Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period.
A while back, film scribe Vadim Rizov asked the Internets for some of the music from Interkosmos. Thanks to the kind offices of the Gurgling Cod and his fancy mp3-generating turntable, we are able to oblige with sides one and two of the vinyl-only album [for a limited time, natch.] Shame you can't upload its beautiful letterpress sleeve....
The music for the film was created byJim
Becker and Colleen
Burke with additional drum parts by Jim White
and additional vocals by Jiha Lee and
Amy Warren. Besides writing and touring with his band
Califone,
Jim Becker most recently has toured with the bands Freakwater
and the Dirty Three. As well as playing piano in the band We
Ragazzi, Colleen Burke recently toured with Smog and is currently
collaborating with filmmaker Eve Sussman to develop a musical
film in Miami. Jiha Lee has sang and played flute with Bright
Eyes and The Good Life. Amy Warren is a Chicago singer and actress
who has sung with Tallulah and The Aluminum Group.
Dirty Three drummer Jim White has toured and recorded with
Cat Power, Nick Cave, Will Oldham and recently played percussion
on the score of Nick Cave's film The Proposition.
So I saw (500) Days of Summer finally, on the big screen in Harvard Square, after skipping it in favor of I forget what back in April at the Independent Film Festival of Boston. Frankly, I'm surprised at the relatively rapturous response it's getting from critics, sheer adorableness of the leads aside.
I mean, I like the Smiths. I like Hall & Oates. I thought the UCLA band was a nice touch. Ditto the Han-Solo-as-Bogey nod to Breathless. I killed singing the Pixies ["Wave of Mutilation," not "Here Comes Your Man," but still] the only time I played Rock Band. Hell, my brothers have been playing the penis game for years. What is wrong with me that I wasn't charmed utterly?
Then I watched Globe critics Wesley Morris and Ty Burr's take on Summer. And I encourage you to do likewise, not just because they have even better chemistry than Summer and Tom do. Wesley totally nails the cause of my unease:
"I'm just rooting for Zooey Deschanel to be something more than a notional girl, that's all."
...[Roland] Waizenegger became inspired by stories of taxi dancers, a trade that
peaked in popularity in the 1920s and 30s in Berlin and other major
cities. (The term is derived from the fact that a dancer's pay is
proportional to the amount of time spent with a patron, like that of a
taxi driver.) In Berlin between the two world wars, when young
able-bodied men were fairly thin on the ground, ousted aristocrats and
jobless army officers with posh manners began earning money spinning
ladies in the city's many dance halls. (Billy Wilder,
a Polish-born Hollywood film director, allegedly worked as a taxi
dancer in Berlin for several months in 1926. He was a 20-year-old
aspiring journalist at the time.)
It's been raw and rainy all day. Totally creativity/productivity-sapping weather. Then I discovered that the beginning of one of the most beautiful films I've seen this year is online. So I thought I'd share these nine minutes of David Lowery's St. Nick with you. Enjoy.
In sum, it's been a fairly fallow summer for movies thus far. I'm hoping to improve my luck during a quick jaunt to Boston this coming week. Fingers crossed.
But! One bright spot: Yesterday, I snagged an Athena 224-ES [or perhaps 224A] Motion Analyzer 16mm projector from campus surplus. Haven't tested to see whether it works yet, but the documentation promises "Forward and Reverse, without flicker" and "Unlimited single-frame hold time." I know where there's a stash of 16mm features on campus and am thinking serious flicker party time looms in my future. Anyone out there played with one of these babies? Pipe up in the comments, s.v.p.
Oh hai! [waves shyly]. There are reasons I have neglected my corner of the Interweb of late, swear. Chief among them is that when I left my home on June 11 for a 10-day holiday on a remote and wifi-free island, I had no idea I wouldn't be returning until this coming Monday, a month later. In between there was a stint getting seminarians drunk at the Flaherty and, well, a lot of icing of kegs. So give me a couple more days to regroup and finish my nomadic adventure and I promise to ply you with prose cinematic. Soon.
Until September 22, ATLiens can perch poolside every Tuesday at 8 PM
via the W Atlanta-Perimeter (111 Perimeter Center West, Atlanta, Ga
30346) for a poolside movie screening aboard the swanky hotel's "Wet
Deck." Admission is free, but reservations are recommended (770-396-6800).
You'll still need your cocktails cash and some extra change if you want
to pick up some treats from the hotel restos. Got a kickball game
tonight? No sweat. Check out the schedule for the remainder of the
summer below.
