I don’t know about you but we here at the FAM are beat, dog-tired, perhaps even, knackered if you’re of the sort who use that specific verbiage. It’s been a long day and after a long day nothing soothes the soul and calms the nerves like a dose of the dulcet tones of David Attenborough. Here, then, is the naturalist (at the spry age of 45) in the BBC documentary A Blank on the Map from 1971, which details the first meeting of a previously uncontacted tribe in New Guinea. As I’ve noted before, the man could read a Denny’s menu and make it sound interesting. The FAM apologizes for the brevity and will return next week, fully refreshed, with a healthier helping of exposition.
Here on these internets doomsayer analysts and tech gurus have for years foreseen the death of the printed page, especially newspapers, those seemingly horrible vestiges of what many keep hoping is a bygone age. From a trance-like state they attempt to divine the future, devoting thousands of words to the subject, drunk on the smell of blood in their nostrils, slathering at the thought of a world devoid of ink. I suspect that I could hyperlink every other letter in this post without fear of running out of material.
The anti-hero of Mark Potts’ faux-trailer for faux-remakeKane understands this all too well. How precipitous the fall is of no consequence to him; what is assured is the fall itself and Kane will not be pushed aside without a fight. With that as its main thrust, Kane proceeds to exemplify everything one would expect from a modern remake of Orson Welles’s classic film. Kane poses a simple supposition: If Citizen Kane is the greatest film ever made, imagine an updated re-imagining with at least 100% more dick kicking.
What follows is funnier than it has any right to be. Welles’ Charles Foster Kane is replaced by a brooding, unshaven, gravelly-voiced vigilante, cutting a bloody swath on his way to destroying the internet; every fight occurring in a blurry series of flashy cuts, set to a selection from Nine Inch Nails’ The Fragile, giving way to The Pixies’s Where Is My Mind, to establish the proper pathos for a Fight Club generation. It covers nearly every cliche on the way to the finish line, even hitting us with an “In 3-D Fall” stinger. In all honesty it’s a bit disheartening when a scene like the one in which Kane, trembling with rage and bellowing in frustration, defecates on a Macbook seems like something that I can imagine being in a trailer for an actual film. Trust me, in a few years popular cinema may consist solely of angry men, shitting on things. You heard it here first, on the internet.
Happy Summer Solstice! Y’know, unless, like Sergeant Howie here, you’re not into that sort of thing…
SPOILER ALERT. Don’t watch if you haven’t seen The Wicker Man before! Rent the full film.
Summer is Icumen in,
Loudly sing, cuckoo!
Grows the seed and blows the mead,
And springs the wood anew;
Sing, cuckoo!
Ewe bleats harshly after lamb,
Cows after calves make moo;
Bullock stamps and deer champs,
Now shrilly sing, cuckoo!
Cuckoo, cuckoo
Wild bird are you;
Be never still, cuckoo!
“Sumer Is Icumen In“, a traditional English round, is one of the oldest known pieces of polyphonic music in existence, dating back to the early 13th century. It’s actually a song celebrating the advent of spring (or Christ’s crucfixion, depending on what translation you favor), not summer. Yet it always seems ends up in my stereo on June 21st.
G’day. We’re not sleepy, and there ain’t no place we’re going to, so here’s David Zellner blowing a raspberry in slow motion, as shot by Wiley Wiggins.*
*This post is my shamefully lazy subtle way of reminding the Coilhouse readership that Wiggins and the Zellner Bros are under-appreciated cinematic geniuses of our time. Now go. Explore. Lose hours and hours of your work day spelunking their respective websites.
The master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, and his leading lady, Polish born, Czech actress Anny Ondra, perform a sound check for his feature film Blackmail in 1929 which was released in both a silent and “all-talkie” version. What begins as an innocent little back and forth is quickly turned into crude double entendre with a simple “said the actress to the bishop” or in this case “as the girl said to the soldier.” BFIfilms, in their YouTube description, notes that one outcome from this test was that Ondra’s lines would later be dubbed live off-screen by Joan Barry, who sounded decidedly more British.
A bit of bonus trivia: production of Blackmail had already begun when producer John Maxwell decided that, based on the success of films like The Jazz Singer, it should also contain parts with sound. He authorized Hitchcock to film only a portion of the film in sound but, Hitchcock being Hitchcock, he decided to surreptitiously record the entire film in sound. Also, Anny Ondra wasn’t the only actor who experienced changes in the final product. In the longer, silent version, the role of the Chief Inspector was played by Sam Livesey whereas the sound version featured Harvey Braban.
In remembrance of Dennis Hopper, who passed away on May 29th, The FAM presents David Lynch’s 1986 masterpiece Blue Velvet, a film that did perhaps just as much for Hopper’s career as it did for Lynch’s. I would imagine that most, if not all, Coilhouse readers have seen this film at least once. Starring the aforementioned Mr. Hopper as the psychotic Frank Booth as well as Kyle McLachlan, Laura Dern, and Isabella Rossellini, Blue Velvet is the story of a small town that hides dark and terrible secrets. It’s a classic Lynchian theme by now, but coming after the disaster that was 1984’s Dune — a film that I must admit, I like very much and a book, I must admit, I dislike as equally — it was a revelation.
Much of the film’s success must be placed at the feet of Mr. Hopper who, after accepting the role of Frank Booth (he was Lynch’s third choice for the part) was said to have exclaimed “I’ve got to play Frank! I am Frank!” His portrayal of Booth: impulsive, unpredictable, and terrifically violent, makes for one of the scariest characters in all of film. His constantly shifting moods and disturbing, recursive, Oedipal-tinged sexual proclivities, combined with his iconic nitrous oxide kit, are the perfect foil for McLauchlan’s naive, amateur detective. It’s a truly masterful performance.
