Always a fan of surreal macabre, but I don’t like living things slaughtered for art.  I present the following films with descriptors for those seriously twisted fucks in my readership.  PETA folks will particularly enjoy this blog.  Almost all of the following text comes from IMDB and Wiki, except the Sans Soliel and Le temps du loup, both of which I discovered (and of course the nin video).

Danièle Tessier’s Death of a Giraffe, an excerpt of which is shown in Chris Marker’s 1983 film Sans Soliel - depicts a giraffe shot through the neck, with an extended scene of it bleeding to death as it stumbles around, blood gratuitously spurting out from both sides of the neck in huge pulsing waves as the bullet penetrated clear through and out the other side.  Eventually the giraffe falls to the ground and begins twitching and spasming horribly.  Finally someone walks up and shoots it in the head.  From that exact camera location we see the vultures eating the giraffe’s eye, so it doesn’t appear the animal was used for any purpose other than the sport of killing.

Trent Reznor’s nine inch nails band music video to the song Closure (1997) - includes an excerpt from vintage 1903 film footage shot by Thomas Edison showing an elephant (Topsy) being electrocuted to death.

Kim Mi-Duk’s Seom (2000) - a scene where a man cuts some pieces off a living fish and then throws it back into the water, and it swims away.
There are numerous scenes involving cruelty to animals, which according to the director Kim Ki-duk, were all real.

Mou Tun Fei’s Men Behind The Sun (1988) - a cat is thrown amongst a bunch of hungry rats, with predictable results, following which said rats are set on fire.
The film is extremely controversial for its use of what Mou claims to be actual autopsy footage of a young boy and also for a scene in which two cats are thrown into a room to be eaten alive by hundreds of frenzied rats (the rats are later set ablaze).  There is some question as to the legality of the film, since there are laws against animal cruelty in many countries, but not in China.

Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust (1980) - genuine cruelty to animals, banned in over 50 countries, Entertainment Weekly magazine named Cannibal Holocaust as the 20th most controversial film of all-time.
Seven animals were killed during the film’s production, six of which are seen on screen:
A coatimundi (mistaken as a muskrat in the film) is stabbed multiple times in the neck by an actor.
A large turtle (about three feet long) is captured in the water and dragged to shore, where it is then decapitated and its limbs and shell removed.  The actors proceed to cook and eat the turtle.
A large spider is killed with a machete.
A snake is killed with a machete.
A squirrel monkey has its face cut off with a machete.
A pig is kicked twice and then shot with a rifle.
Many condemn this as animal cruelty for the purpose of mere sensationalism and only to attract controversy, and it has also been called “animal torture.” Deodato himself has condemned his past actions, saying “it was stupid to introduce animals.”

Guillermo Habacuc Vargas, the one where he [allegedly] starved a dog to death in a gallery (Since then he has been asked to recreate it for another gallery)
In August, 2007, Vargas displayed his “Exposición N° 1″ in the Códice Gallery in Managua, Nicaragua.  The exposition included the burning of 175 pieces of crack cocaine and an ounce of marijuana while the Sandinista anthem played backwards.  The work also included an emaciated dog tied to a wall by a length of rope with “Eres Lo Que Lees” (“You Are What You Read”) written on the wall in dog food.
Vargas noted that no one tried to free the dog, give it food, call the police, or do anything for the dog.  Vargas stated that the exhibit and the surrounding controversy highlight people’s hypocrisy because no one cares about a dog that starves to death in the street.

Michael Haneke’s Le temps du loup (Time of the Wolf) (2003) - Horse shot in the head, falls to the ground, followed by a close-up of someone stabbing the horse in the upperchest/lower neck, with gratuitous blood spurting out and the horses twitching head in frame show it is not an animatronics.

Michael Haneke’s The Seventh Continent (1989) - It has a fish scene similar to the horse scene in his film Le temps du loup (Time of the Wolf)

Georges Franju’s Le Sang des bêtes (Blood of the Beasts) - a French documentary by a director who went on to do horror films.  It is about French slaughterhouses and has graphic images of animals (even horses) being slaughtered.
The key here despite it supposedly being a documentary is this: Franju stated by using a documentary film format, he was able to use both locations as lyrical counterpoints and “to explain it as a realist while remaining a surrealist by displacing the object in another context.  In this new setting, the object rediscovers it’s quality as an object”.
Le Sang des bêtes was made as a black and white film as an aesthetic.  Franju states “If it were in colour, it’d be repulsive…the sensation people get would be physical one.”
Therefore it is the graphic killing of animals for art.

