DVD Review: Ain’t Them Bodies Saints

By Less Lee Moore

There’s no question that Ain’t Them Bodies Saints is a visually stunning movie. Though set in Texas during the 1970s, it was filmed in Shreveport, Louisiana. Cinematographer Bradford Young takes full advantage of the natural landscape and his exceptional ability to capture light in a shot is impressive. The performances from the entire cast—Rooney Mara, Casey Affleck, Ben Foster, and Keith Carradine—are outstanding. Writer and director David Lowery certainly has a way with creating a mood. Unfortunately, all of the characters are such slippery fish, that it’s sometimes hard to connect with any of them.

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Waxing Nostalgic: Frankie Goes to Hollywood, “The Power of Love”

You know what kind of world we used to live in, kids? During the summer of 1984, the number one song in the world was about the importance of doing Kegel exercises. Now we have Carrie Underwood starring in The Sound of Music. We just get blander and blander. Miley and Gaga run around topless or in some kind of meat suit, and who cares? We’ve all seen boobs and steak.

It’s not edgy; it’s stupid.

But Frankie Goes to Hollywood? That was some ballsy music. It may not seem so now, with your jaded ears filled with the wax of cynicism and Wilco, but Frankie pushed everything to the limit. Their marketing plan was a finely planned mixture of saturation and nonsense. T-shirts and buttons appeared in shopping malls like alien spores with messages like, “Arm the Unemployed!” and “War! Hide Yourself!” Their videos played on MTV all the time and honestly, they weren’t that good. The original video for “Relax” simply features the band in a warehouse with a laser beam. “Thriller,” it ain’t.

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Best Of 2013: Chris Butler of The Waitresses

Photo © Marianne P. Smith

Music: The Front Bottoms, Talon of the Hawk on Bar-None. I used to hope that if was young and in an indie band, that I/we would be like The Replacements. Now, I hope I’d be like these guys. Smart, fast, funny, real.

Food: Jose’s Real Cuban, Bradenton FL. My brother saw a segment on this place on Diners, Drive-Ins & Dives. Too few seats, too many flies for the germophobes. . . order the picadillo and shut up, Clean Freak. 8799 Cortez Rd W, Bradenton, FL 34210, (941) 795-4898

Worst Food: I’m avoiding the Cult of Kale. I don’t care if it’s good for me; it tastes like old socks.

Best Ironic “I Am Old” Moment: The closing block party for Maxwell’s in Hoboken. End of an era, so many good times, blah blah blah, getting old sucks. http://www.nj.com/hudson/index.ssf/2013/07/maxwells_goes_out_with_a_block_party_bash.html

Personal Magical On-Stage Moment: Winning the Rosendale, NY Gong Show by playing spoons to an a capella version of “My Generation.” Really. I got a trophy and everything.

Movies: 20 Feet From Stardom. Everything else was shit. I had to take my son to so he could keep up with his peers.

Gear: Fender Squier “J. Mascis” Jazzmaster. First new guitar I’ve ever bought. Got it for a trip to London for a one-off gig, thinking if it got smashed by the airline I wouldn’t mind. If this had happened, I would have bawled like a bee-stung baby. A great guitar.

Best Found YouTube Clip: The Kinks in Paris 1965. Wonderful fuckin’ band. Watch before it gets pulled.

Best Roadside Attraction Discovery: The Museum of Jurassic Technology (thank you, Elaine Sokoloff). Key to my heart? Nothing beats a joke idea taken too far. 9341 Venice Blvd, Culver City, CA 90232 (310) 836-6131.

Best Live Show: 15-60-75 (The Numbers Band) record release party and reunion show, The Kent Stage, 11/9/13. Still the baddest band in the land.

Just Desserts: The Complete Waitresses was released by Omnivore Recordings on September 24.

Best Of 2013: Singer/Songwriter Lewis Watson

Photo © Alex Brown

Television:
Breaking Bad
Homeland

Music:
Chance the Rapper, Acid Rap
The 1975, The 1975
Half Moon Run, Dark Eyes
Matt Corby, Resolution EP

I’ve read a lot of the Sherlock Holmes books this year and started—finally—my vinyl collection.

Lewis Watson‘s latest EP, Some Songs With Some Friends, was released December 16 via Warner Music.

