Holy Crap*: She's Ovine

There is certainly no shortage of horror films these days, so a smart slow burn like this absurd drama stands out. There's nothing like the unforgiving winter Icelandic landscape to ratchet up the tension.

Noomi Rapace, the original girl with the dragon tattoo, is perfectly cast as the taciturn farming wife who embraces a ewe's newborn that turns out to be part-human and part-sheep. Maria and her husband Ingvar (Hilmir Snaer Gudnason) not only embrace the baby but take it into their home and nurture it, neither one of them batting an eye at the absurdity of the miracle birth. 

The couple take everything in stride, to the consternation of Ingvar's visiting brother Petur (Bjorn Hlynur Haraldsson) and to the maternal vitriol of the mama who birthed the little freak with a human body and an ovine head, and with one hand and one hoof. Maria will be the one to take care of that battle of the moms, and she'll also have to convince Petur not to overreact to the situation.

Writer-director Valdimar Johannsson (working with novelist/poet/songwriter Sjon) embeds this production with a simmering foreboding, peppering the narrative with hints of backstory. Apparently Maria and Petur have a bit of history, though it's not clear if Ingvar knows about that. And Johannsson drops two pretty clear hints about why the couple are childless and despondent. 

Johannsson times this all with Swiss precision, pretty much turning a new chapter every 20 minutes (that's how long it takes for the birth scene to occur). He ratchets up the horror incrementally and without resort to the common tropes of creaking doors or sudden shocks. He knows that the viewer will understand that the premise itself is untenable and simply cannot end in a pleasant manner.

Despite the preposterous premise played for deadpan amusement, this troupe somehow wins us over into caring about the survival of this improbable family unit. And while the narrative device of the grieving young couple deserves a soft ban, "Lamb" is smart and visually compelling enough to rise above B-movie material.

Only a swerve into the realm of fantasy during a startling deus ex machina ending detracts from what otherwise is an impressively assured filmmaking debut. Rapace and her co-stars go all-in to ensure that this story can be told with a straight face. And, when you think about it, just about any ending would be at least somewhat unsatisfying. Custody battles -- even those not involving a girl with a sheep's head -- usually are quite messy.

GRADE for "LAMB": A-minus

* - Holy Crap is an occasional series about unique films, cutting a wide swath from brilliant to awful. Check out previous entries here.

BONUS TRACK

The perfect trailer:

 And our title track, from the Easybeats:

Dynamic duos

 

LANGUAGE LESSONS (B+) - Mark Duplass seems to never wear out his welcome. Here he teams with Natalie Morales (they write, she directs) to tell a touching tale of an improbable friendship that develops between two people over an internet connection. With an improv vibe, they muddle along through a series of Spanish lessons that eventually take a backseat to an emotional entanglement.

Duplass' Adam has been gifted 100 weekly lessons by his husband, and so he plies his rusty Spanish with bespectacled Carino, who lives in Costa Rica. A tragedy strikes early on, and the two begin to form an unlikely and shaky bond via long distance. Their interactions unfold completely on computer screens and video phone messages; the gimmick is handled so deftly that you quickly get used to the Zoom-style construction of each frame. 

Duplass is scruffy throughout as he uses Carino as a de facto therapist at times, and when she goes through her own rough patch, he smothers her as an older-brother figure. There is a quick, sharp self-reference to White Savior Complex -- Adam fell into wealth and is guilty about that -- and Morales digs deep to find her own character who can match the emotional layers revealed by Duplass's engaging creation. 

You might see the ending coming a mile away, but that doesn't mean it still won't hit you in a tender spot. These are two actors who threw their hearts into a passion project. They have a lot of fun (in Adam's broken Spanish (often reflected in the subtitles), he confuses the words for being embarrassed and being pregnant), and they spill their guts here and there. In the end, this feels like two real people (either Morales and Duplass, or Carino and Adam) throwing caution to the wind and taking a chance on each other.

FLORA AND ULYSSES (B) - Instead of boy-meets-girl, this is girl-meets-squirrel, in a very Disney story that zips along on the charm of its cast. Upfront is tween Flora (a powerhouse Matilda Lawler), who believes in super-heroes and lucks into a meet-cute with a newly super-charged squirrel named Ulysses, who boasts several impressive powers, not the least of which is the ability to type complete (if clunky) sentences.

Flora's parents are separated -- the mom (a world-weary Alyson Hannigan) is a romance novelist and the dad (a wry Ben Schwarz) is a frustrated action-comics author, and they spend most of the movie at arm's length. Meantime Flora's big adventure involves sparing Ulysses from the clutches of the town's animal-control officer (Danny Pudi).  

