Something New (This Week) vol. 26

Cymande, Strangers on a Train (1951), and Giant (1956)

Welcome to Something New (This Week), a (sometimes) weekly installation of recommendations for movies, music, readings, and more.

It is Plough Monday as I sit down to recommend some writing and movies and ideas to you. Today was the first day back at my day job since December 20th, and it is the sixth day of Dry January (Brain Rot Edition). It has been a vastly productive and uniquely strange week, and I’m glad the changes I’ve made are having any effect, good or bad.

So that’s where I’m at. But now let’s talk tunes:

My local jazz radio station, KMHD, has changed their daily schedule. They have DJ’s coming on at different times, with different show names, and — thankfully — they are actually updating their Playlist page with the songs they are playing, rather than entering that data 40% of the time, which was the case for a long time. It feels like a “new year new us” move, and I am excited to get a grip on the flow of things again. I depend on the starting of these radio shows to tell me where I am at in the day, like a local church bell tower. When Bryson Wallace’s voice came over the airwaves at 10:23AM this morning, I thought I had time traveled. That’s how much I love that station. Bless them.

This morning, it was Wallace that played the rack above, from a band I had never heard of: Cymande, a British funk group from the 1970’s. They formed in ‘71, disbanded in ‘74, and are now back for the first time, doing a reunion album and tour. They are coming to Portland the day after my birthday. This all sounds too good to be true. I have found that when it sounds too good to be true: buy tickets to that show.

That song rocks, the tracks I have listened to throughout today have rocked, and I think that show will rock. Maybe I’ll see you there.

Editor’s Note:

It’s me, Bobby, the editor. For the last Something New (This Week) I started a segment in which I made a playlist on Spotify of the songs that caught my attention between the time of publishing and the the previous (This Week). I’m happy to report that I am still capturing those songs, but unfortunately, I am being overly strict with my Spotify retreat, and I do not have the songs all in a playlist, and can’t access the playlist anyways. That just means that, in February, that playlist is going to be big. I look forward to parsing through it then.

Hitchcock at Cinema 21

Elliot Lavine, programmer for Cinema 21’s Saturday matinee series, kicked off my viewing of Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951) by telling us that the 300 viewers seated today were the most he’s ever seen for this weekend series. People in the ticket and concession lines could not stop themselves from marveling at the amount of people. Many movie personalities and podcasters have talked, anecdotally, of the burgeoning repertory screening boom that is happening recently. I can confidently say, anectoday, that I have been seeing the same boom here in Portland. Old movies are back, baby. Get on the ride!

And what a ride this movie was. I thought Challengers (2024) was going to be the sexiest tennis thriller I would ever see. How wrong was I! Strangers is an exacting script without a gram of fat on it, directed, as always, with zest and wit and excitement. The is a range of performance styles from the actors that I loved: a creeping, charming antagonist; an arrid, almost dopey and handsome leading man (our star tennis player who gets taken advantage of); a smarter-than-all, suave romantic interest; an excitable murder-mystery fan kid sister; and a bunch of side characters, each of them memorable in their own right.

I have yet to see even half of the films that Hitchcock made, but Strangers on a Train is immediately near the top of my personal list. Yeah, the particular viewing experience was a boon to my reaction to it, but I won’t hold that against the movie, nor should anyone. These things were made to be enjoyed while trapped in an auditorium with hundreds of other people!

There are three more Hitchcock movies showing on Saturdays this month. I suggest you go, and I suggest you buy your tickets soon, and arrive to the theater early. The boom is here!

Brushing up on the classics

Giant (1956) is “your favorite filmmaker’s favorite film”, and by that I mean it played a huge role in inspiring Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, and by all accounts it looms large over Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, which I am seeing Thursday. This was a homework watch for me, my favorite kind of watch: hungry and attentive for detail and craft, carefully monitoring themes and performances and production designs and camera moves. It can be a cold way to watch, but that has never stopped a truly moving movie from getting to me.

Giant is a huge undertaking of storytelling, its scope is vast. What starts as a love-at-first-sight drama — between Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor — quickly broadens into a regional story of gender norms and pride and tradition. Additionally, around the midway point of this very long movie, the story starts jumping ahead, and our romancers get older — way older — and have kids who become adults. We are barreling forward. The themes are still here, and the aim is to touch on them with variation and to let characters come back to them over nearly a lifetime. It is ambitious, and beautiful to look at, but the wide view for decades of time removes you a bit too much to stay grounded.

The real star of the movie is James Dean, the first movie I have seen him in, and the last movie he would ever act in — he died in a car accident just days after finishing his scenes. He stands on his own in this film, giving a performance unlike anything any other performer in this movie gives (though Carroll Baker also steals every scene she is in as the head-strong younger sister). One of the best, most tense moments of the film are a near monologue from Dean, who has just gotten his hands on some wealth of his own for the first time, and he does the scene covered head-to-toe in thick, black oil. Then, as if stealing the movie wasn’t enough, he also goes through a massive physical change as the movie leaps ahead in time, changing style and posture and vocal performance. Dean is obviously properly heralded as one of the most important performers of his century, and I have read that a hundred times by now, but seeing it for myself was still marvelous.

A rewarding watch, if not an all-time favorite.

Thank you, as always, for reading. I’m still seeing tons of movies in the new year, and will try to comment on any that are comment-worthy. I’m also excited to, somehow, share my music-listening adventures while being “offline”. That, and more, soon.

TTFN