Year 18, Day 106 - 4/16/26 - Movie #5,304
BEFORE: We're still on the path to Mother's Day, I'm just going to tweak things along the way, just to make sure everything works out. I was out all day yesterday, working - yes, the shift started at 7:30 am and I didn't really understand what the presentation was, something about preserving the homes and studios of American artists, but I don't always have to connect with all of the presentations, it's more important that I supervise the screening and the reception and make sure that all goes well. I got home at 8:30 pm, took an hour nap, we watched "America's Culinary Cup" and then I watched "Survivor", because Wednesday is the BIGGEST night in TV right now, and then I had to post yesterday's blog entry and only THEN could I start today's movie. I'm still very behind on my sleep, but I need MORE sleep, not less, to shake this damn cold.
Well, Paul Walter Hauser seems like he's everywhere these days, doesn't he? He's in the "Naked Gun" reboot, he's in the "Press Your Luck" movie, and he's here in the Springsteen bio-pic. I even dropped one movie with him that COULD have gone here, and I did that because it seems to be a comedy about fathers, and it's very link-able, so I've got a good chance of working it back in come June, which would be seasonally appropriate. OK, so there's a chance that I won't be able to do that, but what would be even worse would be watching it HERE and then needing it for linking THERE. Right?
FOLLOW-UP TO: "A Complete Unknown" (Movie #5,051) and "Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band" (Movie #5,074)
THE PLOT: Bruce Springsteen's journey crafting his 1982 album "Nebraska", which emerged as he was recording "Born in the USA" with the E Street Band.
AFTER: Damn it, this one could have made a good Father's Day movie, too - but I just didn't know that going in. There's a bunch of stuff about Bruce's relationship with his father, who was something of an abusive bully when Bruce was a young boy, also his father drank a lot and was one of those old-school tough guys from the 1950's, and well, it was a different time. The majority of those fathers from that generation were raised a certain way, not to be "weak" for, you know, the sake of America, and they worked in factories and they all drank and smoked and beat their wives. I'm generalizing here, but also I think this is true to some extent, how one generation impacts the next and real change and growth takes time. If this movie plus that one that I cut had ended up next to each other in June, I could have worked with that.
It would be impossible to put the story of Springsteen's entire career into a movie, without it being fifteen hours long - geez, that "Road Diary" documentary was over two hours, and that was really just about the concerts. How do you take a forty-year career in music as one of the really really big acts and make that into a two-hour movie? You just can't, so you kind of have to pick a couple of weeks or a few months in the man's life and focus on that, hoping that by looking at the small, you can at least get a sense of the bigger thing. So here they picked a period when Bill had just come off of a big tour promoting "The River", a double-album, and he wanted to rent a house somewhere in New Jersey and just chill for a while, decompress, maybe focus on writing some more songs. But that proves to be problematic because 1 am invariably rolls around, and he can't sleep, so he heads down to the Stone Pony and sits in with whatever band is playing. Sure, that tracks.
Bruce's parents moved to Los Angeles shortly before this - look, I don't understand that either, why would an older couple who lived their whole lives in New Jersey just pack up and retire to L.A., of all places? It doesn't make sense, unless they were trying to live near another one of their kids or something, but you know, I do have a bias against Los Angeles, so there's that. San Diego, sure, I could see moving there, but L.A. is a giant shit-hole, and I'm talking about Hollywood and Beverly Hills. Just me? But then Bruce's father disappears while Bruce is driving around New Jersey feeling all sentimental and moody about places he spent time with his parents, so he has to drop everything and fly to L.A. where he finds his father drinking in a Chinatown bar, and of course this is very triggering, it reminds Bruce of all the times his mother sent him in to some bar or diner to tell his father it was time to come home, knowing this could lead to a beating later on.
Yeah, nice try, the film almost got me with this one - poor Bruce Springsteen, who has to search all of Los Angeles to find the needle in a haystack that was his father. Any guess how many bars there are in the L.A. area? But not all of us have the resources to fly across the country after paying FULL PRICE for a plane ticket bought at the last minute, and he probably stayed at a very nice hotel and he didn't worry about the expenses involved in renting a car, driving across a giant city and checking out a couple hundred bars over the course of two or three days. He's still Bruce Springsteen, he had the money and time to do this, he had the resources that you or I would not have. If my father wandered off somewhere in North Carolina, I'd have to say, "Well, I hope he turns up soon, but maybe he won't..." I mean, OF COURSE we would drive down there to look for him, but doing that would put a big strain on my finances. Just saying.
