Archive for the ‘film’ Category
Sunday, January 29th, 2012
Shame is a film about a really boring suit in New York who has a troubled relationship with his sister (Carey Mulligan). The suit (Michael Fassbender) not only has a really tiresome office job, his leisure time is equally tedious – it is mostly spent looking for nookie (both with and without his vapid boss). The suit often buys sex and it is precisely because he thinks that human relationships can be commoditised that his love life is as dull as ditch water.
Imagine the most lacklustre out-take from a story by a forgotten eighties literary brat-pack also ran and then make whatever you’ve dreamt up about a hundred times worse, and you’ll just about have a handle on Shame. The film is set in the present but its addled reinvention of New York owes more to the way the city was depicted by the likes of Jay McInerney and Tama Janowitz about 25 years ago. And by drawing on outdated clichés, McQueen manages to make Manhattan look way less exciting than Cleethorpes.
The sex scenes are ultra-tame softcore with no come shots, no erect pork swords, and a focus on brief glimpses of female tits and ass. Shame is squarely aimed at middle-brow audiences from middle England and middle America who are easily shocked and incredibly prudish. There are lots of shots of faces and heads (and I mean the type of head primped by a regular hairdresser – not anything sexual) with out-of-focus backgrounds to make the movie look mildly arty. Typical of this over-used trope is a scene where we see the backs of the heads of the brother and sister with an out-of-focus TV playing cartoons to provide visual ‘interest’. Overall the cinematography sucks as badly as a rubber slave with a dirty butt plug jammed down their throat. The soundtrack is really crass as well – with way too much Bach.
Shame is a movie that will appeal to repressed and aesthetically-challenged saddos who consider TV programmes like Strictly Come Dancing sexually charged. If you don’t fit this category then avoid Shame like the plague. I thought McQueen’s first film Hunger was unadulterated middle-brow crap, but Shame manages to be even worse! There’s more excitement to be had from watching flies swarm around a dog turd for ninety minutes than in McQueen’s cinematic slumber parties. But if you like Merchant Ivory Productions, you’ll probably love Steve McQeeen. Me? I prefer watching paint dry!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Bach, butt plug, Carey Mulligan, Cleethorpes, come shot, Hunger, Jay McInerney, literary brat-pack, Manhattan, Michael Fassbender, middle America, middle England, New York, pork sword, rubber slave, sex addiction, shame, Steve McQueen, Strictly Come Dancing, Tama Janowitz, tits and ass
Posted in film | 21 Comments »
Friday, January 13th, 2012
In terms of having the greatest film career slide of all time you’d have thought Eric Roberts had everything going for him. For starters his sister is Hollywood A-lister Julia Roberts, and he got Golden Globe nominations for his early starring roles in King of the Gypsies (1978 – best actor debut) and Star 80 (1983 – best actor). But by the time Roberts took the lead role in the martial arts flick Best of the Best (1989) you can see it has all gone wrong. Why Roberts was cast as a member of a fictional US karate team when he couldn’t fight his way out of a paper bag is a mystery in itself. Best of the Best has a tediously moralistic plot that is so predictable you could set your watch by it, and Roberts also displays his not so unique ability to over act (particularly in the hospital scene with his injured five year-old son). And Julia’s big brother also boasts a haircut that is even worse than his inability to fake the fight and exercise routines depicted throughout the flick…
Let’s skip Best of the Best 2 and a whole slew of other junk and move onto Ninja Creed AKA Royal Kill (2009). Despite the fact that Roberts refrains from any martial arts antics in this utter train wreck of a movie, he somehow manages to make his barnet look even worse than in Best of the Best. Having sat through the movie on DVD I can concur with the Washington Post’s verdict: “deliriously bad film-making… Royal Kill needs to be seen to be believed, but don’t see it, under any circumstances”. And Roberts followed this up with among other things Shartopus (2010), in which he appears to be drunk rather than acting….
All that said, Eric Roberts looks like a rank outsider in the movie career slide stakes when compared to muscleman Richard Harrison. After a bit part in South Pacific (1958), Harrison discovered the best way to get his career going was to marry the daughter of B-movie boss James H. Nicholson (of American International Pictures). For much of the sixties, Harrison found himself in Italy making an assortment of spaghetti westerns, spy flicks and sword and sandal movies. In the seventies and eighties Harrison went from being a B-movie star to having his name used to sell grade-Z flicks. He worked with virtual everyone who was considered to be no one in the film industry – ranging from the notorious Jess Franco and sleazy Joe D’Amato, to the utterly fabulous Godfrey Ho.
Godfrey Ho was the William Burroughs of martial arts films. As deftly as Billy Burroughs applied the cut-up technique to text, Ho utilised it to splice together unrelated celluloid elements. Working with producer Joseph Lai, Ho took footage from other films and more or less randomly intercut this material with his recurring motif of ninja fight scenes (usually featuring Richard Harrison) to create new movies. This is the situationist method of detournement deployed on an industrial scale, and it leaves more carefully wrought exercises in subversion – such as René Viénet’s Can Dialectics Break Bricks? (1973) – looking like tedious Hollywood bollocks by way of comparison.
Ho and Harrison’s masterpiece is Scorpion Thunderbolt (1988), which is basically two films mashed down into one. The earlier material comes from Name (1985), an unreleased Hong Kong horror flick about a woman who is half-human and half-reptile – she commits gory murders under the influence of a snake charmer and a witch (who has groovy erotic dance moves and really long finger nail extensions). Meanwhile a gang controlled by the same enchantress is attempting to assassinate Richard Harrison because he’s unknowingly in possession of a ring that poses a threat to the semi-nude sorceress’s occult omnipotence.
