Beautiful Disasters

After taking a short break from the blog to watch the Olympics (or more specifically, the car accident that is curling, and the men's ice hockey), and be told that one of the people that reads my blogs sees it as being written in the style of an Anthony Bourdain (which upon reflection, I take as a major compliment), I'm back to cover a topic I feel as though I know a little about--beautiful disasters.

What do I mean by the term "beautiful disaster" you may ask? By my definition, it is something that, while being something of high quality, is deeply flawed on some level. For the most part, I've applied this term to a few cd's in my cd collection. For those of you don't know what a cd is, you might be using one as a coaster, or remember them as the thing you used to play your music on before you got the iPod nano that shoots video. And to answer your next question, I still buy cd's, I just load them onto my iPod and play them in my car.

Anyway, here are a few cd's and at least one movie I view as "beautiful disasters."

• Pearl Jam's No Code--first, please contain your shock that I have criticized something Eddie Vedder related. Second, don't get me wrong, I like this album. Notice I didn't say I love it. Because I don't. This album and I strictly platonic. It is from the late 90's, during the period where the band almost broke up, and the drummer at the time, Jack Irons, left before the album's supporting tour for his own personal issues. Let's just say all the tension in the band is evident. OK, there's that, but nothing says "let's break the tension" more than making an experimental album, and arguably the group's most experimental one, borrowing Middle Eastern percussion, being one example of the experimentalism. What all this together is a decent album crippled by one's own artistic grandiosity. In other words, a beautiful disaster.
• U2's Pop--this album may have been doomed from the start. It was part of the experimentation U2 went through during the 90's. Sadly, third time was not the charm. Having drummer Larry Mullen out of the mix with back issues didn't help either. Add to that, the three remaining members putting together songs they felt had to be completely rework upon Mullen's return. Oh, and then, getting an album that, in hindsight, really wasn't done, to the record company to meet a deadline. Throw them all together and what do you get--an album that I think is decent at best, but critically yields mixed reviews and commercial was a dud. How much of a "beautiful disaster" is this record? U2 has talked about, on several occasions, going back into the studio, and reworking the album, so that it is the way they actually wanted it. In other words, they want to actually complete it.
  
• U2's No Line on the Horizon--I must admit, I didn't think of this as one till I started writing and took a look at the cd shelf to see if I could find more examples. It has all the hallmarks. Start with Rick Rubin as your producer, but then shelve your ideas and go back to your "old reliables" producing wise in the forms of Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois. Move forward to the editing and mastering process, during which you almost scrap the whole album idea and release it as two EP's. Thankfully, the band came to their senses and assembled the best tracks into an album. Sadly, some of what they assembled wasn't all that great. Like a quarter of the album. What do you get (and stop me if you've heard this before, a critically mixed album that fails to deliver commercially). Unlike the other two cd's, this album has yet to grow on me as being good, although with that said, it's about a year old.
  
• Pearl Harbor--this is a good movies. No, I didn't not run spell check, or hae a grammatical hiccup in the previous sentence. This movie is actually two very good movies. Sadly, director Michael Bay, in his infinite wisdom, shoved them both together, and a yielded a beautiful disaster. There is a good romantic drama in this movie, but unfortunately, it's stuck rapped around a great war movie. The glue holding the whole
  thing together is cheesiness. Absolute cheessiness.
  
• Watchmen--this movie gets added to this list for one simple reason--Zack Snyder filmed a movie out of a comic book series that many thought was unfilmable. What he creates is something that, while good, is a very divisive force. You either like it or you hate it for reasons such as the cartoony at times violent, the interspersed cheesy moments, and the changing of the ending from the comic. Personally, I am more of a fan of the Director's Cut of this movie. It fits a little better to the comic book.
  
• Kingdom of Heaven--this movie gets this designation based on one reason--the version seen in theaters is a victim of poor edits which lead to horrible transitions. Then again, these things happen when after showing the movie to test audiences, it's decided you have to cut out about 50 minutes of the film. Thankfully, director Ridley Scott also released his Director's Cut (read this as Original Version) of the film on DVD. What this yields is a brilliant film, which is sadly trapped in the shadow of it's beautifully disastrous theatrical counterpart.

Music and movies are works of art, some of them are things of beauty, some disastrous failures. As you can see, there are a group of works that manage to straddle that line.