Really, the whole film is like that, they really tried to get me to feel sorry for Bruce Springsteen - he's coming off the road, he's tired, he just wants to decompress, he wants to write some very personal songs but he can't seem to find the time. BOO-fuckin'-HOO, you're a rock star, this is the life you chose, it's what you wanted. Springsteen's also going through that parental stuff, he's haunted by memories from his childhood, and he's having trouble committing to this woman he met who's the sister of a classmate, has a daughter and lives near Atlantic City or something. Well, Bruce, something's got to give, you can't have a committed relationship and spend time with Faye and her daughter if you have to tour, and write music, and play at the Stone Pony on Sunday nights with Southside Johnny. Also brooding, you have to maintain that very strict brooding schedule, so you know, there's bound to be some conflicts because there are only so many hours in the day.
We were supposed to feel sorry for Bob Dylan in "A Complete Unknown" because he had to balance songwriting and appearing at the Newport Folk Festival with the relationships he was having with TWO women at the same time, only one of which was Joan Baez. Yeah, that film ALMOST got me, too, but again, at the end of the day, he's still mega-star Bob Dylan, he's having wild sex with (at least) two women simultaneously, and he's well on his way to mega-stardom, dozens of hit albums and eventually a Nobel prize. So I really didn't have much sympathy to spare for Dylan - like I'm sorry your life is so complicated right now/then, but that's really on you, you chose this life for yourself, and now you have to follow through and become what you always wanted to be.
Really, we're back on "artist brain" because initially as a music star you just want to perform, you want to write a few songs because they have meaning to you, you want to meet other music stars and jam with them, you want to have a hit record, you want to be on TV or MTV and eventually maybe win some Grammys, have enough money to do whatever you want, and fame and glory and groupies and sex and drugs and fast cars (or motorcycles, whichever). Well, you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, as they say, so maybe your personal life is going to be in the crapper for a while, and maybe you'll need therapy of some kind to sort everything out, but really, that all comes with the territory.
The "artist brain" delusion kicks in once the record company doesn't agree with your vision, and you find yourself going to the mat because only YOU can see the potential in these songs, or in how they're recorded or mixed or edited, and if you're lucky, you've got producers or editors or sound mixers who share your vision, and if you're SUPER lucky, you get proven right and your work has meaning for fans and you form a connection with your fan base and it all works out. But surely there must be instances where music performers were WRONG and nobody else shares their vision for the small, intimate acoustic album or it does NOT connect with the fans and the album doesn't sell and the ride is over. I mean, the highway's jammed with broken heroes, right?
What would have happened if they'd shelved "Nebraska" and the record company moved ahead with "Born in the USA" instead? "Born in the USA" was like the biggest album of 1984-85, so it was probably going to be a hit record no matter what, but who's to say? Maybe if it had come out two years earlier the pro-American Reagan-era zeitgeist would not have been ready for it, and perhaps it would have been a minor success instead of the cultural phenomenon that it was. This is the "Burned Toast" philosophy all over again - we look at a potentially bad thing that happened, Bruce fighting with the record company, Bruce in deep emotional turmoil while releasing a very personal acoustic album, a bad review of "Nebraska" from Rolling Stone, but maybe things worked out better because the toast got burned, and "Born in the USA" got a little extra polish and Courtney Cox was hired to be in one of the music videos, and Springsteen got married, divorced and married again. It seems like maybe things worked themselves out over time, but we'll never know what could (or couldn't) have been.
This is all still very fascinating to me - my favorite part of "A Complete Unknown" was watching the song "Like a Rolling Stone" come together in the studio, and I kind of like the little parts of the studio sessions we see here, but they're not as prominent, and also I just don't know enough about the "Nebraska" album and what that all means. This does kind of work as a primer, dumbing it all down for those of us who only know "Hungry Heart" and "Born to Run" and maybe "Rosalita", but all of this brooding and depression and psycho-babble only gets me so far. I'm going to go take a spin through Springsteen's Greatest Hits album and see if I gain any additional meaning to it all, after watching this film. But really I just have to take the events portrayed in this film and make my ruling based on that.