The early scenes set the tone for the whole of Scorpion Thunderbolt. In one of these sequences, Harrison drives past a hitchhiker. He changes his mind about not wanting to give the nubile young woman a lift after getting a flash of her tits. Once inside Harrison’s car, the horny wanton tells our man she’s an actress. After a bit of banter this dangerous seductress takes our hero to a sex cinema, where he dogs her as film of the ‘actress’ in a porn vehicle is projected behind them. However, what makes this episode particularly insane is that Jean Michel Jarre’s Oxygene is used on the soundtrack (presumably without anybody actually bothering to pay for the rights). The ‘actress’ attempts to kill Harrison during sex but bites a suicide pill when he foils her attack.
The plot of Scorpion Thunderbolt doesn’t matter much. It is enough to say it veers from the comic capers of badly dubbed cops investigating the snake murders to brutality and bloodshed, and back again. It is these startling shifts in tone and imagery that make Scorpion Thunderbolt a post-modern schlock classic. Unfortunately Hollywood and its fans failed to recognise that Ho’s pictures left Jeff Koons looking like a rank amateur when it came to transforming eighties post-modern tropes into high art: and as a consequence once these flicks were released in the USA on video, they did so much damage to Harrison’s reputation as an actor that by the mid-nineties he’d retired from making movies. So there you have it – a no contest – Harrison easily beats Eric Roberts to claim the title of greatest movie career slide of all time!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: . Can Dialectics Break Bricks?, American International Pictures, B-movie, bad hair, Best of the Best, Best of the Best 2, cut-up, detournement, Eric Robers, Godfrey Ho, Golden Globe, James H. Nicholson, Jean Michel Jarre, Jeff Koons, Jess Franco, Joe D'Amato, Joseph Lai, Julia Roberts, karate, King of the Gypsies, kung fu, martial arts, monster, Name, ninja, Ninja Creed, Oxygene, porn, post-modernism, René Viénet, Richard Harrison, Royal Kill, schlock, Scorpion Thunderbolt, sex, Sharktopus, situationist, snake, South Pacific, Star 80, Washington Post, William Burroughs, witch
Posted in film | 20 Comments »
Sunday, December 18th, 2011
Although these days it is possible to see almost any film in the comfort of your own home, the experience is very different to watching a movie on the big screen. A lot of my favourite flicks – movies starring the likes of Bruce Lee and Jimmy Wang Yu – were shot with the assumption that viewers would be metaphorically knocked dead by the wide-screen scale of the action. That doesn’t happen on a computer or TV screen – and not even in the small auditoriums of multiplex cinemas. Home viewing also lacks the social aspects of movie theatres – for example, cheering and laughing along with fight scenes. Although in the seventies and eighties I went to cinemas all over London, I ended up spending more time at The Scala in Kings X than anywhere else.
I actually started going to The Scala when it was in Tottenham Street but my memories of it’s first two years of existence (1979-81) in Fitzrovia are a little dim. I do recall being really knocked out when I saw Ministry of Fear there one afternoon – I think on a double-bill with The Third Man. I recently watched Ministry Of Fear again and was rather disappointed by it, since this Fritz Lang feature didn’t live up to my 30 plus year old memories of it. That said, I’ve had worse reactions to watching films at home that I’d enjoyed when I last saw them at the cinema decades earlier. Ministry Of Fear wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t nearly as good as my recollections of it.
The Scala on Tottenham Street was perfectly placed for those of us on the punk rock trail between Soho and Camden. Walking distance away to the south there was the 100 Club, Marquee, Notre Dame Hall and Rock On Record Stall; and in the other direction were venues like The Music Machine and Electric Ballroom – as well as Compendium Books. But at that time there were still a lot of cinemas around central London, so The Scala didn’t seem too special.
As we went into the eighties a lot of both repertory and first run cinemas disappeared from the face of London. As a result, The Scala – which had relocated to Kings X in 1981 – came to seem a lot more like a lone London beacon for lovers of midnight movies. Aside from having better flicks than anywhere else, The Scala must have been the dirtiest and most run down fleapit in The Smoke – and therefore it had way more character than places like The Everyman. The Scala also had ultra-cheap daytime multi-bill screenings with concessions (for the unemployed and pensioners) – and I was merely one of a crew of dole scum who seemed to spend more weekly daylight hours in this particular fleapit than out on the street or looking for work.
One of the things that particularly sticks in my mind from the earlier part of the eighties are the all night screenings – particularly stuff such as all night beat generation movies, which was where I first encountered flicks like Beat Girl and Bucket Of Blood. Around this time there were also free preview screenings for The Worst of Hollywood TV series (a Friday late-night slot on UK Channel 4 shown towards the end of 1983). As anyone who went to those free screenings can tell you, they’d do filmed introductions for several flicks before showing them. The audience were there to applaud and laugh at Michael Medved running down various grade Z movies – and we got commands from the film crew about how to react to him. Despite doing free screenings for all the films in the series (3 per day as far as I recall), the TV people used the same piece of stock footage of me in the audience on each of their weekly broadcasts. The films themselves – Plan 9 From Outer Space, Wild Women of Wongo, Robot Monster etc. – found a new life and a new audience, and went on to be recycled on more recent TV reruns such as Mystery Theatre 3000.
