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La Vallee: Hippie cinema curio with Pink Floyd soundtrack
03.14.2012
12:46 am
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Barbet Schroeder’s La Vallee (aka The Valley or The Valley Obscured by Clouds), his second film, is a cinematic curio about a materialistic Frenchwoman who throws her lot in with a group of free-thinking hippies who are searching for a mythical valley of paradise somewhere deep in the bush of Papua New Guinea.

La Vallee is a bit long, but it’s stunning to watch. If you are in the mood to kick back and space out with a trippy film that you can kind of half pay attention to, it’s not a bad choice.

The original soundtrack by Pink Floyd was released as their seventh album, Obscured By Clouds in 1972.
 
Below, a beautifully odd scene from La Vallee with the song “Mudmen” by Pink Floyd accompanying the visuals.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.14.2012
12:46 am
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Kevin Macdonald’s ‘Marley’ documentary
03.13.2012
10:26 pm
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Made with the blessings and full cooperation of Bob Marley’s family, Kevin Macdonald’s sprawling, two and a half hour documentary Marley is an emotionally engaging and beautifully filmed tribute to one of the great spiritual forces in music history. A revealing and well-rounded testament, Marley digs deep into the psychological and sociological forces that drove Bob Marley to create great art and eventually become an international symbol of inspiration to people everywhere. From Zimbabwe and Jamaica to the suburbs of privilege in America. Marley’s message of peace, love and human rights cut through all stratas of society and was Universal in its power and authenticity.

Marley walked it like he talked it and Macdonald’s film makes it absolutely clear that Marley was willing to put his life on the line for his beliefs…literally. His efforts to serve as peacemaker between warring political factions in Jamaica had earned him countless enemies and on December 3, 1976 he was wounded in an assassination attempt. The persuasive sting of a bullet didn’t for a moment stop Marley from his mission to unify his homeland.

Marley the movie is not blind to the contradictions and complexities in Marley the man. He was a “half-caste” who struggled with racial identity and was bullied relentlessly as a child for being neither white or black. In learning to balance the yin/yang of this racial polarity, Marley became an embodiment of the ‘“One Love” he preached of so passionately.

The film touches on Marley’s legendary womanizing. In interviews with his wife Rita and several ex-girlfriends, there is a bittersweet acceptance of some of the sexism in the patriarchal Rastafari culture. But if you look closer, you will see that Marley’s life was shaped by strong women and his attempts to control them was akin to a boat attempting to control a typhoon.

Marley is composed of some terrific restored concert footage and a wealth of anecdotes from friends and fellow musicians. A highlight is Bunny Wailer’s humorous account of how The Wailers overcame stage fright by rehearsing in a cemetery at night. Perhaps this was the seed that led to the song “Duppy Conqueror.” [Duppy being Jamaican patois for ghost.]

Is Marley the last word on Bob Marley? In addressing that question at the film’s SXSW premiere, director Macdonald commented on the distinction between an authoritative and definitive film on Marley’s life. “About 30 minutes,” he said. We’ll have to wait until that 30 minutes pops up as an extra on the DVD box set.

During a Q&A at SXSW, Ziggy Marley was asked to summarize his father’s legacy. He replied with one word: “love.”

 


 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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03.13.2012
10:26 pm
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Joss Whedon’s ‘The Cabin in the Woods’
03.13.2012
04:28 pm
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For over a decade, Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard have pumped new life into the sci-fi and horror genres by upending traditional approaches to well-worn tropes and re-imagining them in a post-modern, psychedelically surreal style. As the creators, individually and together, of Lost, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Alias, Firefly and Angel, Whedon and Goddard have conjured up alternate realities of suburban vampires, gigantic lumbering monsters, time-traveling lost souls, sci-fi psychonauts and Modesty Blaisenesque secret agents that have turned the gaze of a generation up from their shoes to the pulsing ray of the TV screen. Rod Serling would be proud of this prolific pair.

