Review: Vinyl Reissues of 'Ringo' and 'Goodnight Vienna'

The reports of Ringo Starr’s luck are greatly exaggerated. He wasn’t some half-talent along for the Beatlemania ride, as his most heartless and clueless critics insist. His solid backbeat was essential to holding the band together and his quirky way with a drum fill was as essential to The Beatles’ distinctive sound as George’s ringing 12-string or Paul’s leaping bass lines. However, there is no question that Ringo would not have had a career as a solo artist if not for his old band. While Ringo-led tracks such as “Yellow Submarine”, “With a Little Help from My Friends”, and “Octopus’ Garden” are much more than novelty spots for the goofily charming drummer, one probably doesn’t hear even these classics and think, “Gee, this guy needs a whole album to himself.”

Review: 'Superman: The Atom Age Sundays-1956 to 1959'

Superman has gone through all sorts of variations in his 80 years, including— stupidly enough—dark, broody Superman. Like most of the comic book heroes who followed him, Superman was always best when he was at his most whimsical. Delightfully, IDW’s new collection Superman: The Atom Age Sundays-1956 to 1959 catches him at one such point. Without the depressing, often racist baggage of the war years, Superman is free to use the sun as his personal Turkish bath after gaining some extra pounds, match wits with an alien race of talking mushrooms, and testify at the trial of a giant chimp that shoots kryptonite beams from its eyeballs. Even his origin story is told after a wacky visit by G-Men from the future who insist that the "S" on Superman’s chest is for "Shark." Hooray for Superman and the goofy scripting of writers such as Batman-creator Bill Finger!

Another pleasure of The Atom Age Sundays is how fluidly these one-a-week chapters coalesce into complete stories. With the exception of one of the three Lois Lane-centric stories that end the book, there is a minimum of annoying exposition intended to remind the reader of what happened the previous weekend. Since these are Sundays only, every comic is in full color. Consequently, this volume reads more like a collection of comic book stories than newspaper ones, and interestingly enough, the book’s introduction notes that the comic book and newspaper stories were mirroring each other at this point in Superman history (though writers Mark Waid and John Wells can’t reach a definitive conclusion about which medium was the chicken and which one was the egg). As usual, the packaging is beautiful with comic book-style textured paper, ribbon bookmark, and colorful hardcover. All of this makes for one of the very best volumes in IDW’s ongoing series of Superman newspaper comics.

Review: 'Opera' Blu-ray

Evaluating a Dario Argento movies requires its own rule book since his methods are so unlike anyone else’s. In a movie such as Opera, he may liberally borrow from horrors past ranging from The Birds to Halloween to A Clockwork Orange to (of course) Phantom of the Opera, but his films are always entirely his own no matter how referential or how successful they are. Opera is no Suspiria or Deep Red, but it is still one of Argento’s more successful pictures despite its absence of logic and ridiculous musical choices. While the latter undermines Argento’s purposes as he renders his most shocking scenes comical by scoring them with awful heavy metal tunes, the former just adds to the dreamy unreality that is one of his more appealing signatures.

Opera finds the soprano starring in a production of Verdi’s Macbeth being stalked by a masked killer. Instead of targeting the life of the singer (Christina Marscillach), he merely forces her to watch while he slays other folks in her theatrical inner circle. He ensures her peepers remain open by Scotch-taping rows of needles under her eyelids. If you’re like me and have a thing about your eyes, these scenes are almost impossible to watch (oh, the irony!).

Like any Argento picture, Opera is not a matter of plot. It is the sum total of Argento’s audacious flights of fancy and weirdly poetic extreme violence. We get plenty of this stuff with a disorienting opening filmed in the first-person pov, a gory raven raid on an opera audience, and of course, that vicious gimmick with the needles. An extended scene that finds the heroine trapped with the killer in her own apartment and escaping through an air duct with a little girl out of a Lewis Carroll story could be the most masterfully suspenseful set piece in a career littered with them.

Scorpion Releasing brings Opera to blu-ray with a meticulous 2K scan. I know, I know—4K is the ideal way to go, but this is still a very attractive presentation with barely a speck of dust and organic, lively textures. This is particularly important since the film is so textural whether lingering on red velvet, the gnarly twine of a thick rope, or the pearl-like ring around a raven’s eye. There are also two bonus interviews—a previously issued 21-minute talk with Argento and a brand new one with actor William McNamara. McNamara has a relatively small role in the feature, but his interview is still nicely illuminating as he explains the circumstances that led to the audacious pov of the opening scene and his reaction to having his voice dubbed by a British actor.