After a while The Scala became a home from home for many, and the regulars had their favourite seats. I always took the one immediately in front of Kim Newman (who I didn’t actually ever get to know until years after The Scala closed). Other things I suppose I should mention include the famous Scala cat – who’d walk over the seats and across the front of the screen – and the rumble of trains going under Kings X. Ditto the fact that there were lots of broken seats.
in the early and mid-eighties The Scala seemed good at building new films. They’d put movies without a ready-made audience on a multi-bill with established cult favourites. To give an example, I don’t remember what Liquid Sky was showing with the first time I saw it at The Scala, but I was mesmerised and didn’t know if it was really great or totally shit – so I went back to see it again and decided it was great.I must have seen Liquid Sky at least half a dozen times at The Scala during the eighties. The Scala was also a good place to see multi-bills of John Waters or Russ Meyer flicks; although it wasn’t where I first encountered films by either of these directors, it was one of the few places I could see their movies regularly. Thundercrack was another of my Scala favourites, alongside the more obvious art house choices like the I Am Curious movies and WR Mysteries of the Organism (which I still love). The Scala also had some less tasteful multi-bill choices – such as the regular Nazi exploitation triple of The Night Porter (a massively over-rated piece of shit), Salon Kitty and Red Nights of the Gestapo.
Later The Scala seemed to lose its way and failed to build up new to their audience (but not necessarily recent) films. I guess the cinema’s founder Stephen Woolley was concentrating on making a go of his film production company Palace Pictures. I brought Decoder to the UK for the first time in 1989 and screened it in Glasgow as part of the Festival of Plagiarism I organised there, and also arranged to show it at The Scala a couple of days later. I remember getting dropped off by a friend outside the cinema (he’d brought me back from Scotland in his car) and the queue for the screening stretched back to the main Kings X station. It was an amazingly large audience – some of whom I guess had to be turned away.
Colour was important to Decoder and you didn’t really get it’s full celluloid effect on the videos that had circulated in rather limited circles in the UK until then. I don’t remember the exact deal, but The Scala basically insisted that Tom Vague (who came in on the promotion of London screening of the film with me) and I take all the financial risks; then when they saw the audience and money coming through the door for Decoder, suddenly discovered loads of extra expenses so they could keep nearly all the dosh. I presume they wouldn’t have insisted we four-wall it if they’d realised we had a sell out, so they could have made their cash grab look like less of a rip-off – which in the end included things like alleged bottles of whisky for members of staff.
I got the impression that by the end of the eighties the Scala management had become absolutely shameless about doing anything for money because Palace Pictures was a financial black hole. After seeing the crowd Decoder pulled, The Scala started screening it themselves as part of their programme… but earlier in the eighties I think they’d have realised it was a film worth showing without someone coming in from outside. I don’t know or don’t remember how they started screening all the Hong Kong action movies they showed later on (and which I enjoyed seeing at The Scala a great deal), but I assume it was someone coming in from outside and wanting to do it that kick-started those John Woo/Chow Yun Fat etc. screenings.
I was sorry The Scala closed but by the time disappeared in 1993 it wasn’t the institution it had once been. I think it was Palace Pictures – as much as the court case over an illegal screenings of Clockwork Orange – that killed the place. The Scala had been showing that Kubrick film for years under titles like Mechanical Fruit, but I never liked it much as a movie (or a book) and avoided those screenings. The closest we’ve got now to The Scala is the Prince Charles but that’s more a second run place, and the excellent monthly BFI Flipside screenings (but that’s a much cleaner environment).
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 100 Club, 1980s, all nighters, beat generation, Beat Girl, BFI Flipside, Bruce Lee, Bucket of Blood, Camden, Channel 4, Chow Yun Fat, Clockwork Orange, Compendium Books, Decoder, Electric Ballroom, Festival of Plagiarism, Fitzrovia, Fritz Lang, Glasgow, I Am Curious Yellow, Jimmy Wang Yu, John Waters, John Woo, Kim Newman, Kings X, Liquid Sky, Marquee Club, Mechanical Fruit, Michael Medved, midnight movies, Ministry Of Fear, Music Machine, Mystery Theatre 3000, Notre Dame Hall, Palace Pictures, Plan 9 From Outer Space, Prince Charles, punk rock, Red NIghts of the Gestapo, Robot Monster, Rock On Record Stall, Russ Meyer, Salon Kitty, Soho, Stanley Kubrick, Stephen Woolley, The Night Porter, The Scala, The Third Man, The Worst of Hollywood, Thundercrack, Tom Vague, Tottenham Street, Wild Women of Wongo, WR Mysteries of the Organism
Posted in deep topology aka psychogeography, film | 32 Comments »
Friday, October 14th, 2011
Santiago Sierra (b. 1966, Madrid) is well known for his cruel and nihilistic pranks. To save myself the effort of writing very much about Sierra (whose work is tedious but simultaneously serves to illustrate the complete decomposition of the institution of art), I’ve taken the following from a Wikipedia page about him: “Some of Sierra’s most famous works have involved paying a man to live behind a brick wall for 15 days, paying Iraqi immigrants to wear protective clothing and be coated in hardening polyetherane foam as “free form” sculptures, blocking the entrance of Lisson Gallery with a metal wall on opening night, sealing the entrance of the Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Biennial, only to allow Spanish citizens in to see an exhibition of left over pieces of the previous year’s exhibition… In 2006, he provoked controversy with his installation “245 cubic metres”, a gas chamber created inside a former synagogue in Pulheim Germany.”
Sierra’s cynicism and inhumanity are well illustrated by the examples above. He titillates the rich by locking them out of galleries, whereas when it comes to the wretched of the earth, Sierra delights in degrading them by providing a meagre wage in exchange for the performance of boring and humiliating tasks. Sierra’s treatment of those he hires demonstrates not just his repugnant inhumanity – his success as an artist is also based on some extremely cynical calculations about exactly what types of degradation inflicted upon the poor will most appeal to rich collectors.
