A Musical Dilemma

I have a serious question. Is it just me or does Ke$ha sound like the Lady Tigra from L'Trimm?

Comparison:

Versus

And here's something just for fun:

Stop the Presses!!!

Rotten Tomatoes has just blown my mind! Can you believe that they've dug up some obscure Chinese movie and said that Quentin Tarantino may have recycled ideas from it for his film Reservoir Dogs? This is impressive journalism!

Okay, okay, I'm being completely sarcastic. Believe it or not but it's almost the twentieth anniversary of Who Do You Think You're Fooling! Maybe in 2003 I'll ask George Lucas to remaster it and add a retarded rabbit to it.

A Nightmare on Elm Street - The Remake

I wasn't expecting high art but I had hoped for something better than what I got.

The unnecessary remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street takes the central theme and some iconic lines and images from Wes Craven's 1984 film but director Samuel Bayer and writers Wesley Strick and Eric Heisserer then have no idea of what to do with them. They attempt to retell the origin story of Freddy Krueger (Jackie Earle Haley playing a child molester again while doing his Rorschach voice from The Watchmen).

In Bayer's Nightmare, Krueger worked at a pre-school as a groundskeeper where he molested the students, especially little Nancy (the older version played by Rooney Mara). Rather than turn to the police, the embarrassed parents perform some vigilante justice on Krueger, setting him ablaze. There's a moment -- a left field moment (typical for this film) when Nancy's quasi-boyfriend Quentin (Kyle Gallner) suddenly states that all of the parents in town were wrong and that, obviously, the preschoolers were making things up (like the kids in Capturing the Friedmans or Witch Hunt). Ahh, this would have made things interesting! Rather than punishing the guilty, the parents had murdered an innocent man! No wonder he's pissed and killing the children of Elm Street!

But, no. As quickly as that idea is introduced it's thrown away again. That's par for the course in this muddled film.

Apart from the retread plot, the biggest problems I had with Bayer's Nightmare were the writing and the casting. The only thing good about the 2010 Nightmare on Elm Street is that it makes a great drinking game. The wretched writing has characters calling each other by name all the time, meaning that taking a drink whenever you hear "Nancy" or "Quentin" will quickly get a viewer hammered.

Meanwhile, the core group of young actors that Krueger terrorizes looking anything but young. Freddy's first female victim, Kris (Katie Cassidy) looks older than her mother (Lia D. Mortensen) and seems to be more in danger of breaking a hip than falling victim to Krueger and his unexplained finger-knives. Kyle Gallner seems to have been cast for his ridiculous eyebrows which recall Robert Pattinson but, really, he looks more like David Hemmings. That he wears a Joy Division shirt through the film shows just how out of touch the filmmakers are. Finally, Rooney Mara manages to go through the entire film with one expression; a stunned look as if someone just punched her in the stomach. She manages to make the 1984 performance of Heather Langenkamp as Nancy seem like an Oscar-worthy turn.

If you still feel the need to see this film, wait until you can see it at home with a copious amounts of alcohol.

The Garage Sale

"Sometimes the things you own end up owning you." - Tyler Durden

The garage sale was the last step in my self-guided "stuffectomy." After trying for five months to sell as many books, video tapes, and DVDs as I possibly could on Half, Amazon, and eBay, I finally pulled everything offline and out into my driveway. Along with the aforementioned media items I also carted out laserdiscs, records, CDs, cassette tapes, screenplays, a half dozen VCRs, two printers, a couch, three chairs, and other assorted items donated by my wife to the cause (quite a few serving dishes that looked nice but remained in their boxes since the day we got married).

There was so much junk that even a full day of trips up from my basement on Thursday just didn't get everything out into the open. I was still bringing up armfuls of junk as late as Saturday morning.

Unprepared? You bet! Especially for foul weather. I got three good bouts of rain over the weekend -- the first Thursday evening after I finally had all of my tables (and makeshift tables) in place. I nearly cried.

The strangest thing about the whole garage sale experience had to be the way that two people would show up wanting the same thing at the same time. The first time this happened was 8:30 AM the first day when I had two record collectors show up. The one arrived just a few minutes before the other and, in that time, negotiated a deal for all of my LPs and CDs. When the second one was told that all my music was gone, she got pissed and fairly belligerent; blaming me for selling everything (rather than the guy who bought everything). I wanted to say, "Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't know I needed to wait for your permission."

