WE'D LOVE TO TAKE YOU HOME...

For nine nights in September, the world's most under-appreciated band Cheap Trick will be doing a special engagement at The Las Vegas Hilton where they will perform The Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper" album in its entirety, accompanied by several additional musicians and an orchestra.

As a rabid lifelong fan of both acts, i plan on hitting one of the shows. If I could do all nine, believe me I would. But the economy being what it is, I like my home and don't want to lose it to sleeping in a bus station if I can help it.

For anyone who can't or won't part with the bread for a ticket, I highly recommend the new DVD of the show that was filmed last year in New York. Fans of either The Fabs or CT will not be disappointed. Since I plan on hitting the show in a couple weeks, I will save a more detailed review until that time.

The DVD looks like it was shot at a very swanky expensive ballroom with tables of people as opposed to seats or general admission. The crowd is very receptive and the band pulls off what would seem like a daunting task reproducing an album that, by 1967 standards, was never meant to be reproduced live.

Vocalist Robin Zander is possibly the only person alive that can sound like John Lennon AND Paul McCartney when he sings. Getting to hear his work on "She's Leaving Home" on this DVD is worth the purchase itself. Guitarist Rick Nielsen, drummer Bun E. Carlos and bassist Tom Petersson just cruise through the songs effortlessly as if they'd been rehearsing them for years. The chemistry of this band after 33 years together is still nothing short of brilliant.

A couple of songs have vocal duties by Ian Ball of Gomez, who has a very Liverpudlian flavor to his singing, and Joan Osbourne, who, I have to admit, I like more now than back when she was all over the radio with "One Of Us" fifteen years ago. I underestimated the soulfulness in her voice. The whole DVD ends with a very spirited stab at the Golden Slumbers medley off Abbey Road, which gives everyone on stage a chance to shine.

As I said, I'll do a more thorough write-up after the live show, I just thought I would spread the word about this nice little ditty to anyone shopping for a proper Beatles tribute without all the fake accents and bad wigs.

There is no high quality footage of the DVD uploaded yet but here is CT doing Magical Mystery Tour from, I believe, Japan in 1992. Great version....

I NEED A FIX 'COS I'M GOING DOWN....

It took someone dying for me to admit that I have a serious personal problem that I need to address. Like any addiction, it started out casually enough, something I would just indulge in on days off, never more than twice a week.

Then, suddenly, it became a regular daily habit. Before I knew it, I was actually scheduling my regular life around my habit.

The addiction? Reality television. The dirtiest and most self-deprecating vice of all to possess.

Like I said, it started so innocently. I seem to remember catching the first episode of Rock Of Love with Bret Michaels on VH1 out of truly morbid curiosity. Twenty years ago, I couldn't imagine any female wanting to be in a relationship with this douche, and that was when he had a steady job. But, in 2006, I had to check out what type of bottom-feeder would admit to a nationally televised audience that this was her type of man. I was expecting the type of chick I saw at hair metal shows. 45, leathery skin, fried hair from using the same bleach for three decades, unable to read the memo forbidding the showing of stretch marks in a rock club.

You know the type.

Of course, every woman who ended up on the show was 20 to 30 years old, and semi-glamorous but in the stripper/bad horror movie actress kind of way. And of course, I watched the whole season because the TV trainwreck just could not let me out of its Kung Fu Grip.

Suddenly, I'm watching not only the following Rock Of Love seasons, but I am even getting sucked into the VH1 vortex of spinoff shows, like "I Love Money" and "Charm School". These shows don't even have a real payoff. The contestants are people who basically sucked so hard they got booted from other reality shows. And I actually watched these people week after week.

It would be like following Gary Cherone's career closely just because your favorite band is Van Halen and he was in the lamest version of it for two weeks.

