Cynical C links to When An Audience Member Had To Fill in on Drums for a Passed Out Keith Moon. It starts getting emotional about half-way through. Townsend is invigorated. When the band takes a bow, John Entwhistle congratulates the guy in what I think is a hand-painted, long-sleeved, button-up, high-collared skeleton shirt.
From Matt Yglesias:
We still don’t have a good answer to the question posed by Sen. Warner the last time Gen. Petraeus appeared: How has this effort in Iraq made us safer and how do we expect it will make us safer in the long run?
Congratulations to my sister-in-law, Gaby, and my new brother-in-law, Dana, on their recent marriage in Costa Rica (or, Why I Haven’t Been Writing For The Past Week - thanks, Jayson, for filling in). Congratulations also to Barack Obama for his current 10-in-a-row winning streak. Quick notes: I saw Michael Clayton recently and liked it quite a bit - a great look at law, corporate malfeasance, and the intersection of the two, it features pitch-perfect performances from George Clooney and Tilda Swinton in particular (had a nice back-and-forth about it with Dan Sallitt over at his blog); Mr. Untouchable was a solid documentary about Nicky Barnes, the man at the center of the Harlem heroin trade in the 1970s and the high-level players he betrayed - it brought to mind the excellent Cocaine Cowboys, a doc about the Miami cocaine wars that peaked a little bit later.
Here’s some stuff that Roland Topor has done that you haven’t.
1. He was a key member of the “Panic Movement” in 1962, a theatre group that critiqued Surrealism for being too bourgeois while still embracing its basic guidelines. The other founding members of the group were crazy psychedelic filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky and crazy psychedelic playwright Fernando Arrabal.
2. He wrote the novella “The Tenant” which was adapted by pederast extraordinaire, Roman Polanski into one of the best horror films ever made.
3. He was the main animator on Fantastic Planet (La Planète Sauvage, 1973) and wrote a ton of stuff for TV and film, including “Marquis” which features an dog faced Marquis de Sade arguing with his human-faced erection. A-may-zing.
5. Acted in a ton of crap. He was Renfield in Werner Herzog’s “Nosferatu” (1979). I know, that’s pretty fucking sweet.
So this is a dude to check out. Big time.
So this isn’t a review of the film, but more a reason to show our faithful readers (blogateers, ho!) a trailer that would/could make you download in your pants. This is a 1971 Mario Bava masterpiece more popularly known as “Bay of Blood” but released initially in the US with the title “Twitch of the Death Nerve” (which wins the award for best movie title of all time (next to “Fast and Furious : Tokyo Drift” of course)). This is the film that laid the groundwork for all of those 80s giant body count slashers we’ve come to know and… well… sometimes love, but mostly watch out of obligation. In fact a number of kills in “Friday the 13th” were taken directly from “Death Nerve.” Suck on that. But don’t blame Bava too hard for creating a genre that kills fun teens (aka ones who like beer and doing it) and rewards nerds (aka the ones that don’t) - he didn’t know how weird America would be in the 80s. Anyfart, here’s the trailer and I’d have to say it might be my fav based on aesthetics alone. Oh yeah, the Italian title is “Reazione a Catena.”
Earl Macklin (Robert Duvall) is barely out of prison when his girl, Bett (Karen Black), tells him his brother’s been killed. Worse, she’s partially responsible. Worse yet, he’s next. When his would-be killer comes through the door, Macklin jumps him, ties him up and puts the proverbial screws to him. Turns out he and his brother robbed the wrong bank, and the organization whose money went missing wants payback. So begins Earl’s epic excursion against the Outfit, a crime syndicate that controls half of the country.
Following is a take on the new Rambo by my buddy, Jayson Green, hopefully a frequent contributor:
Rambo, Or, Why I Have an Uncomfortable Ramboner
A Play In One Act
A glassy-eyed ME sits, staring into the middle-distance. YOU enter.
You: How was Rambo?
Me: I don’t think I can answer that question. I guess I can say it’s amazing, but I don’t necessarily mean that as a compliment.
You: Was it violent?
Me: They throw a newborn baby into a burning building. And what I mean when I say that is, you see someone THROW A TINY BABY INTO A FIRE!
Congratulations to the New York Giants, who won a Super Bowl for the ages with great pass defense and a resolute quarterback. Congratulations to Kristen, who made it down to the bottom of the blog and saw my favorite thing of January 2008 - she is our reader of the month! Some quick notes: I have received emails and comments concerning my review of Bachelor Party. It seems I’ll have to defend myself… My mother writes, “Do you ever see movies that are less, shall we say, noir? I’d love to see reviews of things more along the line of My Life as a Dog, Tears of the Camel, etc. You don’t have to put them on your blog if it makes you look less cool, but you could send them to me.” She means The Story of the Weeping Camel and, yes, it will make me ”look less cool”.
