In Which We Rock Out

 

As a proud little baby hippie, back in the late '60s during the waning days of both the Nixon administration and the age of Aquarius, I was a passionate lover of loud rock and roll and I have the tinnitus to prove it.  So when our good friend Drumstick asked if we wanted to go see the new documentary, Becoming Led Zeppelin, my answer was an enthusiastic "OH HELL YEAH".

And that's how you would have found Drumstick, Hotfoot and me downtown, after dark, for a very amusing evening, helped in no small part by the excellent Mexican food we had for dinner beforehand.  The movie was pretty darn entertaining, even if it did lean sort of towards hagiography.  But I suppose if you want the Led Zeppelin seal of approval, you have to kiss a little Led Zeppelin ass.  The timeline of the film is pretty fine-grained; it's more than 2 hours long and it only covers between when they first meet as a band in 1968 and when when they become the number one group in the world in 1970.  There were times when I felt like we were watching those 18 months in real time.

The only speaking roles are the three surviving members of the band (drummer John Bonham died in 1980).  They're photographed seated in sort of throne-like chairs, beaming and nodding, modest and genial as all get out as befits the elder sages of rock and roll.  Nobody actually calls themselves "genius" but it's pretty clearly understood.  Movies about bands like this typically would examine the "sex and drugs and rock 'n roll" triumvirate, but if that's what you're looking for, you can just take your sordid little business elsewhere.  The words "heroin" and "cocaine" are never mentioned, and groupies are thoroughly ignored.  This is all about the Music. 

I suppose that's the way it should be, and certainly the presentation of the music is outstanding.  Instead of just clips of different songs to illustrate the points being made, entire songs are presented from various concerts.  The first two albums they put out, which are what the movie covers, have some great songs in them, like Dazed and Confused and Ramble On, so the producers couldn't really miss.  Like the title says, this is the Becoming part of their story.   Probably the biggest problem I had was there's no sense of struggle; the boys meet each other, they're geniuses, and everything falls in place.  But man, do they ever have great hair.  All four of them consistently looked like they have just escaped from a shampoo commercial.

Maybe I am just not whom this was made for.  I was a fan of the band, but really more of their stuff from the mid-70s like Immigrant Song or Kashmir, and even then, I was always more of a Bowie/Pink Floyd/the Who fan.  Certainly, I was never the kind of Led head as most of the crowd in the theater was.

Drumstick and I had disagreed about what the audience would be like, I predicted it would be an Old Hippie Festival.  Once again, I was right, of course.  I always am.  Drumstick is only in his early 50s so he wasn't even born during the period the movie covers.  But I was a teenager in that era and remember it vividly, as did most of the rest of the audience.  When I looked out over that crowd in the dim lights, the gray hair was gleaming everywhere.  It looked like an outing from every old folks home in town.  The crowd was very enthusiastic, clapping and singing and just a-hootin' and a-hollerin' in general.  Yuck.  Calm down, pappy.  If they have to stop this movie for your coronary, I'm going to be mad. 

Boys who put the sex in sex, drugs, and rock and roll:

Skinny boys in shabby jeans, it's a look.

It's been cold and gray for much too long.

Charles Paquette, professional beauty.

I heard one of the cats puking last night, and now I can't find the relevant puke, which makes me uneasy

Speaking of dazed and confused.

Beefy goodness.

Kirill Dowidoff.  I know you can't see his dick.  Use your imagination.

Things That Lead from One to Another in mrpeenee's Universe

This is one of the driest winters in California history.  Finally, this evening a smallish storm has rolled in and I opened the windows to revel in the pattering, got distracted by the internet and just now realized the house is filed with the pungent aroma of skunk.  What the hell, skunk?  You don't have anything better to do than wander around on the only rainy night this year stinking the place up?  Stupid dumb skunk.

While I was lost in the wonders of the world wide web, I stumbled across a series of references to what many authors claimed were the worst movies ever made, movies worse than the Lindsay Lohen oeuvre, a series by some schmoe named David DeCoteau. The series is called "1313."  I have no idea why they're considered a "series," they seem to have no discernible relation to each other except that the main feature of each is a bunch of attractive young men running around in their underpants.  Sounds good to me.

