DISQUS

Well, that's just it Tom, it's not a real passion or a real rebellion...Ben & Elaine may think it is, and by 1973 they would have awakened to discover they're in a dead end marriage just like their parents. Maybe after their divorce they would have individually turned to other things--Est, fundamentalist Christianity, or scientology...--which also would have left them unfulfilled.

Victoria, that's not the way I see it. I think Ben knows he's not happy, but I don't get the sense that he has a real inner life or knows what would make him happy, and I get the sense that his "relationship" w/ Elaine isn't really something that comes from any genuine feeling but from the desire to experience some genuine feeling projected on to an obvious scrim.

I don't get the sense that anyone's really in love in the graduate, tho ben thinks he's in love. Pretty sure Elaine knows in her heart of hearts that she's not in love w/ Ben...who could be, he's just as empty as everyone else in the move, an emptiness he masks with a would-be worldly cynicism, a faux knowningness which in turn masks his own naivete.

Victoria, you're right about the color. The movie is really a transitional movie--still the brightly lit bright color of studio hollywood, not yet the dark, muted color of, say, The Godfather, etc.

Lance, I think it's more the novel that's at the heart of Rumor Has It, but I never read the book so I'm not on top of the whole Graduate mythos. Worth catching on HBO, where it's in pretty heavy rotation.

I don't agree w/ Tom. I think the movie is great, but weirdly static...everyone's frozen in a social role, and deadened emotionally, and despite the end when it looks like Ben & Elaine have broken free, we know they haven't...it's static-ness gave the movie a kind of modernism in its time, I'm sure, but it also means the movie lacks the old verities of character development, transformation, etc. I think it works beautifully because it's so beautifully observed. But it's true that it doesn't go anywhere. Seems like that's a flaw for Tom, tho' I suspect it's the whole point.

I never really was a big Mike Nichols or Nichols and May fan. But The Graduate is just perfect. Anne Bancroft, of course, is smoking hot. The first MILF is still the best. But I never thought so much that she was playing older...I guess she was if she were old enough to be Hoffman's mother, presuming that Dustan's character is circa 22. It was more that Hoffman was playing younger, a lot younger.

No doubt Ben & Elaine would have wound up late 1960s early 1970s california divorcees, something right out of a Joan Didion essay.

In a little aside, Rumor Has It, a smarmy little movie w/ Kevin Costner, Jennifer Aniston, and Shirley McClain is entirely a riff on The Graduate and Pasadena, and I must say, I enjoyed it.

In the end, I think there's really no heros or villans in the movie, and, frankly, I think precious little character development. Ben and Elaine's "relationship" like lots of young relationships, is clingy, half baked, immature, destined to fail. A sequal would have been relentlessly grim, kinda like The Godfather II.

Well, I'm on a completely different page.

John Adams is the only appointment TV in my house this spring not only for myself, but also for my wife and my 16 year old.

Seeing what was truely the "greatest generation" brought to life, seeing the revolution era on screen, and seeing those men and that era treated not as an ivory carved myth to be protected but as a bloody, political and very real drama, its just fantastic, I wish it were an ongoing series. At the end of each episode both my daughter and I look at each other and wish there were more.

That Adams was prickly, sour, ambitious, and self-important, are pretty much all facts of history...that he was smoldering center of a political revolution that changed the world was also true. The show embraces both visions beautifully.

Sure, at times, the show falls into the trap of "Law and Order" style dialogue that sounds like exposition of background instead of sounding like the way people speak.

And there seem to be two kinds of people when it comes to Laura Linney, those who find her "peerless" and those, like me, who she just rubs the wrong way for some reason that it's hard for me to articulate.

Sean, yeah I wanted to go see 'em too but I'm gonna be out of town when they're here in NYC in a coupla weeks. Just my luck Ornette, DBT, and Back Door Slam (power trio from the Isle of Man led by a precocious 20 yr old guitar talent) are all playing NY while I'm away. Love to hear your report.

I agree that Hood's songs are generally better than Cooley's (and Isbell's may be better still and missed in the long run) but some of Cooley's on the new album, like "Bob", have have really grown on me over the last coupla weeks.

I agree w/ Tom in re: Kevin Gilbert and the rest of the TNMC grousers...Every record Crow has done since TNMC has been better than TNMC, which, tho it broke her commercially, was the least interesting of all her records(in contrast to, say, Lauren Hill, who really has not been able to prove her mettle after her original solo album and its disputed production).

Most of the TNMC folks have had cracks at the big time either before or after the Crow record broke (records w/ airplay, other kinds of industry opportunities). Furthermore, everyone in the industry knew who was involved in TNMC.

Gilbert's story sounds like the tale of a troubled, talented guy who couldn't let go of a past that depressed him. Sad, but doesn't take away from her post TNMC acheivements which are real, and sustained.

One disagreement I have with Tom, I don't think she has a great voice...a good one, and one whose best qualities--clarity and fantastic pitch--make it extremely radio-friendly. She's delivered strong, solid records over an over again. My hat's off to her.

Don't sell Lohan short. She was able to carry a movie when she was 11 or something and then again at around 18. Clearly she's a gifted screen romantic comedy performer. I think in fact, troubled tho she obviously is, she's also quite talented and a real screen presence. I hope she gets a chance to fully realize her talent.

