Watching Movies Alone with crumbsroom

Oh, and also this weird thing.

I've only seen American Movie, but I concur that it's pretty great.

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For some reason I can't see what this is but your 5 bags has me intrigued, what is it?

Hmm, can't see this one either.

Les Blank's "Hot Pepper"

The World of Gilbert and George

I dunno. I avoided it like scabies. It does seem to encapsulate the creative bankruptcy of our current 'pop culture' devolved into an endless IP recycling machine. It's a sad confirmation that the only way our current culture can compete with the past is to kill it and fake its place.

Be sure to complement this with Blank's Dry Wood, a companion overview of Creole society.

Oh, good to know. I haven't seen that one yet. Out of those I"m familiar with, they are all great, but Hot Pepper has long been my favorite. Its central figure is so compellingly emotive on stage, but so inscrutable to understand as a person. There is something both joyful and menacing about his aura. His music is incredible, even when sloppy drunk. And Blank has a knack for being utterly able to catch absolute reality, unfettered, and yet it is always cast towards fleeting moments, each of which can tell their own stories as they dance to his music. I adore this movie. And anything more about this scene/environment would be welcome.


As for Yesterday, yes, stay clear. It's exactly as bad as you would imagine it to be. But, in some ways worse. Because for a few very brief moments, it seems to flirt with something that might at least be interesting. The idea of a struggling musician who becomes in possession of histories greatest collective songbook, a perfection he can cast his own image in, and at first no one seems to really care about the quality of these songs he is coming up with. And his frustration that no one gets how great it all is. If it just stuck with this, the notion of it not really mattering how good one is, because when history and memory and culture become unstuck from the artifacts of the work created, they would no longer really matter to the vast majority of the world, it would have something tenable to work with.


But, of course, it ends up just becoming a big cock-tug Beatles sing a long, and I almost wanted to die.


It's so bad it would be worth considering the Beatles never existing just so that it couldn't.

Well, yeah, that's kind of the bottom line here. Any and all Blank is worth watching. All For Pleasure, his Mardi Gras document, is my favorite, but god damn it if he didn't also make me interested in polka culture for about the first time in my life. Music and food, folks. Les understands the essentials of life.


My understanding of the convoluted and ridiculous plot is that somehow The Beatles failed to exist but that the individual members do exist, and that Lennon makes an appearance at some point. This only exacerbates my problems with the film and its notion of creativity. As Lennon has said himself, if it wasn't for music, he wouldn't have made it, dead or in jail by 30 type of deal. He was an artist, and would have found some way to be an artist or die trying. This film, just judging by reading the synopsis, is an artistic resignation. If the individual members existed, then they were simply too creative to have not been something in any universe that they existed. The filmmakers here seem to fail to understand this very basic compulsion, and this is why the film could not have been what you wanted it to be because it's clear that this seperation of the "artifacts of the work created" and why it matters (ala the profound social and cultural influences that would have to be rewritten in its absence) is something that the filmmakers are incapable of understanding or appreciating.


When I was about 11, 12 and I was learning how to play Beatles music (they were my musical alphabet, so to speak), I would have fantasies of "what if I wrote these songs" and releasing them to great acclaim at that time. It's a properly juvenile fantasy. It's also a useless fantasy without the ensuing artistic compulsion to then, eventually, begin to actually write my own material, however inferior to the Beatles as it was bound to be. It's learning how to find your voice. Looking at the synopsis of this film, this guy doesn't have an artistic voice. That's fine, we need music teachers as well. The problem is that the film doesn't seem interested in this essential need to have artistic voices though. And maybe that's why it's so content to relegate Lennon to being OK with never achieving one despite his very essential (primal) nature to uncompromisingly develop one. I think that this is an awful message to send to any young aspirational artist, and the reason why I refuse to have any part of this extremely basic motion picture.

Redundant opinion time: The Thing is perfect.

All of this has very much to do with the pain the movie caused me. Even before I saw it. When I realized through the trailer what the concept was and how off putting it was when it comes to my understanding of what makes art matter. It's a complicated thing. And it's not simply that The Beatles wrote the best songs. It was that those guys, in those times, thinking those things, wrote those songs.



Of course I didn't expect it to wrangle anything of worth from that kind of art philosophy talk. I didn't expect anything of it. I didn't even want to be in the room with it. But those brief moments where it seemed to understand the complications and pains of being an artist, the weird relationship between performer and audience, the interference of history with the legacy of a musicians work and how it is interpreted, the essential question of 'what makes something good', made me annoyed that it was at least somewhat aware of these more difficult points, but still resolutely chose to barrel ahead being the pile of vile, supposedly feel good nonsense that it is.


It is wretched.

I read the transcript of the Lennon part, and it was awful how it shrugs all of this off. The film, as I understand it, isn't exactly championing the industry, and it's funny to have Ed Shereen as a perfectly compliant example of that empty industry. But I don't see any thoughtful concern for this cultural context. How and why culture works, and maybe even pops occasionally. It seems like a similar dissonance between The Beatles as a cultural institution and what they represent as an esoteric and creative dream to the types of religious zealotry that calcifies the institution of a stone church and ignores the spirit of mercy.

Man, this site is getting creepy. A lot of new spammers in the middle of a Monday night.

I think I just saw one in Matt's Vietnam thread, although it would have been a lot funnier if their post was right after mine.


But as Elton John once said, Monday night's alright for spamming...

I did notice that sidestep over you there. The one post that person chose to make. You're inspirational, Rock.

Oh, didn't realize that poster isn't English....the movie is Downpour.


More Criterion channel success.

I will overlook the disaster that was Gypsy '83