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MOVIE REVIEW: Trainwreck

I wonder what Amy Schumer’s cousin, U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) thought about the movie Trainwreck?

trainwreckThere’s a TV show on Comedy Central called Inside Amy Schumer. I’ve never seen it, but it is described as “straight from [her] provocative and hilariously wicked mind,” exploring sex and relationships.

So the language and sexuality was not a shock to my system when The Wife and I saw Trainwreck, written by and starring Schumer as a thirtysomething named Amy, who learned early on, from her father Gordon (Colin Quinn), to eschew romantic commitment; so she is either sex-positive or slutty, depending how one views these things.

She can be snarky about the marriage of her younger sister Kim (Brie Larson) to Tom (Mike Birbiglia), which meant instant family, with Tom’s son Allister (Evan Brinkman).

Amy is a magazine writer for a publication trying too hard to be cutting edge. She is assigned by her editor Brianna (Tilda Swinton, ever the chameleon) to write about a successful sports doctor named Aaron (Bill Hader), who hangs out with his patients, such as basketball player LeBron James (well played by LeBron James). Aaron has the audacity to ask her for a second date, and the tensions ensue.

Despite its explicit nature early on, at the heart of this film is a rom com, though, in the traditional roles, Amy’s the guy. That is not a putdown, only a description, as many of the mostly positive reviews suggested. Plus there are some interesting family dynamics; Amy’s dad was the original trainwreck. The movie’s a tad long, for which I blame director Judd Apatow, and it’s more than a bit sappy at the end.

I liked it when The Wife and I saw it at The Spectrum Theatre a couple of weeks ago. She was unsure early on whether she’d like it, but it turned out to be a winner for her too.

Amy and her father’s cousin, U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), have teamed up to fight for gun control following a mass shooting at a screening of the movie in Louisiana.

 

Music Throwback Saturday: Anyone Who Had a Heart

The fact that Black’s version of Anyone Who Had a Heartstalled Warwick’s version at #47 in the UK bugged Warwick even 30 years later.

Dionne WarwickMy Times Union blogger buddy Chuck Miller linked to a version of Anyone Who Had a Heart by someone named Anja Nissen which you can hear HERE or HERE. It’s nice, it’s fine.

But I’m forever a fan of the original of the Burt Bacharach (music) and the late Hal David (lyrics) song, which was the Dionne Warwick version, released in late 1963, and getting to its zenith on three different charts in 1964: #8 on the Top 100, #6 on the rhythm & blues charts, and #2, for three weeks, on the adult contemporary charts.

There were a number of versions over the years. Heck, there was a lot in 1964 alone:

Percy Faith, 1964
Dusty Springfield, 1964
Cilla Black, 1964 #1 in the UK, Ireland, New Zealand, and South Africa.
According to Wikipedia, the fact that Black’s version stalled Warwick’s version at #47 in the UK bugged Warwick even 30 years later.

Petula Clark, in French (Ceux Qui Ont Un Coeur) #7 in France in 1964
Petula Clark, in Italian (Quelli che hanno un cuore) #5 in Italy in 1964
Petula Clark, in Spanish (Tú No Tienes Corazón) #1 in Spain for two weeks in 1964

Four Seasons, 1965
The Lettermen, 1968
Martha and the Vandellas, 1972
Linda Ronstadt, 1992
Josey James, 2012

What’s YOUR favorite version? (Note to Sharp Little Pencil: I think I know your pick.) My second favorite is probably the Ronstadt take. The Vandellas version is interesting, but I’m not sold on it.

Cilla Black; and writing about comic books

So THAT’S what I am, a comics industry observer.

cillaPriscilla Maria Veronica White OBE, the singer and, later, UK television personality, better known as Cilla Black, died this past weekend at the age of 72.

I was waiting impatiently for Dustbury’s take. And he did not disappoint: “Perhaps the very definition of ironic: the first I heard about the death of an iconic Liverpool star was from two girls trying to make it big in Liverpool fifty years later.”

I always associated Cilla with the Beatles, of course. Lennon-McCartney wrote a few songs for her, including Love of the Loved and It’s for You [LISTEN], and she covered Beatles tunes such as Yesterday, For No One, Across the Universe, and The Long and Winding Road.

Moreover, I bought LP The Big Hits From England & U.S.A. back in 1965, featuring songs by the Beatles, the Beach Boys, plus two L&M songs by Peter & Gordon. On Side 2 were songs for the “grownups” by Al Martino, Nat Cole, and two from Cilla, Suffer Now I Must [LISTEN], which was just OK, and the last song on the album You’re My World [LISTEN], which I really loved.

She was introduced to [Beatles manager Brian] Epstein by John Lennon, who persuaded him to audition her. Epstein had a portfolio of local artists but initially showed little interest in her. Her first audition was a failure, partly because of nerves, and partly because the Beatles (who supported her) played the songs in their usual vocal key rather than re-pitching them for Black’s voice. In her autobiography What’s It All About? she wrote:

I’d chosen to do “Summertime”, but at the very last moment I wished I hadn’t. I adored this song, and had sung it when I came to Birkenhead with the Big Three, but I hadn’t rehearsed it with the Beatles and it had just occurred to me that they would play it in the wrong key. It was too late for second thoughts, though. With one last wicked wink at me, John set the group off playing. I’d been right to worry. The music was not in my key and any adjustments that the boys were now trying to make were too late to save me. My voice sounded awful. Destroyed—and wanting to die—I struggled on to the end.

