Here’s a trailer for the comic A Muppet Wicker Man. The comic, which is described as, “Bad puns, paganism and the smell of burning felt…” can be read in its entirety here.
Let there be no doubt that this is a hell of a lot better than that shitty Nicolas Cage remake!
Thank you Trey Lane!
Shot in 1975/76 during The Rolling Thunder Revue tour, Bob Dylan’s four epic vanity production, Renaldo And Clara, is a pretentious hodgepodge of disconnected vignettes shot through with occasional moments of musical brilliance. But even staggeringly good performances of “Knocking On Heaven’s Door” “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and “Tangled Up In Blue” can’t save this bloated folly flung from the depths of Dylan’s gargantuan narcissism.
A commercial bust when it was first theatrically released, Dylan later cut the film by almost two hours, leaving mostly concert footage, and even then audiences stayed away in droves.
In describing the making of Renaldo And Clara, Dylan said “a third is improvised, about a third is determined, and about a third is blind luck.” The improvisation part is clearly apparent and I imagine that the determined part is an allusion to the musical performances. But the last ingredient, the “blind’ thing, is what seems to have really driven the film…and blind ain’t good in a visual medium.
While a few critics compared Renaldo And Clara to French surrealist films like Les Enfants Du Paradis (must be Dylan’s mime make-up), I see absolutely no poetry or magic in the movie. I’m a Dylan fan and over the years I’ve repeatedly tried watching R&C with all the mercy and love I can bring to it. But it has yet to reveal any hidden genius to me. Are there readers out there who see something in this that I don’t? I’m open to having my mind changed. Really.
Anyway, here’s Renaldo And Clara in its uncut shambolic glory. It looks beautiful. Much better than the bootlegs I’ve seen in the past.
I had a good little chuckle while watching the trailer for the new zombie horror flick Osombie. You knew something like this was going to happen, right? Will I watch it once it’s been released? Probably not, but I thought I’d share the trailer with you anyways. Enjoy Osombie!
Via io9
BTJunkie, the popular torrent tracker that boasted tens of millions of monthly users has voluntarily shut down for good to avoid legal hassles. After a nearly seven year run as one of the world’s top five Bit Torrent destinations, the following message was posted on the homepage:
“This is the end of the line my friends. The decision does not come easy, but we’ve decided to voluntarily shut down. We’ve been fighting for years for your right to communicate, but it’s time to move on. It’s been an experience of a lifetime, we wish you all the best!”
Via TorrentFreak:
Talking to TorrentFreak, BTjunkie’s founder said that the legal actions against other file-sharing sites such as MegaUpload and The Pirate Bay played an important role in making the difficult decision. Witnessing all the trouble colleagues got into was cause for a lot of worry and stress, and those will now belong to the past.
That said, BTjunkie’s owner still thinks there might be a future for other BitTorrent sites.
“I really do hope so, the war is far from over for sure,” he told TorrentFreak.
While BTjunkie was never targeted directly by copyright holders, the site was reported to the US Trade Representative (USTR) November last year. Both the RIAA and MPAA listed the torrent index as a ‘rogue’ site that facilitated mass copyright infringement.
BTjunkie is also one of the search terms censored by Google because it’s piracy related, alongside The Pirate Bay, RapidShare, uTorrent and others.
The latest 2-minute trash compactor from our friends at Everything is Terrible! This one is particularly… terrible, but, you know, in a good way!
For the next like four years or something the EIT gang will be criss-crossing America on their DoggieWoggiez! PoochieWoochiez! traveling cinematic roadshow, featuring a screening of the aforementioned new film. DoggieWoggiez! PoochieWoochiez! dares to pose the questions: “What if we make a movie composed ENTIRELY out of dog-related found footage?” and ‘‘What if this magickal movie, made up of thousands of other dog movies, is also a remake of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1973 masterpiece The Holy Mountain?” —and then answer them!
