Some Came Running

A couple more Gordon Willis screen caps

From End of the Road, Aram Avakian, 1970.

The actors are Stacy Keach and James Earl Jones. 

What the hell, here's the third one, which also featured in the Vanity Fair Hollywood memorial of Willis that I penned. 

End of the Road is a fascinating motion picture, not just because it was cinematographer Willis' debut feature.  John Barth, the author of the 1958 novel on which it is based, dislikes the movie expansively. Being a fan of the book I anticipated I might come to a similar assessment, if I ever saw it. Which was difficult for some time. It became available for viewing under the aegis of Steven Soderbergh, who also made a documentary about its making; the movie and the doc are available via Warner Home Video. As it happens, Road, while not a very good adaptation of Barth's book, is an engaging, sometimes mesmerizing, and ultimately affecting movie. In transposing the book's action from the early '50s to the then-present day, Avakian and his co-screenwriters Dennis McGuire and Terry Southern concoct an alienated counter-culture anti-parable. If Eustache's The Mother and the Whore depicted personal and romantic dysfunction in Paris as an emblem of the failure of May '68, Avakian's picture implies a sour elegy for the Woodstock Nation. And its imagery is unfailingly striking and beautiful. There are worse things you could do this weekend than to seek it out. 

"Monster Island Dance Party:" An Observation By Artificial Intelligence

A little background: I've alluded to my band, Artificial Intelligence, on this blog before, most expansively here; in the wake of the engagement described in the linked post, the personnel determined that, as they say in the movie, it would be fun to either make a record or play out again, or both. 

Three years and change after that, we made a record. The aforementioned personnel are:

Daniel Burwasser, drums; Ron Goldberg, keyboards and samples; Douglas Harvey, the electric bass; myself, Glenn Kenny, vocals and low-grade guitar; and Thomas Santamassino, guitar. The rhythm tracks were recorded at BC Studios in Brooklyn by the great Martin Bisi in the winter of 2011; the vocals were recorded in the same venue, by Mr. Bisi, in November of 2012. The overdubs were recorded by Ron Goldberg at his homes at various sessions between 2011 and 2014. The records was mixed in February of 2014 by Martin Bisi, with Ron and myself sitting in on all sessions, Mssrs. Harvey and Santamassino advising on separate sessions. 

The recording, which if released in album form will be titled Revisionist History, was produced by Ron Goldberg with Martin Bisi. The band entity can best be credited as the Associate Producer. The reason for the title is that all the material on the recording was originally composed and played out in the early 1980s. We have not yet determined a release date, or even a definitive release form for the recording, which consists of eight songs. I wanted to present the above track as a kind of "sneak preview" of the record, and also leech some interest off of the release of the latest Godzilla picture, no duh. Hope you enjoy the song and the admittedly rudimentary slideshow "video." 

The current cinema

Don't get too excited. The Protector 2, from which the above still is derived, and which I review at RogerEbert.com, is pretty bad. And Rhatha Phongam doesn't figure in it as prominently as she might. Phongam was last "widely" seen in these parts in Only God Forgives, so she's due for a karmic break soon, I'd reckon. 

Also in my reviewing sights this week are two films of worthy ambition that don't quite get to where they ought: Decoding Annie Parker and Belle, the latter of which does not have any relation to an Al Green record, which is too bad.