In The Company Of Glenn

Follow for now...

Until further notice, or maybe for the duration, I will be blogging at a website of my own, which I have decided to call..."Some Came Running."

Here is the link:

http://somecamerunning.typepad.com/

Let's hang there for a bit. Could be fun. Thanks.

The end of an era

I've just been informed that my position at Premiere.com is being terminated. What this means for this blog is still up in the air; I've got meetings this afternoon in which such things are to be negotiated. In any case, I now join the ever-growing ranks of film critics without staff positions. I very much hope to keep this blog going...and get some good freelance work, quick. Anybody with ideas in this area should contact me at glennkenny@mac.com.

Hope to be in touch again soon. Thank you, you're the best goddamn audience a blogger could ever have.

A spot of color

Damn, I've been running a lot of black-and-white screen caps lately. People are gonna start to think this is a blog about old movies or something.

To remedy, here's Dean Martin in an iconic (some would say seminal) image from Vincente Minnelli's great 1958 Some Came Running, to remind you that the long-awaited domestic DVD version of this influential picture streets on May 13, from your friends at Warner Home Video.

Beefheartiana (Updated)

For reasons that remain somewhat obscure to me, my friend the astonishing guitarist Gary Lucas has asked me to read the Captain Beefheart lyric/poem "Old Fart At Play" as part of a multi-media tribute to Beefheart at the Knitting Factory on the evening of April 9. The high points, of course, will be two sets by Fast N' Bulbous, the Gary-and-Microscopic-Sextet-sax-maestro-Phillip-Johnston-led big band dedicated to the music of Beefheart. There will also be rare films, auditings of unreleased Beefheart tracks, and for the spoken word section of the evening, readings and reminiscences from the likes of Suicide's Alan Vega, Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo, the legendary musical cross-breeder Hal Willner, the legendary rock entrepreneur Giorgio Gomelsky (who I'm looking forward to catching up with), and, in audio-only form, Mr. David Lynch, who recorded a reading especially for the occasion. As well as many others, including, as I said, myself, who have been spending much of this evening trying to decide on just the right intonation for the phrase "gorgeous gingham."

Do stop by if you're in the area and so inclined.

Here's the legendary video for "Ice Cream For Crow," directed by the Captain himself, back when Gary was both playing in the Magic Band (that's him getting his hat levitated by Beefheart) and managing it. My lord, the mind boggles just typing that phrase. Other Magic Banders seen in the clip are Richard "Midnight Hatsize" Snyder on bass, Jeff Morris Tepper on guitar, and young Cliff Martinez on drums. Martinez moved on to a brief tenure with the Red Hot Chili Peppers before going into movie scoring, starting with Steven Soderbergh's sex, lies, and videotape back in 1989...

UPDATE: Steve asks how it went. Pretty well, if I may say so myself. I was the first reader, and heeding My Lovely Wife's coaching, I took a lighter declamatory approach than I had initially planned, emphasizing the comic qualities of the piece before getting a little more grand and oddball for the surreal climax, wherein the the wooden mask turning real. The crowd seemed to dig it. David Lynch's mp3 of "Pena" was pretty awesome, as was Giorgio Gomelsky's reminiscence of first hearing Beefheart. As I predicted, Fast N' Bulbous were the highlight, and Gary really ripped on "Kandy Korn." One fairly prominent rock musician was irritated by the absence of beer in the dressing room. A splendid time was had by all, up to the point when I left my gym bag in the cab after we got home. This resulted in a ridiculously overstated bad mood.

The whole shebang was videotaped and will be up on a website whose name escapes me at the moment some time next week.

I'm Def

Work continues apace on my next Hi-Def DVD Consumer Guide—I need to log in some serious hours in front of the plasma so I can bring the lowdown on such burning questions as "Is that the way Before the Devil Knows You're Dead is supposed to look?" and "How does the new Blu-Ray firmware update impact on my experience of Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story?" In the meantime, the home theater mavens among you might want to check out to worthwhile pieces over at one of our sister sites, that of Sound and Vision: one on the oft-dreaded but entirely necessary ritual of spring-cleaning your setup, and another on the perplex of why cable channels are so light on HD content. Although for myself at the moment there's enough on my need-to-watch plate that this is not quite an issue of major concern—it's still informative stuff.

