Blog O’ Leaps

WAY DOWN UNDER IN A LAND MEDIUM UNDERDONE

An article in the hilariously abrasive CREEM magazine of yore (and many years yore at that) once posited that the amazing thing wasn’t that George Harrison had subconsciously and accidentally incorporated portions of the Chiffons’ song He’s So Fine into his own hit My Sweet Lord, but that he’d done so in such a blatant and cack-handed fashion that he’d somehow managed to convince a judge in a court of law that he’d done it. *

To me, the amazing thing about the court decision that Men At Work’s famous national baggage, Down Under, plagiarised the well-known children’s earache, Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree, is that when I looked up from first reading a report about it, the date-line didn’t read “April 1st”.

For clarity’s sake, I have to make a few points here.

1 – I am no fan, friend or booster of Men At Work, Colin Hay, Ron Strykert, Greg Ham, or any other member or former flute roadie thereof. I’ve never thought of Men At Work’s music as being anything other than an annoyance similar to a gigantic blowfly buzzing in through an open window in summer, except that you can at least give the blowfly a face-full of bug spray, a practice which it is, for better or worse, illegal to do to members of Men At Work under current federal and state law.

2 – If I never hear the song “Down Under” again, it will be several millennia too soon.

3 – I have never knowingly, or at least within memory, had any dealings – good, bad, indifferent or all of the above – with Larrikin Music, or its apparent owners, or parent company, or whatever they are, the UK publishing conglomerate, the enchantingly named Music Sales Group.

4 – Grand Australian tradition though it may well be, it would probably double my remaining life-span to never hear the song about the kookaburra again either.

Never, and I mean, in the timeless phrasing of pro wrestler/wordsmith Chris Jericho, “Neh-eh-eh-eh-EVER!!” in the 37 million or so times I, along with every other living Australian who hasn’t passed away from exposure to this song, have been subjected to Men At Work’s notorious ear-wash “Down Under” have I ever noticed that the flute line quoted “Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree”.

That’s a guarantee. 100% truth. Right to this day. I can sit here right now, with the famous mental toothache “Down Under” coming unbidden to mind, and not remember one part that to me sounded like the kookaburra song. Never occurred to me.

Now, enough people are saying it that there must be something to it – i.e. that there is some quotation in the flute part of “Down Under” that sounds like the kookaburra song. According to court testimony, apparently Colin Hay even sang part of the freaking kookaburra song on stage in 2002 during performances of “Down Under”.

(Actually, I have no idea what that proves. I worked out years ago, before it was anything like common knowledge that you can sing the whole of the Gilligan’s Island theme lyric to the tune of the Australian national anthem, or vica-versa, and the words fit the music perfectly. I strongly doubt the composition of one musical item had any influence on the other in that case, the fact that we, in many ways, clearly ARE living on Gilligan’s Island notwithstanding.)

The point I’m making is that, as with all Australians, I’ve been exposed to this song roughly as often as I’ve been exposed to direct sunlight, and perhaps to ultimately the same effect, and in all that time I’ve never once been struck to note, “Ah yes, the flute part is the kookaburra song.”

Here’s the other point. Larrikin’s lawyer stated they were after 40 to 60% of the income derived from the song. The song made the tens of millions of dollars it did because it was a WORLDWIDE hit.

So what percentage of people around the world, or even here for that matter, bought/loved/confirmed-their-taste-buds-were-located-in-their-rear-underpant-area-by-listening-to, the song “Down Under” specifically because they were enchanted by the way a bit of the flute diddley supposedly brought all the joy of “Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree” flying to mind?

To start with, I think it would be ridiculously kind to the Larrikin music side of the case to suggest that even 50% of the overseas market concerned even knew what that kookaburra song was. Overseas was the exact location that the real money came from. If we were talking about the royalties that came in from Australia alone, I doubt we’d be talking about a court case at all. Comparatively speaking the two parties could have split the difference and bought each other a cup of coffee, and the only argument would be over who had to pay for the biscuits.

Secondly, what made the song a hit, other than a worldwide intermission in anything resembling taste. Well, the song did. The music, very much the lyrics, the singer’s delivery of the song, the production, the engineering, the mixing, the instrumentation (including use of the wretched flute), the instrumental performances, the arrangement, and no doubt several million accountants’ headaches worth of promotion, advertising and marketing.

One part of one part of that was a guy playing a flute. Was the flute part of the sound that made the song “work” as well as it did? Well, maybe. Or “why not?”. Or “to a degree”. Would it have sold more, less or the same without a flute part? Who knows? All you can really say for certain is that the flute was a conspicuous part of the sound of the track.

But for argument’s sake, let’s all hold hands around the copyright séance table, (adjacent to the “assessing musical/monetary worth of the whole via constituent parts” ouija board), and agree momentarily that the flute being present on the record contributed to some degree to the track’s success.

Assessing how much it contributed to that success, as with the peculiar alchemy of just about any hit record, is (given all the other factors mentioned earlier, and that wasn’t necessarily anywhere near an exclusive list) completely impossible. So let’s for the hell of it say it’s 5% of the value of the song just being there.

(I’ll just point out that unless there’s some arrangement I’m unaware of in this case, that “5% value” wouldn’t be recognised in any songwriting royalty arrangement, as the composers were listed as Colin Hay and Ron Strykert. There may be some performance royalty payable to Greg Ham as the woodwind guy in the band, but I’d be guessing that this wouldn’t amount to 5% of the entire value of all money recouped from the song.)

And the next question that lurches into the starting gate is, of course, how much of that 5% specifically comes down to the flute part supposedly being derived from that timeless wonder of Australian musical fauna, “Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree”?

Or to put it another way, if he’d have played any other diddley-widdley flute line that came to mind and vaguely fit in with the rest of the music, how much difference could it have possibly made to the overall worldwide sales of the song?

Considering that, to me, the only part of the song where I’ve ever vaguely noticed what the flute guy was actually playing, was the introduction, and for the life of me, I can’t find any connection between that and the melody I’m familiar with, as part of unwanted lifelong mental luggage, as “Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree”, the answer for me would be “None”. No difference at all. Had the guy instead blown his nose into the flute while performing the correct fingering for The Jetsons theme, I wouldn’t have noticed any difference.

My question is, if the flute line had been there, incorporated into the arrangement in the same manner, been in the same key, but hadn’t incorporated any material from the kookaburra song, would it have made one Transylvanian pfennig’s worth of difference to the song’s international success and royalties haul?

There’s only one rational answer to that question, I reckon. No. It didn’t, it couldn’t, and not even in a science-fiction movie in which Gary Coleman ruled a world of robot dinosaurs, assisted by former members of Bananarama, would it have been possible for this ever to make one iota of difference in the sales of the song “Down Under”.

However, according to everyone else, who can hear it where I can’t, there is a bit of the kookaburra song quoted in the flute part, somewhere in the track “Down Under”. The reality is, if they quoted it, even fleetingly (although that would also probably depend on how fleetingly, but let’s skip over that for now) and the song has a copyright holder (and it does) there is some financial obligation on the part of the quote-er to recompense the quote-ee.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed this but in a movie, if anyone even sings the Happy Birthday song we still all suffer on an annual basis at birthday parties spanning the globe, there’s always a listing in the musical acknowledgement section of the credits, because even that song had writers, and apparently still has a legal owner.

Then the question becomes, what do the Men At Work guys really, logically, fairly, owe the kookaburra song copyright holders, in terms of the impact that musical quotation made in worldwide sales. And I tell you what, if we’re talking MC Hammer’s use of the Rick James riff from Super Freak in the historical Hammer hit You Can’t Touch This, and I’m the guy in charge, I’d say, well, that’s significant usage. The riff from the former is an integral part of the latter. If it were me and I were assessing it, I’d say you could figure that as being in the 10’s of percentage of the later song’s worth, whether 10% or 15% or 20%, or whatever.

(Don’t ask me what the actual agreement/figure was – I wouldn’t have a clue. I’m not even aware of what the standard arrangement for something like that is, or if there is one. I’m just trying to make a comparative point here. Don’t bust my pants-bulbs over it.)

In the case of Men At Work vs Kookaburra Up Tree, I’m saying, taking all salient facts into consideration with a deeply furrowed brow and judge-wig at a comical angle, I reckon it’s worth about one-squiffteenth of 1%, and not a penny more, Stephanie.

I reckon if Men At Work end up having to pay much more than their opposition’s parking fees for the duration of the trial, they’ve been taken to the cleaners.

It matters to some minor degree that there is a flute part in “Down Under”. Quite frankly if the same guy had been featured in the mix in the same way, and had played the alien theme from Close Encounters of the Third Kind throughout, or the Ron Grainer theme tune from Steptoe and Son for that matter, in place of the appropriation of some portion of the kookaburra song, the total difference to overall world sales would have been in the close vicinity of exactly zero per cent.

In the court of Leapster, I find, grudgingly, for the plaintiff, and award them the total of seven $10 parking stubs, and a weekly travel-card for the junior legal assistant who doesn’t own their own car. Parties to pay their own costs, and ensure I never hear either accursed song involved in the dispute ever again, on pain of torture. Case disgraced, and dismissed.

In conclusion, let me point out that Americans previously used to refer to the kookaburra as the “laughing jackass” and had the Americans concerned lived to see this day, they would have been gratified to find out that they were at least half right.

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* There is apparently a hilarious postscript to this case which most people I think are unaware of. Usually you just hear the part about how Harrison was taken to court for unconsciously plagiarising He’s So Fine in his song My Sweet Lord, and that’s where the story stops.

Maybe Klein then phoned him up to volunteer to represent him in any appeal over the plagiarism finding. I wouldn’t put it past him. I can only think that if Klein fought for ten years over the matter, that the $587,000 figure must have actually been what he paid for it, despite any alternative suspicions that might otherwise automatically leap to mind. I’d guess it would have killed him not to make a profit on the sale. I still find it hard to believe he didn’t, actually.

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SCREAM 2 (1997)

ALVIN AND THE CHIPMUNKS – THE SQUEAKUEL (2009)

It’s the nature of entertainment business executives to give the public more of what they’ve liked before. On the surface of things, it makes a good deal of sense, from a business point of view.

