Ok I am non stop on the
move for good info on
simple fun life. Today, I
come across a very
excellent article that discusses simple fun life from a different
light. Today’s fun post is titled Life .
Life
The long-awaited autobiography of the guitarist, songwriter, singer, and founding member of the Rolling Stones. Ladies and gentlemen: Keith Richards.
With The Rolling Stones, Keith Richards created the songs that roused the world, and he lived the original rock and roll life.
Now, at last, the man himself tells his story of life in the crossfire hurricane. Listening obsessively to Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters records, learning guitar and forming a band with Mick Jagger and Brian J
List Price: $ 16.99
Price:
Ok I am non stop on the
move for good info on
simple fun life. Today, I
come across a very
excellent article that discusses simple fun life from a different
light. Today’s fun post is titled Life .
Life
Four years in the making, filmed over 3000 days, across every continentand in every habitat, Life is the latest wildlife blockbuster from the BBC’s award-winning Natural History Unit, the producers of Planet Earth and The Blue Planet. Packed with excitement, revelation, entertainment, and stunning screen firsts, this breathtaking ten-part epic presents 130incredible stories from the frontiers of the natural world. Discover theglorious variety of life onEarth and the spectacular and extraordina
List Price: $ 59.98
Price:
Ok I am non stop on the
move for good info on
simple fun life. Today, I
come across a very
excellent article that discusses simple fun life from a different
light. Today’s fun post is titled Life .
Life
- New
LIFE – DVD MovieMartin Lawrence and Eddie Murphy play it surprisingly straight in this film by director Ted Demme. Though there are laughs to be had, this is a story about perseverance in the face of a life of disappointment (yet the film was sold as a prison comedy). But Stir Crazy this isn’t. Rather, Lawrence and Murphy play a couple of New Yorkers making a moonshine run from New York to Mississippi during the Prohibition who find themselves framed for murder and sentenced for life to a prison
List Price: $ 9.99
Price:
Find More Life Products
You thought he’d remember nothing? Well, he remembers all of it. ‘Life’ is absolutely fascinating.,
Keith Richards. Right, he’s the Rolling Stone you notice when Mick Jagger’s not shaking and singing. The one who kicked his heroin addiction by having all his blood transfused in Switzerland. Who was — for ten years in a row — chosen by a music magazine as the rocker “most likely to die.” Whose solution to spilling a bit of his father’s ashes was to grab a straw and snort. Whose most recent revelation is about the size of Mick’s equipment.
Yeah, that’s the guy. Wild man. Broken tooth, skull ring, earring, kohl eyes — he’s Cpt. Jack Sparrow’s father, lurching though life as if it’s a pirate movie, ready to unsheathe his knife for any reason, or none. Got some blow, some smack, a case of Jack Daniels? Having a party? Dial Keith.
When you get a $7 million advance for your memoirs, there’s no such thing as a “bad” image. But the thing about Keith Richards is, he wants to tell the truth. Like: he didn’t have his blood transfused. Like: he didn’t take heroin for pleasure or to nod out, but so he could tamp his energy down enough to work. Like: he and Jagger may not be friends but they’re definitely brothers — and if you criticize Mick to him, he’ll slit your throat.
Why does Keith want to undercut his legend?
Because he has much better stories to tell.
And in the 547-page memoir he wrote with James Fox, he serves them up like his guitar riffs — in your face, nasty, confrontational, rich, smart, and, in the end, unforgettable.
Start with the childhood. Keith grew up in a gray, down-and-out suburb of London. School: “I hated it. I’d spend the whole day wondering how to get home without taking a beating.” By his teens, he’d figured the system out: “There’s bigger bullies than just bullies. There’s ‘them,’ the authorities.” He adopts “a criminal mind.” His school record reflects this: “‘He has maintained a low standard’ was the six-word summary of my 1959 school report, suggesting, correctly, that I had put some effort into the enterprise.”
