Arizona Republic from Phoenix, Arizona • Page 103

All EDITIONS Sunday, December IS, 19S3 The Arizona Republic X-cK 1 Spotlight inni Marriage of talents works to punk band's advantage i' By Mark de la Vina Special for The Republic Has sold out? The pace-setting band out of Los Angeles did leave Slash Records for Elektra Records, a label suspected of having a tighter grip on the creative freedom of its acts. But what does the lead singer for this California group have to say about selling out? "The truth of the matter is that that term is meaningless," Exene Cervenka said. (She and the band will be at the Devil House Tuesday night with openers Gentlemen Afterdark.) How did all this hoopla about the selling out of a punk band surface? Cervenka explained: "The media started asking us, 'Are people saying that you guys sold and we'd say, They'd say, 'Well, I hear people say you sold We'd say, 'Well, we haven't heard anything yet, so if they're saying it it must be behind our Cervenka added that after answering these questions, articles still appear saying, "some say has sold out." X's latest. More Fun in the New World, is the group's second album for Elektra, a follow-up to last year's highly touted Under the Big Black Sun. More Fun in the New World is a smorgasbord of at its best: The Hank Williams inclinations of Poor Girl, the blistering sarcasm of We're Having Much More Fun! and the ultragrind of the Jerry Lee Lewis cover Breathless.

What is more, the disc stands among the best rock LPs of the year. might become the critical favorite in the '80s, but it was not long ago that the quartet was just another band out of then-blossoming late "70s Los Angeles scene, the same pool of creativity that spawned the Blasters, the Flesh Eaters and the collection of hard-core punk outfits that appeared with in the music documentary The Decline of Western Civilization. The group's chief lyricists, Cervenka and bassist John X. Doe, met at a poetry workshop. The two hit it off both socially and artistically and now are husband and wife.

The two might even give Talking Heads bassist Tina Weymouth and drummer Chris Frantz a run for their money in the rock married -couple-of-the-year competition. Does Cervenka find it difficult for them to constantly be working and living together? "I haven't done it any other way, so I don't know if it's -difficult," she replied. "I don't think it's difficult, but if I wasn't in a band with my husband, I might think it was less difficult I don't really want to be in any other band." The other two musicians in guitarist Billy Zoom and drummer D.J. Bonebrake, anchor the sound of the group with their instrumental expertise. Cervenka and her spouse also are the lead vocalists of her country-tinged singing style is another piece of their musical attack, but the technique she now employs was not in her original plan.

"I thought that the best way to sound would be to sing in gospel style," she recalled, but that idea was long ago Billy Zoom, D.J. Bonebrake, Exene Cervenka and John X. Doe, from left. So what is the biggest problem with the United States today? "The people in it," Cervenka anr swered. She divided Americans into two groups: those who have selfish ambitions and those who are "just kind of wimpy "and don't care." tucked away.

So who might Cervenka draw from? "I don't really have any vocal influences. When you're singing, you're just trying to get a feeling across that is soulful and honest and sounds good," she said. As with her singing, Cervenka says her writing is absent of influences. "I started writing poetry when I was a little girl," she said. "I never read poetry and I didn't read it in school unless I absolutely had to.

I'd rather read fiction or Flannery O'Connor short stories than poetry." On Afore Fun in the New World, the' lyrics cover unemployment, political dishonesty and contain unfavorable references to Ronald Reagan was better before they voted for what's his not exactly uplifting topics. There does not seem to be an ounce of hope lining these observations, but Cervenka disagrees. "I think when people don't have hope, they stop thinking about (problems). Obviously, if we thought America was a crummy place and there was no hope for it, we wouldn't have bothered to write about it" "(You are) told when you're born that you can do anything you want (that) you've got this capitalist system that can work for you. You can make as much money as you want any way you can to provide for your family.

That's what justifies it, providing for your family." OrCx ttlh) MOSS Gore festoons holiday films JEM comic-book violence with the advent of the Star Wars revolution. What we're seeing this Christmas is a return, however brief, to that realistic, adventure-picture kind of violence. Whether it marks a turning away from comic-book shoot-'em-ups or simply a coincidental lapse remains to be seen. I suspect the latter. Certainly, De Palma's Scarface is an attempt to push shoot-'em-ups to.

their state-of-the-art limit And the action scenes are the best part of the movie. The infamous chain-saw scene is really just the opener for an action sequence that leaves corpses lying all over a motel room. As choreographed by De Palma, it becomes a dance of blood and passionate carnage. The climax, a violent raid on Pacino's Miami mansion, pushes our tolerance for realistic violence even further. So many people are mowed down with machine guns (bullets rip graphically into their bodies with dull thuds and spurts of red) that it makes the slow-motion end of Bonnie and Clyde, now more than 15 years old, seem restrained.

