Skvot-Pop

This Must Be the Place (Paolo Sorrentino, 2011)

2012-03-07T14:32:00.003+01:00

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Cheyenne is a former rock star. At 50 he still dresses "Goth" and lives in Dublin off his royalties . The death of his father, with whom he wasn't on speaking terms, brings him back to New York. He discovers his father had an obsession: to seek revenge for a humiliation he had suffered. Cheyenne decides to pick up where his father left off, and starts a journey, at his own pace, across America.

Tennis - Origins

2012-03-06T18:02:00.000+01:00

Birdeatsbaby – Feast of Hammers (2012)

2012-03-05T18:09:00.003+01:00

...Girl Anachronism...Girl Anachronism...Girl Anachronism...

Alt-classical prog-punk act Birdeatsbaby are an unusual four-piece that hail from Brighton, UK. Not really fitting into any current musical trends, the band steer towards a ‘dark cabaret’ rock sound, with fast-paced and complex drums, piano, bass and violin all tied up with huge and catchy choruses. Like a more hyper-active Nick Cave meets a slightly depressed Freddie Mercury, Birdeatsbaby have been described as many things, including ‘a distinctly unhinged brand of burlesque freak-pop’, and ‘Twin Peaks on snuff.’

The band first made their mark on the music scene with their infamous ‘The Trouble’ music video which has since received over 100,000 YouTube views since it was aired. Since then they have released their critically acclaimed debut album Here She Comes-a-Tumblin’ in 2009 and the cathartic follow up, Bigger Teeth EP (produced by Marc R Norris of 80s Matchbox B-line Disaster) in 2010.

The band have toured extensively in the UK, Europe and America, playing with other such musical oddities as The World Inferno Friendship Society, Thomas Truax and most recently worked with prestigious producer, Jason Rubal on their latest album Feast of Hammersreleased in February 2012. Hailed as the ‘The Critics: Sound of 2012′ by Simon Price from The Independent, they have also had radio exposure and live sessions on big name stations such as 6 music, Amazing Radio and more locally, Brighton’s Juice FM.

If you’re looking for something dark, nasty and completely original, Birdeatsbaby have the potential to be one of those cult bands that only appear once in a lifetime. Let the music speak for itself.

Happy Together (1997), Wong Kar-Wai

2012-03-05T01:53:00.003+01:00

Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai directs the strange, intimate drama Cheun Gwong Tsa Sit (Happy Together). Australian cinematographer Christopher Doyle employed multiple film speeds and different color film stock during the shooting. Ho (Leslie Cheung) and Lai (Tony Leung) are lovers from Hong Kong who have run away to live in Buenas Aires, Argentina. However, Ho is immature and unwilling to settle down, which makes Lai depressed. When they break up, Lai works as a doorman in a tango bar in order to save money and go home. The restless Ho becomes a prostitute. After Ho is beaten and injured in an attack, Lai takes him to his apartment to recover. Ho tries to rekindle the romance, but Lai isn't interested. He leaves the tango bar and works in a kitchen, where he meets the young Chang (Chang Chen) from Taiwan.

Days of Being Wild (1991) , Wong Kar-Wai

2012-03-05T01:49:00.005+01:00

Following up on his debut As Tears Go By, master filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai directs this dark, brooding tale about identity and unrequited love. Set in 1960, the film center of the young, boyishly handsome Yuddy (Leslie Cheung), who learns from the drunken ex-prostitute who raised him that she is not his real mother. Hoping to hold onto him, she refuses to divulge the name of his real birth mother. The revelation shakes Yuddy to his very core, unleashing a cascade of conflicting emotions. Two women have the bad luck to fall for Yuddy. One is a quiet lass who works at a sport arena named Su Lizhen (Maggie Cheung), while the other is a glitzy showgirl named Mimi (Carina Lau). Perhaps due to his unresolved Oedipal issues, he passively lets the two compete for him, unable or unwilling to make a choice. As Lizhen slowly confides her frustration to a cop named Tide (Andy Lau), he falls for her. The same is true for Yuddy's friend Zeb (Jacky Cheung), who falls for Mimi. Later, Yuddy learns of his birth mother's whereabouts and heads out to the Philippines. This film won a armful of trophies at the Hong Kong Film Awards, including Best Director, Best Actor for Leslie Cheung, and Best Picture.

Nedelja Vece...

2012-03-04T22:02:00.004+01:00

As Tears Go By (1988), Wong Kar-Wai

2012-03-04T20:54:00.004+01:00

Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-wai makes his feature film debut with this gritty romantic crime-drama inspired by Scorsese's Mean Streets. The film opens with young gangster Wah (Andy Lau) getting a visit for the day from his beautiful cousin Ah-Ngor (Maggie Cheung), who is coming into Kowloon from the remote outlying Lantau island to receive medical treatment for a lung condition. At first, the short-fused gangster and the quiet country girl have little in common, but gradually the two start to form a bond of sorts. Meanwhile, Wah's buddy Fly (Jacky Cheung), who has an absolutely volcanic temper, is always getting Wah into hot water. Even though Wah knows that Fly is bound to end up dead soon, he stands by his foolhardy friend. After some hesitation, Wah -- who has fallen for Ah-Ngor -- visits his cousin on Lantau, hoping to make their relationship more than family. Fly later infuriates a psychopathic mob boss, Tony (Alex Man Chi-leung who, along with his henchmen, beats and degrades Fly and Wah. This induces Fly make amends with Tony by undertaking the outrageously difficult task of rubbing out an informant who is in the custody of the cops, before the man has the opportunity to testify in a court hearing.

Flowers of Shanghai (1998), Hou Hsiao-Hsien

2012-03-04T20:35:00.002+01:00

Around 1884, during the closing years of imperial China, Crimson worries about losing civil servant Wang since he's spending so much time with Jasmin. Emotions escalate when word arrives that Wang will relocate to another post in the Canton province

Chungking Express (1994), Wong Kar-Wai

2012-03-04T20:33:00.004+01:00

A Hong Kong fast food restaurant acts as the link between two unusual stories of police officers in love in this eccentric, stylish comedy-drama. Director Wong Kar-Wai plays freely with traditional narrative structure, dividing his film into two loosely connected segments. The first centers on a depressed cop struggling to come to terms with a recent break-up. His sad isolation is transformed when he encounters a beautiful, mysterious femme fatale, whose involvement with the criminal underworld proves troublesome for both. The second story explores the odd relationship between a female restaurant worker and another recently jilted police officer. The strange woman decides to regularly clean and redecorate the man's apartment in his absence, allowing the two to form a close intimacy without meeting face to face. Both stories present a beautifully atmospheric look at modern urban life and romance, with its combination of isolation and casual, unexpected meetings. Chungking Express came to the attention of American audiences thanks to the efforts of director Quentin Tarantino, whose own brand of fractured storytelling and urban cool owes a debt to Wong Kar-Wai.

Nedelja popodne...

2012-03-04T14:26:00.000+01:00

UKs punk poet Patrik Fitzgerald
1982 "Gifts & Telegrams LP"

Oslo, August 31st

2012-03-03T11:45:00.000+01:00

Oslo, August 31st
Dir : Joachim Trier (2011)

Remake of Louis Malle "Le Fou Follet" (1963)...
A ko nije gledao prethodni film Joachim Triera, topla preporuka :
http://skvot-pop.blogspot.com/2011/05/reprise.html#more

Anders will soon complete his drug rehabilitation in the countryside. As part of the program, he is allowed to go into the city for a job interview. But he takes advantage of the leave and stays on in the city, drifting around, meeting people he hasn’t seen in a long while. Thirty-four-year-old Anders is smart, handsome and from a good family, but deeply haunted by all the opportunities he has wasted, all the people he has let down. He is still relatively young, but feels his life in many ways is already over. For the remainder of the day and long into the night, the ghosts of past mistakes will wrestle with the chance of love, the possibility of a new life and the hope to see some future by morning. –Cannes Film Festival.

OSLO, 31. AUGUST is a portrait of contemporary Oslo. A visually striking and quietly shattering drama about a man in deep existential crisis. Anders will soon complete his drug rehabilitation in the countryside. As part of the program, he is allowed to go into the city for a job interview. But he takes advantage of the leave and stays on in the city, drifting around, meeting people he hasn’t seen in a long while. Thirty-four-year-old Anders is smart, handsome and from a good family, but deeply haunted by all the opportunities he has wasted, all the people he has let down. He is still relatively young, but feels his life in many ways is already over. For the remainder of the day and long into the night, the ghosts of past mistakes will wrestle with the chance of love, the possibility of a new life and the hope to see some future by morning. ~ Poff

Anders may be a middle-class kid who “fucked up” (as he puts it), but he’s also a product of the postmodern intellectual culture that offered specious justification for all-night parties and rampant drug abuse, with little concern for the aftermath. Yet Trier and his collaborators refuse to moralize excessively about Anders’ past — an all-night party ends with an impromptu bike ride through the city that suggests a post-rave “La Dolce Vita” and is, somehow, simultane ously anarchic, elegiac and tender. Ultimately the film is driven by the pathos of the reformed addict, whose only sense of himself is so linked to drugs and alcohol that he no longer knows who he is or was. This is a breathtaking, profoundly mature piece. ~ Steve Gravestock, Toronto FF

Lee Ranaldo - Between the Times & the Tides ( 2012)

2012-03-02T12:19:00.004+01:00

...ALBUM OF THE MONTH...

Explosions in the city, explosions deep in me
Someone in the crowd has me falling at her feet
These days are so uncommon flashing lights and siren’s calls
These days I’m trying hard to keep from falling off the wall

Member of Sonic Youth, now in 30th year; visual artist, writer, producer etc. Recent live performances with partner Leah Singer, sight unseen, have been large scale, multi projection quadraphonic sound+light events, w Lee performing suspended guitar phenomena. A solo record of songs was completed this summer and slated for realease early in 2012, with band contributions from Steve Shelley, Nels Cline, John Medeski, Alan Licht, Irwin Menken, Jim O’Rourke, Kathy Leiesen and Bob Bert.
Sonic Youthʼs most recent recording: Simon Werner a Desparu, a film soundtrack [SYR9, 2011].
Leeʼs drawings, prints and videos have been on view this year in gallery and museum shows in places such as Bratislava Slovakia, Auckland New Zealand, Salt Lake City Utah and in Brooklyn and Manhattan, NYC.

Zombie and the Ghost Train (Mika Kaurismäki,1991)

2012-03-02T12:13:00.002+01:00

Antti "Zombie" Autiomaa does two things well: play the bass guitar and drink. After several months' sleeping on the streets of Istanbul, he returns to Helsinki where he's called into the army but discharged on mental health grounds after adding turpentine to the officers' soup. Zombie lives bleary-eyed in an apartment off his parents' house where his lonely, unemployed father suffers from heart disease. His girl-friend Marjo has taken up with a hairdresser but comes back to Zombie. His friend Harri hires him as a roadie for his band "Harry and the Mulefukkers" then gives him a chance as a bass player. He has his girl and he has a gig, but can Zombie put the bottle down?

