If I was to send one Christmas card this year, then it would be Alessandro Cima’s beautiful short film Glass Boulevard.
Cima is a film-maker and editor of Candleight Stories and he has just directed this enchanting short film, Glass Boulevard, which was shot in “the dullest imaginable environment of shops along a major Los Angeles street at night when the shops were closed.” This is Cima’s Christmas film and it is one to be smitten by - a cinematic poem reminiscent of Kenneth Anger’s work, filled with delightful images loaded with suggestion and meaning.
The music is “There’s Something in the Air” by Artie Shaw and his Orchestra, from 1936, with Peg La Centra on vocals.
As Brad noted last year at this time, it behooves us to remember D. Boon, guitarist and singer for one of L.A.’s most innovative punk bands The Minutemen. His death after a van crash in Arizona 25 years ago today shook the entire L.A. scene, and nothing was the same. But the influence of the bandsurvives and thrives, in no small part due to We Jam Econo, the Minutemen documentary directed by Tim Irwin. Here’s part one—if you like it, buy the DVD!
Hong Kong’s Johnny To is indisputably one of the best living action directors on the planet. Full Time Killer, Exiled, The Mission, Election and PTU are certifiable balls out classics. So, what could be better than a new Johnny To flick? How about a Johnny To flick starring Johnny Hallyday? Hot damn! Champs-Élysées meets bullet ballet. I am so there.
I lived in France when I was a teenybopper. The Beatles and Stones hadn’t hit yet and I was enthralled with French pop: Sylive Vartan, Francoise Hardy, Jacques Dutronc and Johnny Hallyday. They were fluff, but they were sexy fluff with a sophisticated freshly-fucked vibe. So much cooler than Frankie Avalon, Leslie Gore, Fabian and the rest of the pasteurized American pop stars on top 40 radio, the white and the bland.
Johnny Hallyday has evolved over the years from a totally cool Elvis wannabee through folky hipster to a bonafide superfine actor. As he’s aged, his pretty boy looks have turned into a ragged and weary kind of beauty that makes him perfect for tender tough guy roles. Check him out as an over-the-hill gangster in 2002’s Man On A Train. And now in To’s Vengeance
Here’s the trailer for Vengeance followed by two clips of Hallyday in rock and folk mode. He sings ‘If I Were A Carpenter’ with Emmy Lou Harris as though he really does want her to have his baby. ‘Black Is Black’ is pretty hip too.
Phill Niblock, himself a notable composer in his own right, made this lovely, minimalist filmed portrait of Sun Ra and his Solar Arkestra in 1968. Shooting them on a rooftop in high contrast black and white and focusing in on fingers and mouths, this is as good an excuse as any to take 17 minutes out of your day to enter the waking dream world of Le Sony’r Ra.
The Tron-a-sutra has been updated and animated for those who found the ancient pictorials a bit too mystifying.
The missionary position allows for easy entry, deep penetration and although women are placed in a passive role (hence “missionary”), it is one of the more enjoyable positions for couples who take pleasure in intimacy.”
To view in detail all 40 positions of the Tron-a-sutra click here.
Hopefully many of you have already listened to the latest episode of The Dangerous Minds Radio Hour, but if not, then maybe this clip of the title credits from The Liquidator—specifically the theme tune, sung by Shirley Bassey and written and conducted by Lalo Schifrin—will entice you to do so. I lead an “all female” set off with this track, taken from the scratchy old soundtrack album.
Obviously, the makers of this film were trying their hand at creating another James Bond, with Rod Taylor playing “Boysie Oakes,” a character that came from a Cold War-era spy book series that also tried to chime in on the James Bond action. There were dozens, maybe hundreds of sub-Bond rip-offs during the Sixties. The Liquidator, to its credit, tried hard by hiring Bassey and Schifrin (who also worked on The Man from U.N.C.L.E. around this time). They even snagged the gorgeous Jill St. John a few years before she became a proper Bond girl in Diamonds Are Forever. Superb Richard Williams credit sequence.
It caused nausea and vomiting when first shown at the Cinephone, Oxford Street, in London. Some of the audience demanded their money back, others hurled abuse and shouted “That’s sick,” and ““Its disgusting.” This was the idea, as writer William Burroughs and producer, Antony Balch wanted to achieve a complete “disorientation of the senses.”
Balch had a hard-on for the weird, unusual and sometimes depraved. It was a predilection born from his love of horror films - one compounded when as a child he met his idol, Bela Lugosi, the olde Austro-Hungarian junkie, who was touring Britain with the stage show that had made him famous, Dracula. Film was a love affair that lasted all of Balch’s life.
He also had a knack of making friends with the right people at the right time. In Paris he met and hung out with the artist Brion Gysin and druggie, Glaswegian Beat writer, Alexander Trocchi, who was then writing porn and editing a literary mag called Merlin, along with the likes of Christopher Logue. Through them, Balch met the two men who changed his life, Burroughs and Kenneth Anger.