Best Of 2013: Paul Casey

2013 was a good year for my interests. Some of the greatest video games I have experienced all came in a bunch. R&B continued its resurgence with both new and legendary musicians, making this year one of the greatest in nearly a decade for human music. Rap has also reached a more interesting place than it has been in a long time with much of the dull-minded aversion to being smooth and beautiful wiped away. Now if you want to hit a nice melody on the chorus you can do it without the fear that you will be removed from the big-cock-I’m-in-a-street gang-and-will-literally-murder-you-and-your-family club. Even when it was aggressive or violent, this year it was from the Miike Takashi School of Creative Perversion.

On the television too, I had a wonderful time with the most original American show in the last decade ending its run on top. Yes, Eastbound & Down (probably) ended Kenny Power’s story as fearlessly as it began. This was not a big movie year for me and while I am sure there are a bunch that I will love when I get around to seeing them—Blue Jasmine, The Counsellor—nothing I have seen this year warrants a recommendation.

Games
Music: Albums
Music: Singles
Television
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Best of 2013: Jazz Guitarist Nir Felder

Photo © Phil Knott

Best meal: A toss up between Battersby in Brooklyn and Cal Pep in Barcelona.

Best coffee: Also a toss up: Courier Coffee or Barista, both in Portland, OR.

Best wine: A 1998 St. Emilion that Eric Harland brought to his birthday show at the Blue Note.

Best gig: Montreal Jazz Festival with Aaron Parks, Orlando LeFleming, and Mark Guiliana.

Best concert: Tie between St. Vincent and David Byrne at the Mountain Winery in Saratoga, CA and a traditional flamenco group at Villa Rosa in Madrid.

Best album: Midlake’s Antiphon.

Best movie: I’m hooked on Michael Apted’s original English Up series.

Best purchase: A 1966 Fender Electric XII!

Best drive: After a gig in Vicksburg, MS I took a couple of days to drive up the old “Blues Highway” from Mississippi to Memphis, passing by Dockery Plantation, the legendary “Crossroads, and many of the unmarked places where the blues was born.

Best achievement: Finally finished reading Infinite Jest, which I started sometime in 2012. . .

Best opera: I had a blast playing with the NYC Opera in Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Anna Nicole, in what ended up being NYC Opera’s final performance. A sad and moving occasion.

Best city: Athens, Greece. You can take a boat to any thousands of beautiful islands, you can study amazing ancient ruins, or you can just hang out and eat Greek food all day. I love it.

Nir Felder‘s next release, Golden Age, will be out on January 21, 2014 via OKeh.

Best Of 2013: Melissa Bratcher

I could strictly do a Top Ten list from the albums I’ve reviewed, but surely you’ve read all of those reviews and logged them away in a notebook with “Cool Music—Top Secret” written on the front of it and will later take that notebook to the record store (or computer; that’s okay, too) and buy things and be happy about the choices you’ve made in life.

So instead, I have a different list of things that made me happy to be a human this year, in no actual order.

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Best of 2013: Reed Mathis of Tea Leaf Green

The best concert I saw this year was Iron & Wine at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, TN in November. Unreal!

Favorite albums of 2013:
Iron & Wine, Ghost on Ghost
Wayne Shorter Quartet, Without a Net
Volcano Choir, Repave
Portugal. The Man, Evil Friends
Elvis Costello & The Roots, Wise Up Ghost
Neko Case, The Worse Things Get. . .
Maria Bamford, Ask Me About My New God!
Page McConnell, Unsung Cities and Movies Never Made
Nathan Moore, Hippy Fiasco Rides Again
James Blake, Overgrown
Atoms for Peace, Amok

Tea Leaf Green‘s latest album, In The Wake, was released on May 14 through Greenhouse Records and Thirty Tigers.

The Five Movies of 2013 I Did Not Expect to Like and Ended Up Loving

By Jeffery X Martin

Of course, as a professional guy who writes about popular culture, I try to go into a movie with as little expectation as possible. Keep an open mind. This isn’t always easy for me, because I’m kind of a dick. I like what I like and I don’t give a damn who knows it. I’m not going to watch a Tyler Perry movie. I’m not going to watch a James Cameron movie. It’s not my thing.

This doesn’t mean I can’t get surprised once in a while, as the following list, which is in no particular order, proves.

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Assemblog: December 13, 2013

Out of the Furnace

New this week on Popshifter: Brad was less than impressed with Paradise, but excited about Streets Of Fire; I explore the unexpected gravitas of The Wolverine and pay my respects to the new Melvins album Tres Cabrones; LabSplice shows how Arrow fights crime the Bill Gates way through product placement; Jeff waxes nostalgic about holiday tunes; and we’ve got Best Of 2013 lists for you from David Barras (Electric Man), singer/songwriter Willie Nile, our own Danny R. Phillips and Jeffery X Martin.

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