Page 6-Saturday, September 16, 1978-The Michigan Daily
Heavy-metal reigns at Cobo
- ,
By TIMOTHY YAGLE
It was the rock 'n' roll veteran and its
offspring performing Thursday night as
heavy rock masters Black Sabbath and
Van Halen blasted a sold-out Cobo
Arena 'with some incredibly loud but
often mediocre heavy-metal rock.
The California-based, four-man,
powerhouse opened the show playing
all the tunes from their highly
successful debut LP Van Halen. It was:
clear from the beginning that this wild,
AUDITIONS
Soloists * Chorus * Orchestra
Johann Strauss'
GYPSY BARON
Sign up Wednesdqy, Sept. 20, 7:30 pm
Conference Room, New Fire Station
Corner Huron and Fifth
THE COMIC OPERA GUILD
For further info: 665-6074
party-down band was there to just
make noise. Lead guitarist Edward
Van Halen attacked his guitar, wailing
out some screeching solos while lead
vocalist David Lee Roth, looking very
pretty, did his best to emulate Robert
Plant, frequently arching back and
screaming his larynx out. Needless to
say, it didn't all sound very good.
Van Halen is a great band live, if you
like to let it all hang out - like they do.
Vasco da Gama became the first
European to sail around the Cape of
Good Hope into the Indian Ocean 490
years ago-on Nov. 22, 1497-on a
voyage commissioned by the Portugese
monarch. After founding a trading post
at Calcutta, India, he returned home
two years later.
They have a good time performing, and.
expect their audience to do the same.
They got rowdy, priming the anxious
crowd for Black Sabbath.
THIS FOUR-MAN British band on
their 10th anniversary tour, called the
last of the underground bands, began
their three and four chord assault on
the ears with the pounding "Symptom
of the Universe" from their LP
Sabotage. This set the musical tone for
the evening. Their song selection could
have been a bit better. They didn't play
a few of the true Sabbath tunes most of
us expected them to play ("Sabbath
Bloody Sabbath" for one). However,
they did do ear-splitting versions of
"Electric Funeral," "War Pigs," "Iron
Man," and "Paranoid", probably their
best of the evening, along with "War
Pigs."
This punk-like band with a very select
following lost everything when they
played the incredibly lazy and slow
"Black Sabbath". The band was
missing notes and cues and really
shouldn't have played the song at all.
It's just not a good live number.
Sabbath does not have an outstanding
stage show. Lead guitarist Tom Ommi
was in the center-state spotlight instead
of lead vocalist Ozzy Ozbourne who was
to Ommi's left. Sabbath's raw, gut-level
sound revolves around Ommi's guitar
and the heavy bass, which is what
attracted their followers in the first
place.
OZBOURNE IS no Tyler or Jagger,
either. He looks almost clumsy
running, yelling and clapping around
the stage and looked like a complete
moron hunching next to Ommi trying to
mimic him while he just stood there
grinning and playing his black guitar.
They ended their one-and-a-half hour
set with "Dirty Women" and "Rock 'n
Roll Doctor" from their last album,
Technical Ecstacy. Then they played
the title cut from their soon-to-be-
released LP Never Say Die.
Black Sabbath is going to be around
longer than most people think, even
though their songs receive little
airplay. They've got a limited but
strong cult that believes "never say
die" is a perfect motto for their band,
.
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Fred Zinneman's JULIA 197
JANE FONDA and VANESSA REDGRAVE together offer superb Academy
Award winning performances. Based on Lillian Hellman's tribute to her re-
markable friend and childhood idol, this film examines the nature of friend-
ship, indep ndent but enduring relationships, the personal agony of crea-
tivity, political and personal commitments and the precariousness of survi-
val in times of war. "Julia is a most superior film."-Variety. Also stars
Jason Robards.
