Hothouse Flowers was an Irish band that sounded as if they’d learned their traditional homeland folk from a tipsy bluesman at a Middle American roadhouse. Every song on their debut release People sounded as if the whole band had cracked their hearts clean open and poured the contents in. They may not have veered from the stalwart tones of Ireland more than the immediate forebears The Pogues or The Waterboys, but they were Irish enough to have a band member named Peter O’Toole (not that one, of course, but it still bolsters the bona fides). Mostly, they seemed to strive for the universality of shamelessly grand rock ‘n’ roll reeled off with the full expectation that anyone within earshot would be helpless to sing along. They sounded like they’d be a helluva live band.

I almost saw them once, giving me a chance to potentially prove that theory. They played a Friday night show at Headliners in Madison and I went down there from central Wisconsin with the Program Director from the radio station. Being a tad too youthful for the 21-and-up show, I was stopped at the door. My traveling companion went to the show while I killed time with a bad sequel at the nearby University Square 4 Theatre. When we met up later, he was drenched in sweat, cheerily and breathlessly telling me, “You missed a great show.” I know he was only being an honest reporter, but he didn’t need to rub it in.

Hothouse Flowers, “Feet on the Ground”

(Disclaimer: It appears to me that the debut album from Hothouse Flowers is no longer in print as a physical item. It can be purchased digitally, but what fun is that? Besides, acquiring it through that method may provide some compensation to a major online retailer and the besuited individuals at the record company, but it seems likely that artist will see none of those pennies, and it’s damn certain that the proprietor of your favorite local, independently-owned record store will not benefit. So why not visit the establishment down the road that needs your support and work with them to acquire a brand-spankin’ new copy of the greatest hits release from Hothouse Flowers, which appears to have a very good line-up. Everyone who deserves to be happy will be happy. This song isn’t on that compilation, so it’s posted here under the belief that it can’t be added to a collection by buying a new CD. If someone wants me to take it down and asks me to do so, I will gladly and promptly comply.)

#47 — Assault on Precinct 13 (John Carpenter, 1976)
By most assessments, the glory of American cinema in the nineteen-seventies was largely a result of major studios turning over significant dollars to daring directors who then spun that money into edgy masterpieces. The big entertainment companies were still reeling from the gradual but decisive collapse of the studio system and also didn’t yet know quite what to make of the new freedoms they had thanks to the abolition of the Production Code in favor of the ratings system. There’s a lot of truth to that, but it was also a time when the public appetite for boundary-testing visions was so strong that there were all sorts of filmmakers operating comparatively on the cheap and benefiting from similar freedoms. There’s unlikely greatness in that realm too.

John Carpenter had only made one chintzy, jokey sci-fi film, 1974′s Dark Star, when he was approached by some Philadelphia investors who were interested in hiring him to make the sort of exploitation movie that was routinely yielding healthy returns on minimal investment at the time. An unabashed fan of genre films, Carpenter wanted to make a western to pay tribute to the Howard Hawks films that he loved, but he found that the outlay of cash wasn’t sufficient. So instead, Carpenter simply borrowed and modified the basic plot of Hawks 1959 classic Rio Bravo, about a sheriff and his partners who defend the jailhouse from a band of hired gunslingers after arresting the no-good brother of a powerful local rancher. Carpenter transplanted the story from the bygone western frontier to the modern city; Los Angeles, to be precise. The result was Assault on Precinct 13.

In modernizing the story and placing in the inner city, Carpenter, perhaps inadvertently, drew a parallel between the Wild West and the surging crime rates and crumbling infrastructure of American urban centers. The film naturally, instinctively played on the fears of middle-class, upstanding citizens. Everything was falling apart and a band of thugs could step from the darkness into the wash of a flickering street light at any moment, immediately winning the battle of the night with the sheer force of their inherent menace. As the western was fading, structured as wounded, romantic elegies on the increasingly rare occasions they were made at all, Carpenter tapped into the muscular appeal of the genre by pointing out that the flying bullets and shattered glass weren’t necessarily a thing of the past.