With The Cabin in the Woods— which had its world premiere before a packed house a few nights ago at the Paramount Theatre in Austin, TX— director Goddard and his co-writer Whedon start with an homage to Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead trilogy and end up mashing up several decades worth of horror movies into 105 minutes of mind bending insanity that no plot summary can do justice to without spoiling the fun. The ingenuity of the movie is in its inspired combination of the familiar and the utterly strange. Just when you think you know where things are headed, the movie takes a turn for the wildly unexpected. The monsters may be old school, true, but The Cabin In the Woods moves with the speed and agility of a young and very hungry Velociraptor.

See the movie premiere photos and read more about The Cabin in the Woods at Tap into Austin 2012.
 


 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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03.13.2012
04:28 pm
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‘The Source’: An extraordinary new documentary feature about the ‘Source Family’
03.13.2012
03:22 pm
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The Source, an extraordinary new documentary feature about the “Source Family,” a little-known hippie counterculture enclave living in Los Angeles in the 1970s, premiered at the SXSW Film festival this year. Co-directed by Jodi Wille and Maria Demopoulos, The Source intimately examines the lives of a group of spiritual seekers who came to follow a charismatic but deeply flawed polygamous guru who opened one of the very first vegetarian restaurants in America. The Source restaurant was a Sunset Strip landmark for over two decades, attracting clientele like Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Willam Morris super agents and various other Tinseltown notables with its healthy food and good-looking staff.

Who were the Source Family?

Jodi: They were a utopian group of 140 beautiful young people who, for a time in the 70s, lived together in a mansion in the Hollywood Hills and explored the cosmos with a man named Father Yod, a controversial restaurateur turned spiritual leader. They had a popular vegetarian restaurant on the Sunset strip that movie stars and musicians frequented and they had their own rock band.

What was it about Father Yod that was so special that he could attract followers so easily?

Jodi: He was a wizard, a war hero, an outlaw, a conceptual genius, a father figure and a friend. He was fearless and he had a sense of humor. He showed those who were seeking how to make magic real in their own lives. And the ladies loved him.

Didn’t Woody Allen use the commune’s health food restaurant as the backdrop for some anti-Los Angeles sentiment in Annie Hall?

Maria: Indeed he did. It’s an iconic scene because it defines the great polarity at the time between the two coasts. The Source was an epicenter and represented the West Coast’s fixation on health and mysticism, which his character, “Alvy Singer,” a cynical New Yorker, perceived as self-indulgent and superficial.


 
How did you come to make a film about The Source?

Jodi: While I was helping to put together the book about the group (The Source, Process Media 2007) with Isis and Electricity Aquarian, Isis suggested we shoot our interviews with family members on video. Once Isis’ showed me her mind-blowing Source archives with the Super 8 home movies, color slides, scrapbooks, and hundreds of hours of audio recordings, I knew we had to make a film. I then brought in Maria, a talented and experienced commercial director and a longtime friend, to help bring things to the next level. The universe unfolded from there.

Are the Source Family still together, in some form, in 2012?

Maria: They’re no longer an active family— they dispersed in 1977 after Yod’s death. But the internet has reconnected many of them and they also have occasional Source Family reunions. The band reunited in 2007 when the book came out, and since then they’ve toured nationally and released new three albums. While the Source Family members all have their own lives now, it’s clear when you talk to them that most still have one foot in Yod-land.

Below, an exclusive clip from The Source.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.13.2012
03:22 pm
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Kubrick’s Cover Story: the double narratives and hidden meanings of ‘2001’
03.13.2012
11:01 am
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Rob Ager is a Liverpool-based film theorist whose videos have been popping up on YouTube for the last few years. He tends to get lumped in with the usual conspiracy brigade, and while Ager’s work does approach material in the same analytical fashion his conclusions can be very different.

This close examination of Stanley Kubrick’s science fiction masterpiece 2001: A Space Oddessy theorises that Kubrick was working on this film with a “double narrative” structure. Thus, the imagery, set design and camera shots created a complex story all of their own that was separate, and sometimes in direct opposition to, the commonly accepted themes of the Arthur C. Clarke screenplay.

