Four seasons of Breaking Bad rendered as an old-school console game. (Spoiler alert.)
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"Robot" (by Jim Henson)
There's a definite proto-muppet (not to mention HAL 9000) quality to the robot in this vintage short introducing business owners to the cutting-edge concept of "data communications."
Dear Mr. Scorsese
This video was purportedly shot near the end of a screening of Hugo at the Regal Union Square multiplex in downtown Manhattan. Farewell to scratched prints, melted film, and brain wraps. Still, CHAOS REIGNS.
Pingu’s The Thing
Continue reading Pingu’s The Thing.
Deep Focus Audio Commentary: Flash Gordon
A look at art direction, performance, and sci-fi sensuousness in the 1980 version of Flash Gordon directed by Mike Hodges.
Continue reading Deep Focus Audio Commentary: Flash Gordon.
Vampire Circus
Updated 01/13/11: Blu-ray review
Originally reviewed 05/16/08
As this Hammer horror melodrama from 1972 opens, schoolteacher Albert Mueller (Laurence Payne) catches his wife (Domini Blythe) and one of the young village girls making their way through the countryside in what's apparently a quite unwholesome direction. He follows, but is unable to prevent their entry to the castle of Count Mitterhaus, a notoriously sexy vampire who holds the whole village under his sway. As the cuckold tries to marshal the shiftless men of the village for a rescue mission -- experience with the Count seems to have whipped everybody here into a sense of meek helplessness -- his wife offers up the young blond virgin to the vampire, who rips the girl's throat out. The woman tears her own clothes off and Mitterhaus makes love to her. When the villagers are finally coerced to make their way to the castle with torches and grim looks, they carry away the dead girl and do battle with Mitterhaus himself, who ends up impaled through the chest on a pointed wooden stick while cursing the village in a stage whisper. Albert's wife is brought outside and whipped as punishment for her betrayal, but finally runs back into the castle, which is set afire and burns into ruins. And then the opening credits roll.
Continue reading Vampire Circus.
Audio Commentary: They Live (John Carpenter, 1988)
Continue reading Audio Commentary: They Live (John Carpenter, 1988).
Halloween Horror Montage
Every year, I see those Chuck Workman clip compilations on the Oscars broadcast and I think, "Gee, that looks like a fun job." Also every year, I wish I had started thinking about Halloween early enough to do something special for my Web site. Here's the result of those twin impulses: a short montage of clips culled from my collection of horror movies from 1960 and later, cued up and intertwined in a sequence dictated by my memories of watching them over the decades -- and some ascertainment of their meanings in relation to one another -- and set to a fairly arbitrary choice of music. Accordingly, and as HBO and/or the MPAA might note, it contains graphic violence, brief nudity, strong language, strong sexual content, and some disturbing images. It also may contain sidelong SPOILERS for a number of terrific horror movies (they're listed at the bottom of this entry), so proceed at your own risk.
Continue reading Halloween Horror Montage.
Audio Commentary: The Blues Brothers
A look at the shopping-mall car chase from The Blues Brothers, including some of the recent history of the Dixie Square Shopping Mall.
Continue reading Audio Commentary: The Blues Brothers.
Audio Commentary: Persona (Bergman, 1966)
A look at a crucial "dream sequence" from Ingmar Bergman's Persona, drawing on ideas in the book Mindscreen by Bruce Kawin and putting it in context with the rest of the film.
Continue reading Audio Commentary: Persona (Bergman, 1966).
Audio Commentary: Prospero's Books (Greenaway, 1991)
Continue reading Audio Commentary: Prospero's Books (Greenaway, 1991).
Audio Commentary: Drunken Master 2 (Lau, 1994)
A look at a fight sequence from Drunken Master 2, including a brief comparison of the original Hong Kong audio and the dubbed, re-scored, and re-foleyed U.S. release version.
Continue reading Audio Commentary: Drunken Master 2 (Lau, 1994).
Audio Commentary: Se7en (Fincher, 1995)
A look at the opening titles sequence for Se7en; some of the work by Joel-Peter Witkin, Stan Brakhage, and Norman McLaren that inspired it; and the Mark Romanek music video for "Closer," which served, in a remixed version, as the movie's theme song.
Continue reading Audio Commentary: Se7en (Fincher, 1995).
Link Dump #5: W., Stars, Vampire Weekend, and Criterion Blu-Ray
W., un film de Oliver Stone
If this trailer (for Oliver Stone's W.) were just a joke, it would be a great joke. We'll see what happens with the movie.
Music Video: Stars/"Bitches in Tokyo"
"This is what you're worried about: something called The New York Dolls."
Music Video: Vampire Weekend/"Oxford Comma"
It's probably too soon for the Wes Anderson homage videos, but whatever.
Criterion Collection, High-Definition Division
Speaking of Wes Anderson, The Criterion Collection has just announced details on its November (delayed from October) opening salvo of Blu-ray Disc releases, and it's a doozy. Bottle Rocket
. Chungking Express. (Swoon.) The Third Man
. The Man Who Fell to Earth
. And The Last Emperor
. Five solid selections from five great directors -- and two films (the one with Faye Wong and the one with Orson Welles) that I absolutely adore. I am so there.
If this trailer (for Oliver Stone's W.) were just a joke, it would be a great joke. We'll see what happens with the movie.
Music Video: Stars/"Bitches in Tokyo"
"This is what you're worried about: something called The New York Dolls."
