Rio Bravo

Fred Zinneman’s High Noon is considered one of the great Westerns, but fellow director Howard Hawks was no fan. As he later remarked, “I didn’t think a good sheriff was going to go running around town like a chicken with his head off asking for help.” So Hawks teamed up with John Wayne (who disliked High Noon even more) and set about making the exact opposite of that film. The result was Rio Bravo, a movie about a sheriff who does ask for help – though unlike the Gary Cooper character in High Noon, only from those who are likely to be of use.

Despite its indignant origins, Rio Bravo is one of the most blissfully entertaining Westerns ever. Sheriff John T Chance (Wayne) is in a tight spot. He’s just arrested Joe Burdette for shooting a man at point-blank range, and knows that Nathan Burdette, Joe’s brother and a powerful rancher, will be looking to bust him out. He also knows the townspeople are either too afraid to help, or too inept to fight. So he assembles a strange posse – his former deputy Dude (Dean Martin), now a recovering alcoholic, an old cripple named Stumpy (Walter Brennan), and the youngest draw on the block, the Colorado Kid (Ricky Nelson). There’s also a seductive cardsharp called Feathers (Angie Dickenson), who Chance can’t intimidate or seem to shake.

Howard Hawks was lionised by the auteurists because his films – no matter what genre – always looked like they’d been made by the same man. Rio Bravo certainly does have that patent Hawks mixture of screwball comedy, sexual tension (male-female and male-male) and economically choreographed action. Yet this film, rated by many as the director’s best, also deviates from the Hawks canon in certain ways. The relaxed fatalism that hangs over the film is miles away from the frantic rhythms of His Girl Friday or Scarface. There’s also a melancholy – especially when Dean Martin is onscreen – that one doesn’t see too often in the director’s films.

The script was by Hawks regulars Jules Furthman and Leigh Brackett, and the broad-ranging score by Dimitri Tiomkin (to hear “El Degüello” once is to have it haunt your dreams). Dean Martin showed why he was the best actor in the Rat Pack. Pedro Gonzalez-Gonzalez is a caricature of an excitable Mexican, but funny nevertheless, and Angie Dickenson’s voice is so laden with mischief one gets the feeling she scares John Wayne more than the killers. Wayne was already an icon by then; he exudes the confidence of one who’s realised the audience doesn’t expect him to act, but just be himself. A couple of years later, Sergio Leone ushered in the age of the revisionist Western. Rio Bravo thus stands not only as Howard Hawks’ last great film, but also the first “last great Western”.

A shorter version of this review appeared in Time Out Delhi.

Super 8: DVD Review

In the months leading up the release of Super 8, there were rumours about how the movie was JJ Abrams’ tribute to the film’s producer, Steven Spielberg. This seemed unfair, especially since Spielberg’s produced several films that bear no resemblance to his oeuvre (Transformers: Dark of the Moon, for one), and JJ Abrams is a serious talent in his own right (he created Lost and directed the sleek 2009 reboot of Star Trek). Yet, once the film released, it turned out the rumours were accurate. Super 8 is strongly reminiscent of early Spielberg, especially Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. Kids on bicycles in tense situations. Check. Townsfolk looking up in wonder at bright lights in the sky. Check. Henry Thomas in the lead. Check. (Okay, it’s Joel Courtney, but they’re dead ringers for each other).

So Super 8 is definitely Spielbergian. Sadly, it isn’t quite Spielberg. Six kids working on a Super 8 zombie movie witness a strange train crash. After they pick themselves up, they hear a loud banging from inside one of the derailed bogies. As they watch from a distance, something indistinct and animal-like breaks out and disappears into the night. Almost immediately, sinister military men arrive and refuse to say anything useful. It transpires that the escaped creature is an alien, and this time it isn’t phoning home, but roaring, mauling and slaughtering its way back. What starts out as a fluent piece of ’70s nostalgia turns into a monster movie that’s high on spectacle and low on logic.