His mother is his savior. She likes music, and is a “master twiddler” of the knobs on the radio. When he’s 15, she spends ten quid she doesn’t have to buy her only child a guitar. (No spoilers here, but much later in the book, you’re going to fight tears when he plays a certain song for her.)
The rest of the book? Keith Richards and a guitar — and what a love story: “Music was a far bigger drug than smack. I could kick smack; I couldn’t quit music. One note leads to another, and you never know what’s going to come next, and you don’t want to. It’s like walking on a beautiful tightrope.”
What music interests him? Oh, come on: the music of the dispossessed — black Chicago blues. Mick Jagger, who lives a few blocks away and is prosperous enough to actually buy a few records, also loves this music. To say they bond is to understate: “We both knew we were in a process of learning, and it was something you wanted to learn and it was ten times better than school.”
The Rolling Stones form. The casting is quite funny: “Bill Wyman arrived, or, more important, his Vox amplifier arrived and Bill came with it.”
Today bands dream of getting rich. Not the Stones: “We hated money.” Their first aim was to be the best rhythm and blues band in London. Their second was to get a record contract. The way to do that was to play.
Something happened when the Stones were on stage, something sexy and dangerous and never seen before. The Beatles held your hand. In 18 months, the Stones never finished a show. Keith estimates they played, on average, five to ten minutes before the screaming started, and then the fainting, until the security team was piling unconscious teenage girls on the stage like so much firewood.
Fame. When it comes, there’s no way out; you need it to do your work. The Stones at least brought a new look to it; they provoked the press, didn’t care what the record company wanted. Only the music mattered. As Berry Gordy liked to say, “It’s what’s in the grooves that counts.”
“The world’s greatest rock band” — between 1966 and 1973, it’s hard to argue that they weren’t. Songs poured out of them: “I used to set up the riffs and the titles and the hook, and Mick would fill in. We didn’t think much or analyze….Take it away, Mick. Your job now. I’ve given you the riff, baby.”
Drugs? Necessary. In the South, a black musician laid it out for Keith: “Smoke one of these, take one of these.” Keith would move on beyond grass and Benzedrine to cocaine for the blast and focus, heroin for the two or three day work marathon. Engineers would give their all and fall asleep under the console, to be replaced by others. Keith would soldier on. “For many years,” he says, “I slept, on average, twice a week.”
With money and success, though, there’s suddenly time to think — in Keith’s case,…
Read more
Was this review helpful to you?
|5 stars … 3 stars … 2 stars,
The first third of the book is absolutely fantastic. Keith Richards chronicles his childhood and the formation of the band with lots of personality and charm. Highly recommended. I really couldn’t put the book down.
The book loses steam in the middle third — the drugged-out 70s. I wish a little more time was spent talking about the music. When he *does* write about how songs come together, or about musical insights he has (like discovery open tuning), it’s great reading. The sections where his son Marlon talks about life on the road with his dad are interesting. But much of the middle just gets bogged down in all the drugs, the drug busts, the cold turkey sessions, etc. Yeah OK, that was his life, but they were still making records, and a better balance of material about the band and the music would have been a nice respite from all the drugs.
It gets a bit better when he’s writing about the late-80s/90s – the split with Mick and their respective solo careers.
But the final section just falls apart. It reads like the anecdotes that celebrities tell on talk shows. “Ah, the funniest thing happened at my daughter’s wedding ….” “The crew found a puppy hanging around near the stage ….” “You wouldn’t believe the enormous snapping turtle ….”
And there are some odd omissions: Bill Wyman is barely mentioned, which is fine, but more explanation is needed. Some of the biggest Stones albums are glossed over in half a page. Great songs like Shattered and Some Girls aren’t even mentioned. The mixing and release of Tattoo You is barely discussed (if at all … I don’t recall now).
So 5 stars for the first third / 3 stars for the middle / 2 for the end.
Still worth it, especially for Stones fans.