Gaspar Noe’s Carne - not sure the details on this, but his work has been linked to the New French Extremity and I’ve been told it fits the bill.

Walter Hill’s Southern Comfort (1981) - a slaughtered pig is hung by the legs using nooses and skinned and gutted.

Louis Malle’s Lucien, Lacombe (1974) - animals like chickens and a real dead horse (the horse appeared to have died a natural death)

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s In a Year of Thirteen Moons (1978) - depicts an extensive cow slaughter house scene.  The film follows the tragic life of Elvira, a transsexual formerly known as Erwin.  In the last few days before her suicide, she and her prostitute friend decide to visit some of the important people and places in her life.  In one sequence, Elvira wanders through the slaughterhouse where she worked as Erwin, recounting her history amid the meat-hooked corpses of cattle whose slit throats rain blood onto the floor.

Lars Van Trier - not sure which film, but I know this guy and I’m sure he delivers.

Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) - A water buffalo was slaughtered with a machete for the climactic scene.  The scene was inspired by a ritual performed by a local Ifugao tribe which Coppola had witnessed along with his wife (who filmed the ritual later shown in the documentary Hearts of Darkness) and film crew.  Although this was an American production subject to American animal cruelty laws, scenes like this filmed in the Philippines were not policed or monitored, and the American Humane Association gave the film an “unacceptable” rating.

Thoughts?  Anyone?  Anyone?

 

No, we’re not talking about smoking a bowl of stems here (we all know that we had to make do on limited funds in college), but rather how you hold your freakin’ wine glass.  Someone asked Mick LaSalle, the San Francisco Chronicle pink section film columnist and reviewer, why actors in movies hold their wine glasses by the bowl instead of the stem.  He replied that that is probably because that’s how most people hold their wine glasses.

But I’m here to tell you, and LaSalle would no doubt agree with me, that that is not the correct way to hold your precious wine glass - for several reasons.  Not that there are several reasons LaSalle would agree with me, but you get what I mean.

First, temperature.  If you’re storing and serving your wine correctly, as I’m sure you are, there’s really no need to increase the temperature once the wine is in the glass.  And that’s what you’re doing if you hold the bowl with your hot little fingers.  When I open something straight out of my cellar at 55 degrees Fahrenheit and I’m in too much of a hurry to wait an hour for it to come up to 65 in the decanter, sure I’ll rest the bowl against the topside of my right hand in the area between the thumb and pointer finger.  But I never palm the bloody glass, or touch the side of the bowl with my greasy fingertips!

Which brings us to reason number two: fingerprints.  It’s bad enough that the rim of the glass is all smudged up with your lipgloss, or worse yet lipstick - please don’t wear lipstick to any tasting at which you’ll find me - but some people insist on holding the bowl with their FINGERS!  Egads - and who is going to wash your unique crime-scene identifying slime off the glass?

As an aside here as we’ve already alluded to it - the lipstick/lipgloss/chapstick/lip balm thing is really annoying.  I think we can all agree that one of the most horrifying of modern visuals is the ashtray with cigarette butts slathered in fluorescent pink lipstick.  Few things are as disturbing and disgusting.  Looking at the rim of a wine glass with your lip residue caked on it, coloured up or otherwise, is extremely unappetizing.

Reason number three to not hold your wine glass by the bowl is that you don’t look like you know what you’re doing.  Classy sophistication, snobbery and elitism aside, you just haven’t passed Vino 101 if you still insist on fondling your stemware anywhere north of the south pole.

Reason number four - I don’t do it, so why should you?  ‘Nuf said.

 

Zombieslayer wrote me this:
Take a look at some of your favorite 80s albums.  One thing you will notice is they’re considerably SHORTER.  I’m noticing this with my Metal albums as well as non-Metal.  I think the push to make albums longer has hindered music, as you end up putting crap on there that in the 80s, you would have left off.