In the film, the precinct house that winds up under siege is in its last hours, populated by a meager staff charged with closing it down for good. The few people left in the building the face off over a street gang that has shown up to besiege the station with gunfire in retaliation for earlier LAPD actions. A scrambled group of civil servants, remaining officers and lingering inmates all take up arms to defend the station and their own lives. Carpenter constructs the film with an feverish zest, pulling out every trick he can think of to prolong the action, such as making the gang especially adept at disguising the results of their mayhem so that any passing squad cars assume all is well.

As with many of the best films, there’s a sense that anything can happen and yet it’s all under tight, focused control. For a relative novice, Carpenter is notably sure-handed, dispensing the perfectly conceived beats of his story with inspired artfulness. Most of the characters are there primarily to serve the plot and the actors fall perfectly in line with blunted, direct performances, more concerned with getting from one storyline point to another than infusing an abundance of personality into the roles (with the exception of Tony Burton, who masters the tone of incredulous agitation). They clearly count on Carpenter to deliver the spirit and energy. It’s a good call, because he does it with great drive and style.

I have no doubt that The Artist will prevail in this year’s Best Picture race at the Academy Awards. None whatsoever. Michel Hazanavicius’s tribute to the distantly bygone glamor of silent picture storytelling by making his own black-and-white, almost entirely silent film of his own is rife with charm and ingenuity. While the story’s focus on a Hollywood star whose prominence fades when talkies arrive allows Hazanavicius to slyly ape the tropes and techniques of those cinematic relics in the films within the film (I’m especially fond of the tragedy that befalls a hero when he finds himself in quicksand), the writer-director is largely sifting his conceit through a very modern sensibility. The best parts of The Artist are those that play cheeky tricks with the predominant lack of sound save the wall-to-wall music score by Ludovic Bource, whose also assuredly got his own Oscar in the offing, earned for sheer volume alone. It’s perfectly marvelous that an early scene hinges on a round of applause that can’t be heard but can instead be seen in the reactions of the characters onscreen. And the first sequence which employs sound effects is a little masterwork of quietly inventive comedy worthy that strikes me as the sort of thing the Coen brothers would have conceived had they taken a crack at a silent film. That’s as about as high of a compliment as I can pay.

Just as I think the film will prove irresistible to a significant number of Academy members, I understand why some were so effusive in their praise when The Artist tiptoed gracefully through the festival circuit. Amidst films that were undoubtedly dominated by dour assessments of the human conditions, the blithe spirit of The Artist would be as welcome as a sweet breeze on a sweltering day. Removed from that context, I’m afraid the film starts to look a bit more slight. For one thing, the story is a bland mash-up of the handful of similarly structured yo-yo sagas of Hollywood life that are about as old as the talkies themselves.

Jean Dujardin plays a matinee idol whose good fortune is smashed to bits when the movies start to speak, and his downward trajectory has its opposite in the rise to stardom of an ingenue whose first flash of fame came when she bumped into him outside of a lavish premiere and gamely played along with his genial mugging. There’s nary a moment of these intertwined stories that isn’t wholly predictable. That’s not necessarily a huge problem in and of itself; a film with enough style and grace can overcome an overly familiar structure, even turn it into an advantage as the added grounding that gives the plot allows from greater flights of fancy in the telling. The Artist achieves this, but not quite often enough to prevent significant stretches in the middle from sagging.

Overall, it’s a wholly admirable film, largely achieving a markedly audacious goal with eager, agreeable panache. Dujardin is a mighty contributor to this, building a performance that begins with the overly pronounced facial expressions of the silent film era but progresses into something more subtle and moving as he evolves from pushing emotions to letting them settle into his face. It’s an acting turn that could have been little more than a prolonged stunt–a problem Bérénice Bejo skirts direly close to at times as the bright ingenue–but Dujardin counterbalances the grand goofiness of it with the proper dose of gravity. There’s indeed artistry on display throughout the film, but none more impressive than that of Dujardin. Hazanavicius might bring considerable skill and creativity to The Artist, but it’s Dujardin who gives it a soul.