There's so much more to Bruce Springsteen than can possibly be contained in one film, you could make three or four more films like this and not even come close to what happened to him over forty years plus. There's the early days, the formation of the E Street Band, the "Born to Run" era, the "Born in the USA" superstar era, winning the Oscar for "Streets of Philadelphia", the break-up of the band, the re-formation of the band, playing a Super Bowl, getting into the Rock Hall of Fame, Kennedy Center Honors and then the Broadway years. And then there's all the activism and causes and political views, which have come to a head here in the disastrous Trump-fueled end times. I had a run-in earlier this week with a different rock star, Roger Waters from Pink Floyd, because I worked an event at the theater where he was promoting the re-working of his song "Comfortably Numb" to accompany a short film all about support for Palestine and the displacement of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip. As I usually say, how can you tell when a rock star has a cause they support? Don't worry, they'll let you know.
I was just worried that the event would somehow be targeted by activists on the right, or worse, on the left. But thankfully nobody protested the event, we got Roger Waters in and out with no trouble, except for some over-eager autograph hounds. I cleaned out the green room afterwards and found a few bottles of wine, which could easily have come from the PR people, not Mr. Waters himself. Hey, he's a rock star, really there's nothing I could have found in the green room that would have shocked me. His reputation alone has kind of earned him the right to do whatever he wants (within reason, of course) and if he wants to re-work one of his songs to support a cause, of course, he can do that. I did not talk to the man, of course, really it was just enough to see him in person and hear him perform one song in my place of work, then I had to coordinate with the piano movers to get the baby grand off the stage and into their van without damaging the piano, the stage, or anyone or anything else. Mission accomplished - if Mr. Springsteen wants to come to the theater and support a cause and perform something, I would be happy to help out then, too.
If I had a NITPICK POINT tonight, it would be with the end of the film, where Bruce moves to Los Angeles and his friend Matty drives him there. Wow, that's a long way to go for a friend, but I guess if your friend is a rock star, you make the time and you put in the effort. But Bruce flies to Los Angeles when his father is missing, but when it's his own move, he makes his friend drive him? It's not like he had a moving van full of stuff, but still, that's a week's drive at least, plus there's hotel costs and sightseeing along the way, it must be nice when you can afford the cost and that much of your time. Along the way they stop at a Texas fair, and that sure didn't look like the Texas State Fair that I went to twice. If anything it looked like the stockyards in Fort Worth, BUT it was filmed in New Jersey, on a farm in Harding. To be fair, they never said it was supposed to be the big State Fair outside Dallas, it was meant to be the Archer County Fair, which probably would have been smaller, especially back in 1982. So it's fine, ignore my complaint.
Directed by Scott Cooper (director of "Antlers" and "The Pale Blue Eye")
Also starring Jeremy Allen White (last seen in "The Iron Claw"), Jeremy Strong (last seen in "The Apprentice"), Stephen Graham (last seen in "Venom: The Last Dance"), Odessa Young (last seen in "Assassination Nation"), David Krumholtz (last seen in "Oppenheimer"), Harrison Sloan Gilbertson (ditto), Gaby Hoffmann (last seen in "13"), Grace Gummer (last seen in "The Homesman"), Marc Maron (last seen in "Get a Job"), Matthew Anthony Pellicano Jr., Jayne Houdyshell (last seen in "Little Women" (2019)), Jeff Adler (last seen in "Beautiful Boy"), Chris Jaymes (last seen in "Fathers' Day"), Bartley Booz (last seen in "Babygirl"), Craig Geraghty (last seen in "A Complete Unknown"), Laura Sametz, Vienna Barrus, Vivienne Barrus, Arabella Olivia Clark, T. Ryder Smith (last seen in "Birth"), Clem Cheung (last seen in "The Wizard of Lies"), Stephen Singer (last seen in "The Prince and Me"), Judah Sealy, Johnny Cannizzaro (last seen in "Jersey Boys"), Brian Chase, Charlie Savage, Andrew Fisher, Mike Chiavaro, Pappy Faulkner, Lynn Adrianna Freedman (last seen in "A House of Dynamite"), Bailey Rae Allen, Ryan Bourque, Tom Konkle and the voice of Jimmy Iovine (last seen in "Stevie Van Zandt: Disciple")
with archive footage of Jane Fonda (last seen in "Here"), Mark J. Goodman (last seen in "Pee-Wee as Himself"), Robert Mitchum (last seen in "The Last Tycoon"), Martin Sheen (last seen in "Brats"), Sissy Spacek (last seen in "Music by John Williams").
RATING: 6 out of 10 radio ads for Action Park
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