Maîtresse (Barbet Schroeder, 1975)

2012-03-02T12:09:00.003+01:00

A common thief (Depardieu) breaks into the house of a professional dominatrix (Ogier), and begins to help her "train" her clients. Though this world is alien to his experience, he finds himself falling in love with her. Eventually he discovers that she does this in order to support her son, and he attempts to help her out of this life, which she is not sure she really wants to leave.

Christopher Paul Stelling – Songs of Praise & Scorn (2012)

2012-03-01T18:04:00.004+01:00

First impressions count for a lot with records. How you choose to start an album can influence the listeners’ feelings about the rest of its contents. The first few seconds of ‘Mourning Train To Memphis’, which kicks off Songs Of Praise And Scorn tell us exactly at which end of the singer/songwriter spectrum Christopher Paul Stelling falls. With feverishly plucked strings and a distinct Southern US twang to his voice, Stelling has very firmly nailed his colours to the country mast. Indeed, ‘Mourning Train…’ gives a very precise introduction to the Stelling sound. Backed by minimal accompaniment, Stelling seems to rely almost exclusively on the intricate picking of his guitar to create a sense of mood, with only the occasional hint of strings and basic percussion added in. This gives Stelling’s voice, which is strong yet allowing a sliver of melancholia to slip in, a suitable platform to sit on.

John Wesley Coleman – The Last Donkey (2012)

2012-03-01T16:42:00.003+01:00

The Last Donkey Show is the latest album from everyone’s favorite freaky Texas troubadour John Wesley Coleman. While Coleman’s particular madman swerve still recalls Doug Sahm and Roky Erickson, this collection covers more territory than his earlier work. Does this mean the half-mad misfit has grown up? Not quite—but the songwriting chops are all there, from carney kookiness to fuzz rockers to barstool tearjerkers to dustbowl pop.

Barna Howard – Barna Howard (2012)

2012-02-29T12:24:00.003+01:00

Missouri’s clearest voice since a certain steamboat pilot, Barna Howard is a meticulous craftsman. His are songwriter’s songs, weaving melody, narrative and gravity in ways only the best have. He comes to us like some overlooked great, reincarnate for one last shot.
Barna’s self-titled debut arrives February 21st.

Barna Howard sounds more like a lost genius from the 60’s than a man about to release his debut album. The first track from Howard’s self-titled album is “Promise, I Won’t Laugh”, a contemplative folk-song sung in the style of early 1960’s folk singers like Dylan and Pete Seeger. Howard cites Neil Young, Bert Jansch and Townes Van Zandt as influences, but he does a nice job of not channeling them in any overtly recognizable way. This song is straightforward and well executed, making it all the more surprising and exciting that this is coming from his first record.

Once (2007), John Carney

2012-02-27T19:05:00.002+01:00

A Dublin-based busker and vacuum-cleaner repairman enters into a fruitful relationship with a piano playing florist in a toe-tapping "video album" directed by John Carney and featuring a cast comprised entirely of professional musicians. He (Glen Hansard of the Frames) was a six-stringed street musician. She (Markéta Irglová) was a flower woman who couldn't afford to purchase a piano of her own. One day, after admiring the musician's songs and asking if he would take a look at her broken vacuum, the flower-pushing piano player discovers that she shares a remarkable sonic rapport with the mechanically savvy guitarist. As their musical sensibilities quickly converge to striking effect, the talented pair soon determines to record an album together.

Fanfan (1993) , Alexandre Jardin

2012-02-27T19:03:00.002+01:00

Alexandre (Vincent Perez) has been through the cycle of seeing the initial passion in romantic encounters burn off and having the relationship become routine and boring. He thinks that this happens for two reasons: the courtship and wooing dance ends, and mere sex enters the picture. He is determined to prevent this cycle from happening with his latest love-interest, a sexy young woman named Fanfan (Sophie Marceau). However, despite the delightful, romantic and inventive ways he discovers for them to spend time together, Fanfan finds his refusal to go to bed with her increasingly irritating; their burgeoning relationship is seriously jeopardized by Alexandre's attachment to his plan. This film is based on the director's best-selling novel, which was translated into almost two dozen languages.

Hunx – Private Room

2012-02-27T10:58:00.000+01:00

Hunx - Private Room from Hardly Art on Vimeo.

Nedelja Vece...

2012-02-26T20:14:00.004+01:00

Nedelja popodne...

2012-02-26T17:16:00.000+01:00

Woke up on a good day
And the world was wonderful
A midnight summer dream had me in its spell
I dreamt about an old man
Sat and watched the rain all night
He couldn't sleep a wink as all the drops fell
He told me of the beauty
Hidden in our foreheads
And he told me of the ugliness
We show instead
And when we put a foot wrong do we learn
From all the pain
A midnight summer dream as he watched the rain
Then at midnight he poured another drink
And bent my ear
And after midnight we sat up half the night
Or maybe more
And he began to tell me what it was all for
I woke up in an armchair
He had gone I don't know where
He left me there to sit and look at the rain
I Don't remember much at all
But his words were echoing
A midnight summer dream and then awake again
Maybe I'll never find him
Maybe he's gone forever
Maybe I'll have to sit here
Watching the weather
But one thing's pretty certain helped me
Make it in the night
Showed me somewhere else between wrong and right
So at midnight if you can't sleep
Then I will bend your ear
And after midnight we'll sit up half the night
Or maybe more
And I'll begin to tell you what it is all for

I Wake up on a good day
And the world feels wonderful
Midnight summer dream has me in its spell

I woke up in an armchair
He had gone I don't know where
He left me there to sit and look at the rain
I Don't remember much at all
But his words were echoing
A midnight summer dream and then awake again.

The Wooden Sky – Every Child a Daughter, Every Moon a Sun (2012)

2012-02-26T12:52:00.005+01:00

Toronto outfit The Wooden Sky have been churning out well-received melodic pastoral folk rock for a little while now. On February 28th they offer up their latest installment with the awkwardly titled Every Child A Daughter, Every Moon A Sun.
Melodic and pastoral is exactly what we get out of the gates with the lead track, “Child of the Valley”.
Over the years the group has morphed into a band that deserves your attention. Their niche may be folk and country melodies, but throughout their upcoming Every Child a Daughter, Every Moon a Sun you can hear subtle nods to other genres hidden underneath the twangy guitars.
The album is a journey through the band’s search for different ways to express their music and the outcome is a solid effort that the Toronto-based band recorded in the same Montreal studio that the Arcade Fire recorded Funeral.
Throughout the 13 songs The Wooden Sky’s energy is stretched over a wide array of emotions, but their talents are never thin. You can stream Every Child a Daughter, Every Moon a Sun below.
The record does have some stellar moments. “Angelina” is delivered with gut-wrenching passion. Beautiful lyrics and a measured (as opposed to methodical) arrangement make “Take Me Out” an intoxicating slow dance.

Young Prisms – In Between (2012)

2012-02-26T12:42:00.005+01:00

arrying on the grand tradition of San Franciscan stoner ambiance, Young Prisms released their largely successful debut, Friends for Now, early last year. Now, the band is ready to followup that lush, dream-pop record with a sequel. Their sophomore album, In Between, is due out March 27th, once again via Kanine Records.

According to press for In Between, the effort takes inspiration from two traumatic events, though one is markedly less so than the other. Run ragged from touring and without their green, budded companion (that’s weed, for the square), the group of SanFran youths got trapped in London’s Heathrow Airport thanks to “an epic ice storm.” That “traumatizing” crisis, coupled with the loss of a loved one, led to “a strong sense of rejection, loneliness, and despair” informing this new LP.
The quintet behind Young Prisms underwent a change – guitarist/singer Ashley Thomas replaced Jason Hendardy – and experienced some trying times. Yet, with the production aid of Monte Vallier, they “sound refreshed and Young again.” You can sample what these Cali shoegazers have crafted by hearing the first track, “Floating in Blue”, below (via Noisey). Also, peep the full tracklist underneath the song, followed by Young Prisms’ upcoming touring itinerary, which includes a stop at South by Southwest.

Anais Mitchell – Young Man in America (2012)

2012-02-24T20:13:00.004+01:00

Anais Mitchell is not a man. She’s a woman, quick to laugh and to cry, a fan of Jane Austen and miniskirts. So it may catch a few listeners off-guard when Mitchell cries out, in the opening sequence of her latest album, I’m a young man! And it may come as a surprise when, over the course of eleven songs, she seems to be channeling spirits from the Old Testament to modern America- but mostly, well, from the Y chromosome. Taking on voices other than her own in not exactly new for Mitchell. In 2010 Righteous Babes Records released the recorded version of her folk opera Hadestown, a modern retelling of the Orpheus myth, featuring guest singers Justin Vernon (Bon Iver), Ani Difranco, and Greg Brown. The album became something of a critical phenomenon in the UK, making Best of 2010 lists in the Guardian, Sunday Times and Observer, thanks in part to the skillful production of Todd Sickafoose, who also produced and arranged Young Man. Mitchell is as interested in the world around her as the one inside her. She has a way of tackling big themes with the same emotional intimacy most artists use to describe their inner lives. The emotions are my own, says Mitchell. As for the Young Man, he’s in me too, I feel his restlessness a lot. He’s part of me like my dad s old book or like something an old lover said one time. Those parts of ourselves that haunt us, sometimes we have to appease them with an offering of food and wine so they ll quit haunting us for a while. This album is that kind of offering.

Dirty Three -Toward the Low Sun(2012)

2012-02-24T18:23:00.003+01:00

...Warrenovo Remek-Delo-Opelo...

Warren Ellis: “Dirty Three has always been about the way we play together and feed off each other. We wanted this one to be a return to the more improvised and instinctive approach of the earlier recordings.”
Toward The Low Sun may be the best Dirty Three album in over a decade. While I think that both 2005’s Cinder and 2003’s She Has No Strings Apollo are undeservedly maligned, there is no denying that Low Sun does a better job of recapturing the magic that the Dirty Three found in their earlier records. They don’t compromise here, either. The band has been accused of losing sight of melody for the complexity of their sonic adventurousness. Low Sun is by no means pared down. Without “dumbing down” their sound, however, the band crafts structures that complement the melodies without obscuring them.