Before I realize it, I'm watching shows with chefs. I'm watching shows with drug addicts, some of whom used to be famous. I'm watching shows about people stuck in a house for three months. I'm watching shows about guys trying to wade through a sea of strippers to find the love of their lives. I'm waking up in a cold sweat at night fearing that a show about fashion models is coming on and I can't find the remote in time to shut it off.

My dependency ended when the murder-suicide of Ryan Jenkins and Jasmine Fiore broke last week. Jenkins was a contestant on Vh1's latest time-waster, "Megan Wants A Millionaire" which was essentially twenty douchebags vying for the affections of a retarded woman in a bikini who was actually too stupid for Bret Michaels' tastes.

It was the same thing I would see in Vegas nightclubs if i actually wanted to dress up and stand in a line for four hours.

Anyway, Jenkins was briefly married to an actress-model from Vegas named Jasmine Fiore, whose severely mutilated body turned up in California a couple weeks ago. Jenkins, it turns out had murdered her. He tried fleeing back to his native Canada, only to be found dead by hanging.

VH1, in a rare show of taste and compassion, immediately yanked any and all episodes of "Megan" as well as another unaired show Jenkins participated in, "I Love Money 3". I could not have been happier. I just knew that I would somehow give in and let my brains and my self-esteem get teased, violated and discarded once again by those date-rapists at VH1.

I am just so sorry somebody had to die to get me off this visual junk food.

I'm pledging now to catch up on the quality TV I keep hearing about. Sons Of Anarchy, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, True Blood.

If not for the current season of Rescue Me, I would have forgotten there was such a thing as thoughtful, emotionally charged series with these things called ACTORS!!!! And they're all tangled up in PLOTS!!!! Which were created by SCREENWRITERS!!!!

I'm gonna put more effort into my new addiction. I can't promise I'll give up crap TV forever. I will have to make an occasional concession here and there. But if you hear about me getting so down in the emotional hole that I am on pins and needles waiting for the results of a televised dance-off or karaoke contest, you have my permission to put me in the ground like a sick dog.

MY EULOGY TO SENATOR TED KENNEDY

(cue thick Boston accent)

"Er..ahh...it' the end of an era. Er, ahh."

I will be watching the live coverage of the service on Saturday just to see if the hearse goes off a bridge into a lake.

Er, ahh.

MOVIEGOING ON MARS

So last week while in grey breezy Los Angeles, i took in a showing of the guitar documentary It Might Get Loud. It had opened that week and i knew it would be weeks before it came to a theater near me. And even that is wishful thinking. Usually small movies like this one i just save to my Netflix queue and wait for them to materialize in my mailbox months later on their street date.

The movie is playing in Hollywood at a place i had never heard of called the Arclight, located on the legendary Sunset Blvd. I found out from my unofficial human California directory that it was once known as the Cinerama, which i had driven by on every trek down that street for the past twenty-two years of visits. It used to be this big funky dome shaped like a cross between a snow globe and a generic knockoff Faberge egg.

(I wonder if those are the same people that made my favorite cologne, BRUT....by Faberge. Wait....okay, G Ramone says no emphatically.)

Like everything else in LA, the theater is adjacent to a shopping center, but at least with this one you don't have to plod through the mall to get to it. You open the doors and you step into this massive room that looks like a museum. Unbelievably high ceilings, soft muted tones in the paint and carpet, and, get this, it was full of people and yet relatively calm and quiet. There's a massive electronic marquee overhead and a huge table for a ticket counter with no partition or microphone that makes the ticket agent sound like Darth Vader.

The admission prices startled me because i knew that this place would not be cheap, even by LA standards. Matinee prices were 12.00! Yikes! If i came on a weekend after 5pm, i'm parting with 15.00! Wow! But, godammit, i was on vacation and dying for this movie, so fuck it! I'm in!!

Here's where it all started to feel like an acid trip.

The nice girl at the ticket counter turned her computer monitor towards me and asked where would i like to sit. HUH??!??!? She explained that i was looking at a diagram of the theater my movie was playing in and any seats that were not highlighted were free for my taking. JESUS!! I don't get that kind of option buying concert tickets anymore. I picked fifth row center and made my way up the escalator to my seats.

