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NOT ‘The Little Mermaid’:  Is ‘The Lure’ the most f**ked up movie of the year?
03.13.2017
10:23 am
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The Lure is a 2015 film from Polish director Agnieszka Smoczynska that’s finally enjoying a theatrical run stateside this month. It is an aggressively weird and unsettling film, a musical comedy that is almost never funny and never all that musical, even with half a dozen song and dance routines. It is mostly a washed-out, glam-grunge descent into surreal depravity where romance, tragedy, lust, and alienation intermingle in a bizarre alt-world filled with slime and cigarette smoke.
 

Singing/dancing/man-eating sister act Silver and Golden
 
The story involves two young mermaid sisters, Golden (Michalina Olszanska) and Silver (Marta Mazurek), who use their siren song to lure a couple of low-rent musicians to a Warsaw beach to rescue them from the briny deep. They join the band as a singing/dancing mermaid sister act and perform nightly in a dingy cabaret show that looks like some zero-budget post-Soviet nightmare of polyester and short-circuiting synthesizers. When they dry out they grow legs, but they’re smooth like Barbie dolls from the waist down. Silver falls in love with the curly-haired guitar player in the band but has no human genitals to offer him. She does have a goopy fish vagina on her tail, but he’s not into that. Luckily, they find an off the grid doctor willing to perform radical fish-to-human surgery. Golden does not approve and starts going out nightly to feast on the local hornballs in protest. All of this high weirdness is bracketed with kooky cabaret numbers that sound like they just discovered disco a week ago and are still trying to figure out exactly how it works. I mean, this film really does have it all.

Watch the trailer for ‘The Lure’ after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Ken McIntyre
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03.13.2017
10:23 am
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Dude, get over it: Businessman buys, distributes hundreds of movie tickets to impress ex-girlfriend
07.01.2014
10:22 am
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It takes a truly unusual event for Dangerous Minds to take notice of a movie like Michael Bay’s Transformers: Age of Extinction, but a certain Chinese businessman named Wang has supplied a worthy pretext. 

It seems that seven years ago, this Wang guy was dumped by his girlfriend, and ever since, he’s been consumed by the desire to make her understand, in no uncertain terms, that she made a mistake. At the time they were both living in Nanjing, and he was so broke he couldn’t afford to take her to the movies. In the meantime he has become a successful businessman in Beijing (news reports don’t indicate in what capacity), and thought of the idea of buying out all the tickets at several IMAX cinemas for June 23, the first day Transformers: Age of Extinction was available to be seen in the city. Since his former girlfriend had moved to Beijing after their breakup, Wang was fairly certain she was in the city even though they were not in touch.
 
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One of several receipts Wang posted on Weibo
 
Wang took to the Chinese version of Twitter, known as Weibo, to offer a free ticket to a screening to users as long as they shared his post about it, which was directed at his ex. In the post, Wang wrote, “I just want to say that you may have been wrong to make that decision.”

Soon Wang’s post had been shared 110,000 times and had garnered more than 35,000 comments. And approximately 1,590 people had scored a free ticket to see Bay’s stupid mega-blockbuster. The escapade cost Wang the equivalent of $40,000 (he supplied receipts on Weibo to prove that he had actually bought up all the tickets), which represents about half of his monthly income.

Understandably, Wang’s resentment-fueled project has sparked tons of commentary. RocketNews24 explains, “Understandably, plenty of people were angered that the businessmen had snatched up so many tickets for himself, and commented that thanks to his antics they were unable to see the film as they have planned. But equally many others have commended him on the move and are sure that his ex girlfriend is now kicking herself.”

I think most of us can relate to those feelings of wanting to show a former ex what a blunder breaking up turned out to be. I feel like any decent therapist would be likely to advise Wang that you can’t have your cake and eat it too, the only way you can make contact is by signaling that you are still obsessed with her; Weibo isn’t some loophole you can use to get around that.

Personally, I think she made the right call.

Here’s some random footage of the stars of the movie (Mark Wahlberg et al.) visiting Beijing in case that shit interests you:
 

Posted by Martin Schneider
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07.01.2014
10:22 am
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Pop Art: 5 celebrity artists

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A selection of artworks by artists better known for their work as actors, musicians and writers.
 
William Burroughs
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Burroughs explains his shot gun art:

“Once you know where to point, all you have to do is get out of the way and let this thing happen [...] and letting what you really know take over.”