Ager’s work falls on just the right side of conspiracy-culture to be of interest to skeptics and conspiracist’s alike, and with this particular film analysis he is careful to avoid any “tin foil hat” readings of the text, which can be a major downfall of “critical” videos of this kind. 

What Ager does posit is that Kubrick was working with a language of imagery that spoke directly to the subconscious and could be in contrast to the spoken words. This is more than a little believable when you take into account that Kubrick’s incredible talent and the huge amounts of time and effort that he spent on the various different aspects of his craft.

Kubrick’s Cover Story is in four parts, and comes in at just over an hour long. Not for everyone, perhaps, but definitely of interest to film students and the hardcore Stanley Kubrick fan (not to mention those who have a soft spot for a lilting Scouse accent):

Kubrick’s Cover Story part one:
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Kubrick’s Twisted Dimensions: why ‘The Shining’ is a masterful mindbender

Kubrick’s Cover Story part two to four after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Niall O'Conghaile
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03.13.2012
11:01 am
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‘Planet of the Apes’: A behind-the-scenes home movie of the 1968 classic film
03.12.2012
07:22 pm
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Roddy McDowall’s behind-the-scenes look at the making of the classic film Planet of the Apes in 1968. The quality is incredible as we watch McDowall slowly made-up to look like Cornelius, and then join his co-stars, Kim Hunter, Maurice Evans and Charlton Heston, on the beach at Malibu for the film’s shock ending. I can still recall the playground buzz over this film, months before its arrival in the U.K. The bubble gum trading cards came first, only one grocery store stocked them, its owner, a thin, waxen-faced man in his late 50s, couldn’t fathom the film’s attraction. “Talking apes? What utter nonsense…tsk..tsk…tsk. Whatever next?” But it was believable to our fertile minds, and revolutionary.

This was the film that inspired my admiration for Roddy McDowall - how could he wear all that make-up? What was it like to act with it on? McDowall later said:

“A year before production, [the producer] Arthur Jacobs talked to me about the project. I was one of the few people he explained the whole thing to, including the ending. He talked with me about playing Cornelius, and I thought it was all intriguing. About a year later, I signed to do the film, and to have my face molded for the makeup. The first film was very difficult because it was made in the summertime, at the Malibu Ranch. In August, with all those quartz lights, it hits like 140*, and it’s just unbearable. Although it was a wonderful experience, because I like [director] Frank Schaffner very much, I thought I would never do one again….”

“The heat made us perspire, which in turn worked on the spirit gum which in turn forces the reapplication of the adhesive - which in its turn works on the skin….”

Planet of the Apes is a very hard film for me to judge because it was such a physical agony doing it. I’d begin to sweat remembering the heat. I think it’s a fabulous movie, up until I come into the film, and then it’s just purely a subjective reaction.”

The difficulties of wearing his make-up didn’t stop McDowall returning to the role of Cornelius in Escape from Planet of the Apes (1971), Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972), Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973), and a Planet of the Apes TV series, all which I followed through the books, the comics, the cards and the films.
 

 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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03.12.2012
07:22 pm
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‘Small Apartments’ premiere: Matt Lucas & Johnny Knoxville at SXSW
03.12.2012
03:30 pm
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Small Apartments focuses in on the small lives lived inside of a run-down Los Angeles apartment complex on the wrong side of the tracks. Little Britain‘s Matt Lucas is both creepy and sympathetic in his stellar performance as the eccentric Franklin Franklin, an underwear-clad Swiss alphorn-playing weirdo who accidentally kills his horrible landlord (Fargo‘s Peter Stormare). Franklin adores his handsome, charismatic older brother (James Marsden) who lives in a mental institution and sends him daily letters, cassette tapes of his rantings and ravings, and fingernail clippings. One day when no letter arrives, Franklin panics and goes to investigate what’s happened to his sibling.

Franklin’s soda bottle-filled apartment is flanked by his neighbors, Tommy Balls, a ne’er do well stoner liquor store worker (a terrific Johnny Knoxville) and Mr. Allspice, a bitter, divorced painter who moved into the building and just never left (James Caan). Neither can stand freaky Franklin or his annoying alphorn playing.