A camel gives birth to an albino calf and ignores it totally, deep in post-partum depression. The calf nears death. The Mongols of the Gobi Desert have a cure: a violinist plays a reconciliation song for mother and child. It works: the camel learns to love its offspring. Try not to cry.
Tris writes, “I really enjoyed Bachelor Party. I was twelve at the time, and that may have had something to do with it, but still… that was my kind of movie. Its only flaw, in my opinion, was that Rodney Dangerfield was not in it. But he was there in spirit.”
- Dangerfield would have been the cherry on the top, definitely.
Stefany writes, “I still think that Bachelor Party is some of Hanks’ finest work.”
- Agreed.
Jeff writes, “terse stuff yano. I guess you just don’t “get” adrian zmed stick to the art fag movies from now on.”
- I saw Grease 2 in the theaters, friend.
Listen, I like Bachelor Party as much as the next guy. Not in the sense that I’d want to watch it sober more than once every twenty years; but it’d be fun at a frat - every time someone says “hookers” or “tits”, drink, and I guarantee you’ll be wasted in half an hour. Does that make it “good”? Okay.
“What if I shaved my moustache off?” Marc (Vincent Lindon) asks his wife, Agnes (the always excellent Emmanuelle Devos). “No idea. I like you with it. I don’t know you without it.” And so immediately, willfully and with some pleasure, Marc shaves his moustache off. But instead of being surprised or dismayed, Agnes doesn’t notice at all; their friends Serge and Nadia, with whom they dine later that night, don’t notice anything unusual either. Marc doesn’t bring it up, but he’s visibly shaken; and worst of all, when he finally does confront Agnes, he’s told he never had a moustache - more than a bit upset, he thinks he’s the victim of an elaborate joke orchestrated by his wife.
Men collide into one another on a rugby pitch, a confusion of bodies and sounds; someone’s punched in the face, falls bloody to the ground, gets carried off - a distraction. The Hobbesian poetry of this opening scene could stand in for the entire film: full of violence, turmoil and confusion, ending in devastation. Directed by Lindsay Anderson, This Sporting Life is considered the last of the major British New Wave films; containing both an angry young man and a kitchen sink, the film was the Rank Organisation’s late entry into the field, and when it failed financially, the social realist trend in British cinema essentially died.
Coke, ‘ludes, hookers, trannies, T&A, S&M, a drug-addled donkey, an Indian pimp, Tawny Kitaen - and Tom Hanks? Is it good? Does it matter?
I’ve tiptoed around Nicholas Ray’s movies for ages: I love the stuff I’ve seen, particularly Johnny Guitar and In a Lonely Place, but I haven’t seen a lot - something about the burden of expectations… But when Ray’s first feature, They Live By Night, was recently made available on DVD, I took a chance. It looks like an easy one, part of a cheapo double feature with Side Street, but the film is a revelation. An absolutely devastating noir starring Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell as Bowie and Keechie, the eponymous lovers on the lam, They Live By Night highlights in particular what a great director of actors Ray was, right off the bat. He’s no slouch with the visuals either: often noted for his expressive use of camera and color, here Ray works us over in black and white, following the misbegotten couple from the first bated breath of romance to its last gasp.
Vanishing Point opens with a wonderfully slow 180-degree pan, beginning at an empty Shell station, passing over rural landscape and ending on an empty road. From the distance a police motorcycle speeds towards us, siren blaring, but we don’t follow it - the camera stays on the road. Two bulldozers creep across the screen; another police vehicle whips by, but again the camera refuses to budge - it’s focused intently on the bulldozers’ deliberate advance. A broken window with a tattered screen, the bulldozers reflected in a shard of glass - an old man mumbling to himself, watching the bulldozers pass - a handful of townsfolk eyeing the strange procession, vaguely curious… Finally the bulldozers stop and drop their blades to the blacktop, blocking both lanes of the two-lane highway. This title sequence is a near-perfect example of a certain kind of Seventies filmmaking - it’s contemplative, has a real pastoral quality and induces a strange longing - and it’s a shame because it’s the best part of the movie. It’s a shame, too, because the absurdity that follows does not feel nearly as enjoyable as it could have, coming on the heels of such a fine introduction.
