For some reason I don’t see Cocteau Twins or The Sex Pistols on here, but this was dynamically generated from what I scrobble (play) over on last.fm, so apparently this is what I’m listening to mostly.  Not sure why Interpol is that high - I much prefer many bands to them, but they’re cool.

 

My friend stated the following: “I’m just showing you that there are natural blondes that are very hot.  We had that discussion before that brunettes are naturally prettier but I really think the reason for that is they’re the majority, that real blondes are so rare that statistically, you’re not going to find a lot of attractive ones just because the numbers are so low and if the numbers were the same, it would probably be close to equal.”

So I thought about this and will write what turns out to be a pretty defensible yet inflammatory blog, much to the annoyment of my readers.

First off I suppose that IF Gwen Stefani were a natural blonde she’d be a good example to that which you are referring to.  But she isn’t.

I’m interested to see your example, and I’ve seen some beautiful blondes in my time, but I think the actual aesthetic issue here that makes brunettes and black haired girls always (the best examples of course) superior to the best blondes and red heads is contrast.  Contrast is the single most important element, and with light skin blonde hair is of course nowhere near the contrast that a dark haired girl naturally has.  And the eyes too - so the blondes I do like (Misty my bartender) have brown eyes.  The best combos are in this order of priority:

01. black hair with green eyes
02. black hair with blue eyes
03. brown hair with green eyes
04. brown hair with blue eyes
05. black hair with brown eyes
06. brown hair with brown eyes
07. dirty blonde hair with brown eyes
08. blonde hair with brown eyes

Numbers 05. and 06. are ahead of the blonde hair - brown eye combos because the contrast between dark hair and light skin (assuming white-ish girls here) is more pronounced and effective than light hair - light skin even with the eye contrast.

The rest of the combos aren’t going to be the same caliber as the above 8, although of course there are beautiful people with any and all types of hair/eye/skin color.  It’s just that those are the exception, and statistically much more difficult to come by.

Now, I might have misinterpreted your whole point - if you’re talking about “natural blondes” and what you really mean are women with blonde hair “down there” then I’m not sure what the point is - there are a lot of aesthetic considerations to consider in terms of anatomy in that region that outweigh haircolor that’s for sure, but again in general blonde hair is not as satisfying as dark hair because it doesn’t have the contrast.

Furthermore I’ll tell you a HUGE problem with “natural” blondes: blonde eyebrows.  The eyes are the single most important feature  on the face, and to highlight them you need to provide contrast.  The most important way to do this is the eyebrows.  Not having dark eyebrows makes a girl look like a bleached out zombie (e.g. when a girl first wakes up without mascara/eye liner/etc.).  Think about it - that’s why Marilyn Manson and Chinese opera singers (no offense to the latter) look so freakin’ freaky and alien and disturbing - no eyebrows is just wrong, and MM does it just to up his freak-cred.

Let’s face another factor here: the feminine beauty aesthete is primarily, and primaly, driven off the desire inspired by finding a suitable mate to perpetuate the species - that’s the innate force-of-attraction we’re talking about here.  The reason blondes and red heads will never be as attractive as brunette/black haired girls is because they look inbred due to the recessive gene pigmentation of hair and skin.  These are the results of centuries of bad biology, and your inner sexual being senses it, and it is a huge turn-off.  I hate to make it sound so non-intelligencia, but it is a big underlying factor in our aesthetic evaluation, like it or not.  It’s not the entire aesthetic evaluatory mechanism, as each person has her and his own environmental biases - like if you had an early girlfriend who had freckles then you’ll probably like them your whole life, even though they’re a sign that the person suffers from greater health risks.

And yes, of course the statistics aren’t in the blonde girls favor, but again my numbered list shows that the aesthetics are against them in a subjective, factual way, so although yes you can find a singular blonde chick hotter than millions of brunettes, here’s my fundamental premise: DYE HER HAIR BLACK AND SHE WILL BE INFINITELY MORE ATTRACTIVE.

 

Last night I went to see my favourite “good” (meaning still potentially able to put out decent output and worth seeing live - that list includes only Social Distortion, Bjork, nine inch nails, and Marilyn Manson - who I’ll see later this month at The Warfield in San Francisco - my favourite venue) band Sonic Youth perform at The Fox Theatre in Oakland, California, Sunday night, August 2, 2009.

Sonic Youth’s latest album The Eternal  is my favourite work of theirs since 1997’s a thousand leaves, and then of course you have the awesome years 1987 - 1992 that I love dearly.  So I knew this would be a good time to see them again.  I usually see them every time they’re in town, and I mean every show, including when they open (I suffered through R.E.M. (jk) and (ugh - not kidding) Pearl Jam (yes, I could’ve left but I thought “How bad could they be?”  Oh, they’re plenty bad, trust me.)).  However they are playing the Independent tonight and I’m not going - it’s sold out, otherwise I’d be there.  I guess I’ve seen them over a dozen times.

