Hollywood no longer provides the buzz that a hardcore movie junkie like myself requires. So, I’ve had to go to other sources for my celluloid kicks. For the past couple of decades, I’ve turned East to Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea and Bollywood to satisfying my cravings for a dose of the old silver nitrate.

As anyone who has followed my blogging on DM knows, I love Bollywood. And one my favorite Bollywood performers is Indian mega-star Rajinikanth. The guy is bigger than life, an action star, romantic lead, buffoon, singer and dancer. Like most Bollywood leading men, Rajinikanth can do all. And he’s never been better than in the 2007 film Sivaji.

Indian films are rigorously censored and sex is not allowed, so, whenever a couple is about to get it on, they usually break out in song and dance. But in Sivaji, instead of dance, sex is supplanted by a non-stop barrage of gunplay and violence. Bullets have replaced kisses, bombs orgasms, the scent of woman is gunpowder. It doesn’t take a degree in psychoanalysis to see the Freudian gun as cock symbolism in this shoot em up. 

As the hero of Sivaji, Rajinikanth displays his flamboyant style in action sequences that mash up Hong Kong bullet ballet with Spaghetti Western macho cool and psychedelic Peking Opera visuals. Note the incredible set design and use of color. No matter what the subject, be it lavish costume dramas or modern gangster films, Bollywood sees the world through prismatic glasses. In Bollywood, every day is the day the world turned day-glo.

Rajinikanth’s motorcycle entrance at the beginning of this clip is one of the greatest in the history of the movies. You’ll see what I mean.

The music is by A.R. Rahman, India’s greatest modern film composer.
 

 
By the time Montreal-born filmmaker Arthur Lipsett made his nine-and-a-half-minute long dystopian short 21-87 in 1963, he was well-aware of the power of abstract collage film. His short from two years earlier, Very Nice, Very Nice was a dizzying flood of black & white images accompanied by bits of audio he’d collected from the trash cans of the National Film Board while he was working there. And wildly enough, it got nominated for a Best Short Subject Oscar in 1962.

But with 21-87, the then-27-year-old Lipsett was not only using moving images, he was also refining his use of sound. And it got the attention of the young USC film student George Lucas, who’d fallen in love with abstract film while going to Canyon Cinema events in the San Francisco Bay area. 21-87’s random and unsettling visions of humans in a mechanistic society accompanied by bits of strangely therapeutic or metaphysical dialogue, freaky old-time music, and weird sound effects, affected Lucas profoundly, according to Steve Silberman in Wired magazine:

’When George saw 21-87, a lightbulb went off,’ says Walter Murch, who created the densely layered soundscapes in [Lucas’s 1967 student short] THX 1138 and collaborated with Lucas on American Graffiti. ‘One of the things we clearly wanted to do in THX-1138 was to make a film where the sound and the pictures were free-floating. Occasionally, they would link up in a literal way, but there would also be long sections where the two of them would wander off, and it would stretch the audience’s mind to try to figure out the connection.’

Famously, Lucas would later use 21-87 as the number Princess Leia’s cell in Star Wars. But although his success allowed him freedom at the NFB, Lipsett’s psychological problems would lead him to commit suicide in 1986, two weeks before he turned 50.
 

 
After the jump, compare with Lucas’s equally bewildering short Electronic Labyrinth: THX-1138 4EB!
 

 
Nothing like a good banning to warm an old gay punk’s heart—especially in the internet age. Looks like Australia’s classification of Toronto-based filmmaker Bruce LaBruce’s latest bit of hardcore underground gay gore, L.A. Zombie as pornography has prevented it from being screened at the Melbourne Film Festival. According to Melbourne talk-radio station 3AW, LaBruce couldn’t be happier:

‘‘My first thought was ‘Eureka!’… I’ll never understand how censors don’t see that the more they try to suppress a film, the more people will want to see it. It gives me a profile I didn’t have yesterday.’’

Virtually all of LaBruce’s films—from the skinhead-fetishizing No Skin off My Ass from 1991 through to the political-porno-zombie flick Otto; or Up With Dead People—have managed to shock and scandalize straights and gays alike with their violence and satirical stereotyping. It’s good to know there are some areas in the Western world that aren’t immune.
 

LA Zombie trailer
Uploaded by blankytwo.

 
Speedway is a typical lightweight Elvis romp from the ‘60s co-starring Nancy Sinatra who plays a sexy IRS agent who comes to audit racecar driver Elvis, whose business manager (Bill Bixby) is an idiot addicted to gambling. She succumbs to the King’s charms, natch. There are songs and a plucky homeless family living in their car. That’s the plot in a nutshell.