Film schedule: June 16: "Transformers" June 23: "Revolutionary Road" June 30: "Top Gun" July 7: "Galaxy Quest" July 14: "The Duchess" July 21: "Dreamgirls" July 28: "Breakfast at Tiffany's" Aug. 4: "Tropic Thunder" Aug. 11: "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" Aug. 18: "School of Rock" Aug. 25: "Coming to America" Sept. 1: "Iron Man" Sept. 8: "Defiance" Sept. 15: "Eagle Eye" Sept. 22: "Babel"
And then, at the enviable Wexner Center at OSU:
Soundtrack Available: Music in American Film Watch—and
listen to—classic movies whose popular music soundtracks propel action,
underscore emotion, heighten authenticity, and stay in our memories.
Organized by Wexner Center Film Curator David Filipi, the Soundtrack Available
series features films notable for their creative and thoughtful use of
popular music as a cinematic element. Many spawned soundtrack albums
whose impact equaled that of the films themselves.
Also, looks like the Brattle will be able to serve beer & wine soon. Huzzah! You can go here to vote for which film they should show to celebrate this milestone.
Attending a festival in the same town your family calls home can be a bit tricky. Festivals, understandably, program films at times when the largest audiences possible might attend--weekday nights and all day long on weekends. But that means that your free time falls when everybody else is at work and you're booked solid when they're not.
So I was especially delighted that I was able to catch the premiere of Speaking in Code at IFFB with my brother, house music DJ Mike Swells. Code evangelizes for electronic dance music, specifically techno, examining its spread from its origins in African-American clubs in the midwest to the huge festival circuit in Europe and trying to figure out why it fails to thrive on that scale in its home country. [Boston's tiny scene is a case in point: My brother seemed to know nearly every person in the balcony. He also knew filmmaker Amy Grill's husband David Day, another Boston-based DJ and promoter, who I'd met as well, way back when he worked at Other Music's short-lived Cambridge branch.]
Director Amy Grill is fortunate in her documentary subjects, odd ducks united by their passion for techno music. Philip Sherburne, who decamps to Spain from San Francisco [I quickly glimpsed a copy of Benjamin's Illuminations on his bed amid the packing clutter], and Day himself are the only Americans of note. Instead, there are established figures like Gerhard Behles of Monolake, who tends his plants in a gorgeous white-on-white Berlin flat, having made his fortune by inventing Ableton Live DJ software. We get a glimpse of BPitch Control's queen Ellen Allien, and Miss Kittin, too, yielding the stage at a Spanish fest called Sonar to up-and-comers Modeselektor--at the prime time of 4 a.m.
But scenes like Modeselektor performing before thousands of ecstatic dancing bodies, which give the viewer a sense of the scope of this music's popularity in Europe, are all too rare. More common is footage like that of Grill spending time in the German countryside with the Wighnomy brothers, one of whom gets increasingly morose and withdrawn over the course of the narrative. Or else back in Boston, where she and Day try to promote their beloved music, at one time even hosting several parties per week in their live-work loftspace, all the while falling further behind in paying their bills.
In all honesty, one of the first notes I made during the screening was "Amy G. v.o." I completely understand the economies behind documentaries, particularly a globe-trotting one like Code, but I was skeptical of her choice to serve as narrator. And I was less than sold on her choice of her partner as the representative of the U.S. techno scene, nice as David is. But the film takes a turn for which its editors/advisors can't be lauded enough. Grill's "economy jet set lifestyle" in pursuit of these musicians unexpectedly but persuasively morphs into a moving portrait of a marriage. We see Grill and Day grow further and further apart over the course of the film, until Grill realizes that her husband is no longer her co-producer but one of her characters. This realization marks the beginning of the dissolution of their marriage, and the choice to show this plays as brave rather than exploitative, again thanks to the editing.
Would that I could say the same for the post-screening Q&A. Even though the hometown crowd was supportive, the awkward arraying of bodies on the stage--Grill on one side, Day on the other, with editor Jason Blanchard in between--expressed more eloquently than their words the careful balancing act struck between exes still united to promote their common love of techno music.
A confession: I went into this doc with only the vaguest notion of what Up With People was, aside from shorthand for clean-scrubbed, conservative, and insipid, and the hope it might shed some insight on a very popular organization that appeals to clean-scrubbed do-gooder youths where I teach, FCA [ask your Christian friends]. Smile 'Til It Hurts, with its mix of talking-head interviews and epically cheesy archival performance footage [the 1986 Super Bowl halftime show!], did much more than deliver the goods. What I discovered about the history of these singing and dancing "radical moderates" was equal parts fascinating and fuuuuucked up.
Smile begins the Up With People story with an investigation of Moral Re-Armament, a zealot-y evangelical Christian [and anti-Communist] sect, and its cult leader-like founder, one Reverend Frank Buchman. He preached the Four Absolutes: absolute honesty, purity, unselfishness, and love, but what that meant for members was that Buchman was the absolute authority: he alone granted permission when and whom to marry, whether they could have children or even have sex. Oh, and there was the usual accrual of money and property, etc. Buchman died in 1961, and in 1965 MRA executive national director J. Blanton Belk founded a youth group that gave musical performances to counter the counterculture called Sing-Outs.
By 1968 the group was named Up With People and had broken from MRA with an eye to spreading its message through the mainstream media. It attracted earnest late adolescents who wanted peace just as much as their hippie peers--but without sacrificing personal hygiene. However, even after People officially severed its ties to MRA, it continued to be governed according to Buchman's cult-y manipulative methods. Yes, these kids got to travel the globe and meet world leaders and celebrities, but former cast members, including featured performers, tell of being dropped/shunned if they defied the diktats of the Up higher-ups. Some, like former Olympian rower John Sayre, continue to defend Up With People's world-changing agenda even after essentially being excommunicated. Others, like Frank Fields, an African-American member who got in trouble for criticizing Nixon, dropped out and disappeared. These people were naive college-age kids, but their
present-day senior citizen selves still seem stung by these abrupt volte-faces.
The story of Up With People is a story of co-opted optimism. American presidents like Nixon embraced the performers' pro-America message of patriotism as a welcome corrective to the protests of their peers. In subsequent decades, as the troupes toured the world and stayed with host families in countries on every continent save Antarctica, the CEOs that Belk recruited to sit on the People board realized that these kids, selling "America" to hostile nations, were tailor-made emissaries for corporations with ambitions of going global [Hello, Haliburton!]. Which may explain why they kept pouring cash in to the constantly strapped organization and invited the kids to perform corporate tours before bemused factory workers.
Cynical capitalism may have supplanted ideology, but despite it all, the members really believed in the Up mission. And they were like missionaries at first, impressively integrated from the get-go with African-, Asian-, and Native-American members singing and dancing with gusto everywhere from Watts to Washington D.C. alongside bright-eyed white go-getters [like a very young Glenn Close]. Over time, Up With People moved from a missionary to a tuition-based model, and escalating costs resulted in less racial and economic diversity.
By the early 80s, reports a queeny former cast member, Up With People was a preserve for closet cases. His account drips with scorn, but it's balanced by passionate testimonies from other members, including one African-American woman who tells an amazing story of a Southern tour stop during the Freedom Riders summer. Ultimately, what's remarkable and endless engrossing about Smile is how many of the participants who appear in the doc still cite their time in the troupe as not simply life-changing but positive.
A final word of warning if you manage to see Smile [and you should]: Good luck getting those earnest, catchy, campy songs--"Which Way, America?" "What Color Is God's Skin?"-- out of your head.
Today, the cinetrix offers the first of three reviews of music-themed films I caught at three separate festivals this spring. Servicey!
SXSW: Sounds Like Teen Spirit
First up: a doc by the charming and adorable Jamie J. Johnson, a self-deprecating young Brit. I saw Sounds Like Teen Spirit deliberately and delightedly on Sunday night at SXSW. After a slew of bro-tastic indie boy 20something microdramas [about which more, er, sometime], I needed a palate cleanser. What better than a look at the driven moppets who compete for glory and country at the kid's edition of the Eurovision Song Contest? Tightly wound kids? Anxious/proud parents? Europop and glittering, questionable outfits? Nationalism? Yes, please!
The film, part of the SX Global sidebar at the Hideout, was all that I hoped for, with one exception that I'll get to in a bit. I slid into the seat next to my old grad school classmate Basil, and we were off and running. A nice mix of archival, talking head, and performance footage outlines the storied history and noble aim of the Eurovision contests, meant to bring nations back together through song after the devastation of World War II. Better still, the junior version features songs written by the contestants themselves.
Johnson begins at the qualifiers in Belgium--walloon Whitney loses to a four-piece featuring lanky drummer Laurens, which advances to the finals. From there, we meet the other subjects: Giorgios, a dark-eyed Cypriot boy hassled at school for being fey; Marina, a beautiful Bulgarian girl who hopes her absent oligarch father might return to her and her mother if she does well; and the aforementioned Belgian band.
And then there's Mariam. The first ever contestant from the former Russian satellite of Georgia, she carries the ambition of her tiny country with stolidity and grace. But unlike the other kids, she doesn't speak any English. Which wouldn't be an issue, except the print that screened at South By lacked subtitles. To Johnson's credit as a storyteller, 90% of the audience stuck it out, even though there were long stretches in Georgian. After a while, in fact, I began to think it was intentional, a critique of my own First Worldism. Why don't I know Georgian?
Anyway, the big show begins, our subjects compete, nerves fray, and the votes are tallied. Flying in the face of the global understanding Eurovision seeks to encourage, the countries tend to vote in blocs, rating their regional allies higher in the tally: Greece boosts Cyprus, and so on. There's no way I'll give away which country prevails, but the "where are they know" montage that closes the doc--to the strains of "The Winner Takes It All," what else?--left few dry eyes when the lights came up. The tears quickly turned to laughter, however, at the very English mortification expressed by Johnson about the missing titles in the post-screening Q&A. Seek it out, won't you?
