Friday, November 30, 2007

Fluorocarbons Unleashed!


One does not feed well-executed buffet exclusively of subtitled films and sober auteurists with themes of mortality and queries of existence. Sometimes one has just gotta have fun! And the gang from Hairspray certainly does. Media messages I intercepted in the last couple of months came in two forms, a bunch of nonsense about John Travolta in a fat suit and reviews that this was a very entertaining and clever movie.

There is much to enjoy here. The script is tight and funny. Musically it is fun to hear every Brill building Motown Philly corner Spector riff be recast and sung by likable actors such as Christopher Walken, Queen Latifah, and Nikki Blonsky as the irrepressible Tracy Turnblad. Tomorrow I will probably try to get through Day of Wrath and other sober fair, but tonight it was 1962 , the New Frontier in Baltimore where a change is gonna come, even if the first steps are mainly dance steps on the Cony Collins show where DAs and beehives abound.
posted by well-executed buffet at 8:53 PM
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Thursday, November 29, 2007

Find Me Guilty


Viewing Sidney Lumet's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead linked me to seeing what else he has been up to in recent years. Find Me Guilty came out in 2006 and to my mind, deserved a greater audience and a better reception than it received.

Lumet is like an orchestra conductor in the courtroom. And extra attention to orchestration is needed when you are trying to tell the story of a trial in the 80s involving 20 mob defendants, their lawyers which took two years to complete. A Lumet courtroom is an interior with the right camera angle and well crafted observation of what light does in a finite interior. But this is no ordinary court or trial. It has an outrageous center.

That center is Jackie DiNorscio, a mobster whose family and interactions were government witnesses in the longest and probably most expensive criminal case in federal court history. Vin Diesel's performance and the real life character of Jackie are fascinating. He has the kind of endearing characteristics that America in its love affair with the mob appreciated with Tony Soprano, is obviously a heinous amoral sociopath criminal, but also toggles between buffoon and a person with intelligence and some emotional depth. DiNorscio was the only defendant of the 20 already in prison and burned by former legal counsel decided to defend himself.

Find Me Guilty clearly sits in the zone of satisfying entertainment. Ron Silver as the presiding judge struggles to keep his court in control, but the script of the film (with healthy helpings of actual trial transcript) and an attention to detail by a master director. (In the a special feature on the DVD, Lumet says he approved the hire of every courtroom extra) is really what keeps things grounded.

Lumet's openings are often memorable. Find Me Guilty begins with some choice footage of a 80s Rudolph Guliani with hair back in his zealous prosecutor days pontificating with flourish about efforts to eradicate the mafia. That shot is quickly followed by a botched murder attempt, which is a powerful visceral experience because its significance is not known in context of the story. It turns out to be very key to the storyline. The target is Jackie Dinorsico and the gunman with a 22 caliber is his troubled junkie cousin who later turns out to be the star witness in the large scale RICO trial. Progressive disclosure is a storytelling tool that Lumet uses well and wisely. There is some of this in Find Me Guilty but it is central to the drama in the current release of Before the Devil Knows Your Dead. Not often to never does one get to see accomplished work by a maestro in his sixth decade of filmmaking.
posted by well-executed buffet at 7:12 PM
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Wednesday, November 28, 2007

My Brother Ego: Fliegenden Robert


posted by well-executed buffet at 9:31 PM
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Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Of Class and Play: Free Cinema I


The first wave of state sponsored British documentary lead by John Grierson had very high minded ideals. They were films inspired by Walter Lippman's notion for society to know itself better and for self identification of noble world at work to lead to a better society.

The Free Cinema movement of the fifties and sixties seems more inspired to document play, class, in a natural spirit of the times. Most importantly it served as the film school for the likes of Tony Richardson, Lindsay Anderson, and Karel Reisz whose creativity and influence impacted the cinema in their many achievements beyond Free Cinema documentaries. The films were filmed using the likes of a 16mm hand cranked Bolex, and were highly modeled in the editing room with a variety of soundtrack resources. Here is the manifesto for the first program of Free Cinema from 1956 and some comments from my screening of these in the new BFI collection on DVD of British Free Cinema. The entire program is available here.

O Dreamland by Lindsey Anderson
The first image is a chauffeur polishing a Rolls Royce, the we enter a fenced gate to the carnival. Images shown are in direct irony with a soundtrack featuring Frankie Laine singing I Believe and Bingo numbers being called. Anderson's camera and cutting explores the surreal environment of the carnival midway. The fun seems bleak and forced.

Momma Don't Allow by Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson
First a rehearsal of a slow traditional dixieland blues intercut with butchers in the kitchen, a dentist office, showing folks getting off work. Then life at the night club. Smoking, drinking talking swinging. High toned upper class folks come in as the chauffeur pulls off the hood ornament. All dance and groove to the hot dixieland sounds at the Wood Green Jazz Club Slow blues changes the mood and folks talk and gaze at one another. Light reflections of the disco ball reverses right when the tag coda is played. Turtle necked hipster chick goes outside followed by a "what's wrong baby" back inside the music picks up and the rich folks leave. Dude talks her back inside. Final uptempo blues and the night and film are over. Impressive rhythmic cutting and use of looped sound. At times feels like it was truly synched up.

Together by Lorenza Mozetti and Denis Horne
Lindsey Anderson had an editing credit as well. Intertitle shows this is going to be about London's East End. Sounds and sights of children playing
Barges on the river. Sound plays a critical part in these films, that are in essence silent. Non-actors staged. I guess I somehow missed that the two main characters were deaf mutes. Certainly the lively pub scene is broken up with silence on the soundtrack as geezer is chatting at one of the young lads the film is following. Another clue should have been the protagonists find their way home and a truck wants them to move out of way. Shots in this film have a rhythm and a repetition that feels natural and a lot like Italian Neorealism. Great scene where a sweatered beatchick dances as a kind of barker in a carnival followed by more pub more hot dancing Big guy plays with marbles again A chick finally cop in street skinny guy home chick comes home lovin' Natural sounds of the harbor return to the wall. Kids play and move through an abandoned building intercut children a silent film greek chorus, retuning again man on the wall bridge overlooking the harbor.

