A few days ago, I posted here about disco singer Monti Rock III, the first queen I ever saw on TV when I was a kid, and I mentioned that he had not really crossed my mind in a very long time… then coincidentally, yesterday, Robert Coddington, Nelson Sullivan’s archivist (who I wrote about here), gave me a copy of a short film by D.A. Pennebaker titled You’re Nobody Till Somebody Loves You. Who should turn up in this obscurity? Well, Monti Rock III, that’s who, then working as a celebrity hair stylist (he did the bridal party’s hair). A young Richard Alpert (AKA Ram Dass) and jazz great Charles Mingus also turn up in the film.

And Mrs. TImothy Leary? Well, after divorcing the High Priest of LSD—their marriage lasted about a year—the high fashion model then known as Nena von Schlebrügge married Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman. Their daughter, actress Uma Thurman, was born in 1970.

Here’s how Pennebaker describes the Leary nuptials:

This movie is something of a mystery. Timothy Leary was getting married to a model named Nena Von Schlebrugge up in Millbrook, New York at the Hitchcock house, where Leary had been carrying on his hallucinogenic revelries for the past year or so after leaving Harvard. It was rumored that this was going to be the wedding of the season, the wedding of Mr. And Mrs. Swing as Cab Calloway put it.  Blackwood took me downtown to meet Monte Rock III who was singing at Trudy Heller’s but who was also a very pricey and off-the-wall hairdresser and was in fact going to be doing the bride’s hair.  Nena’s brother, Bjorn, known as the “Baron” was a friend of the Hitchcock’s, as was I, and the idea of going along and filming the wedding seemed not unwarranted. I’ve always wanted to film someone getting married.

So we drove up in Monte Rock’s ancient Buick, Diane Arbus, an editor from Vogue whose name I can no longer remember, and of course Monte Rock, his fingers covered in rings. Close behind, Proferes and Desmond filmed us as we drove, up the Taconic and through the gates of the Hitchcock mansion.

There were Hitchcocks and friends and relations of Hitchcocks, the Baron and his court, a score of models, and Charles Mingus playing a lonely piano. Even Susan Leary fresh out of jail.  It was indeed an amazing wedding, and for all I know, an amazing marriage, although someone later told me it was over before I’d even finished editing the film.

After Nena divorced Leary she married a Tibetan scholar, Dr. Robert Thurman and her daughter Uma is Uma the actress.  Dick Alpert became his own guru, Baba Ram Dass and achieved a sainthood of his own.  Monte Rock III left Trudy Heller’s and went out to Hollywood and became famous for his line in the John Travolta movie, Saturday Night Fever, when as the disco DJ he exclaims, “I love that polyester look.” Charles Mingus got thrown out of his loft and sadly perished, and in time the Hitchcock house itself burned down, or so I’ve been told.  The mystery is that we never filmed anyone actually getting married.

D A Pennebaker, 1964, 12 min., b&w

 
Part II after the jump…

 
Bad Boy of British cinema, Nigel Wingrove, is the only director to have one of his films banned on the grounds of blasphemy. His 1989 short Visions of Ecstasy, was refused certification by the British Board British Film Censors on the grounds of its sexualized representation of Saint Teresa of Avila making love to a crucified Christ on the cross.

The film was based on St Teresa’s own religious and highly erotic writings:

I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron’s point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it…

When I interviewed Wingrove in 2005, for Channel 4’s Banned in the U.K., he explained the main issue was over Christ responding to Teresa’s kisses. If Christ had been represented by a wooden mannequin or a blow-up doll, rather than an actor, then Teresa could have fucked her brains out, and the film would have been passed uncut. As it was, the BBFC wanted the offending scenes removed, which meant losing almost half the film. Wingrove rightly refused and the film was banned.

In 1996, supported by the likes of authors, Salman Rushdie and Fay Weldon, film-maker, Derek Jarman, and musician Steven Severin, who composed the soundtrack for Visions, Wingrove appealed to the European Court of Human Rights under Article 10, which defends freedom of expression, to have the ban lifted. The Court dismissed his case, stating that the criminal law of Blasphemy, as it was applied in England, did not infringe the right to freedom of expression under Article 10. In other words, typical bureaucratic ass-covering.

Wingrove is currently working on his next cinema release Sisters of Armageddon, which as he tells Dangerous Minds is:

A sci-fi nunsploitation film called Sisters of Armageddon - think Planet of the Apes meets The Nun’s Story with a sprinkling of The Gestapo’s Last Orgy and a soupçon of Mad Max.

