In 1964, Jim Morrison made the short film First Love as part of his UCLA Film course. This version has been re-cut to The Doors track “The Spy” by Nuno Monteiro, which fits rather well.
Bonus - alternative version of Morrison’s film after the jump…
Icelandic avant gardesters Sigur Rós are in the midst of their “valtari mystery film experiment.” The idea was to give twelve filmmakers a small budget to make whatever film they wanted to make when they heard songs from the groups’ latest effort valtari
“we never meant our music to come with a pre-programmed emotional response. we don’t want to tell anyone how to feel and what to take from it. with the films, we have literally no idea what the directors are going to come back with. none of them know what the others are doing, so hopefully it could be interesting.”
The stunning short film for ‘Ekki múkk,’ tenth in the series, was directed and written by Nick Abrahams, who writes:
“Goes without saying, but no animals were hurt during the filming—had to wait weeks until someone I know came across a dead fox in the countryside to use in the end sequence.”
Irish actor Aidan Gillen (“Mayor Carcetti” in The Wire) plays the man. The voice of the snail was provided by Shirley Collins, icon of traditional British folk music.
You know, the only really shocking thing about it is that they think they can proselytize to fanboys with the prequels. I mean, come on!
While I have no objection to this sort of weirdness, if The People Vs George Lucas
Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula has never been out-of-print, since it was first published in 1897.
Stoker spent 7 years researching vampire tales from European folklore, including some of the myths and history surrounding Vlad Tepes Dracul, the infamous Prince of of Wallachia, who impaled his enemies on stakes and allegedly drank their blood.
As for the character of Dracula, Stoker captured much of his friend, the actor Henry Irving, in his description of the Count. Later, it was thought Irving would make the perfect stage Dracula, but when asked to read an extract form the book, Irving pronounced it, “Dreadful!”
Since then, there have been many great actors who have portrayed the Count, most notably Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, Gary Oldman and Louis Jourdan - who made a memorble TV version back in the 1970s.
Dracula is the most portrayed literary character on film, with 272 films, as of May 2012. The closest rival is Sherlock Holmes with 254 films.
Christopher Lee regarded the character of Dracula as “heroic, romantic, erotic. Irresistible to women. Unstoppable by men.” When cast as the vampire, Lee “played him as a malevolent hero.”
“I decided to play him as a man of immense dignity, immense strength, immense power, immense brain…he’s a kind of a superman really.”
Dracula, and vampires, are re-interpreted by every generation. These days, the vampire is a hormonal bad boy who wants a suburban life. But when I was child, I used to ponder: can vampires lose their fangs? And if they did, what happened?
To which I responded (in my best Bela Lugosi):
‘It is often believed that a vampire cannot lose his or her fangs, but I can assure you vampires can, and often do, lose their fangs.
‘The loss of such essential teeth leads the vampire to use various utensils to start the flow of blood: a knife, a cutthroat razor, a bottle opener. Unfortunately, this means the death of the victim, which is generally to be avoided, as the last thing a vampire wants is to attract any unnecessary attention.
‘Such toothless vampires are messy eaters, and are rarely invited to dinner parties, as they waste more than they can drink.
‘Another misconception about us nightwalkers is our fear of garlic. We love garlic – well, most of us do – as it adds flavor to our diet. This is quite understandable when you consider our native homeland is Transylvania, where the local diet is rich in garlic that infuses the blood with a very delicious tang. It also purifies, lowers cholesterol and aids digestion.
‘It is a commonly held superstition that vampires are terrified of the crucifix. Well, while some vampires are Christian and some Jewish, most are agnostic. This is because we are the living dead, or undead. We are the creatures of the night, the residents of limbo, who have not quite died and have not gone to wherever-it-may-be. If at all. We therefore find it hard to believe in an after-life, unless it is this one. Which I suppose means, we are more like Jehovah’s Witnesses.
