Happy Birthday Herzog

by Jason Adams

Film director Werner Herzog is marking three quarters of a century on this planet today - a planet that he has probably explored the weirdness hidden away at every single obscure corner of. We should cherish him while we have him, people - even if some of his more recent efforts have been iffier than most. Go see every damn one, reviews be damned.

Funnily enough last night I was reading a review of the Twin Peaks finale (no spoilers here, don't worry!) that called that series mastermind David Lynch "American pop culture's answer to Werner Herzog," and I got to thinking about these two directors in relation to each other. Besides Herzog and Lynch easily making my list of Top Five Greatest Living Film-makers I don't usually think about them in relation to each other, but it's not an invalid point.

So here, for Werner's birthday, let's latch him onto the zeitgeist's momentarily hottest art-house auteur, and list three similarities, with one glaring dissimilarity...

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Soundtracking: "Blue Velvet"

This week, Chris Feil's soundtrack series covers a David Lynch classic...

David Lynch has used music to genius effect over his career, particularly drawing from 50s and 60s crooners to create a cinematic world displaced in time. But Lynch’s most definitive use of preexisting songs is in one of his most narratively focused masterpieces, Blue Velvet. This is the best example of how he distorts the wholesomeness of the sound to reveal darker tones beneath performative American culture.

Music is as much a piece of this suburban facade as any of Lynch’s hellscapes, announcing as much when it fades from Angelo Badalamenti’s operatic overture to Bobby Vinton’s title classic. A placid sky descends upon a thorny rose bush, gorgeously staining the picked fence’s rigid sterility like how Lynch poisons our relationship to the music. Vinton’s voice is tinny in its soulfulness, a swingy sanitized ode that matches Lynch’s picturesque neighborhood for quaintness. Musically, it feels as manufactured as this idyllic vision before us until it fades and morphs into something beastly beneath the manicured, bland exterior.

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Today's 5: Gigi, Bulworth, and much Cannes mania

Here are you five mood boosting anniversaries from showbiz history. Do these things today and report back on how they made you feel!

May 15th

2015 At the 68th annual Cannes Film Festival Son of Saul, Embrace of the Serpent, and The Lobster, all have their world premieres. All three go on to successful awards runs and arthouse releases.

In their honor: Embrace your singular point of view, however strange it seems at first. So many of the greatest movies over the years did this...

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Links: Atomic Blonde, Underwater Armageddon, La La Lynch,

Pajiba at what point exactly did Dev Patel get hot?
Variety Billy Brown, who previously sexed up Viola on How to Get Away with Murder, will costar with Taraji P Henson in the new thriller Proud Mary which has nothing to do with Tina Turner 
/Film Van Helsing reboot gets a new writer 
Coming Soon Charlize Theron's Coldest City gets a title change. It's now Atomic Blonde
NYT Whoa. I thought that little kid (Shailene Woodley's boy) on Big Little Lies looked familiar. Turns out he's that child theater critic who does all the popular Broadway Youtube reviews

 

Boy Culture interviews old Hollywood actor Carleton Carpenter who talks Debbie Reynolds, Cary Grant and being bisexual in Hollywood in a new memoir called "The Absolute Joy of Work"
The Playlist has ranked every best picture nominee of the 21st century. Weirdly they made a huge accounting error that kept Moulin Rouge! out of the #1 spot by a truly embarrassing margin
MNPP the King Arthur trailer is obsessed with crotches
Interview Evanna Lynch, Luna Lovegood from Harry Potter, is interviewed about her post Potter career by another Potter alum 
The New Yorker looks at Harry Belafonte's 1956 mega hit "Day-O" and the social power of song 
i09 a new movie is begin described as "Underwater Armageddon."  Kristen Stewart is in talks to headline
AV Club the law that allowed actors to have their ages hidden from IMDb is probably in danger of being overturned 
Comics Alliance the proposed X-Men TV series has not announced a list of characters yet but Blink will be amoung them. Actress Jamie Chung has been cast in the role 
Screen Crush is stating that Logan has a post-credits scene. If there is one it most definitely did not screen for critics as I waited until the lights came up. (I generally stay for credits... and did so before post-credit scenes were a regular thing)
Film School Rejects the use of primary color in La La Land 

Video To Go
La La Land as directed by David Lynch (file under: the internet is fun) and a iphone rehearsal for La La Land's opening number filmed in a  parking lot

Laura Dern Week: INLAND EMPIRE.

We're celebrating the great Laura Dern all week in honour of her 50th birthday. Here's David on the film that sent her down a rabbit hole...

It would be easy for an actor to be a puppet in a David Lynch film, lost as they are in a labyrinthine maze of the mind. The chronology is distorted and the characters’ consciousness is constantly splitting and merging in a kaleidoscope fashion. Laura Dern, though, knows the director better than most, and their most recent collaboration, 2006’s INLAND EMPIRE., places at her at the centre of an intricate puzzle of which she is all of the pieces...

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