Ken Russell dead at 84

One of my favorite film makers, director Ken Russell died this week.  John T. at Shocks to the System  shared from his personal experience as a film student under Russell's tutelage and Aylmer at Unflinching Eye  wrote a short but very insightful analysis of Russell's films and relationship to British cinema.

Post Thanksgiving Trailer a thon-I have been warned

It seems that our trip to New England has left me bedridden for the the day.  My tools to fight boredom between naps are a laptop, an Internet connection, and a set of DVDs Named Horror  Do Not Watch Alone.  Curiously, the discs identify themselves as "Do not watch" when I put them in my laptop.

Random Rumblings: Black Flag - 1983 - Culver City

I saw this this morning from Scott (gotankgo)'s web site.

Random Rumblings: Black Flag - 1983 - Culver City

What I am watching tonight: Dracula's Fiancee (2002, Jean Rollin)

There are a handful of directors that I love purely because of their beautiful visual style; I just want to grab individual frames from their movies, blow them up to poster size and decorate my house with them.

Jean Rollin is one of those directors.

Insomniac Theater Presents: My (Pretty lame for a guy that calls hmself a horror movie fan) Shocktober Movie List

The Halloween Spirit  appeared, for the first time this year, on Friday night when Adrienne and I went to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show,  a loving tribute to many of the movies I saw as a kid.  This was the first time in (way) over two decades that I had been to a "live" RHPS showing.  Fortunately it wasn't at midnight because there is no way I could have stayed up that late.

It was a great show; in addition to the antics in the audience, there was a fairly well choreographed stage show.  Many of the men and woman in the audience wore jaw-droppingly revealing costumes, often made up of bustiers, lingerie and thigh high stockings held in place with a garter belt.  I was hoping to see amongst the usual Playboy Bunnys, sexy nurses, maids, stewardesses and pirate babes, some serious female role model type  costumes like Slutty Secretary of State or Supreme Court Dominatrix.

Curiosity Killed the Cat

Today was a beautiful fall day, high around 70 degrees.  There is a definite advantage to living in southern Georgia.  I am taking it as pay back for the crushingly hot summer.  How did I choose to celebrate this beautiful gift of a day?  By stretching out on the couch in my big fluffy bathrobe and watching Twilight (Catherine Hardwicke, 2008).

The Thing (Matthijis van Heijningen, 2011)

I just came from watching (the prequel to) 1982's The Thing, confusingly enough also called The Thing and I am  giving it a 3/4 jar full of change (I am looking for an original icon to use to rate movies) of terror.

Insomniac Theater Presents: Salome's Last Dance (Ken Russell, 1988)

Last night, my cat Olivia and I watched Ken Russell's Salome's Last Dance (1988), and wow, what a blast. I can't think of any director I have been as devoted to as Ken Russell. Looking at his IMDB page, I have watched ten of the 19 feature films listed.


Just like his earlier film, The Boyfriend (1971, with Twiggy and 6 foot, 6 inch dancer Tommy Tune), Salome's Last Dance presents itself as a story within a story. However, instead of focusing equally on the actual setting of the play, Salome is almost solely about a performance of Oscar Wilde's banned play, Salome, for it's author,  by staff and customers of a brothel.

Russell's love of literature was also featured in 1988's Gothic, about the famous, 19th century, horror story writing contest that produced both Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and John Polidori's The Vampyre.  Experienced as a laudanum induced hallucination, the viewer gets to see, among other things, breasts with eyes for nipples and Henry Fusell's painting, The Nightmare, come to life as the Shelleys, Lord Byron and other guests attempt to outdo (and undo) each other

Russell's flamboyant, visual style was completely unleashed in 1975's The Who's Tommy, which took viewer on an insane, psychedelic trip.  Resist the urge to watch this movie under the influence of drugs, the film is hallucinogenic enough.  Tina Turner's performance of "The Acid Queen" will tear your soul apart.  And you will never forget Ann Margaret, all in white, writhing on on the floor in front of a television screen, ejaculating baked beans (an allusion to the cover of an early Who album).

Tommy starred Oliver Reed.  Reed is best know (to me) as the hairy chested  Leon in Hammer's 1961 Curse of the Werewolf.  He was nominated for an Oscar for his role in Ridley Scott's massively overrated Gladiator ( I know it is a great film, but believe that sometimes the weight of sadness that must crush Russell Crowe is so overwhelming that many nights, he goes in his study, stares at his Best Actor Oscar and weeps in shame, knowing that it belongs to Chow Yun Fat for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.)

Reed played Urban Grandier in Russell's 1971 The Devils, a stew of sex, religion, political intrigue, hysteria, and lesbian nun sex.  Clearest memory, besides the big orgy wherein a statue of Christ is sexually assaulted by a bunch of "possessed" nuns, is the arrival of the witch hunter, who leads his entourage onto the scene like a rock star complete with long hair and purple tinted glasses.