Shortly after that my driveway played host to the comedy stylings of two video collectors who I thought were a team at first. The one came armed with a scanner that told him how much things were going for on Amazon. He reminded me of a younger, slightly friendlier version of Harlan Ellison. As the other guy started piling DVDs onto my table "Harlan" started to tell me just how crazy I was to sell my DVDs for a dollar. "Do you know how much this is going for on Amazon?" he asked.

Yes, I knew. I'd been trying to sell everything for months. He just couldn't accept that I was letting things go so cheaply... or that this other guy was getting some really good titles. So, "Harlan" started taking discs out of the other guy's "to buy" pile and started hiding them around the periphery of my driveway to purchase in secret. Meanwhile, the other guy finally gave up on pulling out individual items and made me an offer for every video tape and DVD I had. He low balled me, of course, and we dickered for a while. Oddly, he could have had everything for only $80 more than he ended up paying for three tables worth of stuff. This still left three more tables of VHS tapes.

These tapes and my books sold slowly for the rest of Friday and into Saturday. By mid-afternoon Saturday I was done. Mentally checked out. Still sore from moving so many boxes on Thursday, sunburned from sitting out Friday, and exhausted from the lack of sleep over a few anxious nights; I started lowering prices to ridiculously low levels.

The odd competition came up again around that time when a guy came in and started buying some old magazines. I had eight boxes of old movie/TV magazines and put a handful out for sale. If they sold or if someone expressed interest, I was going to restock or offer more. This guy was totally into them -- kind of strange since he looked like a total "gangsta" (complete with grillz). "Hey, I've got tons more of these if you'd like to take them off my hands -- maybe for twenty bucks?" I offered. He bit and ran to his car to get some money. As soon as he was out of earshot an older lady started berating me.

"Those magazines are worth a lot more than what you're charging," she told me. Rather than telling her to put her money where her mouth I said, "Okay, tell you what, I won't sell him every box but I'll sell you one or two. What will you give me?" Her top offer? Two dollars. Rather than make $20, I went ahead and made $22 and sold six boxes to the guy and two boxes to the lady. Again, no one had expressed any interest in those magazines but suddenly I was caught between two people that wanted them at the same time.

The most extreme instance of this phenomenon occurred Sunday morning when I posted to Craigslist that everything remaining had to go. Come and get it.

One lady showed up and started combing carefully through my remaining video tapes, meticulously looking at each box and the tape inside, telling me all about her family and their tastes in movies. She had a husband into war movies and comedies while her son loves Jackie Chan. She wanted movies from the '70s and '80s. After about an hour of going through my tapes four or five times and picking out two dozen titles a rather boisterous dude showed up and started asking about the prices (or lack thereof) for everything. When I told him that the videos were free he started grabbing handfuls of tapes. This then spurred the lady to do the same. She went from a rather pleasant, discerning movie fan to a wild animal when her territory was threatened. It was like a video feeding frenzy as both removed armfuls of tapes, depositing them in their stockpiles. Gone was the careful combing -- she took anything she could get her hands on.

Shortly after this, another woman showed up to go through my remaining books. She was asking about nearly every title as if I had to "sell" her on them. After a while I said, "Hey, everything is free, if you don't like it you can donate it to a library." She still wouldn't take more than a few titles until a guy showed up who was willing to clean off the book table to donate everything to his company's free reading program. This sure put spurs to her flanks as she began grabbing handfuls of things. It's amazing how greedy people get when their free things might get taken by someone else.

When everything was over I realized that I probably should have had a few confederates helping me out, going after whatever anyone else had their eye on. This may have made for some fisticuffs but I certainly would have made some more money throughout the weekend.

When the dust settled, the tables were clean, everything was gone, and I had $800 back from all the money I'd spent amassing so much stuff. I can't call any of this profit (specifically as I'd spent $100 on classified ads and signs) but it was a small recuperation of cash. Here's hoping that I've learned my lesson and stop hoarding.

Getting stuff together on the driveway. Makeshift tables galore.

