Showing posts with label USA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label USA. Show all posts
Friday, July 03, 2009
Karl Malden (1912 - 2009)
A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
On The Waterfront (1954)
The Streets of San Francisco (1973)
The Old Potato Nose is gone: American actor Karl Malden has died at the honourable age of 97. Malden, born as Mladen George Sekulovich, won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and was also nominated for On The Waterfront (1954), another Marlon Brando movie. Malden was already 60 years old in 1972, when the popular cop show The Streets of San Francisco was launched, lasting five seasons and amassing 119 hour-long episodes where he starred as Lt. Mike Stone all through the series, alongside the newcomer Michael Douglas. With a career that spanned amazing seven decades, Karl Malden lent his rough, down-to-Earth charisma to whatever he worked with.
Friday, December 26, 2008
Thursday, December 25, 2008
"Christmas? Bah, Humbug!"
Scrooge McDuck is a Disney character created by American comic book artist Carl Barks (1901 - 2000) for the Donald Duck story Christmas on Bear Mountain in 1947. The wealthy, nasty and misanthropic old duck, scary to the point of being Gothic, was modelled after Ebeneezer Scrooge, the Christmas-hating rich curmudgeon in A Christmas Carol (1843) by Charles Dickens. Mr. Scrooge's disapproving catchprase "Bah, humbug!" was something he used to describe the Yuletide in general.
Thus "Scrooge" has also became a common nickname for the people disliking Christmas for various reasons of their own.
Later on, for his Donald Duck comics Carl Barks softened the character of "Uncle Scrooge", who became a caricature (though one not portrayed with a too critical eye) of an extremely wealthy but overtly stingy venture capitalist, keen to literally take swims in the sea of coins he keeps in his Money Bin building. For those to whom Walt Disney's empire means American cultural imperialism at its worst, the association became all too poignant (for further studies, check out How To Read Donald Duck by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, 1971).
Politics aside, the late 1940s is my favourite Barks era when his visual style was at its sharpest; often capturing some hues of the noir-ish post-war angst even with occasional Gothic overtones, to his otherwise comical stories meant for children. This was especially obvious with his long storylines, usually displaying a more epic scale in exotic locations around the world, in comparison to his "shorties" that were based on different "screwball"-style gags around everyday hometown situations, and other classics such as The Ghost of the Grotto and The Old Castle's Secret were born.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Urgh! A Music War (1981)
Klaus Nomi: 'Total Eclipse' off Urgh! A Music War, 1981
Urgh! A Music War (1981), shown by YLE Teema yesterday, is a film that, instead of having a plot in a traditional sense, consists just of a series of live performances from some extremely diverse US and UK acts, with "post-punk" moniker as their common (and in many cases, the only) denominator. So many goodies: most acts were familiar to me, at least by name, but I have to admit I had never before heard of such as Skafish (quite brilliant, actually), Splodgenessabounds or Invisible Sex (whose bizarre performance made me roll with laughter).
Another proof why this is among my favourite musical eras: the original punk of 1976-77 was in many ways a purist putsch kicking out those musical styles and artists that had become outdated ("classic rock" millionaires WhoZeppelinStones with their Learjets and cocaine), choking under their colossal weight (prog-rock), thoroughly commercialized and -- to use the favourite expression of the era -- boring, but personally, bar some exceptions (Ramones, Pistols, Buzzcocks), most of those first wave's three-chord wonders with buzzsaw guitars and their simplistic slogans leave me cold, and more interesting things started only happen in the second, "post-" (or "new wave") phase of punk when artists widened their musical palettes to include, e.g., such things as keyboards and synths (in the most purist Year Zero punk phase only Satan's, Prog-Rock's and Big Commerce's despicable tool nothing to do with Pure, True, Authentic and Genuine Street Expression), more complicated song structures with that fourth chord (and more), more thought-out lyrics, even dance music and (terror, terror!) disco (reggae was a big influence to it all), and so on, but still retaining punk's original DIY ethos.
Of course, it was all very art-school (as had prog been its very beginnings) and artsy-fartsy, and not without certain pretentiousness (though a lot of it was interesting pretension) and by the 1980s corporate rock era it had all died away (some of these acts like Police and Sting solo eventually became corporate rock themselves), but just by witnessing the amazing variety of music in Urgh!, at least for a couple of years, extremely lively things were happening. To see and hear yourself, check Urgh! A Music War search results @ YouTube.
The complete list of all acts heard in Urgh! A Music War:
The Police – "Driven to Tears"
Wall of Voodoo – "Back in Flesh"
Toyah Willcox – "Dance"
John Cooper Clarke – "Health Fanatic"
Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark – "Enola Gay"
Chelsea – "I’m on Fire"
Oingo Boingo – "Ain’t This the Life"
Echo & the Bunnymen – "The Puppet"
Jools Holland – "Foolish I Know"
XTC – "Respectable Street"
Klaus Nomi – "Total Eclipse"
Athletico Spizz 80 – "Where’s Captain Kirk?"
The Go-Go's – "We Got the Beat"
Dead Kennedys – "Bleed for Me"
Steel Pulse – "Ku Klux Klan"
Gary Numan – "Down in the Park"
Joan Jett and the Blackhearts – "Bad Reputation"
Magazine – "Model Worker"
Surf Punks – "My Beach"
The Members – "Offshore Banking Business"
Au Pairs – "Come Again"
The Cramps – "Tear It Up"
Invisible Sex – "Valium"
Pere Ubu – "Birdies"
Devo – "Uncontrollable Urge"
The Alley Cats – "Nothing Means Nothing Anymore"
John Otway – "Cheryl’s Going Home"
Gang of Four – "He’d Send in the Army"
999 – "Homicide"
The Fleshtones – "Shadowline"
X – "Beyond and Back"
Skafish – "Sign of the Cross"
Splodgenessabounds – "Two Little Boys"
UB40 – "Madame Medusa"
The Police – "Roxanne"
The Police – "So Lonely"
Thursday, November 06, 2008
Who's Nailin' Paylin?
The first minute off Who's Nailin' Paylin? (2008) [Safe for work watching]
Sarah Palin, the Vice President candidate for Republicans, has inspired many spoofs, parodies and countless image manipulations spreading on the Net. Obviously there's something in this former-beauty-queen-gone-icebear-hunting-ultra-conservative which especially appeals to male fantasies. [One thing that is for sure is that our own 'Sara Pain' had nothing to do with her!]
One inevitable outcome in this booming mini-industry (something that is hard to imagine with Joseph Biden) is naturally an adult movie dedicated to her exploits called Who's Nailin' Paylin? (subtitled "Adventures of a Hockey Milf"), with the up-and-coming skin flick starlet Lisa Ann playing Governor "Serra Paylin" and the adult film veteran Nina Hartley as Hillary Clinton, and brought to us by no one else than The Hustler Video. Maybe there are alternative career prospects in sight for Ms. Palin after the current election defeat.
Drill, baby, drill!
Sunday, June 22, 2008
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