The building had these framed color shots of people like Carlos Santana and Slash all over the lobby. I assumed it was for the movie i was seeing but it was to promote another rockumentary called Rock Prophecies playing there next month. They had four seven-foot glass cases with tuxedos and dresses worn in Inglorious Basterds with lobby cards and synopses of each outfit. As i said, it was like being in a museum or an art gallery. No way was i in a movie theater.

We get our seats, which were velvet and built like a new La-Z-Boy. The screen had a very dim subtle Arclight logo which never changed. The speakers played this very soft, unintruding light classical music for the 10 minutes before showtime. The room has again a high ceiling, contoured walls and roomy aisles that you would expect to see in a small concert hall, not a 16-screen multiplex. The front row is easily 30 feet away from the screen so one is never forced to throw their neck all the way back to take everything in.

The music stops and a very professional-looking gentleman steps up in front of the audience and announces his name, his title and welcomes us to the theater. He tells us the movie's name, the running time and that we will have three previews before the feature. He asks us to please turn off our phones and if we have any questions or complaints to please ask for him or any of his employees in the lobby. He thanked us and walked off, the lights dimmed, three previews played and, without abeat, the movie starts!!!

I held my hand up to my face to see if it had melted or just simply gave off vapor trails yet.

Then, after the film, the audience actually sat in their seats for the closing credits, applauded when the lights came up, THEN started talking and filing out!!!! I honestly cannot tell you the last time i saw a movie in a room full of people who actually enjoy going to the movies.

I didn't have to glare or sshhh some fuckhead who brought his cumstain of a kid to an adult-themed movie, that insists on wandering around the aisles aimlessly, while I ponder strangling it like a jizzmop at a nudie booth.

I didn't have jerkoffs with muscle spasms behind me who can't stop kicking my seat.

I didn't have to keep making room for the fat cunt with the bladder dimensions of a Dixie cup every twenty minutes.

Speaking of spasms and poor bladders, I didn't have to deal with the confused and deaf eldery couple who can never understand the movie we're all watching because back in their days of Kinescopes and live piano players in the front row, movies didn't have plot twists and non-linear storylines.

And, best of all, the three trailers before my movie were actually of the non-Jennifer Aniston/Matthew McConaughey romantic comedy type. I swear when i see the audience laughing loudly at the trailer for this upcoming middle-aged guy comedy with Robin Williams and John Travolta, i can simultaneoulsy hear Jesus weeping.

I know someday soon i am gonna have to face all this shit again at a movie theater near me.

But, at least, i know now that a Nirvana-like filmgoing experience is just a gas tank away.

IF IT'S TOO LOUD, YOU'RE JUST TOO FUCKING OLD....

With the sudden global obsession that is Guitar Hero and Rock Band, this could not be a better time for a documentary involving a summit with three of the rock world's most famous and influential guitarists.

It Might Get Loud was conceived and directed by Davis Guggenheim, who also brought us the cinematic bane of anti-environmental conservatives everywhere, An Inconvenient Truth. It Might Get Loud brings together the stories of three wildly diverse guitar legends from three different generations and styles: Jimmy Page (Led Zeppelin), The Edge (U2) and Jack White (The White Stripes, The Raconteurs, Dead Weather...did i forget any of his other bands? What's with all the jobs? Is this guy Jamaican? )

The center of the film is a summit meeting where the three sit on a soundstage with amps up to 11 and discuss their individual creative processes, inevitably leading to jam sessions on each other's tunes. The ultimate goal of the film, i feel, is to show that however diverse the style or the influence, the musician's true inspiration comes from within the soul.