Well . . . except for record opener “Furnace Skies.” The album’s first track is a blast of guitar noise, irregular beats, and general chaos. It’s as if, at the start, the band is trying to get the mess all out of their systems before moving on. The rest of Low Sun is full of the Dirty Three’s elegant instrumental folk/jazz oeuvre. “Sometimes I Forget You’re Gone” strips down an aberrant piano melody and accompanies it with Jim White’s drumming, which sounds as if he’s trying to hit every drum and cymbal simultaneously. Warren Ellis’s violin doesn’t take its customary prominent position within the band’s sound until lovely folk ballad “Moon on the Land,” which is also enhanced by mandolin and more restrained drumming from White.
Ellis takes the lead on the record’s two best tracks, driving both “Rising Below” and “Rain Song” with some of his most evocative violin melodies since Whatever You Love, You Are. The former focuses mainly on the dynamic between guitarist Mick Turner and Ellis’s multi-tracked strings. Between the two of them, Turner and Ellis produce a vibrant melancholy that, in line with the band’s aesthetic, climaxes in an orgasm of instrumentation. “Rain Song” mainly consists of Ellis’s disconsolate strings and picking, which wander across the span of the funereal tune before ending in a whimper.
Low Sun ends impressively, with “That Was, Was,” “Ashen Snow,” and “You Greet Her Ghost” finishing the backend of the record with impassioned sadness, particularly with the addition of a forlorn flute on “Ashen Snow.” The closing is reminiscent of some of the Dirty Three’s finest late-’90s/early-2000s work, concentrating on violin-led melodies evocative of a wide array of emotional responses. In fact, while every emotion from extreme pain to extreme joy is explored in the space of the instrumental tracks, the one response that never comes to mind is boredom. The Dirty Three have always been a thrill to listen to, and on Toward the Low Sun, the thrill never comes at the expense of complexity. If the band’s fire was simmering low throughout most of the 2000s, it is certainly roaring again.

Lower Dens - Brains

2012-02-22T19:39:00.000+01:00

Tsar (Pavel Lungin, 2009)

2012-02-22T18:55:00.004+01:00

In 16th-century Russia in the grip of chaos, Ivan the Terrible strongly believes he is vested with a holy mission. Believing he can understand and interpret the signs, he sees the Last Judgment approaching. He establishes absolute power, cruelly destroying anyone who gets in his way. During this reign of terror, Philip, the superior of the monastery on the Solovetsky Islands, a great scholar and Ivan's close friend, dares to oppose the sovereign's mystical tyranny. What follows is a clash between two completely opposite visions of the world, smashing morality and justice, God and men. A grand-scale film with excellent leading roles by Mamonov and Yankovsky. An allegory of Stalinist Russia.

No habrá paz para los malvados (Enrique Urbizu, 2011)

2012-02-22T18:50:00.004+01:00

Enrique Urbizu's career is a curious anomaly in Spanish filmmaking. Spanish genre filmmakers usually score a couple of box office gongs and go on to collaborate with renowned international actors, screenwriters or directors, then feel disappointed or frustrated with the experience and go back home where their creative freedom is less restricted. (After directing Nicole Kidman in The Others, produced by Tom Cruise, Alejandro Amenábar shot The Sea Inside with an all-Spanish cast, while Jaume Balagueró chose Manuela Velasco for the lead of his hit Rec after unsuccessful collaborations with Anna Paquin and Calista Flockhart).

Urbizu has followed a similar path, but in an almost inverse chronological order. After a couple of pleasant but forgettable comedies, he surprisingly scripted Roman Polanski's The Ninth Gate before enjoying general success at home with two thrillers: La caja 507 and La vida mancha.

No habrá paz para los malvados -or, to use the title that rolls off the cosmopolitan tongues, No Rest for the Wicked- is a perfect follow-up to those two titles: a deft, gripping cop thriller against the backdrop of drug trafficking, police corruption and Islamic terrorism.

José Coronado, a regular of Urbizu's films, brilliantly plays boozy detective Santos Trinidad, a police inspector once hugely admired, now disgraced, who gets involved in a triple murder whose ramifications will lead him to the hidden underworld of crime and, ultimately, to his own redemption. Urbizu keeps the narrative engine ticking over with compelling throb, each new piece of the puzzle perfectly fitting with the previous one. In fact, the film is maybe most surprising because -or despite, and depending on your take on the question you will like or not the film- everything is exactly what it seems. There is an aptly forensic approach to the way Urbizu disentangles the mystery, not least on account of that sort of narrative traceability so common in modern thrillers (a name saved in a cellular phone which leads to a car whose sat-nav remembers its last journey guiding the hero to a crucial clue).

Some journalists were complaining about the film's predictability after the press screening, which is precisely the reason why I find it so purely enjoyable. And of course, there is a powerful central performance from Coronado, impressive in his role as the quintessential antihero. This is the first film in competition shown at the festival, but his name must necessarily be kept in mind for the final kudos.

Children of Nature (Friðrik Þór Friðriksson, 1991)

2012-02-22T18:42:00.004+01:00

Old Thorgeir must leave his home far off in the icelandic 'countryside' and move into a home for senior citizens in Reykjavik. There he meets an old friend from his childhood, Stella. Thorgeir soon becomes unhappy living there and together with Stella he steals a jeep. Together they leave the city for Stella's old home in northwestern Iceland. A drama who asks us: how important is it to have a long life if you have to leave everything that has a meaning for you?

Most of "Children of Nature" is about the rebellion of Geirri and Stella, a widow whom he meets at the home and who shares his impatience with this attempt, in effect, to pervert death by socializing it. One day Geirri and Stella walk out of the home, withdraw their money from the bank, steal a Jeep and start driving north.
As the Icelandic landscape becomes increasingly wild and primeval, the line between life and death gently blurs until it disappears.
"Children of Nature," a nominee for this year's Oscar as the best foreign-language film, will be shown at the Museum of Modern Art today at 6 P.M. and on Saturday at 12:15 P.M. in the New Directors/New Films series.
"Children of Nature" is an intelligent film, not easily categorized. Neither Geirri nor Stella is a character in a conventional sense. They are representations, figures in a modern myth that is dramatized in settings of spectacular, chilly beauty. Mr. Fridriksson has directed "Children of Nature" with a notable rigor, but it prompts rather more awe than passionate interest.

Lee Ranaldo - 'Off The Wall'

2012-02-21T17:44:00.000+01:00

Howlin Rain – The Russian Wilds (2012)

2012-02-20T15:54:00.003+01:00

One of the first things you’ll notice about “The Russian Wilds” is the song lengths; five of the 11 songs are over six minutes in length. Howlin Rain have borrowed more than just the simple “sound” of 70′s rock – they’ve studied its structure. These songs may be long, but they don’t drag. Not by any stretch of the imagination. Every song has been painstakingly crafted and intricately assembled down to the tiniest detail; every lick, harmony and drum flare is there for a reason, and it really does help every song reach its full potential. This is a rock album that makes a great use of its entire runtime. “Phantom In the Valley”, is the song that drives home the bands inspired and tight musicianship. About four minutes into the infectious rock anthem, I noticed the track had three minutes left. I thought this was odd, as the song by that point had apparently achieved everything it had set out to do; then came the drop. The song launches into a salsa-inspired build, complete with excellent horn-work and fantastic, heavy percussion. Before this the song was infectious, but here it becomes downright possessive.

Archers of Loaf – Vee Zee (1995/2012 Remaster/Expanded)

2012-02-20T12:31:00.005+01:00

Play It Loud & Proud !!!

The Archers of Loaf were darlings of the indie world in the early to mid-‘90s, thanks to an off-kilter sound that was edgy and challenging, yet melodically accessible at the same time. Cornerstones of the Chapel Hill, NC, indie scene that also spawned Superchunk and Polvo, the Archers’ chief inspirations were the Replacements and Sonic Youth, but that only began to tell the story. Their music was frequently likened to a more intense, raucous version of Pavement’s postmodern pop, and indeed they shared key elements: fractured song constructions, abstractly witty lyrics, clangorous guitars, and lo-fi production. More rooted in punk and noise rock, however, the Archers took the dissonance, white noise, and angularity to greater extremes, and played with more overt commitment and enthusiasm in concert. The Archers became a hip name to drop with their acclaimed 1993 debut, Icky Mettle; several more accomplished albums followed before the group called it quits in 1998.

The Archers of Loaf were formed in Chapel Hill in 1991, when all four members were attending the University of North Carolina. Coincidentally, they’d all grown up in Asheville, in the western part of the state, but hadn’t all gone to the same schools. Singer/guitarist Eric Bachmann, guitarist Eric Johnson, bassist Matt Gentling, and drummer Mark Price cut an independently released single, “Wrong,” that helped them land a contract with the California-based indie label Alias (also home to releases by American Music Club and Yo La Tengo). Another single, “Web in Front,” became a substantial hit on college radio in 1993, creating a strong buzz for the group’s full-length debut. Icky Mettle arrived later in the year to highly positive reviews and more alternative-radio airplay, and the Archers supported it with an extensive national tour.
A five-song concept EP, Archers of Loaf vs the Greatest of All Time, arrived on the heels of Icky Mettle in 1994. Amid growing media attention, Madonna’s Maverick label made a play for the band, but they elected to continue developing on an independent, with lower commercial stakes. Their second album, the rawer and noisier Vee Vee, appeared in 1995 and was an even bigger college-radio hit, thanks in part to the single “Harnessed in Slums.” The album landed in the CMJ Top Five, and even got some press from the hipper mainstream media outlets. In its wake, Eric Bachmann convened the Chapel Hill side project Barry Black, an eclectic, mostly instrumental outfit given to bizarre arrangements; their eponymous first album was also released in 1995.
Meanwhile, the Archers compiled a raft of non-LP indie singles, B-sides, alternate takes, and live cuts for 1996’s The Speed of Cattle. Their proper third album, All the Nation’s Airports, came out later that year and showed the band moving into quieter, more layered territory. Bachmann’s second album with Barry Black, Tragic Animal Stories, arrived in 1997, as did the live Archers of Loaf EP Vitus Tinnitus. The band’s fourth proper album, 1998’s White Trash Heroes, continued its exploration of calmer, more spacious sounds, and began to incorporate keyboards and samples. However, their marathon touring commitments were contributing to a sense of stagnation within the group. After the supporting tour for Heroes, the Archers decided to call it quits. A live album recorded at that tour’s Chapel Hill show, Seconds Before the Accident, was released posthumously in 2000. Bachmann moved on to the folkier Crooked Fingers, which issued the first of several albums in 2000.

Nedelja Vece...

2012-02-19T20:57:00.003+01:00

Nedelja popodne...

2012-02-19T14:46:00.000+01:00

The Auteurs
"Now I'm A Cowboy" (Hut,1994)

a onda masterpiece:

live masterpiece

Andrew Bird – Break It Yourself (2012)

2012-02-19T12:09:00.005+01:00

Andrew Bird’s highly anticipated follow up to 2009’s Noble Beast won’t hit shelves until March 6, but we’ve got a few exclusive details about his upcoming album.
The album is titled Break It Yourself and will be released on Mom + Pop records (out March 5 in the UK via Bella Union). It was produced at his Western Illinois barn-turned-studio. Break it Yourself is Bird’s twelfth album.
“We had our front of house engineer Neal Jensen bring his old Tascam 8-track tape machine and Yamaha board (nothing fancy) out to my barn,” Bird said about the recording. “We rolled tape as we were learning the songs and to our surprise we started nailing the songs by the second take. I think we got a rough, unfussy honesty in this session.”