In its stronger first half, before we actually see the creature, Super 8 conveys a real sense of what it must have been like to be young and film-crazy in small-town USA in the ’70s. Abrams, his friend and cinematographer Larry Fong and the film’s producer Bryan Burk all started out this way, making genre film rip-offs in their backyards (in a neat bit of back story, Abrams was given the chance to restore Spielberg’s own 8mm films as a teenager). The affection the director has for these kids and their cheesy horror flick is palpable. The younger actors respond beautifully, especially the self-possessed Elle Fanning and Riley Griffiths as the young director.

There’s plenty of trivia on the audio commentary, as well as in the two mini-features “The Dream behind Super 8” and “The Visitor Lives”. None of these is successful in explaining why the town suddenly becomes a war zone, or why exactly all the dogs disappear. What they do make clear is the extent to which everyone on the project was in awe of the Spielberg. Abrams, Fong and Burk spend half the audio commentary’s running time trying to come up with a suitable question to message the man; the next half is spent anxiously waiting for his reply. As always, you can rely on Spielberg to transport grownups back to childhood.

Closing night

Ben Gazzara, best known for his films with John Cassevettes, died today at the age of 81.

Grapes over wine

Listen my friends, and I'll tell you about Moby Grape. They were tremendous and tragic, sublime and perverse. They had five members - Skip Spence, Bob Mosley, Jerry Miller, Don Stevenson and Peter Lewis. Spence played guitar, sang and wrote some of their best songs. Mosley played bass and howled like a white Otis Redding. Lewis also sang, and finger-picked beautifully. Miller was responsible for some of the most stinging lead guitar in rock history, Stevenson for some of the most kinetic drumming.

It doesn't end there. All five of the Grapes sang on record and in concert; one of the particular glories of their early work is hearing all those voices colliding with each other. Their incendiary guitar interplay was almost with parallel: at the time, only Buffalo Springfield could boast of three guitars playing in tandem (and they fought so much, it was usually two). In addition, all the members of Moby Grape were song-writers, right from the first album.



There's more. Moby Grape was a failure almost as soon as its first album released, overhyped by the record companies, embroiled in legal battles, destroyed by drugs and disagreements. Spence, and later Mosley, would wander off into the thickets of schizophrenia. What makes this even sadder is that that first album, Moby Grape, was an unmitigated masterpiece. Opening with the caterwauling, almost ridiculously exuberant "Hey Grandma", it runs through r&b ("Mr Blues"), country rock ("Ain't No Use"), delicate balladry ("Someday", "8:05") and jagged, jet-propelled rock ("Indifference").



And there's "Omaha", a song that should be bracketed with "Johnny B Goode" and "She Loves You" as one of the most unstoppable, shout-it-from-the-mountaintop unhinged force of nature rock 'n roll singles ever. It's a driving, breakneck love song to friendship, centering around the repeated phrase "Listen, my friends". The Grape were a product of the '67 Summer of Love scene, and it shows in the lyrics that go from earnest ("You thought never/ but I'm yours forever/ Won't leave you ever") to poetic (No more rain/ From where we came) to carnal ("Get under the covers, yeah!/ All of your lovin'/ Beneath and above ya/ Bein' in love!) in the space of a few paragraphs. Under, beneath and above are also where the guitars are at; never breaking for a second to admire themselves or see what the others are up to. I've added both the studio version and a live one from Monterey Pop below; the latter has an extra guitar break that arrives after the famous opening riff and before the vocals arrive. It is A) as good a reason for the enduring legacy of this band as any - those few odd seconds approach a ragged perfection that many other bands wouldn't be able to touch after a dozen albums and three reunions tours - and B) so good I could weep. Which is the way I feel about Moby Grape in general, and Moby Grape, the album, in particular.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes: DVD review

For the majority of its running time, this Planet of the Apes reboot makes the same mistake that Peter Jackson’s King Kong did – it bleaches the original of all its frivolity and fun. Sure, times have changed since 1968, the year Franklin J. Schaffner’s silly but enjoyable Charlton Heston-starrer released. But have viewing habits evolved to the extent that we’re now making emotionally sensitive, psychologically acute movies about apes taking over the world? It’s like someone took Chuck Berry’s advice and decided there was too much monkey business going on.

