roller roller skate

I love rollerskating jams. One of my favorite singles of '09 is this odd Matias Aguayo tune called "Rollerskate." Like Bjork's Medulla album, everything is constructed purely out of vocal effects. It has a swaying, grooving vibe that will make you feel dizzy.

Here's something circa '79:

"...its going to be brown, feathered hair, wood paneling 80’s"

Great House of the Devil interview with director Ti West & actress Jocelin Donahue on Brutal as Hell.

Read my review here.

the outsider

Martin Provost's film about the French painter Séraphine de Senlis is one of 2009's overlooked gems that came and went in the indie theaters. Yolande Moreau is astonishing in the lead role. Like the film itself, it's authentic, non-showy. She is well-matched by Ulrich Tukur who plays Wilhelm Uhde, the closeted art critic who discovers her and Rosseau among others. Their relationship in the film is a complicated beautiful friendship.

Loving and slow (with plenty of long takes and blackouts), the film is one of the best depictions of an artist on film. I was reminded of Schnabel's leisurely-paced Before Night Falls which depicted the saga of another doomed artist (the Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas). I thought too of Ed Harris's Pollock. Wishing it had stuck to Lee Krasner's point of view (it's no wonder Marcia Gay Harden won an Oscar for that role), I found the protagonist a frustrating character to follow.

Here, the picture is truthful and involving. Towards the end, when much of her work is revealed, a character comments to Séraphine, "it's you." Like a bird making a nest, Séraphine goes place to place, using and creating her own materials--in the film, candle wax and chicken blood--amongst other things--to paint with.

As Séraphine slowly loses her mind and eventually ends up in a mental ward, the film stays true to her character without ever resorting to being condescending or glamorizing. After the screening, walking out the door, I was stunned by someone's reaction: "What made her go crazy? The war?" As with any good biographer, Provost doesn't provide any answers to this. There are hints all along that like the term deemed to the art movement she was a part of, that Séraphine was an outsider--climbing trees, singing and talking to herself, lonely and obsessive but enormously talented as well.

-Jeffery Berg

fine & mellow

"Fine & Mellow (My Man Don't Love Me)" performed by Billie Holiday.

underdog horror flicks

In celebration of upcoming Halloween, I thought about my Top 10 underdog horror flicks. Here are 10 oft-forgotten-about horror gems.

Tourist Trap (1979) is an enjoyable, campy film with Chuck Connors as the owner of a spooky roadside museum populated with life-like mannequins. The score by the great Pino Donaggio is one of the film's highlights.

A handful of ghost stories are told in an old farmhouse in the moody Dead of Night (1945). Naturally a ventriloquist and dummy doll figure in the creepiest one. It's an interesting, curious picture that remains influential.

Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (1987) is ridiculous 1980s horror fun. Remembered less but far and away better than its predecessor. Endearingly pays tribute to Carrie and chock full of bad 80s fashion.

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A strange film obsession of mine that will never go away. In Bert I. Gordon's Empire of the Ants (1977) a group of prospective buyers of phony Florida real estate are attacked by menacing giant ants. And all of it is played straight. Pamela Susan Shoop utters one of the better lines: "they're herding us like cattle!"

The Boss's sister, Pamela Springsteen is winning as the tormented camp counselor Angela in Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers (1988). The original is a favorite as well.

Much more well-known now with no thanks to its terrible remake, Black Christmas (1974) still holds up well as a slick, creepy phone-caller-is-in-the-house horror film. Margot Kidder's performance and the film's ending are both bizarre.

Unlucky passerbys are dead meat in the bizzaro pro-vegetarian horror film Motel Hell (1980). Over-the-top but very unnerving.

William Castle's The Tingler (1959) is pretty avant-garde for B-horror movie standards. A "metafilm" with audience participation gags, literal shocks and some trippy sequences. Somewhat uneven but Vincent Price is magnetic.

Malevolence came and went in 2004. It's pretty dark, and the plot is somewhat preposterous but it delivers good scares.

Similar to The Fly, The Alligator People (1959) is another fun entry in the science-gone-wrong genre of the 1950s. Scream queen Beverly Garland at her best.

What are some of your underrated horror flicks?

don't carry me back to ole virginny

If you haven't watched your dvred episode of Sunday night's Mad Men, stop reading, but those who have ... remember who got fired this week?

Joe. My. God. posted a clip from a debate between Creigh Deeds and Bob McDonnell. McDonnell flat-out says he would overturn Mark Warner's order banning discrimination against hiring on the basis of sexual orientation.

I am outraged that McDonnell would want to revert his state back to the Mad Men era. There has been a lot of griping about Obama's slow movement to change LGBT issues. Yet there is a lot happening at local levels that could have devastating consequences for the community. I hope my home state will turn out for Deeds, but so far, McDonnell, flush with money and an admittedly effective moderate makeover, is in the lead.

night of the living dead - unintentionally subversive

In the mood for Halloween, I re-watched Romero's film. It's still an unsettling, bleak film--tightly edited and shot in crisp black & white. The no-name, but talented cast and shoestring budget add to the creepy atmosphere.

It's watershed horror, the peak of drive-in cinema, with a nod to films like Hitchcock's The Birds. In comparison to other horror movies, like the Universal monster series, Dead is grimier and grittier. Instead of lavish designs, the farmhouse was furnished with items from Goodwill. One of the actresses, Barbra Eastman, contributed to the make-up. Throughout the shoot, the cast helped carry equipment and lights.

In recent years, zombies have become more comic. They are played straight here with some comic effect, but each one, slowly creeping about the front yard, has a memorable uniqueness.

Two performers whose lives were cut at a young age haunt the film. Duane Jones is effective as the film's hero. Merely a truck driver passing through (a la Lilies of the Field), he fights for his own life but also for the group of strangers he's stuck with. Jones's Ben is a complicated character, originally written--as Romero terms it--as "colorless." The nihilistic ending has given rise to subtext about racial politics and violence in America (Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in the year of the film's release). Jones distanced himself from the film's acclaim and popularity, devoting his life to theatre and teaching. I wonder about (and secretly sort of understand) the reasons for his aloofness. In a supporting role as Tom, Keith Wayne has become a sort of a cult film figure. It's his lone film role.

Perhaps why this film has lasted so long as a horror touchstone, is the subtext that historians and audiences have applied to the film. It's still difficult not to compare the grim news footage of Vietnam with some of the scenes in Dead. And despite Romero's intentions, the racial issues that one could apply to the film, is hard to ignore, especially since Dead was released during an era of social pictures (In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner). Romero seemed to force sociological issues in his subsequent works, especially Dawn of the Dead. By being unintentionally subversive, Living Dead remains one of the most remarkably unique films of its time.

-Jeffery Berg