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‘Anger Me’: A documentary on Kenneth Anger
06.26.2012
07:02 pm
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As a film, Anger Me is almost the antithesis of a Kenneth Anger film . It’s about as artful as an industrial training movie. But it does feature one of the great visionaries of cinema speaking to a camera for 70 minutes and for fans and admirers of Kenneth Anger, that is something to be grateful for. This is a talking head well-worth listening to.

Director Elio Gelmini clearly believes that Anger can carry the film on his own and given Anger’s fascinating history and storytelling gifts the film succeeds despite its threadbare production. The film would have greatly benefited from a more expansive approach. As Anger discusses his work, scenes from his films have been added to a blue screen background and the effect diminishes the evocative mystery of Anger’s imagery. You yearn to enter the mystical caverns of Anger’s world, but instead are left with a kind of retro MTV effect. Ironic, considering Anger hugely influenced the world of music videos, pointing a direction away from glossiness into something more magical and dreamlike. But putting aside my criticism of the film’s technique, I applaud Gelmini for shining a light on one of the most remarkable human beings to have had an impact on my life.

So here have it, Anger Me. For those unfamiliar with Kenneth Anger, this is a solid introduction. Watch it and then seek out his work on DVD. It’s mindblowing stuff.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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06.26.2012
07:02 pm
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‘Voyage Of The Rock Aliens’: Pia Zadora’s stupendously goofy space odyssey
06.26.2012
06:34 pm
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Here’s something very special for fans and friends of Dangerous Minds: the ultra-fabulous, wildly synthetic and cute as a bug’s ear Pia Zadora in the stupendously entertaining sci-fi/musical Voyage Of The Rock Aliens.

This goofy flick contains more spandex, hairspray and lip gloss than Divine’s overnight bag. And it features the video mega-hit “When The Rain Begins to Fall”, in which Zadora and Jermaine Jackson emote like black and white Ethel Mermans while wearing outfits lifted from a discofied mashup of the Road Warrior and Saturday Night Fever.

Who could not love a movie that has the credit “Ruth Gordon as The Sheriff?”

Break out the bath salts and be prepared to eat your own face as you watch Voyage Of The Rock Aliens.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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06.26.2012
06:34 pm
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Boing Boing’s Mind Blowing Movies series: ‘What’s New Pussycat?’
06.25.2012
03:01 pm
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Here’s my short piece for Boing Boing’s Mind Blowing Movies series:

After reading over the other entries in Boing Boing’s Mind Blowing Movies series, I couldn’t help feeling a little embarrassed that I was unable to think of even a single film that I felt had truly blown my mind. Works of art, music, weird science, books of philosophy, sure, ideas have blown my mind, but when I try to mentally flip though the catalog of my favorite films, or ones that I quote from the most often, or what have you (Female Trouble, Valley of the Dolls, Putney Swope, Ken Russell’s Isadora Duncan: Biggest Dancer in the World, Head, Richard Lester’s criminally underrated Petulia) I still wouldn’t file any of them as particularly “mind blowing,” just as movies that I happen to really, really like.

When Mark sent out the invite to contribute, I confess that I immediately drew a cinematic blank, but there was one film that that didn’t necessarily “blow my mind,” per se, in the same way that the other participants here have expressed it in their posts, but it did fundamentally alter my mind, or at least it did something to immediately change my perception of the world around me, in the sense that there was a before & after aspect when I watched it. Accordingly my anecdote will be short and sweet.

When I was a 7-year-old kid in 1973, What’s New Pussycat? the quintessential sexy 60s comedy “romp,” aired on ABC’s Movie of the Week and I watched it in the basement of my parent’s house on a cheap black and white TV set with a rabbit-ears antenna with balls of tin foil crunched at the tip of each branch. The picture quality was comparable to a security camera. Why I was watching What’s New Pussycat? sitting alone in a damp, crappy basement or even interested in this particular film in the first place at that age, I couldn’t tell you, but I am guessing I wanted to watch it because I liked the theme song, sung by Tom Jones (I owned the 45rpm on Parrot Records) or else simply because Peter Sellers was in it.

In any case, the pivotal moment for me happens at about 120 minutes into the film when Swiss bombshell Ursula Andress suddenly drops from the sky and parachutes into Peter O’Tootle’s convertible. I can vividly recall my eyes growing wider and wider and feeling what you might call a “stirring” in my loins as I stared in utter amazement at the most gorgeous creature I had ever seen in my short life. I was completely astonished and transfixed by how beautiful she was. I had never before seen a woman who looked quite like that and the sight of this blonde goddess strongly implied to me that there was something that I might be missing out on…

It was at that precise moment the proverbial light-bulb went on over my head about what the whole “big deal” with girls must be all about. That such a creature as Ursula Andress existed indicated that there were more of them out there. Suddenly there was meaning in my life and something to aspire to. I made a mental note to move to Switzerland as soon as I grew up.

