“Live a Little, Love a Little:” It’s 1968, released the same year as the dog’s breakfast, “Speedway.” And Elvis and his handlers still have no idea what to do in the face of the British invasion.
Inexplicably, “Live a Little, Love a Little” isn’t wretched. In fact, it’s serviceable Elvis semi-romantic comedy. And while on the subject of a dog’s breakfast, there’s an acting K9, Albert the Great Dane, who steals a number of scenes.
Elvis is Greg Nolan, a photographer, who rides his beach buggy (a VW chassis with an idiotic orange plexiglas body, remember the Bradley kits?) into the clutches of “Bernice,” a character who could easily have played “Evelyn” in “Play Misty for Me.”
Bernice has Albert drive Elvis into the surf where he suffers hypothermia. Back at her house, she drugs him unconscious for three days. When he recovers he discovers he’s been fired by his newspaper employer who inexplicably has the pressman crew beat him up. When you were fired at the newspaper, didn’t they beat you senseless?
Forced to move in with Bernice, Elvis lands two jobs on two floors of the same building, one as a soft porn photographer, the other as the photo editor in charge of a high button agency run by an aged Rudy Vallee.
The movie veers between Elvis running the stairs, juggling work and trying to avoid becoming weird Bernice’s prey. Dick Sargent, who always played an affable clown, does decent work as Bernice’s ex-husband, a wealthy man who keeps her financed. In the interstices between the farces, Albert barks, whines, growls and threatens to bite when necessary.
There’s an EP’s worth of music of little account. But “Wonderful World,” a gay throwaway which opens the movie, sets the tone as Elvis goes histrionic in its last 20 seconds. Definitely an oddity for his then moribund reputation.
It’s 1964 and the Beatles have made Elvis virtually irrelevant. But I saw “Roustabout” as Saturday matinee in Pine Grove, PA. With a screwdriver cup of soda and bag of popcorn, fitting for a carnival movie.
The music in “Roustabout” is mostly pocket lint. But the opening number after the title sequence, “Poison Ivy League,” is great, particularly for what follows. Elvis karate chops three of America’s privileged into submission (one actually runs away) in a parking lot. Elvis was really into the karate chopping. And in every movie, no matter how lousy, if there’s a fight scene, he always gets one in.
Anyway, Elvis as Charlie Rodgers, a character virtually indistinguishable from his Deke Rivers in “Loving You,” except for a far superior sneer, gets backed into being a carny.
You know how it works: Eventually he saves the nearing bankruptcy business when he sees how he’s let those with better character down. Barbara Stanwyck takes half the show. And outside of “Poison Ivy League,” “Hard Knocks” is all you want to hear.
“So loaded with cash/They give me a rash,” the chorus from “Poison Ivy League” cries out for revival.
It’s the mid-60s. The Beatles, the Stones and Bob Dylan are happening, so how does Elvis Presley answer? He puts his heavy foot down, pedal to the metal on two racing car comedy musical romances, one sub-mediocre, the other godawful.
“Spinout’s” ridiculous story has Elvis as a bandleader and Grand Prix race car driver in the hills above Santa Barbara. A committed (maybe that should have been “confirmed”) bachelor, he’s chased by three women, one of them his drummer, played by Gidget.
All the characters are either simpering, swaggering or antagonizing. The only things that save the movie are the Three Stooges-like Grand Prix race (dig the cars spinning out and going the wrong direction and Elvis spinning out, and smoking over the same clump of straw more than once) and the music.
About the music: The uptempo tunes save it, special notice to the tromping, swingin’ shuffle, “I’ll Be Back.” There’s the title cut and two, “BeachShack” and “Smorgasbord” played at a pool party without a grain of sand in sight. “BeachShack” is a loose rip-off of Rolf Harris’ “Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport.” “Never Say Yes” has a snappy drum break, offset by the tune’s terrible fuzz guitar’
“I saw that movie and it was dirty!” yells “Les” (Elvis’s female drummer) at a cookout. “Spinout” would have benefited from some good old-fashioned filth.
“Speedway,” from 1968, is bad from start to finish with moments of laughter only because parts are so senseless.
