Review: The Mule

Posted on March 7, 2019 by philipbrasor

For reasons that are easier to understand than explain, Clint Eastwood is probably considered the most important American director by the Japanese film cognoscenti. Even his minor works, the ones that obviously play to the rafters, get listed on annual top ten lists as a matter of course. The Mule will certainly be no exception, despite the fact that its ambiguous take on the War On Drugs clashes starkly with the Japanese attitude toward illicit drugs in general. That’s not necessarily a demerit when it comes to cinematic depictions, but locals might take away conclusions that weren’t intended.

For one thing, in spite of the overhanging themes of impending mortality and moral compasses gone awry, The Mule is something of a human comedy. Based sketchily on a true story, the plot follows the late career fortunes of an Illinois flower wholesaler named Earl Stone (Eastwood) whose business success contrasts mightily with his failures as a husband and father—yeah, another one of those Eastwood characters. Eastwood’s peculiarly effective style of exposition works exceptionally well when it shows how Stone’s prosperity is quickly undermined at the turn of the century by the ascent of internet commerce, which eventually makes his work obsolete. By the 20-minute mark Stone is scraping by on Social Security and dodging creditors. But he’s got a nice truck and at one point is approached by a Mexican gentleman who offers him a transport job. All he has to do is “drive.” Having been a free spirit all his life, Stone is hep to the offer, but it isn’t immediately clear that he will be carrying drugs from Mexico into the U.S. for the deadly Sinaloa cartel.

Though Eastwood and his screenwriter, Nick Schenk, don’t obviate the evil behind the operation, they let Stone off the hook continually, and often try the viewer’s patience with nonsense that seems to have no purpose except to prove that old coots like Earl can still enjoy life, even with ill-gotten gains. There is not one, but two scenes of Stone enjoying sex in motel rooms with much younger women. And Stone’s road trips are presented as something out of a Kerouac fantasia. The nominal bad guys are humanized rather than demonized, but you get the feeling that’s only so that Stone can make jokes with them and come across as less of a social leech. Like many an Eastwood character, Stone starts out at least borderline racist and later warms to his Mexican colleagues, even if some of them have obviously murdered without compunction. Andy Garcia, as the kingpin who can’t wait to meet this senior citizen who’s doing such great work—and being paid well for it—is such a softie his proxy killings feel like misdemeanors.

And while the movie develops in substance when it introduces two DEA agents (Bradley Cooper, Michael Pena) who finally figure Stone out, the script, perhaps at Eastwood’s insistence, still dips fitfully into the family values trough that undergird every one of the director’s films. It’s as predictable as the Eastwood smirk, and twice as annoying. The Mule has so much potential that you wonder if it lost about twenty minutes of what constitutes unnecessary plotlines it might not have been a minor masterpiece along the lines of Gran Torino. As it stands, it’s simply Trouble With the Curve but with more geezer moxie.

Opens March 8 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Marunouchi Picadilly (03-3201-2881), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Shinjuku Picadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

The Mule home page in Japanese.

photo (c) 2018 Warner Bros.

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Media Mix, March 3, 2019

Posted on March 3, 2019 by philipbrasor

Kozo Nagata

Here’s this week’s Media Mix, which is about suspicions among certain media outlets that NHK’s planned restructuring has something to do with bowing to government pressure. As pointed out in the column, NHK has always been more or less in the government’s pocket but that certain producers and divisions nevertheless make shows that are valuable in terms of information, including information that is not flattering to the authorities. However, this information comes mainly from the Production Division and not the News Division. The latter is mostly involved in daily news and breaking news, and NHK has always seemed over-cautious in both areas if not downright solicitous to those in power. Much of the reason for this caution is the nature of news reporting in Japan, which is only more pronounced at NHK. Most broadcast reporters in Japan are recruited straight out of university and trained to be reporters by the media outlets that hire them, meaning they aren’t necessarily driven to be journalists. It has more to do with corporate culture than press culture: Reporters for the major TV stations, including NHK, are constantly undergoing on-the-job training, which is why their copy tends toward the drab, their on-air skills are lacking, and their understanding of the topic under consideration is shallow.

