A night with Lou Reed

Lou Reed

A night with Lou Reed is a terrific concert video taken from a show at The Bottom Line in New York City in February of 1983. The newly sober and married Reed is on his best behavior, clearly chuffed to be playing live with the most accomplished band of musicians he ever toured with. That band--Robert Quine on guitar, Fernando Saunders on bass, Fred Maher on drums--had recorded The Blue Mask with Reed, his best release in many a moon. The follow up to that album, also recorded with the same band, Legendary Hearts was due to be released in March. Before an intimate audience of yuppies and Andy Warhol, the quartet provides a robust show of new material and oldies, quite a few dating from the days of the Velvet Underground.   

The video is competently directed by Clark Santee, but is missing four numbers from the concert. Still, the world probably doesn't need another live version of Heroin. I slightly prefer the versions of the songs on this video to the versions on the Live in Italy album which was recorded by the same band later that year. Both Saunders and Quine were exemplary improvisers and Reed provided them more leeway than was usual in his touring band. It is particularly unusual for a bass player in a rock band to be given the chance to provide numerous solos and flourishes as Saunders did for Reed, but Saunders was an accomplished jazz player who had already accompanied such guitar luminaries as Jeff Beck and John McLaughlin. Reed's joy at Saunders' solo on New Age here reflects the enormous pleasure he got from Saunders' playing. Saunders ended up contributing to Reed's albums and tours into the 21st century, remarkable given the track record of testy Lou.

Fernando Saunders, Lou Reed and Robert Quine

Such was not the fate of Robert Quine. A lifelong Velvets fanatic, he and Reed parted ways in 1984, never to collaborate again. Quine was not overly fond of touring and retreated to session work. Reportedly, Quine played on Legendary Hearts' followup, New Sensations, but his contributions were erased by Reed after the two wrangled over the writing credits for I Love You, Suzanne. Besides his work with Reed, Quine's sizzling guitar work is best sampled on the two Richard Hell and the Voidoids albums and the explosive passages he lent to Matthew Sweet's albums in the 1990s. While not as ecstasy inducing as 1969: The Velvet Underground Live, A night with Lou Reed is an impressive document of a short lived band in cozy surroundings. Lou doesn't have to hector vocally as much as he does on the Live in Italy. This video was released on VHS and Betamax in 1984 and there is a laser disc from the 1990s floating about which can be had on eBay. Luckily, A night with Lou Reed can be seen and more importantly heard for free currently on Tubi. It will please any and all rock and role fans.
                             

Out of It

Gretchen Corbett and Barry Gordon

Paul Williams' Out of It is an amateurish teen film set in Long Island in 1965 or so. The teens take turns dating each other and hanging out at the beach. The boys are tormented by their football coach (Frank Campanella) during summer practice and that is about it in terms of plot. Nobody seems to have a summer job. The kids are enjoying upper middle class leisure and the film, to its credit, acknowledges this. Williams' dialogue is more nuanced than his direction. Even the villains of the film have moments in which we see glimpses of humanity. Ultimately, this is a better teen flick than the beach blanket flicks or a pretentious youth picture like Last Summer. The main reason is that its four main actors are all solid performers who have their moments here and would go on to greater acclaim. 

The main character of Out of It is Paul (Barry Gordon), a restless and horny teen riding out the summer between Junior and Senior year. He is a existentialism reading nerd ultimately more interested in getting some girl action than understanding Camus. He dates Barbara (Gretchen Corbett) briefly, but doesn't seem to mind when she pairs off with one of his buddies. This is because he is fixated on Christine (Lada Edmund Jr.), a stunning blonde who functions here much as Suzanne Somers would in American Graffiti. Christine is going steady with Russ (Jon Voight), a lunk-headed football star and Paul's nemesis. The role of Russ is not dissimilar to that of Joe Buck. Out of It which, judging from Ms. Corbett's paisley bikini, was shot in 1967, sat on the shelf for a while until it was released in 1969 to ride the coattails of Voigt's starring role in Midnight Cowboy. Voigt was promoted as the star of Out of It along with Gordon, but Voigt's role in the film is really a supporting one.