Unfortunately, it’s the nature of art, which movies are to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the individual case, (and there’s plenty of variation just in the list above, to veer sharply into the lane of understatement), to tell its story, and then that story is told, and that’s the end of the story.

There was probably a reason, when you think about it, that Dickens never did a Great Expectations 2, or an Oliver Twist sequel entitled Fagin’s Frolics. William Shakespeare somehow avoided the temptation to fudge a sequel involving various bench-warmer relatives of Romeo and Juliet having a similarly star-crossed romance, perhaps with a happy ending this time around. Beethoven’s fifth symphony was pretty hot stuff, but it apparently never occurred to him to re-work a few of the themes, trot out the “da-da-da-DUMMM” bit for another airing, and issue a Symphony 5B. He seemed content to get on with #s 6, 7, 8 and 9 instead.

No matter how compelling the characters, settings, themes or combinations thereof, the rule of thumb in art seems to be, when you’ve nailed it the first time, well, that was your creative adventure in that little world, and now you get on with the next development, wherever the contents of your head happen to take you. You don’t stick around and play with your food. You finish your plateful and move on to the next meal.

The odd thing is, we all get this, at least on a subconscious level. When the tale is told, and it’s a good one, and it’s well-told, as much as we liked it, or revelled in it, we really know it’s over when it’s over. If they produce a sequel, we might buy a ticket, go along and kind of enjoy it, maybe, but it’s generally a kind of pale photocopy of enjoyment. We KNOW the magic was in the first time around. We KNOW they’re playing with their food for our entertainment. That birthday cake tasted great on the first bite, but three pieces in and your stomach starts to perform stunt-flying manoeuvres. The movie business often seems dedicated to proving comprehensively that lightning isn’t the only thing that doesn’t strike twice.

The exceptions to the grinding truism that movie sequels are inferior to the originals are few. Generally those few involve a substantial revision of the original conception, (perhaps, for one obvious example, a tendency to greater comedic orientation than in the original version), and/or better casting, a superior screenplay, and a better (or more suited) craftsman as director.

But generally, they’re a washout.

There’s also an irony, or a fallacy, in the Bizness theory of “giving ’em more of what they already ate”. If you ask the general public what they want, regardless of which pop or mass culture area you’re talking about, they’ll ALWAYS indicate that they want more of something they’ve had before.

And then the Bizness keeps feeding that to them, and the public will go right on saying they want more of it, right up until most members of the public all suddenly realise they’ve mined that particular seam of entertainment dry, at which point someone ends up with a massive turkey on their hands flickering away in empty cinemas, and the public all rushes off to see something novel/new/different which they never told the Bizness people they wanted, because they didn’t KNOW they wanted it, right up until they saw or heard it. (And whatever that is, it will soon enough be strip-mined, sequelled, and imitated to death as well, prior to the next big thing coming along.)

And this is the fallacy of asking the public what they want. Most of the general public don’t have the inclination to indicate they’d like something different, and don’t have the imagination to hazard a guess or express a preference as to what that “something different” might be. Which is absolutely fair enough – it’s not their jobs.

What you might expect, though, is that the showbiz execs who are paid to analyse this kind of information, would know better than to fall for the same three-card trick over and over again. But, quite frankly, if you put enough accountants and brothers-in-law in roles that really demand a creative mind, this is the kind of result you’re probably bound to get.

The pursuit of endless sequels (and needless, ill-conceived remakes – just as poisonous and creatively-challenged a phenomenon) is, necessarily, a determined pursuit of the law of diminishing returns, certainly creatively, generally in terms of quality, and arguably, also financially. The funny thing is, on some level or other, we all know it. The other funny thing is, nobody really does much about it, and this is not like the weather, where you CAN’T.

Anyway, let’s nail some specifics, and talk about some movies in this here movie column.

The brouhaha with the Scream pictures when they first surfaced was about how clever they were, playing with the conventions of the slasher horror movies, turning them on their heads, and underscoring them with knowing humour. I have no doubt that the thoroughly revolting word “savvy” was bandied about at some point.

I don’t know about all that. The first Scream had some in-movie winking at the format and formula of horror movies, with the characters describing the “rules” as the bodies fell. This didn’t diminish the scares, (it was used well on occasion to build chills), but if it delivered so much as a laugh, I wasn’t in the room at the time. Actually, the banging on in the dialogue about the “rules” got kind of tiresome to me.

The laughs came from some unexpected slapstick involving the killer, and a few bits of sly commentary in the movie-making itself, rather than the dialogue per se. However what made the movie work as well as it did, along with Wes Craven’s technical facility in manipulating you through a horror movie, was the excellent capturing of atmosphere and place in the small college town, and some endearingly eccentric performances that allowed you to care about the characters.

It’s Drew Barrymore’s small but telling role near the start that sets up the whole picture. The various Cox-Arquettes and Arquette-Coxes did their jobs too. No matter how clever the horror movie is, it’s harder to get really sucked in if you don’t care about the characters. You “bought” the college atmosphere too. These kids have lives, hopes, dreams etc. And some lunatic is killing them.

The undertow of wry self-commentary was important in giving Scream its own peculiar life, but it was a long way from being the whole deal.

As Scream 2 demonstrated pretty well. The Courteney Cox performance is a little more of a caricature, the David Arquette one simultaneously more stock-comedy and manic, there’s no Drew Barrymore, and Neve Campbell’s lead character is given less to demonstrate why we should care about her.

So we run through more rope-a-dope with the audience expectations, more jack-in-the-box set-ups, more horror “rules”, more fitful “commentary” that doesn’t really comment on anything.

The skill demonstrated in running the ropes of the horror movie genre delivers some good solid scares, and it is mostly an entertaining movie, but there’s no real core to it at all. It probably would have skated by, but where Scream 1 delivered an ending that was something of a wet-end, and lacking for brains in the logic department, the many climaxes of Scream 2 are (a) completely ludicrous on any level, (b) a series of car-crashes in execution. And those climaxes just keep-a-comin’.

Ten years later, the abattoir artistes behind Saw IV dispensed with the “knowing self-analysis of horror movies” stuff and just built that right into the movie, rather than telling us all about it so we knew how clever they were. That wasn’t such a bad idea, probably. They also dispensed completely with humour. That was more of a mixed blessing.

For those who don’t know, the Saw saga (and odds are there must some web-galoot out there who calls it a saga) concerns a serial killer type guy called Jigsaw who was active in the first couple of pictures, got crook and kind of roped in an assistant or two after that.

At the beginning of Saw IV, he’s very crook – to the extent that he’s dead. However his trademark killings are still going on, which means there’s still some assistant out there doing his work. There’s cops coming at him from one end, the FBI from another, and all concerned are trying to nail down who the active Jigsaw is, who just might be one of the people involved in the investigation.

So it’s a whodunnit, along with a horror picture once over heavy on the surgical levels of guts and gore, plus the killer’s trademark gimmick, of conceiving bizarre torturous traps in which the victim or victims’ fate/s are often in their own hands, kind of.

The peculiar backwards morality behind the Jigsaw killings is kind of an interesting point of distinction with this movie, right until they morality us to death with it. There’s just far too much background/origin information on why the original Jigsaw became what he became, until it becomes like a particularly psycherligical Law and Order: SVU episode gone horribly wrong. It also successfully diminishes the Freddy Krueger of this particular franchise from being a kind of supernatural figure into being an old tired man who went bananas. Quite a bargain heading in that direction, then.

And for all that the movie has technical facility – not so much editing as footage chopped up like highly energetic coleslaw, and some “Say, how did them movie folks DO that?” shot transitions – it sometimes handles routine exposition like lumpy gravy, is riddled with incredibly poorly incorporated flashback material, and the build to the ending struck me as incoherent to world and Olympic levels – I literally couldn’t tell if one of the parallel expositions being shown was a flashback or a “contemporary” sequence, and once I had worked it out, I still didn’t know why it was there.

Saw IV can’t even sustain its own logic. It pimps on this regularly, whenever it suits. It has some effectively grisly moments, and some clever gimmicks, right alongside idiotic gore flinging that comes across like a gross-out routine that two 12 year olds might have come up with. It’s not exactly an actors’ showcase type of film, but alongside the performances that get the job done, there’s a few that clunk like a loose nut in a power mower. Any thought of characters an audience member might actually get involved with was apparently dispensed with prior to the soup course at the first luncheon meeting concerning the picture. The result is that it’s not really that scary. Hard to be scared on behalf of characters you can’t care about. I think I may have mentioned that before. Can’t say after this one I’m desperately HANGING to see Saw V.

It’s hard to see how they could have screwed up on the 21st Century Batman sequel, right up until you see the picture. And by the way, if you haven’t seen it yet, and you’re determined to, make sure you pack a lunch. Or two.

The first Christian Bale one was an ok action/adventure movie, with a certain smell of obsession, danger and the odd question of principle, to help flesh things out. Adding in THE franchise villain of Batman’s world to the mix in the sequel shouldn’t have hurt, exactly.

So where did they go wrong, to cut to the chase. Well, it’s two and a half hours long, to start with. Roughly one hour of that comes down to Batman and the Joker demonstrating their duelling psychological obsessions (directly opposed and yet somewhat strangely similar, and interdependent in a way) – and that’s the whole guts of the picture, and apparently nobody in charge realised it.

The other 90 minutes is a loud exploding series of hiccoughs and explosions, with some vaguely desperate attempts to claim contemporary significance by comparing what the Joker does with terrorism. To say this is in poor, or no, taste might be fair comment. But what cripples the picture is that it has nothing to do with the core of what the movie is so obviously about – the Batman/Joker dynamic.

And you can also throw in that Christian Bale mostly decided to deep-asthma-breathe his dialogue in standard cartoon superhero fashion, rather than acting like he did in the first picture, that there are only about 97 climaxes too many, that the Joker as portrayed in this movie is a complete unreliable, unpredictable maniac, who can also pinpoint plan a highly complex scheme that would be beyond the resources or planning abilities of the greatest military minds in history, that the long-term Batman comic book villain Two Face is introduced and blown off in one picture for no reason, and that even at the movies with full multi-track sound, in between the explosions, the musical score farting away, and the mysterious clanking noises that all big movies have up the back of the mix somewhere for no apparent reason, I couldn’t hear some of the dialogue at all. I think they won an Oscar for making me not hear the dialogue.