One bit of intelligence that came up in our research for the column that I wasn’t aware of is that at NHK reporters have more power than directors. During the cited discussion on the web channel Democracy Times, former NHK director Kozo Nagata explained that this power balance is unique to NHK, and he thinks it’s central to the “overwork” problem that the restructuring is meant to solve. To me, however, this explains why NHK daily news is often worse than it is on commercial stations, where directors (in the U.S. we would call them producers) come up with story ideas and then find a reporter to do the coverage. At NHK, the process is the other way around, and while that sounds natural—reporters, being on the front lines of journalism, should be digging up their own stories—given the lack of professional depth manifested by Japanese broadcast reporters, the stories pursued on NHK aren’t going to get much further than press releases and news conferences. Sources will be the most obvious ones, specifically those who have something to gain by talking to reporters. In that regard, sucking up to the government is not a matter of wanting to please the authorities, but is simply what happens when you don’t have the talent or the will to get beyond the official version of a story.

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Review: Green Book

Posted on March 2, 2019 by philipbrasor

A lot of critics are calling this road movie about a black musician touring the South in 1962 with a white driver the most embarrassing Best Picture Oscar winner since Crash. Such critics take the Academy Awards too seriously, and for what it’s worth, Green Book has a certain savvy charm that has nothing to do with its racial friendship theme. If anything, Mahershala Ali’s gay, classically trained pianist and Viggo Mortensen’s almost-made-guy club bouncer start out as cartoons and mostly remain that way, even as they both warm to each other’s pecadillos over the course of their journey. It’s not likely that anyone will take it at face value, though, it’s supposed to be based on a true story.

It’s this conceit that makes Green Book a bit of a grind. Dr. Don Shirley (Ali), we know now according to his family, did not develop the kind of palsy-walsy relationship with Frank “Tony Lip” Vallelonga (Mortensen) that the movie claims and which is structured almost like a classic romantic comedy. Knowing this bit of intelligence makes the story that much more intolerable, because that’s the whole point of the conflict. Director Peter Farrelly, known more for his off-color humor, is rather cavalier about this conflict, and if he had made it a straightforward comedy the movie might have had less pushback because comedies are taken less seriously by default. He knows we know about the Jim Crow South and trusts our basic decency to give him a pass for exaggerating the Shirley-Tony relationship. The title refers to a travel guide for black motorists that indicate where they can stay and eat without having to suffer white people’s scorn over their presence in the lower half of the country. Tony is hired to not only drive Dr. Shirley, but also act as his bodyguard, a task he has to carry out more than once. If Tony is a lunk who overcomes his native racism while carrying out his work, Dr. Shirley is a stuffy epicure who learns a little tolerance himself for the plight of dumb working stiffs like Tony. In fact, the movie’s most egregious calculation is making Tony more appealing than Dr. Shirley in the beginning, a point that clearly shows who the target audience is, and it sure ain’t Spike Lee.

The episodes that prove the movie’s opinion of itself are rote and predictable—Dr. Shirley draws good-sized audiences but can’t eat in the white person’s sections of the venues he plays. His patrons are polite but doctrinnaire about their exclusionary culture, and at first Tony, as a Northerner, is more amused than concerned, so it’s Farrelly’s and Mortensen’s job to flip his reaction. When Dr. Shirley’s homosexuality is addressed, however, you get the feeling Farrelly can’t get out of the scene soon enough. Even the movie seems to be conflicted over its moral choices.

And whatever you want to say about Mortensen’s and Ali’s own choices, they are very entertaining and deserve credit for making the movie not only watchable but enjoyable. It’s not a bad movie at all, just terribly misdirected in terms of what its makers are trying to prove.

Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024), Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Shibuya (050-6868-5002).

