The Great Scenes: Jason Bourne and Filmdom's Best Fight Scene

Grantland today posted a long piece by Shea Serrano and Jason Concepcion about the greatest movie fighters ever. It's a really cool piece that I recommend everyone check out. Of course, there's no way anyone was going to agree with everything they chose (and omitted) , but it's a very good list with a nice mix of obscure stuff that I'd never seen before. It even highlighted a really cool moment from Jack Reacher, a decent action flick that no one seems to have seen. 

A list like Shea & Jason's is meant to provoke appreciation for its subject, not to be attacked via pointless argument, so before I start doing just that, let's all take a moment to celebrate how cool good movie fights are, and to thank Shea & Jason for reminding us. 

Overall, I don't find myself with too much to argue against. They definitely like Road House a little too much--and let's be honest, anyone that likes Road House likes it a little too much--and they somehow never mention anything featuring Bruce Willis or Mel Gibson, which feels like a tragic oversight. I know sergeants  John McClane and Martin Riggs aren't exactly the most graceful fighters ever to grace the silver screen, but they're the action stars that an entire generation was raised on, so they deserve a shout out. But those quibbles aside, the big gripe I have about the list is the absence of Jason Bourne. He should have been in the top 4 or 5 of Greatest Movie Fighters. 

What almost every fight scene on the Grantland list has in common is that--in some way or another--style trumps reality. Be it the soundtrack guiding our emotional response, long tracking shots, snappy dialogue among the fighters, exaggerated blood and/or sound effects, inventiveness in weapons that defy logic, blind protagonists, Jean-Claude Van Damme laughably screaming, Patrick Swayze ripping someone's throat out (literally!), Uma Thurman yanking out not one, but two eyeballs, Keanu Reeves doing Keanu Reeves things, Jackie Chan guzzling alcohol like he's Popeye power-upping through spinach, or someone backflipping off an elephant, every single one of the fight scenes highlighted in the Grantland column finds a way to deemphasize the possible reality of the situation. They all proactively act as entertainment, and find specific ways to make sure we're entertained beyond just the hitting. 

Okay, now hold that thought while I pretend to be an expert on something I know nothing about. 

Here's the best fight scene from The Bourne Ultimatum, which is the third film in the series and, for my money, the best action movie of the last 10-15 years. 

This is the most realistic fight scene I've ever seen in a film. I know this from my extensive experience in fights to death. (See, I told you I'd pretend to be an expert on something I know nothing about!)

Everything that I mentioned about being in the other fight scenes is completely absent from this one. Nothing jokey or hokey, ridiculous or self-consciously stylistic. The fighters never crack puns, scream dramatically, make cool poses to intimidate one another, or defy all logic of speed/movement/anatomy. There's no music to heighten the drama. It's simply two-and-a-half minutes of two people trying to kill each other with every ounce of savagery, efficiency, and concentration they can muster, and doing a damn effective job of it. No more, no less. 

I'm perfectly aware that there's a lot more editing in this scene, the shots are infinitely shorter, and that probably hides that the actors have a lot less skill than the actors highlighted in the Grantland piece. But the problem with the less-edited clips in the Grantland piece is that the choreography and scene prepping come across much more. We become more aware of the impressiveness of the craft. With the Bourne fight, the idea is that all awareness of absolutely anything in the viewer is eliminated except for the two characters trying to kill each other. It's all we can see, hear, or think about. 

It's also worth noting that Bourne's final disposal of Desh is far less showy and glamorous than any of the other fight scene climaxes. There's no Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique. Bourne simply gets his opponent in a hold, and chokes him until he's dead. (Warning: I'm about to play an expert again.) That's how it would be! 

The pretentiousness often associated with critics of any discipline is that we try too hard to not be entertained. All of the fight clips in the Grantland piece are entertaining, and I truly love a lot of them. But they're all less impressive to me than the Bourne fight because the Bourne fight is the only one that isn't trying to entertain me--it's trying to show me truth. And I find that the most entertaining of all. 

Song of the Day: Moby - Extreme Ways (2002)

Some songs just have a perfect time, place, and situation. A lot of songs we refer to as summer songs, or road trip songs, or campfire songs, or bar songs… But here's a song that's perfect for the isolation you can only feel at night in a big city. 

Let me set the scene for you: It's late at night in a big city, the bars have closed, the streets are empty, but the fluorescent lights are still all about you, soaking you in a million colors because you're the only thing in their path. You get in your car, hit the gas, and press play. 

