Maya Deren and the Shocking Blue

Good Times in March!!

Just wanted to post some things happening this month in Western Mass. I hope you make it out to some of these worthy events. If you have anything to add just send it in to bombasticos@yahoo.com.

Tonight!!
---Mafanti at Deja Brew in Wendell, 9-11 pm. World folk soul with Shanti, Mafu and friends. Shanti has been a guest on clandestino a few times. www.myspace.com/mafanti

Tomorrow, Saturday 3/6 during the light hours...
---"Death & Taxes". A half hour movie about war tax resisters. Showing at Greenfields Market in Greenfield. 4 pm and free.

Tomorrow night, Sat 3/6...
---The Equalites at the Rendezvous in Turners Falls, 9 pm. Excellent reggae band, very soulful and a local institution. $5 www.rendezvoustfma.com
---J.D. Hairston (NorthPoleTapes), Brian Phantom Fairlane, Simon Eaton, Luke Eaton, Dakota Roberts, and Eric D'ambra at the Siren Cafe in Greenfield, 7 pm. I'm looking forward to the NorthPoleTapes/Urthquake split 7" on Spooky Tree out late summer. Also looking forward to going on tour with the dude in September. Very cool and meditative kalimba/guitar/etc compositions. $3 and up sliding scale.
---Skokazoba at Black Moon Lounge in Belchertown, 9 pm. $5. This is your local Afrobeat band. Watch for their new show schedule and CD coming soon. www.skokazoba.com



Thursday 3/11...
---Grace Potter & the Nocturnals at MassMOCA, Hunter Center in North Adams, 8 pm. B-3-driven blues rock/soul from Vermont, they have established a reputation as an excellent live act. $18 for advance ticket purchase. www.massmoca.org


(Grace Potter & the Nocturnals)

Film festival!!
---Women's Film Festival in Brattleboro, VT. It runs from March 12-21. Celebrate women's history month with this film fest, taking place all over Brat. Details at www.womensfilmfestival.org

Saturday 3/13...
---Third Annual Cabin Fever Seed Swap at Greenfields Market in Greenfield, 1-4 pm. Bring the extra seeds you saved and share with others! For more info: 413-774-2220 http://www.buylocalfood.com/page.php?id=12
---Nuggets Night!!! at the Rendezvous in Turners Falls, 9 pm. Psychedelic and garage rock classics from the Nuggets sets. Featuring Ray Mason, the Original Cowards, Claudia Malibu and many, many more! $3. www.rendezvoustfma.com
---Gaia Roots at Bishop's Lounge in Northampton. Shanti (Mafanti) and crew present their CD release party ("Motherdrum"!!) at the Bish. 8 pm. www.gaiaroots.com Check out the CD cover design by Shanti!



Sunday March 14th...
---Flywheel Monthly Flea Market at Flywheel in Easthampton. Free! 10 am to 3 pm. Sell or buy clothing, records, movies, art, junk, etc. It's a benefit for the esteemed Flywheel Arts Collective, a Western Mass institution. They will be re-opening soon, thanks to your support and help. www.flywheelarts.org

Friday March 19th...
---Sweet Exorcist. Our own monthly at the People's Pint in Greenfield. Come hang, dance and drink at the area's finest brewpub. Resident DJs Andujar, B-COMING and guest DJ Urthquake (South Jersey). Funk, soul, garage, afrobeat, rocksteady, psych, hip hop, etc. All vinyl and free. 10 pm.
---Rob Skelton's Pitchfork at Burrito Rojo in Turners Falls, 8 pm. Come eat and listen, dance, drink etc. A good beer selection too! www.burritorojo.com
---Urthquake, NorthPoleTapes and others at a location TBD. Stay tuned. It will be an early (7 pm) thing.

Thursday March 25th...
---Raining on the Moon Sextet with William Parker, Hamid Drake, Lewis "Flip" Barnes, Rob Brown, Eri Yamamoto, and excellent vocalist Leena Conquest. It's the second show of the season's Magic Triangle series, all concerts featuring the all-universe duo of Parker & Drake. At Bezanson Recital Hall at UMass, Amherst. $12. http://www.umass.edu/fac/magictriangle/


(William Parker & Hamid Drake)

Saturday March 27th...
---Zakir Hussain at Bowker, UMass-Amherst. 8 pm, $15-35. The legend leads the Masters of Percussion in concert, a real Valley treat. Details at http://www.umass.edu/fac/calendar/centerseries/events/ZakirHussain.html

I'm sure I'm missing something! Let me know what's going on.
Cheers.

Film Noir in Greenfield

The Garden Cinema in downtown Greenfield will be rolling classic film noirs on Tuesdays, 6 pm in January. In conjunction with the Greenfield Business Association, we are fortunate enough to be screening such classics. Buy your tickets at the door or get a pass for all four screenings at places like the People's Pint or the Hope & Olive.

