IOMB006 (pw: Shade'sVintageRadio)
martes, 28 de febrero de 2023
BONUS 001 - 2nd ANNIVERSARY
Today, is the 28th of February (last day of the month). And it so happens that two years back on this very day Shade's Vintage Radio was born. Our very first Anything, Anywhere, Anytime let itself be heard, or so I wished as, to be honest, I thought my dear friends and me were the only ones aware of that. It all began for the extreme love I have of music, especially 50s (with all its different styles, sounds and sights). Somehow, the idea translated what used to be our norm as friends, meaning "get together" and sharing this love and knowledge of sounds that made us go nuts. But as we grew older with families of our own, jobs and distance we started losing our frequent "get-togethers". How I missed (still do) those long gone days of just enjoying music in the company of good friends. So, there you have it, as the proverbial phrase goes: When life gives you lemons, make lemonade", I decided to create Shade's Vintage Radio to cover that loss. And, lo and behold, it has worked out fine. To my surprise, not only were my lifelong friends "gathering" together one more time, though in the distance, but also I have had the immense satisfaction that, thanks to the internet many newcomers have jumped on the bandwagon, and are participating in what once used to be a private, exclusive, friends only activity.
Shade's Vintage Radio, became an extension of my daily music home listening activity, increasing its production with The Sky's The Limit; Saturday Night At The Movies; Shade's Vintage Radio Special and lately It's Only Make Believe (I do have other ideas in mind, but I just don't have the time, maybe if I finally get my retirement!). I would like to take the opportunity to thank every one of you out there, who have decided to stop by and check out the blog. Most importantly, I would like to extend my gratefulness to those who have taken their precious time to dedicate a few words both in open and private conversations. I wish you all well and hope that future programmes will continue to be of your pleasure and liking. This is the power of music and the magic of the internet, what started out to be a small gathering (in the distance) of old friends, has increased its power by welcoming new friends, where we all share our love for music. Let's not forget, "Without music, life would be a mistake.
Take care,
Shade.
domingo, 26 de febrero de 2023
sábado, 25 de febrero de 2023
SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES 029: COAL MINER'S DAUGHTER (1980)
Coal Miner's Daughter is a musical bio-pic without hysteria - a sweet-souled movie in a genre known for its flamboyant miseries and luxuriant despairs. Based on the funny, ornery, naively egotistical autobiography of country-music queen Loretta Lynn (written with George Vecsey), the movie is good-hearted in a simple way that usually embarrasses big-city audiences.
The movie chronicles one of the famous happy marriages of show business: When she was all of thirteen, Loretta Webb of Butcher Holler, Kentucky, deep in the coal-mining country, was successfully wooed by Doolittle Lynn, a hotshot just out of the army. After fathering four children, Doolittle - or "Doo," as Loretta calls him - pushed his eighteen-year-old wife into a singing career; despite much loneliness and occasional bouts of alcoholic disaffection, he has championed her ever since. The Lynns, who acted as advisers on the production, obviously want to share the lessons of their marriage; their self-love is so humorously unpretentious we can hardly object. Who would deny them a measure of self-satisfaction? Coal Miner's Daughter celebrates the blessed ordinariness of country-music people - the ordinariness Robert Altman turned inside out in his classic "Nashville". This movie, an anti-Nashville, says that country-music stars are really as straightforward as they present themselves onstage. In the end, the simplicity and niceness lessen the movie. Coal Miner's Daughter is often lovely, but it's too tame for art.
The director, Englishman Michael Apted, and the screenwriter, Tom Rickman, who was born in Kentucky, do their best work in the early scenes, which are set among the back-country people of the Cumberland Plateau. Apted, who has a superb sense of design and mood, knows perfectly well that the combination of scraggly buildings and coal-blackened, worn-out faces, set against a background of great beauty, carries an almost automatic emotional charge, and he doesn't linger; he doesn't make poverty picturesque. In passing, we notice the impeccable rightness of the details: Levon Helm (the drummer from the Band) plays Loretta's exhausted coal-miner father with a lusterless, melancholy voice; her mother is not so much acted as embodied by a woman of heart-stopping beauty, folksinger Phyllis Boyens, who has the broad forehead and lank hair of the mother holding young children to her breast in Dorothea Lange's most famous Depression-era photograph. In one scene, four or five hungry-looking children sit at a rough wooden table with the yellowish light of a kerosene lamp illuminating their faces and the floral-patterned wallpaper behind them; Levon Helm turns on the radio for the Grand Ole Opry broadcast, and Phyllis Boyens breaks into a kind of heavy-footed stomp - a point of poetic perfection that the movie never attains again.
