Excuse Me Miss Pope, WHAT Did You Just Say?!

Scandal. The very word evokes the scintillating frenzy of gossip, deceit, sexual promiscuity and betrayal. Luckily, you can find all of this in last week’s season finale. The episode finds us back at Pope & Associates, with the gang recently discovering Billy Chambers, former Chief of Staff to the Vice President, has been the mole attempting to leak Defiance to the public, exposing President Fitz for rigging the Presidential Election. Quinn gets trigger-happy when delivering justice via an electric drill to Chambers when she and Huck suspect he stole the Cytron card containing the details on Defiance; Cyrus has a heart attack, Fitz shows off his “superpowers” to Olivia (good one, Fitz—so risqué), and David Rosen proves to be a competent locksmith. And on top of that, once everything resolves — Defiance cleared David Rosen, who’s made DC District Attorney, Chambers is locked up, and Olivia dons her white cowboy hat, — you’ll get some news that made me, along with the other eight people viewing the finale with me, scream so loud we began to sweat. More than one secret’s out, and we’ll have to wait for Season Three in the fall to see how it’ll all go down.

Kanye West temporarily dropped from the artistic sphere with his engagement to Kim Kardashian, but in this week’s SNL hosted by Ben Affleck, West revealed two new tracks from his upcoming LP Yeezus, “Black Skinhead” and “New Slave,” that without a doubt reestablish his position as one of the leading artists of our generation. “Black Skinhead” was performed over gritty projections of the three-headed beast Cerberus and — perhaps suggesting that he’s been made a beast within racist media — with West grunting, groaning, and even roaring in his raps. “New Slave” is nothing short of artistic brilliance, critiquing the prison industrial complex, structural socio-economic inequality, and an era of new slaves trapped within all-too-familiar and dehumanizing capitalist constraints. Visually arresting, dramatic, socially relevant and brilliantly executed, if these songs are at all verifiable indications of what’s to come of Yeezus (and why wouldn’t they?), we might find ourselves listening to one of the most engaging, controversial, and meaningful albums in recent years.

All Highs Must Come Down on Mad Men

What what, in the butt? After the creative team at Sterling Cooper Draper Price Cutler Gleason and Chaough (phew) injected with a serum comprised of “some vitamin supplements” and a mysterious, undisclosed chemical mash, things quickly take a turn for the worse when Don’s unconscious begins to rehash a history of abuse and he completely loses sight of his work with Chevy. Even worse, we realize Don’s drug-induced psychosis causes him to leave the back door of his apartment open, leaving Sally, Bobby, and Jean vulnerable to a thief named Ida who breaks into their home. “The Crash” finds Don to be more than just a cheating husband, a stalker, and a negligent parent; he’s proving to be an increasingly incompetent worker. The episode also hints at more than just Don’s crash from the vitamin high and his collapse when he finally after days returns from work; the lies and cover-ups Don’s been holding onto his entire life are finally beginning to drive him insane, and perhaps to an untimely death.

Marc Maron and his dad (Judd Hirsch) having it out in the RV on this week’s episode of Maron.

Marc Maron’s comedy — and this new show — are often about real pain, and you get a sense of it in this scene in which he unleashes decades of pent-up anger and resentment. The show is also concerned with masculinity, and how men process that pain and express it to each other. There’s a conversation between Maron and Dennis Leary in the previous episode where Maron’s inability to stick up for himself becomes the basis of Leary’s pointed jabs — calling him a “pussy” repeatedly, then scoffing when Maron refuses to retort. This scene sets a precedent for the fight between Maron and his father; the scene also doesn’t give us the easy out of reconciliation: it’s resolved with either violence or insults. It’s the kind of thing that’s supposed to make you feel better, like a weight has been lifted, when it really hasn’t.

