Every two years Canadian duo Handsome Furs release an album, and each time it’s worth the wait. Pent up energy explodes in a volcanic display of aggressive keyboard led melodies, joined by vocalist Dan Boeckner’s gravely roar on the band’s third album, Sound Kapital. Inspired by Eastern European industrial and electronic music, the album’s nine tracks trigger themes of claustrophobic repression, and the feeling of freedom that comes when you finally let it all blow.
On “Bury Me Standing” Boeckner repeats the track title’s words over and over, growing more agitated with every iteration. It’s synth-pop filled with tension, a quick-paced anthem for raising your fist in the air, and demanding your voice be heard. This sense of urgency defines Sound Kapital. “Damage” teeters on the edge, one foot suspended and ready to jump. Chaotic whipping synths leave another layer of scars on already damaged flesh. Radio samples from a Hong Kong hostage broadcast are scattered throughout the noise, building momentum towards what feels like the final standoff of a long chase scene. Desperation weighs heavy in the trudging keyboard notes of “What About Us”. Words of heartbreak flow from Boeckner’s lips, the melody growing gradually slower as he folds into the meaning of his heavy lyrics.
Sound Kapital suffers somewhat under its own weight. The often depressing lyrics and aggravated instrumentation paint a front page news story of a life where everything is hard, and freedom comes with consequences. It leaves you feeling appreciative of the little things. And again, the Handsome Furs pull off energy with ease.
Hanna-Barbera is best known for classic cartoons filled with old-timey, squeaky-clean yuks. Even their work featuring anthropomorphized nude animals always came off as pretty chaste. However, video that has surfaced of their 1988 retelling of the book of Genesis manages to be a lot racier, despite depicting one of the most revered religious myths of all time.
The Greatest Adventure – Stories from the Bible is a sexy, scandalous cartoon version of the classic Adam and Eve story, featuring an apple-bottomed, nipple-less Eve and Tim Curry (!) as the voice of the serpent. There are also tons of acid-swirly sequences, proving the tried-and-true theory that LSD is an excellent way to feel spiritually connected with God, man, even amongst the hardcore Judeo-Christian set. The first and best one is right after the title sequence and credits, about a minute and a half into the video above.
Look at the light of heaven shining down on that can. Eve looks smokin’ and provides the possible inspiration for A Tribe Called Quest’s classic song “Bonita Applebum,” released just two short years later, as well as showing off plenty of perky, if anatomically-incorrect tittage (where are her nips?) and a historically-inaccurate Brazilian. Maybe not the best advertisement against original sin, Hanna-Barbera.
I happened to randomly walk in on photographer/video/performance artist Laurel Nakadate’s The Wolf Knife while at PS1 this past weekend. The movie is part of a pretty huge exhibit of Nakadate’s work, and I have to be honest, was my first real taste of her work. I really loved it. Nakadate is an attractive woman who puts herself in incredibly uncomfortable situations in front of the camera, as well as creates an uncomfortable relationship between the photograph or video viewer and what he/she is looking at. I’m not going to get into a whole examination of her work, but for example, a large majority of her video work is finding strange men in seedy locales across the country, inviting herself back to their homes, and asking them to, say, pretend it’s her birthday. She videotapes the interaction. It’s the sort of thing that feels like something incredibly bad could happen at any moment, yet nothing ever does.
The show included a lot of her video work (which lasts 3-10 minutes usually) and when I sat down to watch The Wolf Knife, I thought it’d be another short. But after 40 minutes I decided to check the title card and come to discover this was in fact a full length film, and Nakadate’s second as a writer and director.
No one besides my girlfriend and I lasted through the whole film at the showing we saw. People usually came in and lasted 15 minutes, tops, before leaving. One family brought their children in, quickly ushering them out again when the film began showing incredibly questionable situations. I’m not sure if most people walking out weren’t prepared to sit through a 90 minute feature or the film itself just wasn’t their cup of tea, but judging from the many negative reviews the film received when it was first released, I’m going to assume it’s mainly the latter.