Anyway, Salome's Last Dance is a visual treat as the lounge in the bordello becomes transformed into the setting of Wilde's play.  Wilde's prose, mostly unadulterated, flows from the mouths of the elegantly costumed whores and johns in a delightful cadence.  Imogen Millais-Scott, as Salome, captivates the viewers eyes as she prances around the stage, the petulant teen-ager whose desires lead to her undoing.  

This Sh*t P*sses Me Off!

I am tired of people forwarding me emails or exhorting me to copy-and-paste their facebook status to mine, espousing the fallacious belief that America can be saved from its debt crisis if I and my family would buy only American products from locally owned businesses.  Even more so tonight when I got  one that promised "if every American spent just $64 more than normal on USA made items this year, it would create something like 200,000 new jobs" after reading about John Boehner walking away from President Obama's "grand bargain" due objections over raising revenue by "removing tax breaks for oil companies, corporate-jet owners, and hedge-fund managers." ("No 'grand bargain' on the debt ceiling," from The Week, the Best of the US and International Media, July 22, 2011, volume 11, page 2).

Security Risk; how to avoid the "...make frustrating changes to your browser." warning.

I love living in the age of computers and the Internet.  They are two tools that have given opportunity and access to worlds I never even thought could have existed.  I can write and publish whatever I want, edit video or music at home without expensive machines (or software), and learn interesting things about people, places and things.  Occasionally, the Internet and my computer work against each other.  Sometimes when I am searching for images on the Internet, this pop-up will appear:

Anniversary

This was me, a year ago.

God is good.

Keywords

I was looking at the statistics for my blogs today and saw this on the Traffic Sources section:

I hope they found what they were looking for.

Insomniac Theater Presents: Blood on Satan's Claw (1971)

I am watching it now; the whole movie is available on YouTube

I didn't make it through last night.  I'll have to pick it up where I left off.

I first heard about this movie when I was a kid.  Channel 43, from Lorain, usually showed horror movies at 8 o'clock on Saturday nights and The Blood on Satan's Claw  was on once or twice a year (along with Don Sharp's Curse of the Fly, the Ishiro Honda's War of the Gargantuas).  Of course, since this was in the days of one television per household, we didn't watch many of these movies.  Curiously, Dad made an exception for Curse of the Fly. 

The Blood on Satan's Claw takes place in rural, 17th century England.  The tone is set early in the film when the Judge, played with extreme pomposity by Patrick Wymark, declares "Witchcraft is dead and discredited."  He quickly changes his mind when a series of bizarre and unholy events sweep through the shire.

My Scripture classes were never this interesting

Eighteen-year-old Linda Hayden gave a standout performance as Angel Blake, the leader of the nastiest church youth group since the Manson Family.  

Sometimes the pacing is a little slow, The Blood on Satan's Claw is an unusual and entertaining horror film.

Ciao, Oxford

Ciao, Oxford

I know it is a couple of weeks after the fact, but I finally got my farewell compilation to the place that had been my home for the last five years (almost to the day).

I started making mix tapes 30 years ago, when I was in college (coincidentally, that was also in Oxford).  Making audio compilations, whatever format, has always been something I have enjoyed to do.  I often listen to my favorite ones on my iPod.

RIP Amy Winehouse (14 September 1983 – 23 July 2011)

Amy Winehouse's "Love is a Losing Game" had just started playing on my iPod, in a mix that I was preparing about my recent departure from Oxford, when I read that she was dead.  Her songs were musically very rich and often quite fun.  She blended many disparate different musical styles into a melange and fired it in the crucible of deep soul.  Plus she had a knack for an amusing turn of phrase.  

Public Service Announcement

Starting this afternoon, I will be without the Internet for several days while moving to Georgia.  Please wish us well and appeal to whatever Higher Power(s) you may recognize that my wife does not abandon me at an isolated rest stop along the way.

M

Link

Blogging Harry Potter: Harry Potter vs Jane Eyre (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, part One)

I finally watched the penultimate chapter in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, part One, (directed by David Yates).  It was a Harry Potter movie: there is some inept, magical bumbling, some righteous indignation, and the growing presence of evil.

The night before watching Deathly Hallows, I watched Jane Eyre (Robert Stevenson, 1943), with Orson Wells and Joan Fontaine.  Harry has a few, superficial similarities to the plucky, gothic heroine: they both were orphans, brought up by cruel relatives, including an overweight, obnoxious cousin, and  both were forced to live under the stairs.



Jane Eyre and Harry Potter were also had submissive relationships; Jane had Rochester in what was a very strange relationship: The more he abused and humiliated her, the stronger her love for him grew.  Much the same with Harry and Professor Snape.  Alright, that last one was a stretch, but  all poor Alan Rickman (about $11 million poor) did in this film was walk dramatically, with his giant cape flowing behind him so I felt he needed a mention.

