Cat Stevens and He-Man

This was shot in 1976 in Maryland but 18 months later Cat Stevens quit performing and, well you know the rest.  It was found and released in 2004, five years before his first album in 30 years came out in May of 2009. 

I've never seen Cat Stevens perform live so I have no previous bar by which to measure this performance but based on the extras (some performances are from 1971) I'd say he's the same, which is to say peak or bottom, depending on your view.

The tour included magicians, a back up band, grand piano, and a large set (but not elaborate even by those standards).  Stevens sits up front, kind of standing/sitting on a large stool, and sings his hits. He sounds exactly like his records.  I've never seen anyone sound almost identical to their recordings.  There were only a few songs where he varied his voice enough to make them different from his albums.

This is for a Cat Stevens.  The performance isn't so great that it'll win people over, if anything, it'll disappointment fans by the lack of depth he displays as a performer but his songs are so well crafted that his hardly matters.

  DOLPH LUNGRAN.  There is nothing else to say, which is good because this movie, well...it doesn't hold up very well.  I think it may not have held up from day one.  Dolph is awsome, more so because his name is fun to say and he's a total bad ass in Rocky 4, but the movie is lame.  There isn't any one thing that I can point to and say that is sucked, I can only point at it all of it and say that is sucked.  The acting and directing were flat---Courtney Cox was forgettable, the dude from Back to the Future---the hairless principal, actually looked feminine at times--- I swore I saw eyeline a few times and if I did I blame the makeup guys.  The story is disapointing.  This is He-Man, he should be fighting dudes on his world, not coming back to Earth.  That seems like it was either laziness on the scriptwriters or an attempt to save a buck on the producers part, or both, although it can't be that hard to find alien landscapes in the dessert of California. 

It was fun to watch because it was reliving a part of my childhood but it was also painful to watch.