As an adjunct to the Frieze Art Fair in London, Sierra’s new film No was screened last night to an invited audience at The Prince Charles Cinema just of Leicester Square. The promotion for the movie ran like this: “NO, Global Tour, 2011 A film by Santiago Sierra, Directed by Santiago Sierra, Filmed by Diego Santome, black and white film, 120 minutes. Santiago Sierra(‘s)… recent work, NO, GLOBAL TOUR, consists of the manufacture and transportation of two monumental sculptures in the form of the word “NO”, travelling through different territories on a flatbed truck. The NO, GLOBAL TOUR has resulted in a feature film that documents the passage of this large NO through various world cities… The film, full of all manner of references, does not aim for surprise but thought. Using the strict black and white that characterises his work, and with a soundtrack limited to a careful treatment of incidental sound, the film revitalises the road movie genre through a productive encounter with other languages and disciplines.”
The information that came with my invitation to the free screening was, of course, hype (as is the claim – sometimes made about Sierra – that his work is in some way ‘anti-capitalist’). Free beer and popcorn were a further enticement to attend. Rather than provoking ‘thought’, NO looked like someone had randomly strung together a bunch out-takes from one of Iain Sinclair and Chris Petit’s TV movies – and with results that were far less enticing than those achieved by this pair of London psychogeographers. I went to the screening with the intention of watching the reaction of the audience, who looked bored shitless after ten minutes. Most had walked out before the end of the movie. I presume this is what Sierra wanted and that he’s more than happy with this result. For the rest of us NO is simply a bit of a yawn. The lettrists achieved far more with their deliberately boring films of the early-1950s, and if you want to be alienated in style then stick with the output of the French avant-garde of sixty-odd years ago. Sierra is strictly for the idle rich, and hopefully they won’t be with us for much longer.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Chris Petit, cynicism, degradation, Diego Santome, Frieze Art Fair, Iain Sinclair, idle rich, inhumanity, Leicester Square, lettrist cinema, Lisson Gallery, London, No, No Global Tour, Prince Charles Cinema, psychogeographers, psychogeography, Santiago Sierra, Wikipedia
Posted in art criticism, film, scam | 22 Comments »
Tuesday, December 29th, 2009
Having recently read Phil Baker’s The Devil Is A Gentleman: The Life and Times of Dennis Wheatley, I was moved to revisit the Hammer film adaptations of Wheatley’s novels – The Devil Rides Out (Terence Fisher, 1968) and To The Devil A Daughter (Peter Sykes, 1976), both of which ‘starred’ pseudo-aristocratic plonker Christopher Lee. The first flick is an ultra-conservative thriller with some occult trimmings that looks absolutely pathetic when compared to what was happening in horror cinema at the time. It is of the same vintage as early post-modern classics like Succubus (Jess Franco, 1967), Rape of the Vampire (Jean Rollin, 1968) and Night of the Living Dead (George A Romero, 1968), but looks positively antediluvian in comparison.
With To The Devil A Daughter, Hammer finally caught up with what had been happening cinematically in the late-sixties; they may have been a decade behind the times but the result was still a groove sensation! Just before giving up the ghost, Hammer had finally made a film that rather than being plot driven was based around atmospherics and didn’t rely on a stupid climactic end scene to ‘please’ its audience. There was even some full frontal nudity, albeit very brief . Being arch-reactionaries (and literal Tory party supporters from over-privileged backgrounds) with absolutely no sense of taste or style, Lee and his chum Wheatley loved The Devil Rides Out and disliked the infinitely superior To The Devil A Daughter (which took enormous and much needed liberties with the half-baked novel on which it was based).
Lee’s contributions to the featurette accompanying To The Devil A Daughter in The Hammer Collection DVD box set, reveal him to be an unbelievably vain and pretentious twit. He has a movie career simply because he is tall and can look menacing (he is chiefly famous for his ‘non-human’ roles as Frankenstein’s monster and the ‘undead’ Dracula), few people beyond Lee himself could possibly suffer from the delusion that he can act. Despite this, he witters on about how his Wheatley movies fulfilled the serious function of warning the public of the dangers of the occult. Lee himself is enough of a half-wit to take ‘black magic’ and related hucksterism seriously. It should go without saying that the main danger ‘black magicians’ pose to the wider public is that their attempts to part fools from their money tend to be so ham-fisted that they sometimes make people complacent about the ability of more sophisticated con artists to pull a fast one.
Having had the misfortune to see Lee’s brainless performance on the featurette accompanying one of his best films (although it isn’t quite up there with Beat Girl, directed by Edmond T. Gréville in 1959), I found myself thinking that if this B-movie blockhead really wishes to distance himself from the villains he’s portrayed onscreen, then he really ought to stop behaving like one of the ‘undead’. I therefore leave him and you with the following question to ponder: Christopher Lee, why aren’t you dead? Isn’t it about time he did himself the huge favour of popping his clogs?
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Christopher Lee, Dennis Wheatley, George A. Romero, Hammer Films, Jean Rollin, Jess Franco, Night of the Living Dead, Peter Sykes, Phil Baker, Rape of the Vampire, Succubus, Terence Fisher, The Devil Is A Gentleman: The Life and Times of Dennis Wheatley, The Devil Rides Out, The Hammer Collection, To The Devil A Daughter
Posted in film | 57 Comments »
Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009
Martin (1977) was the film that revealed director George A. Romero’s desire to emulate the middle-brow success of ‘horror’ author Stephen King. It is the tale of a teenage boy who believes he’s a vampire. Obviously, and as Romero confirms in a making of documentary you’ll find on the Arrow’s ’2 Disc Special Edition’, he isn’t; in ‘reality’ he’s just an alienated psycho. The central character comes from a dysfunctional family who believe they suffer from a vampire curse. Despite this, Martin can eat garlic, attend church and walk about in sunlight. His main problem is he is confused and the only way he can get laid is by drugging women; he also murders his rape victims by slashing their wrists with a razor, and then drinks their blood. Eventually he meets a bored housewife who is just gagging for it and whose double entendres are laid on with a trowel. They get it on and Martin’s urge to rape and kill lessens, and when he does murder he switches to male victims.
