Watching Stuff
WATCHIN' STUFF: A Double Dose of '70s "Deafsploitation"!
There are times when a “dueling” duo of films (Dante’s Peak vs. Volcano, Mirror, Mirror vs. Snow White and The Huntsman, Mission To Mars vs. Red Planet, etc.) are the result of different studios trying to beat each other to the punch at the box office — and then there are those impossible-to-explain, zeitgeist-in-hindsight moments when multiple films on the same subject tumble off the assembly line for no good discernible reason. After peeping both Dummy and Voices, I can definitively say that this double dose of 1979-based “deafsploitation” is my absolute favorite example in “dueling cinema” history. (Well — there is that early ’70s triple movie title threat of GGas-s-s-s, Sssssss and Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, but that’s another story.)
These two weird, weird gems are now surprisingly both on the Warner Archive DVD label, and I couldn’t be more thrilled to have them unleashed onto an unsuspecting public.
I discovered Dummy during a late-night IMDB jaunt — one of those wormholes when I lose a few hours checking out the filmography of an actor or filmmaker, seeing what weird entries there are that I’ve never heard of, clicking on the cast listing of one of the unheard-of films, looking at the misshapen filmography of one of the cast members, and so on and so forth down the rabbit hole. I’ve discovered many a mind-melting title that’s next to impossible for even a skillful movie locator like myself to track down in the real world (Allen & Rossi Meet Dracula And Frankenstein, anyone?) — and Dummy came up while I perused the work of Frank Perry, the amazing director of Play It As It Lays, Last Summer, Mommie Dearest and Diary of a Mad Housewife.
Just from the title alone, Dummy sounds like a great time. Turns out it’s a “true story” TV movie-of-the-week about Paul Sorvino as a deaf lawyer defending LeVar Burton as a deaf-mute defendant on trial for murdering a prostitute. How on earth could this possibly NOT be a smackum-yackum good time?!?! Thankfully, it delivers exactly the kind of bizarro whipcrack-paced TV movie thrills I was expecting: a minimum of fuss, a maximum of forward narrative momentum, and a bevy of familiar character actors hangin’ out.
Paul Sorvino is a treat here, as his realistic portrayal of a deaf person with a fast-paced job requires him to deliver dialogue as a cross between Prof. Stephen Hawking’s talking computer and Bill Cosby’s old “novocaine” routine (“My boddom libb-ip iz on the ph-flor-or!”). It’s very unsettling at first, but then, as the film wears on, you start to wonder if you haven’t ever hear real-life hearing-impaired people speak in the same way, and it becomes part of the window-dressing of the film. Check out this scene between Sorvino and Burton, and you’ll see what I mean:
The "Last Year At Marienbad" of Strange TV Commercials!
Every once in a while, you come across something on YouTube that shatters your reality, and thwarts your attempts to reconstruct your fragile headspace, as you keep dwelling on how creepy it all is.
What follows is the Last Year At Marienbad of local TV commercials: multiple layers of hazy meaning, a vast array of personal interpretations to take away, a cascading fountain of juicy mystery.
It also seems like the kind of spot that would be playing on the fictional cable station in Cronenberg’s Videodrome (during the commercial breaks for “Samurai Dreams”!). Anyway, enough chatter — take a feverish gander:
There’s so many haunting individual moments in this one commercial that it almost does me no good to describe them, for repeat viewing and discovering each subtle shade of wrong is the best part! However, I have to give it up for the moment that comes at 0:04. And 0:20. AND 0:28!!!!
Let’s also not forget that, just as an anonymous commenter said on Videogum’s post about this same commercial back in ’09, “the Girl on the box for the pierogies looks like she is taking a dump.”
A Bloody Bollywood Buffet!
CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS FOR “BOLLYWOOD BLOODBATH”, FRIDAY, OCTOBER 14TH, 8PM @ THE CINEFAMILY!
This Friday, October 14th, Cinefamily once again visits one of it’s favorite stomping grounds: the weird, wild and wooly world of Hindi horror: a phantasmagorical boiling cauldron of ectoplasmic ghost stories, remakes of Hollywood fright fare jam-packed with musical numbers, crispy-fried effects designed to gouge your third eye — and of course, truly incredible soundtracks. And the good folks at B-Muisc/Finders Keepers Records’ new compilation BOLLYWOOD BLOODBATH covers the as yet unheard sounds from these movies’ music scores. Here’s a sneak preview, enjoy! Take a gander at an excerpt from the compilation’s liner notes:
“After what seems like a thousand years of blood, sweat, tears (and a lot more blood) the zombified disc disciples at Finders Keepers (Kreepers!) unveil one of their most exquisite, exhumed, ectoplasmic, and existentially essential collections yet. This musical mausoleum of malformed freak funk and dreadful dis-cothèque pop has been resurrected from the maligned cinematic subculture of Bombay’s bloodthirsty horror film industry, and witnesses the cognoscenti of the Bollywood pop scene at their most creative, destructive and experimentally effective.
