What I watched: The Outfit, a movie about a man who owns a tailor shop in Chicago and who is trying to survive a night with warring mob families in his store. It’s a good film—well written and acted. Almost the entire movie takes place within the shop which makes me wonder if this originally started out as a stage play.
What I read: I’m in the midst of a new book and it’s not short enough for me to blow through it in a week.
What I listened to: This week’s stop on the tour of the best engineered albums of all time brings us to Back in Black by AC/DC. This was their sixth album, but the first to feature singer Brian Johnson after Bon Scott went on a drinking binge in London and died as a result. There are many stories about how Johnson came to be the new singer, but the reality is that producer Mutt Lange recommended Johnson to the band.
The overall feel of the album is a complete departure from the previous five, which were heavily blues influenced. This one is straight up hard rock, which certainly fits better with Johnson’s vocals. Recorded in 1980 by Tony Platt, this album basically became the marker of 1980’s hard rock. The sonics for this album are incredible, which is no small feat in a good studio—and they did not record this album in a good studio. It was recorded in the Bahamas (mostly because they couldn’t get studio space in the UK and the Bahamas offered a sweet tax incentive), in a studio that was basically a bunch of dead, dry rooms. Plus, there were a series of tropical storms hitting the area around that time so the electricity was…iffy. But the sound is full, and punchy, with a great dynamic range.
Any engineer will tell you that the best way to get a good sound is to start with a great performance. For that, we have Mutt Lange to thank. While it is well known that he brutalizes his acts with a multitude of takes (because he wants any edits to sound natural), the end result is a surprisingly solid performance on tape.
Fun fact: the bell ringing at the very beginning of the album was specially commissioned with a foundry to get the sound they wanted.
The album became so popular upon its initial release that four of their previous albums likewise became incredibly popular all over again. To date, this album has sold over 25 million copies and is rated as one of the best rock albums of all time. For years after its release, Nashville recording studios would use it to check their room acoustics and Motorhead famously used it to tune their sound system.
I watched the Midnight Club, equal parts scary and sad. There is a last scene which sets it up for a season two. Premise: terminally ill teenagers go to haunted hospice. I read The Enclave, book 3 in the Scholomance series. I loved book 1, and book 2 was fine. As for book 3, I had to push myself to finish it (more angst than action). And as for listening, well, my Spotify algorithm has failed me. 3 weeks ago it was spot-on, this week it was no good. Sigh.
I watched a lot more TV than normal this week. First up – Vatican Girl, a 4 part documentary on Netflix. What do a missing girl, the attempt on Pope John Paul II, the Cold War, Roberto Calvi, and the Mafia have to do with each other? Maybe nothing, maybe everything. There’s no answer but it’s a wild story. Next -Over the Garden Wall which came out about 5 years ago but I’d never seen it. It’s a sweet animated Halloween fairy tale. The episodes are short, around 12 minutes each. It’s on HBOMAX and Hulu. And finally- the first episode of Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities. No better or worse than any TV horror anthology, pretty much what I expected. I’ll watch some more when I get around to it but I’m not in any hurry.
I read The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix. I hadn’t read any of his books yet, there’s always a long waitlist for them at my library. Except for this one so I borrowed it even I wasn’t very interested. I enjoyed it much more than I thought I would.
…my last couple of saturdays haven’t really allowed for a suitable moment to try & to remember what I’ve been watching…so this isn’t all this week…but there’s a fun noir-ish comic book thing called “werewolf by night” on the disney app…lower decks continues to be fun…still liking the old man thing with jeff bridges…& I’m part way through both a thing called “taboo” with tom hardy & a collection of familiar faces in an odd but reasonably compelling thing with the east india company in the role of the villains…& setting called the imperfects that’s a sort of mutant thing but played pretty light-hearted
…you could do worse than any of those, I figure?
I enjoyed Taboo. My opinion is biased because I’m a sucker for Tom Hardy.
…that’s fair…I think without him doing his best brooding-hulk-of-a-protagonist thing it would be hard to see it working…though the rest of the cast is none too shabby…jonathan price is pretty perfectly unlikeable, for one…but there really are a lot of quality actors in some relatively small parts…it almost feels like it’s punching above its weight?
I finished watching House of the Dragon. I’m not sure I’ll bother with subsequent seasons. It forcibly reminded me why I never finished the books. Long, dreary, and filled with unpleasant and unsympathetic characters. Call me reductive, but I like at least someone to have some redeeming qualities. I was okay with Game of Thrones, because the Starks were clearly positioned as heroes, but this doesn’t have anyone in that slot. After slogging through it, I just read an online synopsis of the rest of the series, and I can’t see any reason to continue. Come at me, I don’t care.
Almost done with The Rings of Power. Some of the same problems as Dragon, but there are at least clear lines of good vs. evil. I did keep wondering why I didn’t remember details from the books (to be fair, it’s been a fair few years). As it turns out, they’re compressing the timeframe to tell a tighter story — a lot of this occurs over hundreds of years in the books, and the producer (I think) pointed out that they’d have to recast and restart everything repeatedly to stay book-accurate. Which I thought was fair. I don’t really care to see things that are slavish recreations of other media for the most part.
…I finished the rings one before the dragon one…& on balance I think they did ok but it wasn’t as successful as they meant it to be?