Andy Kaufman: World Inter-Gender Wrestling Champion

When I first heard of the new DVD, Andy Kaufman: World Inter-Gender Wrestling Champion, my first question was, "How is this different from I'm from Hollywood?" -- the documentary about Kaufman's wrestling career.

Where I'm from Hollywood is a documentary, Inter-Gender Wrestling Champion is a collection of home video tapes of Andy Kaufman's wrestling bouts, usually unedited, poorly lit, and accompanied by some really annoying songs from S.S. Bumblebee and some repetitive crowd sound effects.

Directed by Lynne Margulies -- a co-director of I'm from Hollywood, Inter-Gender Wrestling Champion feels like a garage sale of a film. It's like Ms. Margulies had a lot of tapes she transferred willy-nilly to a DVD and called the end product Andy Kaufman: World Inter-Gender Wrestling Champion. This and the accompanying book, Andy Kaufman: I Hate Your Guts feel like Ms. Margulies trying to make some quick cash off the name of her dead friend. Pretty fucking tacky.

Do yourself a favor and stick to I'm from Hollywood instead.

Tales from the Script

We all know that being a screenwriter is a lonely, thankless job. There have been myriad narrative movies that tell us so (The Player, Sunset Boulevard, Barton Fink, etc).

It's a rarity when we get the straight poop right from the writers' mouths but Peter Hanson and Paul Robert Herman's Tales from the Script provides a soap box for dozens of writers to share their war stories. Some folks, like William Goldman, take to the task with relish, unloading with both barrels and sparing no one from his wrath. Meanwhile, less-established writers shy away from dishing too much dirt, their next paycheck depending on still "playing the game" in Hollywood. Between the two extremes, subdivided by level of jadedness, there's a central theme to the entire talking-head documentary--writers aren't appreciated. This isn't news to just about anyone but perhaps this film will be viewed and taken to heart by young scribes with stars in their eyes.

If you get off on hearing the dirt about someone's profession (as I do) then Tales from the Script will bring a smile to your face. I highly recommend checking out this DVD, especially the extra "The Gospel According to Bill", a solid twelve minutes of golden curmudgeon William Goldman.

Bastard Pop - Play the Funky Mashup, White Boy

Without knowing it, I’ve been a fan of so-called Bastard Pop for years. As a kid, I loved Dickie Goodman’s “Mr. Jaws”—my lazy music teacher in Elementary School would throw that on whenever she needed a break. Later, I was tolerant of the “Stars on 45” albums (including the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra’s Hooked on Classics). This paved the way for years of enjoyment from Weird Al Yankovic’s obligatory polkapalooza of current hits that he’s done since his premiere album.

Creative sampling in hip hop put a smile on my face; the more layered and diverse the samples, the better. Groups like Pop Will Eat Itself, with its wide range of The Osmonds, The Warriors, and Run D.M.C., delighted me with a hodgepodge of riffs, drum tracks, and movie quotes used as building blocks to create a new wall of sound. However, other than the occasional clever remix, there was little to satiate my love of recycled sounds or bastardized songs for about fifteen years.

Everything changed when I heard The Kleptones.

My first exposure to the “mash-up” musical movement, The Kleptones stand at the top of a very large heap of artists (and hacks) who take two or more songs and marry them together to create something totally new. Their albums—Yoshimi Battles the Hip-Hop Robots, A Night at the Hip-Hopera, 24 Hours, Uptime/Downtime—are mash-up essentials. With Yoshimi, The Kleptones re-envision the Flaming Lips’s 2002 album Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots via the removal of Wayne Coyne’s vocals and the addition of vocal tracks from The Beastie Boys, 50 Cent, Missy Elliot, Public Enemy, and more.

If Yoshimi Battles the Hip-Hop Robots was a “simple” subtraction and addition, then A Night at the Hip-Hopera is a quadratic equation. The Kleptones pilfer a wide array of music by Queen while blending in multiple rap tracks, extra percussion, and sound clips from interviews, music videos, commercials, films, and television shows. In any given track one can hear Calvert DeForest, Meat Loaf, Old Dirty Bastard, Raymond Scott, Detroit Grand Pubahs, Tyler Durden, Brittany Spears, the Mooninites, Jeffrey Lebowski, or Jethro Tull; all the while without missing a beat. Just about every track is a winner with standouts being “Ride” (a mix of “My Name Is” by Eminem with “Bicycle Race” by Queen) and “Jazz” (which skillfully lays lyrics from Queen’s “We Will Rock You” over their tune “More of that Jazz” between bits of “Tears on my Pillowcase” by Task Force).

