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It's... a claw!

Alien From The Deep, dir. by Antonio Margheriti (aka Anthony Dawson)
Starring Daniel Bosch, Marina Giulia Cavalli, Robert Marius, Luciano Pigozzi, Charles Napier
Review by Brian Charles Clark
Originally published on Curled Up with a Good DVD
3 stars

A hot babe, Jane (Marina Giulia Cavalli), and some guy named Bob (Daniel Bosch), who isn’t nearly as hot, are environmental activists roaming the jungle looking for do-badders. They find the evil ones in the green depths: E-Chem corporation is conspiring to dump toxic waste into an active volcano.

Dumping toxic chemicals into a volcano is in some sense (which one, though, is not at all clear) brilliant. After all, one thing real-world toxics producers want to do to get rid of their vile putrescences is incinerate them. So why not turn to Mother Nature’s Milk of Magma to settle a toxic stomach? But let’s overlook the logistics of building a complex waste-disposal facility in the bowels of a volcano and move right along to the snake milker. Read the rest of this entry »

Straight Up is out now on Blu-Ray.

Review by Brian Charles Clark
3.5 stars

Straight Up is straight up-adventure of the vertical kind. This film glorifies helicopters and the people who pilot and work with them.

Produced by the National Air and Space Museum, Straight Up is wonderfully educational while also maintaining a thrilling, exploitative edge — call it copter porn. The movie was originally made for IMAX screens and, as director David Douglas says in the behind-the-scenes featurette, the helicopter point of view is perfect for really big images.

The standard jobs are here, of course: the medevac teams who whisk people to life-saving medical care via mountain-hopping chopper; drug interdiction; rescues at both sea and in mountains. We see helicopters delivering humanitarian aid and being used for research and relocation of endangered species.

Nothing like a little copter porn to liven up a mix.

But who would have thought that the folks who carry out repairs on the huge high-tension wires that carry electricity from dams in remote locations to the grid in the city are repaired by guys coming in on helicopters? Indeed, the lines aren’t shut down for repair; the electricians work on live wires. To do this, the workers wear special Faraday cages — stainless steel threads in the specially woven fabric used to make their clothes — that allow zillions of volts to pass harmless over their bodies as they work. And they get to work sitting on the wheel strut of a helicopter. When the chopper gets to the stretch of high-power cable that needs repair, the worker scoots off the strut and into a harness hanging directly from the wires.

The behind-the-scenes film is also great. Any number of trade secrets are revealed as the filmmakers show how they got some of their shots and we learn the basics of flying helicopters. Point left, go left; point right, go right: this is good to know

Originally published on Curled Up with a Good DVD at Straight Up: Helicopters in Action – DVD review – Blu-ray / documentary DVD / IMAX DVD.

reviewed by Brian Charles Clark
3.5 star review originally published on Curled Up with a Good DVD

One of Paul Gauguin's Tahiti paintings.

Paul Gauguin was a strange guy who spent his life in search of paradise, which he tacitly but clearly recognized as an illusion. For over a hundred years he’s been considered one of the most important of the French post-impressionist painters but, in his own time, he was a commercial failure.

The predominant subtext of the short film Gauguin: Maker of Myth, is that, in fact, “Mr. Flop City But I Don’t Care Gauguin” very much wanted to be a commercial success. This, says Myth, despite the fact the that he vehemently eschewed the trappings of bourgeois culture and went so far as to call himself “un sauvage,” a savage. This driven man fled as far as possible as it was in his day (which was very far, indeed) from the sources of capital, fame, and “civilization.” Gauguin fled, mind you, but he did so complaining about his poverty every inch of the way. Like James Joyce, he was of a contemporary milieu that found its satisfaction, even joy, in exile.

