The Telekino Times-Picayune

DIM earworm

2011-12-16T16:04:00.000-05:00

Once heard, never forgotten jingle.

Down The Rabbit Hole with R. Stevie Moore

2011-06-04T11:55:00.017-04:00

How did I only find out about R. Stevie Moore a couple of days ago and only by accident? I was trawling youtube looking for cover versions of '96 Tears' and I found this lo-fi, raunchy version that sounded like it was recorded in a bar for ex-cons. So I looked to see what other songs he recorded and I fell down the rabbit hole.

Moore is the son of one of Elvis Presley's key session musicians but he has a back catalogue of pop music deeper than Elvis Costello's; he recorded hundreds of self-produced cassettes of music, in his house - several thousand songs, and the dozens I've sampled have bowled me right over. There are about 100 of them on youtube. The music goes back to the very early seventies but the videos that go with seem to have been made in the eighties, many seemingly edited using 2 VCRs or video toaster technology and topped up with found footage. This is the exact kind of musical discovery I live for - psychotic chord changes, cognitive dissonance between tone and content and a vast catalogue of it too, and all resolutely idiosyncratic and timeless. I remember the first night I was introduced to the music of Serge Gainsbourg. The next day I was scouring the record stores buying up every record of his I could (he had recently died and Polygram had released an excellent career-spanning 9-disc set that I bought in individual installments.) For Moore, it's not so easy. You can buy some of his albums on Amazon, or directly from the man himself) but I find it strange that some millionaire musician/philanthropist hasn't made it his life's work to finance the release of a proper curated boxset, because it's an embarrassment of riches and a missing piece in the history of pop music...

I Not Listening 1974

I Love All The Girls 1974 (technically NSFW)

Sort of Way 1987

I Like To Stay Home 1986

Girl Go 1978

First-Hand 1983

Morricone Trailers

2011-03-18T23:16:00.004-04:00

La Califfa (1971)

Vamos a matar, compañeros (1970)

Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)

Grand Slam (1967)

Irresistblement

2011-02-09T19:06:00.001-05:00

From the golden age of Eastern European variety shows.

World Fashion Creator

2011-02-06T14:29:00.000-05:00

International Dragons

2011-01-27T19:25:00.005-05:00

Japanese trailer.

French one-sheet.

Korean TV spot.

Les Fleurs

2011-01-09T14:08:00.003-05:00

My Essential 100

2010-05-16T20:08:00.004-04:00

there are only 2 qualifications for this personal list:
1. I love these films
2. films that were included on TIFF's 'Essential 100' list are excluded

titles listed in no order

1. The Godfather Part 2 (coppola)
2. Duck Soup (mccarey)
3. A Night at the Opera (wood)
4. Talk To Her (almodovar)
5. The Killer (woo)
6. Two Men and a Wardrobe (polanski - short)
7. Dr. Strangelove (kubrick)
8. Rear Window (hitchcock)
9. Crumb (zwigoff)
10. Jackie Brown (tarantino)
11. Goodfellas (scorsese)
12. The Conversation (coppola)
13. The Celebration (vinterberg)
14. Il Posto (olmi)
15. Comment Je Me Suis Dispute... (desplechin)
16. The Insider (mann)
17. Punch-Drunk Love (anderson)
18. Manhattan (allen)
19. Sullivan's Travels (sturges)
20. La Maman et Le Putain (eustache)
21. Pierrot Le Fou (godard)
22. House of Bamboo (fuller)
23. Night of the Hunter (laughton)
24. Grey Gardens (maysles)
25. David Holzman's Diary (mc bride)
26. Fanny & Alexander (bergman)
27. Welfare (wiseman)
28. The Empire Strikes Back (kershner)
29. Knife in the Water (polanski)
30. Sans Soleil (marker)
31. Scarface (de palma)
32. Touch of Evil (welles)
33. Two-Lane Blacktop (hellman)
34. Bigger Than Life (ray)
35. Les Ordres (brault)
36. The Dead (huston)
37. Rois et Reine (desplechin)
38. Rebels of the Neon God (tsai)
39. Chicken Ranch (bloomfield, sissel)
40. Very Nice, Very Nice (lipsett - short)
41. Antonio Das Mortes (rocha)
42. North By Northwest (hitchcock)
43. A Woman Under The Influence (cassavetes)
44. Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (haynes - short)
45. Le Ballon Rouge (lamorisse - short)
46. Le Samourai (melville)
47. The Manchurian Candidate (frankenheimer)
48. My Neighbor Totoro (miyazaki)
49. A Married Couple (king)
50. Kiss Me, Deadly (aldrich)
51. Year of the Dragon (cimino)
52. Dawn of the Dead (romero)
53. The Wild Bunch (peckinpah)
54. Days of Heaven (malick)
55. All The President's Men (pakula)
56. Prime Cut (ritchie)
57. Paddle To The Sea (mason - short)
58. Central Station (salles)
59. Meshes in the Afternoon (deren - short)
60. Une Femme est Une Femme (godard)
61. Point of Order (de antonio)
62. Toby Dammit (fellini - short)
63. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (nichols)
64. Lolita (kubrick)
65. Beyond The Valley of the Dolls (meyer)
66. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (demy)
67. Spirited Away (miyazaki)
68. The Best Years of Our Lives (wyler)
69. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (spielberg)
70. Double Indemnity (wilder)
71. Harlan County, USA (kopple)
72. White Heat (walsh)
73. Once Upon a Time in the West (leone)
74. Stranger Than Paradise (jarmusch)
75. Fox and His Friends (fassbinder)
76. Sweet Smell of Success (mackendrick)
77. Rosemary’s Baby (polanski)
78. The Magnificent Ambersons (welles)
79. Point Blank (boorman)
80. Red Desert (antonioni)
81. Stroszek (herzog)
82. The Power of Nightmares (curtis)
83. Dekalog (kieslowski)
84. Powers of Ten (eames - short)
85. Buffalo 66 (gallo)
86. Anna (koralnik)
87. Robocop (verhoeven)
88. Broadway Danny Rose (allen)
89. Muhammad Ali: The Greatest (klein)
90. L'Eclisse (antonioni)
91. Shoot The Piano Player (truffaut)
92. Aliens (cameron)
93. To Live and Die in LA (friedkin)
94. Femme Fatale (de palma)
95. The Shining (kubrick)
96. Chameleon Street (harris)
97. Rio Bravo (hawks)
98. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (kaufman)
99. Pigs and Battleships (imamura)
100.Smile (ritchie)

Bringing It On in Tokyo

2010-03-19T20:42:00.002-04:00

Keisuke Kuwata performing a cover of the Hall & Oates song 'Private Eyes' live in Tokyo with the Indigo Girls. This is the epitome of Bringing It On, as far as I am concerned.

Blu-Ray Review: Love Happens (Ultimate Edition)

2010-02-16T13:08:00.027-05:00

Synopsis:

When self-help author Dr. Burke Ryan (Aaron Eckhart) arrives in Seattle to teach a sold-out seminar, he unexpectedly meets florist Eloise Chandler (Jennifer Aniston), the one person who might be able to help him help himself. But will two people who may have met the right person at exactly the wrong time be able to give love a chance? If they can, they'll find that sometimes, when you least expect it…love happens.