Here's the trailer from my favorite

Is that great or what?  Plus you know from the trailer that the movie is so bad that you don't need to waste any time actually watching it.  The trailer is sufficient unto itself.

Amazingly, one of the panty bitches was Corey Monteith.  Perhaprs you remember this Monteith person, he's the guy who OD'ed last year.  I only remember it because all the news outlets were slobbering so much about it at the time.  In researching semi-naked men of the 1313 world, I discovered I had completely mistaken just who Corey Monteith is.  Was.

This is Corey Monteith.  He's dead.

This is not Corey Monteith.  He's not dead, but he is who I've been thinking was Monteith all this time. What do you know?

But then I also ran across this, which actually looks funny.

It's on my list.

Caperless

I like heist movies, like The Thomas Crowne Affair, or The Italian Job, or Rififi, or Inception, any complicated caper that involves split second timing and completely unbelievable coincidences and high speed car chases through a mid-town Manhattan with amazingly light traffic.  Or a naked Jason Statham.  Especially a naked Jason Statham.

So I settled in to watch Now You See Me happily enough and after it was over thought "What the fuck was that?  Can I have my ninety minutes back, please?"  Turns out, no.

I understand all of this genre requires a certain willing suspension of disbelief (again, Manhattan car chases with no traffic.  Yep.  Okay.) but Now You See Me takes this to another plane, sort of a willing assumption of simple mindedness.  The obligatory car chase turns out to have absolutely no purpose in the movie.  There is no reason the crooks indulge in it, it does nothing for the plot (or "plot") and the reveal of how the crooks structured it is just ludicrous.  It involves Woody Harrelson driving a city bus full of commuters who apparently don't notice there is a car attached to the bus.  With a convenient dead guy in it.

It's all very slick and the cast is nice looking

Dave Franco, James Franco's little brother, who simply disappears for a big chunk of the movie.  Maybe he found something better to do.

Mark Ruffalo, who was cute, in a fresh-out-of-rehab sort of way.

but let me emphasize the main adjective here is "ludicrous."

One of minor points I found the most irritating turns on the cops being able to find a hotel room in New Orleans at Mardi Gras because they have an Interpol chick who speaks French and, naturlement, being able to do so is a big plus in the Big Easy.  I lived there a long time and ran into plenty of natives who apparently could not speak English, but not because they were Francophones.  I know it was a French colonial town, but so were St. Louis and Detroit and nobody expects them to roll out fluency in French.

And no naked Jason Statham.  I mean, really, what's the point?

mrpeenee Has Fallen

You know how there are movies which you can actually feel removing points from your I.Q. as you watch them?  Which brings us to Olympus Has Fallen, a ripe piece of tripe that rolled out onto an unsuspecting mrpeenee this evening because once it started I was too lazy to change the channel to something better, something like Are You Being Served?

I had initially thought anything with Gerard Butler in it had to have something going for it.

I was wrong.  Plus he plays the whole thing wearing a long sleeve shirt which makes me suspect there was Spanx involved under it all.  And Angela Bassett, for god's sake, who certainly deserves better.  As do I.

Sunday Night at the Movies

As I mentioned, the New York Times groused that Liz and Dick was "not terrible enough," but I don't know what they were whining about, it seemed plenty awful to me.  Puh-lenty.  Diane von Austinburg kept asking what I had expected.  It was pretty much just as bad as I had been led to think, but that was what kept me cringing and moaning loudly throughout.

We debated who might have been better cast in the leads.  I was undecided between William Shatner and Courtney Love as Richard Burton, but absolutely convinced that Liz should have been Lypsynka.

Then we stumbled on a French silent movie that made no sense, possibly because we were all loaded by then, possibly because we missed the first hour and had to refer to all the characters by labels like "Baby Teeth" and "Crazy Wig".  There was a seance in the Magic Room where Crazy Wig's brother climbed under the table, apparently to orally satisfy the guests.  As you can imagine, the whole thing was a great improvement over Liz and Dick.

