by Christopher Hassett
Bookends: The Doors’ Debut
The Earthy, Irresistible Groove Of “Know Thyself”
by Aphrohead & Clarian
Glen Campbell
The legendary Glen Campbell died today at age 81 following a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease. He will be missed.
Here he is on an old TNN special with a room full of country music legends, including Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Roy Clarke, Chet Aikins, Ray Stevens, Tammy Wynette and Crystal Gayle:
Lilting New Work From Cassius: Fame
New Work From Jazz Pianist Jon Davis: Happy Juice
In their review of Happy Juice, all⋅about⋅jazz says “This album, once again, reminds us that Jon Davis remains one of the most important voices in the Posi-Tone stable and one of the most underappreciated pianists out there.” Audiophile Audition says “Davis’ compositions draw on rhythm complexities . . . the piano runs are intriguing, reminiscent of the unbridled freedom of the era of jazz explored on this album.” Listen to the title track below:
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The Importance Of Bruce Conner To 20th Century Cinema
In seeking the magic of Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver, Robin Scher speaks of Bruce Conner’s Cosmic Ray as not only shaking “the very bedrock of pop culture” but essentially becoming the first music video through harnessing the full power of rock ‘n roll in support of his imagery.
In the video below, Dennis Hopper, David James, Bruce Jenkins, Michael Kohn, Gerald Casale and others consider the importance of Bruce Conner in 20th century cinema. Dennis Hopper, in fact, calls Bruce Conner the most important artist of the 20th Century. Bruce Jenkins, more fundamentally, says Conner was “first and foremost a visual artist, somebody who was always drawing, who really understood the world through a visual lens [and] understood the power of the scale of cinema.” Michael Kohn sees “a great spirituality” in Conner’s work, a “sense of mysticism [that] is not going to be made clear for you but is going to be made manifest for you through his work.” See the interview and snippets of Conner’s work in the video below:
New Work From Shabazz Palaces: “Shine A Light”
Twin Peaks: Episode 8
Episode 8
by Alci Rengifo
Madness grips the airwaves like a deafening transmission, and the overlords of the earth seem to speak in terrifyingly grim visions. Thank the gods that every age produces its own soothsayers. It is fitting, then, that just as a surreal state of affairs takes hold, David Lynch returned to us with Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), a continuation of his landmark cult 1990s series that combined melodrama with the director’s brand of surrealist imaginings. But not only did Lynch return, he also shows himself to be fully in tune with these new dark ages. Episode 8 of the revival in particular goes beyond television or even cinema — it is one mad flow about our civilization’s communion with dark forces to unleash absolute destruction. [Read more…]
Prodigy
Twin Peaks: Episode 3
Episode 3
by Christopher Hassett
The new Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) finds David Lynch working in fresh and sublimely haunting domains, ones that pleasurably flirt or unnervingly skirt the spectral drop-offs of some charged and sinister abyss. This seems no visional or evolutional change of tack, nor does it appear, at least in these early episodes, Lynch is newly surveying unmapped terrains. Rather, there is something more elevated in this late-career landscape, and something far more intimate as well. One senses, when viewing this new series, particularly his excursions into Lynchian Other-Realms, that his articulation of these doppelgänging worlds feel more experiential than conceptual, more occupied than conceptualized. [Read more…]
The Bad Batch
The Bad Batch (2016) is a stark and stunning new film by Ana Lily Amirpour. And timely too, considering every effort by our current regime to cast those of seeming naught into the desperate oblivions of a world only slightly less unhinged than the one depicted in this film. With a nod to the current depravity of our day, the film opens (forgive my indulgence) in the wet dream of said regime whose spooging head is our ever-ranting, ever-pissy Child-in-Chief — let’s call him Boy — he who nightly wets his bed and in the dreamy slosh fingers blindly for his own plundered asshole. Were the Boy blessedly in this film, he’d be swiftly on a sizzling spit: fatted swine for its flesh-hungry natives. [Read more…]
Raw
While most of the republic’s cinema-goers flock to local theaters to indulge in the new incarnation of Stephen King’s It, your local RedBox is harboring a deliciously wicked and original work of cinematic viscera, Julia Ducournau’s Raw (2016). This cannibal parable created quite the stir at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, where audience members were reported to have fainted due to the movie’s bloody moments. As with most movies of this type, the gore doesn’t do justice to the hype. The film’s power resides in what it has to say as opposed to what it wants to show. Like all good satire, it knows that showing too much ruins the effect. Like American Psycho, Raw gets under your skin by casting a mirror. Ducournau is essentially putting on display a civilization eating itself, like Goya’s painting “Saturno devorando a su hijo (Saturn Devouring His Son).” Raw is art as splatter, capturing in its own special way those moments when youth, sexual awakening and finding one’s place in the social labyrinth all crash together. [Read more…]
I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House
I’m still disappointed that I missed out on Osgood Perkins’ directorial debut February (now retitled The Blackcoat’s Daughter) at last year’s TIFF. Bloody Disgusting raved about the Emma Roberts film, naming it one of the best films of the year. So I knew that this year I had to check out Perkins’ sophomore effort, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016).
The new film is a slow-burn haunted house story that’s a little reminiscent of The Others. Unlike other recent ghost films, Perkins eschews CGI completely, opting to use lingering off-centered static shots, silence and an unsettling soundtrack to create a moody, atmospheric tone. To suggest that the film is languid is an understatement. Perkins is less interested in a conventional narrative than he is in enveloping the audience in the timeless world filled with mystery novels, endless routine and constant ethereal banging on the walls. [Read more…]
The Eyes of My Mother
Nicolas Pesce’s new American gothic, The Eyes Of My Mother (2016), is a spare, simmering vision of riptiding loneliness and grim pathology, and it is both beautiful and unconventionally good. Pesce gives us a protagonist we cannot know, nor scarcely bear, and delivers a film we can no less turn our eyes from, though considering the subject at hand this may be blindingly ill-advised. [Read more…]
The Wailing
The Wailing is an expansive and often excruciating horror film from South Korea. It is the work of the director Na Hong-jin, whose 2009 debut feature, the action thriller The Chaser, made a huge impression not least for its almost staggering flouting of genre convention. The Wailing (2016), about demonic possession, is similarly uncompromising. [Read more…]
The Lure
As folkloric Polish musical sex-comedy horror movies go, The Lure (2015) is pretty interesting. The first feature directed by Agnieszka Smoczynska, the film follows two mermaid sisters onto land, where they look for love, feast on human flesh and find work singing and stripping at a nightclub that might have come from an early David Lynch movie or a vintage-’80s music video [Read more…]
David Bowie, 2016 Man Of The Year
Evolution
Reviewed by
The opening shots of Evolution (2015), the long-awaited new feature from Lucile Hadzihalilovic, show a sumptuous underwater environment. (Her last full-length film, the eerie and provocative Innocence, came out in 2004.) The sea is so clear one might be tempted to breathe it in; the colors of the undulating forms of plant and animal life are psychedelic and virtually tactile. A young boy swimming in these waters is startled by the sight of another boy, drowned, a garishly red starfish covering his navel. [Read more…]
East Village, 6 a.m.
