So, the BFI really brought their A-Game with the 3 disc collector's edition Blu-ray of Jerzy Skolimowski's Deep End; so much so, that my copy has a strange aroma of some type of luxurious Belgian chocolates which probably cost €100.000 per strawberry cream and I can't stop taking a whiff of its case, discs and booklet as if I were John Moulder-Brown sniffing Jane Asher's yellow trenchcoat in the movie :
I guess I was too busy gawping around at who was in the fairly packed theatre with us when I first caught Deep End at the cinema a few months back, because I didn't notice Can, whose 14 minute Krautrock freakout Mother Sky was recorded especially for the film and used sparingly as incidental music throughout the nighttime in Soho scene, getting M.C UGK-ed during the opening credits on that occasion :
One thing I did pick up on in the first viewing, however, was that the oriental Hotdog seller is the young Burt Kwouk, who was already a veteran of cooning it up as the bloken Engrish-speaking chigga in two James Bond movies, the very first Bond spoof and TV shows such as Hancock's Half Hour, Patrick McGoohan's proto-The Prisoner serial Danger Man, The Avengers and The Saint :
KanYe's Drunk And Hot Girls was a pretty good song before the carcinogenic nuclear pollution of Mos Def's dibba-dabba-dinosaur singing (Scatman (Ski-Ba-Bop-Ba-Dop-Bop) >>>>>> Umi Says) rendered it as musical Chernobyl, but that being the only real notable instance of The Can being sampled by das rap musik is a situation which really needs rectifying. I can't do nuttin' for ya, man, in that department other than offer up some crap Can/rap puns in the Fat Lace stylee :
Damu Suzuki Tago Magoo Malcolm Mooney Ain't A Thang Soon Over DJ Babuluma Ege Bambaataa.
On rest of internesk you have to find movies yourself, but on Youtube, Soviet Russia funded Czechoslovakian 60s sci-fi movie that Alex Cox wrote about in The Guardian a couple of weeks back in his Rockets from Russia: great Eastern Bloc science-fiction films piece finds you! Cox's whole essay was fascinating but it was his talk of Jindrich Polák's Icarus XB 1 (also known as Ikarie XB 1 in eastern Europe and Voyage To The End Of The Universe in America, where it was colourised and apparently butchered with an alternate ending) that piqued my interest with the description of it as a bizarre 60s loose-in-space "high-art" sci-fi movie that "anticipated Solaris" and which features "a derelict spacecraft, inhabited by something so strange I can only say it seems to have drifted in from a Buñuel film." Here it is on the 'tube in its entirety as one easily digestable 1:22:48 chunk of a video :
(Click CC for the English subtitles if they're not already working.)
Look to Cox's words in The Guardian piece as the definitive love letter to Icarus XB 1 'cause I'm just bloggin', my G, but, whoa, this flick really is a sight to behold, and I'll make like Herzog if this wasn't as big an influence on the cream of 70s American sci-fi like Alien and John Carpenter's Dark Star as Cox suggests it was on Solaris and that ridiculously overrated pretty picture by the tubby geezer with the beard who was responsible for the worst Auteurist film in American movie history with Eyes Wide Shut until it was usurped from its position in the U-bend by The Tree Of Life.
Another reason why The Guardian should banish Laura Barton from the Film & Music supplement for good is the space she currently occupies could also be used for a more regular missives by Alex Cox. Isn't Barton an entity far more evil than Rebekah Brooks when her articles about shitty indie albums and why earnestness in music is a good thing are taking precedence over Cox's essays such as the ten greatest Spaghetti-Western death scenes and his tribute to Dennis Hopper with the story that John Wayne once wanted to kill Hopper after hearing a rumour he was a Commie or my proposed weekly concurrent columns by Anne Billson and David Thomson? Moreover, isn't The Guardian wilfully employing Tanya Gold a journalistic crime far more dastardly and offensive than the News Of The World hacking into the voicemails of Milly Dowler, the murdered Soham girls, 7/7 victims, Susie Lamplugh, Jamie Bulger, the anorexic bloke from the Manic Street Preachers, Lord Lucan, the 1986 Challenger space shuttle astronauts, D.B. Cooper, 2pac & Biggie, Red Rum and my pal's cat, Tiger, who vanished without trace when he went on holiday back in 1996?
From a 2010 mixtape but clearly recorded sometime around 2005/2006 because Curren$y references Wayne on it with the "one shot to (Birdman) Jr. 'll have your block steamin'" line, mentions the then oft-repeated fallacy that Lupe Fiasco could skate, and Nutt Kaze himself acknowledges $pitta's Young Money affiliation twice :
Nutt Kaze ft. Curren$y - Come Back (From 5 Star Generals; 2010)
What's the deal with this Nutt Kaze guy then? I refer not to his odd little Hitler moustache which makes him a dead ringer for Kase 2 in the extra features on the 2003 Style Wars DVD, but more generally who is this dude exactly since he also has solo songs on 2 of those Community Service mixtapes DJ Hektik & Curren$y put out last year?
