Music Video of the Day: Lust for Life by Iggy Pop (1996, dir by Danny Boyle)

Posted on December 3, 2017 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Hi everyone! Lisa here with today’s music video of the day.

Lust for Life, which was co-written by David Bowie, was originally released in 1977 but it didn’t become a hit until it was used in the 1996 film Trainspotting. The director of Trainspotting, Danny Boyle, also directed this video, which is basically scenes from the movie mixed in with footage of Iggy Pop performing.

Appropriately for a song that would become the theme to Trainspotting, Lust For Life is a song about heroin addiction. (The majority of the song is told through the eyes of Johnny Yen, a character created by noted heroin aficionado, William S. Burroughs.) Because of the song’s rousing chorus, it has regularly been used in advertisements for things that have absolutely nothing to do with heroin. For instance, it was used to promote Royal Caribbean Cruises.

The recent Trainspotting sequel featured The Prodigy’s remix of Lust for Life. Sadly, this one doesn’t come with a music video but you can listen to it below:

Enjoy!

Music Video of the Day: I Like Snow by Lara Snow featuring Safra (2016, dir by Vadim Mechona)

Posted on December 2, 2017 by Lisa Marie Bowman

For the record, I like snow, too. I especially love snow in December and January but, as of right now, I have my doubts as to whether it will happen during this particular holiday season. It’s a shame. Next year, I’ll do Christmas in Canada.

As for this video …. well, I like this video. It’s trippy and weird and kinda disturbing and it’s got two dancing wolves. Dancing wolves are always a good thing.

It was directed by Vadim Mechona, who was also one of the directors on the previous Lara Snow video that I shared.

Enjoy!

Insomnia File #31: Arsenal (dir by Steve C. Miller)

Posted on December 1, 2017 by Lisa Marie Bowman

What’s an Insomnia File? You know how some times you just can’t get any sleep and, at about three in the morning, you’ll find yourself watching whatever you can find on cable? This feature is all about those insomnia-inspired discoveries!

If you were having trouble getting to sleep last night around midnight, you could have turned over to Showtime and watched Arsenal, a film that had a brief theatrical run in January and which has now made its way to cable.

Arsenal tells the story of two brothers. When we first meet them, they’re kids and they’re living with their uncle. But then their uncle kills himself and the two brothers find themselves going down very different paths. JP (who is played, as an adult, by Adrian Grenier) turns a part-time job mowing lawns into a full-time job as the owner of a construction company. Meanwhile, Mikey (played, as an adult, by Jonathon Schaech) stumbles across gangster Eddie King (Nicolas Cage) while Eddie is busy killing a man. JP heads for a life of respectability. Mikey heads for a life of crime. Much like the Bulger brothers, they remain close despite their differing lifestyles.

But who cares about the brothers? Adrian Grenier and Jonathon Schaech both do the best that they can with these two underwritten parts but ultimately, neither JP nor Mikey is that interesting. If anything, they’re like the guys who you keep around as backups in case the guy you really like never works up the courage to talk to you. Instead, let’s discuss about Eddie King.

As I said before, Eddie King is played by Nicolas Cage. As you can probably guess, Cage does not exactly show anything resembling restraint when he plays King. That may not be surprising but what is surprising that, after twenty years or going totally overboard in almost every role that he’s played, Cage can still surprise audiences by just how far he’s willing to go. Every time that you think Cage’s performances can’t get any more bizarre, something like Arsenal comes out and proves you wrong.

There is so much to love about Cage’s batshit crazy performance as Eddie King. For one thing, it makes absolutely no sense. If you look at real-life mobsters, one thing that becomes clear very quickly is that the best ones may have been sadistic but they were usually smart enough to know when to lay low. Eddie, on the other hand, never lays low. He’s so crazy that he might as well be wearing a shirt that reads, “I kill people and then laugh about it.” So, not only do you have Cage giving one of his most over-the-top performances but, for some reason, he’s also wearing this extremely fake nose and the movie doesn’t really make much of an effort to disguise the fact that it’s a fake nose. I mean, you can literally see the glue that’s holding the fake nose over the old nose. And then there’s Cage’s haircut, which would appear to suggest that Eddie King shares a barber with every pervy humorist who has ever had a job working for Minnesota public radio. When we first see Eddie, he’s gruesomely killing a man and Cage gets so into it and there’s so much blood flying that I was half-expecting Eddie to then turn into Pennywise the clown. Eddie gets another scene where he writes a letter to his dead brother. Cage acted the Hell out of that scene. It’s as if he was saying, “You thought my Left Behind performance was strange? CHECK THIS OUT, DAMN YOU!”