Heath Ledger is pretty good. It’s a valid interpretation of the Joker character, and different from anyone else’s. As far as the make-up goes, I could have come up with the same given about ten minutes, a bag of flour, and the continuity girl’s lipstick.

The answer to the conundrum of making a great Batman/Joker picture is pretty simple. Instead of just happily tearing off bits and pieces of ideas from the comics concerned and turning them into a theme park, they just have to read Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke or Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and convert them as faithfully as possible into movies. But of course the ever-delightful mantra of “This is Hollywood and we change everything here” will doubtless prevail. Maybe they can make the next Batman picture three and a half hours long and have 243 climaxes. Think I might sit that one out.

A Night at the Museum 2 – err, has anyone previously ever made a “lo-concept” picture? This one’s pretty simple to explain. In fact, arguably the previous sentence was two words too long. Ben Stiller – currently heading for a Dan Aykroyd-like longevity record of not actually being funny while repeatedly appearing in comedy movies – plays the guy who is night guard at a museum where all the exhibits come to life at night, including dinosaur skeletons, and famous people from history and stuff like that there. The basic result – and level of ambition – is a cross between Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Toy Story, only a great deal dumber and more incoherent than either.

This may be the first movie with attention deficit disorder. It can’t remember what it’s trying to be from second to second, much less sequence to sequence, and keeps throwing in irrelevant spot gags like one of the more irritatingly patchy Family Guy episodes. Incidentally, that’s an approach that works a lot better in a half-hour series than a 104 minute movie. Everyone except the people who made this movie probably knows that already, of course.

What makes this a great deal worse is that the movie wants you to take it seriously (when it remembers) and actually care whether Ben Stiller’s team of good guys beats the bad guy team involving Al Capone, Ivan the Terrible and Napoleon. It’s not only centred on a premise that’s fairly stupid but it can’t even retain any consistency on what the premise is. The “to thine own self be true” subtext it can barely be bothered paying lip service to. The intermittent thud of rah-rah USA-boosting is nauseating in this context, not to mention coming off as shallow enough that toddlers could swim in it unsupervised.

Performances, like everything else in here, vary wildly. Owen Wilson is annoying as usual. Stiller is virtually a straight male lead. Christopher Guest is wasted, given very little to do as Ivan the Terrible. However the guy who plays Napoleon is given plenty, and just isn’t funny at all. Amy Adams is cute and fun as Amelia Earhart, but the role’s not funny and the dialogue tends to be wearing. Robin Williams gets the job done as Teddy Roosevelt, but that’s not a funny role either.

Steve Coogan IS good as a tiny little Roman Emperor, it’s difficult to work out what Ricky Gervais’s character was meant to be, other than Ricky Gervais. (This may well have been a design flaw at script level, like most of the rest of the movie.)

But there’s one guy in A Night at the Museum 2 who may well enter the annals, if not top the all-time listings, for a wig-flipping performance in a doggedly unnecessary movie – Hank Azaria, as the evil Egyptian pharaoh with a rather foppishly theatrical manner, and a Boris Karloff-imitation voice that just won’t quit. He’s just fantastic. He would have committed grand larceny of the entire movie, had there been one there to steal.

Otherwise, suffice it to say that about three-quarters of the way through I suddenly realised that I couldn’t even work out what kind of audience they THOUGHT they were aiming at when they made this picture – general, adult, or exclusively kids. Still couldn’t tell you on that one. Oh, and by the way, the special effects are tremendous. And, as usual, what an undetectable difference that truly does make in entertainment when the rest of the picture is one big vacuum cleaner spill.

And finally we come to Alvin and the Chipmunks – The Squeakuel, in which the entire concentration of inspiration and telling wit involved in the enterprise was plainly expended on the title. I’m going to waste very little time on this one. It’s a kids’ entertainment. It’s proficient enough at what it is, I guess. I would have thought Betty Thomas has demonstrated sufficient talent as a director that Hollywood might be able to find her something to do a little more, err, essential than this, but she gets the job done, and neatly, and (and this could be a lesson to virtually every other film covered here), in good time as well. The “Our heroes go through trials and tribulations, but when things are darkest, they prevail” plot-line has hairs on it that are older than most of our grandparents, but no-one went to the cinemas expecting King Lear, or even King Leonardo and His Short Subjects. By contemporary standards, it was a little short of leavening gags to keep adults awake.

(There was just one that I liked. A harried MC type, hosting the big climactic talent show remarks that there’s a lot of acts on, and we have to get through them in a hurry “because the heating goes off at ten”. I laughed solo in the cinema at that one.)

I mean, it was pap, and the music was fairly grisly. But then most of the actual chart music of right now, other than the voices being at normal speed and the concept of “booty” being mentioned rather more frequently, is pretty much identical to the oeuvre of the Chipmunks and the Chipettes. And just about every movie I mentioned elsewhere here is pap, only this one more or less did what it set out to do, and completed the task in under 90 minutes. My nine-year-old niece thought it was just peachy. I didn’t have to keep asking her, in a whiny voice, “Is it over? Can we go yet?” I guess that’s a win-win. I just couldn’t recommend it that strongly to anyone over nine years of age.

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Official ratings on the LeapsterMovie “Ours is one better”, out-of-eleven MPHOAH scale:

Scream 2 - 6.5 out of 11 MPHOAH (docked 0.5 for multiple idiotic endings)

A Night at the Museum 2 – 5.5 out of 11 (would have been about 3.5 without Hank Azaria and the effects)

Alvin and the Chipmunks – The Squeakuel – 5.5 out of 11

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A Brief Guide To Unfathomable Liquor Licensing Reforms

If there was a sustained outbreak of people smashing their thumbs with hammers as part of ill-conceived home DIY endeavours, what would be your idea of an appropriate solution? Slapping a massive new licensing fee on all hardware stores? Cutting off every third person’s hands so there was no risk of them hammering their thumbs anymore? Banning the use of hammers on all odd-numbered days to cut down on the incidence of self-inflicted hammercide? I’m tending to assume, unless you’re a complete thundering loon, that those options would not be considered rational solutions by anyone.

On a level which is not by any means a million miles away from this kind of logic, the gazebos in charge of liquor licensing in Victoria have attacked the much-trumpeted problems of drunken and drugged young fatheads loose on the streets, kerbs and dance floors of Melbourne Town, committing random acts of violence against strangers, each other, and probably, given the level of brain-activity concerned, themselves by accident. (And, forced to make a choice, I’d like to see rather more of the latter, and rather less of any of the alternatives.)

Unlike some kneejerk ‘fight the power’ types, I don’t think this whole scenario is a beat-up, incidentally. I don’t think there’s any shortage of this kind of violence, and I don’t think there’s been a time where it’s been any worse, on a general basis. Basically, I’d be struggling to think of any time since I was of an age to legally consume alcohol and be out amongst those doing same, where people here handled being drunk any worse. I don’t think the ‘party’-type drugs are doing them any favours either.

However, it’s how the State Government’s liquor licensing pharaohs are going about their business that’s bunching my lingerie at the moment.

The operators of the well-known loveable live music rat-hole The Tote have just been forced to close its doors and put all staff members on the bread-line, and probably a fair few musos who had regular-ish gigs there as well. This, according to co-licensee Bruce Milne, was specifically due to massive hikes in the licensing costs, due to being assessed as a high-risk venue, according to the liquor licensing nabobs. (There were other factors, but enforced increased costs due to liquor licensing requirements are the common thread running through all of these.)

The problem here is that according to local police quoted on the issue, and virtually all those who have regularly attended live music events at The Tote, dating back to when that was the music venue name and the pub was still officially known as the Ivanhoe Hotel (when dinosaurs ruled Collingwood), the only high-risk involved was of getting drunk, playing pool or the jukebox and having your ears sand-blasted by some live music. It’s not like the Tote was any sort of volcanic hotbed of violence. A lot of the people who went there knew each other. It was a good-times type venue. You’d have more chance of getting into a fight standing on any street corner in the CBD of Melbourne any night of the week. And probably, realistically, at the footy too, not that they’ll be conducting a major liquor licensing hike at sporting events that will put them out of business.

In a judgement which smacks of hasty “knees-bent running about” type thinking, from middle-management nobs who want to be seen to be making decisions to justify their pay-cheques, but aren’t really equipped for thinking about decisions, the Tote was ruled high-risk because it was in a high-risk area.

This is a tremendous nonsense. According to the papers, the whole CBD of Melbourne is a high-risk area these days. By that kind of logic, every licensed venue in Melbourne, from the kerbside cafes that serve the odd beer to the old buffers’ “establishment” clubs to the Windsor Hotel, and beyond, should all have to pay skyscraping licensing fees. They’re all in a “high-risk area”.

What would be obvious to anyone who wasn’t using their skull as a suppository is that the nature and track record of the individual business would have to have some input in whether a particular venue or other liquor-selling operation was truly high-risk, and thus deserving of higher licensing fees. Otherwise the laws are a nonsense. Otherwise, the stated aim of all this general pissfarting around – to achieve a safer Melbourne, via appropriate controls on liquor sales (and I’m only guessing that that’s what they’re trying to achieve, because the current approach will obviously do absolutely nothing to achieve that aim) becomes a statement without any rational foundation.

In the case of The Tote, the wrong people were victimised. The list of those so victimised would include Bruce and James Milne, all the staff, all people who have looked at The Tote as an oasis for scruffy, disreputable loud live rock music for decades, the bands, the live music industry, anyone in Melbourne into what, for want of a more agreeable term and for the sake of brevity, we’ll call ‘alternative’ music.

A virtual non-risk venue was called high-risk, and licensing fees in line with being ‘high-risk’ were levied, forcing the licensees to realise they couldn’t afford to operate the pub with that sort of financial albatross around their necks. (I won’t say “make a profit” because I have my doubts as to what sort of “profit” they were making even under the previous licensing and security costs regime.) The venue was forced to close, specifically due to this situation. If the liquor licensing schmedleys think this made one person on the streets of Melbourne safer on an average night (or any night), they’re absolute turnips. If they DON’T think that, why has this situation been allowed to occur on their watch?