It's those first two siren-like notes that immediately make you feel so cool, like the world is sitting still just so you can have your way with it. 

Virtually every pop song ever written about loneliness takes a sad tone. This one does not. "Extreme Ways" treats loneliness not merely as a proactive choice, but as a necessity, as though only you can handle the intensity of your life, and there's simply no practical place for anyone else. It powerfully creates the backstory of living an adventurous and dangerous life, so of course it immediately became the theme song for a film series about just that. 

"Extreme Ways" is from the 2002 Moby album 18, and just a month after it's release it was used during the end credits of the first Bourne film, The Bourne Identity. The internet seems unsure of whether or not the song was created specifically for the film.  Regardless, it's one of the most perfect marriages of song-to-film that has ever existed--a marriage that proved so durable it continued through three subsequent Bourne films. 

All four Bourne movies end the exact same way--something happens that casts doubt about the fate of the main character, that doubt is slyly eliminated in a clever winking way, and that winking moment is immediately cut into by the opening two sirens of this song, signaling the end of the film and the rolling of the credits, and Moby reassuringly sings to us that "Extreme ways are back again."

Action franchises often get taken to the cleaners by critics and bloggers for recycling the same formulas again and again, but this is the rare exception. Not only does each of the four Bourne films end like this, they end exactly like this, and it feels perfect. It's just the sense of adrenaline inducement that a movie about Jason Bourne is supposed to leave you with. That's how you know a movie theme song gets it just right--when each successive entry in the series still ends with the same song and the audience wouldn't have it any other way. 

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Song of the Day: Blind Faith - Had to Cry Today (1969)

I've written before about my picks for the first moments of punk rock and indie rock, so I thought it'd be fun to make the same claim on heavy metal. Except I didn't have an answer, so that idea spent a while on my back burner. Then this week, as I've been going through another stack of CDs to potentially get rid of (or "edit," as my aunt calls it), I put on the lone album from 1969 super-group Blind Faith, which I probably listened to twice when I bought it in high school and has been collecting dust on my shelf ever since. It took all of ten seconds into track one to know I'd be writing about it soon. 

Blind Faith was Eric Clapton's fourth band in as many years, formed directly after the dissolution of Cream, almost by accident after a jam session with Steve Winwood while his own band, Traffic, was on hiatus. Their lone album has six tracks, the last of which takes up almost all of side two with relatively aimless Ginger Baker drum solos. Because the album had no hits and possesses easily the worst album cover of all-time (the kind that's so bad you hope prospective girlfriends don't even stumble upon lest you have to defend owning it), it's pretty easy to forget about its existence at all. Cream was great, Derek & the Dominoes had "Layla," and Blind Faith was just that side project in between that no one really cares about. At least, that's the narrative I had in my head. 

I don't really know what I was expecting when I put this album on the other day. I knew what "Presence of the Lord" sounded like because it was on a Clapton compilation I used to have, and it's vaguely boring church-ish blues, so I guess my memory had falsely carried that over as the sound of the whole album. Nope. The first song, "Had to Cry Today," now strikes me as the first heavy metal song. 

First, some timelines: Obviously this came out after Cream's entire career, and it's also after the first Blue Cheer album, the first Jeff Beck Group album, and the first Led Zeppelin album. But those all feel like distinctly hard-edged blues albums from which you can understand the advent of metal, but which don't fully feel like metal themselves. This is prior to Led Zeppelin II, all of Black Sabbath, and Deep Purple's In Rock (their first heavy album), and came out about the same time as the second Jeff Beck Group album, all of which are much closer to traditional metal. 

As with any artistic debate like this, the precise transitive moment is tricky, if there even is one. It's like Descartes' old philosophical question of replacing every board in a ship with a different kind of wood, one by one. At what point is the ship made of a different kind of wood? How many of our hair follicles have to go gray before we officially have gray hair? It's both trivial and arbitrary to pinpoint, but fun and somewhat informative to try. At least as informative as any other argument about pop music really can be. 

Anyway, this is my answer. This opening riff. This is the beginning of heavy metal. Crank it up, stretch out your devil horn fingers, make sure no one's looking, and bang the shit out of your head. And try to pretend it's not Steve Winwood's white-soul voice that you're doing it to. 