The Kleptones’ magnum opus, 24 Hours, continues the group’s eclectic journey. Using the framework of a day, the album tells the story of a person’s life through music.

Another great use of Queen is The Silence Xperiment’s Q-Unit: Greatest Hits, a collision of 50 Cent’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’ and The Massacre with some of Queen’s greatest hits. Like Yoshimi Battles the Hip-Hop Robots, this collection is more of a one-to-one mixing and matching of complimentary tracks. In this way it’s similar to works like “Smells Like Bootylicious” which pairs Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” with Destiny Child’s “Bootylicious”) or The Grey Album by D.J. Danger Mouse (Brian Joseph Burton), a meeting of the Beatles’ eponymous work (commonly known as The White Album) and Jay-Z’s The Black Album.

Pairings of two disparate artists (the “A vs. B” subgenre of mash-ups) can be fun but I find more pleasure in albums like A Night at the Hip-Hopera which take from a multitude of sources. The other best example of this is Dean Gray’s American Edit, a complete makeover of Green Day’s American Idiot. Working from a Green Day backbone, Dean Gray (artists Party Ben and team9) layers on and mixes in impossible musical fits. No song is left untouched. Some of the more jaw-dropping tracks include “Greenday Massacre” which seamlessly crosses between Green Day’s “Wake Me Up When September Ends,” The Eagles’ “Lying Eyes” and several more tracks. Another, “American Jesus,” crosses genre chasms between Green Day, Bryan Adams, Smokey Robinson, and Johnny Cash, to name a few.

With the release of the Kleptones’s latest,Uptime/Downtime, HKIC Eric Kleptone took a few minutes to answer a few of my burning questions:

Cashiers du Cinemart What is your day job?
Eric Klepton Being a Kleptone is, right now! Although I do/have done many other things, but I have a history of sound/lighting work, IT stuff and now lecturing both of those - I’m going to be doing some Ableton Live workshops with BBC Blast (http://www.bbc.co.uk/blast/) over the coming months, which should be excellent!

CdC: How did you get involved in the “Mashup Biz”?
EK: Well, like a lot of peeps, the idea of sampling stuff and cutting and pasting came before someone gave it a catchy title - I’ve been hooked since I was a teenager, when a friend of my older brother started giving me pause-button edit tapes of mixes he’d made. I got really inspired by the journey you could take people on linking and overdubbing clips together, so inspired by him I started to make my own. Not long after that I heard The Art Of Noise and early UK cut-up dance tracks alongside more experimental stuff by artists like Negativland. All I had to do then was wait for samplers to get cheap enough to allow me to join in. On top of that I’d started DJing, which meant throwing entire tunes on top of each other, and not being limited by the memory of the sampler -- for example, play Kraftwerk’s “Numbers” and Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time” on two decks -- probably the first genuine “mashup” I ever chanced upon; still sounds great!

CdC How on earth do you get your inspiration? I picture you like John Travolta in Blow Out with a thousand strips of sounds around.
EK: That’s pretty accurate. I spend a lot of time assembling source material - When I do put a track together, I like it to happen pretty quickly, so I’m pretty OCD about filing stuff right, but that means when I have a brainwave, I can check it out right then! Having said that, there’s also an element of “throw shit at the wall and see what sticks” - Everything gets filtered through my own taste buds though, which are pretty particular, as evidenced by what ends up on the album.

CdC: How have video games such as Rock Band / Guitar Hero changed the mashup game? It seems that so much of The Best of Bootie 2010 had bits of songs from those games since the tracks have been released.
EK: Well it certainly gave the mashup biz quite a shot in the arm...Personally I’m delighted as I love those sort of tunes! Freebird!

An Evening with Timothy Carey

Wow.