Audio / Video (4.5 out of 5)

This Ultimate Edition of Love Happens is sleek to the say the least! Upon initial boot-up, the disc displays a computerized HUD with a map of North America. If your Blu-ray player is profile 2.0 compatible and connected to the internet, the HUD displays your location, the time of day, time zone, the current weather in your location, and the name of your ISP. Clicking "Continue" takes you to the disc's main menu, where you can access the feature as well as a ton of extras.

Through the magic of seamless branching, this dual-layered 50-gigabyte BD contains both the 109-minute theatrical and 105-minute "inflight entertainment" cuts of the movie, as well as the 135 minute "International edition" (released only in select Latin American markets, and the Phillipines). But that's not all. Choosing "Select Version" from the disc's main menu, highlighting the asterisks at the bottom of the expanding menu, and entering the code "5558345" (Eckhart's character's cellphone number) will add a "Play All Editions" option to the menu. This allows you to watch all three versions of the film at once via split-screen (the shorter cuts both play at respectively slower speeds so they will all play out to the international cut's 135 minute running time.) The 1080p VC-1 transfer on all three versions of the movie offers a stark improvement over this month's previous DVD release of the theatrical cut. Color accuracy and black levels are superior, as is detail. The image is pristine, showing no signs of dirt or damage. Unfortunately, the transfer suffers from an overuse of digital noise reduction, resulting in a smooth, glossy image that is a tad weak on textural details (especially in close-ups) and suffers from minor moiré effects. Whatever the case, Love Happens ultimately delivers the kind of stable image that squarely positions the next-gen HD formats above over-the-air high-def broadcasts, which often can't handle 'meet-cute' sequences and suffer from excessive pixelization.

The default audio option is an absolutely bombastic DTS-HD lossless mix in 6.1 surround. Fine detail and spatial imaging are excellent. The dating montage sequences deliver the noise in the form of elevator bell-rings, champagne corks popping and slamming car doors. The mix is a huge improvement over the standard, vanilla DTS track on the original DVD. And both the EX and ES tracks benefit from the placement of the extra surround center channel; granted, pans across the rear soundfield are not as seamless or abundant as on, say, Must Love Dogs, but their presence at all is impressive for a remix. Other audio options include a Dolby 5.1 EX track (in English), Dolby stereo surround tracks in French, Spanish, Korean and Brazilian Portuguese, a special headphone mix in English, a Dolby 5.1 TheaterVision option that includes an audio description for the visually impaired, and an isolated 'music and effects only' track. Subtitle options include English, Spanish, Dutch, German, Malay, Korean, Big 5 Chinese, French, and English for the deaf and hard-of-hearing. The International Cut is presented with English, Spanish and Tagalog audio and subtitle options.

(Note: some users have experienced poor image quality when viewing this Blu-ray on the Samsung first-generation BD-P1000 Blu-ray disc player when connected via the deck's HDMI output. Apparently these problems, including decreased resolution and diluted color reproduction, are largely corrected when switching to the BD-P1000's component outputs. It has also been confirmed that both Samsung and Sony have been made aware of the issue, and the problem most likely stems from a faulty internal scaler chip in the BD-P1000. Samsung is reportedly working to fix the problem on future shipments of the unit, and plans to soon issue a firmware patch upgrade to correct the problem on current players.)

Extras (5 out of 5)

It is in the extras that this Blu-Ray edition of Love Happens really shines. Besides two commentary tracks from director Brandon Camp (both feature-length and scene-specific tracks), there is also a commentary track bringing together over 60 of the actors (pretty much everyone who had a speaking part gives insight on their performance methods), a commentary from director of photography Eric Edwards that serves as a cinematography masterclass in itself, over forty deleted/extended scenes, a feature-length making-of documentary by Laurent Bouzereau documenting the film's nearly three-year long incubation process, a one-hour documentary on the founding of the city of Seattle (the film's location) and an informative featurette focusing on the painstaking digital work that went into making Jennifer Aniston's hair look so lustrous (and natural!) on-screen (yes, computers were involved!). Rounding out the list of featurettes are a short doc on the preparation of the inflight entertainment edit of the film, a brief biography of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (who developed the '5 stages of grief' model on which the plot here hinges) and a special round-table discussion on the influence of this film on contemporary American culture, recorded at the Museum of Modern Art in November 2009 featuring pop sociologist Malcolm Gladwell, Professor of Clinical Psychology at Columbia University, Dr. George Bonanno, and Chief of Investigative Projects for ABC News, Christopher E. Isham. Twelve television spots, three trailers and the little-seen red-band trailer are also included, as well as an international poster gallery and downloadable PDFs of nearly 75 international newspaper reviews and thinkpieces about the film thrown in for good measure. In all, there are nearly nine hours of bonus material included on this disc.

Final Thoughts:

I happen to love Love Happens, and with such a wealth of extra material and three different editions of the film to choose from, you might as well get rid of all your other Blu-Ray films, pop this disc in the player, weld the tray shut, tie your remote control to your wrist, and never leave your house again. Love Happens has redefined home entertainment.

Tirez Pas Sur L'Ambiance: Tuca

2009-12-02T15:36:00.006-05:00

Tuca is a personal favourite musical artist of mine - she is utterly unknown but as I plunged into the investigations of my two main music obsessions of the last few years - sixties/seventies pop from France and Brazil - her name kept coming up.

Tuca put out a couple of records in Brazil in the sixties but then decamped to France, fleeing the dictatorship that took particular trouble to crack down on the nation's artists. In one year (1971) she arranged and played on two records I would take with me to that mythical desert island... Nara Leão's Dez Años Depois (a two-record set of Jobim songs) and Françoise Hardy's La Question (Tuca is also credited as a co-writer on this, Hardy's best record).

Both records are immaculately produced - spare Brazilian acoustic instrumentation captured in the air of a Parisian recording studio... to hear them both together is to realize that Tuca was probably what made the records as great as they are, which was confirmed once I tracked down a copy of her final solo record, also recorded in France, Dracula I Love You (1974), which is steeped in her unorthdox approach (bossa nova guitar enhanced with both symphonic and electronic effects). She died a couple of years later, back in Brazil, her death attributed to an extreme weight loss.

Here's the first track from Dracula I Love You...

Legalize It!

2009-10-31T13:37:00.002-04:00

He's a complicated man, and no one understands him but his woman... Serge Gainsbourg.

Does anyone know where I can score some Cannabis? I mean on DVD, dig?

Ukabino Peach Girl

2009-07-30T20:36:00.000-04:00

Un Hombre Muy Respetado

2009-03-08T20:12:00.002-04:00

Los Walkers covering the Kinks on Canal 13.

Hausu!!!

2009-02-24T22:44:00.003-05:00

What? Still not at all interested?

If I had seen this in 1977 I would have been scarred for life.

Playing It Kool

2009-02-03T23:04:00.001-05:00

The Girl With You

2009-01-28T20:13:00.003-05:00

Françoise Hardy, unplugged.

Tally-Ho

2009-01-28T20:03:00.000-05:00

Forgotten Sci-Fi Openers

2009-01-28T14:53:00.000-05:00

Ginty!

2008-12-30T03:15:00.000-05:00

Bonus Ginterview:

What Can I Tell You About Bs.As.?

2008-11-23T15:32:00.010-05:00

1. This music video is actually a documentary.

2. The subway system (el subte) is designed like a fork, with all the lines of the city converging in a central focal point right around the Plaza de la Republica (the famous obelisko). But since the last time I was here they have opened a new line (the H line) that cuts down the middle of town and allows one to take a minor shortcut. The stations in this new line are super modern yet the trains that run through are the rickety ones found in all the other lines. Some of the trains rumble so heavily through these historical tunnels that you feel the train might actually be wrenched apart while you're en route.