The Noir-Fest begins on January 5th with "Sunset Boulevard", about an aging Hollywood star (Gloria Swanson) thinking she's invincible by taking in a young and hungry writer (William Holden). This is a good flick from one of my favorite directors, Billy Wilder.

Wilder also directs the famous Fred MacMurray/Barbara Stanwyck flick "Double Indemnity". Also starring Edward G. Robinson, and with writing help by Raymond Chandler, this is a classic murder flick involving an insurance scam. "Double Indemnity" will be shown on Tuesday the 12th of Jan.

The 19th will feature Orson Welles' classic late-noir, "Touch of Evil". Charlton Heston plays a Mexican narco, and Welles is a racist pig...(I mean cop). They match brains and someone comes out on top. Listen for Henry Mancini's cool (cinema) lounge score.

The series concludes on the 26th with John Huston's "The Maltese Falcon". A great early Huston flick (his first!) with all the fast direction and drunken stars that made his 40s/50s work so much fun! Humphrey Bogart plays Sam Spade, a private eye who only looks for the gold. It glows in appearance as a Falcon trophy, a mystical underground artifact that everyone seems to want. Bogart and Peter Lorre are on top of the game in this bangin' noir classic. A must see.

Here's the link to the spot:

http://www.gardencinemas.net/index.cfm?p=announcements&id=243

Film Soundtrack Favorites

Yeah...I'm hitting you all up for your favorite movie soundtracks or scores. Be it sentimental or purely artistic, let us know what has moved you in a cinematic fashion.





Send your suggestions and comments to: bombasticos@yahoo.com

Check Out Our Movie Site

Becky started up the DejaView site for all things cinema-related. Watch for my soundtracks article. Speaking of which, if anybody has any favorite movie soundtracks, let me know. Contributions accepted.

To visit the DejaView blog click here.

Out of the Past - a Noir Appreciation

Author: Theo Wulff
Contact: beshef2000@yahoo.com

I am obsessed with old black and white films, in particular those which fall under the shadowy, bleak category of film noir. These films are pretty much all I watch these days. The ghostly, fog-heavy landscapes and half-obscured faces that fill these films provide a dream-like visual aesthetic that is almost entirely missing from color films. Bright, cheery color lacks the depth and ambiguity offered by black and white cinematography: Ted Turner’s contemptible campaign of colorization providing perfect illustration of this, as the deeply impressionistic and allegorical compositions of black and white were lost with the garish, gaudy substitution of color. For me, the indelible image of doomed, three time loser Richard Widmark in Night and the City (a title that is as representative of the noir aesthetic as any), scurrying across the sinister, shadowy streets of London’s criminal underground, decaying, desolate tenement houses threatening to swallow him whole, is far more powerful and iconic than anything I could hope to find in a slick, CGI-laden blockbuster at the local faceless multiplex.



These films don’t just appeal to me visually, though many has been the time I have paused my DVD player to marvel at the carefully crafted composition of a particular shot, as haunting and evocative as any painting. The acting and dialogue in films of this era are also, in my opinion, far superior to their modern day counterparts. Watching Humphrey Bogart in a film like The Maltese Falcon, tossing off caustic, cynical one-liners with sneering aplomb is a true joy. With his haggard countenance and world-weary eyes, Bogie’s authenticity is unimpeachable: he doesn’t just play a role, he lives inside of it.

Robert Mitchum is another one of my favorites. An intriguing combination of hard-drinking macho man, intellectual proto-beatnik, and sensitive soul, Mitchum is the epitome of cool. His acting style is unique, as a laid-back, almost indifferent demeanor belies a smoldering intensity that is put to wonderful effect in films like Out of the Past. After amoral, doe-eyed Jane Greer protests that she didn’t take the forty grand she is accused of stealing, he intones in his syrupy, somnolent baritone, “Baby, I don’t care.” (That phrase is also the title of Lee Server’s wildly entertaining 2001 biography of Mitchum.)

In 1955, Mitchum would star in one of the finest American films ever made, the gothic, surreal Night Of The Hunter, in which he played a demonic, scheming preacher with “LOVE” and “HATE” tattooed across the knuckles of his hands. The film is a startlingly original piece of cinema, owing as much to German expressionism as traditional Hollywood narrative. Of course it was a box office failure, ending the directorial career of stage icon Charles Laughton almost before it began.

There is a priceless photograph taken during the conclusion of Mitchum’s 1948 trial for marijuana possession, in which he is standing between co-defendant Lila Leeds and high-powered attorney Jerry Giesler. Leeds and Mitchum have just been found guilty, and their responses are caught by a reporter’s camera. Leeds stands mouth agape, shocked and dismayed. Giesler, his hands on his hips, glowers and grimaces. Mitchum has a delighted smirk on his face, reacting as if the judge has just told him a rather risqué joke, rather than pronouncing him guilty of drug possession.