In many ways Blue Velvet may be Lynch’s crowning achievement, and part of reason for that, I would maintain, is due to its relative simplicity. The imagery he uses here is powerful, but it is also far less obtuse than he has a tendency to be. In other words the signal to noise ratio of meaningful symbols and Stuff David Lynch Thought Looked Pretty is fairly low, making for what I feel is a much more complete and perhaps enjoyable experience.
At the very least, it’s a chance to see Dennis Hopper at his crazed, drug-addled best, every line spewed wild-eyed, frothing, and peppered with profanity. He shall be missed.
Memorial Day is almost upon us in the States, and we here at The FAM have chosen to begin our long weekend with sex, drugs, and violence, as is our wont. Today we present 1971’s Get Carter, directed by Mike Hodges and starring Michael Caine; quite possibly one of the greatest gangster movies of all time, British or otherwise. Based on the novel Jack’s Return Home by Ted Lewis — which took its inspiration from the “one-armed bandit murder” in the north east of England in 1967 — it tells the story of one Jack Carter as he weaves his way through Newcastle’s seedy underworld in search of the truth of his brother Frank’s death, supposedly due to a drunk driving accident. In his wake he leaves a trail of bodies and a river of blood.
There is an image of Michael Caine for many people, greatly influenced by The Cider House Rules and his role as Bruce Wayne’s butler Alfred Pennyworth in Christopher Nolan’s Batman films, of a kindly, wise, and lovable older man with a cockney accent. For this audience Caine will be almost unrecognizable here. His Jack Carter is a ruthless man; death in a well-tailored suit. Carter’s rampage through Tyneside is relentlessly brutal culminating on a lonely, gray beach and ends on a note that takes the viewer completely by surprise, though the more astute will recognize the players from an exceedingly brief appearance at the very beginning of the film.
Get Carter is a highlight in a storied career and it remains one of my favorite movies. To be sure Caine has played many memorable characters besides Jack Carter, but few have had that kind of presence on screen. It’s a role almost completely devoid of pathos. Jack Carter is out for revenge, and he really doesn’t care how you or anyone else feels about it. All that’s certain is that he’ll get it, one way or another.
What do you guys think of this new 16-minute commercial that David Lynch created for Dior? Art-directed by John Galliano and starring Marion Cotillard, the film is rife with beloved Lynchian hallmarks: red curtains, an anxious woman in an empty hallway, and curiously gaudy hotel decor. Lynch told the Financial Times, “(Chanel) called me up and said, ‘Would you like to make a short film for the internet? You can do anything you want, you just need to show the handbag, the Pearl Tower and some old Shanghai.'” He added, “this falls between a regular film and a commercial. I liked that idea.” Lynch says that he didn’t know much about the Pearl Tower, but when he learned that the building’s architecture was inspired by a poem, ideas for the long-form commercial started coming to him (in fact, the film itself is based on a poem that Lynch wrote, titled “It holds the love“).
Lady Blue is the third chapter in Dior’s cinematographic campaign starring Cotillard; Lady Noirwas directed by La Vie En Rose‘s Olivier Dahan (really moody!), and Lady Rouge was a Franz Ferdinand music video (kind of boring).
Do you like this short, or do you feel like this could’ve been directed by the guy who made the trailer for David Lynch’s A Goofy Movie? I’d have to say “both of the above.” There’s a bit more repetition (or self-parody?) here than in his earlier commercial work – and even then, there was almost always a hint of that in his ads. I love the “Laura Palmer is Alive and Pregnant” commercial, for which, the legend goes, Lynch asked the actress (not Sheryl Lee, but looks like her) to take a pregnancy test, and then switched her result with a positive-testing one unbeknownst to her in order to capture a genuine reaction. Littering never looked more sinister than in his “Clean Up New York” PSA. He made fish rain from the sky, in reverse, to sell us… cigarettes. More David Lynch commercials (with appearances by Heather Graham, Gerard Depardieu, Michael Jackson and Bambi), after the jump.
Weirdness and misogyny this week on The FAM as we present 1987’s The Confessions of Robert Crumb produced by the BBC (which includes the wonderful Arena opening and song. Seriously, I love that intro.) Unlike 1994’s Crumb by Terry Zwigoff (which is seeing a Criterion release this August) Confessions is less concerned with Crumb’s bizarre family and more concerned with the man himself. In that regard it spends much of its time letting Crumb explore and contemplate his objectification of women and self-loathing, preferring to be a catalog of the man’s various fetishes, to merely witness a day in the life of a dirty old man.
Both documentaries illustrate how difficult it can be to separate the artist from their art. A great fan of his work I can’t help but cringe as Crumb displays his current wife to the camera, showing off her musculature as if he were trying to sell the viewer a horse. It is, perhaps, admirable that one would be able to be so honest with the world, willing to expose one’s Id to whoever passes by, and it has certainly worked out well for Robert Crumb. I just can’t help but think that those images made living, breathing flesh are not nearly as entertaining when not on the printed page.
Brevity is the word of the day both in regards to this post and the film it features. Matthew Gordon Long’s The Anachronism tells the story of Katie and Sebastian, two Victorian era, aspiring naturalists who while on expedition one summer day discover a mechanical squid on a rocky beach. What secrets does this mysterious cephalopod hold?
The Anachronism wears its steampunk aesthetic on its sleeve, from the squid’s nod to Jules Verne’ 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea to Katie’s parasol and Sebastian’s pith helmet and butterfly net. It’s a nice, well told little tale, with a surprisingly sinister ending. What it really comes down to is this: mechanical squid. Like you’re going to pass that by.
