BTJunkie, the popular torrent tracker that boasted tens of millions of monthly users has voluntarily shut down for good to avoid legal hassles. After a nearly seven year run as one of the world’s top five Bit Torrent destinations, the following message was posted on the homepage:

“This is the end of the line my friends. The decision does not come easy, but we’ve decided to voluntarily shut down. We’ve been fighting for years for your right to communicate, but it’s time to move on. It’s been an experience of a lifetime, we wish you all the best!”

Via TorrentFreak:

Talking to TorrentFreak, BTjunkie’s founder said that the legal actions against other file-sharing sites such as MegaUpload and The Pirate Bay played an important role in making the difficult decision. Witnessing all the trouble colleagues got into was cause for a lot of worry and stress, and those will now belong to the past.

That said, BTjunkie’s owner still thinks there might be a future for other BitTorrent sites.

“I really do hope so, the war is far from over for sure,” he told TorrentFreak.

While BTjunkie was never targeted directly by copyright holders, the site was reported to the US Trade Representative (USTR) November last year. Both the RIAA and MPAA listed the torrent index as a ‘rogue’ site that facilitated mass copyright infringement.

BTjunkie is also one of the search terms censored by Google because it’s piracy related, alongside The Pirate Bay, RapidShare, uTorrent and others.

 
The latest 2-minute trash compactor from our friends at Everything is Terrible! This one is particularly… terrible, but, you know, in a good way!

For the next like four years or something the EIT gang will be criss-crossing America on their DoggieWoggiez! PoochieWoochiez! traveling cinematic roadshow, featuring a screening of the aforementioned new film. DoggieWoggiez! PoochieWoochiez! dares to pose the questions: “What if we make a movie composed ENTIRELY out of dog-related found footage?” and ‘‘What if this magickal movie, made up of thousands of other dog movies, is also a remake of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1973 masterpiece The Holy Mountain?” —and then answer them!

With our heroes, those gurus of found-footage viral videos back on the road again anything can happen, America.

Get a copy of the brand-new DoggieWoggiez! PoochieWoochiez! DVD!

See the Everything is Terrible! roadshow in YOUR lousy town!
 

 
On the heels of Madonna’s half-time spektakular and the new M.I.A. video (torrents of Arabia), may I present the The King of Rock and Roll (the white one) immortally preserved in hi-def.

Elvis on Tour was shot during a 15 city tour of the States in 1972 and Elvis is in fine Vegas form, wearing enough bling, satin, scarves and hairspray to make Liberace look like Bon Iver. Chubbier than in his sleek ‘68 Comeback Special, Presley still puts on a dynamic, though somewhat predictable, show. 

The montage (split screen) sequences were directed by Martin Scorsese. I guess the producers thought if they replicated the look of the film Woodstock that hippies would suddenly think Elvis was hip. Had The King’s handlers let him stick to his lean mean black leather look of the ‘68 Comeback Special that might have happened. Afterall, a decade or so later, Morrissey found the look compelling enough to imitate it.
 

 
Looking like an advert for Swinging London, Joe Massot’s 1965 short Reflections on Love mixes pop documentary with scenes devised by writer Derek Marlowe and (apparently) an uncredited, Larry Kramer. Though everything looks rather beautiful, it is such a terribly straight film, and considering the talent involved, and doesn’t really offer much love for the audience to reflect on. Then, this was the Sixties, when everything was new and exciting, and getting hitched in a registry office was daring and rad. O, how innocent it all seems. Massot went on to direct George Harrison’s Wonderwall and later, Led Zeppelin’s concert film The Song Remains the Same. Kramer went on to script Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (1967), and Ken Russell’s Women in Love (1969), before writing his novel Faggots in 1978. As for Marlowe, he wrote the classic double-agent spy thriller, A Dandy in Aspic, and followed this up with a series of idiosyncratic and stylish novels (from crime to Voodoo to Lord Byron), which are all shamefully out-of-print, and not even available as e-books - publishers please note.

The original version was twenty-one minutes long, and this is the revamped, re-scored (by Kula Shaker), re-edited (12 minutes) re-release from 1999, and still watchable pop-candy.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

A Dandy in Aspic: A letter form Derek Marlowe

Wonderwall: The Ultimate Sixties Flick?

Wonderwall Music: George Harrison’s little-known 1968 solo album

 
The magus of American cinema turns 85 today. I had the good fortune to see Kenneth recently at his MOCA opening and he’s looking rather hale and hearty for a man his age, I must say.

Anger’s musical collaboration with Brian Butler, Technicolor Skull, has recently produced a limited edition blood red vinyl album available only at the Technicolor Skull website (I have one, it’s a cool looking object).

Below, Anger’s short film made for the 2010 fall/winter collection of the house of Missoni:
 

 
In its 50 years of independence, Jamaica’s had an indelible influence on the global scene, mostly via its dizzyingly prolific music industry and sports stars. In terms of film, as iconic and authentic as movies like The Harder They Come, Rockers and Dancehall Queen are, they’re largely non-indigenous productions.