The femme fatales that inhabit these flickering, fatalistic films are as memorable as the male leads, luscious glamour girls whose style and grace easily outclass the actresses of today, who are primarily a dull, unrefined lot. You’d never see Grace Kelly stumbling around in sweatpants or drunkenly flashing her crotch outside a nightclub, that’s for sure. On screen, they were mesmerizing. Once you have seen beautiful, beatific Veronica Lake smile, her luscious locks cascading onto her shapely shoulders like a honey blonde waterfall, you won’t soon forget it. Gorgeous Gene Tierney, as the coldly calculating murderess in Leave Her To Heaven, even manages to make overbites look sexy. Then there is the iconic image of Barbara Stanwyck, clad in towel and cheap blonde wig, alighting on a staircase in Double Indemnity, a silky half smile playing across her crimson lips. This enticing vision holds more erotic possibility than any number of interchangeable, gratuitous Hollywood romps in the sack. I would rather watch Rita Hayworth’s virtually skin-free striptease in Gilda, as she slowly, deliciously pulls off her long white gloves, than sit through Demi Moore’s disrobing in Striptease any day of the week.

The dialogue in film noir titles is also first rate. Crackling, razor sharp prose flies from the sneering mouths of the actors, reflecting the pessimistic, dour attitudes of many Americans in the post-war era, who had become disillusioned and weary, their happiness sapped by the horrors of WWII. Even the dullest and most uninspired films from this era still have a least a few redeeming moments of snappy patter, the kind of verbal repartee that is sorely lacking in today’s cinema, where well-written dialogue seems to have taken a back seat to mindless violence and gratuitous sex. In the 1940s, with the restrictions of the Production Code, sexuality could never be shown outright, which led screenwriters down a far cleverer path, as they were forced to use subtle, witty metaphors to get the message across. For this viewer, the sexually charged, double entendre-loaded exchanges between Bogart and smoky voiced Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep provide much more of an erotic thrill than the cold, clinical coupling of Angelina Jolie and her latest on-screen conquest. Witness this wonderful exchange from Double Indemnity, a verbal ping-pong match/mating dance between insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred Mac Murray) and conniving housewife Phyllis Dietrichson (Stanwyck):

Phyllis: Mr. Neff, why don't you drop by tomorrow evening about eight-thirty. He'll be in then.
Walter Neff: Who?
Phyllis: My husband. You were anxious to talk to him weren't you?
Walter Neff: Yeah, I was, but I'm sort of getting over the idea, if you know what I mean.
Phyllis: There's a speed limit in this state, Mr. Neff. Forty-five miles an hour.
Walter Neff: How fast was I going, officer?
Phyllis: I'd say around ninety.
Walter Neff: Suppose you get down off your motorcycle and give me a ticket.
Phyllis: Suppose I let you off with a warning this time.
Walter Neff: Suppose it doesn't take.
Phyllis: Suppose I have to whack you over the knuckles.
Walter Neff: Suppose I bust out crying and put my head on your shoulder.
Phyllis: Suppose you try putting it on my husband's shoulder.
Walter Neff: That tears it.



These are films I invariably view alone, as I have long since given up attempting to convert my friends to black and white aficionados. My suggestions of Detour or DOA are always met with eye-rolling derision and vetoed immediately, and I am then forced to sit through the latest Adam Sandler opus. This essay does paint an admittedly dire portrait of modern cinema, and I would like to make it clear that I am not dismissive of the entity as a whole. There are current directors like Wong Kar-wai, David Lynch, Bela Tarr and Aki Kaurismaki that create original, memorable films, but such auteur seem to be few and far between these days. The films that I treasure and am captivated by come from a bygone era that most of my peers are indifferent to or unaware of, a reality that I have reconciled myself to. To invoke the title of a Robert Mitchum film again, these pictures come from Out of the Past, a past that I am forever fascinated by.

And here's Rudolph Maté's "DOA"...

Review: Rasputin and The Empress

Author: Kastle

-----in my pre-teen years, I caught a film that seemed to capture my attention for action, intrigue, mystery and adventure.... I kind of remember it having something like “The Mad Monk” in the title.

