If you’re a kid who grew up in the 1970s — and still like rock and roll — Saturday Morning Cartoons’ Greatest Hits
is a must-buy album. Many of the artists on the album weren’t well-known when this first hit the streets, although pretty much all of them deserve to be.
“Saturday Morning Cartoons’ Greatest Hits” benefits by having artists of the right generation (mostly) playing the covers. Everything from the amazing Liz Phair’s cover of the “Banana Splits” theme song to Matthew Sweet’s “Scooby Doo, Where Are You” to Sumblime’s “Hong Kong Phooey” to the Ramones’ “Spider-Man” are incredibly fun tunes that both evoke the classic cartoons and are representative of the musicians’ work.
I picked this album up the first day it was in stores, having heard choice cuts from it on Washington, DC’s WHFS all week prior, and it remains one of my favorite albums to this day, years later.
I only picked Higher Learning up during the Liz Phair drought waiting (seemingly forever!) for her “whitechocolatespaceegg” album. Her Grammy-nominated song, “Don’t Have Time,” really isn’t one of her better tunes, but it is a standout on this soundtrack … which should say something about the overall quality here.
This isn’t a bad album, per se, but it’s ultimately very ordinary.
While I found “Where is Joe Merchant” to be trying too hard, the earlier “Tales from Margaritaville” is one of my favorite books by doing just the opposite: The stories here — often little more than vignettes — pour out as easily as Jimmy’s songs, which isn’t surprising, since many of them are expanded versions of songs off his album “Off to see the Lizard.”
Taken together, we get an extremely good vision of the Gulf Coast and the lives of the characters in Jimmy’s musical world, where a big heart is worth more than a fancy car or the nicest clothes, and where good music and good food and good company are more important than who one is in the community or how successful they are.
The book only falters when it leaves the more realistic settings behind for the more fantastic, something that threatens to swamp the novel he wrote as a follow-up to this work, “Where is Joe Merchant.”
No, this isn’t brain surgery, and Jimmy didn’t win the Pulitzer for fiction for this work, but it’s more-than-pleasant summer reading and a worthy companion to his music.
I’d heard nothing but bad things about “The Beach,” from people who’d apparently come to it expecting “Titanic II.” It’s certainly not that, but it’s also not a terrible movie. The problem is that it’s the “Trainspotting” director giving us a story that’s an odd hybrid of “Six Nights, Seven Days” and “Trainspotting” — with a contempt for ordinary travelers that even the movie eventually acknowledges if fatuous — that veers off unexpectedly to become “Lord of the Flies” or “Apocalypse Now.”
Which isn’t to say that there’s nothing good in the movie. The setting is breathtaking, and many of the performances — by a who’s who of indie film regulars — are extremely well-done. Even many of the story and directorial conceits work well, most notably a videogame sequence late in the film.
But ultimately, the movie’s lack of focus makes for a frustrating experience. There are flashes of a great film in here, although too often they’re flashes borrowed from other, better movies.
According to the ratings, I’m the only one watching Rock Star: INXS. And that’s a shame, since as the band winnows down the candidates, it really seems like they have a shot at getting a new lead singer who could credibly take over for the late Michael Hutchence.
(On the other hand, I guess this saves us from Rock Star: Velvet Revolver next year.)
That said, COME ON, GUYS! Daphna Dove had charisma and stage presence to burn, and if she didn’t give her best performance this week, she didn’t deserve to be in the bottom three, much less get cut. Hopefully some indie label will give her a ring and she’ll get an album deal of her own. (It’s funny, but it was rare that I felt that way about also-rans on American Idol, other than Bo Bice.)
Rock Star Go Home lets people bet on who’s next to get kicked from the show. Of course, I was surprised to see Daphna in the bottom three, so maybe there’s not a lot of chance of me winning here.
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