I've always liked U2, and always felt The Edge was the true musical brains behind the band. Absolutely nobody has a sound like his. Coldplay and The Killers, among others, keep trying but there is just no matching that heavenly ringing sound he produces on their best work (Where The Streets Have No Name and I Will Follow to name just two). He even honestly shows that the strength in his playing lies in his use of technology. He demonstrates this by playing a riff with no pedals or effects and it sounds very dull and lifeless. He then switches on what seems like an arsenal of foot pedals and BANG!-- the song just comes to life like a tornado.

Jack White, on the other hand, is vehemently anti-technology and a staunch supporter of visceral attitude and gut-churning feeling which he openly links to his love of the blues. His style is reflected in his Detroit workmanlike upbringing. It's just distorted and dirty and, as the film attests, downright bloody. Snobs can complain all they want about his lack of technical prowess...Jack White is a bad-ass at getting the most unnatural sounds out of a six string.

Jimmy Page is truly the film's elder statesman. It would be redundant of me to even begin to talk of his influence on me not just as a guitar enthusiast, but a music lover overall. His mark cannot be measured enough. In the tradition of Les Paul and Jimi Hendrix, he changed everything. Sound, style, technique, recordings, showmanship...the man has done it all.

For me, he anchored my two favorite moments in the film. The camera crew watches him at home playing a 45 of "Rumble" by Link Wray, with Jimmy providing commentary through the entire song. Fifty years later, he still has this look of wonder in his eyes upon listening to this seminal electric guitar anthem. It just felt great to me to see that, with all of his accomplishments, he can still get off on listening to a song for the millionth time and feeling like it was brand new to his ears.

My other favorite scene was during the summit when Page stands up with his Les Paul and hammers out the "Whole Lotta Love" riff. The film's money shot occurs with Edge and Jack just staring and smiling like teenagers watching the creator of the riff that melted minds 40 years ago playing that monster in front of them.

It made me remember the very first time i heard that song and it brought back the very same chills to my body that i got then.

The film also pays loving and appropriate tribute to the guitarists' influences, from Son House and Muddy Waters to The Ramones and even Spinal Tap. It just helps put a little perspective on where all this genius came from...other geniuses.

For musicians and music lovers, this movie cannot be seen fast enough. It truly stopped my jaded heart from forgetting why i fell in love with rock and roll in the first place.

It Might Get Loud. It Just Feels Good.

HERE COME THE BASTERDS

For Quentin Tarantino fans, the wait for a new film can feel interminable. The wait between Jackie Brown and Kill Bill Volume 1 was seven years. The six months between that film and its' second installment felt like an eternity filled with unanswered questions. Nearly three years passed before Death Proof materialized as part of the Grindhouse double feature in 2007.

Two and a half years later, the long-in-the-making Inglorious Basterds has at last roared into your nearest multiplex, promising all the dark humour, bizarre plot twists and unexpected violence you would expect from this generation's most audacious auteur.

You get that with this movie and a whole lot more.

The story being marketed to you in the trailers involves Brad Pitt leading a ragtag Jewish squadron of Nazi headhunters (literally) who are on a mission to stop the Third Reich scalp by bloody scalp. You get that but it's only one-third of the actual story. There is a subplot involving the terrific Christoph Waltz as a charming yet diabolical Nazi officer Col. Landa (nicknamed the Jew Hunter) who has killed the family of Shoshanna (Melanie Laurent), a refugee who has reinvented herself in France as a cinema operator. There is another subplot involving her romantic pursuit by a Nazi war hero-turned-movie star (Daniel Bruhl). There is yet a third subplot involving a German actress (Diane Kruger) who is also working as a double agent for the British in their plot to hire the Basterds to assassinate Hitler.

Confused? NO?!! Excellent! You now have my permission to check out this movie.

Tarantino, i feel, has put himself on a whole new plane as a director here. The stories eventually piece together very nicely and although there are plenty of macabre comedic moments throughout (mostly due to Pitt's character), they take their sweet time appearing here. Nothing as in-your-face as Kill Bill Vol. 1, for instance. The dialogue also has a new maturity to it. Maybe it has to do with the period of the piece that there are no typical QT observational diatribes about, say, 70s action movies or comic books. The script is still fabulous but the conversations here just have a decidedly different feel to them than i would have expected.