Not surprisingly, in Harry's darkest moments, when Ron deserts him and Hermiogne, he tries to bird dog Ron's girl.  This reveals a remarkable lack of character in the seriously flawed hero that Harry would be.  Harry Potter has always been just a boy, dependant on the people around him to protect him, shelter him and make his decisions for him.  He may have extreme powers, but he lacks the knowledge of them until he gets into a bad position.  Even magical screw-up Ron does more than Harry just by leaving the group when the going gets too rough for him.  All Harry does is whine, complain and so on.  At least Jane enjoyed her submission.

So far, in his story, Harry has been proven that it is better to be lucky instead of good; and at the end of Deathly Hallows, part One, that luck seems to have turned against him.

(aargh!  Too much work and not enough sleep;  I made a huge error when I published this yesterday, falsely naming Jane Eyre's beau Heathcliff.  Heathcliff,  of course is from Wuthering Heights, which I also watched prior to writing this post.)

Super 8

I am in the process of transitioning from one house to another, 800 miles away, so my output is going to be even more sporadic.

It is good that we saw  Super 8 last night.  Even there there were some little screw ups, the filmmakers did a fantastic job creating my life as a middle school student in 1979.  The fact that the action in takes place in south eastern Ohio, where my Dad was from, made it a bigger trip down memory lane.

They even recreated my fantasy first kiss; with a girl zombie.

As for the movie, it was pretty good even though a little predictable.  Think Stand by Me and ET had a baby.

Time to get to work.

Insomniac Theater Presents: What Amber Heard

Wednesday, June 1, 2011 01:31:27 PM


SPOILERS AHEAD!

Self Portrait of a three-year-old

Last night my three-year-old granddaughter and I recently watched 101 Dalmatians, after which she spent the next two hours running around the house yelling "15 puppies! 15 puppies!" It is amazing that she has so much energy after only three hours, 45 minutes sleep, two spoonfuls of strawberry yogurt, a package of cheese and crackers and half a gallon of milk, consumed in 8 ounce increments.

She sleeps in our bedroom and often slips into our bed and is prone to peer over my shoulder and ask, "What are you watching Pop-pop?" I have had to move my late night viewing to what used to be the office and is now discarded toy storage.

During a particularly sleepless night, I watched a double feature, 2006's All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, Jonathan Levine's first feature length film as a director and veteren filmmaker John Carpenter's 2010 The Ward.  I didn't realize it but I was in for a night of Amber Heard, a new (to me) scream queen.

Amber Heard was Mandy Lane and Kristen.

Insomniac Theater Presents: Miike Madness

Monday, May 9, 2011 10:22:00 AM

Recently, a friend returned my DVD of 2001's twisted love story Audition.  Audition was my first exposure to the to the world of Takashi Miike; I had ordered it on Amazon (pre-release!) on impulse, based entirely on the blurbs. I watched it once, then put it in the cabinet with my rusty nails, hand grenades, dirty syringes of smack, Rush Limbaugh tirades, everything that tastes good and other unhealthy things and forgot about it.

I don't know what possessed my to take it out and share it with Steve; perhaps the perverse image of him watching it in his lovely, suburban living room replete with high def tv and the assorted bric-a-brac of normal family life contrasted with the white knuckle horror of the final act was too much for me to pass up. He returned it with clenched teeth and a “don't ever do that to me again” look on his face.

Updates from the cellar

Olivia and I just finished watching a colorized Night of the Living Dead; I guess she has gotten over our Takashi Miike fest (post coming soon).  NOLD is still the scariest movie I have ever seen.

Last week I watched Audition and Ichi the Killer and have never enjoyed being repulsed so much.  I also saw the latest Harry Potter film, but haven't found much to say about it.

Problems of Leisure

Last night I saw a commercial for X-Box  that used the Gang of Four song, "Natural's Not In It," from their 1979 debut album, Entertainment. The song is a fairly straightforward rant against consumerism, the systematic creation and fostering of a desire to purchase goods and services in ever greater amounts, (Wikipedia). Even though the commercial only features the funky, grinding guitar break and no lyrics, which mock  society's attempt to find fulfillment by acquiring the newest pleasure toys.  By definition, this attempt to stay abreast is a never ending (or winnable) battle because the objective will always remain out of reach.

The problem of leisure

What to do for pleasure

Ideal love a new purchase

A market of the senses

Dream of the perfect life

Economic circumstances

Insomniac Theater Presents: Grindhouse and Exploitation Treasures

Tuesday, April 26, 2011 08:20:16 AM

This morning Gilligan at Retrospace, the best blog for looking at the world of my childhood, published another fantastic post called 1970s Grindhouse:  You Can't Go Home Again.  In between the newspaper ads for horror and sexploitation double and triple features, he speculates on the demise the genre and reasons why it has not experienced the renaissance many thought it would.  

“ So, with Machete, Piranha 3D, and Drive Angry tanking at the box office, can anyone out there deny that the public at large does not want this kind of smut? Don't blame Hollywood. When it's offered in the theaters, no one goes to see it.  It's a sad example of how you may want things to be as they were, but you can never go home again.”