‘You may be surprise to hear that vampires do date and have various courtship rituals, just like you day-walkers. I can still recall my first date with my dear wife – we dined out on some winos, and got pleasantly drunk. As you can imagine, my future father-in-law was not best pleased when I returned his tipsy, giggling daughter back to their crypt.
‘And let me be clear, once and for all – no we cannot turn into giant bats, dogs or any sort of ethereal mists. Which is a pity, I know. No, sadly, we have to get around on foot or by car. In fact, it was another creation of the industrial revolution, trains that allowed vampires to move away from our overcrowded homeland.
‘As for sleeping in coffins, there is much conjecture about this. Some vampire historians believe we may have slept in coffins, mainly to escape detection. Remember it would have been rather strange in the olden days to get up at night and sleep during the day. Therefore, sleeping in a graveyard became the ideal place to hide out.
‘Or, perhaps, living and sleeping in a coffin is much cheaper than maintaining a house, a castle or a condo on the upper-eastside.
‘Yes, daylight is bad for us, just as it can be for you – it gives us skin cancer, something we are highly susceptible to, as our flesh is undead and has no elasticity or protection from the sun’s harmful rays. But, thanks again to changes in society, we have been able to find work as night watchmen, town criers, long distance lorry drivers, sewer workers, or just generally the night shift workers, who stack shelves or keep garages open, you know the sort. These days, most of us are in IT, where we can work to our own flexi hours.
‘As soon as we started working we made money. And as we made money, we found that we were buying houses, moving into nice neighborhoods, raising our families.
‘Oh yes, we do have families with all that this entails. We start junior off on mother’s blood before weaning them onto small insects, rodents, then medium sized animals.
‘And as for drinking blood, well it is the world’s fast food, a kind-of McDonald’s. Just as easy to pick up, but more filling, and nutritious, and there’s always plenty of it to go round. What amazes vampires is why humans waste so much of it – murder, suicide-bombers, muggings, knifings, gunshots, slaughterhouses, funeral homes, and war.
‘Of course, our kids do all the rebellious - feasting on winos blood, or sucking on a junkie to get high.
‘As for disease, we try to be careful about this, as too often you can catch a dose from some late night snack. That’s why we tend to stick to nice, clean, straight people, middle class people, who go to church, say their prayers, look after their health and work hard for a living. And yes, stakes can kill us. As can silver bullets, regular bullets, knives, and lots of other things too. That’s because we are not, as you say, immortal, we are the Undead.
‘We live to about one-hundred-and fifty or two hundred years of age, but that’s only because our metabolism is slower than yours. Our heartbeats approximately at one beat an hour. As for reflections – you can see us, we’re physical after all not ethereal.
‘So, how can you recognize a vampire?
‘We look like you. A bit pale, maybe. A bit more lethargic. The best way to recognize us is to look out of your window tonight, some time long after dark, and just see how many people are up and about. You can take my word for it, that at least one in ten or one in twenty of the people you can see is a vampire.
‘And don’t be fooled, not all of them have fangs - some of them wear dentures.’
A fine selection of false teeth are on display here, in this short video history of Dracula. Presented by Christopher Lee, who tells Dracula‘s history from novel, to the first theatrical productions and on to the Count’s life on film. With contributions from Bela Lugosi jnr, Peter Cushing, Jimmy Sangster, Freddie Francis and Caroline Munro.
Ken Russell thought he was all washed up after his 1977 film Valentino failed at the box office. Things became so bad that “nobody in Hollywood would give me even a B-movie to direct,” he told Nancy Mills at the Guardian in 1981.
Then he was offered a second chance - to direct a troublesome script called Altered States, by the Oscar-winning author of Marty and Network, Paddy Chayevsky .
“I was the twenty-seventh director Warner Brothers approached for Altered States. Arthur Penn had stuck it for six months and then left. They tried everyone else before they dared risk me.”