Much of this one has a lightweight evanescence that doesn't stick to the brain for long, but little Lawler's magnetism helps hurtle this forward. She and a fabulously rendered CGI Ulysses are cute and clever and fun to watch. The kid also is aided by a solid working-class cast that includes Bobby Moynihan as a comic-book store proprietor, Kate Micucci as a waitress at the restaurant where Ulysses first flips out and wreaks havoc, Anna Deavere Smith as the family's neighbor, and a CGI cat from hell that bedevils the animal-control officer.

Director Lena Kahn gets in and out in 95 minutes. The plot is propelled by Ulysses' inventive super-hero exploits and one girl's relentless pluck. If you don't at least smile at this, you might want to readjust your cynicism levels.

BONUS TRACKS

The trailers:

Waves of Joy

 A pair of films that have proved elusive for a while, finally unearthed, thanks to Mubi.

THE HAPPIEST DAY IN THE LIFE OF OLLI MAKI (2017) (A-minus) - The Finnish boxer Olli Maki gets the retro bio treatment in this sweet story of the romance that threatened his chance to take the featherweight crown from American boxer Davey Moore in 1962. Olli (Jarkko Lahti) gets distracted in the weeks before the bout when he finds himself falling in love with Raisa (Oona Airola) and suddenly caring a lot less about preparing for his opponent.

This does not sit well with his gruff, greedy manager, Elis (Eero Milonoff), who is looking to put Olli's little hometown in Finland on the world map. Elis (who gets top billing on the promotional fight card) is hyping Olli for monetary gain, himself distracting the boxer with ad shoots and a film crew chronicling the run-up to the momentous event.

Olli is having trouble making weight (he's usually a class or two above featherweight), and he can't stop thinking about Raisa, who tries to stay out of the way but can't help it if she's irresistible to our hero. Olli starts to question his role in the media circus, particularly when he goes to an arcade and gets a backstage glimpse of one of the women who performs in a dunk tank. Is Olli, too, just a jester in a sideshow?

Director Juho Kuosmanen shoots this wistful period piece on luscious black-and-white, and at times this truly feels like a film made in the early Sixties. The script gives Lahti plenty of space to let his character evolve. The details are meticulous at times, including the scenes of Olli's training and the climactic bout with Moore. (Moore would die after a fight in 1963 and be eulogized in song by Bob Dylan.) 

As the story casually unspools, it might become apparent which particular day will serve as the happiest in Ollie's life. It's a bittersweet battle between love and war.

FIFI HOWLS FROM HAPPINESS (2014) (B+) - Filmmaker Mitra Farahani pursues a labor of love as she crafts this final, seemingly definitive profile of the artist Bahman Mohasses, an itinerant iconoclast sometimes referred to as the Persian Picasso. Mohasses is a nihilistic misanthrope who reportedly destroyed many of his paintings and sculptures, thumbing his nose at the art world and, fleeing Iran, disappearing into a hermetic existence at a hotel in Rome.

Farahani tracks him down and earns his trust. Quite aware that his chain-smoking lifestyle was steering him quickly toward the grave, Mohasses opens up to Farahani, whom he refers to as "lady," as he tells tales of life as a gay provocateur in Shah-era Tehran. (Mohasses also translated poetry and directed plays, a true renaissance artist.) 

Mohasses rarely lets a cigarette leave his lips, and his asthmatic rasp (he has a rascally scratchy laugh that recalls the snickers of Muttley and Shane MacGowan) grows a bit more dire as the story progresses. Mindful of his impending demise -- he would die in 2010, a few years before the film finally found release -- the subject directs the director, suggesting lively cutaway shots to break the monotony of his cramped hotel room. Farahani complies.  She also tags along as Mohasses makes arrangements with a couple of fanboys who commission a final masterwork from the legend.

The film makes time to linger over the artist's impressive images, including muscle-bound minotaurs, plenty of fish and birds, and the image above that gives the film its title. Mohasses has no regrets about his scorched-earth journey on the planet, having, in the parlance of sports, left everything out on the field. And he burns a few bridges on his way to the afterlife.

BONUS TRACK

The title track from "Olli Maki" serves up some surf noir:

We're Doomed. We'll Never Make It.

 

DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: A LIFE ON OUR PLANET (B+) - In which the great-grandfather of nature documentary narrators will depress the hell out of you as he explains the horrors he has seen served on this Earth during his 93 years romping across it.

This valedictory, the work of three directors, lets Attenborough, in that distinctive voice, traipse across the decades, telling both his own personal story and society's. Biographical material mixes with reminiscences, and it is all leavened by one long cautionary tale about what we've done to the planet in the past century. As he intones in the trailer, "Human beings have overrun the world."