The message that a lot of people aren’t getting is that, as bad as the unnecessary loss of The Tote is, it’s probably the finer edge of a wedge as large as the Rialto building.

The other week I dropped by a small grog shop, Swords, in the South Melbourne Market. The friendly and helpful Joe who runs the joint asked me to sign a petition – something I normally do about as often as I transform stale rye bread into gold with a wave of my magical pinkie finger. I signed this one, however.

Apparently liquor licensing, in its slightly short of infinite wisdom, has designated this tiny cubicle of a grog shop as a “high-risk” operation, complete with matching licence fees/security demands etc, because it sells liquor after 8pm. We’re talking about a miniscule little box of a shop in a fruit market that sells a small selection of wine and boutique beers to the kinds of yuppies, bored young well-heeled mummies, and harmless shambling loner types like Unca Leapster that you’re likely to find wandering around the South Melbourne Market, for Odin’s sake.

Forget selling crateloads of CUB product at retail beer-barn prices, and I can’t even think whether or not they sell spirits. It’s a boutique wine and beer outlet. The nearest thing they get to unfettered lawless liquor-driven excess is that the moustache-bearing nice guy in charge of the operation gives you a mixed six-pack discount for beer whether or not you realise that there is a mixed six-pack discount. It’s not exactly Tombstone, Arizona in there.

As the manager guy rightly pointed out to me, the only real beneficiary of stores like his, and others in the same chain, or of a similar kind, being forced out of existence by insane and mis-applied licensing fees, will be the liquor mega-stores and drive-thru chains, who can afford to soak up licence-fee hikes (although I bet some of them won’t be delighted by them either – I doubt every suburban Joe or Jolene running a local franchise of a big-name chain liquor outlet can afford these kinds of fee hikes and security costs either) and will pick up the business from the smaller retailers that go under.

(Of course, we’ll end up with less choice of retailers, and less access to choice of product, and those making small-batch beers will have less access to customers, making their operations less viable, but I have a feeling that liquor licensing is a fair few decades away from addressing that as a problem, or even recognising it as one.)

There are any number of ‘worst parts’ to the current liquor licensing approach in this state, but a couple of them stand out like Fido’s scrotal area. Number One is, the designation of what’s “high risk” is demonstrably being applied completely indiscriminately, and unique businesses with strong appeal to a particular market are being effectively forced out of business, when there is absolutely no need for this to occur.

Number Two is, and this is the heartbreaker, and the bit that makes all this so irredeemably idiotic, forcing liquor sellers like The Tote and specialist liquor retailers out of business achieves absolutely NOTHING towards making Melbourne a safer place to live in terms of alcohol-fuelled violence, which is the whole aim/panic behind liquor licensing’s current actions. Even considering the notion, for five seconds, over whether closing The Tote or a tiny licensed grocer like Swords at the South Melbourne market, could make the average person in Melbourne less at risk of being donged on the scone by a hormone-charged, booze-soaked ninny of a nightclub escapee out on the streets filled with rage because he’s (a) a plonker, and (b) couldn’t pick up on the night in question, would tell anyone given to rational thought that the whole idea is insane.

The main problem is, quite frankly, young idiots who are far too full of themselves (not to mention drugs and alcohol), driven more or less insane by head-splitting crap tinker-toy dance music over the length of an evening while they’re trying to pick up, attending people-factory type huge nightclub/pub style venues, getting maggotted, and being comprehensively unable to handle it and still act in a manner vaguely resembling a human being.

Fixing the problem is not as easy as identifying it, incidentally. Cutting down operating hours doesn’t remove the problem. It’s a logic akin to cutting down the number of people hammering their own thumbs in DIY accidents by limited the use of hammers to odd-numbered days. If people want to go out and get obliterated and then inflict themselves on the innocent citizenry, and this is acknowledged as being a problem, you have to do the non-populist, non-rabble-rousing, long-term, hard-yards solution, which is analysing why young idiots feel like that and act like that, and then going about the business of trying to effectively educate (and penalise, probably) them, so you eradicate the cause at the root of the problem, as best you could achieve this.

Anything else is a band-aid solution, at best.

Closing joints like The Tote, similar music venues, small specialist liquor outlets etc, isn’t even a band-aid solution. That’s like trying to help your cut finger to heal by sticking it in hot fat, rather than putting a band-aid on it. There’s no benefit to this course of action whatsoever. The people concerned with liquor licensing in Victoria should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves. Because they apparently don’t have that level of thought or imagination working for them, my alternative is that they should be publicly shamed into feeling thoroughly ashamed of themselves. And then they can pull the finger out, leave the weirdo/small/specialist/harmless venues and liquor retailers alone, and go about actually addressing the problem, like they were meant to in the first place. Idiots.

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THE MAN WITH A CLOAK (1951)

Determinedly oddball little picture set in a New York City of a previous century, when, going by what you see on screen, the entire population apparently consisted of the dozen or so principal cast members, and exactly one policeman. Manages to mix in a little French history, a fitfully persistent theme about idealism v. life-tarnished cynicism, and a murder mystery format that ultimately fails to contain either a murder or any great deal of mystery.

Joseph Cotten busts plenty of acting chops playing some sort of alcohol-sodden roué, who is part amateur detective, part stony-broke bum, part rather voluble ‘man of mystery’ type, and kind of a freelance good Samaritan, although one who appears to be constantly on the make. At the behest of an innocent French girl (Leslie Caron, who is so saintly, it becomes somewhat nauseating), Cotten investigates the strange case of a rich old buzzard of a former French general who is tucked up in his mansion, surrounded by a couple of servants and his kinda-sorta mistress/carer (Barbara Stanwyck) all of whom seen keen on the old boy popping off sooner rather than later. Everyone in the picture is after his money, for one reason or another, and maybe Cotten is too, as far as we know.

As the Leonard Maltin guide says quite rightly, we don’t find out the true identity of Cotten’s character until the last shot of the picture. What it doesn’t say is that when we have found out, we still don’t know why that guy is involved in this story, or what relevance his identity has to any part of the story. In short, they may as well have revealed at the end that it was Cardinal Richelieu, or Lou Costello, or Trigger the Wonder Horse as they guy they actually chose, although the choice the writers made WAS kind of a cool one.

But the picture’s got atmosphere, holds the attention, squeezes a little suspense, and, apart from Cotten’s turn as the cloak-wearing chappie of the title, Barbara Stanwyck does some screen-holding underplaying in a performance that manages to convey a considerable downstairs conflagration lurking somewhere under the petticoat-region (this kind of thing is something of a Stanwyck standby), and Jim Backus affably steals scene after scene (that was his standby) as a garrulous publican.

Having sat through the entire movie and watched it reasonably intently, I can honestly say that from a storytelling point of view, I’d still be struggling to detect what the point of the exercise was. My assumption would be that to the director *, if not the various hands credited with story and screenplay as well, the motivations of the various featured characters – and in particular the comparisons between youthful idealism, aged cynicism, and various shades of morality, avarice, and jaded pragmatism in between – were of considerably more interest than meeting any generic expectations of a typical crime-based movie. I guess you have to give them points for headstrength, in the unlikely but appealing circumstance that being headstrong had a noun-form version.

Beyond that, as mood pieces go, it establishes a mood. It also holds the attention, if in a hazy and somewhat indescribable way. And that’s about the works. However, if you like to see something a bit different among your vintage Hollywood job lot, this might just about fit the bill, or at least kill 81 minutes in relatively painless fashion.

(7 out of 11 on this site’s trademark MPHOAH scale)

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* I’d never previously heard of The Man With a Cloak director Fletcher Markle. From a quickie look-around on imdb.com, it seems that most of his work was done for television, and most of that on shows no-one has seen for decades. His most striking career entry is that apparently he was an uncredited screenwriter on Orson Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai. Who knew?

** I can’t even work out the title, much less the rest of the picture. Why is he ‘the’ man with ‘a’ cloak? Think about this for a second. If you were asked to describe some guy you’d seen in a bar or wherever, presuming this is all happening in an alternate universe where they still wore cloaks, you might say “Oh, you mean the man with the cloak!” or you possibly might admit that you’d seen a man with a cloak. I can’t think of any conversational circumstance where a person would describe someone else as “The man with a cloak”. Even “A man with THE cloak” I can kind of imagine coming up in conversation, if THE cloak had magical powers, or was worth $20,000, or was a key piece of evidence in a murder investigation or something. But not “The man with a cloak”. Who would say that in that fashion, other than something entering the very early rounds of their first serious bout with the English language?

There’s nothing in the picture to explain this quirk of expression in the title either. But then there’s nothing in the picture to explain why the Joseph Cotten character turns out to be who he does either. There are some solid clues as to who he is. I think I picked just about every last one of them up as well. There’s just absolutely no reason to connect them all and arrive at his true identity, because that identity has nothing to do with the rest of the movie. It’s like they put together a locked-room mystery set in some isolated chalet in the 17th Century, featuring a range of suspects like the cook, the maid, the butler, the cheating husband, the vengeful wife, and then at the very end, the murderer is revealed to be the Green Goblin from the Spider-Man comics, who hasn’t turned up anywhere in the rest of the picture.

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A number of people – who clearly have never successfully absorbed the wisdom of the old folk expression beginning “Be careful what you wish for…” – have asked my opinion on the 122 seconds of lickety-split sporting history that comprised the entire Danny Green-Roy Jones Jr fight from last week.

Since I’m now getting nearly as nauseous hearing myself repeating the same thing over and over again as I do watching bank commercials on television, I’ve decided to commit the whole screed to electrophonic print, so I can now simply point to it and say “Lookie over thar” rather than repeatedly running through the exact same, none-too-gripping, ten act operetta until the Earth falls screaming into the Sun.

Being of sharp mind and sound analytical faculties compared to the average zoo baboon, one thing I noticed when people asked me my opinion about the fight, was that it was basically, at very least in part, an excuse to offer theirs.

