Category: [Videos]

RIP David Stratton

What awfully sad news to wake up to today. I knew Stratton was going blind, which is an awful thing to befall someone whose chief love that they built their life on is a visual art, but this really is the last of him… I suppose at least he didn’t have to live too long without films. The Stratton family’s grocery store loss was very much cinema’s gain; he did well for a man who never finished high school.

And, for once when I’m doing one of these notices, I’ve actually got a story about Dave and how *I* once taught him something about a film…

…the film in question being Benjamin Christensen’s great barnyard oddity of a movie Häxan, a weird hybrid of horror and documentary before either of those film genres were really a thing. So, picture this: it’s 1999, and Stratton’s restarting his great cinema history course as part of the Continuing Education thing at Sydney University. I can’t resist passing this up, especially given how big I was on silent cinema at that time and that was where the course was. I sign up as a student. In the second semester, we get around to the first half of the 1920s, and for one of his 1922 choices, Stratton picks this. And people are CONFUSED.

Cos the version Stratton showed only had dialogue intertitles; all the expository titles for the opening lecture bit and elsewhere in the film were missing. By the end of the screening, I think the general mood was “WTF”, cos the absence of the expository titles rendered some parts (particularly the ending) kind of incomprehensible. I, on the other hand, was, well, not as confused as the rest of the class, cos I’d actually seen the film before this—got the old Redemption VHS from the UK when we were there in ’96—and so I knew what should’ve been there… so why wasn’t it? Well, I also knew the film had been reissued in 1968 with a narration by William S. Burroughs… was that what we were watching that night? That would explain the lack of expository stuff cos the narration would’ve replaced that… but the print didn’t have the narration. So I was still a bit confused.

Anyway, I got the Criterion DVD of Häxan a few years later and that confirmed my suspicion that it was indeed the 1968 print (which is on that disc as an extra), just that someone had stripped the narration from it for some reason (I can’t remember now if it even had a score or not). On that night, though, everyone was a bit bemused by what had just happened… and your humble scribe here uncharacteristically put himself forth to explain to everyone else “hi, I’ve actually seen this before and David’s copy was missing a whole heap of intertitles for some reason, so it actually does make sense than you’re all probably thinking it does”. And Stratton was quite taken aback by this cos, as he then said, he’d never seen any other version of the film, and had never realised there even was one. Well, he certainly knew by the end of that class. And that, children, is how I, of all people, got one up on the expert and professional. I don’t get to do this sort of thing often, so excuse me if I’m mildly self-impressed for a moment…

Another crush bites the dust?

Yeah. I’ve written about Sydney Sweeney before, the woman with The Tits That Saved The West From Wokeness Somehow, and I said then that I didn’t know much about her, so I didn’t know where she herself might stand on that issue and other matters political… well, I have more of an idea now. Mind you, even if I didn’t know much about her, I did find her awfully cute, and I could’ve added her to the list of ladies on that older post. I wish I could still find her cute in the same way, but now I don’t know if I can… Oh well, not the first time I’ve discovered someone I had a bit of a crush on might actually be shitty in some way, and it probably won’t be the last time. I just hope Emilia Clarke doesn’t come out as a Reform voter or some such, because that would be too awful to handle…

Anyway, as to that ad campaign:

The actor by then had generated considerable media coverage after the outfitter American Eagle released several videos showing her modeling the company’s denim jeans and jackets. American Eagle’s campaign generally revolves around the punny use of the phrase, “Sydney Sweeney has great genes.”
In one video, “genes” is crossed out and replaced with “jeans”. Another clip showed the blue-eyed blond suggestively looking at the camera and discussing how her body’s composition “is determined by … genes”.
“Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color. My jeans are blue,” Sweeney continues in the advertisements, which include a joke about the cameraperson becoming distracted by her breasts.
Some social media users dismissed the campaign as graceless, arguing that it echoed rhetoric associated with eugenics and white supremacy at a time when the Trump administration was seeking to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives as well as aggressively pushing to detain and deport immigrants en masse.
One TikTok reaction video that received hundreds of thousands of likes accused Sweeney of ignoring the political climate of the moment, saying “it’s literally giving … Nazi propaganda”.
US conservatives have seized on the indignation over the campaign on the liberal fringes, rushing to praise Sweeney for landing a blow on “woke” advertising, invoking a term some use to besmirch DEI measures.