Although there are a few jokes and the odd stab at satire, essentially this is a straight and serious film with one-dimensional characters and a terrible soundtrack; and because it isn’t particularly trashy – like say Jess Franco’s Female Vampire – it quickly turns into a snore fest. I really hate movies like Martin, films that go out of their way to project themselves as being better than exploitation efforts but at the same time are so desperate for an audience that they steer well clear of genuine cinematic experimentation.
All the films Romero made before Martin are interesting, afterwards he made nothing of worth seeing apart from the curious but flawed Knightriders (1981). With Night Of The Living Dead (1968), Romero reinvented the zombie movie. He went on to wreck the genre with various re-cuts and remakes of his first film, not to mention the tedious follow-ups. Romero’s sophomore feature There’s Always Vanilla (1971) is a perfectly watchable second-rank attempt at an underground movie; it’s about guy who doesn’t really know what he wants to do but lands a top advertising job to keep his girlfriend happy. It isn’t as good as Hi, Mom! (1970, Brian de Palma) or David Holzman’s Diary (1967, Jim McBride), but it is a lot better than The Wedding Party (1969, Brian de Palma).
George Romero’s third flick Hungry Wives AKA Season of the Witch (1972) has at its centre a bored housewife who gets into witchcraft as a way of spicing up her life. In the middle of Hungry Wives there is a beautiful montage of the main character purchasing magical implements cut to Donovan’s song Season of the Witch. This is the best single sequence in any Romero film, and the movie is perhaps his finest too. With The Crazies (1973), Romero successfully returned to the horror genre. This time a virus that turns people into psychotic killers leaves those without the disease fighting for their lives against the swelling ranks of the infected who have it. And that’s that, after The Crazies Romero turned into a bore obsessed with appealing to middle-America. Post The Crazies, even his zombie films suck!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Arrow Films, Brian de Palma, David Holzman's Diary, Donovan, Female Vampire, George A. Romero, Hi Mom, Hungry Wives, Jess Franco, Jim McBride, Knightriders, Martin, Night of the Living Dead, Season of the Witch, Stephen King, The Crazies, The Wedding Party, There's Always Vanilla
Posted in film | 33 Comments »
Monday, December 21st, 2009
The label tells it like it is – “Beat Beat Beat was a German music programme that ran during the sixties. Not to be confused with the other well known German pop programme Beat Club. Beat Beat Beat was broadcast out of Frankfurt commencing in 1966.” Well you wouldn’t want to confuse the two programmes as far as getting the DVDs of material from them is concerned, coz while the Beat Beat Beat (ABC Entertainment) disks give you classic mod, British Invasion, freakbeat, pop and even soul performances, on the The Best of Beat Club vol 1 & 2 (Eagle Vision) you apparently get Deep Purple, The James Gang, Johnny Winter, Santana, Procol Harum, Nazareth, Free, Humble Pie, Jethro Tull, Alice Cooper, The Kiki Dee Band, Johnny Rivers, The Hollies, Bachman Turner Overdrive, The Doobie Brothers, Ten Years After, Canned Heat and Three Dog Night. So while a mixed bag, the The Best of Beat Club vol 1 & 2 will appeal more to headbangers and others of that ilk; whereas Beat Beat Beat is a groovers kinda thang! That said, there were earlier year by year compilations of Beat Club and those for 1965, 1966 and 1967 look a lot better than the more recent ‘total overview’ disks… But I’ve only seen them listed online, I’ve not actually viewed them.
There are Beat Beat Beat DVDS running to about 10 minutes each devoted to The Small Faces, The Kinks, The Yardbirds, Eric Burdon and the New Animals, The Spencer Davis Group and The Hollies. Performances by these acts are not particularly rare and I’ve certainly seen enough footage of them to know the Small Faces totally rock onstage, whereas the Kinks or The Yardbirds (both of whom made records I love) tend to look too static and overall not that great. With more tunes and some groovy but less well known acts, The Best of Beat Beat Beat compilation disks are a better option, despite a really odd selections of talent.
At 41 minutes The Best of Beat Beat Beat volume 1 offers the longest running time. There’s Barry Ryan (Eloise), Cat Stevens (Granny and Matthew & Son) and Chris Farlowe (Out Of Time and Ride On Baby) lip-synching really badly to pre-recorded tracks. Farlowe in particular looks completely uninterested in what he’s doing, but remains compelling in a train wreck kinda way, especially as he is one sad and ugly motherfucker who had an obsessional interest in Nazi memorabilia (fortunately it was illegal for him to wear his fascist uniforms on German TV). There’s straightforward sixties pop from Herman’s Hermints (No Milk Today and My Reservation’s Been Confirmed) that while adequate need not detain us. By way of contrast, Casey Jones and The Govenors (Come On And Dance and Don’t Ha Ha) are a bit of an oddity.
In the UK Casey Jones AKA Brian Casser is known to music fans (but not the general public) as the bloke who booked The Beatles as his support act and briefly had Eric Clapton as his guitarist, but not really for his music. In Germany he had a huge hit with Don’t Ha Ha, hence his inclusion here. And if you like primitive beat sounds then you’ll dig the two Casey Jones and The Governors tunes on the The Best of Beat Beat Beat volume 1. It is probably unnecessary to add Don’t Ha Ha was a Huey ‘Piano’ Smith song. Volume 1 also gives us two tunes from The Trinity featuring Julie Driscoll (Save Me and Road to Cairo), with keyboardist Brian Auger’s theatrics totally upstaging his singer Julie Driscoll (who sounds great, albeit not as good as Aretha Franklin when covering her, but doesn’t have much stage presence). The best is saved for last, The Easybeats doing Loving Machine (incorporating the Batman Theme) and that old stomper Friday On My Mind. As prot0-punkers The Easybeats completely outflank Casey Jonees and The Governors.
