Arthur Edmund Carewe | Doctor X (1932)

Safe in Hell (The Lost Lady) (1931) William A. Wellman

May 16th 2023

All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)

My ★★★★★★ review of All Quiet on the Western Front #CharityShopCinema #FilmReview

All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) Synopsis – A German youth eagerly enters World War I, but his enthusiasm wanes as he gets a firsthand view of the horror – All Quiet on the Western Front. Director – Lewis Milestone Starring – Lew Ayres, Louis Wolheim, John Wray Genre – War | Drama | Historical Released – 1930 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 6 out of 6. If you liked: 1917, Dunkirk, Empire of the…

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Nothing New in the West (1930) - film review

Sometimes everything in production, from the script to the first cinema screening, happens very quickly. In this case, a monument was even created to a film classic that has cast a long shadow on other projects for almost 100 years and defined the war film genre. NOTHING NEW IN THE WEST is the first major anti-war film from Hollywood. It is based on the 1928 novel by Erich Maria Remarque. Shortly…

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Yesterday's Movies charges into All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)

All Quiet on the Western Front. Universal Studios 1930.

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“Gone To The Wolves” by John Wray (2023)

I really, truly wanted to love this novel. Ilana Masad gave a glowing review for NPR (https://www.npr.org/2023/05/04/1173613977/john-wray-novel-gone-to-the-wolves-heavy-metal-book-review), which only heightened my interest and led me to purchase the e-book through Barnes & Noble.  

As a traumatized and misfit kid of the ‘80s who embraced heavy metal in ’85, then thrash in ’87, then speed in ’88, then crust and grindcore and death metal after my very first concert—the Milwaukee Metal Fest of ’89, then . . . just a couple of years later as the “Grunge Gold Rush” took off . . . all subgenera of what is now a vast spectrum of metal musicianship, I felt this story might resonate deeply within my grey matter of memories. Back then, metalheads were truly outcasts just about everywhere, the geeks and freaks and broken things that slithered into our own cloistered cliques who haunted the back of the cafeteria and found solace in empty parking lots far away from the football and basketball games, wanting to disappear and be left alone with our music and comic books and hollowed-out dreams. Finding kinship in any form was something akin to fate; the dark gods smiling on their chosen bastard children for some blissful moment. Tape-trading was the ONLY way to discover new music that wasn’t on garbage FM rock stations, until Columbia House started having a metal insert in their monthly mailings. There were the magazines, but we never read any of them. Nobody had the money to piss away, or the monomaniacal fascination to toss money at them. I didn’t even know about MTV’s Headbangers Ball until about ’90 and only then because my girlfriend was babysitting at a house who could afford cable. 

I remember that hallowed night in a cavernous building in the dead of winter watching some 30 bands blast us to shreds in Milwaukee, most of whom I had never heard of before then. We were kids amongst a horde of leather-clad giants handing us beers and drags from joints and pushing pills in our hands (“just say no!”). Nuclear Assault nuked the place. I remember being deafened by a wall of speakers as Judas Priest opened up with a long drum solo for their Painkiller tour in Chicago, while Rob Halford languidly rolled out on his Harley as another curtain opened to reveal a second wall of speakers. I remember climbing a plastic construction fence to get to the sound booth in the rafters as Rage Against the Machine whipped the crowd into a frenzied mob on the outskirts of Honolulu. They tore the place apart. I remember seeing Metallica in Bangkok in an open-air arena with what felt like a million others who spoke a different language. I remember seeing Type O Negative, Danzig, and Ronnie James Dio-fronted Black Sabbath play on Halloween 1994, and the hurried drive back for the graveyard shift with some kindred spirits with ears ringing and the afterglow lasting long past dawn. I remember seeing Project 86 at what seemed like a 1950s cocktail lounge in Chevy Chase, Maryland, as they thunderously evoked their Songs to Burn Your Bridges By, and as I prepared to go to Iraq to save hallowed democracy from the evils of Islam (and cash in on their oil fields). I remember seeing Slipknot at a filthy toilet-bowl bar in downtown Des Moines looking like lunatics who just escaped from the asylum and raided a cheap costume store (by this time I was wearing earplugs to concerts big and small). I remember seeing the almighty GWAR, alien overlords that they are, in Minneapolis, drenching the crowd in fountains of fake bile and blood and semen. I remember thousands of us screaming “God hates us all!” over and over at a Slayer show to the silent, impotent, starry and frigid firmament in Sacramento. I remember seeing Obituary on Leap Day 2020, as the world soon succumbed to the worst pandemic in a hundred years, and the millions of obituaries which followed in its wake. I remember, quite recently, Body Count turning their mosh pit into a furious meat grinder with energy I’ve not witnessed ever before, nor probably will ever again. The hate is real, America. It is so tangibly real. So many other venues, tours, and bands with less-permanent memories are held within my mind, for as long as that lasts. Metal music is infused within my apostate, heathen, godless life-blood. It will accompany me beyond, to whatever end awaits us all. Most likely boring, open-mawed Oblivion. 

