“Rosebud” and other famous last words uttered on the big screen: Video mashup
An amusing compendium of some famous last words in film history.
An amusing compendium of some famous last words in film history.
The Syd Barrett-penned “Scream Thy Last Scream” was supposed to be Pink Floyd’s fourth single (fitting in after “Apples and Oranges” and before “It Would Be Be So Nice”) but the song, and its intended b-side, “Vegetable Man” (about a loser superhero) were never released. Having said that they’ve been heavily bootlegged for years, since acetates (glass test pressings) were cut. In fact, there are several versions (mono, two stereo mixes) known to exist. I can’t believe such amazing songs have never been given legit release on a Pink Floyd or Syd Barrett compilation.
“Vegetable Man” was memorably covered by the Jesus and Marychain as the b-side to their “Upside Down” single.
You can download a full complement of these tunes at the great Pathway To Unknown Worlds blog.
Back in 1999, Channel 4 aired Mirrorball a TV series that showcased the best promo directing talent across the globe. Two series and one animation special were made, featuring the talents of Spike Jonze, Mike Mills, Michel Gondry, Jonathan Glazer, Jonas Akerlund and Chris Cunningham. Each program was dedicated to one director, with an interview, a selection of their work, and a specially filmed insert (from Gondry drumming to Glazer mucking around with actor Paul Kay - aka Dennis Pennis). Mirrorball was an instant hit and has gone on to become a cult TV classic since the series was cancelled in 2001.
Inspired by Edinburgh Film Festival’s Mirrorball screenings, the offshoot TV series was a collaboration between the Festival’s David Smith and Blackwatch Media, under producer and director, Nicola Black. As Black explained to Dangerous Minds:
“It was a fantastic opportunity to bring together groundbreaking directors and treat their work seriously, for the first time. We wanted to reveal the process behind these incredible pieces of work, which used cutting edge technology and post production techniques to achieve startling and unforgettable visuals to tell brilliant stories. You have to remember, this was way before any of these directors had made their names in movies.
Black started out as an intern working with Derek Jarman, before moving on to directing and producing. She set up her company in 1995, making an internationally acclaimed documentary on crime writer James Ellroy’s search for his Mother’s murderer. Since then, Black has made a variety of award-winning shows, animations and “hard-hitting” documentaries, and started the trend in “shock docs” with Designer Vaginas.
“Mirrorball was a great series to make, not only in terms of the breadth of creative work shown, but also by the fact it gave insight into the early works of film-makers like Spike Jonze, Mark Romanek, who went on to make One Hour Photo, Michel Gondry, who made Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Jonathan Glazer, who directed the brilliant Sexy Beast.”
There were many great highlights to choose from the Mirrorball series (including Jonze’s superb short film How They Got There, Gondry’s genius work with Massive Attack & Daft Punk, Glazer’s collaborations with Radiohead, Akerlund’s Smack My Bitch Up and Mills promos for Air), but we’ve gone for a selection from Chris Cunningham’s work, whose promos for Aphex Twin (aka genius Richard David James) are amongst some of the most original and disturbing ever made. Enjoy!
Bonus clips of Mirrorball after the jump…
Fouad Hady contemplates a 15-year sentence in a Saddam-era women’s prison cell
Whether under Saddam Hussein’s abysmal regime or in this post-“liberation” era, we tend to think of Iraq in terms of power and its players—mostly leaders and soldiers and mostly men.
Nine years after he fled Baghdad for Australia, Melbourne-based reporter Fouad Hady has helped change that by travelling back to his home country to file long-form reports from the ground for the Dateline program on Australia’s public SBS One channel.
In 2009’s “City of Widows,” Hady first surveys the miserable poverty of Baghdad’s outlying Al-Rashad district before being told of the Saddam-era womens’ prison, some of the cells of which are now occupied by refugees from other areas. Downtown in the city—which is home to 80,000 of Iraq’s 750,000 widows—he finds a burgeoning movement of women in loss.