And I (Bad Man) responded thusly:
Yes, I suppose there’s some truth to that - but also it’s in part due to the format - when CDs came out artists realized they could fit 60+ minutes on one album, instead of the 20 minutes per side when the standard was vinyl.  So a couple of things happened there - gone was the “side complex”, where an artist would combine thematic elements to fit within 20 minutes, and have the ability to present a duality, or a journey, on an album, with essentially two discrete sets of beginning, middle, and end.  With CD you had 1 uninterrupted listening experience, and you could fit a lot more in there.

So that’s both good and bad - if you had a lot of great material, it was good, and could still accommodate the “journey” motif but it was way more difficult with the longer format to come up with so much cohesive material (unless you’re Pink-freakin-Floyd).  Bad in that now artists were much more likely to pad the album with a bunch of mediocre stuff because it looked better from the marketing point of view of the record company to have albums average 12 songs instead of the previous 10 max.

Another sister evil here is that the reduction in album physical size brought with it a huge loss in album cover artistry, as now no one really cared and the size was too small to humanly perceive subtleties in the artwork, or even experience the scope as could be done when it was 4 times larger.

CDs: bad.  MP3s: bad.  Parents no longer choosing their children’s spouses: bad.

Ah, the benefits of living in the technological age.

 

Back-to-back I watched two docudramas tackling the assassination of John Lennon, a member of the Liverpool (England) rock band The Beatles.  The films were JP Schaefer’s 2007 Chapter 27  and Andrew Piddington’s 2006 The Killing of John Lennon.

Supposedly Lindsay Lohan, one of the main actors in Chapter 27, is BFF with Sean Lennon (one of John’s real-life sons), so they wanted to respectfully service this material.  Well, maybe they did, but then again the screenplay wasn’t a mouthful to chew on - this is no War and Peace.  It all took place within those last three days standing on the sidewalk in front of the Dakota.  Jared Leto also stars in the film, playing the part of Mark David Chapman (the guy who shot John Lennon), and his wannabe southern-drawl narration adds a circus freak show element of annoying disbelief.  How could anyone in the sound booth think his voice was anything less than awful, much less authentic?  Who cares; use a real voice.  I thought it funny that the actor who played John Lennon a) didn’t look like John at all and b) was named Mark Lindsay Chapman.  Now that’s a riot.

The other film, released a year earlier and starring a bunch of people I don’t know (Krisha Fairchild, Robert Kirk, Gunther Stern, Jonas Ball, Mie Omori, Anthony Solis, Vera Felice, Gail Kay Bell, etc.) was The Killing of John Lennon.  This was a vastly superior work, as it took you on a journey through Chapman’s mind and locales, filmed on the locations in which he lived and killed.  The costume design to set these period pieces was taken most seriously in this earlier film, which included building fronts, automobiles, and outer/underwear all working together to create that bygone era, while in the first film it’s hardly noticeable except a few afros and a bad late 70’s shirt worn by the photographer.  The film stock and lighting in The Killing  was also very beautiful to watch, especially the Hawaii shots.

So if you must watch one of these, pass on the star-ensemble boring rendition headed by Leto and Lohan and instead pick up a copy of The Killing of John Lennon.

And with that a few closing observations.  I felt sorry that in the Schaefer film actor Jared Leto had to gain quite a bit of weight to play a role that had been played the year before only much better.  I felt sorry that Lindsay Lohan is super cute - possessing that dark hair, light eyes, and crackly voice that I love - but she’s in major need of serious breast reduction surgery.  I felt sorry for myself for having to watch not one but two movies about a guy I don’t even care for musically (well, that Imagine  song was lyrically the best single piece of music ever written on world peace, but other than that John was in the where-is-he-now-bin since 1967’s A Day in the Life).  But most of all I felt sorry for Paul McCartney.  Because on December 9th, 1980, when he first heard the news this thought HAD  to be going through his head: “But, but why didn’t he shoot ME?”.  Mark David Chapman finally cemented the fact that John Lennon was THE  Beatle.