This lovely short film, produced by the National Gallery of Art, is a vivid and concise introduction to the artistic career of the pivotal and influential Gauguin. Oddly, though, no director or writer is credited; distressing, that. The film is edited by the talented and keen-eyed John Warnock (the photographer, not the CEO of Adobe who announced Photoshop in 1987–unless I’m deeply confused, of course, and the universe is in fact running in a course deeply in tune with the desires of mortal humans). Read the rest of this entry »

reviewed by Brian Charles Clark
1 star review originally published on Curled Up with a Good DVD

Last Tango in Paris? Don't bother.

An American man (Marlon Brando), his wife having recently committed suicide, meets a lovely Parisian girl (Maria Schneider) in an empty apartment each is considering renting. There, ladies and gentlemen, is the plot of the “classic” Last Tango in Paris laid bare.

The film has survived as one of the world’s greatest based, apparently, on the scandal it caused when it was first released in the fall of 1972. No doubt there are good enough reasons to consider it an important film, but a great one? Film critics and les connoisseurs des artes cinematiques probably find the symbolism thrilling: the crazy lady at the bottom of the stairs, the cracked mirrors, the blood in the bathroom, and on and on.

All of it amounts, frankly, to a lot of hot, stale air. Marlon Brando, once the amazing actor who starred in On the Waterfront, is frumpy, cruel and boring–it is extremely odd that his performance in Last Tango is considered one of his best. Or maybe it’s not so odd; maybe it is a great performance, one that mirrors the sadism of the general population. Schneider, meanwhile, is clearly miserable and, as we now know, her misery was not an act. Read the rest of this entry »

Review by Brian Charles Clark
3 stars on Curled Up with a Good DVD

Look out. Look up. A still from Resonnances

Look, you guys, quit giving rides to serial killers, okay? I know you think, what with the intertubal Facebooks and the Tweety birds surveilling from limb to limb and all that wooly blanket of webbery, that you’re perfectly safe. All watched over by machines of loving grace, as it were. But what you didn’t count on is what you need to count on.

In the case of the “micro-budget” (I ain’t buying it) RESONNANCES, the thing you didn’t count on was the alien craft crash landing in the vicinity some 400 years ago.

And this is rural France, don’t forget, so things are… different. Vive la difference, sure–except things aren’t. We’re ricocheting between Hollywood horror and indie spoof here. This is familiar, fun turf – with subtitles.

read the rest of Brian’s review on Curedl Up with a Good DVD.

This is so beautiful…. I love Playing for Change and the work they are doing. They’ve started several music schools in Nepal, Mali, Rwanda, Ghana, and elsewhere. You can help — make a small donation and direct toward a drum, a stringed instrument or, hell, just lay some bread on these folks.

Gotta love They Might Be Giants and their new(ish) album, Here Comes Science.

I’ve been a fan of Africa’s rich musical cultures for many years, so was stoked to bump into Afropop a year or two ago. The organization produces radio programming and runs a damn cool web site chock full of interesting stuff, including reviews of CDs and concert info.

Afropop was started by, among others, Banning Eyre, who wrote In Griot Time, a book I read a few months ago. Eyre is also the author of a guitar atlas of Africa, part of a series of atlases collected in two volumes. I have both and have spent many an hour noodling my way through the incredible diversity of music they contain, and reading about all the different scales and techniques employed by players around the world. Volume one covers Africa, Brazil, India (Sanjay Mishra is the author here, a guitarist I discovered by reading this book and whom I’ve come to admire for his lovely playing and deeply textured compositions), Italy, Japan and the Middle East. Volume two covers Celtic styles (renewing my admiration of Pierre Bensusan), China, Cuba, Flamenco, Jamaica, and Russia.

The Afropop crew made this short video recently, asking the question, What is Afropop? Considering the vast influence African musics have had on American ones, I’m surprised at the paucity of answers. Afropop — isn’t that another name for the blues? Samba? Rumba? Cuban and Brazilian music? It’s none of those and all of them and more.

Check this cat out. He’s playing some old beater archtop guitar, as far as I can tell (I don’t see a brand name on the head stock), and it looks to me like he’s running this ship with only three strings. But he gets one hell of a bang for his buck.