Review: 'Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff: The Expanded Story of a Haunting Collaboration'

With the release of Ed Wood in 1994, “Karloff! That Limey cocksucker!” quite nearly replaced “I never drink…wine” and “The children of the night…what music they make” as the go-to phrase when doing a bad Bela Lugosi impression. Tim Burton’s movie hipped the larger film-going public to some of the real-life seething that went on during the filming of such Lugosi/Boris Karloff collaborations as The Black Cat and The Body Snatcher. However, Burton’s superb yet cartoonish film provided little of the complexity behind this classic Hollywood “rivalry.” For that, one would have to take a trip to the local Waldenbooks and pick up a copy of Gregory Mank’s Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff: The Story of a Haunting Collaboration.

Originally published in 1990, the over 350-page book attempted a more nuanced view of a relationship that couldn’t simply be boiled down to a venerated horror star and a jealous, drug-addled also-ran. Swelling with an additional 250-or-so pages in 2009, the now Expanded Story of a Haunting Collaboration went into even greater depth with additional information and interviews. By Mank’s analysis, Lugosi and Karloff may have enjoyed a rather friendly working relationship while making Son of Frankenstein, and the alleged hatred Lugosi felt for Karloff may have really been directed at a Hollywood system that constantly ground the vampire under its merciless stake.

Karloff is not completely without blame in this mostly one-sided clash of titans. While he never had an explicitly nasty thing to say about Lugosi, his patronizing insistence on referring to his co-star as “poor Bela” in private and public could not have endeared himself to the actor who could be quite proud despite demeaning himself in Poverty Row and Ed Wood pictures.

Mank’s valiant attempt to uncover how Lugosi and Karloff really felt about each other was doomed to go without a definitive answer, but that barely matters when the rest of the story is so fascinating and well told. Mank goes deep into the movies they made together with nearly scene-by-scene analyses without neglecting the most important pictures they made without the other. So we get very satisfying histories of Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, and other key films, as well as quite a bit of information about other key players in those films such as James Whale and Colin Clive.

Last updated nearly a decade ago, Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff: The Expanded Story of a Haunting Collaboration is now enjoying a new printing though not another updating. That’s generally fine since there probably haven’t been many new revelations about the Karloff/Lugosi rivalry in recent years since so many of their other collaborators have died. Mank’s incessant leching over Lugosi and Karloff’s female co-stars is more than a little dated and brings nothing but discomfort to the storytelling, but if you can get past that, you will find that Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff: The Expanded Story of a Haunting Collaboration remains one of the great studies of classic horror films.

Review: 'Ultimate Spinach" Mono Vinyl Edition

The term “Bosstown Sound” was DJ Dick Summer’s valiant yet failed attempt to promote Boston as the next San Francisco in the late sixties. At the forefront of the movement was Ultimate Spinach, a psychedelic conglomerate led by an acid muncher named Ian Bruce-Douglas and supported by a bunch of squares. Though the group is only known by the most hardcore psych acolytes today, and they never even tried to score a hit single, Ultimate Spinach’s eponymous debut album did surprisingly well, even climbing to #34 in the LP charts, and is remembered fondly by a dedicated few.

Psychobabble’s 100 Favorite Songs of the 1990s!

Wow. A list of Psychobabble’s 100 Favorite Songs of the 1990s. That’s so cool. It’s totally not like everyone else in the entire universe hasn’t already listed their 100 favorite songs of the nineties. Like anyone cares. Whatever. Lists are wack, but I don’t know… music is pretty cool. I mean, not when they’re like “Oooh, look at me! I’m a big rock star! My hair is so big and I screw so many groupies!” That is so eighties. But when they…I don’t know… kind of don’t care so much, I guess I’m kinda like, “That’s pretty cool. I don’t care so much either.” It’s like sometimes I think Kurt Cobain is singing about my life, you know? I don’t know what the fuck Bob Pollard is singing about half the time, but Guided by Voices rock so hard because Bob is like a forty-year-old schoolteacher or something, so it’s so ironic that he’s a rock star. And then there’s all the “Women in Rock” (I put that in quotes to show what I really think of the mainstream media’s “labels”) like Liz Phair, Tanya Donelly, Mary Timony, Juliana Hatfield, PJ Harvey, and like, all the others. They are sincerely hella cool. Sincerely! I’m not even being ironic about how totally dope they are. Don’t think I’m not being ironic? Oh well. Whatever. Nevermind. Then here’s your mom’s 100 favorite songs of the nineties.

100. “Over the Neptune/Mesh Gear Fox” by Guided by Voices

So we get started the way every party must get started…with a chant of “GBV! GBV! GBV!” Then Bob Pollard is all like, “Rock and Roll!” Then he’s like “This song does not rock,” which is so cool, because sincerely admitting that you rock is so lame! But the real irony is that “Over the Neptune” really does rock! It rocks like Cheap Trick (and not lame Cheap Trick, like “The Flame”). Then “Over the Neptune” morphs into “Mesh Gear Fox” like that cop in T2 morphs into water or whatever, and guess what…it stops rocking but it remains awesome as Guided by Voices get all psychedelic. It sounds like your dad’s best records… and Uncle Bob is like your dad’s only cool friend.