We Give Thanks for So Many Things

In case you missed it, Thursday was Thanksgiving.

before

after

Let's just move on, but not before offering up sincere and deep thanks to Diane von Austinburg (who blew in town just for the cooking) and Secret Agent Fred, both of whom were great help.

In more up-to-the-moment news, we are sharing in the general slavering over tonight's trainwreck that is the Liz and Dick movie starring Lindsay Lohan.  A great many reports confirm that it seems destined to challenge Plan 9 from Outer Space's long held title as the worst movie ever made.  The New York Time's review actually said that it wasn't "terrible enough."  That's right, they were complaining it was insufficiently crappy.  Wow.  That's just greedy.  Anyway, come 9:00 PM West Coast time, count on the inhabitants of Chez Peenee to be in our jim jams, thrilling to this epic.

Lifesaving bitches at attention in case the Virginia Woolfe scenes overcome mrpeenee.

A Night at the Theatuh

Jon over at Give ‘em the Old Razzle Dazzle recently posted about the charming Yvonne De Carlo on her Sept. 1 birthday which  brought to mind the  magical evening some friends and I saw her in a bizarre live show in New Orleans in 1986 or '87.

My friend Abby was house manager of the theater and had called to beg me to scrape up as many of my friends to come for free to the show because ticket sales had been so anemic she needed to paper the house.  A bunch of us agreed, which may have been a mixed blessing for Abby since we wound up laughing so hard we had the audience around us, composed almost entirely of Old Dears, glaring at us viciously.

I think the show was called something like "Legends of the Silver Screen," but it lives on in memory as "Has Beens on Parade."   I guess it might charitably called a "cabaret act."  Besides Yvonne, it also trotted out Howard Keel, Katherine Grayson, Jane Russell, Mamie Van Doren (!) and Dorothy Lamour.

Each one would creak out on stage, fumble through a couple of songs and what they must have thought was patter and then shuffle off.  The whole evening carried with it a thrilling frisson that any one of them might actually die right there before us, onstage.  Surely that's how troopers like this would want to go.

Mamie van Doren was tarted out (and I mean that in the most literal sense of the term) in a gown that looked a lot like it had been run up from a shower curtain.  As the designated chicken of the group, she flashed most of her still substantial cleavage in a manner that was awe inspiring.  Possibly a little scary, too.

Howard Keel came out with an oxygen tank and thanked Jesus for something or the other.  It wasn't clear exactly what.

Howard was followed up by his old co-star Katherine Grayson who reminisced about her role in Show Boat (in her review of it, Pauline Kael referred to Ms Grayson as "the singing valentine", a reference to the saccharine soprano she typically belted out.)  We all settled in expecting her to take a crack at "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man" or maybe even "After the Ball " (man, would that have been appropriate.)  Instead she launched into an astonishing cover of "Ole Man River."  Apparently, her range had dropped into something approaching basso and she wasn't about to raise her sights any higher.

We ran into Abby at the  intermission which everyone (including, apparently, the cast) spent getting as loaded as possible.  She apologized for getting us into what was rapidly turning into a theatrical disaster. We laughed, made some jokes about Madame Tussard and got more glares from the people around us.

Then we were back for Jane Russell.  All I recall about her was that she had some trouble with her props when she tried "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend" (the nerve!) and that she looked a lot like a mean lesbian gym teacher.

Yvonne was up next and really was the most successful of the whole lot, mostly because she didn't seem to be taking any of it too seriously.  She sang "Before the Parade Passes Me By" and got so tangled up in the last chorus, she finished a bar behind the band.  She just laughed and said "I guess that's a parade that passed me by!"  Yukyukyuk.  What a gal.

Dorothy Lamour, who was born in New Orleans, was last and came out to a very warm hand.  There were people in the audience who obviously knew her from their long gone youth and she worked it, recalling watching vaudeville in the theater we were in.  By that point in the evening, she could have pulled out a reminiscence about seeing John Wilkes Boothe there and I doubt anyone would have batted an eye.   She sang something or the other, but so many people in the audience had fallen asleep, she could have gotten away with shadow puppets.