I’m bound by honour, and a comprehensive inability to keep my trap shut, to say that I thought some of the reaction was slightly bizarre, to, say circus sideshow levels, what with people running around with their arms waving in the air like streamers, hollering about the fight being a bunch of crap, or “fixed”, if not an unholy amalgam of the two.

On that point, I was just saying to a mate recently, that I think in certain cases of big fights, particularly when an Australian is involved, you get a lot of people watching that don’t exactly have anything you’d confuse with an extensive history of following the sport of boxing.

For a fight - big or otherwise - to finish this quickly is not exactly an unprecedented circumstance. That’s the risk you take when you pay for a fight. It’s how boxing goes, sometimes.

Re “fixed”, this is what some folks automatically bellow anytime an event doesn’t go the way they thought it would. It’s just an inevitable and natural reaction for them. I don’t know whether you ought to pay a lot of credence to all that stuff. When a person’s leg kicks out sharply because a doctor has struck them on their knee with a hammer, you don’t immediately assume that person is planning to enter a career in tap-dancing.

A LITTLE BACKGROUND IN THE FOREGROUND

Anyway, here’s what I thought. Jones looked great in his last fight - probably better than he has done for years, and the guy (former world super-middleweight champ, Jeff Lacy) wasn’t a complete bum. But the reality is, it’s been quite a while since Jones was so dominant at light-heavyweight, he basically single-handedly killed the division, and also his chances of big paydays within it.

(Something that took him up to heavyweight, for one fight, where he won a version of the title from John Ruiz, even though Jones at 193-odd pounds wasn’t even at the minimum heavyweight limit. And later took him into the fight with Calzaghe, where he got beat. And the Green fight, for that matter.)

His career slide started around five years ago, when he was KO’d by Antonio Tarver and Glen Johnson at light-heavyweight - guys who were ok, but basically couldn’t have held his jock in his heyday at that weight. (The only fight he’d lost before those was on a DQ, and he later avenged that, from memory, with a 1st round KO of the same guy.)

So his jaw wasn’t the same with age, and probably not his speed and movement either. Green always had a puncher’s chance in the fight, which generally isn’t much of a chance, but it’s there, and perhaps moreso in this case for a few reasons.

If Jones was super-serious about winning this, I think he was ill-advised to come in at as low a weight as he did. He weighed a quarter-pound more than Green on the scales, but Green is a naturally bigger guy, and whatever rehydration and solid work at the lasagne buffet Green had put in in the day and a bit since the weigh-in seemed to count, as he looked a fair bit bigger than Jones in the ring.

Jones’s people should have, and I presume would have, known all this. If Jones could get up to a career high 193lb for the Ruiz fight, and the cruiserweight limit is 200 these days, I think he should have been setting himself for at least 185 if not 190, rather than 179-and-change. (If there was an agreement between the two camps that neither would weigh in over 180, I’m unaware of it. This would change things, but then, in theory it shouldn’t have been an official cruiserweight title fight if the upper limit wasn’t 90kg/200lb, and it was for the IBO cruiserweight title, for whatever that’s worth.)

I’m thinking he needed that kind of size and the extra power and punch absorption ability that goes with it, to best deal with Green.

Either he didn’t want to do the kind of weight work and cardio to get that kind of size and stay in shape at his age, or he underestimated Green, and thought he could win based on his skills edge standing on his ear, regardless of the size he came in at. (Or he just didn’t care, is the third possibility.)

ANALYSIS MANY TIMES LONGER THAN THE FIGHT ITSELF

Of the fight itself, I thought in the first 30 seconds that Green looked better prepared than I expected, and looked effectively aggressive, and seemed to be doing better. The punch he caught Jones with hit him high up on the left side of the head, with power, and knocked him silly, which was the knockdown. Some people thought this looked suspicious, or odd, that a punch in that area would have that effect. I’ve seen enough fights to suggest to me that punches that land with power to the temple or the side of the head, if anything, have better KO potential than the ones that land right on the jaw-button, contrary to popular wisdom. This was one of those and it landed pretty good.

From there, after the mandatory eight count, Green attacked, and Jones had his hands up covering his head, but wasn’t throwing anything. After a ref break, Jones, in going back to the ropes, clearly staggered for a moment. I think the ref saw this and didn’t like the looks of it much. Green moved in and continued the barrage. Again, Jones had his gloves up covering his head and face. The ref stopped it.

I thought it wasn’t a horribly early stoppage, but it was just a little early. I think there would have been less controversy and the crowd/viewers would have “got it” better if the ref had allowed another 20 to 30 seconds for Jones to either prove he was gone, or that he had got his head back together somewhat and was capable of continuing for at least a while.

I’m not one to make a big deal out of knocking a slightly early stoppage when the call is made reasonably, and for the right reasons. I’m all for protecting the fighters, and the idea of “Live to fight another day”. That said, I think this was just a little early, but nothing to make a federal case out of.

I think the probability was that Jones had had his bell rung, and wasn’t coming back from it. Green was trying to finish, and if Jones threw a punch after the knockdown, I can’t remember it.

What people forget is, as great as Jones once was, past a certain age and point in their careers, fighters can age very rapidly, and Jones as a fighter had been showing his age for half a decade before this. (The actual age this happens at varies per individual fighter, but generally once you’re in your 40s, you’re pretty much on borrowed time, if not before that point. Bernard Hopkins with a mixture of guile, psychology, experience, and just being a freak in general has been able to fight creditably into his mid-40s, but those guys are certainly the exception rather than the rule. And, even there, Calzaghe beat Hopkins too.)

Green was too big, too young, too strong, and Jones isn’t what he was. If people feel they got “taken in” by the pre-fight hype, well, that’s exactly what pre-fight hype is designed to do in a sense. It’s there to make you want to buy the fight.

WILDLY WAFTY WAFFLY WHIFFLE-BALL SPECULATION

I guess the question mark is how seriously Jones took the fight. Did he think he had it in the bag, and all he had to do was show up vaguely in shape? Did he see this purely as his “gold watch” retirement fight, and only showed up for the money? (And I believe the money would have been pretty good.) Was it something more “sinister” than that?

I have no idea which of these, if any, is correct, and nor does anyone who doesn’t personally know Jones or have some sort of in with one, if not both, fighters’ camps, no matter what various loudmouth self-appointed sharpsters think they know.

I have very little doubt from viewing the fight a couple of times, that Green had serious intentions of winning, and had come to fight. If Jones wasn’t 100% committed to the fight, Green didn’t seem to have any inkling of it.

I don’t buy that it was any sort of “fix”, or to put the same thing slightly differently, I don’t agree that anyone could infer that from the fight footage with any conclusiveness whatsoever.

Whether or not Jones saw this as a big payout last fight, I’ve got no way of knowing. He sure looked like he got clouted a good one though.

OTHER THAN DOWNHILL, WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

All I can say beyond that is that Green as a cruiserweight is something of a bizarre concept. I’m not familiar with the idea of the champion of a division weighing in at 9kg under that division’s upper limit. The cruiserweight division is not now, or traditionally, a talent-studded weight class. But there are other guys in it, who probably have a good bump in experience, if not skill-set as well, over Danny Green, and who are really what used to be called “small heavyweights”. (Whether they’ve got Green’s heart and will is another matter, but if they’re 9kg heavier and can punch and take a punch, there’s only so far that heart and will can take you. Green’s a better boxer than he used to be, but Floyd Mayweather Jr he’s not.)

Green’s not a small heavyweight. He weighed in at 179-and-change, which is basically four pounds over the light-heavy limit. He’s a light-heavyweight who apparently just doesn’t want to have to think about cutting weight.

I guess this will only be a problem if he wants to mount some sort of campaign at cruiserweight. All the above makes me think he doesn’t. I think Green and his camp are probably after whatever bigger money fights they can squeeze in before he finally calls it quits, which at his age, can’t be a lot more than three or four years away, tops.

They’d want the Bernard Hopkins fight, which may work out the same way for Danny as the Jones fight - he gets another legend on his record - or may be a poisoned chalice. Hopkins is devilishly tricky, has an enormous experience edge on Green in every way (and I’m not just talking about age or rounds fought - his knowledge edge and smarts in using it has bamboozled and demoralised guys a lot more talented and achieved than D. Green), and will do anything that works, legal, borderline or dirty, to get in his opponent’s head and suck the fight out of them.

I don’t seriously believe that Hopkins would accept this fight at cruiserweight. Although he’s fought comfortably and strongly at light-heavyweight, he’s basically a great former middleweight champion who, at his age, can’t be bothered about thinking about cutting the weight, and doesn’t have to cut it to come in fit.

I think he’ll make Green fight him at 175lb, tops, and he’ll have the whip hand in the negotiations to do it, because Green needs Hopkins a lot more than Hopkins needs him. That takes the size factor, and to an extent the strength factor out of it. Not to mention it would get in Green’s head (being the guy who fights at a weight class he’s essentially too small for, because he doesn’t want to cut a few pounds to light-heavy), which is perfectly in line with the usual Hopkins modus operandi.

Then the question mark on Hopkins is the age thing. So far, it really hasn’t been a factor in his “Twilight Years/Zone” fights, (although he would have had a better chance with Calzaghe a few years earlier) but, as I mentioned before at this kind of age, generally when fighters do start to show the effects of age, it marches in at double-quick time. This is purely in the “who knows?” category. When/if he fights Green it may be the proverbial “one fight too many”, but there’s no way of saying for sure.

The other big money fight available for Green is obviously Anthony Mundine. Apparently Mundine’s now got this conceptual comedy skit going where, in order to avoid anyone dangerous at a given weight class, he keeps running to lighter and lighter divisions. For the purposes of his next fight, he’s a junior-middleweight, apparently. If he keeps this up, in a few years’ time, he’s going to have to fight under an electron microscope for people to see it.

Although “The Man” mouthed off about fighting Green in the aftermath of the Jones fight, it must be generally accepted by now that this means nothing, as Mundine regularly, and for quite some time, has mouthed off about a variety of big name guys, none of whom he’s actually got around to fighting.