Bird said the sessions for the album were a “mix of distilled, grounded songs and some wild soloing.” The band for the Break It Yourself session included long-term collaborator Martin Dosh on drums, Jeremy Ylvisaker on guitar and Mike Lewis on bass.
The album includes songs like the steel-drum heavy “Danse Caribe,” the instrumental “Behind the Barn” and the lush, eight-minute “Hole in the Ocean Floor.”

Mad About Mountains – Mad About Mountains (2012)

2012-02-19T12:06:00.003+01:00

Mad About Mountains is the solo project from Krakow frontman Piet De Pessemier.
With Krakow taking a break he was able to realize his long time dream, releasing a solo album, a Townes van Zandt, Neil Young, etc inspired singer songwriter album!
Pure songs, no special effects but lots of reverb…

Arbor Glades – Coming Home [EP] (2012)

2012-02-19T12:04:00.001+01:00

Arbor Glades is the most recent addition to the Flagless fold. Centered on the songwriting of lead guitarist/vocalist Andrew Duval, the band find a meeting point between Duval’s South African upbringing and the humdrum nooks and crannies of Montréal’s sometimes somber and frosty atmosphere.”

Audra Mae and the Almighty Sound – Audra Mae and the Almighty Sound (2012)

2012-02-17T08:17:00.004+01:00

Audra Mae has upped the ante on her self-titled sophomore album, thanks to the addition of her backing band, the Almighty Sound. She’s shifted from writing dark, yarn-spinning lyrics to crafting vibrant, imaginative songs soaked in sass and served with a slice of Oklahoma charm. But even with a new band and backing vocalists adding layers of depth and texture to her music, the ace up Audra Mae’s sleeve is her dramatic, deep voice. In the lead-off track, “The Real Thing,” she powers through the verses with such conviction that it’s impossible to deny her attention. Once she’s hooked her audience, she lets them know just what’s on her mind: “Little Red Wagon” is a bone fide heartbreaker in which she denies any would-be suitors the opportunity to get close. (At least her bad news comes with a quick, easy rhythm and a saloon-worthy piano arrangement.)

The singer does touch on her character-driven songwriting style in the inspired ballad, “Annie Get Your Gun,” in which she tells the tale of Annie Oakley in her twilight years, reflecting on her life and the messages of hope and optimism she would’ve told her younger self. And the album does have a barn-burning, whiskey-soaked party song, “Jebidiah Moonshine’s Friday Night Shack Party,” an audience-friendly number with a big call-and-response verse that’s sure to get fans moving when performed live. A certifiable vocal powerhouse and a proven songwriter, Audra Mae takes her music to a new level with her energized songwriting and a few great musicians by her side.

Springtime in a Small Town (2002), Tian Zhuangzhuang

2012-02-17T01:57:00.002+01:00

For his first feature since 1993's acclaimed The Blue Kite, director Tian Zhuangzhuang chose to remake a classic 1949 Chinese film, Springtime in a Small Town. The film takes place in 1946. Yuwen (Hu Jingfan) lives on a country estate with her sickly husband, Dai Liyan (Wu Jun), and his rambunctious teenage sister, Dai Xiu (Lu Sisi). They are waited on by the family's longtime servant, Lao Huang (Ye Xiaokeng). Yuwen cares for her husband and she's kind to him, but she doesn't seem to love him. Frustrated with his inability to give her a child due to his constant illness, she sleeps in a separate room. For his part, Liyan feels guilt and shame over his inability to properly care for his wife. Their lives are disrupted by the arrival of Liyan's childhood friend, Zhang Zhichen (Xin Bajqing), a well-traveled doctor. Liyan soon learns that his old friend was once his wife's neighbor, but he doesn't know that they were also in love, and had at one time planned to marry. Tensions swirl about the household as Yuwen and Zhichen try to reconcile their lingering feelings for each other with their responsibility to Liyan. Springtime in a Small Town won the San Marco Prize at the 2002 Venice Film Festival, and was selected for the 2002 New York Film Festival.

Carobnjak!

2012-02-16T15:47:00.003+01:00

Dok sneg pada...I napolju i unutra...

Diver – Kites (2012)

2012-02-15T18:47:00.003+01:00

There is something gently melodic, yet majestic about the music of Diver. They place a heavy emphasis on extremely well played mostly acoustic instruments, with seemingly years of carefully and patiently honing their considerable craft.Band: Their music is affective, simple and honest. Emotions are realized powerfully, still quiet, with acoustic instruments and through a variety of different voices. The essence of their music is the contradiction between harmony and their lyrics dealing with insecurity and disorientation. Their songs are swirling around the difficulty to fulfill other people’s expectations,still trying to be true to oneself and about the discrepancy between overwhelming emotions and rational realizations.

Shilje Sanghwang (2000), Kim Ki-duk

2012-02-15T12:54:00.002+01:00

An unstable artist (Ju Jin-mo) is sent over the edge during a walk in the park when a woman with a video camera (Kim Jin-ah) begins following him. Flying into a murderous rage, the artist begins running loose through the city, leaving dead bodies in his wake, until he winds up back in the park where he began. Director Kim Hi-duk shot this feature in "real time," during less than four hours in one afternoon, using an armada of 20 film and video cameras set up in different locations; significantly, the film ends with the film running out in the cameras set in the park. Kim Hi-duk then edited his footage down to a compact 86 minutes.

The Men-Open Your Heart

2012-02-13T19:21:00.002+01:00

Wymond Miles – Earth Has Doors (EP, 2012)

2012-02-13T17:27:00.004+01:00

Four years ago Wymond Miles, guitar player and songwriter in San Francisco’s The Fresh & Onlys, began writing solo material thematically based on the concepts of eschatology, anthroposophy, and Gnostic and Hermetic symbolism. Drawing from a vast musical pool of inspiration, including Scott Walker, Robert Wyatt, Arvo Part, and Nikki Sudden amongst others, Earth Has Doors is Miles’ first solo release. Since beginning Miles had basically shelved these songs to attend school, focus on fatherhood, and commit to the demanding schedule of the F&O’s. He earned a degree in humanities with an emphasis on the philosophical implications of the ecological/economic crisis of our times, and that subject matter can be traced throughout his first EP. These songs concisely yet esoterically document the existential crisis of our current epoch — moving from the nothingness of modern materialism, fragmented reductionist thought, and drug escapism to a world imbued with subjectivity and meaning through a new relationship with the Earth and cosmos as alive and full of inherent intelligence.

Wymond describes his early writing process: “For the first time I had a sense of place, and a reverence of humility for my surroundings. I was full of wonder, but I felt very small, and went inward to begin the work of writing.” He elaborates, “Sonically the mood had to reflect the somberness of moving between the existential chaos of my twenties into this new perspective of living … The mysterious hues of the soundscape reflect a sense of curiosity and possibility in the canyons of sound.” Working in his home studio and using 8-track tape (the infamous Tascam 388), Miles performs almost everything on this record: guitars, synths, bass, drums, manipulated tape delay, and vocals. A few friends played with him, guesting on drums (“Hidden Things” and “Earth Has Doors”) and viola (“As the Orchard”), while his wife Sarah sings some harmonies on side A.

Time (2006) , Ki-duk Kim

2012-02-12T20:24:00.003+01:00

To save her relationship, a woman puts herself through extensive plastic surgery.

Voyage to Cythera (1984), Theodoros Angelopoulos

2012-02-12T20:14:00.004+01:00

An old communist returns to Greece after 32 years in the Soviet Union. However, things aren't the way he had hoped for.

Nedelja Vece...

2012-02-12T19:41:00.003+01:00

Nedelja popodne...

2012-02-12T15:34:00.000+01:00

Dr. Dog – Be The Void (2012)

2012-02-11T14:04:00.006+01:00

Starting to feel the winter blues? Check out the newest album from Dr. Dog entitled Be the Void, a spirited consortium of genre-bending tunes guaranteed to get you out of your funk. This highly underrated psychedelic rock group from Pennsylvania are releasing their sixth album on February 7th but gave fans an extra treat by publishing the tracks on their Soundcloud page a week in advance. How do you listen to them? By way of one of their biggest fans of course: none other than Conan O’Brien himself endorsed Dr. Dog as one of his favorite bands and offered the full album stream. The 12 track album is a pretty good introduction to their music, which is heavily influenced by 60’s rock, classic indie rock and some contemporary artists like My Morning Jacket, Wilco and M. Ward.

They are strong proponents of recording in lo-fi and never sticking to one genre or sound.
Similar to how Wilco’s latest album The Whole Love sought to accent their more experimental side, Be the Void is a shift back to Dr. Dog’s earlier, more adventurous ways as they incorporate a flurry of different instruments and genre-influences into the music. What’s most interesting is how they interplay those styles throughout the tracks. In “Heavy Light” there’s an awesome bridge that beautifully syncs the bongo, salt shaker, piano, and sitar. “That Old Black Hole,” the album’s biggest hit, starts with a hypnotizing intro and a smoking bass line that will suck you in from the start and then kicks in an accelerando that quickens the tempo before you have to time pick up on it. It’s the sort of album you have to listen to a couple times to really appreciate the subtle nuances, like lead-singer Scott McMicken’s vocal slides on “Lonesome” or the clever key change in “Get Away.”

A Simple Plan (1998), Sam Raimi

2012-02-11T13:45:00.002+01:00

Based on Scott B. Smith's bone-chilling 1993 novel, A Simple Plan is a bit of a departure for horror film director Sam Raimi. Instead of flying eyeballs and dancing corpses, A Simple Plan is a taut crime thriller in the vein of Joel Coen's Academy Award-winning Fargo. Set during the white winters of Minnesota, this story tells the eerie tale of Hank and Jacob Mitchell (played by Bill Paxton and Billy Bob Thornton) who, along with a buddy, find a downed single-engine plane buried in the snowy woods. Inside it is a decaying pilot and a bag carrying four million dollars in one-hundred-dollar bills. The men decide to hide the money until spring when the snow is melted and the plane is found. If no one notices the missing money at that time, they will split it and live a wealthy new life. A simple plan, right? Wrong. Much like Humphrey Bogart's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, things can only get worse, as distrust and greed creep into the minds of the principals. They find it difficult to decide which one gets to hold the money -- and even more impossible to keep from dipping into the stash until spring. And so on. It also becomes increasingly tough to keep a secret of this magnitude. And if all this doesn't get moviegoers' brains working, it seems there are suspicious characters in town who just may be able to link them to the plane, forcing the more dangerous and bloody question of what to do with those people and how to cover their tracks.