I didn’t write this, but I concur wholeheartedly…

Lux Interior, the awesomely ghoulish frontman for sleazed-up New York rockabilly OGs The Cramps, died February 4th, 2009 in Glendale, California, as the Daily Swarm reports and an official statement confirms. He was 60.

Interior, born Eric Lee Purkhiser, formed The Cramps with his wife, Kristy “Poison Ivy” Wallace, in 1976. Although the band played CBGB a lot and was a part of the whole NYC birth-of-punk thing, but they didn’t really fit in with pummelers like the Ramones and the Dictators or art-school types like Television and Blondie. Their sound was a slow, deranged, almost sensual take on 50s rockabilly: lots of guitar fuzz, no bass, tempos slowed to a slithery crawl. Before even the Misfits, The Cramps jammed their songs full of allusions to trash culture and long-forgotten B-movies.

The chemistry between Interior’s halting, insinuating growl and Ivy’s snakey surf-informed guitar lines remains one of the great iconic pairings in American underground rock. The Cramps even coined the term “psychobilly.” Their 1981 sophomore album Psychedelic Jungle is a very serious must-have.

Onstage, Interior was always a proud member of the Iggy Pop school of self-sacrificing showman: climbing all over the stage, stripping down, rolling on the ground, generally showing no regard for his physical well-being. But he also had absolutely nuts timing and some truly great, theatrical facial expressions. He was a showman, not a performance-artist. And no less an authority than Ian MacKaye has often named a late-70s Cramps gig at a DC college as a hugely formative influence on the DC hardcore scene, even though those bands really couldn’t have sounded more different than the Cramps’ greasy throb.

Over The Cramps’ three decades years of existence, Interior and Ivy plowed through a small army of supporting musicians, always remaining as the band’s center. Against all odds, the band remained active up until very recently, though they weren’t playing live shows too often anymore.

Lux Interior - RIP

I knew Keith Forsey produced most of Billy Idol’s material, and I remember being very surprised in 1985 when I found that he wrote Simple Mind’s huge hit-single, Don’t You (Forget about Me).  I loved Simple Minds back from their beginnings as Johnny and the Self-Abusers, but I knew when I heard DYFAM that the end was nigh - that was just too cheese-poppy of a song, and with its release the magic of Simple Minds was gone.  They followed that up with the suck-ass Once Upon a Time in 1985, admittedly the first polished album wherein Jim Kerr demonstrated that he could finally write a decent pop song (note “demon” in “demonstrated”), which of course is not a good thing unless you’re Phil Collins and don’t want to sit behind the drum kit in Genesis anymore (to which the young girls say, “What, Phil Collins was in Genesis?”  Yes ladies, and Sting was in The Police; go figure.  Anyway…)

What I didn’t know was that Keith Forsey wrote Flashdance…What a Feeling.  Wow.

 

My girlfriend works in a dance studio (yes, I know it is a major surprise to everyone that a) Bad Man has run across a member of the same species that will tolerate extended exposure to him in close proximity, not that members of different species are more willing as it’s fairly equivocal across the animal kingdom and most every other kingdom too that Bad Man is at his best when given a wide berth and b) said girlfriend has something active to do with the arts, possesses some level of literacy and even bathes occasionally, not to mention has most of her teeth), so she decided to rent this Australian mockumentary (she knew what it was going into it) entitled Razzle Dazzle: A Journey Into Dance.  Directed by Darren Ashton and released in 2007, it stars Ben Miller as a young girls dance studio instructor trying to take his class to the annual championship tournament to win the top trophy.  Along the way we encounter the stereotypical over-zealous mother, played by Kerry Armstrong, the fame-crazed and a little too helpful instructor’s admin/aid, played by Denise Roberts, and a host of young dancers who could actually deliver a modicum of acting.  This film is a mockumentary triumph along the lines of the incredible This is Spinal Tap  (1984) and the scintillating Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999).