Was this review helpful to you?
|RIVETING ACCOUNT OF RICHARDS’ LIFE IN AND OUT OF MUSIC,
This memoir, written with the help of writer James Fox, is an intricately detailed account of Keith Richards life, both in and out of music-but mostly in. All the stories are here-the funny, the touching, the horrendous, and the amazing. Some are well known, some weren’t even known to Richards-he only hears later, from others who were with him, what went on. And he’s put it all in this book. Included are 32 pages of b&w and color photographs (including one of the band, with Jagger driving, in a vintage red convertible, across the Brooklyn Bridge) in two groups, plus photos throughout the book itself chronicling Richards’ life. Also of interest is an early diary that Richards kept detailing the bands early gigs and impressions of the music the band played.
Richards has been known as many things-”the human riff”, as some kind of prince of a dark underworld filled with drugs, booze, and skull rings, as “Keef”, a rock ‘n’ roll pirate, as someone who should be dead (several times over) from massive drug use and other lifestyle choices, and as someone hounded by law enforcement-looking to incarcerate this bad example to all the kids. But Richards is also known as a settled (for him) family man. But somehow he’s survived it all. And now, with this autobiography, he’s letting us into his life. This book looks back at all the times-good, bad, and just plain strange.
Beginning with Richards’ boyhood in post-war England, no stone is left unturned in detailing his young life. A life which changed forever with his discovery of American blues. From that era the book details the formation of THE ROLLING STONES (I would like to have learned more about Brian Jones’ in relation to the formation of the group), which changed his life again-a life he continues to the present.
This book is important, interesting, and at times, harrowing, with a myriad of details surrounding Richards, his band, and anyone caught up in their universe of music, good times, misery, drugs, violence, and just plain weirdness. But the book also shows another side of Keith Richards. The pain he felt (and still feels) when his young son Tara, died while Richards was on tour. The loss of musician and friend/band hanger-on, Gram Parsons. Looking back with regret as people close to him sunk into a hellish pit of drug addiction. And Richards’ own account of his years of drug use-especially heroin and the misery he brought on himself, even while he was careful not to go to far over the edge.
Of course no memoir concerning Richards would be complete without accounts of the ups and downs, over many years, with Mick Jagger. There’s a number of fascinating asides and insights concerning their ideas of what direction the band should follow. Unfortunately, but not surprising, Jagger (and the other band members) are not heard from. That’s unfortunate because of all the valuable insight concerning Richards’ life on and off the stage, and the inner workings of one of the world’s greatest rock ‘n’ roll bands, that his long time band mates could bring to the story. But others who have known Richards over the course of many years were interviewed. People like Ronnie Spector, Jim Dickinson, Andrew Oldham, Bobby Keys, and a number of fellow musicians and friends, all have telling bits and pieces to add to the overall picture of just who Richards is.
The detail Richards and Fox have put into this well written memoir is almost staggering. Reading about the early days of the band is exciting and fascinating, if for no other reason the era they came up in is long since vanished. The discovery and idolization of musicians like Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Jimmy Reed, Slim Harpo, and other blues greats, trying to emulate the hard scrabble lifestyles of American blues artists, the small scruffy clubs the band played in the beginning, living in abject poverty and squalor, the large concerts in later years, the songs, the albums, the drugs, and the many fascinating (and sometimes disgusting) characters that drift in and out of Richards’ life-it’s all here. And taken together, this is a story only Keith Richards could live (and survive) to write about in such detail.
While there have been other decent books on Richards and/or the Stones, for the straight, unvarnished truth, as he sees it and lived it, this is the book that matters. This memoir, written in a Richards-to-you conversational style, is interesting, exciting, gritty, informative, harrowing, and important. And with this book, written in his own words, we can’t get much closer to the man and his life than that.
Was this review helpful to you?
|Natural Educational Dramedy – another great job by the BBC,
Over the past two decades, the BBC Natural History Unit has become a prolific documentary factory of the highest order, with ever-improving skills and increasing dedication. Some of their productions are relatively minor, but this is one of their flagships, and you can tell this because they use David Attenborough as the narrator (who is still in top form).