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Song of the Day: The Faces - Cindy Incidentally (1973)

For the second straight day, rock and roll has lost one of its greatest sidemen. Yesterday it was Bobby Keys, saxophonist for The Rolling Stones, and today it was Ian McLagan, pianist/organist for the Faces and Small Faces. I've written about The Faces before, how they were one of the five best bands of their era, but no one seems to have heard of them anymore. Because of that, comparatively few people will realize what a loss McLagan is, but he was one of the best and most beloved keyboardists in rock, having played at one point or another with virtually everyone. 

I own probably two dozen CD box sets, but my favorite one is the Faces' box set that Ian McLagan compiled in 2004, Five Guys Walk Into a Bar…, because it so gloriously and perfectly recreates the band as they actually were instead of how revisionist history might have dreamt they were. The set isn't remotely in chronological order, nor does it stick to a clear "highlights and lost gems" game plan like so many other box sets do. Instead, it haphazardly runs through 67 songs that range from the singles to drunken rehearsals with unintelligible band dialogue. 

If we've learned one thing from the history of rock artists compiling their own work, it's that they rarely know what the hell they're doing, and their misguided attempts at rewriting history only rob fans of informative listening experiences. Not so with McLagan, who proves to be one of the great exceptions. In the introduction to the box set, McLagan writes that he initially had it organized chronologically, but switched it because that bored him. He continues:

"So I sat down one afternoon, poured myself a pint of black madness, and put on 'Flying.' It was the first song Ronnie, Woody, and Rod wrote together, it was the first track we cut, and it became our first single. So it was the obvious place to start, a nostalgic beginning. But after that I was desperate to hear 'On the Beach,' and then 'Too Bad' followed it so well, and 'If I'm On the Late Side' was a natural after that. I was on a roll, pouring drinks and wiping tears from my eyes all at once."

He then also tells the story of how "Dishevelment Blues" came into existence, that the New Musical Express had asked them for an original song to include on a free flexidisc, and Rod suggested they give the publication this "abomination of a blues, knowing they wouldn't have the balls to use it. But they did." McLagan says he included it on the box because "piss-taking is part of what we were as a band." 

In addition to compiling the definitive history and portrait of the band, McLagan also helped co-write many of The Faces' best songs, and "Cindy Incidentally," which was one of the singles from their final album, is among their loveliest. You can hear in the opening piano melody just how crucial and stylish his playing was to one of the greatest rock bands ever. He'll be deeply missed, but don't feel sad. Instead, pour yourself a pint and press play. 

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Song of the Day: The Faces - Maybe I'm Amazed (1971)

My cousin has been begging me for a Paul McCartney song, but since I'm not in the business of just totally giving people what they want, he'll have to settle for this, which is arguably the greatest cover of a McCartney song. 

If every band in history were ranked solely by the size of the gap between how great they are and how popular they are (at least for bands whose greatness is higher than their popularity, not the reverse), The Faces would probably be number one. While they enjoyed a good amount of success in the early '70s while they were together, they seem to have been totally and utterly forgotten by history. They have zero name recognition. None of their albums are in print on CD. They have exactly one song that gets touched by classic rock radio ("Stay With Me"). They were finally inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame about 15 years too late. But Jesus, consider the pedigree! Three of their members (Ronnie Lane, Ian McLagan, and Kenny Jones) were previously in The Small Faces, who were a hugely successful British pop band of the '60s, and two of their members (Rod Stewart and Ron Wood) were previously in The Jeff Beck Group, which was a very popular heavy British blues/hard rock band. And after The Faces broke up, one of them replaced Keith Moon in The Who (Kenny Jones), one of them became the second guitarist in The Rolling Stones (Ron Wood), and one of them became Rod Stewart (Rod Stewart). That's a huge amount of mileage in terms of importance and popularity, and yet the best work any of those five guys did was with this band. So why doesn't anyone but music snobs know who they are? It's a mystery. For people that care about the history of art forms, we always hope that things will get straightened out once the dust settles. And yet that doesn't seem to be working out for The Faces. 