If you had trouble getting onto IMDb this morning, it’s because was trying to figure out who the hell Demián Bichir was at the very same time. Okay, that might be a little unfair; Bichir was also a Screen Actors Guild Best Actor nominee for A Better Life, but he was still one of the more surprising announcements this morning. In same category, Gary Oldman became an Oscar nominees for the first time, making the cut, somewhat unexpectedly, for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. They are two of the nine acting nominees who are getting their first invite to the big competition. There are also a few performers who are back in the Oscar fold after gaps of more than twenty years: Max von Sydow was last nominated for Pelle the Conquerer for the 1988 movie year, Kenneth Branagh (as an actor, anyway) for 1989′s Henry V and Glenn Close was last nominated for 1988′s Dangerous Liaisons.

And so let’s talk about poor, poor Glenn. This is her sixth Oscar nomination. She’s never won, and she’s almost assured to lose again. The Best Actress race largely boils down to whether or not the Academy finally breaks down and gives Meryl Streep her third trophy or if they decide that the wounded nobility of Viola Davis in The Help is preferable. The Academy does love wounded nobility, you know. There’s also a chance that Williams could benefit from a split vote and win a very deserving prize for My Week with Marilyn, but Close is almost assuredly going to be jockeying with Rooney Mara for the thankfully unrevealed ignominy of least votes in the category.

A couple other quick thoughts:

–The acting branch really didn’t like the edgy, indie stuff this year. Despite plenty of attention in the precursor awards, Michael Fassbender for Shame (maybe keep it in your pants next time, Michael, the Oscars is a classy joint), Tilda Swinton for We Need to Talk About Kevin and Albert Brooks for Drive were all bypassed. That last one is especially sad, but at least Brooks knew full well what the ultimate outcome was going to be. Now he doesn’t have to dress up if he doesn’t want to.

–Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen each picked up his seventh nomination as Best Director, tying them for third on the list of most nominations in the category with David Lean and Fred Zinnemann and putting them right behind Billy Wilder who was nominated eight times. They’re still unlikely to ever catch William Wyler’s record twelve nominations. Interestingly, they moved past Spielberg who stays stuck at six, even though his film War Horse is a Best Picture nominee. While the expanded Best Picture category blunts this observation somewhat, it’s the third time this has happened to Spielberg after being passed over when Jaws and The Color Purple received Best Picture nods.

–Bérénice Bejo landing in the Supporting Actress makes about as much sense as Hailee Steinfeld being relegated to the same category last year. I’ll guess one ridiculously misassigned performance is a new Oscar tradition.

That’s all I’ve got on the subject until the gold-plated men are doled out next month. But, seriously, I really would have predicted Malick’s nomination. Honest.

The Oscar nominations arrive tomorrow. Usually I would be sitting in front of the television with a sheet of paper hastily scrawling down the honorees in the key categories as they’re announced, giving me the data needed to do some rapid-fire calculations. Somewhere nearby I had my predictions and those of my cohort from the movie review show we did on 90FM in Stevens Point what now seems an eon ago. Once the announcement was complete, I quickly tallied up which one of the two of us did a better job forecasting the nominations. Overwhelmingly, he was the victor. I bested him once–once!–in over twenty years.

This year is different, though. We’ve mutually decided to skip the prediction ritual this year. There are some extenuating circumstances, but the sad truth is that the fun had simply drained out of it. I think we both recognized that our enthusiasm had dissipated in recent years, but neither one of us wanted to bring it up. There was time when each of would tinker with prediction lists for weeks, scratching out names and adding others as precursor awards were handed out, box office receipts seemingly reshaped perceptions and different performers and films gained or lost prominence. Increasingly, I pulled mine together at the last minute. I don’t think I was the only one. The enthusiasm simply wasn’t there any longer. Predicting the Oscars was a dead shark.

