FOLLOW US ON:
GET THE NEWSLETTER
CONTACT US
Exclusive clip of Alejandro Jodorowsky for Dangerous Minds readers
01.18.2011
10:18 am
Topics:
Tags:

image
Left to right: Donald Cammell, Dennis Hopper, Alejandro Jodorowsky & Kenneth Anger.
 
Cinematic shaman Alejandro Jodorowsky discusses his work. Taken from the over five hours worth of extras that will come with the much-anticipated re-release of Santa Sangre on DVD and Blu-ray by Severin Films on January 25th. Pre-order a copy of Santa Sangre.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
|
01.18.2011
10:18 am
|
‘I am not your Superstar’: Klaus Kinski as Jesus Christ
01.15.2011
07:02 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
You wouldn’t mess with Klaus Kinski. He had a look that said it all - a cross between Iggy Pop and a drug-addled psycho. His mental health had been an issue. In the 1950s, Kinski spent three days in a psychiatric hospital, where he was diagnosed as schizophrenic. In 1955, having failed to find any work as an actor, he attempted suicide - twice.

By the late 1950s, he had slowly established himself as an actor in Vienna, but the anger, the passions, that fueled his performances meant he was always labeled difficult. To overcome this, Kinski started performing one-man shows, reciting Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde and Francois Villon.

In the sixties he found some security as a bit player in Spaghetti Westerns such as For a Few Dollars More, but Kinski had an ambitious ego that inspired him to greater, more confrontational things.

In 1971, Kinski hired the Deutschlandhalle to perform his own 30-page interpretation of Jesus Christ. It was no ordinary show, and the audience was a mix of radical students, religious followers and those intrigued to see the “mad man Kinski”. Even then, before his work with Werner Herzog, the public thought of Kinski as either mad man or genius.

Moreover, there was some confusion amongst the audience, who seemed to think Kinski was an evangelist, rather than an actor interpreting a role. This led to constant heckling from the spectators - both the happy-clappy Christians, who thought he was blaspheming; and those on the Left, who though he was soft-soaping Christianity. Kinski was doing neither. His Christ was part Kinski, part Anarchist-Revolutionary, and he repsonded fulsomely to the abuse, as Twitch Film notes:

For example, after someone stated that shouting down people who disagreed with him was unlike Christ, Kinski responded with a different take on how Christ might respond: “No, he didn’t say ‘shut your mouths’, he took a whip and beat them. That’s what he did, you stupid sow!”

In another scene, he brow beats the audience by saying “can’t you see that when someone lectures thirty typewritten pages of text in this way, that you must shut your mouths? If you can’t see that, please let someone bang it into your brain with a hammer!” The evening’s festivities also turned physical as an audience member is shown getting bounced from the stage by a bodyguard. Someone responds that “Kinski just let his bodyguard push a peaceful guy, who only wanted to have a discussion, down the stairs! That is a fascist statement, Kinski is a fascist, a psychopath!”

Kinski continued undaunted:

“I’m not the official Church-Christ, who is accepted by policemen, bankers, judges, executioneers, officers, chruch-heads, politicians and other representatives of the powers that be. - I’m not your super-star!”

The evening was filmed by Peter Geyer, who later assembled the footage together into an incredible documentary film Jesus Christus Erlöser (Jesus Christ Saviour) in 2008. It is a film well worth seeing for Kinski’s powerful, passionate and unforgettable performance, which gives an unflinching insight into the man, the ego and the mad genius that was Klaus Kinski.
 

 
Bonus clip in color, after the jump…
 
Previously on DM

Klaus Kinski Skateboard


 
With thanks to Little Stone
 

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
|
01.15.2011
07:02 pm
|
24 Second ‘Psycho’
01.15.2011
05:17 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
In 1993, Scottish artist Douglas Gordon exhibited his 24 Hour Psycho, a slowed-down screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film that lasted twenty-four hours. The project contained “many of the important themes in Gordon’s work: recognition and repetition, time and memory, complicity and duplicity, authorship and authenticity, darkness and light.”

In 2005, talented artist Chris Bors created his own version of the film and art work, but this time as 24 Second Psycho.