Eastwood's Sudden Impact, which he also directed, really little more than a rehashing of the tired Dirty Harry litany. The crooks are just scenery for Eastwood's sneering, macho posturings. If it is more violent than the other Dirty Harry movies, that's only because Eastwood is trying to give the audience what it wants. After failing to win with milder efforts such as Bronco Billy and Honkytonk Man, he has returned to the same old tune and turned up the volume. Graphic violence became popular in the late 60s for a good reason; it showed people something they'd never been able to see.

Audiences knew that one reason the camera had averted its eye when the villain got shot was that Hollywood didn't have the technology to make it took authentic. Making that violence realistic heightened the intensity of action sequences and aroused audience interest Likewise, slasher movies became popular in the mid-708 because they showed audiences something new: nauseating gore without apologies. And sci-fi, comic-book adventures became popular later in the decade because the trend in movie special effects had moved in that direction. The problem with cops-and-robbers violence is that once you have shown someone taking a bullet, between the eyes in a slow-motion close-up, you have pretty well exhausted your store of shocking, gfaphic violence. It's for that reason that the current move toward more violence will probably flicker out When you've, seen one guy get his head blown off, you've seen themalL By Rick Lyman Knight-Ridder The colors of Christmas are red and green, but never quite so much as this year.

This holiday movie season is the most obsessively violent in recent memory. What's most interesting is that, for the most part, it's a realistic kind of carnage (cops-and-robbers stuff instead of outer-space laser battles) and nauseating splatter spew-ings. It's as though Santa had ripped off his beard and turned out to be Sam Peckinpah. The season isn't single-mindedly violent It has a Barbra Streisand musical YentI), a John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John romance (Two of a Kind) and a Mel Brooks comedy (To Be or Not to Be). But the overwhelming impression is of a December devoted to the art of bloody technical effects.

Of course, turning red into green is a long-accepted Hollywood tradition. But rarely has so much red been thrown at so many people with such verdant expectations. Take a look at what Santa has in his bag: Al Pacino watches with feigned dispassion as an angry Colombian drug dealer saws Pacino's buddy to pieces with a chain saw. The blood splatters across his face like mud from a spinning tire. A KGB officer kicks away the snow to expose three bodies in a remote corner of Moscow's Gorky Park.

There's nothing left to identify them but three grinning skulls covered with hunks of frozen, red meat The faces have been hacked off. A foul-mouthed teen-ager runs down a dark alley to escape a rampaging '58 Plymouth Fury named Christine. He finds a culvert too narrow for the car to enter, but the demon-possessed auto shears its own fenders in a mad lunge to get at the boy. Screaming in agony, the kid is chopped in half. Dirty Harry stalks a revenge-crazed woman who! lures the men who raped her to secluded spots where she gives them a ".38 vasectomy" and watches them writhe in agony before putting slugs in their brain; pans.

Pacino's chain-saw massacre in Brian De Palma's Scarface got all the pre-release ink, but it's downright muted compared with some of the other bloody thrills of the season. In Sudden Impact, we have Clint Eastwood mowing dpwn what seems to be an endless parade of robbers, elopers and smart mouths. One guy get blasted three times with Eastwood's is entwined electrical wires, falls three stories through the roof of a merry-go-round building and is finally impaled on the horn of a wooden unicorn. No Kstmty gert onRepublic doubt about it, that guy's dead. The modern age of movie violence began in 1967 with Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde.

Graphic scenes of bullets tearing into flesh with reckless abandon became the standard for action sequences, oaring to new heights two years later with Peckinpah's epochal Wild Bunch. The number of deaths suddenly became less important than the level of realism. Having someone drive his car off a cliff was less graphically pleasing than showing a bullet catch him right between the eyes. Splat! Advances in mechanical and special effects technology made it easier for film makers in the 70s to show bullets thumpjng into chests, blood spurting as villains fall in slow motion to the dusty' The technology was further exploited in such efforts' as Peckinpah's Straw Dogs and Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather. The next big step was 1973 and William Friedkin's The Exorcist Graphic violence had previously been restricted to male action pictures and Westerns (or used for irony in such films as Robert Altman's M'ASH).

Friedkin brought a new level of realistic violence to the horror movie by presenting the eerie mayhem in a setting of ordinary, everyday life. Exorcist initiated a new genre: the gore movie. As it has been mutated in John Carpenter's Halloween and various slasher competitors, it has centered on frequent sequences of realistic gore interspersed with the threat of more. As gore increased, the level of violence in the standard adventure film declined. It was old hat Indeed, the whole focus changed from realistic to.