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Smoking Guns

Post author By
Post date February 28, 2003

If you’re struck with a case of Déjá vu while watching the formulaic corrupt-cop movie Dark Blue, there’s good reason. The film is based on a story by ace crime-fiction writer James Ellroy, the scribe behind L.A. Confidential, and the screenplay was written by David Ayer, who penned Training Day. Those are both better films than Dark Blue, and their echoes reverberate throughout this disappointing exposé on police corruption in the Rodney King-era LAPD.

Like Training Day, Dark Blue is part buddy movie, pairing a morally shady veteran cop, Sgt. Eldon Perry (Kurt Russell), with a handsome, good-hearted but corruptible young partner, Bobby Keough (Scott Speedman). Perry and Keough work under a sinister higher-up named Jack Van Meter (Brendan Gleeson, basically playing James Cromwell’s Dudley Smith role from L.A. Confidential), who is engaged in an internal war with ambitious Deputy Chief Arthur Holland (Ving Rhames) for the soul of the LAPD. Perry is a key foot soldier in this conflict, part henchman, part vigilante with a badge, his combination of ambition, muscle, knowingness, and internal conflict making him something of a composite of Ellroy’s three cops in L.A. Confidential.

Dark Blue‘s plot ostensibly centers on a robbery/homicide investigation at a Korean grocery store, a seemingly simple crime that ends up having much broader implications, a plot element similar to the role of the “Nite Owl” massacre from L.A. Confidential.

The film opens with Russell’s Perry in a motel room, unshaven, bloodshot, firearms and open alcohol containers littering the room. It’s March 3, 1991, in the moments just before the verdict is announced in the trial of the LAPD officers who beat Rodney King. Then the film flashes back five days to show us how Perry got this way.

The King trial marks time in the background of the film, in much the same way that the World Series was used as a background structural device in Abel Ferrara’s corrupt-cop flick Bad Lieutenant. Perry sees the trial as a no-win situation, telling his young protÇgÇ that their “brothers” don’t deserve to take a fall for merely doing their job but that “this city will burn” if they’re acquitted.

Dark Blue is directed by Ron Shelton in his first trip outside a sports milieu since his second film, 1989’s disappointing Blaze. Shelton at his best (see Bull Durham) is one of the few contemporary American directors capable of making mainstream comedies with the style, verbal wit, and feel for incident of masters like Howard Hawks and Preston Sturges. Shelton has a subject too — no, not sports per se but masculinity: specifically, male stubbornness and macho camaraderie, which he consistently portrays with knowing affection yet also critiques from within (most prominently in Tin Cup). Dark Blue fits this subject, but anything Shelton might have to say about the dying breed Russell’s macho cop represents gets drowned in noise and clumsily delivered genre formula.

The material here seems too weighty for Shelton’s easygoing style, and the feel for conversation that marks his best films is absent since he isn’t working from his own script. I haven’t read the particular Ellroy story the film is based on, so I’m not sure if “I was raised up to be a gunfighter by a family of gunfighters” or “This city is here because my grandfather and father helped build it, with bullets” comes from Ellroy’s pen or Ayer’s. But the blustery, Ellroy-esque language that’s such a gas on the page and that worked so well in jive form in a period film like L.A. Confidential doesn’t hold up here. And the film’s climax is a lazily assembled grandstanding speech that is basically a rewrite of a scene Shelton wrote for the William Friedkin-directed basketball dud Blue Chips, a silly theatrical spectacle that comes across as false in a film so intent on creating a gritty, realistic feel.

About the only thing Shelton really has going for him here is Russell, a classic Shelton lead with his rough good looks and regular-guy demeanor. The vastly underappreciated Russell is in fine form here, but he doesn’t get much help. Gleeson and Rhames are restrained by underwritten roles, and Speedman is a bland cipher.

The high points of the film, outside Russell’s performance, are the riots themselves, depicted in a hazy, disorienting way that burns with a life that (literally) explodes the formulaic machinations that come before. The tension of this impending unrest creeps along underneath the film’s personalized main story until erupting in the end. DÇjÖ vu all over again. This is the exact same strategy that was recently deployed in Gangs of New York and with a similarly mixed-results payoff. The riots are the most compelling thing in the movie, but the surface story isn’t tied to this tension as well as one would hope, leading one to wish that the film had been more directly about the riots and what led up to them (a subject that I don’t think has been dealt with in a feature film before).

To its credit, Dark Blue ties a racist police system to the 1991 riots, directly so in its vision of Russell’s wayward gunslinger trying to navigate the smoky, chaotic post-verdict streets of South-Central L.A. In these scenes lie the elements of a fine film waiting to be born, but Shelton and company never realize this promise.

