p e n g u i n d e v i l

As one might imagine, even though I haven’t been watching too many movies of late, my lack of attention to the penguindevil has led to having a backlog of movies. Which, of course, means multiple instances of brevity, so here’s a start.

I went and saw, at a theater no less, Willie Nelson’s 4th of July Celebration. Now I don’t know what you’re thinking, in fact I don’t know what I was thinking (okay, a friend asked me to go, and I figured, what the hell). So what is it? Well, it is a bare-bones documentary of a concert 30 years ago where Willie Nelson and a cadre of guest stars get drunker all night long on stage and spend the evening talking, playing music and all of that in front of a big mob of long-haired Texan country folk. The fun is mainly in watching the musicians interact, but there are some entertaining musical bits too. Willie doesn’t seem to be the focus, instead Leon Russell spends pretty much the whole night wandering around the stage with his shirt open and a beer in his hand… He is the centerpiece of this treasure of mid-era (as in, between the great classics of olde and the great crap of new) of country music. Musically, I would say that Waylon Jennings is the most prominent person there, which seems sensible as he is Waylon Jennings, but mind you, I’ve really never heard any music by any of these people before so what the hell do I know. The other artists come and go as a repeating, revolving door of musicians. And really, that sums it up. If you want to watch a bunch of long haired country stars of the 70’s get drunk and put on a little musical festival on stage, then this is for you! The high point is unquestionably the performance of Doug Kershaw. Sure, a mild mannered name, but the guy is some crazy fiddlin’ blend of (the crazy world of) Arthur Brown and Pete Townsend. He put on what is, bar none, the craziest and most incredible musical performance I’ve ever seen. I swear the guy was going to explode right on stage!

And in my new series of weekly beer & movie socials, we actually got around to watching a movie on one of them. We watched High Tension (I’ll give up on the Haute this time). Sadly, I don’t feel I have much to say about it. Which would seem justified as this is the third time that I’ve watched it since I started this blog. But looking back to the two previous mentions of it, I didn’t say much about it then either. Well, what to say? If you actually haven’t seen it yet, then it is a great looking, tense, action and gore filled French slasher film. The brief paragraph I gave it in i possess a stellar convertor… still pretty much sums up my feelings about it.