Strange to think that a man of Russell’s genius was considered a risk. A sad reflection on the lack of quality at the very top of Hollywood. Eventually, the studio did take the risk and Russell was appointed director.
“They wanted a director who has a very visual imagination, and they knew I had that. They were a bit doubtful about my ability to handle actors. I must say, I don’t bother about actors too much. The Warner Brothers people screened two of my films that showed I could handle actors if I had a mind to - Savage Messiah, which was just two people talking, and Song of Summer about Delius. Between the two, they thought they’d take a chance.”
Once on board, Russell came to “loggerheads” with Chayevsky, which ended in the writing walking off the picture, as Russell explained:
“I couldn’t work with someone else judging everything I did. Chayevsky told me, ‘I’ll just be on the set as a benign influence.’ The producer said, ‘How do you spell benign, Paddy?’ He answered ‘W-I-C-K-E-D’ He was joking but he wasn’t joking.’
Russell thought Chayevsky’s script ponderous, pretentious and labored. He had the actors mumble their lines, or give speeches in between mouthfuls of food or wine. It worked as the film centered on the relationship between Dr. Eddie Jessup (William Hurt) and Emily Jessup (Blair Brown). It also allowed Russell to concentrate on the incredible visuals.
“There are scenes in Altered States that are on screen for a third of a second, and they took perhaps three days to shoot. That’s $30,000 or maybe $300,000. They are expensive. In this case the studios realized the visuals were very much key to the story.”
Yet, when it came time for the film to be released, the executives at Warner Brothers started to get worried. But when the film was first shown to a preview audience of mid-western housewives, they were left mystified, which confirmed the studios unease. But when a young audience saw the film, it received a highly favorable reactions, leading the cinema manager to assure Warners they had a hit.
He proved to be correct, and Altered States proved Russell was a far greater talent than Hollywood had ever imagined.
These are pages from one of my scrapbooks on Ken Russell, looking at the response to one of the most daring and original Hollywood films of the 1980s.
More clippings on ‘Altered States’ plus trailer, after the jump…
The evil geniuses of Bad Lip Reading are back and this time they tackle The Hunger Games.
I thought The Hunger Games was good but not great. I think I might actually like this version better.
Berberian Sound Studio is a new film by the British director Peter Strickland, about the travails of an English sound foley artist (Toby Jones) who is hired by an Italian production to create the sound for their Giallo film The Equestrian Vortex, at the titular studios in mid-70s Italy.
I haven’t done a film review in a while, but Berberian Sound Studio sufficiently piqued my interest, and left enough of a curiously unsatisfying taste in my mouth, that I’m compelled to write it up here for DM. The other main reason I am writing this is because it has been nigh on impossible to find a negative review of this film anywhere online. There are two bad reviews of note so far, but one of these comes from the Daily Mail, and as such doesn’t count.
The almost unanimous critical acclaim the film has received from the press is bemusing but not too surprising, really. This is a film that ticks a lot of boxes. It takes a hitherto scorned genre (Giallo, which if you are not familiar, are mid-70s Italian horror/exploitation flicks directed by the likes of Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci) and strips it of the grubby grindhouse connotations it has in favor of polishing it up for an art house crowd. It takes the gaudy, over-the-top brilliance of the original films it references and replaces it with it with an arch, guilt-free sense of smugness
As I’ve mentioned, BBS is an unsatisfying, frustrating experience. It is a hard film to classify, even though it is being touted as a horror-cum-thriller-cum-psychological exploration. The trouble is that it is neither horrifying nor thrilling, and as a psychological exploration it really doesn’t have much to say. What makes it even more frustrating is that it looks, and, yes, sounds brilliant, and it is hard to fault Strickland as a director in that regard. He has managed to make a film about films (and film-making) that thankfully avoids the clichés of Tarantino and his ilk, but like the 90s wunderkind, it feels hollow and bereft of any real meaning. And crucially for a film about horror, and Giallo in particular, it’s just not scary at all. In fact, at points I was plain bored.