— Chris Herrington

There is a zesty little Web site out there called RottenTomatoes.com, a compendium of movie reviews from the heights of Roger Ebert to the most inarticulate nerds with their own small, movie-skewering sites. I’m a lurker there, making frequent visits to see what’s hot and what’s not. The Life of David Gale, it would seem, is not. With a 17 percent approval rating, Gale summons online respect in amounts just below other contemporary critical targets Just Married and The Hot Chick. Ouch! What a shame, since it boasts three of modern moviedom’s best and brightest: Kevin Spacey, Kate Winslet, and Laura Linney.

David Gale, played deftly by Spacey, is a fallen man. Once a respected philosophy professor and leading anti-death-penalty activist, he now sits on Texas’ death row for the rape and murder of colleague Constance Harraway (Linney). The odds are against him: He was previously accused of sexually assaulting a student, and his idiot lawyer has virtually ignored potential evidence and several opportunities to have Gale’s sentence reduced. Now, four days before his execution, he has summoned ace magazine reporter Bitsey Bloom (Winslet) to chronicle his life story and his last, philosophical thoughts as he approaches his end. Bloom gradually comes to believe that Gale is innocent, and when a missing videotape of Harraway’s death appears in her hotel room, she is galvanized to sort through the mire of injustice, red tape, and local rubes to discover the truth before it is too late.

I enjoy a good, preachy, political melodrama a great deal. Boasting a thick skull, I enjoy a good whack over the head from time to time by extremist, liberal-minded cinematic politicos with fierce, fight-the-man propaganda films. The recent Bowling for Columbine springs to mind as such a film, as does JFK, The China Syndrome, Philadelphia — all as subtle as sledgehammers in getting their points across: gun control and the validation of Kennedy conspiracy theorists, etc. These are movies that not only make you think but tell you what to think. And you love or hate the film based on your ability to empathize with its characters and agree on its social points. These are artful films, powerfully written and superbly acted and directed. Their messages are carefully and successfully delivered amid superlative production values. Not so here.

The Life of David Gale is obviously against the death penalty. We know this because everyone in the film makes powerful statements against it except the inarticulate, Bible-wielding, redneck, former frat-boy Texas governor. There’s also Bitsey’s 11th-hour symbolic jaunt through a cemetery on her way to deliver crucial evidence to the police — before it’s too late. There’s more symbolism to be found — Hallmark card-quality heavens, Gale posed crucifixion-style as he lies pensively in the grass looking skyward. There is no subtlety here. The Life of David Gale mistakenly unfolds as a melodrama instead of a political potboiler or conventional thriller. Consequently, any potentially interesting or provocative points are wasted on preachy diatribes or emotional histrionics — not good, old-fashioned grandstanding. Winslet, usually quite good, is wasted on a part that should have gone to an older actress — a Cate Blanchett or a Jodie Foster. It is not easy to buy her as a formidable journalist. And what kind of name is Bitsey Bloom, anyway? Fortunately, Spacey anchors the film with gravity and down-sized pathos, though he has the unenviable task of making believable a minutes-long drunken rant about Socrates. Regardless, the movie’s best scenes are between him and Linney, who has a secret of her own that eventually serves as the moral compass by which the film’s consequences are articulated.

Despite good acting and handsome cinematography, the obvious and hammy Life of David Gale misses narrowly what Gale himself so desperately seeks from Bitsey and from us: redemption.

— Bo List

Produced by Ivan Reitman, who helped create godfathers of the form like Stripes and Animal House, and directed by Todd Phillips, who tried to join the pantheon with the horny gross-out flick Road Trip, Old School is a promising attempt at one of those reckless, socially irredeemable, “National Lampoon” comedies.

It’s promising because it has a surefire premise (a group of thirtysomething friends reject their respectable adult lives and start a fraternity) and a great cast (Luke Wilson as straight man, Will Ferrell as wild man, and Vince Vaughn as middleman are perfect for their roles). As a film fan who generally prefers a good dumb comedy (most recently, Super Troopers or, my personal classic of the form, Office Space) to middlebrow Oscar bait, I had high hopes. But Old School isn’t quite lunatic or anarchic enough for its own good. The film is very conscious of the castration anxiety and ex-frat-boy nostalgia of its domesticated, regular-guy audience, so it takes care to balance its glimpse of the wild side with a restoration of domesticated adulthood, teaching its audience that you can find fulfillment in the nuclear family by courting the good girl you had a crush on in high school and by making those weekend trips to Home Depot and Bed, Bath, & Beyond with wifey. It tells the audience that it’s okay to trade in beer bongs and hot rods for Dockers and minivans.