Attenborough calls it a "witness statement" and "vision for the future." It's a last call before lights-out in our collective climate cocoon. He promises to offer salvation in the final reel, but I'm afraid the overwhelming bulk of the 83 minutes here tilts toward doom and gloom so much that no cheery bromides or miracle cures will instill enough hope in the average viewer to walk away more than a tad optimistic. But that's not this 93-year-old storyteller's problem for much longer.

LIFE AFTER PEOPLE (2008) (B) - Cheesy but fascinating, this 108-minute exercise in computer-enhanced conjecture purports to show us what the planet will look like in the days, weeks, years, and centuries after the last human has exited Earth. This was the pilot that launched two seasons of TV episodes on your dad's History Channel.

The CGI seems a little crude, even by the standards of the Aughts, and the talking heads look and sound like outcasts from a VH-1 "I Love the ..." special, but you have to give credit to writer-director David de Vries (who disappeared after this final project) for imagining such a spectacle. He methodically walks us through the presumed evolution of the planet -- a lot of skyscrapers shot through with plant life and teeming with wildlife -- in the absence of humans.

Far-flung talking heads speculate with one foot in science and the other in science fiction. One imagines cats evolving into feral flying felines amid the upper floors of those abandoned skyscrapers. As we eventually move into the passage of centuries, it's fascinating to watch this version of Earth purge its human parasite and heal. David Attenborough would be envious.

New to the Queue

 There is a reason, turn, turn, turn ...

An Icelandic horror film about a childless couple on a farm welcoming a hybrid ewe-human to the flock, "Lamb."

A comic-drama about aging voice actors who have fled the failing Soviet Union for Israel, "Golden Voices."

We will follow Mia Hanson-Love to "Bergman Island."

Wes Anderson is back with perhaps his biggest cast of stars ever for a valentine to the New Yorker magazine, "The French Dispatch."

Krisha Fairchild ("Krisha") and Lily Gladstone ("Certain Women") might be enough to make it through a drama about an aging hippie marijuana farmer threatened by the legalization of weed, "Freeland."

Family Business, Part 2: Decay

 

THE MACALUSO SISTERS (A) - It would be difficult to find a movie as gorgeous and sad as this tale of five siblings dealing with tragedy at three different stages of life. Writer-director Emma Dante unleashes an epic tone poem about the sisters in Palermo, bereft of parents and ranging in age from tween to twenties, who keep doves on their roof for renting out to weddings, their main source of income. 

Dante seeks to delve into the paralysis of families who get stuck in the past and their sclerotic traditions. Their grief -- tied to the death of the youngest of them during a day at the beach (and probably connected to whatever happened to their parents) -- haunts them in the form of little Antonella (Viola Pusateri), who continues to appear in her sisters' visions, having never aged beyond girlhood. Dante takes us to a second phase in time, when the survivors are relatively young adults, bickering over the house, as another of them announces a cancer diagnosis. Finally, she jumps forward to old age, when only two are around to bury a third. 

The two the younger middle sisters are not fleshed out much (one is a bookworm; the other is homely and lonely), and the focus turns to vain Pinuccia, who is popular with the men, and melancholy Maria, a frustrated ballerina with lesbian tendencies. The casting is impeccable -- except for Antonella, each character will be played by two or three actresses -- and the aging of the sisters does not become a distraction but rather a selling point.

Dante is working in familiar territory -- the movie brings to mind the sister film "Mustang," as well as Sofia Coppola's "The Virgin Suicides" and the recent mood pieces from Eliza Hittman. She elides dialogue at times, going for atmosphere over direct storytelling (with an effective loop of Erik Satie's "Gymnopedie No. 1" ringing out at key moments). Some of the scenes -- like a playful, tender moment experienced by a young Maria -- can be suffused with joy, longing and a little dread. 

Dante makes the steadily decaying apartment a character unto itself. By the end, that dwelling is weighted with hopes and dreams but pockmarked by bird droppings and faded wallpaper, a haunted museum. Dante unveils the fateful beach outing in flashbacks that reveal a little more of what happened each time, and she injects a montage-like scene at the end that plays out like a brain emptying its memories just before death takes hold, and the effect is both thrilling and anguished. Some heartaches never heal.

EL PLANETA (A-minus) - With a notable nod to early Jim Jarmusch and a bit of the Maysles brothers' "Grey Gardens," Amalia Ulman offers a deadpan take on a mother and daughter eking out their last days of grifting in an economically depressed seaside Spanish town. Ulman, a New Yorker from Argentina, once lived in Gijon, which hosts this cinema verite polemic touching on Ulman's common themes of class, gender and sexuality.