The cast is rounded out with a wonderfully nuanced performance by Billy Crystal as a world-weary fire investigator and a spray-tanned Dolph Lundgren, unexpectedly hilarious as an egotistical pop psychologist who preaches the gospel of “brain brawn.” Juno Temple plays an aspiring teen stripper with dreams of Vegas who lives in the building and the always pitch-perfect Amanda Plummer shares awkward/sweet screen time with Knoxville as Tommy Balls’ worried mother.

Director Jonas Åkerlund is practically a legend for his music video work (Madonna’s “Ray of Light,” Prodigy’s “Smack My Bitch Up,” Lady Gaga and Beyonce’s “Telephone” and dozens of other iconic clips) and known for his meticulous eye, strong art direction, innovative camerawork and clever edits. The slow-moving Small Apartments, is, as the title implies a small film, but one that sports an impressive A-list cast and, despite the Coen Brothers-esque darkness of the plot,an ultimately uplifting message.

The screenplay was written by Chris Millis and adapted from his own novella, which won the 23rd Annual International 3 Day Novel-Writing Contest in 2000. With a haunting soundtrack courtesy of Swedish composer Per Gessel.
 

 

 
More SXSW 2012 coverage at Tap Into Austin 2012

Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.12.2012
03:30 pm
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Kony 2012’s Visible Funding: Invisible Children’s anti-gay, creationist, Christian right donors
03.12.2012
03:15 pm
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Xeni Jardin over at Boing Boing reports:

Bruce Wilson digs in to the sources of funding for the group behind “Kony 2012,” and finds that 990 IRS tax forms and yearly financial disclosure reports from the nonprofit and 990s from its major donors “tell a story that’s jarringly at odds with the secular, airbrushed, feelgood image the nonprofit has cultivated.”

The documents show that Invisible Children received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the biggest financial backers of California’s anti-same-sex marriage Proposition 8, with links to James Dobson, The Family (see Jeff Sharlet’s excellent book on the subject), and similar Christian Right entities.

Read the rest of the story: Kony 2012’s Visible Funding: Invisible Children’s anti-gay, creationist, Christian right donors at Boing Boing.

Posted by Tara McGinley
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03.12.2012
03:15 pm
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Roddy McDowall: Hollywood Home Movies from 1965
03.10.2012
06:33 pm
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Other people’s homes movies, like their holiday snaps, can sometimes be terribly dull. But Roddy McDowall’s silent home movies are different, mainly because they have a cast list to die for - from Simone Signoret to Lauren Bacall, Ben Gazzara to Paul Newman, even Judy Garland and Dominick Dunne.  Also, Mr McDowall was a film fan, and there’s a fine sense of his enjoyment and wonder at the Hollywood stars larking about at his Malibu beach home. These are fun artifacts, a last hurrah for a golden age of Hollywood.

The films were uploaded onto You Tube by soapbox, who was personally given the home movies by Roddy McDowall.
 

Jane Fonda, Tuesday Weld, Anthony Perkins, Rock Hudson, Lauren Bacall, Natalie Wood, Judy Garland, May 31, 1965.
 
Plenty more of Roddy McDowall’s Hollywood Home Movies, after the jump….
 

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
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03.10.2012
06:33 pm
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‘Born Into This’: Charles Bukowski documentary
03.09.2012
03:29 pm
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Charles Bukowksi (August 16, 1920 – March 9, 1994) made me want to write and he made it look it look easy. But there is an art and skill to “easy” that is everything but easy. Finding your own true voice in writing is something multitudes of young novelists and poets have attempted only to watch their words lay there on the page like orderly dead flies. Shake em off and start over again.

Bukoswki made me want to write because he made writing seem essential to life, a sign of life, as important as breath or food or drink. As profane as Bukowski could be, he could also draw forth the spiritual in the most mundane of acts and make tying your shoe seem as profound as death.

Rich with footage shot by Taylor Hackford and Barbet Schroeder and plenty of talking heads who knew Bukowski well, Born Into This is probably the definitive documentary on the man.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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03.09.2012
03:29 pm
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