As you’ve probably gathered, this isn’t going to be a good review. That’s not to say Berberian Sound Studio isn’t worth watching - it most definitely is, even just for the simple fact of letting the viewer making up their own mind. If you do intend on seeing this film, and you probably should, then I recommend that you skip what comes after the jump and go straight for the trailer. If, on the other hand you have seen it already, then you may find something worth discussing here.
More on ‘Berberian Sound Studio’ after the jump.
In 1964, Stanley Kubrick wrote to science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke. He explained he was a “a great admirer” of his books, and that he “had always wanted to discuss with [him] the possibility of doing the proverbial really good science-fiction movie.”
Kubrick outlined his ideas:
My main interest lies along these broad areas, naturally assuming great plot and character:
The reasons for believing in the existence of intelligent extra-terrestrial life.
The impact (and perhaps even lack of impact in some quarters) such discovery would have on Earth in the near future.
A space probe with a landing and exploration of the Moon and Mars.
The pair met, and a treatment was written, based around Clarke’s short story, “The Sentinel” (later published as “The Sentinel of Eternity” in 1953), in which a strange, tetrahedral artifact is discovered on the Moon. The story’s narrator speculates that the object has been left as a “warning beacon” for some ancient alien intelligence to signal humanity’s evolutionary advance towards space travel.
At the same time Kubrick was making 2001: A Space Odyssey, Clarke was writing his own version as a novel.
Having viewed Kubrick’s film rushes, Clarke wrote an explicit interpretation of the film, explaining many of the themes left open-ended in the movie. In particular, how the central character, David Bowman ends his days in what is described as a kind of living museum or zoo, where he is observed by alien life forms.
Kubrick was never as explicit, and refused to be fully drawn over the film’s meaning, or its many differences from Clarke’s novel, usually stating that his intention had been to make a “really good science-fiction movie.”
In an interview with Playboy in 1968, Kubrick gave an answer on the meaning and purpose of human existence, which could almost be a description of 2001:
“The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning. Children, of course, begin life with an untarnished sense of wonder, a capacity to experience total joy at something as simple as the greenness of a leaf; but as they grow older, the awareness of death and decay begins to impinge on their consciousness and subtly erode their joie de vivre, their idealism – and their assumption of immortality. As a child matures, he sees death and pain everywhere about him, and begins to lose faith in the ultimate goodness of man. But, if he’s reasonably strong – and lucky – he can emerge from this twilight of the soul into a rebirth of life’s elan. Both because of and in spite of his awareness of the meaninglessness of life, he can forge a fresh sense of purpose and affirmation. He may not recapture the same pure sense of wonder he was born with, but he can shape something far more enduring and sustaining. The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death – however mutable man may be able to make them – our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.”
The documentary 2001: The Making of a Myth is introduced by James Cameron, who looks at the stories behind 2001: A Space Odyssey, examining why the film has endured and why it still generates such interest. With contributions form Arthur C. Clarke, Keir Dullea, Elvis Mitchell, and Douglas Trumbull.
Previously on Dangerous Minds
Stanley Kubrick explains the plot of ‘2001’
Before 2001 - Pavel Klushantsev’s classic science fiction film ‘The Road to the Stars’
“My wife likes Rubber.” As soon as it came out of my mouth I knew how weird that phrase sounded. I was referring to the movie not her fetish for latex. The movie Rubber came up today in discussion with a friend of mine at Fantastic Fest about festival films we were jazzed to see. The new film from Quentin Depieux, the director of Rubber, was high on our list.
I had seen a teaser earlier this year for Dupieux’s latest project, at that time called Wrong Cops, which featured Marilyn Manson in the role of a homeless transsexual. The film quickly disappeared from the Internet and I wonder if it wasn’t just an elaborate hoax engineered to fuck with people’s heads. It would be in keeping with Dupieux’s style.
