First, MDvto sent me this great Quincy theme tune…
Then, while hunting for that basketball vid from below, I checked the history of this browser and searched keyword "youtube." There were a bunch of interesting vids that never made it to the blog…here they are, random and youtubey. Individually they didn’t seem to warrant a post, but collectively, it’s some pretty good stuff…
Haven’t you been wondering what all those "Maxine interviewing" pictures have been about? No? Yes? Well, after a frenzied weekend of editing, we finally finished the 6 minute tease/pitch version of our proposal piece for the Musicwood doc we’re trying to get funded. The band spanking new and improved Hitman Productions website is now rocking the internets (thanks Dana!) and that gave us a good deadline to get focused and motivated to finish Musicwood. We think this piece came out pretty well, and should hopefully be able to assist us greatly in getting this baby funded.
Check it out and lemme know whatcha think… Oh, and feel free to invest if you’re so moved! Donations of any amount accepted!
Also please note that the Dave Matthews/Ray LaMontagne footage is borrowed…for the full doc we’re trying to line up a shoot with a well-known but cool acoustic guitar player type…any suggestions?
This youtube fan vid gets so many things right. I really really liked TDK — lots of issues of modern powerlessness, terrorism, comic book good vs evil, etc. — but The Voice was way too over the top.
Sometimes you see something that gives you a new appreciation for the true definition of a word. Such is this film and the word "archivist". Perhaps also the phrase "vinyl junkie". Worth watching for the first :30 alone.
to whet your appetite for it, here’s a Guiness ad that was pretty big in the UK but we never saw here…it’s so good, and directed by Sexy Beast’s Jonathan Glazer…audio takes a moment to kick in, so don’t adjust your set…
The other day ML at work hipped me to the great angryalien site, which contains many many films that have been cut to 30 seconds, animated and had all the actors replaced with bunnies. Needless to say, it is great. Star Wars is really well done, the bleeped version of Reservoir Dogs is particularly fantastic, but the Shining is just classic.
Work’s been a little slow recently, so I’ve been crossing items off the ole to do list, and watching this fascinating hour-long doc on the thousands of boxes Kubrick left behind when he died. The guy who made it spent 5 years going through the boxes (off and on, not 5 solid years), and the doc is a really interesting look at a bit of an obsessive recluse.
The whole thing is on google video…I found it via good old metafilter…here’s a great clip where the filmmaker finds a bunch of behind-the-scenes footage shot by Kubrick’s daughter on the set of Full Metal Jacket…apart from how fun it is to see a little bit of what Kubruck was like, I love how prominently tea figures in this scene…
One sunny Autumn day a few Falls ago, I went out to the backyard of 1806 Lamont to work on Oscar Wild’s catwalk. Maxine filmed me doing it, she finally finished editing it, and it came out great…
Well played, Battle for the Earth, you successfully posted something that made me feel as though I’ve been drinking nothing but Pimm’s for 2 days straight. This is weird and wild. I’m posting it here because people need to see this. Good luck, everyone.
I recently saw the excellent film by Penelope Spheris, The Decline of Western Civilization Part II. Part I was a documentary about the early LA punk scene, and it was unbelievably good. Hunt it down, the performances are stunning and seeing burnt-up stars like Darby Crash at their zenith is so energizing. Great great film.
Part II takes a look at the 1988 metal scene in LA. It’s a lot funnier than Part I, because hair metal is just naturally more hilarious than raw punk. Poison have become big stars, Ace Frehley of KISS is interviewed on a bed full of girls, everyone talks about how intensely they’re into drinks, drugs and sex, Aerosmith talk like they’re the biggest thing ever. Guns n Roses get a random mention at one point, but it’s in the context of all the bands currently playing LA trying to make it big.
And that’s one of the most poignant aspects of this doc — that there are so many bands profiled or mentioned who are so determined to make it big, and now, with the hindsight of history, we know that they won’t. Where are these folks now? There’s a sadness, and an irony, but also a strange sense of maturity that comes from seeing so many bands play out variations on this conversation:
PENELOPE: So what if you don’t make it?