With our heroes, those gurus of found-footage viral videos back on the road again anything can happen, America.
Get a copy of the brand-new DoggieWoggiez! PoochieWoochiez! DVD!
See the Everything is Terrible! roadshow in YOUR lousy town!
On the heels of Madonna’s half-time spektakular and the new M.I.A. video (torrents of Arabia), may I present the The King of Rock and Roll (the white one) immortally preserved in hi-def.
Elvis on Tour was shot during a 15 city tour of the States in 1972 and Elvis is in fine Vegas form, wearing enough bling, satin, scarves and hairspray to make Liberace look like Bon Iver. Chubbier than in his sleek ‘68 Comeback Special, Presley still puts on a dynamic, though somewhat predictable, show.
The montage (split screen) sequences were directed by Martin Scorsese. I guess the producers thought if they replicated the look of the film Woodstock that hippies would suddenly think Elvis was hip. Had The King’s handlers let him stick to his lean mean black leather look of the ‘68 Comeback Special that might have happened. Afterall, a decade or so later, Morrissey found the look compelling enough to imitate it.
Looking like an advert for Swinging London, Joe Massot’s 1965 short Reflections on Love mixes pop documentary with scenes devised by writer Derek Marlowe and (apparently) an uncredited, Larry Kramer. Though everything looks rather beautiful, it is such a terribly straight film, and considering the talent involved, and doesn’t really offer much love for the audience to reflect on. Then, this was the Sixties, when everything was new and exciting, and getting hitched in a registry office was daring and rad. O, how innocent it all seems. Massot went on to direct George Harrison’s Wonderwall and later, Led Zeppelin’s concert film The Song Remains the Same. Kramer went on to script Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (1967), and Ken Russell’s Women in Love (1969), before writing his novel Faggots in 1978. As for Marlowe, he wrote the classic double-agent spy thriller, A Dandy in Aspic, and followed this up with a series of idiosyncratic and stylish novels (from crime to Voodoo to Lord Byron), which are all shamefully out-of-print, and not even available as e-books - publishers please note.
The original version was twenty-one minutes long, and this is the revamped, re-scored (by Kula Shaker), re-edited (12 minutes) re-release from 1999, and still watchable pop-candy.
Previously on Dangerous Minds
A Dandy in Aspic: A letter form Derek Marlowe
Wonderwall: The Ultimate Sixties Flick?
Wonderwall Music: George Harrison’s little-known 1968 solo album
The magus of American cinema turns 85 today. I had the good fortune to see Kenneth recently at his MOCA opening and he’s looking rather hale and hearty for a man his age, I must say.
Anger’s musical collaboration with Brian Butler, Technicolor Skull, has recently produced a limited edition blood red vinyl album available only at the Technicolor Skull website (I have one, it’s a cool looking object).
Below, Anger’s short film made for the 2010 fall/winter collection of the house of Missoni:
In its 50 years of independence, Jamaica’s had an indelible influence on the global scene, mostly via its dizzyingly prolific music industry and sports stars. In terms of film, as iconic and authentic as movies like The Harder They Come, Rockers and Dancehall Queen are, they’re largely non-indigenous productions.
But recently, a new breed of grassroots digital DIY film- and video-makers have emerged who are depicting the zeitgeist on the island in ways that transcend the typical “yeah mon” stereotypes with which we’re too familiar.
One of these new breed is twenty-four-year-old Simon Thompson, who directs and edits video under the moniker Yosef Imagination. Along with videos for some of the island’s most well-known artists—including Capleton, Luciano, Fanton Mojah, Lutan Fyah—Thompson’s produced ads, short subjects and video series like the hilarious Konfu Dread, which has previously featured here. He’s currently at work on Zombie Flim, Jamaica’s first undead flick, which he’s uploading to his YouTube channel as he shoots and cuts.
Thompson’s work is pretty impressive considering that he’s got no formal training and has been at it for a little under two years. He’s also shot virtually all his stuff on Canon T2i and Canon 5D digital still cameras rather than conventional camcorders.
