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‘The Devil’s Apricot’: Meet the man who puts Satanic messages into songs
03.31.2012
06:30 am
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If you’ve ever wondered who’s responsible for putting Satanic messages into songs, then meet Damon Lewis, producer at Treble Six Records.

The Devil’s Apricot is a fabulous short from writer / director Jonathan Brooks, starring John Rutledge (aka Eggsy from Goldie Lookin’ Chain) as Lewis, and comedian Mark Davision as Lord Satan. More power to this fine trinity of souls.
 

 
With thanks to What a Prick TV
 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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03.31.2012
06:30 am
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Preview of the beautifully restored ‘Yellow Submarine’
03.30.2012
10:51 pm
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Here’s the trailer for the newly restored Yellow Submarine.

The digital clean-up of the film’s photochemical elements was lovingly done entirely by hand, frame by frame. Having seen the world premiere of the restored version at this year’s SXSW, I can attest to its eye-searing intensity and lysergic beauty. While the story obviously remains the same, rather thin with a script comprised of surreal non sequiturs and bad puns, the overall experience of watching the film in a pristine digital format overwhelms the narrative with colors and artwork so you rich you can practically taste it. And the stereo soundtrack sounded wonderful.

Coming out on Blu-Ray and DVD on May 29 with 5.1 surround sound. Expect to be astonished.
 

 
Mod Odyssey is a groovy short documentary on the creation of Yellow Submarine. Enjoy.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds: The Beatles’ classic 1968 animated feature film, ‘Yellow Submarine,’ has been restored

Posted by Marc Campbell
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03.30.2012
10:51 pm
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New documentary on Jobriath: The true fairy of rock and roll
03.30.2012
03:21 pm
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A new documentary on the ill-fated career of glam rocker Jobriath, Jobriath A.D., screened last night at the BFI London Lesbian and Gay film festival and has received a very warm critical reception. In a glowing review in The Guardian, critic Andrew Pulver writes…

[...] in this fantastically revelatory documentary by Kieran Turner, Jobriath has been thoroughly rehabilitated: as a charismatic performer in his own right, the unwitting victim of record-industry hubris, and an unlikely, reluctant martyr for gay rights.

Haven’t heard of Jobriath? In an article previously posted on Dangerous Minds, R. Metzger, a Jobriath fan, described him in succinct fashion:

If you’ve never heard of Jobriath Boone, don’t worry, you’re not alone. Obscure even by “rock snob” standards, Jobriath was the first really openly gay rock star. David Bowie and Lou Reed flirted with bisexuality, nail polish and make-up, of course, but Jobriath was in his own words, “a true fairy.” He wasn’t just “out of the closet” he was out like a police siren with the volume turned up to eleven!”

And in an article published yesterday in The Guardian, Marc Almond pays homage to his hero and explains why Jobriath may have been too much too soon:

Jobriath (born Bruce Wayne Campbell) was a readymade entity with no big backstory, yet to those in the know he was thrilling and seductive, a guilty secret. I remember, before hearing a note, taking a journey to the big city to buy his first album, the eponymous Jobriath, on import. Its striking cover showed him with porcelain skin and film-star ruby lips, a fallen, broken, beautiful statue. On a first listening, the music is a baffling mix of glam, musical theatre and 1970s rock. At a time when we craved simple guitar chords and a Starman chorus, Jobriath seemed just too musical, too clever – not pop enough. His voice had a touch of Mick Jagger at his most sluttish (like that other wonderful US glam import, David Johansen of the New York Dolls). He was a mix of wide-eyed innocent and world-weary punk. And though there was a nod to Ziggy in the vowels, Bowie he was not.

For me, above all else, he was a sexual hero: truly the first gay pop star. How extreme that was to the US at the time. His outrageous appearances on the hallowed US rock show The Midnight Special prompted shock, bewilderment and disgust. Everyone hated Jobriath – even, and especially, gay people. He was embarrassingly effeminate in an era of leather and handlebar moustaches.

Jobriath A.D. will have its US premiere on Apr 14 at the Florida Film Festival.

Here’s the trailer:
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds: Jobriath, Rock’s Fairy Godmother

Posted by Marc Campbell
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03.30.2012
03:21 pm
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‘The Spells of Kenneth Anger’: An interview on Film and Magick with the Magus of American Cinema
03.29.2012
07:57 pm
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Bilingual? No problems if you’re not, the important sections here are Kenneth Anger’s, where the Magus of American Cinema tells his story from Fireworks to Lucifer Rising, via Bobby Beausoleil, Mick Jagger and Aleister Crowley, in this rare interview with French television from 2003.
 