The chord that rang out was familiar enough—an overdriven minor triad—but what stood [Kip’s] hair on end was how it felt. Distorted guitar had always had a certain temperature to him: it had always, no matter how vicious the music, been a sound he understood in terms of heat. Embedded with that warmth—hidden inside it—lived a cryptic form of life-affirming power. Deicide and Morbid Angel played their riffs to raise the dead, not to inter them. That was the nature of the exchange, the secret truth of the transaction, however bleak the songs might sound to virgin ears. Rage and violence and pain instead of nothingness (pp. 226-227, Nook). 

Wray captures this environment—this “subculture”—incredibly well, even if his chosen trio is nothing like anyone I ever knew, wedged as we were between the steel mills and iron works of East Chicago and Gary, Indiana, and the endless cornfields of everywhere beyond. Florida backwater it was not, but neither did anyone have the depth of knowledge in guitars, amplifiers, band members, and vocabulary like Leslie does at such a similar age. Doesn’t matter. I was the quiet, awkward, rage-filled wallflower . . . and metal music filled the void in my damaged soul. 

Masad has understandable issues with the lone female character, Kira, but at the same time the “beautiful but broken girl from a white-trash home” was a familiar trope from my high-school hellscape. No circus-freak father required. Normal blue-collar fathers were awful enough. My white-collar Vietnam Vet father was simply a haunted monster no bottle of bourbon could quell. Connie and Angie and Kim and Shannon and Crystal fit the bill all-too perfectly with Kira, if tragically. Masad may want to do some research on childhood trauma and its effects on developing brains. I have no idea if any of them are alive today, but I have no recollection of any of them speaking to the depth of personality that Kira does either. We didn’t grow up online though. We had, at best, five or six television stations to gawk at. Some regrets can never be resolved. Some mistakes never forgiven. 

Gone To The Wolves is theatrically broken into three parts for our wayward trio: the Florida Death Metal scene, the dying LA Glam and rising LA Thrash scene, then—oddly—the Norwegian Black Metal scene. It’s the Scooby-Doo third part that collapsed my nostalgic high, but I understand Wray’s supposed Dan-Brown desire to make a “thrilling finale”. For me, it falls flat by stepping way outside plausible reality (but I’m primarily a nonfiction reader so grant me some leeway if this is the norm these days). Too many people need endorphin bumps every two minutes or so thanks to tech addiction. I do not. I would have liked to see our troubled trio mature in the early 90s, like most of us did to one degree or another. Some died early of course, others weren’t true metalheads to begin with. We die-hards are devoted to the bitter end. 

While I can’t definitively identity with any character in this book, Wray opens to door to so many vibrant arteries of our subculture’s primordial existence that we can—at the very least—sympathize with them. We knew people who resembled them. The lost souls, the drug addicts, the lovelorn, the bipolar-depressive violent. I have to assume early heavy metal coming-of-age stories are rare. Nobody truly cared about us, and they still don’t. So maybe we can call this The Perks of Being a Wallflower meets Lords of Chaos? 

Nevertheless, completely enjoyable, to a fault. 

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#OTD in Irish History | 10 August:

1316 – Battle of Athenry: Irish rising in support of Edward the Bruce of Scotland. 1636 – The Annals of the Four Masters is completed. The Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland (Annala Rioghachta Éireann) or the Annals of the Four Masters (Annala na gCeithre Mháistrí) are a chronicle of medieval Irish history. The entries span from the deluge, dated as 2242 years after creation to AD 1616.8 1719 – The…

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