Is this all true? Of course it is. But we don’t come to a movie like Old School to reaffirm our conventional life choices. (At least I don’t.) We come to a movie like Old School to see a butt-naked Ferrell interrupt a Snoop Dogg performance at an off-campus house party with a plea to go “streaking across the quad.” We come to a movie like Old School to see an 89-year-old pledge named “Blue” engage in intergenerational KY Jelly wrestling with a couple of co-eds and to hear Vaughn give a rousing speech to the trio’s motley group of fraternity pledges: “We will give nothing back to the academic community and do nothing for community service, that I can assure you.” In other words, we come for the glimpses of anarchy, not the reassurances of normalcy.

But at least we’ve got that cast to get us through the rough patches. Wilson, who’s had difficulty getting screen time in interesting movies outside those done by his brother Owen and Wes Anderson (particularly, Bottle Rocket and The Royal Tenenbaums), plays a real-estate lawyer who comes home early from a convention only to find his live-in girlfriend (Juliette Lewis in a very small role — guess Scientology hasn’t done the trick for her career) engaged in some serious hanky-panky with several creepy “Internet friends.” Disillusioned and shell-shocked, he moves out, renting a house adjacent to the campus of the unnamed university where presumably he and his buddies matriculated. The house rekindles a bit of nostalgia in Vaughn’s Speaker City millionaire, a wife-and-two-kids soccer dad who sees the house as an avenue to “getting a lot of ass — I mean boy-band ass,” though he may just see it as an opportunity to sell high-end stereo equipment to the college kids. Along for the ride is Ferrell, a just-married regular Joe whose newlywed wife cautions him not to let old alter-ego “Frank the Tank” back out again.

These guys keep the film going. Ferrell looks the role of good suburban husband, which only makes his over-the-top commitment to the bacchanal life of “Frank the Tank” all the funnier. Vaughn, who seems more at home here than in anything since Swingers, is all paradox, playing the role with what amounts to deadpan intensity and achingly sincere insincerity. He gets great mileage out of having a kid (and having the kid cover his ears — “Earmuffs!” — on those frequent occasions when he’s about to say something hopelessly crude), and to see him aping Britney Spears choreography during a fraternity-testing show of “school spirit” or flashing an appreciative glance at Ferrell’s interpretative gymnastics routine are moments of dumb-comedy glory. And Wilson, relegated to the straight-man role, is a regular guy even not-so-regular guys wouldn’t mind hanging out with, which is about what you could say for the movie itself. — CH

Music Record Reviews

Short Cuts

Post author By
Post date February 28, 2003

Audioslave

Audioslave

(Epic/Interscope)

What happens when Rage Against The Machine turntable guitarist Tom Morello and his fellow lumbering, shrieking instrumentalists collide with the full-throated wail of Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell, the Samson of Seattle’s ancient grunge mythology? Well, there’s plenty of noise and plenty of old-fashioned soft-loud dynamics and a few genuine houserockers until the show eventually wears itself out.

But I can’t really say I was surprised by the fact that Audioslave’s new album starts as strongly as any recent hard-rock record before it meanders into the last remaining light. It seems as though overgenerosity is as much a part of this kinda-supergroup as it was when its members toiled for different bosses. Think about it. As great as they were, both Soundgarden and Rage Against The Machine overstayed their pop moments by one album each. Rage’s cover album Renegades was a bum nostalgia trip coming on the heels of their finest album, and I’m pretty sure nobody has ever heard the Soundgarden swan song Down On the Upside. But careers are hard to end. Just ask Michael Jordan. They are also hard to resuscitate. Just ask Michael Jordan again.

Still, it’s comforting to hear the Rage boys’ racket again, especially Morello’s as he coaxes the usual bleeps and squeals from his guitar but shows some astral tenderness on “Like a Stone” and “Shadow of the Sun.” The one-two-three punch that opens the album is sure to make you wish you had long hair to swing around. And nobody needs to worry about politics when Cornell is writing lyrics about his pained soul and psycho girlfriends and screaming the hell out of them.

These tried-and-true pleasures are all good for casual listening. But when I tried and tried to get past all that sound and fury, I kept coming up with this distressing equation: Cornell – Morello = Coverdale – Page? —Addison Engelking

Grade: B+

Red = Luck

Patty Larkin

(Vanguard)

On this, her 10th album, singer-songwriter-guitarist Patty Larkin traverses the same familiar but very fertile ground. Red = Luck finds the artist in a partly Zen, partly feel-good mood.

Larkin compares each of her albums to an art opening, in the sense that she explores a different motif with each successive release. An Oriental theme prevails here, with songs about cranes, quotes from the Dalai Lama, and heavy color symbolism. Red = Luck is a sort of manifesto for Larkin, a redhead — a very grown-up statement of her feistiness, sexuality, and playfulness but also, ultimately, of her acceptance and gratefulness to take things as they are. Ruminations on lost love and lost opportunities find her merely reflective, not bitter at all. Recorded in the aftermath of 9/11, this release emphasizes, more than ever, the need to “be here now” instead of pining for some mythical good old days or fearing a postapocalyptic future. As always, Larkin moves lightly between the gossamer realms of rock, pop, funk, ethnic music, and folk. Achingly beautiful pop songs, exquisite little guitar meditations, and innovative instrumentals abound, all capped off by a bouzouki and mandolin romp with Middle Eastern and Celtic tinges, where East truly does meet West.