The music is, however, flying in the face of the period piece. There are even more spaghetti western selections from the legendary Ennio Morricone and Lalo Schifrin than Kill Bill and Death Proof combined, as well as the brilliant use of David Bowie's "Cat People", from the 1982 Paul Schrader film. Even in a Nazi war film, Tarantino throws the rules out the window and still finds the right song for the scene.

The film is heavily subtitled for a mainstream American studio movie, which will inevitably piss off a lot of people who were thinking they paid for Brad Pitt in GI Joe-Rise Of The Cobra instead. I gotta hand it to QT here. It would have been so much easier to just cast well-known American actors working hard on their French and German accents. But he knows his real fans can handle subtitles and foreign actors. The rest of you can just stay home and watch America's Got Talent.

You know who you are.

Overall, i can't recommend this enough for Tarantino fans. It will hopefully keep us sated until the next movie comes out in, by my averages, 2014.

I have a dream...

that people start throwing support to get Sarah Palin in office in 2012 so my dream of having an illiterate flight attendant run the country can finally be realized.

Free peanuts and sniper rifles for all Americans!!!!

LAUGH? I NEARLY DIED...

Judd Apatow is brilliant. As writer, director and-or producer,he has been responsible for almost a dozen of my favorite comedies in the last few years. Superbad, Knocked Up, 40 Year Old Virgin, Pineapple Express, Anchorman, Step Brothers, Talladega Nights, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and for me personally, the greatest 18 hours of network TV ever made, Freaks And Geeks.

His third film as writer-director is Funny People. It may not be his peak creatively, but it is certainly his most ambitious. Adam Sandler plays a rich and famous comedy actor who is very lonely and depressed. He is diagnosed with terminal cancer and things don't look good. He meets and hires Seth Rogen, an aspiring standup, to write him jokes and eventually take on the role of personal assistant/best friend. Sandler then becomes miraculously cured and yet he still hates his life and those people in it.

The film is an acerbic look at the ugly truth about showbiz, standup comedy in particular. It shows that guys who make you laugh for a living are really unhappy with themselves and the world on the inside. It goes to some dark, uncomfortable places you don't see in comedy.

The second act is where this movie has taken some hard criticism and i can sort of understand it. It involves a subplot involving Sandler chasing after the woman who got away and is now married with children. The reason i say this is because it steers the film away from the raunchy humor for about an hour and delves into serious character development. It's well written and acted nicely, and i can handle it, but some people can't take two genres in one film.

This is the sort of storytelling that could find an audience thirty years ago when Hal Ashby made movies like Harold And Maude but nowadays, moviegoers don't want unpredictable twists and deep plot. They just want to laugh at anything that doesn't remind them of the real world, rather than stop and think how much they might relate to.

I really enjoyed the movie. I just have a small list of people i can recommend it to. Let's put it this way. If you REALLY got psyched about the Transformers sequel this year, don't go see Funny People. You will be forced to think about people and life and relationships and love and who needs to be bothered with that when you can just go deaf while watching stuff blow up around Shia LeBeouf for 150 minutes.

You know who you are.

Rooney Eats It....

In writing about the sudden and sad passing of writer-director-comedic genius John Hughes, this was what made it hit home for me. Take a couple minutes and read this stunning personal eulogy...

http://wellknowwhenwegetthere.blogspot.com/2009/08/sincerely-john-hughes.html

After reading this, it all came home for me just how heavy this loss is for movie lovers of my generation. I personally can remember nearly everything about seeing these movies for the first time and how they made me feel. Sixteen Candles i first saw on my shiny new BETAMAX and i thought i would never stop laughing. I saw Breakfast Club in the theater with my folks and sister and just watched with dropped jaw at the subject matter and emotion i was vicariously displaying to my family. I remember thinking, if they don't get this movie, they'll never get me.