“That Road You’re On…Leads to Nowhere.” Princess Bubblegum Has A Suitor 

Princess Bubblegum has always been an independent, deeply thoughtful, and self-determined person. A scientist and an empiricist, she finds hard evidence to justify facts, and then develops an appropriate strategy to address them. Love and infatuation for Bubblegum are conundrum she can’t quite understand because they can’t be proven scientifically; it’s why she left Finn hanging dry when he professed his love for her season’s back, and why he moved on to Flame Princess. But in this latest episode of Adventure Time, a suitor named Braco pursues PB down a road that leads to a pit of fire, and is then transformed by Peppermint Butler into a deranged, demon-possessed monster. Finding love is hard, and it’s even more difficult maintaining it. But if your princess is a super-genius who can whip you up a robot-clone of herself at a moment’s notice, it doesn’t always have to end in heartache. It could however, end with an unexpected slap from Peppermint Butler.

Manohla Dargis
WRITES FOR: The New York Times
FIND HER AT: The Times; she’s not on Twitter and seldom makes public appearances (but when she does, they’re worth paying attention to).
STYLE: She’s not chief critic at the paper of record for nothing; her prose is sharp, confident, and stimulating.
SAMPLE: “‘Stories We Tell’ has a number of transparent virtues, including its humor and formal design, although its most admirable quality is the deep sense of personal ethics that frames Ms. Polley’s filmmaking choices. Although it touches on intimate points, many recounted by Michael Polley in voice-over, the movie is revelatory rather than exploitative. And while the movie finally proves as much an autobiographical tale as a biographical one, Ms. Polley resists turning it into a flattering self-portrait of a young artist in search of her origins. Instead, building on the interest in narrative form that she expressed in earlier movies like ‘Take This Waltz,’ she explores storytelling itself and the space between a life lived and its different, at times conflicting representations.”

Boards of Canada — ”Reach for the Dead”
However annoying it’s been, you can’t deny the effectiveness of Boards of Canada’s ongoing viral marketing campaign — they’ve gone from being a well-respected but ultimately niche electronic act to one of the year’s most talked-about bands. Having a gimmick never hurts, eh? Anyway, after all the hype comes some actual new music, and it’s… well, it’s Boards of Canada, basically. If you’re a fan, you’ll certainly enjoy this, but it’s hard to imagine it might

Talking Heads and Arthur Russell — “Psycho Killer”
Well, this is fascinating: an alternate version of “Psycho Killer” featuring alternate lyrics, a slightly better attempt at a French accent from David Byrne during the bridge, and a cello part played by the late Arthur Russell. It was apparently released on the b-side to the original single, and has been hard to get hold of ever since — it’s resurfaced in advance of the Movement Festival in Detroit, which will be staging a tribute to Russell as part of its program.

Scout Niblett — “No Scrubs”
As in, yes, the TLC “No Scrubs.” This pleasantly menacing cover appears on Niblett’s new album It’s Up to Emma, which is out now and is most excellent. (She’s always been a dab hand with a cover — you should also check out her awesome version of Althea & Donna’s “Uptown Top Ranking” from a few years back if you’ve not heard it.)

Susanna — ”Death Hanging”
You may know Susanna Wallumrød from her work as Susanna and the Magical Orchestra, who make gorgeous minimalist emotional pop music (and are also responsible for one of the very few worthwhile covers of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”) This solo track explores similar territory, containing lyrics like “Death hanging over you/ Death hanging over me/ Death hanging over us to come/ There’s nothing we can be/ To prevent the forthcoming event/ Of death coming to we” and yet somehow managing to be beautiful and even, gulp, uplifting.

Pharmakon — ”Ache”
Trigger warning: don’t listen to this if you’re feeling fragile. As I’ve mentioned before, Pharmakon’s Abandon is pretty heavy going — but if you’re feeling up to it, this is definitely pretty compelling listening.

Glass Candy — ”Warm in the Winter”
This isn’t strictly new — it’s been around since 2011 — but it’s the lead track on the much-anticipated Italians Do It Better compilation After Dark 2, which was released digitally this week. So fuck it — play it again, Johnny.

