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The weird and wonderful Candy Candido
09.12.2012
06:13 pm
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Comedian Candy Candido puts his three-octave voice to good use in this sweet little Soundie for the song “One Meatball.”

From Candido’s Wikipedia entry:

Candido provided the voice of a skeleton in Abbott and Costello in the Foreign Legion, and he later teamed with Bud Abbott during Abbott’s attempted comeback in 1960. He was the voice of the bear in the Gentle Ben TV series, and he worked as a voice actor on animated films, notably for Walt Disney, where he portrayed the Indian Chief in Peter Pan, one of Maleficent’s goons in Sleeping Beauty, the Captain of the Guard in Robin Hood, Brutus and Nero in The Rescuers, the Escaped Convict (Gus) in the Haunted Mansion attraction and Fidget the peg-legged bat in The Great Mouse Detective. Other animated films with Candido voices: Chuck Jones’ adaptation of The Phantom Tollbooth, and the Ralph Bakshi movies Hey Good Lookin’ and Heavy Traffic.”

Thanks to the badasses at Badass Digest for this one.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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09.12.2012
06:13 pm
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Tutti Frutti: Carmen Miranda’s crazy banana dance that inspired generations of future drag queens
09.12.2012
05:30 pm
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All next week, Cinefamily in Los Angeles will be screening a brand new 35mm print of Busby Berkeley’s kaleidoscopic 1943 extravaganza, The Gang’s All Here:

It’s the most hyper-saturated Technicolor musical of the 1940s, it’s the picture featuring the legendary Carmen Miranda “Tutti Frutti” banana number, it’s the camp classic that launched a thousand drag queens — and it’s one of Hollywood’s most gleeful slices of vintage war propaganda ever. It’s The Gang’s All Here, legendary director/choregorapher Busby Berkeley’s most purely kooky on-screen effort, and one amazing good time out at the movies. Plot, schmott — it’s all about the the geometric conflagrations of chorus girls, the dancing, the singing, the oversized psychedelic fruit, the charmingly overt suggestions to invest in war bonds, and the unbelievable.

Screenings start tonight and run through next Monday. Get tickets at Cinefamily.

Below, Carmen Miranda’s mind-boggling “Tutti Frutti” production number from The Gang’s All Here.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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09.12.2012
05:30 pm
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‘The Master’: It ain’t the meter, it’s the motion
09.11.2012
10:27 pm
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There are few theaters left in the world that have the capability to screen 70 millimeter film. Which is a shame. Because if you’re going to see Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master one of the main reasons to do so is to be ravished by the look of the film, which was shot in the high resolution 70mm format. The Ritz (part of the Alamo Drafthouse chain) in Austin will be screening The Master in 70mm when the film opens wide on September 21. While Anderson has made a bold move by reviving the format, this isn’t a first for The Alamo. In its ongoing commitment to present films as they were originally shot, The Alamo has already been screening classics like West Side Story, Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade and Baraka in 70mm. Upcoming films include Ghostbusters, Cleopatra and Jacque Tati’s Playtime. Bliss for film fans

I saw The Master in 70mm this past Tuesday and it really is an amazing looking film. The opening shot of ocean water churning in the wake of a boat was the bluest blue I recall ever having seen projected onto the silver screen. A series of shots in a mid-twentieth century department store had the heightened look of photo realism, the colors so rich they seemed edible. Yes, the film is ravishing to look at, but as an emotional experience, it is hollow - an epic about nothing. It may be a masterpiece of some sort, but it’s not a good movie.

Anderson creates screenplays that on the surface seem important but as you attempt to dig deeper there’s nothing below. It’s like the wooden laminate flooring you buy at Home Depot - there’s a veneer of faux wood stamped onto some synthetic crap. It pleases the eye and fools you into thinking you’re seeing something real, but it’s plastic.

