Video: Orangechair.tv – “Black Swan”
Black Swan is Darren Aronofsky’s latest gem about addiction and obsession. The intensely sexual thriller straddles the line between thriller and drama, with a final act as powerful as any in recent memory.
Movie critic for OrangeChair.TV, Mike Eisenberg is also an independent filmmaker and staff writer at Screenrant.com.
Leonard Cohen – Bird On A Wire (TMC)
The story goes that Leonard Cohen’s manager, Marty Machat, commissioned director Tony Palmer to follow Leonard around on a 20-date European tour with the intention of capturing a bit of the creative muse on celluloid.
The film Bird On A Wire sat in Machat’s storage until he passed away, at which time Cohen took over possession and kept the film in hiding. Recently, Cohen returned the footage to the son of his former manager, who immediately set about tracking down Tony Palmer to complete the project that had started four decades earlier.
Newly released on DVD, Wesley Willis’s Joy Rides is a beautifully assembled biographical documentary of one of Chicago’s most unique artists. Wesley Willis was a diagnosed chronic schizophrenic who found a way to turn both his art and his music into a reliable source of income over his tragically shortened life; he died at 40 of leukemia in 2003. Willis’s twin careers as both an artist and musician fascinated some, offended others, and were marginalized by still others.
His career as a visual art is sometimes even further obscured by the same subset of fans who loved his music. While it is easy to dismiss his ballpoint-pen artwork of cityscapes, to do so is to do Wesley a huge disservice. I wasn’t aware that to a degree, Wesley had formal architectural drawing experience. The amount of detail in his drawings is staggering, and the fact that years after he’d visited a certain city he could draw a building or a subway tunnel from memory is an astounding ability. The movie shows Wesley in the latter part of his life while drawing, and it’s fascinating to see the artist in action.
It’s a terrible name so can the film be any good? Who knows? A new biographical film on John Lennon titled Nowhere Boy premiered in the UK this week. The film focuses on Lennon’s youth up through the launch of The Beatles. One unique factor is the use of Lennon’s actual voice to drive some of the narrative. He’s a fascinating character and the story of The Beatles doesn’t get old for many of us, but how many really good non-documentary movies have been made about John Lennon’s life and music?
Trailer: Nowhere Boy
On the movie’s 30th anniversary, Vice Magazine features Over the Edge: An Oral History of the Greatest Teen Rebellion Movie of All Time. They talk to the cast (including Matt Dillon), the writers, the director, the producer, and even Bun E. Carlos:
Bun E. Carlos (drummer for Cheap Trick): When the movie came out, we were still up-and-coming and not yet rock stars. This was our first major soundtrack; we hadn’t had a hit single yet. We were just glad to be asked to participate.
There were two scenes in particular that really worked well with our music. The first scene was when the kid [Mark] shoots the cop car with a BB gun. That song was “Downed,” and it was brand-new. The guitar had a kind of helter-skelter sound, and it was very effective. The second scene was when the other kid [Carl] lies on his bed, listening to headphones with “Surrender” playing. I just thought it was great.
The director admits that one of the teenaged actresses “was practically the music supervisor for the movie. I just listened to what she played me and paid attention. The movie is better for it.” The soundtrack is amazing and—in addition to Cheap Trick—also features the Cars, Van Halen, and the Ramones. Badass.
Via bb.
If someone had asked me what Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard and Son Volt’s Jay Farrar have in common I might have answered, “They both have unique voices?” As it turns out they have much more in common, including a shared passion for Jack Kerouac and it appears now, co-writing credits on the soundtrack for an upcoming bio on the king of Beat writers.
Gibbard and Farrar were approached by filmmakers in 2007 about writing music for the film One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Kerouac’s Big Sur (IMDB), due on October 20. According to Farrar, approximately 90% of the soundtrack’s lyrics draw directly from Kerouac’s poems. One wonders how the filmmakers landed on these two as writing partners, a question that isn’t immediately answered by Gibbard.
“I’d never met Jay before, and we found ourselves in a studio with a film crew, just blinking at each other, diving right into recording sessions,” Gibbard told Billboard.com. “In that first session, we did 3 or 4 songs together. We had the trepidation of not really knowing each other; getting to know each other in real time as we were recording made for a beautiful recording.”
Album details after the jump…
Tom Waits will portray Satan himself in Terry Gilliam‘s upcoming film, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.
“How do you play the devil?,” muses Waits of his second pairing with the filmmaker. “How do you play an archetype that large, that deep in history? I finally realized that I was just going to have to play it myself — it’s my devil. It’s the way I play the devil.”
Should be good. You know there ain’t no devil, there’s just God when he’s drunk…
Tom Waits: iTunes, Amazon, Insound, wiki.
Via 24bit.
Never Get Out Of The Van: The Story of Mustard Plug is an 84-minute documentary that traces the ska-punk pioneers “from their humble roots in the basements, bars and punk clubs of Grand Rapids, Michigan and follows them on a 17 year journey across the world.” Over two hours of bonus material includes audio commentary, deleted scenes, interview outtakes, six music videos, and live footage of nine songs.
The band claims that the DVD chronicles their “meteoric rise to traveling in a van and their subsequent continuation of traveling in said van.”
“. . .rock ‘n’ roll is always a quintessentially B art form. Its potency, even the bulk of its charm, has always been about no respect for artistic authority, musical elegance, refinement of taste, or virtuosity.” So write David Sterritt and John Anderson in the introduction to one of the 11 sections in their eclectically focused selection of essays culled from sources ranging from the Los Angeles Times to tcm.com, The B List (Da Capo Press; $15.95). The section in question is titled “Whole Lotta Shakin’: Rock, Pop, and Beyond,” and it contains essays on the movies The Buddy Holly Story, King Creole, American Hot Wax, The Girl Can’t Help It, and Greendale. The essay on Neil Young’s Greendale, by Sam Adams, contributing editor at Philadelphia City Paper, is quite possibly worth the better part of the price of this collection of essays on that movie as well as 57 others that Sterritt and Anderson encompass in the subtitle The National Society of Film Critics on the Low-Budget Beauties, Genre-Bending Mavericks, and Cult Classics We Love.
Sterritt, chairman of the National Society of Film Critics and a film professor at Columbia, and Anderson, a writer for venues including Variety, miss the point vis-à-vis B movies and rock and roll. A better way of looking at it is that a B movie is to a full-blown feature what a B side is to a disc. Peter Keough, a film editor at the Boston Phoenix, writes in one of the collected essays, “Traditionally, the term B movie refers to those cheap, readily accessible, generally lurid exploitation films from pulpy genres designed to fill the second billing for the main feature.” The occasion of his essay is Francis Ford Coppola‘s The Conversation (1974), which was made just after The Godfather. Clearly, Coppola didn’t make a film that had “no respect for artistic authority;” Keough points out that Coppola acknowledged Michelangelo Antonioni‘s Blow-Up (1966) as inspiration for the film; Blow-Up was nominated for two Academy Awards (director; screenplay), and while it didn’t win either, let’s face it: back then, mainstream was the only stream so far as the Academy was concerned. Keough writes that The Conversation represented a “new kind of B picture,. . . an intensely personal expression of the filmmaker’s soul.”
Submit video of yourself dancing like Ian Curtis for your chance to win two new Joy Division DVDs. HOW?
• Video your moves
• Upload them to YouTube (or any other hosting service)
• Include the links to your video in the form or in the Comments…
ONE lucky winner, chosen by the GLONO staff, will win both films.
Winner of nine film festival awards, including three at the Cannes Film Festival, CONTROL profiles Ian Curtis, the lead singer of the pioneering post-punk band Joy Division.