Music Video: Vampire Weekend/"Oxford Comma"
It's probably too soon for the Wes Anderson homage videos, but whatever.
Criterion Collection, High-Definition Division
Speaking of Wes Anderson, The Criterion Collection has just announced details on its November (delayed from October) opening salvo of Blu-ray Disc releases, and it's a doozy. Bottle Rocket. Chungking Express. (Swoon.) The Third Man. The Man Who Fell to Earth. And The Last Emperor. Five solid selections from five great directors -- and two films (the one with Faye Wong and the one with Orson Welles) that I absolutely adore. I am so there.Link Dump #4
How desperate does Hollywood have to be to vandalize its own movies?. According to the usually reliable projectionist crowd over at Film-Tech.com, Deluxe sent out film prints of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull that had the audio tracks deliberately fucked up as part of some monumentally misguided plan to catch pirates down the line by tracing the audio glitches in their pirated recordings. (The audio tracks of bootlegged movies are often of much higher quality than the video, since pirates have figured out how to tap directly into theatrical sound systems.) The mob at boingboing reports what seems like a high occurrence of anecdotes about screenings of the film where the soundtrack fell back to analog -- or dropped out entirely. If this is true, it's a massive "fuck you" to moviegoers, much worse than those annoying orange dots that serve the same supposed anti-piracy function. My local theaters have a hard enough time maintaining the integrity of picture and sound without the distributors making their lives even more difficult. Just unbelievable. (Via Movie City News.)
Continue reading Link Dump #4.
Link Dump #4
I can only hope that reports of Mike D'Angelo's death are, once again, greatly exaggerated. Even if they come from Mike D'Angelo himself.
Not movie-related, but kinda fascinating, I'd think, for content geeks of any stripe: A Usenet-based team of music obsessives -- known, apparently, as The Whitburn Project -- has been not only working on creating a huge (illegal) archive of post-1890 pop songs, but also maintaining a huge spreadsheet database of song data, including song length, BPM, label, and more. Andy Baio (Waxy.org) is running the numbers. Today, Baio charts average song duration over time, but promises more to come.
Zhang Ziyi appears in a Mercedes commercial. In China.
Check out this slideshow: Liberty City vs. New York City. What's especially interesting is, at low resolution, it's sometimes hard to tell the live-action shots from the videogame grabs.
From the Flickr comments on this image: "Last night I blew up a cab with my rocket launcher here. Bodies were everywhere."
Not movie-related, but kinda fascinating, I'd think, for content geeks of any stripe: A Usenet-based team of music obsessives -- known, apparently, as The Whitburn Project -- has been not only working on creating a huge (illegal) archive of post-1890 pop songs, but also maintaining a huge spreadsheet database of song data, including song length, BPM, label, and more. Andy Baio (Waxy.org) is running the numbers. Today, Baio charts average song duration over time, but promises more to come.
Zhang Ziyi appears in a Mercedes commercial. In China.
Check out this slideshow: Liberty City vs. New York City. What's especially interesting is, at low resolution, it's sometimes hard to tell the live-action shots from the videogame grabs.
From the Flickr comments on this image: "Last night I blew up a cab with my rocket launcher here. Bodies were everywhere."
The Double Life of Exotica
Not long ago, a friend emailed me to say she had recently NetFlix'd a "little B movie." She said she enjoyed it, but her tone suggested that she was reluctant to go too far with an endorsement of such a lowbrow film. Had I seen it, she asked?
The name of the movie was Exotica. Why did that blow my mind?
Continue reading The Double Life of Exotica.
e-Cahiers, Hidden Iraq, and Movie Locations on Google Earth
Sweeeeeet. The "e" stands for "electronic" as well as for "English". Mais oui. Now I don't have to keep typing sentences into translate.google.com and hitting
YouTube: George Washington
I don't know who the hell Cox & Combes are, but the funniest thing I've seen lately is this blunt, oddly hilarious music video directed by Brad Neely dealing with the outsized exploits of the first president of the United States. Nicely short-circuits the main drawback of YouTube -- lousy video quality -- by relying solely on lo-fi cartoon images.
"George Washington"
"George Washington"
"George Washington"
Pitchfork's "Awesome" Music Videos
PItchfork links to 100 "awesome" music videos at YouTube. Most of them are, in fact, pretty awesome. Since there's not a chance in hell of anyone getting a chance to legally compile a collection of this scope, well, viva the Internet bootlegs.
Off the top of my head, I'd add the following:
Jonathan Demme's video for New Order's "Perfect Kiss"
The Flaming Lips' "Turn It On"
Monster Magnet's "Spacelord"
When is The Industry going to figure out a way to make shit like this happen legally, and for a reasonable price? I mean, come on -- two bucks to buy a music video at sub-VHS quality just so you can watch it on your iPod? At that rate, the Pitchfork list would run you $200, and that's just silly. Carry on.
Len Lye on Google Video
So you go to Google video and type "Len Lye" into the search box, and whoomp, there it is. Somebody pointed a video camera at a screen in a darkened room where prints of some of Len Lye's (wonderful, transporting, mind-expanding) work were showing. Yes, these highly compressed bootleg video streams are a poor substitute for seeing the real thing -- but man, how psyched was I to suddenly have a copy of "Free Radicals" that I could watch on my PSP on the train ride home? I can honestly say it elevated my mood. What kind of film snob am I?