Shot entirely on a handheld digital camera, The Wolf Knife features mostly amateur actors playing out what I assume are just loosely-given plot instructions. It’s incredibly lo-fi and the closest thing I can even compare it to is Harmony Korrine’s Gummo, another film people either love or hate. There is some raw yet incredibly attractive cinematography (which mirrors Nakadate’s photographic work) against some very bad acting by the sort of creepy yet commanding screen presences Korrine utilizes regularly – they’re even Tim & Eric-esque in their badness.
The story focuses on Chrissy and June, two sixteen year old girls from Hollywood, Florida who decide to run away to Memphis. The girls are basically both Lolita archetypes, making ideal foils for translating Nakadate’s video art into a feature film. Nakadate does everything possible to amp up the girls’ erotisism short of having them appear nude or engaged in any real sex. But there’s plenty of skimpy and revealing clothing, wettened lips, Sapphic undertones and gratuitous camera angles focusing on thighs and the crotch. There’s never a point where the viewer of the movie isn’t aware of or forced directly to come to terms with the two lead’s youth, naivete and sexual awakening.
It’s a compelling device, but also incredibly uncomfortable to watch (for both men and women, possibly for different reasons), so I’m not blaming anyone who wasn’t able to sit through it. But that doesn’t make it any less successful, as this is the underlying point of almost all of Nakadate’s work. The girls are placed in countless situations of dubious morality as they journey from Hollywood to Memphis, with plenty of inappropriate behavior from older men that seems to stop just before it goes too far. Oh wait, by the way, the reason they’re going to Memphis is because Chrissy wanted to see and possibly move in with her former 3rd grade teacher who she’s been corresponding with, so that’s a good example of what I mean when I say “dubious morality.” The scene where they meet up is the film’s climax, and easily it’s most disturbing and confusing scene.
Like Gummo, this is not a plot-driven film. It’s all situational and voyeuristic, based on how you, the viewer, process what is happening on screen and what is insinuated. Nakadate has made an incredibly earnest and thought-provoking examination of the confusions females experience when they reach adolescence, be it identity, relationships or sexuality – or all of the above, at once. I really hate to keep hammering home the Gummo point, but I imagine a larger number of our readers have seen it and if you’re a fan of anything Korrine has done (or just that general aesthetic), this not only worth seeing, but incredibly well done. No, it’s not for everyone, but for those of you who don’t mind feeling like a creepy perv for 90 minutes. You’ll appreciate it, and well, you know who you are.
I’m not sure where you can catch a screening of The Wolf Knife (originally released in 2010) or easily find it on DVD, as it’s not available on Netflix. But it is screening at Ps1 currently as part of the Laurel Nakadate: Only the Lonely exhibit (which I also really recommend seeing in general), which is on view until August 8th. The film is free with your admission into the museum.
When Oh Mars put up that trailer for The Troll Hunter, I was reminded of a mockumentary from a few years back that tickled my fancy. I’m speaking of course about 2004′s Incident At Loch Ness, a movie that, for all intents and purposes, has no reason to exist. Except to be awesome. It’s written and directed by Zak Penn (PCU, Last Action Hero, upcoming The Avengers) and Werner Herzog, who also both star as themselves on a journey to Scotland to try and uncover the truth about Nessie. Yes, this is a real thing. And it’s pretty great.
First of all, Herzog is one of those “interesting reading the phone book” people. He’s just plain hysterical, enigmatic, smart, and weird as hell. If you’ve never seen Burden Of Dreams (an actual documentary about him that is legitimately stranger than this one) do that immediately. Though it’s not necessarily marketed as, like, found-footage, the masquerade of Incident being absolutely real is kept up masterfully.
There are some funny scenes in Los Angeles where Zak (who looks like Tom Collichio) convinces Werner to accompany him to Scotland, against the judgement of his friends (Jeff Goldblum, whatup). When they get to Scotland, we’re introduced to some supporting characters including cameramen, the grizzly boat captain, an uncomfortably gung-ho cryptozoologist, and a suspiciously buxom sonar operator.