She stars as Leo (Leonora), a 30-ish would-be fashion aesthete who has bad luck meeting available men and is stuck with her eccentric mother in a flat with no heat and, eventually, no electricity, as the pair's economic reckoning slowly comes to a head. The women still put on airs and a confident face to the world -- Leo in funky fashions of her own creation and her mom, Maria (Ulman's own mother, Ale), in a full-length fur coat and designer handbag (convenient for carrying shoplifted items). They dine out on the tab of a local politician that Leo may have dated at one time. With little food in the house besides pastries, Leo whines, "If I keep eating carbs, I'm going to have a poor person's body."

Ulman shoots in distinct black-and-white, with long static camera shots and languorous dialogue reminiscent of Jarmusch's "Stranger Than Paradise." She uses old fashioned screen wipes for a corny retro effect. Her camera lingers on the shuttered businesses of Gijon, a town that apparently has never recovered from the 2008 recession. The women -- exhibiting that bittersweet "Grey Gardens" loopiness -- bicker over mundane household things. Maria likes to "freeze" her enemies by writing their names on scraps of paper that she places in the freezer. Leo, meanwhile, pursues relationships but can't find a man who wants anything but a side romp. (Her meet-cute with a blase shopkeeper (Zhou Chen) finds a real connection between the two actors.) 

Ulman is endlessly appealing as she acts out a parallel version of her own life story. She doesn't lay all her cards on the table, and the pace of this 80-minute exercise can be a bit lethargic in spots, but she reels you in to the sadness and ennui of the mother-daughter team at this critical juncture in their lives. Ulman has a lot to say here about fourth-stage capitalism, and it's fascinating, not really knowing her history going into this (there's this profile focusing on Ulman's transition from fashion and art to film), to be introduced to her fresh voice. 

BONUS TRACK

Satie:

Family Business, Part 1: An Offer You Can Refuse

 

THE MANY SAINTS OF NEWARK (C+) - I would not be the first one to point out that, in both the first episode and the final episode of HBO's epic series "The Sopranos," anti-hero Tony Soprano complains to his therapist about having arrived too late, at the end of "this thing of ours," and wondering aloud if there's even a point to the whole dance anymore, having missed out on the glory days. That same question might bedevil David Chase, who, robbed of his star, James Gandolfini, insists on perpetuating this mob classic by delving into its origins with a pointless prequel.

It is a misfire on several levels. Most glaringly, Chase centers the film around unassuming Dickie Moltisanti (the "many saints" of the title). "Who?" you say. That's the father of Christopher, Tony's nephew and onetime heir apparent, a jerk and a junkie who got unceremoniously snuffed out by Tony in the final season and who sporadically (and needlessly) narrates this film. Dickie Moltisanti (a serviceable but bland Alessandro Nivola ("Who?")) served as a macguffin in the series (Tony convinces Christopher that a retired cop was responsible for killing Dickie and urges Christopher to exact revenge, in the kickoff to the fantastic Season 4), and poor Dickie's not much more than that as the leading character in the prequel. (Although, in a twist near the end, we find out the real culprit behind Dickie's demise. It's a fairly satisfying easter egg to discover.)

The problem here is that Dickie, in these period bubbles of 1967 or 1972, just isn't that interesting a character in the "Sopranos" universe. He violently deals with his daddy issues and steals the young bride his father imported from the old country (the Penelope Cruz clone Michela De Rossi). Dickie is torn between encouraging the bright young Tony to go straight and luring him into the family business. (Tony's dad, Johnny Boy Soprano, is a cipher here, spending most of the movie in prison, a blatant missed opportunity to balance out the series' emphasis on Tony's mommy issues.)

But Chase spends the first half of the two-hour movie engaging in a meticulous set-up -- laying out his characters (many of them familiar from the series, albeit with younger actors) and establishing a milieu among the Newark riots of 1967, a racially nuanced plot device that never really pays off. Chase did a much better job of transporting us to the Sixties in the finely crafted "Not Fade Away" in 2013. Here, there's too much artifice and posturing for the production to rise above the typical period dress-up that most movies engage in. 

A significant distraction here is the unavoidable game of Spot Your TV Favorites -- hey, look, it's Uncle Junior, and there's Paulie, worried about someone ruining his manicure or his new leisure suit. Chase has fun with a young balding Silvio Dante (John Magaro, the star of "Not Fade Away"), but all we get is a cartoonish impression of the mugging consigliere made famous by Steven van Zandt. At first it's fun to test your knowledge of side characters, like high school pal and future restaurateur Artie Buco, or to finally glimpse a teenage Carmela Soprano (nee De Angelis). But, as others have pointed out, this too often reeks of a "Muppet Babies" gimmick, bordering on parody.