“Deadly Legacy”—filed last month—finds Hady reporting from Fallujah, which was the site of massive anti-insurgent operations during which American troopes used munitions made with depleted uranium. Hady’s reporting on the city’s astronomical rates of cancer, infant mortality and leukemia speaks for itself.
These two reports are staggering in their eye-level view of some of Iraq’s afflictions before and after Saddam. No matter your position on that war, these should also prove instructive to those clamoring for action against a far more formidable foe like Iran. War against that country would make this look like a game of croquet.
Click to see City of Widows on YouTube
After the jump: see Deadly Legacy on YouTube…
I never took much notice of Flying Saucer Attack as I was busy plowing similar fields at the time, but having just found this cover of glam-douche band Suede’s The Drowners, a song I happen to love (along with nearly every other Suede A-Side, truth be told) I feel some self-education might be in order. it might simply be that it’s a great tune that lends itself to such a noisy and introverted reading, though.
The original song after the jump…
Republishing an entire article here from the Las Vegas Sun because it’s an eloquent discussion of how things got to where they are in Nevada, i.e. how a hateful harpie—a joke of a human being—like batshit Sharron Angle can be in a statistical dead heat with the Senate Majority Leader! Anyone who is reading this blog who lives in Nevada, PLEASE vote (and vote often!) to keep this woman from gumming up the work that needs to be done in Washington. She’s an unsophisticated, bigoted, MEAN AS HELL church lady who intends to inflict her twisted view of the world on the rest of us. That I’m not so worried about (I live in California, everyone would just laugh at her ideas, here) it’s the idea that someone like this, given a forum (such as the Senate, FOX News, et al) will probably be able to stir up enough shit to derail every progressive thing that would get proposed for the next six years. Sharron Angle is a moron, but she’s dumb enough to be dangerous. Her $14 million dollar campaign haul in the 3rd quarter proves it. Jon Ralston writes:
“Sharron Angle produced one of the most successful single quarters of fundraising in the nation’s history for a U.S. Senate campaign. This is a testament to the hatred of Harry Reid, the nation’s disapproval of President Obama, and the unprecedented grass-roots support for Sharron Angle. Harry Reid is losing this race, he knows it, and he is just going to get more desperate over the final three weeks.”
— Angle spokesman Jarrod Agen after reporting GOP Senate nominee had raised $14 million in the third quarter
•••
What’s hate got to do with it?
Everything. Or just enough.
Even though it has been the leitmotif of the Nevada Senate race, even though it is the undercurrent that has electrified the GOP, even though it is the reason Republicans still have hope here after nominating a verbally flawed candidate, it was still jarring to see the word used in a news release.
I’ve read plenty of such missives over the years that have vicious language and stinging adjectives. Indeed, the Reid campaign has called Angle “crazy” and said she has “lost her mind.” But “hatred” is such an awful word — a word I forbid my daughter to use — and yet it sums up exactly why the Senate majority leader may lose to a woman who just last week talked of Sharia law existing in cities in Michigan and Texas.
It’s hatred that has brought this Senate race, with three days until voting begins, to a place where Angle can win. It is hatred that brought her that $14 million haul. And it is hatred that courses through the American electorate, bringing venomous and vitriolic assaults upon anyone who dares to suggest Obama-Reid-Pelosi is not a three-headed monster.
Angle has all but done what she promised to do when she advertised her campaign on conservative talk shows and Fox — “Harry Reid has said he will raise $25 million in this race. I need 1 million people to send $25.”
And you know what: She did it. Or essentially she did.
An incredible 161,358 people sent her checks of $200 or less. Her average donation is $90, Agen says.
This is real, unparalleled (except, perhaps, for Barack Obama in 2008) grass roots. And there is a wildfire blazing through the grass roots, with burning hatred for Reid animating Angle’s chances.
Of those small contributors, my guess is only a handful of the 161,358 people know much about Angle. They have no idea about her religious fervor, fail to separate her church (which apparently doesn’t like Mormons) from our state, or her multifarious positions on Social Security and Medicare, her sympathy for “Second Amendment remedies” or her latest incendiary comments about Dearborn, Mich., and nonexistent Frankford, Texas, implying “the Muslims are coming, the Muslims are coming.”