By the end of the film—which being a comedy made in 1965 only hinted at the things that were going on offscreen—the mechanics of procreation seemed rather obvious to me.

After that brief “Aha!” moment, the world around me started to make a whole lot more sense…

Mind Blowing Movies (Boing Boing)

In the clip, Ursula Andress drops from the sky to tempt soon-to-be-married Peter O’Toole in What’s New Pussycat? to the tune of Dionna Warwick singing “Here I Am.”
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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06.25.2012
03:01 pm
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Amusing ‘The Big Lebowski’ poster starring Frank Zappa, Iggy and Bowie
06.21.2012
02:20 pm
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I had a good laugh with this one.
 
Via Retrogasm

Posted by Tara McGinley
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06.21.2012
02:20 pm
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Nick Broomfield’s utterly insane ‘Sarah Palin: You Betcha!’ doc now on Netflix
06.20.2012
09:00 pm
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“Wasilla makes Twin Peaks look like a walk in the park. It’s a devout evangelical community. Sevety-six churches with a population of only six thousand, and the crystal meth capitol of Alaska.”

The movie that I’ve been raving about to everyone since I saw it on Netflix last week, and that I want to recommend to you, too, dear reader, is Nick Broomfield’s mind-blowing documentary Sarah Palin: You Betcha! When the film played festivals last year, it got a lot of attention, but then it was promptly forgotten about before most people ever had a chance to see it. I had forgotten about it myself, but when I saw that it was on Netflix, I couldn’t hit play fast enough.

First off, it’s not that it’s a “good film,” per se, because it’s most certainly not, but man is it entertaining. Nick Broomfield is a canny and yet extremely lazy documentarian, and Sarah Palin: You Betcha! is chock-a-block full of Broomfield falling back (again and again) on his standard Broomfieldian tropes (chasing people with a microphone as they drive away from him; implying that anyone who tells him to fuck off has a hidden agenda; having doors literally slammed in his face; asking “inopportune” questions in public). But Nick Broomfield, a pioneer in the “You get a documentary PLUS ME” school of film-making and his annoying shtick IS NOT THE POINT of Sarah Palin: You Betcha!!

Sarah Palin and her family are the point, of course. And let me tell ya, the fuckin’ Kardashians of Wasilla do not come off like very well-adjusted people here… No, not at all.

We’ve read about many of the things covered in the film and the narrative arc—a dim, but steel-willed former beauty queen becomes the mayor of a small Alaska town and rules over it like a peevish mean girl fascist dictator, then becomes governor of the state and then the GOP’s VP nominee in short order—is a familiar one, but to actually see and hear people talk who have known her for years (or their entire lives, some of them) and who line up tell their fucked-up Sarah Palin war stories with venom dripping from their fangs (or alternately like kicked dogs) is nothing short of breath-taking, riveting as hell and bust-a-gut funny, too.

With his usual pseudo-bungling charm Broomfield even manages to talk his way into an on-camera interview with Sarah Palin’s father (who quickly sours on the British film-maker), her former brother-in-law (who viciously goes to town on her ass. I found him quite credible) as well as various people Palin has fucked over, froze out or back-stabbed over the years, such as her loyal chief of staff and one time campaign manager. Certainly there is no shortage of former friends and colleagues who have been cruelly thrown under a bus by the imperious Queen Sarah, who comes off TEN TIMES MORE CRAZY than you’ve ever dared to suspect in Sarah Palin: You Betcha!

Of course, the notion of how frightening it was that this idiotic ignoramus got as close as she did to accidentally occupying the Oval Office is by now a only an academic—and yet no less nightmarish—consideration, making the in retrospect “what if?” implications of Broomfield’s Sarah Palin: You Betcha! all the more powerful (and yes, fucking funny in a gallows humor kind of way). What we didn’t know at the time, could have really hurt us. Let me conclude here by saying that Sarah Palin: You Betcha! would make a damned good double bill with Stanley Kubrick’s slightly less unnerving Dr. Strangelove.