BAND: That’s not an option. I will make it. There’s no alternative.
Maturity because I think, well, they didn’t make it, so they must have had to change that dream, or realize that the exuberance of youth is sometimes not enough to make the dream come true. You also need a healthy amount of luck. Rock is for the young, as others have been noting.
I wanted to show one of the bands so you could get a sense of what I’m talking about. For a bunch of reasons I chose this band called Odin. They seem to have it all, poised to break big. They’ve got the look, the girls, the Budweisers in the hot tub, the awesome old-school manager in a suit, oh yeah, and the ASSLESS CHAPS. The only problem is that their music is terrible…
As I move more and more out of the realm of various intoxicants (and into the realm of various antioxidants) I find the I have more respect for art that is able to transport me to that same, mind-blowing realm while I’m stone-cold sober. I tried to do it with the PhD mix and I feel like I was able to get pretty close. As much as I am a fan of the idea of "Taking Drugs to Make Music to Take Drugs To", these days it seems more badass to me if you can conjure up that feeling while straight-minded. In the daytime. Drinking water.
This song by "Milkshake" by Holy Fuck is doing a great job at that. Jack gave me the album when we visited NC in May and I’ve been giving it a thorough listen. This track sort of takes over my mind by force in the beginning, only to relax its grip once the vibes kick in. It’s fantastic.
In the same vein, I recently revisited the animated film "American Pop" by Ralph Bakshi. Bakshi gets (sort of) a bum rap in the world of animation, I guess mainly because his stories are pretty thin, his animation takes cheap short-cuts, and I’ve heard he’s kind of a jerk. (Plus he made "Fritz the Cat", which I haven’t seen but is notable for being the first X-rated animated film…) He also made the first "Lord of the Rings" film back in the 80’s. It’s not very good.
Be that as it may, when I first saw American Pop — a rotoscoped low-fi animation sort of history of popular American music — I was appropriately under the influence and was totally blown away. The rotoscoping looked amazing, the songs that appeared were unexpected and awesome ("People Are Strange", "I’m Waiting For My Man"?! "Pretty Vacant"?!), and the pizza I was eating was delicious.
Upon re-viewing, however, it didn’t hold up so well. The story was kind of a joke, the animation is still pretty neat, but the parts where he cheaped out are more obvious. The songs are still good, but when the story is that meaningless the songs are kind of beside the point. The look of it is pretty cool though, and it’s rotoscoping way before Linklater thought up A Scanner Darkly or Waking Life…
When I first saw it, the film’s final scene totally blew me away. I was so caught up in the psychedelic majesty of it all. Now? Well, parts of it still hold up, but wow the very end is kind of embarrassing…I do love the bit early on where he’s handing out the music and he says "Pass ’em out, turkey!" People should still call each other "turkey", it’s such an endearing put-down…
In February, right when I had started the blog, I was working on a project at Sundance Channel when I saw an editor working on these amazing Isabella Rossellini short pieces based on the sex life of bugs(!!). They are weird and amazing. Yes, they have that sort of "consciously viral" quality to them (i.e., "I’m a big business but I’m making something weird so it gets forwarded around the internet!"), but luckily Isabella R is so over-the-top and great that it doesn’t matter.
I immediately thought I would grab them from the edit room and post them on my blog before they were even out! I had just started my blog, and already a real scoop! This was going to be great!
Then I realized that Sundance would know it was me and I really like working there (still, I kinda feel, as Gillanders would say, "the old Josh would have done it."). So I’ve been patiently biding my time for them to have an official release and now it has happened. Here is a brief sampling of two of them, bee and snail. Find the rest on the Sundance site here.
(For some reason they’re not available outside the US, which has caused a bit of a stink on the internets (old-school rights management in a new school world)…someone on boingboing provides a workaround to the original flv’s here)