But recently, a new breed of grassroots digital DIY film- and video-makers have emerged who are depicting the zeitgeist on the island in ways that transcend the typical “yeah mon” stereotypes with which we’re too familiar.

One of these new breed is twenty-four-year-old Simon Thompson, who directs and edits video under the moniker Yosef Imagination. Along with videos for some of the island’s most well-known artists—including Capleton, Luciano, Fanton Mojah, Lutan Fyah—Thompson’s produced ads, short subjects and video series like the hilarious Konfu Dread, which has previously featured here. He’s currently at work on Zombie Flim, Jamaica’s first undead flick, which he’s uploading to his YouTube channel as he shoots and cuts.

Thompson’s work is pretty impressive considering that he’s got no formal training and has been at it for a little under two years. He’s also shot virtually all his stuff on Canon T2i and Canon 5D digital still cameras rather than conventional camcorders.

Videographers like Thompson are composing a wide-ranging vision of a young, energetic and cosmopolitan Jamaica, mindful of its cultural history and struggles, yet infatuated with what’s next in music, technology and style. And yes, it’s a vision that’s imbued with the indefatigable sense of humor that typifies life on the island.

Thompson explains how his stuff differs from that of the island’s street-side genre directors:

I looked around in Jamaica and realized the quality and the topics of our film industry is pretty much the same from filmmaker to film maker. I wanted to show Jamaica in a different light. We’re not all gangsters we don’t all smoke weed and we don’t all push violence towards others who don’t have the same viewpoint we have. I want and will continue to push for change, push for a difference in Jamaica’s thinking, showing the youths that, hey, we can make quality films that don’t have to be about gangsters and politics.

I also try to include alot of humour in the projects from Yosef Imagination showing people a lighter and more free-spirited vibration of the Jamaican people and culture.

And what does the future hold?

I see Yosef Imagination as a Paramount Pictures or a Universal Pictures eventually…the sky is no limit to our imagination ....Yosef Imagination is limitless.

Here’s one of the most hectically paced YI pieces yet: a multi-artist jam on the Bipolar riddim…
 

 
After the jump…more music vids and Jamaica’s first zombie film!

 
It’s Friday, so I present to you without comment 70s Blowjob Faces!
 

 
More after the jump…

 
I’m Almost Not Crazy: John Cassavetes - The Man and His Work directed by one of the finest writers on the planet Michael Ventura was shot during the making of Cassavetes’ final personal film Love Streams in 1984. One of Cassavetes’ best and most underappreciated films (so what the fuck else is new?), Love Streams is inexplicably and appallingly unavailable on DVD in the USA.

I think Ventura’s extraordinary gifts as a writer provided him with the necessary insight on the creative process and a kindred spirit’s respect for Cassavetes’ incisive skill with the spoken word and empathy for the ways human beings try to find a language for the inexpressible that makes this documentary connect on a visceral level.

Cassavetes’ obsession to get at the “heart of the matter,” to find the essential truth that animates our being, to cut through the bullshit, is as spiritual a journey as any in the history of film. As a young man pounding my fists against the walls of my own masculinity, I found Cassavetes films liberating. Beneath the machismo and testosterone-fueled angst of his male protagonists, there exists a tenderness, vulnerability and uncertainty that belies the inherited social concepts of masculinity. Cassavetes’ men are tough guys clawing at their macho veneer like caged animals desperate to find that one exist point where they can burst free.  

Cassavetes died on this day in 1989 and we present this very special documentary in honor of one of America’s pioneers of indy cinema and an artist of profound depth.

And there is no honoring Cassavetes, without giving equal honor to the phenomenal Gena Rowlands. Has there been a more dynamic collaboration between husband and wife in cinema? And that is not a rhetorical question. Let me know what you think.

Love Streams is available on import DVD. Michael Ventura’s book “Cassavetes Directs: John Cassavetes and the Making of Love Streams” can be purchased here.
 

 
God Bless America is the title of an upcoming black comedy from Bobcat Goldthwait:

Loveless, jobless, and possibly terminally ill, Frank has had enough of the downward spiral of America. With nothing left to lose, Frank takes his gun and decides to off the stupidest, cruelest, and most repellent members of society with an unusual accomplice: 16-year-old Roxy, who shares his sense of rage and disenfranchisement.

I haven’t seen it yet, but people, based on this trailer alone, God Bless America is already my favorite film of all time. As Movie Bob says of God Bless America, “It’s not the movie we want, but the movie we need.”

They called his Shakes the Clown the “the Citizen Kane of alcoholic clown movies,” so with this new film, can we declare Bobcat Goldthwait “America’s Godard,” too?

God Bless America hits VOD on April 6th and select theatres on May 5th.
 

 
Thank you Mr. Michael Backes of Sacramento, CA!

 
“Some people are bullfighters, some people are politicians. I’m a photographer.”

GIF by If we don’t, remember me.