Now I’m not above using the word “Nazi” when I think it’s warranted, of course, but in this case… yeah, I’m not feeling it. I just don’t think it’s the white nationalist dogwhistle some people on the Left are calling it…

Mind you, that doesn’t mean some people on the Right aren’t taking it as one, even if I’m not hearing the signal… which is the point of dogwhistles after all, I know, though I suppose some people will pick up signals even if they’re not intended (cf. noted Beatles fan Charles Manson). This particular creep has a bunch of Taylor Swift AI pics with sunwheels and the like, so, you know… one of them.

I don’t know, I just find the whole thing dispiriting somehow; we perhaps should’ve known (and I’m seeing quite a few people saying they did, because OBVIOUSLY they’re all so SMART) after the “MAGA party” thing that she would be as Republican as the rest of the family evidently is, but the evident confirmation is still a letdown. I hope she has enough sense to disavow the chuds who’ve replaced the aforementioned Ms. Swift as their “Aryan” icon and that she does it in less time than Tay Tay took to make her own positions clear; like I said, I don’t entirely buy the argument that this is all some eugenics propaganda, and I rather doubt Sydney had that much creative input into the campaign… but she’s still the public face/cleavage of the thing, and some sort of clarifying statement might not go astray. In conclusion, I offer you this video I found:

Goddamn it, Chud

I’ve been rewatching some of Pat Finnerty’s stuff lately, so the YT algorithm has been suggesting more, including this one which I somehow had missed before. Not only did it introduce me to “San Quentin” (not a Johnny Cash cover, fortunately), it also introduced me to the even more egregious “Figured You Out“, which just… Christ. So yeah, I just got one but TWO new reasons to despise Nickelback. I don’t usually expect much from a Sunday night, but that’s a lot more than I usually get.

Oh, and this guy died too, brother

Yeah, Hulk Hogan shuffled off his mortal coil last night too. Funnily enough, I’m not seeing nearly as much affection on his passing as I’m still seeing for Mr Osbourne, which I suppose indicates a certain… difference between the two. Hogan was famous enough that even I kind of knew about him in the 80s, and I knew nothing about wrestling; I only started becoming even dimly aware of what it was all about once the Internet started seriously becoming a thing at the start of the oughts, but it was my housemate and bandmate Joe who taught me more about it cos he was a big wrestling nut and had actually run some shows here… so that was also how I kind of discovered just how rotten the business is, and how Mr Bollea above was one of the most rotten figures in it. Whatever else could be said against Ozzy—and let’s be honest, there is quite a lot—I don’t think he ever claimed to be something he wasn’t; conversely, Hogan’s stardom was built upon him doing just that, using the stage figure of Hulk to hide the fact that the real Terry was a bit of a shit. And, as time passed, people became increasingly aware of that as he became increasingly shitty… but what about Hulk, instead of Terry? Steve Shives, an actual lifelong wrestling fan, had some thoughts I found interesting, so I’ll let him speak:

The Comfort Zone

Michael K. Vaughan is one of my favourite Youtubers, and his latest video is a particularly interesting one; he tells about a viewer who expressed disappointment that, for a while now, the sort of books he’s been reading and reviewing on his channel isn’t as broad as it used to be, and he should read more widely and out of his comfort zone, and dared him to read something by Jane Austen (there being a Booktube reading event devoted to her in June)…

“That’s more like it, Roger!”

