Comedy Comes to Highland Park!
Starting next Friday (March 30), we've got a standup show going at Highland Perk. It's a HUGE space that's been beautifully renovated near the eastern end of the awesome taco strip known as York Boulevard. It's every Friday night at 8:00, admission is free, and they have delicious coffee, Mexican hot chocolate, baked goodies and other treats, and will very soon have beer and wine. Nice review of the place here. Bobbie will be the MC, and there will be a gaggle of hilarious comcis supporting her. Come on out!
In other news, Hot Fuzztival is already sold out! Dude, it would be so cool to see a Hot Fuzz/Hard Boiled/Point Break triple feature with Edgar, Simon and Nick all in the house? Hardly matters, since I'll be out of town anyway...
I went back to the New Beverly Wendesday for Brotherhood of Death and Johnny Tough. Brotherhood of Death is pretty fun. Black guys go to 'Nam, join the special forces, come back to the South where the Klan starts fucking with them...BIG MISTAKE. It's not anywhere close to the great film that Harry Knowles makes it out to be, but it's a good time. It probably would have been better with a full house. The crowd was not very lively. The second feature, Johnny Tough, was actually very good. Not so much a blaxploitation flick as a black indie film from the 70's. Beaks calls it a restaging of The 400 Blows, which I guess is pretty accurate.
Over the weekend we managed to get the whole family to go out to see Zodiac, which is probably my favorite David Fincher movie now. I mean, it's probably more to do with the screenplay and all the great actors, including a lot of comic actors doing straight roles, which was fun. A good, unconventional police procedural that really makes you feel how someone could get obsessed with a case. It's like when you have a crossword almost done except for one word, and you just can't think about anything else, you just HAVE to know what that ONE FUCKING WORD is!
Performance is really good. It's a very disorienting, weird film, in similar ways to Myra Breckenridge, which came out the same year, only made by someone who seemed to know what they were doing. But I do see the two films as having similar intentions. Great music, too.
And I watched the Jimi at Monterey/Shake! Otis Redding at Monterey DVD. Otis is pretty great, and obviously Hendrix is just mind-blowing. I'd never seen the whole Hendrix performance from start to finish before. There's some bits of an interview with Pete Townsend who expresses that he (and presumably Clapton, Page and Jeff Beck as well) was feeling some frustration at the time that Jimi was stealing their act and doing it better than they could have. It's interesting, because...well, I don't know for sure what kind of music Hendrix was playing in NYC in '66, but I imagine he was reaching for something, but wasn't quite sure what, then when he came to England, he probably went to see The Who, The Yardbirds and Cream, and realized "Oh, this is it," but then immediately took it to the next level. At which point, the British guys probably heard him and said, "oh, that's it!" In other words, they were all building on each other's work, but I guess it was frustrating because they hadn't made it in America yet, and were still breaking through in England, and here's this guy doing the NEXT level of their stuff before anyone has heard them...yeah, I can see how that would be frustrating.
You know, I think that last paragraph reads like a bunch of babble.
Anyway, Dennis Cozzello has a new movie quiz up, Professor Irwin Corey's Foremostly Authoritative Spring Break Movie Quiz. This one's taking me a long time to finish, but go give it a try. It's fun!
In other news, Hot Fuzztival is already sold out! Dude, it would be so cool to see a Hot Fuzz/Hard Boiled/Point Break triple feature with Edgar, Simon and Nick all in the house? Hardly matters, since I'll be out of town anyway...
I went back to the New Beverly Wendesday for Brotherhood of Death and Johnny Tough. Brotherhood of Death is pretty fun. Black guys go to 'Nam, join the special forces, come back to the South where the Klan starts fucking with them...BIG MISTAKE. It's not anywhere close to the great film that Harry Knowles makes it out to be, but it's a good time. It probably would have been better with a full house. The crowd was not very lively. The second feature, Johnny Tough, was actually very good. Not so much a blaxploitation flick as a black indie film from the 70's. Beaks calls it a restaging of The 400 Blows, which I guess is pretty accurate.
Over the weekend we managed to get the whole family to go out to see Zodiac, which is probably my favorite David Fincher movie now. I mean, it's probably more to do with the screenplay and all the great actors, including a lot of comic actors doing straight roles, which was fun. A good, unconventional police procedural that really makes you feel how someone could get obsessed with a case. It's like when you have a crossword almost done except for one word, and you just can't think about anything else, you just HAVE to know what that ONE FUCKING WORD is!
Performance is really good. It's a very disorienting, weird film, in similar ways to Myra Breckenridge, which came out the same year, only made by someone who seemed to know what they were doing. But I do see the two films as having similar intentions. Great music, too.
And I watched the Jimi at Monterey/Shake! Otis Redding at Monterey DVD. Otis is pretty great, and obviously Hendrix is just mind-blowing. I'd never seen the whole Hendrix performance from start to finish before. There's some bits of an interview with Pete Townsend who expresses that he (and presumably Clapton, Page and Jeff Beck as well) was feeling some frustration at the time that Jimi was stealing their act and doing it better than they could have. It's interesting, because...well, I don't know for sure what kind of music Hendrix was playing in NYC in '66, but I imagine he was reaching for something, but wasn't quite sure what, then when he came to England, he probably went to see The Who, The Yardbirds and Cream, and realized "Oh, this is it," but then immediately took it to the next level. At which point, the British guys probably heard him and said, "oh, that's it!" In other words, they were all building on each other's work, but I guess it was frustrating because they hadn't made it in America yet, and were still breaking through in England, and here's this guy doing the NEXT level of their stuff before anyone has heard them...yeah, I can see how that would be frustrating.
You know, I think that last paragraph reads like a bunch of babble.
Anyway, Dennis Cozzello has a new movie quiz up, Professor Irwin Corey's Foremostly Authoritative Spring Break Movie Quiz. This one's taking me a long time to finish, but go give it a try. It's fun!
posted by Chris Oliver at 1:10 PM
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