3. Part one of Soderbergh's epic about Che Guevara is already playing here, with giant posters of Benicio Del Toro all over town (they might be saving the downer second half of the project until the new year.) There are also posters everywhere for High School Musical 3, which will probably be the biggest Argentine box office hit of all time, as Zack Efron seems to possess the standards of genetic perfection that, outside of Argentina, can only be achieved in science-fiction or at Paul Verhoeven's casting calls.

4. I saw a half-hour show yesterday morning that was all footage of football goals scored, perhaps last week, perhaps all season. One shot after another of a striker scoring and the announcer screaming GOOOAAALLL!!!!!! for thirty seconds. Rinse and repeat.

5. I went to see Quantum of Solace in Palermo last night, shortly after watching a free performance by the Berlin Philharmonic in the centre of town (again, in front of the obelisko). When I bought my ticket and went in, the usher showed me to my precise seat. This might be a North American thing, but assigned seating to go see a movie seems to be a bit much, especially in an age where the film will not only be available in three months on DVD, but also can be found immediately on the sidewalk after coming out of the theatre, in bootleg form.

6. TV in Buenos Aires is insane. The hotel I'm staying at has about 75 channels, about 65 of which are Latin American variants of all the major American satellite channels. One of the tawdriest news channels, Cronicas TV, is aptly-named because I think Dr. Dre is the director of news operations there - if someone is lucky enough to catch a kid in the favelas firing his weapon off, they will show it in an endless loop and set it to music. There is a channel for each of the main American media conglomerates, plus an MGM Channel. The Latino TCM shows some movies, but mostly Spanish dubs of Get Smart and Kojak. I thought Argentine TV would be way raunchier than it actually is. The local channels are very low-budget by comparison, though they openly mimic the graphics of CNN, right down to the exact onscreen fonts. But one thing I can't do in Toronto is get up in the morning and start the day off with a one-two combo of Gilmore Girls and Veronica Mars reruns and stumble home to watch a chapter of Kieslowski's Dekalog, all of it subtitled en castellano... in Toronto you can only really depend on seeing a rerun of Everybody Loves Raymond while channel surfing at any given moment. By the way, I don't love Raymond and I want to go on the record with this.

Volver a Buenos Aires

2008-11-11T20:14:00.004-05:00

Telekino is off to Argentina for another round of primavera. I leave on the 19th and get back on December 4. I switch planes in Chile - I will be have to kill four hours roaming the Santiago airport before legging it to Buenos Aires. Last time I stayed at a minimalist boutique hotel in Palermo Viejo but this time I want to hotel-hop and spend a few days in a few different barrios. I start off at a bed and breakfast in Boedo, a currently resurgent neighbourhood that was a hotbed of tango and leftist politics in the thirties. Then I move over to Recoleta, kind of the Upper West Side of Buenos Aires, to stay at an old hotel with stone lions at the entrance and an elevator that goes Bang! when it descends to the main level, i.e. my kind of place. Haven't yet booked the hotel for the last leg of the trip - I trust that I will be able to find another interesting place to stay when I'm there.

More bulletins to come.

Official Proclamation

2008-11-11T20:09:00.002-05:00

As of November 2008, it is decreed that all arthouse films with a female protagonist must be marketed identically in this country's newspapers. None of this 'other kind of poster' bullshit. This is the design that elicits the most effective response.

Like a Hurricane

2008-11-05T22:48:00.005-05:00

Paul Lynde hijacks the Channel 13 news team in Toledo, Ohio in 1978. One of my favourite inexplicable slabs of television history... I got hammered just watching this.

Bang Bang

2008-11-02T14:22:00.003-05:00

The definitive version of course.

You could always count on Mina to do this song justice.

A French-Vietnamese cover by Thanh Lan is pretty awesome...

Equipe 84 did a hot psychedelic Italo version one evening on RAI...

Umm, can someone please put Raquel Welch's TV variety specials out on DVD?

My Name Is Potato

2008-10-21T20:56:00.001-04:00

Southern Nights

2008-10-10T19:45:00.004-04:00

Currently working through a particularly unshakeable earworm - Allen Toussaint's 'Southern Nights' (1975).

Glen Campbell took it to number one on the pop and country charts in 1977 - here he is performing it live in short shorts, with a little help from a friend.

Compare the hit version to the Toussaint original - with eerie lead vocals run through a Leslie speaker...

Meanwhile the Lawrence Welk version from 1979 makes the song sound like Huey Long might have used it as his campaign theme in the thirties...

NBC in the BA

2008-09-13T22:27:00.007-04:00

Stanley White vs. Joey Tai

2008-09-13T22:24:00.002-04:00

Galack Obama

2008-08-31T01:43:00.003-04:00

Perhaps the Sci-Fi Channel should consider sending some reporters out to cover the GOP Convention in the Twin Cities this week. I mean, I know Battlestar Galactica is supposed to be a grand metaphor for the Iraq war and all, but come on - cylons running for president is laying it on a bit thick.

This election is the first between two nominees born outside of the continental United States (Barack was born in Hawaii; McCain, Panama) so why not add a VP pick who lives next door to Russia?

I can see the Ivan (Jason?) Reitman movie now - the 72 year president dies a few months after the inauguration and suddenly a 44-year-old Alaskan über-Soccer Mom becomes leader of the free world. With sexy results.

(Thanks, Ken!)

Frankenheimer Trailers

2008-08-14T23:38:00.000-04:00

John Frankenheimer was one of the great black & white directors - in fact, I took his advice from an interview with him I saw once and checked out some of his cheesy eighties pulp like 52 Pick-Up with Roy Scheider and Dead Bang with Don Johnson but I turned the colour off on my TV; he said they were much better viewed in monochrome and yes, they are. He was also the master of the DVD director's commentary track. Too bad he never recorded one for Black Sunday...

Very disturbing trailer for The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

The most depressing movie ever made - Seconds (1966)

Cinerama-hyping TV trailer for the bloated Grand Prix (with Françoise Hardy!) (1966)

Am I the only one who prefers French Connection II (1975) to the original?

JLG & ACJ

2008-08-08T14:54:00.003-04:00

More 'Waters of March' discoveries - here's a montage obviously made with love and some consideration.

Águas de Março

2008-08-08T00:33:00.003-04:00

The sacred.

The profane.

The ABC Movie Of The Week

2008-08-05T22:59:00.006-04:00

Mary Tyler Moore font slathered in Douglas Trumbull visual effects set to the music of Burt Bacharach... does it get any more seventies than this? I guess if you were to watch the clip while wearing orange Foster Grants after stirring your fondue...

Avant et Apres: Nino Ferrer

2008-07-29T14:18:00.005-04:00

The mid-sixties yé-yé look

Disciplined Salut les Copains crowd enjoying the rave-up? Check.
Ray Davies meets Jacques Dutronc stage presence? Check.
Microphone framed by substantial sideburns of singer? Check.
Ruffled cuffs on Hammond organ? Check.
Belting out a song about pickles? Check.

The mid-seventies burnout look

Giant, foamy Civil War beard? Check.
The fashion sense of Mike Love at his most attenuated (beard-hat combo adorning gaunt skullface)? Check.
Walking around a waxy jungle diorama while ignoring a beautiful woman? Check.

