Word: rocks
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Despite its customized carpeting of a soft-rock score, Immediate Family isn't exactly sentimental. It's a fond diagnosis of sentiment, which director Jonathan Kaplan (Heart Like a Wheel, The Accused) observes with his usual handsome care. Close and Woods, more familiar playing high-powered candidates for psychosis, are laser-precise as the Spectors. They work hard at appearing comfortable in roles without edges. But the Spectors, who set the film's agenda, cede sympathy to Lucy, as the well-to-do in movies inevitably do to the poor-but-spunky...
...fact that "I Will Take You Home" is a song that the Dead couldn't have written 20 years ago is exactly what sets it apart as something truly special. For music fans who have spent the summer listening to some of the other dinosaurs of rock and roll refusing to die before they get old, watching the Dead accept and acknowledge their age with grace and dignity through compositions like this one is a pleasure...
...best thing about L.P.'s is the packaging. They're the size that a piece of music is meant to be. You can hold an album's cover and read the liner notes and lyrics and grasp the full meaning--the full cosmic earth-shaking force that rock 'n roll at its best can be. I know they put all the same information in C.D.'s and cassettes these days, but it's always in the form of some fold-out thingamagig like the pamphlets they hand out on street corners about safe sex or finding Jesus or joining...
...message is the medium, rock 'n roll will become slick, polished and unspirited like the compact discs that play it. It's already happening. I immediately associate the word C.D. with artists like Dire Straits, Steve Winwood and anything on the Windham Hill label--music that sells albums but doesn't inspire much personal devotion because any emotion it peddles is clearly mass manufactured...
...least part of the fun of rock music is being a fan, being a megafanatic, reading fanzines and probing the deep (or, more often, shallow) recesses of your rock star idol's mind. Only L.P.'s are part of that whole experience. Let's face it, Elvis' Sun collection and Buddy Holly's "Peggy Sue" and Jerry Lee Lewis' "Great Balls of Fire" and the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds just had to be playing on records. As it is, music today is getting closer and closer to being embodied in the commodity that can only appear in the forms...