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Sex, cigarettes and revolution
01.31.2012
02:49 pm
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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

Posted by Marc Campbell
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01.31.2012
02:49 pm
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Monkeyshines: Charlotte Rampling falls in love with an ape in ‘Max, Mon Amour’
01.30.2012
07:13 pm
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Max, Mon Amour, “the greatest ape romance since King Kong,” is a peculiar 1986 comedy starring Charlotte Rampling as a woman engaged in a polite ménage à trois with her husband and a monkey.

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 was made by celebrated Japanese director Nagisa Oshima (Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, In the Realm of the Senses). You have to hand to the beautiful Ms. Rampling, she really knew how to pick provocative projects. From The Night Porter to this!
 

 
Via PCL Linkdump

Posted by Richard Metzger
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01.30.2012
07:13 pm
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‘The Godfather’: Robert De Niro’s audition tape for the role of ‘Sonny’
01.30.2012
03:03 pm
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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)

Posted by Tara McGinley
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01.30.2012
03:03 pm
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The Muppets karate chop Fox News
01.29.2012
06:48 pm
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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:
 

Posted by Niall O'Conghaile
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01.29.2012
06:48 pm
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Brendan Behan’s Dublin from 1966
01.27.2012
07:36 pm
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Brendan_Behan
 
The idea of Brendan Behan eventually became greater than the man himself. No one knew this better than the Roaring Boy, who played up to the image of “a drinker with a writing problem”. By the early sixties Behan was the toast of the West End, the toast of Broadway, the toast of every-effing-where, but his best works, The Quare Fellow, The Hostage, and his biography Borstal Boy, were all 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


 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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01.27.2012
07:36 pm
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Glitterbug: Derek Jarman’s final film
01.26.2012
03:37 pm
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derek_jarman_glitterbug
 
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.
 

 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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01.26.2012
03:37 pm
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Hilarious mashup of ‘Game of Thrones’ and ‘The Goonies’
01.26.2012
02:22 pm
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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)

Posted by Tara McGinley
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01.26.2012
02:22 pm
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Revered filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos has died
01.26.2012
01:02 am
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World renowned Greek director Theo Angelopoulos has died.

Award winning Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos has been killed in a road accident in Athens.

The 76-year-old sustained serious head injuries after he was hit by a motorcycle while crossing a road in the Greek capital.

The motorcyclist, an off duty police officer, was also injured in the collision.

The director was hard at work on his latest film “The Other Sea” when he died.

Born in Athens in 1935 his career spanned some 40 years he won the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival for “Ulysees’ Gaze” in 1995 and three years later picked up the Palme d ‘Or for “Eternity and a Day.”

His themes in the main dealt with Greece’s recent history exile, immigration and war, he said last year that he wanted the Greek financial crisis to be the theme of his next movie.

Angelopoulos’ films featured some of cinema’s great actors, including Marcello Mastroianni, Harvey Keitel, Willem Dafoe, Bruno Ganz and Jeanne Moreau. His films are deliberately paced, visually rich and demanding. You either succumb to their dream-like atmosphere filled with symbolism and long stretches of silence or go mad trying. I’ve always struggled with his films but have been greatly rewarded for my patience.

Below is Ulysses’ Gaze in its entirety. Enjoy the journey.

Winner of the Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, this drama centers on the Balkan conflict as viewed through the eyes of a filmmaker named A (Harvey Keitel). Director Theo Angelopoulos wrote the screenplay, drawing from personal experiences. A is a Greek émigré director who returns to his homeland after 35 years in the U.S., ostensibly to screen his latest film, which is so controversial that it attracts religious protests. In fact, A’s real purpose is to search for three reels of undeveloped film that may be the first ever shot by pioneer Balkan filmmakers the Manakis brothers, who documented simple circa-1900 peasant life. A’s Homeric journey includes flashbacks into past historical events. He travels by taxi to Albania, where he enlists the help of a film archivist (Maia Morgenstern, who plays all four female roles). She joins him on a train ride to Bucharest, Romania. An extensive flashback chronicles A’s childhood under Communism in Bucharest. His next stop is Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, where he is directed to Sarajevo. Angelopoulos mixes scenes shot during the actual Balkan war with historic re-enactments and dreamscapes to examine the role of the artist in political upheaval. ~ Michael Betzold

After pressing the start button (the arrow), click on the “CC” button (framed in red) to choose English, Spanish or Turkish subtitles.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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01.26.2012
01:02 am
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If 2012 Oscar nominated film posters told the truth
01.25.2012
11:14 am
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descendants
 
If these were the movie posters, would you still go and see the film?

Find more here.
 
the_help
 
iron_lady
 
A few more samples, after the jump…
 

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
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01.25.2012
11:14 am
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The only film footage of blues/folk legend Leadbelly
01.25.2012
03:11 am
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Although the audio was prerecorded and Leadbelly is lip-synching,Three Songs By Leadbelly is the only performance footage of Leadbelly (aka Lead Belly) in existence. Hard to believe that someone of his stature was so under-represented in the world of film. He died in 1949, more than a half a century after Louis Lumiere’s creation of the first motion picture.

The three pieces of films strung together for this film originated as a folklore research film in 1945, shot by Blanding Sloan and Wah Ming Chang, then edited by Pete Seeger of The Weavers.

The one-reeler is a mite over ten minutes of which 8 minutes is the research footage. It opens with shots of the rural south & of the Shilo Baptist Church in Morningsport, Louisiana, with Leadbelly on the soundtrack humming & strumming the plaintive “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” behind the opening credits.

Seeger recounts: “I think that [cameraman Blanding Stone] recorded Leadbelly in a studio the day before then he played the record back while Leadbelly moved his hands and lips in synch with the record. He’d taken a few seconds from one direction and a few seconds from another direction, which is the only reason I was able to edit it. I spent three weeks with a movieola, up in my barn snipping one frame off here and one frame off there and juggling things around. I was able to synch up three songs: ‘Grey Goose’, ‘Take This Hammer’ and ‘Pick a Bale of Cotton’”

Here’s “Three Songs By Leadbelly” in all of its faded glory.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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01.25.2012
03:11 am
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