From the creator of Airplane, A Melodrama!:
There is an apocryphal story of Groucho Marx meeting the Pope. On being introduced, the Pope said ‘Thank You Mr Marx for all the humour you have put into the world.’
Groucho replied ‘And thank you for all the humour you have taken out of the world’.
‘Airplane, A Melodrama!’ is a re-edit of one of the funniest films of all time with all the gags taken out.
(via BB Submitterator)
Tomorrow night in Echo Parque with the incomparable John “Drumbo” French (pictured above in 1968) ! :
ECHO PARK FILM CENTER is proud to host MESS (Media Ecology Soul Salon) with JOHN “DRUMBO” FRENCH on SAT, Oct 9 at 1200 N Alvarado St. (at Sunset Blvd.) Los Angeles, CA. 90026, 213-484-8846, $5 admission
7pm - CROW’S MILK - Rare MAGIC BAND documentary film (2003, 50 minutes)
8pm - Interview of JOHN FRENCH by Gerry Fialka.
10pmish - Book signing and more film of MAGIC BAND live in concert (London 2003, 80m)
The public is invited to this engaging Gerry Fialka interview of JOHN FRENCH, who will address the metaphysics of his callings and the nitty-gritty of his craft. He revolutionized drumming with Captain Beefheart and recently authored the book entitled Beefheart: Through The Eyes Of Magic.FILM INFO: Nearly twenty classic Beefheart compositions are rejuvenated on stage by five of the finest musicians who ever performed in The Magic Band. The playlist ranges from storming versions of such crowd-pleasers as ‘Moonlight On Vermont’ and ‘Big Eyed Beans From Venus’ to the intricate guitar work of ‘Evening Bell and the melodic ‘Alice In Blunderland’.
Especially interesting are the instrumental versions of songs such as ‘I Wanna Find A Woman That’ll Hold My Big Toe Till I Have To Go’, ‘My Human Gets Me Blues’ and ‘Steal Softly Thru Snow’. Without Don’s voice, for Don is no longer performing, these compositions can be clearly heard as the mind and finger bending riddles they are.
The vocal parts in this Magic Band are taken by John French who comments “Don had a great lung capacity - he had a 50 inch chest. I have to breathe a lot harder and low frequencies take a lot more energy to push. I did a lot of training and exercise to get the most I could out of this puny 42 inch chest.”
This film of the London Shepherds Bush Empire concert in April 2003 (80 minutes) was directed by Elaine Shepherd who was also director of the BBC documentary ‘The Artist Formerly Known As Captain Beefheart’.
A second DVD ‘Crows Milk’ (originally titled ‘Like Bluegrass, Only Weirder’) is included in the package. This is a 50 minute documentary which follows The Magic Band rehearsals in California in February 2003, recording of the CD ‘Back To The Front’, the feelings of the band members about the project, rehearsals in London for the two 2003 UK concerts, plus concert and backstage footage from Camber Sands and Shepherds Bush. John Peel provides the narration.
There is also a short amount of recently found 8mm footage from John French’s home movie collection which shows Don sitting on a sofa and sketching and Don viewing a car in a garage while wearing a neck-brace and a ‘coolie’ hat. He had apparently had just had a crash in his other car which was a wreck. This material dates from the early to mid 1970s
Thx Cliff Martinez !
A mashup of a 50s instructional film on dating and Star Wars. Quite funny.
I got an advance copy of Ladies & Gentlemen: The Rolling Stones
Originally shot on the 1972 USA tour in support of the Exile on Main Street album, during four separate shows in Ft. Worth and Houston, Texas, the film was shown theatrically in midnight screenings throughout 1974. The “QuadraSound” four-channel magnetic soundtrack required a a 3300-watt sound system to be delivered on a truck to the cinema which was run by professional sound engineers who tailored the mix according to how big the venue was (and also how full the seats were). The releasing company, Dragon Aire Ltd. had four of these systems touring at once.
The 1972 North America tour was the Stones at the absolute pinnacle of their powers as live performers—as even Mick Jagger admits, they could be a pretty sloppy live band at times. Here, with a setlist culled from their best albums, (Beggar’s Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main Street) they really putt their shoulders into it, clearly full of piss and vinegar to spare . It’s just a great Rolling Stones performance, full stop. If you are a fan, this is exactly what you want.