So the first hour of Rise of the Planet of the Apes is solid and unremarkable. James Franco plays scientist Will Rodman, whose experiments involving a possible cure for Alzheimer’s come crashing down when a chimp they’re testing the formula on goes berserk and is shot. After it’s discovered that she’d just given birth, Will, hit by the sort of half-baked guilt that screams “plot furthering”, adopts the baby. The chimp, who he names Caesar, grows up so smart and sensitive, you’d almost think he was human. Oh wait, he is. Andy Serkis, master of performance capture (he was Gollum in Lord of the Rings and the ape in King Kong), plays – or more accurately, acts out the movements of – Caesar. It’s still the most compelling performance in the movie – beating out Franco, Frieda Pinto as primatologist and love interest, John Lithgow as Will’s Alzheimer’s-afflicted dad and Brian Cox as a very bad zookeeper. Whether or not it feels like there’s too much that’s human in the monkey’s body language is something for each viewer to grapple with individually.

The film finds its mojo in the last forty-five minutes, with the now-violent Caesar in a facility and plotting an ape revolution. Director Rupert Wyatt builds to the moment when Caesar says his first word (the earlier movies had talking apes), and from that moment on it’s a breathless rush to the climactic man versus money showdown. The ending, as with every other Hollywood action movie now days, is left wide open to the possibility of a sequel. No one stands to benefit from this more than Serkis, who, with an extra feature on this DVD all to himself, is clearly being seen as the franchise’s trump card.

A version of this piece was published in Time Out Delhi.

Is there livestock in any of them?

Superlative short film by the Coen brothers, starring Josh Brolin's character from No Country for Old Men. "World Cinema" was part of an omnibus film called Chacun son cinema ("To Each His Own Cinema").

Every Picture Tells a Story

In Every Picture Tells a Story, song after song, Rod Stewart and band stretch for and find surprising depths of emotion. The wearing of hearts on sleeves for sustained lengths isn't common in rock ‘n roll, especially ‘70s rock. Even its rival for the other great English rock album of the ‘70s – Mott the Hoople’s Mott – relies on ironic posturing to get its horrors across. This album also seems to starts out that way, with the “Ballad of John and Yoko”-like title track and its cheerful numbering of legal scrapes and sexual conquests. But “Seems Like a Long Time” is poetry without the punchline. Soon, it becomes clear that this is an album about memory, and the consequences of holding onto it too tight.

There’s the brief distraction of “That’s All Right Mama”, a lot bluesier that Elvis’ version, followed by a slide guitar-led “Amazing Grace” and “Tomorrow is a Long Time”, a Dylan outtake that never made it onto the Freewheeling album. There’s a stately flashback, the medieval-sounding mandolin piece, “Henry’s Time”. “Maggie May” follows; this was Stewart’s big hit off this album. This story of a boy in love with a more experienced woman is wry and emotional and funny and sad, and even more interesting if you consider that there was also a popular Liverpudlian ditty about a prostitute called “Maggie May”.

The band consists of Mick Waller on drums, Pete Sears on piano, Ian McLagen on organ, Dick Powell on violin, Martell Brandy and Martin Quittenton on acoustic guitars, and Andy Pyle and Danny Thompson on bass. The only really famous musician here is Faces (and pre Rolling Stones) guitarist Ron Wood. Yet this bunch (with an uncredited Lindsay Jackson on mandolin) contribute some of the most heart-rending ensemble playing I’ve heard outside of The Chieftains or some of Van Morrison’s backing bands. It comes to a head in “Mandolin Wind”: Stewart’s voice sounds like it’s lit by a fire of regret, and the band plays around it like winter. On to the last two. Stewart's rowdy version of the Motown hit “(I Know) I’m Losing You” sounds like it’s off another album. Fortunately, the closing track, a Tim Hardin-penned number called "Reason to Believe", is the kind of finish this album deserves. “Someone like you makes it hard to live without somebody else”, sings Stewart, sounding like he’s lived that line. The violin sympathises, as does the mandolin. The band musters up one last sigh, the singer, one last breath. They know they’ll never make music like this again.