Aerosmith might be are pretty cheesy, don’t get me wrong, but that wasn’t always the case. Before lots of money too much money and rampant drug addiction killed their mojo, Aerosmith, uh, rocked. I was an unrepentant rock snob, even as a little kid, but I still had time for their Rocks album, especially, but also for Toys in the Attic and “Dream On.”

After that, they pretty much lost me for good—they’ve been shite for 30 plus years now, of course—although I confess I saw them once at Madison Square Garden (at the height of their cheesiness) but that was only because I got a free ticket and I had never been to the Garden before. I found myself seated right next to actress Sylvia Miles, of all people.

In the clip below, from the (justifiably) much-maligned Sgt. Pepper’s Lonley Hearts Club Band starring Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees, Aerosmith (when the drugs were still working for them, apparently) perform a barnstorming cover of “Come Together.”
 

 
This French documentary from 1992 is an enjoyable overview of Brigitte Bardot’s forays into pop music. It features insightful interviews with Bardot, Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg, as well as dozens of clips of Bardot’s appearances in TV shows, Scopitones and movies.

Needless to say (though I’m saying it), Bardot was not much of a singer. But her willingness to poke fun at her sex kitten image and serve as a comedic and visual foil to the gruff machismo of Gainsbourg makes it easy to forgive her limitations as a vocalist and appreciate her sassy self-awareness. She’s having fun and so are we. One gets the impression that Bardot was perfectly content with her status as a pop icon, leaving the existential Sturm und Drang to her chain-smoking, brooding co-star.
 

 
British football legend and tough guy gangster in Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, Vinnie Jones demonstrates CPR in this British TV public service announcement. The result is one of the most amusing things you’ll see today that could actually save a life.

Perfect choice of music.
 

 
Via Copyranter

 
Daniel Grabner’s 2003 documentary Haschich is a fascinating look into the world of hashish artisans living in Ketama, Morocco.

Simple yet filled with detail, the film reveals the daily rituals revolving around the production and business of hash and the centuries-old society of the men who make it. For many of us, hashish evokes a certain exotic mystique, but Grabner’s film shows us that the production of hashish is as ordinary as the work clothes worn by its producers. The end result may be something sought out by connoisseurs of mind-altering smoke willing to spend hundreds of dollars on a finger-sized chunk of Moroccan Caramello, but the process of its creation is far less romantic than the dreams that smoke will generate.  

Beautifully photographed and with a lovely soundtrack of traditional Moroccan music, Haschich is so intimate that you can practically smell and taste the sweetness of its subject.
 

 
“Possibly the best thing we have seen over the entire festive period…” says John Robb over at Louder Than War, and who could disagree? Animator Lee Hardcastle retells John Carpenter’s The Thing in 60 seconds, using claymation and children’s TV favorite Pingu. Sheer bloody magic.
 

 
Director’s Cut: ‘Pingu’s The Thing’, after the jump…
 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

 
Via Louder Than War
 

“As an obsessional artist I fear everything I see. At one time, I dreaded everything I was making.”—Kusama interviewed in BOMB magazine in 1999.
 
You may have seen some of the lovely, now-viral shots of renowned Japanese Pop/Minimalist/AbEx artist Yayoi Kusama’s Obliteration Room installation at the Brisbane Gallery of Modern Art, in which children are handed colored polka dots stickers at the museum’s entrance with which to deface a pure-white-painted living-room.

Whimsical as those images are, it’s important to remember that Kusama’s pattern-obsessed work reflects her career of art-as-therapy in response to a life marked by childhood abuse early on and mental illness throughout. As someone who’s both seen a measure of fame in New York City’s underground art scene in the ‘60s that rivaled Warhol’s, and lived in a mental institution in Japan for the past 34 years, Kusama strikes a remarkable figure. The raising of her profile in the US has been a long time coming for the 83-year-old.

Heather Lenz’s forthcoming documentary, Kusama: Princess of Polka Dots, promises to more fully flesh out the story of Japan’s most popular living artist. The film’s slated for a summer 2012 release to coincide with the arrival of a Kusama retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
 

 
After the jump: check out Kusama’s Self Obliteration, a portrait of the artist at one of her peak periods…

 
This is fun. A short film by a Star Wars fan.
 

 
With thanks to Mare Meyer
 

 
Montreal-based movie buff StooTV has put together a loving homage to Raiders Of The Lost Ark and the cinematic tradition that Steven Spielberg’s epic adventure pays tribute to and draws from. The brilliantly titled Raiders Of The Lost Archives is a “shot-by-shot comparison of Raiders of the Lost Ark vs. scenes from 31 different adventure films made between 1919-1973.”

The amount of research that went into this 13 minute ode to Indy and his predecessors is impressive to say the least.

StooTV will be posting a list of the films that appear in the video soon. So revisit his Youtube channel in the next few days.
 

 
I love it when European directors try to wrap their heads around America in the Sixties. I’m thinking of Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, Godard’s Sympathy For The Devil and the film I’m sharing here, Henry Chapier’s Sex-Power. Revolution has never been sexier, more romantic, existential or just plain goofy when seen through the prism of the nouvelle vague.

Sex-Power is a sweet bit of candy-colored psychedelic fluff with an astringent dose of agit-prop militancy in its chewy center. While most of the film is in English there is occasional French dialog without the benefit of English subtitles, but you hardly need to know French to get the gist of what is happening. This is the tale of a young Frenchman who arrives in Northern California looking to forget a lost love (Jane Birkin) and ends up encountering various forms of feminine power as embodied by Bernadette Lafonte as Salome and Catherine Marshall as “la fille moderne.” The film moves through space and time in an impressionistic, lysergic dreaminess.

Directed by film critic and journalist Henry Chapier in 1970, Sex-Power has a lovely soundtrack by Vangelis and luscious cinematography by Edmond Richard.

Released the same year as El Topo and Zabriskie Point, Chapier’s film has some striking desert imagery that can’t help but recall those films. More than likely a case of cosmic synchronicity as opposed to influence, given they were all made at the same time.
 

 
 
Billy Wilder spent seven years with his co-writer I. A. L. Diamond working on the script of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. The finished film originally lasted over three hours, but the studios panicked over the failure of such long form films (Doctor Doolittle with Rex Harrison, and Star! with Julie Andrews and Michael Craig) and demanded cuts. The film was hacked down to an acceptable 93 minutes. Diamond didn’t speak to Wilder for almost a year

It was a terrible act of vandalism that robbed cinema of one of its greater Holmes, as portrayed by Robert Stephens. It was also bizarre that Wilder, who believed in the primacy of the word, allowed his script to be so drastically altered, turning what was an original meditation on Holmes into a mildly distracting caper. In the process we lost Wilder and Diamond’s analysis of Holmes not as just a fictional creation, but in comparison to Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

The clues are all there to be found. Let’s start with the casting, Stephens, who was one of the most gifted and brilliant actors of his generation - who sadly only graced the screen in a handful of films: scene-stealing in A Taste of Honey, as the art teacher Teddy Lloyd in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,  and as the BFI states, “sublime” in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Stephens was a stage actor, the heir apparent to Laurence Olivier indeed, in some respects, a far better actor than Olivier, who depended for success by flirting with the audience - Olivier could never be bad as he needed, demanded, the love of his audience.

When Wilder cast Stephens, the actor asked the great director:

‘“How do you want me to play it for the movie,” I asked Billy. “You must play it like Hamlet. And you must not put on one pound of weight. I want you to look like a pencil.” So, that’s the way we did The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.’

 
The game’s afoot on ‘The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes’, after the jump…