The theme for this 10-part series is the challenges of life and how various animals and plants solve them. This includes unusual and extreme food gathering techniques, hunting strategies, surprising evolutionary weapons and defenses, adaptations to harsh environments, mating rituals, and the lengths they go to in order to pick the right breeding partners.
Each episode covers this vast topic in specific areas: The first episode is an overview and top-20 hit parade of the upcoming episodes. Each of the ensuing episodes then cover a branch of the animal kingdom, including reptiles, insects, mammals, plants, birds, fish, with additional specialized episodes covering hunting, sea-life and primates.
This will obviously overlap with many of their previous releases, especially The Trials of Life, Attenborough’s series covering the animal kingdom, and even The Living Planet and Planet Earth. But their approach here is interestingly well-chosen: Previously covered footage and educational information is usually summarized, before continuing with the more obscure, the upgraded, and the exciting new details.
For example, The Private Life of Plants is obviously much more comprehensive and educational, but this show’s episode on plants features things like a 60-second time-lapse shot of growing life in the woodlands that took two years to create, new information on the strange shape of the Dragon’s Blood tree, and more footage on the Venus Flytrap, this time its dual use of insects complete with tiny sound recordings.
Now, I have a pet peeve about repetition. This show’s annoyingly useless overview episode, and the fact that much of the information and footage lacks freshness and has been covered before, all tempt me to rate this show lower. But the combination of nicely summarized educational information, a good theme and structure, new amazing cinematography that uses the latest skills and technology, and some new exciting footage that I don’t think I have ever seen before, compels me to give this top marks. This is a much better release than Planet Earth.
In addition, while many nature documentaries have elements of drama and laughs, this show has more than usual, and you will find yourself frequently touched, horrified or very amused by all of the amazing behaviour on screen, all obviously very real.
The BBC also continue their recent trend that devotes the last 10 minutes of each episode to a ‘making of’ featurette. These are usually just as interesting as the footage and you can always stop watching if you aren’t interested, so I suppose I can’t complain. But keep in mind that if you subtract the overview episode and diary scenes, you are actually getting 450 minutes instead of 600.
In summary: If you are relatively new to BBC documentaries, this will amaze you to no end AND provide a nice informative summary of life on earth. If you are a seasoned watcher of Attenborough’s series, you can still enjoy this series as a combination of educational summary, a provider of new, complementary and upgraded information with some of the most beautiful, rare and amazing footage ever recorded, and even as a highly entertaining natural drama and comedy, or ‘nature dramedy’, if I may coin a phrase.
However, if you place emphasis on educational and more comprehensive information, Attenborough’s previous Life series still reign supreme and will probably remain unequalled for a long, long time.
Was this review helpful to you?
|Another Top Notch Effort from BBC/Attenborough,
As a frequent watcher of nature programs over the last 30 years, I have to say that this is one of the all time greats. Attenborough docs are always solid and there’s no shortage of the usual charm, but the filming techniques have really come to the fore on this effort. There are utterly spectacular moments in each of the episodes. Yes, the overview episode is redundant, but there’s very little else to be critical about. One for the ages, this.
Was this review helpful to you?
|A serious movie that also happens to be pretty funny,
Yes, this movie has plenty of funny moments, but there is a very real and sometimes rather touching story that takes precedence over everything that happens. You can’t get through the most serious of situations without the palliative of laughter now and again, and Life actually does tell a serious story. Eddie Murphy proves once again that he is a great actor, and Martin Lawrence was surprisingly good as the more serious of two men sentenced to life in prison for a murder they didn’t commit. One night in 1932, fate brought Rayford Gibson (Murphy), a smooth-talking hustler with big dreams, and Claude Banks (Lawrence) a respectable fellow about to start a good job, together in a New York nightclub. For entirely different reasons, both guys have to face the displeasure of the club owner’s wrath; and so it is that Gibson and Banks end up going on a bootlegging run to Mississippi. One dead man later, and both men are sentenced to life in prison for murder. Since Banks blames Gibson for getting him into all this mess, there relationship varies in quality as the years go by, but gradually a real friendship develops between them. They try to escape several times but end up spending basically their whole lives in prison. Along the way, we meet with several sub-plots involving some of their fellow inmates, but the movie never strays far from the lives of Gibson and Banks. The passage of time is marked by clips of historical events, and some excellent makeup works makes both men look old and worn out as they advance into their senior years.