I think that’s largely for two reasons: there’s no shortage of people taking their own crack at predicting the Oscars, and the Oscar season, more than ever, is a long march towards an outcome so certain that it may as well be predetermined. As to the former point, when we first did this a couple decades ago (for those who want to precisely carbon date this, the first time we did it over the airwaves, we were correctly certain that Goodfellas and Dances With Wolves would be among the Best Picture nominees), there were few outlets devoting the necessary time or column inches to wagering on who would make the Academy’s first cut. With the Web provided boundless square footage for such things, it sometimes seems like every goof with a Netflix account shares what they see in their own crystal ball. As to the latter, the constant barrage of other awards that lead up to the Oscars (and the increasing uniformity with which they celebrate films and and performers) have shorn away much of the unpredictability of the Oscar nominations. Just about everybody will have Davis, Streep, Swinton and Williams on their Best Actress list, and, making matters even duller, people have probably had all four of those names on their anticipated list since the summer, well before two of the movies were even seen.

So, that’s enough for now. And that’s all right. We had a good run and we had fun. If we can find a way to approach the endeavor that makes it feel fresh again, I’m sure we’ll jump straight in. Until that point, we’ll stand down and let others wrap themselves in knots over trying to figure out which four actors will get to graciously applaud for Christopher Plummer on Oscar night.

This, of course, isn’t going to stop me from spouting off about the nominations tomorrow.

15. “Don’t Go” by Hothouse Flowers
Another Irish band playing anthemic music steeped in classic American styles? Yes, it was the year after The Joshua Tree was released, why do you ask? People, the sensational debut album from Hothouse Flowers came out in 1988 and immediately benefited from the hunger radio programmers had for a sound that could scratch that U2 itch, even though the newer band was creating music that sounded far earthier than the dispatches from a troubled Heaven that Bono and the boys had settled on. “Don’t Go” was the lead single from the album and its escalating hootenanny charge made it one of those songs that immediately inspires thoughts of seeing the band play live. It’s the sort of joyous romp that promises potential greatness if it’s recreated well. Hothouse Flowers persevered as a band, including some truly bizarre sidetracks such as collaboration with Def Leppard.

Previously…
An Introduction
20 and 19: “All I Wanted” and “Don’t Walk Away”
18 and 17 “Back on the Breadline” and “Motorcrash”

I knew was a little extra stressed out this week for a reason. It just occurred to me, as I prepared this post, that I actually wrote a lot for Spectrum Culture this week. I’ll start on the movie side, where I claimed responsibility for reviewing the directorial debut of Vincent D’Onofrio. This was in part because he’s enough of an oddball that I was very curious as to what he’d do behind the camera. I also have a marital obligation to acquire a horror movie for review from time to time and this one had the added curiosity of being a weird indie rock musical as well. Sadly, it doesn’t really work, not because it’s too loony but because it’s not loony enough.

I also contributed to the Revisit feature on the music part of the site, writing a fresh consideration of PJ Harvey’s debut. It was interesting to consider the ribald rawness of it in comparison to the ever-maturing work that followed, but after writing a review of Let England Shake last year and a lovelorn testimonial to the song “You Said Something” just one week earlier, I think I may be at a temporary limit for writing about PJ Harvey.

I also reviewed a new CD, again with some household obligations in mind. It was the latest release from Ani Difranco and it was an unfortunate disappointment. It did, however, give me my first opportunity to namecheck a guy with a familiar moniker in a Spectrum piece.

Finally, I chipped in on this week’s List Inconsequential, covering the Best Musicians Turned Actors. I chose a acting turn that I was seriously considering for the Greatish Performances series here. This may be a good moment to note that the List Inconsequentials may be presented as a collective effort, but each entry in the list is an individual choice that none of the rest of us have any say in. I just want to make it clear that I would have fought tooth and nail against the inclusion of Justin Timberlake’s remarkably unaccomplished work in The Social Network.

Dreams So Real was one of the many bands to emerge out of Athens, Georgia in the eighties. Excited by the distinctively different sounds but similar success of the B-52′s and R.E.M., labels went flocking to the college town, snapping up every band they could find. Dreams So Real, as all bands should, began when the various members met in a local record store. R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck produced their first single and debut album. After that first full-length, they were snapped up by Arista Records, a label that never quite seemed to know what to do with college rock bands once they got them. The band’s first release for the major was Rough Night in Jericho, for which they traded Buck for Bill Drescher, the regular producer for, of all people, Rick Springfield. The change was apparent as the whole record sounds incredibly slicked up.