Cold Cave — ”Black Boots”
“You give me half of what I need,” complains Wes Eisold in the first verse of this new track, which is nevertheless actually pretty upbeat as far as Cold Cave goes. Maybe Eisold is mellowing a little now that he’s cold and sober.

Melvins — ”Dr Mule”
In which Melvins make a track for this curious compilation celebrating the 10-year anniversary of a car company. The song is exuberantly loud and pleasantly silly. We trust they’re enjoying the cash.

Ikebana — ”Rose”
This Japanese duo’s press release suggests they’re “for fans of Grouper, Mirrorring and Juliana Barwick,” and while I generally regard such “recommended if you like” pitches with deep suspicion, in this case it’s pretty much spot on. Their minimalist-drone-and-ethereal-vocals does indeed fall somewhere in between those artists — not quite as dark as Grouper, not as floatily gorgeous as Barwick — and has a charm all its own.

Inga Copeland — Higher Powers mixtape
And finally, a suitably strange and spacey mixtape from Hype Williams’ Inga Copeland. Enjoy the long weekend!

The time is the late ‘70s. Hoo boy, is it ever the late ‘70s. The Blueberry Hill Disco is the place to be (people are literally dancing to get in); all the macks and hustlers and their ladies gather at the bras-optional discotheque to boogey to the latest tunes and enjoy moves and rhymes of the “Disco Godfather,” Tucker Williams (Rudy Ray Moore). Sure, he’s a poor dancer and a good 20 pounds to bulky for his snug-fitting, cut-down-to-here jumpsuits, but he’s quick to jump into the DJ stand and recite rhyming couplets (occasionally from a script that can be clearly seen on the console) and commanding his patrons to “put your weight on it!”

Alas, there is trouble in paradise. DG’s nephew Bucky (Julius Carry, later of The Last Dragon), is a promising young basketball star, but he’s hooked on PCP — angel dust, or, as it is called by the DG, “aaaaaangel duuuust.” Bucky somehow tears himself away from the endless opening disco scene to get high in the parking lot, and goes plum crazy. His girlfriend rushes to tell Tucker, which leads to this immortal exchange:

When the am-ba-lance arrives, the lab-coated doctor inside (all ambulances have a doctor in them, right? Or was that just in Cannonball Run?) assures Tucker that Bucky will be okay, and invites him to the hospital, so he can tell him all about this angel dust business. So Tucker pays a visit to either Bucky’s hospital or a scene from Reefer Madness; day players overact wildly as Tucker is told the story of a young, PCP-addicted mother who roasted her baby alive, and other delightful tales. (The doc recites most of his dialogue from behind sunglasses, so you can only barely see that he’s reading it off of cue cards.) The Disco Godfather is rousted into action; you see, before he got into the disco-godfathering business, he was a cop, so he goes to visit his old captain, and tells him he’s going to be “investigating this angel-dust phenomenon.” The captain and his terrible toupee tell Tucker to do whatever he likes, as police are wont to do with private citizens investigating the drug underworld. After Tucker leaves, we get this priceless scene:

Two questions: 1) What are the other two things? 2) Really important phone call there, huh?

Once the plot is established, it’s back to the club for more disco dancing. The first fifty minutes or so, with no exaggeration, is comprised of club scenes: people dancing, Tucker rapping, more dancing, people reacting, more dancing, people clapping (usually out of sync with the shoddy soundtrack), and then, just when you are maybe growing tired of all the disco dancing, they break out the big guns—skate dancing.

A little of this stuff goes a long way; one wonders what exactly the thinking was in the editing room for these endless dance scenes (beyond “We paid good money for that location, we’re using every second of footage we shot!”). Saturday Night Fever was a huge hit a few years earlier, yes, but what’s the fun of watching people in a disco for twenty minutes at a time? Did they think moviegoers were going to join in? Or were they banking on people shelling out a few bucks to watch the kind of thing they could see on Soul Train for free?