I can’t remember when I’ve witnessed a movie of this brilliance.  The casting was impeccable, the script hallucinogenic, the concept conceived and executed with sublime perfection - ladies and gentlemen, it just doesn’t get any better than this.  Every third line was perfectly quotable, although I failed to write any down for your enjoyment here.  It was all done with that gleefully deadpan British (okay, in this case Aussie) delivery similar to the phenomenal BBC show The Office  (not the contrived suck-ass American copy-cat).  We are talking Bad Man laugh-out-loud hilarity on this one!

But it wasn’t all laughs; the reason I write this isn’t because of the humor.  It’s because of the complexity.  This film spurs an incredible range of reactions, many of which are not pleasant or even positive.  We are soundly repulsed and disgusted by the exploitation of the children by their mothers, we are tearfully pained to see the hopes of these poor kids dashed by the devastation of physical breakdown, and we horrified at bearing witness to the extremes parents will go to assure their child stays ahead of the competition.  And the saddest thing is that we all know this happens in real life - far more often than it should.  On the other side we are elated when we see the triumph of children over the manipulation of adults, the natural synergy as we watch them work together as a team toward a common goal, and the rhapsody of success when they win one of the first early rounds in the competition.

Disturbing and horrific yet edge-of-your-seat spellbindingly hypnotic, this film, like no other in recent memory, challenges the audience in the most bizarre and surreal of ways, all the while causing one’s sides to split in ecstatic laughter. 

I can’t say enough about this movie, but like all great quotable films you need to watch it twice (at least).  Like a breathing glass of first growth Bordeaux, this beauty of a film will open new vistas with each sampling.  In a word, amazing.

 

Okay, so the wine press is all up in a tizzy over the latest release of Louis Martini Sonoma Cabernet Sauvignon, the 2006 vintage.  Although some places have it for $11.99, the stores I’ve been able to walk in and plunk down my ducats charge $13.99, and that’s including a $4 discount on top.  So we are really  looking at an $18 bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon.

At any price, this mother f%$^er is a show stopper.  The pure extract of rich dark Cab fruit is mind boggling.  That this thing could come out of Sonoma is miraculous, as there are only a handful of decent Cabs produced there.

Zero tannins so Parker saying it can go 8-10 years shows he is back on the crack again.  And he poses that it is full-bodied, which is entirely an incorrect mistake of body from fruit.  But he’s spot on about the concentration, depth and texture.

I will point out that as noted on the label it is “Vinted and bottled by …”, so guess what boys and girls?  The winery does not own the vineyards from which these grapes came!  You can be absolutely  certain that next year’s vintage will be in bottles labeled by the highest bidder, which will probably be Gallo, so it will go in with their high-end Sonoma stuff.  Or some other major player will snap it up and hike the price to $130/bottle.  That’s my prediction; I’m no Nostradamus but I’ll back this up with whatever money, or wine, you care to throw down.

Buy a bottle or a case; at triple this price you won’t find a better wine, Old or New World, at least not fruit-wise.

 

Okay, now I do know, uncouth though I am, that it’s not cool to dis a man when he’s down, especially if he’s six feet down, but I mean come on!  All this media Oscar hype over a guy who was in a few films and did a decent enough job, but nothing above average.  His notoriety began with 2005’s mainstream cross-over movie Brokeback Mountain, popular only because the subject matter raised eyebrows with the bourgeois American closed-minded audience.  Without this film he’d be just another Hollywood actor; not even A-list.  But because of that movie being released in the right place (repressed America) at the right time (America’s gayness acceptability awakening) Ledger was tapped by Christopher Nolan to play the role of the Joker in his 2008 vehicle The Dark Knight.  While Ledger’s work in the film was adequate, Nolan completely missed the mark with this style-less quagmire of a film, one of the worst portrayals of Batman among many dismal productions of that subject matter.

Let’s not forget about a movie I own starring him (Heath Ledger) and the hot (yes I have her Zombieslayer) Shannon Marie Kahoolani Sossamon - Brian Helgeland’s 2003 German/American production The Order (aka The Sin Eater).  The two things (yes, the only two) worth watching in that film are Sossamon and the incredible Italian Baroque architecture.  The architecture is the only reason to own it.