Each of Larkin’s releases finds her doing bolder and more upfront things with her guitarwork. (She plays a mean slide and ranges from elaborate, tiny finger patterns to a percussive slap.) Her smoky alto voice has never sounded better, and her wry sense of humor and cutting social commentary are still very much intact. I’d say in this sense, with her latest album, we’ve all lucked out. — Lisa Lumb

Grade: B+

Evil Heat

Primal Scream

(Epic )

What would it be like if Primal Scream made an album that had more than two or three memorable tracks on it? I was suckered into buying 2000’s XTRMNTR because the first three songs promised and delivered on Radiohead’s deferred dream of exciting, distorted cyborg rock-and-roll. Those first three songs — “Kill All Hippies” (sexy), “Accelerator” (distorted and desperate), and “Exterminator” (sexy again!) — still blow me away. The rest of XTRMNTR was a betrayal, full of mood and drone and synth-plunking and chill-out music.

Every year or two, I wonder if I’ve missed something when the band releases another collection of new music, but as Evil Heat shows, the band has apparently found a bait-and-switch pattern they love, and they plan on sticking to it. This year’s model is composed of more synth-plunking and the kind of loud, vaguely threatening music that Iggy Pop might put on when he wants to have sex. I know consistency, conshmistency. The market rules Primal Scream’s decisions, though, and times are tough. They may say they’re restless, but I say they’re either pandering or totally lost. For the curious, “City” and “Skull X” are in the style I prefer. — AE

Grade: C+

Music Music Features

Sound Advice

Post author By
Post date February 28, 2003

As frontman and primary songwriter for the onetime alt-country-identified Old 97’s, Rhett Miller emerged as about the most underrated songsmith of his era, a clean-cut collegiate version of Paul Westerberg. Miller’s subtly literate songs are as likely to be inspired by Raymond Carver as by Gram Parsons. (How many other pretty faces get a lyric like “There is a world inside the world that you see/I read it in Delillo like he’d written it for me” onto commercial radio?) But his songs are also so sweetly sexy and hook-filled that he never comes across as a smarty-pants.

Miller’s band bid adieu to the roots scene with 2001’s Satellite Rides, a blissed-out collection of raging guitar-pop anthems. Then Miller bid adieu to his band (hopefully only temporarily) with last year’s solo debut, The Instigator, a straight-up pop record that didn’t have nearly the punch of his best work with the Old 97’s but still displayed his whipsmart pop instincts and razor-sharp lyrical eye, perhaps most of all on the sardonic, straightforward “This Is What I Do”: Miller the lothario-next-door (or “serial lady killer,” as he described himself in the Old 97’s’ one-night-stand classic “Barrier Reef”) sings, “Jennifer once was a race-horse rider/Heidi was a house on fire/Bernadette kept her distance/We got tangled up in telephone wires/I’m gonna sing this song forever/About a girl that I once knew/And how she is always leaving/This is what I do.”

And that’s what he’ll do Thursday, February 27th, at an 8 p.m. show at the Capriccio Bar at The Peabody. The concert is sponsored by radio station 107.5 FM The Pig. The only way to get tickets is to register online at RadioPig.com, which you should do fast if you wanna be one of the few to hear Miller’s great songs about ex-girlfriends and post-college rootlessness in the flesh. My fave of the former? “Victoria,” which opens like this: “This is the story of Victoria Lee/She started off on Percodan and ended up with me/She lived in Berkeley ’til the earthquake shook her loose/She lives in Texas now where nothing ever moves.” —Chris Herrington

Flesh Vehicle, fronted by former Superdrag bass player Tom Pappas, can switch gears in an eye blink. One second they sound like Sebadoh at their fuzziest (sonically and mentally, if you know what I mean), next thing you know they are tearing it up like AC/DC on a cocaine binge. Then, as if from nowhere, they’ll deliver a pop confection that would make Cheap Trick’s Robin Zander sick with envy. Their subject matter runs from gap-toothed strippers with lots of money and a runny nose to a poor slob trying to make excuses for the inexplicable wounds he has developed. This is a group not to be missed, so catch them when they play the Hi-Tone Café on Friday, February 28th.