Bollywood Bloodbath features India’s finest composers, such as Bappi Lahiri, R.D Burman, Sonik Omi, Sapan Jogmohan and Laxmikant Pyarelal making the kind of radical risk-rock that would under normal circumstances have studio security escorting these overworked maestros off set for a well-earned break or a relaxing exorcism. Take all the most oblique, indigenous characteristics of your favorite Bollywood musicals then condense them into a bubbling serum and watch the Jekyll and Hyde transformation commence as these A-list composers create bloodcurdling B-Music for the films they never thought the outernationals would see or hear.
The Genius Film Trailers of Pablo Ferro!
Our guest blogger Marcus Herring joins us for another post on one of his favorite filmic subjects! Marcus, take it away…
THE TRAILER IS BETTER THAN THE MOVIE: THE LONG, EXTRAORDINARY CAREER OF PABLO FERRO
Once upon a time, it was quite common to hear someone remark that their favorite thing about going out to the movies was watching the trailers — or “the previews”, as they used to say, before the Internet made everyone more savvy with industry terminology. Now, I don’t want to pass any overt judgement on the current state of cinema, but I just don’t hear anyone make that comment anymore. One thing I do hear these days is that the trailers “show the whole movie.” That’s debatable, but one thing’s for sure: most modern trailers follow a highly predictable formula.
Not all trailers used to be better back in “the good old days.” Some old trailers are real duds, but many achieve a kind of high art unto themselves. I bet you can think of a couple of ’70s trailers off the top of your head that are actually better than the movie. Exorcist II? Perhaps Zabriskie Point? I prefer not to speculate that this phenomenon is a result of the movie just not being very good, as there is an art to cutting an amazing trailer, and some editors really have a knack for it. It is undeniable that there was an experimental zeitgeist that pervaded the ’60s and ’70s — which led some film editors to produce some really awesome trailers.
It’s uncommon to know who cut what trailer. There are never on-screen credits for them specifically, so it’s more or less an anonymous task. There is at least one artist, however, who really made a name for himself with some of the most creative film trailers ever assembled: Pablo Ferro. Pablo’s more popularly known for his work as a master title sequence designer (Dr. Strangelove and The Thomas Crown Affair among countless others) and occasionally an actor as well (Greaser’s Palace), but Pablo also crafted a number of the most memorable trailers of all time.
WATCHING STUFF: "The Computer Chronicles"
Sometimes the “hiding in plain sight” thing catches even The Cinefamily by surprise. The rather incredible Internet Archive (found at archive.org) is a humungous repository of free knowlegde that’s different from Wikipedia in that it is an ever-expanding library of deposited materials (rather than a living encyclopedia), all free of charge. Its video section — in which you can either download items or stream them — contains a bounty of weird ephemeral stuff. I just discovered a treasure trove of “The Computer Chronicles”, a long-running PBS show based out of Northern California, about the evolution of the computing revolution. I’m a sucker for old-school tech, as I’m sure many of you reading are as well, so this was quite a find. One episode in particular caught my eye, from 1984, on new computer games.
Watch the entire episode of “The Computer Chronicles: Video Gaming”!
Fading All Away - Jay Reatard: A Legacy
Our L.A. premiere screening of the new documentary Better Than Something: Jay Reatard is happening this Thursday, 7:30pm, as part of the ongoing music doc series Don’t Knock The Rock, curated by Allison and Tiffany Anders — and as prep to get you even more stoked about the show, here’s guest blogger Jordan Cronk (writer for PopMatters, cokemachineglow and In Review Online) with an impassioned overview of the career of the late Jimmy Lee Lindsey, Jr. (aka Jay Reatard). Read some more of Jordan’s film writing on Godard, Altman and Apichatpong Weerasethakul!