The Dust of Time (2008) , Theo Angelopoulos

2012-02-11T13:42:00.003+01:00

A filmmaker looks to his family's history as the basis for a historical epic that reflects some of the most tumultuous events of the 20th Century in this grand-scale drama from Theo Angelopoulos. A. (Willem Dafoe) is a director struggling to complete shooting on his latest project, a sweeping historical story being shot in Berlin that tells the true story of his parent's relationship. Spyros (Michel Piccoli) and Eleni (Irene Jacob) first met and fell in love shortly before World War II broke out, but the two were separated during the fighting, with Spyros making his way to America and settling in New York, while civil war forced Eleni to seek exile in Russia. Stalin established a colony for Greek expatriates in Tashkent, where Eleni joined her fellow expatriates, and when Spyros learned of her whereabouts after Stalin's passing, he left New York to be with her, entering Tashkent illegally via Germany. However, after a brief reunion which led to Eleni becoming pregnant, Spyros was found out by the authorities. After Spyros was arrested, Eleni was sent to Siberia, where she met Jacob (Bruno Ganz), a German Jew. Jacob fell in love with Eleni and he stayed by her side as she wrestled with he memory of Spyros and her son, who with Jacob's help was smuggled out of Tashkent to Canada and eventually reunited with his father. It's not until years later that A. is finally reunited with his parents (as well as Jacob) in Berlin as he tries to put their story on film, but what should be a happy time becomes potentially tragic as A.'s daughter falls into a deep depression and threatens to take her life. I Skoni Tou Chronou (aka The Dust Of Time) was an official selection at the 2009 Berlin International Film Festival.

The Wrong Man (1956) ,Alfred Hitchcock

2012-02-11T13:38:00.003+01:00

Director Alfred Hitchcock lets us know from the outset that The Wrong Man is a painfully true story and not one of his customary fabricated suspense yarns, through the simple expedient of walking before the camera and telling us as much (this introductory appearance replaced his planned cameo role as a nightclub patron). The real-life protagonist, musican Christopher Emmanuel Balestrero, is played by Henry Fonda. Happily married and gainfully employed at the Stork Club, Balestrero's life takes a disastrous turn when he goes to an insurance office, hoping to borrow on his wife's (Vera Miles) life insurance policy in order to pay her dental bills. One of the girls in the office spots Balestrero, identifying him as the man who robbed the office a day or so earlier. This, and a few scattered bits of circumstantial evidence, lead to Balestrero's arrest. Though he's absolutely innocent, he can offer no proof of his whereabouts the day of the crime. Lawyer Frank O'Connor (Anthony Quayle) does his best to help his client, but he's up against an indifferent judicial system that isn't set up to benefit the "little man". Meanwhile, Balestrero's wife becomes emotionally unhinged, leading to a complete nervous breakdown. As Balestrero prays in his cell, his image is juxtaposed onto the face of the actual criminal-who looks nothing like the accused man!

TS and The Past Haunts-Gone And Goner(2012)

2012-02-10T21:14:00.003+01:00

Whatever is your favorite, that's what we are...
Formed out of the demise of Boston indie/punk rock royalty, TS & The Past Haunts came to be through mutual friends sharing common interests. Travis Shettel (TS/Totally Travis), guitarist, singer and ring-leader of the band Piebald, met The Duke Spirit (Shangri-La Records) when he was invited to take on tour manager duties for the band during one of their first US tours. Acting as a US Ambassador-of-sorts for the band, a friendship was formed and The Duke Spirit soon learned of Travis’ musical past. After asking TS to join them both on the road and in the studio playing keys and percussion, it would only be a matter of time before they would return the favor. Travis and The Duke Spirit knuckled down in between their tours of Australia and the UK and recorded a handful of his songs; learning, writing and recording along the way.

Since the Dukes have their own schedules full with... well, The Duke Spirit, Travis wanted an outlet to perform the songs live. The recordings with The Dukes were a catalyst for the formation of a true band. He found his rhythm section in Ben (drums) and Heather (bass) Heywood, a married duo who front bands of their own (Summer Darling and Kissing Cousins, respectively). The power trio version of TS & THE PAST HAUNTS has been busy; playing shows and writing songs. In the very near future, they will be heading north to Sacramento to record a full length album with Robert Cheek at the tape-op darling studio, The Hangar. They plan to record live to capture the energy and rawness of their live performances. The new batch of songs are energized blasts of dark rock that still maintain pop sensibilities

Sharon kicks off her epic tour TODAY!

2012-02-10T21:07:00.001+01:00

La Blogothèque delights us with another wonderful Take Away Show. Filmed late last fall in Paris, Soirée de Poche: Sharon Van Etten is a beautifully intimate video of the songstress who has managed to encapsulate just about every person who dares taken a listen. Joined by Heather Woods Broderick and armed only with her acoustic guitar, Sharon stands in front of a handful of people and delivers another incredibly moving performance. It’s really something you have to watch for yourself.

Sharon Van Etten performs "Give Out" on Soundcheck Live in The Greene Space

2012-02-09T19:29:00.000+01:00

Father John Misty – Fear Fun (2012)

2012-02-07T18:26:00.008+01:00

...Jesus Christ, girl. What are people going to think?

When I show up to one of several funerals, I’ve attended for Grandpa this week

With you, With me, But someone’s got to help me dig...

ALBUM OF THE MONTH-FEBRUARY

When discussing ‘Father John Misty’, Tillman paraphrases Philip Roth: ’It’s all of me and none of me, if you can’t see that, you won’t get it’. What I call it is totally arbitrary, but I like the name. You’ve got to have a name. I never got to choose mine."
He goes on, “‘People who make records are afforded this assumption by the culture that their music is coming from an exclusively personal place, but more often than not what you hear are actually the affectations of an ’alter-ego’ or a cartoon of an emotionally heightened persona,” says Josh Tillman, who has been recording/releasing solo albums since 2003 and who recently left Seattle’s Fleet Foxes after playing drums from 2008-2011. “That kind of emotional quotient isn’t sustainable if your concern is portraying a human-being made up of more than just chest-beating pathos. I see a lot of rampant, sexless, male-fantasy everywhere in the music around me. I didn’t want any alter-egos, any vagaries, fantasy, escapism, any over-wrought sentimentality. I like humor and sex and mischief. So when you think about it, it’s kind of mischievous to write about yourself in a plain-spoken, kind of explicitly obvious way and call it something like ‘Misty’. I mean, I may as well have called it ‘Steve’”.
Musically, Fear Fun consists of such disparate elements as Waylon Jennings, Harry Nilsson, Arthur Russell, “All Things Must Pass,” and “Physical Graffiti,” often within the same song. Tillman’s voice has never been better and often sounds like Roy Orbison, “The Caruso of Rock”, at his most joyous, while the music maintains a dark, mysterious and yet conversely playful, almost Dionysian quality. Lyrically, his absurdist fever dreams of…

Father John Misty - Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings from thatgo on Vimeo.

The Hunter (Daniel Nettheim, 2011)

2012-02-07T17:57:00.003+01:00

Martin, a skilled and ruthless mercenary, travels into the Tasmanian wilderness on a hunt for a tiger believed to be extinct. Hired by an anonymous company that wants the tiger's genetic material, Martin arrives in Tasmania posing as a scientist. He proceeds to set up base camp at a broken-down farmhouse, where he stays with a family whose father has gone missing. Usually a loner, Martin becomes increasingly close to the family; however, as his attachment to the family grows, Martin is led down a path of unforeseen dangers, complicating his deadly mission.

Feist - The Bad In Each Other

2012-02-07T14:18:00.001+01:00

The Holiday Crowd – Over The Bluff (2012)

2012-02-06T18:55:00.004+01:00

...William, It Was Really Nothing...I Want The One I Can't Have...

Shelflife Records has put together another gem of a release with The Holiday Crowd. They will be releasing their debut on January 24th. I thought I’d change it up a bit and just show you what they have to say about themselves. I think it gives us a pretty good idea of what we’re dealing with in this band, so here you go:
The album title Over The Bluffs comes from a lyric in their song “Tiresome”, “I would have led you away from the alliance and over The Bluffs instead”, but in many ways it is an open love letter to Scarborough, Ontario, a notorious suburb of Toronto where lead singer Imran Haniff and guitar player Colin Bowers grew up.

“The whole mood of the record has a Scarborough vibe to it and it only seemed fitting to name it with an honorary nod to our old stomping grounds. Scarborough has so much stacked against it; it almost seemed like The Holiday Crowd needed to stick up for it. There’s more material lyrically to write about a place that’s tangible and misunderstood than writing about Narnia or Mordor,” says Haniff.

“anybody could tell, they didn't belong – belong to the early summer sun, the cool Whit sun wind off the sea, the holiday crowd.” Graham Greene- 1938 Brighton Rock - Toronto, and then the world, is about to take a holiday. Canada’s cultural centre form from the ashes of the city's nightclub-mainstays and their offshoot hangers-on. With their style, wit and musical eclecticism, The Holiday Crowd give proper nods to the once hallowed rock’n’roll ideals of cool, substance and jingle-jangle melody. Lead singer Imran Haniff, first met of the band’s guitarist-of-many-powers Colin Bowers in high school. Haniff was impressed with The Stone Roses T-shirt Bowers was wearing and that very day they developed a strong bonding friendship and songwriting partnership. With the addition of long time friend David Barnes on drums and newcomer Alex Roberts on bass guitar, the band was completed. It's taken some friendly shuffling. Barnes was initially brought in to try his hand at singing, but when the live-long moment came, the more soothing and wistful vocals of chief Holidayer Haniff couldn't be ignored. Self described as minimal and stripped-down, The Holiday Crowd's sound/lyrics arise from all manner of experience- summer afternoon camaraderie’s, introspective reveries and a few shapely ‘inspirations’ along the way. Smear the lipstick! From their haircuts to their shoes and with a nonchalant, but forceful attitude, the band truly ‘send’ the listener. This year, the group are embarking on their first live dates spreading joy into your hearts and injecting a skip into your step, it’s The Holiday Crowd!

Nedelja Vece...

2012-02-05T19:53:00.003+01:00

Nedelja popodne...

2012-02-05T15:54:00.000+01:00

Meanwhile, Back in Communist Russia...

Ben Gazzara Dies at 81-R.I.P.

2012-02-04T13:49:00.004+01:00

Ben Gazzara, one of the great character actors of his generation, has died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 81. A product of New York's Lower East Side, Gazzara grew up speaking the language of his Italian-immigrant parents and had to learn English as his second language. He caught the acting bug while still in his teens, but only signed up at the theater program at The New School after a stint studying electrical engineering at City College didn't pan out. In 1951, he joined the Actors Studio at a time when it was the hottest incubator of theatrical talent in Manhattan and, under its director Lee Strasberg, the center of the Method. It launched him into a career that would span 60 years.
He made his Broadway debut in the 1952 production End As A Man, which which was adapted by Calder Willingham from his own novel. Gazzara played Jocko DeParis, a smiling, sadistic cadet at a Southern military academy who uses his rank, the power of his family connections, and his Machiavellian slyness to terrorize everyone within reach. The role gave Gazzara the chance to use his brilliance at games of theatrical one-upmanship and his special talent for projecting intelligence, meanness, and the suggestion of something twisted in his cocky nature.