Videographers like Thompson are composing a wide-ranging vision of a young, energetic and cosmopolitan Jamaica, mindful of its cultural history and struggles, yet infatuated with what’s next in music, technology and style. And yes, it’s a vision that’s imbued with the indefatigable sense of humor that typifies life on the island.
Thompson explains how his stuff differs from that of the island’s street-side genre directors:
I looked around in Jamaica and realized the quality and the topics of our film industry is pretty much the same from filmmaker to film maker. I wanted to show Jamaica in a different light. We’re not all gangsters we don’t all smoke weed and we don’t all push violence towards others who don’t have the same viewpoint we have. I want and will continue to push for change, push for a difference in Jamaica’s thinking, showing the youths that, hey, we can make quality films that don’t have to be about gangsters and politics.
I also try to include alot of humour in the projects from Yosef Imagination showing people a lighter and more free-spirited vibration of the Jamaican people and culture.
And what does the future hold?
I see Yosef Imagination as a Paramount Pictures or a Universal Pictures eventually…the sky is no limit to our imagination ....Yosef Imagination is limitless.
Here’s one of the most hectically paced YI pieces yet: a multi-artist jam on the Bipolar riddim…
After the jump…more music vids and Jamaica’s first zombie film!
It’s Friday, so I present to you without comment 70s Blowjob Faces!
More after the jump…
I’m Almost Not Crazy: John Cassavetes - The Man and His Work directed by one of the finest writers on the planet Michael Ventura was shot during the making of Cassavetes’ final personal film Love Streams in 1984. One of Cassavetes’ best and most underappreciated films (so what the fuck else is new?), Love Streams is inexplicably and appallingly unavailable on DVD in the USA.
I think Ventura’s extraordinary gifts as a writer provided him with the necessary insight on the creative process and a kindred spirit’s respect for Cassavetes’ incisive skill with the spoken word and empathy for the ways human beings try to find a language for the inexpressible that makes this documentary connect on a visceral level.
Cassavetes’ obsession to get at the “heart of the matter,” to find the essential truth that animates our being, to cut through the bullshit, is as spiritual a journey as any in the history of film. As a young man pounding my fists against the walls of my own masculinity, I found Cassavetes films liberating. Beneath the machismo and testosterone-fueled angst of his male protagonists, there exists a tenderness, vulnerability and uncertainty that belies the inherited social concepts of masculinity. Cassavetes’ men are tough guys clawing at their macho veneer like caged animals desperate to find that one exist point where they can burst free.
Cassavetes died on this day in 1989 and we present this very special documentary in honor of one of America’s pioneers of indy cinema and an artist of profound depth.
And there is no honoring Cassavetes, without giving equal honor to the phenomenal Gena Rowlands. Has there been a more dynamic collaboration between husband and wife in cinema? And that is not a rhetorical question. Let me know what you think.
Love Streams is available on import DVD. Michael Ventura’s book “Cassavetes Directs: John Cassavetes and the Making of Love Streams” can be purchased here.
God Bless America is the title of an upcoming black comedy from Bobcat Goldthwait:
Loveless, jobless, and possibly terminally ill, Frank has had enough of the downward spiral of America. With nothing left to lose, Frank takes his gun and decides to off the stupidest, cruelest, and most repellent members of society with an unusual accomplice: 16-year-old Roxy, who shares his sense of rage and disenfranchisement.
I haven’t seen it yet, but people, based on this trailer alone, God Bless America is already my favorite film of all time. As Movie Bob says of God Bless America, “It’s not the movie we want, but the movie we need.”
They called his Shakes the Clown the “the Citizen Kane of alcoholic clown movies,” so with this new film, can we declare Bobcat Goldthwait “America’s Godard,” too?
God Bless America hits VOD on April 6th and select theatres on May 5th.