Of course, Cage isn’t the only good actor acting weird in Arsenal. John Cusack plays a cop. He always wears sunglasses and a cap and he also keeps his shoulder slouched. Was it a character thing or was Cusack sincerely hoping no one would recognize him in the movie? I’m not really sure but it’s still fun to try to figure out.

Anyway, Arsenal is your typical low-budget gangster film, where there’s a lot of yelling and people getting shot and tortured and all the rest of the usual crap. There are thousands of these films and they tend to blend together into one tedious mass of pointless mass of sadism. One of the brothers gets kidnapped. The other one has to shoot a lot of people. Bleh. Boring. Outside of the people who need something to watch while at the Russian mafia sleepover, who cares? WAKE ME WHEN THE BULLETS HAVE STOPPED FLYING AND IT’S ALL OVER! But at least Cage and Cusack are around to keep things kind of interesting.

Previous Insomnia Files:

Music Video of the Day: Sometimes It’s Enough by Lara Snow (2016, dir by Jonatan Harpak and Vadim Mechona)

Posted on December 1, 2017 by Lisa Marie Bowman

For today’s music video of the day, we have the video for Lara Snow’s Sometimes It’s Enough.

Why do I like this video? To a certain extent, I relate to it. Abandoned buildings have always fascinated me, just the idea that a structure that was once full of life can suddenly be so … dead. It’s hard to resist. Just a few years ago, my sister and I had a lot of fun when we came across an abandoned house with an open door. I mean, on the one hand, it was the perfect set-up for a horror movie. On the other hand, that kind of made it fun. That may or may not make sense to most people but it makes perfect sense to me.

This video also reminds me of the films of Jean Rollin. That’s always a good thing.

Requiem for a Vampire (1971, dir by Jean Rollin)

Anyway, enjoy and welcome to December!

Music Video of the Day: Psycho Killer by Smoke Season (2016, dir by Scott Fleishman)

Posted on November 30, 2017 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Hi! Lisa here, with our final music video of November!

This, of course, is a cover of the Talking Heads song.

As for the video, I like it. It’s got atmosphere. It makes me want to lock the doors, stock up on the pepper spray, and be thankful that I live in an open carry state.

Enjoy!

Music Video of the Day: Daydreaming (2016, dir by Paul Thomas Anderson)

Posted on November 29, 2017 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Since Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film, Phantom Thread, had a pretty good showing with the National Board of Review yesterday, I figured that I would pick his video for Radiohead’s Daydreaming for today’s music video of the day.

(Raidohead guitarist Johnny Greenwood has, of course, composed scores for many of Anderson’s films, including Phantom Thread.)

As for the video itself, it follows Thom Yorke as he randomly wanders from location to location. Is he dreaming? Is he traveling through time? Is he in a building that just has an extremely odd layout? I guess any solution could be true.

Supposedly, this song was inspired by the end of Yorke’s relationship with Rachel Owen. (Tragically, Owen herself passed away only a few months after this video was released.) Supposedly, if you listen to the song backwards, Yorke appears to be singing, “Every minute, half of my love.” Interpret that however you want. It’s Radiohead, after all.

It’s always interesting how Radiohead can be both so consistently compelling and so consistently depressing at the same time.

On that note, enjoy!

Playing Catch-Up: Beatriz at Dinner (dir by Miguel Arteta)

Posted on November 28, 2017 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Beatriz at Dinner is very much a film of the moment, which is a polite way of saying that it’s not very good but it does accurately reflect the way that a lot of people are feeling right now. I imagine that’s the main reason why it’s received a good deal of critical acclaim. It was even cited, by the National Board of Review, as one of the top ten independent films of the year. By 2019, I doubt anyone will even remember that this film exists.

Salma Hayek plays the title character. Beatriz is a massage therapist in Los Angeles. She’s not having a good day. Not only has her neighbor killed one of her goats but, while she’s at the house of one of her wealthy clients, her car suddenly won’t start. Beatriz says that she can call a friend to come pick her up but that he won’t be able to show up until after he gets off work. Beatriz’s client, Kathy (Connie Britton), invites Beatriz to stay for dinner.