Easter Greetings

Anybody remember this classic?

Feel free to discuss its highlights in comments—my two favorite lines are "And remember, keep smiling," and "I can't miss with my Dick Twacy hat!" In the meantime, I am hieing to the bosom of my family, therein to bake lasagna and commune with kin I haven't seen, my mother is quick to remind me, since my wedding almost two years ago. I shan't have much time with the laptop, so the live-vlogging of my lasagna making is gonna have to wait, despite such a thing being a sure-fire traffic builder. I shall return Monday morning, bright-eyed and bushy tailed.

Apology for viewing

Sorry for the light posting, and this one is basically gonna be a place-holder, in part because I don't want a hateful name to be the first thing any visitor sees on arriving. I've been not so much resting as thinking (trying to put together a post about the shuttering of New Line, a subject of some complexity for reasons easily inferred by Premiere readers with longish memories) and viewing...most notably, the Peggy Ann Garner double feature of Daisy Kenyon and Black Widow.

Well, that's one way to categorize a pair of pictures in Fox's latest Film Noir DVD releases. The still-little Peggy Ann, of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn fame, plays the older of Dana Andrew and Ruth Warrick's two beleagured daughters in 1947's Kenyon, which I first brought up in a post below. Garner is not quite as innocent in 1954's Black Widow, an enjoyable piece of work from Nunnally Johnson, one of Hollywood's smartest journeymen, which I found most beguiling due to the specific qualities of its early Cinemascope image and 4-track stereo sound. Wonky of me, I know. I'll get into both in more detail sometime soon...

Kenyon struck me as a stone masterpiece on revisiting after several decades, and put me on a bit of a Preminger kick, sending me to 1963's oft-sniffed-at The Cardinal, another of Preminger's films I haven't looked at in a while. I'm still taking it in, but I feel confident in pronouncing its final 40 minutes or so as among the director's most outstanding achievements. I have a little more wool to gather, and some social obligations to meet, before weighing in further...here's hoping your own weekend viewing is as fulfilling...

A friendly reminder

I'll be liveblogging the Oscars tomorrow night, and hell, maybe the Barbara Walters thing or maybe the Joan and Melissa red carpet thing, or what the hell, why don't I just get up early and liveblog CBS This Morning and/or Meet the Press while I'm at it? I could liveblog everything I watch and do and...

No, seriously. Around the time the Oscars get started, I'll be "weighing" in, along with some reliably knowledgeable and witty pals. Come on by and leave your snark or sorrow or what have you.

A friendly reminder

It's so-called Super Tuesday. Do your civic duty.

Gimme back my blog.

While I give much thanks to my stalwart hearties Howard Karren and Ryan Stewart for pitching in with reviews and reporting during the Sundance Film Festival (especially during my food-poisoning-forced sit-out), said festival is so last Saturday, and while there'll be a few more posts on it, and a lot more coverage going up on the website proper in coming days, I think it's time for me to, as Hillary Clinton would say, find my own voice again. To that end, I've been steeping myself in the new DVD of the great El Cid (from which the hugely evocative image above is taken), Criterion's incredibly rich Varda box, and the latest Eclipse collection, this one of delightful Lubitsch musicals (which I see the Criterion/Eclipse people were able to license from Universal—could this mean the company's growing less uptight about allowing other concerns to access the vault riches that the studio itself seems to have little interest in? One hopes so...). I'll have more to say about them in the days to come. But in the meantime My Lovely Wife has taken a little ill herself, so I'm going to be giving her a little more attention than this for the next several hours. Just wanted to give you all a head's up that, like Newman's Fast Eddie at the end of The Color of Money, I'm back...