Thank you Mr. Michael Backes of Sacramento, CA!
“Some people are bullfighters, some people are politicians. I’m a photographer.”
GIF by If we don’t, remember me.
French director Henry Chapier’s 1968 documentary American Summer is a companion piece to Sex-Power which DM featured a couple of months ago. What I said about that film applies to American Summer: ” Revolution has never been sexier, more romantic, existential or just plain goofy when seen through the prism of the nouvelle vague.”
In American Summer we’re confronted with a bunch of white California militants who’ve aligned themselves with the Black Panther movement during the trial of Huey Newton. The film captures a moment in which the youth movement of the Sixties was becoming restless with passive forms of resistance against the Vietnam War and civil inequality, a time in which giving peace a chance was being supplanted by a naive and relatively unrealistic notion of revolution. The ideology was becoming more radical and language more provocative, but little action was actually being taken by the children of privilege. It was mostly a theoretical revolution composed of words and salutes. “In dreams begin responsibilities”...but most of us were still dreamers.
Featuring clips from speeches given by Black Panther party militants, an interview with Black Panther Party information secretary Kathleen Cleaver, concerts, a Black Panther military parade and music by Quicksilver Messenger Service.
‘Sex-Power’: Rarely seen French film about the Sixties with Jane Birkin
Max, Mon Amour
Here’s the synopsis from IMDB:
Reserved and cool, Margaret is the French wife of Peter, a British diplomat posted to France with their son Nelson. She takes a lover, a chimpanzee she bought from a zoo and installed in a flat. Peter asks that she bring the chimp, Max, to live with them. He obsesses about Margaret and Max’s relationship, hiring a prostitute so he can watch Max perform (Max declines) and peering through the keyhole as Margaret and Max sleep. He tries to kill Max, then finally accepts the ape’s presence. When she is called away to her ill mother’s bedside, Max stops eating. Worried, Peter takes Max and Nelson to the countryside so Max can be with Margaret; once there, Nature beckons. Is Max lost?
Max, Mon Amour
Via PCL Linkdump
As you all know, the role for “Sonny Corleone” went to James Caan. I think Robert De Niro might have made a better “Sonny” IMHO. At least he’s part Italian.
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Robert De Niro’s real taxicab driver’s license from 1975
(via Cynical-C)
Kermit the Frog by supajoe
Jim Henson’s Muppets have been in London this past week for the UK premiere of their new movie, simply called The Muppets. On Thursday, Miss Piggy and Kermit the Frog gave a press conference at the May Fair Hotel, and one of the questions raised was how they reacted to the recent claims by Fox News’ Epic Trolling Eric Bolling that the Muppets “brainwash children” with a “dangerous liberal agenda”.
Kermit answered the question reasonably, but as usual it was left to Miss Piggy to strike the fatal blow, with a swift and simple rebuttal. Fox “News”, indeed - if you are interested in seeing the original idiotic anti-Muppet outburst by Trolling, then you can go here - but I am not sullying the beautiful countenance of Dangerous Minds by embedding that shite here.
What an insanely delusional world these people must live in if even the goddam Muppets are somehow seen as a dangerous Communist threat. Speaking as a non-American, the work of Jim Henson was fundamental in inspiring a view of American society in my generation that was founded on the tenets of diversity, equality and opportunity. Beautiful ideals that could never be associated with those Pox News sock puppets. Fox has done more than any other media outlet in destroying the United States’ reputation around the world. All this despite the fact that Bill O’Reilly’s sagging face looks more and more like Kermit by the day - and even then, Kermit made the better reporter.
