PAUL SIMON, JAMES MURPHY AND THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE MODERN ARTIST

By Alicia Van Couvering

Does the culture make the artist, or does the artist make the culture? Two Sundance documentaries — Shut Up And Play the Hits, which follows James Murphy through the last concert of his band LCD Soundsystem in 2010, and Under African Skies, Joe Berlinger’s history of Paul Simon’s seminal Graceland – might seem to be unlikely bedfellows. Both films are brilliantly executed portraits of musicians walking the tightrope of cultural relevance and personal expression. The differences between the two stories illustrate fundamental changes in our popular culture over the last 30 years.

Both films seek to explore “a moment in time.” For Under African Skies, that’s 1986, the year Simon released his celebrated and controversial album Graceland. His prior album, Hearts & Bones had flopped, providing his first taste of anything but wild success since the ‘60s. “I felt liberated,” explains Simon, not having the record companies on his back expecting hits. “I could kind of just do what I wanted.”

So he accepted an invitation to spend ten days in South Africa. “Intimidated” by the albums of local musicians like Lady Smith Black Mambazo and Miriam Makeba, Simon nevertheless got everyone together to jam. “There were babies in the studio… it was a big party…” The album – which involved further recording in London and New York with the South African singers and musicians, plus an appearance on Saturday Night Live – was a smash. But backlash came quickly, as anti-apartheid groups insisted that Simon had violated a cultural ban in place to protest apartheid, and black American groups accused him of exploiting black musicians for his own gain. Simon ignored their complaints, and set off on a world tour that was widely protested and frequently paused for bomb threats. He arranged a concert in Zimbabwe, and encouraged his South African band to sing their national anthem on stage. While everyone who was part of the tour declares their total affection for Simon and unified disagreement to those who opposed him at the time, other voices from South African political groups contextualize the controversy into … Read the rest

“ROOM 237″ AND THE MUSIC OF “THE SHINING”

By Scott Macaulay

I’m leaving Sundance this year was the longest list of films I missed but really want to see then ever before. At the very top of is Room 237, Rodney Ascher’s treatise on the multiple meanings viewers have constructed from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. “Discover why many have been trapped in the Overlook Hotel for over 30 years,” is the film’s beguiling tagline. Here, via Lance Weiler’s Text of Light, is an excerpt about the music.

… Read the rest

LADY VENGEANCE: LAST MINUTE GIFT GUIDE FOR GENRE BUFFS

By Farihah Zaman

Still not sure what to get your comic-book-obsessed little brother? Forget to pick up something for mom that satisfies her cinematic blood lust? The following gifts are Lady Vengeance approved, and most arrive just in time for December 25th.

For the Low-Brow Art Lover:

Crazy4Cult: Cult Movie Art (Gallery 1988/Kevin Smith, $25)

The currently out-of-fashion but undeniably hard-working Kevin Smith has teamed up with the LA-based Gallery 1988 to collect the best in good, pulpy, sometimes downright dirty artwork inspired by cult films. The aesthetic style and subject matter is fairly diverse, meaning there’s something for everyone.

For the High-Brow Art Lover

Stanley Kubrick Photograph (Stanley Kubrick, $250)

From 2001: A Space Odyssey to The Shining, Kubrick was the master of thoughtful, witty, and unnervingly beautiful genre film. VandM and the Museum of the City of New York show us he was also a damn good photographer, exhibiting that penchant for the bizarre, the menacing and the secret as he did in his beloved films.

For Those who Didn’t Mind the Revised Spelling of Syfy:

Sharktopus Double Bill: DVD (Declan O’Brien, $8) and T-shirt (NBC Store, $26)

In honor of the DVD and Blu-Ray release of another fantastic low budget Syfy original revolving around a crazy beastie hybrid, give that special someone a one-two punch with a copy of the film (thanks, Anchor Bay!) and the graphic t-shirt they should obviously be wearing while watching it.

For the Thoughtful Comic Book Collector:

MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic, Maus (Pantheon, $25)

Art Spiegelman’s all-mouse graphic novel about the holocaust is legendary, and his reflections on the book and its influence are equally sharp and articulate. This behind-the-scenes book is also unique in that it comes with a DVD-R with related historical documents, audio interviews with Spiegelman’s father, the artist’s sketches, and more.

For the Politics Buff who Has Everything:

On the Art of Cinema (Kim Jong … Read the rest

LADY VENGEANCE: HALLOWEEN DREAM

By Farihah Zaman

While theaters all across America have been raiding the vault to bring us horror favorites throughout the month of October, there’s just nothing like catching something gory, bloody, spooky or flat out disgusting on Halloween night, sweating in your topical costume and getting sugar-high on candy corn.

