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Cannabis cinema at The 7th Annual Artivist Film Festival
12.01.2010
05:56 pm
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Frequent readers of this blog know that California’s thriving medical marijuana scene is rather…uh… near and dear to our hearts. Tomorrow night in Los Angeles, at The 7th Annual Artivist Film Festival, there will be a free festival screening of director Kevin Booth’s How Weed Won the West documentary at the Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Boulevard, at 7p.m. Booth will be in attendance for a Q&A after the screening. He will be joined by NORML’s Allen St. Pierre and Law Enforcement Against Prohibition’s Lt. Diane Goldstein. All screenings at the Artivist Film Festival are free, tickets for How Weed Won the West can be reserved here.

While California is going bankrupt, one business is booming. How Weed Won the West is the story of the growing medical cannabis/marijuana industry in the greater Los Angeles area, with over 700 dispensaries doling out the buds. As a treatment for conditions ranging from cancer and AIDS, to anxiety, ADHD, and insomnia, cannabis is quickly proving itself as a healthier natural alternative to many prescription drugs. Following the story of Organica, a collective owned by Jeff Joseph that was raided by the DEA in August of ‘09, the film shows that although some things have changed with Obama in office, the War on Drugs is nowhere near over. From Kevin Booth, the producer/director of Showtime’s American Drug War, How Weed Won the West puts California forward as an example to the rest of the country by documenting how legalizing marijuana can help save the economy.


 

 
Also screening for free at the Artivist Film Festival in a similar “herbal genre” is Hempsters, 9:00pm on Friday December 3 at the Egyptian with the director in attendance for a Q&A afterwards:

This lively documentary directed by Michael Henning, begins with the arrest of Woody Harrelson for planting four feral hemp seeds in Kentucky and his subsequent trial and acquittal, then joins traveling Hemp activist Craig Lee and a number of featured old-school Kentucky tobacco farmers who just want to grow the multipurpose crop as a way to save their farms. Viewers meet Alex White Plume, leader of the Lakota “Tiospaye” (family clan), and the first family to plant industrial hemp on American soil since the 1950′s. He makes a startling case that his right to grow hemp is a sovereignty issue. Julia Butterfly Hill goes to extreme lengths to protest the pulping of old-growth forests by living for over two years at the top of a 1,000 year old redwood tree in Northern California. Gatewood Galbraith, the fiery orator of the US Reform Party, attempts to bring to the public at large to its senses in his own inimitable style. A hyper-paced ride with a sizzling soundtrack, this motion picture puts hemp at the heart of just about every grassroots issue in America today. Featured players include Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, Ralph Nader and Woody Harrelson. More than a political study of cannabis, Hempsters is a rousing portrait of our country’s most spirited and sensible free-thinkers.

 

 
Get free tickets for the Hempsters screening here.

The 7th Annual Artivist Film Festival

Posted by Richard Metzger
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12.01.2010
05:56 pm
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Driven by Demons: Robert Shaw, James Bond and The Man in the Glass Booth
12.01.2010
05:26 pm
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Sean Connery once remarked that From Russia With Love was his favourite Bond film, as it depended more on story and character than gadgets and special effects.

This is true but the film also had a great title song, sung by the incomparable Matt Monro, and outstanding performances from Robert Shaw and Lotte Lenya in its favour.

By the time of making From Russia With Love, Lotte Lenya was a celebrated singer and actress, known for her pioneering performances in, husband, Kurt Weill’s and Bertolt Brecht’s Mahagonny-Songspiel (1927) and the legendary Threepenny Opera (1928).

In From Russia With Love, Lenya played Rosa Klebb, a sadistic former SMERSH Agent who has joined SPECTRE to become Ernst Blofeld’s No. 3. You can uess what happened to 1 and 2. The name Rosa Klebb was a pun contrived by Bond author Ian Fleming, derived from the Soviet phrase for women’s rights, ‘khleb i rozy’, which is a Russian translation for ‘bread and roses’. Lenya’s perfromance as the sadistic Klebb is one of the most iconic of all Bond villains, with her poisoned tipped dagger, secreted in the toe of her shoe.

Lenya’s Klebb often overshadows Robert Shaw’s underplayed, though equally efficient Donald ‘Red’ Grant. Shaw was a highly talented man whose own personal tragedies (his father a manic depressive and alcoholic committed suicide when Robert was 12) and alcoholism hampered him from rightly claiming his position as one of Britain’s greatest actors.

Shaw established himself through years of TV and theatrical work, most notably his chilling and subtle performance as Aston in Harold Pinter‘s The Caretaker. He went on to throw hand grenades in The Battle of the Bulge (1965), and gave a deservedly Oscar-nominated performance as Henry VIII in A Man For All Seasons (1966). He delivered excellent performances in Young Winston, and, as the mobster Doyle Lonnegan, in The Sting (1973), then gave two of his most iconic roles, the quietly calculating and menacing Mr Blue in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) and a scenery chewing Quint in Jaws (1975).