Carl Ballantine from McHale’s Navy and Gale Gordon, best known as Mr. Mooney from The Lucy Show are also part of the cast. One production number, for a song called He’s Your Uncle, Not Your Dad, takes place in an IRS office! It’s perfectly dreadful, if entertaining, drivel, but it does have two great numbers in it. Elvis does a rocker called Let Yourself Go that was released as a single, but flopped, which is a shame, because it’s one of my top favorite Elvis tracks. And Nancy Sinatra performs a swingin’ little number called Your Groovy Self, complete with minimalist mod choreography, It’s one of her best songs, certainly one of her best performances on film and the sole track by anyone other than Elvis to appear on the soundtrack album to one of his movies.

Two fun facts: First, Speedway was originally written for Sonny and Cher! Second, take a look at the nightclub: Quentin Tarrentino’s set design for Jack Rabbit Slim’s in Pulp Fiction was inspired by the decor of the Hangout, where Speedway’s in-crowd mix in a racecar booth ‘60s disco splendor.

The plot device that gets Nancy to sing is when Carl Ballantine, the maitre’d of the Hangout shines a spotlight on her, and for some arbitrary Elvis-movie logic, she has to “get up and do something.” This is what she does:
 

 
See Elvis’s big number after the jump

 
Here’s some fun unused footage from Danny Boyle’s 1996 film Trainspotting. Fans of Trainspotting will certainly appreciate these awesome clips.

(via Interweb3000)

 
Cori Dials, looking a bit like Tura Satana, stars as nicotine addicted Cigarette Girl. Set in the near future, when cigarettes sell for $65 a pack, Cigarette Girl is a small time hustler in the black market distribution of cancer sticks. When she runs afoul of the major players in the tobacco world, all shit breaks loose.

Based on the trailer, this grade Z action flick looks inspired by the films of Roger Corman, Russ Meyer and John Carpenter. It’s the sixth film directed by Memphis-based film maker Mike McCarthy. Currently making the film festival circuit, I suspect Cigarette Girl will probably be a direct to DVD release. If it’s as trashy fun as this trailer, count me in.

 
Or HAL64.
 
(via Interweb3000)

 
It’s safe to say we’re all scarred for life from seeing The Exorcist as kids but these kids worked it out in an exceptional way. The sound design in particular is a marvel of resourcefulness.

In 1974 while THE EXORCIST was still playing in the theaters, my friends and I made a version of our own called THE DEMONIC POSSESSION. Originally the title was going to be MALEDICTION but we figured nobody would know what that is. Filmed in Pittsburgh, Pa and Atlanta, Ga, the film was made on SUPER 8 SOUND and runs 60 minutes. This is an excerpt. Miraculously the film was made without ANY parental censorship or supervision. A film by CLIFF CARSON Cinematography by BILL BURTON

 
Thanks Brian Ruryk !

 
I think this is absolutely great. Definitely mashup-magic of the day!

From Classy Hands:

Inspired by one of our favorite websites, /Film.com, which ran an article called “The Ferris Bueller Fight Club Theory” last year. The piece hypothesized that Cameron could have possibly imagined his whole Day Off, and that Ferris was actually his own Tyler Durden.

 
(via Daily What)

 
Hausu (House), directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi, is the kind of movie that sends a writer scrambling for adjectives in an attempt to christen a new film genre. You pound your frontal lobes in the hope that you’ll dislodge some electrifying catchphrase that will be absorbed into film geekdom’s lexicon. I’ve been trying to come up with something hooky to describe the virtually indescribable mindbender that is Hausu. It’s not a J-horror film, it’s not a head film, it’s not some avant-garde psychological torture test, it’s not a cult film with an ironic smirk, it’s not…Well, I’m telling you what it is not. Let me try to wrap my brain around this and tell you what I think it is: Hausu is to cinema what a dream is to reality. It’s not just a simple record of events, it is the event itself. Hausu refers to nothing outside itself.

Though a mashup of pop memes, Hausu exists in a world of its own, devouring “reality”  and puking it back up in glorious Technicolor. It’s a mixtape compiled by a demented Carl Jung -  immersive, repellent, hysterical and visionary - forging a new consciousness composed of scraps of dead worlds.

Hard as it is to believe, Hausu was made in 1977. It feels as fresh and looks as startling experimental as anything being made by David Lynch or Guy Madden…except wilder.
 

 
Oh, the plot is about a demon possessed house, but that’s not important.
 
As for my new catchphrase, it’s a play on hypnagogic, that state between being awake and falling asleep. Hausu is hipnagogic.
 
Hausu will be released by Criterion in August on DVD.