Heath Ledger is an adequate actor who went the way of a certain Mr. Elvis Presley, and that’s a bummer no doubt.  But the guy deserves exactly what he got, and that does not include an Oscar or any film award whatsoever.  And I’ll prove my point - he wouldn’t get anything if he were still alive would he?  No, decidedly not.  So you’re giving him an award posthumously for some future role in which you’re speculating he’d eventually earn an Oscar?  Although I abhor the Academy, Hollywood, American cinema and specifically the Oscars above all else with but nary an exception (read: David Lynch’s early work), that should be beneath even those artless pompous poseurs.

Heath Ledger.  1979 - 2008.  R.I.P.

 

I’ve been a huge fan of Austrian film director Michael Haneke ever since I first saw his work in his 2002 film La pianiste  (The Piano Teacher).  The harsh emotionally disturbing characters just oozed from the screen, making it tangibly difficult to suffer through, yet at the same time you’re riveted knowing you’re viewing something extremely provocatively disturbing which is actually quite rare when done so authentically.

Having seen, and been harshly enthralled with, his 1997 German language film Funny Games, I was quite surprised when I heard he was going to do an American remake with A-list actors.  I mean come on now - why?  Did he not feel he did it right the first time?  More likely - as was the case with other directors once the Hollywood studios discover them - some movie execs finally took notice of Haneke and decided to capitalize on his genius by throwing American money at him.  Their thinking, I can assure you, is this: No American is going to wade through some Kraut flick with subtitles, so we can make this a whole new movie and make a lot of money off it for the narrow-minded American audience.  Well, you still gotta give ‘em credit for even entertaining such a maelstrom as this emotionally discordant monstrosity.

Now I must say I assumed - without reading the press on it - that this new film of the same name would be different from the original German language piece.  Upon queuing it up in my home theatre system I soon realized that it was a shot-for-shot remake, including the same minimal soundtrack, with John Zorn’s scorching death metal inserts, the same script, the same set design, and even exactly the same wardrobe down to the oversized pullover v-neck sweater the Naomi Watts character wears in the final scene, further humiliating her by graphically exposing her in her underwear.

I read some reviews on Netflix.  Why people don’t get it is sort of a mystery to me.  Sure I understand the average person can’t handle high-art of an extreme nature, but some of their comments are unfounded:
“What may work for the printed page didn’t work for the moving image in this instance.  The acting is not believable, flat, and listless.  It seems to me to be another instance of cool, detached intellectualism, that underneath it all, hates art.  Very European art chic.  Stay away!”
Okay, if it’s “chic European art” then I’m there!  The Europeans know more about art than this country could ever comprehend.  And that the acting is flat and listless is not true - watch the movie.  It is held together by tension created solely through the acting and sparse dialogue.

“This is not an academic exercise in horror movie “deconstruction” or any other pukeworthy pretentious concept.”
Nice.  I like this review too.  And yes, it is just that - Haneke takes everything we know as a movie-going audience and turns it on its ear.

“There were several moments where the camera was on a scene for 15 to 30 seconds with NOTHING happening.”
Actually, (yes, I timed it) there was a great scene toward the end of the movie that lasted 9 minutes and 30 seconds - all in a single-take shot from a camera mounted on a tripod that just slowly panned through an arc of about 60 degrees.  Very little movement and no dialogue, but tension so strong you can barely breath.  Slow, laborious… perfection!

Perhaps this review says it best:
“Worst movie I have ever seen.  A total waste of 2 hours of my life.  I don’t even have anything else to say to get this review to 80 characters.”
Great review.  This is what I expect from the hoi polloi.

Okay enough about what other people thought; here is the truth: It is a horror movie that uses no elements typically associated to the horror film genre.  It is violent, yet the violence is completely non-gratuitous (in terms of blood and guts, but not psychologically).  In fact there are no on-screen deaths.  Except one and that doesn’t count - you’ll know what I mean when you watch the movie.

You know how they list the reasons why the (suck-ass) MPAA gave the movie the rating it received?  They forgot to include that this has been rated “R” for nudity - as it bares the raw blisteringly naked psyche  in all its contorted ugliness, gratuitously splattered across the screen in nearly every scene.

Despite my questioning the decision to create any American remake of anything, I stand up and applaud Haneke for delivering this triumphant masterpiece in two language and actor formats.