About thirty five minutes into Tweet's Ladies of Pasadena I felt as if I'd had a psychotic break. The story of a bizarre man-child, Tweet Twig (Timothy Carey)--the only male member of the "Don't Drop a Stitch Knitting Club"--the film apparently combines a score of episodes for a television show that never happened. With most shots running less than a second, characters speaking in tandem, and things occurring on screen that come close to being a plot without actually adhering to anything close to a coherent narrative, Tweet's confounded the audience.

You could say that Tweet's was akin to a car crash but where that analogy works for compelling disasters, Tweet's drove several folks out of the theater. I was tempted to leave as my head was pounding but couldn't imagine that the breakneck pace could continue unabated and that the film would never return to some of the items that passed by winkquick as it unfolded. What about the people covered in roses? How about the dog that came back to life? Would Tweet ever find a job? Why did his wife not appear for the first third of the film and then appear to be different woman for the final third? Would those South American ants play a part in anything?

I've had drug trips that are more lucid than Tweet's Ladies of Pasadena.

Overall, I'm glad I saw it but it may take me a while to recover from it.

After the screening Timothy Carey's son, Romeo, gave a brief Q&A where he said Tweet's was shot over a period of roughly seven years, as if it had been a show that the elder Carey worked on despite it never being picked up by a network. And, despite the wild programming that populated the TV landscape in the '70s, I could never see such a show playing. It's still not clear if the 70+ minutes of Tweet's shown was one show or several cut together. The print screened appeared to be some kind of work print that had been edited to within an inch of its life.

I was hoping for some more information about Tweet's in the documentary about Timothy Carey, Making Sinner. However, this seemed to focus on Carey's early career up to and including The World's Greatest Sinner (1962).

Directed by Romeo Carey, I fear that Carey's son may be too close to the project when it comes to presenting a complete portrait of his father. Instead of being behind the camera, the eloquent Romeo would be better in front of the lens, relating the untold tales of his father's passion and wild life. As it stands, the rough cut of Making Sinner was a rather disjointed assembly of a handful of interviews and abrupt clips punctuated with stock photos. I'm not sure if these pictures were meant to be funny but I couldn't help but laugh when something mentioned by an interviewee always came accompanied by a loosely-related image. Someone would say "Jesus" and we'd see "Jesus". Or, a rather happy Latino fellow wearing a sombrero appeared whenever Mexico was mentioned.

There's not enough about The World's Greatest Sinner in Making Sinner to truly qualify it as a documentary of the film. Yes, there's some interesting behind-the-scenes footage including takes of scenes that go on for far longer than in the final film (at one point cameraman Ray Dennis Steckler discusses a scene that was taken twice -- once at ten minutes and another at eight -- while the scene runs only thirty seconds in the final cut. Seeing these outtakes makes me wonder what World's Greatest Sinner would look like without the disjointed editing; or is that what gives the film so much of its charm?

Making Sinner demonstrates the need for the definitive documentary of Timothy Carey. This needs to happen soon, while people that worked with him are still alive. In Making Sinner the interviews with Carey's youngest brother and Ray Dennis Steckler are great, yes, but a Carey doc needs interviews with people like Peter Falk, Bob Rafelson, Robert Blake, and Ben Gazarra (to name a few). As it stands, Making Sinner is an ambitious idea that isn't quite ambitious enough in its scope (and not cohesive in its presentation).

Between Making Sinner and Tweet's Ladies of Pasadena the audience was treated to Cinema Justice, a single scene in which an unhinged Carey steamrolls fellow actor Michael C. Gwynne, and The World's Greatest Sinner -- always a treat.

Was the evening worth a 10 hour drive, $20 parking and a $109 speeding ticket?. Yes. I don't know if or when Tweet's will ever play again and I couldn't pass up the opportunity to have my mind blown so thoroughly. Toodeloo!

Gimme Some Money

When my book comes out sometime this year (knock wood), there's not going to be boffo money for advertising.

To that end, I'm hitting the streets with my tin cup and some pencils, shilling for dollars via the website "IndieGoGo" in hopes of drumming up a couple bucks to help spread the word once Impossibly Funky hits the streets.

Got a couple extra bucks to throw into the pot? Click here.