This film hasn’t really been seen (except for an Australian VHS release that’s been widely bootlegged) in about three decades, so the experience of these performances hasn’t been devalued by constant repetition on Vh1 Classics. Aside from that, let’s not forget the presence of virtuoso guitarist Mick Taylor (arguably the best musician ever to play in the band). And it sounds very, very good in the newly remastered 5:1 surround. (I’m a little less sold on the picture, which looks fine, but has that slightly jagged looking quality that always results from a 16mm film getting blown up to 35mm).
All in all, I’d say that if you are “so inclined” that this should be a definitive “buy,” fanboy. I didn’t feel that way about the recent Exile on Main Street reissue in the least, but this DVD, especially on Blu-ray, really can’t be beat.
Here’s a somewhat murky—but asskicking—clip of “Happy” from the film.
Big Tits Zombie 3-D (AKA Kyonyu Dragon), where strippers meet Night of the Living Dead, all refracted through a distinctly J-sploitation vibe. This whole 3-D might be a fad, so enjoy it while you can…
“You’re a big man, but you’re in bad shape. With me it’s a full time job. Now behave yourself.”
It’s Michael Caine as Jack Carter, intimidating a small-town gangster, Cliff Brumby, in the 1971 film, Get Carter. Within seconds Carter has shown Brumby, played by future TV soap star Bryan Mosley, who’s boss - a quick karate chop and Brumby’s on his knees. That’s what Carter does. He’s a hardened criminal, a killer, and now he’s back home to find out who murdered his brother.
Taken from the novel Jack’s Return Home by Ted Lewis, Get Carter changed modern crime fiction. Firstly, it created a new genre British Noir; secondly, it kicked in the French windows at St. Mary Mead, and replaced the anaemic Miss Marple with the harsh reality of professional criminals, and the brutality of their lives, from which every succeeding British crime writer has taken their cue.
Lewis was born in Manchester in 1940, and raised on Humberside. He showed skill as an artist and as a writer, and attended Hull Art School. In 1965, his first novel All The Way Home, and All Through The Night was published. Lewis then worked as animator on The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine, before writing Jack’s Return Home. He wrote a further seven books, including two more Jack Carter novels, and the classics Plender, Billy Rags and GBH. He died too soon, too young, almost forgotten in 1982. What a fickle fucking world we live in.
Jack’s Return Home was in part inspired by a real-life killing that took place during the height of the swinging sixties.
In August 1967, criminal Angus Sibbett bullet-riddled body was found in his Mark Ten Jaguar under Pesspool Bridge, County Durham. Sibbett was a bag man involved in extortion and collecting slot machine money.
Sibbett was employed by notorious, North-East gangster Vincent Landa, a man considered “more important than the Prime Minister”. Sibbett worked with London criminal Dennis Stafford and Landa’s brother, Michael Luvaglio. Luvaglio had no previous convictions but Stafford, who went under an alias, had served a seven year sentence for possession of a firearm and had notoriously escaped from Dartmoor and Wandsworth prisons eventually fleeing to Newcastle, where he set up a company which was a front for fraudulent activities.
When Sibbett was discovered creaming off Landa’s takings - pocketing £1,000 a week - he was killed.
It seemed an open-and-shut case. The police came after the gang. Landa fled the country, while Stafford and Luvaglio were arrested for Sibbett’s murder. But both men claimed their innocence, however, they were tried, found guilty and sentenced to gaol.
Stafford believed he was charged because of his previous activities whilst on the run in Newcastle, and has since stated, “If it had not been for me, Michael would never have been charged.”
While Luvaglio has said: “When I was arrested, the police told me that I only had to say that Stafford had left me for a while that night and I would go free.”
In hindsight, the whole case seemed like a fit-up as the evidence against both men was flimsy to non-existent. Importantly eye-witness statements and forensic evidence, which could have cleared both men, was ignored.