Barry Gordon and Jon Voigt

Russ, at one point, taunts Paul about his Jewish heritage. I found this interesting, especially since Out of It seems to be a cut rate version of The Graduate, a film which somehow managed to turn Dustin Hoffman into a goy. Director Williams gives Paul some ridiculous Walter Mitty type fantasy sequences that fall flat, but he also gives Paul moments of emotional growth that redeem a shaky picture. Paul asks Christine out for a date and is surprised when she accepts and eventually comes on to him. He is able to provide her the conversation and feeling of relatedness that she doesn't find with the dim Russ. Paul learns that to have a real relationship there has to be a common bond that transcends sexual attraction. This leads him back to Barbara.

The wimpy baroque rock soundtrack is credited to the New York Rock Ensemble and one of its members, Mark Snow. Snow would soon leave the group and become a successful composer for television and film. Out of It is greatly helped by the cinematography of John G. Alvidsen who went on to direct Rocky and The Karate Kid. His efforts are the most professional aspect of a film that suffers from poor pacing and clunky sound. Barry Gordon would have a successful and long career in television and movies. He ended up being the longest serving President of the Screen Actors Guild, but is best known as the voice of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' Donatello. Lada Edmund Jr. was one of the original go-go dancers on the Hullabaloo television show and eventually realized that she was not cut out for acting. She became one of the most successful stunt women in Hollywood. 

Out of It marked the film debut of Gretchen Corbett, always a Kino Biff favorite. She is most famous for her continuing role as James Garner's on-again, off-again love interest and attorney on The Rockford Files. She was either bussing Garner or bailing him out. An Oregon native, Corbett first had success with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and on the Broadway stage. Her glowing notices led her to be signed by Universal Pictures as one of its last contract players. She eventually returned to Oregon and has been heavily involved in Portland theater for the last thirty years or so. She still makes appearances in films and television, usually for productions that are filmed in the Pacific Northwest like Pig, Portlandia, and Shrill. I think she is the cat's pajamas and the bee's knees.

James Garner and Gretchen Corbett in The Rockford Files

Normal

Bob Odenkirk and f(r)iends

Ben Wheatley's Normal combines small town atmosphere, propellant bursts of action, and dark comedy. Bob Odenkirk stars as Ulysses, the newly hired interim sheriff of Normal, Minnesota. That an outsider could take on such a job for a mere two months strains credulity, but Normal strives for a canvas of bent reality rather than realism itself. Soon into the film, Ulysses and the audience begin to feel that something sinister is lurking beneath the prairie home exterior of the little burg. An inept bank robbery reveals that the institution was housing yakuza money and that the whole town is on the take. Ulysses and the two hapless robbers (Reena Jolly and Brendan Fletcher) must fight off the entire populace. The town is armed to the teeth and Ulysses takes advantage of the firepower in an extremely violent last act.

Normal was written by Derek Kolstad, the writer chiefly responsible for the John Wick series of films. Mr. Kolstad has written a clever script, thankfully more compact than the operatic Wick films. The action scenes contain more of a Rube Goldberg/ Wile E. Coyote element than in the Wick films and are expertly wrought by Wheatley who has previously displayed his action chops in Free Fire and Meg 2. Kolstad gives Ulysses a voice over narration in the form of phone messages to his estranged wife, Penny (geddit). Odenkirk handles the voice overs with aplomb, but this points to the derivative nature of Kolstad's work. Not derivative of Homer though Kolstad is brainy enough to make shout outs to Dorothy Parker, Breaking Bad, and Old Boy. No, Normal is a Coen brothers tribute, grafting the Homeric allusions of O Brother, where art thou? to the high plains noir of Fargo. There are worse formulas, I suppose, but seasoned cinema goers will have seen it all before.

That said, Kolstad deserves credit for creating varied and striking roles for a compact, B movie format and Wheatley has elicited good performances from Mr. Odenkirk, Ms. Jolly, Mr. Fletcher, Henry Winkler, Lena Headey, Jess McLeod, and Billy MacLellan. Manitoba stands in well for Minnesota and the picture gets points for killing off a beloved character actor halfway through the proceedings. Mr Wheatley's psychedelic dynamism meshes well with Kolstad's askew view of his characters, but with limited results. Novel seems more like a project for hire for Wheatley whose best and most personal works remain the films he has directed in his native England: Sightseers, A Field in England, and In the Earth.