An exclusive
preview of the new
'28 Days' movie . . .
. . . from a
Loudon Wainwright point of view - of course ;-))
by Tim
Mooney of the Loudon
Wainwright Mailing List
(Posted 15th May 2000)
Hey Loudites!
I finally went to see "28
Days" today. Came straight home and popped open a
beer.
Good movie, but perhaps not their
intended effect. I haven't seen any reports on the specifics
of Loudon's apprearances/performances in the movie, so I though
I would fill in the blanks.
 Heaven and Mud - Just the opening lines heard from this song
(I think Loudon was sitting on a chair playing): "We were
up in Heaven, but now we're in the mud..." Then a
bunch of dialogue over the verse, though you could still kind
of hear the song playing underneath. The camera then comes
back to Loudon for the final moments of the verse "... for
twenty eight boring days..." Unfortunately the bit
that goes "We were high on life..." was drowned out
by the dialogue, so the audience may have been bewildered as
to just what they would be doing for those twenty eight days,
and perhaps wondering about the extra syllable thrown into the
line.
The Drinking
Song - This was the closest
to a Loudon performance in the show. This time he entered from
behind a tree, singing "Drunk men stumble, drunk men fall"
...(through) "quite often they will urinate outdoors."
It was very much a "Something About Mary" moment, which
may have been what the director had in mind, though there was
nothing else quite like this in the movie, so stylistically it
seemed like a bit of a mistake.
The camera cut away, following
other action, though the music continued to play. At one
point there was an evident jump in the music to a later point
in the song, and the only parts that I can recall hearing include
"...a drunk will crawl around on all fours" and "Puke
it stinks and so it seems, that drunkards go to great extremes,
but there has yet to be a perfectly straight line..." The
latter played under a shot of Sandra Bullock, who had succumbed
to her Jones weaving her way among the rehab center.
Hmm. Think I'll have another
beer.
White Winos - No shot of Loudon as he sang this
song; it just played under the action. It was a quiet moment
in the show. "You could clearly hear "Mother liked
her white wine," and the several repeats of how she would
"get the glow," and a bit of the punch line of how
he would "switch to beer," but not the classic line
about how he was glad she stuck to white.
I'd Rather
Be Dreaming - A great
poignant moment when one of the characters (not Sandra Bullock)
had OD'd, Loudon faded in underneath with "I'd rather be
dreaming than living, cause living's just too hard to do ..."
From there, the song jumped around, and it was impossible to
get a sense of context. To anyone who knows the song it
had to have sounded all jumbled.
Soap Opera
Stingers - One part of
the action finds the rehabbers staging a soap opera parody, and
Loudon shows up playing an electronic keyboard, accenting dramatic
moments with the typical stingers that underlie the soaps. Here
was perhaps the most attention we managed to see paid to the
Loudon visage, as he did several exquisitely dry takes over the
ongoing action. Speaking of which, there were only a handful
of such moments with Loudon in which he was NOT performing a
song. There were a few brief takes of Loudon sitting in
the therapeutic circle, in which he has the mildest of reactions
to what was going on, but even in his most understated, Loudon's
reactions were dead on.
Joy to the
World - At the end of
her court-directed rehab, the general cast of characters shows
up at the exit to the rehab center to sing goodbye to Sandra
Bullock, led by Loudon, playing the guitar and singing "Jeremiah
was a bullfrog!" I think frogs had some symbolic relevance
here, but for the life of me I can't remember what it was. If
nothing else, it was intended to symbolize an improvement on
the endless chorus of "You've got a friend" that the
patients were singing. And yet, this summed up the nature
of the show for me. While Loudon stood down center singing
the song, the verse was filmed in an over-the-shoulder shot from
behind Sandra Bullock, effectively blocking any view of Loudon
with Sandy's head, while the dozen other cast members were featured
nicely singing along.
Lean on Me - This was NOT a Loudon song. The
filmmakers saved it for the final song of the show, where so
many of the songs that eventually get released as singles showed
up. It was a very well produced song, sung very well ...
by Tom Jones.
Timmy
For more info - http://www.spe.sony.com/movies/28days |