But Shaw’s success as an actor was countered by further personal tragedy when his second wife, Mary Ure, who had followed Shaw into alcoholism, died from an accidental overdose. Ure’s death caused Shaw considerable guilt and despair, and led the actor to become severely depressed and reclusive in his personal life.

Shaw countered this by continuing his career as a respected and award-winning novelist and playwright. His first novel The Hiding Place, was later adapted for the film, Situation Hopeless… But Not Serious (1965) starring Alec Guinness. His next, The Sun Doctor won the Hawthornden Prize.  While for theatre he wrote a trilogy of plays, the centerpiece of which was his most controversial and successful drama, The Man in the Glass Booth (1967).

The Man in the Glass Booth dealt with the issues of identity, guilt and responsibility that owed much to the warped perceptions caused by Shaw’s alcoholism. Undoubtedly personal, the play however is in no way autobiographical, and was inspired by actual events surrounding the kidnapping and trial of Adolf Eichmann.

In Shaw’s version, a man believed to be a rich Jewish industrialist and Holocaust survivor, Arthur Goldman, is exposed as a Nazi war criminal. Goldman is kidnapped from his Manhattan home to stand trial in Israel. Kept in a glass booth to prevent his assassination, Goldman taunts his persecutors and their beliefs, questioning his own and their collective guilt, before symbolically accepting full responsibility for the Holocaust.  At this point it is revealed Goldman has falsified his dental records and is not a Nazi war criminal, but is in fact a Holocaust survivor.

The original theatrical production was directed by Harold Pinter and starred Donald Pleasance in an award-winning performance that launched his Hollywood career.  The play was later made into an Oscar nominated film directed by Arthur Hiller and starring Maximilian Schell. However, Shaw was unhappy with the production and asked for his name to be removed form the credits.

Looking back on the play and film now, one can intuit how much Shaw’s own personal life influenced the creation of one of theatre’s most controversial and tragic figures.
 

 
Bonus clips of Lotte Lenya singing ‘Pirate Jenny’ and Matt Monro after the jump…
 

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
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12.01.2010
05:26 pm
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Score: Radley Metzger’s 70s bisexual erotica
12.01.2010
02:28 pm
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Softcore sinema auteur Radley Metzger (no relation) turned out high budget, high class. visually luscious European art-house smut via his Audubon Films company in the 60s and 70s. He’s famous for such highbrow sex fare as Camille 2000, Carmen Baby and The Lickerish Quartet (which I wrote about here)

Metzger’s 1972 film Score was sourced from an off-Broadway play that spoofed swingers and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, set in Queens, NY, but the locale was changed to a mythical European country for the film adaptation (Sylvester Stallone had a small role in the play, but not the film. He wasn’t “European” enough). Score is the first film with any kind of a decent budget to explore onscreen male bisexuality. A lascivious pair of swingers makes a bet about seducing a naive couple. Hilariously forward Claire Wilbur (who was apparently ashamed of being known for the role) and Gerald Grant portrayed the jaded seducers. Cult film favorite Lynn Lowry (The Crazies, Shivers, I Drink Your Blood) and gay porn icon Casey Donovan (here called Calvin Culver) played their prey.

At one point, one of the characters says of her husband, “I like everyone here except him because he won’t take his pants off.”  Do check out the clip, it’s one of the best trailers I’ve ever seen. You won’t wonder what the film is about, that’s for sure…

A new HD version of Score has just been issued on Blu-ray and DVD by the Cult Epics label. An uncensored version including full-frontal male nudity and fellatio is also available.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Radley Metzger’s Erotic Masterpiece: The Lickerish Quartet

Posted by Richard Metzger
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12.01.2010
02:28 pm
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Happy birthday Les Blank: Werner Herzog eats his shoe!
11.27.2010
10:10 pm
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The master documentarian Les Blank turned 75 today, and there’s no shortage of his films to recommend, including The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins, Hot Pepper and Burden of Dreams.

But one of his most infamous pieces is the 1980 short Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe. It follows the great German director in the San Francisco Bay Area as he makes good on the bet he made that filmmaker Errol Morris couldn’t make and publicly screen his film about pet cemeteries, Gates of Heaven. Morris succeeded, and the ever-charming and rather hilarious Herzog obliged, even stewing the footwear at Alice Waters’s recently opened post-hippie gourmet shack Chez Panisse.
 
