Author: Seb Palmer

Starz

After watching Warfare a second time, and still enjoying it. Another film was requested, by Teresa (she hadn’t watched Warfare).

After much confusion we wound up trying MI3. Teresa promptly fell asleep. I wasn’t even watching it. And our guest, Patrick, regaled me with how much he dislikes J. J. Abrams, the director.

Since I wasn’t watching it, and had already had my fill of televisual thrills n’ entertainment, I very happily switched off.

In fairness to the film, this is hardly a review, really. It’s just a space-filling opportunity to say I’m totally uninterested. I could see and hear much gunfire, glass-breaking and explosions. But I simply wasn’t drawn in.

I couldn’t have cared less. So it’s off to bed, to continue reading The Price of Victory. Spend my precious time on something worthy of attention.

Capricorn, the jazz, funk n’ soul band I ran for some years, used to play Jimmy McGriff’s wonderfully funkified ‘The Worm’.

I’ve been collecting chunks of recordings by cats like Groove Holmes and Jimmy Smith, and have been feeling the urge to splurge on organ-meister McGriff.

I absolutely love the early Solid State album covers, particularly A Bag Full of Soul. That’s got to be made into a funky tee-shirt for my collection.

Well, I splurged. On the excellently useful cdsvinyljapan website, my go-to source for anything that can’t be had cheaper at Amazon or Discogs.

Trying to get this lot via Amazon UK would’ve cost me circa £75 – see above – and that’s for just three – only half! – of the albums in this order. The others being currently unavailable…

Every which way you spin this, the cdsvinyljapan order comes out top trumps. Even with a hefty £17 shipping charge.

This still leaves huge chunks of Mr McGriff’s recorded catalogue to be explored. I’m most interested in the Solid State and Groove Merchant stuff, plus a few odds and ends on labels like Blue Note and United Artists.

Oh, sheeit… also bought these:

All this buying CDs from Japan means I need to book more work. Dang it!

Ok, so I’m reading about Jimmy McGriff’s albums, on Wikipedia, album by album. And I hit one that says:

… having now contributed a few edits to Wiki posts, I figured, ‘Hell, yeah, I’ll create a page… why not?’

Well, I quickly learned that it’s very easy to edit stuff that’s already there. Creating a new article, however? Sheesh…

So, what I’m going to do, is mock one up here, by assembling all the pertinent info. And then, if I can face it, I’ll try and learn how to code for Wiki, or use the ‘visual’ interface.

I started out trying to do all this on my iPhone. It might be that I need to be doing it on a desktop? We shall see.

Anyhoo, here’s a non-standard (wiki-wise) attempt at collating the required info…

Jimmy McGriff, Junior Parker (Jimmy McGriff/Junior Parker album)

1. “Don’t Throw Your Love On Me So Strong” (A. King)
2. “Pretty Baby” (H. J. Parker)
3. “I Need Love So Bad” (P. Mayfield)
4. “Baby, Please Don’t Go” (M. Morganfield)
5. “Five Long Years” (E. Boyd)
6. “No One Knows What Goes On When The Door Is Closed)” (H. J. Parker)
7. “Don’t Let The Sun Catch You Cryin’” (J. Greene)

• Jimmy McGriff – organ
• Junior Parker – vocals, harmonica
• Horace Ott – electric piano
• Arthur ‘Fats’ Theus – tenor sax
• O’Donel Levy – guitar
• Saint Jenkins – drums
• William Thorpe – baritone sax
• Joseph Morris – alto sax
• Ronald White – trumpet

Hmmm… pretty lame. I like to watch as many WWII movies as I can. This was a bit of a stretch.

An Italian ‘macaroni combat’ movie – the military or WWII equivalent of a ‘spaghetti western’ – it’s directed by ‘Frank Kramer’ (real name Gianfranco Parolini), with a mostly Italian cast and crew.

All these Italians pretending to be Americans, dubbed – horrendously woodenly (as was the norm it seems, in this era) – into English, makes for a disembodied and weird feel. The biggest name familiar to me here is Klaus Kinski, cast as a stereotypically loathsome SS officer.

Mixed in with the mostly Italian meatballs, is the really rather gorgeous English actress, Margaret Lee, who made her career working mostly (perhaps entirely?) in Italy.  

There’s no point synopsising the plot. It’s a complete muddle. And if ever there were a less interesting McGuffin… I’ve not encountered it.

The whole tenor of the movie is – to contemporary eyes (or mine, at any rate) – quite strange. The music, and even a good deal of the action, are more than a little tongue in cheek. 

It’s probably somewhat ‘grindhouse’. I can imagine QT quite liking it. But for me it’s just off on too many notes. The music particularly so. Possibly making for a whole that’s some kind of celluloid analogue of Sven Hassel meets Benny Hill?

