Hey c’mere. Smell this.
It smells like…
(At one point or another, Paul Giamatti, Benicio Del Toro, Sean Penn, Johnny Knoxville, Michael Chiklis and Jim Carey were all being discussed in relation to this atrocity. Methinks these gentlemen dodged career-killing bullets. This looks really, really terrible.)
Late last month in Mexico City, Alejandro Jodorowsky organized the “March of the Skulls” to disperse negative energy caused by the death toll of the nation’s drug war. Nearly 40,000 Mexicans have died drug war related deaths in the past five years. The advance billing for the November 27th event described it as “the first act of collective psycho-magic in Mexico” and it attracted nearly 3000 people who donned skeleton masks, face-paint, tops hats. Some marchers carried black versions of the Mexican flag and shouted “Long live the dead!”
From the Los Angeles Times:
The “maestro” arrived at the palace steps about 1:30 p.m., causing brief havoc among the gathered calaveras as people jostled to get near him. The white-haired Jodorowsky, fit and agile at 82, wore a black sports coat, a bright purple scarf and a detailed skull mask.
Along with his family, Jodorowsky led the calaveras up the Eje Central avenue to Plaza Garibaldi in a mostly silent demonstration. In the late 1980s, he filmed some key scenes of “Santa Sangre” at this plaza, homebase for the city’s for-hire mariachi bands. On Sunday, it was easy to imagine another “Santa Sangre” scene being filmed during the march, but this time from a dark and unfamiliar future.
Someone decided the group should sing a song. It became “La Llorona,” the Weeping Woman.
Jodorowsky was displeased with the group’s initial interpretation, so he asked for another go at it. A mariachi band joined in as accompaniment.
“There are 50,000 dead beings,” Jodorowsky said through a bullhorn, before the sea of skulls. “They are sheep. They are not black sheep. We must have mercy for these souls that have disappeared. Let’s sing this song with lament, as if we were the mother of one of these persons. Understand?”
Then he asked that all those present cross and link their arms with those of the strangers around them. The group did. They chanted “Peace, peace, peace!” until Jodorowsky asked that everyone let out a big laugh. Laughter and applause followed.
You have to love that the wiley shaman did the old “c’mon you guys can do better” routine and made them sing it again!
After the jump, a news report about Alejandro Jodorowsky’s November 27, 2011 Psychomagic event in Mexico.
Apparently the American International Film Festival will consider just about anything that comes out of a video or film camera and maybe even award it prize money. Lots of it, too!
Song Of The Blind Girl and The President Goes To Heaven are two features that recently premiered at the Ann Arbor, Michigan-based festival. Both low-budget films are from writer-director Tom Charley, who apparently won the $100,000 prize for his bizarre movies, as well as an additional $10,000 prize for best trailers(!). I don’t exactly know the back story of this festival, but if the competition was so weak that these films (and trailers) won an actual six-figure monetary prize, well, that’s, pretty pathetic. (The same guy won the year before, too, with his 2010 film Lucy’s Law.)
Song Of The Blind Girl is about a PTSD-suffering Irag War vet who kidnaps children he mistakes for his own, to reconstruct his family. The President Goes To Heaven is about a dictatorial US President who can’t get past the pearly gates.
Alert the cinematic schlockmeisters at Severin Films, I think they might have another Birdemic on their hands, maybe two!
First the $10k winning trailer for Song Of The Blind Girl. Was this cut with scissors or what?:
You’re asking yourself “What the fuck is this?” right now, aren’t you?
Now carry on to the trailer for Tom Charley’s eariler “award-winning” film, Lucy’s Law, after the jump…
Quite possibly the finest use of the Youtube I’ve come across yet. You’re welcome.
Thanks to the redoubtable Jimi Hey !
Sad to hear that Cynthia Myers, best known for her roll as bass playing Casey Anderson in the fictional all-girl rockers, “The Carrie Nations” in Russ Meyer’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, and for being Playboy magazine’s Playmate of the Month for the December 1968 issue, died on November 4, 2011.
She was 61. The cause of her death is unknown.
Thank you Douglas DeMille
Michael Baute and Bettina Blickwede have taken moving imagery from 47 films directed by Jean Luc Godard and created loops based on recurring motifs in the director’s work. These include automobiles, guns, color, faces, sound and more.
Using split screens, the loops act as a kind of optical music in which themes and colors riff off of each other in a Godardian eye view of the modern world.
For the story behind the creation of these loops and to see more of them visit Fandor’s website.
Godard is one of the prime architects of cinema as language, a language in which vowels and consonants find their counterparts in color, light and movement. Rimbaud spoke of this derangement of the senses a century ago. Godard acted on it, but without Rimbaud’s symbolist lyricism or surrealism. Godard, like Warhol, let the images speak for themselves, without embellishment. And speak they do, as clearly as any alphabet based on the interaction between teeth, tongue and breath. If Gertrude Stein had made films instead of books, she would have found in Godard a kindred spirit. “A gun is a gun is a gun is a gun.”
The anti-piracy group BREIN has been accused by a soundtrack composer of not having permission to use his work in their well known “you wouldn’t steal a car” anti-downloading campaign. The image above is a still from the infamous advert, which has been satirised heavily (most famously by The IT Crowd).
