Crystal Castles ft. Robert Smith 'Not in Love'

UHHMMMM.

Just stumbled across this thanks to a retweet from Drowned in Sound. Reckon it's sort of like really very good. Robert Smith and Crystal Castles. Who'd have thunk it.



Crystal Castles played the last two Leeds Festivals but I wasn't allowed to watch them because my friends reminded me I'm not 17 and I'm not in Skins. I think I regret not going to watch them. I think I definitely regret going to watch Vampire Weekend instead (2009 was a dark year).

Anyway. Big fan of this. Always preferred the skanky mess of the second Crystal Castles album to the (mostly) more tightly arranged first one. Even if I'm almost 22 and was never in Skins.

It's out December 6. Apparently they're popping acoustic versions of Celestica and Suffocation on the single too. Bless 'em. Maybe they're sensitive souls after all.

(Thanks Drowned in Sound, thanks Clash)

'I'd be lost without the weight of you two on my back'

17 year old Ree (Jennifer Lawrence), the focus of Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone, doesn't have it easy. Abandoned by a feckless dad and left to look after two kid siblings and a mentally ill Mum, she's been robbed of her teenage years. If things look bad at the start of the film, as she spends long grey days chopping wood and begging neighbours for supplies, they're about to get a lot worse. A local sheriff drops by to let Ree know that her dad jumped bail. Since he put the house she struggles to maintain up as bond, her family will be left homeless unless she can track him down. So begins her meet and greet with the strange folk of the Ozark Mountains.

The Ozark Mountains don't seem like they're much of a tourist spot. Stuck out in southern Missouri, in the Midwest, Ree's home town is eerily isolated from any discernible sources of industry or recreation. The sound of the film is characterised throughout by the dull thud of axe blades on wet wood and dogs barking in the distance. Life moves slowly here, but it's not just a place of quiet innocence. In the absence of any notable industry to sustain life in the sticks, crystal meth has become a main source of commerce. Though there's barely any explicit reference to the drug – only that Ree's dad 'cooks' – it becomes apparent that it dominates Ree's community.

To Granik’s credit is the fact that this aspect of the plot is subtly underplayed. The film doesn’t become a shrieking tabloid piece about a society on drugs. Instead it is a meditation on the way people alter their minds when they can’t alter their environments. And it’s not just crystal meth. Ree’s ill mother is constantly sedated on medication; it is for this reason that Ree can’t count on her. When Ree is badly beaten after asking the wrong person about her dad’s whereabouts, a neighbour offers painkillers, warning: ‘She’s gonna want more but start her with two’.

Ree’s uncle, Teardrop (John Hawkes), is a neat embodiment of the film’s major themes. In one scene, he approaches from behind as Ree chops wood and the brooding hum of the chainsaw becomes heightened in the soundtrack. The shifty menace Teardrop exudes is a constant source of tension. It transpires that this menace stems not from innate cruelty but from a life lived on the fringes. The knife-edge relationship he shares with Ree echoes that which she shares with her siblings. There's a scene in which she teaches her brother and sister to fire a rifle over a plastic picnic bench - in Teardrop’s violence, too, emerges tenderness. Life can be cruel but it’s crueller without your family, even if standing by them makes things worse in the short-term.

The film has been cleaning up at the film festivals. It's picked up awards at Sundance and the Berlin Film Festival; Jennifer Lawrence is widely tipped for an Oscar for her portrayal of Ree. And with good reason. Winter's Bone is a haunting elegy on the importance of family in rural life – and what happens if that family splinters. Ree captures it best when she tell her brother and sister: ‘I’d be lost without the weight of you two on my back’.

Image via Google

'Welcome to sunny East Finchley'

Love him or hate him, Mark Kermode knows what he's on about. He's like Kim Newman in that his encyclopedic knowledge of film is sort of depressing; there's no way a yawning airhead like me could cram that much knowledge into my tired little brain. Some people say he's arrogant, too hyperbolic and sure of his own opinion. But I don't reckon that's true. It's not arrogance, it's a willingness to contribute. Followers of Mark Kermode's Film Blog will be familiar with his habit of sharing notoriously audacious views via a short video - and then encouraging viewers to respond to said views in the 'comments' section. A few weeks later, he'll discuss those comments in a follow-up video. Those who comment are wise to be equally audacious. It's a way of building a public forum where everyone's opinion is valid. His recent discussion of the impact of 3D cinema is a good example.