Nutt Kaze - I'm Ah Beast (From Community Service 2; 2010)
His M.O is Louisiana gangsta-rap in the more traditional vein of Ca$h Money, No Limit, Concentration Camp and Trill Fam, and, ergo, I'd prefer a dude interpolating untold Juvenile lyrics per song and rapping about "swiping his goon card" in the role of Curren$y's chief weed carrier as opposed to godamn Trademark Da Skydiver and Young Roddy rhyming about Karmaloop.com discount codes on at least 4 joints per $pitta project :
Nutt Kaze - Roll Wit' Me (From Community Service 3; 2010)
I really like Curren$y's new She Don't Want A Man cut (double Aguirre OST swag with the ambient synths and vague traces of panpipe), but I'm way more excited that Amalgam Digital have finally released This Ain't No Mixtape (my favourite rap album of '09 alongside BlaQKout by Quik & Kurupt) on CD than I am about Weekend At Burnies, which sounded so humdrum it barely registered on the admittedly brief skim I gave it. Also, was that really the best 80s movie/weed pun he could come up with for a title when Kush Groove and Roach House are both still available? If his pun game is so weak nowadays couldn't he just simply name his next weed-themed mixtape after 3 O' Clock High, which was probably the only American high school flick of the 80s to use some awesome Godardian jump cut editing techniques in a climatic David Vs. Goliath fight scene; brass knux if ya buck, Jerry :
Okay, if I'm taking credit for DB Tha General rapping over incidental music from Alphaville, then I'm almost certainly positive that Lil B producer Clams Casino using footage from Aguirre, Wrath Of God for his latest promo clip is on me too. As spotted on Space Age Hustle :
Clams Casino - Natural (From the Rain Forest EP; 2011)
A Young L martian-slap over Aguirre'sofficialsoundtrack by Popol Vuh is surely inevitable by friday now, so let's get our Fat Lace swag on in the meantime and come up with some rap/European cinema crap puns, gentlemen :
MC Renoir Un Chien AndaLouis Logic Buñuel B The Discreet Charm Of The Boosie New Jerzy Skolimowski Drive Jean SeYung Berg Pierrot Le cruisin' down the street in my six-Fou Klaus KinSki-Beatz The Enigma Of Kasper I'll House You Jeeps, Les Quatre Cents Coups, Bimaz & Benz
I'd been gagging for a piece of Deep End by Jerzy Skolimowski for years, so finally getting to behold it on the big screen when the movie was awarded a brief cinema re-release last month after the relative success of Skolimowski's latest picture Essential Killing was a mildly orgasmic experience, and for it to live up to its hype as one of the most lurid films about the mania of desire you'll ever see is refreshing after similar incidents when my expectations weren't quite matched. It's out on DVD/Blu-ray next month but they've only gone and plumped for this cover when I was hoping they'd use the infamous American poster and finally remove the cumbersome RESTRICTED banner so we could savour it as originally intended :
See, rap dudes - it's not just mixtape joints which suffer from obtrusive tagging but movie posters too, so I was hoping this'd be the cinematic equivalent of the time when Boosie & Webbie's classic Long Journey from the Superbad.. The Return Of Mr. Wipe Me Down mixtape turned up in CDQ minus all the DJ sound-FX on Boosie's Incarcerated album last year for its DVD release, but, alas, it's not to be, c'est la vie, c'est la vie. Hey, since your screen is currently awash with tenuous links between vintage European movies and regional gangsta-rappers with yelping voices, am I totally bugging here or does DB Tha General go in over some of the scoring from Godard's Alphaville on Upgrade 'Em 2 at 4:16 in that King Of Oakland promo movie for his new album? :
If so, I won't go as far as saying I Did That exactly, but who was it that suggested Bay Area rappers should take the unprecedented move of getting busy over classic European arthouse cinema soundtracks last summer? Oh, that's right, it was your man right chea - Mr. Aguirre, Wrath Of Blog.
You really need to fire that indie-bird who writes the bi-weekly Film & Music supplement column about growing up in Wigan listening to The Verve so Anne Billson's movie musings and David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary Of Film post-scripts can run concurrently the same week, but this here blurb about one of Egyptian Lover's true masterpieces is your best F&M Playlist selection since the gay lad who likes rap chose Rubberband Banks by Young Dro a couple of months back, and its inclusion just about makes up for the ‘Sikk Tha Shocker’ faux pas last year and the hilariously predictable Tyler piece comparing Odd Future to the Sex Pistols more recently :
Egyptian Lover - I Cry (Night After Night) (From On The Nile; 1984)
I'm always surprised you don't find more gay ppl rushing up to put a ring on rap musik's dick, because a genre that was erected on the dubious bedrock of dudes writing explicitly detailed salutations to their own genitalia surely has way more wildly homoerotic masturbatory thrills to offer them than Take That and Lady Gaga, no? But I digress because Egyptian Lover's tear-stained-pillowed ode to loneliness here was rap's first great ballad as well as the missing link between Computer Love by Zapp & Roger and The Beautiful Ones by Prince & The Revolution. His wordless exclamation of despondency after he says "because my smile's so weak" at 1:38 is just so utterly heartbreaking and the song also features the most concupiscent guitar solo-ing this side of the Dream Window version of the main Come To Me theme from the Fright Night OST :
Brad Fiedal - Dream Window (Come To Me) (From the Fright Night soundtrack; 1985)
The cheap fútbol gags we've all been denied just because Fright Night/Terminator 2/True Lies soundtrack composer Brad Fiedel doesn't have an r dropped between the F and i of his surname probably do exist in the parallel dimension where Arsenal could actually manage to score past his near-namesake during his spells at Blackburn and Aston Villa. Have all y'all seen the trailer for the Fright Night remake yet then? Damn, son - you bleedin', son, baaaaad, son, and not because Jerry Dandridge has just taken a bite out of your neck, son, but because you're menstruating like Amy Peterson, son. If this terrible Adam Lambert video of a remake is a success with teenagers, gay ppl, mall-goffs and fat feminist blogger weed-carriers then it'd be the perfect opportunity for the original movie's soundtrack to receive the ol' remastered & reissued treatment, because my copy sounds like it was recorded in Max Schreck's coffin' back in 1922.
