Continuing with the film director-musician theme, here's Jim Jarmusch's band.
"At that time everyone in New York had a band," Jarmusch recalled in an interview The Washington Post. "The idea was that you didn't have to be a virtuoso musician to have a band. The spirit was more important than having technical expertise, and that influenced a lot of filmmakers."
Without any announcement Blogger/Google has removed my Yann Tiersen post. It must be illegal to provide a link then.. Bastards. Well, let's do it via themselves.
Yann Tiersen - Dust Lane (2010): (It's the second result.)
Garth Marenghi's Darkplace (2004) is a British comedy show made for Channel 4. The show revolves around fictional horror author Garth Marenghi and his publisher Dean Learner. Darkplace is presented as a lost classic: a television series produced in the 1980s, though never broadcast at the time. Darkplace's fictional show-within-a-show includes deliberately poor production and special effects, sub-par acting, and storylines that are severely flawed and open-ended.
Features Mighty Boosh's Noel Fielding and Julian Barrat.
I, got a script, read it. Scared me senseless, comme d'habitudes. And I said to Garth, I looked straight into his face, I've never been afraid of holding a man's gaze - it's natural. I said: "This is going to be the most significant televisual event since Quantum Leap."
The doors of Darkplace were open. Not the literal doors of the building, most of which were closed. But evil doors. Dark doors. Doors, to the beyond. Doors that were hard to shut because they were abstract and didn't have handles.
Narcissus and Goldmund is considered Hermann Hesse's literary triumph. The main theme of the book is the wanderer's struggle to find himself.
Goldmund, a young man, is filled with the desire to experience everything, learn about life and nature in his own hands-on way. With his friend's support, he leaves his monastery and wanders around the countryside, setting the scene for a story that contrasts the artist with the thinker.
Solaris (1961) ★★★★
Solaris, by Stanisław Lem, is a Polish science fiction novel about the ultimate inadequacy of communication between human and non-human species. Solaris is pervaded by a powerful, poetic sense of the physical remoteness of outer space. The sense of loneliness that this engenders is among Lem’s philosophic explorations of man’s anthropomorphic limitations.
Cien años de soledad (1967) ★★★★
One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez, is the multi-generational story of the Buendía Family, whose patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, founds the town of Macondo, the metaphoric Colombia. The magical realist style and thematic substance of One Hundred Years of Solitude established it as an important, representative novel of the literary Latin American Boom of the 1960s and 1970s.
A dominant theme in One Hundred Years of Solitude is the inevitable and inescapable repetition of history in Macondo. The protagonists are controlled by their pasts and the complexity of time. The fate of Macondo is both doomed and predetermined from its very existence.
Running with Scissors (2002) ★★★★
Running with Scissors is a 2002 memoir by American writer Augusten Burroughs. The book tells the story of Burroughs's bizarre childhood life.
The New York Trilogy (1985-86) ★★★
The New York Trilogy is a series of novels by Paul Auster. Originally published sequentially as City of Glass, Ghosts and The Locked Room, it has since been collected into a single volume.
The New York Trilogy is a particular form of postmodern detective fiction which still uses well-known elements of the detective novel but also creates a new form that links the traditional features of the genre with the experimental, metafictional and ironic features of postmodernism.
Chump Change ★★
A blackout brought on by a Mad Dog binge that ended with a self-inflicted steak knife wound bought Bruno Dante another stint in the nuthouse, no different from all the rest. Bruno heads back to Los Angeles for a fraught family reunion, where the tension and stress force him to dull the pain the only way he knows how — with alcohol. And when he wakes up naked in a stolen car with an underage hooker whose pimp has stolen his wallet, Bruno realizes the trip has just begun.
The book expresses the bewilderment of its hero and its author with rawness, crudeness, and shock, and also serves as a very beautiful and touching homage to Fante's famous father John Fante.
A British film about Manchester's popular music community from 1976 to 1992, and specifically about Factory Records. It begins with the punk rock era, and moves through the 1980s into the "Madchester" scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The main character is Tony Wilson, a news reporter for Granada Television and the head of Factory Records (played by Steve Coogan), and the narrative largely follows his career, while also covering the major Factory artists, especially Joy Division and New Order, A Certain Ratio, The Durutti Column, and the Happy Mondays.