Another distraction is the presence of Ray Liotta as both Dickie's father and as the father's twin brother who, having long ago sacrificed for the family, has found a Zen grace while serving out a life sentence for the murder of a made man. The lazy casting of Liotta, especially as the viciously brutal "Hollywood Dick" Moltisanti, merely reminds us of the "Goodfellas" lineage that the original series was subverting but that the film, to its detriment, falls back on. That said, Liotta is a standout in the second hour as the enlightened conscience of his nephew Dickie. The good it does the dull young man.

We paused this movie briefly at the 90-minute mark for a quick bathroom break, and it gave me a few minutes to contemplate some of the above problems -- what is the plot; what is the point; what exactly is Chase trying to accomplish, besides watering down the legacy of the greatest TV series of all time. The final reel offered no redemption.

The biggest shortcoming, though, is the plot, to the extent there is one. Dickie is just not an interesting guy. He's another finely coifed greaser who snuffs out loved ones during fits of anger and who couldn't care less about his wife and the son who would play such a critical role in the series. Chase botches Dickie's connection to teenage Tony (Michael Gandolfini, James' son, who's mostly just OK), and the actors never form a believable bond; thus any insight into Tony's choice to join the mob is lost in the muddle. And Dickie's supposed reaching across racial lines with Harold (Leslie Odom Jr.) feels shoehorned at first and an afterthought by the end. I mean, really ... Dickie Moltisanti -- why him?

Vera Farmiga is much more interesting as Tony's evil mother, Livia. Farmiga seems to be channeling Edie Falco's Carmela as much as Nancy Marchand's Livia, providing a juicy Freudian undertone to the filial relationship we marveled at in Season 1. It's one of the few examples of Chase actually adding a fresh layer of storytelling here. Of course, Chase is ham-handed with a scene of Tony spilling his guts to a guidance counselor (Talia Balsam), a too-obvious parallel to the series' central conceit of mobster Tony opening up to Dr. Melfi. (The guidance counselor tries to convince Livia that her son is a born leader, but the old lady swats away the idea with that famous wave of her hand.) 

There is precious little insight to be gleaned here. The end of "The Sopranos" was 14 years ago, a lifetime in mob-movie years. The series could have been the final whack on a tired genre and an era. Going even further back in time is a fool's errand. (And overloading the soundtrack with treadworn songs only reminds us of how much Martin Scorsese has pounded this species into submission.)

Chase could do little wrong at the helm of the series' six (really seven) seasons, but here he is reduced to explaining away both the mother-son relationship and Tony's fateful decision to go crooked by having us believe that Tony and Uncle Dickie tried but failed to get Livia on the meds she needed. If only Tony's mother, back in the '70s, had had access to the anti-depressants that Tony so freely gulped at the turn of the millennium, we could have avoided this whole thing of theirs. 

Not only is Chase's prequel, in the end, unnecessary, but it also calls into question the very being of the brilliant TV epic he bequeathed to the world. That tingle you experience as the familiar theme song bubbles up just before the final credits roll might feel like a tinge of regret. Shame about it.

BONUS TRACK

If you haven't seen the series finale of "The Sopranos" from 2007, read no further. Below is my deadline review of that last episode for the Albuquerque Tribune:

A big `Sopranos' finale? Just you fuhgeddaboudit!
By J.A. Montalbano
Monday, June 11, 2007 

In the end, we realize life is a journey. Or maybe it's just a Journey song.

To the strains of "Don't Stop Believin' " - and then to an ominous black screen that must have had millions cursing their cable provider before the credits finally rolled in silence - "The Sopranos" faded into history.

"Is this all there is?" Tony Soprano wondered to his shrink earlier this season. Some viewers probably asked the same thing after Sunday's finale on HBO. Or maybe they phrased it more like "Are you freakin' kidding me?"

In his predictably unpredictable manner, series creator David Chase (who wrote and directed the swan song) toned down the violence and played up the mundane. Despite having a target on his back the whole episode, Tony was constantly joking. He complained about his mother to a new psychiatrist and nagged his son about household chores.

(SNITCH ALERT: We're about to spill the beans about Sunday night's series finale. So, if you didn't watch it - and how could you have waited this long? - come back and finish reading later.)

In the end, Tony outfoxed his rival, Phil Leotardo, by making a deal with the Brooklyn boss's underlings and finally putting to good use the previous Brooklyn leader's inept son, Little Carmine, as broker.

Leotardo's execution in front of his wife and grandchildren was the only violence in the episode. (And not only did he get shot, but the rear wheel of one of those ubiquitous SUVs splattered his head.)

In the series' final scene, Tony - informed he faces almost certain indictment because one of his captains, Carlo, is talking to the feds - sits in a diner, waiting for his family to arrive. He flips through the selections on the tableside jukebox - "This Magic Moment," "Magic Man," Tony Bennett, classic rock - reminding us how integral the show's soundtrack has always been.