…there’s a couple of reveals they didn’t do a great job of misdirection about…one they did a better job of than the other…but they’re sort of a matched pair so the less subtle one kind of undid any subtlety about the other…
…the dragon thing looks like it has the bigger budget…but aside from the dragons themselves being pretty cool as you point out the sheer lack of sympathetic characters makes it more of a slog…& I find I largely don’t care all that much what happens to who…plus that one threw in a time-jump or two so it’s also trying to foreshorten a long-winded bit of prologue to something that wrapped up poorly on screen & may never get a last page
The lack of caring about what happens to who is why I gave up. It just felt like maneuvering for the sake of maneuvering, kind of like reading about different counts and dukes in the French court in 1602.
What killed the Rings saga for me was the music. Every single dramatic scene was larded with it. I thought a lot of the actors were really good, but the producers refused to let them convey anything with dialogue alone. It ALWAYS had to include swelling strings and flutes and brass, and it just got annoying.
…I’ve been prepared to cut the rings one a bit of slack but I’d agree less could certainly be more as far as the score goes…but then I may have funny ideas about what makes a good score?
…I’m a sucker for a well-picked soundtrack…but I probably don’t give actual score its due in a lot of things…I hear people enthuse about the deft use of character motifs in things like star wars & I can sort of see why they’d care but I tend to think background music does its best work when it keeps to the background part…if it’s front & center to the point you’re noticing it more than the stuff going on more often than not it undercuts the thing it’s supposed to be accenting…& I think in the rings thing they might just be trying to hard for the sake of appealing to that kind of fan?
…that said I once heard a pretty good lecture from someone who wrote film scores & one of his illustrations of something was to play the introductory credits of a film…& then replay the sequence without the incidental music…with it you were cued up in several senses for the scene the credits cut to despite having seen nothing but names & titles whereas without it those titles seemed to go on so long you were bored & without a fast forward button well on your way to being the proverbial tough crowd
I think you’re right about the makers playing to audience expectations, although I also think they’re grossly underestimating the audience. I think the actors have the chops to pull off good dialogue with no music overlay, or at least vastly less.
This scene from El Dorado with John Wayne, James Caan, Robert Mitchum and Ed Asner is a good example of what I wish the Rings did more of. It’s a pure genre movie, but the cliche of a jangling saloon piano gets completely rewritten, followed by no music at all as Mitchum just does his thing.
I watched The Northman and liked it quite a bit. It’s weird and gory. The director Robert Eggers leaned hard into the Norse mythology and folklore without getting to the level of a Thor movie, and I can’t say I followed everything. But it’s extremely inventive. It reminded me a lot of The Green Knight in approach, although that was a good bit more fantastical.
…to begin with I thought I’d seen that…but then I realized I’m thinking of the northmen comics…which, incidentally, are rather good
…I might have to watch it, though, skarsgard’s generally pretty good…& I should probably get around to making sure I got to the end of that vikings show on amazon because I’m sure I came across something the other day that seems like it’s meant to follow on from that…called vikings valhalla (can’t remember if it had a : after vikings)…on netflix, I think it was?
For me it was like watching something that would have been the love child of Stanley Kubrick and Carlos Casteneda. Altered States meets Conan the Barbarian.
Plot wise it was not what I expected, which is a feat movies rarely achieve anymore. Also he’s so hot, I’d watch him in anything…except that pedo movie, can’t remember the name, don’t watch that one. I did watch it and it was gross.
I finished season 1 of She-Hulk and I really want a second season. It broke the 4th wall in a delightful way and I was very entertained.
I also started season 2 of The Vow about the NXIVM cult people. Interesting, I don’t know how much I buy that what’s her face in charge of the “company” aspect didn’t know all the batshittery abusive stuff happening.
…out of that mismatched pair I’d take she-hulk any day of the week & twice on sundays…I don’t know a whole lot about the sketchy psuedo-religious cult thing but I already feel like it’s more than I want to
…whereas I’m a long way from having had enough of she hulk…it’s not quite the same but there’s also a new season of the animated harley quinn show…& that’s kind of fun in at least some similar ways…& has a similar runtime?
She Hulk was well done, and it has the perfect lead.
If you have HBOMax, How To With John Wilson has an episode “How To Appreciate Wine” which intersects with Keith Raniere in a very unexpected way.
I’ve read a bunch the last 2 weeks… finally finished that biography of Polly Adler, which was good but kind of a long slog.
Read book 4 of the Wyrde series by Charlotte E. English which was a lot of fun.
A book of short stories(“Jade”) by Romance Writers of Australia award winners, which wasn’t all that great… only 2 or 3 of the stories were actually good.
A Wind In Cairo by Judith Tarr, which was really good but written kind of oddly. Short, choppy sentences and a… second person perspective? Not sure how to explain that one. It’s about a guy who’s a real dick and he gets turned into a horse for his sins, and (horrors!) has to obey his female owner.
Sentence of Marriage by Shayne Parkinson, which is a rather depressingly moralistic tale set in 1880’s New Zealand. I just started the second book, Mud and Gold.
Last, but not least, I read a book my son just read in school and recommended to me. The Screaming Staircase by Jonathan Stroud, book 1 of the Lockwood & Co. series. It’s probably classed as YA, but it was a very engaging story about ghoulies and ghosties and other things that go bump in the night. I have the second book on hold and should be getting it soon.