Check pt. 2 after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Ron Nachmann
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11.27.2010
10:10 pm
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Stanley Kubrick explains the plot of ‘2001’
11.27.2010
05:55 pm
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If you or anyone you know insists that they know what Stanley Kubrick’s classic film 2001: A Space Odyssey is all about, they are of course, bluffing, because no one really knows what that film is all about. There was, of course, one exception, and that would be the auteur himself. So what did Kubrick have to say about the “plot” and meaning behind his iconic film?

From a 1969 interview with Kubrick by Joseph Gelmis:

You begin with an artifact left on earth four million years ago by extraterrestrial explorers who observed the behavior of the man-apes of the time and decided to influence their evolutionary progression. Then you have a second artifact buried deep on the lunar surface and programmed to signal word of man’s first baby steps into the universe—a kind of cosmic burglar alarm. And finally there’s a third artifact placed in orbit around Jupiter and waiting for the time when man has reached the outer rim of his own solar system.

When the surviving astronaut, Bowman, ultimately reaches Jupiter, this artifact sweeps him into a force field or star gate that hurls him on a journey through inner and outer space and finally transports him to another part of the galaxy, where he’s placed in a human zoo approximating a hospital terrestrial environment drawn out of his own dreams and imagination. In a timeless state, his life passes from middle age to senescence to death. He is reborn, an enhanced being, a star child, an angel, a superman, if you like, and returns to earth prepared for the next leap forward of man’s evolutionary destiny.

That is what happens on the film’s simplest level. Since an encounter with an advanced interstellar intelligence would be incomprehensible within our present earthbound frames of reference, reactions to it will have elements of philosophy and metaphysics that have nothing to do with the bare plot outline itself.

 

 
Via Kottke

Posted by Richard Metzger
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11.27.2010
05:55 pm
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Conny Froboess: German rockabilly boogie
11.26.2010
11:50 pm
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I promised DM readers I was gonna dig up some cool international rock and roll and here’s something ultra-groovy: Rocka-hula-billy from German pop star Conny (Cornelia Froboess).

In the late 1950’s and early 60’s, Conny had a string of hit records and starred in the German equivalent of Beach Blanket Bingo style films. She’s still alive and working.

The stylized sets and eye-popping Technicolor in the following clips from Holiday in Honolulu and Blue Jean Boy  recall the live action cartoons of Frank Tashlin (The Girl Can’t Help It).

Conny comes on like a female Eddie Cochran boppin’ in a teenage galaxy in some swingin’ universe all its own. Dig it!
 

 

 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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11.26.2010
11:50 pm
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3-D Film of Train Journey on the Bergen Line
11.26.2010
03:07 pm
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Forget Black Friday, get your 3-D glasses on and take a trip along the Bergensbanen, the railway line between Bergen and Hønefoss, in Norway.

This is just an extract form an incredible seven-and-half hour TV documentary of the journey called, rather unimaginatively, Bergensbanen which, if you’re in the holiday mood or having a slow work day, can be viewed here.
 

 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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11.26.2010
03:07 pm
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8-bit computer games that do not exist
11.24.2010
04:15 pm
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Lou Reed Street Hassle (above and below)
 
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Eraserhead
 
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Barry Lyndon (natch)
 
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via Dimension Arcade Thanks, Ian Raikow

Posted by Brad Laner
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11.24.2010
04:15 pm
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The Yesterday Machine: ‘Somewhere in time Hitler lives!’
11.24.2010
12:16 pm
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When I read Wired editor Chris Anderson’s 2006 best-seller, The Long Tail, I was still professionally involved with book publishing and DVD distribution, and called total bullshit on his theory.  Anderson’s central thesis in the book, that unlimited digital “shelf space” would enable long term profits on “back catalog” items, I can tell you for certain, is absolute nonsense, for all but retailers of Amazon’s size (can you name another?). Comforting fiction to corporations, companies and individual who would sell their wares on Amazon or iTunes, perhaps, but fiction nonetheless. The public always wants the “new” thing and after a point, books and movies just become too dated for anyone to care about, let alone pay for.

Even more to the point, it seemed like Anderson, when he wrote The Long Tail, had scant awareness that Bit Torrent was about to do for the Hollywood bottom line what it had already done for the music industry’s. Presuming people were going to actually pay for stuff, was the book’s most fatally flawed assumption. As far as this reader was concerned, six months after The Long Tail appeared on the best seller charts, its thesis was pretty much D.O.A. (as Anderson kind of tacitly admitted to with the title of his next book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price in 2008).

Certain things, even if they were priced at a dollar, no one would buy them. Human psychology, especially that of the subgroup “American consumer” would also make a calculation “too cheap = it must suck.” There is also an opportunity cost associated with this internal calculation, that of how do you want to “spend” your free time and of other things competing for your attention, be they “real life” or more entertainment choices. “New” usually wins, because it also happens to be what most other people are interested in, and so there is the “social currency” aspect of what what entertainment and infotainment provide, which is to say, if you haven’t seen it, you can’t have an opinion about it and so you are left out of the conversation.