His family members show up one by one. Doom hangs in the air amid their ordinary banter. As the Journey song blares, we see suspicious characters come and go. Daughter Meadow is the last one to arrive, and she is flustered trying to parallel park.

Meadow, seemingly in a panic, runs toward the restaurant's front door. Was she merely worried about being late? Had she just found out she's pregnant? Does she know something's about to happen in the restaurant?

As Tony looks up to see his daughter arrive and Steve Perry croons "Don't stop," the screen goes black and silent for 10 seconds. Then the credits. The music's over.

Just another family dinner and a bittersweet ending? Or did that black screen mean the shady guy who went to the men's room came out with a gun, "Godfather"-style, and Tony didn't see it coming?

Or was it the rest of us who just didn't see it coming?

The final episode played with stereotypes, big and small, as if to remind us that Chase himself never forgot that he took guff for eight years because of how he depicted his fellow Italian-Americans. The finale had us swimming in images that tripped our biases and toyed with expectations:

Phil's right-hand man Butch walks a couple of blocks while talking on the phone, hangs up and stands perplexed amid a sea of Asian faces. (Have you been to Little Italy in Manhattan lately?)

Anthony Jr. wants to study Arabic and join the war in Afghanistan. In the end, though, he takes a job as a gofer on a movie set, finally snapping out of his season-long slouch toward Bethlehem.

Meadow wants to fight for civil rights because of the injustices she has seen her dad and other Italian-Americans put up with.

We get TV footage of President Bush dancing in Africa.

Tony's favorite FBI agent (and our first line of defense against the terrorists) has a nagging wife, cheats on her, helps Tony track down his rival and then, when told of Phil's hit, exhorts, "Damn, we're gonna win this thing."

And the people in the restaurant in that final scene - any one of them or none of them could have popped Tony at a moment's notice: a trucker in a "USA" cap; two black kids milling about; the jittery guy at the counter. Or maybe the table full of Boy Scouts could have saved his life.

For those who wanted Tony brought down in a hail of bullets or hauled off to jail by the FBI, Chase reminded us that life is neither that messy nor that neat.

The final nine episodes of "The Sopranos" were brilliant for reminding us that Tony wasn't a nice guy, to say the least, and never would be.

He wasn't going to see the light, despite his Buddhist fever dreams and his peyote-fueled exultation to the sunrise, "I get it!" (In the finale, he stares up at the sun while raking leaves in the backyard.)

He was brutal this year. When he wasn't bashing in the teeth of a goon who dissed his daughter or mocking his own son who was descending into a suicidal stupor, Tony was just a callous bully. With his own hands he killed his chosen successor, Christopher, and then went out to Vegas to sleep with one of Christopher's girlfriends, for good measure.

But his true sociopathic pettiness was re-established in the first of the final nine episodes. Seething over a drunken brawl with brother-in-law Bobby Baccalieri, Tony got revenge by ordering Bobby to carry out his first hit, essentially sealing the man-child's doom.

That first episode this year also brought home the bitter irony inherent to the Mafia: Family is everything. Unless it's your biological family we're talking about - parents, siblings, wife, children - because those loved ones are just around for blame and recriminations.

Not that you fared any better if you were Tony's "brother," Big Pussy; his "son," Christopher; or his "father," Hesh. Not to mention the actual cousin he blew away with a shotgun in Season 5.

Series guru Chase dawdled during last year's 12-episode run-up, trying fans' patience with Tony's extended coma, the never-ending saga of gay mobster Vito and other apparent dead ends. But this year, the storytelling was economic and powerful.

One by one, Chase showed us the fate of key characters. We saw psychiatrist Jennifer Melfi questioning her years of working with Tony; Paulie vegging out to "Three's Company" or sunning himself in front of Satriale's; Johnny Sacrimoni unrepentant while he lay dying of cancer; and Christopher drug-addled and gurgling for his final breath.

Chase was telling us very clearly that it's not pretty at the end for these guys. Most of them probably would have taken a hero's bullet in the head years ago to be spared such indignities. The sudden black screen to the slow fade.

Is it a victory to be sitting in a New Jersey diner munching on onion rings and listening to classic rock?

In Sunday's penultimate scene, Tony visits Uncle Junior, who sits toothless in a state-run nursing home, staring at the birds outside his window. Nothing Tony says registers with Junior. Not the whereabouts of his stash; not that little incident where he shot his nephew. That is, until Tony utters this phrase: "This thing of ours."

Tony is reminding the old man that Tony's father and Junior once ran things in New Jersey.

"We did?" Junior says sweetly. "Hmm. That's nice."

Soundtrack of Your Life: Selling Out

An occasional feature in which we mark the songs of our relative youth as played over public muzak systems and beyond. Previous entries are here.