Murdoch’s cronies obviously don’t understand that some cultural artefacts beyond their ken are as sacred as Jesus and money, especially those associated with happy childhood memories. To condemn as being part of some imagined “problem” is a big mistake. Have at ‘em, Piggy:
The idea of Brendan Behan eventually became greater than the man himself. No one knew this better than the roaring boy himself, who played up to the image of “a drinker with a writing problem”. By the early sixties he was the toast of the West End, the toast of Broadway, the toast of every-fecking-where, but his best works, The Quare Fellow, The Hostage, and his biography Borstal Boy, were behind him, and his confidence had been battered through working with the firebrand director, Joan Littlewood, who had turned the English version of The Hostage into a “Knees Up Mrs Brown”. Unable to stay focussed long enough to put pen to paper, Behan was forced to record his last works (rambling travelogs of New York and Dublin, the play Richard’s Cork Leg) onto tape-recorder for others to transcribe. It was a terrible waste, and of course there’ll be those who’ll say a lesson of sorts, but so what, as his fall form grace didn’t stop the great man’s legend form soaring.
Two years after the Behan’s death, Irish producer / director Norman Cohen (later best known the film version of Spike Milligan‘s Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall and the Confessions of…. comedy porn series) made Brendan Behan’s Dublin, a travelog of the Irish capital based on the playwright’s memoirs, anecdotes and writing of the city by Carolyn Swift, and narrated by Ray McAnally as Behan. The Dubliners supplied the soundtrack.
Previously on Dangerous Minds
Key Writers: Photos of writers and their typewriters
Glitterbug was Derek Jarman’s final film, compiled from the many hours of Super 8 footage he had shot throughout his life. Originally made in 1994 for the BBC’s Arena. arts strand, Glitterbug is a visual journal that ties together aspects of Jarman’s life from the 1970s to 1990s.
The film opens with the artist awakened by the memory of dreams, of lovers, of friends, of place - Jarman’s lofts on Bankside, Upper Ground, the Thames River; of self, shaving, washing, breakfasting - those small rituals that prepare the day, the structuring of artifice and order. The world outside, My Tea Shop, the day-time existence, Jarman’s curiosity for the world around him. Then at night another world, we see preparation for Andrew Logan’s Alternative Miss World, returning to day, a garden party, is this Andrew Logan singing as Little Nell Campbell dances? Duggie Fields watches, Jarman films.
The dreamer sleeps, travels to the country, Van Gogh fields, standing stones, the memory of place, absence of others, a white-washed cottage room, the creation of art, the structuring of order.
The dreamer awake, and we are now watching Jarman at work, Sebastiane, the sea flecked gold, the actors at play, legs entwined. An office, an apartment, ‘phone calls, then filming the artist Duggie Fields, his designs, his face, a prelude to Jubilee, a young flame-haired Toyah Willcox, The Sex Pistols, Jordan and a dress rehearsal for what will become The Last of England, as she pirouettes around a burning Union Jack, Adam Ant, hair-cutting, the Silver Jubilee.
Jarman is showing us the sketches for preparation, the themes he returned to throughout his life. Rome, ritual, the research for Caravaggio, punk, the art of mirrors, The Slits, William Burroughs, Gensis P. Orridge, Throbbing Gristle, Jarman’s fascinations and obsessions, his idols and co-conspirators. The ritual of sharing tea, sharing cigarettes, a shared communion, youthful faces, sun flecked, smiling in the sun, a future ahead, too often cut short by the frost, this the last summer they danced on the rooftop, ‘Here I am, here are my secrets,’ he is saying, as we plunder through his film diaries, Super 8 scrapbook, glittering trinket chest, memory is what makes us, what sometimes betrays us, what gives us the love we have to share, returning to the Thames, the friends, the lovers, those living, those dead.
Glitterbug Derek Jarman’s Super 8 films, with Andrew Logan, Duggie Fields, Tilda Swinton, Michael Clark, Adam Ant, Toyah Willcox, William Burroughs and Genesis P. Orridge. Music by Brian Eno, specially commissioned for this film.
You’d have to be a fan of both HBO’s Game of Thrones AND The Goonies to understand why this is absolutely freakin’ hilarious!
So funny. So wrong.
No liquids while watching. You’ve been warned.
(via High Definite)