To this day, the jury is still out if they got it.

My mom and i went to Ferris Bueller and laughed through our tears at the incredible similairities between her and Edie McClurg's school secretary Grace. Anyone who knows my mom will testify. And the resemblance between Ed Rooney and our vice prinicipal Mr. McCormick has only been bested in real life by Dick Cheney and Satan.

Planes, Trains And Automobiles was, for me, the comedic equivalent of...well, honestly it defies comparison. Steve Martin's records and John Candy on SCTV molded my sense of humor when i was ten. I'll be doing impressions of them at parties until i die.

Pretty In Pink was a hard one to watch because i watched it with the same girl who turned me down for the prom the previous month. I felt like i was cursed to be Ducky for the rest of my life. After watching one and only one episode of Two And A Half Men, i can now say thank God i'm not Jon Cryer. Have you seen this godawful fuckin' show?

But i digress....

I think after reading the aforementioned blog from his former pen pal it hit me that John Hughes' movies perfectly captured a place and time in my life that only a small handful have done since. It was a time where things were way different, when supposedly i was gonna look back in my forties and feel good about how easy i had it then.

I would not be seventeen again for anything. Fuck that.

Especially not today. It's only because i'm where i am now in my life that i feel like i've accomplished miracles because i didn't kill myself and half of my high school with me.

Big props to Mr. Hughes for helping prevent such a catastrophe.

When Heavy Metal Makes Me Cry.....

My buddy just got me a copy of the most amazing documentary which i have been waiting over a year to watch.

"ANVIL!-The Story Of Anvil."

Simply brilliant, brutally honest, unflinching in its realism. That's all i can say.

Anvil were (are) one of those 80s metal bands i knew the name but never really got into. I knew kids in school that liked them but i think they just liked any band that wasn't Duran Duran at the time.

The band was one of those that came out during the golden age of Metal, when Priest and Maiden ruled and spawned seemingly hundreds of like-minded bands who were all about leather and volume and long frizzy hair with no trace of conditioner. Some of those bands flourished, like Scorpions and Whitesnake. Some just faded without making the REALLY big break, like Raven, Kick Axe, Grim Reaper and Anvil.

The ship had sailed and a couple years later, as Lars Ulrich and Tom Araya point out, you had the rise of the "Big 4"...Metallica, Anthrax, Megadeth and Slayer. And then, that high pitched fantasy-themed"Metal On Metal" style kind of dated itself to make way for the heavier, angrier style of thrash metal.

The documentary nicely sets up the scenario of how this band could have (should have) been bigger but nobody can really pinpoint where it all went wrong. It shows two guys in their 50s who just continue to churn out record after record, tour after tour, make very little money, and run into obstacle after obstacle. Why? Because this is all they wanted to do with their lives.

The thing about this movie that touched me was the realism shown that gets overlooked on Vh1 specials about bands. The constant aggravation and disappointment of playing empty venues and crooked promoters who don't pay. The loss of time spent with family and their combination of tireless support and tiresome worry about when the boys in the band will want to begin a sturdy normal life. It doesn't try to glamourize the job and make the viewer think it's all screaming fans and wild parties.

The harsh reality is it's a lot of time waiting around with nothing to do. It's cold and boring dressing rooms. It's constant moving from place to place with no chance to enjoy the surroundings. It's being stuck in a small space with four other people whom you love dearly but could strangle to death at any moment if they say one more stupid thing. Amazingly, all that and more are shown here with not a single shred of "prepared" feeling you sometimes sense in typical documentaries.

"Anvil!" ultimately gives metal fans and haters alike an inside look at the unwavering drive that possesses the musicians that make it and the fans that support it. There are hundreds of bands like Anvil, who may never quite get that big break or career-spanning documentary, but at least they can take comfort in knowing that their story has now been told, albeit vicariously.