Volume 2 is shorter but better. The Minderbenders do a Wilson Pickett medley in the form of Land Of A Thousand Dances/In The Midnight Hour and their big hit Groovy Kind Of Love; and also Don’t Cry No More and a medley of C. C. Rider/Jenny Jenny Jenny. P. J. Proby’s What’s Wrong With My World provides another spectacular train wreck; his lip-synching is terrible and the old rocker looks both off his box and down on his luck – he has to be seen to be believed! The disk winds up with two total class acts, P. P. Arnold and The Creation. A former Ikette (an Ike and Tina Turner backing singer) and session vocalist for the likes of The Small Faces, Arnold is diminutive but her voice is 100% pure soul and her two tracks here (Speak To Me and The First Cut Is The Deepest) are just fabulous.
You’d think there’d be nothing in the Beat Beat Beat vaults that could credibly follow Arnold, but The Creation are up for it! Aside from being a truly awesome song writer and musician, their guitarist Eddie Phillips also had the greatest haircut of 1966, just look at the shape of it around his ear in the footage of The Creation doing their cover version of I’m A Man! The Creation look fabulous in their dark trousers and button-down shirts with contrasting white details (buttons and belts). The shame here is that on the same edition of Beat Beat Beat (their first TV appearance) they also did That’s How Strong My Love Is and Makin’ Time, but they ain’t included on the DVD. Still you do get to see Eddie using his innovative technique of playing his guitar with a violin bow, something much imitated by lesser talents like Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin. What you also see here is The Creation doing Painter Man a year later, with their hair a little more grown out; the band still look really stylish but a little freakier. When I was a teenager back in the 197os I was on the lookout for some Creation vinyl for a long time, and when Raw Records stuck out Makin’ Time and Painter Man on either side of a 45 in the latter part of that decade, I grabbed a copy as soon as it came out. I really love this band, Makin’ Time in particular. And, of course, we should never forget the famous Eddie Phillips quote: “Our music is red with purple flashes.” Incidentally, after The Creation broke up, Phillips joined P. P. Arnold’s backing band.
Volume 3 of The Best of Beat Beat Beat features solid sixties pop from The Searchers (Love Potion No. 9, Sweets For My Sweet and C. C. Rider) and The Tremeloes (Loving You Is Sweeter Than Ever, Silence Is Golden and Here Comes My Baby). Then there are the more psychedelic sounds of The Move (Walk Upon The Water and I Can Here The Grass Grow). However, the real highlight is The Smoke doing My Friend Jack, a song banned by the BBC in the sixties because it is about LSD! My Friend Jack is a psyche classic and everything else on this particular disk looks second-rate in comparison… so surely we could have had more than one track from The Smoke!
I’ve also spotted but haven’t acquired a two band Beat Beat Beat DVD compilation featuring The Troggs alongside Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich. I love The Troggs but I figure the DVD ain’t worth getting coz there won’t be enough of ‘em. Likewise, any disk you see in the Beat Beat Beat series will probably feature gawky looking teenagers dancing badly to groovy sounds… You can also see most of this stuff and much more for free on YouTube, although it comes and goes and the image is obviously heavily compressed- whereas on these disks both the audio and visual quality is really top-notch. Weird how you can see and hear so much shirt now that just wasn’t available to those of us based in London back in the old days, but I ain’t complaining! It’s like time travel for ravers…
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1960s, 60s, ABC Entertainment, Alice Cooper, Aretha Franklin, Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Barry Ryan, Batman Theme, BBC, Beat Club, Brian Auger, Brian Casser, C. C. Rider, Canned Heat, Casey Jones and The Govenors, Cat Stevens, Chris Farlowe, Come On And Dance, Dave Dee Dozy Beaky Mick & Tich, Deep Purple, Don't Cry No More, Don't Ha Ha, Eagle Vision, Eddie Phillips, Eloise, Eric Burdon and the New Animals, Eric Clapton, Free, Friday On My Mind, Granny, Groovy Kind Of Love, Here Comes My Baby, Herman's Hermints, Humble Pie, I Can Here The Grass Grow, I'm A Man, Ike and Tina Turner, In The Midnight Hour, Jenny Jenny Jenny, Jethro Tull, Jimmy Page, Johnny Rivers, Johnny Winter, Julie Driscoll, Land Of A Thousand Dances, Led Zeppelin, Living Machine, Love Potion No. 9, Loving You Is Sweeter Than Ever, LSD, Makin' Time, Matthew & Son, My Friend Jack, My Reservation's Been Confirmed, Nazareth, No Milk Today, Out Of Time, P. J. Proby, P.P. Arnold, Painter Man, Procol Harum, Raw Records, Ride On Baby, Road to Cairo, Santana, Save Me, Silence Is Golden, sixties, Small Face, Speak To Me, Sweets For My Sweet, Ten Years After, That's How Strong My Love Is, The Beatles, The Best of Beat Beat Beat, The Best of Beat Club, The Creation, The Doobie Brothers, The Easybeats, The First Cut Is The Deepest, The Hollies, The James Gang, The Kiki Dee Band, The Kinks, The Mindbenders, The Move, The Searchers, The Small Faces, The Smoke, The Spencer Davis Group, The Tremeloes, The Trinity, The Troggs, The Yardbirds, Three Dog Night, Walk Upon The Water, What's Wrong With My World, YouTube
Posted in film, music | 23 Comments »
Thursday, December 3rd, 2009
By the time I left school at sixteen in the late-seventies the big sound was disco. That said, the real hipsters among the kids who underwent the same non-education as me were into northern soul (rare mainly American and mainly 1960s records that sounded like Motown but never made the pop charts). I first came across northern soul in the mid-seventies because a school friend shared a bedroom with an older brother who was obsessed with a handful of northern soul platters. This big brother would come in from his factory job, put Tainted Love (later a huge hit when it was covered by Soft Cell) or some other northern favourite on a record deck, then flop on his bed to listen to the music until his mum had made his tea. For some reason this particular teenager also liked prog, so he was also the first person to play me Greenslade!