The Master approaches subjects that had they been examined with more insight and imagination could have yielded hugely thought-provoking and entertaining results. Subjects like Scientology, sexual dysfunction, post traumatic stress disorder, psychoanalysis, masculine rage, past life regression, alcoholism and the cult of personality are rich in possibilities for a director who might have a real passion for storytelling. Unfortunately, Anderson doesn’t seem to have either the patience, the intelligence or curiosity to approach these worlds with more than a glance. It is not enough to throw this stuff up on the screen and hope that somehow through some sort of mystic alchemy they will coalesce into something approximating a point of view - something that transcends mere technique and gives us something to think about, to feel. Not even Jonny Greenwood’s relentlessly melodramatic score can fill in the emotional blanks.  Anderson’s eye candy may be gorgeous, but it has little nutritional value.

Frankly, I’m fucking tired of film makers who demand that their audiences fill in the blanks. There’s a mighty big difference between films that compel one to think and those that ask the viewer to co-write the script. Like the Rorschach test that appears early in the film, The Master asks us to make something out of a series of beautiful blots on the screen. When confronted with the Rorschach, the main character in the movie sees mostly “pussy.” When confronted with The Master I saw something other than “pussy.” But it wasn’t nearly as satisfying. And I saw it in 70mm.

The Master has two brilliant performances that will no doubt be nominated for this year’s Academy Awards. Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman are extraordinarily good in roles that have almost no anchor in character. These are indelible acting riffs that exist in a series of powerful moments none of which connect to the other. Therefore, they have no momentum or shape. As you watch Phoenix and Hoffman act, you’re enthralled not by the persons they’re depicting but by their skill in making you believe in something that is not there. I challenge anyone who sees the film to tell me who these men are…what makes them tick, why they do what they do. And most importantly: why are they drawn to each other? As much as I admire the acting skills on display here, there’s absolutely nothing to engage you. And that goes for the rest of the cast as well. These people are members of some kind of Scientology-like cult. Even cults built on depersonalization have some defining qualities. With the exception of one jarring scene involving a nude sing-a-long, there’s nothing about this group of people that differentiates them from any gathering of good friends. They could be your local PTA. Why make a bunch of boring stiffs the subject of a movie? Even the normally magnetic Laura Dern fails to make an impression.

Hoffman has a certain appealing bluster in his depiction of an L. Ron Hubbard-type guru. But he’s more of a mess than a messiah. It’s hard to believe that anyone would fall sway to this fleshy fellow with anger issues and an alcohol problem. He’s a huckster more along the lines of Criswell than Hubbard and I guess it makes some sort of sense that his most slavish disciple (Rivers) seems to have wandered in from a Jim Thompson novel.

Anderson has been given all kinds of props for being some kind of wunderkind, a boy genius film maker. Well, guess what? He’s no longer a boy. He’s 42 years old. One year older than Roman Polanski was when Polanski made a genuine masterpiece Chinatown. He’s seven years older than Donald Cammel was when Cammel made (with Nic Roeg) the mindbendingly brilliant Performance.

Anderson has formidable skills, but he lacks the ability to summon up a vision from deep within. No matter how hard his characters stomp their feet and no matter how many millimeters he has at his disposal, there is something emotionally stunted in his work. His films are beautiful, and like Stanley Kubrick’s they have their own special architecture. But just as Kubrick’s films suffer from a lack of a human pulse, so does Anderson’s. His movies feel as though they were made by someone who hasn’t really lived yet. Anderson’s ideas may appear big and gorgeous looking. But so is Italian pastry…and that shit’s mostly air.

I recently watched F.W. Murnau’s beautiful and moving Sunrise on my television set. In terms of scale, it was as far as one can get from seeing The Master in 70mm. Sunrise is black and white, silent and was made in 1927 when its director was 39 years old. But any given scene in Sunrise packs more of an emotional punch, a sense of humanity and an engagement with the world we live in than the entirety of The Master. Proving, at least for me, it’s not the size of your frame that matters, it’s what you put into into it. It ain’t the meter, it’s the motion.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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09.11.2012
10:27 pm
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Poème électronique: Le Corbusier, Edgard Varèse & Xenakis collaborate, 1958
09.11.2012
05:01 pm
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The Philips Pavilion was a World’s Fair pavilion, part of Expo ‘58 in Brussels and was designed by the office of Le Corbusier. Commissioned by the Dutch electronics corporation Philips, the exhibit was a multimedia spectacle that celebrated postwar technological progress. Iannis Xenakis, the famous Greek experimental composer/architect, was responsible for much of the experience.

