Solo Artist
Redditor HappyHarryHardOn says, “Let’s draw a little Death Star in the background… and it’ll be our little secret”
(via reddit )
Redditor HappyHarryHardOn says, “Let’s draw a little Death Star in the background… and it’ll be our little secret”
(via reddit )
While it will be for Columbo that the late great actor Peter Falk will be best remembered, we should not overlook his Oscar-nominated performances in Murder inc. or Pocketful of Miracles; his subtlety in Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire; or his brilliant work with John Cassavetes in Woman Under the Influence and Husbands.
Made in 1970, Husbands told the compelling story of 3 middle-aged men (Falk, Cassavetes, and Ben Gazzara), who re-examine their lives after the death of a close friend. After bar-hoping and long subway conversations, the trio decide to take a trip to London, in a hope of finding something long lost. It’s a love it or loathe it movie and depending on your point of view it’s brilliant, self-indulgent, funny, boring, frustrating, the best or the worst. When I first saw it, I was blown-away. Here was something more like a documentary, centered around 3 of the greatest improvised performances putt on film. I was breathless at their audacity and brilliance.
Cassavetes wrote the script after improvising scenes with Falk and Gazzara. Falk described his experience of working with Cassavetes as a director “shooting an actor when he might be unaware the camera was running.”
“You never knew when the camera might be going. And it was never: ‘Stop. Cut. Start again.’ John would walk in the middle of a scene and talk, and though you didn’t realize it, the camera kept going. So I never knew what the hell he was doing. But he ultimately made me, and I think every actor, less self-conscious, less aware of the camera than anybody I’ve ever worked with.”
It’s an amazing piece of cinema, an uncensored slice of life in all its humor, pain, emotion, charm and endless subterfuge.
During filming in 1970, the BBC followed Cassavetes and his actors in New York and London making a documentary for their Omnibus strand, examining the unique way this great director made his movies.
Peter Falk’s death today will bring back memories to Boomers and Gen X-ers of his title role as the good-natured and shambling L.A. detective in the ‘70s TV show Columbo. But by the time he donned that character’s famous trenchcoat, he had about 15 years of acting under his belt, most famously in gangster roles in films like Murder Inc. and Frank Capra’s last, Pocketful of Miracles. (Of course, he augmented the Columbo years with amazing performances like his role as Nick in John Cassavettes’s masterful A Woman Under The Influence.)
He also appeared as the Chief of Police in Joseph Strick’s 1963 adaptation of Jean Genet’s surreal play The Balcony. The film stayed faithful generally to Genet’s meditation on revolution, counter-revolution, and nationalism, which is set in a brothel/movie set/fantasy factory designed for its authoritarian allegorical characters while unrest boils over in the fictional country outside.
Here’s Falk’s big segment after his character breaks up the party. May he rest in peace.
According to his biographer, Steve Aylett, writer Jeff Lint was “the most imaginative and inconvenient SF writer in modern history.”
Aylett’s new film Lint: The Movie documents the life and perplexing work of Jeff Lint with participation from the likes of Alan Moore, Stewart Lee, Josie Long, Robin Ince, D.Harlan Wilson, Jeff Vandermeer, Leila Johnston, Andrew O’Neill,and enigmatically creative literary/comics genius, Aylett himself.
Featuring clips from Lint’s books, cartoons, music, comics and films, plus interviews with fans & critics, the movie follows Lint’s life from the days of vintage pulp, through his adoption by the psychedelic counterculture and disastrous scripts for ‘Star Trek’ and ‘Patton’; to his status as an enigmatic cult figure. Never-before-seen archive footage and recordings of Lint himself, and commentary by those who knew and read him, results in a compelling portrait of the creator of Clowns & Insects, Jelly Result, The Stupid Conversation, The Riding On Luggage Show, the CATERER comic, and Catty and the Major, the scariest kids’ cartoon ever aired.
Lint’s was a career haunted by death, including the undetected death of his agent, the suspicious death of his rival Herzog, and the unshakable ‘Lint is dead’ rumours, which persisted even after his death. Like his contemporary Philip K. Dick, he was blithely ahead of his time.
Steve Aylett will premiere Lint: The Movie this weekend, Sunday, June 26th at the Kino Club in Brighton. The very wonderful ceremonial magician/transvestite stand-up comic, Andrew O’Neill will performing live and Aylett will do a Q&A. More screenings are coming up, so follow Steve Aylett’s Twitter feed for more information.
What I find amazing is that a talent like Tim Burton fucks around with unnecessarily remaking Planet of the Apes and Alice in Wonderland when he could be making one of Aylett’s multi-level works into a truly modern 21st century film. Aylett’s work is terrific source material for Hollywood (and if not, then certainly for Adult Swim!), but they just haven’t realized it yet. Burton’s oeuvre has needed a shot of new energy for years (if you ask me) and Steve Aylett would make a fantastic collaborator for him. How amazing would it be if Tim Burton directed The Caterer, huh? Just saying…
Robert Downey Jr., Jim Carroll, James Spader
It’s hard to imagine what Jim Carroll was thinking when he agreed to appear in the teen angst turd-fest from 1985 Tuff Turf.
“It’s Too Late” is a cool tune with a great opening line and it’s nice to see Carroll in any context (even with Judy Garland eyes), but, man, Jim must have been hurting for cash when he took this gig.
By the way, that’s Robert Downey Jr. on drums.
Absolutely spot-on parody of BBC documentarian Adam Curtis’s signature style by “psychonomy.” Perfectly encapsulates my own reaction to each and every one of his films:
In a landmark new documentary produced for YouTube, Adam Curtis has not examined his career and laid bare his style in the light of some confused academic papers he stumbled across on the internet. Instead, I have plundered various video archives and ripped him off, up, down, left, right and back again.
The documentary films of Adam Curtis are entertaining, for sure, and thought-provoking, too, but I always feel that he takes but one strand of a very complex braid of historical confluences, and then presents this sliver of history as if it is THE received truth in that authoritative BBC voice of his. I do enjoy watching his films (and I like his blog, too) but he completely fails to win me over to his arguments each and every time.
Thank you Niall O’Conghaile and John Caples!
Truly one of the dumbest products I’ve ever seen. Apparently with this, uh… versatile mustache disguise kit you can pretend you’re in Star Wars, endorse Colt 45 malt liquor or be a mac daddy ladies’ man. It’s entirely up to you! The mustache is $7.99 at the Star Wars Shop.
(via Gorilla Mask)
Today in 1960, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho was released, ushering in the age of ultra-violence in American cinema and to some extent the independent movie (Paramount were aghast at Psycho‘s script, so Hitchcock financed the film via his own Shamley Productions for $806,947.55)
Based on the novel of the same name by famed author Robert Bloch, Psycho was inspired by real-life murderer Ed Gein. It was filmed in black and white, not just to save money, but because Hitchcock knew that the shower scene would have just been too much in color. Principle filming took place on the set of Revue Studios, the same location where Hitchcock shot his television show. The Bates Motel set is still standing at the Universal Lot (see above).
Janet Leigh was apparently so upset after she saw the infamous shower scene (which had over 50 edits and used chocolate sauce for as the blood stand-in) that she tried to avoid them for the rest of her life. Leigh told documentary producers in 1997 that she would only shower if everything in the house was locked down first and she felt safe. She also always left the bathroom door open.
As, well, psychotic as Psycho is, it would take another twelve years before Hitchcock would film his sickest film of all, Frenzy. You wanna talk about a sick film? Frenzy makes Psycho seem tame by comparison. Today’s “torture porn” ain’t got nuthin’ on Hitch, baby!
It started when producer Barry Hanson asked writer Barrie Keeffe, one night, what film he’d like to see? Keeffe said he wanted to see an American gangster film set in the East End of London. There was nothing like it on at the cinema, so Hanson told Keeffe to write it. The result was The Long Good Friday, a movie regularly voted the greatest British gangster film, and one of the best British films, of all time. High praise for a movie that was nearly re-cut, dubbed and pumped out onto TV by its original parent company, ITC, who hated it.
I was lucky enough to see The Long Good Friday, when it was screened at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1980 as the highlight to a mini-retrospective of director John MacKenzie’s work. It had an indelible effect.
MacKenzie was established as a major talent, having made the films Unman, Wittering and Zigo with David Hemmings in 1969, and Made with Carol White and Roy Harper in 1972. He had also achieved further success directing Peter MacDougall’s brilliant dramas Just Another Saturday, which won the Prix Italia, Just A Boys’ Game, which starred rock singer Frankie Miller, and MacDougall’s adaptation of notorious hardman, Jimmy Boyle’s biography, A Sense of Freedom. Now he had just completed a film that captured the essence of 1980’s Britain under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
Written by Barrie Keeffe, a former journalist who made his name writing political drams for TV and theater, Scribes (1976), about newspaper workers during a strike, .Gimme Shelter (1975–7), a powerful trilogy that dealt with deprivation, frustration and anger of working-class youth, and the tremendous BBC drama Waterloo Sunset, starring the legendary Queenie Watts.
Keeffe wrote The Long Good Friday in three days, over an Easter weekend. Originally called The Paddy Factor, the story dealt with East End gangster Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins) who plans to go into partnership with the Mafia to redevelop London, only to fall foul of the IRA. The film co-starred Helen Mirren, (who battled to make her character, Victoria, stronger), a young Pierce Brosnan, and Eddie Consantine, as the Mafia don.
The script came from all the stories Keeffe heard growing-up and working as a reporter on the Stratford Express, as he told the Arts Desk last year:
The seeds were planted then; it was a very fertile time, just before the end of the Krays’ empire, and a lot of my plays, and some of the incidents in The Long Good Friday, came from my experiences. For instance, one of the gangland punishments, if you strayed into someone else’s territory, was to crucify you to the warehouse floor. As a very innocent junior reporter, a young 18, I was sent to interview a guy in hospital. He was covered in bandages and I asked him what had happened. He said, with that wonderful East End humour, “Do you understand English, son? Well, put it down to a do-it-yourself accident.”
Filmed the same year as Thatcher’s election, The Long Good Friday predicted much of the change Conservative rule would bring to London and the British isles.
The Long Good Friday was obviously about the transformation of the East End. The Bob Hoskins character was talking about the end of the Docks and mile after mile of territory for “profitable progress” - I think that was his phrase. I saw the film again about five years ago and it has a scene showing this model of how the area would look under the developers. It underestimated it completely - it ought to have shown Canary Wharf looking like Manhattan. Looking at it, I was taken by the fact that none of us had foreseen the enormous scale of change.
The Long Good Friday was a film “raging” at what was about to happen to the country, the story of gangsterism / Thatcherism / Captialism coming face-to-face with terrorism / idealism.
Cast and Crew: The Long Good Friday brings together John MacKenzie, Barrie Keeffe, Barry Hanson, actor Derek Thompson, casting director Simone Reynolds to discuss the film, its making and its legacy. There are also interviews from Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren. Watching Keeffe and MacKenzie around a table together, there is still the crackle of creative tension, as writer and director both lay claim to the film’s success.
Previously on Dangerous Minds
Singer Frankie Miller stars in Peter MacDougall’s legendary gang film ‘Just a Boys’ Game’
More from ‘Cast and Crew’ plus bonus clip, after the jump…
