Every month, Cosmik Debris brings you many CD and record reviews, but the writers manage to find a little time for other pursuits, like reading, going to movies and watching videos. That's where Everything Else In Review comes in.


MOVIE: The Time Machine
Starring Guy Pearce, Samantha Mumba,
Jeremy Irons, Orlando Jones, Mary Addy
Directed by Simon Wells, Gore Verbinski
Written by John Logan
Dreamworks
Reviewed by Rusty Pipes

Guy Pearce, the star of last year's most intriguing movie, Memento, had better be careful or he'll be caught in a never ending loop of starring in time paradox movies. This time he's Alexander Hartdegen, a Victorian scientist obsessed with time travel.

I love the George Pal-directed Time Machine movie from 1960, and the original H.G. Wells story is a true classic of sci-fi, so I was wondering what exactly this movie could do to improve upon it. At least the director, Simon Wells, is a descendant of H.G.'s. I expected cutting edge special effects at least, and got that in spades, but I wasn't sure how the story would fare.

The movie Time After Time with Malcolm MacDowell and Mary Steenburgen has a far more inventive take on the story, where H.G. Wells himself actually built a time machine, but its charm derived from the conflict of his 19th Century attitudes in a 20th Century world. There's nothing quite that engaging here, except for the basic plot of the book. One major change, the 2002 ending is not what's in the book or the first movie, but it actually seems more appropriate it a way.

Certainly Guy Pearce's performance completely outclasses Rod Taylor's, perhaps because this time we have a reason why our hero is so obsessed with time travel. It's the new version's strongest change, one I'm sure H.G. would approve of. There were also some minor adjustments to the book's plot even in the first movie, of course. An atomic war in 1966 was the cause of mankind's demise in the old movie, something H.G. would know nothing about. In the new movie mankind's demise is caused by something else he wouldn't have imagined and it's been moved up about a hundred years. I won't give it away but at least it's not terrorists.

Escaping the disaster into the far future, when Alexander meets up with the Eloi this time, instead of a splendidly white Yvette Mimieux, we get the vaguely Polynesian Samantha Mumba. She's more believable, except when she miraculously speaks perfect English and the rest of her tribe doesn't. We are given an explanation of why she can after 800,000 years, but it might have been more interesting to have a sequence where they learn to communicate. It's the screenplay's biggest missed opportunity.

Special effects are handled very well, of course, that was a requirement. The opening scenes are suitably Victorian and the Machine itself manages to be convincingly high tech in a late 19th Century kind of way. The Morlocks are suitably sinister and Jeremy Irons is there under several pounds of blue prosthetics to give them a human, er, Morlockian face. Another improvement, for they were completely two dimensional in the first movie. The talking book rings have become the electronic/holographic avatar of the New York Public Library, who has somehow survived the ages and is played with aplomb by Orlando Jones. It's a nice touch, perhaps the best addition to the story, but you can't fool me, computers are obsolete every six months, that would never happen!

The Time Machine weighs in at least twenty or thirty minutes less than most feature flicks. That's pretty economical and refreshing in the face of some of these elephantine epics with multiple fake endings, you know, where the battered villain keeps popping up for one last attack. Again and again, one last attack.

I can imagine that if someone were to see this version first, they might actually like this version best after exposure to all three. There's a lot of bias when it's the other way around. I can't say that Simon is channeling H.G. for improvements, but still, the fact that I left the theater feeling that the movie held up pretty well against the classic version says that Simon Wells did things right.


(C) 2002 - Rusty Pipes



DVD: THE LAST HURRAH
Muhammad Ali v. Trevor Berbick, Dec. 11th, 1981
124 minutes - Rhino Home Video
Reviewed by DJ Johnson

All these years I've believed that Muhammad Ali went out a loser. I don't just mean the L in his fight record next to the words "Trevor Berbick v. Muhammad Ali." I'm talking about the absolute thrashing I'd read about in many publications. According to these writers, Ali barely touched the much younger Berbick while taking a battering and looking simply... old. This was, after all, just a short time after Ali had been beaten in just such a fashion by Larry Holmes, so it didn't seem far fetched.

Why, then, is Rhino bringing out a DVD of this entire fight and its press conference?

I was confused, too, and as I received no extra information with the DVD, I still didn't know until I watched the fight. I still can't say for certain that their reason was to set the record straight, but after viewing the fight that is my suspicion. As a lifelong fight fan and onetime punching bag I know how to score a fight. I'm not going to give it all away here. You should score it for yourself. You should also know in advance that while Ali was certainly not floating like any kind of butterfly and just how much sting was in his punch is something only Berbick knows, it was a very close fight. Berbick's end-of-round body punching flurries quite possibly saved his bacon, because that old man with the legs that barely shuffled anymore and the bob 'n' weave that had become an afterthought was still getting to him somehow and occasionally taking him to school.

