Some Christmas songs are just purty, others are purty awful but giddy fun. John Waters assembled a Christmas CD some years ago which had a number of tunes that straddled the line of sublime and shitty. Shockingly, there were two truly bad songs that I kind of love that didn’t make the cut.
“The Little Drummer Boy” is a “classic” Xmas song, but unless it is the Bing ‘n Bowie rendition, most folk give it a pass. Harry Connick Jr. did a passable if incredibly overwrought version- but the most jaw-droppingly WTF recording is of Marlena Dietrich’s teutonic mumble speak-singing the lyrics and the “rum-pum-pum-pums”. Exquisitely bad. Sadly, not on youtube.
Red Sovine was a solid if non-remarkable country & western crooner who did some solid work until he suddenly became a break-out star in the early 70s due to his “trucker” songs. Most of them are awful- but his biggest hits were these saccharine spoken word sob stories- most famously the tale of the crippled kid whose trucker-daddy is dead who gets on the CB to talk to truckers and say thanks to them for being truckers. Seriously.
Red Sovine did a couple of Xmas “songs”, the grandest and most batshit awful was “Well Here It Is Christmas” in which a half-drunk narrator breaks down on Christmas Eve in a letter to his ex-wife. It is terribly and it makes me laugh which makes me a terrible person. Wait, does that mean I like it ironically? Oh god- am I a hipster?
Louis Armstrong recorded two fantastic Xmas songs- ‘Zat You, Santa Claus?” which might be an unhinged horror story of holiday paranoia in a shitty neighborhood. His more serene “Christmastime in New Orleans” is vintage Louis.
The Staples Singers (especially belt-out artist Mavis Staples) recorded an up-beat pseudo gospel Xmas tune called “Who Took the Merry out of Christmas?” it is a bit tongue-in-cheek (or is it?) but a solid groove.
This year Noirbettie’s favorite holiday song is “(Don’t Call Me) Mrs. Christmas” by the superlatively named Emmy the Great. I don’t know how Emmy is the rest of the time, but she is pretty damn great on that little number- currently available for free download at Amazon.
There are probably always multiple levels to what makes a song or a particular version of it “good” to the listener. I know there are for me.
Case in point, the gooey earnestness of
“Marshmallow World” might turn some folk off immediately. If it is Dean Martin’s version, I’m a sucker for it.
Now whether Dean Martin was a factually-and-truly for real heavy drinker or not has been called into question. Was he usually buzzed on stage or off- it doesn’t matter. That his image was always half-in-the-bag does. And on his recording of “Marshmallow World” you can practically smell the bourbon wafting through the speakers. The song itself is treacle, but Martin’s grinning good-natured drunk (act or not) performance is the lovable Holiday lush, and the fun is infectious.
And speaking of drinking and Christmas Music, what about Clyde Lasley & the Cadillac Baby Specials “Santa Came Home Drunk”? A mostly forgotten old rhythm and blues classic, and possibly the greatest boozed-up travelogue ever.
And while we’re talking about rhythm & blues, I would be remiss to pass over Elvis Presley’s “It’s Christmas Time Pretty Baby”. Terrible title, great rockin’ bluesy song. Skip “Mama liked the Roses” and “Why Can’t Every Day Be Like Christmas”. Hell, skip the in-constant-rotation Blue Christmas (Johnny Cash did a fun up-tempo version of “Blue Christmas”) and just listen to “It’s Christmas Time (Pretty Baby)” for your Elvis quotient of the holiday mix.
And speaking of the blues, Tom Waits recorded a version of “Silent Night” which sounds like a New Orleans jazz funeral that got crashed by a boy’s choir. It isn’t for everyone, but I love it. And he loops his vocals on it, so it’s like four or five or six Tom Waits are singing to you. Bonus!
Otis Redding did a cover of “White Christmas” that knocks Bing down a few notches, and Solomon Burke’s incredible energy suffuses his “Presents for Christmas” and both of these performers cause me to question whether James Brown really was the hardest working man in show-biz like his press claimed.
