The CultureMap Interview

Onto a different Page: Barenaked Ladies open up on band changes

The Barenaked Ladies are all about the 4 now.
Steven Page is out and the band's moved on.

In marriage or band membership, often times it's what is not said that speaks most about a divorce. Such is the case with a very amicable Canadian rock band.

Barenaked Ladies is in Houston for the first time Wednesday night as a quartet, playing the Verizon Wireless Theater.

In February of last year it was announced that guitarist/singer-songwriter Steven Page — arguably the most well-known member of Barenaked Ladies (BNL) and the voice behind past hit singles "One Week" and "It's All Been Done," — was leaving the band by mutual agreement. Both Page and the band made the announcement at the same time and niceties like "for 20 years the relationship has been fruitful" and "All agree it's time to move on" were volleyed about with great diplomacy.

The finest of spin doctors couldn't have produced a more professional and less dramatic separation between lifelong band brothers.

With time and more space to talk, however, some of the latent, simmering frustration that must have been building behind the scenes started to seep to the surface in fragments. Put all the pieces together and a second picture starts to unfold.

In retrospect, one of the first red flags was waved a year before Page left the band. After eight albums and 15 years of rock that saw BNL play its way out of Ontario, Canada and onto an international stage with well over 10 million albums sold, the band decided to briefly abandon lucrative rock radio to make the children's album, Snacktime!

Apparently Page was not completely on board with this project.

"...It wasn't my idea. I was along for the ride," Page was quoted as saying to the Ottawa Citizen last year about Snacktime! (although, curiously, he is credited with writing one-third of the tracks). A drug arrest two months after the album's release probably did nothing to help endear Page to his bandmates or the kiddies and parents who might be buying the album.

Other bombs started to burst after the split as it appeared Page thought — very incorrectly — that his departure might signal the end of Barenaked Ladies all-together. Apparently the remaining members — guitarist/vocalist Ed Robertson, multi-instrumentalist/vocalist Kevin Hearn, bassist Jim Creeggan and drummer Tyler Stewart — had a different plans that included the creation of the just released first post-Page BNL album, All In Good Time.

Earlier this year Page told the Toronto Star that he thought it was weird that the band didn't change its name when he left and that they continue to perform songs that he wrote. He went on to say that he has no plans to rejoin the band in the future.

Even now, with BNL in Houston, the remaining band members mixed feelings toward Page can be heard both in what is said ... and what isn't.

"The changes were necessary which is difficult to admit," Hearn tells CultureMap. "But a lot of the feedback we've been getting after concert is that this is the best we've ever sounded live."

The multi-faceted BNL does have one advantage over bands that depend solely on one member for lead vocals. With the exception of drummer Stewart, all the other members of the band write and sing songs on every album. With Page gone, it was simply a matter of reinventing the songwriting formula and redistributing the duties among the remaining members for the making of All In Good Time.

"I'm working a lot harder now," says Hearn who wrote three songs for the album. "I feel more present. Physically on stage, Steve used to stand in front of me. Now I'm front and center."

Hearn has some new duties, but it's Robertson who has been asked to truly take center stage in place of Page, both as a songwriter and a singer. In addition to writing over half of All In Good Time, including the first two singles, "You Run Away"and "Every Subway Car," he's also taken over the vocals on many past favorites and hit singles.

"If Chris Martin left Coldplay it might be difficult for them to carry on," Hearn says. "But for (BNL), we all had a voice and have all worked very hard on this over the years to carry on.

"Bottom line is we're having fun again."

That "again" being the key as to why BNL is now a quarter, not a quintet.

Movie Review

Glen Powell stumbles in remake of sci-fi classic The Running Man

Glen Powell in The Running Man

Photo courtesy of Paramount Pictures

Glen Powell in The Running Man.

For all its cheesy ‘80s greatness, the original version of The Running Man starring Arnold Schwarzenegger was a very loose adaptation of the novel by Stephen King. For the new remake, writer/director Edgar Wright has tried to hue much closer to the story laid out in the book, a decision that has both its positive and negative aspects.

Glen Powell takes over for Schwarzenegger as Ben Richards, a family man/hothead who can’t seem to hold a job in the dystopian America in which he lives. Desperate to take care of his family, he applies to be on one of the many game shows fed to the masses that promise riches in exchange for humiliation or worse. Thanks to his temper, Ben is chosen for the most popular one of all, The Running Man, in which contestants must survive 30 days while hunters, as well as the general population, track them down.

Given a 12-hour head start, Ben earns money for every day he survives, as well as every hunter he eliminates. Since he only has a relatively small amount of money to use as he pleases, Ben must rely on friendly citizens who are willing to put their own lives on the line to help him. That’s a task made even more difficult as the gamemakers, led by Dan Killian (Josh Brolin), use advanced AI to manipulate footage of Ben to make him seem like a guy for which no one should root.

Co-written by Michael Bacall, the film is shockingly uninteresting, working neither as an exciting action film, a fun quippy comedy, or social commentary. The biggest problem is that Wright seems to have no interest in developing any of his characters, starting with Ben. Our introduction to the protagonist is him trying to get his job back, a situation for which there is little context even after we’re beaten over the head with exposition.

The situation in which Ben finds himself should be easy to make sympathetic, but Wright and Bacall speed through scenes that might have emphasized that aspect in favor of ones that make the story less personal. The filmmakers really want to showcase the supposed antagonistic relationship between Ben and Dan (and the system which Dan represents), but all that effort results in little drama.

Ben has a number of close calls, and while those scenes are full of action and violence, almost every one of them feels emotionally inert, as if there was nothing at stake. It doesn’t help that Wright doesn’t set the scene well, making it unclear how far Ben has traveled or who/what he’s up against. There are times when Ben feels surrounded and others when he can walk freely, weird for a society that’s supposed to be under almost complete surveillance.

Powell has been touted as a movie star in the making for several years following his turn in Top Gun: Maverick, but he does little here to make that label stick. With no consistent co-star thanks to the structure of the story, he’s required to carry the film, and he just doesn’t have the juice that a true movie star is supposed to have. Nobody else is served well by the scattershot film, including normally reliable people like Brolin, Colman Domingo, Michael Cera, and Lee Pace.

The Running Man is a big misfire by Wright and a blow to Powell’s star power. On the surface, it has all the hallmarks of an action thriller with a side of social commentary, but nothing it does or says lands in any meaningful way. Schwarzenegger’s one-liners in the original film may have been goofy and over-the-top, but at least they made the movie memorable, which is way more than can be said of the remake.

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The Running Man opens in theaters on November 14.

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