Author: Monkeystador

Enthusiast.
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Yeah No Thanks

It’s funny, when I had met with Tim about it last, and we’re talking about five years ago at this point, the reason that it’s so hard to get going is because so many people love it and because there are 10 million ways to get that sequel wrong and four ways to get it right. It’s such a very fine needle to thread that I certainly didn’t get it there, on the script side. I didn’t thread the needle. There are things that were cool and some interesting ideas. I’ve certainly emotionally moved on from it and just said, “If it happens someday, it happens.”

– Seth Grahame-Smith, writer of The Lego Batman Movie

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Another King: “She Used To Pound Down”

Carole King rules. Songs I forgot she wrote but probably you guys all know:

  • I’m Into Something Good (Herman’s Hermits)
  • Chains (Beatles)
  • The Loco-Motion (Grand Funk Railroad)
  • The Porpoise Song (Theme from “Head” The Monkees Movie)
  • Up On The Roof (The Drifters)

I included the above because I enjoy the Scottish punk versions of things, and go Monkees of course. In describing Up On The Roof:

Appropriately enough, the song was born among the rat-race noise of a crowded city street. “Carole came up with the melody in the car – an a cappella melody,” …

A peaceful moment above the fray would have seemed like heaven to King – a young woman with two children and a demanding full-time job in a hit factory. The sophisticated arrangement was overseen in the studio by King herself, who was barely 20 years old at the time. “Carole used to hang in there with us tough,” Drifters member Charlie Thomas told Emerson. “She used to pound down. She wasn’t no hard woman – a girl, at her age. But she played the piano and it was amazing the songs she gave us.

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I Hope They Consulted Fat Elvis

I haven’t watched many of these, and almost always prefer footage of the original artists to their biopics. From Vince Mancini’s The Academy Can’t Quit Biopics, Even When They’re Bad:

Biopics now seem to exist somewhere outside of movies, belonging more to public relations; flashy advertisements for their stars and validations of their subjects’ legacies. Missing is the expectation that we’re actually going to gain any insight about their subjects… So it is we’ve gotten decidedly un-illuminating, subject-friendly portrayals such as Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman.

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I Liked This Film

I even liked the writing about this film.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of things I dislike about movies: certainty, endings, faithful adaptations, characters saying the name of the movie within the course of the movie, diegetic music, explanations, CGI, and the non-casting of Barry Keoghan in a Barry Keoghan-ass role. Here is a non-exhaustive list of things The Green Knight has going for it: the correct casting of Barry Keoghan, ambiguity, an ever-shifting sense of “reality,” mushrooms, unexplained phenomena (what’s up with the big people?), and an anti-ending. So, a perfect movie for 2021.

and:

David Lowery’s movies make me feel like I’m watching a movie for the first time. All the familiar hallmarks are there, but it never settles into anything resembling a predictable pattern.

I don’t enjoy any other filmmaker so abstract or so self-consciously arty, nor could I entirely articulate Lowery’s purpose in any given scene. Words fail, and that’s part of his power. I’m left with an unmistakable feeling: this was a good trip.

The beauty of Green Knight is that it’s so fully realized on every level — score, cinematography, production design, acting — that even when you don’t know entirely what Lowery is on about you can’t look away. It’s almost as if every individual shot has a narrative arc unto itself. It’s so compelling on a micro level that the “big picture” becomes irrelevant. You stop worrying “what does this mean” and “where is this going” and simply savor the moment, like a creature of pure sensual pleasure. Like I said, mushrooms.

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The Perfect Crime

From Defector:

The Justice Department announced today they’d arrested the two people behind the 2016 Bitfinex hack and recovered 94,636 of the 119,754 bitcoins stolen in the heist. That haul is currently valued at more than $3.6 billion, making it the largest financial seizure in United States history.

One of the actual crimes the pair of alleged masterminds are accused of committing is money laundering, which is somewhat redundant given, again, that we are dealing with cryptocurrency. In this case, the feds say Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan successfully laundered 21 percent of their bitcoin plunder through a number of labyrinthine pathways, including setting up fake accounts, swapping BTC for gold, and buying a bunch of PlayStation and WalMart gift cards. The feds found the unlaundered 79 percent just, uh, sitting in Lichtenstein’s cloud storage account, which they pretty easily recovered after getting a search warrant.

Morgan bills herself as a “Surrealist Artist, Rapper” and “Forbes writer” performing under the stage name Razzlekhan. 

“Just like her fearless entrepreneurial spirit and hacker mindset, Razz shamelessly explores new frontiers of art, pushing the limit of what’s possible. Whether that leads to something wonderful or terrible is unclear; the only thing that’s certain is it won’t be boring or mediocre.”

Um… right. The interwebs are having a field day with her terrible rapping. You were warned.

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Hit Factory

I always forget they’re Californian, as it seems like they could have spewed forth from Appalachia, or anywhere.

Fogerty’s ’68-’70 run was nuts:

  • I Put A Spell On You
  • Proud Mary
  • Bad Moon Rising
  • Green River
  • Down On The Corner
  • Fortunate Son
  • Travelin’ Band
  • Who’ll Stop the Rain
  • Lookin’ Out My Back Door
  • Long As I Can See The Light

Been reading more about them, their implosion, all the record label nonsense.

I was alone when I made that [CCR] music. I was alone when I made the arrangements, I was alone when I added background vocals, guitars and some other stuff. I was alone when I produced and mixed the albums. The other guys showed up only for rehearsals and the days we made the actual recordings. For me Creedence was like sitting on a time bomb. We’d had decent successes with our cover of “Susie Q” and with the first album when we went into the studio to cut “Proud Mary.” It was the first time we were in a real Hollywood studio, RCA’s Los Angeles studio, and the problems started immediately. The other guys in the band insisted on writing songs for the new album, they had opinions on the arrangements, they wanted to sing. They went as far as adding background vocals to “Proud Mary,” and it sounded awful.