The film is a dramatisation based on a combination of real events, rumours, urban legends, and the imaginations of the scriptwriter.
Written and directed by John Huston, the film stars Humphrey Bogart as private investigator Sam Spade; Mary Astor as his femme fatale client; and Peter Lorre (the creepy fellow from Fritz Lang's 'M'). The film was Huston's directorial debut and was nominated for three Academy Awards.
The story concerns a San Francisco private detective's dealings with three unscrupulous adventurers who compete to obtain a fabulous jewel-encrusted statuette of a falcon.
The Maltese Falcon has been named as one of the greatest films of all time by Roger Ebert, and was cited by Panorama du Film Noir Américain, the first major work on film noir, as the first film of that genre.
Last but not the least: the Halloween night and 3/5 of the Horrors! Spider Webb and Coffin Joe in "a freakbeat cultish supergroup" The Diddlers whose set was a selection of Bo Diddley songs. And in support Cramped (feat. Joshua Third) made their live debut with a bunch of Cramps covers.
Poliţist, Adjectiv is a 2009 Romanian drama film directed by Corneliu Porumboiu. The movie focuses on policeman Cristi, who is investigating a teenage boy who has been smoking hashish. Over time, Cristi begins to question the ethical ramifications of his task. Police, Adjective won the Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. The film was the official Romanian entry for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film at the 82nd Academy Awards. - Wikipedia
Howl is a 2010 American experimental film which explores both the Six Gallery debut and the 1957 obscenity trial of 20th century American poet Allen Ginsberg's noted poem Howl. The film is written and directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman and stars James Franco as Ginsberg. - Wikipedia
The Most Interesting Man in the World is an advertising campaign for the Dos Equis brand of beer, produced by the marketing firm Euro RSCG for Cuauhtémoc Moctezuma Brewery. The ads feature Jonathan Goldsmith as "the world's most interesting man" and are narrated by Frontline's Will Lyman. The advertisements first began appearing in the United States in 2006. -Wikipedia
These ads are almost converting me to a beer drinker.
Curious soundtrack: Angelo Badalamenti (as usual), David Bowie, Marilyn Manson, Rammstein(?!), and, during one the greatest sex scenes I have ever seen..
Like the person who posted the YouTube link, I thought it was a Cocteau Twins song. Apparently it's Tim Buckley's.
The Squid and the Whale is a 2005 American drama film written and directed by Noah Baumbach and produced by Wes Anderson. It tells the semi-autobiographical story of two boys in Brooklyn dealing with their parents' divorce in the 1980s.
The Squid and the Whale was a critical success. At the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, the film won awards for best dramatic direction and screenwriting, and was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize. Baumbach later received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay. -Wikipedia
Ivor Cutler (15 January 1923 – 3 March 2006) was a Scottish poet, songwriter and humorist. Cutler was born in Glasgow into a middle-class Jewish family of eastern European descent. He became known for his regular performances on BBC radio, and in particular his numerous sessions recorded for John Peel's influential radio programme. He appeared in the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour film in 1967. Cutler was an anti-intellectual and noted eccentric, dressing in a distinctive style including plus-fours and hats adorned with many badges. Many of Cutler's poems and songs involve conversations delivered as a monologue and, in these, one party is often Cutler as a child, a part of his intended "bypassing the intellect". Cutler recited his poems in a gentle Scottish burr, and this, combined with the absurdity of the subject matter, is a mix that earned him a faithful cult following. - Wikipedia
This is a pretty incredible film. In the sense that someone managed to make such an awful piece of shit with the cast at hand (Vincent Gallo, Christopher Walken, Benicio del Toro and a couple of guys from the Sopranos). Just unbelievable. I checked what the director had been up to after this film, surprisingly not much.. If you want to see an example how not to direct, or mainly to cut a film, watch this.
I'm probably giving this one a star too much but I think it's mainly because of the Funeral above which fucked up my grading system. At least I had no expectations for a Hugh Grant romantic comedy which, to make things worse, I watched alone in my cabin on the way from Stockholm to Turku. (Can I say on the way if I'm on a boat?) Perhaps all the cheese on board made me immune to Hugh Grant.
Have to say that I'm a sucker for this kind of fictional life story films (Forrest Gump, Big Fish.. can you recommend others?) so I understand if you don't agree with my generous amount of stars.