One of the most overused words in rock criticism is ramshackle, and The Faces were the band that word was created for. My Dictionary.com app defines ramshackle as "loosely made or held together; rickety; shaky." Ummm, yep. That's these guys. By all accounts they didn't get along great behind the scenes, with two different songwriting/singing factions in the band. When Ronnie Lane wrote their best song, "Ooh La La," there was such a fight over who would sing it between he and Stewart that Ron Wood (who was absolutely not a singer) finally ended up doing the vocal just so neither could be pissed that the other won the fight. And yet, that's part of the song's charm, that it was just sung by this hugely flawed voice, with the great Rod Stewart merely chiming in for harmony work. It sounds like something the band recorded at a drunken bonfire. It also sounds utterly wonderful. Further contributing to the ramshackle nature of the band was that despite none of them having notable drug problems, they notoriously played their shows so shitballs drunk that the concerts had a sort of "anything goes" atmosphere. They were The Replacements before The Replacements. They even used to have a bar on stage! And a bartender!!

But they made truly timeless and phenomenal rock and roll, so much so that all of the band's many flaws appear as charming elements of the whole package. With this song, recorded less than a year after the McCartney version, they begin by eliminating all of the tenderness and poignancy of the original, and then somehow relocating those things along the way almost by accident. It starts like bar band rock and roll. They're probably drunk, they're smiling, the drums are loud. The organ acts as the lead instrument. You could make cogent arguments about how tight the instrumentation is and how loose it is. That's the kind of thing The Faces were very good at--leaving you completely unsure about whether they were on the same page, but thinking that no matter how on or off they were was part of what made it so great. And then, at the 2:46 mark, Rod and Ronnie--band nemeses--join each other at the mic for one of the most lovely chorus harmonies you're ever likely to hear. For just over 30 seconds the rest of the band comes to a virtual halt, and we just get two guys who allegedly hated each other coming together for a sound so beautiful that it demands to be experienced as loud as you can handle it. While the McCartney version is romantic, this one seems celebratory. Rod and Ronnie, huge grins on their inebriated faces, passionately singing to the skies and loving every moment of it. It's no wonder they stretched the song out to six minutes. Why stop when you can sound like that? Then when it finally does stop, the last few notes seem sloppy and accidental. The Faces wouldn't have had it any other way.

This was originally written and posted on Facebook on August 4, 2014

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Song of the Day: The Rolling Stones - Sweet Virginia (1972)

The wonderful Bobby Keys, who is probably the second-greatest rock saxophonist ever (RIP Big Man), died this morning after a long fight with cirrhosis. Born on the same day as Keith Richards, Keys was 70 years old. 

Keys, named to play piano and defiantly turning to the sax, was a great rock and roll rebel who started touring with Buddy Holly when he was just 16. He became one of the great session players of the '70s, recording with Eric Clapton, Joe Cocker, John Lennon, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and several others. But, of course, he's best known as an honorary member of the Rolling Stones, appearing on virtually every Stones album and tour since first teaming with them for '69's Let It Bleed. 

There are numerous spotlights for Keys' work; His solo on "Brown Sugar" is widely regarded as one of the great sax moments in rock history. He also has a long solo on "Can't You Hear Me Knocking," virtually dominating the second half of the song. My personal favorite Keys moment is his first major Stones contribution, "Live With Me," which is the only rock song I've ever heard to use bass and sax as its two lead instruments. Sadly, the only good live version I could find video of is the excellent 2005 one from Martin Scorsese's concert film Shine a Light, with Christina Aguilera on co-lead vocals, and you should definitely seek that out if you haven't heard it. But I can't deal with that video, because watching 62-year-old-Mick-Jagger grind on 24-year-old-Christina makes me nauseous.

So instead I went with this under-heard gem from the Stones' magnum opus, 1972's Exile on Main Street. 

I've always regarded Exile as like a Masters Thesis on what rock and roll fundamentally is. It's grimy, rebellious, and mostly recorded in a basement while the Stones were in tax exile. It's a long swirling mix of country, blues, soul, gospel, and everything else, soaked to drowning in drugs and swagger. But good god is it transcendent. Every song feels like a piece of rock and roll dictionary that exists outside of time, like it was discovered on some archaeological dig, all carbon dating attempts failed, and no one bothered to wipe the dirt off--or "scrape the shit off," as Jagger sings here. 

"Sweet Virginia" feels a bit like an attempt to write an early-twentieth-century Carter Family number. It's a song where a long sax solo just should not, would not, could not work. And yet, there it is. I love at the 2:29 mark, where Mick introduces Keys' solo by saying (something like) "Come on Bobby, bring it on home to Texas!"

No matter where he was, who he was playing with, Bobby Keys always brought it on home. He'll be missed. 

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