Nicholas Thurkettle

Thanks to the influence of pirate radio stations that embraced it, Concrete and Clay, a British pop song with some atypical vocal harmonies and a Latin beat, was the #1 song in the UK for exactly one week in 1965. The band, Unit 4 + 2, never had another hit, and after attempts at shuffled lineups, harder rock, and even psychedelia, broke up in 1970 and never re-formed for a nostalgia tour. When the song was released in the US, it was forced to compete with a cover version by singer songwriter Eddie Rambeau, and as a result, neither made it to the top 10. Ironically, it was also the biggest hit of Rambeau’s career.

Here’s the original – six lads singing a good little tune about young love:

You might recognize it from the soundtrack to Rushmore. I heard it on the radio the other night and realized I had never known its right title. I also realized that I wanted to sing it at karaoke some night. So I went hunting for it on YouTube to study it, and was surprised to see the strange life this song has led since it came into being 45 years ago.

I think about that moment in That Thing You Do! when Tom Hanks tries to explain what he likes about the song, and just snaps his fingers and says: “’That Thing You Do’, you know, it’s catchy.” This is a catchy song, and sweet, and you can see why many artists along the way have thought it could do them some good.

Here’s now-prolific film composer Randy Edelman giving it some ballad-y touches and good 70’s over-instrumentation, scoring a hit in the era when singers could be fugly:

And here’s Australian rocker Martin Plaza, complete with mullet and “I’m Dead Sexy!” facial confidence, who adds some perfectly-deployed horrible synthesizers in a video with so many bits of cutting-edge 80’s low budget trickery that you’ll be wondering where the star wipe is:

Once again, a hit for him. And it was also a hit for late 80’s German pop trio Hong Kong Syndikat, whose video teaches us that with a bit of good music coming out of the boom box, hobos, baby-snatchers, rockabilly rejects, naughty nuns, and overweight people can all smile and share pastries together on the sidewalk:

But you want to know someone for whom this song wasn’t a hit? This guy:

Believe it or not, that’s Kevin Rowland, former lead singer of Dexy’s Midnight Runners, another One-Hit Wonder Hall of Famer with 1982’s unforgettable Come on Eileen. Seeing this video, I remember that this was how I first heard a snippet of this song, on a VH1 Where Are They Now? special, where Kevin announced that with this new album of his, he was going to be unveiling his line of men’s dresses; and how it wasn’t at all a gay thing, he just thought it should be okay for men to wear dresses. And stockings. And combination phallus-hammocks/thongs. And schoolgirl shoes.

I cannot decide what is my favorite part of this video – is it the conga drummer who is barely playing the drums, but is just there for Kevin to rub up against in an extremely non-gay manner? The widely-varying but still-very-generally-low enthusiasm of the backup singer/angels? The way this was obviously shot in a couple of hours on a tiny soundstage for next to no money? Or is it just the whole conceit that this middle-aged pansexual really wants everyone to pay more attention to his shaved ass?

According to the never-ever-wrong Wikipedia, the album – which was supposed to have something to do with his recovery from drug addiction – sold less than 500 copies, and when he tried to perform live in the dress, he was driven off the stage by a hail of bottles.

Understand, I do not mean by this light mockery to discourage. I think more weird people need to do more weird things, because it enriches life for the squares. I think all the people in these videos felt the same impulse I felt when I heard that song. Snap snap, you know, it’s catchy.

On my first day of my first acting class in my first year as a theatre major, the teacher arranged us in a circle on the floor; and, one-by-one, we had to leap to our feet, brandish an imaginary spear, and shout: “I will dare to fail gloriously!” The point is that in the theatre, there is no going back and there is no room for apologies. If you are going to screw up, screw up big.

I have always loved this philosophy because it incorporates the idea that mistakes will happen no matter how much you prepare. The imperfections are as much a part of the music as Jackson Pollock’s cigarette ashes are part of his paintings. Every night, the audience gets a version of the show that will never be done again, because of the hundred little accidents, deviations, and discoveries.

This spontaneity is part of the reason I moved away from acting – I have a hard time with trust and letting go in the moment, and my best idea usually only comes after rumination and calculation. It’s why I’m better as a writer than a performer – I get a chance to think rather than just react.

