”  In Mr. Robot, Elliot’s fitful, tortured desire to rearrange society into a different reality is not complete at the end of Season One, leaving him and us demanding a torch to cut through the darkness.  Season Two holds that promise, and I cannot wait to see how bright the torch burns.

Season Two of Mr. Robot premiers on the USA Network on July 13^th.  Hold off watching until you’ve binged on Season One.  The show contains adult themes, like mean dog owners, odious bosses, confused sexuality, bad parenting, drug use, violence, bankers, lawyers and free popcorn. 

Mockument This!

Popstar, the new film by the comedy trio Lonely Island, wont’ make much money.  It won’t be in theaters for long, has zero chance of winning awards, and I’ll bet you’ll never see it, at least on purpose.  But as Teresa Giudice is my witness, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping is the greatest mockumentary about our nation’s vapid obsession with fame for fame’s sake ever made, eighty-six minutes of inappropriate songs, celebrity cameos, turtle funerals and Michael Bolton.  I implore you to see it – my son and I were two of seven people in the theater last Sunday, so there are plenty of tickets left!

 Andy Samberg is Connor4Real, a dim yet enthusiastic popstar whose rapid ascent to fame is followed by an equally speedy decline.  After leaving his best friends and their rap group, Style Boyz, behind to chase solo success, Connor’s first album, Thriller Also, goes platinum.  But his follow-up effort is a dud, and after hitting rock bottom, Connor slowly pieces things back together through horse-drawing therapy and his former bandmates, although his mom appears to be a lost cause, as is Seal, although he has angry wolves to blame – it’s a long story.  With Taylor Swift’s arrest for murder, Connor finds the opportunity for redemption.  The Donkey Roll makes a comeback, the caterer dons a fish costume and everyone except Seal goes home happy.

Popstar is not high art – the Citizen Kane of mockumentaries it’s not – it’s not even The Amazing Mr. Limpet of pretend documentaries, but it’s good enough to keep you entertained and serves as a reminder that we have no one to blame for the Real Housewives of Kenosha, Justin Bieber and TMZ except ourselves.  Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping is worth seeing – consider it a reminder that sometimes a good book is the best solution for quality entertainment. 

In the spirit of equally fantastic mockumentaries, here are a few worth watching:

This is Spinal Tap (1984) – this remains the standard by which all mockumentaries are judged, and one of the top five funniest films of all time.  The dialogue has worked its way into our culture (“This one goes to 11”), and the film helped launch a series of almost as equally great films from Christopher Guest and his kooky pals, like Best in Show, Waiting for Guffman and A Mighty Wind.  I’ve seen Spinal Tap at least 75 times from start to finish, and it never gets old.  Just remember that a cricket bat can be both totemistic and rather handy in the topsy-turvy world of rock and roll.

What We Do in the Shadows (2014) – a documentary film crew follows three New Zealand vampires for a year as they try living together without driving each other batty.  Jermaine Clement, from the landmark HBO comedy series, “Flight of the Conchords,” portrays Vlad the Vampire, and he and his cohorts battle the modern world and a murderous but polite gang of werewolves (“Remember – we’re werewolves, not swearwolves”).  This movie is brilliant – the best vampire documentary you’ll ever see.

Real Life (1979) – comedian and filmmaker Albert Brooks plays himself making a documentary about an ordinary family in Phoenix, and he manages to put himself the center of every scene.  Between the crew wearing space-age camera helmets on their heads to the veterinarian dad, played by Charles Grodin, losing a rather large patient on the operating table to Brooks dressed as a clown as he plumbs the depths of a nervous breakdown, Real Life is priceless comedy.  The statement uttered near the end, “Reality sucks – the audience loves fake,” captures the essence of this late ‘70’s masterpiece.

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006) – If you watch only one scene in this film, catch the moment when the bear greets the children hoping for ice cream.  Or the scene when Borat’s producer runs through a crowded hotel in his birthday suit or when Borat sings the national anthem at a rodeo or when he takes driving lessons or . . .  Good lord this film is insane.

Documentary Now! (2015) - SNL alums Bill Hader, Fred Armisen and Seth Meyers created a TV series both mocking and paying homage to legendary documentaries.  Watch Hader and Armisen as the two old women in “Sandy Passage,” based on the famous documentary Grey Gardens, and witness things go terribly wrong for the film crew.  The episode spoofing the in-your-face style of Vice’s HBO documentaries, called “The Search for El Chingon,” does not have a happy ending but is riveting nonetheless. 

(Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping is in theatres for probably another nine days; all other films are available for online rental or on-demand; Documentary Now! is available on IFC on-demand)