ENTERTAINTMENT

An Exclusive Interview with Interpol
Richard Carter | For the Wichitan

A little over two years ago, amidst the breakout of popular Brooklyn bands like Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Liars and !!!, a slightly less punk band named Interpol released their first album, titled “Turn on the Bright Lights.”
Atmospheric, filled with meticulously gorgeous guitar melodies and well-done angst, the quartet hit the concert trail and has seemingly never looked back.
Following the release of their second album last month called “Antics,” I had the opportunity to speak with Interpol’s drummer, Sam Fogarino, prior to their Dallas show next Monday.
“We’re absolutely pleased with second album,” he said. “The aim for ‘Antics’ was to take what we did on the first record and kind of put it into focus a bit more.”
 Despite the band’s extensive touring schedule in the US and Europe, they actually made quality time in Brooklyn to write and record the new album.
 Following the “Bright Lights” tour that ended late last year, “we took from October to March before we entered the studio. There were a number of months to get it together. Some stuff was preexisting, like ‘Next Exit,’ and there was some other stuff that was in the works.”
 The first song on the album, “Next Exit” may seem like a radical departure for the band, but was, in effect, one of their older songs. “It was meant to be recorded for ‘Bright Lights,’ he said. “At the last minute we decided it wasn’t ready. It still needed something.“
“Antics” is the kind of album that doesn’t reveal itself all in the first listen or two.
“While it doesn’t slam you over the head at first, it always seems like it’s going to be a long player. There’s a lot of records in the past that didn’t at first strike me, that I ended up listening to 10 years straight. We can always hope, right?” the drummer said with a laugh.
 Fogarino recently moved out of Brooklyn to Manhattan, where the rest of the band is now spread out. The band writes and practices in a rehearsal studio in a Brooklyn basement.
  Interpol is really kind of glad that the Brooklyn wave from several years has dispersed.
“We’re nowhere near being lumped with all the other New York bands like we were two years ago,” he said.  As a result, people are hearing Interpol and Liars, for example, for the bands they are and less as part of some punk or post-punk scene.
 Fogarino said that New York bands have faced similar obstacles. The New York music scenes have always been more disparate that what they seemed from the outside.
“If you look at all those historic moments in time--as far as music is concerned in New York--it’s always been diverse. The CBGB’s scene of the late 70s went from the Ramones to Blondie to the Talking Heads. You always have a rock and roll contingent but there’s always other people like ‘art fags’ fucking it up for everybody.”
And then there is the music of each of those bands which is always changing, at least if they are properly developing.
Asked about how the music of Interpol has evolved over the last six years, the drummer said that it’s been a natural progression. “There’s a very healthy and natural growth. Otherwise, it’s too much of an abstraction to really put my finger on. We’re all satisfied with what we’re doing at the moment.”
The band still creates their songs together and then later overdubs keyboards in the studio. The arrangements and writing are a group affair, he said.
“Paul writes the lyrics and the melodies, and I like to call Daniel the instigator. He brings in a lot of original ideas that get morphed into what become the songs. It’s really everybody feeding off each other. It’s definitively a band.”
If each of Interpol’s members have separate musical influences, they have discovered that as time goes by, they have become dependent on each other to create their sound and the music.
Fans of the band swear by Interpol’s performances as a live band, and Dallas happens to be one of their favorite cities to play.
“Dallas is really good for Interpol. There’s a really good crowd down there, Fogarino said.  “There’s a lot of people that we still hang out with that we met day one. We always have a really good time.”
If most groups are a best neutral about touring, Interpol makes a party of it. The band’s bass player, Carlos D., is known for throwing After Parties in
which he DJ’s.
Fogarino appreciates getting to meet some great people along the way. “The experiences we’ve had on this tour alone. The visceral response we get from our audiences. When you stop and ponder it, it’s really amazing.”