But even though since college I have rarely sought out opportunities to perform on stage, I have developed this strange pattern over the years of ending up on a stage anyway. It started in high school. A community children’s theatre group I had performed with in the past needed someone to fill in on tech – and on our budget, by “tech” I mean flipping a light switch and operating a CD changer in the back of a cafeteria. So I showed up for one rehearsal, watched the show, and noted all my tasks.

On opening day, at one o’clock, the director called and said: “Hey, I’ve got a crazy idea. Want to act in the play?” One of the cast (and strangely enough, he might be reading this post right now) had twisted his ankle after the last rehearsal and couldn’t perform. The director needed someone who could memorize the part in six hours.

Now this part I do well. I’ve done Shakespeare and Tom Stoppard and I adore words, so I have the skill for recording language in my brain on short-notice. I will freely say I am not all that good an actor, and I’m tricky to cast – I can’t dance, my singing is so-so, I’m too odd-looking for the leading man roles, too tall and soft for the energetic character roles, too cerebral for the boisterous roles, too rubber-faced for serious roles, too unthreatening for the macho roles, and too young for the old crafty roles. But I understand stagecraft and discipline enough that people I work with can trust that they don’t have to start from square one. I can be plugged in on an emergency basis and they won’t have to worry I’m going to crash the show.

It happened again when my sister was helping produce her fiancée’s musical. They needed an extra set of backstage hands and someone who could walk on to do two lines at the end. And with one rehearsal, that’s exactly what I did. Auntie Mame happened a few years later because of my brother. He had kept doing community theatre as an occasional hobby, and when a production needed to fill a supporting role eleven days from opening, a friend of his in the cast dropped his name. He wasn’t available for the whole run, so I got brought along as part of the family package for half of the performances.

After that, when I was directing my 10-minute play for Sacred Fools in LA, and my lead dropped out three days before the show, my good friend Mishka the Hairy Russian, who I had also cast and have known since college, was the one who convinced me that searching for a new actor on such short notice was foolish when we already had a perfectly capable one who knew the script available – by which he meant me.

I auditioned for one play a year or so ago, but didn’t prepare, mumbled my way through it and didn’t have a serious chance at a part. I have never been that good at auditioning and it wasn’t a show for which I was actually appropriate, in hindsight.

But Norma Jean, one of my castmates from Auntie Mame, remembered my ability to swing in at the last minute (and actually has a far higher opinion of my abilities than I do), and on Saturday night she dropped me a Facebook message which is the reason why I haven’t been able to post, or really even think much, since then.
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The Road
Director: John Hillcoat
Writers: Screenplay by Joe Penhall, based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy
Producers: Nick Wechsler, Steve Schwartz, Paula Mae Schwartz
Stars: Viggo Mortensen, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Charlize Theron, Robert Duvall, Guy Pearce

Viggo Mortensen’s performance in The Road is great because of all that the movie denies him. Withered and hoarse, he has such small spaces within which to suggest the human he used to be, covered as it is by what he has to be now. He says to his son: “I’ll shoot anyone who touches you; ‘cause it’s my job.” And under his absolute conviction he is able to show us his grief that life has become that simple, that the nearness of death has made his parental tunnel vision, in his mind, necessary. We believe he is not a ruthless man, but his love is now a ruthless love, and the way it has altered him provides the tension in this post-apocalyptic journey filmed from the pages of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.

As movie apocalypses go this is one of the most thorough I have seen – even the innocent plants and animals were not spared. It’s a planet-wide cemetery; everything is decay and despair, and the only sound on the horizon is the sighing crash of another dead tree. Even their roots have given up. Director John Hillcoat used the primitive Australian Outback to mesmerizing effect in 2006’s The Proposition, and he realizes this bleak future just as capably.
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Originally published 11/1/04

Team America: World Police
Director: Trey Parker
Writers: Trey Parker, Matt Stone, Pam Brady
Producers: Scott Rudin, Matt Stone, Trey Parker
Starring the voices of: Trey Parker, Matt Stone, Kristen Miller, Masasa, Daran Norris, Phil Hendrie, Maurice LaMarche

-PERSONS attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

-Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

It’s a dangerous, dangerous thing to assume that Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park and the brains/voices behind Team America: World Police, have any agenda beyond making you laugh.