Green Book home page in Japanese.

photo (c) 2018 Universal Studios and Storyteller Distribution Co., LLC

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Review: Memoir of War

Posted on February 24, 2019 by philipbrasor

Based on Marguerite Duras’s 1985 novel, La douleur, Emmanuel Finkiel’s film removes the fictive conceit and presents the story as a fairly straightforward memoir of Duras’s experience in occupied Paris during World War II. It’s easy to understand why Duras boosted the book as a novel and not a memoir: removed from their circumstance by forty years, her memories of that time had been clouded by doubts and second thoughts brought on by trauma and repression, especially given the dramatic impetus of the so-called plot. Duras kept diaries, but since she claimed she had no recollection of actually writing things down their context is virtually meaningless except as exegesis.

Finkiel is bold in transferring the narrative with a stark immediacy that is almost documentary-like in its urge to be taken seriously as fact. Melanie Thierry plays the young Duras as a moody, almost enervated shell of a girl whose only ambition is to get her husband, Robert (Emmanual Bourdieu), out of detention. Robert was arrested by the Nazis as part of the Resistance. It’s often difficult to square her dogged determination to secure Robert’s release with her nagging doubt about whether it’s possible—or, for that matter, with her nagging doubt as to whether Robert is even alive any more.

But the movie is not entirely naturalistic. Duras’s split persona is rendered as such by the fledgling writer observing herself, which Finkiel, in turn, renders visually by doubling her image. This disembodiment serves to make it easier for Duras to sleep with the French Gestapo agent Rabier (Benoit Magimel) in order to glean information about Robert. But even here she seems to be operating on inertia. To say her heart isn’t in it is to deny her any agency in her own survival, which may be the most compelling aspect of her story. She makes it through the war without as much as a glance from the Germans, and afterwards her complicity is not remarked upon by the nationalist forces who punished anyone with a hint of collaboration. She certainly doesn’t feel inclined to join in the celebration. In a sense, she’s almost a non-person, which may explain why her memoir-novel seems written by a third person and makes such a riveting film. Robert, in effect, becomes a red herring: Maybe he doesn’t even exist. Was that stillborn child we see in flashbacks a figment of her fertile imagination? Though the truth is out there, Finkiel would prefer we make up our own, and for once it’s a fitting challenge to the viewer.

In French. Now playing in Tokyo at Bunkamura Le Cinema (03-3477-9264).

Memoir of War home page in Japanese.

photo (c) 2017 Les Films du Poisson-CineFrance-France 3 Cinema-Versus Production-Need Productions

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Review: If Beale Street Could Talk

Posted on February 22, 2019 by philipbrasor

Reportedly, Barry Jenkins wanted to do an adaptation of James Baldwin’s 1974 novel before he directed Moonlight, and the consensus seems to be that the only reason he got a green light to tackle Baldwin’s tricky story of tender love in the jaws of gross injustice was his previous movie’s Best Picture Oscar. By most measures, If Beale Street Could Talk is the superior film, though it likely won’t gain the same amount of attention; which isn’t to say both films are significantly different in terms of style and mood. Jenkins might be too tasteful, in fact, but then so was Baldwin despite the undercurrents of anger that course through his writing. There are moments of such incandescent beauty in Jenkins’ film that you almost can’t believe it’s about a man being railroaded for the crime of rape.

As with Moonlight, Jenkins wisely does not attempt to make his characters “understandable” or sympathetic to white viewers. Tish (KiKi Layne) and Fonny (Stephan James) are sweethearts of an almost classic sort. They’ve known each other since childhood, growing up in Harlem in the 1960s, and entering their 20s they fall in love and Tish becomes pregnant, news that is not met with the usual gnashing of teeth on the part of their parents, who, despite their dynastic differences and a brief moment of shocking violence, celebrate the event with a bottle of cognac. The joy is short-lived, as Fonny, an aspiring sculptor who seems to be making a name for himself—he’s already got his own loft—is arrested for raping a Puerto Rican woman by a racist policeman who has it in for Fonny. The movie is bifurcated between attempts by Tish and the two families to hire a lawyer and convince the accuser, who is conveniently back in Puerto Rico, to change her story; and, in fitful flashback, the story of Tish and Fonny’s love affair. Jenkins is nothing if not careful, describing both developments with a slow, close attention to detail that brings out the story’s tragic elements without making too much of them. Tish and Fonny’s love is delicate and deep, while the case against Fonny is, in contrast, immovable, like a huge boulder lodged in a crevice.