Le Corbusier said he wanted to present a “poem in a bottle,” so he asked French avant gardist Edgard Varèse to write an electronic score for the installation. Poème électronique was heard on over 350 speakers embedded into the walls of the nine hyperbolic paraboloid of the exhibit and seen on multiple projection screens. Several human operators using telephone dials somehow controlled the sounds.
 
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Posted by Richard Metzger
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09.11.2012
05:01 pm
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Pre-Zef Die Antwoord in a strange little film called ‘Picnic’
09.09.2012
09:01 pm
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Anri, Waddy and their baby Sixteen.
 
Before being drawn to the Zef-side and morphing into Die Antwoord, Ninja and Yolandi were a couple of writers and actors known by their birth names Watkin Tudor Jones and Anri Du Toit. While not as conceptually outrageous as the ultra-freaky and fabulous Die Antwoord, they still managed to create some surreally weird videos and performance pieces for their multi-media project known as Max Normal.

Here’s a faux documentary from 2004, Picnic, directed by “Waddy” Jones and starring Ms. Toit. On the surface, the intent of the film seems to want to present a warmhearted slice-of-life story showing viewers how important family reunions are, psychologically and emotionally. But in Picnic we don’t ever see the family actually bonding, we just hear the steady, chattering, drone of a young girl who is clearly living inside her own head, where memories have perhaps become ghosts. As the music on the soundtrack gets weirder and weirder, the disconnect between the subject and tone of the film takes on a mildly unsettling vibe that feels like a prelude to some bad shit.

Anri Du Toit briefly slips in some Yolandi-like moves at the end when she does a weird little dance.

I’m not sure Picnic works as satire (of reality TV), social commentary, a ghost story or much of anything. I’m not sure what it intends to be. It reminds me a bit of Harmony Korine’s Gummo , which may explain Die Antwoord’s collaboration with Korine in recent years. Whatever it is, there’s little indication in Picnic of the radical imagery and energy to come when Waddy and Anri eventually find The Answer in Zefness. 

Update: DM reader S. Bonelli writes that Picnic is a: “satire of white privileged church going south african society and their normalization of what is correct is actually max freaky - all they needed was to record reality and boom- zef is in it all the way…” This makes a lot of sense to me.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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09.09.2012
09:01 pm
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For your viewing pleasure: David Bowie’s film debut in 1967’s ‘The Image’
09.08.2012
09:32 pm
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David Bowie’s first screen role was in Michael Armstrong’s 1967 short film The Image.

In The Image Michael Byrne plays a troubled artist haunted by a ghostly young man who appears to step right out of one of his paintings. David Bowie plays the mysterious apparition who is haunting the artist and his unusual good looks and other-worldly appearance are used to great effect here. Bowie was just 20-years-old when he made his acting debut, but he had studied with the avant-garde performance artist and actor Lindsay Kemp who included elements of Mime and Butoh into his teaching. Bowie obviously made use of the skills he developed studying under Kemp for his role in The Image and his wordless performance as an unrelenting spectre is undoubtedly the most memorable element of this short film.”

The Image was shot in just three days and completed in 1967, but it didn’t have its official screen debut until 1969. Due to the violent content of the film it became one of the first shorts to receive an ‘X’ certificate from Britain’s notoriously restrictive film rating’s board.” Cinebeats.

The Image has appeared in the past on Youtube with first three minutes of the film lopped off. Here’s the film in its entirety.
 

 
Director Armstrong went on to direct one of my favorite horror films, the notorious Mark Of The Devil, which also ran afoul of the British censors.

In the following clip, Armstrong talks about working with Bowie.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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09.08.2012
09:32 pm
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Derek Jarman: Interviewed on Spanish TV from 1989
09.08.2012
08:29 pm
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When asked how he felt about the fact he’d received £400,000 to make Caravaggio in 1986, and the director of Chariots of Fire, Hugh Hudson had received 4 million to make his film, Derek Jarman replied, ‘Fortunately, I’m one hundred times more intelligent than Hugh Hudson, so it doesn’t matter.’