From there we embark on a comedy of misunderstandings and misdirections as Penn basically attempts to falsify evidence for the documentary, while he, of course, thinks the legend is patently untrue. Eventually Herzog finds out what he’s doing, and the ensuing clashes are hysterical. Particularly when Werner comes upon a small papier-mâché nessie that Zak has commissioned to float around in the loch.
There are some more twists and turns involving the rest of the crew (and a certain american-flag bikini) and after Penn ends up putting a flare gun to Herzog’s head (as Herzog supposedly did to Klaus Kinski with a real gun on the set of Aguirre) the team ends up stranded on a boat in the middle of the loch. And that’s when the film basically turns into a horror movie.
A pretty tense, scary and dark horror movie at that. Something that, just perhaps because it’s Herzog, you almost believe could be real. I always ask people about this one when Herzog gets brought up, and no one seems to have seen it. Hell, the trailer was fucking impossible to find online. But I really think it’s worth a watch if you come across it, and definitely worth seeking out for a Herzog fan.
I like being scared by movies. I like being unsettled by them. But that experience is contingent on my knowledge that what I am watching is inherently false. There’s a world of difference between being afraid watching The Exorcist and the fear you get from, say, a car speeding towards you. One is fun. One is not. Countdown To Zero is the latter. Informative? Certainly. Well constructed? Definitely. Utterly terrible to watch? You betcha.
This 2010 documentary about the world’s apparently tenuous hold on nuclear stability is tough to watch, to say the least. Especially for someone who lives in New York, the various doomsday scenarios that are presented from the alarmist (I hope) stance of “not if, but when” will send your stomach a tumbling. Though I would have no trouble saying that Countdown To Zero is well made, I can only recommend it on a conditional basis.
I’m not trying to say that a documentary should be avoided just because it’s “scary”. If it’s presenting new information that people need to hear, even if it’s difficult to take, hell that’s something that a lot of docs should strive to do. But Countdown To Zero is more like apocalyptic fetishism. What made it seem unnecessary for me is that I already know that nuclear weapons are insanely powerful and dangerously accessible.
I think that, as a world, that’s an uncomfortable truth that everybody lives with. Especially as Americans living in a big city (many of whom lived through the Cold War) a nuclear threat is nothing new. And I’m not sure that it’s something that I want to confront head on for 90 minutes. The film, on the other hand, revels in it’s ability to scare the shit out of you.
It’s ultimate message of nuclear disarmament should be a “duh” moment for 90% of it’s viewers, and one that doesn’t need a bevy of horrifying images and statistics to support it. The film has some curiously unnecessary “star power” attachment to it, featuring interviews with Tony Blair, Jimmy Carter, Mikhail Gorbachev, and, bizarrely, Valerie Plame. Though initially “exciting” those appearances quickly devolve into obvious platitudes.
The more interesting segments, unsurprisingly, are those with nuclear scientists and other, y’know, experts on the topic. The reason being that in these sections the film takes a merciful, and unfortunately brief break from what mostly amounts to repeatedly punching you in the face while yelling “you’re going to die!” Worst of all, the film presents little to no chance of solution. I myself am a cynic, and have certainly been called a pessimist many times, but even I found the movie to be disheartening and defeatist.
Can the situation really be this decided? If so, then the purpose of the film is nil other than to keep you up at night. I’m not saying don’t see it. But I am saying that you might be better off seeing Rango and remaining in willfully imposed ignorance. Because as far as Countdown To Zero is concerned, the end of the world is coming, it involves Smilin’ Joe Fission, and there ain’t diddly squat you can do about it. So much for fun times at the movies, huh?
Anyway if you’re looking to get paranoid about our existence Countdown To Zero is streaming now via Netflix’s Watch Instantly.
Premiering last year at SXSW, The Parking Lot Movie follows a group of over-educated parking lot attendants at The Corner Parking Lot in Charlottesville, Virginia, not too far from the University of Virginia. The film follows the attendants in their daily tasks, which often include arguing with customers for mere pennies and dimes, chasing down drunken vandals who feel the need to break the gate, and dealing with customers who flee without paying, all the while receiving general rudeness from their fellow man.