24 Second Psycho appropriates the entire Alfred Hitchcock movie Psycho and condenses it into twenty-four seconds. Tweaking the concept of artist Douglas Gordons 24 Hour Psycho, where Hitchcocks masterpiece was slowed-down to a crawl, here the process is reversed to accommodate society’s increasingly short attention span. Seeing Hitchcocks most lasting contribution to cinema flash before your eyes in a matter of seconds represents our new information age where culture is packaged for easy consumption at a breakneck pace.

Bors work has been exhibited at PS1 MoMA, White Columns, Sixtyseven and Ten in One Gallery in New York, Casino Luxembourg in Luxembourg, and the Videoex Festival in Zurich, Switzerland.

Update:

Also over on You Tube, Joe Frese has created a variety of mini masterpieces, including his own Sixty Second Psycho.
 

 
Bonus clip Joe Frese’s ‘Sixty Second Psycho’, after the jump…
 
With thanks to Henri Podin
 

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
|
01.15.2011
05:17 pm
|
Bruce Dern freaks out!
01.15.2011
04:42 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
Tonight and tomorrow night in Los Angeles, Cinefamily is having a mini Bruce Dern film festival, “An Evening With Bruce Dern.” Dern will be in attendance.

Specializing in villains and heavies, but bringing to them the sensitivity and complexity that makes them truly memorable, Dern has been the premier psychotic-neurotic of the past forty years.

“I’ve played more psychotics and freaks and dopers than anyone.”—Bruce Dern.

Visit the Cinefamily website to get details.

Cinefamily’s promo video for the Dern fest is hilarious. I just wish it were longer. Check it out.
 

Rare theatrical screenings of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s ‘Santa Sangre’ in select cities
01.14.2011
06:07 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
I’ve been sitting on a pretty decent but not perfect bootleg DVD of Alejandro’s nightmarish 1989 film, Santa Sangre for the last six years, but I could never bring myself to watch it because I knew (I thought) that a proper DVD release was just around the corner. Well, it took long enough, but it looks like it was worth the wait, as Severin Films is about to release the film on Blu-ray and regular DVD on January 25th with over five hours of extras, including deleted scenes, Jodorowsky’s audio commentary, multiple documentaries and interviews with key members of the cast and crew.

What’s more, there is going to be a small number of theatrical screenings around the country in anticipation of the Santa Sangre’s digital debut:

To commemorate the long awaited re-release of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s masterpiece SANTA SANGRE on DVD and Blu-Ray, Severin Films and The American Cinematheque will be presenting a 35mm screening of the film, preceded by a reception, at the Egyptian Theater, Hollywood Blvd. There will be a special Q & A after the film with soundtrack composer Simon Boswell, whose other credits include work for Danny Boyle, Clive Barker and Dario Argento.

More screenings will take place on 1/19 at the Alamo Downtown, Austin, TX, 1/24 at the reRun, Brooklyn, NY and 1/24 at the Brattle Theatre, Cambridge, MA followed by a Q & A with Star Sabrina Dennison.

Blanca Guerra, Guy Stockwell and the filmmaker¹s sons Axel and Adan Jodorowsky star in this surreal epic about a young circus performer, the crime of passion that shatters his soul, and the macabre journey back to the world of his armless mother and deaf-mute lover. “This is a movie like none I have seen before,” wrote Roger Ebert in his original four-star review, “a wild kaleidoscope of images and outrages, a collision between Freud and Fellini. It contains blood and glory, saints and circuses, and unspeakable secrets of the night. And it is all wrapped up in a flamboyant parade of bold, odd, striking imagery, with Alejandro Jodorowsky as the ringmaster. SANTA SANGRE is a movie in which the inner chambers of the soul are laid bare.”

I have to admit that now that I know this is coming out on Blu-ray, I’m salivating to see it. I haven’t seen Santa Sangre since I first saw it in a theater when it was released. Jodorowsy’s films are just too amazing visually to watch on bootleg DVDs. On Blu-ray, however, this will be a (sur)real treat!
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
|
01.14.2011
06:07 pm
|
‘Chatterbox’: The singing vagina
01.13.2011
05:11 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
Back in the days when there were video stores, you’d find 1977’s Chatterbox in a faded box stuffed on a dusty shelf alongside Roller Boogie and Slammer Girls . Released by ubiquitous B-movie merchants Vestron Video, Chatterbox isn’t good or bad enough to be a cult hit or sexy enough to be a softcore pud tugger. One would think a movie about a singing vagina would have one or two money shots, but no, not even a closeup of a lip syncing labia. What it does have is Tarantino’s favorite sex kitten Candice Rialson (Candy Stripe Nurses, Hollywood Boulevard, Summer School Teachers) in the role of Penny and the erotically challenged Rip Taylor and Professor Irwin Corey.