Performances Paltry in 'Ju-on: The Grudge' Rewrite
Jason Kimbro | Staff Reporter
 
Japanese horror gone the way of Hollywood has been the new craze in fright flicks due to the ever-so-popular-yet-over-dramatized sleeper hit “The Ring.”  Yes, it is very much over-dramatized.  A dead, albino girl with dark hair and wrinkly skin climbing out of a television set is just plain silly.
 Anyway, the latest addition to the list of these particular scream gems is “The Grudge,” rehashed from “Ju-On: The Grudge,” the third installment from what is now four “Ju-On” films.
 The writer and director of the original flick has graced the United States with his presence and has placed himself in the director’s seat again. 
One big difference between the original and the new Americanized version is screenwriter Stephen Susco, who succeeds in making a freaky film, despite a few scares, that’s mostly a fortune cookie full of laughs.
The laughs may come from producer Sam Raimi’s ability to create that juicy bit of camp we sometimes love in these horror flicks.  This flare doesn’t mix well with the decidedly creepy style of this film.
Wondering where I am going with this?  Is it a good film?  Is it a bad film?  Well, read on and you shall see. Here’s the gist:
An old American lady named Emma (Grace Zabriskie) remains in a catatonic state in an old Tokyo home, thus giving the actress a much easier role to handle.  Her Matthew (William Mapother) and his wife Jennifer (Clea Duvall, a highly under-utilized actress), are nowhere to be found, and now the cute, young Asian girl hired to help out is missing as well.
Well, Karen is hired to take the place of the missing helper.  Karen is played by Sarah Michelle Gellar.  I was waiting for her to pull out a wooden stake and pull off some deranged karate moves. 
Karen goes into the home, investigates some odd noises, finds a weird kid and a cat, and meets a huge, black shadowy demon with big, white eyes, then ZOOM! We are all zapped back into the past so that the disappearance of Matthew and his wife can be revealed.
Some weirdness ensues.  Cops show up, the old lady dies, and before we know it, Matthew’s sister is being harassed by the same wide-eyed ghoul in her office building and her home.  Nothing real grizzly goes on, only a few people get scared to death, literally.  Can’t be too bloody here, or they would lose their lucrative PG-13 rating.
Karen gets out alive, but since she has touched the house, the ghostly fiend wants to bully her by appearing in bus windows and making hands grow out of the back of her head.
One of the police detectives gives her the legend behind the house and the basis of the whole film, not to mention its tagline: 
When someone dies in the grip of rage, a curse is born and brought upon anyone who comes into contact with this entity on its rampage of horror and evil and Satan and monsters and the Klu Klux Klan and Hitler with a miniature pitchfork haunting Sunwatcher Village and, well, something like that.
Karen wants to stop the curse, so she goes and investigates a few more noises, finds the point behind putting a poor actor like Bill Pullman in the movie, and does what she can to save Tokyo from Godzilla.  No, wait, from The Grudge!  OOOOH!
This movie is highly entertaining.  One minute you’ll be jumping in your seat and the next you’ll be laughing at the white faces in the elevator.  It might not mix well, but you won’t be sleeping.
Performances were quite paltry; in fact, they just plain sucked.  The catatonic Emma gave the best performance and all she had to do was lay there and open.
There was a strong creepy aura about this film.  When I walked out of the theater, I was declaring to everyone how, well, for the saving graces of Christian eyes, “screwed” up this film is.  I didn’t know whether I should be laughing or scared when it was through. All in all, the atmosphere of this flick is quite unique.
The story could’ve been better.  The creepy/comedy mix didn’t work for me and it made everyone else in the theater ask themselves:  “what just happened?”  Susco should have been denied a rewrite and the film should have been made the way it was in Japan, or not made at all.
Don’t get me wrong.  I did enjoy this film and I was happy to have watched it, but now I am utterly confused as to what I should eat for dinner.  How this relates to the movie, I really don’t know, but what I do know is that if I had not seen this movie, I would have wanted pizza.
On that note, I am just going to starve.  Besides, I have had enough cheese and beer this weekend to hold me through fifteen grudges, a baker’s dozen of curses, and two big, white eyes staring out at me from a television screen.  Who am I kidding?  Pepperoni or sausage?

Entertainment Value    B,
Performances:              D,
Story/Plot:                    C,
Artistic Style:                B,
Overall GPA:                2.25