Though I knew I was supposed to have an instinctual aversion to such polished material, I loved the title cut and lead single. I think, like quite a few tracks I clung to when I was first entering college, it was the way it resided in the zone right between my old classic rock favorites and the sparer stuff I was growing to value more. It might have been a gateway song, but that doesn’t mean I cast it aside when the transition was complete (or as close to complete as that sort of transition can ever be). I kept right on playing it throughout my radio tenure, whether it was in the midst of a Dream set or not.

Dreams So Real, “Rough Night in Jericho”

(Disclaimer: It looks to me like the Dreams So Real catalog is out of print, although a digital purchase of the album in question is available, but we all know how likely that is to provide due compensation to the artist given the accounting chicanery routinely practiced by the major labels. And it damn well won’t put biscuits on the table of the proprietor of your favorite local, independently owned record store. Still, in this age of government saber-rattling, I’m well aware that this song officially and unquestionably belongs to someone else. Should I be contacted by one of those individuals or corporations that can make a viable claim on the track, and should that individual or corporation request or demand it’s removal from the interweb, then this individual who is not a corporation at all will gladly and promptly comply.)

#48 — Stroszek (Werner Herzog, 1977)
It’s difficult to write about Stroszeg without caving in and turning the whole thing into a prolonged essay on all the distinctive elements that make Werner Herzog’s films, the good and the bad, so endlessly fascinating. That’s not just because of my recurring bad habit of making every review of a major director’s work into a rambling consideration of its place with their entire oeuvre. I do that. I know. Instead, the temptation flares up because Stroszek is as perfect of an encapsulation of Herzog’s style, strengths and off-kilter instincts as could be imagined. His relatively consistent theme of man’s hubris in the face of nature’s awesome power is the only piece that’s missing from the puzzle. Otherwise, this is Herzog being Herzog at his most vividly Herzogian. It is loopy and prone to digression, dotted with moments that are deliberately unpolished to the point of amateurish. Remarkably, it is also controlled and firmly, fiercely committed to its overarching themes, particularly its flatly considered exposure of the false promise of freedom.

The title character is played by Bruno S., who’d previously appeared in Herzog’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. Herzog structured the character around his leading actor, drawing on his experiences, especially those in the first part of the film, which takes place in Berlin. Stroszek is released from prison, begins working as a street performer and starts up a relationship with a prostitute he encounters in a bar. That naturally leads to a conflict with her pimp, who arrives as fully adorned in furs and finery as any overdressed extra slipping information to Huggy Bear on Starsky and Hutch. The situation gets dire enough that the join and elderly neighbor in fleeing to the expected safety of the United States, eventually settling in rural Wisconsin. This is where Herzog starts bringing the film to giddily surreal new heights, largely by conceding whole scenes to the mundane bizarreness of the world Stroszek and his compatriots encounter: a businesslike auctioneer, hunters who are politely baffled by their encounter with a foreigner and, after a change of locale, the assembled oddities at a lonely and decrepit roadside attraction. With wickedly funny understatement, Herzog makes the point that there’s nothing stranger than the American experience.

And there’s nothing more deceptive than the so-called American Dream. The weary travelers come to the country that promises prosperity and find opportunity that is always immediately countered by insurmountable heroes. Stroszek is outfitted with the trappings of success–his own home, an assemblage of the latest conveniences and a steady job where the Point Beer is shared freely as a reward for finishing the day–only to find how quickly it can all be stripped away. Easy Street is actually pockmarked with ruts and bumps, but no one explains that when they’re ushering in a newcomer.