I’ve given former Blue Mountain ringleader Cary Hudson quite a bit of grief about his solo recording career, but you know what? His work with the aforementioned proto-Americana band could forgive a dozen yucky solo releases. He’s back at the Hi-Tone Café on Saturday, March 2nd. And while on the subject of Americana, the Athens roots-rock group Dodd Ferrelle & The Tinfoil Stars will be at Young Avenue Deli on Thursday, February 27th. From the sound of their most recent album, Always Almost There, Ferrelle and company seem to have an ’80s college-rock fixation. They aim for the Replacements, but land somewhere between the Bodeans and the Waterboys. It’s straight-ahead rock with a folkie flavor. It’s not my cup of bitter brew, but for those who like such hybrids, it’s certainly worth a listen.

Lastly, if you miss Memphis’ own Bloodthirsty Lovers, you are dumb. Yep, it’s that cut and dry. This collaboration between former Grifter Dave Shouse, former Satyr Jason Paxton, and former DDT member Paul Taylor has yielded angsty, atmospheric, keyboard-laden pop with a punk heart and an electronic brain. It’s music you can take a bath in. They are at Young Avenue Deli Friday, February 28th, with Mouse Rocket. —Chris Davis

Sports Sports Feature

City Sports

Post author By
Post date February 28, 2003

Catfight

It was no holds barred in last Saturday’s best boxing match.

By Bruce VanWyngarden

Man, you missed a good fight. At least you did if you weren’t in The Pyramid Saturday night.

No, I’m not talking about Tyson vs. Etienne. That was a pathetic excuse for a boxing match, over before it got a chance to be remotely interesting. The only compelling thing about that mugging was how the vanquished “Black Rhino” carefully removed his mouthpiece with his glove before settling his head to the mat and waiting out the 10-count. It was one of those things that make you go hmmm, as they say. In fact, Etienne fought harder trying to get to the fans who were heckling him as he left the arena than he did against Tyson.

On the other hand, there was no doubt that the battle between Tonya Harding and Samantha Browning was the genuine article. Oh sure, it was a Jerry Springer-esque setup — disgraced, nekkid-posin’ ice skater takes on a beer-joint brawler from Mississippi — meant only to be comic relief before the big boys went at it. But that was its charm. You had the hope that maybe they’d confess to lovin’ the same man or something, then really go at it. Reality television at its best. All I can say is you shoulda been there. It beat the hell out of “Get Me Out of Here. I’m a Celebrity.”

Browning entered the ring first, surrounded by a motley crew of goobers in bad haircuts who looked like they just got off work. And maybe they did, come to think of it. They all wore white T-shirts with “Advanced Fire & Water Restoration, Tupelo, MS” on the back. Talk about your big-time sponsors.

As she shed her robe and began bouncing around the ring, Browning looked confident, ready to kick some skater butt. A rangy, statuesque woman, she raised her arms over her head, clearly enjoying the cheers. If her white sports bra had had a pocket, the crowd would have been in it.

Tonya’s entourage came to center stage wearing black jackets emblazoned with “Team Tonya.” They looked cool, confident, like real boxer-handler guys. Their fighter, however, looked scared spitless. As the crowd loudly booed her entrance, Tonya screwed her face into a cartoonish scowl and stared at Browning’s ring antics, awaiting instructions from the referee, clearly overwhelmed by the spectacle. But hey, that’s life. One decade you’re trying to nail a Hamill Camel and outskate some Boston blueblood, the next you’re trying to avoid getting nailed to the canvas by a big ol’ redneck girl.

At least in boxing you don’t have to worry about those pesky Russian judges.

Not long after the opening bell, it was obvious Harding should have given ice-dancing pairs a try. Her strategy — perhaps “strategery” is the better word — was to extend her left arm and run at Browning, rubbing her glove in her opponent’s face and clutching with her other arm.

But Browning quickly proved she knew how to, uh, take a push. She pounded Tonya upside the head, shoved her away, then pounded her upside the head again. It looked like a classic bar brawl. You half-expected someone to douse them with a pitcher of Bud Lite and yell, “Yeeeeeehaw! Cat fight!”

Or throw a hubcap in the ring.

After repeated shots from Browning’s automatic right, Harding’s pug nose was lit up like a baboon’s ass. But she was a gamer, coming back for more time and again. What the woman lacked in finesse, she made up for with moxie and a lack of talent. Browning had the edge in reach and punching power, however, and it was too much for Tonya to overcome.

It was the only fight of the evening to go the distance, in this case, four rounds. But by the end, the only question was whether the judges would have the nerve to take the fight from Browning and award it to Harding. One did, scoring it 39-37, Harding. (He must have been from L.A., where celebrities get extra credit.) Boos cascaded down like a three-year mullet before order was restored and Browning was awarded a split decision.

Afterward, Browning danced around the ring some more, milking the crowd, then headed for the exit — and probable instant obscurity. As she and her entourage walked through the nearly empty media room, they high-fived each other and giggled. One of them said, “You don’t [bleep] with a Mississippi woman. I know, I’m married to one.” And Browning repeated her best line of the night, which was that she felt good but not good enough to “go barrin'” — not that night anyway.