Basking In Bacharach

2008-06-23T23:35:00.005-04:00

Vedettes Sur 45

2008-06-23T14:48:00.002-04:00

All I know is Françoise is on the charts and I think she placed ahead of 'More Zan Zis'. The year is 1982.

Hypercolour

2008-05-30T20:42:00.006-04:00

Awesome scene from the awesome Sholay!

This scene from Mehboob Ki Mehndi is pastelrific.

Sydney Pollack - R.I.P.

2008-05-28T13:57:00.005-04:00

This clip would be even better if it was the Sydney Pollack from Husbands and Wives or Eyes Wide Shut dressing you down for preferring to watch films that have been formatted from their original aspect ratio to fit your TV... "What the hell is the matter with you? Don't you realize you lose 50 fucking percent of the widescreen image when you watch this shit in pan and scan? You infant!"

Widescreen title sequence for Three Days of the Condor... avec Data70 et Dave Grusin.

And the master in action...

He will be missed...

Whither The Weather?

2008-05-28T00:04:00.002-04:00

"It Even Looks Like Freedom."

2008-05-27T23:28:00.003-04:00

Toronto Hulk

2008-05-23T23:09:00.007-04:00

The Incredible Hulk wreaking havoc on Yonge Street, beating tanks up in front of The Big Slice and swatting shoulder-fired missiles down on the U of T campus promises to be one of the highlights of a long hot Toronto summer. My friend Dov and I thought long and hard about other amazing Toronto-centric sequences that no doubt will await us in the multiplex...

The Hulk having dinner at Cafe Diplomatico and then going to Soundscapes

The Hulk walking everywhere or on his bike wearing a helmet with wings on it

The Hulk riding a paddle boat at Ontario Place

The Hulk at H&M trying on low-waist jeans

The Hulk at the Brass Rail

The Hulk in K-Town ordering another garbage can full of kimchi

The Hulk turning Play De Record into Break De Record

The Hulk getting rejected by the NFB

The Hulk in Yorkville tickling young ladies passing by with tree branches

The Hulk ordering a triple-triple at Timmy's and rolling up the rim of the actual store

The Hulk getting in on that 2 day rebate on his April Metropass because of the TTC strike

The Hulk hanging around the Central Reference Library waiting to check his hotmail on the free computers

The Hulk starting a facebook group to promote his DJ night in Kensington Market

The Hulk renting an apartment on Roncesvalles, inspiring a hulkaccino drink at his local fair trade coffee spot

The Hulk producing an award-winning season at Soulpepper after being named the new Artistic Director

Toronto Fantasyland

2008-05-18T23:55:00.003-04:00

The thing is, it sort of was this awesome when I was very young.

I Will Never Stop Loving You, Quebec.

2008-05-14T21:23:00.003-04:00

Salute To Ontario

2008-05-12T23:28:00.002-04:00

Dave Le Diamant: Juste Un Gigolo

2008-05-12T22:41:00.006-04:00

This eighties interview with quote machine David Lee Roth from the French Enfants Du Rock is greatly enhanced by the gallic touch of the giggling interviewer, the subtitles and the video toaster effects.

Aberturas da Telenovelas Brasileiras

2008-05-12T21:01:00.008-04:00

These opening credits from seventies Brazilian telenovelas are FANTASTIC in every way.

Miami Vice Will Continue

2008-05-11T21:13:00.005-04:00

I have the first three seasons of Miami Vice on DVD and they are awesome enough, but I feel that this is a show that should have been released with the original commercial breaks of the eighties. I remember a great night out many years ago that ended with us all over at someone's house watching their roommates' 6-hour VHS tape of Vice episodes with the original ads, and night turned into day...

Since then I have made a point of searching Goodwills and Value Villages for old VHS tapes marked Miami Vice - that was a show that people tended to record weekly on a timer and fill up a tape.

Anyway, here is are some prime Vice commercial breaks to prove my point, from a Pittsburgh NBC affiliate.

Mr. Freedom Isn't Free

2008-05-10T23:42:00.004-04:00

Next week Eclipse is putting out The Delirious Fictions of William Klein on DVD - never dreamed that Mr. Freedom would receive a Criterion-level restoration and release, but here it is, along with Who Are You Polly Magoo? and The Model Couple, three over-the-top satires by one of the masters of photography. Here is a tribute to Mr. Freedom that should wet your whistle.

Canadian Ad Agencies On The Rampage

2008-05-10T01:43:00.007-04:00

Some of these ads make that Lee Majors/Mitchum Canuxplotation classic Agency look like a documentary.

The Original Lady Sovereign

2008-05-07T22:30:00.002-04:00

Aretha Franklin takes Manhattan, clearly.

Primavera

2008-05-06T23:19:00.005-04:00

Tullio De Piscopo brings it on, full Stop Bajon. This song is like potato chips for me these days. I heard this song again down in Argentina when I went a bit overboard buying vinyl - loading up on trashy disco compilations from the eighties put out by a DJ named Pato C. More on him later.

Good luck only listening to this song once.

Sloganeering

2008-05-04T21:33:00.002-04:00

If this were only the original trailer...

Question Me An Answer

2008-04-16T11:42:00.006-04:00

Though it's probably a bad, bad movie, I'm dying to get my chance to see the 1973 remake of Frank Capra's Lost Horizon, a prime example of the disconnect between the Hollywood Studios and the movie audience of the seventies. And I don't want to see it so much because of the moviemaking but rather to see how the songs are deployed in context of the film, as this is the only original motion picture musical written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David; in fact its colossal failure was the beginning of the end of their partnership. I bought the soundtrack on a whim a few years ago, partly because the movie was so famous for being bad and partly because of its garish gatefold cover of the steps of Shangri-La. I didn't actually listen to the record until I went on a huge Bacharach bender and tried to sample everything he did. (Another fantastic discovery along these lines was Bacharach and David's score for Promises, Promises on Broadway, another remake, this time of The Apartment, with Jerry Orbach. The clip below is a mindblowing number from the 1968 Tony Awards of the most uncharacteristic song from the show.)

This is a clip from a Bacharach TV special made around the time of Lost Horizon and Burt seems pretty enthusiastic about the project and working with a children's choir (was there ever a man who seemed more comfortable in his own skin?) but in a more recent interview he painted the experience as a nightmare - perhaps the reception it received got under his skin over the years.

But it's a terrific score, anyway, considering Sally Kellerman sings a few of the songs. I would have been classified as a "heavy user" of this soundtrack a couple of years ago - I played it a few times a week, not my usual practise. Of course there is no DVD of the film, even as a cash-in on Bacharach's cult status. How happy I am to be able to present this appreciation of one of the highlights of Lost Horizon courtesy of two hilarious Dutchmen.

Senior Moment

2008-03-28T21:29:00.006-04:00

The first thought I had when I saw the final one-sheet for this summer's Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Meth was: hasn't anything happened to me in the last eighteen years? It looks exactly like the other posters in the series, in the sense that it looks like it came off a template of eighties action movie poster design. I will repeat my grousing of last year. Harrison Ford is now older than Sean Connery was when he played his father in the last one. But Connery was supposed to be a senior in that film...I highly doubt Ford's role is to be that of the grumpy old man in this one. Please let there not be a shirtless scene.