Dumber and more hostile people than them have suggested that celebrities who speak out against war are giving aid to the enemy, which is exactly what happens in the movie. The catch is, the people who’ve suggested this have never been funny at it. And I doubt Parker and Stone really believe it. But I do think they consider it funny. And maybe it is inherently funny that famous actors believe they can change the world, but it can’t be discounted that the climax of the movie involves, well, good acting changing the world. And thus a clear message beyond universal mockery eludes us again.

I will not attempt to even guess at Parker and Stone’s politics, much less criticize them. My criticism is reserved solely for their humor.
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Originally posted 9/27/04

Shaun of the Dead
Director: Edgar Wright
Writers: Simon Pegg, Edgar Wright
Producer: Nira Park
Stars: Simon Pegg, Kate Ashfield, Nick Frost, Lucy Davis, Dylan Moran, Penelope Wilton, Bill Nighy

The Scream movies were labeled “post-modern” because the characters in them had seen horror movies and used them as a template for survival. Shaun of the Dead is a different kind of post-modern, because its success depends heavily on the audience having seen horror movies, particularly zombie movies. The characters have not seen zombie movies, and know nothing about survival except how much their preferred post-hangover victuals cost at the corner market.

This almost appallingly-amusing movie’s central joke is that there’s no thing too weird, say, for example, an apocalypse of the walking dead, that we as people couldn’t eventually filter into a background irritant. The inertia of the average low-watt slacker, we see, will always bring him back to his couch, television and beer.
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It started when Roxie e-mailed me a list of discount tickets she could purchase through her job – markdowns on distractions all over Southern California. Is “Ambitious Cheapskate” an oxymoron? I’m sure striving to make it not so.

They had a sub-half-price offer for Six Flags Magic Mountain – the West Coast’s rollercoaster Mecca – and I had not paid my respects in far too long. So we started to plan a trip, and as we compared schedules it became obvious that the best time to do this was going to be Valentine’s Day Weekend. It’s the ideal time of year for a local to hit Six Flags – the summer weather up there is obscene, and the crowds even worse. A nice, temperate February weekend, without even Spring Break threatening the ride lines, drastically increased the likelihood of getting our money’s worth and avoiding heat stroke in one bang.

My plan was already to drive up to Santa Clarita on Saturday and get a hotel room, so as not to have to endure 90 miles of driving in the morning before we even reached the parking lot. And so – totally conveniently and naturally – a fabulous weekend getaway snapped into place on the calendar.

Before we checked into the hotel we detoured up the 14 Freeway to Vasquez Rocks – a place you’ve probably seen even though you didn’t know it. The jagged shapes formed by our San Andreas Fault have loomed in the background of countless films and TV shows. Perhaps most famously, it was the setting for Captain James T. Kirk’s mano-a-mano with the Gorn:

We spent about ninety minutes clambering up and down the rocks – tourists, dog-walkers, and horseback riders were going every which way. The whole park is only about three-square kilometers, and we tempered our exploration by remembering that we were going to need some strength left in our legs the next day. I’d love to come back closer to sunset, and see what the place looks like in the golden hours. Pictures are below the cut.

We checked into the Holiday Inn Express just at the foot of Magic Mountain, cleaned up and dressed for dinner. We went to a restaurant/pub called Mulligans, which was already decorated for Valentine’s Day but didn’t have the crowds or the menu markup that comes along with the day. She had the Shepherd’s Pie, and I had Filet Mignon, and we both got to appreciate that good Filet Mignon experience of having meat melt in your mouth. Dessert was fried ice cream, and we all but staggered back to the car, blissful.

We settled in for an early bedtime, and watched an absolutely amazingly effed-up sci-fi movie from the 70’s – A Boy and His Dog. Based on a novella by professional misanthrope Harlan Ellison, it stars a teenaged Don Johnson, wandering the post-apocalyptic desert with his telepathic dog, looking for canned food and rapeable women. Things proceed to get seriously strange from there, building up to an ending that is both evil and perfect. Whatever cult follows this movie, consider Roxie and I the two newest members.