There was something like a curtain call when they all came back out.  I have never seen a cast taking their bows with so many of the audience determinedly making their way up the aisles.  My friends and I were probably some of the only faces they could have seen, and we were still laughing.

So hahahaha, and now I am slightly mortified to realize that even though they seemed so terribly ancient, I am now closer in age to these dinosaurs than the stoned and giggling smartypants I was then.   Wait, is that a parade I see passing by?

To put this in pespective, a similar show today might very well be composed of Neil Young, Micky Dolenz, Bette Midler, Henry Winkler, and Adrienne Barbeau.  Singing "Ole Man River."  Actually, I would line up for that show. 

Clint, Clint, Clint

OK, I haven't watched the entire lunacy that is Clint Eastwood's remarks (one would be hard pressed to call it a "speech") at the Republican convention, but not because I haven't tried.  I just can't sit through more than a few seconds of the stammering, wandering,"I left my tinfoil hat at home" wackiness of it.

And then, in reading about it, I stumbled across the slightly astounding fact that he's scheduled to direct Beyonce in a remake of the movie A Star Is Born.  Wow.  On so many levels, wow.

Wow number 1: Clint Eastwood is a proven good director (Million Dollar Baby.)  He is also a proven crazy old man (Republican National Committee convention.)

Wow number 2:  Beyonce is making a movie career out of resurrecting gay singing icons gone-by, either dead (Etta James in Cadillac Records,) from one of their past heydays (Diana Ross in Dreamgirls.  Sort of.) or fictional/past/dead (Esther/Judy Garland in A Star is Born.)   A mrpeenee prediction: before the next presidential election, we will see Beyonce in a remake of Yentl.  You heard it here first.

Wow number 3.  Clint Eastwood used to be really cute.

Something Wrong with Strippin'?

Magic Mike.  Hmmm.  Put me down as a firm "It wasn't awful."  Nobody embarrassed themselves. Tatum Channing was sort of adorable.  I had assumed the music would be pretty rockin', rocktastic, in fact, but no such luck.  It's Raining Men is the only thing I can remember and that's not much of a highlight.  Tampa looked like Tampa; make of that what you will.

And the stripping?  Considering the quality of meat they had to work with, especially considering that, it was amazingly dull.

I think you need to approach the fleshy arts with a certain amount of lechery to have them work and that was missing here.  The filmmakers might not have been actually embarrassed by it all, but they certainly didn't seem to relish the sight of Matt Bomer in a thong, either.

They seemed sort of resigned, let's-just-get-this-unfortunate-business-out-of-the-way-shall-we?

When Joe Manganiello hits the stage after working up with a vacuum cock pump, I want to not only see the results, I want to linger on them.  Instead, we get a fireman costume that would have passed muster on the Disney channel.

To put this in perspective, Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter was showing at the same theater and as we left, I wished we had gone to see that instead.  How's that for a review?

Gasp.

Who knew?

In other queer happenings (or mo mo news, as it were,) Secret Agent Fred, the Fashion Sensation and I are all going to see Magic Mike, a biopic ripped from the headlines about the lives and loves, the laffs and heartaches of stripperboys, starring Joe Manganiello's titties.

Amazingly, Fred had heard nothing of this epic until Sunday at brunch, but once we had filled him in on the details (i.e. Joe Manganiello's titties,) he was enthusiastically on board.  I'll report back as soon as I can get my lap back under the keyboard.

A Good Cry. Putting the "Moron" in "Oxymoron"

I don't cry. I am not a crying person.   I say that not as some testimony to how tough or butch I am (there's an amusing idea,) it's just not how I react.  When R Man sickened and died, I made it through those very dark days without a tear, and not because I restrained myself;  I just don't cry.

Imagine my surprise tonight, then, as I watched the movie 50/50 and burst into huge weeping sobs. Wracking, wailing, misery pouring from several orifices.  I had to pause the movie.  I scared Saki.  I sort of scared myself, a rational part of me watching horrified demanding to know what the fuck was going on.  Could it be more than just reacting to cinematic mastery?  Mmmmmmmaybe.

