A Thursday Night on the Couch

A couple buds and I were channel-surfing last night, and we were forced to make a great decision: Big or Almost Famous.

After toggling between the two for a few brief minutes, we opted to watch the second half of AF, the hippy, flower-children film about a 15-year-old music buff who fools Rolling Stone into hiring him to snag an exclusive with Russell Hammond (Billy Crudup), the lead singer of "Stillwater." Not only does the movie's soundtrack remind you why your parents are right, they did live through a Golden Era of music (something that was driven home to me during countless Father-Daughter Grice sessions of 1960s-70s music education), the film's impeccably cast.

Of course, you can do no wrong when you're the haggard, scruffed-up, yet dreamy, Mr. Crudup, but Kate Hudson is also beautiful and tragically endearing as Penny Lane, a Stillwater "Band-Aid"; Patrick Fugit as the doe-eyed musical wunderkind William Miller is perfect -- and grossly under-worked, now that I think about it; Philip Seymour Hoffman plays the boozy and bitter, filthy indy-music magazine martyr and needs no explanation.

I was glad to have revisited it.

It got a friend and me reminiscing about our favorite music movies. He began extolling the many virtues of Detroit Rock City ("Don't you know what KISS stands for???? Knights in Satan's Service!"); I went down another path and blathered about one I stumbled on last year, called Control.



This was one of my favorite movies of 2007. I happened upon it back when I was diligent about Morgan's Tuesday-night Movietime ($7 tickets and a free large popcorn with a [expired] student ID). It's about Ian Curtis, the lead singer of Joy Division, who killed himself the day before his band was bound to leave U.K. provincialism for the U.S. on its first major tour.

Curtis was an epileptic, who regularly had seizures on the middle of the stage as he was getting into some crazy bop-around dance moves, and an overall tragic, torn rocker/artist "before his times." Lead actor Sam Riley is amazing, not only in his ability to mimic the spastic singer, but in his ability to portray him over a good many years of his sad, evolving short life.

First Morgan Grice Original

I've been working on a news package on the Food Crisis in New York, so I've been having to learn a lot of new software. For my education, I made a short video about a kidnapper named "No Nose" who was in the news last year. A friend was curious as to how he got the nickname, so I did some research.

`When Did You Last See Your Father?'

June 6 (Bloomberg) -- ``When Did You Last See Your Father?'' is the screen version of British poet and author Blake Morrison's bestselling memoirs, focusing on his conflicted relationship with his dying father. It's a moving and beautifully shot story whose sentimentality rarely swerves into self-indulgence.

An early scene takes place in the late 1980s with Blake (Colin Firth) receiving a prestigious award for a recently published book of poems; his father quickly boasts about never having read the rubbish and loudly laments the fact his son didn't follow in his footsteps by becoming a money-spinning physician.

Flashbacks

Shortly afterward, we learn of dad's impending death, and the rest of the film jumps from his father's hospital bedside to Blake's boyhood memories from the 1950s and 1960s. Alternately moving and embarrassing, the flashbacks are nearly all intensely emotional.

Jim Broadbent plays Arthur Morrison, an English-countryside doctor whose bluster brings out an offensive paternal gusto. He's the dad who gets his jollies by referring to his son as ``Fathead'' rather than acknowledging him as the literary wunderkind he is.

Much of Blake's unresolved hatred for Arthur comes from the years he spent parading his mistress in front of the family, and particularly Blake's mother (Juliet Stevenson). However, Arthur woos us just as he woos his family, by endearing us with his imperfections.

Firth gives a typically pensive performance; he has the potent ability to wordlessly convey inner conflict and agony. Matthew Beard, who plays the young Blake, shares Firth's ability to express a quiet, subtle intelligence but also does well as a rebellious and angst-ridden teen. In the end, however, they're both upstaged by the boisterous and improbably lovable Broadbent.

Sandler's `Zohan' Makes Shampoo-poo: Review

June 6 (Bloomberg) -- What's hilarious about Adam Sandler's pelvic gyrations, un-P.C. barbs and hummus obsession? Taken individually, perhaps you could find something laugh-worthy in there; mash them together into a 90-minute movie and all you've got is an hour and a half of pathetic.

``You Don't Mess With the Zohan'' stars Sandler (who also co-wrote the movie with the ubiquitous Judd Apatow and Robert Smigel, of ``Saturday Night Live'') as an Israeli counter- intelligence agent who's really a pacifist and whose true passion is hairdressing. Fed up with miraculous feats of assassination and disco-dancing on the beach, he fakes his death and flees to America, where his goal is to work for his idol, salon king Paul Mitchell.

After a series of mishaps (including a scene with a spoiled brat in a tony East Side kids' salon that may actually win Zohan some fans), he finds work at a parlor run by a beautiful Palestinian woman (Emmanuelle Chriqui). She shares Zohan's dream of world peace but is skeptical of his motives.

Many mindless minutes are devoted to watching an oversexed Zohan please his aging female customers, which is only slightly less annoying than the movie's final scene, involving a possible corporate takeover and the sudden appearance of Zohan's arch- enemy, a Palestinian terrorist known as the Phantom. Lots of laughs there.

Even the versatile and entertaining John Turturro, as the Phantom, fails to save the film from being an almost totally brainless farce.

Perhaps Apatow needs a rest. He's worked on roughly a dozen movies in the past four years, and they're declining in quality. It's time, as well, for Sandler to recapture what made him a success back in his ``SNL'' or ``Billy Madison'' days, which seem long ago, indeed.