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NOT ‘The Little Mermaid’:  Is ‘The Lure’ the most f**ked up movie of the year?
03.13.2017
10:23 am
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The Lure is a 2015 film from Polish director Agnieszka Smoczynska that’s finally enjoying a theatrical run stateside this month. It is an aggressively weird and unsettling film, a musical comedy that is almost never funny and never all that musical, even with half a dozen song and dance routines. It is mostly a washed-out, glam-grunge descent into surreal depravity where romance, tragedy, lust, and alienation intermingle in a bizarre alt-world filled with slime and cigarette smoke.
 

Singing/dancing/man-eating sister act Silver and Golden
 
The story involves two young mermaid sisters, Golden (Michalina Olszanska) and Silver (Marta Mazurek), who use their siren song to lure a couple of low-rent musicians to a Warsaw beach to rescue them from the briny deep. They join the band as a singing/dancing mermaid sister act and perform nightly in a dingy cabaret show that looks like some zero-budget post-Soviet nightmare of polyester and short-circuiting synthesizers. When they dry out they grow legs, but they’re smooth like Barbie dolls from the waist down. Silver falls in love with the curly-haired guitar player in the band but has no human genitals to offer him. She does have a goopy fish vagina on her tail, but he’s not into that. Luckily, they find an off the grid doctor willing to perform radical fish-to-human surgery. Golden does not approve and starts going out nightly to feast on the local hornballs in protest. All of this high weirdness is bracketed with kooky cabaret numbers that sound like they just discovered disco a week ago and are still trying to figure out exactly how it works. I mean, this film really does have it all.

Watch the trailer for ‘The Lure’ after the jump…

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Posted by Ken McIntyre
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03.13.2017
10:23 am
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Tuxedomoon, Cult With No Name & John Foxx make music inspired by ‘Blue Velvet’


 
In 1985 a German photographer named Peter Braatz traveled to North Carolina and ended up filming a good deal of behind-the-scenes footage of the making of one of the best movies of the 1980s, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. Diverging from what most people would have done, I’d say, Braatz declined to make a regular documentary and opted instead to make a free-standing work of art called “No Frank in Lumberton”—we wrote about it a while back.

In late 2015, as part of its “Made To Measure” series, Brussels-based label Crammed Discs put out an “original soundtrack” composed by Tuxedomoon and Cult With No Name for the documentary Blue Velvet Revisited, a more recent reworking that Braatz forged from his original footage. In 2013 and 2014 Braatz came to realize that the contributions of Cult With No Name and Tuxedomoon would complement his images perfectly—in short order an agreement was made for the two groups to create a “joint soundtrack.”

Of the collaboration, Braatz commented:
 

In July 2013 I first heard the album ‘Above as Below’ by Cult With No Name. As the song ‘As Below’ came on I immediately had the idea to use it for my ‘Blue Velvet Revisited’ project, and to edit a trailer to the track that would showcase my footage.

...

I was keen to hand over the making of the soundtrack to one group of musicians, particularly as much of my film would have no dialogue. The soundtrack would need to carry the feel of ‘As Below’ throughout. Erik Stein revealed to me that the amazing trumpet part on ‘As Below’ was played by Luc Van Lieshout of Tuxedomoon, a group I also knew well and greatly admired. Because it was the trumpet part that I found so perfect, we soon pitched the idea of a joint soundtrack between Cult With No Name and Tuxedomoon.


 
Later on Braatz added a track by John Foxx, the original lead singer of Ultravox. Originating in the Bay Area, Tuxedomoon were one of the most important and influential bands of the post-punk movement. Self-described “post-punk electronic balladeers” Erik Stein and Jon Boux collaborate as Cult With No Name.

More after the jump…

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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12.23.2016
01:22 pm
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