Which is too bad. I’d love to have bought her a beer.

Miller Time

What can Grizzlies fans expect from new acquisition Mike Miller?

By Chris Herrington

Monday night at The Pyramid, the under-manned Memphis Grizzlies beat a Utah Jazz team that had demolished them in three previous games this season. How is it possible that such an unlikely victory carried a tinge of disappointment? Because most of the crowd showed up anticipating their first live look at the team’s newest player, recent trade acquisition Mike Miller, who made his Grizzlies debut on last week’s two-game road trip against New Orleans and Houston but missed his first game in Memphis after a freak turf-toe-like injury in shootarounds prompted back spasms.

Miller, who has no history of back problems, is expected back in the lineup in about a week and will probably take a couple of weeks to get comfortable in the system. What can fans expect from the newest Grizzly?

Before we discuss what Miller is, let’s establish what he isn’t. Mike Miller is not an “emerging superstar,” as one over-excited local radio personality enthused the day after the trade. Nor is he likely to become the team’s “go-to guy,” as many sources have intimated. It’s also unlikely that he’ll dramatically improve on the 16.5 points per game scoring average he brings over from the Magic. In Orlando, Miller was a distant second option to league-leading scorer Tracy McGrady on a team without a decent third option. For Memphis, he will likely be a close second option to Pau Gasol on a team with plenty of viable third options. Call it a wash.

But Miller also isn’t just a spot-up shooter, as some sports-radio callers and message-board posters have claimed. In fact, though Miller can certainly stretch defenses with his shooting range, he’s not really a Wesley Person-caliber marksman, at least not yet. Miller’s three-point shooting percentages have actually gone down in each of his three NBA seasons, from 41 percent as a rookie to 38 percent last season to 34 percent so far this season. Prior to the trade, Miller was mired in a horrible shooting slump from beyond the arc, making only 14 of 65 three-pointers (22 percent) over his previous dozen games.

But if Miller isn’t yet a sure thing from downtown, that’s okay, because what he is is more impressive than what he isn’t: He’s a kind of player this franchise has never had — a rangy, talented athlete on the wing who can get you 20 on a regular basis. While Miller isn’t superstar material, he is a great complementary scorer with superb all-around offensive skills, and he’s young enough (he turned 23 the day the trade went through) and talented enough to develop into a borderline All-star.

At 6’8″ and 220 pounds with speed, agility, and surprising explosiveness, Miller is a quantum leap athletically over the team’s other options on the wing. Person may be a better shooter and Shane Battier certainly a more hard-nosed defender, but neither can match the variety of skills that Miller brings to the floor.

And though Miller’s local debut was spoiled Monday night, he gave what amounted to a seminar on his game in his first Grizzlies appearance Friday at New Orleans. Miller entered the game at the 5:09 mark in the first quarter, the team down 14-22. When he left at the 6:15 mark in the second quarter, the Grizzlies led 44-39. Over that stretch, Miller showed us just about everything: his raw speed and ability to finish on the break with his first basket, blowing past Hornets point guard Robert Pack after a steal; his ability to make the pass in half-court sets, coming off a curl and finding Mike Batiste for an open look; his playmaking, by leading the break and setting Stromile Swift up for a lay-up with a left-handed scoop pass into the lane; his ability to create off the dribble, by driving past Kirk Haston and finishing with a dunk; his mid-range game, by jab-stepping Stacey Augmon and rising up to sink a 17-foot jumper. And he showed his range by knocking down a deep three. Monday night, after the Utah game, Hubie Brown looked back at that stretch in New Orleans and called it “a glimpse of what we can be.”

But what’s perhaps most exciting about the addition of Miller is how his skills seem to mesh with those of Gasol and Jason Williams. On November 13th, Brown’s first day as coach, he talked about the need to establish a style of play, an identity, and this trade, perhaps more than anything else, is a step toward accomplishing that.

In Miller, the Grizzlies have added an athletic finisher on the break to fill the other lane opposite Gasol — someone who can beat defenses down the floor, catch Williams’ passes (not always a sure thing with other Grizzlies, as Monday’s game attested), and finish plays. Miller is also, like Gasol, the rare forward capable of getting a defensive rebound, handling the ball in the open court on the break, and making the correct pass. With Person as the perfect trailer, spotting up for open three-point shots, the Grizzlies now have the makings of one of the best fast-break offenses in the league. The only component that’s missing is a defensive-oriented true center to get things started. And the addition of Miller also gives the Grizzlies three playmakers in the half court as well. Miller, Williams, and Gasol can all pass, shoot, and handle the ball, and all are unselfish players.

