The Big Cube, a 1969 LSD exploitation flick starring a washed-up Lana Turner and West Side Story’s George Chakiris, is a miasma of nightmarish psychedelic cliches intended to scare kids away from LSD. This turkey is a blast from beginning to end. Highly recommended. Watch it while you’re high.
This is incredible: Behold as Miles David watches Louis Malle’s French film noir, Ascenseur pour l’échafaud, AKA Elevator to the Gallows, and improvises his moody soundtrack score. Followed by an interview with Malle.
Jazz critic Phil Johnson described this as “the loneliest trumpet sound you will ever hear.” This is like watching Picasso paint.
Via PCL Linkdump
Last week an email blast went out about a special LA screening at Cinefamily of British satirist Chris Morris’s new, uh, “terrorist comedy”—for what else could you call it?—Four Lions. The director would be present, a rare appearance indeed, by Morris on these shores. I’d already seen the film, but getting to hear Morris talk about his work in person was not an event I was going to miss.
I attended the packed and enthusiastic screening with my good friend, Xeni Jardin, who conducted a terrific interview with Chris Morris that she posted today on Boing Boing:
Xeni Jardin: When I first heard about this film I thought: Chris Morris has spun a comedy from of a sad and serious subject. After seeing the film, and now hearing you talk, it seems that the comedy was all there—it’s just not politically correct to bring it to light.
Chris Morris: I suppose, in a way. Look, the cartridges that were bombs, that were intercepted in the FedEx parcel bombing attempt last week—the guy who made those bombs turned his brother into a bottle rocket last year. That whole group are basically displaced Saudis in Yemen. They don’t like the Saudis. This guy wanted to blow up a Saudi prince. And he persuaded his brother to use a suppository bomb. The suppository bomber turns up at the Saudi prince’s place, says hello to the Saudi prince, pulls out a trigger, fires off the bomb, then blasts himself vertically, straight through the ceiling. The Saudi prince picks himself up and says, “Right, now then, where was I?” And that’s the end of that. It’s a perfect sight gag. For everyone other than the guy’s mother, it’s a funny story.
Four Lions opens tomorrow in selected American cities.
Four Lions: Finding the Lulz in Jihad(Boing Boing)
Described by Milos Forman as “Disney + Bunuel,” stop-motion animator Jan Švankmajer is one of the few artists to truly translate the spirit of early-20th century surrealism for the present. Folks like Tim Burton and Terry Gilliam cite Švankmajer’s late-‘80s and early-‘90s feature films like Alice and Faust as classics in the art form.
But most of all, Burton and Gilliam point to Švankmajer’s early short films from the ‘60s through the early ‘80s. One of these, the 10-minute Kostnice from 1970—known as Ossuary—isn’t stop-motion at all. Instead, it’s a beautifully stylized study of the decoratively laid-out bones of 70,000 people in the Cemetery Church in suburban Sedlec in the Czech Republic.
Shot during the dire couple of years after the Prague Spring liberation of 1968 collapsed under an invasion by Warsaw Pact troops, Svankmajer made Ossuary a grim reminder of human fallibility.
As Jan Uhde wrote in his piece on the film for KinoEye:
Film-makers, particularly those of the “Czech New Wave,” were among the most severely persecuted. The fact that a non-conformist like Švankmajer was allowed to shoot in this atmosphere at all was in part due to the fact that he was working in the relatively obscure and inexpensive domain of short film production; this may have saved him from the crackdown that struck his more exposed colleagues in the feature film studios during the 1970s.
Moreover, Švankmajer’s remarkable tenacity and creative thinking enabled him to sometimes outwit the regime’s ideological watchdogs[…] The film was commissioned as a “cultural documentary,” a form popular with the authorities and considered relatively safe politically. But the subject Švankmajer chose must have been a surprise for the apparatchiks: on the one hand, the Sedlec Ossuary was a first-rate historical site which, at first glance, suited the official didactic demand. On the other hand, there was the uncomfortable subject of decay and death as well as religion, reflecting a subtle yet defiant opposition to the loud secular optimism of the communist officialdom.