While the parking lot seems like a simple enough setting with your typical cast of punks, misfits, and scholars, the movie perfectly depicts the way we, as a society, treat each other in certain situations. The ongoing theme throughout the film is the struggle between classes, and how those with the fancy cars and money treat those who work at the lot with little or no respect.
Fortunately, the workers are not only smarter than they appear, but have quite the “bite me” attitude throughout the movie. Maybe I found this movie relevant to my life because I generally hate the mass public and often feel like I’m completely surrounded by idiots who think they’re owed something based on the amount of money or material items they possess.
The wide range of characters consist of attendants from both the past and present who share their stories of how they came to work at the lot and the various customers that they have encountered (those with fraternity and sorority ties amongst their favorites to complain about), along with how they pass the time collecting tickets and small amounts of money while trying to maintain their sanity.
One of the more obvious things you notice in the film is the amount of intelligence the workers display when discussing their part-time profession. If Clerks was real life, it would be The Parking Lot Movie, an awesome look into a lesser-known profession and the select group of likable characters who call it work. The movie is now streaming on Netflix, so you should definitely check it, especially if you’re not sure if you are a decent person or an arrogant guy or girl who is all high and mighty with their SUV and cheap ways.
I’m kind of surprised Holy Roller has flown mostly under the radar without any major release or distribution. It came out last year and you’d think the film could have just ridden Jessie Eisenberg’s hype via the Social Network to a larger spotlight than it got. But alas it’s seems to have been a promotional casualty which is a shame.
Set in the late 90s, Holy roller is a coming of age/crime drama based on the true story of a Ecstasy smuggling ring involving Hasidic Jews. Esienberg plays Sam Gold, a poor Hasid who lives a fairly sheltered life. He’s studying to be a rabbi, while also working at his father’s fabric shop to support his family of five and just barely scraping by. At age 20 he’s just about to be introduced to his future wife and he’s conflicted about becoming a Rabbi and instead of following the path of god seems more keen on providing a better life to his family much to the disapproval of his father.
When his future wife’s parents decide to pull out of the arranged marriage, Sam takes up with his best friends older brother Yosef (played by Justin Bartha, The Hangover and National Treasure) who is clearly the community’s black sheep. Yosef offers Sam an opportunity to make more money than he can imagine “importing medicine” from overseas. Eventually Sam realizes that the medicine is ecstasy but the allure of the money is too much to give up. Sam quickly gets ingrained into an Israeli-run drug trafficking ring, recruiting other unsuspecting Hasids to bringing pills to the U.S. from Amsterdam until it’s eventually broken up.
While Holy Rollers does introduce you to a world not typically associated with crime and drug trafficking, it is your typical crime drama featuring the usual arc and reckoning for the films morally challenged characters. And even if you know exactly where it’s going and how it will all end, it’s still a really enjoyable ride that’s well done and features some good character driven performances that really carry it. Eisenberg is really good as the naive and too smart for his own good Gold, while Bartha is fantastic as the most badass Hasid you’ll probably ever come across. The supporting cast aren’t slouches either… Sam’s father Mendel (played by Mark Ivanir) is reminiscent of a character plucked straight from A Serious Man as the film’s moral compass, while Danny A. Abeckaser makes for a great slimy Israeli drug lord named Jackie Solomon. Ari Graynor plays Solomon’s girlfriend Rachel the yeshiva-to-reform school temptress Eisenberg’s character begins to fall in love with.
On top of the performances, the film shines an interesting light on a culture we rarely get to see inner workings of, and does so believably. Plus it has one of the most realistic “Hey I’m tripping on E!” scenes you’ll probably see on film. While not remarkable it is solidly directed by Kevin Asch and thanks to Antonio Macia features the sort of believable gritty dialogue that a film like this lives or dies on. All in all, formulaic as it may be, Holly Rollers is a hard movie not to like.