You couldn’t make this shit up. Well no you could - but no-one would believe you. Which is why Melchior Rietveldt, the Dutch musician whose work was used on the huge international ad campaign after it was commissioned for a only one-off screening, wore a wire to record the conversations he had with his national royalty collection agency Buma/Stemra. As if it wasn’t bad enough that his music was used without permission (in a bloody anti-piracy campaign, of all things) Mr Reitveldt was then told by a representative of Buma/Stemra, Jochem Gerrits, that the issue could be resolved if Gerrits was given a 33% share of the possible million-Euro-plus pay out that Rietveldt was due. In effect, a bribe.
Via Torrentfreak:
It all started back in 2006, when the Hollywood-funded anti-piracy group BREIN reportedly asked musician Melchior Rietveldt to compose music for an anti-piracy video. The video in question was to be shown at a local film festival, and under these strict conditions the composer accepted the job.
However, according to a report from Pownews the anti-piracy ad was recycled for various other purposes without the composer’s permission. When Rietveldt bought a Harry Potter DVD early 2007, he noticed that the campaign video with his music was on it. And this was no isolated incident.
The composer now claims that his work has been used on tens of millions of Dutch DVDs, without him receiving any compensation for it. According to Rietveldt’s financial advisor, the total sum in missed revenue amounts to at least a million euros ($1,300,000).
The existence of excellent copyright laws and royalty collecting agencies in the Netherlands should mean that the composer received help and support with this problems, but this couldn’t be further from what actually happened.
Soon after he discovered the unauthorized distribution of his music Rietveldt alerted the local music royalty collecting agency Buma/Stemra. The composer demanded compensation, but to his frustration he heard very little from Buma/Stemra and he certainly didn’t receive any royalties.
Earlier this year, however, a breakthrough seemed to loom on the horizon when Buma/Stemra board member Jochem Gerrits contacted the composer with an interesting proposal. Gerrits offered to help out the composer in his efforts to get paid for his hard work, but the music boss had a few demands of his own.In order for the deal to work out the composer had to assign the track in question to the music publishing catalogue of the Gerrits, who owns High Fashion Music. In addition to this, the music boss demanded 33% of all the money set to be recouped as a result of his efforts.
Unbelievable! I hope Mr Rietveldt rinses these bastards for everything they’ve got. Here’s the original BREIN anti-piracy advert:
Thanks to Paul Shetler.
Franz Liszt once said:
‘Truly great men are those who combine contrary qualities within themselves.’
He could have been talking about the late, great Ken Russell, who mixed contrary qualities in his films, perhaps most brilliantly in his bio-pic on the composer, Lisztomania.
Russell had this incredible ability of presenting the truth of an artist and their work, while abandoning any pretense towards biographical realism. In 1975, he captured this perfectly with Lisztomania, presenting Liszt as the equivalent of a pop idol, with his screaming fans and over-indulged libido, in an intelligent, multi-layered imagining of the composer’s life, while using reference points from Charlie Chaplin to rock and roll, comic books to literature, philosophy to the horrors of Nazism.
At the time of its release, Russell described his process of making the film:
‘My film isn’t biography, it comes from things I feel when I listen to the music of Wagner and Liszt, and when I think about their lives.’
Lisztomania is a Pop Art movie with a Punk Rock sensibility - released the same year as Russell’s version of The Who’s rock opera, Tommy, and The Rocky Horror Show, on the cusp of the Sex Pistols formation.
I recall how the Observer Magazine ran a color spread on Lisztomania, in eager anticipation that then 48-year-old l’enfant terrible, Mr. Russell, had re-invented cinema with his marriage of pop stars and classical music - Roger Daltery as Liszt, Ringo Starr as the Pope, Paul Nicholas as Wagner - all surrounded by icons of Elvis and Pete Townshend. Of course, when the film was released, the critics recoiled in horror, and ran screaming for their mothers, or shared smelling salts in the back row of the cinema, to keep them from fainting.
Lisztomania is like no other movie, it is an art work that demands repeated viewing to pick through the cinematic and cultural references, and to appreciate the workings of the creative mind behind the camera. Ross Care in Film Quarterly said of the film:
‘Ken Russell is an intuitive symbolist and fantasist, a total film-maker who orchestrates his subjects in much the same manner that a composer might transcribe a musical composition from one interpretative medium to another (as, for example, Liszt himself did with certain works by Wagner and Berlioz and other composers of the period).”
Starring Roger Daltery as Liszt, Sara Kestelman as Princess Carolyn, Paul Nicholas as Wagner, and Ringo Starr as the Pope. Look out for (LIttle) Nell Campbell, Rick Wakeman, Georgina Hale, Murray Melvin and an uncredited, Oliver Reed.
Read Ross Care’s article on Lisztomania here.
Previously on Dangerous Minds
Original photo-spread for Ken Russell’s ‘Lisztomania’, from 1975
Before he began directing films, Stanley Kubrick was a photo-journalist with Look magazine, starting his career in 1946, and was, apparently, their youngest photographer on record. Kubrick snapped over 10,000 pictures, sometimes hiding his camera in a paper bag to achieve a more intimate and natural image.
Kubrick’s photographs of New York in the 1940s, have the look of gritty movie stills from some imagined film noir, revealing intriguing personal narratives, for which the viewer can compose their own script.
A selection of Kubrick’s photographs are available to buy from V and M, with proceeds going to the Museum of the City of New York.
More of Kubrick’s photographs, after the jump…
Via Flavor Wire with thanks to Tara McGinley
Nice animated tribute to Drive produced by Tom Haugomat and Bruno Mangyoku. The soundtrack is Glass Candy’s “Digital Versicolor.”
(via Mister Honk)