That said, the NY mag shoot was the worst sort of exploitation of a young woman desperately in need of a leg up to revive her already flagging career. In fact, I'm stunned by what a piece of trash the magazine has become under Adam Moss. When he was ass't ed at the NYT mag he was the first call every time an EIC slot opened in a national mag, and he turned every job down until NY mag which, under his leadership, has become a slightly more erudite version of the Bravo TV network--the worst kind of effete gossip, tales of the lifestyles of the rich and famous, really just awful dreck dressed up in enough trappings of intelligence to convince the wives of people making more than $300K a year that reading it is somehow different from watching E!. The horror, the horror.

oakling, nice comment. Being honest w/ oneself about what one really likes (and why) is a beautiful thought.

I'm not sure how disguised it was. Very peculiar, but a much better read--more entertaining and more revealing--than the Bruce Pegg bio, and fascinating language.

Can't get any hipper than the Flight Deville!

Great post. Phenomenal song. Chuck Berry is rock's greatest songwriter. Never gets his due anymore.

Imagining rock w/o Chuck Berry is like imagining English lit w/o Shakespeare. For a kick, check out Chuck's autobiography, really peculiar language.

BTW, for the reference standard version of the song, please dig Elvis' Dec 1973 recording--probably his last great studio performance, and a blistering one, one of the King's greatest records. A lot of Chuck's songs fit Elvis like a custom Nudie suit, but none more so than Promised Land.

Sean, if only I were that together...

actually, I don't that the RNR HOF and in fact I really like the idea of an institution dedicated to the preservation of rock history. But I do have skepticism about the criteria for inductee election.

Greg, I'm hip to the Ventures career, and it's certainly more influential than, say, the careers of my cherished minor groups (the MC5), so you're not telling me anything I don't know. And certainly the Ventures have HOF credentials compared with some of the prior inductees. I still don't understand how Del Shannon and Bonnie Raitt are HOFers, whatever the charms of their music.

If pressed, I'd bend on the Ventures. Nevertheless I'd compare them to a borderline case in baseball, a guy like Don Mattingly. (And I won't give an inch on the Dave Clark Five--who were minor in their own time, less than minor now--or Leonard Cohen.)

One point in your history that I dispute: I dont' know what AMG is talking about when it claims that the Ventures were the first band to organize records thematically. The first credit for that kind of stuff usually is given to Sinatra, for records w/ themes like Come Fly w/ Me, which was 1958. Ray Charles also did a record of travel/place name songs in 1960.

Also, let's not oversell the Ventures impact. Like Mickey & Sylvia's "Love is Strange," their records popularized and introduced certain guitar sounds. But they didn't exactly touch off the kind of band formation that the Beatles did. The Encyclopedia Britannica quote is a gross overstatement. They weren't exactly the Beatles. (BTW, speaking of guitar sounds, Duane Eddy, who is also in the Hall, is another case, like the Ventures, that I'm not sure about.)

Finally, I have to admit a personal bias against rock instrumentals--a genre of music I generally find dull as dishwater, so it's music I tend to devalue (they make great beds for live reads on radio ads, a format which I think is the one in which the Ventures are most widely heard today). Also, when it comes to surf guitar, I'm partial to Dick Dale.

Great songwriter. Great song. Rock and roll HOF career? Makes you wonder about the criteria.

Correct me if I'm wrog, but record companies don't have any claim against bands playing covers, only publishing companies do. Record labels might have a claim on jukebox plays.

This reminds me of the time one of the licensing agencies went after the girl scouts or the campfire girls on unpaid royalties on camp songs or when they put on a show.

Then again, if peformance, not recording, is going to producing an increasing share of music biz revenue, I can understand publishers' interest.

Of course, the idea that they could present you w/ an unitemized lump sum bill then threaten legal action is a pure shakedown.

Lamb, what's w/ the hostility? Do you do PR for NARAS? I hate the Grammys because they're a smarmy orgy of industrial self congratulation. I love Sun Ra and Charles Mingus, because, well, they made great music.

Oh so right about the Billy the Kid section. My favorite part. Can't wait to see the movie again.

And Dylan IS cooler than the Beatles.

I loved the movie from the time it opened. Liked it better than Fargo then, and still think it's better than Fargo now. A great riff on all those Raymond Chandler books turned movies. But I think the cult of Lebowski is over the top, and I'm a natural born cultish obsessive.

Yeah, of course, and also in the end, the counter culture following him up there too

Donna-

A question for ya...coming in to the movie, where did you fall on the Dylanology axis?

I love the Billy the Kid section, and I love the basement tapes--the original tapes, all 4 cds worth of 'em w/ not only the original songs but the gid tanner covers, the goofs, everything. An irreducible, accidental masterpiece and, in the end, perhaps the most influential music of Dylan's career. To me the BTK section of the movie was a great, figurative representation of the cultural weight of the basement tapes. I'm just wondering how much of that section was accessible beyond the priestly class of Dylan loons.

oh yeah, I thought the same think, looks like it was shot on location

Too short for me...I could have watched it all night...(apparently Haynes did trim it some at the request of Harvey Weinstein).

But yeah, I would have liked to have had more of the later story of the man, and if that meant less divorce and 1966, I could have lived w/ that trade off for sure, tho I found Charlotte Gainsbourg irresistable on screen.

Apparently Haynes' buddy, an Israeli Jew who helped write the screenplay, became fascinated w/ the Christian period and kept trying to convince Haynes to get more of it into the film. The pacing on that section felt very rushed although the visuals of the fictionalized Vineyard Fellowship were spot on, and the version of Pressing On was great.

BTW, I dunno who did the version of Goin' to Acapulo in the Riddle, Mo. sequence, but that was great. Gotta get the soundtrack.

And I couldn't believe how few people in the audience got the jokes--the panthers shot, Julianne Moore's Joan Baez routines...hilarious.