These films are the DNA foundation for the kitchen sink British New Wave to follow, with most of these filmmakers expanding their vision into stories of working folks, youth, and anxiety as the fifties turned into the sixties making stars of folks like Tom Courtney and Albert Finney in the process. As the original Free Cinema states, the fictional features of the films also were created with the feeling that "An attitude meant a style." And "A Style Meant an attitude."
posted by well-executed buffet at 8:48 PM
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Monday, November 26, 2007

Journey made the Wrong Way


Wim Wender's fifth film, Wrong Move or Falsche Bewegung, was a modern interpretation of an 19th century Goethe novel recast in modern times. Peter Handke later collaborated with Wenders in Der Himmel uber Berlin (Wings of Desire) Characters in Wrong Move show up with dreamlike predestination similar to Wings in this interpretation/inspiration of Goethe's coming of age story or Bildingsroman, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship.

As Wenders explains in his voice over commentary, he and Handke had the premise is that the romantic notion of going out into the world to learn about it, as was the case in Wilhelm's Apprenticeship is no longer important. In fact. it is now the wrong move. One no longer has to learn by moving out. "The world is no longer a theater for experience," as Wenders says in the voice over and they wanted to turn this romantic notion on its ear in the brash New German Cinema Zeitgiest of young men setting out to prove something in the world themselves.

The first half or so of the journey is filled with a sense of hope and newness. Wilhelm says he wants to be a writer but he has no experience, no ideas or ideals. An ensemble builds around him, a former Nazi officer who claims to be a singer and punctuates life with a harmonica traveling with a young girl acrobat (Nastassia Kinski--her first role at 13 never speaking), Hanna Schygulla as a listless actress, and a large and awful poet from Austria who attaches himself to the group. Things fall apart. Our apprentice poet is unable to empathize and see the folks who surround him. Wilhelm can't get out of his own head. He doesn't take the opportunity to listen and give to the folks around him. Was his move wrong? Maybe less what it was as opposed to what he did with it.

With a very small crew, long takes, using a Renault being pushed as a dolly, dialog about dreams and meaning with lots of wonderful choices in location and light, and 100% live sound, Wrong Move still impresses as a small and earnest film. And one whose modern Germany feels eternal caught in time. The look and feel of the country in 74 does not feel so foreign to my own frame of experience in the country 25, 30 years later.
posted by well-executed buffet at 8:13 PM
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Sunday, November 25, 2007

Herzog Sort of Goes Hollywood with Dieter



Werner Herzog is among the most physical of filmmakers, fueled by independent vision and iconoclastic and seemingly uncompromising eyes. From Even Dwarves Started Small, to the weird unique films of the seventies and staring fringe personalities like Bruno S and Klaus Kinski to unique and poetic documentaries, such as Little Dieter Needs To Fly, the source for his recent Rescue Dawn. My conclusion: no matter budget, topic or marketing of film product: Herzog is unique, individual and always worth checking out.

Rescue Dawn came into theaters this summer. It didn't do well at the box office. I had a hard time trying to track down where it was playing. It seemed to drift between theaters in the middle of the two weeks or so it was out there. And anyone who has been struck by the 65 year old German filmmaker's legend and work might have been quite surprised by the appearance of this film. A Herzog film with genre! (POW camp escape war movies) A Herzog film with stars recognizable to American film goers! (Christian Bale, Steve Zahn, and Jeremy Davies) A Herzog film released by a major US studio! (MGM)

But rest assured, it is still a Herzog film. The shots of SE Asia jungle aren't as long as they are of the Amazon jungle in Fitzcarraldo or Aguirre. And the camera moves with Hollywood visual vocabulary (not just pans but crane shots too! -- the famous Herzog static camera with long shots of mist or Bruno S staring in space are in no way a stylistic pillar of this film) The soundtrack music is lovely and used in the way that traditional Hollywood films are scored. Also, Rescue Dawn has quite the standard three act structure: I. Pilot goes on mission and is shot down. II. Pilot is captured and endures great hardship while leading others in planning escape. III. Pilot escapes with partner, endures the jungle, monsoon, in classic man against nature conflict (seasoned with attacking Vietcong) and is rescued.

This is the best of both worlds:It is artistic vision yet delivered as commercial product. The story of Dieter was very well told in the documentary, Little Dieter Needs To Fly. I watched it for the first time in about eight years after screening Rescue Dawn. But the documentaries of all sorts will have limited appeal and won't ever reach the audience that movies with stars will have. This may be what Dieter intended when he said told Herzog that there was "unfinished business" here.

Dramatic Hollywood-based movies have a lifespan well beyond their initial release. I recall the comments in Robert Stone's memoir of the sixties, Being Green, where he advises against putting one's book on the screen unless you want it to haunt you on late night motel reruns for the rest of your life. Rescue Dawn is more than war movie and it is more than simple entertainment, but the genre, conventions, and star power will keep it alive for the eyes of many, perhaps for generations, regardless of how it fared at the multiplex this summer.

The extras on the DVD and a screening of Little Dieter will bring a viewer to greater depth and a fuller relationship with Rescue Dawn. On the commentary, Herzog tries to be convincing that he never puts his actors in harm's way, although he numerates his own list of injuries on the set. My favorite Werner Herzog moment is when he says "Storyboards are for cowards." And makes a point for non-computer generated reallity in filmmaking, carefully pointing out the shot or two (1965 prop driven fighters in formation) that had to be done with CGI. Also, he is very insightful in the commentary and features about the choices a filmmaker must make in transforming and editing non-fiction material like Dieter's story. He carefully explains tha some things you must do to make it more movie-like and you can't tell it all or you would have an eight hour film. In Herzog's experienced hand and continued unique strong vision, the choices he made from Dieter's life for Rescue Dawn were ones made well indeed.
posted by well-executed buffet at 1:46 PM
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Saturday, November 24, 2007

La Vie Promise: Sylvia and her Roadsong with Nature


Road trips are such a natural topic for the cinema since both require time and have the potential of something transformational occurring over the course of the trip and/or the ninety minutes to two hours spent viewing it.

In a prior post, I wrote of how coming to the attention of the work of French director Oliver Dahan was the major benefit for me of time spent watching his film about Edith Piaf, La Vie en Rose. As a result of viewing the Piaf film, I watched his 2002 film, La Vie Promise with seemingly eternal French goddess actress, Isabelle Huppert, who I have admired in films for thirty years.

The journey of La Vie Promise begins when a prostitute and her daughter have to leave after the daughter has wounded or killed one of her mother's "bosses" in a skirmish with a knife. There is always sky and flowers an mountains as they travel to and through Sylvia's past and towards an unknown thereafter. It features some of the loveliest sunset cutaways on the other side of Days of Heaven.