Obviously Mundine must be aware that Green-Mundine II is a very big money fight - depending on what slips happen between cup and lip, it could be promoted into a bigger money fight than their first one, which coined it in - but it has to be admitted that preparing to fight a guy who campaigns at cruiserweight by moving from super-middleweight to middleweight to junior-middleweight is, at best, a little bit odd, and seems to be the kind of career path that Wrongway Feldman would have come up with.

I don’t think there’s any way Green would take this fight at super-middleweight again. (Forget anything lower than that.) He would hold the whip hand in negotiations in this case. The best Mundine might be able to get out of him is a catchweight just over the light-heavyweight limit, say around 178 or 179. If Green won’t cut to 175 right now, I can’t see any way he’ll do it for Mundine’s convenience. A weight like that takes young Anthony way out of his comfort zone.

Green’s a better and more experienced fighter now than he was when he fought Mundine (and he’d want to be.) Mundine now, as opposed to then, well it’s pure guesswork, given the level of opposition he’s fought. I can’t say from what I’ve seen of him that he’s significantly declined, (you can’t really tell, against bums and shoeshine punchers) and there’s absolutely no reason whatsoever to assume he’s significantly improved.

Some folks are saying he’s slipped. Well, he got hit a lot against Daniel Geale. I don’t know what that tells anyone exactly. Every appearance suggested that he wasn’t running or covering up against Geale because he knew that Daniel Geale didn’t have anything to throw that could actually hurt him. Team Mundine wouldn’t have taken that fight if they’d thought Daniel Geale was holding anything to hurt him. Anyone who thinks Mundine would fight the same way as the Geale fight against Danny Green in a rematch must think boxing is exclusively what the gift-wrap counter people do at Myer prior to the holiday season.

But, if the Green guys think that the weight limit could be a significant influence in changing things around from the first fight, I think they’re probably on the right track. The higher that Green can come in, short of him coming in with a beer-gut the size of Unca Leapster’s, the better for him. Mundine is realistically a super-middleweight at his heaviest effective fighting weight. That’s really as high as we’ve seen him fight at. Beyond that limit, I think he’s just putting on weight for no demonstrable advantage.

[The case with Roy Jones was different. He was able to fight effectively against a limited but larger opponent at 193 pounds. Mundine has never fought a significant fight over 168, and has instead cut back to 160 (and now apparently to 154) since then. Incidentally, I can’t see how all this ping-ponging around in weight can possibly be helpful to an athlete of Mundine’s age. Let alone to try and blow back up to, say 180 pounds or that vicinity, for a Green rematch. That sounds like a recipe for ageing as a boxer at a tremendous rate.]

Whether an edge in size and power, plus the improvement in skill-set and experience since the first fight, would be enough for Green to cover the gulf in speed and effectiveness revealed between the two in Mundine-Green I is up for grabs. It’s the question that you sell the fight on really, apart from the personalities involved. But you’d have to at least note and acknowledge the possibility now.

Mundine’s apparent flakiness in career-path, and his steadfast determination to avoid serious major opposition must make people at least consider the possibility that Green has a better chance the second time.

Whether the fight will ever happen is at least as much a matter for speculation, I guess. I can’t see how either can ultimately ignore the money this fight would generate, but Mundine has been avoiding serious money-making fights with name opposition for years. However, at some point, I’ve always felt that when Team Mundine feel they’ve worked the “Bum of the Month” club mine down to the last seam of pocket change, they were always going to have to take at least one “dangerous” fight as Anthony’s last-shot “gold watch” fight. It wouldn’t shock me if Danny Green turned out to be the one. But, as with any consideration of Mundine being involved with the prospect of an even vaguely competitive opponent in a fight, it pays to take an “I’ll believe it when I see it” approach.

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YOU KILL ME (2007)

This unusual – and as far as I’m aware, largely ignored – skewed variant on a crime-based movie, has no shortage of comparison points with the TV series The Sopranos. You Kill Me is more reflective, and less operatically pitched than The Sopranos, but like that series, it’s inherently ‘hi-concept’, but not so focussed on that that it fails to sketch in intriguing characterisations, nor to include some memorably off-kilter whimsical humour.

In The Sopranos the ‘hi-concept’ part the show was sold on was that an organised crime guy could also be the other type of family guy, with all the usual problems anyone might face, leading him to enter therapy with a psychologist.

In You Kill Me, Ben Kingsley plays Frank Falenczyk, a hitman for a Polish mob group of dwindling influence in his home town of Buffalo, NY, who, due to his extreme and regular abuse of alcohol, botches one job too many, and is sent by his uncle (Philip Baker Hall), the Polish mob’s leader, to dry out in San Francisco, under the supervision of a contact (Bill Pullman). The latter, who gives every impression of being a complete douche-bag, arranges regular work for Falenczyk, which turns out to be in the business, or ‘backstage’, area of a funeral home, and arranges for him to attend AA meetings.

Frank is the kind of closed-in guy who is about as likely to “open up and share” as the average school headmaster of the 1960s and 70s, so the AA meetings where everyone pours their guts out pretty much drive him nuts in the early going. Also this not drinking business has little immediate appeal for him.

However, he turns out to have something of a knack for his new work, dealing with another side of the death process than he’s used to, and in the course of his new duties meets a woman he’s interested in, Laurel Pearson (Tea Leoni) – the step-daughter of one of his ‘dear departed’ clients.

It’s when he starts to share a few more details (well, actually pretty much all of them) of what exactly he does for a living with her, and his AA sponsor (Luke Wilson), that the muted black humour of You Kill Me begins to take on a particularly surreal edge.

Director John Dahl (probably best known for the Matt Damon poker movie Rounders, but also somewhat known for his breakthrough picture Red Rock West) lays himself out a curious tightrope to tread here. As played by Kingsley, who is tremendous, the Frank Falenczyk character is realistic and likable, which is a tough sell for a professional killer. The main characters in the movie want him to succeed in defeating his alcoholism and regaining control of his personal and professional life. To an extent, the audience is also encouraged to want him to succeed in these areas. However, there’s that little business of him killing people.

The line Dahl has to walk is to get the viewer on-side, at least to some extent, with Frank and Laurel, while also acknowledging the bizarre and unpalatable (at least) qualities of what exactly his real line of work is.

Actually, within the seamless little world of small triumphs, failures and ironies comprising You Kill Me, he does about as good a job of reconciling this both dramatically, and for comic value, as possible. With a good whack of suspension of disbelief and a temporary suspension of ‘real world’ moral judgement, most viewers ought to be able to get there.

It’s a movie gifted with very solid support performances. Tea Leoni in the co-lead shows a great ability to create a sympathetic character from one not particularly overburdened with likeable traits. Her Laurel is dark-humoured, somewhat abrasive, and has clearly seen a certain amount of damage from previous relationships and life in general. (There’s a vague similarity to the character played by Lisa Kudrow, in her jaw-droppingly strong performance in The Opposite of Sex, but the Leoni character here isn’t quite THAT damaged, and You Kill Me isn’t emotionally quite as jagged.)

Dennis Farina is perfectly cast to exploit his inherent qualities on screen, in terms of affably loathsome smarminess, as the leader of Buffalo’s Irish crime family, which is intent on squeezing the last atoms of life out of the Polish mob’s influence. He might not look outstandingly Irish, but in a movie where Ben Kingsley is playing a Polish-American, presumably one makes certain allowances.

Pullman really gives his loudmouth real estate-broker/arsehole character a stink that lingers in what probably should have been a minor role in terms of screen-time, but resonates a bit beyond any per-line basis; and Luke Wilson has just the right combination of likeability, confusion and being just a bit ‘off’ as the AA sponsor. As usual he’s more engaging and more amusing than his brother Owen ever quite seems to manage.

You Kill Me is probably, on any further, deeper reflection, a slight movie, but it’s also about as engaging, flavoursome, and endearingly odd as one of those gets. Pretty much everything about it is well done, right down to Winnipeg, Manitoba doubling for the US in location shooting, and, perhaps most of all, the virtually unheard of running-time of 92 minutes for a modern movie, when that’s the length it actually needed to be.

About the only major thing I can fault it on is the title. It sounds like they were thinking of some caper-crime type Vegas wiseguy comedy movie with Danny DeVito and Bette Midler from a couple of decades ago. Apart from the word ‘Kill’ it conveys little of the content of this movie, and precisely nothing of the tone. Had they called it The Rootin’-Tootin’ Boozin’ Shootin’ Movie, they could have hardly have done it any less of a favour.

(8.5 out of 11, on the industry-standard MPHOAH scale)

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About two years ago, I posted this elsewhere on the site.

Now someone famous is remaking this movie in the typical dynamic go-getting approach of the day, i.e. unnecessarily, so before they make a royal corn beef hash of it, I thought I’d remind you of the original.

Harvey with Jimmy Stewart used to be held as a quiet favourite by hardcore olde-Hollywood movie fans, and over time, possibly for reasons of political correctness to do with part of the subject matter and possibly by the sheer general attrition of attention that affects the status of some older movies, because everyone’s keeping up with the ‘latest and greatest’ - we could call it plain critical ignorance for short - has become the even quieter favourite of somewhat fewer fans.

So, after they’ve pretty much inevitably gone right ahead and ruined it in remake, take the time out to try and catch the unspoiled original.

HARVEY (1950)

Now almost forgotten, this used to be on TV enough that it was considered something of a family classic.

The reason it doesn’t get a run much now is probably partly because it’s black and white, but mostly because the hero is an alcoholic, and that’s pretty much presented as a positive thing. Just imagine trying to pitch that one to a studio today. Yep, folks, we got us a loveable kid-friendly picture for the whole family about a guy who drinks in every scene in the movie and has an imaginary buddy who’s a white rabbit over six foot tall. You’d probably land in the nuthouse on the first bounce.

Anyway, it’s a shame, because this is one of those rare mold-denying timeless Hollywood studio pictures that effortlessly maintains a blithe tone of unforced farce. It captures a kind of idealized small-town life and makes its little points about the interesting and different ways people have their heads bent by everyday life, without the slightest strain or pain on the part of either movie or audience. (In a way it’s kind of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest territory thematically, but makes the same points doing a lot less overt hard work.)