99. “I Wanted to Tell You” by Matthew Sweet

Review: 'The Breakfast Club' Criterion Blu-ray

John Hughes only made six movies about high schoolers, but the fact that he is synonymous with teenage travails isn’t necessarily because Curly Sue wasn’t a great piece of cinematic art. It also isn’t because he was the only one talking to teens in the eighties. Filmmakers such as Amy Heckerling, Savage Steve Holland, and Tim Hunter were too, and probably with more audacity, but there is some intangible magic about a John Hughes picture. It could be his decision to use the Brat Pack as his personal casting pool. There certainly is something special about witnessing Molly Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall sharing the screen. It might be the fact that Hughes never shied from the kind of raw, maudlin emotions that we teenagers loved to wrap ourselves in or the toilet humor we thought was funny. Or maybe it’s that his films were so hopeful, and hope is what we really need when twirling down the angst whirlpool. Sometimes we also need a big, horse-killing dose of eighties, and watching a Hughes movie is like playing nine hours of Pac-Man while blasting Duran Duran and gobbling a vat of Nerds.

Whatever it is, Hughes movies scratch an itch that Fast Times at Ridgemont High and River’s Edge can’t quite reach, and no Hughes movie scratches it like The Breakfast Club. It has it all: the cast, the quotable lines (“No, dad, what about you?!?”), the puerile humor without the gratuity or racism of Sixteen Candles, the melodrama, the Simple Minds, and Hughes’s oddball perspective of teenagers that is both cluelessly unreal, and yet, aspirational. I certainly never attended a detention group therapy session with a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess, and a criminal, but I and a zillion other eighties teens sure wanted to after seeing The Breakfast Club. Which is crazy, since Saturday detention would clearly suck and spending nine hours with the kids most likely to tape your butt cheeks together would too. But Hughes made it seem appealing, probably because he made the mutual understanding these five kids reach seem possible.

The Breakfast Club may not fit in with the Criterion Collection’s usual crop of cult classics and art-house achievements, but there’s no question that it is an important movie. What picture better defines its generation? That’s right, my Neo-Maxi-Zoom-Dweebie…none of them. So Criterion showers all the respect on The Breakfast Club that it would give to a Bergman film. The 4K polishing is gorgeous. Extras are abundant. The most attractive will probably be nearly 52 minutes of deleted and extended scenes. Some of these will be tough for all but the most hardcore cultists to distinguish from scenes in the final edit, but other bits certainly stand out. We get Claire and Brian acting out Bender-style daddy-issue psychodramas. We get Bender calling Brian “smegma toast.” We get Carl the Janitor’s complete explanation for how he came to pursue the custodial arts, as well as his really mean predictions for each of the Breakfast Clubbers’ futures. We get Bender’s bizarre Ricky Ricardo impersonation and several scenes that help build the argument that Ally Sheedy was the movie’s MVP (sadly, we also get more of the tragic scene in which Claire gives the formerly cool Allison a jock-bait makeover. Boo!).

A clutch of cast/crew interviews includes a new 18-minute recollection starring Sheedy and Molly Ringwald, who discusses the cast’s atypical role in finalizing the script and gives some theories on what might have gone down on Monday, February 17, 1985. Period, on-set interviews with Sheedy and Judd Nelson reveal a couple of rather thoughtful young stars, while Paul Gleason’s on-set interview reveals that unlike the character he plays in the movie, he was a nice, goofy guy and not a total dick.

The less substantial supplements are so plentiful that they’ll still keep you busy for hours. A 23-minute “electronic press kit” to promote the original film includes interviews with the principal cast. Nelson reads bits of Hughes’s production notes for twelve minutes. Two segments from the Today show totaling ten minutes find Jane Pauley picking the brains of Ringwald and Nelson and Sheedy, Hall, and Emilio Estevez. There’s also an hour of audio interviews with Hughes and a 15-minute one with Ringwald.  Rounding out Criterion’s exclusive extras are the excellent Sincerely Yours documentary and Nelson and Hall’s commentary track from Universal’s 2008 “Flashback Edition” DVD.