Check out Cilla Recording Alfie in Abbey Road Studios with Burt Bacharach, and Beatles producer George Martin.

Now that Jon Stewart is leaving the Daily Show, and there is a slew of articles about him, I’m fascinated by the program’s evolution, best covered by the New York Times in Jon Stewart and ‘The Daily Show’: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at 9 Essential Moments. I watched the program occasionally by 2004 but recorded and viewed it regularly for only the last seven or eight years.

Thanks to that rascal Alan David Doane, I’m in Trouble with Comics, again, trying to do some writing about the four-color phenomenon as I did most recently with the late, lamented Flashmob Fridays.

So far:
Comics Industry Observers Respond to Black Lightning News; so THAT’S what I am, a comics industry observer.
The TWC group answer the question, “What single comics creator has had the greatest influence over how you perceive the comics artform, and why? Can’t believe someone else selected MY pick.
*I review Archie & Friends Wacky Wild West

The Comics Beat touted the TWC return, and Tom Spurgeon of the Comics Reporter has taken notice as well.

Restore the Voting Rights Act of 1965

“It would be transformative if everybody voted. That would counteract money more than anything.”

votingrightsact_0The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was signed into law on August 6, 1965, by President Lyndon Johnson because “Congress [had] determined that the existing federal anti-discrimination laws were not sufficient to overcome the resistance by state officials to enforcement of the 15th Amendment,” which had been ratified on February 3, 1870.

“Through the use of poll taxes, literacy tests, and other means, Southern states were able to effectively disenfranchise African Americans.”

The Act has been chipped away by the Supreme Court, resulting in a recent surge in voter ID laws, cuts to early voting and gerrymandering. One of the heroes of the Selma march of March 1965, John Lewis says voter ID laws are ‘poll taxes by another name’.

The 2014 midterm election turnout was the lowest in 70 years, when World War II was an understandable reason for failure to exercise the franchise. President Obama, who did NOT “suggest requiring everyone to vote”, did recognize that “it would be transformative if everybody voted. That would counteract money more than anything. If everybody voted, then it would completely change the political map in this country…” As my friend Steve Bissette put it, “It’s discouraging how many folks I know (especially younger voters) rationalize and justify opting out. ‘It’s rigged’ is easy when your refusal to vote cinches the rigging.”

At least, in June 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court voted 5 to 4 to uphold the right of states to set up independent, non-partisan committees to draw the district maps that determine seats in Congress.

The trend for most of this country’s history was to expand the right to cast the ballot, from requiring direct elections of US Senators, to allowing women and 18-year-olds to vote. This retrenchment in recent years is discouraging for my sense of what democracy should look like. See A Dream Undone: Inside the 50-year campaign to roll back the Voting Rights Act from the New York Times magazine.

One last thing: from Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, learn about the disenfranchisement of Americans living in U.S. territories.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Dwight Eisenhower (1963): “Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly, our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.”

HiroshimaRuinsLargeMy sixth-grade teacher, Paul Peca, who died four years ago, believed that the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan on August 6 and 9, 1945, respectively, was necessary in order to end World War II in the Pacific.

He said, and the conventional wisdom supported the claim, that the kamikaze fighters were doing severe damage to the Allied troops and that the war needed to end quickly.

Regardless, I was never convinced that the United States should be the first country to drop the bomb. The sheer devastation, not just immediately but in the aftermath, troubled me.

On this issue, I was affected greatly by two pieces from the arts. One was the 1983 documentary Atomic Cafe. “Disturbing collection of 1940s and 1950s United States government issued propaganda films designed to reassure Americans that the atomic bomb was not a threat to their safety.” It reviewed quite well.

You can watch Atomic Cafe at Snagfilms.com or Vimeo or Documentary Storm, or elsewhere. It also had a nifty soundtrack, which I have on vinyl, and you should seek out these songs.

The other item was Hadashi no Gen, or Barefoot Gen: A Cartoon Story of Hiroshima by Keiji Nakazawa, which “recounts the bombing of Hiroshima from the perspective of a young boy, Gen, and his family. But the book’s themes (the physical and psychological damage ordinary people suffer from war’s realities) ring chillingly true today.”

“Leonard Rifas’ EduComics (together with World Color Press) published it [in 1976] as Gen of Hiroshima, the ‘first full-length translation of a manga from Japanese into English to be published in the West.’ It was unpopular, however, and the series was canceled after two volumes.” I have those two issues.

There was a 1983 film, which I have not seen; it is here, in Japanese.

Much more recently, I read The Real Reason America Dropped The Atomic Bomb. It Was Not To End The War.

Some salient sections:

Here’s what General/President Dwight Eisenhower had to say about it in his 1963 memoir, The White House Years: Mandate for Change, 1953-1956 (pp. 312-313):

“Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly, our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of “face.”

and

Here is a quote from Deputy Director of the Office of Naval Intelligence, Ellis Zacharias:

“Just when the Japanese were ready to capitulate, we went ahead and introduced to the world the most devastating weapon it had ever seen and, in effect, gave the go-ahead to Russia to swarm over Eastern Asia. Washington decided that Japan had been given its chance and now it was time to use the A-bomb. I submit that it was the wrong decision. It was wrong on strategic grounds. And it was wrong on humanitarian grounds.”

There’s a lot more well-documented information there. Here’s hoping, “Never again.”

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