Pun Salad

Fifty years ago today, as Don McLean put it, the music died. I usually do the iPod shuffle in my car, but today I stuck in my From the Original Master Tapes CD and listened to Buddy on the way to work.

• At the American Spectator, Daniel J. Flynn has a nice essay putting the plane crash in the context of rock history.

• My favorite bit of trivia, as recounted in the UK's Independent:
  … in June 1956, The Searchers, a western directed by John Ford and starring John Wayne, opened in Lubbock. Holly's new drummer, Jerry Allison, was there. "Buddy and I went to see The Searchers and for a couple of days afterwards, we were mocking the way John Wayne said, 'That'll be the day.' Then we wrote the song. The first time we recorded it was in Nashville for Decca Records. It was the summer of 1956 and I had just gotten out of school. The producer said, 'That's the worst song I've ever heard in my life.' That hurt my feelings 'cause it was the first song I'd written!"

• Jerry Allison was not on the 1959 tour, and he's still around. The song "Peggy Sue" was originally titled "Cindy Lou"; Allison persuaded Buddy to change it to impress Allison's girlfriend, and future wife, Peggy Sue Gerron.

• Peggy Sue is still around too, she even has her own website. She and Allison divorced long ago, though, making "Peggy Sue" another entry in the "undying love for my, um, first wife" genre. (Other examples: Marc Cohn's "True Companion", Johnny Cash's "I Walk the Line", James Taylor's "There We Are".)

Mediocre reviews for Eagle Eye (IMDB score 6.7, Tomatometer 27%), but I was sucked in by the trailers on TV. Sometimes this works, but more often it doesn't.

The movie's plot involves two strangers, Jerry (Shia LaBeouf) and Rachel (Michelle Monaghan) who find themselves being coerced by a mysterious voice on their phones to do ever more ludicrous stunts of derring-do, all in pursuit of a goal that remains obscure until near the end. All of this is accompanied by an impressive amount of gunplay, car chases/crashes, explosions, and crane-on-building action.

Scanning through the reviews, the most common word seems to be "preposterous". Yes, if we're talking Shia LaBeouf movies, it turns out that Transformers and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull were both more believable than is Eagle Eye. Movies are funny that way. But they have a point: the plot relies on dozens of extremely unlikely dangerous actions performed by our protagonists with split-second timing, and if they had missed just one, the whole thing would have fallen apart. I'll believe in giant talking alien robots before I buy that.

In a cute nod to a much better movie, one of the minor characters who plays a role in the movie's resolution is named "Bowman". I don't remember if that was revealed at a point in the movie where it might have been considered a thuddingly obvious clue as to the identity of the omniscient mastermind. Obviously, I didn't replay it to find out for sure.

Also, Billy Bob Thornton is in it, and he's pretty good.