That sure wasn’t a style of play developing with Drew Gooden, the player the Grizzlies gave up to get Miller (with Gordan Giricek heading to Orlando and Ryan Humphrey and two marginal but not meaningless draft picks coming to Memphis). The hunch here is that Gooden will put up numbers for Orlando that will lead a lot of fans to question the trade. The Grizzlies’ attempt to develop Gooden into a small forward was an utter failure and he will get to play his “natural” position in Orlando. I put that in quotes because Gooden is really a tweener, too slow to guard the three and too small to ever be an All-star-caliber four, at least in a Western Conference with the likes of Tim Duncan, Chris Webber, Dirk Nowitzki, and Rasheed Wallace. In the East, the only comparable talent at the position is Indiana’s Jermaine O’Neal, so Gooden should be able to get away with being undersized. He’s also going to a team that previously boasted perhaps the worst interior talent in the league, so he’ll have all the minutes and shots he wants.

But Gooden was never going to work out here. Some have said that trading the player he earlier claimed would be the Rookie of the Year is an admission of failure on Jerry West’s part. Others have defended the move as in keeping with West’s stated strategy of stockpiling talent and making moves from a position of strength. Both are valid arguments. Mike Miller may be but a piece to a puzzle at least a couple of years away from completion, but he makes the team better, now and in the future.

Music Record Reviews

Short Cuts

Post author By
Post date February 20, 2003

Soft Rock

Lifter Puller

(The Self-Starter Foundation)

Soft Rock is a posthumous collection of early music by a short-lived band that you’ve probably never heard of. Why care? Because at their very best, which is captured on the first six tracks of this two-disc compilation and occasionally throughout the rest of the 40 songs collected here, Lifter Puller approached greatness.

This Minneapolis band broke up shortly after the release of their apotheosis, 2000’s brilliant concept album Fiestas & Fiascos. Three years later their cult seems to have actually grown, thus Soft Rock, which compiles almost everything the band recorded prior to Fiestas & Fiascos — their eponymous 1996 debut, 1997’s Half Dead and Dynamite, and 1998’s The Entertainment and Arts EP, plus a handful of singles, demos, and stray tracks. On it you can hear the band evolve from a fine if borderline conventional indie-rock band into the outfit that can be heard on Fiestas & Fiascos, a band that was basically a genre unto itself.

In the band’s final form, lead singer Craig Finn looked like late-’70s Elvis Costello, sounded like croaking Archers of Loaf frontman Eric Bachman, and spewed narratives with the verbosity of early Springsteen (a direct influence paid homage to with song titles “11th Avenue Freezeout” and “Candy’s Room”). The band mostly eschewed verse-chorus-verse in favor of straight-line stream-of-consciousness, Finn giving the impression of making each song up as he goes along, like a stand-up comic enraptured in a rant a few steps beyond merely funny. And the band sounds like they’re just following his cues, their stuttering stop-start dynamics, angular post-punk guitar riffs, and funky-drummer beats simultaneously propelling Finn’s monologues and playing off them. The effect sounds more spontaneous than perhaps any guitar-bass-drums song-music I’ve ever heard, even if it’s all no doubt worked out in great detail.

And the band’s unique form served equally idiosyncratic content, their great subject summed up by a song title from Fiestas & Fiascos: “Lifter Puller Vs. The End of the Evening.” The band’s entire career seemed to follow one long nightlife adventure with recurring places and characters (a bar called the Nice Nice, drug dealer Nightclub Dwight, paramours Juanita, Jenny, and Katrina). It’s a chronicle of drugs, alcohol, anonymous sex, and long nights hopping from bar to bar, club to club, concert to concert. One of my favorite moments is when they hang out in front of a club in the early-morning hours and pour their drinks into the street in memory of dead-tired homies who didn’t make it to the end of the party.

“Secret Santa Cruz” is quintessential Lifter Puller, a breathless description of nightlife transgressions where Finn takes the voice of Jenny, at this point a co-ed back on campus recounting her wild summer to sorority sisters, the motormouth rush of images giving an indication of what pretty much all of the band’s songs are like: “Twenty-seven lovers in the back half of the summer/I know you think it’s way too many/But the X makes me feel sexy and the sex makes me feel empty/The alcohol destroys me/And I did it in a disco with some guy from San Francisco who looked a lot like Roger Daltry/And the night of all that bloodshed I was kissin’ on some crackhead who said he knew about a party/He keeps it in his mouth in those crazy chipmunk cheeks/I gave him $50 and he kissed me, spit a little treat between my teeth/I think we’re starting to peak/Woke up at some hedonistic rodeo with cowboys kissing cowboys, trading magazines for videos/Yeah, God bless the radio, all that fine fine music without all the messed up musicians/And Dwight’s a magician/He gets sensible people makin’ terrible decisions.”