At the same time, even at his nastiest, he could be too funny and entertaining to be really disliked. In 1957, the play was filmed (as The Strange One), marking his movie debut. Directed by Actors Studio member Jack Garfein and with the cast of the New York production largely intact, the movie endures as a potent time capsule of what the Method was about when it was new and smoking fresh. You can see how Gazzara would have caused a sensation in the New York theater at the time, and you can also see the qualities that inspired Pauline Kael, reviewing another performance of his 25 years later, to write that he was "handsome yet guarded, like an armadillo. He could be a survivor of an ancient (and trustworthy) race."
Exciting as all this may sound, they were not qualities to make Hollywood studios offer him the keys to the vault. Gazzara's second Broadway role was as Brick in the original production of Tennessee Williams' Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, but he wasn't courted for the movie version, which starred Paul Newman. Instead, he made his second appearance on movie screens in Otto Preminger's Anatomy Of A Murder (1959), playing an army lieutenant on trial for the murder of a man he says raped his wife. Although the hero of the movie is the lieutenant's defense attorney, the film strongly implies that the lieutenant is a mean drunk and a wife-beater who may have killed the man out of sheer cussedness. (He even skips out on paying the lawyer after he gets him off.) The movie was considered groundbreaking in its day because of its frank discussion of rape, and Gazzara's performance firmly established that things just seemed a little more real when he was around. He'd work steadily for the rest of his life, but he was now soundly defined as a supporting player in Hollywood, with occasional flings as a leading man in low-budget schlock (such as 1973's The Neptune Factor and the cheesy 1975 biopic Capone) and more offbeat projects.
Many of the films that fall into the latter category came about through his friendship with the unofficial pope of American independent cinema, John Cassavetes. Over the course of seven years, he starred in three films directed by Cassavetes: Husbands (1970), The Killing Of A Chinese Bookie (1976), and Opening Night (1977). He also co-starred with Cassavetes' wife in the 1985 TV movie An Early Frost, in which they played the parents of a man (Aidan Quinn) dying of AIDS. They later both appeared in the 2002 TV film Hysterical Blindness. Gazzara was nominated for an Emmy Award for both films, and he won for the second one.
Gazzara also starred in two films directed by Peter Bogdanovich, Saint Jack (1979) and the troubled They All Laughed (1981), as well as Marco Ferreri's Tales Of Ordinary Madness (1981), the film that inspired Kael to compare him favorably to an armadillo, in which he played a fictionalized version of Charles Bukowski several years before Mickey Rourke inherited the franchise. Later on, he appeared in David Mamet's The Spanish Prisoner (1997); Vincent Gallo's Buffalo '66 (1998); the Coen brothers' The Big Lebowski (1998), in which he spoofed his own ominousness as the flesh peddler Jackie Treehorn, famous for treating objects as if they were women; Todd Solondz's Happiness (1998); Spike Lee's Summer Of Sam (1999); John McTiernan's 1999 remake of The Thomas Crown Affair (1999); and Lars von Trier's Dogville (2003), along with a great many other films, many of them in Italian. Bad movie fans may know him best as the bad guy in Road House (1990), one of two films that earned him Razzie Award nominations. (The other was the 1982 Moonie military epic Inchon.) He had been known to suggest that it was probably his most-seen performance.
His Broadway credits include Michael V. Gazzo's A Hatful Of Rain in 1955, a revival of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1976, and Eugene O'Neill's two-character, near-monologue play Hughie, double-billed with Duet, in 1975; each of these performances earned him a Tony nomination. His last stage appearance was in a 2006 production of Clifford Odets' Awake and Sing!

Three Cane Whale – Three Cane Whale (2011)

2012-02-03T19:25:00.004+01:00

Three Cane Whale are a multi-instrumental trio from Bristol with a fresh, innovative approach to music. The band consists of Alex Vann, from acoustic four-piece Spiro (mandolin, bowed psaltery, music box), Pete Judge from jazz masterminds Get The Blessing (trumpet, harmonium, lyre, glockenspiel) and Paul Bradley (acoustic guitar), who is largely responsible for the category defying Bristol band, Organelles. Together, they’ve created Three Cane Whale.

The album is as individual as every other project the trio are involved in. A collection of acoustic delights, where delicate themes plucked out on music box and lyre, mere seconds long, give way to soaring combinations of guitar, mandolin and trumpet.

Little Caesar (1931)

2012-02-03T14:12:00.002+01:00

The ambitious criminal Rico moves from the country to the big city in the east and joins Sam Vettori's gang with his friend Joe Massara. Sooner he becomes the leader of the gangsters and known as Little Caesar, and gets closer to the great mobster Pete Montana. In a robbery of a night-club, he kills the Crime Commissioner Alvin McClure and his pal Joe witnesses the murder. When Rico orders Joe to leave his mistress Olga Strassoff, she takes a serious decision

Shearwater – Animal Joy (2012)

2012-02-03T14:08:00.005+01:00

Thanks God that Shearwater’s Jonathan Meiburg chose this particular moment to release his band’s eighth album, Animal Joy. Always one for hyper-literate prose, meticulous production, and ambitious concepts, Meiburg’s songwriting is in many ways the antidote to America’s current obsession with bedroom recording projects; the questions posed by Shearwater are weighty ones, and often the answers lie in places well beyond the solitary confines of a studio apartment. Indeed, you’re unlikely to find another band in 2012 that can navigate between volatile theatrics and startling intimacy with such deftness. Dude can conjure dreamy ambience as well as anyone, but the real joy of a Shearwater record is how even the most ethereal atmospheres retain an air of effervescence and immediacy.

Purportedly a step removed from the richly decorated prog-rock leanings of the band’s “Island Arc” trilogy (2006’s Palo Santo, 2008’s Rook, and 2010’s The Golden Archipelago), Shearwater’s Animal Joy exhibits a welcomed touch of minimalism while still concerning itself with many of Meiburg’s existential burdens. Bound together thematically by metaphors and symbolism concerning the ephemeral nature of the world’s fauna, the record finds Meiburg veering between enervated lamentations and paeans to doggedness as a Spoon-like prudence surfaces in the instrumental arrangements.

The Twilight Sad – No One Can Ever Know (2012)

2012-02-03T14:04:00.003+01:00

Bearing the uncertain honour of an ‘anti-production’ credit from Andrew Weatherall (it means general pre-recording guidance, it seems), this second album from The Twilight Sad is a surprising and substantial progression. The washes of epic, wind-tunnel guitar and richly Scots-accented vocals from singer James Graham remain (‘Not Sleeping’ is one of the few restful pieces on the record), but otherwise the discovery of post-punk and synthesisers appears to have lent a more heart-shredding, austere edge. Witness the churning Krautrock of ‘Dead City’, the glacial and monolithic ‘Nil’ and the air-punching choral highlight of ‘Don’t Look at Me’. It’s what you might call, we suspect, a definite grower – and perhaps a worthy Mercury contender nearer the time?

Lazarus and the Plane Crash

2012-02-02T11:04:00.000+01:00

Lazarus and The Plane Crash – Horseplay (2012)

2012-02-02T10:58:00.005+01:00

Lazarus and the Plane Crash is a project fronted by Joe Coles of defunct berserkers The Guillotines and Stephen Coates, aka the Real Tuesday Weld aka The Clerkenwell Kid.

Horseplay, whose oversized packaging folds out into a ouija board, is a peripatetic, eclectic magpie’s nest of styles, with Coles alternating between a badass Beefheartian blues rasp and a more courtly Cole Porter diction, while Coates provides an alluring cut-and-paste backing of vintage found sounds.

Adam Arcuragi – Like a fire that consumes all before it… (2012)

2012-02-02T10:55:00.005+01:00

This isn’t groundbreaking music: You can hear Bruce Springsteen here, 16 Horsepower there, and some dark, gospel-infused folk along the way. But it’s all so full of soul, so unadorned; it’s a sound that always feels as if it’s reaching toward the sky. The music seems bigger than it is.
Out Jan. 31, Like a Fire That Consumes All Before It… is Arcuragi’s third full-length album and, like 2009′s I Am Become Joy, it features his fine band The Lupine Chorale Society. I’ve heard Arcuragi refer to this music as “Death Gospel” — a term that certainly implies darkness — but a passionate infusion of Southern roots music helps make Like a Fire seem lighter than expected. With his poetic preaching and rousing choruses, Arcuragi crafts songs of community, with music that binds.

Elephant Micah – Louder Than Thou (2012)

2012-02-01T23:15:00.005+01:00

Much like Iron & Wine is synonymous with project leader Samuel Beam and Bon Iver is with Justin Vernon, Elephant Micah is with Joseph O’Connell. For over ten years, O’Connell has been recording mostly at home under the moniker, striking a chord with many listeners but not as large a fan base as Iron & Wine or Bon Iver. That may not change with Elephant Micah’s new EPLouder Than Thou released through O’Connell’s own label, Product of Palmyra, but it’s likely to spark interest and turn some heads previously unaware of O’Connell’s talent.
Louder Than Thou implies a booming sound, but it’s mostly a quiet, acoustic affair. Though Elephant Micah is largely O’Connell’s solo project, many of his friends round out the band with additional instrumentation – some guitar strumming, light percussion, occasional keyboards and saxophone – and though they’re never loud sonically, the songs’ messages speak high volumes. O’Connell’s songs deal in somber metaphors and pained reflections on choices made. Even when the songs take upbeat turns as in “My Cousin’s King”, thematically it remains tragic. On “If I Were A Surfer”, O’Connell sings, Let the old rhythm end / I’ll start all over again as he laments choices he’s made.

Tindersticks – The Something Rain (2012)

2012-02-01T20:01:00.004+01:00

...Ledledledled...Nisu napravili ovako dobar album od Simple Pleasure...

Tindersticks release their new album “the something rain” in February 2012.

Recorded between May 2010 and August 2011, it comprises nine songs.

They have gradually grown into a tight five piece band, utilising the riches of a great extended family of musicians.

There are the usual collaborators here – Terry Edwards (saxophone) and Andy Nice (cello, soprano sax) – and on “The Something Rain” they are also joined by: Thomas Bloch (crystal bachet), Gina Foster (vocals) Julian Siegel (bass clarinet, tenor saxophone) and Will Wilde (chromatic harmonica).

Through this period of change, tindersticks enjoyed the support of Beggars Banquet/4AD. In their recent parting with the label, they left behind what had become a comfortable space for making music. In its place within the studio there was, in Staples’ words,”a new creative edginess around, and a determination.”

“The Something Rain” was recorded in bursts over approximately a year, from May 2010 to August 2011 and mixed in September-October 2011. It was a time of experimentation, of searching and honing down a shape and sound. Of the twenty or so ideas they set out with, nine songs became the final album.

CANINES-Willful Feelings

2012-02-01T14:00:00.003+01:00

Willful Feelings from CANINES on Vimeo.