Review: 'Long Title: Looking for the Good Times: Examining The Monkees’ Songs, One by One'

While examining “(I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone” in his book Long Title: Looking for the Good Times: Examining The Monkees’ Songs, One by One, Michael A. Ventrella writes, “I’ve never been much of a fan of this song. I’m not sure why; I can’t really point to anything wrong with it.” Hmm. Are you sure you’re the best person to be examining The Monkees’ songs one by one? Because I expect better insight than what Ventrella and his co-author, Mark Arnold, try to pass off as analysis in this book. “I don’t know why I don’t like this; I just don’t” may cut the mustard in a Facebook comment, but it does not belong in a book. And beginning that book by stating, “neither Mark nor I claim to be Monkees experts” does not give you a pass when it comes to the facts either. If I’m reading a book about any topic, I expect the writers to really know what they are talking about, to do as thorough a job of tackling their goal as possible. And there certainly is a lot one could do with a book examining a discography like The Monkees’. There were so many composers, so many musicians, so many influences, so many genres attempted, so many varying circumstances under which the music was made, so much variation in quality. In a sense, The Monkees’ body of work is much riper for analysis than The Beatles’ because it is so all over the place.

How to Have Yourself a Merry Little Psychobabble X-Mas

A real evergreen decked with handmade ornaments. Choruses of “O Little Town of Bethlehem” around a roaring fire. A ham dinner with all the trimmings for you and yours. Midnight mass. These are the things that make up an old-fashioned Christmas. But there aren’t very Psychobabbley.

Here on Psychobabble, old-fashioned does reign supreme, but it ain’t that kind of sweater-vest brand of old-fashioned. It’s the stupendously, tremendously retro brand. Don’t understand what I mean? Well, don’t fear, don’t panic, and don’t throw yourself in front of the next oncoming reindeer-drawn sleigh. My holiday gift to you is the following 24-hour schedule for having a very merry Psychobabble-style X-Mas….with all the groovy trimmings.

December 25

Midnight: Wake up. Ideally you spent the entirety of Christmas Eve sleeping and building up reserves of energy, because the following is—as I’ve already stated—a 24-hour schedule. No sleep ’til Boxing Day. And you’re really going to need that energy because the first task on our holiday schedule is stocking up on the gifts. No lazy shopping in front of your fancy home computer. We do it the old-fashioned way: Midnight Sale at Toys R’ Us.  Be prepared to gouge out the eyeballs of a fellow loving parent for that last Cabbage Patch Kid on the shelf, because in Psychobabble Land, that kind of thing still happens.

1:00 A.M.: Now get all that booty home and wrap it as fast as possible because it is time to deck some fucking halls the Psychobabble way. If you’ve already set up projected LED snowflakes or any other newfangled decoration, tear that shit down and replace it with toxic melted plastic peanut snowmen on the windows, garish blow-molded Santa and reindeer display on the roof, and flaming hot C7 ½ multicolored bulbs around the eaves. Tarp up that brick fireplace and hang your stockings from a vintage cardboard fireplace by Toymaster. Finish it all off with an aluminum tree sprinkled with satin-covered Styrofoam balls and bathed in the artificial glow of a motorized color wheel.  

Review: 'The Rolling Stones On Air'

Until very recently, ABKCO/Universal has kept a pretty tight lid on the Stones’ 1960s vault. This began to change in 2016 with the release of the long anticipated Rolling Stones in Mono box set, and more recently with the unanticipated-by-everyone-but-me deluxe edition of Their Satanic Majesties Request. This new access continues with Rolling Stones On Air, a double disc collection of BBC recordings the guys made from 1963 to 1965.

This is the first taste of real rarities yet as we get to hear renditions of eight songs that never made it onto the Stones’ proper LPs or singles and versions of popular faves with more pronounced differences than a mere shift from the familiar to stereo to the slightly less familiar mono. The chance to hear the Stones’ takes on gems such as Buster Brown’s “Fannie Mae” (which they’d later rip for “their own” “Under Assistant West Coast Promotion Man”), Tommy Tucker’s “High Heel Sneakers”, Bo Diddley’s “Cops and Robbers” and “Crackin’ Up”, Jimmy Reed’s “Ain’t That Lovin’ You Baby”, and a whole mess of Chuck Berry tunes will probably provoke the most purchases. The other stuff may not be quite as valuable, but it’s still very cool to hear things like “Cry to Me” and “I’m Moving On” with greater clarity than the more familiar versions.

Sometimes the greater clarity is not really an asset as it demystifies the murky alchemy of “Satisfaction”, “Mercy Mercy” (complete with way out-front falsetto by, I believe, Bill Wyman, who was no John Entwistle in the falsetto-singing bassist department), and “The Last Time”, but it’s always fun and interesting to hear such well-worn material in any different light. In at least one instance, hearing a lack of difference is actually fascinating. I’ve always marveled at the fluid, effortlessness of Keith Richards’ playing on “Down the Road Apiece” and surmised it was something our sloppy hero could never recreate. The fiery rendition of that number recorded he recorded for the Top Gear program proves me wrong in the most wonderful way.