Monthly Archives: May 2009

Cinematics, Tuneage

Hollywood, Pay This Man!

nick_cave.jpgEsteemed rocker/filmmaker Nick Cave wrote a sequel to Gladiator, apparently at the behest of fellow Aussie Russell Crowe. A synopsis/assessment of the script was posted to the intertubes not too long ago. It is, as you might imagine, fucking insane. In the best possible way.

I know what you’re thinking–hey, Maximus died at the end! Mr. Cave is way ahead of you. In his script, Maximus has been damned to gladiate (if that’s a word) for all eternity for his sins. The screenplay is rife with supernatural hoodoo-ery, like people rising from the dead. Several times. Oh, and there’s a closing montage in which the deathless Maximus is shown fighting in the Crusades, World War II, Vietnam, and, curiously, working in the Pentagon.

Still not hooked? How ’bout a climactic speech in which an anti-Christian leader screams CHARGE THIS FISH! How ’bout the movie’s climactic battle scene, which takes place in a flooded Coliseum with battleships and alligators.* Tell me that itself isn’t worth the price of admission.

* The ancient Romans actually used to flood the Coliseum and stage naval battles there, so this last detail is plausible. But still nuts.

Though the assessor of this script noted that “Cave’s writing, the storyline, the dialogue…it’s Grade-A material through and through,” he/she still rejected it. Why?

-…I’m not really interested in seeing a sequel to Gladiator
featuring elements of mythology and the supernatural. They weren’t
present in the first film and they simply feel out of place here.

-The script renders most of the original film moot…

-I love it as a standalone screenplay but hate it as a sequel to Gladiator.

To all of these criticisms, I say, So fucking what?!

First of all, despite all the Oscar nods, Gladiator was nothing more than a better-than-average popcorn movie. You’re not going to “ruin” or “dilute” it with Nick Cave’s interpretation. And the first movie was a big enough hit that, as long as Russell Crowe stars in the sequel, you’re pretty much guaranteed a certain box office number. Take a chance, Hollywood assholes!

Second of all, look at any movie franchise: the second movie is always the crazy one. And it’s always the one that cineaste snobs say is the true masterpiece. Think The Godfather Part II. Think Dark Knight. Think 2 Fast 2 Furious!

If this is how a wonderfully mad potential masterpiece is assessed by Hollywood, I’d love to see the synopsis for some market-researched piece of total junk like Ghosts of Girlfriends Past. “Reading this made a small piece of my soul shrivel up and die. Greenlight immediately!”

This rejection of Nick Cave’s vision really puts a damper on my own screenplay hopes. I was just starting to get some meetings about my full-length adaptation of “O’Malley’s Bar”.

Baseball, Tuneage

Lost Classics of the Stadium Riot Genre

The tweeting of JohnU alerted me to a blog post over at Mandatory Mustache which details a lost Mets-related punk rock classic from 1985 by a band called The Nightmares. I’m sorry it took me almost a month to discover it (the post debuted on April 14), but I’m glad I did, because it is awesome.

I’ll let the post speak for itself, but the gist is this: The Nightmares, a New York garage-y band, wrote a tune called “Baseball Altamont”, which detailed a riot that occurred in the Shea Stadium stands in 1984. They even had a record release party for the single in the Shea luxury suites, which is pretty friggin rad.

The song namechecks Keith Hernandez and Dr. K, and talks about “sitting up in the sky” in the cheap seats. I found that image particularly evocative, since I spent so much time in those cheap seats, which really did make you feel like you were 10,000 feet in the air. Especially if you sat in the very last section on either the left or right field side, hanging out over nothing. It was both exhilirating and terrifying. Oh, and you couldn’t see the game for nothin’.