By the end of 1976, I was into punk rock (one of only two pupils in my school into that scene then), while a couple of kids in my class were regularly going to Wigan Casino for its northern soul all-nighters. I can remember them saying to me: “You should come to Wigan, it’s great, we drop a load of blues and dance all night!” My reply was: “Why would I got all that way to listen to records? I like seeing live bands.” There were plenty of blues (amphetamine tablets) around at punk gigs too…
And so that was that, I blew my chance to go to Wigan – possibly the worst decision I made at the age of 14 or 15. Tony Palmer’s 1977 TV documentary makes it very clear there was a truly extraordinary youth culture blossoming there. Space put it this way: “Wigan Casino documents an idiosyncratic scene based around the weekly club night that ran from 1973 to 1981. From elegant slow motion dance shots to fervent scenes of vinyl swapping, Palmer precisely captures the bustle and energy, as well as the overarching subcultural strangeness, of the Northern Soul phenomenon.”
If you have any interest in soul music you should have seen Palmer’s incredible dance shots used by other film-makers or simply posted on YouTube. But it is worth seeing those scenes in context, with a record dealer talking about the prices paid for northern vinyl and a girl who works in a hospital laundry explaining that going to Wigan is the only meaningful thing she does in her life. There is also an interview with the manager of The Casino and a couple of elderly Wigan residents giving their take on life. Cut into this are old photographs of industrial Wigan, and shots of factory machinery that turn with an almost Brion Gysin-like flicker effect. The contemporary scenes of Wigan, particularly images of terraced houses by a canal, make it look every bit as derelict as the rest of England in the late-seventies.
Wigan Casino may be a 32-year old piece of TV, but it’s the best thing I’ve seen in an art gallery for some time! It is on until 19 December at Space 129-131 Mare Street, Hackney, London E8 3RH. Catch it if you can…
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1960s, 1970s, 1977, 60s, 70s, amphetamines, blues, Brion Gysin, dancing, disco, east London, Greenslade, Hackney, London, Motown, northern soul, prog rock, punk rock, S.O.U.L., seventies, sixties, Space, Tainted Love, Tony Palmer, Wigan, Wigan Casino, YouTube
Posted in exhibitions, film | 15 Comments »
Sunday, November 29th, 2009
You have to love Alejandro ‘Chuckles’ Jodorowsky… he’s such a great conman that he’s able to fool most of his fans most of the time (fooling all the people at any one time is rather more difficult). His first feature film Fando y Lis (1968) was fabulous, but his output went gradually downhill from there…. as I’ve already said in different words elsewhere on this site. Nonetheless, I’ve enjoyed watching Chuckles’ almost overnight transformation from an obscure cult figure whose films were very difficult to see, to his re-emergence as a maverick who merits regular name-checking by the ‘mainstream’. The tipping point for Chuckles was 2007, when Tartan in the UK and Blue Anchor in the US issued a box set of his three key movies (Fando y Lis, El Topo and The Holy Mountain), and since then I haven’t been able to move without stumbling over press coverage for Jodorowsky; a couple of weeks ago he was even featured on the front cover of the print version of The Guardian’s weekly Guide. The Guardian piece was hung on a Season of Jodorowsky in London organised by Guerrilla Zoo, comprising an ‘art’ exhibition, three performances of a play and some film screenings.
A few months ago I saw the Drawing Room’s Jodorowsky show, based on this director’s preparations for his aborted Dune film project. I went on a Saturday and the ‘wow factor’ was the dense and completely mixed art and cult film/sci-fi crowd, the place was heaving. The work displayed at The Drawing Room – production sketches by Moebius, H.R Giger and Chris Foss, plus recent art pieces inspired by the unrealised movie – did nothing for me. As a result of that Drawing Room experience, I decided to catch Jodorowsky’s current London exhibition at The Horse Hospital on a Friday afternoon right at the end of its run (today is the last day), hoping it would be a little emptier than the Dune show. I was surprised that no one else was there when I was looking at the work, but my expectation that I would find it dull proved well founded. The ‘wow factor’ this time turned out to be the price tags (in the £12,000 to £15,00 bracket) for work that looked like it had been made by a teenage outsider artist born in the early part of the 20th-century and just after he or she had discovered surrealism and the occult (Jodorowsky turned 80 this year, so perhaps this can be attributed to him starting off a little old-fashioned and then never growing up). I can’t imagine the trade in these items, or even those pictures that are available in limited edition prints at £80, being particularly brisk. Still, the sheer front Chuckles possesses continues to impress me; and as I hope is clear, I value his happenings and film work of the 1960s. The current show features 32 mediocre (they aren’t even bad) watercolours, all of them collaborations between Chuckles and Pascale Montandon.
After a Friday afternoon looking at Alejandro Jodorowsky and Pascale Montandon’s incredibly dull watercolours, there was only one thing I wanted to do that evening, and that was see a movie with no pretensions to being anything very special at all. I hadn’t watched Joel Silberg’s Breakin’ (1984) for at least two years, so it seemed like a good candidate as a piece of mindless entertainment. Two street dancers Ozone (Adolfo Quinones) and Turbo (Michael Chambers) meet up with a middle-class white girl called Kelly AKA Special K (Lucinda Dickey) and like each other’s style. Kelly is a trained dancer but she realises the street kids have talent, and after a few set backs they all gain the recognition they deserve. The film is set in LA, so there is plenty of sunshine alongside the endless breakin’!