The success of this film on the viewer, it seems to me is on the willingness to take the journey and observe the bits of character, plot and circumstance that are skin that are stripped a few layers back like onion skin from the characters. Sylvia, her daughter, and the mysterious stranger are not the same folks you make at the film as they are at the beginning, if one chooses to invest care and interest in them at all.

The simplicity of this plot, the film's use of music and the empathy of the characters remind me of Wenders, who even named his production company Road Movies. And with that connection in mind, La Vie Promise does remind me of a folkrock chamber music version of Paris, Texas with the genders reversed.
posted by well-executed buffet at 7:23 PM
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Friday, November 23, 2007

Grit and Spring: Sidney Lumet's Cinema of NYC


It makes me happy that Sidney Lumet made a film that is probably great in his fiftieth year of feature films that began with 12 Angry Men. It would have been long, but it would have been kind of cool if his new movie was titled in its entirety for the Irish saying it was named:"May you be in heaven half an hour Before the Devil knows you're dead"

Recalling the films of Lumet, I am struck on how the emotional content of the films is clearer than the plot and how clearly I remember the time and place where I first saw them.


The long and faithful adaptation to A Long Day's Journey into Night with Jason Robards, Jr., Ralph Richardson and Katherine Hepburn is about the The decline and fall of Eugnene ONeil's Tyrone family. The Hansons in When the Devil.. also have a decline and fall: Egotism, emotional paralysis, alcoholism, drug abuse, consumption and knock Kneed enertia...oops, those were the problems of the Tyrones. The list for the Hansons in the new film has a few duplicate maladies and its own flavors of dread, inhumane behavior, and betrayal.

At 83. Lumet has created a film as worthy as any he did in his high profile prime body of work years in the seventies. He still is generous as he was in his book "Making Movies" with lessons learned about the creative process, working with actors and nature of film as he was in this New York Magazine interview from earlier in the year. He also has embraced HD and said he will never go back to filmstock.

I am as excited by the addition of Before the Devil Knows You're Dead to Lumet's work as a hard core fan is about their team making it to the playoffs. Even more pleased to see that there is at least another film in development. And now I look forward to visiting his work and picking up on some films such as last year's Find Me Guilty, which received some good reviews but not an audience or the status of multiplex event in seventies flashback as When the Devil finds you Dead currently and well deservedly seems to have found.

As I reflect on Sidney Lumet, I try to figure out what makes a Lumet film special. Most of his films are set and are about New York City with an emotional intensity and a truth to that intensity. Characters and his films often have a special kind of coil and spring to them. There is a wide shot in real time the Devil Finds where Philip Seymour Hoffman pours himself a glass of tonic water while cartoons obnoxiously play on a HD television in a living room. In this pregnant pause to the action the audience is given the opportunity to try to figure out what is going on and maybe what will happen next. The spring is being loaded as it is time and time again during the film with payoffs of plot, character, and cinematic experience in just a few frames to come.
posted by well-executed buffet at 3:43 PM
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Thursday, November 22, 2007

Campelot: Junk Food for the Holiday


The reason for my Thanksgiving viewing of Camelot had its roots in watching Becket a few weeks prior. Man, did Burton and O'Toole cut it up as ol' Henry and Tom! Early/mid sixties mainstream America must have felt cultured with the currency of some ideas and some ye olde Anglo history. But where was Richard Harris? Of the sixties over-amped drinking Brit bad boys he was my favorite. ("Because it took so long to baaaaake it and I'll never have that recipe again Oh No...") So in tribute of these hard drinking U.K. rodent pack icons and because I have really been enjoying DVDs that have faithfully remastered with lovely sixties high key lighting (Intense blue eyes of actors in Camelot made even more so) and presented in original screen aspect ratios. And also, I had never seen it. So Monday Camelot went to the top of the que for Thanksgiving day screening.

Warner Bros. was in transition when Camelot was produced. Jack Warner hadn't let go entirely. It seems obvious that this was a last hurrah to try to bring the studio the glory and success it had with My Fair Lady. But the sixties were definitely in full effect. Film-making techniques could become very self-conscious. Joshua Logan uses the zoom like an adolescent would discover a fountain pen and some of the songs would jump cut between six or seven locations, as a way to remind you that this is a movie and no longer a stage play. The numbers would never seem to end with the sound and picture editors shouting out a "one more time" for reprise or coda. My mom was wondering what they were trying to do. Mondo montage for the musical probably seemed like a good idea back in the sixties.

My mom and I watched together up until the point where Lancelot became knight. Priscilla's reaction was "Why aren't there any stars in it" True, Richard Harris, Vanessa Redgrave, Franco Nero, and David Hemmings aren't exactly perennial A-listers. But each, in their own way, left something eternally campy and memorable to their role. Harris, especially in the soliloquy at the end of the first act, never fails to make me smile when he goes for the rafters. (..and what's with the bad eye shadow he seems to be wearing in about half the film?) Redgrave is directed to look great in hairstyles, gowns, and whenever possible, "tasteful" big movie nudity. Nero's Lancelot is driven by his native Italian phonetic English with a French faux accent, pompous egotism, and, of course, rich baby blues. David Hemmings as Mordred is maybe the role that delivers best--in a goofy, unbelievable world, he frightens a bit as the bastard child leather clad rocker set on taking the classic romantic triangularity of Jenny and Lance (yes, that's what they call each other" I wonder if there was a script draft where the king was referred to as "Art") and weird Becket-like bonding between Lancelot and Arthur.

Hemming's Mordred is sixties revolution with seventies punk flavor. He is young brash Hollywood watching the round table of Jack Warner, Louis B. and King Cohn get broken and plundred. Camelot was in the transition of Warner Bros. to Warner-Bros./Seven Arts. Warner-Bros./Seven Arts is essential in the history of what we now think of as Independent film and quintessential late-sixties cinema. Check out the imdb list of films they distributed or produced in two short years: Cool Hand Luke, Bullit, Bonnie and Clyde, Petulia, etc. with filmmakers like Altman and Coppola represented. The final verses of the eponymous title could indeed be interpreted as a gulp and goodbye to a film impacted by current zeitgeist but fighting hard to still be old Hollywood an maybe prescient of the "indpendent" director/visionary period to follow in the late sixties-mid seventies: "That once there was a fleeting wisp of glory called Camelot."