On that fateful night, Sibbett was to meet Stafford and Luvaglio in The Birdcage nightclub in Newcastle. Eyewitnesses vouched for both men, apart from a period of 45-minutes around midnight - the time Sibbett was murdered. This 45-minute window proved crucial, as the police claimed Stafford and Luvaglio had left the nightclub, driven 16 miles, pushed Sibbett’s vehicle off the road, then pumped 3 bullets into him, before returning to the club.
In 1967, even in a souped-up cop car, traveling at full-speed, lights flashing, it wasn’t possible to do what was claimed. But it didn’t matter. Luvaglio and Stafford were set for punishment. It was a warning to any other London criminals (most notably London’s notorious Kray twins) against moving their operations north.
Stafford served 12 years but always insisted his innocence, claiming a Scottish shooter committed the crime. This was confirmed in a TV documentary by John Tumblety, who said on camera that he in fact had driven the real murderer back from Pesspool Bridge to the Birdcage club and that man was neither Luvaglio nor Stafford.
In May 2002 Sibbett’s slaying (now renamed The Get Carter Murder) made news when the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the British Home Secretary had kept Dennis Stafford in jail longer than was necessary and ordered £28,000 compensation to be paid.
To this day, both men continue to campaign to clear their names of the crime they didn’t commit
In Get Carter the film’s slot machine king was played by playwright, John Osborne, whose character Cyril Kinnear, lives in Dryerdale Hall, Durham, the very building Landa used as his gangland HQ.
In 2002 Landa said :
“The two (Stafford & Luvaglio) men were wrongly convicted and the evidence was incorrect. If they were tried today they would never have been found guilty. It was a political trial. The Home Office had suffered at the hands of gangs like the Krays and the Richardsons and they stepped in to smash what they thought was an organised crime ring.”
These aren’t the only characters Lewis adapted for his novel, and later the film. Property developer Cliff Brumby was a hybrid of Newcastle City councillor, T. Dan Smith and architect John Poulson. Both men were notorious in the sixties, and were later found guilty of bribery, corruption and giving backhanders to MPs and councillors in order to have shoddy building plans passed.
The pair destroyed most of Newcastle and built cheap concrete housing and offices. At the trial, the judge said that the scandal “now couples corruption with the north east.” So far reaching were their underhand activities that Conservative Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling resigned over the scandal.
Smith was accused of infiltrating councils across the North of England and corruptly forcing them to give business to architect John Poulson. Smith used £500,000 of Poulson’s money as bribes. Smith ruled with an iron hand and was described as a “demagogue”. He ended his life championing pensioners’ rights from the 14th floor council flat in a block he had built.
Incredibly Get Carter was not a box office hit on its first release. This was in large part down to the stupidity of the critics who described the movie as “soulless and nastily erotic…virtuoso viciousness”, a “sado-masochistic fantasy”, that “one would rather wash one’s mouth out with soap than recommend it.” Of course, since then Get Carter has been rightly reappraised by a younger generation who have hailed Michael Caine’s chilling and utterly compelling performance as Carter, which has led to the movie being described as a classic of modern cinema and arguably the greatest British crime film ever made.
Killdozer was an awful mid-70s ABC Movie of the Week about some tough guy constriction workers doing battle with an alien-possessed bulldozer on a desert island or in Africa or something. How dangerous can a demonic bulldozer really be? When you get right down to it, they can still only go about 5 miles an hour,
It was co-written by sci-fi Theodore Sturgeon, based on his novella of the same name (there was also a Killdozer Marvel comic). Clint Walker and a young, pre-S.W.A.T. and Spenser for Hire, Robert Urich starred.
As crap as Killdozer is, it’s still probably the best alien-possessed bulldozer film ever made…
Coming attraction for Otto Preminger’s sixties psychedelic misfire Skidoo. Credits sung by Harry Nilsson.
Skidoo is a mess, but it’s still fun in the way a car crash without serious injury is fun. And the soundtrack by Nilsson is totally groovy.
Watch the movie in its entirety after the jump…
In Luigi Petrini’s 1980 bizarre b-movie White Pop Jesus the son of God takes on the mafia and assorted sinners in a Bavaesque dreamscape to a Shaft-like funk groove.
Watch polyester Jesus wage holy war against spandex, spiky hairdos and a giant syringe.
More disco Jesus after the jump…
