We had a lovely Thanksgiving. Spent the day out on Long Island with Jeannie’s sister and the niblings, playing Jackbox and watching the Bills game. Michelle came home from college, although Lizzy stayed in Buffalo cuz she had work on Friday. We observed Slack Friday, as is our custom, and did no shopping. For someone who doesn’t watch alot of TV, however, there was alot on.
First, we watched the new Cowboy Bebop live action series the weekend before Thanksgiving. I thought it was great, very entertaining, and want to watch it again at Christmastime. John Cho is excellent, as is the whole cast, and they pulled off the trick of staying faithful to the spirit of the original tone, action, humor, and sci-fi world building, while pulling the story arc and characters in into deeper directions. And the music was great.
The internet seems to hate it, but they must all be super picky nerds who do nothing besides wallow in their fandom. After all, it’s a show on a streaming internet service, based on a cartoon from the ’90’s. What do you expect? If you’re at all reasonable, the new Bebop blows them away.
Then we watched the new Peter Jackson remake of the Beatles’ Let It Be. I heard it was long, but was hopeful nonetheless. After all, Jackson’s adaptation of Help! was the original extended trilogy, and remains one of my favorite movies of all time, even at thirteen hours long. In fact, we usually watch it every winter, and since Michelle was home for the long weekend, we viewed the first half.
Granted, Jackson transposed the setting for Help! from 1960’s England to a place called the Shire, and the four young lads are Hobbits rather than Liverpudlians, and as they try and get rid of the ring, they’re being chased by a death cult of Nazgul rather then a death cult of Kali, and they’re trying to get to Mordor rather than the Bahamas. Eleanor Braun is replaced by a CG Gollum and Victor Spinetti by Christopher Lee. They added a few new songs and changed the title, but the basic plot remains the same.
So, was the new Get Back on the level of Lord of the Rings, or more like PJ’s The Hobbit, bloated and stretched thin like butter over too much toast?
Well, I have to tell you I’m a huge Beatles fan, but now I finally feel like they’ve jumped the shark and landed in overrated and self-indulgent territory. It would have been a much better film if it was five or six hours long rather than eight. As a musician who has spent tons of time in rehearsals and recording sessions, I know very well how tedious it can be to write, arrange, rehearse and perfect a set of tunes. I think there was actually a great story in there, and a bit of editing would have moved things along without all the false starts, noodling jams, and endless complaining how they don’t have the material for a movie yet. Eight or sixteen bars would do. As it is, the new film is not really much better than the original, just alot longer. They should have named it The Long and Winding Road.
Ah well, at least Jackson has kept in touch with his horror movie roots. He featured Yoko Ono “singing” (ok, really just screaming) for several minutes, presumably anguished over George quitting the band. Why anyone would let that woman near a microphone is beyond me, even if you’re drug addled, madly in love, and think it’s avant-garde. The look on young Heather McCartney’s face at witnessing the spectacle is priceless though.
In other news, my new jazz album is almost done. I’ve decided on a running order for the tracks, and five of the six songs are fully mixed and mastered. The last one, Sun of the Son, was the first track I did, over a year ago, and I did a three or four rock tracks after that before I decided to make the focus of the album instrumental jazz. So I changed my mastering setup for the newer songs, to give the sound more depth and dynamics. Now I’ve gone back and done the same thing for SotS. Almost there!