Quick note on the music: does anyone know if "Follow Me" has been recorded by a hard bop outfit? It would swing in that setting like nobody's business.
posted by well-executed buffet at 7:51 PM
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Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Elegant while Straight and Giddy at the same time: Appreciating Terry Southern


I am starting to write this while listening to a duet of Bobby Darin and Judy Garland.


It is actually perfect for the holidays and I bet if Terry Southern could hear it today he would say something like "This is perfectly droll" in such a way that the vibrato would spice that on some level he kind of digs it. I bet Lester Bangs would scurry around his medicine cabinet after inflicting himself with "Look up and see your maker when Gabriel blows his horn." All-star variety numbers on holiday specials make me nostalgic for a fire and my parent's basement.

...Meanwhile, the reason I decided to blog about Terry Southern is because he is the answer to a question that came up: What rebels do you have a soft spot in your heart? My answer was Terry. He was the Texan that you were convinced was English. I look at him as being as a kind of smarter hipper Uncle who was really to old or ornery to be a hippie and even though he gets lumped in with the beats, his bandwidth was darker than hip straight up. There were rocks and you banged around on them sometimes with him, especially when he comes of as a straight, non-gothic kind of WS Burroughs with a adolescent arrested development and more of a sense of mischief and play.

There has been arguments about authorship in Southern's screenplays. It kind of baffles me because his genius is something well-defined. It really doesn't take a freaking Mensa member to see what is his and what is Kubrick's in Dr. Strangelove or which parts aren't Hopper or Peter Fonda's in Easy Rider. And it shouldn't be that hard to guess what parts of The Cincinnati Kid are less Ring Lardner Jr.'s than Southern's. Or even parts of The Loved One belonging more to Southern than Evelyn Waugh.

Southern, Marianne Faithful, Allen Ginsberg, Martin Mull, Michael J. Pollard
Nelson Lyon, Jonathan Winters Sandra Bernhard Taylor Mead Michael O'Donoghue are all on an album which mostly consists fully realized productions of excerpts of Southern's fiction complete with music, sound effects and Hal Wilner's production qualities entitled Give Me Your Hump" (the title is from Candy.) Easy to get if you are an emusic subscriber. Another great resource to check out is his anthology, Now Dig This! I never read Candy but the film is to be avoided. I think his masterpiece must be The Magic Christian and it is one of my favorite films. I never read Candy, but can tell you for sure, the film is to be avoided. I also have fond recollections of one of his last published works, Texas Summer. The biography A Grand Guy by Lee Hill was interesting, but I felt empty afterwards. Southern is someone of whom I would prefer to get closer to the legend of rather than the true mortal.

And it doesn't get much legendary than being the guy who wore the sunglasses on the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band cover. The Wikipedia entry has many memorable quotes by and about Southern, but the best of all has got to be by Kurt Vonnegut who said Southern was "the illegitimate son of Max Sennett and Edna St Vincent Millay." How could one top that? Perhaps only by another viewing of the Bobby and Judy travel medley.
posted by well-executed buffet at 6:02 PM
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Tuesday, November 20, 2007

An Hour with an Obsessive Collector


The Collector: Allan Stone's Life in Art is another documentary by an offspring about a famous or notable parent. What is satisfying this time is (versus, for instance, "My Architect" or "The Ballad of Rambin' Jack") is that the filmmaker, Olympia Stone, doesn't seem to have an agenda or a score to settle with her father, Allan Stone, a noted art dealer and art collector, she seems just to want to show her father's story and personality.

Stone admits that he is addicted to collecting and addicted to art. He started out as a young Harvard-trained attorney who bought a De Kooning when in school and later did legal work for the art community, including a draft of divorce papers for De Kooning's wife. Gradually he became very well known in what fellow art dealer Ivan Karp jokes as one of the same 348 people who were at every Tuesday opening and every art event in late fifties NYC. These connections and love of art and the scene lead his bliss and obsession to the opening of his gallery on December 7 1960, a date he refers to as his "real birthday."

The Allan Stone Gallery's first big break was a show of Wayne Thiebaud, whose regimented depictions of rows of pastries helped transition the trends of American Art in the early sixties from Abstract Expressionism to the lightness of Pop Art. Stone's gallery helped the art scene turn that and other corners, continuing to be a force through the eighties. But things changed in the eighties when emphasis in the NY contemporary art scene turned into one to high prices, investment collectors, and auction houses. Throughout these decades, Stone collected and then collected some more. It is pretty clear that when he would buy one of his entire shows, it was all or mostly for the love of the way the things made him feel.


The way his unwieldy collection overstuffs large home is a kind of work of art in itself. A hand held shot early in the film chaotically moves among the chaos: all kinds of native fetish statues, paintings, masks and weird junk. Stone says he believes in the magic associated with these items. "It energizes me." In the film, some of his six daughters weigh in on how it was a scary place to grow up in. Olympia talks about how there were monsters openly in their house, not just under the bed as was the case with other kids.

There are comments from friends, wives, and children of how Stone was no model father or family man, but his family was not dismissed from his own private life either. Olympia does not uncover another life and family in her subjects life, as Nathaniel Kahn found Louis to have in My Architect. Instead, his children have fond memories of being dragged along to the galleries her father visited.

Olympia and Alan also visit a gallery in the film. Here, we get to see Stone interact and assess with the work of an artist. His body almost dances with the work. some he likes, but stands still in front of others clutching chin at times repeating that some of it "just doesn't cut the mustard."

Dealers, patrons, collectors, and fans fuel and drive commercial aspects of the world of art. Getting closer to one of the players of this world for an hour in a portrait of someone's dad isn't likely to change a viewer's perspective in a major way. But it is refreshing to see a record of purity in the obsession of someone in this aspect of the art community who obviously is not participating in that world primarily for financial gain and investment.
posted by well-executed buffet at 6:30 AM
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Monday, November 19, 2007

Radio of the Streets


Digital video creates more opportunity for non-fiction films of all varieties. And non-fiction film is a unique way to see and hear from unique folks you would have never ever known about. Folks such as Curt Nice, who has a record store of apparently mostly bootleg recordings in his mother's basement in East Cleveland. In Mixtape, Inc. a rambling but intriguing documentary of the mixtape culture in hip hop, he is honest about there not being any difference between bootlegs and mixtapes, but nice is clear about th service he provides and takes pride in his literally underground capitalist enterprise. "You got to know your product." If Curt was in my neighborhood, I'd surely stop by from time to time to find out what's happening.