Nancy Sinatra is dumbfoundingly cast as an IRS auditor and Bill Bixby, fresh off “My Favorite Martian,” is Elvis’ (again as an entertainer and race car driver, this time — NASCAR) manager. There’s also an annoying tv variety show comedian, Carl Ballantine, who seemed to be hot stuff at the time, as Elvis’ mechanic.
One song furnishes most of the unintentional hilarity, “He’s Your Uncle, Not Your Dad,” about Uncle Sam, tax man.
Choice lyric:
“If he calls you, as he may do, don’t be mad, don’t be frightened,
red, white, and blue/Just be thankful you don’t live in Leningrad/Just remember, he’s your uncle, not your dad.”
As a tune, best fit would have been as one of those acetate-mounted-on-cardboard singles included every so often with a copy of MAD magazine. Astonishing Elvis didn’t walk off the set, it’s that humiliating.
“It’s a beautiful job of driving by both these drivers,” raves the “Speedway” announcer. Indeed! And viewers were screwed at the ticket window by this screw-up movie.
Both pics feature major product placement for Fender Musical Instruments, which had just experienced a big expansion when Leo Fender sold out to CBS.
Reprinted from Facebook while I was out. All movies reviewed in the Pasadena Elvis Presley Film Fest were either downloaded or streamed from pirate sites.
Omar Mateen’s calling of 911 from the toilet of the Pulse and subsequent declaration of allegiance to ISIS was just a smokescreen. Mateen knew he was going to be killed and tried to set the story. In this he was successful.
In my estimation, Mateen was a loathsome and apparently very vain American man who just happened to be Muslim. He blew a spoke because he was gay or bisexual, couldn’t be a human being about it and so decided to kill a lot of gay people at a club he frequented. Using his paramilitary/police training and weaponry. Self-radicalized, my butt.
Mateen’s obsession with selfies was and is nothing less than nauseating. It’s not the picture of a Muslim terrorist. It’s the picture of someone, very disagreeable, in love with himself. Mateen probably sent them to many people he wished to hook up with (it now appears this is so), unbidden, who woke up to the news of his massacre and said to themselves, “Oh, jeezus, that guy!”
This story will come out. There were people at the club quite familiar with Mateen but now circumspect in what they have to say, understandably so, because they don’t want the FBI, Homeland Security and the media crawling all over them.
Would you?
This is most probably the central truth of the massacre, one that our six figure media explainers and terrorism experts simply won’t want to attribute without wasting everyone’s time concocting some long, stupid and convoluted story about ISIS and its inspiration to those not yet fully realized terrorists.
“Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump reacted to the Orlando shooting with evidence that they can agree on at least one thing: bombing people,” reads The Intercept. “Both candidates called for an escalation of the U.S.-led bombing campaign against ISIS in Syria and Iraq.”
You would expect nothing else.
Right on schedule, sales of AR-15s/M-16s jump. The real national character is defined by the image of the assault rifle, one aimed at your head.
Most of it having to do with the pains of having to deal with WordPress and the hosting company. I’m 60, much older than when I started, and less capable. And blogging through the bugs and database errors was a nuisance. It stopped being fun.
And then I got threatened by the hosting company for not applying the latest updates.
Which entailed thought about whether I wanted to shut it entirely and dump all the years of essays and posts. Came close.
But over the weekend I cherry-picked the best essays over the last few years — there were about thirty.
And then I went about updating to the latest version. It took most of the evening, going through rolling incrimental changes.
Now, here it is.
N.b.: The hosting company is still poor, along with its database server, which has some sort of incurable disease.
From a long time ago and what seems very far away, the only rock song to feature former US Cyber-Czar, Richard Clarke.
“They’ll also launch a big ol’ DOS,” he “sings.”
Taken from a conference call between him, the bosses of the biggest anti-virus companies, and some government officials on what was to be done during one of the big network virus/worm scares (Code Red, 2001, specifically) of the time. “A big ol’ DOS,” or denial-of-service attack was what the virus was going to launch.
At the time, the biggest anti-virus software developer in the US recommended disconnecting the US from the internet. Absolutely true.
“Cyberwar Boogie” is/was a jaunty ditty about trouble on the frontier in cyberspace from someone who was there. I even threw in some poor man’s Jimmy Riddle.
