From: owner-jewel-digest@smoe.org (jewel-digest) To: jewel-digest@smoe.org Subject: jewel-digest V4 #645 Reply-To: jewel@smoe.org Sender: owner-jewel-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-jewel-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk jewel-digest Saturday, October 30 1999 Volume 04 : Number 645 * If you ever wish to unsubscribe from this digest, send an email to * jewel-digest-request@smoe.org with ONLY the word * unsubscribe in the BODY of the email * . * For the latest information on Jewel tour dates, go to * the OFFICIAL Jewel web site at http://www.jeweljk.com * and click on "Presence" * OR * go to the Atlantic Records site at http://www.atlantic-records.com * and go to the "On Tour" section * . * PLEASE :) when you reply to this digest to send a post TO the list, * change the subject to reflect what your post is about. A subject * of Re: jewel-digest V4 #xxx or the like gives fellow list readers * no clue as to what your message is about. Today's Subjects: ----------------- * MrBB-WSIT Premiere!/Jewel Calendar Updates Galore! [alan@jeweljk.com] * Some 'Ride With The Devil' Reviews.. [Jwlfan112@aol.com] * JOY [CaitAdaire@aol.com] * Merle Haggard And Jewel ["dsmcelro" ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 29 Oct 1999 23:05:18 EDT From: alan@jeweljk.com Subject: * MrBB-WSIT Premiere!/Jewel Calendar Updates Galore! Hi All GiggleLily@aol.com writes: > I was just wondering if anyone knew when the video for WSIT >is going to premiere? Will it be when Jewel is on TRL? Ah! A very good question & the answer is yes! The World Premiere of Jewel's new video for "What's Simple Is True" will be on MTV's Total Request Live next Friday afternoon, November 5th. Tonight, I'm spending a good bit of time updating the www.jeweljk.com calendar. Please check it this weekend for MANY NEW listings. Get those VCRs & tape decks ready! There will be many more TV shows added. I'm also adding many upcoming live radio broadcast listings from around the country, which will be featuring Jewel. Two of them (in Denver & San Diego) will be Christmas Radio shows hosted by Steve Poltz with Jewel performing. Also mark your calendars so you can participate in the live online chats with Jewel soon! She'll be chatting live on AOL (Keyword: Live) at 7:00PM EST on Thursday November 4th. Jewel will be chatting live again on Monday November 8th at Alloy.com. This too, begins at 7:00PM EST. Remember, if you'd like to have your "Jewel: A Life Uncommon" home video BEFORE the November 23rd release day, you will be able to order it direct from Jewel's website store beginning next Monday night at Midnight (Pacific Standard Time). It's the only place you can get it BEFORE it is released to stores on the 23rd. And I needn't remind you that Jewel's new Christmas album "Joy: A Holiday Collection" is released Tuesday. I'll keep this fairly short so I can get this new calendar together for ya tonight. I have a lot to add. Have a look this weekend at www.jeweljk.com for lots of NEW Jewel calendar information. Enjoy the weekend. Alan ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 29 Oct 1999 22:10:46 EDT From: Jwlfan112@aol.com Subject: * Some 'Ride With The Devil' Reviews.. From a visitor to the UK Internet Movie Database (uk.imdb.com): Date: 5 October 1999 Summary: surprisingly witty and engaging If it weren't for the young, mostly unproven cast, Ride with the Devil would be a shoo-in for Oscar contention. It has some of the wittiest dialogue in recent memory, with the banter between Tobey Maguire and Jewel matching the best Tracy-Hepburn repartee. The plot moves steadily but surprisingly - never racing ahead (hence the viewer who found it slow) but also never telegraphing what's going to happen next. With most movies it's easy to tick off "plot point one, reversal, climax," but with Ride with the Devil the structure is buried deeper than that. The themes are also profoundly understated. The friendship between Maguire and the black slave humanizes the Civil War. It also shows why it's far more interesting to make the heroes southerners fighting AGAINST emancipation (who then have more to learn), as opposed to conventional good-guys with their moral compasses neatly pointing in the politically correct direction. Jewel has such a well-written and lively role that it would be almost impossible for her to screw it up. Many other actresses could have played the part; however, it's to Jewel's credit that she doesn't seem out of her league here. I sat through heaps of films during the Toronto Film Festival. This one stood out above flashier critical