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The Sun Came Out. Highly recommended by Smart Energy.

The Sun Came Out: 7 Worlds Collide Again

How do 20 musicians who’ve never worked together before record an album of original material in three weeks? First, you get Neil Finn to invite you to the wild west coast of New Zealand. Make it for right around Christmas time, the heart of southern hemisphere summer, and have Finn invite not just you, but your whole family.

Ask everyone to bring a song. “We need songs,” Finn would’ve pointed out. “We’re recording an album.”

But no one does, of course, because artists are more human than humans, and thus are more easily distracted, are lazier, are more prone to procrastination. But it doesn’t matter because there is a deadline. Record the album, then play the shows.

Don’t want to let your mates down, so write something good and then learn to play it.

Because we’re not doing this for fun, nor for a nice subtropical vacation, but for Oxfam. So we want it to be good, so people will buy the album and come to the shows so we can make some money and give it all away. Read the rest of this entry »

Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo on DVD. The beetle may have conquered Japan, but the film conquers nothing.

Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo
Grade: C-
reviewed by Brian Charles Clark
directed by Jessica Oreck

Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo promises much more than it delivers. Directed by Jessica Oreck, a contributor to PBS’s Nature, the PR for the film alludes to science and a probing of the Japanese fascination with insects. Although Beetle Queen is a good-looking film with some interesting facets, it on the whole disappoints for its lack of narrative drive and its insistent but meandering obsession with tying together bits of Japanese poetry with shots of landscapes and bugs.

If we expected an in-depth look at Japanese culture and its people’s fascination with insects, I suppose we must be satisfied with the filmmaker’s visual anthropology. There are many arty shots in the film, that’s for sure, but they do not synergize into a narrative, nor do they create lyric intensity. With the emphasis on quoting snippets of Japanese literature, I suspect the latter, lyric mode was Oreck’s intention. I don’t think it works. The film is dry, full of lush (and creepy, no doubt, to the insectophobe) close-ups that ground us in nothing and leave us nowhere, offering nothing more than a macro shot of one bug after another. Read the rest of this entry »

Howard Zinn You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train

review by Brian Charles Clark
5 out of 5 possible stars
Directed by Deb Ellis and Denis Mueller; narrated by Matt Damon

Originally published on Curled Up with a Good DVD

One day — I think it was a Tuesday — about 25 years ago, someone handed me a copy of a book and said, “You’ll love this.” The book was Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. At the time, I was in college and had heavy stats and logic (if P then not Q and such nonsense) homework. I made the mistake of dipping into Zinn’s book over lunch and couldn’t stop reading for three days straight.

I was too young to have taken part in the radical ’60s and then in the ’70s – well, let’s forget the ’70s existed. In any case, I’d never heard of Zinn until I read A People’s History. But I quickly discovered that he was a member of a loosely affiliated cluster of radical activist philosopher-historians, a group that includes Noam Chomsky and many others, some of whom appear in this film. These activists were fighting the good fight against that relentless tide of greed called capitalism: they educated and advocated for civil and women’s rights, unions and labor rights, and against wars big and small, hot and cold. Read the rest of this entry »

Plastic Planet - have you had your Bisphenol A today?

Review by Brian Charles Clark
4 out of 5 stars
Directed by Werner Boote

Originally published on Curled Up with a Good DVD

At the rate we’re going, we’re all going to need to isolate ourselves from the toxins we’ve dumped into our environment by diving into HazMat bubble suits. We’ll have to invent filters that keep the nano-sized particles of cancer-dealing crap out – but, hey, we’ve got the technology for that. And plastics.

On second thought, no: plastics are one of the biggest sources of toxins. Bisphenol A, for instance, is a plasticizer that makes plastic, well, plasticy, and has been a known estrogenic since the 1930s. Estrogenics are those wonderful chemicals that are the secret culprits behind the bitching and moaning of the Iron John crew. Chief among them, Robert Bly has long complained that men have become too feminized, and clearly plastics are to blame, not doting mothers. I mean, look at the amphibians: scientists have been observing them changing sex, male to female, mid-stream for years, so why not humans, too? Is there a problem? Read the rest of this entry »

Fellini's Clowns is not-to-be missed cinema.