Horrid Red – Celestial Joy (2012)

2012-02-01T13:54:00.005+01:00

Horrid Red is an offshoot of Teenage Panzerkorps, consisting of Bunker Wolf, Edmund Xavier, and Catholic Pat & Clay Ruby (Burial Hex). Horrid Red explore the dusty corners of dark post-punk music ...
Celestial Joy is a wholly enjoyable, barely poppy, and somewhat horrifying trip into a world of low fidelity, danceable darkness. It’s your entire dusty, goth/art-rock record collection cued onto a shitty boombox and told to all play at once, Zaireeka style–with a dude yelling atop it all in German.

Though some of the lo-fi sounds are harsher than they are sugary, there’s a lot more new wave goodness to be had than the pure post-punk or industrial obscurity they list to emulate. A lot of the record’s instrumentation shimmers and lulls, rather than stabs and batters. Sure, at times frontman Bunker Wolf attains a Mark E. Smith level snarl (albeit in Deutsch), which gives the record a nice, angry kick. But overall, it’s equal parts danceable 80s new wave, John Maus lo-res, Casiotone pop, and post-punk melded into a slow-burning new wave nightmare.
“Forever Is Too Long”, for instance, is an 8-bit, lo-fi, punked-out take on The Cure’s “Love Song”, fit with with humming organ synth and delicate acoustic guitars, only sharpened by the onset of drone-y bass synths and Wolf’s angry ranting. “Marble Staircase Part III” features languid, shimmering guitars juxtaposed with digital hi-hat and industrial trash can banging and metallic gun cocking, all shrouded in the record’s perpetual haze of lo-fi impenetrability.

Eternity and a Day (1998), Theo Angelopoulos

2012-01-31T19:55:00.003+01:00

Theo Angelopoulos (Reconstruction) directed this 1998 Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or winner about a famed author nearing the end of his life. Alexander (Bruno Ganz) lives in his old seaside family home near Thessaloniki, but his daughter and son-in-law plan to sell the house, slightly damaged by an earthquake. Seriously ill, Alexander thinks if he checks himself into the hospital, he'll never check out. Awash in nostalgia, he recalls his late wife, Anna (Isabelle Renauld), seen in flashback, and he lets his daughter read a letter her mother had written to him right after her birth. Alexander's current project involves completing the last unfinished work of a 19th-century poet, but he puts that aside in order to spend time finding a home for his dog. Since his son-in-law won't take the dog, Alexander gives it to his servant. After rescuing an Albanian boy (Achileas Skevis) from a gang that sells children to wealthy Greeks who can't adopt legally, Alexander intends to return the youth to his grandmother in Albania. However, the child lied, and Alexander is unaware the boy has no grandmother. The old man and the boy set forth on a journey, and the other bus passengers include several musicians and the 19th-century poet (Fabrizio Bentivoglio). Bruno Ganz was dubbed into Greek for this Greek-French-Italian co-production.

Leonard Cohen – Old Ideas (2012)

2012-01-31T19:50:00.003+01:00

It’s difficult, albeit a little ill-mannered, not to regard Old Ideas as possibly Leonard Cohen’s final recorded testament. There’s a distinct valedictory tone to his customary musings upon life, love and the spirit, with one track titled “Amen” and another “The Darkness”. But if it is to be his last communiqué, at least the old smoothie’s going down swinging.
The higher concerns are continued in “Come Healing”, whose hymnal tone reflects a desire for both physical and spiritual healing: “Come healing of the reason, come healing of the heart”. It’s an obvious heir of sorts to “Hallelujah”, although given that that song was as much about waning potency as anything, a more apt successor may be “Show Me The Place”, a heartfelt plea for the restoration of desire: “Show me the place I’ve forgotten I don’t know”. Likewise, in “Crazy to Love You”, Cohen admits to the wearisome duty of love: “I’m tired of chasing desire, I’m saved by a blessed fatigue.”

Devendra Banhart's Love-In for Oliver Peoples

2012-01-30T10:39:00.001+01:00

"Get in the bathtub! Be together!" Those were the orders given to Devendra Banhart and his girlfriend Rebecca Schwartz for today's exclusive film, the director's cut of a new campaign for eyewear company Oliver Peoples shot by photographer Lisa Eisner. In homage to French New Wave classics like Godard's Une Femme Mariée, Eisner was determined to cast a real-life couple with genuine chemistry, to create "infatuated cant-keep-your-hands-off-each-other moments." Psych-folk polyglot Banhart and his set designer paramour happily obliged, their liaison unfolding on staircases and shag carpets in the Rainbow House, architect John Lautner's 1961 Los Angeles masterpiece. The Venezuelan-born Banhart's Spanish serenade "Brindo" (from 2009's What Will We Be; a new album is in the works) sets the mood for love, a topic he mused on when we rang him up in LA yesterday morning. "The last lyrics are 'the only thing open right now is the hospital'—there's something weirdly beguiling and beautiful about that. But the majority of the song is about: 'I'm going to say a toast to this person who has given me a reason to drink joyfully.' And she's definitely that person," he says of his girlfriend.

Nedelja Vece...

2012-01-29T19:44:00.004+01:00

The Whiskers - 08/13/2011 - Flying Squirrel Community Space - Rochester, NY from Awkwardcore Records on Vimeo.

Nedelja popodne...

2012-01-29T15:34:00.000+01:00

Damien Jurado – Maraqopa (2012)

2012-01-29T14:31:00.006+01:00

Damien Jurado’s newest collaboration with producer Richard Swift drops us into a brutal and benevolent landscape. The bold strokes and new turns the pair made with 2010′s Saint Bartlett are taken even further. He throws open the gate on his oft insular dirges and allows them do some real wilding out in the canyon. In Maraqopa, the vistas are miles-wide; the action is more dynamic; the close-ups sweaty and snarling. The strummed desert blues that begin “Nothing is the News” quickly bursts open into an Eddie Hazel-worthy supernova shred session, all of it swirling in tinny-psych and Echoplex’d howls. We’ve never heard anything like this from Jurado. Fifteen years into his remarkable career, and he continues to blossom. Jurado and Swift establish themselves not only as inventive, trusting collaborators, but as one another’s spirit animals in American outsider songcraft –lone wolves in black sheep’s clothing. Swift is the Ennio Morricone to Jurado’s Sergio Leone.

Shearwater – Animal Joy Demos (2012) EP

2012-01-29T14:26:00.002+01:00

Magicno... Uvek

Mark Lanegan – Blues Funeral (2012)

2012-01-25T13:50:00.003+01:00

...Princ Of Darkness Is Back...Kakav Album!!!

Mark Lanegan Band releases Blues Funeral on February 6th 2012, Lanegan’s first album since 2004’s Bubblegum. It was recorded in Hollywood, California with Alain Johannes and features guest appearances from the likes of Josh Homme, Greg Dulli and Jack Irons
‘The Gravedigger’s Song’ will be released as a 7” backed with a new version of ‘Burning Jacob’s Ladder’, a song which briefly featured in a trailer for the Rage video game in early 2011. The 7” will be issued on coloured vinyl and available from January 2nd.

Animal Kingdom (2010), David Michôd

2012-01-24T18:49:00.002+01:00

A youngster is given an inside look at a criminal empire that also happens to be his family in this independent drama. Teenage Joshua Cody (James Frecheville) is suddenly on his own after his mother's drug habit catches up with her, and he's taken in by his grandmother Smurf (Jacki Weaver), usually regarded as the black sheep of the family. Joshua quickly learns Smurf's reputation is well deserved; she and her four sons are members of a mid-level crime syndicate that operates out of her home in Melbourne. Baz (Joel Edgerton) looks after the money and is urging Smurf to move into something legit, Pope (Ben Mendelsohn) is a criminal jack-of-all-trades who never lets go of a grudge, Darren (Luke Ford) is an enforcer with an unfortunate weak streak, and Craig (Sullivan Stapleton) is a drug dealer who has become addicted to his own product. When Baz is murdered, the family's voice of reason is gone, and the unstable Pope takes the lead in the family's hierarchy; as suspicions fall on Joshua, the quiet newcomer is moved out of the house to keep him safe. Nathan Leckie (Guy Pearce) is a police detective who has found out who Joshua is and what he knows, and he tries to convince the teenager to help him put the Cody family behind bars, though Joshua isn't certain about his loyalties to these outlaws who are also his blood. The first feature film from director David Michod, Animal Kingdom was an official selection at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, where it received the World Cinema Jury Prize for Best Dramatic Feature.

Perfume Genius - 'Hood'

2012-01-24T14:46:00.000+01:00

From the upcoming album 'Put Your Back N 2 It' out Feb 20 (UK)/Feb 21 (US).

Xiu Xiu - Hi

2012-01-24T14:45:00.000+01:00

Xiu Xiu – Always (2012)

2012-01-23T11:33:00.005+01:00

...Zajebano Sjebano I Lepo...

Wonderfully and schizophrenically aggressive post-punk band Xiu Xiu will be releasing Always on March 6th, and the tracklist for said album is out. As per usual, some of the titles of the songs are controversial (e.g. “Factory Girls” or “I Luv Abortion”). Xiu Xiu, of course, wouldn’t engage in controversy without reasonable explanations; “Factory Girls” is really about the “sexual objectification and desperate existence of Chinese female migrant workers,” and “I Luv Abortion” is about the “resolute heartache of a friend too young to be pregnant.” A vinyl version will also be dropped, and it will include a poster of Xiu Xiu tattoos.

the album ALWAYS will be released on February 28th in Europe/UK by Bella Union Records & on March 6th in thee rest of the earth by PolyVinyl Records.
Always will be released on white 180 gram vinyl and there will be 500 limited edition copies of translucent pink 180 gram vinyl available via Polyvinyl mailorder

Nedelja Vece...

2012-01-22T19:47:00.004+01:00

Nedelja popodne...

2012-01-22T16:00:00.000+01:00

Fanny and Elvis (1999), Kay Mellor

2012-01-22T13:02:00.003+01:00

British TV screenwriter Kay Mellor debuts with this quirky screwball comedy. The film opens with romance novelist Kate (Kerry Fox) crashing her VW bug into the gleaming Jaguar of car salesman Dave (Ray Winstone), resulting in an insult-barbed screamfest. They both enter the same pub, where they learn that Kate's husband is leaving her for Dave's young buxom wife (his third). The distraught Kate seeks solace and cheer from Andrew (Ben Daniels), her gay actor friend and housemate. When Dave's wife changes the locks, he cuts a deal with Kate, who still intensely dislikes the man: if he can stay in her spare room, she can forget about the outlandishly high bill to repair his damaged Jag. Soon, of course, love blooms when Kate realizes that Dave is no mere car salesman: he is a loving father to his six kids from previous marriages and an avid reader of the classics. Things seem peachy until Dave mysteriously disappears. Fanny and Elvis was screened at the 1999 Dinard Film Festival.