Jenkins’ signature shot is the hazy long take, which renders many scenes as dreams, or, perhaps, because they’re usually narrated by Tish, filtered through her memory. A recollection of a meeting that Fonny has with an old friend, which took place supposedly at the same time as the rape and thus would offer Fonny an alibi if his friend weren’t an ex-con and thus automatically rejected by the D.A., is uncharacteristically vivid, the conversation notably naturalistic, the mood relaxed, and thus seems separated from Tish somehow. If Jenkins fails to bring the expected tension to Fonny’s legal problems, it only accentuates the notion that black people, both then and still now, know that once the white man has them where they want them, there’s little they can do. If Beale Street could talk—a reference to New Orleans, not Harlem—it would likely scream in frustration, but Baldwin and Jenkins would rather we see how love still has the power to make the worst of matters survivable.

Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter (050-6868-5001), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063).

If Beale Street Could Talk home page in Japanese.

photo (c) 2018 Annapurna Pictures, LLC

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Media Mix, Feb. 17, 2019

Posted on February 17, 2019 by philipbrasor

Yoshihide Suga

Here’s this week’s Media Mix about two instances that appear to demonstrate government attempts to limit journalistic activities. In the case of Tokyo Shimbun reporter Isoko Mochizuki’s dogged questioning style during press conferences at the prime minister’s residence, I mention that many of her colleagues in the press club resent this style because they think it makes their job more difficult, presumably because she uses up time that others might use to ask questions, or, generally speaking, by putting Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga in a foul mood. Make of that what you will, but the point is that no one else, except Asahi Shimbun’s Akira Minami, who is now on sabbatical working with the newspaper workers union, follows up their questions when Suga equivocates, which is all the time. A related point I didn’t mention in the column was Mochizuki’s motives. On a recent installment of his talk show at Videonews.com, freelance journalist Tetsuo Jimbo mentioned that some press club reporters grumble that Mochizuki asks questions about topics that she doesn’t intend to write about, thus suggesting that they think her badgering is more or less a gratuitous gesture meant to draw attention to herself. Be that as it may, since no one else is asking such penetrating questions it can hardly be considered gratuitous. I say badger away.

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Review: The Favourite

Posted on February 15, 2019 by philipbrasor

The recent death of Albert Finney revived interest in the movie that first made him a star in the U.S. (he was already a sensation in the U.K. thanks to Karel Reisz). Tom Jones attempted to obliterate the stuffy British costume drama with its focus on the low stakes bawdiness that was prevalent in 18th century literature but theretofore ignored by the movies. Whatever its worth as art, it paved the way for a more nuanced, naturalistic take on the historical record. The Favourite is a natural outcome of that legacy, and in the hands of provocateur Yorgos Lanthimos it goes beyond earthy effrontery. Like Lanthimos’s other works, it is sublimely ridiculous, and thanks to a witty script (not written by Lanthimos, but rather by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara) that ridiculousness for once has a firm narrative footing.

Supposedly based on some kind of truth, The Favourite invades the court of Queen Anne (Olivia Colman), who, reigning over England in the early 18th century, has problems with affairs of state that she isn’t expected to understand, mainly because she’s a woman, but also because of her wayward personality as a result of more than a dozen miscarriages. Constitutionally unwell and in possession of a temperament that’s wildly unstable, she relies on her lady-in-waiting and part-time lover, Lady Sarah (Rachel Weisz), who not only arranges her toilet and keeps her on as even a keel as possible, but mostly dictates affairs of state, including an impending war with the French. Into this cozy nest steps Sarah’s cousin, Abigail (Emma Stone), whose own fortunes have been squandered by her father’s gambling habits. She comes to Kensington Palace a “fallen woman” to take employment with the household staff under Sarah’s direction, and the first thing she does when leaving the stage carriage is fall into a deep puddle of muck.