The street lingo and threads of the ‘real’ kids are a groove sensation, but even better are the eighties outfits worn by the trained dancers! Looking at the Dickey’s crazy leotard outfit with purple pants worn over it, made me want to dig out my copy of Lucio Fulci’s Murder Rock – The Dancing Death (1984), which like Breakin’ is a Flashdance (1983, Adrian Lyne) rip-off that is not only much better than its ‘inspiration’ but also has plenty of gore and nudity! My main problem with Breakin’ is that while there is some semi-romantic interest between Ozone and Kelly, they fail to get off, let alone get it on in a steamy tripple X-rated all nude sex scene.
The rapper at the street events in Breakin’ is Ice-T and he’s described the film as ‘whack’; but actually it’s Ice-T who is whack, the film itself is so stupid it is really far out! The formulaic nature of Breakin’ represents a complete break with realism, and it is this that makes it a prime example of post-modern kitsch, in other words it is so bad it is good! In dissin’ the film to cover up his own poor performance, Ice-T merely demonstrates that he don’t know jack shit about the way in which ‘the masses’ absorb all meaning; I’d expect a bit more savvy from a motormouthed entertainer like Ice-T, who claims to have been a pimp before he started rapping and acting – but maybe he’s just the ‘original’ Sunset Boulevard ‘flake’! I watch a film like this mainly to check the dance moves, and there are plenty of those, I don’t really care about the ‘plot’, which is after all merely a vehicle to display plenty of lockin’, poppin’ and breakin’!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Adolfo Quinones, Adrian Lyne, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Blue Anchor, Breakin', Chris Foss, Drawing Room, Dune, El Topo, Fando y Lis, Flashdance, Guardian Guide, Guerrilla Zoo, H.R Giger, Horse Hospital, Ice-T, Joel Silberg, London, Los Angeles, Lucinda Dickey, Lucio Fulci, Michael Chambers, Moebius, Murder Rock, Murder Rock - The Dancing Death, occult, Pascale Montandon, post-modernism, Season of Jodorowsky, Sunset Boulevard, surrealism, Tartan, The Guardian, The Holy Mountain
Posted in counterculture, exhibitions, film, occulture | 18 Comments »
Thursday, November 19th, 2009
Back in 1970 this allegedly ‘serious’ documentary about witchcraft sneaked a lot of full frontal nudity past the British censor and was then screened in sex cinemas for the enjoyment of the dirty raincoat brigade. It acts as a kind of companion piece to Derek Ford’s Secret Rites, since both feature Alex Sanders (as, indeed, does Angeli bianchi, angeli neri AKA Witchcraft 70, but that’s an Italian mondo movie not an English ‘documentary’). As the self-styled King of the Swingers (oops, sorry, I mean witches), Sanders camps it up as much here as he does elsewhere; unfortunately there’s a lot less of his rib-ticklingly softly spoken voice than in Ford’s short.
If the late Alex Sanders actually had any ‘occult powers’ then I’m The Queen of Sheba (and no doubt there are plenty of Alexandrian Wiccans out there prepared to assert that I was indeed Sheba in a previous incarnation). Nonetheless, Alex and his coven of nubile young wenches (there are an equal number of considerably less attractive men) dancing naked around fires and performing (simulated) sex magick, are a psychedelic groove sensation. The bad news is that this movie is 72 minutes long and way too much of its running time is devoted to other shit.
Before we get to the self-evidently fake stuff with Alex, there is a load of Margaret Murrayesque bollocks about the supposed survival of the ancient pagan religions of Europe right through the Christian era to the modern day, which is delivered as a voice-over to a few interesting and innumerable dull visual illustrations. Anyone who knows anything about the actual history of European witch trials, will appreciate that the claims of Murray and her followers are complete cobblers. Less informed viewers may take these claims at face value, since the voice-over sounds authoritative, but believe me (actually don’t, go and read up on it), it isn’t!
Anyway, back to Alex, he was obviously an obliging bloke who’d do whatever it took to get into a film. So here you have a witch initiation ceremony that mirrors aspects of Christian baptism (because the alleged survival of the ‘old religion’ is Malcolm Leigh’s obsession) and it looks rather different to the way the Sanders’ coven does supposedly the same thing for Derek Ford. That said, there is still plenty of nudity, bondage, whipping, and other borderline sexual thrills – so if you belong to the real army of the night (the dirty raincoat brigade) fear not, you’ll get your jollies! However, things get even groovier when we move onto scrying, where we have psychedelic hypnotic-patterns flashed across the screen – it’s a total trip, and wouldn’t have looked out of place in a hip 1960s horror flick like The Sorcerers.
Since director Malcolm Leigh is obsessed with the parallels between Christian and pagan rituals, Sanders also obliges him with a black mass; except, of course, this looks nothing like any black mass you’ve ever seen (such as the one in Ray Laurent’s Satanis, a 1970 documentary about Anton LaVey and the Church of Satan). Alex Sanders may be a showbiz sell-out but he’s both sweeter and considerably less of a flake than LaVey. While LaVey appears to have been no more than a huckster, these days so-called Satanism (in reality it is just Christianity in a mildly inverted form) seems to act as a magnet for kiddie-fiddlers and related low-life scum. Sanders, by way of contrast, is great entertainment. It’ s well worth grabbing a copy of Legend of the Witches just for the footage of Alex and his coven acting out their fantasies for the entertainment of dirty old men!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Alex Sanders, Alexandrian Wicca, Angeli bianchi angeli neri, Anton LaVey, Christianity, Church of Satan, Derek Ford, dirty raincoat brigade, Europe, Legend of the Witches, Malcolm Leigh, Margaret Murray, occult power, Queen of Sheba, Ray Laurent, Satanis, Satanism, Secret Rites, sex magick, The Sorcerers, witch trials, Witchcraft 70
Posted in film, occulture | 19 Comments »