The dancing thankfully disappears in the film’s second half, which is good news. The bad news is that it is replaced by montages of Tucker cleaning up the city (which allows the already pop-eyed Moore to engage in even more insane, silent movie-style overacting) and breaking out his kung-fu for fight scenes that are deliriously lacking in credibility:

Moore’s clumsy, hilariously fake fights were by now part of his schtick; he’d starred in three low-budget releases (along with the slightly more reputable Monkey Hustle) before Avenging Disco Godfather, playing his signature character, Dolemite, in two of them. Those films mixed Blaxpoitation tropes with broad comedy elements, so there was always at least a sense that Moore was in on the joke, that we were at least partially laughing with him. No such luck this time around — Disco Godfather’s painfully earnest anti-drug message implies that we’re supposed to take this mess seriously.

Nowhere is that intention — and its failure — more evident than in one of the few scenes from which Moore is absent: the “Attack the Wack” rally.

This is a scene that has it all. A big rally set piece, apparently attended by about a dozen people. A major character keeps saying “Wack the Attack” instead of “Attack the Wack.” A woman steps forward to tell her “personal story,” recites a few lines of dialogue with the flatness of a disinterested student reading aloud from a textbook, and doesn’t tell a personal story. And then, presumably distracted by the wailing off-camera police siren, the aforementioned major character totally blows her line (“cases of, of wack attack”), and then breaks character, laughing at her own mistake. And it all stays in. Golden! No need for another take!

And that’s the kind of wildly incompetent filmmaking that renders Avenging Disco Godfather simultaneously a chore and a treat. (It was the first and last screenwriting and directing credit for one “J. Robert Wagoner.”) Shots butt into each other awkwardly. Random lines are delivered directly to camera. Drug-induced fantasies are staged like low-budget church pageants. Entire sequences are woefully underlit, leaving actors literally in the dark for long stretches. (There is an art to lighting actors of color, and it is not on display here.) Audio sync issues are frequent. Close-ups are problematic, with the camera often entirely too close to the aesthetically unappealing Mr. Moore — which renders his two speeds of playing (over the top and way the fuck over the top) even more cringe-worthy. But he does get plenty of chances to strut his questionable stuff, and know this: if you watch this one, you and your friends will spend the next month asking “HOW? AND WHY?” and “WHERE IS BUCKY? AND WHAT HAS HE HAAAAD?” and screaming “PUT YOUR WEIGHT ON IT,” apropos of nothing. Side note: someone counted 24 uses of the latter phrase in the film — so many that it got its own credit, albeit a misspelled one (“Put your weight on it: Original phase by Rudy Ray Moore”).

By the time it was released under its original title Disco Godfather in 1979, the disco craze was ending — an unfortunate turn of events for a film that was dated within approximately four seconds of its completion. Early VHS releases tried to downplay the disco angle, switching the title to Avenging Godfather, so the forty minutes of disco scenes must have come as quite as shock to those rental customers. At some point in the ‘90s, both were combined to create the best-of-both-worlds title Avenging Disco Godfather; this was its moniker when it was first brought to my attention, and that’s how I prefer to think of it, thank you very much. But if you seek it out (and my, do I ever hope you will), they’re back to calling it Disco Godfather. Call it whatever you want; I call it a schlock masterpiece. PUT YOUR WEIGHT ON IT!

Special thanks to fellow bad movie aficionados Mac Welch, Brenda Welch, Amber Malott, and Meridith Jones.

“Years ago I read something in a letter by Chekhov that impressed me. It was a piece of advice to one of his many correspondents, and it went something like this: Friend, you don’t have to write about extraordinary people who accomplish extraordinary and memorable deeds. (Understand I was in college at the time and reading plays about princes and dukes and the overthrow of kingdoms. Quests and the like, large undertakings to establish heroes in their rightful places. Novels with larger-than-life heroes.) But reading what Chekhov had to say in that letter, and in other letters of his as well, and reading his stories, made me see things differently than I had before.” — Interview with The Paris Review, 1983.