I first became aware of Jimmy Lee Lindsey, Jr. in 2006, via his first album under the Jay Reatard moniker, “Blood Visions”. It wasn’t until much later, however, that his career began to make sense outside this airtight, sub-30 minute adrenaline rush of a record. Breaking through at a time when garage-rock was at its resurgent peak, Lindsey nonetheless ran his own course around the traditional indie circuit, unloading a barrage of 7” singles in lieu of a proper follow-up to “Blood Visions.” Unlike his contemporaries in the Black Lips or other alter-ego stamped personalities like King Khan or Mark Sultan, the Memphis-based Lindsey seemed ideologically beholden to an era of punk ten-plus years the senior of many of his colleagues’ acid-fired garage rock. Up until his unexpected death in January 2010 at the age of 29, Lindsey kept his priorities set squarely on the music at hand, only returning with another full album after his Kiwi-pop experiments and new adventures in melodic noise-pop had fully developed across these small-run 7″ vinyl releases. It seemed for a number of years that a month couldn’t go by without a new Jay Reatard track hitting the web, despite the fact that his last four years of activity yielded only two proper full-lengths. It never quite seemed like too much, but now, almost two years later, it feels like not nearly enough.
Watch Jay Reatard perform “My Shadow” live!
Watchin' Stuff: Pierre Clementi
Another guest poster brings us a juicy peek at a hidden corner of cinema! Marcus Herring, longtime friend of the Cinefamily and our blood brother in total madness, schools us on Pierre Clémenti: icon of the French avant-garde, and one of the most intense European actors of his generation. Watch some of Marcus’s music video work here!
Sometimes, once you learn the meaning of a new word you’ve never seen or heard before, almost immediately afterward you’ll start seeing the word everywhere. Say you’d never heard the term “synesthesia” — but once you understand the definition, “synesthesia” starts turning up in every book, magazine, and movie you come across. It doesn’t seem to be a matter of zeitgeist; likely, you’ve probably just skipped over it if you didn’t know about it beforehand. This concept (which really needs a term itself) explains perfectly my experience with French actor/filmmaker Pierre Clementi.
Most of us might recognize his pouty visage from the sugar pot sex scene in Sweet Movie (as seen in the image above), but Clementi seems to have worked with every A-list European surrealist director of the 1970′s: not just Sweet Movie’s Makavejev, but also Visconti (in The Leopard), Bertolucci (in The Conformist and Partner), Bunuel (in Belle de Jour and The Milky Way), Pasolini (in Porcile), Phillipe Garrell and more. He really is a touchstone actor in the world of Euro art house, as well as being a revolutionary filmmaker in his own right — and I don’t mean revolutionary as never-been-done-before, but rather, as in true rebellion. He seems to have been dramatically affected by the Paris student riots of 1968, and the promise of youthful revolution would drive not only his personal work but also his choices as an actor.
Clémenti’s silent short La Revolution N’est Qu’un Debut features footage he captured of the ’68 Paris riots overlayed with pink and blue color washes, and circular mattes. It typifies the uniquely trippy youth politics of the 1960s (where the political message is so often obscured by candy-coated hedonism) as text propaganda flashes onscreen: calls for Liberte and Egalite, but also demands for Loukoums (I’m not sure whether he’s referring to a French band of the time or the confectionary Turkish delight so popular in France.)
Watch an excerpt from “La Revolution N’est Qu’un Debut”!
Watchin' Stuff: The Secret History of Basque Cinema
Our latest post comes to us from Cinefamily’s first guest blogger: Ben Pearson, who regularly writes for Tiny Mix Tapes!
Sometime in between Citizen Kane and Gallo Wine commercials, Orson Welles directed a travelogue miniseries for British television called Around the World with Orson Welles. The world, evidently, means Europe, since that’s where all the episodes took place, but I still have to give Welles props for his itinerary, which featured two whole episodes’ worth (one-third of the entire series) of one of my own filmic obsessions, the Basque Country.
Amazing cinematic histories abound in countries across the globe (Japan, France, Italy, Czech Republic, Germany, South Korea, Mexico, Iran, Romania, Russia, the US, Spain, India and Nigeria are but a few that immediately spring to mind), but the Basque Country doesn’t appear on many lists. And with good reason: it isn’t even a country, but rather a region straddling the Spanish-French border where about 3 million people called Basques (not to be confused with the other Basque) live.
What’s a Basque person, anyway? That’s a question that a lot of people – from the 19th century ethnologists who went around measuring Basque people’s skulls, to Orson Welles, to the Basques themselves – have tried to answer. I have a M.A. from a Basque university (Deustuko Unibertsitatea), and I still really don’t know myself, but I can give you a few facts: a) their popular sports include competitive wood chopping, boulder throwing, and grass cutting; b) they’re the oldest native inhabitants of Western Europe; c) they dig berets; d) their language has a lot of Xs and Ks and Zs in it, and isn’t related to any other language in the world; and, e) they make really good alcoholic cider.
