Cinema Soul

Yes, this is supposed to be a film blog, but Bruce Springsteen is one of our most cinematic songwriters, and his new album Western Stars is drenched in the iconography of westerns old and new. It also reminds us that if you ride far enough west you end up in Hollywood; forgotten b-list actors and limping stuntmen make up some of the characters in this collection of stories put to music. Listening to a Springsteen album from beginning to end is like watching a movie full of separate stories intertwined around a central theme or location, like Short Cuts or American Graffiti . Even if they are now streamed rather than spun his songs always sound best in the context of an LP: his aesthetic sense was forged in vinyl. His work retains the sense of structure and thematic unity that was a hallmark of the great albums in the glory days of FM rock. Springsteen has always been fond of western imagery, but this time around instead of the monochrome noir of Nebraska or the Depression era...

At  the beginning of Rocketman, the new Elton John movie, Tara Egerton bursts onto the screen in one of the flamboyant musician's signature outrageous outfits. It is no accident that this particular getup resembles some glam rock demon from one of the more fabulous corners of the netherworld. Carl Jung noted that the Latin word for alcohol is spirtus , that it is "...the same word that we use for for the highest religious experience as well as for the most depraving poison”. Addiction is a spiritual disease; that's why we say that the addict is "wrestling with their demons". Alcohol and other drugs, food, sex, gambling, shopping...all forms of addiction are demonic in the truest sense of the word; they are pathogens that infect our spirit and possess our souls, hijacking our lives and steering us toward ruin. In the depths of his addiction, Elton John has recognized the demon that he has assimilated; he spends the rest of the movie physically and spiritually rem...