Jimmy Stewart is at his most absent-mindedly likeable as Elwood P. Dowd who apparently has blithering piles of money and lives in a huge house, but doesn’t care about any of that, he just likes to go out drinking in low-life bars where he cheers everyone up with his generosity, unfailingly gentle, accepting manner, and also confuses them with his invisible giant rabbit buddy, Harvey.

His sister is a little more concerned, mainly because Dowd’s harmless eccentricity interferes with her plans to marry off her social-climbing hatchet-faced daughter, due to everyone figuring he’s mad. Also she’s starting to see the rabbit as well, which is bothering her.

Naturally, she tries to have Elwood committed, and naturally this works out a lot easier and better on paper than it does in real life, since the staff at the fairly demented local insane asylum wrongly assumes that she’s the jittery lunatic and that Dowd is just a regular happy guy, which on the surface of things is admittedly an easy mistake to make.

The story unfolds in a leisurely amiable series of confusions, and in general Harvey kind of feels like Arsenic and Old Lace (right down to one of the same cast members, Josephine Hull, who won an Oscar in this as the sister) only with a lot less pushing and running around. Stewart probably never had a better vehicle for his most familiar screen persona than this picture. The on-screen explanation for how his character became that way comes late in the piece, and is the perfect rationale. Everything that’s done here is done well. If you’re not familiar with Harvey, or haven’t seen it in years, make the effort to catch it. It’s a real one-off.

(10 out of 11, on the MPHOAH scale)

Wrote an email to a friend, and realised in the glowing AfterMASH of composing it, that the subjects covered were of general-enough interest to form the basis for a fire-up restart for this long dormant/just about healed over webslight. So I tidied it up a little, and hyar she blows. (Possibly quite literally.)

So all due thanks for completely inadvertent inspiration to my semi-anonymous pal Buddy Dennis, and to the upcoming Hulk Hogan tour that provided the unlikely stimulus for the lively email exchange. (And which, out of clemency, is not mentioned below at all.)

THE ACKNOWLEDGED WORLD CENTRE OF PURE SHOWBIZ GOLD

If you love a good Aussie showbiz disaster, please avail yourself of Channel Ten’s The Spearman Experiment before they yank it off television, which going by the first show I saw, could be within the proverbial New York minute.

It’s Nine’s 20-to-1 show (a programme I’ve always felt was innovatively named after the viewer’s likely odds of getting any entertainment out of the show) except the young, swingin’, bopster hepcat version, in theory, which actually translates to nostalgia stuff aimed at people watching television in the 1980s, so Ten’s idea of cutting-edge young people’s TV is actually aimed at 40 year olds.

The show I saw was about the “great Australian TV comedy characters”, and I’m now convinced that the real greatest Australian TV comedy characters would include Jim Waley, Laurie Oakes and Tony Barber in the wake of the ones they came up with, such as Kylie Mole, two of the scintillating comic characterisations by the ever-hilarious Glenn Whatsisface who used to be on The Panel, and anyone else who ever was in a comedy show on Channel Ten.

Just to pull the shroud over the deceased, they had “celebrities” talking with their great comedic knowledge about the ‘great comedy characters’, in a manner that suggested they’d just been brained with a baseball bat prior to taping, and most of them were “television personalities” I’d never previously seen or heard of. I’d guess they were from the Witness Protection Program channel.

The finishing hold was provided by the hosting of Magda Szubanski, and I can honestly say without any hyperbole that this was the single coldest, unfriendliest job of hosting anything on TV I’d seen, perhaps since Bryant Gumble was at the height of being tired with his co-host/weather presenter combo on NBC’s Today show, or anything Daryl Somers has done in the last 20 years, minus the smarm. I don’t know whether she was trying for being ‘cool’ or ‘dry’, or some other aspect of personality that a deodorant might have, but it seemed like one of the greatest examples in television history of a host clearly conveying to an audience that she’d rather be lying in a puddle of cold mud than hosting the show she was presenting.

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ROCKETING TO THE POORHOUSE

This business of music promoters (and in some cases I mean alleged music promoters, as there’s no apparent promotion involved) bringing out music acts to Australia that have a specialist appeal - i.e. not mainstream, but there’s probably a cult audience there if you can tap into it - and then murdering any chance of success by not doing anything other than hanging the shingle of the act’s name out there, and assuming this will draw an audience without any other advertising, explanation or promotion, has gone from being a definite trend a few years back to a confirmed epidemic. They book the dates, they buy the plane tickets, they book the hotel rooms, and then they sit back with a stupid smirk on their faces and assume the deal is done, and fans will flock in.

Recently I went to see the LA pop singer-songwriter Aimee Mann at the Palais. (Explanations would take up valuable time, but I’m a fan of her stuff.) She should have a solid little cult following here (did the soundtrack for a movie called Magnolia which a lot of the alternative types seem to know her from, and she was in the band Til Tuesday in the 80s) but the show pulled about 50% capacity, maybe 1000 people being generous. She’s never been out here before. The reaction when I mentioned going to the show to a fellow fan a few days later was, and this is close enough to verbatim: “Really? Aimee Mann? When is she playing?” I’m guessing the message didn’t quite get out to the people who knew her stuff, or to other folks who would have liked her music but weren’t aware who she was or what she played.

When the 70s heavy metal band Budgie came out here a couple of years ago, there was no advertising to speak of, and nobody explained to the kids that, wait a minute, these guys were contemporaries of Zeppelin and Sabbath, were covered a couple of times by Metallica, and were the roots of the metal we’ve had since. They drew about 200 people at the Forum. Now someone, who I’m imagining needs a major tax loss on the books for the current financial year, is touring them again! I’ll bet you anything that the level of publicity will guarantee another venue mostly filled with dry ice, tumbleweeds and cicadas. Those poor guys will be going back to Wales and telling everyone that Australia must have a population of around 2000 people, and that you see more koalas than human beings there.

Even when the Dictators came out here a fair while back - and that was a band that was a super-easy sell, being the pre-Ramones roots of punk rock, and contemporaries of the New York Dolls, the Heartbreakers, KISS etc - nobody remembered to do the sell, and with a stacked support card, they still didn’t do much better than about 60% fill the Corner Hotel, and the show at The Tote was fairly packed, but if a quarter of my brother-in-law’s family members turned up, the Tote would be chockers. Had they been sold properly and advertised adequately, I think they could have done a Forum show at least, and maybe a Palace (Metro) or Billboard sized venue. (And the bizarre thing was, when Whitesnake came out last time, which was only a few weeks prior to WASP from memory, and it was apparently promoted on the basis that it was some sort of official state secret, they (a) put them in the Palace/Metro, when I think that properly promoted, that’s at least a Festival Hall/Vodaphone gig, and (b) thanks to the hardcores, it was apparently chockers anyway.)

It’s amazing how often people miss the boat on this stuff. I think touring bands here is like the old tablecloth trick of movie and stage magic fame – where a guy tries and whips the cloth off the table in one snappy motion, leaving all plates, cutlery and glassware atop it undisturbed. Basically there’s a lot of drunk people who think they can do this, and none of them realise they have no idea whatsoever until we’re all knee-high in food scraps and crockery fragments and drenched in leftover wine.

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BASE PLUG FOR CURRENT MOVIE

Regarding this latter sentiment, and for a bunch of other reasons, you should make an effort if you can to catch the movie Anvil - The Story of Anvilwhile it’s still in the cinemas. This is being promoted as a real life equivalent to This is Spinal Tap, which in some ways isn’t a bad description. These guys are a real-life Canadian metal band, who had influential albums out in the early-mid 1980s, but while virtually everyone else they played with went on to become multi-million sellers, nothing ever happened for them. There are still two original members, now in their 50s, still touring around as Anvil, with a couple of younger guys. The movie, in part, follows them on possibly the worst-organised European tour since Germany’s tour of Stalingrad in WWII. You have just got to see the wacko woman booker who promotes this tour in action. She’s incoherent in any language she encounters - actually I couldn’t even work out what her first language might be, other than it’s definitely not English - and screws up every single date, venue, and train/plane transfer, one after another. It’s so well organised that at one venue the club manager attempts to pay them in bowls of goulash. I’m not making this up.

The movie is actually kind of a feel-good movie because the two main guys are so likeable. Also (and this point is made by various of their contemporaries, including Slash and Lemmy) they’re actually a pretty damn good metal band. In some ways it’s a lot like the movie The Wrestler because the main guys are working Joe-jobs throughout the week to feed their families, and then keeping the dream alive working crappy clubs on the weekends. However, it’s more feel-good than that (well, almost anything bar The Spearman Experiment is) because the band is good, and by the end, they kind of start to finally get a break, and play a big show in Japan. (And the movie has kind of given them a career, I gather.)

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BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE (2009)

You know, you watch a movie like this, presuming you’re of a certain age, and perhaps disposition, and you start to think about posterity, and the mark you or anyone else might be likely to leave on it. This can get a little depressing.

In the case of Hilly Krystal, who ran the rock club CBGB’s in New York City for the best part of three decades, his legacy is assured, if also perhaps slightly depressing. The music that came out of there, thanks to the then no-name groups he allowed to play there in the early-mid 1970s, was critically lauded for what constituted forever in the 20th Century, and likely will be for as long as anyone remembers or cares about rock music. Television, the Talking Heads, the Ramones, Blondie, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, the Heartbreakers (Thunders, not Petty) – they all played there, as did everyone else in the New York punk scene at the time. Hell, it kind of WAS the New York punk scene.

(The New York Dolls mostly played elsewhere, and maybe a little before this time-frame, I think. This doco doesn’t mention the Mercer Avenue Arts whatever-it-was, where they played, nor is Max’s Kansas City – a New York venue despite the name – mentioned at all.)

Hilly Krystal was a former male chorus singer (in a heterosexual type of way, one gathers) at Radio City Music Hall, who had ambitions of being some kind of bluegrass artist, and never made it as such. He opened up a club called CBGB, which stood for Country, Bluegrass and Blues, and lived to see it become an icon for precisely none of those kinds of music.

According to this movie, by all testimonies given therein, his joint was a complete rat-hole in the early 70s, which he never spent a dime on if he could avoid it, with the one exception being a then-state of the art PA he had put in, roughly (it isn’t quite specified in the movie) around the time that he started booking the bands that were to become known as “Punk Rock”.