Now, I’m sure the horror he expresses at that idea in his video was mostly performative and for comedic value, cos he has a couple of videos on the subject of favourite books (one of which I actually rewatched the other night), and he’s upfront about his broad tastes being pretty populist, but his top 100 also encompasses classical authors like Homer, Thucydides, Herodotus (whose Histories is his top book), Arrian, Xenophon, Polybius and Livy, and “serious” authors like Dickens, Steinbeck, Walter Scott, Wilkie Collins, Hemingway, Stevenson, Charlotte Bronte, John O’Hara, Conrad, Dostoyevsky, Wilde, Dumas, Tolstoy, Fitzgerald, Haggard, Wells and Hugo, and even his “genre” preferences would mostly be considered classics of their kind and even literature in general too (Asimov, Bradbury, Lovecraft, E.R. Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, Chandler, Hammett, Ross MacDonald, Matheson, LeGuin, Machen, S. King, Verne, Simak, Tolkien). So his tastes are much broader than his viewer possibly thinks. But he’s also made videos about all of these in the past, so it’s probably not like he feels the need to redo them.

And the whole thing made me wonder: what if someone did that with me? I mean, if someone came across this blog and looked at the page for the films I’ve reviewed and decided the stuff I’ve reviewed on here so far (which is mostly of a horror nature) so far constituted my “comfort zone”, and then told me I needed to watch something “good” instead… well, would I respond with similar grace to Michael? Cos I suspect probably not; I would note that yeah, horror is a lot of what I’ve been watching in the last few months, but I have seen plenty of the standard classics. I’m not stupid enough to make a top ten list or anything of the sort, but if they demanded I name some non-horror titles I have considered “great” over the years, I’d include a lot of the following:

    • Citizen Kane and quite a few other Welles films
    • Singin’ in the Rain
    • The Rules of the Game
    • Sunrise
    • The Great Dictator
    • Bad Day at Black Rock
    • The Searchers
    • A Matter of Life and Death and, again, most other Archers titles from the ’40s
    • Lucifer Rising
    • 2001: A Space Odyssey
    • Duck Soup
    • Sherlock Jr.
    • A Hard Day’s Night
    • North by Northwest
    • Blazing Saddles
    • Wild Strawberries
    • Forty Guns
    • Yojimbo and, again, several other Kurosawas
    • Sansho the Bailiff
    • Tokyo Story and, again, quite a few other Ozu films
    • Fitzcarraldo and, yet again, other Herzog films
    • Battleship Potemkin
    • King Lear (1971)
    • The Cranes Are Flying, Letter Never Sent and I Am Cuba (Mikhail Kalatozov triple bill)
    • Metropolis and, once more, several other Langs
    • Heat
    • Ben Hur (1959, though the 1925 one is also good)
    • And any number of Warner Brothers cartoons, especially from the 40s and 50s (and by Bob Clampett particularly)

Alternately, I could just point them at my Letterboxd, save myself time, and tell them to choke on my general experience of “good” cinema. It’s not like I feel the need to justify myself anyway, of course, but if someone were to approach me like Mr. Vaughan’s viewer and tell me to widen my horizons, I think they’d soon live to regret doing so…

‘Tis a fine explosion but sure ’tis no liftoff, English

So Edolf’s latest Starship test went… poorly, and, as you can see, the cult is already trying to downplay it; somehow the fact that it blew up before launch is apparently less bad than it blowing up once it was in the air.  And I know they always try and spin these cases as “well at least now we know what needs more work so it was still useful”, but you still can’t call it successful. Rockets shouldn’t blow up on the launch pad, nor indeed at any other point. By this point the company should know what the fuck it’s doing, which it apparently still doesn’t. I present you with the explosion itself…

…which has been compiled in this video from multiple angles, including slow motion at one point, and just keeps getting funnier with each new change of camera position as it repeats. It must be said, the explosion is pretty great; if only they’d been testing to see just how well the thing could blow up before launch, then this would’ve been a spectacular success.

Meanwhile, Honda—a company better known for vehicles of other kinds—just successfully tested a reuseable rocket of their own without much fuss. Fairly simple test, obviously, I’m guessing rather less complicated than SpaceX’s stuff and it obviously wasn’t going all the way to space, but it actually worked, which is kind of the important thing. And it’s kind of delightful to watch the thing go up and down again from the onboard camera, too.

Oh not another one

And just a few hours later it’s goodbye Douglas McCarthy from Nitzer Ebb… no word on what took him out, but he was apparently diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver last year so I’m guessing alcohol caught up with him at last. A damn shame, whatever the case. I was shocked to discover he wasn’t even 60 yet; apparently he was just 15 when Nitzer started, so only 18 when the first single came out.

