Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Avanti Popolo!


If the Revolution thread has shown us anything, it's that any revolution is interpreted by its participants in as many different ways as we've found musical interpretations of the theme. I don't expect this selection to have us all rising up together to throw off the fascist yoke of the, um, community moderators but (watch Novecento - six hours long, no time to explain here...) if that Donald Sutherland wanders past my house after I've listened to this lot, he might just get a pitchfork up his jacksy:

Bandiera Rossa
Swamp Dogg
Delta Man (Where I'm Coming From)
Arrested Development
Steel Pulse
Curtis Mayfield
Can you hear the drums?
The Three Degrees
Albert Ayler
Jimmy James and the Vagabonds
Bone Thugs-n-Harmony

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

Excellent work, May1366. I'd not heard the Steel Pulse for decades, though I think my brother still has the vinyl; the homegrown reggae stands the test of time really really well.

Northern Soul, especially with baritone sax. always makes me a bit sad that I can't do back-flips; my second-greatest regret after not being able to imitate accents.

Cheers.

Shoey said...

Think that Donald deserves the pitchfork treatment just for giving us Keifer.

goneforeign said...

May: I didn't recognise the title Novecento, here's it's called 1900, I saw it many years ago you prompted me to add it to my Netflix list, I'll see it again.

May1366 said...

goneforeign - yeah, to be honest, I know it as 1900 as well, but quite like the cineaste posing of using the Italian title. Also, there was a shorter cut (I mean, it's long by most standards but still cut to a pretty brutal degree) released in the States, obviously under the 1900 title, and carrying an R-17 certificate. Given that this would probably rob us of Sutherland Senior's astonishing rococo extremes of stomach-churning violence, an act of self-mutiliatory defiance that makes Resevoir Dogs look like Clifford The Big Red Dog, Burt Lancaster's staff development training in the cowshed, Robert De Niro and Gerard Depardieu's auditions as human ski-poles and key but naked childhood scenes between the two protagonists, the result was probably a mess. So we'd probably be looking to an uncut, Italian-language, subtitled Novecento as the best available version.

The version I have on DVD seems not to have been cut but it is dubbed, which is a little off-putting, not least because you have some characters dubbed by the great actors playing them (De Niro, Depardiu, Sutherland, Lancaster, Sterling Hayden) and others presumably by the voice artists who regularly dubbed European films in those days and rendered them fairly comical. And while Depardieu in subtitled Italian brought tears to my eyes when I first saw the film and he directly addressed the audience near the end, Depardieu in English rattled off the lines impressively but the emotion didn't quite strike home. Or maybe that's because of a change in my perspective in the however many years since I first saw it - similar politics but different expectations.

Blimpy said...

"jacksy" is such an excellent word.

EJD said...

Happy birhtday May!

saneshane said...

Hey May Happy Birthday...

(I went to Oxfam and purchased some records to celebrate - or I might be trying to cheer myself up!)

Have a great day.

May1366 said...

Thanks for the wishes guys - ejay, hope last night's spanking from the Mancs isn't still smarting. Just focus on having Arshavin available in next year's CL, provided he's not stropped off somewhere else by then.

goneforeign said...

May: 1900- agreed on all counts, i hesitated before adding it to my Netflix for all those reasons, mainly, I thought it'll be an edited and shortened and mutilated version, but we shall see.
If you like long Italian films,have you seen "Best of Youth"? A wonderful 6+ hour film Google it.

goneforeign said...

A ps. The all-time worst ever dubbing of a film was 'Black Orpheus', a 1959 film by Marcel Camus, set in Rio's carnival. Beautiful music track with Luis Bonfa and Antonio Carlos Jobim. It won all the awards and then for the US market they dubbed it, atrociously, it made it unwatchable.
Find the undubbed version!
It was remade in 1999 titled Orfue with the music track by Caetano Veloso.

ejaydee said...

Thanks for the support May, I really thought we'd win a cup this year.

Also, the concept of live sound is alien to the Italian film industry, which is why some films are unnecessarily dubbed.

goneforeign said...

Well they're all dubbed but most in Italian.