Sun.-Richardson's SANCTUARY
Wyler's WUTHERING HEIGHTS-ANGELL
7
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Breaded bon bons: A tc
CINEMA II
TONITE
7:00 & 9:00
Angell Hall, Aud. A
$1.50
-
The Anno Arbor film Copperative
presents at MLB 3 MEAN STREETS Saturday, Sept 16
(Martin Scorsese, 1973)6 7 only-MLB 9
A virtuso work of such explosive intensity, origanility, and power that it
stands as the film of the 70's. The underside of New York's Little Italy is seen
through the eyes of Charley (Harvey Keitfl), whose ascension in the Mafia
is hindered by the depth of his Catholic upbringing and his faith in his reckless
friend Johnny Boy (a brilliant Robert DeNiro). A must see film. "You don't pay
for your sins in church. You pay for them on the street."-Charley. "Exquisite,
savage, compassionate, and brilliant."-Josepy Uelmis. Atverything that is
said or done has the sense of being absolutely right. It is evident that Scorsese
is a bgrn filmmaker . . . MEAN STREETS is an unqualified success."-Kevin
Thomas, L.A. TIMES.
TAXI DRIVER
(Martin Scorsese, 1976) 9 only-MLB 3
Robert DeNiro is Travis Bickle, a New York City cabbie whose boredom and
loneliness finally erupt into a paroxysm of violence. Written by Paul Schrader,
with Cybill Shepherd and Harvey Keitel. "No other film has ever 'dramatized
urban indifference so well."
MONDAY: Lewis Festival-MY NAME IS JULIA ROSS &
SO DARK THE NIGHT FREE
By CHRISTOPHER POTTER
Gather 'round, all you deprived
movie fanatics, and know that your
cinematic antidote has arrived. Its
name is Bread and Chocolate, an
Italian import beside which our current
domestic profusion of uncomic
comedies and unthrilling thrillers fade
like the grimy prosaic stiffs most of
them are. Bread and Chocolate is a
dream of a film, a work so alive with
passion, intelligence and sheer
virtuosity that one must embarrassedly
wonder what has so recently become of
all the inventiveness and provocative
energy that American film no longer
possesses in this age of Burt Reynolds
and Neil Simon.
It's a measure of Bread and
Chocolate's breadth of vision that its
surface theme - the tragi-comic
problems that plague Italians working
in Switzerland - soars far beyond
European regionality into a universally
adaptable parable of racial-ethnic
jealousies and longings. Writer-
director Franco Brusati focuses on the
ongoing crisis of one Nino Garofoli, a
southern Italian forced by his
homeland's economic stagnation to
seek work in Switzerland. Like
countless fellow countrymen, hejabors
long hours dreaming that he can one
day afford to send for his wife and
children to come live in his new-found
adopted land.
ALAS, WE SEE from the start that
Nino will just never fit in. We first see
him standing in a lush, impeccably
manicured Swiss park populated by
impeccably manicured golden-locked
picnicers, complete with a string
quartet performing Mozart on the lawn.
Nino settles himself comfortably under
a tree, pulls out a hero sandwich,
chomps down - and, E. F. Hutton-like,
the picnicers stop eating, the quartet
loses its place, a bird in the
overhanging tree twits scoldingly down
at the abashed Nino.
' Things get no better for this well-
intentioned but rank outcast, as he
scrambles from job to job often in
hysterically funny fashion. Nino gets
fired from a waiter's job because he
was inadvertently photographed by a
Swiss couple while peeing against a
wall. He latches onto a butler's position
with an Italian-emigree millionaire, but
loses it the first day_ When the
millionaire decides to commit suicide.
DESPERATE, abhorr'iig the thourght
of returning penniless to Italy, Nino
reluctantly acceptsThe ultimate social-
economic humiliation: A chicken-
plucking job with a band of incredibly
seedy Italian wetbacks who live in a
chicken coop and spend most of their
time raucously imitating fowl rather
than people.
Throughout his expatriate odyssey,
Nino meets with various subtle, if often
loony, social rebuffs from the haughty
Swiss, and even dying his hair blond
and effecting a German accent (though
he knows practically no German) does
nothing to alleviate his ostracism.
Abashment seems his chronic state in
life.
I can remember few films that blend
and intensify comedy and drama as
well as does Bread and Chocolate; for
barely a pulsebeat beneath the
hilarious complications that entangle
Nino, the film is an agonized howl of
rage. It's a howl of ethnic self-loathing,
intertwined and often confused with a
consuming economic deprivation, both
furies feeding upon and sustaining the
other.