It certainly didn’t matter as Jarman’s output, during his 20-year career, pisses from a great height on Hudson’s work. What Jarman would have made of this year’s London Olympics, with its recurring reference to Chariots of Fire, would certainly have been interesting. Yet, Jarman was never fooled by his position as an outsider, he was well aware that there ‘is a complicity between the avant-garde and the establishment, it’s symbiotic, they need each other,’ as he explained to Peter Culshaw in the NME, April, 1986.

‘..all avant-garde gestures have been appropriated by just those people they sought to undermine. Dada was conceived as a full-scale assault and now Dada sells for millions. But what people never point out about me is that I’m probably the most conservative film-maker in the country. I’m not talking about Thatcherite-radical conservatives, who are anti-traditional and destructive, and who see progress as heaven, I mean more like the conservatism of groups like the Green Party.’

The artist Caravaggio fascinated Jarman, because ‘he was the most inspired religious painter of the Middle Ages and was also a murderer.’

‘Imagine if Shakespeare had been a murderer - it would completely alter the way we see his plays. [Caravaggio] was particularly taken to heart by the Romans because he painted real people. The girl next door was Mary Magdalen. Or in Death of a Virgin he painted a well-known prostitute as a virgin. It was the equivalent of Christine Keeler being put up over the high altar at Westminster Abbey.’

Jarman felt a tremendous parallel between Caravaggio and his own life, and he believed that ‘the cinema of the product precludes individual voices…’

‘...and I think unless one can put one’s own voice into a film, then there’s an element of dishonesty in it.’

In this short interview Derek Jarman talks about his life and films, Caravaggio, The Last of England and War Requiem,  taken from Spanish TV’s Metropolis from 1989.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

‘Glitterbug’: Derek Jarman’s final film


Photo-spread of Derek Jarman’s ‘Jubilee’, from 1978


 
Bonus interview of Jarman talking about ‘Caravaggio’, after the jump…
 

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
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09.08.2012
08:29 pm
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Pulp’s unused James Bond theme, 1997
09.07.2012
05:25 pm
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Another disused James Bond theme, this time from Pulp. In 1997 the Britpop band submitted “Tomorrow Never Lies,” but the the film was re-titled and their song shelved in favor of a Sheryl Crow number, instead.

“Tomorrow Never Lies” came out as the B-side to “Help the Aged.”

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘Thunderball’ opening credits with the theme song that Johnny Cash submitted

Alice Cooper’s unused 1974 James Bond theme
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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09.07.2012
05:25 pm
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‘Breaking Bad’ meets ‘Star Wars’ GIFs
09.07.2012
01:01 pm
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Something Awful held a Breaking Bad meets Star Wars GIF mash-up contest. Most of the submissions were, well…awful. However, I do like the above GIF submitted by The NPR Store.

See the rest over at Something Awful.

Via Nerdcore

Posted by Tara McGinley
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09.07.2012
01:01 pm
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Atlas Ugh: Fox New’s Sean Hannity to appear in Ayn Rand sequel
09.06.2012
04:06 pm
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Loyal, goon-like GOP mouthpiece Sean Hannity posted on his blog that he will be making a cameo appearance in the upcoming Atlas Shrugged Part Two, portraying someone who “may be a character close to home.”

An overconfident, self-important frat-boy dim-wit? I can’t imagine he’s got all that much of a range… although he’d be great in a Planet of the Apes movie.

Salon’s Jillian Rayfield mentions that the critically savaged first installment of the Atlas Shrugged screen adaptation made just $4.6 million at the domestic box office on a production budget of some $20 million:

“That’s the free market at work, folks. Maybe next time the producers should ask for an NEA grant.”

That would make them “moochers,” Jillian, and not merely losers. The first Atlas Shrugged film has a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 11%. Atlas Shrugged Part Two is released on October 12th.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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09.06.2012
04:06 pm
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