This trailer gives away precious little of what delirious insanity awaits you in Nick Broomfield’s Sarah Palin: You Betcha!.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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06.20.2012
09:00 pm
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David Bowie holding a cute pink pig on the set of ‘Just A Gigolo,’ 1979
06.20.2012
01:33 pm
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Here are some photos of David Bowie holding an adorable pink pig. These were shot during the shooting of Bowie’s second major film performance Just A Gigolo in 1979.

Bowie himself has said that Just A Gigolo, directed by Blow-Up actor David Hemmings, was his his 32 Elvis movies all rolled up into one.
 

 
More shots of Bowie and the pig after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Tara McGinley
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06.20.2012
01:33 pm
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The Master: New look at PT Anderson’s upcoming L. Ron Hubbard film
06.20.2012
12:26 pm
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The marketing campaign for director Paul Thomas Anderson’s fictionalized L.Ron Hubbard flick, The Master, is starting to heat up. Yesterday a mysterious trailer with Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams and Joaquin Phoenix was released and it looks like this is going to be a fascinating film.

Here’s all it says on IMDB at present:

“A 1950s-set drama centered on the relationship between a charismatic intellectual known as “the Master” whose faith-based organization begins to catch on in America, and a young drifter who becomes his right-hand man.”

Hoffman as Hubbard is an inspired bit of casting (although I think the ultimate portrayal of Hubbard will come one day from The Mighty Boosh‘s Rich Fulcher) but are Adams and Phoenix supposed to be based on Marjorie Cameron and Jack Parsons? It kinda looks that way.

One of the film’s producer, JoAnne Sellar, denied any connection to Hubbard or Scientology: “It’s a World War II drama. It’s about a drifter after World War II.”

Yeah, right…

With a tense soundtrack from Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood. The Master is scheduled for release on “Crowleymass,” October 12th. I wonder if that is a co-incidence or deliberate?
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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06.20.2012
12:26 pm
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Behind-the-Scenes: Alfred Hitchcock Directs ‘Frenzy’ in 1972
06.19.2012
07:02 pm
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Alfred_Hitchcock_directs_Frenzy
 
Incredible behind-the-scenes footage of Alfred Hitchcock directing Frenzy from 1972.

Frenzy was greatly undervalued on its initial cinematic release - considered by many as too dark, unnecessarily seedy, and not worthy of Hitchcock’s talents, but I always thought it a superbly suspenseful and complex film that captured the lonely heart at the center of our everyday world. Taken form the novel by Arthur La Bern, Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square (which is worth reading), it was Hitchcock’s last great film, and contained some exceptionally fine characterizations by Jon Finch, Barry Foster, Anna Massey, Billie Whitelaw and in particular Alec McCowen as Chief Inspector Oxford.

The sound quality is non-existent, but just enjoy the pictures.
 

 
With thanks to Nellym
 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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06.19.2012
07:02 pm
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Saul Bass’s visionary sci-fi film ‘Phase IV’ for your viewing pleasure
06.19.2012
04:35 pm
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Saul Bass’s Phase lV is an underrated sci-fi film that has in recent years started to gain a richly deserved cult following. It was released on DVD in 2008 and has subsequently been discovered by fans of cinematic psychedelia. There are segments of Phase lV that are genuinely trippy and have influenced latter day head films like the newly released Beyond The Black Rainbow. Considered by some to be the greatest movie about killer insects ever made (a small but pesky genre), I would add that it is one of the most beautifully photographed films, of any genre, ever made.

Bass is famous for his iconic credit sequences in many of Hitchcock’s films, among others, and for his striking movie posters. Phase lV was his one and only directorial effort and died a quick death at the box office in 1974. But it is a film that, despite some amateurish elements, has a significant wow factor. Ken Middleham’s (The Hellstrom Chronicle) cinematography is absolutely stunning and there are moments in the film that are truly visionary.
 

 
Here’s Phase lV in its entirety. I suggest to fully appreciate the film, you pick up the DVD. There are new copies selling for less than $5.

If you’re in the L.A. area, you should get your ass over to Cinefamily this Sunday (the 24th) to see a rare screening of a 35mm print of Phase lV. According to a reliable source, Cinefamily will have a surprise for the folks who attend the screening that will make the event an absolute must-see for film lovers and fans of Saul Bass. Trust me, it will be a historic night for movie freaks.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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06.19.2012
04:35 pm
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Watch the watercolor version of ‘Blade Runner’
06.19.2012
02:19 pm
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Swedish artist Anders Ramsell used 3285 watercolor paintings to create over 12 minutes of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner entirely of watercolors.

This is part one. I suppose more are on the way.
 

 
Via Kottke

Posted by Tara McGinley
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06.19.2012
02:19 pm
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