This was a happy accident, or a brilliant selective use of available capital, as the sound in CBGB was apparently excellent. (You have to trust them on this, because most footage included in the movie from the old days is rugged as hell for both sound and visuals. Actually, they even have an unrelated clip of Aerosmith which is just about digitising, it’s so crappy. Anyway, I’ve been in there, and the sound was good.)

By the way, him “booking” these bands is kind of an overstatement. CBGB was a dive on the Bowery, which was a street for down and outs that, in general, made the venue almost posh by comparison, “almost” being the key word. Again, by all testimony, there was no young rock scene indigenous to New York at the time. Bands like Television and Richard Hell’s band were around and wanted to play somewhere. One gathers that they saw CBGB as a place shitty enough and with low-enough standards and expectations, that they might be allowed to play there, since they and their friends being there would boost the bar-tab.

Krystal went along with it, and, as a result, history subsequently happened in his long, skinny, divey rock bar. He was a kind of absent-minded accommodator of the arts, in a kind of not-quite beatnik (he had played at Cafe Wha? and that NY coffee-house set-up of the early 60s that gave rise to Bob Dylan, among others – incidentally on an unrelated note of bizarre cross-culture pollenisation, David Lee Roth in his autobiography mentions that Cafe Wha? was run by his Uncle Manny), not-quite hippy kind of way. That tendency to nurture the somewhat wayward musical artists and the otherwise artistic, and the sound-system he put in, are probably the foundation of his legacy, along with having his “colourful” club in an even more colourful street.

The movie is not a history of the NY punk scene, although there’s plenty of that in there, and principals from the time are interviewed, including Debbie Harry, Tommy Ramone, Cheetah Chrome etc.

One good thing about Burning Down The House is that it DOESN’T stop with the club’s famous days. It continues through the hardcore punk days of the 1980s, and the times when it booked grunge era bands in the 90s, which is just as well, because those periods of CBGB are relatively undocumented, and while no more revolutions came out of there, people around the world still iconicised the joint, mostly with some time-locked idealised vision of what it represented, and some documentation of the fact it continued as an active rock venue, and what was played there, was due, and probably overdue.

Unfortunately, this is only partly a documentary on CBGB, or Hilly Krystal. The framework director Mandy Stein (daughter of Linda Stein, former Ramones manager, and, I presume, Seymour Stein of Sire Records) has chosen to construct the picture around is Krystal’s final fight for the venue’s survival, when the landlord, a non-profit organisation aimed at helping the homeless, was trying to kick them out.

Many points are made about the gentrification of the Bowery, and of New York in general, and of the vital cultural nature of what CBGB represented. It’s difficult to avoid the feeling that something irreplaceable and valuable was lost, no matter how crappy in some ways it might have quite literally been. (The legendary CBGB toilets – a Manhattan version of the Black Hole of Calcutta – are cited many times over, not to mention the frequent prevalence of dog poo and worse throughout the club. It’s hard not to get the impression that the only money Hilly Krystal spent on the joint after the PA was on liquor to stock the bar, and whatever staff wages amounted to.)

However, it’s also difficult to escape the feeling that change like this is inevitable, and happens all over the place. In general, given the way things are going, it’s easy to believe that in 50 years’ time, the shittiest of live music bars, clubs or pubs that people fondly complain about would be unrecognisably shimmering, streamlined, clean and modern to those of us with a 70s or 80s start-date for rock joint attendance, and basically look something like the Legion of Superheroes club-house in the year 3000.

It’s also a factor that the Ee-vill landlord bent on cleaning CBGB out of its hidey-hole is an organisation which assists homeless people. If it had been a case of clearing Krystal and CBGB’s out of there to put in some rich nob’s expensive apartment building or something, the fight over the space would have a different feel to it, put it that way.

But probably the biggest factor is that the details – legal, logistical and otherwise – of this fight to save CBGB become tedious by comparison to discussion of the music that was played there, and the interview snippets with the musicians themselves.

Hilly Krystal’s story is a story worth telling, and it’s as big a part of the CBGB story as anything but the best-remembered music that came out of there, but the incredibly detailed recounting of the long, drawn-out and ultimately hopeless final battle to save it is hardly the most riveting portion of this documentary. Unfortunately, it’s a lot of this documentary.

But for anyone interested in any of the music that happened there, there’s still more than enough interest generated to make it absolutely worth your while. The footage of the final concert (Patti Smith, The Dictators, among others) and the venue’s final days is pretty fascinating. The stuff about the merchandising generating CBGB’s survival money in its later years is real interesting. There’s plenty of stuff in there about the scene of the 1970s and interviews with people whose music became an acknowledged part of international music history, as well as mainstays like Wayne/Jayne County, and the Dictators, who didn’t so much.

It’s actually worth it just to see Hilly Krystal’s office, a clutter of such baroque, toweringly filthy magnitude that it’s difficult to believe a single decision that generated so much as a dollar was made from there.

You get to see the joint pulled apart, which has its eerie hold on the viewer as well.

The final irony is seeing various mementos from CBGB enshrined in a New York rock museum, ironically in (presumably) the same Mercer Avenue which used to host the Dolls. They tore the joint down, but saved some scraps to put under glass. Kind of bizarre.

If you were into any of the bands mentioned, and/or the Dead Boys, the Tuff Darts (nice clip!), or whoever, make sure you see it, despite any deficiencies or misjudgements mentioned above. It might not all be great history, but it’s the history of something great.

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(I went to CBGB’s exactly once, in the early 1980s, either ’81 or ’82. There were three bands on – one was called Great Jones, another I can’t remember the name of, and Sylvain Sylvain from the New York Dolls was the headliner. The venue was very very thin, and long. Beers were not cheap. I don’t know if the place had been mildly spruced up since its 70s heyday, but I don’t remember it as being really much shittier than various live music pubs and clubs I was attending here at the time. It just didn’t strike me that way. I can’t remember any poo on the floor, or anything like that. It had a great feel for a rock joint, kind of both welcoming and vaguely threatening, like it says at one point in the doco. But then, there were places like that here too, only I knew them better. I went down to the notorious CBGB toilets. Hell, when I need to go for a beer pee, I’ll go to anyone’s famous toilets. It was all cracked, marked, spattered and splattered, but I’ve seen as bad if not worse in pub toilets here. Maybe I caught it on a relatively good day. That said, you probably wouldn’t have wanted to consume a sandwich in there, or anything. Some kid who looked like Andy Warhol tried to score drugs off me. This is not so remarkable in itself in that (a) about one in six people in there looked like Andy Warhol, and (b) I have a lifetime history of being mistaken for a drug dealer, by civilians, police and drug dealers alike, even though I basically don’t use drugs at all, and have never dealt them. However when you’re a fairly young-looking 21 year old from Australia City, with at best mid-length hair, no facial hair, no tattoos, no earrings, and some guy who looks like Andy Warhol approaches you to score drugs in the CBGB toilet on your first visit to the Big Apple, it’s kind of hard not to have that “If I can MAKE it there/I’ll make it ANYWHERE” line going through your head, once you’ve safely established that the guy is not going to ask you out on a date, to take effect almost immediately. By the way, from memory that wasn’t the only time someone tried to score drugs off me that one time at CBGB. Fortunately for my heart-rate, it was the only time someone did so in the toilet, however.)

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Jake Niall, writing in The Age, 3/8/2009, re Melbourne v Richmond:

“Tanking speculation aside, the upshot was that the frenetic final few minutes salvaged one of the season’s worst standard games.”

Pardon me while I beg to differ, with no disrespect intended to Jake, but considerable disrespect intended to Melbourne v Richmond, Round 18.

The “frenetic final few minutes”, if that’s what they were, salvaged nothing. The game, which was seldom detectable as anything resembling senior AFL football, locked the entire claimed crowd of 30,000 and change (looked like around 27/28000 tops to me and various adjacent experienced amateur crowd estimators who are usually pretty much right on the money) into a coma for large portions of the encounter, and reactions from the crowd were eerily non-existent for most of the match.

The quality of the football played therein beggared description. It largely consisted of a glorified and slightly more elaborate game of kick-to-kick, in which Richmond would routinely stream across the centre-line and deliver the ball with pinpoint precision onto the chest of an opponent, following which Melbourne, abetted by an incomprehensible and entirely ineffectual zoning system of Richmond’s, would easily clear the ball from defence and into attack, prior to exhibiting some peculiar brain-fade which was less a case of butchering the football than mutilating it, thus returning possession to Richmond. And so on, and so forth.

There would have hardly been a game of park football played across the state over the weekend which wouldn’t have been better to watch. Probably the vast majority of these games would have given a general indication that either team in it had more clue about what it was doing out there than either Melbourne or Richmond showed.

There’s this bizarre theory out there, at least among the exceptionally easily-pleased, or “theatre-goer” type football fans, or phenomenological train-spotters, that as long as a game is tight on the scoreboard at the end, that this somehow raises it to the level of a spectacle worth beholding, or something. This was a spectacle worth beheading.

When a winning coach is, by his own testimony, disappointed to the level of being quite dispirited by a victory, it tells a story, you’d reckon. Close or not, this was a stinker of incredible magnitude. It must be considered by anyone voting in Worst Game of the Year polls, and was probably duller and more inept than the deadlier portions of that Carlton-Collingwood game in Round 17, which were at least as hard to watch as any proposed Hey Hey It’s Saturday cast reunion.

Naming half a dozen players for each side whose performance didn’t suck by any reasonable standard, probably including their own, would be a monumental chore akin to the twelve labours of Hercules. If the match will be remembered for one stand-out event, and it’s doubtful at best, that would be Jordan McMahon achieving with one kick, what it used to routinely take former Tiger stalwart Greg Tivendale – known to some Richmond fans as “Mr Awesome in August” – an entire month’s worth of games to achieve, in that McMahon is now presumably un-delistable for at least another year. (He kicked the winning goal after the siren, for those who missed it, or were there and already snoring deeply by that point.)

The AFL could considerably advance the code and cause of Australian Rules football by buying any existing master tape, disc, or if necessary any machine containing a hard-drive recording of this match, and burning it. Excelsior!

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