"A gifted individual who completely lost touch with the abilty to put together a coherent project after his second feature..."
A quote from a review of Malick's The Tree Of Life, but it could just as well be about Nas. I shan't be listening to his new song, but I feel like eating off some Nas-related traffic today all the same so let's see how this analogy pans out : Lanton Mills as the demo joints like Life Is Like A Dice Game and The Understanding, Badlands as Illmatic, Days Of Heaven as It Was Written, the original script for Great Balls Of Fire as The Firm (a compliment as I like both, although their success depends on the other performers involved), the mythical uncut version of The Thin Red Line as the original I Am double album, The New World as Street's Disciple, and The Tree Of Life as some sort of neverending mash-up of Hip Hop Is Dead, Untitled and whatever the album with the spawn of Bob Marley was called.
A not entirely successful cinema-to-rap parallel since there's no room for Nastradamus, Stillmatic and God's Son, but, Thief's Theme aside, would be the world really be that worse a place if those three albums were suddenly eradicated from history by a specialist time-cop team consisting of Biff Tannen and Aaron & Abe from Primer at the expense of a tuesday afternoon post on The Martorialist?
A friend happened to be playing Stillmatic when I was in the car with him recently (no Ma$on Betha/Mister Cee) and even songs I dug back in 2001 like the intro, You're Da Man, 2nd Childhood and Rule just sound so completely humdrum a decade later. The Flyest with AZ is still pretty great, although it's only when Nas trades lines with AZ during the last verse that he isn't persona non grata on his own shit because that sounding-like-a-first-draft-of-I Can-which-was-subsequently-binned solo verse of his employs a barely interested delivery which is pure "l-l-leave..him..a-lone, Ram"-rap and, lyrically, it's a clumsy shambles which doesn't relate to anything else laid down in the preceding 1:48 and proceeding 1:55 of the song whatsoever; As for One Mic, yes, he pulled off the first successful example of Slint-rap, but, I'm far more likely to jam What's Going On, Black by Azie or Lil B rapping from the perspective of the curbs he talks to in Good Morning over the One Mic instrumental on I Am The Hood any time I need a quick dose of In The Air Tonight-derived rap nowadays because, y'know, at least neither song are going to remind me of drug-addled faux-rastamon twins from Toronto wittering on about someone as cretinous as Nas being a "revolutionary thug-poet" or garden variety Nas fanboy dullards arguing about whether he beat Jay-Z as they netcee to instrumentals of Nas Is Like in Youtube comment sections :
Lil B - I Am The Hood (2009)
In conclusion, Nas and Malick are both equally overrated, Lil' Kim's The Naked Truth album which The Source awarded 5 Mics to in 2005 was probably way more deserving of the rating than Stillmatic, and Luv Me, Luv Me by Shaggy totally obliterates Welcome To Jamrock and the entire discography of the Marley family.
If they weren't quite contemptible enough as it is plumbing newdepths in the already acrid genre of white British ppl rapping, Dan Le Sac & Scroobius Pip are now moonlighting from their dayjob to knock out zany recreations of the Scott Woods titty bar scene in Vincent Gallo's Buffalo 66 on Youtube and thus forever soiling the best American movie debut of the 90s with their mark of Cain. They even manage to ruin a piece of music as sublime as the intro to Yes' Heart Of The Sunrise by editing out the 15 second section where the washes of synth begin to build up to make way for the guitar to snake its way into the song because the part of the scene it soundtracks is the bit where the 3 strippers each shake their titties like salt shakers as the club's stagelights cast them in respective shades of red, white and blue before they all dance in unison with the 3 colours bathing them in light simultaneously, and a couple of bitchmade saps like Le Sac & Pip wouldn't ever want to objectify women like that :
Since the big homie Raoul isn't going to be popping anyone but Mary Magdalene anytime soon, I'm currently in the process of hiring a couple of local junkies who'll body a dude for the price of a Greggs sausage roll to kidnap these 2 turds and their pal who plays the Scott Woods character in the video and either offer them as a sacrifice to that volcano in Chile which is currently lookin' mad Biblical or just sell them as human guinea pigs to the Japanese scientists currently working on a cure for the mutant strand of E. Coli outbreak in das fatherland.
If you're as offended by that video as I am, here's some aloe vera in the form of the Martorialist X Step One Buffalo 66 edit remix of Heart Of The Sunrise which draws to a close before the song switches tempo and the guy from Yes who sounds like a sunday morning fishing correspondent on local radio starts singing, plus Vince Gallo interviewing himself in issue 4 of Grand Royal magazine and zinging Abel Ferrara, Chloë Sevigny, Harmony Korine, Tim Roth, John Kennedy Jr., the Clinton Family, Michael Holman, DJ Spooky, Kate Moss, Jefferson Hack, movie caterers, make-up artists, costume designers et cetera in the process :
Yes - Heart Of The Sunrise (Buffalo 66 edit)
Tomorrow marks the first anniversary of Moaty getting his wig split, apparently; I wonder if heaven got a storm drain for thug whiggaz?
