A Haunting In New Jersey

BAKER STREET

by Eric J Baker

This is the true tale of a haunting.

I don’t expect you to believe me. Hell, I’m not sure I do, and I saw it with my own eyes. Nevertheless, it happened. So dim the lights, sit back, and notice that I’m starting my ghost story with a flagrant digression that allows me to mention two brand-new, big-budget films and stick in a cool image which, knowing this blog, will be of a nude man…

...only a semi-nude man, Eric. Ryan Reynolds has the sickest body in Hollywood. Pity to cover it up with CGI in Green Lantern.

The surest way to wreck a movie is to let a computer make it. It’s like crack. If you plan to go on a gang-banging thrill ride and be dead or in jail by morning, you have found your ticket to ride. But filmmakers who care about quality of life and self-respect know that the computer, like crack cocaine, is necessary but best when used in moderation. Art comes from the head and the heart, not from Hewlett Packard.

People Or Plastic?

BAKER STREET

by Eric J Baker

Congratulations. You survived the apocalypse.

I guess Jesus doesn’t read Pure Film Creative (despite the “topless Magdalene” tag last week), because he passed right over me when flinging souls into Hell like I wasn’t even there! However, as surprised – and slightly miffed – as I am to have been spared, it wasn’t the oddest event of my week.

That distinction belongs to Thursday night, when I found myself standing about 18 inches from Weird Al Yankovic, an entertainer about whom I had hitherto no opinion and never expected to see live from that or any distance. Such are the sudden twists and turns of life.

The venue was the State Theater, a renovated vaudeville palace in central Jersey, where I once fell asleep during the 25th anniversary showing of 2001: a Space Odyssey, despite it having been introduced by somebody. He didn’t climb into the audience and sing to the woman next to me, like Weird Al did on Thursday, hence becoming forgettable.

A new tradition: Every generation now has the plain Italo-American chick who morphs herself into an un-nuanced, overdressed, workaholic performer who champions homosexuals and habitually pisses all over the Catholic church.

As Weird Al played his set, I noticed many of the artists he parodies are dead: Jim Morrison, Michael Jackson, Coolio, Kurt Kobain. Oops. Sorry, Coolio. Not content to milk past glory, Al also mimicked Lady Gaga’s Poker Face with his version called Polka Face.

Weird Al or Lady Gaga. Which one is the bigger fake?

I Am Unable To Achieve Satisfaction

Song lyrics are not poetry. Alone, they are paint in search of a canvas.  They are clingy lovers who insist on doing everything with their partners. They gaze longingly into the eyes of music and say, “You complete me.”  Music grits its teeth and thinks, why are you so goddamn needy?

Yet who gets all the glory?

When Americans OD’d on Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill in 1995 (in those ancient times when record stores existed outside of Nick Hornby books), pretentious music writers held a “praise art” orgy in her honor. Her shatteringly awesome lyrics regaled us with the story of her breakup from a boyfriend who turned out to be a cheating jerk. It was so edgy, so intense, so cutting that…

For someone who rode to fame in a chariot drawn by vitriol, it’s damned near impossible to find a picture of Alanis angry. Thank you, India?

Wait. Back up a second. Men are two-faced jerks who dont appreciate women? Apparently, these folks were stunned that a rock artist discovered a topic county singers have been beating to death since the 1940s. In fairness to pretentious music writers, they have to rave about the lyrics. It’s job security.

But it was not Alanis’s words that sold us, peeps, it was her delivery. She’s so earnestly pissed off, she’s hyperventilating. She may indeed be brilliant, but not as a lyricist. Maybe, when she’s not singing rock songs, she’s on the cusp of unlocking the secret to cold fusion. That would make her a brilliant physicist. There’s a slight distinction.

Pop lyricists don’t need to be brilliant, just earnest. Whether Chris Martin of Coldplay is telling the tale of a washed-up king who one ruled the world (?) or Chris Brown is crooning