Vautrin

Took a quick trip over to YT and the print or whatever you want to call it of Christmas Holiday is very good. Will watch it when I have some time. I don't mind watching movies on YT if it is likely they won't be showing up anywhere else. My monitor died a few months back and I got a new, larger one. That definitely helped.

It would take a lot of heavy lifting and squeezing to make this a noir for me. Yes, some of the visuals are rather noirish, but if one shot one of those 1960s Doris Day virgin sex comedies in that style it still wouldn't be a noir. Yes Billy Gray was good. FMC just showed The Day the Earth Stood Still a few days ago and he was good in that too. I didn't think his character was all that bad, just a regular kid who was super ****** that his dog had been killed.

Happy Birthday Keith. I remember reading a few reviews of Keith's autobiography when it came out. It seems Keith was a bit of a bookworm, which is a good thing. Glad you kicked that heroin habit. Um, you really did kick that heroin habit, right?

Roxy Music had their only Number One U.K. hit with their cover of Lennon's Jealous Guy, which they released as a tribute shortly after Lennon's death. As usual it went nowhere in the U.S., though I'm not sure it was even released here. Whistle along with Bryan.

Yes, there are lots of old Rolling Stones jokes. I like the Get Off My Lawn one. Then there are Is Keith Richards still alive, he doesn't look like it. Poor guy. I have several Fleetwood Mac albums and always enjoyed their music. Never really got into the Stevie Nicks solo stuff except what I heard on the radio.

No biggie. It was 45 years ago. And leaving Roxy Music allowed Eno to make all those great albums of the 1970s.

Not to go all anale, but Eno played on the first two RM albums. And on a minor point, RM went through bassists like Tap went through drummers, though minus the fatalities. One more time if you please.

Maybe that was an unintended marketing ploy. See the Stones because they may not be around much longer. I still like the Stones, though I haven't bought a Rolling Stones' album in decades.

Yes, a good bit of it was growing up on a farm and getting a dog to take care of. Nothing wrong with that. It had its noirish moments, but to me it just didn't go full blast. Entertaining enough, but sort of neither fish nor fowl.

If you want to look at it one way, a lot of film genres are, in a simplistic manner, a collection of cliches which movie goers learn about through experience watching them--women's pictures, prison pictures, great white hunter movies, etc. Noir is a little harder to pin down, but there are certain cliches that are usually there. This doesn't have to be a bad thing since many directors rise about the simple cliches of a genre. While the main plot of TAAS is centered on the stranger there is a lot of other stuff going on that isn't really related. A lot of mixing though the focus is on the main point. And it's a story without any villains. I didn't think the kid was that bad. He was greatly disappointed that his dog was killed and he went overboard in his reaction, but I can understand that. He was just a kid. There was one close up where he looks like he is possessed, but all's well that ends well. I saw a couple of episdoes of Father Knows Best today, so maybe I'm prejudiced. Not a bad movie, but I just don't see it as a noir.

I didn't find Talk About a Stranger very noir. It took me a while to remember that I had seen it some time back. I find it to be more of a combo piece--a bit of a gothic haunted house flick, the old stranger in town movie, the small town/gossip film, mom and dad at home thing and a boy and his dog show. I was also reminded of parts of The Invaders from Mars movie. Put those all together and you have a fairly entertaining movie, but not one that seemed film noir for the most part.

I remember people joking about the Rolling Stones doing concerts in their wheelchairs and that was some years ago. They're not there.....yet.

Sure there were girls in that school. They all just happened to be in the maternity ward at the time.

When a group has been around this long it's hard to keep up with all the changes, especially if one is not a huge fan. I get occasional reminders from Song Kick about upcoming concerts and it's still surprising how many old rock groups are still out there doing shows. The mid 1970s and on version of FM is among the "younger" bands. I just got a reminder that Jethro Tull will be on tour again, though Ian Anderson nixed any idea of more Tull a number of years ago. Whatever.

I'm sure there are a lot of Nicks' lookalikes at concerts, understandably so. But maybe they would still do pretty well if she was not there for whatever reason.

I guess it all matters how many FM fans are more Stevie Nicks fans. It would be interesting to see. For me it's hard to get too excited about a group that's been together (in this configuration) for over forty years.

I noticed a few years ago that the L.L. Bean catalog had a snowball making kit with a little plastic scoop and other things that would produce the perfect snowball. I had to LOL when I first saw it. It hasn't been in the recent catalogs so maybe kids can still make snowballs on their own.

It has been a long time. 2018 is the fiftieth anniversary of their first album. Peter Frame draws detailed "family trees" of rock groups. He has 10 versions of FM from 1967 to 1975 when the most popular lineup, with the addition of Buckingham and Nicks, came into being. Since then it has been fairly stable. While I'm a fan I'm not really a mega fan so all the back and forth about the Buckingham situation is of minor interest. These things happen fairly often in all branches of show biz.

Of course there was the pre-Buckingham/Nicks Fleetwood Mac of the late 1960s and early 1970s. They were fairly successful in England, much less so in the U.S.

My mistake. I didn't read it carefully enough plus my mind is a little scrambled by the one and only Christmas trip I made to the mall today.

Hey, I actually recognize them all. Whoever winds up in the Hall, my favorites would be Roxy Music and Radiohead.

Ain't that a kick in the head.

Pete Shelley, 63, vocalist and guitarist for the punk rock band the Buzzcocks, died last week. I never got into the Buzzcocks, sticking mostly with the Sex Pistols and the Clash. It seems that after their initial breakup they got back together a number of times like a lot of groups do. Pete Shelley R.I.P. Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity, Until Death tramples it to fragments.

Bringing a little bit of light to the gritty glum world of noir.

There is somewhat of a resemblance, though it doesn't really jump out at me. More than one art critic has speculated that it was meant to look like Jesus Christ or at least Jesus as Western artists saw him.