This seems to be a bit of a step back for Spielberg. I think it's a bit old-fashioned to continue to knock him for being Mr. Blockbuster, a non-risk-taking director who, to quote from an anti-Spielberg essay written by Crispin Glover (sic), “wafted his putrid stench upon our culture, a culture he helped homogenize and propagandize” (this from the guy who signed up for Like Mike and Charlie's Angels). I myself probably skip as many of his new releases as I see but I cannot take cheap shots at his body of work or his skills as a filmmaker. Minority Report was top-notch and his last film, Munich, even with the WTF sequence towards the end, is a masterpiece that time will be very kind to; maybe someday people will wish it had won Best Picture instead of fucking Crash. I know he pops between these lofty heights and The Terminal, but the career work is worthy of a Cinematheque series as much as that of Lynch or Scorsese... let the comments flamewar begin.

Crackhouse Multiplex

2008-03-02T19:41:00.001-05:00

Another great moment from the history of Cannon Films - from the British release of their late eighties thriller Crack House, here is star Richard Roundtree introducing the film with a public service announcement about not doing crack, while settling back in a teensy, empty little multiplex theatre with springy seats.

Eastern Provinces

2008-02-28T20:50:00.009-05:00

My friend Gordon informed me that Juno has just opened in South Korea, and is the first Canadian film that he can remember playing there since The Red Violin (didn't you guys get A History of Violence or The Barbarian Invasions? What about Les Boys?)

The Genies, the Canadian Oscars, are on next week, and Juno, despite being shot in Vancouver with a Canadian director, star and crew, is ineligible for any awards as the financing was American, whereas Cronenberg's Eastern Promises, with American and Australian leads, a London backdrop and an British crew, was partly financed by Canadians and therefore enjoys 12 nominations.

This nationalistic dilemma could have been addressed by the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences if they had deigned to nominate the soundtrack to Juno for a Juno award this spring...could this be a job for a write-in ballot campaign?

I took the photo to your upper right outside a video store in Buenos Aires - it was prominently displayed on the racks in most of the rental shops I checked out...

Walking With Lee

2008-02-21T21:30:00.000-05:00

Let's take a walk down Valhallavägen...

M.I.A.

2008-02-10T12:47:00.001-05:00

Star-filter-saturated musical number from 1982's Disco Dancer - the sample may ring your bell.

Romney, We Hardly Knew Ye...

2008-02-07T20:49:00.002-05:00

Well, Mitt Romney is out. He said he's leaving the presidential race for the good of the nation, because if he was in any way responsible for the GOP losing the election that would be tantamount to giving the terrorists the upper hand. This is all psuedo-bad news for all the right-wing talk radio blowhards who have been backing his fading candidacy, saying they would vote for Hillary Clinton if McCain was their party's standard-bearer, purportedly because she's more conservative than he is, even though they must know that raging against the ruling Clintons is actually their bread-and-butter.

Well, David Letterman should be good tonight - his nightly skewering of Romney has been a spectacular run of scorched-earth hilarity - and further proof that Mitt's a rich man, as all these wicked burns have been at his expense.

Don't worry about Mitt, if this presidential thing doesn't work out he can always go back to playing Victor Newman on The Young and the Restless. Mitt Romney doesn't look like a president, he looks like a ringmaster. Mitt looks like a guy wearing a golf shirt in an Eddie Bauer catalogue. He looks like the desk clerk at a Peninsula Hotel who tells you your room's not ready. Mitt looks like the guy at a party who gives you his card. He looks like a tennis pro at a restricted country club. He looks like a Jet Blue pilot who comes out to greet the passengers during the delay. Mitt Romney looks like the guy who says to the contestant, 'We're out of time, can you come back tomorrow?'

The Florida retirees didn't go for that Mitt Romney, either. He reminded them of a guy who tries to get a hold of their nest egg. He reminded them of a guy who sells subdivisions in the Everglades. He reminded them of the guy who pitches overpriced cemetery plots. He reminded them of the pharmacist who doesn't accept their prescription plan.

How about that Mitt Romney, am I right about this guy? I mean, he looks like the guy on TV selling life insurance, doesn't he? He looks like that guy on a Father's Day ad for Norelco. He looks like a guy on cable urging you to tap your home equity. He looks like an American President in a Canadian movie. He looks like the medical expert in a Victoria Principal infomercial. He looks like the spokesman for senior lending networks. He looks like the guy who promises accident victims he'll get the money they deserve. He looks like the guy on the 'Just For Men' bottle. I mean, this guy looks like he'd be selling fruit dehydrators on cable. He looks like the guy who tells you how to buy real estate with no money down. He looks like a cosmetic surgeon who gets ambushed on 60 Minutes. He looks like the photo that comes with the frame... By the way, if Mitt Romney is elected, he'll be the first president ever sworn in on a copy of GQ.

What about that Mitt Romney? He looks like a guy who would run a seminar on condo flipping. He looks like the neighbor who spends way too much time on his lawn. Mitt Romney looks like he is the closer at a Cadillac dealership. Mitt Romney looks like that guy on the golf course in the Levitra commercial.

We're all very proud of Mitt. He's the only presidential candidate to come from the Channel 2 news team. Let's throw it over to Mitt and see what's going on in the weather. He looks like the guy that would approve your check at a supermarket. He looks like the piano player at an upscale department store. He looks like a guy who winks when he shakes your hand. He looks like a guy who is married to an over the hill actress. He looks like a guy who would brag about his cholesterol. He looks like the owner of the steakhouse who keeps interrupting dinner to find out how things are going...

He looks like a lawyer who advertises on the back of a bus. This guy, he looks like an American actor who's popular in Germany. He looks like a contractor you'd have to sue, this Mitt Romney. He looks like the neighbor with the neat garage, that Mitt Romney. You remember Mitt Romney from the '80s? He was Mr. Goodwrench.

Mitt looks like a guy modeling briefs on a package of underwear. Mitt looks like a guy who said he met Marge on eHarmony. Mitt looks like a guy who goes to the restroom when the check comes. Mitt looks like a guy who tries to sign you up for Herbalife. He looks like a golf commentator fired for an off-the-cuff remark...

Air Scopitone

2008-01-30T09:52:00.000-05:00

You Are Now Free To Move About The Cabin

2008-01-26T19:59:00.001-05:00

Baby, It's Cold Outside

2008-01-21T00:14:00.001-05:00

What better way to hot things up on an icy-cold winter's night with some lurid imagery from the fevered imagination of Harold Robbins?

Trailer for The Carpetbaggers (1964).

Fashion show from The Adventurers (1970).

Soviet Oscars!

2008-01-15T00:01:00.000-05:00

One thing that has been interesting about the writers' strike in the States is how management's refusal to get back to the bargaining table has wound up imposing a quasi-Soviet gloom on the entertainment industry. Sunday night's televised Golden Globes ceremony was kind of like a 1988 Cold War awards show with a Hollywood touch, with no jokes and glammed-up TASS reporters as the presenters. (Come on, weren't there any right-wing movie stars with enough cojones to stride through a picket line and rip open some envelopes?) It's amazing that the industry is choosing to go forward with awards season in the midst of the strike, pretending that this dourness is the best possible way to do things instead of just sending out a press release like in wartime. The old adage must be true: The Show Must Go On.

Here is clip from Hollywood Foreign Press Association's Televised Conference / Awards Ceremony - category is Best Original Musical Song From Feature-Length Movie Film For Theatres. Loving usage of oppressive roomtone.

Will the Academy Awards be this amazing? Will they fly in Gorbachev to give out the Best Picture award? Will they finally give Sergei Eisenstein his special lifetime achievement Oscar?