Now how the hell did Dean Martin lead me into the rhythm and blues with a slight country detour?
Now abouts this time of year, some folks start to bitching.
“I hate christmas music”
“I’m just so sick of this fucking christmas music”
“Gah. Stop it. Please stop the christmas music.”
I’m not writing this post to bury these folks- but rather to sympathize with them. It is difficult for me to do, because I truly enjoy Christmas Music. I spend months ahead of November searching out any unique recording or one-off single from some recording artist neither me, you, my father, or the other Will have heard of.
And then at some point in November I start listening to these tracks. This can be a painful but occasionally rewarding process because- as has been pointed out- there are a lot of Christmas songs.
But as Shelby points out, there are seemingly about 17 Christmas songs re-recorded (and re-recorded, and re-recorded) by about a hundred acts.
That some Xmas tunes get overplayed is undeniable- but a lot of times there is a reason these songs get repeated so often. Some of them are fine pieces of songwriting, that have just gotten overplayed.
Others are just piles of shit.
How many covers of Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmastime” have you heard? I’ve heard exactly two. They both sucked just as much as the original.
But there are some great christmas tunes. Even for the discerning listener!
For the next few days I’m going to spend some time talking about the Christmas music that makes me happy, make me dance, make me laugh, make me sing.
I might touch on the songs that don’t (thanks, Paul McCartney. Fucker. Laugh all the way to the Scrooge McDuck room in your private mountain island) but I’d rather stay upbeat.
So put on your footie pajamas, get a glass of egg nog (or a cuppa coffee, or if you are me a glass of bedside whiskey) and settle down by the yule log.
Most everyone fears death. Probably because it isn’t really avoidable.
So Vampires are(were) Sex=Death (the vampire as STD allegory still works, even-especially in a post-Twilight world).
Werewolves can be Rage/Rape/Wrath=Death (the hidden beast within, werewolves, until Anne Rice came along, were the most guilt-ridden of monsters)
Ghosts are the past haunting us.
The manufactured revenant (see: Frankenstein and his monster) are really more of a Science-Fiction trope that has become associated with horror and falls into the “what Man Was Not Meant To Know” area of horror (see also: Pandora)
The human psycho/killer- whether solo or part of a crazed clan- tends to be the horror of random violence. You picked the wrong night/street/lake/bbq stand to be in on the wrong day.
The Zombie has certainly become, since 1968, one of the most powerful and lasting monsters in the cinematic pantheon of horror. George Romero created something new and infectious- it is hard to imagine a cinemascape without the legacy of the shambling, reaching, undead legions…
And of course that is the thing of post ‘68 Zombies- they are us, they are death, they are all we have to look forward to. We can slow the tide, but we can’t beat them truly. The best the survivors can hope to do is prolong their time.
And Romero’s certainly got that right. A movie that has little jump scares, some pretty impressive grue (even still, and even though the blue-tinted zombies are kind of funny now) but most of all it builds that utter dread of the inevitability of death.
It is a great, great horror film. And this is its pretty great trailer.
I LOVE how much of the trailer is the usage of the talking heads- the opening 20 minutes of the movie astounded me as a teenager (where is all the cool stuff, why do we have all this TV station bullshit?) but I was a dumb kid and didn’t appreciate the feeling that EVERYTHING was going askew and the world was stumbling to a breakdown- I think the trailer sells that part very well.
And yeah, sure, the social commentary (consumerism!) is kind of heavy handed. But ferchristsake- its a fucking movie where UNDEAD HORDES will EAT YO FACE.
And that trailer, honestly, excites me to watch it again. Good thing I have the Special Edition dvd at home.
Happy Halloween, fiends, I’m glad you joined me for this walk through the trailer park.
“James Woods speciality is playing feral”- Pauline Kael, from a review of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time In America
And finally, John Carpenter let him go apeshit doing his “speciality”.