If there’s anything the band cares more about than drugs and late-night escapades, it’s rock-and-roll. If you caught the Velvet Underground reference in the previous lyric (“all that fine fine music”), that’s standard operating procedure, a wide-ranging obsession manifest in everything, from references to Archie Bell and the Drells (from “The Pirate and the Penpal”: “Told her about the tighten up/The way they used to dance down in Houston, Texas”) to Pink Floyd. Finn rouses one drifting lust object with the sardonic “Wake up, little floozie” and on “Roaming the Foam” leaps from Guns N’ Roses to Salt-N-Pepa, taunting his assembled subjects with “Do you know where you are?/You’re in the jungle, baby/You’re gonna die!” while the band segues into the keyboard riff from “Push It.”

This music might be the soundtrack to your life. It’s sure not the soundtrack to mine. But I find it endlessly fascinating as pop-music anthropology: the soundtrack to someone else’s life.

— Chris Herrington

Grade: A-

Backwards

The Post

(SA Records)

Tribal beats and tape loops are the last sounds you’d expect to hear from a trio of Indianians, but, as the murky cover art suggests, the Post are full of surprises. Backwards, their debut, comes across like a post-apocalyptic merging of organic and artificial musics from both man and machine. While it’s obvious that these kids grew up listening to such experimental grandparents as Sonic Youth and This Heat, they add their own vocabulary to the mix. Keyboard collages and samples that could’ve been lifted from a DJ Spooky 12″ or a Stereolab remix add complex layers, resulting in an ethereal, often unsettling, sound.

But don’t expect the laidback, atmospheric rhythms of Tortoise or Low from this crew. The hypnotic “Fear of Numbers” revisits Can’s “Yoo Doo Right” with its aggressive rant, although the Post cuts their number much shorter than that epic prog-rock chant. “Hum” rings like an outtake from Sonic Youth’s ’85 landmark Bad Moon Rising, while “Minus” draws on the late John Fahey’s minor-chord acoustic guitar technique, melding the notes with soaring vocals and a dense background track. It’s a spine-tingling contrast to the first half of the album, which — from “Waiting” to “Drown” — unwinds like the perfect soundtrack for a dreary winter afternoon.

— Andria Lisle

Grade: A

The Post will be performing at Young Avenue Deli on Saturday, February 22nd, with the Coach & Four and the Duration.

Music Music Features

Sound Advice

Post author By
Post date February 20, 2003

There’s plenty of great blues to be had around town pretty much any day of the week: Beale Street, the Center for Southern Folklore, Wild Bill’s, and Huey’s are all reliable sources for the region’s greatest roots music. But this week Oxford, Mississippi, shames them all. The place to be is that little college town’s the Library — a music venue, not a building on the campus of Ole Miss. The date is Friday, February 21st. The entertainment? Well, first there’s Handy-nominated rabble-rouser Willie King, whose latest, Living in the New World, brings clenched-fist protest to a juke-joint party. Then there’s one-time Sun Records icon Little Milton, one of the music’s greatest elder statesmen, whose upcoming album will attempt to cross him over, Solomon Burke-style, through collaborations with the likes of Lucinda Williams. Then there’s the king of the chitlin circuit, Bobby Rush, who may well be the planet’s greatest entertainer. You should start practicing your hoochie dance now.

—Chris Herrington

Let me share with you my favorite Oneida lyric, from their aptly titled album Come On Everybody, Let’s Rock: “When I do business I do it in Japan/I am signing contracts that I don’t understand/But it don’t matter when the deal is done/I’m getting higher than the rising sun.” Now that, my friends, is rock-and-roll. It’s the perfect commingling of monkey business and illicit pleasure, and it’s not so much smart as it is streetwise. As rock-and-roll bands go, Oneida is so good it’s almost depressing. Well, it’s depressing if you’ve ever thought about starting a band of your own. You have to ask yourself, Dude, if after nearly a decade and a battery of truly fine records, these guys aren’t full-fledged, arena-sized rock stars, is there any hope left in the world that ANYONE can become a full-fledged, arena-sized rock star?

On top of being fantastic musicians, the boys in Oneida are fantastic, and fantastically energetic, showmen. There is a growing consensus that they may very well be the best band playing in NYC these days. Better still, there aren’t too many crowds they can’t please. Say you’re way into indie rock: Oneida pens clever, self-aware lyrics and melodic rock symphonies. Say you’re way into punk: Oneida is louder than a bomb blast. Say you’re a metalhead: Did I mention that these guys are loud? Say you are a classic-rock nut: Drawing on such influences as Foghat, Blue Cheer, and Deep Purple, Oneida is classic rock. They are, quite frankly, one of the best straight-ahead rock bands touring these days. If you miss them, that’s just too bad for you. They’ll be at the Hi-Tone Café on Tuesday, February 25th, with Memphis’ own Lost Sounds. For those who like to rock, it don’t get much better than that. —Chris Davis