When the movie first came out and got such good reviews, I considered going to watch it, even though a film about dealing with cancer sounded like trouble after the last couple of years.  Thank god I skipped it; I have a vivid mental image of myself huddled in tears in the men's room of the Lowe's metroplex.  Yuck.

Maybe it was just a perfect emotional storm.  I'm still sick; R Man's death is (obviously, understandably) a sensitive part of my life; and Joseph Gordon-Levitt is both cute and effective in the role.  Still, I just wasn't prepared for this.   I have so little experience with the phenomenon, I didn't even know crying makes your face hurt.  Does that seem fair?  First you feel bad and then you feel bad?

Crying.  What a stupid idea.

Done

I just love crossing things off my little OCD To Do list.

1) Get my creaky old Mac upgraded and all the bugs lurking around in its depths expunged so that watching porn wouldn't be so annoyingly slow.  I had planned to haul the old dear all the way down to a very inconvenient part of downtown where the very idea of parking is to be laughed at when I remembered Secret Agent Fred's boyfriend Duane works for Apple.   He knows all the kinds of tech stuff required and which is at the fingers of an ordinary 6 year old, but beyond mrpeenee.

We had a very amusing afternoon as he beat the computer into submission and then we went over to Fred's and rearranged his kitchen because we're all gay and stuff.  And now that my computer is blazing along, I realize how sluggish it's been and how resigned I had gotten to it.  No more, mutha.

2) Go see Dark Shadows.  Also with Secret Agent Fred.  I loved it, it looks great, so very Tim Burton-ish with lots of visual gags.  Michelle Pfeiffer is very tough bitch, which I love, especially when she parks herself at the top of some stairs with a shotgun anchored on her hip, blazing away.  Johnny Depp, of course, is wonderful.  I had worried after seeing the trailer that he would just be some halfassed cross between Captain Jack Black and the Michael Jackson imitation from Willy Wonka, but nope.  Interesting and funny and sexy, even under a couple of pounds of kabuki/dracula makeup.

3) Find a Christmas card, just to get ready.

Check, Check and Check.

You Go, I'll Stay

I stopped going to movies a couple of years ago. I'm not sure why; they just seemed more trouble than they're worth. Strange considering how wild I was for them when I was younger. I remember when the first multiplexes opened, I would sometimes wander in and go watch whatever was starting. Today, though, I actually went all the way downtown all by myself, just like a big boy, to see Hugo. After a hiatus of movie watching as long as mine, this might not have been the strongest choice, but maybe it was sort of easing back into the habit, I'm not sure.

I had gotten the impression Hugo was a dazzling steampunk adventure; instead it turned out to be a very well made, insipid little movie. Steampunk? Not so much. After about the third scene of the little kid running through the big giant gears, I asked myself "When is this actualy going to start?"

And was that Jude Law? I guess when you're Martin Scorcese you can dial up just about anybody you want for what was essentially a cameo. "Yeah, come on in Jude, well get you out in time for your dentist appointment this afternoon, promise."

Also, 3-D seems like as big a disappointment this time as it was in the 50s. Certainly in the big, rushing-through-the crowd shots I couldn't ever figure what I was looking at.

I did like the lovely homage to the early days of film making, with the studios of French cinema pioneers recreated and scenes both as they would have been shown and how they were made. And I have a crush on Sacha Baron Cohen so OK for him in his tight blue velour pants.

You know what I think would have made the whole thing much more worthwhile? Big titties.

To Da Moon

Perhaps you've heard of this crazy French silent movie from 1902 Le Voyage Dans La Lune (A Trip To the Moon) that is considered the first science fiction movie made. The hand colored versions by its creator were thought to be lost until a version was found in Spain in the 1990s. There is an excellent story about the film and the new soundtrack over at NPR. You can see it here

The film looks to be both completely antique (much closer to vaudeville than what a modern audience would think of as a movie) and totally psychodelica, trippin' like a thousand screaming monkeys. Apropriately, the soundtrack was produced by a groovy French band called Air, who I like but have never paid much attention to. Now, I've decided I need this soundtrack. Groove on.

Something Wrong with Strippin?