Again, you should do your own scoring, but you're apt to understand why everyone at ringside was buzzing while awaiting the scorecards. Did Ali go out in shame? Not on your life. He managed to fire up the engines on a broken down vehicle and fight his way home, a tribute to the spirit of a man who still means so much to us two decades later.


(C) 2002 - DJ Johnson



BOOK: GENE LEES: You Can't Steal A Gift
Yale University Press
Reviewed by Ron Saranich

Gene Lees, the long-time editor of Down Beat, has written an excellent book about jazz as experienced by four icons of the genre - Dizzy Gillespie, Clark Terry, Milt Hinton, and Nat King Cole. Those readers looking for a traditional approach to writing about jazz (e.g. Gillespie recorded Shaw Nuff in 1945/46) will be disappointed. You Can't Steal A Gift is less a book about facts and more about impressions, memories, and personal encounters with four men Lees lists among his heroes.

Lees was born in Canada and moved to the United States in 1955 to write for the Louisville Times, eventually moving to Chicago and Down Beat magazine. During those 45 plus years, Lees, a white, has been intimately connected with the jazz world. You Can't Steal A Gift is a moving testimonial to the talented artists who dedicate their lives to jazz. It is about the music, the times, and the personalities. But it is also about racism and its persistent and insidious presence in American society. Lees writes "No white person can even begin to understand the black experience in the United States. One can only try, and in the process imagine a life of constant insult and rejection and punishment, and danger from the police." One of the reasons Gillespie, Terry, Hinton, and Cole are among Lees' heroes is that though scarred by the pain of racism, they remained compassionate people of integrity.

You Can't Steal A Gift is a must read for jazz fans, full of many highly interesting and poignant anecdotes. My personal favorites involve Dizzy Gillespie's recollections of his dear friend Charlie Parker and the fact that Parker's achievements and contributions to the founding of bebop are often considered by critics to be superior to Gillespie's. At one time, Gillespie states, "You hear so much about him I don't like to hear - about his addiction, and all sorts of irrelevant nonsense. It's still difficult for me to talk about him - not because he's dead, because he's not really gone to me, but because it's hard for me to think where my life ends and his begins. They were so intertwined."

Lees does a wonderful job of capturing the feel and essence of jazz. It's easy to disassociate the art form from the artist. You Can't Steal A Gift restores this vital connection. Jazz is one of life's joys, truly a gift. Open it now!


(C) 2002 - Ron Saranich



DVD: DEF LEPPARD - Visualize/Video Archive
Mercury Home Video
Reviewed by DJ Johnson

The first of two jam-packed DVD offerings from Def Leppard combines the video releases Visualize and Video Archive for three hours of excellent pop metal entertainment. In an interview on one of these DVDs (the current incarnation of the band is interviewed on both) Joe Elliot talks about getting into DVDs and thinking it would be nice to put some out that would be loaded, a real value for their fans. Well thank you, Joe, I'd say $21 for all this is a hell of a deal.

Let's get past the technical stuff first. The image quality is excellent in most cases, or at least as good as the original source material in the case of the older, cheaply made videos. The same can be said of the sound, which is offered in standard and Dolby digital, as it is on almost all DVDs. In short: No technical worries.

Now, on to the content. Visualize is a documentary that more or less presents the story of Def Leppard, with the early years going by in the first few tracks and the post Steve Clark era taking up the bulk. Since the late Clark was replaced by the more than able Vivian Campbell, this is still well worth seeing. It includes videos, interviews, full songs from concerts and clips of their lives at home and on the road. Whoever came up with the idea of adding the computer-created outlines of their bodies during the interview clips should be forced to watch his or her own work for several hours in a row as punishment.

Video Archive is oddly named. What do YOU think it is? A collection of all their MTV videos, right? Wrong. Nothing of the kind. There are only five videos, sandwiched in the middle and all from the period of 1993-95. It should have been called Concert Archive, because it begins with a 40+ minute, 8 song film of their triumphant return to their hometown of Sheffield, England (a fine performance all around), and closes with a 6 song acoustic performance from Wapentake Club, also in Sheffield, in 1995. The big surprise here is that "Pour Some Sugar On Me" works as well as it does as an acoustic song. Bonus material includes a recent interview, a discography and subtitles in English, Brazilian, Portuguese, and Spanish. Quality? A+. Value? A+. They all claim to be packed, but this one, and its sister CD, Historia/In The Round In Your Face, actually are. No Def Leppard fan should be without these.