This Is Not Your Mother's CBC

2008-01-14T21:09:00.001-05:00

Says the latest full-page ad touting the launch of the Mothercorp's Winter Prime-Time Schedule, and they are not kidding. I guess the bad news is CBC 2.0 won't be bringing us anything along the lines of SCTV, The Kids In The Hall or Donald Brittain-calibre documentaries, then.

CBC has recently seemed to me to be about three or four years behind most TV trends. Their biggest ratings hit of late, Little Mosque on the Prairie, bears more than a passing resemblance to Corner Gas, a successful CBC-esque show airing on the private broadcaster for three or four years now.

This season, CBC has:

- their own 24 (The Border, with lots of Kiefer-meets-David Caruso squinting through Raybans, jittery shots of computer monitors, gunmetal grey interrogation rooms, dialogue revolving around the phrases "intel" and "satellite uplink" and gunfights in parking lots with shutter-strobe photography.)

- their own Footballers' Wives (MVP: The Secret Lives of Hockey Wives): bare bums in the locker room and flashes of boobies after 9 PM! Here's a telling quote from one of the actresses on the show (italics mine): “I remember my jaw dropping when the script for the pilot had a sex scene that involved double-teaming. It never shows that happening, but I remember going, ‘What? For the CBC, a threesome is pretty risqué!'”

- a Reality Bites-esque Gen-Y comedy called J-Pod billed wincingly as "a full terabyte of dysfunctional" but which at least has Alan Thicke as a sleazy dad. That still won't be enough, though.

- their own wacky one-woman Sex In The City called Sophie (itself a remake of a Quebec sitcom) which seems to have incorporated every Cosmo cliché imaginable without irony: the gay best friend, the domineering mother, etc. The tagline for the show is "And the craziness hasn't even begun!", which I imagine they can use for the entire run of the series.

Well, at least it's writers strike reruns in the States and that will allow these shows a rare chance to be seen. And whether or not it all works out, I guess this means maybe in 2010 the CBC will have an ersatz Desperate Housewives or Entourage to push, perhaps while mocking the kind of shows they are running now.

Hey, and what's wrong with the old CBC anyway? It was awesome! I think the braintrust ignores this at their peril.

Write What You Know, Brisseau

2008-01-09T18:35:00.002-05:00

The ever-shrinking world of French filmmaker Jean-Claude Brisseau has just shrunk a bit further... in 2002 Brisseau made the deeply cynical male-gaze extravaganza Secret Things, an erotic thriller about two women using their sexuality to move up the corporate ladder. Upon the film's release, Brisseau was charged by two actresses who auditioned for the film with sexual assault (he had asked them to masturbate before his camera as part of the audition, you see). He was found guilty and received a suspended sentence.

His follow-up film, 2006's The Exterminating Angels, is an even sleazier film about a film director who makes a film about female eroticism, hiring young actresses to audition by masturbating in front of his camera who then turn around and accuse him of sexual assault. And lo and behold, last month Brisseau was accused by two more actresses who said he sexually assaulted them during the auditions for this newest film.

Brisseau, who in real life looks like the Paramount Pictures mountain if it wore a leather jacket, denies these latest charges. This is just a guess, but I think Brisseau's next film will be about a filmmaker making a film about a filmmaker making a film about female eroticism who hires women to masturbate in front of the camera who will then accuse him of sexual assault, only to be charged himself with sexual assault.

(Thanks, Andréa, for the update - I'm now obsessed.)

Buenos Aires In Trailer Form

2008-01-09T11:22:00.001-05:00

Upchuck Taylors

2008-01-05T17:34:00.003-05:00

This might be the most tasteless tribute to Kurt Cobain yet (and that's saying something); this spring Converse, in honour of their 100th anniversary, will be issuing a limited edition line of Kurt Cobain one-star sneakers.

Okay, granted, they are slightly similar to the pair he was wearing when he killed himself, but let's not dwell on that too much. Besides, never underestimate the power of the Insensitivity Dollar: it's a big market, and his estate is wise to capitalize on it.

Is David O. Russell The American Nostradamus?

2008-01-04T16:24:00.001-05:00

I'm starting to wonder.

In 1999 he makes Three Kings, a period piece when it was made that also acts as a commentary on current US involvement in the Middle East. To wit:

And if that wasn't prescient enough for you...

Then a few years later he makes an existentialist post-9/11 screwball comedy called, of all things, I Heart Huckabees. Now go turn on CNN.

So if you're wondering what will happen in America in 2012, here's the synopsis of his next project, Nailed (now in pre-production, according to the IMDB:

A political satire in which Jessica Biel plays Sammy Joyce, a socially awkward receptionist who gets hit in the head with a nail in an accident. This triggers her wild, sexual urges which causes her to fight in Washington for the rights of the bizarrely injured. She meets an immoral congressman (Jake Gyllenhaal) who takes advantage of her sex drive and capitalizes on her crusade as Joyce heads into her own career in politics.

You can't deal with his infinite nature, can you, America?

French Pop Holiday

2008-01-02T18:42:00.000-05:00

This goes out to those who are still enjoying the holidays...Sheila et ses amis...

Euro Gonna Lose That Girl

2007-12-29T23:09:00.000-05:00

Pyongyang Department Store 1989

2007-12-28T21:31:00.000-05:00

S.P.E.C.T.R.E. Vision

2007-12-21T18:46:00.001-05:00

Here's the juiciest bit of casting news I've heard in a while... my friend Gord told me today that not only is my favourite modern actor, Mathieu Amalric (Kings and Queen, The Diving Bell and The Butterfly) going to be the villain in the upcoming (and currently untitled) James Bond film (sic), but rumour has it he's also going to be playing the ultimate Bond baddie - Ernst Goddamn Stavro Fucking Blofeld (triple sic)!!!

Every few years, the Broccoli family try to get me to see the latest James Bond film, usually tantalizing me by casting amazing contemporary actors as the new Bond villain; sometimes it works (Christopher Walken in A View To A Kill) and sometimes it doesn't (Robert Carlyle in The World is Not Enough). And I can tell you right now that I have mentally already bought my ticket for this one, if only so I can reconcile these two trailers in my brain.

Actually...this Scopitone might help tie everything together...

Going To The Movies In Buenos Aires

2007-12-19T00:00:00.001-05:00

The best part about seeing a film when you're travelling is if you luck out and pick a good one to go see, you get sucked into it and when it's over, you walk out of the lobby and are suddenly reminded that you are in another city, not your own.

I saw two films when I was in Buenos Aires. My friend Matias and I had to arrange to get a cab to take us all the way out to a shopping centre in the Bs. As. 'burbs to see Beowulf: La Leyenda (in 3-D IMAX! With IMAX-sized Spanish subtitles!) The tickets cost 14 pesos - or about $4.75 Canadian. You could bring beer into the theatre as well...beer and IMAX goggles, plus the trailer for Soy Leyenda!

On my last weekend in town I went to the Palermo multiplex down the street from the massive Alto Palermo shopping centre to take in a trasnoche screening of Gone Baby Gone. A trasnoche, film-lovers, is a movie-going tradition on the weekends in Buenos Aires - shows start between 1 and 1:30 a.m and are PACKED! You have dinner at 10, maybe an ice cream afterwards, then you roll over to the trasnoche, and THEN you go out clubbing. You can get popcorn either sugared (the local preference) or salted (no such thing as buttered popcorn in this town either way). And no Diet Coke - round here it's called Coke Light. Got to see some amazing Argentine commercials plus the trailer for P.T. Anderson's upcoming Habrá Sangre. Except for kids films, all international movies are in their original language with subtitles en Castellano. Argentinian films for the most part play in their own cinemas.