But they don’t need to know much about Sharron Angle. They know enough about Harry Reid — Obamacare, bailouts, stimulus, good old boy (emphasis on “old”) and part of a corrupt Congress that has bankrupted this country and led it down the inevitable path to socialism.
I think I got most of the message points. Set the kindling, pour on some gasoline, light the fire and poof: You have $14 million, half of it last month.
Almost every national reporter, as I have said before, wants to know why people “hate” Harry Reid. I always say the same thing: 40 years in politics, familiarity breeds contempt, terrible retail pol, bizarre statements, face of unpopular Democratic agenda. But there’s more to it, as I realized after the $14 million revelation. As a headline on New York magazine’s blog said: “Sharron Angle’s Cash Haul Says Something About America’s State of Mind.”
Team Reid has understood this mental state for a while, which is why it has adopted a scorched-earth policy of its own, determined that if their guy is all but in ashes they have to take the blowtorch to Angle. And have they ever, executing one of the most relentless, laserlike assaults in campaign history, turning Angle from the darling of the Tea Party on June 8 to the butt of national jokes as the election nears.
And so we go to the finish line, with the pair matching each other gaffe for gaffe — Reid answered a question recently about who he thought was the greatest living American by naming two dead senators, Robert Byrd and Ted Kennedy.
But Reid’s serpentine rhetorical peregrinations seem addled; Angle’s seem dangerous. So do we want the dotty guy or the crazy woman?
Or, to use that word I don’t let my daughter say: Who do you hate least?
Attention UK Dangerous Minds readers! A possibly once in a lifetime occurrence; a festival dedicated to and featuring nearly all original and main participants in the legendary LAFMS will happen the weekend after next in London. There’ll be tape loops and homemade instruments and creaky old synths by the barrel-full, even a couple of workshops ! So nice to see these DIY warriors get their due, international style.
More LAFMS after the jump…
Politically incorrect? Yes. Funny? Yes.
Apparently some viewers find the ad offensive. Not me.
I love that twist ending.
The song is “If It Don’t fit (Don’t Force It)” by Barrel House Annie. The ad is from Australian agency Marketforce.
Last night Tara and I attended the Hollywood premiere of Jackass 3-D at Graumann’s Chinese Theater, and, predictably, we laughed our fucking heads off.
With a four-year absence in cinemas since their last outing, the advent of widespread 3-D movie screens has provided some irresistibly low-hanging fruit for the Jackass gang, and unsurprisingly, they went all out with it (bodily fluids, bodily, uh, solids, and projectile dildoes make several star turns). The ante has been upped considerably in this installment. Think you felt the pain before? Trust me, it’s TEN TIMES more visceral when someone gets whacked in the nuts in 3-D. Ten times more painful, ten times grosser and tens times funnier.
Not that they’ve altered their classic crowd-pleasing formula all that much, it’s more that the 3-D technology takes their cartoony Buster Keaton meets Tom & Jerry antics to a different level, not to mention pain threshold. They’ve also grabbed the gross-out factor knob and cranked it (much) higher than ever before. Sure, I’ve felt queasy watching past Jackass shenanigans, but there was one point in Jackass 3-D where I (literally) found myself reaching for the popcorn bag to puke in (I didn’t but it was a very close call). Not that I minded, it’s what I came for, I’m just thankful they didn’t use John Water’s “Odorama” gimmick for this one.
Let there be no doubt, Jackass 3-D is a berserk and hog-wild nihilistic joyride, taking the audience places that they would NEVER, EVER want to visit in real life. The whole 3-D thing normally leaves me cold, but to truly appreciate the genius comedic craftsmanship behind the cheerful insanity of Jackass 3-D, you really do have to see this one in the cinema. I’m already a huge fan, but last night I was continuously wiping the tears of laughter from my 3-D glasses. This film is going to be a huge, huge hit.
Jackass 3-D opens this weekend. It’s already a part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.
Below an interview I conducted with Johnny Knoxville in 2008.