(C) 2002 - DJ Johnson



DVD: DEF LEPPARD - Historia/In The Round In Your Face
Mercury Home Video
Reviewed by DJ Johnson

Much of what I wrote about the Visualize/Video Archive DVD goes for this one, too. It, too, is packed to the rafters, a great value, very good quality and highly entertaining. We'll just cut to the chase, then, and get to the goodies. Again we have two previously released VHS tapes remastered, digitized and released on one DVD with bonus material added. Historia tells the story of the band through videos with the clever device of text screens in between, mocked up to look like the caption screens of the silent movie era, right down to the fluttering and scratched film. The band is first seen, fresh out of high school, all with black hair except for the drummer, singing "Hello America," with original guitarist Pete Willis in the fold. As a nice little treat they give us two versions of "Bringin' On The Heartbreak," one with Willis and one with his replacement, Phil Collen, shot after Willis was kicked out of the band for alcohol problems. Their story is told all the way through the Hysteria period, and you do learn quite a lot about the band from the text screens. Aside from that, it's just nice having all of their greatest videos in one place, and it is all here, from "Let It Go," "Photograph" and "Foolin'" to "Pour Some Sugar On Me" and "Love Bites."

The second half of this DVD is the famed 1988 In The Round In Your Face tour, more specifically the show from Denver, Colorado. Even on the smallest stages, Def Leppard always gave the a great show, but put them on a huge revolving stage with room to run and you've got an extravaganza. The guys were all over the place, criss-crossing at high speed on their way to make sure everyone got plenty of attention. The camera crew did an admirable job capturing as much as possible, considering there's no way to really experience such a show through any number of camera lenses. You still come away from the 14 song concert feeling like you've had the Def Leppard treatment, and that's the point, after all.

Finding there was more room on the disc, somebody promptly stuffed in a bunch of videos from the Slang album and, just like the other DVD, a discography and interview. The subtitles available are in English, Brazilian, Portuguese, and Spanish. If you're a fan of Def Leppard you really should have both of these DVDs, which will mean you'll have high quality copies of all four previously released video tapes plus a bunch of bonus material. Can't beat that.


(C) 2002 - DJ Johnson



BOOK: SCOTT YANOW: Bebop
Miller Freeman Books
Reviewed by Ron Saranich

Bebop is the second in a series of books devoted to the various musical styles that comprise jazz. Yanow, a knowledgeable commentator on jazz for the All Music Guide and other publications, also has written about swing, and plans to complete works devoted to hard bop and cool jazz.

Though almost every jazz musician since 1950 has embraced and played bebop, Yanow's focus is on the key performers from the years 1945 through 1949. However, he does devote space to those musicians of the swing era who adapted to bebop, plus those modern musicians who have occasionally played bop since 1949. Once again, Yanow uses a scale of 1 to 10 to rate any recordings of a boppish nature by these artists.

What exactly is bebop? Yanow writes that with swing, most improvised solos are keyed to the melody. An educated jazz listener can usually identify which song is playing even during a solo. With bebop, "solos are based on the chord changes, and often the melody is discarded after the first chorus, not to be played again until the end of the song. The emphasis is much more on the soloist creativity and inventiveness than on the melody or song itself." Finally cool jazz used the harmonic approach of bebop but used "quieter and lighter rhythms" while hard bop kept the passion of bebop "while mixing in gospel and soul influences."

The author does an excellent job of setting the context of the bebop era. He lists five musicians who tower over the genre due to their talent, inventiveness, creativity, originality, and technique. They are Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Max Roach, and Thelonious Monk. Over fifty years later, these men still cast long shadows over jazz, having created music that sounds as exciting and relevant today as when they wrote it.

Bebop, like its predecessor Swing, is wonderfully written. Yanow knows his material and has a great storytelling style, full of warmth and humor. It's a must read, so either buy a copy of this classic book, or head to your local library and check out their copy. You won't be disappointed. After you finishing reading Bebop, you'll be like me - anxiously awaiting Yanow's volumes on hard bop and cool jazz.


(C) 2002 - Ron Saranich



DVD: The Winner Takes It All: The ABBA Story
UMG
Reviewed by Bill Holmes

This ninety-one minute documentary provides an excellent overview of ABBA’s career and boasts a wealth of performance clips and interviews. Bookended with early history and recent postscript, the bulk of the program focuses on their recording years, from their beginnings (winning the Eurovision song contest with "Waterloo" in 1974) through their final ironic songs of failed relationships. Although many thought their gaudy stage show and chipper pop catalogue were tackier than bubblegum cartoon bands, in retrospect it’s hard to argue with their amazing string of chart-busting singles. The recent interview clips with Bjorn and Benny prove them to be a focused and determined songwriting team who slaved over the melodies until they exhausted the possibilities. I never knew they did this during mammoth sessions in an island cabin, but then I learned a lot about the band from this DVD. I didn’t know that they targeted using the English language for American success because radio refused to play their songs in their own country. Sure, I could have imagined Anni-Frid having a successful solo career or Agnetha performing the role of Mary Magdalene in Jesus Christ Superstar. But Bjorn in a Kingston Trio-like skiffle band? Benny manning a Vox Continental in the garage band The Hepstars? Clips of Bjorn and Benny’s sixties bands looked like the phony "early years" videos from This Is Spinal Tap, but they’re authentic. I admit that I came away more impressed with them as a result.