In 2021 it's vaguely possible some young upstart will appear in an issue of Cahiers du Cinéma with the hypothesis that Paul W.S. Anderson & Milla Jovovich's Resident Evil franchise was the noughties equivalent of Jerry Lewis' fifties oeuvre which CdC championed back in the sixties, (though, from here on in the series should be referred to as a trilogy since Resident Evil : Apocalypse is just so awful that the only sensible option is to just pretend it doesn't exist), but why wait another decade to kickstart your admiration at the behest of a Frenchman when you can cosy up to the franchise which gave us the unforgettable sight of Ashanti getting pecked to death by mutant crows who'd been gauging themselves on infected flesh inside a bus right here, right now? It was that noted cinematic expert Chino XL who first brought the narrative arc of black ppl in horror movies to our attention back in 1996, but the grissly death woven around Ashanti's Nurse Betty character in Resident Evil 3 : Extinction was the sort of career move nobody foresaw when she was breaking records in 2002 & 2003 as the first artist since The Beatles to have three songs in the Billboard Hot 100 in the same week with her throwback Uptown-era Mary J. r&b jams, and movies should always be about surprises, right?
Nurse Gladys Emmanuel ain't never have this trouble with her pet Budgie. Our fictitious Cahiers du Cinéma scribe of the future might point out that this set-piece was such a blatantly obvious homage to The Birds that you'd think it was directed by Hitchcock's most famous imitator Brian De Palma rather than a couple of hacks like Milla J's husband and Highlander 2 : The Quickening's - and we use the term loosely here given that it's still one of the most incoherent movies we've ever seen - director Russell Mulcahy, but since this is a blog which is primarily concerned with rap related minutiae the question that's begging an answer is this : Where the hell were Cadillac Tah and Black Child when Ashanti really needed them?
BONUS BEATS :
Ashanti ft. Ghostface - Rain On Me remix (2003)
If one of rap's purposes is to make you feel like you're standing under a waterfall in a linen suit getting blown by a mermaid (and even it's rowdiest practitioners like Mystikal and M.O.P have joints which serve this purpose), then the modus operandi of rap & bullshit jams like the Rain On Me remix with Ghostface is to convince the listener that they're standing under that very same waterfall but wearing a pair of XXXL dungarees with one strap hanging off screaming "ALL WE NEED IS A STAGE, GOD!!!" up at the Heavens. This was far preferable to that official remix with Charli Baltimore, Ja and him from The Outlawz with the missing teeth.
I'd only got this remix on that Ghostface r&b remixes bootleg EP so my whigga hooked me up with an MP3 via the Kay Slay & Ghostface No Pork On My Fork Volume One mixtape he has. Step tells me he once read a Drama King interview talking about how he doesn't shout as much on his r&b 'tapes as he does on his rap 'tapes because 'n*ggas dont wanna hear it when they're with their girl' so this features distinctly less bellowing about "BITCH ASS DJ'S!" and the like.
Well, no, because Beelow's from Baton Rogue even though the song features Juvenile, but this gloriously cheap 'n' nasty posse cut is like what would emerge from Wyatt in Weird Science's en-suite bathroom if he and Gary had fed their magical computer a bunch of NOLA related data including crucial joints by Lil' Slim, the Hot Boy$, the Miller Brothers and Mystikal on another stormy night :
Beelow ft. Lil' Soulja, Juvenile & Thugg Addict - Big Body remix (From Ballaholic; 2000)
How do metal dudes even have the sheer barefaced cojones to brag about their favourite genre being the most hardbody music in America today when Dimebag Darrell died after taking three shots to the dome yet rappers like Beelow, Azie from MobStyle and 50 have all been shot in the head multiple times and lived? Fuck outta here, heshers.
So, some kid called Luis with a pretty outstanding Youtube channel dedicated to Louisiana rap has uploaded a grip of Boosie's DVDs which you can find here. I wouldn't bother with the Baton Rogue Gorillas documentary because it consists of about 12 minutes of footage between 30 minutes worth of adverts for really awful looking DVDs with titles like Streets Of Boston (solitary highlight : some dude freestyling to camera before shots start ringing out behind him, a tactic I'm hoping Beantown thugs will employ next time Termanology starts rapping), but the Gangsta Musik documentary is worth a watch for all Boosie and Trill Fam fanboys.
Sure, you could level accusations that it's just ig'nance-porn for middle class saltine rap fans like me since all the rote cliches of 'hood DVDs about rappers are accounted for with knobs on, but beyond the gun-pointing and marauding pitbulls there's good live footage and interesting interviews full of nerdy rap trivia like Webbie talking about the Do It Big/I Smoke I Drank situation and his account of what happened totally sinks the rumour that the latter began as a remix to the former. The whole mythology of Baton Rogue as the murder capital of America with Boosie plus various other members of the Trill fam entourage contributing to that statistic and the families of both rappers were integral components of their music, so it's interesting to be introduced to both throughout the vistas of their neighbourhoods. Similarly, part of what made the duo so appealing when I first discovered them via the Gangsta Musik album was that they were making the sort of gimmick-free, often introspective, regional gangsta-rap CDs with no concessions to trends or transcoastal collaborations which were hard to come by in 2005 (The Jack Artist being the other main exception) and which could've only been made by rappers marooned somewhere way out in the sticks, so it's also interesting that that sense of them living-in-a-bubble translates to film, especially since they weren't yet in the habit of shooting videos.