Sunday started with the bounteous Holiday Inn Express breakfast, and then proceeded up the hill. What followed you will see in a separate entry.
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More substantial post about Valentine’s Day Weekend is in the works – but in the meantime, a brief taste of Pretty from a recent walk Roxie and I took in Upper Newport Bay after several days of rain.

Saw VI
Director: Kevin Greutert
Writers: Screenplay by Patrick Melton & Marcus Dunstan
Producers: Mark Burg, Oren Koules, Gregg Hoffman
Stars: Tobin Bell, Costas Mandylor, Shawnee Smith, Betsy Russell, Peter Outerbridge, Mark Rolston, Athena Karkanis, Samantha Lemole

“I’m just a soul whose intentions are good
Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood”
     -The Animals

Machinery is what The Jigsaw Killer (Tobin Bell) specialized in during his life, and since the Saw franchise that chronicles his exploits has now succeeded in making three sequels after the death of its main character, it is fitting that those sequels feature machines he built or conceived of in life, that are still grinding thoughtlessly on without him. And Saw VI does feature a saw – by my recollection, every film in the series thus far has contained at least one, and you have to think they make sure of things like that.

I have seen all the Saw movies, originally created by director James Wan and writer Leigh Whannell, and have not thought a single one good. But Saw VI, which shows the franchise out of ideas and beyond the threshold of self-parody, has a way of reflecting back on what few morsels of promise existed in the early movies. In hindsight they find themselves improved, now that I have seen how it is possible for them to be worse.
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Ninja Assassin
Director: James McTeigue
Writers: story by Matthew Sand, screenplay by Matthew Sand and J. Michael Straczynski
Producers: Grant Hill, Joel Silver, Andy Wachowski, Larry Wachowski
Stars: Rain, Naomie Harris, Shô Kosugi, Rick Yune, Ben Miles

The blood is very important. Any self-respecting movie that sets out to call itself Ninja Assassin is going to spill some blood, and you have to make a decision how that blood is going to look and behave. There are more options than you may have ever considered.

The movie before us is a product of the Matrix-making Wachowskis, their long-time champion/producer Joel Silver, and their apprentice director James McTeigue (who also helmed V for Vendetta for them), and with resumes like that you know they thought long and hard about the blood. What they settled on is garish, at the candy-colored end of the spectrum like in George Romero’s original Dawn of the Dead, and it does not squirt or spurt, but splashes and splatters. In our world the average human body contains 5-6 quarts of blood. In the world of this movie, characters carry a few extra quarts inside for visual dash.

Bodies get cleaved, sliced, diced and whipped. Bullets are boring when a ninja can make you burst open like a water balloon. The violence starts early and at full volume, and on the basis of its first startling fatality I can say I appreciate a genre movie that is not out to give you any illusions about the experience you are about to have. This movie is neither smarter than a dog nor deeper than a puddle, but you probably knew that beforehand.
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Originally published 9/20/04

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
Director: Kerry Conran
Writer: Kerry Conran
Producers: Jon Avnet, Marsha Oglesby, Sadie Frost, Jude Law
Stars: Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie, Giovanni Ribisi, Bai Ling, Michael Gambon, the late Lord Laurence Olivier

It takes a special breed of creative audacity to conceive of images for the screen that, if you made them look too realistic, they’d somehow look less believable. That’s the best way I can think to describe the visual splendor of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, any shot of which you could freeze and use as the cover for some thrilling adventure book; or hang on your wall, for that matter. If for nothing else, this movie deserves a view simply because you have never, in your life, seen anything quite like it.

The color is washed out into a semi-sepia toned look, the camera pitches and whirls around impossible sights like an aerial chase passing through a factory warehouse, or hundred-foot high robots marching in murderous rank down the streets of New York, or aircraft carriers hovering in the clouds on giant propellers. First-time writer/director Kerry Conran made the entire film using a unique and painstaking approach, shooting all of the actors on a bare blue stage, then literally “painting” the sets, action, even many of the extras, around them using a computer program he spent six years tweaking and testing. In a way, Sky Captain could be considered an animated film whose lead characters just happen to be filmed and inserted in, like Who Framed Roger Rabbit? in reverse. But Toontown had nothing on this.
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