Chatterbox isn’t a total bust as you will see in the following clip where Penny’s vagina (named Virginia and dressed in what appears to be one Liberace’s fur coats) belts out a show tune, “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo,” accompanied by a bunch of Studio 54 bartenders in molting bird costumes. It all comes to a mindboggling climax on a giant spinning donut.

Lift up your skirt and sing along if you like.

A DM reader brought to my attention that it’s Rip Taylor’s birthday today. Happy birthday Rip!
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
|
01.13.2011
05:11 pm
|
Looking through a glass onion: ‘Enter The Void’ mood elevating visual effects video
01.13.2011
03:08 am
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
French special effects genius Geoffrey Niquet collaborated with Gaspar Noe on the creation of the mindblowingly wonderful Enter The Void. Here’s a clip that shows the multi-layered visuals that were composed for the film. It’s like looking through a glass onion. For those of you have seen the movie, this will be a reminder of its loveliness. For those of you who haven’t experienced the Void, this will tantalize and perhaps compel you to see it.

Music by Sigur Ros.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
|
01.13.2011
03:08 am
|
‘Enter The Void’: The best film of 2010 is a mindblowing death trip
01.11.2011
07:51 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
The phrase “they don’t make movies like that anymore” is an apt description of Gaspar Noe’s psychedelic epic Enter The Void. When was the last time a movie directed by a major film maker was created with the sole intention of blowing your mind, not merely with special effects but with grand metaphysical aspirations?  In attempting to replicate what he imagines as being the stages the soul passes through after bodily death, Noe has created a magnificent head trip that recalls the visual scope and poetry of 2001: A Space Odyssey and the pataphysical leaps of spiritual fantasy that infuse the similarly lysergic El Topo. The fact that Noe had cutting edge digital technology at his disposal and knows how to use it makes Enter The Void not only a provocative intellectual experience but a ravishingly visual one as well.  But it must it must be seen on the big screen…uncut.

Noe has experimented with psychoactive substances since he was a teenager. More recently, he went to Peru to experiment with Ayahuasca. The psychedelic experience not only informs Enter The Void, it IS Enter The Void. The subject of the film is the film. Noe understands what few contemporary movie directors understand: film is a chemical with the potential of being alchemical. Of all forms of art, film can best approximate dreaming or visionary states of consciousness. Enter The Void aspires to nothing less than altering your brain chemistry. And as much as a movie can, it succeeds. I staggered out of a screening of Enter The Void like someone coming down from an extended DMT trip. It took me a few minutes to orient myself well enough to drive my car. And other than seeing the film, I hadn’t had anything stronger than one glass of wine. I noticed that groups of people leaving the film seemed likewise in a daze, many of them laughing giddily like stoned freaks.

Enter The Void is not perfect. It is repetitive at times and probably 20 minutes too long (though I was never bored). Noe claims 2001 as an influence and like that film the performances in Void are often stiff and unconvincing. But the acting is hardly the centerpiece of Noe’s film. Afterall, the main character is a disembodied spirit.

Noe goes for sensation over narrative rigor. He loves constructing lavish and lurid spectacles that are charged with sex and and shot from weirdly skewed perspectives. It’s not all tryptamine, there’s opium in there too. And like another one of his heroes, Kenneth Anger, Noe likes to play with the dark side. For all of its soulful yearning, the movie has scenes of transgression and horror (a gutwrenching car wreck) every bit as disturbing as Noe’s Irreversible and I Stand Alone - two films that on the surface are profane, but at heart deeply religious.

Enter The Void is haunted by the ghosts of the dead and the living dead. In its depiction of the afterlife as just another dimension of this life, the movie blurs the distinctions between living and dying. Throughout the film there are references to the “Tibetan Book Of The Dead” (almost comically so) and it seems that Noe is passing through his own Bardo planes as an artist, traveling through darkness to get to light. Noe explores the idea of the soul in transition like a man possessed. There is a sense of spiritual urgency in Enter The Void that recalls the beatitudes of a Carl Dreyer’s The Passion Of Joan Of Arc. Only this time it’s day-glo.