There’s nowhere to go but up, and the rest of the film is essentially the story of Abigail’s resentment-fueled rise in the palace, propelled by her competitive nature, prodded ever upwards in reaction to Sarah’s haughty attitude. As a caustic romantic triangle, all of whose points are female, the story necessarily trades in certain stereotypes associated with cats and claws and using feminine wiles to get ahead. Abigail eventually worms her way into the queeen’s good graces after sussing out Sarah’s Achilles Heel, which is that nobody seems to know about their affair, but rather than expose it, she studies its ramifications and finds ways to make it work for her. First, she marries up by luring the scheming, self-important Robert Harley (Nicholas Hoult), who fancies himself a statesman of some discernment, into her plan without his knowing. Buoyed in society by the match, she gains access to the queen and quickly steals her affections, but, of course, Sarah is not one to mess with.

What’s refreshing about The Favourite is that its cynical take on romantic manipulation for social betterment is balanced with a close study of historical exigencies that deepens not only the theme but the comedy, as well. The dialogue is almost too deliciously baroque for its own good, but it’s used in situations, like the one where Abigail pleasures Robert in the most hilariously distracted way, that really take advantage of Lanthimos’s talent for weirdness. Henry Fielding, and Albert Finney, would no doubt approve.

Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Shibuya Cine Quinto (03-3477-5905), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

The Favourite home page in Japanese.

photo (c) 2018 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation

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Review: Aquaman

Posted on February 11, 2019 by philipbrasor

To anyone who filters the DC Comics cinematic universe through the overwhelming success of the brand’s rival, Marvel Studios, Aquaman the movie is best seen as a reply to the Thor series, which is where Marvel pointedly plays up the most ridiculous attributes of superhero blockbusters. Aquaman the character has always fit into a dodgy slot in the realm of comic fantasy as a guy who is half Atlantean-half American and talks to fish. And while there’s plenty to laugh at in the movie, its interminable length and earnest attempt to stuff as much “incident” into its two-and-a-half-hour running time leaches all the humor out of it.

The main difficulty faced by director James Wan is not so much the visual challenge of making underwater action scenes feel credible—for what it’s worth, they look perfectly OK—but rather squaring the epic prerogatives of an aquatic empire with the relatively real-world concerns of modern-day landlubbers. Aquaman/Arthur Curry (Jason Momoa) is the son of Queen Atlanna (Nicole Kidman), who has escaped the royal confines of her birthright, and the human lighthouse keeper Tom Curry (Temuera Morrison), who discovers her half-alive and washed up on the rocks below his keep. Atlanna eventually returns to Atlanta and Arthur grows up a bastard, but the main reason he’s bullied as a child is his affinity for fish and all things marine; and for most of its first 30 minutes the film makes for a compelling origin story. It’s when Arthur has to confront his fishier half that things become problematic plot-wise and thematically.

For one thing, the script relies too heavily on the viewer’s understanding of the mythology of Antlantis, which feels almost made up on the spot. Then there’s the surfeit of characters whose rationalization of good-vs.-bad becomes baffling very quickly. When Mera (Amber Heard) arrives at the lighthouse to beg him to claim his birthright from his evil half-brother, Orm (Patrick Wilson), the stakes seem clear, but then the writers throw in lots of complicated iconography, including a trench where exiles are punished, an extraneous super-villain named Black Manta (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), a trusty royal advisor (Willem Dafoe), and a plot by Orm and his father, King Nereus (Dolph Lundgren) to make war on the human race. It’s this last bit of story that brings Aquaman into his own, but getting there proves to be a confusing, incoherent journey. The battles are vivid and ingeniously staged, but when things calm down the compositions feel overly stylized, like those tacky environmental paintings that were so popular in the 80s. Momoa, it should be pointed out, takes the ridiculousness of his character in stride, and the movie would have been funnier if it weren’t so damned busy.

Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Marunouchi Picadilly (03-3201-2881), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Shinjuku Picadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Shibuya Toei (03-5467-5773), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Aquaman home page in Japanese.

photo (c) 2018 Warner Bros. Ent. and DC Comics

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Review: First Man

Posted on February 7, 2019 by philipbrasor

Damien Chazelle’s third feature is an oddly circumspect blockbuster. Though this biopic of Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong fits neatly into the big-budget hero stylings of The Right Stuff and Apollo 13, its focus on a character who was basically unknowable makes for a striking contrast in tone. The action set pieces are as good as space movies get, while the expository drama has a purposeful flatness that often feels inert. And while Ryan Gosling doesn’t look anything like Armstrong, his patented lack of affect sort of prepares you for the Enigma of Neil. In those rare instances where some sort of meaning peaks through the blank facade, the viewer feels they’ve learned something monumental.

In the domestic scenes, what works usually feels accidental, but that may be due to Chazelle’s command of his mise en scene. Though we’ve been bombarded by any number of films set in the early 1960s lately, First Man feels more comfortably situated in the age, not so much because of its detailed production design but rather its leisurely pacing. Life in these United States, mostly Houston and the Midwest, where Armstrong lived before moving to Texas to join the Apollo program, is strictly regimented, which is perfect for Armstrong’s meticulous sensibility. So when his very young daughter dies of a brain tumor, the news feels telegraphed, stressing its inevitability and the idea that Neil and his wife, Janet (Claire Foy), have more than enough time to process their grief despite Neil’s work obligations. Janet herself is an unabashed full-time homemaker in a time and culture when such a calling was normalized to the point of a fetish, but the script by Josh Singer avoids the cliches of the over-worried astronaut wife by making Janet’s anxiety an almost tactile experience. She’s the red hot emotion-burner next to Neil’s cold-as-ice egghead, but you can see how that difference makes their marriage work, though it could only work in this particular milieu.

The movie also nails the peculiar occupational environment of the space program, which is portrayed as being neither macho nor super competitive but rather a job still in the process of achieving definition. Neil spends quite a few evenings popping beers with the other astronauts, who tend to be more emotionally demonstrative. If he fits into this boys club it’s because he understands before anyone else that teamwork is the soul of the program. Comradeship is not romantic wish fulfillment but a life-or-death requirement for these men. And when the movie finally enters into the Apollo 11 mission, you appreciate not just Armstrong’s stoical, over-achiever’s mein, but also his love for his fellow workers. The quasi-religious overtones of the visuals—the dusky browns reflecting off the surfaces of the dinky capsule interior, the deep blue-greys of the powdery dirt under Armstrong’s feet as he steps on the moon’s surface and delivers his famous line—bring home the real feeling of accomplishment, obviating most of the ethical struggle Armstrong felt with the cost of an enterprise that many believed wasn’t worth it. Chazelle himself often seems to wonder if it was worth it himself, beyond its obvious utility as a further means of proving himself to be Spielberg’s most natural heir.

Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Shinuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Shinjuku Picadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Toho Cinemas Shibuya (050-6868-5002), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

First Man home page in Japanese.

photo (c) 2018 Universal Studios

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The Cramps 1998

Posted on February 5, 2019 by philipbrasor

In commemoration of the 10th anniversary of the death of Lux Interior, here is a review I wrote for the Japan Times of a Cramps concert that took place some time in 1998 at Club Citta in Kawasaki, Japan. 

The decision to have Japan’s most famous amateur rock guitarist, Guitar Wolf, open for the Cramps at their Tokyo area shows is understandable, since both artists channel early American rock and stake their professional reputations on outrageous stage antics.

Stage antics can’t always hide musical incompetence, and in Guitar Wolf’s case they aren’t meant to. I have his album. I’ve even listened to it twice. But I didn’t recognize a thing he played at the June 13 show at Kawasaki Club Citta. What I heard was thirty minutes of the same three chords augmented by the standard vocabulary of rock epithets and the kind of stage moves perfected by everyone who was ever a Ramone. 

But the clincher, the move that sealed Guitar Wolf’s fate as last year’s weird Japanese rock act, was when he pulled a guy out of the audience, strapped his guitar on him, and prompted him to continue the song already in progress. The kid didn’t know how to play and since the song didn’t suffer for it we in the audience are supposed to realize that it isn’t the music but the spirit that matters, which is, of course, a load of crap. I’ve seen him do this before and I know he does it at every concert. Spirit has nothing to do with it.