So many, many people ask me "mrpeenee, what is your favorite big muscial about a psychotic mother pimping her daughter out into a life of quasi-prostitution?" I laugh tinklingly and reply "Oh, that would be Gypsy."

Take it away Miss Mazeppa:

Once I was a schleppah....

Criminal Minds. And Booty

Sorry, I can't talk right now, A&E is running an all day marathon of Criminal Minds and I'm only halfway through. A day long orgy of grim, tight mouthed FBI agents and serial killers who giggle. Tip: if the guy sitting next to you on the bus is giggling, you're in trouble.

A big part of Criminal Minds' appeal is Shemar Moore

The FBI apparently doubles as a gay porn factory. Shemar also starred in Tyler Perry's Madea: Diary of Mad Black Woman. I know this because I have been sucked into the vortex of black cinema on the On Demand channel of my cable. The "black cinema" turns out to be all Tyler Perry, all the time. It's as if a "gay cinema" channel was dedicated to permutations on Cage aux Folles. Actually, that's probably happened but I just haven't found it yet.

There is on-going speculation about Tyler Perry's sexuality, to which I respond with a hearty "duh." And it's not his choice of appearing in drag for his most famous role, it his directorial decisions that give away his big mo-ness. Exhibits A and B:

Adam Rodriguez

Boris Kodjoe

stars of a couple of Perry's vehicles and typical of all the men in his movies all of whom are humpy beyond any human norm. It's possible they are mutants. Perry's set-up for the shots of female protagonists show the tender concerns of a dish detergent commercial, while the boys get an on-going soft-core porn thang.

Plus, the women, who are always strong , but oddly mistreated, usually look like they're about ten years older than the men (strong, sensitive, caring, butch, Christian.) What's with that?

Lastly, here is the big wedding scene from Madea's Family Reunion.

Could anyone but a gay man with serious conflicts about heterosexual norms give the greenlight to this in his movie. Yes, those are live women strung up there with some harps. Did I mention various closer shots of the set included big muscley almost-naked men in frames with angel wings and trumpets. Why? Uh, the polite answer might be "I dunno;" the less polite supposition being Tyler owed some trick a favor and this was payback.

Anyway, I gotta go, I got serial killers waiting.

Stripper Joe

You know how deeply I lust after the enormous hunk o' beef, Joe Manganiello, from True Blood. I have even taught myself to spell his name correctly, the better to write "Mrs. Joe Manganiello" on my notebook should I ever find myself trapped in homeroom again.

Word now reaches us he will be participating in the biopic of Channing Tatum, aka Mr. Potato Head, specifically on that sleazy portion of Mr. Channing's life when he was a stripper. I had to make a short sidetrip through Wikipedia to find out who this Channing creature is; turns out he ground out some G.I. Joe movie. But wasn't that Demi Moore before she got her Showgirl tits? I'm confused.

Not so confused that I'm not already salivating at the idea of seeing Joe peel down to a tiny little thong. Yay babay.

Chair Rehab

I have once again waded into the questionable waters of home decorating. I know I am actually better at oral sex than I am at Martha Stewart-ish projects, but that still stops me from neither one nor the other.

My latest plunge (into decorating, not blowjobs) was reupholstering the dining room chairs. Amazingly, I think they turned out splendidly, especially since the whole thing was so easy. The only thing I fell short on was my timing.

That staple of cornball good time cinema, Grease, was on television Sunday night. I knew the only point of the whole show is the last ten minutes when Sandy tarts herself up as a whore in order to lure Danny into her pants (poor thing would have probably done better with big ol' dildo, both for her own love box and for snagging John Taravolta.) I decided to knock out the chairs while the rest of the film was struggling along. I did, too, but missed You're the One that I Want by seconds and wound up with the decidedly second-tier big number We Go Together instead. Rats. There was the consolation of seeing a young, blonde-ish Lorenzo Lamas attempting to shake his ass, but still....

The velvet I used was on sale for 40 percent off (yay) and looked shocking pink in the store (fucking fluorescents.) In person, it's a much more staid magenta, but I still like it.

Before. Tired and tatty.

After. Pussy Pink