Show #131 March 21, 2015

Tonight I say Sorry Suzanne for so many weeks away...
 
Sorry Suzanne- The Hollies 30th Anniversary Collection
I'm Sorry- Travoltas Endless Summer 
Carried Away- Sloan Commonwealth 
Bad For You- Hoehn and Duren Blue Orange 
Now We're Through- Richard and the Taxmen Now We're Through 7" 
Land of 1000 Girls- Scruffy The Cat Time Never Forgets: The Anthology 
Laser Show- Fountains Of Wayne Utopia Parkway 
Waiting To Pull The Trigger- Parallax Project I Hate Girls 
^Sorry- Buckcherry 15 
Black Eyed Girl- The DomNicks Super Real 
The Pain Don't Come So Easy- Silver Sun A Lick And A Promise 
Kings and Queens- Allo Darlin' We Come from the Same Place 
Step Down- The Cavedogs Joy Rides for Shut-Ins 
It's True- The Meanies Waiting For You 7" 
*Sorry- The Smithereens 2011 
*Sorry- City Thrills City Thrills EP 
*Sorry- Nerf Herder Nerf Herder 
*Sorry- Greg Kihn Most Fun You Can Have with Your Clothes On: Beserkley Story 
Never Let You Go- Philip John Master The Monster 
Elm Tree Eulogy- Sugar Stems Only Come Out At Night 
Sorry Sorry- Rooney Rooney 
I Just Care About Me- Stiff Little Fingers No Going Back 
Sorry Sorry Sorry- The Scientists The Scientists 
Everything The Same- Richard X. Heyman Cornerstone >Sorry- The Easybeats The Definitive Anthology 
Uniform- The Secrets Titan: It's All Pop! 
Catch My Heart- Sunnyboys Get Some Fun 
Reader's Wife- Billy Karloff And The Extremes Let Your Fingers Do The Talking 
Back To The Shack- Weezer Everything Will Be Alright In The End 
Sorry- Galaxie 500 This Is Our Music

^Power Pop Peak:  #9 Billboard Hot 100 3/8/2008

*SacroSet:  Sorry Songs

>Power Pop Prototype:  1966

This year marked the 18th Sonoma International Film  Festival- it's been in town almost as long as Jaime and I have.  I go every year and always manage to see something great.  For the last five years I've also done filmmaker interviews for SVTV 27, the local cable station.  Bob the Radio/TV Chief Operator e-mails all the producers and directors the Monday of festival week and by Thursday he's got twenty or so interviews scheduled.  That's when I get to work researching the films.  Most have websites where I get background information and watch a trailer, or if its a short, maybe the entire film.  

Each interview is only ten minutes so I come up with three or four questions and we're good to go.  My favorite interviews are the ones that go off script.  Most of the men and women I talk with are working the "festival circuit," living out of suitcases taking their films from town to town doing countless interviews along the way.  Knowing this I pride myself on avoiding boring questions ("what is your film about?" "what did you shoot on?" etc.) which the filmmakers seem to appreciate.  Bob gets a lot of good feedback from them afterwards which is pretty gratifying.  Here's this year's crop:



I'm a big fan of the TV show Justified and I got to interview Rick Gomez who plays AUSA David Vasquez.  He co-wrote and starred in the film The Week with three other Justified cast mates including Joelle Carter who plays Ava Crowder.   It's a prickly romantic comedy and one of Gomez' most endearing co-stars is his dog.  Our family dog Lacey hates/fears me so I was truly jealous of the unabashed love Rick Gomez' dog has for him in The Week.  Rom com is usually not my thing but the film's plot and characters easily transcend the usual pitfalls of the genre.  As if that's not rare enough, BOTH Jaime and I liked The Week- a rarity for a film with a zero body count. 

One of my other SIFF favorites is The House On Pine Streetan outstanding entry in the "haunted pregnancy" sub genre that includes films like Rosemary's Baby, Grace, and Inside but is completely gore-free.  I interviewed Aaron Keeling who co-directed with his twin brother Austin. The eerie, mute 14 year old twin girls in The House On Pine Street inspired my favorite question of the 2015 festival:  "so, twins are creepy...." which isn't really a question at all.  Anyway, I hope Pine Street gets distribution because it is a very smart, well made film.  

My top picks from the festival this year are both foreign films that have yet to secure a theatrical run in the US.  The first is The Connection which gives the Gallic perspective of William Friedkin's 1971 classic The French Connection.  Oscar winner Jean Dujardin (The Artist) plays Pierre Michel, the magistrate prosecuting the French cartel and he is a total boss.  Since it is a French film and they didn't have to allot 30 minutes for car chases you get to see all sides of Michel, including the stress his job puts on his family.  They do the same thing with Gatean Zampa, the film's bad guy.  I also appreciate how The Connection has the look and feel of those great 70's films like The Day of The Jackal and Three Days of The Condor.

The first film I saw at SIFF this year is also my favorite.  A Hard Day is just that.  It reminded me of Scorsese's Afterhours and Demme's Something Wild, yet unlike the hapless klutzes in those films, we learn early on that Gun-su, the main character in A Hard Day, is a dick.  So rather than making me anxious, as Afterhours and Something Wild do (even though I like both films) watching it rain down crap on Gun-su in A Hard Day is very entertaining.  He deserves everything he gets right up until the film introduces us to somebody even worse.  Black comedy is hard to do, but A Hard Day has it in spades.  

Click the links below to stream/download this weeks show:
Hour 1
Hour 2