Kathy is a familiar type. She’s the rich, privileged white woman who probably brags about how nice she is to her maid. Kathy’s husband (David Warshofsky) may not want Beatriz to stay but Kathy feels that they owe a debt to Beatriz because Beatriz helped their daughter recover after she was treated for cancer. Kathy not only insists that Beatriz stay for dinner but she also asks Beatriz to not only stay the night but also to sing everyone a song after they’ve eaten. As Kathy’s rich friends start to arrive for dinner, Kathy treats Beatriz like a prop, blithely unaware of how awkward Beatriz feels around her guests.

The main dinner guest is an arrogantly vulgar businessman named Doug Strutt (John Lithgow). Doug is best known for building hotels, forcing poor people off of their land, and constantly bragging about how rich and famous he is. He is even working on a memoir. (In perhaps Beatriz at Dinner‘s only show of restraint, the film does not make him a reality show host.) The first time that Doug sees Beatriz, he assumes that she must be a maid and asks her to get him a drink. When Beatriz later launches into a monologue about her childhood in Mexico and how she first came to the United States, Doug interrupts to boorishly ask if she came legally. Whenever anyone admonishes Doug for being rude, he merely laughs it off and says that he doesn’t mean to be offensive. He’s just telling it like it is.

Hmmmm … I wonder who Doug is supposed to be a stand-in for?

Anyway, this all sounds promising enough but Beatriz at Dinner doesn’t really do much with this material. Just as with his previous overrated film, Cedar Rapids, director Miguel Arteta fails to generate any sort of narrative momentum. Basically, the entire film is Doug saying something offensive and Beatriz glaring at him. We keep waiting for Beatriz to blow up but when she finally does start to talk back to Doug, it’s anti-climatic. The dialogue suddenly starts to feel forced and unnatural. Doug goes from being a disturbingly credible vulgarian to just being another comic book villain and, as a result, Beatriz’s speech feels almost as empty as an angry thread of tweets. When Beatriz does take more concrete action towards Doug, the film ruins it all with an obvious twist that is nowhere close to being as profound as the filmmakers seem to think it is. If Beatriz at Dinner was truly as revolutionary as it seems to think it is, that twist wouldn’t be there.

(Buñuel and Godard, who are both obvious influences on Beatriz at Dinner, would dismiss the twist as bourgeois bullshit.)

In the lead role, Salma Hayek is good but not great. There’s really not much depth to Beatriz as a character. She functions more as a symbol than as a human being. (In many ways, the filmmakers treats Beatriz much in the same way that Kathy treats Beatriz, as a prop.) John Lithgow steals the entire movie, giving the only performance that actually shows a hint of real and dangerous charisma. As hateful a person as Doug may be, he is truthful about one thing. He is the only character in the movie who always says exactly what is on his mind. Lithgow plays Doug as not just a vulgarian but also as someone who is proud of being vulgar and who specifically goes out of his way to see how offensive he can be. At times, Lithgow is the only member of the cast actually bringing any life to this stifling bore of a film. Unfortunately, Lithgow is so good that he overpowers the rest of the cast. When Beatriz rebukes him, Hayek delivers her lines with a heartfelt fury that briefly threatens to rescue the movie from Doug but all Lithgow has to do is smirk and just like that, he’s taken the movie back from her.

For a lot of people, the appeal of Beatriz at Dinner is that Doug is obviously meant to be Trump and Beatriz says everything that they wish they could say. They see Beatriz’s frustration and anger and they immediately recognize it as being their frustration and anger. That’s a perfectly legitimate and understandable reaction but that doesn’t necessarily make Beatriz at Dinner a good film. It just makes it a film of the moment.

TV Review: The Walking Dead 8.6 “The King, The Widow, and Rick” (dir by John Polson)

Posted on November 28, 2017 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Oh, the world of The Walking Dead. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

This season started with everyone finally standing up to the Saviors. For once, Rick and his allies had Negan on the run and, regardless of what you think about season 8 overall, it was certainly satisfying to see the Saviors starting to get a little desperate. Personally, I don’t think it was necessary to devote five episodes to just one battle but the Saviors are such a loathsome group of people that it’s definitely enjoyable to watch them get their asses kicked.