Here are my All Hallow’s Eve picks from a few special theaters around the country, and if you don’t happen to reside in one of the cities below, there is always Netflix and Amazon streaming, several options on demand, and a typically killer lineup on Turner Classic Movies, including Lady Vengeance favorite Village of the Damned at 8:00PM EST.

Austin, TX

HALLOWEEN (John Carpenter, 1978)

9:30PM, Blue Starlite Mini-Urban Drive-In Theater

http://www.bluestarlitedrivein.com/home

What better way to celebrate Halloween than with the film that casually co-opted the name of this day devoted to fear? As simply satisfying as the holiday, Halloween ushered in many of the tropes we now associate with modern horrror – the hunted babysitter, the haunted spaces of suburbia, the virginal survivor girl – not to mention anointed Jamie Lee Curtis as the scream queen of the subsequent 1980s. The idea of seeing this classic in the vulnerable dark of a drive-in fills me with terror and delight.

New York, NY

THE HOLY MOUNTAIN: An Evening with Alejandro Jodorowsky (1973)

7:00PM, Museum of Modern Art, Theater 1

http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/film_screenings/13607

A delayed grand finale to the Jodorowsky retrospective earlier this year, the Museum of Modern Art will be screening The Holy Mountain, with the a rare appearance by the man himself for a post-screening Q+A. Mythical, magical, bizarre and surreal, The Holy Mountain tells the journey of a figure known as The Thief as he tries to unite heaven and earth. Don’t you want to find out why this film played The Waverly Theater for 16 months straight?

Advance tickets to this event are sold out so run over to MoMA now to get tickets from the information desk.

San Francisco, CA

ZOMBIE (Lucio Fulci, 1979)

7:00PM and 9:00PM, Roxie Theater

http://www.roxie.com/events/details.cfm?eventid=AC61A71C%2D1143%2DDBB3%2DC6788E528381DA05

 … Read the rest

“THE KILLING”

By Jason Guerrasio

It’s extremely difficult to type the words “my favorite Kubrick film” because I honestly feel I could put that down while writing about any of them. But what I can say about Stanley Kubrick’s Hollywood calling card The Killing is it’s the one film of his that I’m most nostalgic about.

Film noir. Jim Thompson’s words. Sterling Hayden’s “when men were men” bravado. The contract studio picture was on the way out and the New Hollywood of Bogdanovich, Ashby and Nichols were breaking down the doors.

But before that (and likely escalating the emergence of New Hollywood) there was Kubrick. Then 28 and coming from New York’s beatnik era having just made a twisted romance drama Killer’s Kiss (which he shot with no sound and dubbed the dialogue in post) in 1955, one year later he would team with indie producer James B. Harris and Thompson writing a screenplay for the first time to adapt the Lionel White novel, Clean Break.

Now titled The Killing, Hayden plays Johnny Clay, an ex-con who masterminds the heist of a racetrack with a group of men who aren’t “criminals in the usual sense,” as he puts it. All with jobs and different lives, like Clay, they converge in the hopes of a score in the millions that will make them for life. Of course there are problems: women, booze, and other unavoidable wrenches (or should I say horseshoes) in the “masterplan” that leads to one of the most memorable endings in the noir genre.

But unlike the majority of noirs, the combination of Kubrick and Thompson creates an elevated, hard-boiled story that makes the movie standout. Thompson’s razor-sharp dialogue (“smack that face into hamburger meat”) and Hayden’s delivery is filet mignon to the skirt steak of most noirs. Then there’s also Kubrick’s vision and the execution by d.p. Lucien Ballard (though they didn’t get along well), particularly the tracking shots. However, the biggest standout is the structure of the story. Told from the perspective of each player involved, the story moves back and forth from Clay, the track window teller (Elisha … Read the rest

THE MADNESS OF “FULL METAL JACKET”

By Jamie Stuart

“Matthew, don’t allow yourself to ask “Why is he doing this to me?” Wonder why is he doing this to himself.”

The blown-to-hell chaos of productions like Apocalypse Now, Fitzcarraldo and Jaws are often evoked as legendary examples of disasters turned into classic motion pictures, but after reading Matthew Modine’s Full Metal Jacket Diary, I get the feeling that was par for Stanley Kubrick.

It’s one thing to hear stray anecdotes about life on his films, but it’s something quite different to swim through a first-person account of an entire project — an account that isn’t even a memoir but a digested arrangement of actual diary entires written as it all went down.

