Beast

Anyone who has ever watched even a few minutes of stand-up comedy knows that guys are different than girls. If I have learned anything from the shallow insights of the countless cut-rate comics I have seen on TV over the years, it is this: girls like talking about their feelings, romantic dinners by candle light and shopping for shoes. Guys like sex, football, and fart jokes. There are variations on this theme of course, but that basically sums it up.

By extension, we also know that guys and girls like different kinds of movies. Hollywood producers certainly know this, and their market research has shown them that this universal truth can also be a guiding principle for film making. Males in the coveted 18-34 age bracket need to see explosions, kung-fu and boobs in their movies if they are going to throw the full weight of their demographic behind a film on opening weekend. Girls, on the other hand, need something that falls into either the romantic comedy or sappy melodrama categories to get them into theaters.

Needless to say, this presents a problem when guys and girls go to see a movie together - a pretty common occurrence, not to mention a classic American dating ritual. Sure, every once in a while you get a movie that everyone can agree on, but how many times can you go see Slumdog Millionaire? With most movies skewing toward one sex or the other, a compromise inevitably happens at the box office; either a couple sees the movie he wants (Crank 2) or the movie she wants (Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants) or a movie that nobody really wants to see (Tyler Perry’s Madea Goes to Jail).

Since this is one of the greatest problems plaguing the world today, I decided to put my worn out, over-caffeinated brain to work on a solution. The result is a simple formula that can be applied to all date movies. If enough directors decide to incorporate it into their film making we might just eliminate the need for the romantic comedy genre all together.

The format basically works like a double bill compressed into one conventional length movie. One half of the movie would be for the guys, the other half for the girls. For an example of how this would work, I’ll apply the formula to the movie Felon starring Stephen Dorf and Val Kilmer. In the movie, Stephen Dorf plays a husband and father who is wrongfully sent to prison. He gets strong-armed into covering for the Aryan Brotherhood and ends up in the most hardcore part of the prison, where he shares a cell with a serial killer (Val Kilmer) by night and fights gangbangers in the yard by day.

For those of you keeping score at home, that’s prison + gangs + lots of fighting = guy movie. In order to turn that into one of our new unisex date movies, you would do two things. First, compress all of the fighting, prison gangs and weird Val Kilmer scenes into a trimmed down 45 minute section of the movie. This part is for all the dudes in the audience. Once they get their fill of blood and tattoos, you move onto the second half of the movie which is - you guessed it - for the ladies.

In this half of the movie, we find Stephen Dorf home from prison and working to put his life back in order. He is thrilled to spend time with his son and he finally buys his wife that dress she’s always wanted. He still carries the psychological scars of his time in prison, which initially makes him cold and distant. But eventually, he and his wife work through it, slowly rebuilding their life and their love together. They come through this ordeal exhausted, but happy to find that their relationship is even stronger for the effort. And then maybe Stephen Dorf gets in one last fist fight with a rude neighbor or whatever, just so everybody has something to cheer for right at the end.

In truth, I don’t usually go in for this sort of populism, but every now and then it works. Besides the afore mentioned unisex date movie, ice cream parlors and Jane’s Addiction, a good example of the something-for-everyone approach is Canadian band Beast. The duo has only been together for about a year, but they’ve locked in on a sound that works like a musical survey of the last 20 years. With touches of trip hop, hip hop, punk-funk and guitar rock, Beast plays what singer Betty Bonifassi calls “trip rock.” Bonifassi sing-raps her lyrical indictments of satan and other evil spirits over a booming drumscape that swells with gospel choirs and vicious synthesizers.

The end result may not represent a finely honed singular vision, but you can play it any party, club or biker BBQ and not piss anyone off. It stands to reason that both guys and girls will like the band as well. Pending any new advances in the date movie industry, you might just be better off taking your date to a Beast concert instead.

MP3: ‘Mr. Hurricane’

MP3: ‘Satan’


Canada, Montreal, blues, electronica, indie, post-rock | 23.04.2009 19:54 | No Comments

We Are Wolves

I don’t know if it’s the proliferation of cheap recording technology or the fact that Guitar Center is always having crazy, once-in-a-lifetime blow out sales, but for some reason everybody and their mother thinks they should be in a band these days. This is all well and good when the wanna-be Coldplays and the would-be Limp Bizkits keep their ill-fated dreams locked up in a practice studio somewhere. That way the public’s ears are safe and none of us ever have to be subjected to their self delusion and extra shitty music.

The thing is, most of these bands insist on playing live. (The rest of them send me CDs). By way of either luck or tenacity they end up opening for bands that are much better than them. Allow me to address these cut rate opening bands for a moment: Do not do this. I understand you have dreams of rock stardom, but it is simply not in the cards for you. When your lame-ass, no talent band gets up on stage and sucks at full volume, it only makes you look bad. And it makes the band you’re opening for look that much better.

Case in point: I went to see We Are Wolves last night at Cafe Du Nord. There were two opening bands. One of them dressed like a group of drug-addled Burning Man cast-offs and played psychedelic electro dance rock. They were ok. At the very least they got the early crowd dancing and they seemed to be either really enjoying themselves or really high on peyote.

It was the band that came on next that was the problem. They were god awful. The drummer was off time, the guitar player just made noise, and the singer couldn’t sing - although from the look on his face you would have thought he was a finalist on American Idol. By the time they lurched into their second song the whole audience had escaped to the bar in the front room, leaving behind three people near the stage that were clearly relatives.

Why keep playing at that point? If you can’t even make music mediocre enough for people to ignore, if your music literally repels them, why not just give up? Do you think a surgeon would keep cutting people open if everyone he touched died on the operating table? Do you think a race car driver would keep getting behind the wheel if his cars blew up as soon as he crossed the starting line? No, they would not. So why do you insist on playing music when it is so clearly not meant to be?

Really the only acceptable answer is this: The incredibly terrible band whose name I didn’t even bother to look up was there just to make We Are Wolves sound awesome by contrast. If that’s the case, then congratulations on a job well done. When WAW hit the stage and began cranking out their trademark brand of electro-punk, it was like drinking a cool milkshake after 45 minutes of hot shit sandwiches. The crowd came streaming back into the room, twice as large as it was before. Everybody danced and drank. WAW didn’t waste any time with mumbled banter in between songs. They just turned their amps up and rocked like it was meant to be.

MP3: ‘Fight And Kiss’

MP3: ‘Coconut 155′

Montreal, dance punk, electro rock, indie | 2.10.2008 12:40 | No Comments