In the courtship and marriage of Doo and Loretta, the filmmakers are trying to capture something unusual - not a deep sexual attraction but a mutual longing for partnership that is as powerful, as fated, as the greatest of romances. The revelation here is Tommy Lee Jones. In some of his earlier pictures (The Betsy, Eyes of Laura Mars), Jones, shy of acting, ducked his head away from the camera and ran through his lines skittishly, but now he has stopped fighting what he's doing. A lean, hard-muscled man with rough skin and a flat, pale face, Jones is burdened with an orangy dye job on his hair that makes him look like Howdy Doody, but he turns the hillbilly awkwardness of his makeup to good account - he shows us the animal grace and the shrewdness inside the hick. His sudden, nervous grin, shading off into slyness, says to us, "I'm not as dumb as I look." One of the saddest and most beautifully managed things in the movie is the way Doo, still wearing his boots and jeans, gets heavy in the gut and vaguely melancholy as he ages. Jones gives him a sweet, sodden dignity that's immensely touching.
We may not feel as close to Loretta, who isn't so clearly focused a character. It doesn't seem that Rickman ever figured out what he wanted to say about Loretta Lynn and the relation of her music to her life. We see her singing only once when she's a kid, and Sissy Spacek, who's physically very convincing as a thirteen-year-old, doesn't give her any specific character as she gets older. We're puzzled when Doo suddenly pushes this mother of four into a singing career. It's as if he had some flash in the night that his wife was a performing genius and after a short period of reluctance she simply agreed with him. Her drive upward falls in and out of cliché. For instance, she sings to a noisy, indifferent bar crowd which suddenly falls silent in open-mouthed wonder - a standard bit. On the other hand, the next major sequence is startling and funny: As Doo and Loretta drive around Kentucky and Tennessee with her demo single, she strong-arms disc jockeys by breaking into long, exasperated tirades about her life and trials and four children and husband and so on, until, cowed, the poor jerks put the record on the air. But this is the last time that the showbiz details feel fresh. Once Loretta ascends to country-music heaven (with an instant succes at the Grand Ole Opry), all is sweetness and light. She has one triumph after another, and everyone is extraordinarily nice to her - Patsy Cline (Beverly D'Angelo), for example, the reigning country-music queen, who feels not the slightest twinge of jealousy and embraces Loretta as a close friend.
The screenplay by Tom Rickman is not really about their rags-to riches lives or the difficulties of show biz. It is an appealing story about a marriage in which husband and wife switch roles and learn to live with each other's personality metamorphoses. Coal Miner's Daughter speaks to the heart and contains enough truths about relationships to make it universally applicable.
But before we get to the main feature, let's enjoy...
The Pre-Show:
Our Pre-Show today is packed with wonderful documentaries and live shows concerning our main character: Loretta Lynn. You won't regret any minute of it! Please, feel free to enjoy. And what about our TV On Deck section, an extension of last week's adventures of 60s & 70s half hour comic sitcoms plus the thrilling on-going serial The Batman.
The Main Feature:
Title: Coal Miner's Daughter
Director: Michael Apted
Cast: Sissy Spacek / Tommy Lee Jones / Beverly D'Angelo / Levon Helm
Release Date: March 7, 1980
Country: United States
viernes, 24 de febrero de 2023
miércoles, 22 de febrero de 2023
martes, 21 de febrero de 2023
domingo, 19 de febrero de 2023
sábado, 18 de febrero de 2023
SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES 028: PATSY & LORETTA (2019)
Sisterhood strong enough to last a Lifetime. "Patsy & Loretta" compresses 18 months of a tragically brief friendship between two country music legends into one pretty good biopic. But the performers lift it up to a higher level. Megan Hilty (who plays and sings Patsy Cline) and Chicago stage alum Jessie Mueller (who plays and sings Loretta Lynn) tell an inspiring parallel story: that of a couple of Broadway pros with the chops to finesse 90 minutes of dramatic shorthand.