The first experience:

Date: 19 September 2021, 8:40 a.m.

Place: Trader Joe's

Song/Artist:  "Steppin' Out" by Joe Jackson

Irony Matrix: 2.0 out of 10

Comment: Joe Jackson was a post-punk new-wave brat. He slashed through several albums in the late '70s and then finally revealed himself as a moody, flinty jazz aficionado via a collection of old jumpin' jive songs in 1981 and then the elegant Gershwin tribute "Night and Day" in 1982, followed by a film soundtrack in '83 and some Miles Davis (or Chet Baker?) cool in '84's "Body and Soul." It was quite a run through genres (he had also toyed with ska on 1980's "Beat Crazy"), and, along with his snottiness toward fans who dared to make noise at his concerts, by the mid- to late-'80s he was considered rather a dilettante. Nevertheless, I stuck with him through most of those twists and turns, even if he wasn't rewriting the thrashers "One More Time" or "I'm the Man" for my benefit. 

Let's go back to that time. It's a weekend night in Chicago. The details are hazy. I've reached out to friends who were either there or have heard the legend being recounted multiple times, but they are drawing blanks regarding the context and specifics. (It most certainly will not translate as legendary in a modern telling to a broad audience. But here goes.)

The way I remember it, a few guys from our core group were walking late at night through the hoppin' streets, perhaps in the River North area. Jackson's own archives indicate that he played the Chicago Theatre in 1989 -- the first time in the city proper since 1982's gig at the Aragon Ballroom (Brawlroom) -- so let's go with that later downtown locale. (The Chicago Theatre is on State Street, down the road from our late-night diner haunt Tempo, so that makes '89 more likely.)

As I recall, the handful of us had seen another band earlier that night. My hazy memory says it was Firehose, the successor to Minutemen. (Archives also indicate that Firehose played Cabaret Metro in 1989.) OK, so let's go with that.

Let's just say we were full of punk and vinegar that night, Firehose still ringing in our ears, maybe a patty melt and strawberry shake from Tempo roiling in some of our bellies. We pass by the Chicago Theatre and see Joe Jackson's name on the marquee. "Christ," I say, "this guy's career sure went lollipop, didn't it? La-di-da, the Chicago Thee-uh-tah." I could imagine him shushing the crowd while noodling through "Not Here, Not Now," or some other highbrow composition. Other cheesy, mockable pianist-composers from previous generations sprang to mind.

I did an impromptu bit. As we passed in front of the venue, I imagined myself as a heckler being kicked out of the classy Chicago Theatre. I twisted my arm behind my back in agonizing pantomime, as if a bouncer had hold of me and was about to hurl me to the curb. "He's Marvin Hamlisch!!" I yelled over my shoulder. "He's Marvin Hamlisch!" My tiny audience roared.

And, scene. One of my all-time best mad-libs. It gets retold fondly. Fast-forward 32 years later. I'm a middle-age early-bird shopper on a Sunday morning at, you guessed it, Trader Joe's. Is that Gershwin? Hamlisch? No, it's Joe Jackson, steppin' out. Great song. Graham Maby's bass bouncing along. I always loved this couplet, with its initial internal rhyme and color-matching: "Youuu ... dress in pink and blue, just like a child / and in a yellow taxi turn to me and smile."

It's been a while since I stalked a city with a pack of wild animals. 

The second event:

Date: 24 September 2021, 6:50 a.m.

Place: On the road, I-25 somewhere between Truth or Consequences and Hatch, N.M.

Song/Artist:  "Anchorage" by Michelle Shocked

Irony Matrix: 1.2 out of 10

Comment: This one I can pinpoint with precision. The archives place the concert in October 1988 at the Riviera Theater. (Bill Wyman, writing in the Chicago Reader, called it a "an extravagant success.") Michelle Shocked, before she unraveled as a fraud and a lunatic, was doing her aw-shucks Lady Dylan troubadour act, opening for Billy Bragg. 

It was less than a month before the post-Reagan American election between Bush I and Dukakis, though Bragg saved most of his venomous one-liners for Bush's ridiculous running mate, that memorable idiot Dan Quayle. It had been about 10 days since the "You're no Jack Kennedy" debate between Quayle and Lloyd Bentsen, and Bragg was relentless in his mockery. One line I remember, "Dan Quayle said he was inspired by his grandmother, who told him, 'Son, you can do anything you want in this world. ... And here's a million dollars to go do it.'" Bragg was at the top of his game, touring behind "Workers Playtime" and his new hit that would enter the pantheon, "Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards." (Keep hope alive!)