Inevitable as the cicadas every 17 years in eastern Pennsylvania, Hillary Clinton is delivering her shtick in my old home state, only she’s been on an eight year cycle. There’s a big difference, of course, between her and the cicadas. The insects actually do live in the ground there.
“I want to be really clear about this, because I learned how to shoot a gun behind our cottage in Lake Winola,??? Mrs. Clinton said, somewhere near Scranton. “And I know how important gun ownership and particularly hunting is here in northeastern Pennsylvania.???
Has Hillary Clinton ever struck you as a hunter? About as much as I’m a gun owner, I think.
Clinton is from Pennsy, from Little Rock, from New York, from DC, from everywhere. The geography is changeable, much like her politics.
“[A registered nurse], was not moved by Mrs. Clinton’s old-time recollections” at the rally in Dunmore, read the Times. But she would vote for Clinton, anyway, it was said.
Bill Clinton’s legacy is trashed. Out on the stump he’s been dogged by protesters who’ve pointed out his tough-on-crime administration led to an explosion in the prison population, ruining the lives of millions of black Americans. So he loses his temper, wags his finger and looks worse. Others point out his trade deals and bank deregulation accelerated inequality and the destruction of middle class jobs.
So the Big Dog is now a bit rabid. He jJust can’t accept others don’t share the belief he’s the American hero he thinks he is.
Campaigning yesterday, he tried to make a joke:
“One of the few things I really haven’t enjoyed about this primary: I think it’s fine that all these young students have been so enthusiastic for [Hillary’s] opponent and [he] sounds so good: ‘Just shoot every third person on Wall Street and everything will be fine.'”
Probably not something to say when Bernie Sanders just got after his wife for her three-quarters of a million buck speeches to Goldman Sachs. Again.
“The inequality problem is rooted in the shareholder-first mentality and the absence of training for the jobs of tomorrow.” This is Bill Clinton’s answer.
Yes, absence of training for the jobs of tomorrow, jobs that somehow never arrive or that pay almost nothing, or that rewire you to sell off your life in pieces through an iPhone app. Everyone has to go back to school four or five times in life and become innovative or die. Heard it before, dozens of times. This is the only answer the modern Democratic Party has for, well, just about everything outside of endless war (which it largely supports, anyway).
Anyway, I had a song for that a couple years back. It never got old which shows how much progress there’s been.
Thomas Frank, author of Listen, Liberal!, a new book that takes apart the Democratic Party for its failure to stand up for its former base in the working class, takes it to Bill Clinton in the Guardian:
When I was researching the 1994 crime bill for Listen, Liberal, my new book documenting the sins of liberalism, I remember being warned by a scholar who has studied mass incarceration for years that it was fruitless to ask Americans to care about the thousands of lives destroyed by the prison system. Today, however, the situation has reversed itself: now people do care about mass incarceration, largely thanks to the Black Lives Matter movement and the intense scrutiny it has focused on police killings.
All of a sudden, the punitive frenzies of the 1980s and 1990s seem like something from a cruel foreign country. All of a sudden, Bill Clinton looks like a monster rather than a hero, and he now finds himself dogged by protesters as he campaigns for his wife, Hillary. And so the media has stepped up to do what it always does: reassure Americans that the nightmare isn’t real, that this honorable man did the best he could as president …
For one class of Americans, Clinton brought emancipation, a prayed-for deliverance from out of Glass–Steagall’s house of bondage. For another class of Americans, Clinton brought discipline: long prison stretches for drug users; perpetual insecurity for welfare mothers; and intimidation for blue-collar workers whose bosses Clinton thoughtfully armed with the North American Free Trade Agreement.
A recent article from the New York Post on profits from digitized music, here, presents us with a “let them eat cake” moment, courtesy of Robert Kyncl, YouTube’s chief business officer.
YouTube is vilified because it returns zero to little profit in its glued-on advertising/revenue sharing schemes. “The main concern is the fact that ad revenue is not climbing in line with views,??? one industry source says to the Post.
Kyncl, so it says, countered:
“free is the future, ad supported is the future …??? on YouTube’s scheme known as “monetization” and “revenue sharing.”