Carpenter’s Vampires is a piece of crap.
But it is a piece of shit that comes dangerously close to being awesome.
The source material, John Steakley’s awesomely titled Vampire$ is also a piece of crap- in fact, the movie is vastly superior to the novel.
There is a big reveal in the novel (the M. Night Twist of the piece, if you will) that once someone becomes a vampire they have a letch to dress in velvet and a yearning to listen to opera. So when Jack Crow and his band of cash-hungry revenant stakers are listening to Stevie Ray Vaughan and drinking heavily, the master vampire doesn’t come in to kill them because the music upsets his head. Played for satire of the genre this could be hilarious, but Steakley plays is totally straight.
The tagline to the book always got my attention though- “What if vampires did exist? Dark. Stalking. Destroying. They”d have to be killed, wouldn”t they? Of course they would. But what kind of fools would try to make a living at it?”
Well frankly, I’d like to read that book or watch that movie, too bad Steakley was a terribly novelist and too bad John Carpenter had his budget massively cut less with only a few weeks before principal photography began. The western vibe that Carpenter (the biggest self-admitted Howard Hawks fan of all time) brings to the genre was tasty, and would have resonated better if the movie’s Peckinpah inspired finale hadn’t happened off-screen (seriously, see above about the budget)
What if it was a HBO series, or Showtime, or FX, or… what if we were given a set-up of these mercenary gunslinger vampire-killers -including the great Mark Boone Jr, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, stunt actors Thomas Rosales Jr., and Henri Kingi, Tim Guinee who briefly seemed poised to become the next Fisher Stevens, Daniel Baldwin- who was good on Homicide: Life on the Streets so it isn’t like he didn’t have some potential, right?- and then given time to give a shit about their struggles?
Compelling stuff, man. Too bad the movie was borderline unwatchable.
“Wes Craven Presents” is very rarely something you want to see in front of a movie.
I am not here to bury Patrick Lussier’s Dracula 2000 though. That trailer still promises an exciting, fun update of the classic villain.
And the thing is, it delivers.
A terrifically weird cast (Christopher Plummer, Gerard Butler, Johnny Lee Miller, Danny Masterson, Jeri Ryan, Omar Epps, Shane West, Sean Patrick Thomas Jennifer Esposito, Coleen “Vitamin C” Fitzpatrick, blink and you’ll miss Nathan Fillion- and a very good lead performance from Justine Waddell) and solid special effects, a surprisingly interesting twist on the vampire origin myth (and a reason for silver, holy water/relics and sunlight to work beyond “magic”) this is a pure-fun ride of a “horror” movie. Far less scary and more fun, and certainly winged by the Brothers Weinstein insistence on meeting a 2000 release date.
A lot of the hype surrounding Brad Anderson’s The Machinist was due to Christian Bale’s massive (and frankly terrifying) weight loss for the role.
The fact of the matter is, the weight loss IS horrible to behold. But the performance behind the skeletal frame is vintage Bale, ultra-centered and incredibly dedicated.
The Machinist isn’t my favorite of Anderson’s forays into the horror genre (that would be Session 9, sadly lacking a decent quality trailer on YouTube) but it is a very creepy, unsettling movie.
Sorry for the late updates, all 6 of you who read these. I’ve been fighting a bad cold. But better late then not at all, hmm?
Here is a trailer that just sets up pure creepy and the hits you with “the last thirty minutes are gonna be nutty!”
I remember getting excited to see this, back in 1990. George C. Scott? Brad Dourif? Scott Wilson? Nicol Williamson? Hell yeah! These are all actors who- while they have certainly taken “paycheck” roles in their careers, have never not delivered a strong perf.
But for some reason I didn’t see it at the time (or did I? Maybe in college: I have strong memories of a medium shot of a nurses station… and a thing whisking past the camera, and that isn’t in the trailer).
And now I want to see it once again- God knows The Exorcist III: Legion has better street cred than Exorcist II: Richard Burton vs. Pazuzuu.