Good show, too. the main character was true nutter - a Mystic Monk who pretty much drank excessively, pillaged and terrorized his Russian village. It seemed to me that the town just let him do whatever the hell he wanted because they were so afraid of the guy and caved in to his frightful hypnotic stare... I think I did a history report on the original fellow “Gregor (Grigori) Rasputin- The MAD MONK! (holy crap! it's the same guy that was highly featured in hellboy1 says Norbert!!) but come to find out, the guy wasn’t even really a monk at all. Or a Mystic. just a drunk, delinquent crack pot with a super-mean temper. The funny thing to me is that there is a long standing bar in Burlington VT just off main street named Rasputin’s they had shirts for a while in the 80’s bearing this guys likeness. When I recently went back to rewatch this lost gem from the ‘30s I found an interesting side note. An actor I was semi familiar with (from being beat over the head with the movie each christmas since birth) played the main character. That’s right! None other than Lionel Barrymore himself! I know him best as that “Warped, Frustrated Old Man” mean old Mr. Potter from it’s a wonderful life. I like his style and see very few classically trained actors on screen these days. and it wasn’t just him in this film... turns out the entire “Royal Family” as they were known were cast in this picture. This was the first and only movie in which all three of the original Barrymore’s acted together. It was neat and quirky, so I dug a little deeper and found that Ethel Barrymore plays the lover of her real life brother Lionel Barrymore in this film. (ewwww)

Additionally, I was passively wondering how exactly Drew “firestarter” Barrymore was related to _the_ Lionel Barrymore (if at all) because it seemed since Poison Ivy 1, her career went deep down the toily fastly. (though her appearance in Scary Movie 1 was kind of funny I suppose for obvious reasons). Anyhow, I was kind of thinking that Drew Barrymore has seriously tarnished the name of this family of actors forever and wiki was able to connect the dots with genealogy tree. looks something like this:


> Maurice Barrymore (not his real name!?!) married Georgiana Emma Drew, and had three children: Lionel Barrymore, Ethel Barrymore, and John Barrymore.

>> John Barrymore married Dolores Costello his third wife, and had: Dolores Ethel Mae Barrymore and married Thomas Fairbanks, and had Hillary Klaradru Fairbanks and John Drew Barrymore (Jr.)

>>> John Jr. married Ildiko Jaid his fourth (and not final?) wife and had Drew Barrymore. (the young actress from E.T.)

-------

So, with that said, go check out the 1932 classic:

Rasputin and the Empress
or “Rasputin the Mad Monk” as it was known in the UK release.
Rasputin and the Empress (Trailer)

or the several dozen other movies made before and since about this kooky cat.

he seems like one guy I’d definitely want on my team, but wouldn't want to meet up with in a dark alley!

Review: "Don't Play Us Cheap" soundtrack

Author: Becky Coleman



Written, composed and produced by Melvin Van Peebles; performed by original Broadway cast, including Esther Rolle of “Good Times” fame and former Ikette Joshie Jo Armstead.

An outrageous musical designed to pop off the party poopers, “Don’t Play Us Cheap” sends me with its glorious and grotesque blend of absurdity and earthiness, certainty and turmoil, sacred and profane.

Packed with laughs, straight talk and odd plot twists, the story is brought to life by its soundtrack, a singular medley of jazz, vaudeville, work songs, gospel, r&b, blues, showtunes and soul that can be enjoyed on its own but will only be enhanced by watching the movie. The songs are punctuated liberally with the performers calling and responding to each other — whooping up that loose, late-night party feeling.

The plot: Friends gather in a Harlem apartment, many of them transplants from the rural South, for a party on a Saturday night, and two devils (one destined for the bottom of your shoe) scheme to ruin their fun, but the good people are not having it because “when black folks throw a party, they don't play.” In an especially satisfying moment, a fiend tries to break the host’s records, but the platters, they just won’t shatter.

Like the shindig it portrays, the production offers escape, sweet and fleeting, from hard times. Has anyone tried to exploit your hospitality or spoil your hard-to-come-by good times? This story has a message for those fart-whippers: Good fun is foolproof, and love has the potential to win over haters. Have you ever been one of the party poopers yourself? Maybe you were confused, looking for love.

It’s not all sweetness. The celebration of joy is tangled up with the cacophony of moral contradiction that is the stuff of real life ... the pain that sharpens the pleasure ... the harshness that drives us to seek asylum in creativity and whimsy at best, and — at worst — hallucination, illusion, and delusion. However, the story masterfully navigates reality and fantasy with a disarming sense of humor.

“WELL, IF THE LORD CAN’T TAKE A LITTLE JOKE, HEAVEN’S NOT SUCH A WONDERFUL PLACE, ANYHOW.”
— Miss Maybell (Esther Rolle), the party’s host

Auteur Melvin Van Peebles wrote this multimedia “comedy musical,” as a book, then as a Broadway stage production, then he rounded up the cast for a movie (shot in dazzling, candy color and full of cinematic flourishes, many of which Spike Lee has copped). The 1973 movie is available on DVD now, and the 1972 soundtrack — if you cannot track down the original double-record Stax release — is paired on a CD set with Mr. Van Peebles’ visionary “Sweet Sweet Back’s Badasssss Song” score.