I don’t have much info on The Nightmares, other than they were on Coyote, the same outfit that put out Yo La Tengo’s early stuff (fitting that they would share a label with another Met-inspired band). As you might imagine, a Google search yields a million other bands called The Nightmares who are clearly not this one. But the record sleeve shows them posing next to the historical marker in Hoboken where the first organized baseball game was (probably) played. Which is, again, pretty rad.

I also tried to look up some info on the riot in question. Not much luck, except for this remiscence about Opening Day at Shea by Eric Silverstadt, which appeared in The New York Times in 2004:

Twenty years to the day after the first pitch was thrown at Shea, I
returned for the home opener in 1984. Ron Darling was the starter, and again it was a beautiful, sunny afternoon. I slipped away from my job as an NBC page on ”Late Night With David Letterman,” expecting the Doc and Darryl Mets to bring life back to the ballpark. Although the 1984 team won 90 games, what happened that April afternoon could only happen in New York, and perhaps, only at Shea.

The Mets were losing, 10-0, to Pete Rose and the Expos in the seventh inning. Most fans had already bolted. This must have included some members of the New York Police Department because during the seventh-inning stretch, a riot broke out in the left-field bleachers. Tire irons, broken beer bottles, fists flying, bodies tumbling. The culprits? Passive Met and Expo fans? No. Ranger and Islander fanatics, still fighting a week after a brutal playoff series ended with an Islander overtime goal in the fifth and deciding game of the Patrick Division semifinals.

Not sure if this is the event which inspired the tune. Although if it is, ‘hockey Altamont’ doesn’t have quite the same ring.

In any case, give it a whirl and enjoy.

Media Morons

You Failed the Trials for the Human Race: Howie Carr

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I never thought I’d write these words, but I’m a big enough man to admit it: I owe Wallace Matthews an apology.

Mind you, I still think he’s one of the worst writers on the planet. But I also thought he was one of the worst human beings on the planet. I stand corrected. He has been dwarfed in hideousness by Howie Carr, a “writer” for the Boston Herald.

Matthews is cranky and joyless and seems to take pleasure in raining on parades. But he has not, to the best of my knowledge, actually caused anyone harm–or really wished harm on others. Howie Carr, on the other hand, wants people to starve.

Carr is a reprehensible right-wing talk radio windbag on Boston’s WRKO (against his will, apparently). He lies somewhere in the Venn intersection of Bob Grant, Morton Downey Jr., and a playground bully, filling his shows with Code Word Bigotry and seething anti-gay invective.

He also writes columns for the Boston Herald. You’ve probably never read the Herald unless you’ve had to line a birdcage in the greater New England area. It’s basically an angrier, more overtly racist version of the NY Post, aimed squarely at the Tommy from Quinzee set.

In this latter capacity, he authored a piece that appeared in Sunday’s Herald, “Shed no tears as Boston Globe fat gets Pinched”. I was alerted to its poisonous existence by the justifiably angry tweeting of BP’s Will Carroll.

As you may know, there’s a very good chance the Boston Globe will close down very soon. I’m ambivalent about the future of newspapers myself. And I have to cop to a snotty tweet I tapped out on Monday about how no more Globe would (hopefully) mean no more Dan Shaughnessy.

But I think we can all agree that the shuttering of the Globe would be sad. Not only because it’s a storied daily with a long history, but because it would put a lot of people out of work–very few of whom are responsible for the paper’s financial woes. It would also leave Boston with only one newspaper: the reprehensible Herald.

So again, I think we can all agree that the Globe’s imminent closing is a very bad, very sad thing.

Wait, we can’t all agree with that? Apparently not, according to Carr. He’s dancing on a grave that hasn’t even been dug yet. Why? Because the Globe is a liberal newspaper, owned by the NY Times Corp., and therefore is worse than Hitler in his book.

Keep in mind as you read these excerpts that Carr writes for the Globe‘s rival paper, and that no newspapers are doing well right now. So his insane, petty, vindictive Schadenfreude makes about as much karmic sense as the head of GM crowing about Chrysler’s bankruptcy.

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