Director Callie Khouri's project, with a script by Angelina Burnett, borrows the title's ampersand from Khouri's Oscar-winning "Thelma & Louise" screenplay. The Lifetime network's promotional campaign for "Patsy & Loretta" features Hilty and Mueller in tough, defiant, hit-the-road poses evoking Khouri's 1991 film.
The movie covers the years 1957 through 1963, introducing Cline and Lynn separately, four years prior to their meeting in 1961. Hilty warms up the story with a hearty rendition of "Come On In," as Cline takes the stage at a Winchester, Virginia, honkytonk. She's about to embark on her second marriage. Kyle Schmid plays Charlie Dick, equal parts supportive husband and simmering pot of resentment. "There are two things I want in this world," Cline tells Dick early on. "Babies, and hit records."
Out in Blaine, Washington, meantime, Lynn and husband Doolittle (Joe Tippett) scrape by with a house full of boisterous kids. Shy by nature and a wife since either 13 or 15 (accounts vary), Lynn contents herself with singing at the kitchen sink. Mueller, who won a Tony Award as Carole King in "Beautiful," has a way of doing a scene like this so that it feels overheard, not overstressed.
With the support of her mother (Janine Turner), Cline kills it at Arthur Godfrey's talent show, while Lynn makes her way forward as a singer-songwriter with surly input from her husband about how makeup will make her look like a "prostitute." "Patsy & Loretta" brings the star and the star-to-be together after Cline's near-fatal 1961 car accident. Though it sounds like biopic fraudulence, it actually happened. Laid up in the hospital, Cline heard Lynn sing a Cline tribute on the radio and wanted to meet her.
The movie's story beats and rhythms at times feel mighty rushed. There's easily enough material in this friendship, cut short by Cline's fatal 1963 airplane crash, for a four-hour miniseries or more. Hilty more easily suggests the aura, swagger and vocal timbre of the real Cline than Mueller evokes the look, feel and sound of the coal miner's daughter from Butcher Holler, Kentucky. Mueller's edge is softer than the real Lynn's. But there's steel underneath the surface, always, and director Khouri nudges Hilty and Mueller toward realism whenever possible. The roughest domestic scenes in "Patsy & Loretta," in both women's lives, forego melodrama for vivid, unsettling slices of life.
Both singers tend to pretty up the vocal stylings of the legendary singers they're impersonating. Though, the film has a Lifetime malnourishment about it - limited in settings, lacking in razzle dazzle, not even getting the take-off weather right for that ill-fated plane flight. It's "brisk" to the point of "hurried." It's still a most worthwhile endeavor and a worthy film to watch on a Saturday night.
But before we get to the main feature, let's enjoy...
The Pre-show:
The Pre-show is divided in two sections. Section A (film extras) concerns Patsy's life through extra videos which will help us to understand her life and circumstances. Section B (TV on deck) continues the adventures of 60s & 70s half hour comic sitcoms plus the thrilling on-going serial The Batman, where it always ends with comments such as: "Don't fail to see "Chapter 4 - Slaves Of The Rising Sun" of Batman at this theatre next week!" Boy, was it easy to thrill us back in the day!
The Main Feature:
Title: Patsy & Loretta
Director: Callie Khouri
Cast: Megan Hilty / Jessie Mueller / Janine Turner / Kyle Schmid
Release Date: 19-10-19
Country: United States
On Your Way Out:
Grab 'em! Use 'em! Enjoy 'em! What more to say, than have lots of fun!
Cheers, Shade.
Note: Password for all files: Shade'sVintageRadio
viernes, 17 de febrero de 2023
miércoles, 15 de febrero de 2023
martes, 14 de febrero de 2023
domingo, 12 de febrero de 2023
sábado, 11 de febrero de 2023
SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES 027: SWEET DREAMS (1985)
"And I'm crazy for loving you." The closing line of her signature song sums up the main focus of the 1985 biopic: "Sweet Dreams" based on Patsy Cline's life from 1956 through 1963. Hollywood loves to explore the life stories behind great talents, usually offering a particular intepretation of what makes the artist tick. Screenwriter Robert Getchell, producer Bernard Schwartz and director Karel Reisz portray Patsy's relationship with her second husband, Charlie Dick, as being a core element of what fueled her passion as an artist.