 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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03.29.2012
07:57 pm
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‘One American Movie’: Jean Luc Godard’s abandoned Sixties manifesto
03.28.2012
07:26 pm
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1 A.M. (aka One American Movie) was shot in 1968, abandoned by Godard in 1969, and then later resurrected and re-edited by his collaborator on the film D.A. Pennebaker. Intercut with film footage of Godard at work on the film and re-named 1 P.M. (One Parallel Movie), it was finally released in 1972.

An abstract and maddening mash-up of cinéma vérité, documentary footage and goofy political theater, 1 P.M. is another attempt by a European director to wrap his head around America’s turbulent Sixties’ political scene and pretty much failing. Even with input from ace documentarian Pennebaker, the movie seems remote from its material. But despite many yawn-inducing moments of pretentiousness and arthouse vagueness, there are still plenty of interesting bits and pieces in the film to sustain one’s interest. Specifically, an interview with Eldridge Cleaver, a rambling but fascinating sequence involving Tom Hayden. Rip Torn’s absurd Native American routine and a Manhattan-rooftop performance by Jefferson Airplane of “House at Pooneil Corners,” which ends with the cops busting the band and film crew.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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03.28.2012
07:26 pm
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Documentary about Alexander Shulgin: Stepfather of MDMA
03.28.2012
04:03 pm
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Étienne Sauret’s documentary Dirty Pictures is warm-hearted and appropriately shambolic look at the life of Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin, the man who discovered the psychedelic effects of MDMA and a variety of other home-brewed synthetic compounds that alter, expand and raise consciousness.

A former Dow Chemical drug developer who early on saw the light (a mescaline trip), Shulgin moved on to independent research in the mid-1960s. With his wife Ann, he developed and tested hundreds of psychoactive drugs, mostly analogues of phenethylamines (which include MDMA and mescaline) and tryptamines like DMT and psilocibyn.

“I understood that our entire universe is contained in the mind and the spirit. We may choose not to find access to it, we may even deny its existence, but it is indeed there inside us, and there are chemicals that can catalyze its availability.” A. Shulgin.

Shulgin’s books PiHKAL (Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved) and TiHKAL (Tryptamines I Have Known and Loved) combine autobiography and research into essential reading for anyone who is interested in the science and history of psychedelics and the life of a spiritual revolutionary who has fearlessly led the fight to wrest consciousness from the brain police.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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03.28.2012
04:03 pm
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Oliver Reed: Early interview on the set of ‘The Trap’ from 1966
03.27.2012
06:57 pm
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To perfect a French-Canadian accent for his role in the 1966 film The Trap, Oliver Reed spent several days around the docks and bars of Montreal. One would suspect the great Hell-raiser spent most of that time in the bars, rather than around. However, the film company were smart enough to ensure Ollie didn’t spend too much time in the bars, and assigned a local to read him newspapers and teach him the lingo.

That was the thing about Reed - he was a great actor, but his life and work was over-shadowed by his off-screen excesses - even this interview from the set of The Trap ends up on his brawling. Of course, it made him a lovable rogue and, yes, at times a terrible bore, but the main affect was to lower the appreciation his performances deserved. Let’s be clear, he never had the critical acclaim his fellow mavericks Burton, O’Toole, Harris or Hurt achieved, even when Reed regularly proved himself to be a far better film actor, or at the very least their equal.  From early fodder like Curse of the Werewolf through Paranoiac to his collaborations with Ken Russell (The Debussy Film, Women in Love, The Devils) and Michael Winner (Hannibal Brooks, The Jokers, I’ll Never Forget What’s ‘is Name) Reed was an exceptional actor.

Even take for example, his performance in The Trap - a movie with primarily two actors - Reed as a trapper who unwillingly takes a mute girl, Rita Tushingham, as his wife in, to live together in the remotest wilds of Canada, and what happens when he falls into a bear trap - and watch how he delivered a complete range of emotions that carried the film beyond its very slim storyline. Tushingham is equally as good, and their pairing works well.

Reed died too soon, and too young. But fuck it, he left behind a major body of work, which still needs to be properly assessed. And let’s not forget, he died pissed and arm-wrestling in his favored place - the bar.
 

 
Previously on DM

When Oliver Reed Met Keith Moon


 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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03.27.2012
06:57 pm
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Girl Model: Disturbing new documentary exposes the fashion world
03.27.2012
04:13 pm
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Girl Model  is an extraordinarily delicate, expertly observed and ultimately very disturbing fly-on-the-wall documentary that focuses on Nadya, a 13-year-old aspiring fashion model from a remote Siberia village, and Ashley, the seemingly morally bankrupt American model scout who plucks Nadya from her impoverished family home and sends her off to Japan.