Get: Jan Švankmajer - The Ossuary and Other Tales [DVD]
R. Couri Hay talks with Divine, John Waters, Mink Stole and David Lochary at Anton Perich Studio, formerly ‘The Factory’, in 1975. This must be a promo outing for Female Trouble. The video quality leaves a lot to be desired, but this is 58 minutes of pop culture history and well-worth watching. Waters is amusing as always, Divine looks Garboesque, and it’s rare to see see David Lochary and Mink Stole being interviewed. Rich kid R. Couri Hay was a contributor to Warhol’s Interview magazine and gossip columnist for The National Inquirer in the mid-to-late 1970’s.
Yet another example of a once super obscure cult film turning up on the Internet, in this case, for free on YouTube’s OpenFlix channel. The late Curtis Harrington’s darkly atmospheric Night Tide (1961) was the first film to star a young Dennis Hopper. The plot revolves around a sailer (Hopper) who has an affair with a mysterious and beautiful woman (Linda Lawson) who portrays a mermaid at a sideshow on the Venice Beach boardwalk. The sailor begins to suspect that his lover is an actual mermaid who commits ritual murders during the full moon.
Occultist/artist Marjorie Cameron, who memorably played the Scarlet Woman in Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (Harrington shot Anger’s Puce Moment and appeared in Pleasure Dome as well) has a small but pivotal role as a super intense woman who seems to hold a strange and fearsome power over Lawson’s character. There is also a fantastic jazzy/beatniky soundtrack by David Raskin (who also worked on the soundtrack to Modern Times with Charlie Chaplin and composed the haunting theme to Otto Preminger’s Laura, which became a jazz standard).
Carts Of Darkness is a fascinating film in and of itself but when you factor in the fact that its director, Murray Sipple, is a quadriplegic the film enters the realm of the astounding.
I have not always relied on a wheelchair for my mobility. As an able-bodied person I was a high school quarterback, dedicated mountain biker, skateboarder, and a snowboarder. I lived in Whistler, B.C and directed five independent action sport videos that were pre-“X-games” and pre-“mainstream extreme”. I set down deep roots in a short period while living in the mountain community; and traveled internationally filming snow and skateboarding. That lifestyle/ dream was destroyed in 1996 when a high-speed motor vehicle accident compounded by an emergency room error rendered me a quadriplegic. Throughout the following eight years, I continued to hope that my life could still somehow include my passion for filmmaking. Eventually, I was able to renovate a home in North Vancouver that became a model of accessibility and independence. But outside the comforting accessibility of this new home, my vantage point was largely limited to flat pathways, accessible public buildings, and shopping centers. I learned to drive a van which extended my freedom, but my limited hand dexterity made it difficult to work a camera like I had before. So in spite of solid gains in the direction of freedom and mobility, I found myself largely retreating from the dream of returning to filmmaking. The next few years were chiefly spent adjusting to my disability and trying to ignore the craving to make films. I discovered the story behind Carts of Darkness when I was grocery shopping one evening. I noticed some loud individuals who were cashing in bottles. I had a romantic vision that both of our lifestyles were stereotypes to the passing customers: the drunken and comically disordered bottle returners, and me, wheelchair-bound and precarious in my adapted vehicle. When I approached the men with the idea to make a film, a world was revealed to me I had never expected to discover in my own neighbourhood. Murray Sipple
Carts Of Darkness documents the lives of ‘bottle-pickers’, the hardships they endure, and their method of letting off steam thru the extreme sport of shopping cart racing.
I can’t find any info on Monkey Go Round other than it was made in Germany and released in the States by the venerable Castle Films in 1961. There’s no mention of the movie in the Castle Catalog. If anybody knows anything about the history of this little gem, please share.
MegaForce (1982)
The combination of ultra-cheesy blue-screen effects, a motorcycle that looks like it’s made of Styrofoam and garbage can lids, gold lamé jumpsuit and the actors’ goofy reaction shots make this scene from Megaforce a classic of ‘so bad it’s good’ cinema. A cult favorite - Matt Stone and Trey Parker paid homage to Megaforce in Team America: World Police and an episode of South Park - it’s inexplicably never been released on DVD. I’d love to hear director Hal Needham’s commentary.
“Megaforce, a phantom Army of super elite fighting men whose weapons are the most powerful science can devise”
The appropriately goofy theme song was written by Jerrold Immel.