I Clowns (The Clowns)
review by Brian Charles Clark
4 stars (out of a possible 5)
Directed by Federico Fellini

Originally published on Curled Up with a Good DVD

Fellini’s I Clowns (The Clowns) is a fun and colorful way to delve into ontology, the philosophy of representations and appearances–with emphasis on the first half of the sentence. You could safely ignore the ontological cogitating burbling away in the film’s interrogative engine, but only if you were really stoned. Otherwise you’d just wonder what the hell was going on, as Fellini and crew caper about… like a bunch of clowns.

I Clowns is part documentary, part screwball comedy, part really deep thinking, and all extraordinarily well imagined and realized. This made for TV movie was released on Christmas day, 1970, around the time of Fellini’s other wonderful fantasy films, Satyricon (1969) and Juliet Of The Spirits (1965), and perhaps represents a mainstreaming of–or new-found docility in–Italian art film. Read the rest of this entry »

Loving Lampposts, a documentary by Todd Drezner: highly recommended.

Loving Lampposts: Living Autistic

Review by Brian Charles Clark
4.5 stars (out of 5 possible)
Directed by Todd Drezner
Originally published on Curled Up with a Good DVD

Todd Drezner’s beautiful investigation of autism is motivated by the personal. His son is autistic and loves to look at lampposts. They walk every day they can in Central Park and the young boy gazes up at the lampposts, recognizing them as individuals in ways us mere normals simply cannot.

There is a lot of bad information about autism out there and, with grace and compassion, Drezner gives even the lamest and most discredited notions their moment in the sun. The film is divided into sections and a recurring one is called “Autism is…” The reality is, no one knows for sure. But it is certainly not caused by vaccines or mercury, and it very likely isn’t genetic, either. Read the rest of this entry »

The Fernando di Leo Crime Collection is a 4-DVD box set.

Review by Brian Charles Clark
Directed by Fernando di Leo
Four films, box set plus many extras. Caliber 9, The Italian Connection, The Boss, Rules of the City

More whiskey, more scantily clad women, more cars and, definitely, more guns – those are the constantly recurring images in this collection of films by one of Poliziotteschi’s (Italo-crime) greatest directors, Fernando Di Leo. Add to that the incredible locations and Luis Enriquez Bacalov’s cool, noir-funk musical scores, and this box set of four mob films is a feast for the eyes and ears.

A still from one of the films in the Crime Collection.

Di Leo, who died in 2003, was the king of Italian crime films. If the mafia was going to exploit and corrupt the working class by infiltrating and coercing union bosses and shopkeepers for protection money, then Di Leo was going to exploit that trend by splattering it across the big screen. And splatter it does: in these four films, there might be one where five minutes goes by without a fist fight (including women getting socked in the mug), a shootout (including kids being gunned down), or a car chase through city and country. And in those five minutes, there will surely be macho posturing as partners in crime double-cross one another.

These films aren’t about the forces of prescriptive law overcoming those of evil. Here, crime most assuredly pays and the winners are those outsiders –prostitutes, freelancers — who confront and defeat the organized mobs.

Di Leo laid down the blueprint for future directors of action and crime flicks. Quentin Tarantino, among many others, cites Di Leo as a key influence and Pulp Fiction bears a striking resemblance to The Italian Connection, included in this collection. He also provided a home for has-been American actors, like Jack Palance, who plays a mob boss in Rulers of the City.

Carefully restored, remastered, and loaded with tons of bonus material, this quartet of pictures is a treasure trove for lovers of action cinema as well as film history buffs.

Originally published on Curled Up with a Good DVD. Copyright 2011 Brian Charles Clark

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 »