Nadya is promised $8000 dollars worth of modeling work (the minimum requirement for a Japanese work visa). Her apprehensive family spend their meagre savings to send their daughter abroad, because upon her return, the money she makes modeling will pay for them to build a much-needed addition to their cramped home. Their pretty, wide-eyed daughter’s dreams are their dreams, too, for she represents their only escape from living the way they do.

Upon her arrival at Narita Airport, the young girl—who can speak no Japanese, let alone any English—panics when there is no one there to meet her. Thing go downhill rapidly for Nadya from there.

Ashley is a former model herself. Her role as a scout is to descend on Eastern European countries looking for the type of tall, skinny, barely pubescent young girls that are in-demand with the Japanese modeling agencies. Although we see footage that Ashley shot of herself in a mirror at the age of 19, pouring her soul out to her video camera about how much she hates the modeling world, like a dutiful gear in the machine of the fashion industry, she still performs her function to flatter, entice, seduce, and basically lie to young girls and their families about the money and glamor that awaits them in Japan. What happens to them when they get there is really not her concern.

In Girl Model the audience watches helplessly as a child’s dreams are smashed against the cold reality of the fashion industry, in a heart-breaking head-on collision. Although Nadya does attend many “go sees” and even does one photo shoot in Tokyo that she sees printed in a glossy fashion magazine, she returns to her family in Siberia with a crushing $2000 debt.

Co-directors Ashley Sabin and David Redmon were initially approached by Ashley herself—she was a fan of their prior documentary work—regarding making a film about the young Russian models who are often exploited in Japan. One can’t help concluding that Ashley offered her story to the directors in an effort to somehow exonerate herself for her deeds. She is not successful.

She is a fascinating figure—obviously she’s terribly conflicted about her own role in the exploitation of these girls—but in the end, Ashley reveals herself to be a psychic vampire as we see her performing her spiel about modeling in Japan for an Eastern European TV television crew, as Sabin and Redmon focus their cameras on her next young victims’ faces.

Below, Dangerous Minds spoke to co-director Ashley Sabin about Girl Model at the SXSW festival:
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.27.2012
04:13 pm
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Room 666: Wim Wenders asks fellow Directors about the state of Cinema, from 1982
03.23.2012
04:56 pm
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During the Cannes Film Festival in 1982, Wim Wenders set-up a static camera in a room at the Hotel Martinez. He then invited a selection of directors to answer a series of questions on the future of cinema:

“Is cinema a language about to get lost, an art about to die?”

The directors, in order of appearance were:

Jean-Luc Godard
Paul Morrissey
Mike De Leon
Monte Hellman
Romain Goupil
Susan Seidelman
Noël Simsolo
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Werner Herzog
Robert Kramer
Ana Carolina
Maroun Bagdadi
Steven Spielberg
Michelangelo Antonioni
Wim Wenders
Yilmaz Güney

Each director was alloted 11 minutes (one 16mm reel of film) to answer the questions, which were then edited together by Wenders and released as Room 666 in 1982. Interestingly each director is positioned in front of a television, which is left on throughout the interview. It’s a simple and effective film, and the most interesting contributors are the usual suspects. Godard goes on about text and is dismissive of TV, then turns tables by asking Wenders questions; Fassbinder is distracted (he died within months) and quickly discusses “sensation oriented cinema” and independent film-making; Herzog is the only one who turns the TV off (he also takes off his shoes and socks) and thinks of cinema as static and TV, he also suggests movies in the future will be supplied on demand; Spielberg is, as expected of a high-grossing Hollywood film-maker, interested in budgets and their effect on smaller films, though he is generally buoyant about the future of cinema; while Monte Hellman isn’t, hates dumb films and tapes too many movies off TV he never watches; all of which is undercut by Turkish director Yilmaz Güney, who talks the damaging affects of capitalism and the reality of making films in a country where his work was suppressed and banned “by some dominant forces”.
 

 
With thanks to Tara McGinley, via The World’s Best Ever
 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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03.23.2012
04:56 pm
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‘Pink Flamingos’ on acid
03.22.2012
03:51 pm
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A blast from DM’s past:

Babs Johnson and Edie The Egg Lady get psychedelicized.

Yellow matter custard, dripping from a dead dog’s eye.
Crabalocker fishwife, pornographic priestess,
Boy, you been a naughty girl you let your knickers down.
I am the eggman, they are the eggmen.
I am the walrus, goo goo g’joob.”

Mr. Vader: “Do you believe in God?”
Babs Johnson: “I AM GOD!”
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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03.22.2012
03:51 pm
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