I find it all a bit heart-warming. That's possibly because I'm an emotional wreck. Anyway, his latest post was even more self-indulgent than most:

I defy even the most fervent Kermode-hater not to have their cockles warmed by his passion and enthusiasm for the Phoenix cinema in East Finchley. Especially when he keeps going on about how 'glamorous' it is these days. I mean... is it? My own equivalent would have to be the Vue cinema in Clifton Moor, York, back in its hey-day when it was a Warner Village Cinema. That's certainly never been a glamorous place, stuck in the middle of a retail park, adorned by a carpet warehouse and a Tesco's. Its car park is awfully popular with teenage boys on mopeds. But back when I was a wee bairn, my Grandad Syd and I spent every weekend at the Warner Village / Vue cinema in Clifton Moor. Once, when I was 9, he took me to see The X Files movie, which was rated 15. Nothing more exciting had ever happened to me, ever. Another time I took a day off school to queue around the building to see Star Wars: Episode 1 - The Phantom Menace. Oh fuck off, I was only little.

What I'm getting at is that Mark Kermode's attitude to cinema evokes these kinds of memories. It's inclusive, not exclusive. Everybody's experience of film is worth talking about. The stronger the impact of that experience, the more passionate your opinion of it, the better. So just remember next time you hear about that time he got ejected from the Cannes première of Lars Von Trier's The Idiots for screaming, from the back of the cinema, 'C'est de la merde! C'est de la merde!': he only says it because he cares.

'At least they do things with a certain elegance'

Went along to the BFI Southbank last night for a screening of Federico Fellini’s 1960 movie La Dolce Vita. Aside from a notably snooty atmosphere (there wasn’t much crunching of popcorn or rustling of crisp packets; the man in the next seat looked ready to vomit in horror when he noticed me taking a few notes on my Blackberry), the film itself looked great up on the big screen. It’s aged well. Fellini’s dreamy crossfades and precise, swooping tracking shots benefit from the cinema treatment. A packed cinema – however pleased by their own choice of movie - made the experience feel even more worthwhile.



La Dolce Vita, one of Fellini’s most popular and accessible works, isn’t really about much. Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni) is a journalist and man-about-town who wanders endlessly across Rome from one decadent party to the next, followed by his loyal troop of paparazzi. Along the way, he wades through the Trevi Fountain at night with the beautiful starlet, Sylvia (Anita Ekberg), and later covers a woman in feathers so she looks like a chicken. Yeah.

Although the film follows a number of characters from Marcello’s perspective, Fellini has little interest in narrative arcs that allow to them gleam any valuable life experience from their endeavours. La Dolce Vita’s running time stretches to three hours but there’s little room for character development. The films just glides from party to party, presenting a series of vignettes of languid aesthetes. Their hedonism is coldly compelling. As Marcello’s girlfriends puts it, ‘at least they do things with a certain elegance’.

He resists making any overt moral judgements, but Fellini hints at the unfulfilling nature of his characters’ lives. Throughout there is an emphasis on performance. Sylvia sashays from her private jet to her adoring photographers, only to repeat the action so they can get a better picture. This kind of faking it for the cameras occurs elsewhere, and often. This life might be sweet, but it’s not real. When Marcello and his father visit a nightclub and watch a performance by a tragic clown who bumbles from one calamity to another, for the audience’s pleasure, the message is clear.

Towards the end of the film, a tragedy occurs that is all the more surprising because it comes out of nowhere. What’s interesting is that Fellini largely ignores the aftermath of the event. Instead, he focuses on paparazzi swarming around the family member left behind as police break the news. In an earlier and unrelated scene, one photographer asks Sylvia, the famous actress, ‘Do you think Italian Neorealism is dead or alive?’. A self-reflexive joke that got a (self-satisfied) laugh from last night’s audience, the line now suggests how everything becomes a commodity in the end, even a person’s life.

Surprisingly watchable for its lack of any narrative development, La Dolce Vita is haunting for its cold observational distance. It is a subtle and poignant exploration of life lived elegantly wasted. It’s definitely worth a viewing. Just maybe not at the BFI Southbank, unless you want to get tutted at for breathing.

Metropolis 2010. Reconstructed. Restored. Really long.

A reconstructed and restored version of Fritz Lang's 1927 sci-fi epic, Metropolis, was released in cinemas on Friday. It's brooding, surreal, at times even Kafkaesque. An account of the subterranean proletariat working in squalor to maintain a thriving city of wealthy playboys, the film has long existed on DVD in an incomplete form. In Buenos Aires a couple of years ago, though, a 16mm print featuring twenty-five minutes of 'lost' footage was discovered. Work began to create a full and definitive version.

Much fun is to be had in recognising the additions that make up this 'complete' version; they are badly damaged and grainier than the rest of the film. It's actually difficult to imagine how Metropolis could have existed in any other form (I admit it, ashamedly: this is the only version I've seen). The restored scenes and shots work to explain relationships between characters, even establishing back stories, and define narrative developments that might otherwise have been unclear. Even without an entirely coherent narrative, though, it's easy to see why any version of Metropolis has been lauded. After I left the cinema, two images in particular stood out. Three streams of thousands of workers backed up over the landscape begin to converge, united in revolt, and it's still stunning. In another instance, mad professor Rotwang reveals the robot he has created, accompanied by a soundtrack of shimmering violin and tinkling bells; a beguiling combination. I've included the latter scene below. This version doesn't boast restoration of the original 1927 score, as the version I saw this weekend did, but it should give you an idea anyway (and perhaps even a reason to see the film).

This reconstructed and restored version of Fritz Lang's masterpiece is quite something. I expected Metropolis to be as cold and detached as Rotwang's robot, a chilly dystopian vision of machinery and clockwork and lost individuality. On the contrary, it's warm, human and in places genuinely funny (if you decide that's at least half the intention of the histrionic 1920s acting). Subplots such as an exploration of the Thin Man's role in Joh Fredersen's metropolis (Fredersen is leader of the city) flesh out the world Lang has created. An explanation of Rotwang's vendetta against Fredersen threads together a narrative that had apparently not always been so satisfying. The dual-identity plot generated by the physical similarity between Rotwang's robot and its look-alike Maria evokes the use of mistaken identity in Shakespearean comedy whilst also seeming very modern (evil twin narrative devices have been exploited by franchises like Star Trek and Superman) - encapsulating the timelessness of the film. This is the first time in eighty-three years that Metropolis as Lang intended it has been so readily available, making this seem like more of a cinematic event than just a regular cinema trip. Any two and a half hour silent movie is going to stretch a modern audience brought up on music videos and summer blockbusters, but it's worth persisting with and highly recommended.

The 'new' reconstructed and restored version of Metropolis is playing nationwide now and will be available on DVD/Blu-ray in September.

Image via Google

'Most people here don't even have names. Everyone's just passing through'.

Proenza Schouler make expensive ladies' clothes. Harmony Korine makes weird marginal weirdo films for weird marginal weirdos. Naturally the two came together to make an advert / short film to promote the brand's Fall collection. A disillusioned teenage girl's echoey voice-over laments that 'the Earth is a big ball of shit'. So you'd better jazz it up by spending loads of money on graffiti pants. The film, Act Da Fool, features plenty of trademark Korine imagery: the prickly Nashville heat and shabby neighbourhoods littered with abandoned cars and shopping trolleys and skanky mattresses. After being shown Proenza Schouler's Fall collection, these are the images he was apparently inspired to create. Like always with Korine, the line between beauty and ugliness gets blurred.

Not sure what it all means? Not sure it means anything? When the New York Times asked Korine - in reference to Act Da Fool - if he felt his early success had emboldened his confidence in his distinctive aesthetic style, he replied: 'Yeah. I don't know. I don't even think about it. I just do what I want to do. I don't really ask too many questions. I drink lots and lots of malt liquor and snort white-out and just follow the rainbow.' That's that cleared up then.

Arcade Fire are bastards and they are hogging all the talent and ingenuity.

So I just stumbled across the new interactive music video (of sorts) for Arcade Fire's We Used To Wait, taken from their current album The Suburbs. It's... a bit... good. You enter the address or postcode of your childhood home and it mashes together images of some kid running through a pretty typical-looking suburban setting with images of (and here's where it gets... a bit... good) the place you grew up in. The images are taken from Google Earth and Streetview so maybe that's a bit creepy but whatever, it works. It's actually genuinely quite affecting. Seems best to download Google Chrome if you don't already have it (I didn't) but it's probably worth sparing the few seconds it takes. The results might even leave you feeling a little choked. Go on. Let it out.

I saw Arcade Fire headline the Main Stage at Leeds Festival on Friday and besides making every other band who'd played that day look like a Year 9 garage band, they also insisted on each playing a different instrument for almost every other song. Just because they could. It's not fair on the rest of us that they get to be so... fucking... good.

Make your own video for We Used To Wait here.You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll hate yourself a little more for not being in Arcade Fire.

Image via Google

(Via BeatCrave)

Will Pop Culture Make a Man of Me Yet #1: The Expendables

Every now and then I feel like some area of popular culture has stared me blankly in the face and muttered at me to just be a fucking man. I spent yesterday afternoon alone in the cinema watching The Expendables. Sly Stallone gurned, Jason Statham grimaced and some Latino bird got a bit damp. I felt inadequate. And I took some notes. Here's 5 things The Expendables taught me about drinkin', fightin', male-pattern baldness-defyin' masculinity:

1.) When your girlfriend leaves you for some basketball-playing douchebag, there'll be no weeping and wailing. Real men don't snivel into the answerphone at 3am. Just jump on your Ducati and full-throttle it to Mickey Rourke's tattoo shop. If, upon your arrival, Sly Stallone is ready and waiting bent over a motorbike, you can relax: this is all you'll ever need.

2.) Abducting women is fine, as long as you think it's in their best interests. Especially when they're Latin-American and therefore, you know, probably pretty thick.

3.) Putting too many super-hunks into any one scene can only lead to super-hunk cameo overload. Cutting between John McClane, Rocky and The Terminator inevitably leaves you with something that looks like an advert for a chain of celebrity-endorsed gyms. Or baby oil.

4.) If picking off individual targets is proving a tad finicky - and frankly a waste of time better spent guzzling beer in Mickey Rourke's tattoo shop - just stop messing about. Use a rocket launcher. It's like the tough-guy equivalent of your dad spending ten minutes in his garage trying to carefully disassemble an old Ikea wardrobe, then grunting 'Fuck it' and smashing the bastard to smithereens with the back of a spade.

5.) Watching soggy middle-aged men throw punches at each other is really fun for about forty minutes. And then you remember the first time you saw Carrie Bradshaw in a tutu, way before that last racist movie - and your heart flutters.

'What's wrong with this picture?'

'Everything.'

Images via Google

What do Carrie Brownstein, Woody Allen and Isaac Brock have in common?

I guess each of them has been involved in some kind of sex scandal (not that you'd actually use the phrase 'sex scandal' to describe ex-Sleater-Kinney frontwoman Carrie Brownstein's outing by Spin magazine; put it alongside Woody's mantel-piece-tarnishing misdemeanours and it seems a bit less juicy), but other than that - not loads.

Except this:



So somehow Carrie Brownstein, Woody Allen and Isaac Brock all feature in the new Thermals video I Don't Believe You. Okay, unsurprisingly Woody doesn't ACTUALLY make a cameo, but he does get a name-check when star of the show Brownstein scatters books out from her bookshelf on the hunt for that bloody racket. Blink and you'll miss it, but if you haven't got anything better to do today (I haven't), it might bring a smile to your face. The real money shot is Isaac Brock in his PJ's at 10.22am during the coda, looking grizzled and slightly bonkers. I'm hoping for a similar sight the morning after Modest Mouse's Main Stage performance at Leeds Festival later this week. I'll let you know how that goes.

I Don't Believe You is the first single to be taken from the forthcoming album Personal Life, which is due for release on the 7th September on Kill Rock Stars. Watching the video again, I got to thinking, you know that game where you pick your dream dinner party guests? How about Carrie Brownstein, Woody Allen and Isaac Brock. If nothing else, it's a guaranteed sex scandal.

(via Stereogum)

'See, what people don't understand is that we choose to live like... free... free... free people'

Since Harmony Korine is probably the preferred film-maker of fuck-ups the world over, I think it's appropriate that the first post on this blog should turn to his latest offering, Trash Humpers. Cinema showings over here were pretty few and far between during its UK theatrical release a couple of months ago (local example: a single screening at the Showroom in Sheffield) but the film is due to see a UK DVD release on the 20th of September. Korine describes it as 'a new kind of horror; palpable and raw'. Watching the trailer and a few scraps floating about online, it looks like he might have abandoned the bitter-sweet optimism (and conventional narrative) of 2007's Mister Lonely. This one's about hillbillies in Bo Selecta masks fucking bags of rubbish. And drooling over obese hookers. And stuff. Wouldn't be surprised if some kid turns up to drown a kittie before the end credits roll, like in 1997's Gummo, because it seems Korine hasn't lost his appetite for pissing people off. After eight years in the wilderness, two burned down houses and one lost masterpiece (which, if you believe what you read, is pretty much how Korine's life went between 1999's Julien Donkey-Boy and Mister Lonely), I guess you can't stay chipper forever.

Anyway, in honour of the lo-fi and distinctly anti-digital stylings of Trash Humpers, The Brudenell Social Club in Leeds are showing the film 'on various old school VCR's and tv's, and also on a big screen and through gig PA to provide a unique full effect audio', with a band playing afterwards. Here's the link. The event is on Tue 31st August and me and my mate Pete are dead excited about it. If you watch the trailer below, you'll get excited too. Promise.

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