Dave Simpson
CD OFTHEWEEK
Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst has made a career out of dividing people. For the eight million fans who bought his band’s two albums, he is an iconic spokesperson of post-millennial alienation. For the rest, Limp Bizkit are social pariahs in bad shorts, whose on-stage behaviour was widely blamed for last year’s Woodstock riots. Durst claims to be a “dumb American” but is actually extremely clever. Mythologising himself as a Jacksonville “outcast” (with a baseball cap to appease the macho sports fans), he has graduated to hobnobbing in Hollywood, and soon makes his directorial debut. But the new album Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavoured Water (Interscope) is the most calculated gamble of his career. If it fails, Durst could become another flavour-turned-has-been. If it succeeds, Limp Bizkit could become the biggest band in the world. The album will outrage many, not least the more hardcore of their fans. Scarcely metal for entire periods at a time, the album borrows enormously from 1980s angst-pop, especially Depeche Mode.
Having cornered angst-ridden 15- to 24-year-olds, Durst is now gunning for their elders. First, the band re-establish their rock credentials. Opener Hot Dog is definitively nu metal. Not because of its stadium-sized riffing or Nine Inch Nails chorus, but because of the sheer number of “fucks” in the track.
The trademark paranoic rage lasts through 20 minutes of metal anthems, after which come the surprises. My Way is spellbinding; Violator-era Mode with guitars. The Duran/Goth The One introduces love and positivity to the Bizkit canon for the first time. It’ll Be Okay meets John Foxx-era Ultravox in a metal underpass; Hold On is regretful a-ha. It works because of fine songwriting, Nuremberg-sized choruses and Durst’s surprising vocal affinity with this music. There are other shocks, not least the superbly catchy Getcha Groove On (with DMX), which is fully fledged West Coast hip-hop/R&B.
So will the real Fred Durst please stand up? Probably not, until he has given full vent to his Machiavellian instincts. Containing just enough old Bizkit to pacify the fanbase, Chocolate Starfish is aimed at people who have never liked Limp Bizkit, or worn surfing shorts, or had tattoos. I love it. Listen without prejudice.
@Going straight to Mel
Shaun de Waal
not the movie of the week
Mel Gibson has a certain comic talent, which emerged in his Lethal Weapon series of movies a kind of practical-joker air, a naughty-boy glint in the eyes. It rendered his mad-policeman character appealing and memorable, and made a pleasant change after the grimly taciturn road warrior he played in the Mad Max films. After all, we really only need one Clint Eastwood.
Gibson tried to inject some of this humour into his (a)historical epics, Braveheart and The Patriot, though the sight of a chair collapsing under him was the most amusing moment in the latter film. His humour certainly works best as a sidebar to the psychotic-cop persona: all on its own, it has little to recommend it. In the hit romantic comedy What Women Want, Gibson plays Nick, a sexist Casanova of an ad exec. He is described as a “man’s man”, though a more appropriate description may be a “juvenile’s man”. In fact, he’s a consummate jerk. The film opens with his ex-wife, his daughter and some colleagues enumerating his faults. He’s an egomaniac, a bad father, a bad husband and so on.
His firm’s new creative director is a woman, Darcy McGuire (Helen Hunt), and that is threatening to Nick, who immediately tries to find a way to undermine her while also trying to get with the programme of her drive to create ads that appeal to women. This involves he-man Nick trying lipstick and leg-wax, which generates a certain amount of laughter (it’s the funniest sequence in the film) and culminates in a bathroom accident that magically endows him with the ability to hear women’s thoughts as they think them. At first Nick is confused and worried about this, then helped by Bette Midler, whose few minutes in the film briefly lift it up a notch accepts his new superpower and decides to take advantage of it.
This is a fun idea. It’s a pity someone didn’t think of it 50 years ago, when Billy Wilder could have made it with, say, Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn. With a leading man of some genuine charisma and charm, and a woman to make an antagonist worthy of the name, it could have been tremendous. As it is, Hunt’s rather pinched Darcy is no match at all for a smirking, preening, mugging, leering, swaggering Gibson, who so packs his every glance with the aforementioned naughty-boy glint that he’s quite unstoppable. He bulldozes his way toward redemption, since that’s the well-worn paradigm of the film morally suspect character undergoes change of heart. Except that Nick doesn’t seem to change much over the course of the film; he just opens his eyes ever wider. Certainly, Gibson is incapable of conveying character development, and Nick’s growing empathy for women, if that’s what it is, just seems increasingly creepy, like a more sophisticated form of CIA surveillance. With the assistance of mid-coital mind-reading, he gives a vulnerable woman the fuck of her life, then, to get away from her, tells her he’s gay. This is idiotic.
Not that it matters: one cannot in any case take seriously the attempt to make us disapprove of pre-transformation Nick. We’re really only asked to produce an indulgent “Tut tut” at his boorish antics, so there is no real investment in his becoming a better person. Likewise, it is hard to invest emotionally in his getting together with Darcy, because there isn’t any electricity between them anyway. In terms of sex-appeal, the combination of Gibson’s dyed rug and Hunt’s fake-looking tan and pale blue eyeshadow is not exactly a turn-on. The answer the film gives to Freud’s famous question “What do women want?” appears to be: Mel Gibson. Still naughty, but a tiny tad more sensitive, if you can buy that. As irritating as it is offensive, What Women Want is the kind of film that gives heterosexuals a bad name.
a@also opening this week
Faithless. The master of misery, Ingmar Bergman, is still going strong. Directed by Liv Ullmann, the actress who starred in many of his best-known movies and is the mother of one of his children, Faithless is a deceptively simple story. An old director (a dignified Erland Josephson) thinks back on a triangle of talented artists: an actress (the stunning Lena Endre), an international conductor (Thomas Hanzon) and a self-loathing, thoroughly miserable film and theatre director (Krister Henriksson). No points for guessing who the latter might be. These three play vicious games without too much thought about the child involved. One would expect them to know better, but that’s exactly the point: neither they nor we always do; or maybe art is just a deadly demanding god. Austerely directed, shot and acted, the amazing thing is that after two-and-a-half hours of elegant torture one doesn’t leave the theatre deeply annoyed but strangely cleansed. Neil Sonnekus
A Time for Drunken Horses (Cape Town only). This Iranian film is a family drama set in Kurdistan on the Iran-Iraq border, depicting the hardships of life there when a 12-year-old has to take charge of the household after his father’s death. Tasks in hand include saving a handicapped brother and keeping the horses going by feeding them alcohol. Written and directed by Bahman Ghobadi, using non-professional actors, the film has been described as heartbreaking.