Michelle Shocked had put out her first proper studio album, "Short Sharp Shocked," and she was the opening act. She was the It Girl of the working-class left, the hope of a folkie revival, and she was cute, to boot. (I was so shallow ... back then.) Thanks to Wyman's piece, history supports my recollection of Bragg joining Shocked for her final song, which they wrote together, called "Waiting for a New Deal Now." I recall it had the line "What we need is some [Jesse] Jackson action!" 

It was a heady night -- Bragg with a "Lick Bush" sticker on his guitar; Shocked emerging as a potential superstar with songs like "Hello Hopeville" and "If Love Was a Train." That night, in a swirl of delusion that a nerdy governor from Massachusetts could slay Reaganism, was as much political rally as rock concert. But, while we meant every word and feeling, it all quickly turned out to be illusory. (Welcome to my quarter-life crisis.)

I'm not just referring to the four extended years of Bush-Quayle and the first foray into Iraq, etc. It also was the abrupt unraveling of Shocked in a matter of months. Like Joe Jackson, she decided that her follow-up album would be a melange of outdated styles, like bebop and Dixieland jazz. (It was called "Captain Swing.") Her cleverly crafted back story, like Dylan's, would prove to be mostly fictional. In later years, she would pose in blackface for album art and rant against homosexuality (trashing same-sex marriage at a show in San Francisco, of all places). 

Shocked, in retrospect, had been playing a role. Dylan got away with it. She didn't. Them's the breaks. But she did write some pretty good songs there in the '80s. One of them is "Anchorage" -- "anchored down in Anchorage." When you're 25 and full of spit and vinegar and clinging to political pipe dreams, you're vulnerable to a one-two punch like Shocked and Bragg. Decades later, we're still waiting on that new New Deal. So long, Hopeville? I hope not.

My randomized song list played "Anchorage" while I was driving last month from Truth or Consequences to Las Cruces for a breakfast for scholarship participants at New Mexico State University. I'm part of a group that started a scholarship in memory of a former Albuquerque Tribune colleague, and it had been a while since we got face-to-face with NMSU administrators and students. The soundtrack for the one-hour trip alternated between modern stuff (Waxahatchee, Tinariwen, Beyonce) and obscure '60s garage rock, and there in between, from the late '80s, those heady days, was Michelle Shocked bantering in verse with an old friend. I can't embed a link to a version of Shocked's "Anchorage," but here's a link to her butchering it in a video found on Facebook.Whatever happened to that woman?

BONUS TRACK

Here's Firehose (we used to stylize it along with the band as fIREHOSE, but we've moved on) playing Public Enemy's "Sophisticated Bitch" at Metro in '89:

A Spinnin' Marty Party

 

Country traditionalist Marty Stuart played a Monday night show in Albuquerque with his band the Fabulous Superlatives. He seems as polite as the day is long, and the band shows up wearing crisply pressed suits, so it was a perfect show to take my visiting mom to -- not too loud or rowdy but with just enough of a kick to get the blood flowing.

Stuart continued his persona -- highlighted in Ken Burns' PBS series on country music -- as a cultural custodian. He mentioned his Congress of Country Music in Mississippi, a museum dedicated to the history of country and western, and a stash for all his collectibles.

Stuart treated the mostly full auditorium at the National Hispanic Cultural Center to a journey through time, reaching back to Jimmie Rodgers and sweeping through big names of country, folk and bluegrass, like Woodie Guthrie, Bob Wills, Bill Monroe, George Jones, Willie Nelson and Crystal Gayle. He gave two spotlight songs to each of his bandmates: Chris Scruggs on bass, Kenny Vaughan on guitar, and Harry Stinson on drums. Below are a few of the highlights.

There was his big hit, "Matches":

 The George Jones weeper "This Old, Old House":

A rollicking version of Rodgers' "California Blues":

Stuart is an old-fashioned guitar slinger who was barely out of junior high when he began playing with Lester Flatt's band. As devoted as he is to the Nashville sound, he shows a wide range of styles. Perhaps betraying his upbringing in the '60s and '70s, he leans toward the twang of the Byrds as filtered through Bob Dylan. His song "Sitting Alone" (which I can't find online) would have fit seamlessly on the Beatles' "Rubber Soul." He peppered the set with a few surf songs, and he launched an encore with a bombastic version of the Count Five psychedelic breakdown "Psychotic Reaction." But there was nothing like his solo turn -- the bandmates left the stage for a bit -- just shredding a mandolin through "Orange Blossom Special."

He concluded his encore with a heartfelt rendition of a song popularized by Crystal Gayle, "Ready for the Times to Get Better," from his album "Songs I Sing in the Dark":

 

BONUS TRACK

Here is the band a few years ago with Don Slack on KEXP doing a set that gives you a flavor of his latest lineup of the Fabulous Superlatives: