Okay, hyped or not, everybody cares about this movie.
I think the original film is better, but it doesn’t come with this incredible title sequence. And oh, OH, NO BIG DEAL, JUST TRENT REZNOR AND KAREN O FINALLY WORKED TOGETHER ON A SONG. It’s forgivable that it’s a Led Zeppelin song too (just go with it).
Blur did the effects for this sequence, led by creative director Tim Miller.
The books seem like a waste of time, but the Swedish films are pretty damn entertaining. David Fincher’s films are always pretty, so those are worth a look.
Performed at the European Culture Congress, Wroclaw, Poland, 2011
Original composition by Krzysztof Penderecki
The video and sound qualities are shit, but those didn’t stop me from geeking out hardcore. This original piece by Penderecki is famous for a lot of reasons, but also because it showed up in films like THE SHINING and CHILDREN OF MEN.
I just wish I was there to witness Richard D’s remix and to get a better look at the video art going on behind the musicians.
BELLY has one of the best introduction sequences ever. Elements at hand include: an incredible, minimal remix of the aforementioned song, black lights, Nas, DMX, strippers, a strip club, money, strobe lights, armed robbery, NEON EYEBALLS, Malik Hassan Sayeed’s cinematography, and Hype Williams’ styling at its zenith. It seems like every hip hop music video tried to copy this sequence afterward.
I wish there was a better-quality video of this segment out there.
The rest of the film is pretty good.
(Big ups to an old friend who showed me this clip once upon a time, back in the day, however that goes)
Oh, ooh, and there’s T-Boz on that TLC tip. Miss you girl.
Tipping the geek scales to Very – here’s a video from Kotaku, where some dudes (Machinima Respawn E3 2011 LA Noire Landmark Tour Part 1 w/ Sark, Hutch & Seananners) visit all of the historical landmarks in Los Angeles that appear in L.A. NOIRE.
I haven’t bought that game yet, but it’s on my to-do. Hours of film noir stories and visuals will make any film geek…excited? Wait, aren’t film geeks excited a lot, anyway? Anyway.
The long-anticipated brainchild of producer-composer Danger Mouse and Italian composer Daniele Luppi, Rome benefits from a bit of context. More than five years in the making, the project assembles many of the surviving performers of classic ’60s and ’70s Ennio Morricone scores — and, in half a dozen memorable cases, pairs them up with the vocals of Norah Jones or The White Stripes‘ Jack White.
Naturally, Rome can’t possibly exceed the sum of its parts, with its successful composer and arranger in Luppi, its groundbreaking producer and composer in Danger Mouse, countless combined years of orchestra experience, a painstaking recording process with vintage equipment, and the juxtaposition of White’s fatalistic moan with Jones’ coolly detached croon. It almost has to sound better on paper than in practice, but it’s terrific in practice, too, as it alternates appropriately cinematic instrumentals with a handful of nifty showcases for its headliners.
Jones is long overdue for an image makeover: All those tens of millions of records sold and armloads of Grammys have made it easy to forget that she’s still a remarkably cool singer. Here, Jones at times channels the wounded iciness of Metric‘s great Emily Haines, while still lending her own brooding gravitas to “Season’s Trees,” “Black” and “Problem Queen.” Of course, White makes the most of his own three appearances, from the tone-setting portent of “The Rose With the Broken Neck” to the album-closing “The World,” which helps conjure mental images of rolling credits. But Jones and White aren’t the only scene-stealers in Rome: Edda Dell’Orso pops up in the album-opening “Theme of Rome,” picking up where she left off in the soundtrack to 1966′sThe Good, The Bad And The Ugly.
If it weren’t for the unmistakably contemporary voices among its ranks — White’s in particular —Rome could just as easily have emerged from a vault, sealed 40 or even 50 years ago. That’s clearly the point: From start to finish, the album provides a timeless, arduously arranged backdrop to past generations’ visions of panoramic vistas and blood-stained betrayals.
JUST KIDS won the National Book Award last year, and though I don’t and wish I read more books, I’m quick to agree with that pedigree.
The book is about the life Patti Smith shared with Robert Mapplethorpe, while the two of them grew up and became artists in New York City in the 1960s and 1970s. Interspersed are a few photos of them together, first as a couple of 19 year olds hanging out, evolving into the first batches of photographs that Mapplethorpe took as works of art.
I couldn’t put this book down, because it was a joy to be lost in Patti Smith’s romanticized NYC, to feel her anxiety as a growing artist clamoring for her voice, and to feel that I was striding those cold streets in her skinny bones and Caprezios.
It’s wonderful to fall in love with Robert Mapplethorpe through Patti Smith’s poetic words.
I always thought Patti Smith was kind of full of it, but it’s fun to read her references to obscure literature, to pedantically namedrop her and Mapplethorpe’s famous and infamous friends, foes and patrons, and to continue her wide-eyed, fan girl fever for the artists she admired and emulated.
I’m deep in the rabbit hole of the Smith & Mappethorpe friendship-affair-companionship. I finished the book on a sunny but chilly Sunday in April, lying in the grass and I let myself cry when Smith finished her biography with an elegy.