IT'S AN unhinged passion to become
one of the Beautiful People, not only in
affluence but inevitably in appearance
and manner as well. Thus Nino's comic
attempt to "become" Swiss through
hair alteration takes on an almost
unbearable scope of pathos as well. His
efforts are based on misguided sham
and he knows it, but still he cannot bear
the idea of going back to a tribal
lifestyle he regards as unmitigated
failure.
Bread and Chocolate's conception -
through Nino's eyes - of Italians as
perpetual song-singing ne'er-do-wells is
amazingly frank and
uncompromishing (Nino tells a fellow
emigree: "None of us can stand each
other half the time - you can wonder
what foreigners must think of us"). Not
that the Swiss come off any less
scathingly; The objects of Nino's
"
rs ty flick
longings come across as smug, priggish
and unbearably humorless. Nino comes
to realize this as well, eventually
despising his adopted land as much as
he does his own countrymen. It is
perhaps an unsolvable quandry, as the
film's last shot of our hero, undaunted
but frighteningly stymied, implies.#
Bread and Chocolate is visually no
less memorable than it is thematically:
A pseudo-surrealist scene of Nino and
his squalid compatriots staring out
through the barbed wire of their
chicken coop at a group of nude,
Wagnerian-oriented Swiss teens
frolicking regally in a nearby forest
will surely endure as one of the most
memorable sequences in the historyof
cinema. It bespeaks volumes for self-
made human barriers, for distorted but
universal longings to reach something
glorious but ultimately non-existent.
Again and again, director Brusati's
images linger in one's memory: A
transvestite-tinged show put on for
lonely Italian construction workers that
turns from comedy to homesick
longing; a train headed back to Italy
roaring into a tunnel, its high-pitched
whistle sounding like an agonized
shriek to be let out; the pictorial
portrayal of. immaculate Swiss towns
and countryside-as a kind of impossible
Land of Oz in Nino's fevered dreams.,.
y Actor Nino Manfredi is simply
perfect in the role of Nino. Where 'a
Giancarlo Gianninni might have
overplayed the part to the point 'of
grotesqueness, Manfredi invests it with
an ideal laid-back bewilderment, k
Chaplinesque semi-comprehension th4t
makes one want very much to laugh
and cry along with him. I don't know if
I've ever seen another actor display
such a knack for simultaneous whimsy
and desperation.
The supporting cast is impeccable, as
is the photography, music and laser-
crisp editing. In short, Bread and
Chocolate is film-making of the very
highest order, a veritable redeemer for
this point in time when one must begin
to wonder whether the concept of good
films is headed into avaricious
extinction.
Perhaps Bread and Chocolate can
serve notice: A motion picture can be
inventive, controversial - indeed,
fearless - and still make grand
entertainment. But is anyone this side
of theAtlantic still capable of taking
notice?
1290 AM
J
I
FELLINi'S AMA RCORD "97
Fellini's Memory as it reaches back into his boyhood growing up in Fascist pre-
WW I1 Italy. A recollection filled with wonderful tales-some romantic, some
slapstick, some illogical, some baudy and some as mysterious as the unexpected
sight of a peacock flying through a light snowfall. Fellini's most beautiful film
so far and winner of an Academy Award for Best Foreign Picture. In Italian and §
§ Color.
§ Sun: Huston's "The Misfits"
§ CINEMA GUILD TONIGHTat'7:00 & 9:00 OLDARCH. AUD. §
$1.50
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You Ought To Bi
On Stage!
or behind it...
or inside it.. .
.k or in front of it, in the orchestra, or outside the front door selling
tickets.
e
.
Whatever your talent is, whether you sing, dance, sew, act, hammer
nails, focus lights, keep accurate accounts or throw fantastic parties, Ann
Arbor Civi Theatre needs you.
If you want to become a maker of magic - a purveyor of dreams,
come down and see us.
MASS MEETING-MON., SEPT. 18-8 P.M.
G o ANN ARBOR CIVIC THEATRE
Ann Arbor Civic Theatre Bldg. - 201 Mulholland Dr.
6. RBORCNKTHISRE (off W. LIBERTY)
Looking fora mate?
Advertise in the
Personals
Call
764-0557
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