Snowtown (2011), Justin Kurzel

2012-01-22T12:58:00.004+01:00

A harrowing account of the true crime story that shocked Australia, Justin Kurzel's Snowtown follows an impressionable teenager as he falls under the spell of a charismatic serial killer and gets hopelessly drawn into a vicious cycle of violence and murder. Single mother Elizabeth Harvey (Louise Harris) lives in a cramped house in the northern suburbs of Adelaide with her three young sons. When Elizabeth's current boyfriend reveals himself to be a pedophile, charismatic newcomer John Bunting (Daniel Henshall) drives him out of the neighborhood while laying on the charm, and in the process he captures the attention of her teenage son Jamie (Lucas Pittaway). But as Jamie gets closer to John, he learns that the amiable stranger's quick smile masks a dark secret.

Justin Robinson and the Mary Annettes – Bones For Tinder (2012)

2012-01-22T12:54:00.005+01:00

Justin Robinson was a founding member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, an outfit steeped in the traditions of Piedmont bluegrass, though willing, on occasion, to interpret a contemporary tune in old-time style. One of only two known contemporary all-black string bands, Carolina Chocolate Drops paid tribute to a once-vibrant, now nearly forgotten tradition of African-American strumming and picking. The band won a Grammy in 2010 for Genuine Negro Jig, an album that Blurt called “a rollicking polemic”. Robinson left the Chocolate Drops in 2011, seeking, according to his website, to break out of the traditional folk mold and explore other musical styles and genres.

Demetra – Lone Migration (2012)

2012-01-22T12:51:00.003+01:00

Winnipeg-based traveller, visual artist and yoga instructor Demetra (full name: Demetra Penner) explores Northern landscapes and the hardships of love on her debut full-length.
It’s a spacious, slow album propelled by piano and guitars, with hints of folk, classical and pop influences and decorated with banjo, mandolin, autoharp, ukulele and strings. Good thing there’s space, because Penner’s soaring soprano – the kind that can be mistaken for “intimate” and “diminutive” before she shows her power – is clearly the star.
The swaying, oceanic lullabies are a lovely falling-asleep soundtrack (she even references waking from dreams in the intro of Hunt & Gather), but I prefer her livelier side, revealed on Hey Stranger and Maiden Of Ice. Also cool is Nikki Komaksiutiksak’s throat-singing on Arctic Sea.

Charlotte Gainsbourg – Stage Whisper (2CD/2011)

2012-01-20T18:36:00.007+01:00

Charlotte Gainsbourg will release her new album ‘Stage Whisper’ through Because Music on 7th November. A double album of live and unreleased studio tracks, it will be the follow up to the critically acclaimed ‘IRM’ album, which came out in January 2010. ‘Stage Whisper’s studio material features collaborations with Beck, Conor O’Brien of Villagers, Noah and the Whale and Connan Mockasin. A new EP entitled ‘Terrible Angels’ will be released on 5th September. Available on vinyl and CD, the EP features two unreleased studio tracks, two live recordings and two videos.

The Hunt for Red October (1990),John McTiernan

2012-01-20T18:33:00.003+01:00

The first of several films based on Tom Clancy's "Jack Ryan" technothrillers, Hunt for Red October stars Alec Baldwin as eccentric CIA analyst Ryan and Sean Connery as Soviet submarine commander Marko Ramius. Ramius sets the plot in motion when he murders his political adviser, burns his orders, and steers his sub Red October towards American waters, hoping to defect. The CIA, aware that the Red October was about to embark on an evasive mission to demonstrate its ability to avoid detection and fire its nuclear missiles upon U.S. installations, believes that Ramius is insane, and that he plans to start World War III. To cover their own behinds, the Russians back up the CIA's suspicion. Only Jack Ryan believes that Ramius' mission is not as apocalyptic as it seems -- and it is Ryan who is assigned to infiltrate the Red October to prove his theory. The sort of film that in an earlier era would have been called a "thinking man's thriller," The Hunt for Red October ushered in a new series of Hollywood-produced post-Cold War adventure films, including 1995's Crimson Tide.

Kafka (1991), Steven Soderbergh

2012-01-20T18:24:00.004+01:00

Steve Soderbergh did a 180 degree turnaround from his debut film sex, lies, and videotape with Kafka, a stark art-film fable for literature majors. Jeremy Irons plays a fictional Franz Kafka, living in Prague in 1919. By day, Kafka works in a massive, impersonal insurance company. At night, he spends his time alone writing stories about men who turn into giant cockroaches. Although quiet and solitary, he becomes a suspect in a murder investigation conducted by Inspector Grubach (Armin Mueller-Stahl) when a friend of his turns up dead. Rather than being harassed by Grubach, Kafka decides to investigate his friend's murder on his own. Kafka speaks to his dead friend's girlfriend, Gabriela (Theresa Russell) and talks with gravestone carver Bizzlebek (Jeroen Krabbe). Kafka follows the clues to the Castle, a menacing tower that casts its shadow over the city and houses files on everything. He winds his way through the cellars and tunnels of the Castle, where he encounters the evil and insidious Dr. Murnau (Ian Holm), whom he hopes holds the solution to the murder.

Moonrise Kingdom, Wes Anderson-Trailer (2012)

2012-01-20T14:08:00.001+01:00

Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory ( Berlinger, Sinofsky, 2011)

2012-01-20T12:29:00.004+01:00

On May 5, 1993, three eight-year-old boy scouts -- Stevie Branch, Michael Moore and Christopher Byers -- were found dead. One month later, three teenagers -- Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley -- were arrested for the murders, despite a lack of evidence. They spent 18 years in prison for a crime they didn't commit, before being released in August 2011 after taking the Alford Plea deal offered to them.
Filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky chronicled the West Memphis Three's 1993 arrests and their sentencing in the 1996 HBO film, "Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills" and a 2000 sequel. The third and final installment of the "Paradise Lost" trilogy, "Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory," premiered on Jan. 12, 2012.

Jason Baldwin, who was just 16 years old when he was arrested and sentenced to life in prison, never gave up hope. He believed that everything would work itself out. Little did he know, however, it would take 18 years to do so.

Baldwin sat down with The Huffington Post's Crystal Bell and went back to 1993, when he was first convicted, and revealed the tremendous impact the documentaries have had on his life in prison.
You have to believe that the system is going to work the way it's supposed to work because if you don't think it will, that means that you can't have hope, and if you can't have hope, then you can't have faith in the system. If the faith in the system and the hope in the system is not there, then why have the system?
I was thinking that things were going to work out right because at the time of the murders, I was with my family. I was cutting my uncle's yard, I was hanging out with my friend after cutting the yard, spending some of the money playing video games at Walmart. There was a guy there watching me play video games. I didn't even know the guy, but he was just waiting his turn. He was willing to testify to that effect. Then, I went to a friend's house and bought a cassette. I talked to my girlfriend on the phone and ate dinner and saw my brothers and my mom's boyfriend. Just normal things that you do, those are the things that I was doing that day. I wasn't out murdering anybody.
When I got arrested, I was telling the police these things, and they just will not listen. It's like I'm speaking a foreign language that they don't understand ... that was infuriating.
And then I get attorneys appointed to me, and it was real hard to talk to them about it too because they're saying, "Well, what about Damien? He's into the Wicca and what's all this Metallica stuff?" And I'm like, "So what?" This is America. We have the freedom of choice. We have the freedom of religion. We have freedom.
That doesn't have anything to do with these boys being murdered because I remember when they were murdered. My youngest brother Terry was just nine years old. My other brother Matthew was 14. I was 16. The next day, when we heard about it, my mom didn't go to work. She stayed at the house to make sure that we weren't going to go anywhere. She was frightened. Somebody was out there killing kids, and my youngest brother is a kid the same age.
We were terrified, so for them to pick us up and arrest us was just crazy. But I had faith that it was going to work out because my family was going to testify for me because if you're here doing these things with your family, you can't be out there doing what they say.
So when the trial comes about, somehow or another, my family isn't even called to testify. I don't even know how that happened or why it didn't happen, so I had no defense.
Joe [Berlinger, one of the "Paradise Lost" filmmakers] was able to see things that I wasn't able to see because I was in the jail. My family took great pains to shield me from what was being said before the trial, to protect me. I didn't know all the madness that they were going through out there.
It was just the scariest thing in the world, to be helpless and powerless to do anything, but I had hope. I knew I was right, and I just knew things would work out.
When I first got to prison, everybody there had been watching the stuff on the news, and they had seen the trial and all the bad stuff that they were saying. They had this wrong idea of who we were. They thought we were child killers. That's the worst of the worst in prison, so they were waiting on me. I'm 16. I turned 17 in prison, and I had every birthday since then -- all the way to my 34th birthday -- in prison. So when I get there, they were waiting on me all of the time.
I got my collarbone broke[n], my skull shattered, and I have all these types of scars in my eyes. I mean, I can't even count the number of fights I was in with people.
But, you know, the documentaries came out, and after I was there for awhile, all of that changed, from punches and kicks and curses to hugs and prayers. When I left prison, the whole prison was literally weeping with joy, from the inmates to the guards to the staff, just everybody.
I took the last of my commissary money, and I told them to cash it in and get ice cream for everyone. I was walking down the hall, hugging people and getting congratulations, and I was like, "Stop at the commissary because there's ice cream waiting for you!"
Mr. Baldwin is currently living in Seattle, where he recently moved into a new apartment. Since being released from prison in 2011, he also recently got his driver's license, a milestone that he had to put on hold for 18 years.

The Descendants (Alexander Payne, 2011)

2012-01-20T12:24:00.003+01:00

From Alexander Payne, the creator of the Oscar-winning Sideways, set in Hawaii, The Descendants is a sometimes humorous, sometimes tragic journey for Matt King (George Clooney) an indifferent husband and father of two girls, who is forced to re-examine his past and embrace his future when his wife suffers a boating accident off of Waikiki. The event leads to a rapprochement with his young daughters while Matt wrestles with a decision to sell the family's land handed down from Hawaiian royalty and missionaries.

Kate i zimski san

2012-01-20T02:08:00.000+01:00

KATE BUSH-50 WORDS FOR SNOW

Sharon Van Etten – Tramp (2012)

2012-01-18T12:39:00.003+01:00

Serpents is the first single off of Tramp, Sharon Van Etten's Jagjaguwar debut.

The shimmering sound of Tramp both defies and illuminates the unsteadiness of a life in flux. During the 14 months of scattered recording sessions, Sharon Van Etten was without a home - crashing with friends and spreading out her possessions between various locations. The only constant during this time was when Van Etten returned to the garage studio of The National's Aaron Dessner.

The resulting album is an assured and strident one, and Tramp showcases an artist in control of her powers, incorporating vivid arrangements and instrumentation into the songwriting. It is a startling collection, filled with as much defiant rock as pious, minimal beauty. There are declarative hymns and remarkably sultry numbers. Tramp features many stupendous guests, as well, including Wye Oak's Jenn Wasner, Julianna Barwick, and Beirut's Zach Condon, and Dessner himself.