In my reverie over Enter The Void, I’ve failed to discuss the amazing technical accomplishments of the film. Put simply: the film is a visual marvel unlike anything I’ve ever seen…on a screen. The camera is in constant motion, following the action from every perspective imaginable, from heaven above to inside the womb. There’s a jawdropping shot of a penis from the point of view of the interior of a woman’s vagina. I laughed to myself imagining what it would have looked like in 3D. The wet neon of Tokyo at night is gorgeously shot by Benoît Debie. Color, lighting and set design blend in an orgy of eye candy that makes most Hollywood films look like they were shot a century ago using cameras powered by steam. With shuddering surround sound, the whole experience is like being immersed in a hot tub full of peyote tea. 

Gaspar Noe wants to fuck you in the head until your brain cums and in Enter The Void he gets some long strokes in.

Enter The Void is being released on DVD and Blu-ray January 25. I strongly recommend you see it on the big screen. But if that’s not possible, you can buy it here. There are several cuts of the film that have been released. It appears that the DVD is the 160 minute version I saw. At this time, that’s the definitive version.

Update: The 160 minute cut of Enter The Void will have its first theatrical run in New York City at the IFC Center from January 14 through January 20. The film will also play at The Landmark Nuart Theater in Los Angeles on January 21 for a special midnight showing.
 

 
Campbell’s top ten films of 2010 after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Marc Campbell
|
01.11.2011
07:51 pm
|
Peter Yates director of action classic ‘Bullitt’ has died
01.10.2011
04:19 am
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
Peter Yates has died. Along with his many accomplishments as a film maker, Yates will be fondly remembered among action fanatics for his groundbreaking direction of one of the baddest badass car chases in the history of cinema. Watch the clip from Bullit below and be amazed.

Yates directed two of my alltime favorite films: Breaking Away and The Friends Of Eddie Coyle. When he was on his game, he was among the best.

4-time Oscar nominee Peter Yates—who helmed such celebrated and dissimilar films as Bullitt, The Friends Of Eddie Coyle, Breaking Away, Suspect, and The Dresser—has passed away in London after a long illness. He was 82. A graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, he was a stage actor before working as an assistant director for Tony Richardson. Yates’ feature directorial debut was the early 1960s low-budget Summer Holiday (1963) with Cliff Richard And The Shadows. He soon graduated to the 1967 crime thriller Robbery, a fictionalized version of Britain’s The Great Train Robbery. It was a short jump to his first American film, Bullitt (1968), starring Steve McQueen in one of the definitive cop movies of all time thanks to that car chase through the streets of San Francisco. Other films he directed included John and Mary (1969), Murphy’s War (1971), The Hot Rock (1972), For Pete’s Sake (1974), The Deep (1977), Eyewitness (1981), The Dresser (1983), Krull (1983), Eleni (1985), Suspect (1987), The House on Carroll Street (1988), An Innocent Man (1989), Year of the Comet (1992), Roommates (1995), and Curtain Call (1999). He earned two Oscar nominations (director and producer) for Breaking Away, and another two (director and producer) for The Dresser.

For a fascinating inside look on how the car chase in Bullitt was created click here.
 
Bullitt starring Steve McQueen. No CGI, just great cinematography, editing and stunt driving.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
|
01.10.2011
04:19 am
|
Quentin Tarantino’s seldom seen first movie: ‘My Best Friend’s Birthday’
01.10.2011
12:36 am
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
My Best Friend’s Birthday is the first film directed by Quentin Tarantino. Shot in 1984 for $5000, the rough cut was 70 minutes long before a fire at the processing lab destroyed all but 36 minutes of the film. It’s never been officially released.

Co-written with Craig Hamaan and photographed by Roger Avery, My Best Friend’s Birthday stars a motley collection of Tarantino’s video store co-workers and friends from acting class.

The stylistic foundations upon which Quentin built his career -Scorsese, Godard, Cassavetes, blaxpoitation and rock and roll - are evident in this clumsy but fun little flick. And the dialog is unmistakably what was later to become known as Tarantinoesque.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
|
01.10.2011
12:36 am
|
Page 268 of 316 ‹ First  < 266 267 268 269 270 >  Last ›