Alternatively, maybe I just enjoy watching Boosie & Webbie getting women to pull their skirts up and then jiggle their arses around? Check it out :
I know a lotta rappers watch a lotta gangsta movies; I'm talkin' Gangsta Musik, no this ain't no gangsta movie; matta fact i think you should also watch Boosie & Webbie in their Ghetto Stories : The Movie gangsta movie; then slap some of their music asap, particularly Gangsta Musik. The Luis kid hasn't upped that in full, but someone else has so now you can enjoy Trill Entertainment's very own I'm Bout It or Baller Blockin' where Boosie isn't quite the sawn-off Satan he's often portrayed to be by the media since he's remarkably victim-friendly to the white ppl he carjacks.
BONUS BEATS :
Webbie ft. Lil' Phat - What's Happenin' (2011)
A few people posted about this song last week before I had a chance to, so I'll just add that it's some 2011 Murder Rap type shit in every department. Where the American justice system taketh Boosie away, rap giveth us another great yelping gangsta rapper who sounds like he has a clothes peg on his nose in his place with DB Tha General hitting a rich vein of form on The Young O.G II mixtape earlier this year, so someone needs to make a Webbie & DB album a reality.
If you're partial to Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant then, I dunno, maybe check out the 1978 directorial debut by James Toback, Fingers, a New York set neo-noir which features Harvey Keitel as a tortured aspiring concert pianist called Jimmy Angelleli who spends his days moonlighting as a debt-collector for his mob-affiliated loan shark father. Jimmy inherited his ivory-tinkering abilities from his otherwise neglectful professional pianist-turned-nutcase ma dukes, and if his mother-issues and disparate lifestyle hadn't rendered him quite conflicted enough, he's also a perfectionist who masters Bach sonatas in the privacy of his own apartment but turns all fingers & thumbs when he attempts to play for her former manager during an audition at Carnegie Hall, and who craves a meaningful relationship with the call girl he's fixated with called Carol (Tisa Farrow, resplendent in a fantastic sheepskin coat similar to the one Isabelle Adjani wears in The Tenant) despite the fact that she's in thrall to her hulking black pimp by the name of Dreems. All of which might explain why he suffers from erectile-dysfunction and why he exchanges longing glances with the resident homosexual at the restaurant where he eats with his father; presumably Jimmy's affinity for wearing ascots tipped ol' gay dude off that he might take it up the jacksie :
Reads like an utterly ridiculous clusterfuck of a story, right? Where Fingers succeeds is in Keitel's simmering performance as a guy crippled by his own emotions, masculinity, and delusions of grandeur, the strong supporting cast from Michael V. Gazzo (Frank Pentangeli from The Godfather Part 2) as Jimmy's wheezy wisecracking father down to appearances from Danny Aiello and Tom Signorelli as minor characters, the varying motifs of juxtaposition throughout, some really great tracking shots by Taxi Driver cinematographer Michael Chapman, the fairly restrained direction for a movie with such an array of complicated filaments, and the final scene of a broken man alone in his apartment that's perhaps even more haunting than the conclusion of The Conversation. Comparisons to both Mean Streets and Bad Lieutenant run slightly deeper than the "yo, it's Harvey Keitel as a sensitive two bit-thug in NYC who calls ppl cocksuckers" premise as the movie also sees Keitel's character attempting to reconcile his morality with the violent crimes he commits, and, as such, Jimmy is best viewed as a gangplank between Charlie in Scorsese's flick and the Lieutenant of the Ferrara picture. It's worth pointing out, though, that Keitel is on more friendly terms with radios than the Bad Lieutenant was as he carries a boombox around with him blaring out 60s R&B numbers, and I suppose the movie is also loosely comparable to Ferrara's The Funeral since it features turns by various mob movie goombahs-for-hire, and future Sopranos cast members in an unrecognisable Tony "Paulie Walnuts" Sirico and Dominic "Uncle Junior" Chianese :
And it's precisely because of Keitel and the Paulie Walnuts > ppl from France nowadays tenet that the 2008 French remake of it called The Beat That Might Heart Skipped isn't a patch on the original, and why this is the only Toback picture worthy of being mentioned alongside his incredible Tyson documentary. Here's one of my favourite scenes from it, where one of Jimmy's father's more lax clients played by Lenny "Luca Brasi" Montana gets clocked in the face with a pistol in the kitchen of his own pizzeria as Jimmy's bumps "Angel Of The Morning" by Merrilee Rush & The Turnabouts on his portable radio, before it cuts to Jimmy back at his apartment pulling vinegar-stroke faces as loses himself in a pitch-perfect rendition of some Bach :
"You don't like what happened to your father, huh? You don't like it? Well, I don't like what he did to my father!"
