Here’s a question, Gentle Readers. You know how Help!<\/I> and A Hard Day’s Night<\/I> are both brilliant movies? I mean, even if you don’t particularly like The Beatles, these are funny, funny movies. I suspect you could forward through most of the songs and still enjoy the movies enormously. They aren’t just good because of the Beatles, or because the Beatles are good actors (although Ringo is a very funny man, John is wicked, and George is, well, George). So, has there been any band since that time for whom making a movie was a good idea?\n
I mean a movie like Help!<\/i>; not a documentary or a concert movie, but a movie where the main characters are band members playing fictional versions of themselves, and that has a plot of some kind. The closest I can think of is Tommy<\/I>, which is sui generis<\/I>, and although the band appears, they aren’t playing the band. And, honestly, I’m not altogether sure that the movie of Tommy<\/I> was a good idea after all, but I don’t think there was a better way to get the soundtrack made. The Spice Girls made Spiceworld<\/I>, which I haven’t seen but have heard was actually nearly watchable, but was generally agreed to be a bad idea. The Pogues movie was clearly a bad, bad, bad idea, and if any Gentle Reader has the soundtrack on CD I will give them an absurd amount of money for it right now<\/I> (For that matter, do any of you have in digitizable format the Pogues cover of “Wild Rover” that appeared on the B-side of “Sally MacLennane”? That must be mine, and soon).\n
The various members of the boy bands have been in various movies, but that’s not the same thing. Nor is it the same thing when the band exists for the purposes of the movie, such as the Monkees (OK, it was for the TV show, but still) or Josie and the Pussycats or The Commitments. I mean, why isn’t there an REM movie, or a Pretenders movie? I can’t believe that the guys in, oh, Queen never said “Hey, let’s make a movie like Help!<\/I>” I know<\/I> Sting wanted to be in the movies, why not a Police movie? Could the Dixie Chicks not have hired any (lefty) writer and director they wanted?\n
My Best Reader suggests that video killed the movie star, at least for that sort of thing. Every band needs to make movies, three-minute movies, but movies, and any successful band makes dozens of them. Maybe that gets it all out of their systems. Or maybe they all discover that actual movie-making is tedious and unrewarding, except the ones that decide they want to be Actors! and make actual movies where they play thinly disguised versions of their stage personas but without the band. I don’t know. Maybe it’s just that movies really are crap these days, and with the music business what it is, and the movie business what it<\/I> is, and Richard Lester dead and all, it really is a bad idea. But you’d think ...\n
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Here\u2019s a question, Gentle Readers. You know how Help! and A Hard Day\u2019s Night are both brilliant movies? I mean, even if you don\u2019t particularly like The Beatles, these are funny, funny movies. I suspect you could forward through most…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[195],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-flim"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3137"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3137\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17526,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3137\/revisions\/17526"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}