I left off after 50 minutes, with 40 minutes to go (had to pick up my wife). I’ll poss’ watch the whole thing, I s’pose? So’s I can tick it off my ‘list’. But it’s an hour and a half I won’t be getting back. Can’t say I’d recommend this one…

PS – Some days later… Haven’t gone back to finish this turkey. Doubt I ever will.

Having just watched Warfare, I wanted to watch some more (reasonably) contemporary stuff on similar lines. I wound up choosing Zero Dark Thirty, primarily for the Operation Neptune Spear part. Hence also my choice of banner image above.

Other demographics might choose other images to illustrate the film. For example, British Vogue magazine prefers the above. This is Jessica Chastain, as ‘Maya’, a fictional composite character, based in part on Alfreda Frances Bikowsky.

Bikowsky also figures large in the much better Looming Tower miniseries. Whilst working at Alec Station, for the CIA, she met the then head of said station, Michael Scheuer, and they eventually married.

Intriguingly, whilst it’s easy to find images of the married couple as dramatic characters, I couldn’t find any of them as a real life couple.

Zero Dark Thirty distorts history massively, and – in the way in which the Maya character is used – does so in a manner calculated to make those who froth at the mouth at the term ‘woke’ drool rabidly.

Both Zero Dark Thirty and The Looming Tower do real history a great disservice – as so many countless films do – by having overly good looking folk glamourise the tawdry doings of much frumpier more ordinary looking folk.

This creates a confusion, especially when films make claims – as Zero Dark Thirty does – to be based on real events. Ok, yes, it is based on real events. But it puts a very particular gloss on them. And many watching will very probably assume this is just how things really happened, when it isn’t.

Bikowsky, as she was then, wasn’t a lone ‘empowered female’ crusader, responsible for finding and killing Bin Laden. Not only was she not involved in much of the events as depicted here, but also many hold that she and Scheuer are culpable for 9/11 because they withheld vital intel from the FBI. This is a theme The Looming Tower addresses.

Presenting the manhunt for Osama Bin Laden as the work of one determined woman, in the face and teeth of many bumbling men, is pure fantasy.

For me, the best part of the film, by far, is the final Canaries segment, in which Navy SEAL Team Six (to use just one of this units many names!) attack the compound and kill Bin Laden. It’s very well done, and really rather horrible.

Speaking of horrible. This movie starts with quite a lot of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ – or in plain English torture – being used on hapless ‘terror suspects’, at ‘dark sites’. Both the real US administration, and the makers of this film, have been widely criticised for suggesting such methods yield useful intel.

All in all, a rather muddled movie, that condenses and distorts an awful lot of history, and then presents it in a rather oddly skewed way. Certainly not brilliant. But still worth seeing.

Whoa, Nelly!

Just watched this… and, well… it was pretty hardcore.

The beginning of the film was outright weird. I thought something had gone wrong…

The scenario that is the the beating, pumping bloody heart of the movie starts with a military ‘home invasion’. The way this is handled – in the movie, that is – highlights an ugly truth of war: ordinary civilian life is the first casualty.

The Navy Seal squad, in Ramadi, Iraq, settle into their OP (observation point) positions. Elliot, the chief sniper – also a Corpsman, or medic – doing most of the ‘scoping’, very literally.

After a long slow build-up, with ‘military age males’ assembling nearby, the ominous ‘Allahu Akbar’ starts to be chanted over a PA; civilians clear the area, and you know the action is about to begin.

A grenade is lobbed through the sniper’s viewing hole, and several of the men incur what appear to be relatively minor injuries. A ‘casevac’ – casualty evacuation – is called in.

But as the team attempt to get Elliot to the Bradley (armoured car), an IED explodes, killing one (or both?) of the Iraqi soldiers attached to the group (for communicating with locals), and seriously wounding two of the Americans.

The handling of this scene is very powerful. And very affecting. Lots of war films have started using silence, followed by ‘ringing in the ears’, and tinny sound, after explosions. But here it’s done particularly effectively.

At first you assume Elliot must be dead. His legs are shredded so badly that… well, watch and find out. Also injured – very similarly; ie legs shredded – is Sam, the group’s LPO, or ‘lead petty officer’ (played by Joseph Quinn, who we’d previously seen, in a very different role, in Dickensian!).

Both of these men – like the whole team – are based on real life soldiers. And the film as a whole is based on those soldiers recollections of events. With one of them – Mendoza (the radio guy, played in the film by the improbably named D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai) – co-directing the film.

There’s a lot to be processed. From the harshness of the combat, to the interesting depiction of US Navy SEAL (and general contemporary American) military gear and procedure.