I couldn't find any of the massive theatres that used to exist in Buenos Aires in their original state; the Monumental, right down on Lavalle (the pedestrian tourist trap) used to have 3,000 seats (you can get a glimpse of it in its former glory in my previous post, at the start of one of the 60's Sandro trailers I linked to) but is now a run-down movie pit - they were playing Supercool, Michael Clayton and El Asesinato De Jesse James Por El Cobarde Robert Ford, plus two films that haven't even come out in North America, a thriller by Andrew Lau starring Richard Gere and some John Travolta / Salma Hayek period piece...

I learned something about Toronto while I was travelling as well, a lesson that left my city in the general deficit column. A small Romanian film like 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days wins the Palme D'Or, and that fall it quietly pops up in Toronto and plays at the Cumberland for a couple of weeks, before winding up at the back of the Carlton for a couple more weeks. Meanwhile in Buenos Aires, the very same film plays at every multiplex downtown, often with giant ads for the engagement in the lobby, and when I went over to the Palermo on a Saturday night at midnight, the 1:30 a.m. show was already sold out. What are we to make of this?

(See my modest set of Buenos Aires movie theatre pictures here...)

The Proof!

2007-12-17T18:29:00.001-05:00

Proof they knew I was coming down to Argentina!

This One's For Las Chicas

2007-12-10T18:22:00.001-05:00

This report is filed from a locutorio in Buenos Aires. Locutorios are internet spots that are all over the city - in Buenos Aires, even the act of surfing the net all day can be part of your active social life.

I'm here because my vacation ends tomorrow and I'm on my way into a Musimundo store (there are no HMVs in Buenos Aires) to grab a couple of DVDs of Sandro, a living legend, a man I had never heard of before until I arrived here. He was all over the papers because he had recently turned 60 and was on yet another comeback trail (his last comeback apparently had him hooked up to an oxygen tank on stage but that wasn't enough to keep him from being snowed under by women's underwear).

But sometimes you achieve something that gets you buried in women's underwear for the rest of your life.

Sandro, the Argentine Elvis Presley (or is he the Argentine Amitabh Bachchan?) was a pop singer who made a dozen or so musicals in the sixties and seventies that were massively popular in Latin America... like Presley's films, they seemed to exist as pure vehicles to deliver the man candy to the ladies...here's a trailer or two of the goods.

If you want your own Sandro DVDs but can't hike it to Buenos Aires, you are in luck.

Taking Care of Bs. As.

2007-12-04T16:14:00.003-05:00

I´ve been in Buenos Aires for 5 days now and although I could never say I´m making myself at home, I am starting to get my bearings in terms of geography, if not communications. I can read Spanish somewhat, but I can´t necessarily understand it as it is spoken, especially in the Latin American dialect, where the double L in words is pronounced with a J sound instead of a Y sound (e.g. - a crazy chicken is El Posho Loco instead of El Poyo Loco ).

Buenos Aires is New York as designed by the French with Spanish dialogue. All the pharmacies have the flashing neon green cross out in front and the street signs are often blue plates with white writing on them. No such thing as a house - everyone lives in apartments with grand balconies.

Here´s a defining moment - last night my friend Matias and I took a big long walk from the north of the city back towards my neighbourhood in Barrio Norte - we were on one of the main drags (Avenida Santa Fe) on a Monday night at 1 am and on the other side of the street there were about 50 young people wearing hospital gowns and surgical masks jumping up and down in excitement, gathering up their group that proceeded en masse towards a club - it looked like a flash mob-slash-Sprite commercial. Three young guys passed us watching them as well, and Matias told me one of them muttered en castellano to his friends "God. Every day, the same thing."

Telekino Goes To Buenos Aires

2007-11-29T12:49:00.002-05:00

Telekino lands in Buenos Aires on Friday morning (November 30th) - staying in Palermo Viejo until December 11th. I will file my first report as soon as I can find an awesome internet cafe.

Pele-O-Vac

2007-11-20T20:50:00.000-05:00

Norman Mailer's Greatest Hits

2007-11-10T10:11:00.002-05:00

Norman Mailer died this morning...I'm less familiar with his novels and more familiar with his exploits as a Renaissance Wild Man.

Mailer directed four films through his life and actually received a career retrospective at Lincoln Center earlier this year - I was actually considering flying down to New York just to see the legendary Maidstone - a macho, alcohol-fueled improv-fest about politics and paranoia, filmed with friends in the Hamptons starring himself, Rip Torn, Ultra Violet and Lane Smith. Here's a description of the moment co-star Herve Villechaize (sic) almost drowned on the set, from the biography "Mailer: His Life And Times" by Peter Manso - the incident as remembered by Barney Rosset, at whose home the filming took place.

I was terrified of the violence, which was so thick you could feel it. After the first or second day these people had finished shooting, it was still light, and they'd gone back to where they were staying, in Bridgehampton, five miles away. My mother in law went outside, then came back into the house screaming, "There's a midget in the swimming pool!"

My wife and I go outside, and sure enough, there he is, floating. Someone had thrown Villechaize into the pool, and he was drowning. I was able to reach over the side and pull him out. My reaction was sheer rage, sort of "what right do they have to put this thing in our pool and then go home, just split?" Here we were in our house, this Quonset hut sunk in the ground, with the swimming pool and a lot of trees; this place had been vibrant with maniacs one minute, and suddenly they're all gone. My poor mother in law hasn't been out all day, she's been barricaded inside, then she comes back in screaming. What I said to my wife was, "Goddamn it, we're gonna get Norman!" I wasn't worried whether the midget was dead or alive. I didn't even call the rescue squad.

I got in my car and raced the five miles to the Bull's Head Inn, where they were all staying. I went up to Norman's room and pounded on the door. "Norman, you've gotta come back and get your midget!" And Norman? He and Jose went back with us and scooped up the guy, and I was told later that they took him to the hospital, where his stomach was pumped. Whether he was suffering from booze or drowning, I don't know, probably a mixture of both. The next day, though, to my utter amazement, he was back playing the piano in the Lane Smith scene.

Maidstone is notorious for being the movie where Rip Torn actually assaulted Mailer with a hammer, leading to Mailer biting Torn's ear in the ensuing wrestling match - all caught on film by D.A. Pennebaker.

Of course Mailer's ongoing feud with Gore Vidal is one for the ages - Vidal's quote that "there has been from Henry Miller to Norman Mailer to Charles Manson a logical progression" enraged Mailer so much that they had it out on the Dick Cavett Show, excerpted here in this documentary on Gore.

Mailer's best-known film as a director was 1987's 100% fucked-up Tough Guys Don't Dance, based on his novel. Sample dialogue: Lawrence Tierney describes his son Ryan O'Neal's ex-wife as the kind of dame "who should wear a sign around her neck that says 'Hang around, I'll make a cocksucker out of you.'" On the half-hour interview with Mailer on the DVD, he considers the film to be a success EXCEPT for this scene:

O'Neal felt Mailer left this incredible part in the final cut in order to destroy his acting career and never spoke to him again. In retrospect, Mailer said he would have taken this part out if he could do it over.

There was a bizarre episode of 'Gilmore Girls' a few years back where Mailer played himself being interviewed in the dining room of the Dragonfly Inn - for no reason except perhaps to pad out the episode. Maybe he thought Lorelai and Rory were distant relatives of Gary...