I recently grabbed a copy, one of only a few hundred remaining, from the original 2005 run of 20,000, and devoured it in one night. It’s not a rigidly detailed portrait like Taschen’s The Greatest Movie Never Made, but more an impressionistic experience mixing text and photos taken by Modine on set and elsewhere. That said, between these two books, you couldn’t ask for a better example of how Kubrick operated as a filmmaker from pre-production through shooting; the first phase seemed ruthlessly controlled and pedantic in his acquisition of research, the second was completely freeform.

Full Metal Jacket was in production from August 1985 through September 1986, including a 3-month break while Lee Ermy recovered from a car accident. Those who recall reading about The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut in newspapers know it went the same way on those films too. Full Metal Jacket took so long to make that Oliver Stone was able to convince investors to fund Platoon based on Kubrick making a Vietnam film, and he beat Kubrick to the punch, sucking a lot of air out of FMJ‘s release six months later.

Considering that Modine is a true ambassador for FMJ, regularly conducting Q&A’s at screenings and even developing a FMJ iPhone app, the most revelatory aspect about his experience on the film is how utterly miserable he seemed while making it — it dragged … Read the rest

THE PERFECT SWAN

(Editor’s Note: This essay contains spoilers.)

In literature or in oratory, where rhetoric arose from, it’s somewhat difficult to separate the argument’s mode of persuasion from its substance. In order to make an entirely skilled rhetorical point, the writer or speaker will have to present a series of assumptions and assertions, facts and hypotheses, in such a way that makes the argument’s substance apparent. That’s why literature lends itself to the intellectual: it’s founded upon a progression of ideas.

Cinema is often referred to as a different kind of linguistic medium (the “language of film”), but a linguistic one nevertheless, and it’s true that cinema has its own rhetorical tools. A film’s style — the sum total of its formal decisions — becomes a mode of rhetoric, as the film tries to advance any number of points. The points being advanced aren’t necessarily didactic in nature — it’s not like every, or even most, movies are trying to “tell us” something directly – but as a movie progresses, it builds an argument, a case, whether it wants to or not. The problem is that, while text or speech is (to a certain extent) predicated upon an argument that follows a logical progression, cinema can make its arguments in a less logical fashion.

I found myself thinking about all this after I saw Black Swan last Friday. The film is utterly compelling, stylistically superb, but it advances a few ideas about art that I realized, after the haze of the film’s compelling rhetoric faded, I entirely disagreed with. Yet that didn’t diminish my enjoyment at all; the film’s rhetoric/style and its ideology were two separate things for me, even though the film uses the former to advance the latter. This separation is hardly an uncommon thing — for an extreme example, think of Triumph of the Will, which is a stylistically superb film that advances an appalling ideology; ditto Birth of a Nation.

Still, the more I thought about Black Swan, the more it began to bug me: the movie was so much fun to watch, yet … Read the rest

BRIAN COOK, “COLOR ME KUBRICK”

By Nick Dawson

JOHN MALKOVICH AS IMPOSTER ALAN CONWAY IN BRIAN COOK’S COLOR ME KUBRICK. COURTESY MAGNOLIA PICTURES.

Color Me Kubrick: A True…ish Story is the fascinating story of English conman Alan Conway (flamboyantly portrayed by John Malkovich) who made his career out of impersonating Stanley Kubrick. Conway found out that hardly anyone actually knew what Kubrick looked like, a discovery which led him to take his deception to extravagant, and often ridiculous, extremes. He used his borrowed identity to obtain huge amounts of money and seduce the young and impressionable, and got so immersed in the activities of his affluent alter ego that he began almost believing he was Kubrick.

The film is the directorial debut of Brian Cook, a veteran of the movie industry who is known as one of the best assistant directors in the business. The Brit cut his teeth on cult classics like Alfie (1966) and The Wicker Man (1973), and has since worked with everybody from Brian De Palma to Mel Brooks. Cook was such an ideal choice to helm Color Me Kubrick because he himself was a long-time collaborator of Kubrick’s. The real Kubrick, that is.

Filmmaker talked to Cook about Kubrick, working with John Malkovich, and his memories of over forty years in films.

DIRECTOR BRIAN COOK ON THE SET OF COLOR ME KUBRICK. COURTESY MAGNOLIA PICTURES.

Filmmaker: Tell me about what it was like working with Stanley Kubrick?

Cook: It was always a long journey with Stanley, because the films always took a long time prepare and then to shoot. So it was always an endurance test as much as anything. On most movies you know when you’re going to start and finish, but with Stanley you were always going off at a tangent so you could never see the light at the end of the tunnel. I worked two and a half years on Eyes Wide Shut, probably a year and three quarters on The Shining, and a year and a bit on Barry Lyndon. I didn’t do Full Metal Jacket because I’d just bought a house in Australia, … Read the rest