However, even with Rick and his allies declaring full out war, I knew that the action would eventually have to be interrupted by an episode of mourning. Every season of The Walking Dead has at least one episode where everyone looks depressed and either thinks about a lost loved one or obsesses on whether or not there’s room for kindness and compassion in a post-apocalyptic world. When the series started, the mourning episodes were a part of what set The Walking Dead apart from other shows. (Remember when kindly old Dale Horvath was gruesomely attacked by a zombie?) But, eight seasons in, it’s become a bit predictable. Any episode where something big happens is going to be followed by an episode where not much happens at all.

“The King, The Widow, and Rick” is a mourning episode. Everyone has returned from attacking the Saviors and now, with no bullets flying and several minor characters dead (and SHIVA! I’m still sad about that…), it’s time to sit around and reflect. This time, a bit more happened during the reflecting than has happened in previous mourning episodes. Even if this episode still felt like it stretched things out a bit too much, it wasn’t quite as slow as some of the episodes that aired during season 7.

This episode opened like a Ken Burns documentary, with everyone reading letters about the war against the Saviors. It ended with Rick naked and locked up in a shipping container and I was definitely okay with that. Don’t get me wrong about this. I do like Rick but occasionally, there is an arrogance to him that just strikes me the wrong way. He’s a lot like Lost‘s Jack Shepherd. He gives a good speech. He is trying to do the right thing, even if he sometimes resents having to be the leader. But Rick is always so sure of his ability to sway everyone over to his side that it was somewhat satisfying to see the Trash People respond to his latest speech by shrugging their shoulders and then locking him up. I’m not sure why Rick felt the need to, once again, go over to the garbage dump. The attack on the Saviors was a success without the help of the Trash People. My theory is that Rick just can’t accept that not everyone wants to be a part of his alliance.

Meanwhile, at Hilltop, we had another one of those patented Walking Dead debates about whether or not people can survive the end of the world without losing their humanity. Jesus was going out of his way to treat the Savior prisoners humanely. Gregory said the prisoners should be executed. Maggie responded by tossing Gregory in with the prisoners and then saying she would keep them alive so that they could be used for prisoner exchanges in the future. Jesus said he was happy with her decision and … you know what? I like Tom Payne’s performance as the character but I feel like an idiot whenever I call that guy Jesus. Yes, he has a beard. Yes, he’s kind. BUT HIS NAME IS PAUL! The whole “They call you Jesus” thing is so heavy-handed and kinda stupid. Last night, one of the saviors said, “Well, Jesus, I’m no angel,” and I’m glad I didn’t have anything nearby to throw at the TV when he said it.

Anyway, I could have done without all the debate about how to treat the prisoners. We all know that they’re going to end up dead, regardless. The only prisoner that Negan might exchange would be Father Gabriel and, honestly, is getting Gabriel back worth the trouble? Maggie should have just listened to Gregory.

Ezekiel was depressed, as well he should be. SHIVA’S DEAD, DAMMIT! Carol told him to stop feeling sorry for himself and to lead his people. The best part of Ezekiel’s subplot was that Jerry was still standing guard, even though Ezekiel told him to go home.

Carl is apparently not dead. Or, at least, he’s not dead, yet. Instead, he ran off and spent some time hanging out with Siddiq, the man who Rick previously chased away. They killed some walkers and bonded over shared pain.

And, of course, Rosita used a rocket launcher to blow up a savior. That made me cheer. Maybe Maggie should step down and let Rosita lead the Hilltop Colony. There certainly wouldn’t be any debate about what to do with prisoners then! However, for now, Rosita, Michonne, Daryl, and Tara are just doing their own thing. Rick probably wouldn’t approve but Rick’s in a shipping container right now.

Anyway, this wasn’t a bad episode. It may have been a mourning episode but at least it wasn’t just Rick sitting around in a catatonic state while Negan circled around him, giving a speech. That’s the important thing.

Music Video of the Day: ACES — Stranger (2017, dir by ????)

Posted on November 28, 2017 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Hi, everyone! Lisa here, with today’s music video of the day!

This video was released yesterday. As I sit here typing this, it currently has 68 views on YouTube and only one comment has been left. That comment: “How are you not famous yet?”

I have to agree. This artist definitely deserves to be famous so I’m going to do my part by sharing this video. I love both this hauntingly beautiful song and the simple but atmospheric video that goes along with it. Sad to say, I don’t have any technical credits for this video but I will say that I love the moody black-and-white cinematography. This is one of those videos that invites you to watch and draw your own conclusions.

Enjoy!