In addition to their own recollections - refreshingly humble, considering their success - testimonials from some past associates (arranger, costume designer) are included, as is the obligatory Bono observation ("they were one of the best pop bands in history.") Yes, I know what you’re thinking - I can’t believe they got Bono to open up and share his opinions either! (Right.) One collaborator even points out that they might have been the first band to use music videos to promote their material. But one need look no further than the ABBA conventions that attract fans and collectors alike - imagine a Star Trek convention with colorful vests instead of Spock ears. Indeed, ABBA was so huge in so many parts of the world that Bjorn Again, the ABBA tribute band, tours in over thirty countries and plays to packed theatres and arenas. Those who miss Bjorn’s KISS-like boots or the garish costumes the girls wore can relive their fantasies.

This DVD version includes thirty minutes of additional footage not included in the original televised broadcast in 1999. Sound is excellent, and there are subtitles in five languages. Extras are minimal, but one added bonus is a trailer featuring footage from the stage play Mama Mia, as big a hit in North America as it was on the West End of London last year. (Of course, Benny Anderson is no stranger to musicals, having penned Chess with Tim Rice.) Contrary to popular belief, the play is not the story of the band itself, but rather uses twenty-seven ABBA songs to weave its tale together. It’s obvious that the music is infectious enough to carry an evening and send the audience out into the street smiling and singing... just like the band did for all those years.

The Winner Takes It All is a must for fans, yet recommended for non-jaded music lovers as well.


(C) 2002 - Bill Holmes



CD: ALANIS MORISSETTE: Under Rug Swept (Maverick)
vs.
CD: CELINE DION: A New Day Has Come, 2002 Planner (Castelli)
Reviewed by John Sekerka

The gloves are off: Canada's battling divas are at it again. Alanis comes out smoking with a new record, featuring a knock-out 1-2 opening chart climbing salvo. Celine, still in semi-retirement mode, glides in under the radar with a chique day planner. After the opening flurry, Alanis' record struggles to maintain pace, losing focus and recoiling in a meandering rope-a-dope defense, trudging through the middle rounds, waiting for a second wind. Meanwhile Celine's planner, an understated (no pictures), classy little three day per page booklet providing a 9-5 breakdown and a couple of lines for notes, shows staying power. Space is tight though, requiring a steady hand and a sharp eye. Jotting notes in transit is impossible. This is a relaxed, resting on the sofa type of planner. There's an added bonus of tear away corners for quick and accurate reference. Nice. Meanwhile Alanis plods through her record, which is strong lyrically though not as biting as earlier sides, and drags musically. She reaches back and offers a late round bonus for the wired generation with a special multi-media insider web club. A desperate, going down swinging, Hail Mary ploy. The winner by unanimous decision: Celine - as long as she stays away from the studio, we are all winners.


(C) 2002 - John Sekerka



DVD: JOAN JETT AND THE BLACKHEARTS: Live!
BMG Special Products
Reviewed by Bill Holmes

Another in the low-priced line of the "Platinum Performances" series, this collection is primarily derived from a 1998 show at Telluride, Colorado (originally broadcast on Vh-1), although clips from a 1985 MTV New Year’s Eve concert are included along with a music video for "Bad Reputation." But the era doesn’t matter - whether sporting her (ahem) jett-black shag or her androgynous blond buzzcut, Jett and her Blackhearts rock the house. Plus she looks like she could kick my ass anytime she wants.

The signature tracks are here - "I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll," "Cherry Bomb," "Bad Reputation," "Light Of Day" - as well as her amped-up version of "Love Is All Around" (the Mary Tyler Moore Show theme, not the Troggs track). Her choice of covers has always been solid, like Sly Stone’s "Everyday People," Iggy’s "Real Wild Child" and the Replacements’ "Androgynous." Her manic version of "Roadrunner" stands up to just about anyone else’s, while "Crimson And Clover" benefits from her two-tempo interpretation. She could kick Tommy James’ ass.

It’s a full screen show with no subtitles, but the 5.1 surround sound is stellar, and the disc also features biography, discography, full motion menus and a photo montage backed by a bonus audio track. (I have not tried the DVD Rom web links; then again I know how to use a search engine.) The sixteen tracks (two repeats) span her career, and at this price, it’s a steal. With minimal effort you could locate this DVD for about eleven dollars, cheaper than an audio cd. If you like rock and roll, what the hell are you waiting for? Must Joan kick your ass?


(C) 2002 - Bill Holmes