Where is the sound? What is hip? In the film, DJ Red Alert, one of the old school particpants in mixtape culture said its like drugs, if you are interested in it, you know where to get the good stuff. In the story of hip hop mixtapes, things started out with DJs like Kid Capri and StarChild who first gave away their tapes then began to charge for them. By 1993, cassette mix tapes turned into CDs and there was money to be made. In the years that followed, mix tapes went from street corner sales to mom and pop music stores like the one in Curt Nice's Mom's basement. And since big money was involved, the record companies were supplying content (either directly or over the transom) and using street mixtape culture as a means to find new talent.

Mixtapes, Inc. covers the story of how the RIAA went to make an arrest in 2003, a music store owner in Indianapolis, Alan Berry, was charged with 13 felonies, which through a defense of jurisdiction was able to reduce the charge to a misdemeanor of selling a CD without the address on the case. Berry was a strange and desperate target, especially since as Mixtapes, Inc. points out, the companies represented by the RIAA are so deeply involved with the current culture of mixtape DJs and hip hop. In the summer 2006, I wandered into a downtown Cleveland record store that seemed to be wholly stocked with mix tapes. I didn't feel like I was in a felonious location--it just seemed curious to be in a record store with so much unrecognizable stock.

Mixtape DJs blend, remix, jack beats, go frestyle and rap on top of content, and sometimes get exclusive tracks (directly or indirectly.) Questions of bootlegging, stealing content, legitimacy and record company complicity resurfaced in swirls during the two hours of interviews in Mixtape, Inc. And director Walter Bell didn't even explore much of the impact of where we are now in Mid 00 decade with the ubiquitous Internet where an entire generation doesn't go to Tower or Virgin for their music first and where the culture of mash-ups has expanded and exploded well beyond the mixtape world he portrays. And I was struck by the fact that most of the players in Bell's film story are now in or nearing their thirties (Kanye West, 50 Cent, DJ Green Lantern, Joe Budden) and more embedded in the mainstream of American culture, if such a thing really exists anymore.

So as you read this, KNOW there are hundreds of kids in hundreds of bedrooms and basements using the net and its content sculpting something their friends will dig, it will somehow challenge and create danger to the infrastructure of American capitalism, but eventually some of what they touch will be the Eminems and 50 Cents of the future who will be able to trace their roots in mixtapes and turntablism as Rock and Roll and soul can connect with blues, country/folk, and gospel that went on before. And those beats will go on until others replace them and expand from them once again.
posted by well-executed buffet at 6:11 AM
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Sunday, November 18, 2007

Commerce and Compromise


Your life won't be changed with a viewing of The TV Set, but if you appreciate your satire medium well done with subtle seasonings similar to the kind of flavor that David Mamet provided in State and Main, you will find this far more enjoyable than, well, almost anything one can find on television itself.

The performances by David Duchovny and Sigourney Weaver as TV pilot writer-developer and network executive are fueled by smart and funny scripting of Jake Kasden, a veteran of the scorched earth of television production itself. There is a sense that there is a lot of personal history and striving for truth and accuracy of how television is run.

Earlier in the film he tells his wife "The show is too personal, I would rather not do it than do it badly." To which his wife, played by Justine Bateman against kitchen counter holding her mid-section replies: "I'm six months pregnant honey, aren't you worried about having a job." As the compromises of his vision that continue, Duchovny's back suffers physical pain probed by the needles of the absurdity he encounters on the board room and the set. I was reminded of Truffaut in one of the standard bearers of a film about filmmaking in Day for Night. He gave his director character a hearing aid symbolic of how one becomes so focused on their internal reality in the film making process. Duchovny's Mike Klein leaves the network roll-out of his show in crutches, having been embattled by strong external forces for weeks. In skirmishes between personal vision and commerce, guess which one will likely win (or leave one a tiny bit wounded)?


posted by well-executed buffet at 7:06 AM
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Saturday, November 17, 2007

Little Sparrow Sings the Blues


In the midst of watching La Vie En Rose, I took a break to look at the real Piaf. This tune, Sophie, kicks out a hard St James Infirmary kind of riff and is different than any other performance of Piaf's I have heard or seen. Her timing on the stage entrance is that of a true pro to be sure.


My conclusion on La Vie En Rose is that the musical biopic has no room for a visionary autuer such as Oliver Dahan. The well executed music biopic screams out for a traditional kind of structure and motif. Examples: Ray, Coal Miner's Daughter, I Walk the Line, or What's Love Got to Do with It. But after some reflection, I wonder if Dahan may be trying for something different or beyond the traditional biopic despite some of the elements associated with it such as star cameos and scenes of discovery, struggle, betrayal and comeback we have seen so many times.

Dahan is not afraid to jump all over the subject's life chronologically, probably more so than any other biographical film on a musical artist I can recall. He also takes his time with sections like the Marcel Cerdan's title fight, that might at first seem to be distractions from the story of Edith. It does not surprise me to find that Dahan has a background in painting and music video. This is more than biopic that (although quite well) a Taylor Hackford or Michael Apted would make. Maybe there is a zeitgeist between our higher artisitc types going on now. Is Dahan's film part of a new wave that also includes Todd Haynes' "I'm Not Here" inspired by Dylan. I may weigh in on that after seeing it, hopefully next week.

The delivery of the news of Cerdan's plane crash to Piaf is one of the most impressive sequences I have seen in any film. It is disturbing, moving, and psychologically intense. For me, it was worth the rest of the 2.5 hours that sometimes became tedious and frustrating. It is certainly enough for me to make the kind of move that I often do at the full buffet, check out his other films. La Vie Promise and Crimson Rivers 2 are now in the cue.

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posted by well-executed buffet at 4:06 PM
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Friday, November 16, 2007

Montand and Pontecorvo On A Wide Blue Road



Gilo Pontecorvo is known for Burn! and Battle of Algiers. Two of the most overtly political films of the latter twentieth century. In 1999 Jonathan Demme saw Pontecorvo's first feature, The Wide Blue Road and later worked with Dustin Hoffman to secure its release. Their gift to the world is the resurrection of a fine fine melodrama featuring Yves Montand in a role that one could also picture Robert Mitchum in. Squarcio the fisherman believes that means justify the end. Therefore to take care of his family, he sees nothing wrong with dynamite fishing despite the illegality and the impact on the other fishermen in the village.


