BEST MUSIC POLL: The ballots are being tabulated as we speak, and come June 19 we’ll announce the winners of the 2002 FNX/Boston Phoenix Best Music Poll with our annual free-for-all rockfest on Lansdowne Street. We’ll close down the block with music in a half-dozen clubs and on an outdoor stage; there’ll also be halfpipe shredding. We’ll have performances by raging national acts including Static-X, Ill Ni–o, Tantric, Trik Turner, DJ Z-Trip, Earshot, the Riddlin’ Kids, Munk, and Sugarcult, plus a selection of home-town heroes: Piebald, Scissorfight, American Hi-Fi, and many more to be announced (stay tuned to these pages and FNX). The doors open at 5:30 p.m. on June 19; tickets are $22.50 and are on sale now through NEXT ticketing at www.nextticketing.com or by calling (617) 423-NEXT.
STILL SPREADING: Swedish garage-punk sensations the Hives haven’t made an album since 2000’s Vini Vidi Vicious (released in the US on Epitaph), but in the past six months — following their first US tour and, in the UK, their improbable ascent to gold-selling stardom — a mania has erupted, culminating in the band’s signing to Warner Bros. in the States, not to mention an uncharacteristically effusive New Yorker review a few weeks back that touted ’em as better than the Strokes and the White Stripes. As of last week, if you didn’t have tickets to the Boston stop on the Hives’ upcoming summer headline tour, you were out of luck — the gig was sold out. But in an indication of how drastically expectations have shifted, the show has been moved from the Middle East downstairs (capacity 600) across the river to the much larger Roxy Ballroom (capacity 1500). The date remains the same — June 11 — and all tickets already sold will be honored. A bunch more are now on sale; call (617) 931-2000.
NEXT WEEKEND:
The Believer
You can understand why a film about a Jewish Nazi would need a little help finding its audience — but Henry Bean’s The Believer hasn’t been getting many breaks. History itself seems to be working against Bean. The movie’s premiere at the Toronto Film Festival on September 11 last year was canceled, for obvious reasons. A bad review from the highly influential Simon Wiesenthal Center ("a primer for anti-Semitism," was one comment) shortly afterward temporarily scotched the film’s theatrical release, forcing it onto cable. Now it’s scheduled to open in theaters in the midst of an intensified Middle East crisis that makes anything resembling a "primer for anti-Semitism" — a tough sell in any climate — a tad more controversial.
"I finished shooting the film two weeks before Lieberman got nominated, and it seemed like Jews never had it so good," Bean recalls. "That phrase itself should have been a warning. But everything seems so much more than I thought I would get."
Maybe it’s because he’s been working on the project for so long that he can be sanguine about its fate. Nearly 30 years ago, a friend told him the story of a young man in the 1960s who was highly influential in the American Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan until he was outed by the New York Times as a Jew. He killed himself. This struck a nerve with Bean, who himself is the scion of a Reformed Jewish family. "What’s personal to me [in this story] is the feeling of contradiction. That feeling within myself of contradictory impulses that don’t logically make sense together yet are there. And whose very contradictory image in some way I find invigorating, revitalizing." He adds, perversely, "I thought The Believer was going to be a comedy."
It took a while for people in the business to get the joke, however, and in the meantime Bean earned a living writing screenplays for such offbeat genre films as Deep Cover and Internal Affairs. That and work for Jerry Bruckheimer on the likes of Enemy of the State helped him put together enough money to finance, in part, the picture himself. Boosted by a terrific performance by Ryan Gosling as the former yeshiva student who becomes an intellectual skinhead out to kill Jews, the film won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance.
These days, though, people might be more sensitive about a film in which a Jew posing as a Nazi leads other thugs in planting a bomb in a synagogue. Certainly the lack of an imprimatur from the Wiesenthal Center didn’t help. "What I felt was behind the Wiesenthal Center issue," says Bean, "was that they wanted their power. They wanted to define what was appropriate for depictions of Judaism and Jewish stuff in Hollywood. Somebody quoted somebody saying, ‘He should have come to us first with this script.’ "
Power, and not anti-Semitism, is the real taboo topic in Hollywood today, according to Bean. "We always try to talk about power, but it’s hard to conceptualize what power is and how it’s possessed. Who has it, does anybody have it, or does it have them? I feel the real questions of power in American society are never addressed — not by art, not by journalism, not by academe. And I would like to try and figure it out, but it’s not easy."
It’s the thing that the anti-hero in The Believer is wrestling with. When asked by some Holocaust survivors what he thinks he can teach, he replies, "Kill your enemies." A lesson that everybody these days seems to be adopting.
"I think it is a very ironic line and we’re treating it like it was simple," says Bean. "I have the same reflexive response when I’m feeling like I want to kill my enemy, but from one minute to the next, I have no idea who my enemy is. It’s the decentralizing of power that’s so terrifying."
The Believer opens next Friday, May 31, at theaters to be announced.
BY PETER KEOUGH