And here’s a sneak preview.
 

 
Bonus clip of the banned ‘Visions of Ecstasy’ after the jump…
 

From the 1987 film Howling III.

 
This lovely synth/psych single from 1968 is a collaboration between former Left Banke, future Woodstock performer Bert Sommer, the then Walter (soon to be Wendy) Carlos and the band Childe Harold. Dig those signature Clockwork Orange pre-cursors ! This is nearly too good to be true. A really dark and woozy bad trip.
 

 
Hear the flip side after the jump…

 
Yuen Woo Ping has been making cutting edge martial arts films since 1978 when his groundbreaking classic Snake In The Eagle’s Shadow starring Jackie Chan burst on the scene like a fist to the solar plexus.  He is arguably the greatest director and choreographer of action scenes in the history of cinema. His credits include the fight sequences in The Matrix, Kill Bill, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and Kung Fu Hustle. Last night I attended a screening of Ping’s newest movie True Legend at Fantastic Fest and I think it’s among the finest martial films produced in the past two decades. While the film features a shitload of computer generated imagery, at heart it’s an old school kung fu movie. A morality play with grand emotions and epic action, True Legend engages the heart while being breathtakingly thrilling. Just when you thought Asian action flicks had lost their mojo, Yuen Woo Ping resurrects the genre once again.

After the screening of True Legend at Austin’s Paramount theater, RZA presented Master Woo Ping with a lifetime achievement award. RZA worked with Woo Ping on the Kill Bill movies.

RZA on Yuen Woo Ping:

“I have been a fan of Yuen Woo Ping since I was young. I had a chance to meet him on the set of KILL BILL along with his team. I have always admired him as a fan and once I met him I admired him as a man too. He has directed many of my favorite movies of all time and it will be a great honor to present him with such a prestigious award.”

 
Watch the mindblowing trailer for True Legend after the jump…

 
This past Friday night, Roger Corman was presented with a lifetime achievement award at Fantastic Fest and Dangerous Minds was there to film it.

After a screening of Machete Maidens Unleashed, Mark Hartley’s funny and informative documentary on exploitation films shot in the Philippines during the seventies, Corman took to the stage of Austin’s Paramount Theater to be honored for his unique cinematic legacy. Appropriately, Corman had produced many of the films featured in Machete Maidens. As a packed house enthusiastically applauded and cheered, film critic Elvis Mitchell (NY Times, At The Movies) presented Corman with his award: an impressive looking samurai sword. Standing with his wife and collaborator Julie at his side, Roger seemed to thoroughly enjoy the opportunity to talk about his extraordinary career.

In the following video, Roger discusses his past accomplishments and his latest project Sharktopus.
 

 
Watch the trailer for Machete Maidens Unleashed and Sharktopus after the jump…

 
Jeff Krulik, the VHS auteur responsible for one of the most legendary low-fi masterpieces of the tape trading underground of the 80s and 90s, Heavy Metal Parking Lot, has a new film out that returns to the era of his much-beloved earlier film. It could almost be considered a prequel.

Dig it! I for one, cannot wait to see Heavy Metal Picnic. This looks amazing:

Produced and presented by the team behind cult hit Heavy Metal Parking Lot (Jeff Krulik and John Heyn), Heavy Metal Picnic is a celebration of mid-80s Maryland rock and roll and heavy metal, by those who lived —and survived—it.

The film focuses on the 1985 Full Moon Jamboree, a weekend field party bacchanal that took place at “The Farm,” home to a cast of colorful characters who lived and partied alongside unamused neighbors in the McMansions of Potomac. The Full Moon Jamboree, an affair so raucous that it made the evening news, was the farm party to end all farm parties, and much of it was recorded using a home video camera and a stolen CBS News microphone swiped from the Reagan Inauguration earlier that year. Twenty-five years later, we revisit the scene and meet the people behind the party, as well as the musicians who performed there, including mid-Atlantic doom metal icons Asylum.

 
Heavy Metal Picnic (official site)

 
These film stills are taken from ffffilm a website where users can upload and share frames from their favorite films. ffffilm reaffirms the notion that we tend overlook many beautifully composed scenes when watching a film.  Looking at these images, I was reminded of a book from the 1970s, which did something similar by examining the best of Laurel and Hardy frame-by-frame, except here you have hundreds of films to look at. It also brought to mind Douglas Gordon’s 24-Hour Psycho, which presented the incredible skill, artistry and ambiguity in a slowed-down projection of Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1960 thriller Psycho.
 