darlings like American Beauty. I'll even go so far as to say that the horseback-riding, pistol-waving battle scenes were some of my favourite moments, and I normally hate macho stuff. This film earns its epic big-screen glory. Every element - plot, theme, character - manages to entertain in an original way. - -- From Radio Times, UK: The [film] opens with a suitable prestigious premiere, Ang Lee's emotional, epic drama of the American Civil War. Far from the battlefields of the Blue and the Gray, Lee turns a thoughtful gaze on the vicious guerrilla war waged among neighbours (Union sympathisers and the pro-southern "Bushwackers") on the Missouri-Kansas border. As he did in Sense and Sensibility and The Ice Storm, the Taiwanese Lee shows an astonishingly evocative grasp of another time, place and culture, sensitively centring still all-too-relevant personal and social themes in magnificant landscapes and some spectacular, brutal action. Playing the innocents getting wisdom through hardship and horror, a superb young ensemble led by Skeet Ulrich, singing star Jewel and Pleasantville's Tobey Maguire (above from left with Jeffrey Wright) cut a romantic dash with touching conviction. - -- From 'Empire' magazine, December 1999: Two childhood friends discover love and manhood in the midst of strife of the American Civil War. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- - ------ What's this? A Western? Surely Ang Lee, delicate maestro of the parlour-room conflict, is finally out of his depth. Yet with Ride With The Devil (based on Daniel Woodrell's novel Woe To Live On), dripping with horse sweat and ragged, furious gunplay, Lee proves as adept at divining the mythology of America's birth pangs as he is at creating the worlds of Taiwanese social morés, Jane Austen's corset repression and 70s staypress familial agonies. And while not as intense or talky as his back catalogue, Ride is every bit as groundbreaking and intelligent - just with less wife-swapping and more horses. Shot with the kind of cinematography that loosens Oscar cabinets, and populated with a cast of less familiar hip young things, this is a masterwork, melding internal conflict with external drama and vivid, sprawling action pieces that the likes of Eastwood, Ford or even Peckinpah would tip their hats toward. Put oversimply, it follows the rites-of-passage of young Jake Roedel (the auspicious Maguire), who ignores his Unionist father and elects to follow his best friend Jack Bull Chiles (Ulrich) and his own beliefs into the Confederacy - and a brutal war that will finally render any ideology pointless. Set (and accurately made) on the Missouri/Kansas border, a stunningly lush Brit-like landscape of farms and dense woodland, it is a long way from the military manoeuvres of the Greys and the Blues. Tapping into a Vietnam-esque war of attrition, the friends join a callous band of killers (including a beardy James Caviezel and a psychotic Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) and endure a conflict of guerrilla tactics and deception between the Southernist Bushwackers and Yankee Jayhawkers, which allows Lee to try his hand at brutal shoot-outs and, in one huge opera of violence, re-enact a real-life mass slaughter, as a rag-tag Confederate army reduce the town of Lawrence, Kansas, to rubble. This is also, of course, an Ang Lee movie - a grandiose Western concerned with human relationships. Jewel makes a polished and attractive debut as the love interest of both friends; far from a clichéd love triangle, her maddening attempts to woo a resolutely bachelor Jake are among the film's most touching moments. Jeffrey Wright (who shone in 1996's Basquiat) is an even more complex character, a slave conversely fighting for the South and the cause of slavery, whose strange yet devoted friendship to Jake is a pivotal feature. James Schamus' politically astute script is at pains to consider the mindset of the Southern fighters, painting a realistic vision of men fighting for family and land, and not simply a bunch of racist Dixie baddies. And even within this highly-charged drama, Lee succeeds in adding humour to the range and colour of emotions he evokes from his material, slipping in the gentle laughs inherent in the absurdity of their situation. He even manages his trademark lavish mealtime motif. Ride falls narrowly short of five-star glory, care of its occasional loss of narrative focus, and fails to truly get into the hearts and minds of some of the characters - chiefly Ulrich's frustratingly vague Jack Bull and Rhys-Meyers' overblown nutcase - but these are just irritants, not