Demons Dance Alone Demons Dance Alone [Directed by the Residents] ...
The Residents have never done things normally. Their music, their videos and their live shows aren't normal. Their collective persona and history are about as far from normal as you can get. So it was no surprise to notice that something odd was afoot during the Demons Dance Alone tour. Those who caught the Brooklyn shows might recall that along with the singers, musicians and a dancing, trumpet-playing demon, there was someone else onstage?a figure who just sort of wandered around during the proceedings.
Turns out he was filming the show, and the result is this new DVD. Par for the course, it's unlike any other performance film you're likely to see.
Snippets of past tours have been available for some time, but apart from Disfigured Night (a one-off performance filmed for German television), this is the first full-length Residents tour performance ever released. As they've done with so many other things, they've taken something as commonplace as "the concert film" and turned it into something darkly magical.
For one thing, being filmed onstage, you never get a sense of how the audience saw the show. There are no static wide shots of the stage. It's mostly done in close-up, the camera roving about from performer to performer?sometimes it even takes a moment to recognize what you're looking at. That, together with the occasionally harsh lighting and hazy editing, gives the show an unsettling, hallucinatory quality?more a musical fever dream than a concert film.
The two singers don simple, anguished masks, the musicians (also masked) are rarely seen at all apart from their hands, and the ever-present demon, in his veined, skin-tight body suit, bears a striking resemblance to a young Richard Widmark.
The 2002 album the show was based on was a beautiful and sad collection of songs about loss and desire, and that sense of melancholy is carried over here. Apart from "The Golden Goat," a rockin' and nasty non-album cut, the music is rich and melodic, the songs mostly about people whose lives haven't gone quite the way they'd have liked.
Underscoring this concept, the show's three acts are marked by different versions of a song with the refrain, "Life would be wonderful?" The third version is perhaps most touching, as the lead vocalist (in a paisley camouflage tux and what appears to be a stocking cap turban) speaks quite personally about meeting James Brown, the loss of their former collaborator Snakefinger, the frustration of sometimes feeling like a bunch of aging hippies, and what it might take to get the band on the charts. It's half-cynical, half-heartbreaking.
For more than 30 years, the Residents have been innovators, turning ideas, forms and technologies on their heads. With this release, they've done it yet again.
?Jim Knipfel
Still, by 1960, Sinatra realized Presley's draw and invited him onto the final episode of his tv special The Frank Sinatra Show, paying him $125,000, the highest fee any tv guest received at that time. Elvis, returning from his Army duty, is greeted by manic shrieking from the female contingent of the studio audience. On hand are Rat Pack members Joey Bishop and Sammy Davis Jr. who, along with Sinatra, make fun of the Elvis phenomenon and joke that Sinatra really wished that Presley stayed in the military, a joke that probably cuts close to the truth. There isn't a whole lot of visible chemistry when the two appear together, Sinatra singing the Elvis hit "Love Me Tender" and Presley tackling Sinatra's signature "Witchcraft" in a quick medley. But it is a gas to watch Presley snap his fingers, shake his shoulders and do his best Sinatra impression right next to the man.
The DVD, which features the entire, uncut show, also includes an absurd dancing Chipmunk Mania tribute, an Oriental wedding dance, lots of shtick and dancing from Bishop and Davis Jr., as well as guest Peter Lawford and the original Timex promotional segments that show a porpoise swimming and leaping with a waterproof Timex watch in its mouth. But all of this is downtime in between the appearances by Sinatra and Presley, both of whom could command a stage like few others before or since. Sinatra delivers a knockout version of "Witchcraft" on his own?no camera angles, props or fancy instrumentation?just him belting out the tune with style. And Presley takes the show into the next era of music on "Stuck on You" with his countrified rockabilly rhythms and slick vocal harmonies?quite a contrast to the Rat Pack's swing sound.
Despite the less-than-great picture quality, it's an odd and somewhat dazzling sight, these two greats on the same stage making nice.
?Adam Bregman
There's more to Tati than obvious tableaux. M. Hulot's Holiday is primarily a comedy of manners in which Tati's screen persona?the hapless M. Hulot?joins middle-class families at a seaside resort. He is participant and witness in a series of idiosyncratic rituals?on the beach, in the dining room, on the roadside. The film appears to be a relay of loosely related skits and stunts, but they gradually build to a bemused social canvas. Tati captures an assortment of types and temperaments; the sharp black-and-white imagery somehow feels open-hearted. Plot is nothing next to Tati's absorbed fascination with how society works. The DVD comes with Rene Clement's 1936 short Soigne ton gauche, where a younger Tati developed his style and identifiable image. Like Chaplin's move from stage to screen, Tati learned to adapt his theatrical technique into movement and blocking that took on greater meaning on screen. He turned mime?clear-cut physical movement and simplified composition?into an abstract form of commentary.
The 1958 Mon Oncle, Tati's biggest U.S. success, is his most pointed piece of social observation. He takes the mechanized lifestyles of the post-WWII boom as his subject, similar to the way Chaplin took on industrialization in Modern Times. But this is a full-color, balloon-bright parody. Tati not only makes fun of plastic but also the way social habits and suburban ritual threaten to turn life artificial. The characters take comical infatuation with new products, with maintaining the image of class through new appliances. This 50s version of crazy future now looks quaint, but it still makes Tati's point to satirize modernization through things and through the always delirious fanaticism over newness. Mon Oncle anticipates Tati's later, large-scale opus Playtime. This one's easier to take, though in the end, less sublime. But both Mon Oncle and M. Hulot's Holiday are good places for the uninitiated to start. Mon Oncle includes the 1947 short L'Ecole des facteurs, which features the French cycling phenomenon seen in The Triplets of Belleville. More proof that Tati isn't just about formal rigor, but slapstick anthropology.
?Armond White