Word: ballads
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...BALLAD OF GREGORIO CORTEZ is at once a Western, a tale of the first Hispanic hero, and a portrait of turn-of-the-century America, and on all three of these levels it works impressively well. Equally impressive is the filmmaker's dedication in producing this unusual movie with a $1.3 million budget, a fraction of the cost of the typical Hollywood release...
...what's old, in the case currently under consideration, is very new indeed for Linda Ronstadt, 37, whose lovelorn voice has provided rock 'n' roll with some of the best ballad singing of the decade just past. Now, turning to other decades long past and currently in musical disfavor among her peers, Ronstadt has found a fresh direction. What's New, released last week by Asylum, avoids all the obvious routes. Powered by the celestial arrangements of Nelson Riddle, the album is not a sentimental journey, a dizzy camp-out or a show-biz grandstand play...
...long and sometimes bumpy ride. Her pal J.D. Souther, a pretty fair hand at writing a ballad himself (Prisoner in Disguise), liked to play Frank Sinatra's 1958 album for her, Only the Lonely. She also listened a lot to the extensive collection of vintage records owned by another friend, Author Pete Hamill. But it was not until the summer of 1980, listening one weekend to a Mildred Bailey record ("She sounds very pure and sexy at the same time-a sexy Snow White") at the home of Producer Jerry Wexler, that Ronstadt first hit on the idea...
...jilted lover in Jim Croce's 1972 pop ballad Operator had been trying to reach his old girlfriend last week, he might have heard a polite but unresponsive recorded message: "I'm sorry, but due to a work stoppage, there may be a delay in answering your call. Will you please try again later?" The operators were on strike against AT&T, as were phone installers, maintenance workers and repairmen. In the first nationwide telephone walkout since 1971, some 675,000 members of three unions (Communications Workers of America, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Telecommunications International Union) were...
...changing. The Japanese cinema has not been so lucky as Chrysler in 1983, but there are small stirrings of renaissance. In May, for only the second time since 1954, the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival went to a Japanese film: Shohei Imamura's The Ballad of Narayama, an elemental and unsentimentahzed portrait of Japan's mountain people in the 1880s. The same festival also showcased Nagisa Oshima's Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, a P.O.W. melodrama set in Java in 1942 starring David Bowie and two popular Japanese performers, Singer-Songwriter Ryuichi Sakamoto...