More stills from ffffilm after the jump…
 

 
For fans of certain foreign films there are no more dreaded words than “American remake”. In recent years, Hollywood has chewed up and spat out English language versions of a half dozen or so superb European and Asian genre films, virtually destroying them in an attempt to reach into the wallets of subtitle phopic American audiences. Recent Americanized versions of A Tale Of Two Sisters, Ringu, Shutter and [REC] are, to varying degrees, vastly inferior to the originals. So, when it was announced that beloved Swedish film Let The Right One In was getting the Hollywood treatment, a collective groan emitted from the film’s legions of fans. I regard Tomas Alfredson’s dark and romantic vampire tale a modern classic. Based on a novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, Alfredson created a movie that critics and audiences adored. The thought that anyone would attempt an American version bordered on sacrilege. Unlike many films that Hollywood recycles, Let The Right One In is not a film that succeeded because of a gimmick. It’s a film that is finely nuanced and artful - two words that are to Hollywood what garlic is to vampires. The fact that Matt Reeves, who helmed the unbearable Cloverfield, was going to direct LTROI, was not reassuring. I expected the worst. It was with a sense of dread that I entered Austin’s Paramount Theater this past weekend to see Fantastic Fest’s screening of Let Me In. Imagine how pleasantly shocked I was that Reeves remake not only honors the original but may have actually surpassed it as a work of art.

Let Me In features remarkable performances by the two young lead actors, Kodi Smit-McPhee and Chloe Moretz (looking like a very young Nastassja Kinski ). Both actors bring a tenderness and subtlety to their roles that give the movie it’s heart and soul. Director Reeves has a deliberate, patient and delicate approach to his characters that is almost non-existent in mainstream American filmmaking. In this regard he recreates with astonishing clarity the tone of the original film. Where he improves upon the original is in his handling of the gender twisting aspect of the story. He’s deepened it, infused it with a bit more eroticism and hints of romantic connections that the original film kept buried. Overall, this a more gratifying emotional experience.

There are scenes in Let Me In that did not occur in Let The Right One In and scenes that have been omitted. There’s a central character in the new film that wasn’t in the original. And there’s an action sequence unique to the new film that will be the subject of discussion in film classes for years to come. It brought to my mind a similar set piece in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children Of Men.

Let Me In also pays homage to Hitchcock in ways that Let The Right One In did not. Echoes of Rear Window and Psycho resonate throughout the film

It’s late. I’m tired. I want to discuss the religious and socio-political aspects of the film. Why does Reeves so strongly emphasize that the film occurs in the Reagan 80’s thrusting the fact repeatedly, thru 80’s pop hits and television images of Reagan, into the foreground? Were the 80’s the culmination of the final estrangement of kids from their parents, the annihilation of the nuclear family? Why did Reeves choose to locate the story in Los Alamos, New Mexico the home of the atomic bomb? Further nuclear annihilation? Are vampires, like Elvis, everywhere because we are a society of the living dead? It’s late, I’m tired.

I’m rather certain that Let Me In is going to be a box office hit. If it is, it may encourage other American filmmakers working within the system to do what Matt Reeves has done: make a film, whatever it’s its source, that elevates the form, that doesn’t pander to the lowest common denominator, and shows a little faith in the American public’s ability to embrace well-crafted storytelling, with or without subtitles.

The following video was shot on Thursday, Sept. 23, the opening night of Fantastic Fest, before and after the screening of Let Me In. Following a short prologue, director Matt Reeves, the film’s music composer Michael Giacchino and actors Kodi Smit-McPhee and Elias Koteas discuss the film.
 

 
Official trailer for Let Me In after the jump…

 
You are an alien. You have traveled across galaxies and you have now arrived on earth. New York. Sometime in the futuristic 1980s - you get the picture. Your needs are simple: drugs - and plenty of them. You’re lucky, you have arrived atop the apartment of a drug-addled model, Margaret, and her drug-addicted partner Jimmy. You’ve found where to get drugs.

You observe Margaret and her friends.  Then you discover something better: sex and drugs. For when humans cum their brains produce the very essence of the drug you seek. To obtain it, you have to kill them at their moment of orgasm. And guess what? Margaret can’t climax which is good news for you but bad news for her. Margaret is raped by a rancid creep. The rapist dies just as he comes. Margaret thinks she’s an avenging angel, who can “kill with her cunt” But really you are the killer and you know you’re just a drug-addled inter-planetary orgasm-addict.

 
More on ‘Liquid Sky’ and bonus clips after the jump…