On a related note, did anyone else notice that one of the seven horrific blond white-trash sisters in The Fighter was Bianca Hunter AKA the teenage brunette Jersey rawk chick from Bad Lieutenant who mock-fellates Keitel out of the window of her car as he furiously pulls his pud to climax and insults her on the rain soaked highway?
Here we were all primed and amped to whip up # 39 in the Greatest Movie Scenes Ever series about how it's a pity that Christopher Reeve is dead because he could've cooled the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan down by freezing a section of the ocean and then dropping it groundwards onto it like he did in Superman III, which'd then lead into the Superman theme-sampling Kryptonite by Big Scoob, how it's a now-forgotten single which was a firm favourite with Flex and Westwood at the time, and how even though Scoob's Champagne On The Block is now his go-to joint of choice for most bloggaz N*ggaz Can't Hang is his masterpiece, but fate cockblocked us because the scene isn't on Youtube and we can't even use the Superman Returns scene where Brandon Routh lifts the Kryptonite infected chunk of landmass out of the ocean and thrusts it up into space as an alternative method to how Superman might be able to avert a nuclear crisis in Japan because ‘embedding is disabled by request’ on the godamn video.
So, literally all we have today is a gif of one Ma$on Betha dancing like a bare-arsed fart on a black leather couch on a humid summer's day in the Been Around The World video instead :
BONUS BEATS :
Sean Price - Don't Say Shit To Ruck (2001)
For some reason I always thought Don't Say Shit To Ruck sampled one of Superman movie themes until I heard its sample source being played at Obama's Tuscon memorial speech in january and someone remarked that it was actually Fanfare For The Common Man by Aaron Copland. We're not particularly fond of the common man here at The Martorialist, but we are marks for the way the Copland song was used to dramatic effect on Ruck's inaugural outing under the Sean Price moniker. Why didn't he put this or 60 Bar Dash on Monkey Barz instead of Fake Neptune?
Lessons to be learned from the fate which befell the Mexican gangbangers in this Falling Down scene : woe betide any infidel who attempts to pull a drive-by without first consulting the No Limit soldier handbook on the rather novel way N.L maharajah Percy Miller recounted that he used to escape his drive-by debut on the last verse of Somethin' Funky For The Street :
"..it's bein' real 'cause the P don't hindsight '89 did my first fuckin' drive-by opened fire with the deuce-deuce on the crowd they started yellin' as the bitches started fallin' down all I heard was sirens from the po-leece ran through the crowd, actin' like it wad'nt me n*ggas in the back of the chev' gettin' chroniced out just handled our business, and we slowly smashed out now we on the freeway danked out *just bust caps* and we got away true g's in the dope game but always comin' through with somethin' funky for the streets, mayn"
Master P - Somethin' Funky For The Street (1994)
Questions :
P begins the third verse by noting that he's on the highway in a black Chevy to commit a drive-by and concludes it by chronicling how he heads back to the same Chevy after escaping the scene of the crime to find the No Limit soldiers getting high, so does this infer that he steals another car between and then jumps out of it into the panicking mass of people he's just blasted at to make his get away, or does he really claim to have perpetrated a drive-by without the aid of a car?
Are P's casual mentions of listening to his own albums and the albums of other No Limit soldiers in his music a mere act of product placement or a more devious ploy to disguise that he was ripping off various other rappers by fabricating a universe where they don't exist and the only music he bumps is his own and that of his roster?
Is Somethin' Funky For The Street a top top E-A-Ski beat ever?
Is the Mexican Douglas shoots in the leg wearing Vans Eras in the clip or some sort of Winos and, if they are Eras, were Mexican gang bangers really wearing Vans in the early nineties?
Poor Jack - he made a fortune off Joker merchandise bearing his image following Batman, and that line from A Few Good Men found itself reaching "you talkin' to me?" levels of quotability in the nineties, but neither triumph could ameliorate the wounds of his Danny DeVito directed/David Mamet written Jimmy Hoffa biopic from 1992 tanking commercially and receiving a couple of Razzie nominations in 1993 when that was his one great picture of the decade which featured his best performance since The Shining, particularly when he was zinging the then-attorney general Bobby Kennedy with claims that he was the Fredo to John's Michael and accusing the entire Kennedy family of being little more than a "bunch of rum-runners" :
I'm not gonna spoil the exact ending of the movie for anyone who hasn't seen it yet, but, regrettably, it doesn't conclude with a sequence based on the possibly total bullshit theory that Richard "The Iceman" Kuklinski and four mafia jobbers snatched Hoffa up from the Machus Red Fox parking lot, killed him by stabbing him in the head with a hunting knife, and disposed of his body by putting it into a barrel, placing it into the trunk a Toyota which was compacted with numerous other cars, and then shipped back to Japan as scrap metal. Vincent D'Onofrio would've made a good Kuklinski and employing the likes of Frank Vincent and Frank Sivero as stereotypical mobster stooges has never hurt any movie.
MC Serch attempting The Crane in the video for that Kurious Benetton joint he was on with DOOM a couple of years back; his only worthwhile contribution to the song.
Back in the late nineties the gentlemen's fashion magazine Draper's Records proposed that the reason men's denim sales in the U.K had slumped to an all-time low was because of "the Jeremy Clarkson effect". It's an immensely plausible hypothesis, but it doesn't explain why the effect didn't spread to the 2 countries where denim is king when Top Gear is the highest rated show on the BBC's flagship channels in America and Japan, or why the equally atrocious Richard Hammond & James May visage of bootcut jeans with a brown leather jacket then became the default casual look of 97% of men over the age of 35 throughout the last decade.