Herzog captures it all with the same plainspoken and opinionated fascination that marks his documentary work. Just as Stroszek is flummoxed by his environment–the main expression Bruno S. employs uses a heavy, creased brow to convey a placid irritation–Herzog is entranced by it. This isn’t in some sort of romantic way, seeing the terrain as some sunbeam, soft focus paradise. Instead, he sees the drabness, the coldness, the landscape perennially scorched into haunted inactivity by the rigors of winter. Herzog sees the challenge of simple survival and makes that into its own murmured drama. Amidst the goofiness–or maybe because of his enduring respect for the goofiness–the director’s voice is resonantly clear.

From the October 31st, 1981 edition of Billboard:

That’s right. This crap has been going on for ages. I’m honestly sympathetic to the creators who’ve had their viable marketplace chipped away by the ease of sharing copyrighted material, even as I myself have been one of those shifty online perpetrators of questionable distribution of their sonic wares. But then I’m also sympathetic to the ways artists–the ones who actually create the material that I value–has been routinely and systematically fleeced by entertainment conglomerates over the years. Aside from maybe Tom Petty, I’m not sure how many of those artists were particularly sympathetic to me when, say, the record labels were selling CDs at a grotesquely inflated markup, approximately double what they were selling vinyl records for even though the CDs were notably less costly to manufacture.

The recording industry railed against radio and the movie industry wailed about television harming them beyond repair. Audio cassettes were the final instrument of destruction and then VCRs were the perpetrators. Apple’s iTunes was going to leave everyone hopelessly impoverished because only one person would buy a song and then share it with the world. Meanwhile, Lady Gaga has annual earnings of around $80 million and the labels do everything they can to squeeze every last meager dime from independent, locally-owned record stores while simultaneously setting up policies that flagrantly favor the big box stores. And we’re supposed to feel bad that the industry is hurting so much that the CEO of Best Buy only made $5 million last year.

I’m not denying that piracy is legitimate issue, but I’m seen little evidence that the corporate bigwigs have any capability whatsoever of distinguishing between that which is theft and the sort of fair use sharing that could be the greatest array of free promotion imaginable. What’s more, most of the protections they need are already well-covered by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1988, a piece of legislation that was onerous in its own right (and, not coincidentally, often exhibited a basic misunderstanding of how digital communication actually worked) but any lingering infringement has less to do with any loopholes in the law and more to do with the general ineptness of the media overlords to protect the fiefdoms. Or, more accurately, an astounding inability to leverage new delivery resources to their advantage. As others have observed, there are lessons to learn from the recent success of Louis C.K. to self-distribute his latest comedy special via the web, but the big execs are too busy tightly shutting their eyes and jamming their fingers in their ears, shouting nonsense syllables to block out any mention of progress.

As always, instead of adjusting to the shifting landscape, the major media companies have instead decided that they’re at war with their consumers and have dipped into the huge reserve funds they have for lobbying purposes and tried to bully Congress into doing their bidding with SOPA and PIPA. Up to this point, they have largely complied, despite outrage from a wide array of concerned citizens, including significant companies whose backbone is built around web commerce: in other words, companies that actually understand how web-based communications work instead of crusty oligarchs like Rupert Murdoch, who apparently have difficulty putting bread on the table because of the invaluable, ubiquitous services Google provides.

The abusive burden these bills place on users and creators on web-based material is put best by Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing (in a quote I found at another spot) who asserts, “”Boing Boing could never co-exist with a SOPA world: we could not ever link to another website unless we were sure that no links to anything that infringes copyright appeared on that site. So in order to link to a URL on LiveJournal or WordPress or Twitter or Blogspot, we’d have to first confirm that no one had ever made an infringing link, anywhere on that site. Making one link would require checking millions (even tens of millions) of pages, just to be sure that we weren’t in some way impinging on the ability of five Hollywood studios, four multinational record labels, and six global publishers to maximize their profits.” The strictures laid out by the bill are so ludicrous that not even the author of the bill currently meets them.

There is ample testimony out there as to why these bills should be stopped. If you agree, call your representative in the House, call your Senators, call the White House. The residents of my home state have worked tirelessly and are now in the midst of potential proving that, despite all appearances to the contrary, representative democracy is not fundamentally broken. Hopefully, the sensible opponents of SOPA and PIPA, a group I truly believe represents the majority, can do the same.