But what does any of this have to do with Adolph Hitler still being alive? Not a blessed thing, I grant you, but here’s a free, little known regional 1963 cult film, The Yesterday Machine with unintentionally campy Cold War overtones, teenagers, rock and roll, a Nazis scientist on the loose in America, whack physics that stoned nerds could argue over for hours and… so much more.

Here’s a description of The Yesterday Machine, taken from The Classic Sci-Fi blogspot:

Quick Plot Synopsis
Margie, a college baton twirler, practice her moves while her boyfriend, Howie tries to fix a balking fuel pump. It’s getting late, so he gives up and they walk through a woods to get help. They encounter two civil war soldiers who shoot Howie. Margie is unaccounted for. Howie’s wound and Margie’s disappearance has the local police and a reporter asking questions. The bullet in Howie, and a cap found at the scene were authentic civil war items. This causes Lt. Partane to recall an odd experience in WWII where old men prisoners were, by the records, actually young men. The camp’s Kommandant was a rogue physicist, but was never found. While reporter Jim and Margie’s sister Sandy explore the scene, they are transported to Dr. von Hauser’s underground lab. Sandy and Margie are reunited in a dungeon cell. Von Hauser lectures Jim, (at some great length) about his science. The two rehash the old arguments over Nazi machiavellianism, which gets Jim tossed into an adjacent cell. They try to talk Didyama, (a female minion from ancient Egypt) into helping them escape. One nazi guard enters the women’s cell with ill intent. Didyama stabs him in the back, but he chokes her to death before he dies. The women get out and let Jim out. In a showdown back in the lab, Jim shoots the other nazi guard and puts two bullets into the time machine before fleeing. Coming up through a secret hatch in a private graveyard, Jim, Sandy and Margie meet Lt. Partane and other policemen. They hear the time machine start up again. Partane goes down to the lab. Von Hauser shoots, but Partane hits von Hauser, who slumps into the time machine’s chair and fades out to some other time. Partane destroys the machine. He gives a speech about man not being ready for such technology. The End.

Why is this movie fun?
The plot unfolds with such unHollywood quirkiness, that it keeps viewer interest up. The story opens with a college coed twisting and twirling her baton to old style rock and roll. From the get-go, FY is different. Also, Jack Herman’s flamboyant acting as Nazi scientist Ernst von Hauser is entertaining.

Deeper Question—Overshadowed by its many shortcomings, YM still manages to raise an interesting question. What if time travel was done by villains? All the usual noble ethics of non-interference would be in the bin. Von Hauser wanted to give his favorite Führer a few more months so that superweapons under development could be finished. Von Hauser talks wistfully of a Reich that would continue more than a thousand years. Why not? With his time machine, the regime could enact as many do-overs as necessary. But, what if TWO powers had time travel? Who’s mucking would prevail?

Science Lecture—Often enough, the villain monologues to the hero for no logical reason other than the scriptwriter’s need for some exposition. Von Hauser gives Jim an extended science lecture in front of a chalk board, to explain time travel to him. The briefer version runs like this: if you speed up light so it goes faster than the (um) Speed of Light, it begins to move backwards in time. The more you speed it up, the more quickly backwards time travels. Just how von Hauser does this with some surplus radio parts is not explained.

Sound good? The Yesterday Machine, all 78 minutes of it, is free to watch on YouTube. If you like this kind of stuff, toke up and watch the motherfucker. But I wonder, if you had to pay a $1 for this, would you?
 

Thanks Jaye Beldo!

Posted by Richard Metzger
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11.24.2010
12:16 pm
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Countess Dracula: Actress Ingrid Pitt dead at 73
11.23.2010
08:24 pm
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Above, Ingrid Pitt, left and Madeline Smith in The Vampire Lovers.
 
Sad news from London today as word of the death of actress Ingrid Pitt, star of several classic Hammer horror films, reaches us. Pitt died just two days after collapsing en route to a birthday celebration in her honor, at the age of 73.

Ingrid Pitt was best known for her risque roles in the Hammer “vampire lesbian” films, Countess Dracula and The Vampire Lovers. She was one of the first, if not the first scream queen to go starkers onscreen. Both of these films were—unbelievably—often shown uncut on “chiller theatre” type TV broadcasts in the 1970s. If you are a male of a certain age (ahem) and were a big fan of horror films growing up, there is a very good chance that Ingrid Pitt’s extremely lovely—and blood-smeared—breasts were the first boobies you ever saw (Can I get a few “amens” in the comments?).
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Vampire Lesbians of Hammer

Posted by Richard Metzger
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11.23.2010
08:24 pm
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