Here at The Martorialist we spend at least 3 minutes per waking hour formulating theories about the effect celebrities in appalling jeans have on the tastes of the general public, and today we've come to a conclusion on the origins of sagged pants and it has nothing to do with 2 Live Crew album covers, street looks derived from the lack of belts in prison, or skaters buying their pants two or three sizes up to act as protection against injuries; the act of wearing one's slacks drooped below one's waistline, we proffer, was actually borne out of the universal horror teenagers experienced in 1989 when they flocked to see The Karate Kid 3 and laid their eyes on the then slightly portly Ralph Macchio making his jeans look all Jeremy Clarksoned out and thought "Christ on a pogo-stick, let's try to look as far from that as is sartorially possible" :
And there, in a pair of ill-fitting denim, is a lesson for you on how cruel, fickle, and ironic the worlds of both fashion and cinema are, given that Ralph had outswagged the rest of the male cast in The Outsiders as Johnny Cade by pulling off what's arguably the greatest Canadian Tuxedo in celluloid history back in 1983, yet still found himself as a proto-Kenny Powers figure for denim dystopia a mere 6 years later. Damn, Daniel son. To his credit, Karate Kid 3 saw Ralph still posessing aspirations of James Dean with his red Harrington jacket ala Jim Stark, but fate was conspiring against him on multiple levels by this point and the movie's wardrobe department could only come up with a cheap replica rather than a real Baracuta G9. Save for My Cousin Vinny, Ralph's movie career never recovered from such indignity and it shadowed the downfall of Sensei John Kreese and the Cobra Kai until regular tv parts acted as a sort've televisual Terry Silver.
BONUS BEATS :
Let's cast our minds back to the days when Serch was a tad more athletic :
3rd Bass - Wordz Of Wisdom (1989)
Yo, you know who's to blame for Serch's achingly solemn delivery on that aforementioned Kurious & DOOM joint? You dudes who've been calling him thee most exalted potentate of whiggatry on the internet for the last 15 years or so, that's who. Even if you've never been partial to Serch's brand of pre-Rappaport whiteness, you have to admit that the enthusiastic Serch of yore is far preferable to the earnest Serch on that song, and I'm sure you'd also concur that in 2011 it's about time someone leaked that original version of Serch's Back To The Grill Again with Akinyele on it which was mentioned in the Ego Trip book back in 1999.
That real rider music. That 2nd 12" by Juan Atkins & Richard Davis from 1983 which effortlessly straddled multiple genres music. That oh shit Noz just posted that Juan Atkins produced novelty rap record he mentioned in the Danny Brown interview comments music. That how the fuck are we now bragging about our cars being spaceships just because they have talking Sat-Nav when they should at least be able to hover at this point? music. That better than the similarly vehicular-themed (I Like To Do It In) Fast Cars by by Vince Lawrence's first electronic outfit Z Factor music. That Alleys Of The Mind predated Jonzun Crew and Soulsonic Force so Cybotron were the real missing link between Kraftwerk and those early Chicago House joints on Trax Records by Le Noiz, Jack Master Funk, and Adonis, right? music. That need a quick thursday post for the blog and it'll also be an excuse to use the finale of Repo Man music. That how on earth is the only major use of a Cybotron sample by a rapper in a godamn Missy Elliot song? music. That how come Cybotron sounded more futuristic than Model 500 when Juan devised Model 500 as a continuation of the electro sound Cybotron helped pioneer? music.
There's a hella engaging essay by David Thomson in the latest issue of Sight & Sound outlining why he believes Citizen Kane should win S&S's next once-a-decade Greatest Film of All Time critics' poll in 2012, where he also explains why he wouldn't be too morose if it didn't win, how a fully restored director's print of The Magnificent Ambersons as Welles intended it would deserve to finally topple Kane from Mount Olympus, and proposing that if Kane does take the gold medal again as it's done every decade since 1962, then maybe it should be retired as the first entry into a cinematic hall of fame in the same way that the Yankees retired the # 5 jersey in honour of Joe DiMaggio in the hope that a more recent picture like Pierrot le fou, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeosie, The Shining, Raging Bull, Taste of Cherry, or There Will Be Blood would enter the top 10 in its place.
All of which, I hasten to add, just about makes up for Toy Story 3 not finding its way into S&S's top 10 of 2010 critics' list (you can read it in full here). Predictably, The Social Network polled the most votes as their movie of the year ahead of Carlos, while Toy Story 3 lingered out in the wilderness at # 13 tied with Aurora, Enter The Void, The Illusionist, and Meek's Cutoff. To which I gotta sky : why are we going to let critics who can't even recognise the best American flick of the year decide whether the time is ripe for Vertigo, The Godfather 1 + 2, La Règle Du Jeu, or Tokyo Story to finally usurp Kane? Letting the general public vote on anything more salient than the fate of Cher Lloyd on the X-Factor (Chloe Mafia got the boot so this 'yatch could do karaokeversions of Turn My Swag On and Nothin' On You on live prime time saturday night tv? Harmony can only be restored to the universe if she performs a rendition of Soulja Boy and Lil B's 30 Thousand, 100 Million in the final and brings out Chloe to do B's verse) should never be an option as the utter mess that is the IMDB top 250 testifies, but can we even entrust the most prestigious worldwide critics to forge the canon for the chil'ren when there were votes for Knight And Day and Wall Street : Money Never Sleeps in amongst their ballots? Shit, dudes could've at least plumped for Piranha 3D as their token Hollywood wild card.