Make It Suntory Time

2007-11-09T10:15:00.000-05:00

(thanks to Kate for the first clip and Mickey Rourke for getting arrested for drunk driving on a Vespa for the second clip)

George Segal: Secretly Canadian

2007-11-06T18:45:00.000-05:00

I need to get my hands on a Canadian thriller called Russian Roulette (1975) - directed by veteran editor Lou Lombardo who, judging from his work on The Wild Bunch, must know his way around an action scene. Set in Vancouver, this one stars the underrated George Segal as a burned-out undercover Mountie (sic) who stumbles across a plot to assassinate the visiting Soviet Premier.

When I was a kid I was a bit obsessed with two 1977 George Segal movies - his Sensurround™ enhanced, quasi-disaster film Rollercoaster (a worn-out cop playing cat-and-mouse with an amusement park bomber played by future George W. Bush look-alike Timothy Bottoms) and Fun With Dick And Jane, the broad satire of the middle-class seventies American dream (written by Mordecai Richler) with Jane Fonda and Ed McMahon (sic). Segal was as much of a ubiquitous male lead in seventies American cinema as Donald Sutherland or Elliott Gould (Segal was even in Altman's California Split), but his skill with both comedy and drama may have led to his eventual marginalization as a leading man as the seventies wound down; that and some bad career decisions (turning down the lead in Blake Edwards' 10, for example) led to a future plucking the banjo on Johnny Carson's couch while promoting TV movies like The Zany Adventures of Robin Hood co-starring Morgan Fairchild (sic). Yes, it had come to this.

Roulette is an British-Canadian co-production apparently loaded with quirks and stuffed with weird casting, including Denholm Elliott as a 'greasy informant' as one review has it, and Louise Fletcher, just off her Oscar-winning role in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, in a bit part as a telephone operator. Plus a rooftop climax involving high-powered sniper rifles, helicopters and a seventies Vancouver skyline - damn, this thing has got to pay off!

This might wet your whistle for international intrigue involving George Segal before you track Roulette down - the stylish trailer for the trippy 1966 cold war thriller The Quiller Memorandum - directed by Michael (Logan's Run) Anderson!

Forever Charlotte

2007-10-31T23:59:00.000-04:00

Trailer/music video for the movie/song Charlotte For Ever... you might need to go lie down after you see this one.

Fight and a Half

2007-10-29T13:00:00.000-04:00

A note for my Argentinian readers...

2007-10-20T22:58:00.001-04:00

According to my Sitemeter and Clustrmap statistics, I have a very high readership in Buenos Aires. For those porteños who are not merely googling the winning Telekino lottery numbers, it just so happens I will be visiting your fair metropolis from November 30th until December 11th. It would be a pleasure to meet some swell people who dig the blog and are into doing stuff, if there are such people. Your city seems amazing!

Is it true that there's a club night in town named after Slavoj Žižek? Are there incredible record shops and vintage clothing stores where I can get 70's t-shirts? Can we go to the movies? Where do the cool brainiacs hang out? I would love to know. I'm Canadian so I only have a grasp of written Spanish and can barely speak it, just so you know...

Anyway, I've thrown it out there.

The Reminder

2007-10-15T19:08:00.001-04:00

I like Feist and all, don't get me wrong, but this is part of what I like about her - she wants to be Françoise Hardy. This is the insanely catchy 'Tamalou' from 1981. Go put it on your iPod Nano.

Souvenirs of Canada

2007-10-14T22:11:00.000-04:00

Model Shop

2007-10-03T19:15:00.000-04:00

No, it's not a dream - from Francoise Hardy's 1965 TV special:

Canadians Being Sleazy

2007-10-01T22:02:00.002-04:00

Alle Die Jungen und Die Mädchen

2007-09-27T09:50:00.000-04:00

'Peter und Lou', von Françoise Hardy: Du kannst denken, daß es vertraut schaut, obwohl du es durch ein anderes namens kennen kannst…

Jackie Rogers, Sr.

2007-09-26T22:26:00.000-04:00

Topping 'Eloise' is like topping 'MacArthur Park', but you can't fault Barry Ryan for trying...

Don't Say Anything

2007-09-19T10:21:00.000-04:00

French Pop Wednesdays can always find time for a little more Anna...

Breakfast at TIFF

2007-09-08T16:14:00.002-04:00

I have been busy of late with my responsibilities for the Toronto International Film Festival but now it's underway and I can start making plans for seeing some films.

I tend to see niche films during the Festival - for instance last year I barely saw anything except for Zizek's three-parter The Pervert's Guide To Cinema and the Open Vault restoration of Peter Pearson's Paperback Hero from 1973. I have a slightly longer "to do" list this year.

Tonight it's Peter Bogdanovich introducing La Grande Illusion by Renoir, which I've never seen. (I will have a drink out of a flask everytime Bogdanovich says "Orson" in his opening remarks.) Next will be Ken Loach introducing the Czech New Wave film Closely Watched Trains - another hole in my education filled. I'm hoping The Diving Bell and The Butterfly will be as good as I would expect from a Julian Schnabel film starring Mathieu Amalric... I don't think I've ever been inside Toronto's Winter Garden Theatre, certainly not to watch a film (though I did go to the Elgin in the seventies when it was a double-bill house!) so what better way to christen the place in my brain than with the latest Johnnie To action film from Hong Kong, Mad Detective? And then of course Donnie Yen in Flash Point at Midnight Madness the next evening... and I'm very much looking forward to seeing Redacted - a lot of people forget that De Palma was a bit Godard-y when he started out and this film looks to reconcile his political engagement with his technical mastery...as long as it's not Natural Born Killers 2.

Still have to pick a documentary, though it won't be Nathan Barley in Baghdad.

Vanilla Fudge and The Supremes

2007-08-17T19:49:00.001-04:00

This would qualify as Bringing It On...

Misono

2007-08-08T23:01:00.001-04:00

Commercials for Misono, a mind-boggling restaurant/entertainment complex in Osaka that only closed its doors earlier this year. These ads were from the 70's. I've looked everywhere for some more information on this incredible place...especially what it was like in the final days; did Misono hang on to its Kubrickian splendour to the end?

French Pop Wednesdays Goes To Japan

2007-08-08T22:48:00.001-04:00

Lee Hazlewood: 1929 - 2007

2007-08-06T17:54:00.001-04:00

Another one of my heroes clocks out... haul out your copy of 'Cowboy In Sweden'...

Ingmar Bergman: 1918 - 2007

2007-07-30T17:15:00.000-04:00

Trailer for Last House on the Left (1972) - Wes Craven's (implausible but true!) remake of Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring!

Best I could do on short notice.

Frei Luft Kino

2007-07-28T16:29:00.000-04:00

Colin's throwing his annual summertime backyard movie night tonight, and I'll be going for the first time... tonight's twin bill is Robert Mitchum in The Yakuza and (in a last-minute replacement for Barbarella) Monica Vitti and Terence Stamp in Modesty Blaise. Ahh, watching Sydney Pollack and Joseph Losey films under the stars, plus short subjects and a reel of 70's commercials and trailers.

"Nein. Es ist für mich."

2007-07-25T18:55:00.001-04:00

Sad news for those who liked The Lives of Others as much as I did - Ulrich Mühe, the German stage actor who played the Stasi surveillance agent in the film, just died of stomach cancer... he won the European Film Award for Best Actor for his work here.