Watchin' Stuff: Found Footage Battle Royale WINNER!
Our latest round of the Found Footage Battle Royale (held on Sunday, July 3rd as one of the many, many events of Everything Is Festival!) brought out fierce competition, and a panoply of crazy and intense video. Some of our favorite bits included Black Magic Rollercoaster’s logic-defying clip of a lawnmower in flight, Son of Ghoul Skool’s bonkers trash-compactor of the Spider-Man childrens’ workout video (“Sling Stance! Dock Knocker! Dock Knocker! Sling Stance! Sling Stance!”), and Zack Carlson’s “pickle party” excerpt from “Carniege Deli: The Musical” —
The winner of the whole affair was Cinefamily’s own Zena Grey, whose homemade mash-ups wowed, zowed and plowed the crowd with their sweetly warped takes on both the subjects of menopause and Xtian pre-teen sugar shock. Check out the winning videos below, plus Son of Ghoul Skool’s “Spider-Man Inc. Training”!
Zena Grey: “Menopause: Woman To Woman”
Zena Grey: “Donut Hole”
Son of Ghoul Skool: “Spider-Man Inc. Training”
Watchin' Stuff: Michael Jackson Unauthorized!
This past Friday night, I spent the evening at a Japanese restaurant in the South Bay, where, after our seafood hotpots, tempura and Orion beer were all consumed, the owners busted out the wireless mics and karaoke discs, and we all sang for an hour or two as the night wound down. In-between playing karaoke tracks, the lady in charge of the place kept playing bits and pieces of Michael Jackson: This Is It on the flatscreen TVs littering the wall.
I’d seen This Is It when it came out theatrically; I had a great time. I’m not necessarily the biggest MJ fan on the planet, but I seriously appreciated the film’s rare and genuinely unique glimpse into the working methods of the most mysterious and meticulous pop performers of the past century (for those not in the know, This Is It was compiled out of gazillions of hours of rehearsal footage for Jackson’s final tour — one which never launched, due to his death.)
These snippets of This Is It in the Japanese restaurant half-drunkenly reminded me of another hard-to-find look into the realm of MJ — a strange tape that I’d viewed long ago called Michael Jackson: Unauthorized. Clad in a cover box featuring a generic Michael Jackson publicity photo, this tape contained only 20-25 minutes’ worth of interview footage shot on Jackson’s Encino estate in the early ’80s (sometime after “Thriller”, but before the Jacksons’ “Victory”.)
Watchin' Stuff: Our New Favorite Vintage Spots
Finally — we have a new way to bring you weird ‘n wild highlights from the non-stop video research avalanche here in the Cinefamily office! New material floods in daily, and quite a few of the very best bits make it into our new “video jukebox” (the gizmo in our A/V booth that now runs the video playlists of pre-show entertainment) — but there’s just some stuff that we have to put in yr. face, front ‘n center.
A friend of ours recently hipped us to a treasure trove of wacky vintage TV commercials; there’s something hypnotic about run-of-the-mill old Triscuit and deodorant ads, no doubt — but there were a few in the bunch that had us either clutching our guts in rapturous guffaws, or scratching our heads:
1) Alice Cooper – “Zipper Catches Skin” LP (1982)
Commercials for individual record albums are a complete and total thing of the past these days — and it seems that beyond the K-TEL-style “All these hits and more!…” kinds of spots, they were somewhat rare to begin with. My all-time favorite album commercial has to be the ’75 Harry Nilsson “Duit On Mon Dei” spot where he makes the half-court basketball shot as the shot clock runs out (if you can, track down that feature-length Harry Nilsson doc, cuz the version uploaded to YouTube is grainy and hard to make out.) This spot for Alice Cooper’s critically and commercially disastrous 1982 album “Zipper Catches Skin” — one which I can’t imagine ever airing on any TV station at the time — goes above and beyond to make no one want to actually buy the album. Gotta love it. Alice claims to not remember ever making this album, due to his extreme alcoholism at the time!
2) 1-900-Dial-An-Insult
I’d pretty much forgotten 1-900 numbers ever existed until this one floated past our eyes. Is that the much-ripped-off Screamers band logo guy, or just a hazy facsimile?