Anyhoo, Toy Story 3 towered over everything else for me this year with the exception of Carlos as it's a picture so moving that even Billy Danze and Paulie Walnuts couldn't help but well-up at the end, and with it we can finally put the "what the best front-to-back trilogy of all time?" debate to rest. Here's one of its myriad of great scenes :
Here's hoping that, much like Kane itself which failed to scrape a spot in S&S's very first Critics top 10 poll in 1952 (it was joint # 11 alongside La Grande Illusion and The Grapes Of Wrath) or Rio Bravo which they deemed unworthy of a review in 1959, the haughty bastards at S&S will catch the vapours and recognise Toy Story 3 as 2010's masterpiece in the not too distant future.
When Corey Haim overdosed earlier this year it took less than 15 minutes for the internet to be awash with people using gifs from The Lost Boys as their forum signatures or posting Ebert's review of Lucas in tribute and swearing that they'd always thought License To Drive and Blown Away were better than The Godfather 1 & 2, but even the ghouls who suddenly declared Prayer Of The Rollerboys a cultural touchstone more important than Spike's Malcolm X biopic couldn't find a place in their fickle hearts for 1988's Watchers :
Yet the love for Watchers is lingering out there somewhere because it inspired no less than 3 sequels and people regularly pay 25 - 50 bones for the now out-of-print dvd release of it which is teamed with Watchers 2. Loosely adapted from the Dean Koontz novel of the same name and generally reviled by fans of the book, Watchers is a story about a scientifically-enhanced Golden Retriever called GH3 (he can play Scrabble!) and a genetically mutated super-soldier creature by the name of OXCOM (an acronym of Outside eXperimental COmbat Mammal) who both escape the lab they were created in during an explosion and who both share a telepathic link, which is kinda unfortunate for GH3 since OXCOM's primary function in life is to kill him (make your own Chinese chipshop joke here if you must but the exact reason he wants to kill the poor doggie isn't revealed until the 2nd half of the movie) and anyone who comes into contact with him including a pre-90210 Jason Priestly.
Realising that the actor Corey Haim actually had the most chemistry with in The Lost Boys wasn't Corey Feldman but his dog Nanook, Haim is the perfect choice for the lead role of Travis who takes GH3 in thinking he's a stray hound, and Michael Ironside always makes for a particularly ruthless villain, as Scanners, Visiting Hours, and Total Recall testified; Ironside is an actor who can curdle milk with even the most cursory of glances, so while his special power here isn't as impressive as Revok's telekenetic braindraining ability in Scanners, he more than makes up for it with one of the greatest "it's me, Austin.. it was me all along, Austin!" moments of the eighties :
Fact-checking this post on IMDB, I couldn't help but notice the arguments about how Alphaville totally isn't as important a Godard movie as Breathless or how it completely doesn't quite sum up Godard's aesthetic to movie making like Pierrot Le Fou does, and it's like, jeez guys, if you really want to troll your fellow Godard fans on a message board then give 'em a c-section with the zing about how Alphaville's now burdened with the indignity of inspring a Kelly Osbourne video for the rest of eternity and keep steppin'. As a fan of Anna Karina and Herrmann-esque themes, I'll take Alphaville over Breathless every time (then again, I prefer the American remake to the original - it's all about the scene where Richard Gere runs through the backstreets to the strains of Link Wray's Jack The Ripper) since it's a gorgeously shot flick which spoofs the multiple American movie genre cliches Godard was fascinated with, and because the movie's sentient computer Alpha 60 (voiced by a geezer with an electronic voice box which had replaced his cancer ravaged larynx, and apparently a homage to the disembodied voice of Dr Mabuse in Fritz Lang's The Testament Of Dr Mabuse) pre-empts the question I might've asked myself after first hearing T-Pain on the Pop, Lock, And Drop It remix had I not first seen Alphaville after becoming a foreign film-fag back in 1995 : what would've happened if The D.O.C had remade The $20 Sack Pyramid with some Auto-Tune software?
Alpha 60 : what do you love above all? Lemmy Caution : Gold and women.
^^ My man. Even Termanology and John Brown from The White Rapper Show were probably making Auto-Tune tracks during its zenith in popularity, so I never want to hear anyone rapping through the device again unless it's Z-Ro in Relvis Presley mode or Big Twin Gambino from Infamous Mobb :
Prodigy & Big Twin Gambino - Box Cutters
Can you imagine Big Twin rapping via Auto-Tune over some aquatic thug-shit like this, which is like a John Carpenter score to an alternate ending of Escape From New York where Snake and the President jump into the toxic waters of the Hudson River to wait for Lee Van Cleef to rescue them? While I enjoyed a lot of Bandana P's 2006 - 2008 muzak it'd be silly of him to return to rapping as his primary occupation when he gets out of the slammer given his considerable talents in other areas like blogging and viral videos. He's MrChiCity, Necro's message boarding persona, and Jessi Slaughter's dad all rolled into one pint-sized thun.
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