So Guitar Wolf was a poor choice for an opening act, since his example served as a reminder that the Cramps, in addition to plugging the same glam-trash rockabilly and Nuggets-era psychedelia for more than two decades, have done the depraved sex thing on stage thousands of times. On the back of their latest album, “Big Beat From Badsville,” there is a warning to “proceed with caution” because the band “that dares to be different” has come up with “more music of anti-social significance designed with the fiendish in mind.” No matter how ironically you put it, insisting that you’re still shocking after all these years will strike some as a bit desperate-sounding.

After all, lead singer Lux Interior and guitarist Poison Ivy Rorschach, who formed the band during New York’s peak punk period in the mid-seventies, have reached that age when physical decadence goes beyond being an aesthetic statement and becomes an everyday fact of life. 

Ivy, dressed in a striped one-piece bathing suit, large-mesh black stockings, and vinyl stiletto boots, still looked pretty good, but Lux exuded every one of his forty-odd years and then some. Set below dyed black hair, his pale complexion and deep set eyes gave him the appearance of the ghouls he often sings about. On top of that there’s the lean, abused body and the grossed-out sissy convulsions that come in waves as he sings. If he ever quits the Cramps he can probably make a career as the Emcee in touring productions of “Cabaret.”

The rhythm section of fey blonde bassist Slim Chance and notably normal-looking drummer Harry Drumdini maintained a reliable throb throughout the ninety-minute performance, while Ivy set the tone with her standard battery of I-IV-V chord progressions and familiar 50s & 60s riffs (Duane Eddy twang, Link Wray rumble, Standells freak-out).

Lux took the stage in a long, black coat, gag sunglasses (the ones with eyes painted on the lenses), and sheer black gloves. The band moved swiftly from “Cramp Stomp” to “Love Me” to “Garbageman” before Lux finally threw off the coat to reveal a shiny skin-tight black ensemble. It looked pretty hot, and I don’t mean style-wise.

Once the coat was gone, the music picked up. “Creature from the Black Leather Lagoon” and “God Monster” provided a one-two punch of Lux’s favorite reference — B-grade monster movies (the new album is dedicated to the late Cleveland TV schlockmeister Ghouldini). This was followed by “It Thing Hard-On,” one of the better songs from “Badsville,” which describes perfectly the singer’s ideal badass rocker. “Well, the doctor pulled me out and smacked me in the can/Wiped me off, took a look and said ‘It’s a man’.”

On the raunchy and slippery “Goo Goo Muck,” and the even less inhibited “Hot Pearl Snatch,” Lux prostrated himself before the temple of Poison Ivy, while the guitarist rewarded his attentions with icy indifference, an attitude that never changed the whole evening. “The city is a jungle and I’m a beast,” he screamed, but rather than sounding like a statement of purpose the humiliating posture revealed it as an admission of unbearable sexual frustration.

Even when effecting youthful cool on “Teenage Werewolf” (which Drumdini played with oversized femurs) and “Sunglasses After Dark,” Lux came off as an adolescent in a state of denial about his miserable sexual prospects. The low-down style that the band values has less to do with the demimonde chic of the New York Dolls — the band that first inspired them to form a group — than it does with the juvenile garbage culture of Mad Magazine and “Big Daddy” Ed Roth. 

For those who had come to rock out, however, the Cramps’ thematic carryings-on didn’t make up for what was in the end a monotonous musical attack. There was a knot of fans in front of the stage who boogied the whole show, but everyone else held back and looked merely curious. During the 10-minute destructo encore of the Trashmen classic “Surfin’ Bird,” the crowd perked up, but it had nothing to do with the song. 

Like Guitar Wolf’s audience participation gambit, Lux’s violent post-set behavior has become an obligatory signature flourish. After swallowing the microphone whole, climbing the speaker stacks and jumping off, rolling around in agony, and then pulverizing the mike stand, Lux peeled off his costume and exposed the sad source of his creative inspiration. Most people had to strain to see above the heads in front of them, a few laughed, and everyone forgot about the music.

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