Italian Neo-realism had the unique capability of putting you in the world of others. The fishing village in Wide Blue Road is isolated universe full of tradition and passion. At the core, there is a conflict of the co-op vs. the individual and this is what propels Montand's self-principled combativeness.

This film is beautiful. The restoration shows how really wonderful colors in the silver rich emulsions of fifty years ago could produce stunning blues for sky and ocean. Ultimately, the command of this film is in Montand's performance. He could bring an impact to a closeup as well as any actor in cinema.
posted by well-executed buffet at 4:52 PM
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Thursday, November 15, 2007

Werner Nekes & the Frames of Perception







Werner Nekes is an experimental filmmaker who is best known for his exhaustive collection of evolutionary examples of pre-film technologies prior to the Lumieres. After reading about Nekes in the Future Cinema book, I ordered two compilations of his work through the Summit library system. One is in the form "Eyes, Lies, and illusions" a catalog of a exhibit a few years ago at the Hayward Gallery in London which features both Nekes' collection and contemporary artists who continue in that spirit and tradition.

The other was a video with the innocuous English title of "Film Before Film." which is especially unimpressive when one finds out that the Deutsch title is "Was Geschah wirklich zwischen den Bildern? (What really happened between the pictures?) Nekes' film is 83 minutes of non-stop demonstrations of illusionary technologies prior to projected film: Praxinoscopes, Phenakisiticopes, Zoetropes, and the impressive contrast art and technologies of the round disk and other delivery of the Thaumatrope. As the film points out, Thaumatropic illusions work because of the sluggishness of the eye and its ability to interpret information and work best when images are in high contrast of opposition to each other to create illusion (bird+cage=bird in cage)

The impact of all of this gentle and subtle category journey pre-20th century technologies in perception, image capture, photo reproduction, panoramic illusion with camera obscura, magic lantern, and peepshow becomes one of triumphant human endeavor when Nekes' film shows the Chronophotography of Muybridge, Anschutz, and MArey as a kind of final prophecy prior to the triumphant Lumieres. At that point, this film became much more than a bunch of demonstrations of antique stuff. It was a powerful testament to the power of technology, curiosity, play, and the human persistence to solve problems.
posted by well-executed buffet at 9:24 PM
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Wednesday, November 14, 2007

The "Other" Bobby Hughes





A few months back I stumbled across a group called The Bobby Hughes Experience. Of course, I was attracted by the name but dug the music also. The sound was a sampled up tempo groove that reminded me of early 90s acid jazz, which I very much dug. And the leader had my name.

Except he didn't. It turned out that Bobby Hughes was the name Norwegian DJ Epsen Horne, gave to his projects. Even cooler, I thought. Now I know how the real Betty Crocker feels like.
posted by well-executed buffet at 8:07 AM
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Tuesday, November 13, 2007

In the Turret


Back in late September, there was no way I was going to be able to watch Ken Burns' The War as a television event for the two weeks or so that it was on. I waited for a while to get episode one from Netflix but it seemed to be forever lodged at Very Long Wait status. Eventuallly, a conversation with my friends at the Cannell Library revealed that there was a copy cataloged and ready for check out.

I am treating it as I would a book. It sits in my DVD drive of my computer and I will dip into a sequence or two. It is a good way to work through this work. A window with episode three is playing as I write this. When a battle gets good I will go to full screen. The structure of following our towns that is at the heart of the film's structure works quite well for this approach of consuming this much material. Need to go visit the battle of Tarawa for a while....

Back from the battle of Tarawa. Sound design is key in this film. In supplemental materials Burns says they spent an entire year on the sound after the picture was locked in. Sometimes the level of intensity of battle sounds is distracting and feels artificial, especially in the ground battles. But I found myself totally captivated in one of the film's first air sequences over Schweinfurt. For a few short minutes, I felt I was in the gun turret with a sensation I had not encountered prior in any other depiction of air combat. And being a son of Air Force, I think I saw most every one growing up.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:00 PM
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Monday, November 12, 2007

Love on the Coast of France


Jacques Demy's cinema of southern France contains some of the best love letters ever committed to film. Nantes or Cherbourg play as important a role in his films as any of the human actors.


Lola is Anouk Aimee. She is a single mom portrayed with a kind of frankness that American film could not touch in the early sixties. She works in this club that seems to explode with a kind of early sixties kinetic bossa cool rave every time sailors walk in the door. In her tender scenes with a grade school sweetheart or the sailor doppleganger American who fathered her son, she reminds me of Marilyn Monroe in her best performance, but with more Madonna self-realization. Elina Labourdette as Madame Desnoyers also has a strong parallel role, another single mother with a adolescent daughter at the gateways of adulthood.

The film features about six characters somewhat interconnecting with each other as love and fate play a part along the coastline. The men are not nearly as interesting as the women here. Demy's judicious use of French New Wave techniques like jump-cutting (not to distraction, like Godard, but more like seasoning) and his trademark inventiveness in music, both in Michel Legrand, who will forever be linked with Demy for Umbrellas) and Beethoven's Seventh. These are important components in the cinema of Demy, but my favorite element in his visual elixir is the use of strong coastal light coming from windows, sometimes for backlight or sometimes providing striking contrast for characters whose hearts and intention of heart don't match up with the conditions of life they find themselves in.
posted by well-executed buffet at 10:55 PM
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Sunday, November 11, 2007

Julian's Temple to Joe




Joe Strummer: The The Future is Unwritten is unwavering in its tone and presentation for nearly two hours. Two or three groups of unidentified folks sitting around campfires, mostly in urban settings. It is a good and noble film that Julian Temple has built, but the center does not hold as we keep going back to the campfires and for my sensibilties, we don't get enough Joe. Almost everytime that Strummer opened his mouth in Dick Rude's "Let's Rock Again" a film released a year or two prior about his tour on the Mesacaleros, one got a sense of something significant, something pithy and inteligent. Those moments are less frequent in the Temple film. It turns way too much into hagiography, especially when reocognizable celeberties like Bono, John Cusack, and Johnny Depp babble on about Strummer. And only by context and those who know the story from the inside already can identify most of the players. The saving grace of Listen Up, The Life and Times of Quincy Jones was that each of the participants introduced themselves. I loved seeing this in the balcony of the Cinema 21, but I can't tell you how many times I wanted to toggle the subtitle button of my remote to see if they would identify the speaker.