“Only about 20 percent of people are historically willing to pay for music. YouTube is helping artists and labels monetize the remaining 80 percent that were not previously monetized.???
Let’s roll out what this really means.
What Google/YouTube does is what’s known as a “winner take-all” system. While YouTube, Apple iTunes, Spotify, etc have demolished barriers to entry in putting out music, the data is in on the results over the last ten years and, invariably, what is returned is highly unequal economics.
And it’s described by what’s known as a long-tail distribution. Martin Ford, in his recent book, “Rise of the Robots,” describes it like this:
“[The ubiquitous] long-tail distribution is central to the business models of the corporations that dominate the Internet sector. [These companies] are able to generate revenue from EVERY POINT on the distribution.”
It’s become obvious, though, that YOU (meaning the majority) cannot.
Ford goes on:
“Markets in goods and services [books, music, for example] that are subject to digitization inevitably evolve into winner-take-all distribution. Sales of … books and music are increasingly dominated by a tiny number of on-line distribution hubs …
It’s not an opinion, it’s supported by all the data on sales and profits now in.
So when the Google YouTube montebank says this, “YouTube is helping artists and labels monetize the remaining 80 percent that were not previously monetized,??? you’re only getting part of the story.
What you’re getting is more like the pic of an iceberg, with a little showing above water, and the rest of it, that which is going to rip a hole in your bottom, unseen.
See – almost 100 percent, or eighty percent, or 50 percent of almost zero, which is what Google\YouTube returns to you, is still almost zero. And 80 percent of even 100 almost zero streams is still pennies. You only make money if you own a piece of ALL OF IT, globally. Which, in the case of YouTube music, Google/Alphabet/Whatever does.
No amount of wishful thinking about turnarounds and the sun coming up in some near future can change any of it. The installed system has you screwed. Period.
Look Who’s Back is a rather on-the-money movie considering our fractured times. It’s based on a best-seller in which Hitler magically appears in modern Berlin with no idea about the intervening time between now and his last day in the bunker. He can’t get anyone to believe he really is himself. Instead, he’s taken as a fabulous method actor who never drops character, winding up sold as a comedian on a TV show called Whoa, Dude, hosted by another funny man made-up to look like Barack Obama.
In the movie, Hitler upstages everyone on the ridiculous show, ignores his joke lines about the “Salafists” and instead delivers Hitler-esque stem-winders drawn from his speeches and Mein Kampf. He tells the audience they’re fools for watching reality shows about cooks and that television has them looking into the abyss. Hitler will save them, Deutschland, from that abyss. It’s so successful he’s put on every show run by the network, generating an immense following.
Oliver Masucci, an Italo-German, plays the Fuhrer. And while you could comb the dialog at length for laughs, the most indelible parts are those in which Masucci is driven around Germany as Hitler. You will not be entirely surprised that, even when in the presence of the impersonator, it’s easy to get some people to let their real selves out. “We need labor camps,” says one, in open resentment over the refugees. Hitler agrees, he can do that. He asks another man, “Will you do whatever I ask of you when the time comes?” The man instructs the camera to be turned off, which it isn’t, and says he’s ready.
At the end we have Hitler riding through modern day Germany in full regalia. He’s in an open top limousine with his agent, a blonde woman who looks a little like Eva, juxtaposed with video from news clips on the rise of fascist parties in Europe and ongoing protests and violence against refugees and immigrants. It’s not exactly the kind of product placement Mercedes had been hoping for.
Of course, if you want slapstick, there’s that too. A segment in which Hitler is pepper-sprayed auf dem Platz in front of the Brandenberg Gate is hysterical.
Look Who’s Back is only a movie, bitingly amusing, but it would be lost on most Americans. First of all, we’d have to read the subtitles and get the jokes, which we can’t because of large gaps in the knowledge of that history. But, mostly,we’re just incapable of seeing bits of ourselves and what we can easily become reflected in parts of it.
I howled with laughter through most of it. However, if the YouTube videos of Hitler ranting in the bunker about being locked out of video games are your cup of tea, maybe not so much. Not accidentally, I’m sure, Constantin owns Downfall and Look Who’s Back, giving it something of a lock on the global Hitler market.