This is not a prison story of hopelessness, however. While no pardon ever comes their way, justice has a way of willing out eventually, and the final ten minutes of the film are just terrific. Since the story does take place in Mississippi in 1932 and beyond, race plays a major part in the film, but it does not define the movie by any means. There are a number of funny scenes, especially those involving pie and cornbread, and Eddie Murphy will definitely make you laugh – Martin Lawrence sort of plays the heavy here to Murphy’s periodic antics. Some familiar faces pop up in the movie: Rick James plays the New York club owner, Bernie Mac has a relatively minor role, and Heavy D plays a small but important part. Wyclef Jean contributes an original score for the film. The whole cast is excellent, and a very good script keeps the film on pace and lively.
This isn’t Stir Crazy; there are plenty of laughs, but I wouldn’t call this a comedy – Life the movie is funny in the way life itself can sometimes be – laughter can get us through the hard times, but it doesn’t hide the fact that the hard times are there. This movie really deserves more attention than it has received; with its serious underlying quality, it ranks among Eddie Murphy’s most impressive films.
Was this review helpful to you?
|One of the very best comedies of ’99,
I’ve seen “Life” twice thus far, and I must concede that it has to be one of the best films to ever cast Eddie Murphy. He and Martin Lawrence are just as emotionally poignant as they are downright hysterical in this memorable comedy/drama of two Prohibition-era guys from Harlem NYC who inadvertently become framed for murder in the Deep South while on a bootlegging run for the local crime boss they each owe debts to back home. They are soon enough sentenced to life imprisonment in a Mississippi chain gang where they share a “Felix and Oscar”-esque relationship that spans 65 years through thick and thin times (including numerous escape attempts). However in the end, they literally become friends for life as they come to terms with their imprisonment. The make-up done by 6-time Oscar winner Rick Baker to transform Murphy & Lawrence from young to old over the course of so many years is the true showstopper of “Life”. I wouldn’t be the least surprised if Mr. Baker garners Oscar #7 come 2000; he and Murphy have been quite a dynamic duo since “Coming to America”. A definite must-see!
Was this review helpful to you?
|Not the aggressive Lawrence/Murphy humor; still a good movie,
I did enjoy this movie, even as I enjoyed Martin Lawrence and Eddie Murphy’s more popular and critically acclaimed work. They are a pair of convicts, one of whom caught up after being “along for the ride”, but jailed nonetheless for life in the South some fifty years ago. They do persevere after, through and despite any number of bad (some unbelievable) circumstances. Life in prison makes them close.
It is very different from my other favorite prison movie, Cool Hand Luke. Like C.H.L., the brutality of prison life is left mercifully for other films. There is one scene common to both, though, with the prisoners resolving their issue boxing in the prison yard with typical results.
As they age, their mutual disappointment makes their friendship ebb and flow from like to dislike and back (of course). Conservative Lawrence (yeah, him) not only blames the typically hustling Murphy for getting him into the situation in the first place. Murphy wants more assertiveness from his sidekick, vowing not to die having given up hope like his Father. As we know they must though, they find some hope, some enjoyment, and even some meaning in their circumstance.
Another reviewer hit the nail on the head: this movie was erroneously marketed. The trailers show hilarity, and lead one to think this is a true comedy. Those expecting just that may be disappointed (unless they go straight to the hilarious outtakes). But it is much much more.
Fantastic ending. Worth the price itself.
Was this review helpful to you?
|