The film begins when Patsy (played by Jessica Lange who received an Oscar nomination for her performance) is married to her first husband, Gerald Cline, pictured as a guy who's more interested in his own hobbies than in Patsy or her musical talent and career. In an early scene, the rigging on his model ship, for example, is more exciting to him than how Patsy's performance had gone at a particular club that night.
On the other hand, a man she met at the club couldn't take his eyes off of her. That man turns out to be Charlie Dick (Ed Harris) who gives her all the attention she's been starved for, including attention for her music, and who has a passionate personality to match her own. It isn't long before Patsy leaves Gerald.
However, where there's fire, there's beauty and power, and the danger of getting burned. The film depicts their marriage as both passionate and rocky, with flair ups due to their strong wills, and Charlie's drinking, philandering and temper. In the midst of the tumultuous episodes, they share the joys of two children together and Patsy's career successes - Charlie serving as one of her biggest fans.
Another great support is her mother, Hilda Hensley (warmly played by Ann Wedgeworth). Some artists are driven by their mothers or fathers, but Patsy seems to have had her own drive and dreams which her mother tried to help steer. She was also Patsy's place and person of safety when she and Charlie had their bouts.
The film also touches briefly on Patsy's key professional relationships, but only highlights that of her manager, Randy Hughes (David Clennon). This is probably due to the fact that in the end he is the one flying the plane on which Patsy, Randy, and performers Cowboy Copas and Hawkshaw Hawkins were killed.
The film ends shortly after the crash and funeral with a devastated Charlie reflecting back on the beginnings of their relationship with all its hopes and dreams, leaving us to ponder the connections between dreams, reality and love. Like a good sad country song, it leaves you with the hurt and longing of love and life somehow incomplete, and the knowledge that you really didn't appreciate what you had until it was gone.
As movies go, this one's pretty good. Lange and Harris's performances are wonderful. As a documentary on the life of Patsy Cline, it falls far short, leaving out so much of the other important aspects of her life, her career, and her lasting impact, as well as taking liberties with the details to make a better script.
The soundtrack is one of the best parts of the film. It features Patsy's actual vocal recordings from the last three years of her life - the MCA years - faithfully lip-synched by Lange who does a good job of capturing Patsy's overall performance style.
As others have said, both the film and the soundtrack make attempts to improve on the original Patsy, in some ways contributing to the legend rather than sharing the real thing. But perhaps that's a reflection of the film's basic idea that love is a crazy mix of dreams and reality.
But before we get to the main feature, let's enjoy...
The Pre-show:
I wonder if last week's download increase had anything to do with the inclusion of the new special, "TV On Deck", where we revisit classic tv series from the past. Mind you, it wasn't the first time when I was a kid / teenager that I would dash into a nearby cinema, not so much for the main feature itself, but for the "extras" which awaited. Some even had me for a complete week waiting to see what had finally happened to my screen hero. In this case our dear "The" Batman. We left him falling off a skyscraper... Did he die? Can't be, it's Batman! How'd he save himself? Boy... did the week drag along.. finally school was over and the weekend invited adventure. How easy it was to get excited back in the day. Let's not forget a taste of two half-hour laughs belonging to two different decades, the 60s and the 70s. To top it all, I'm sure there must be some classic cartoon.
Let's not forget the Pre-show added attraction of some interesting stories concerning Patsy Cline. The most important, in my humble opinion, is the audio testimony of the night Patsy Cline realized her dream at Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts CBS show, January 21, 1957.
The Main Feature:
Title: Sweet Dreams
Director: Karel Reisz
Cast: Jessica Lange / Ed Harris / Ann Wedgeworth / David Clennon
Release Date: October 4, 1985
Country: United States
On Your Way Out:
I'm sure all of you know what is expected in this section. The idea behind this, is to always get something that will hopefully, enhance your viewing experience.
Cheers Shade.
Note: Password for all files: Shade'sVintageRadio
viernes, 10 de febrero de 2023
miércoles, 8 de febrero de 2023
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