The concert was good.  The Fox is very nice of course as it’s very new - my first visit as I missed opening night with Social Distortion last year.  I always dread going to concerts but once I’m there it usually is not a regrettable experience.  I do choose my bands very carefully - I do not like going to concerts if the band isn’t one of my favs as most, no, nearly all, bands suck.  Even good ones, hahaha.  So I almost  didn’t go, up until the last minute I was thinking why bother.  So I drove to Bart and took the train to Oakland - it’s a no-brainer as the Bart station is a direct flight and The Fox is about 100 feet from the station and (unlike SF) the last train leaves at a slightly more reasonable 12:40 AM.  Must’ve been a million ushers, but zero security at the door.  Lots of pot smoke, and I was able to record the whole show.  There was a bar stand every 15 feet, so no lines.  The opening band was only on for 30 minutes - they came on precisely at 8:00 PM.  I had seen them before (opening for SY a few years back in Sacratomato) - Awesome Color - and was annoyed, but the drummer had a ton of energy and was hypnotic to watch.  This time I paid little attention - as they started their first song someone near me nonchalantly remarked “Oh, they’re doing soundcheck”.  But actually they weren’t so bad this time.  I didn’t think it was cool that they played for only 30 minutes - shoulda been 45 to do them justice.  Thank GOD there weren’t two opening bands - I HATE that! (read: at The Fillmore).  Sonic Youth came on at 9:10 PM or so.  I stood on Lee’s side; usually for some reason I’m always on Thurston’s in the past (as most of my friends/readers here know, I adore  Lee!).  I was about 40 people back.  A little moshing, and one fight where security had to headlock some dude whilst a few females hungon - kinda surreal.  The new Mark Ibold (you know, from Pavement) guy was goofy cute, always had a cute little playful smile.  Kim, wearing a silvery sheer short cocktail dress looking divine as always, alternated between bass and guitar and neither.  But no jumping jacks this time around.  The volume was perfect - not really loud at all, although a few people near me wore earplugs.  Maybe I’m already deaf?  What?  The length of time they played was 1 hour and 36 minutes.  They opened with Tom Violence.  Most of the new album was played, and a few old great tracks, nothing poppy (thank goodness) like Bull in the Heather  or Goo.  Between songs Thurston talked in his usual way, dedicating songs to poets and parks and whatnot.  One false start, which always is good for a crowd giggle.  Two encores, both really short.  One included one of my all-time favs: Kim’s Shadow of a Doubt.  Although the inflection she put on the words last night wasn’t right =(.  And wasn’t Lee playing an Epiphone hollow-body guitar - looks like a Gretsch only much cheaper - I think I saw on the Mustang official SY website it’s an Epiphone.  They are such a non-Gibson bunch I’m surprised they don’t spring for the real Gretsch.  And yes, I believe Thurston was playing the Jazzblaster.

From UrbanDictionary:

Jazzblaster
Any type of Fender Jazzmaster guitar with upgrades or modifications that enhances the already superb sound of a stock Jazzmaster.  This is commonly done by changing the soapbar pickups with Telecaster Deluxe humbuckers.  Originally created by Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo around 1996.  It was a 1966-1975 vintage sunburst Jazzmaster, which was stolen in 1999.  A new Jazzblaster then had to be made.
A: Oh dude, Lee Ranaldo’s Jazzmaster sounds unreal. I’ve never…
B: Whoa dude, wait, first of all that’s not a Jazzmaster.  It’s a Jazzblaster.
A: Oh sh*t!
_____________________

And now for the important part of this concert review.  There was one transcendent girl - I wished I had the balls to ask what nationality she was.  Definitely wasn’t upper Scandinavian, nor Spanish, nor French, nor German, and certainly not Irish or British.  Could have been Denmark, Romania, Bulgaria, Luxembourg, Serbia, Belgium, something along those lines (?!?!?).  Ugh.  Dark rich medium length brown hair and eyes, near perfect height although perhaps an inch short - probably 5′ 6″ but that’s better than an inch too tall (as goth platform boots compensate).  Hair parted on the side - the kicker were those side strands pulled horizontally back near the top - trellised like a garland.  Not even showing the ears, she was the very epitome of feminine perfection - an Elven Princess incarnate.  I believe she wore the booze-band, so she either had a fake ID or was over 21.  She looked possibly 23 to me.  Three horizontal straps on the dark brown knee-high tight Elven boots she wore, tight dark grey jeans, white sweater later removed as she was on the floor with me where it was a little hot, although I only saw her outside the venue, then when she first walked in, and then when we left the floor she was directly in front of me again.  Very odd.  Small tattoo on her back as her shirt was backless.  Exquisitely proportioned - not too skinny but sublimely and tangibly intact.

The only time I saw the friend I was supposed to hook up with (neither of us knows each other’s cell number making it a little difficult) was in the Bart station afterward waiting for the train.  She glanced my way but kept walking.  I was too shy to get her attention, so I quietly let her pass me by.  She appeared to have enjoyed the show.

Anyone reading this go to the gig?  What did you think?

 

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.