Anger helped Balch with his ambitions as a cinema distributor, getting him a copy of Todd Browning’s classic Freaks, which was banned the UK, at that time. Balch paid Anger back when he later released his apocalyptic Invocation of My Demon Brother as a support feature.
Burroughs offered Balch something different - the opportunity to collaborate and make their own films. This they did, first with Towers Open Fire, an accessible montage of Burroughs’ routines, recorded on a Grundig tape recorder, cut-up to Balch’s filmed and found images of a “crumbling society.” Put together stuff like this and the chattering classes will always take you seriously. But don’t doubt it, for it was good.
But it was their second collaboration, Cut Ups which for me is far more interesting and proved far more controversial. Cut Ups was originally intended as a documentary called Guerilla Conditions, and was filmed between 1961 and 1965 in Tangiers and Paris. It included some footage from Balch’s aborted attempt to film the unfilmable Naked Lunch. The finished material was collated and then conventionally edited - but the process didn’t stop there, no. For Balch divided the finshed film into four sections of equal length, and then...
I used to wait for new music from The Beatles and The Stones with an almost unbearable anticipation. The same was true of films by Kubrick and Scorsese. Now there’s little music or film that puts me in that state of heightened expectation. The only film maker that conjures the sense that maybe there are new mystical cinematic vistas on the horizon is the alchemist of celluloid Terrence Malick. And Terrence has a new film coming out in 2011. My serpent power is humming.
French film maker Jean Rollin has died (Dec. 15). He was known for his erotic, surreal, blood-splattered horror films. While I found some of Rollin’s movies an uneasy and often tedious mix of high and low art, there is no denying that Rollin had a poetic touch and transgressive sensibility that transformed even his lesser films into compelling experiences of varying degree. Imagine a collaboration between Bergman, Radley Metzger and Herschell Gordon Lewis. There was always something memorably bizarre in all of Rollin’s work.
Film enthusiast and former member of legendary punk pioneers The Flesheaters, Chris D. posted this brief eulogy for Rollin on the New Texture blog:
Director Jean Rollin died today. He was responsible for many incredibly beautiful, poetic images in French films and was looked down on/ignored by the French film industry for decades as only a purveyor of trash. He didn’t direct any unqualified masterpieces, but he was a poet and a visionary and deserves to be remembered fondly for creating some of the most beautiful, simultaneously melancholic, creepy, haunting images of pure poetry in French cinema from the mid-1960s to the present.”
While Rollin’s best films, in my opinion, involved vampires, The Grapes Of Death (1978) is an unusual approach to the world of zombies. Unlike most zombie flicks, Rollin has crafted a film in which zombies are emotional creatures who actually feel remorse for their actions.
As is usually the case with any film directed by Jean Rollin, The Grapes Of Death has sumptuous cinematography and sexually charged imagery. Enjoy.
Film, based on a script by Samuel Beckett, was made in 1965 and stars Buster Keaton. While Alan Schneider gets director’s credit, Beckett made his only trip to America (NYC) to supervise the making of the film and is generally considered to be the film’s actual director or, at the very least, a very present influence on its creation.
Beckett admired Keaton and chose him to play the character of “0.” Keaton, who was old and struggling with alcoholism, agreed to appear in the film despite not caring much for the script. Keaton wasn’t discriminating when it came to money gigs. The fact that Beckett had flown to Los Angeles to woo him was certainly a factor in Buster’s decision to do the movie. Little did he know at the time, or ultimately care, that he was starring in what is considered by many to be a small masterpiece.
Beckett describes the theme of Film thusly:
Film is about a man trying to escape from perception of all kinds - from all perceivers - even divine perceivers. There is a picture which he pulls down. But he can’t escape from self-perception. It is an idea from Bishop Berkeley, the Irish philosopher and idealist, “To be is to be perceived” - “Esse est percipi.” The man who desires to cease to be must cease to be perceived. If being is being perceived, to cease being is to cease to be perceived.’
According to film scholars Katherine Waugh & Fergus Daly:
Beckett sets his film in the year 1929, the year Un Chien Andalou was made (and of course the first year of the sound film). In addition the film opens and closes with close-ups of a sightless eye which would seem to refer to the notorious opening sequence of Un Chien Andalou in which a human eye is sliced open with a razor blade. In fact ‘Eye’ was Beckett’s original title for Film.
For a detailed and entertaining reflection on the making of Film read this piece by Alan Schneider.
Film is silent. Beckett intended that the script be read live during screenings. Here it is in its entirety.
, himself a notable composer in his own right, made this lovely, minimalist filmed portrait of Sun Ra and his Solar Arkestra in 1968. Shooting them on a rooftop in high contrast black and white and focusing in on fingers and mouths, this is as good an excuse as any to take 17 minutes out of your day to enter the waking dream world of Le Sony’r Ra.
—specifically the theme tune, sung by Shirley Bassey and written and conducted by Lalo Schifrin—will entice you to do so. I lead 