Depieux’s debut flick was an offbeat film about an automobile tire with homicidal tendencies. What seemed like a one-joke premise turned out to be a pretty tight little thriller directed by someone who seemed to be channeling 70s B-movies - the ones where automobiles and trucks come to life - through a warped post-modern, surrealist lens.
Depieux’s latest concoction Wrong (no “Cops”) looks like another winner (advance word is very good) and for those of you in Austin this weekend it will playing at Fantastic Fest on Sunday. It’s also been picked up for distribution by Austin’s very own Drafthouse Films, which has been on a tear recently releasing several outstanding titles including Klown, The Ambassador and the upcoming Wake In Fright.
From the folks at Fantastic Fest:
Visionary filmmaker Quentin Depieux’s first feature Rubber might have been a bit of a commercial bust in mainstream America, but among the oddballs who make up Fantastic Fest, it is the stuff of legend. Wrong further celebrates Quentin’s unique brand of absurdism with a heavy flourish of incredible visual style. To me, Wrong is so very right.
Wrong features one of my favorite actors, Steve Little, Kenny Powers’ hapless sidekick in Eastbound and Down.
By the way, the poster for Wrong was created by one of DM’s favorite graphic artists, Jay Shaw.
The world premiere of Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie is kicking off this year’s Fantastic Fest in Austin (September 20 - 27). I had the chance to see a press screening of Frankenweenie tonight and thought it was the best thing Burton has done in a long time. He seems to have reconnected to his Beetlemuse. His new flick is streamlined and fun, unlike the bloated hot water dogs he’s been serving up in recent years
Frankenweenie is a feature-length remake of a wonderful short movie Burton made back in 1984. It features many of the director’s signature touches: bug-eyed goth kids, allusions to horror movie classics (particularly those made by Universal Studios in the 1930s), a main character based on Vincent Price, the manicured emptiness of suburbia, childhood nightmares and alienation. And though the movie has a wicked sense of humor, it is one of the sweetest films Burton has made in awhile, calling forth the kinds of emotions that made Edward Scissorhands so exceptional.
Frankenweenie features spirited voice acting by Martin Short, Catherine O’Hara, Wynona Ryder, Martin Landau and a typically lush, haunted house score by Danny Elfman. The puppets, stop-animation, sets and CGI blend into a phantasmagorical whole that feels more organic than most recent animated films - the world of Frankenweenie looks lived in, with lots of telling details that add to an overall feeling of hyperrealism. In keeping with its homage to the great films of James Whale and Tod Browning, Burton’s tale of a dead doggy brought back to life was shot in in glorious black and white. The film is also in 3D, which apparently is required these days for family-style blockbusters. Burton doesn’t use the 3D for gimmicky effects. With the exceptions of Hugo and Avatar, I haven’t been knocked out by the glut of recent 3D movies. But Burton uses it with subtle artfulness to enhance depth of field, accentuate shadow and stretch space. At times the camera peers around foreground objects with the furtiveness of a curious and frightened child - sort of like peeking through the fingers of your hands while watching a scary movie. Perfect.
After a series of less than stellar films, Burton has returned to a place that he knows well and to the kind of storytelling in which he excels. His connection to the material is palpably joyous. There’s more honest laughs and feel-good moments in Frankenweenie than in any Burton movie since Ed Wood. And the darker, edgier moments in the film keep it from being sentimental kiddie stuff. I found great pleasure in watching irritatingly cute animals transformed into snarling blood-crazed zombies, particularly one repellent little kitty who meets a fate that recalls that long ago encounter between Bambi and Godzilla. There’s a French poodle made to resemble Elsa Lanchester from Bride Of Frankenstein that’s pure genius and just one of a slew of visual gags that give Frankenweenie more snap than a Coney Island tube steak.
Frankenweenie will hit theaters on October 5.
Dangerous Minds will be reporting from Fantastic Fest for the next week. Stay tuned.