I’m so glad I stumbled across this on YouTube… it’s Fiona Apple and Elvis Costello performing the latter’s great song ‘I Want You’ on a VH1 special from a couple years back.
This clip encapsulates what I love about Fiona Apple as a performer… not just the technically impressive vocals, but the extraordinary passion she puts into every song. She is always, to use an acting term, entirely in the moment. So much so she can be uncomfortable to watch sometimes, in a good way.
Poor Jakob Dylan. While his lineage no doubt gave him a leg up in the music business, it has also prevented him from ever really being appreciated on his own merits. And that’s a shame, because he is a truly great artist.
I’m not sure if Dylan’s first solo outing, Seeing Things, marks the end of The Wallflowers. I hope not, because the band has put out several very strong rock albums that are quite different from this stripped down affair featuring mostly just Dylan and his guitar. To reference an artist they’re often compared to, The Wallflowers’ albums are to Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. what Seeing Things is to Springsteen’s Nebraska.
In appreciation of the wonderful Pixar brand, whose latest sucess, Wall-E, I reviewed in the post below this one, here are my rankings of all nine Pixar films.
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Date: June 29, 2008
Location: Muvico Boynton Beach
One of Pixar’s most admirable qualities is the respect it shows for the intelligence of its audience, adult and child alike. The provocative themes of films from Finding Nemo to Ratatouille are often more resonant than anything you see in live action; the jokes are organic and rarely easy. And remarkably, their respect is rewarded big-time at the box office. Pixar not only creates Disney’s most creative films, but its most lucrative.
On paper, Wall-E looks like the most challenging Pixar film yet. Set (initially) on a depressingly bleak future Earth abandoned by humans and covered in waste, told almost entirely without dialogue, this is not The Little Mermaid. But the title character is such a lovable misfit (reminiscent of E.T. in both his appearance and his curious fumblings) that it might not be such a gamble after all.
Date: June 16, 2008
Location: Muvico Boynton Beach
First, I must say (on behalf of my wife) that Fiona is a terror. While she’ll now sit quietly and enjoy a DVD at home, she has yet to make any experience in the theater anything less than a living hell. And Alex inevitably winds up dealing with her and missing half the movie. In this case, I took over for the last 20 minutes but managed to see the climax from the corner of the theater. It’s a good thing she’s cute, or we might have left her behind one of the WALL-E displays and high-tailed out of there.