It’s currently on Netflix watch instantly and totally worth a home screening, especially if you’re the sort who got a kick out of films like Rounders, Blow and were charmed by A Serious Man, see this.
Y’know what’s insanely difficult? Structure. You may be able to put together a good scene or a character, but to string them all together into a cohesive piece in which each progressive moment not only stands on it’s own but enhances or subverts all the others that have come before it? Yeah, that don’t come easy. Not easy at all.
That’s the secret ingredient that makes Boaz Yakin’s 1994 masterpiece Fresh one of the best and most underrated movies of the past 10 years. Usually pigeonholed into the not-so-great genre of “hip-hop hood drama” (think Shottas, Waist Deep, and Belly) Fresh is a whole other beast. A whip-smart and uncompromising look at childhood drug dealing, this movie will linger with you.
Centered around 12 year old Michael AKA Fresh, the movie follows his struggle to survive, and perhaps even extricate himself from the violence-ridden world of drug running. Whereas some movies revel in the “cool” provided by their association with topics like drugs and rap music, Fresh is realistic without being preachy.
It’s nowhere near a PSA though. The world Fresh lives in is entrancing, with it’s detailed and aurally pleasing lingo and confidently outlandish style. But Fresh never lets you forget the blood red pallor that usually ends up tarnishing it. A shooting that erupts at a community park during a basketball game is a scene you don’t forget.
Fresh often plays chess with his estranged father (a great supporting role for Samuel L. Jackson), and it’s this most classic of games that serves as the framework of the film. As the film goes on you’ll realize, subconsciously or not, that Fresh is executing an extremely specific and cunning chess game to save himself and his drug addicted sister.
Every action he makes causes a certain transaction that will pay off later, from the first time he comes on screen to the last. Each character cast in their specific role, whether it Pawn or King. Being an experienced player, Fresh is aware that some pieces have to be lost along the way, and it’s these morally ambiguous decisions he makes that turn Fresh from a one-sided discussion of good and evil into a nuanced and difficult look at what it takes to get by.
I really can’t say enough how much I love this movie. It’s a great coming of age story, a great New York movie, a great family drama, and a masterclass in script construction all rolled into one. It’s got a great soundtrack (not to mention a bevy of it’s own sound bites that have found their way into a host of rap songs since it’s release), and a great look.
The acting is absolutely aces across the board, from Jackson, to a menacing and seductive Giancarlo Esposito, and all anchored by Sean Nelson’s show stopping turn as Fresh. It’s a quiet and deep performance that was well beyond his 13 years at the time. He doesn’t speak much throughout the movie, but he doesn’t have to. He’s arresting. If you’ve never seen this, do immediately, and rue the fact that Yakin is now relegated to writing big-budget Hollywood schlock. But at least we’ll always have Fresh.
There’s a relatively simple formula for delivering a successful music documentary. People inherently want to be rock stars. All people, whether they admit it or not. So giving them a look behind that ever elusive curtain, if only briefly, is usually enough to satisfy. Then, you can fill out the rest of your time with good music. Though Scion A/V and Vice‘s new doc New Garage Explosion!! In Love With These Times never strays too far from this paradigm, it delivers a lean look at the recent rebirth of garage music.
Released originally in 3 parts on VBS.tv in late 2010, New Garage Explosion!! is now available as a 75 minute blast of scuzzy fuzzy pop and punk. Covering people like Jay Reatard, Girls, Black Lips, Vivian Girls, Thee Oh Sees, Davila 666, Magic Kids, and others, the doc is certainly an opportunity to get acquainted with some of garage rock’s recent superstars. Whether it be the mostly queer informed music of the bay area or the southern rock revivalists with a twist from Georgia, New Garage Explosion!! takes all comers.
The music is very good and most of the people are interesting. The performances all look very homegrown and fun. But I must admit, the ghost of Jay Reatard hovered above much of it. He’s certainly the most magnetic figure in the film, taking up a majority of the interview time. Part of me felt uncomfortable with the general espousal of his “do what I want, when I want” attitude knowing it led to his death almost immediately after filming.