But the use of the celebrities was not a total waste. Bono's comment about the immediacy and danger of a Clash show were true of my experience, especially in the Fall of 79 at the Paramount in Seattle where he came out with a fire axe during the Armagedeon Time encore. And that the saddest part of the Clash story for him is that they were still not together. U2 showed how you can play in the court of being the biggest band in the world with longevity and integrity. It makes you wonder if...

The thematic use of the campfires is not totally capricious. It is the campfires at Glastonbury, camping at the festival with his family, that helped bring him back actively as musician and artist with the underrated Mescelaro era. And Joe's christmas card was a festive felt tip colored picture of islands with campfires on them. An image his wife says could be thought of as Joe's view of heaven. Another bridge for the film are shots of the campfires where follks are listening airchecks of the Strummer BBC World radio broadcasts dejaying music that matters to him and therefore, to us all.
posted by well-executed buffet at 6:03 PM
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Saturday, November 10, 2007

Cléo on the Clock


Agnes Varda's Cléo de 5 à 7 is a vibrant flower blooming in the soil of the New Wave surrounded by Breathless, 400 Blows, and others.

Here's the trailer version of the film that reminds me of La Jetee. It is a strange little artifact. There is a still of just about every major shot in the film with very active voice over. It provides major contrast to a film that brims with active and vibrant camera movement, much from a third story building perspective overlooking a 60s Paris in the midst of the Algerian crisis.




Cleo, the spoiled Pop center sees a portion of the film's action from a cab. This scene as they drive through the University district is very strange. In Criterion's essay of the film by Molly Haskell, she says there is a demonstration going on. It looks more like an intoxicated bash to me.



The film's action follows the actions of a spoiled pop singer two hours before she is due to pick up some lab results for cancer. Cléo de 5 à 7 is not in real time. It only runs an hour and a half. The "missing" half hour seems to be eaten up by the compression of editing. The film takes place on the Solstice. And its characters speculate about the fact that it is the longest day of the year and how that impacts the way they feel, etc. Early summer has a kind of shimmer to it where there is something wonderful to begin. Too what impact the year's day of maximum light has on that feeling will remain as much a mystery as what ultimately happens to Cleo and Antoine after the final frame of Varda's masterpiece
posted by well-executed buffet at 4:28 AM
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Friday, November 9, 2007

Meeting Raul





Chilean filmmaker Raul Ruiz has been making innovative films for almost 40 years. I had never heard of him until reading the preface of Future Cinema, a catalog of an exhibition at The Center for Art and Media Karshule that was held in 2003. This clip is from Le Temps retrouvé, his version of Proust's Time Regained. It turns out that Ruiz' latest film is a reportedly uncompromising portrait of Gustav Klimt starring John Malkovich. I want to see it in the front row of the balcony of Cinema 21. Soon.
posted by well-executed buffet at 2:16 AM
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Thursday, November 8, 2007

Defining Play While Surmising Wildly


This has been a great week for a currency of ideas. Tonight we went to go see two WSU-V DTC sponsored artists and scholars speak at North Bank Artist's Gallery.

Samantha Blackmon, a professor at Purdue University loves computer games. She loves to analyze them, look at how race and gender are being defined and impacting the players. Her experts are often those who play games. I had opportunity to see Samantha's presentations twice this week. Her enthusiasm for her topic is infectious. A discussion of games in her world has rqpid fire reference genre, platform, evolutionary moment, type, year, and publisher. Multiplayer, roleplaying and so forth. Samantha talks about one's relation with a game entering the world of the designer, their values and their visions. I've wondered why I don't find a seduction in gaming that I have in watching films or listening to music. Maybe it is indeed this concept of world. Is losing myself in a solo, like the one I listening to John Handy play now as I write this or in an incredibly well executed shot or sequence by a master of cinema anything like losing or extending yourself in one of these game characters. I'm not sure if I'll ever know.

British writer and scholar Sue Thomas is redefining what our concept of cyberspace. She doesn't think about it in the same terms as William Gibson. To her it is wildness and landscape. Her latest work in progress is called The Wild Surmise and it explores natural metaphor as our descriptor for cyberspace.

It was nice evening of engaging presentation and lecture, as good as you would find at a major conference. And who would have thought it likely to happen in a little art gallery next to the Kiggins Theater on Main Street in "America's Vancouver," as our mayor is fond of calling it.
posted by well-executed buffet at 9:23 PM
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Wednesday, November 7, 2007

"Good Citizens Are The Riches of the City"





The title of this post can be found on the Skidmore Fountain in Portland, Oregon. It is attributed to one of the most diverse and biggest historical figures in Oregon history: CES Wood. His life spanned the last of the 19th and first part of the 20th century. With contributions military, literary, artistic, political, and legal. He is associated with Chief Joseph's famous "I will fight no more forever." He was a friend of Mark Twain's, and wrote humor that was compared with his, had an ethical conflict with Clarence Darrow and did impressionistic paintings with Childe Hassam in Oregon's high desert.

John Mitchell Hipple came west in the late 1850s after deserting his wife and another woman he was living with. He changed his name to John Hipple Mitchell, married again. became a senator and died while appealing a conviction in a federal timber fraud case.

These are the two lives discussed at tonight's Mark O Hatfield Distinguished Historian's Forum lecture. by journalist and author Fred Lesson. I've very much enjoyed these lectures in the First Congregational Church in the Park Blocks of downtown Portland. The 85 year old Senator Hatfield is in attendance, introducing the speakers and asking the first question at these events. Just like CES Wood, Hatfield could not be pigeon-holed politically, part of the progressive Republican tradition associated with the crazy and independent Pacific Northwest. A Northwest that CES Wood and Mitchell Hipple (or is it Hipple Mitchell?) fell right at home in half a century earlier.

Hatfield is still eloquent. During his traditional first question of the Forum after Lesson's presentation. He praised him for bringing the "untold story that needs to be broadcast for the people's enrichment." The audience in the classic stone church almost audibly respond in a kind of awe. Then our Senator god became mortal: "I forgot my question." As we walked back to the car under the drooping Fall trees on Park, I realized that Wood was only partly right. This city, this state and this region are truly rich and we are so very fortunate to be a part of it.
posted by well-executed buffet at 10:03 PM
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Tuesday, November 6, 2007

MB's Muses, Furies, and Fates



The community college I work at has lately been playing it safe, from my point of view. For example, the political mainstream commentator David Gergen is going to be a speaker tomorrow.