The big day is just around the corner, folks! Are you ready? To celebrate our beloved Arrested Development week, we threw together our very own illustrated flowchart to determine which character suits you best. Are you Lucille? Annyong? Tobias? …Frank? Find out after the jump!

It’s been heavily reported that Soderbergh intended, with the bankability of his A-list stars Michael Douglas and Matt Damon, to release the film theatrically. He found that most producers passed on the project, based on a memoir by Liberace’s companion Scott Thurson, because it was “too gay.” It’s a shame that Soderbergh had to move to cable TV; not even HBO’s prestige added much caliber to this production. Despite its two Oscar-winning leading actors, the rest of the cast is filled with C-list TV actors; one doesn’t immediately imagine Dan Aykroyd, Paul Reiser, or Scott Bakula in a serious film, and these three only add to the campy, cheap quality of the production. There’s Debbie Reynolds as Liberace’s mother; unrecognizable under a prosthetic nose and a Polish accent, one imagines why anyone went to the trouble to stunt-cast her (obviously, the angle here is that, like Liberace, Reynolds was a Las Vegas mainstay) when she’d go unnoticed if her name weren’t listed in the credits. Rob Lowe is also along for the ride as Liberace’s plastic surgeon, officially adding “comic squinting” to his repertoire.

While Michael Douglas delivers a terrific Liberace impression, and there are a handful of surprisingly tender and believable moments between Douglas and Damon, it’s the latter who has less to offer in the film. There’s the immediate ridiculous notion that Damon, a 42-year-old actor, is playing a character that ages from 18 to 22 during the course of the film (perhaps if Soderbergh had gotten to make this movie ten years ago, the casting would be a bit more understandable). And it’s hard to take him too seriously while he’s under that laughable, stiff blond wig.

Overall, the couple is a comically stereotypical pair of gay men. There’s the very obvious pop-psychologizing of what brought them together: Scott Thorson is desperate for a parental figure, and Liberace needs a younger male companion to mold into his own image. When the former goes through a variety of plastic surgeries to transform himself into a carbon copy of the latter, the film doesn’t manage to fully encapsulate the destructive nature of the relationship. There’s too much sparkle distracting the viewer from Liberace’s faults (which, of course, is what Liberace did in real life). There’s never the notion that this is indicative of only Liberace’s lifestyle and not the lifestyle of gay men, as Liberace displays all of the worst qualities commonly associated with the gay male community: the obsession with image and youth, the extravagant spending, the promiscuity. That he dies of an AIDS-related illness seems less like biographical truth and more like the old-fashioned cinematic trope that the homosexual monster that preys on the naïve youth must be punished for his sins. To find anything indicative of the broader gay experience in Behind the Candelabra is to look at the Real Housewives franchise for an understanding of femininity.

The film makes the viewer love Liberace, however, up until the point where he ends his relationship with Thorson once he outgrows his boyish charm and is replaced with a younger model. It’s then that Thorson is the hero: he watches with shame and disgust as Liberace shares his love for older women in a sad, public expression of his heterosexuality. Liberace’s worst offense, if the tone of the film is to be believed, is that he refused to come out publicly about his five-year relationship with his lover.

The pervading homophobia at the time that kept performers from coming out is hardly addressed, and that the film features only one openly gay actor (Cheyenne Jackson, who doesn’t even get a line) says something about the current homophobia in the entertainment industry that keeps male actors from coming out. Some critics might consider the sex scenes between Douglas and Damon to be progressive, but the film as a whole is simply is Hollywood business as usual. The gays are campy and fun — that is until they die of AIDS — and the straight men that portray them on film are commended for their bravery. Meanwhile, the gays in Hollywood sit silently, watching as their stories are told for them.

It might not make as much sense as yesterday’s Daft Punk / Soul Train pairing, but damn, Celine Dion’s got some moves. [via Gawker]