 
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More celebrity artists, after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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06.27.2011
06:14 pm
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‘Eraserhead’ in sixty seconds

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Two sixty-second versions of David Lynch’s Eraserhead: one by Lee Hardcastle; the other by Martin Funke, which was made for the Jameson Empire Done in 60 Seconds competition.

It takes Lee Hardcastle 10 days to make one of his 60-second claymations, as he told Don’t Panic magazine:

I have some shortcuts, biggest ones are within the story – keep characters/locations down to a minimum because that stuff takes the most time to create. Something I learned over time is that whatever you do, do not skip out on the animation. People watch a video for animation, not a static image or boring moving graphics.

I re-use materials like cards & clay. Once in a blue moon, I’ll invest in something, last year I bought & made three armatures at £70 a pop. If I need something, I’ll search the apartment for props/materials. Check out my Eraserhead claymation, the bed sheet they’re sleeping in are in fact the underpants am wearing right now. It’s just the rent I have to worry about.

Lee has made a variety of other great 60 seconds films, including Evil Dead and The Exorcist, all of which can be found here.

Martin’s Eraserhead was one of the 10 shortlisted finalists, and more of his work can be found here.
 

 

 
Previously on DM

‘Inception’ in 60 seconds


 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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03.13.2011
02:40 pm
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Some of the earliest color motion pictures that you will ever see
08.24.2010
01:16 am
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Watching these Kodachrome color tests from 1922 actually took my breath away for a moment. I felt as though time had stopped and I’d entered a dream. The colors are so sensual I felt like devouring them, inhaling them like opium. This stunning footage is archived at the George Eastman House and is an early test of the Two-Color Kodachrome Process.

In these newly preserved tests, made in 1922 at the Paragon Studios in Fort Lee, New Jersey, actress Mae Murray appears almost translucent, her flesh a pale white that is reminiscent of perfectly sculpted marble, enhanced with touches of color to her lips, eyes, and hair. She is joined by actress Hope Hampton modeling costumes from The Light in the Dark (1922), which contained the first commercial use of Two-Color Kodachrome in a feature film. Ziegfeld Follies actress Mary Eaton and an unidentified woman and child also appear.

Read more about these gorgeous moving pictures here.
 

 

 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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08.24.2010
01:16 am
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We have come for your scalps: the wild world of Redsploitation films
08.07.2010
06:43 pm
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Vice online has a terrific piece on ‘Redsploitation’ movies.

Somewhere in the grey area between the noble savage and the savage-savage lies the Redsploitation film. These gems of schlock cinema feature Natives getting off their knees and kicking white ass all over the West.

For the whole scoop on really pissed off Indians in the movies check out the Vice website.

 
more vengeance after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Marc Campbell
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08.07.2010
06:43 pm
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Cher vs. Christina Aguilera in ‘Burlesque’: drag queen training film or C-cup Russ Meyer
08.05.2010
04:06 pm
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I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait for this November release. Burlesque looks like a delirious mashup of Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls, Flash Dance, Coyote Ugly and Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls. Who could ask for anything more?

In what is sure to be a doublewide’s worth of celluloid delight, Cher, her face in the last stages of rigor mortis, plays an aging exotic dancer who owns a down-on-its luck joint called The Burlesque Lounge. Into her life walks bright-eyed, Ali, a small-town gal from Iowa with big dreams and a set of thighs that could crack open coconuts. Hired as a waitress, Ali quickly works her way up to the stage, knocks the socks off everyone with her funky moves and soulful warbling, and becomes the star attraction at the lounge, the diva of the dive. Sounds great, right? And to add just the right amount of campy sweetness to the whole mix, Christina Aguilera plays Ali. Man, I’m choking up Jujubes just thinkin’ about it.

As added insurance that this glitzy, camp classic in the making, has street cred, Burlesque is directed by a former stunt boy from 80’s breakdance classic Beat Street, Steve Antin.

Oh, shit, I’m frothing at the mouth. I need a moist towelette. Quick.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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08.05.2010
04:06 pm
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Psycho at 50: Zizek’s Three Floors of the Mind

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Today marks the half-century anniversary of the premiere of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, which—along with Fellini’s La Dolce Vita opening earlier the same year—used the artform of cinema to hold up the cracked mirror of compulsive desire to Western civilization.

Movies, of course, would never be the same. Who better to drive the point home than our friendly neighborhood Lacanian critical theorist from Slovenia, Slavoj Žižek, from his excellent 2006 documentary, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema?

 
Get: The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema Pt. 1-3 [DVD]

 

Posted by Ron Nachmann
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06.16.2010
06:40 pm
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