The blandness is being challenged downstairs from where Gergen is speaking with political artist MB Condon's art project that explores women and war, The Red Thread. Her work has lots of pink and expresses loads of anger and outrage, but there is a wonderfully thoughtful framework at the heart of her project, not random rage and imagery.

The pieces in the show are divided thematically into thirds. There are a number of works where MB is depicting herself, mainly in line drawing as Greek Fates or Moirae: Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos. Then there is the Furies depicted as blood thirsty spike -heeled Condi Rice and her lot. But the project's greatest strength is in her tribute to Muses.

MB's three Muses are Virginia Woolf and her essay Three Guineas which was her scathing response to the Spanish Civil War, Simone Weil and her inversion of Homer's Illiad, and Susan Sontag's with her final major length essay "Regarding the Pain of Others"

The Sontag piece is one of the more striking comments of media I have seen of late. She resequenced 65 pages of the November 2006 Marie Claire magazine which featured the first in-prison interview with Lyndie England a fashion spread full of women separated from their husbands and lots of imagery where Marshall McLuhan could easily find evidence of what he called the Mechanical Bride.

Check out more of Condon's work. It will be on display at the Archer Galleryat Clark College in Vancouver, Wa until December 5.
posted by well-executed buffet at 8:21 PM
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Monday, November 5, 2007

Hot for teacher flicks


A guilty pleasure sub-genre for me is films dealing with educational environments. Is this because I am a teacher by occupation? Perhaps? Is it the fact that most of cinematic tales from the chalkboard have some kind of transformational lift.


Notes on a Scandal is no To Sir with Love. It is harsh, unflinching, and undeniably hard look at the human condition. It is a film that sticks with you for a day or two after, thinking about the characters and the awful choices they made for themselves. Cate Blanchett's flaky art teacher and Judi Densch's battle axe historian are folks you can find in just about any educational institution. Teaching is an occupation with passion and it does indeed overflow sometimes.
posted by well-executed buffet at 9:39 PM
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Sunday, November 4, 2007

Stronger than Fiction


The impact of non-fiction film and its ability to teach and make you feel differently about something has been huge for me. John Grierson believed in the ability of film to instruct and make social change by virtue of that ability.

My view of the Vietnam war was certainly impacted by Hearts and Minds which I saw shortly before graduating from high school. This film had the ability to encapsulate the imagery and issues I had become aware of for ten years prior and verbalized/visualized my instincts ,observations and many of my conclusions of why I knew America's involvement in SE Asia was wrong and criminal.

My hope is that folks will have similar experience with No End in Sight. It has the uncanny ability to take the news events over the past five years and pulled it together in a narrative with first-person accounts from a wide range of participants involved in the Iraq occupation. As the fumbling during the spring of 2003 was shown with detail, I had this strange sense of wanting to go into the television and alter events so they wouldn't lead to the conclusions we are all so well aware of.

Don't let the overkill of music effects and sense of impending hyperdrama of the embedded clip below put you off. Charles Ferguson's film is definitely worth the space in your Netflix cue. I haven't felt this well served by non-fiction film since 1975.
posted by well-executed buffet at 10:30 PM
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Saturday, November 3, 2007

They say Frank Lucas is a Bad..Shut your mouth


One's well-executed buffet means going to the movies in a theater maybe once per week or when something is of great interest. American Gangster is a big film. Big exposure and a big cast. The contrapuntal movements of the Crowe cop/lawyer and the Denzel drug distributer/gangster/businessman are bridged by bad cops and the rise of the Soul Power era.

Reviews glimpsed before hand struggled with whether or not it was ultimately the great film it strived to become or just a really good one. No matter. So much is right here, especially with the performances. If I have a complaint, it is in aspects of the cinematography. The shadowy evening scenes have a weird olive-green cast to them. To me it felt unnecessarily murky, but I remember how Gordon Willis style of deep shadows seemed first quite jarring in the classic Woody Allen and Godfathers. American Gangster's Harris Savides also did the lighting for Zodiac and some recent Van Sants. I make notice of him now and will watch for him in credits to see if future and past work of his makes an impact on me.

Another quick note--major thanks to Pam Rentz,a digital goddess, for updating my blog template and directing the Well-Executed buffet to the homepage of the robertLhughes domain.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:17 PM
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Friday, November 2, 2007

Marker of time: La Jetee


Chris Marker's La Jetee is one of my favorite films. Most notable is its use of still imagery as motion picture grammar and storytelling. Let's face it, the Leica M is so much more portable and intimate than the preferred tool of Marker's French New Wave brethren, the Eclair ACL. And freeze drying time is important. What's more powerful? Elliot Erwitt's image of the Khrushchev/Nixon debate or a newsreel of the event.

Also, the film's post-war futuristic apocalyptic theme will always resonate with my being at the very tale end of the duck and cover generation. And I think it is a most rudimentary human impulse to muse on the nature of memory and the possibility of time travel. The scenes in La Jetee of the time traveler and the woman of his memory in among the natural history artifacts always return to me whenever I am in a quiet corner of a museum.

I showed La Jetee to my GRCP 101 class to begin a discussion about the choices a creator has with media, form, and content, just as a professor did to me thirty years prior. I'm not sure how many times I have seen his film. Probably forty at least. I've seen the English and French versions in 16mm, owned VHS airchecks, borrowed temperamental videos, and now have Criterion's DVD release in our school library. It even lives on YouTube (albeit the inferior, in my mind, English version.)

I'm not sure how many times I have seen his film: Probably forty at least. Just like a favorite symphonic work, there is something both new and reassuring to be rediscovered every time.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:00 PM
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Thursday, November 1, 2007

Declarations of Independents


Criterion Collection recently released Gus Van Sant's Mala Noche and Jim Jarmusch's Permanent Vacation This past weekend's viewing both of the first features for these quirky, individualistic late 20th century American Autuers provides quite a study in contrast, as well as lots of similarities.

Their budgets were low and they are works of filmmakers determined to tell their stories their way. Walt Curtis, the author inspiration of Mala Noche, is a Portland Oregon vulgarian committed to living the life of the artist. In the interview on the Permanent Vacation DVD, Jarmusch indicated that the film's star Chris Parker, was close to the strangely hyper and uni-non directional uber slacker characterized in the film.
posted by well-executed buffet at 1:43 PM
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