F L I C K H E A D: 08/01/2012

Music to watch girls by

Vocal by Andy Williams

Lana Del Rey vids

A film by Interview magazine

Summertime Sadness

Carmen

Blue Jeans

National Anthem

Stuck inside of mediocrity with the election year blues again

The 10 best movies I ever saw

With the recent brouhaha over Sight & Sound’s latest Ten Greatest Films of All Time, I reflect back on the films that have had considerable impact on me. They generally hold up well, and I don’t believe there’s a bum frame in the bunch. (They’re listed chronologically.) Sorry, no Kane or Vertigo… and, regrettably, no comedies:

The Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith, 1915)
Greed (Erich von Stroheim, 1924)
Strike (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925)
The Crowd (King Vidor, 1928)
Umberto D. (Vittorio De Sica, 1952)
Ordet (Carl Dreyer, 1955)
The 400 Blows (François Truffaut, 1959)
The Virgin Spring (Ingmar Bergman, 1960)
The Young Girls of Rochefort (Jacques Demy, 1967)
Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974)

Art by Kelsey

“In the Sweat of Her Face” by Kelsey Sartory. (Click image to enlarge.) To see more of her work click here.

The Fount of the Gaping Maw

    Above, “Angelina Jolie, Lusty Spring” by David LaChapelle. Click to enlarge. And please visit the source.
    As I ponder this intoxicating image and savor the prurient implications of that gaping maw, my cable company and Movieplex are presently offering Hackers (1995) for free on demand. It’s a ridiculous movie which has sucked me in time and again, the initial draw a brazen LaJolie, then twenty-years-old, voluptuous mouth, piercing eyes, boyish ‘do and wrinkle-free baby fat so rounded, so fully packed, a yummy dish of young womanhood who prompts the screen mother of the character she’s falling for to quip, “Now I see what all the fuss is about!”
    Now, indeed. If there’s anything that’s nowhere near ‘now,’ it’s this lame account of computer nerdism among middle-class adolescents back when the web was in its infancy and hacking, as the script would have it, a viable activity among sleazy teenage outlaws who answer to handles like Acid Burn and Crash Override. (Prone to self-nipple-pinching, Matthew Lillard’s braided, tongue-wagging Cereal Killer is among the foremost grotesques of modern cinema.) As I remember it, 1995 was something of a pop culture wasteland tragically anchored to the 80s while meekly anticipating the revolution of the hard drive. Our rollerblading troupe in Hackers (three or four totally righteous dudes to LaJolie’s one tough cookie) save the dial-up universe with their ADHDs and floppy discs.
    As a fan of Pink Floyd and Floyd guitarist David Gilmour, I was surprised to hear this number on the Hackers soundtrack. Written and performed by Guy Pratt, a rhythm guitarist who’s toured with Gilmour for more than twenty years, it features an uncredited Gilmour solo:

Skin flick

Strange even by Almodóvar’s standards, La Piel que Habito (The Skin I Live In, 2011) is ‘Les Yeux sans Visage on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,’ as plastic surgeon Antonio Banderas conducts clandestine experiments in skin modification down in his mad lab-slash-finished basement. Absurd and profound and ripe with metaphor, it’s a fascinating two hours’ spiel on gender, desire and denial, set in the director’s punchy universe of concerned alternate citizens living a topsy-turvy La Dolce Vita sadly nowhere near where I live. Also starring Elena Anaya (remember Belén in Sex and Lucia?).