flaws. Ang Lee's sweeping romantic Civil War adventure clips the bar of masterpiece and remains a magisterial movie experience IAN NATHAN [four stars] - -- From Total Film, December 1999: What's the story? The Kansas-Missouri border, 1861. As America goes to war with itself, Jake Roedel (Maguire) and Jack Bull Chiles (Ulrich) join the Southern irregulars, or "Bushwackers", launching surprise attacks on the Union soldiers. After initial success, Jake begins to question his loyalty to the cause, while his German parentage and friendship with a freed slave (Wright) arouses the suspicion of his comrades. Chiles, meanwhile, falls in love with fetching 'widder' Sue Lee (Jewel). -------------------------------------------------------------------------- - ------ While filming Sense And Sensibility, Ang Lee told his producer James Schamus he wanted to make a movie "with characters who have dirty fingernails". The Taiwanese director's wish comes true with this Gone With The Wind-style epic, a mix of history lesson and horse opera that offers a Young Guns perspective on the American Civil War. Any doubts that Lee may be out of his depth in such an alien time and place are soon dispelled by the scale and ambition of his sixth feature. For while the emphasis is on the periphery of the conflict - the guerrilla tactics pursued by The Ice Storm's Maguire and his nomadic band of gunslingers - Ride With The Devil has its share of audacious set-pieces: a pitched battle between the Yankees and the Bushwackers, for example, or the harrowing recreation of the 1863 Lawrence Massacre, the largest mass murder on record. These scenes are undoubtedly impressive, but Lee scores even higher in the way he shows his youthful protagonists growing old before their time, their innocence butchered by cruel circumstance. Jake kills 15 men before he loses his cherry, Sue Lee (folk singer Jewel in a very respectable acting debut) is widowed twice in two years; while Jack Bull sees his dad shot dead, in front of him. The boyish cast, with the exception of Rhys Myers (far too pretty to convince as a psychotic renegade), are outstanding, bringing maturity and gravitas to their performances. Where this film flounders is in its depiction of an ex-slave fighting on the Confederate side. This may indeed be historically accurate, but Maguire's buddy bonding with Basquiat's Wright has an anachronistic, Lethal Weapon-ish flavour that flies in the face of recorded fact. This, though, is the only flaw in a masterly Western-war drama that's already being tipped as a serious Oscar contender. Neil Smith Final Verdict A grittily authentic depiction of internecine strife, not without its humourous moments (look out for The Full Monty's Tom Wilkinson). Lee's sweeping saga is a long way from Jane Austen, but he handles the material with breathtaking assurance. [Four Stars] - -- From Hot Tickets, Oct 1999: Evening Standard Hot Tickets 28 October 1999 Having scrutinised Austen's rarified society in Sense And Sensibility and dissected Seventies sexual mores in The Ice Storm, director Ang Lee was unlikely to come up with a standard take on the US Civil War. Thus Ride With The Devil approaches its canvas from an intriguing point of view. A motley collection of young Southerners form a guerrilla band to bushwack Union soldiers. Their actions are complicated by the shifting relationships of a group that includes a German/American and a black Southerner. Add a love triangle and Lee's intentions become clear: an epic study of relationships set against one of the most turbulent moments in American history. A very fine film. Neil Norman - -- I think the film offers and asking price for Jewel are going to increase? What do you all think? Scott Evans - -- Let Me Fly http://jewellover.tripod.com yahoo im: jwlfan112 ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 29 Oct 1999 22:54:07 EDT From: CaitAdaire@aol.com Subject: * JOY im so excited about the cd comming out. Does anyone know if it is going to have words in it? like poy and spirit? Anywho, i was just wondering about that cd. I have some great clips of some songs from it, and it sounds wonderful. Kudos to our jewel. Well ngiht guys ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 29 Oct 1999 20:40:41 -0600 From: "dsmcelro" Subject: * Merle Haggard And Jewel What is this about Merle Haggard and Jewel singing together? An earlier post stated that they heard it while listning to country radio? Where would I found out more about this? MIchael, the Obscure Angel ------------------------------ End of jewel-digest V4 #645 ***************************