It’s a movie with quite a narrow focus. Literally depicting, other than the intro, a near ‘real time’ slice of life/death. And the focus is resolutely on the US troops.

So on the one hand this is a strikingly contemporary and somewhat unusual depiction of modern warfare. The building tension – from humdrum ennui to confused creeping fear – leading up to the ‘action’, and the chaos, stress and horror of combat, are superbly conveyed.

But on another level, this is actually an ages old theme. And in American cinema its antecedents are the ‘Cowboys & Injuns’ movies. The SEAL unit are the beleaguered defenders of the circle of wagons/fort (or in this case, Iraqi home); their attackers are the ‘Injuns’; and the Bradleys (and other support) are the cavalry.

A very powerful film. Which I think I’ll watch again.

PS

A fascinating and I think brilliant aspect of the film is the soundtrack. The film starts in silence (even the MGM lion’s roar is silent!), segueing into the music video of Call On Me, still in silence.

Then the music kicks in, and we see the SEAL team enjoying a moment of hyper-macho bonding, to the steamy video and pumping feel-good music.

But, after that, as GQ writer Killian Faith-Kelly succinctly puts it, ‘a notable absence of score … allows the audience to arrive at their emotional experience of the film without any musical instruction.’

Compare that to the unbearable and relentless sonic assault (I found it a form of torture!) of the Dunkirk soundtrack.

The latter was, in my opinion, grotesquely heavy-handed. And egregiously manipulative. The sound design of Warfare, by comparison, is an object lesson in stripped down excellence.

Oh, and talking of stripped down… I liked the little touch of unabashed realism whereby we get a glimpse of Sam’s genitals, as they treat his appalling wounds. Actually a prosthetic. But a nice touch, nonetheless.

And staying, briefly, with cock ‘n’ balls… sportsmen have their ‘boxes’. Surely by now soldiers, with their helmets and body armour, ought to also have thigh/crotch armour?

WWII naval cat and mouse, set in the Caribbean, between Robert Mitchum’s US Navy Destroyer Escort and Kurt Jurgens’ U-Boat.

The small scale – just two antagonists – is quite good, as it means the limits of pre-CGI film making don’t spoil things (cf w 1956s Battle of The River Plate). Indeed, part of this movies’ charm is how much procedural business features. Lovers of military/naval history ought to enjoy this. I know I did.

They sketch in a bit of the two commanders’ pasts: Mitchum was a civvy Freighter man, and Jurgens a WWI U-boat man. Curt is jaded, and Mitchum was widowed by a U-boat. 

For a war movie it’s quite feel-good and upbeat. It’s certainly a fun watch. The procedural aspects lend hints of realism. But there’s a line of ‘noble warriors’ sentiment running through the movie, that – whilst making for great entertainment – feels less realistic. 

The use of models vs real boats, something that, prior to CGI, could be an Achilles heel – both in terms of authenticity and looking credible (suspension of disbelief, etc.) – is handled very well. Only at the film’s denouement does the use of models become very obvious. And even then it’s well enough done to charm rather than irritate. 

Indeed, the ending is an altogether fittingly exciting and well rendered climax to a very satisfying bit of WWII naval entertainment. Not a classic, perhaps. But worth watching. 

*The book is actually the story of a British naval encounter with a U-boat.

Teresa and I recently holidayed briefly in St Leonards. Whilst there we visited The Shipwreck Museum, in Hastings.

A film was showing, which, it turned out, featured parts (maybe the whole?) of an episode from a BBC TV series called Chronicle, pertaining to the discovery and exploration of the wreck of The Amsterdam, nearby.

Wrecks weren’t as well protected legally then as they are now. Which was an issue the archaeologist on Chronicle talked about.

This is an interesting article on a full-sized replica of The Amsterdam, which resides at a mooring alongside the Dutch National Maritime Museum.

Chronicle sounds terrific. Here’s a link to a BBC page about it.

Last night I finished reading James Holland’s superb Sicily, ‘43. Later today I’ll start volume three – The Price of Victory – of Rodger’s British Naval History trilogy.

But in addition to books I brought with me, I acquired some new tomes, from the superb Black Gull Books. Yesterday I bought a French language work on Picasso. And today, having intended to buy more Picasso, I instead bought the Taschen Funk & Soul album covers book.

Re the latter, given how groovy some of these are, the choice for the front cover is – to my mind/eyes – bizarrely rubbish!

This year is the first time either of our Wisterias have come into full bloom. The one out front is struggling a bit. Needs fresh soil/compost/nutrients, I guess?

The one out back – actually two plants – has really come on this year.

And some other bits of beauty in the garden…