It also briefly touches on some of the larger labels in the scene, like Goner. Because it jumps around so rapidly, perhaps it misses out on some opportunities to delve deeper with some of the artists, but it’s just not that type of doc. It’s not one to ask hard questions or figure everything out because, like the music it explores, it’s meant to simple, fun, and an all around good time.
Movies can be prohibitive. It’s funny, sort of, to think about that. Film seems inherently liberating. Especially now, with seemingly endless graphical capabilities, many filmmakers have left behind notions of what they can or cannot do. To a point. Lemme blanket all of this with a reassurance that in no way do I think that is a bad thing. I’m not coming down on movies at all. At all. I fucking love movies. Partly because what they do is tell a story.
Show something happening. But if you think about the things you can do with not only a camera, but effects, music, archival footage, animation, art, editing, it’s almost humorous how alike most films are. It’s like rolling a million sided die a million times and landing on something between 1-1000 every time. Still a multitude of differences, but overall only covering a small part of the whole. Every once and a while, I see a movie, if you still want to use that term, that is out of that comfort zone.
Koyaanisqatsi, which I put up as the Saturday Matinee this past weekend, is a movie like that. So is Johan Grimonprez’s Double Take. Now, this doesn’t mean that I necessarily think movies that do this are all better than others, or even very good (though these both are, in my estimation, great). But they’re interesting, if only for their ability to usurp your expectations (hopefully) without being manipulative, disingenuous, or unwatchable. The words that I would use to describe the initial interactions I had with Double Take would definitely by “fucking confused.”
I had seen it’s poster – a picture of Alfred Hitchcock standing in front of a police line-up wall, bearing the tagline “If you meet your double, you should kill him.” – around the time it experienced minimal release last year. My interest was piqued, as I assumed it was a Hitchcock documentary, and a very good one judging by all the accolades the poster let me know had been heaped upon it. But minimal investigation left me befuddled.
The more I read about it, the less I understood: it’s a video essay, about Hitchcock, but also communism and the red scare, and Hitchcock meeting his double, but it’s all archival footage, but they may have hired a Hitchcock impersonator too, and a guy who does his voice, and it’s about time travel. That’s basically what I gleaned. After spooning my brain matter back in through my ears, I decided to move on I guess, finding it easier just to forget about it than watch it and be embarrassed at my inability to understand it and risk my head exploding Scanners style in a packed (well, probably not packed) theater.
What a mistake. Luckily, I was reminded of it’s existence by My Pal The Crook last week, and quickly jumped at the chance to finally watch it. So remember that really fucking strange and muddled description I gave of it a couple sentences ago? Turns out that’s actually pretty accurate. Swag. Double Take is much easier to consume, and enjoy, if you just try not to necessarily think about what you’re watching. Just get lost in it’s wholly unique, hypnotic, thrilling, and mystifying rhythms.
At it’s most basic level, Double Take explores the parallel stories of The United States’ 1960’s tension with the USSR, and Hitchcock’s (fictional) encounter with his doppelganger on the set of The Birds. There’s a lot of actual footage of Hitchcock in the film, which I thought was just great. In my mind he had become sort of a mythical figure, and the footage of him was human, charming, but also impressive. At least I think it was him. See, they did hire an impersonator, who at various times plays Hitchcock, but also plays himself.
They also hired a Hitchcock voice impersonator (who is totally spot on) to narrate the film. I say narrate, but it’s actually just a reading of an original monologue written by Tom McCarthy in Hitchcock’s voice, based on the Jorge Luis Borges story “August 25th, 1983”. McCartthy (a novelist, whose book C was one of my favorites of last year) knocks it out of the fucking park with the monologue. I don’t want to go into detail, but it’s just great. Starting to kind of get a picture of how hallucinatory and awesome this movie is? I think any further attempt to explain it would do it disservice, so basically I would just say: see it. If only to step outside of the box for 90 minutes and look at movies with fresh eyes.