I never saw Nitzer Ebb live, but I gather they saw me; back in 2006 they were one of the main acts at the Under the Blue Moon festival, performing upstairs at Newtown RSL while I was downstairs with the Inflatable Voodoo Dolls… we were part of the DJ lineup, and also we played a short live set (friends of ours were also playing support upstairs that night), and apparently Douglas and Bon came down to witness our semi-musical shenanigans and enjoyed whatever the hell it was we were doing. So there you go. Lift up your hearts:

And, with rather more hair, here he’s guesting with Alan Wilder’s side-project (as it still was at that time) Recoil on a cover of Alex Harvey’s “Faith Healer”:

Dub housing?

I’ve been listening to this tune a fair bit lately:

“Invasion” by King Tubby from 1975’s Dub From the Roots. You may agree with me that this thing starts off in quite striking fashion with that synth sequencer thing going off, and what it initially put me in mind of the music from Joe D’Amato’s film Anthropophagous (WARNING! You will see scenes from a Joe D’Amato movie):

But it’s clearly not actually that despute the similar skittering synth bass noises, and in any case the record predated that film by about five years. And so, in order to satisfy my own infernal curiosity because I am cursed to want to know about these things, I decided to try and find out more even though I suspected that might be near impossible…

…though I could’ve been wrong about that. This rather helpfully observes the original is this:

However, as you can see, the version on the B-side here is actually by Augustus Pablo, not Tubby. So I’m guessing Tubby’s version was specifically made for his own LP? What complicated things was checking Discogs for more information, which turned up a single by Jackie Edwards called “Invasion” on which Tubby is credited for the dub, but it’s not the same as the one on the album… but whatever. That just left the mystery of the “title card sequence”…

…which, implausibly but evidently, is THIS thing, a “special report” by CBS News from 1967 about homes of the future and what 1967 thought 2001 would look like. Apparently they thought computers would be common by then. That synth thing or whatever it is must’ve seemed suitably “futuristic” to serve as the opening titles music; what I wonder now is, was it conjured up specifically for the program or was it library stock? And none of this explains how Tubby got his hands on it or why, but I may have to leave that mystery unanswered… at any rate, there are a few other tracks on that album deploying these “sci-fi” sounds, so it wasn’t just “Invasion” he was being peculiar with.

RIP Mr Stewart

Sly Stone, pioneering funk and soul musician, dies aged 82

Sly Stone, the American musician who lit up generations of dancefloors with his gloriously funky and often socially conscious songwriting, has died aged 82.
“After a prolonged battle with COPD and other underlying health issues, Sly passed away peacefully, surrounded by his three children, his closest friend and his extended family,” a family statement reads. “While we mourn his absence, we take solace in knowing that his extraordinary musical legacy will continue to resonate and inspire for generations to come.” […]
Among those paying tribute to Stone was musician Questlove, whose documentary about Stone, Sly Lives!, was release earliest this year. “From the moment his music reached me in the early 1970s, it became a part of my soul,” he wrote on Instagram. “Sly was a giant — not just for his groundbreaking work with the Family Stone, but for the radical inclusivity and deep human truths he poured into every note … His work looked straight at the brightest and darkest parts of life and demanded we do the same.”

I’ve got to say, the timing of this news is kind of hilarious, given that it comes only a few months after Sly Lives!, the title of which was supposedly a dig at people who, understandably, could’ve sworn the artist formerly known as Sylvester Stewart had in fact ceased to be with us many years ago. Well, he’s definitely not now… The amazing thing about him dying now, of course, is that somehow he lived long enough to do so; given the amount of drugs he was hoovering up during the 70s (which I suspect contributed to at least some of those undefined “underlying health issues”), I’m surprised he made it out of the decade, never mind this far into this one. The band itself was probably doomed to a short life, especially once the drugs took over, but that was a mightily bright flare-up while it lasted… by way of an example, here they are on TV in 1968 before things started to go downhill: