Artwork of the Day: Cheerleaders

Posted on August 23, 2017 by Dazzling Erin

by Bob Peak

Music Video of the Day: Milk From The Coconut by Toto Coelo/Total Coelo (1983, dir. Philip Davey)

Posted on August 23, 2017 by Valerie Troutman

If I have to break out a music video by Toto Coelo, then it’s a pretty safe bet that I don’t feel well, or have had a long day. Today is an example of both.

The beauty of doing this particular Toto Coelo video is that I can quote my post on the video for their song, I Eat Cannibals:

I don’t have a lot of guilty pleasures in the realm of music. I will usually defend just about anything that I enjoy. A good example of that is Debbie Gibson. Still, if I had to list one band that could qualify, then it would be Toto Coelo (or Total Coelo as they were renamed to in the US). I’m guessing they renamed the band in America so as not to confuse people into thinking they had something to do with the band Toto.

This seems to have been their only hit song. But they did a couple of music videos for other fun songs like Milk From The Coconut, which was supposed to be in the unfinished sequel to Grizzly that had them in it. They also did one called Dracula’s Tango (Sucker For Your Love). They’re all stupid, but fun. Just like this music video. I’m pretty sure Milk From The Coconut was supposed to be taken seriously. However, it’s tough to do so after you’ve seen them sing it on the stage in Grizzly II.

How do I describe the video for Milk From The Coconut? Oh, yeah. It’s easy. It’s a less serious, danceable version of Voices Carry by ‘Til Tuesday.

We have the uncomfortable dinner scene.

Voices Carry by ‘Til Tuesday (1984)

We have the scene where he is less than subtle about judging her because of the way she looks.

Voices Carry by ‘Til Tuesday (1984)

The scene where we see her trying to conform to some sort of ideal image.

Voices Carry by ‘Til Tuesday (1984)

We also get an ending that has the band going back behind the images of themselves that they broke out of at the beginning. In Voices Carry, we get the image of her trapped behind a translucent material that barely lets us see her. She doesn’t break free till the ending at the opera house.

Voices Carry by ‘Til Tuesday (1984)

Where Milk From The Coconut makes up for the absence of seeing the abuse boyfriend, is with these shots.

What happened here? Is that meant to imply that she was sexually assaulted as child? I would assume it’s just a loss of innocence from age, but not in conjunction with other images in this video.

The big difference between the two videos is that you can take Voices Carry seriously. This comes across as sad when you try to pay attention to it. Of course it’s difficult to do so when it’s brought to you by the same group that did I Eat Cannibals. And is still performed the way it is, with things that couch the impact of the lyrics and certain parts of the video.

It’s still one of my favorite songs that they did, and I appreciate them appearing to trying do something less frothy.

Enjoy!

A Movie A Day #226: Citizen X (1995, directed by Chris Gerolmo)

Posted on August 22, 2017 by Jedadiah Leland

How do you solve a crime in a society that refuses to admit that crime exists?

That is the dilemma faced by Viktor Burakov (Stephen Rea) in the fact-based film, Citizen X. Burakov is a forensic expert in the Soviet Union. In 1982, when a dead body is found on a collective farm, Burakov is assigned to investigate. When seven more bodies are discovered, Burakov is convinced that he is dealing with a serial killer. The problem is that the official Soviet position is that crime and, especially, serial murder are a product of western decadence. With his superiors refusing to accept that a serial killer could be active in the USSR, Burakov is driven to the point of insanity as he both tries to stop the murders and keep his job. Fortunately, he has the Machiavellian Col. Fetisov (Donald Sutherland) on his side but, even with Fetisov’s protection, Burakov is no closer to tracking down the murderer.

Citizen X is based on the crimes of Andrei Chikatilo. From 1978 to 1990, Chikatilo committed at least 57 murders, with several of his victims being young children. Though many were suspicious of him, Chikatilo was protected by both his membership in the Communist party and the government’s refusal to allow most of his crimes to be publicly reported. It was only during the reforms of Perestroika that authorities were allowed to thoroughly investigate Chikatilo’s crimes. Chikatilo was arrested in 1992 and executed, via a gunshot to the back of his head, in 1994. In Citizen X, Chikatilo is played by Jeffrey DeMunn, who gives a very good and disturbingly plausible performance as the monstrous killer.

Made for HBO, Citizen X is a low-key but thought-provoking recreations of not just Chikatilo’s crimes but the atmosphere that allowed him to go undetected, Along with DeMunn, both Rea and Sutherland give great performances. (Sutherland won an Emmy.) Max Von Sydow also appears, playing a psychologist who is given the unenviable task of trying to enter Chikatilo’s mind.

Artwork of the Day: Teacher’s Pet

Posted on August 22, 2017 by Dazzling Erin

by Paul Rader

Music Video of the Day: Harden My Heart by Quarterflash (1981, dir. ???)

Posted on August 22, 2017 by Valerie Troutman

Right now, if you go over to Songfacts, then you’ll get the following information about the video:

Released the same year MTV went on the air, the video contains many random images that have nothing to do with the song, including jugglers, a little person, a makeup table in the dessert, well-dressed guys on motorcycles, and a sax solo in the rain. It was fairly common in the early ’80s to throw lots of disjointed scenes into the videos in an attempt to create a memorable image.

That just sounds like somebody who solved Nik Kershaw’s riddle, and is angry that it doesn’t mean anything–according to Kershaw himself. I’m sure this video makes perfect sense.

It starts off with Rindy Ross running away from superimposed text.

She does eventually find a door that opens unto a room where there’s a little person and somebody juggling fire off to the side.

A bodyguard for her heart. And juggling the memories of old flames.

Gymnasts. They are timed to enter when she says “wildest dreams.”

Back in the trailer, she finds another door.

This one leads to a little boy sitting at a makeup table in a quarry.

And he’s in the trailer like some sorta doppelgänger?

Now there are three of them.

Maybe this is a little random.

Phew! This is something that makes sense. Rindy Ross playing the saxophone. She does that in real life.

Why it’s going on in a warehouse with water on the floor behind people on motorcycles is anyone’s guess.

I wonder if this inspired the ewok playing drums on a storm trooper helmet in Return Of The Jedi (1983).

She’s getting ready to “leave you here.”

She’s tormented by her past relationship.

The guitar is kicking in to tell us that she’s ready to harden her heart, which of course means bulldozer…

and someone with a flamethrower.

They’re here to destroy the place that keeps her trapped.

She did say she was going to swallow something. Fire is more impressive than tears, so a fire-eater it is.

She eventually makes it out of the place with multi-colored doors,…

it’s crushed,…

and set ablaze.

Okay, the video is a bit random. It probably helped give us Total Eclipse Of The Heart.

You do have to give them some credit. It isn’t completely random. You can say that the plot is lead-singer Rindy Ross trapped in her own mind where these dream-like images appear while she tries to find a way out of a vulnerable place in order to harden her heart from future heartache by having that place bulldozed and burned.

It’s also a good early example of the lead-singer-wandering-through-trippy-images videos of the early-MTV era. Hungry Like The Wolf by Duran Duran got upgraded to a travelogue. Even Going Back To Cali by LL Cool J is the same kind of thing. The big difference is that they tweaked it from Alice In Wonderland to Monica Vitti In Antonioni-land.

Needless to say, the song did well back then, and is the reason the group even exists, as it blew up from a regional hit in Oregon resulting in them getting a recording contract.

According to Songfacts, they originally released the song under the name, Seafood Mama, before changing their name to Quarterflash, where the song reached the Top 10 on the charts.

I like what the book, Rock Band Name Origins: The Stories of 240 Groups and Performers says about their name:

The name Quarterflash was suggested by the group’s producer, who had just returned from Australia and heard a popular Australian phrase that referred to newcomers to the country as “one-quarter flash and three-parts foolish.” With the advent of MTV, the saying held even more significance, since music videos required groups to not only sound good but look good as well. The formula of adding a quarter-flash (visual image) to three-quarters substance (song) worked for many groups, including Quarterflash, with Rindy Ross to catch the eye.

A fitting description for this particular Quarterflash video.

Enjoy!

30 Days Of Surrealism:

Artist Profile: Casey Jones

Posted on August 21, 2017 by Dazzling Erin

This Casey Jones should not be mistaken for either the comic book artist or the Disney animator who share the same name. Instead, this Casey Jones was an illustrator who was active in the 50s and 60s. Check out some of his covers below and see what was considered to be racy in the 1950s:

A Movie A Day #225: Behind The Camera: The Unauthorized Story of Mork & Mindy (2005, directed by Neil Fearnley)

Posted on August 21, 2017 by Jedadiah Leland

The year is 1978. A television producer named Garry Marshall (Daniel Roebuck) teaches America how to laugh again by casting Pam Dawber (Erinn Hayes) and a hyperactive stand-up comedian named Robin Williams (Chris Diamantopoulos) in a sitcom about an alien struggling to understand humanity. Despite constant network interference, the show makes Robin a star but, with stardom, comes all the usual temptations: lust, gluttony, greed, pride, envy, wrath, and John Belushi.

The Behind The Camera films, which all dramatized the behind the scenes drama of old television shows, were briefly a big thing in the mid-aughts. Because they were lousy, they never got good reviews but they did get good ratings from nostalgia-starved baby boomers and gen xers. I think The Unauthorized Mork & Mindy Story was the last one produced. It probably would have been better if there had been any sort of drama going on behind-the-scenes of Mork & Mindy but, according to this movie, everyone got along swimmingly. Williams may get hooked on cocaine but the film squarely puts the blame for that on John Belushi. The script, which was obviously written with one eye on avoiding getting sued, is sanitized of anything that could have reflected badly on anyone who was still alive when the movie aired.

Stuck with unenviable task of having to play one of the most famous people in the world, Chris Diamantopoulos was not terrible as Robin Williams. Considering how sanitized the script was, not terrible is probably the best that could be hoped for. There was not much of a physical resemblance but Diamantopoulos nailed the voice and some of the mannerisms. Erinn Hayes looks like Pam Dawber but, just as in the actual show, the movie gives her the short end of the stick and focuses on Williams.

For aficionados of bad television, this is mostly memorable for Daniel Roebuck’s absolutely terrible performance as Garry Marshall and a scene in which Williams is heckled in a comedy club but an overweight man who steps out of the shadows and announces that he’s John Belushi! Roebuck’s performance as Garry Marshall begins and end with his attempt to impersonate Marshall’s familiar voice. He was much better cast as Jay Leno in The Night Shift. As for Belushi , since he was not around to sue or otherwise defend himself, the movie goes all out to portray Belushi (who was played by Tyler Labine) as being an almost demonic influence on Williams. The film’s portrayal of Belushi is even worse and probably more inaccurate than Wired and that’s saying something!

To quote Mork himself: Shazbot! This movie is full of it.

Roger of the Skies: VON RICHTOFEN AND BROWN (United Artists 1971)

Posted on August 21, 2017 by gary loggins

cracked rear viewer

Producer/director Roger Corman finally cut ties with American-International Pictures after they butchered his apocalyptic satire GAS-S-S! Striking out on his own, Corman’s next movie was VON RICHTOFEN AND BROWN, a World War I epic about famed German aerial ace The Red Baron and the Canadian pilot who shoots his down Roy Brown. There are grand themes, as Corman sought to make a statement on the futility of war, the end of chivalry, and the mechanized savagery of what was to be “the last war”. The film looks good, shot in Ireland, with exciting aerial footage, but despite all the outer trappings VON RICHTOFEN AND BROWN is still a Corman drive-in movie.

John Philip Law also looks good as Baron Manfred von Richtofen, the aristocrat/warrior who became the feared Red Baron. Law was always great to watch, whether as the blind angel in BARBARELLA, the black-clad supervillain in DANGER: DIABOLIK, sexy Robin Stone in…

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9 Paintings Inspired By An Eclipse

Posted on August 21, 2017 by Dazzling Erin

For centuries, artists have been fascinated by eclipses. In honor of both today’s solar eclipse and everyone who is going to go blind from looking at it without special glasses, here are nine excellent eclipse paintings.