“Inglourious Basterds” Trailer
Inglourious Basterds Trailer from Paul on Vimeo.
Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” finally gets its opening this summer — I think some of us first started hearing about this project a decade ago. From the looks of things, our man from the video store has made one slick piece of bloodlust.
Random 10 for February 24, 2009
1. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, “Dig, Lazarus, Dig.” The title track from Cave’s best disc in years, and that’s saying something. Not many people from his generation are making career-peak music at 52, but between Grinderman, the revitalized Bad Seeds and his soundtrack work, this man is absolutely killing.
2. Led Zeppelin, “Over the Hills and Far Away.”
3. Tori Amos, “A Case of You.”
4. The Flaming Lips, “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (Japanese Version).”
5. The Futureheads, “Hounds of Love.” The Sunderland band that took its name from a Flaming Lips album (!) recasts the Kate Bush classic as an angular rocker.
6. Northern State, “The Man’s Dollar.”
7. This Is Ivy League, “Celebration.”
8. Os Mutantes, “Ando Meio Desligado.”
9. Jimi Hendrix, “Izzabella.”
10. Northern State, “Better Already.” Sort of Luscious Jackson: The Next Generation, 2007 saw the trio led by former Hillary Clinton campaign staffer Hesta Prynn land at Mike Patton’s Ipecac Records, which released the Adrock co-produced Can I Keep This Pen?
Video of the Day: Alessi’s Ark, “Over the Hill”
Breaking from the recent spate of head-trip clips, Alessi Laurent-Marke takes things in a far more cute, twee direction. Tea party!
Video of the Day: MGMT, “Time to Pretend”
The Dave Fridmann-produced Oracular Spectacular was in my Top 10 for 2008, and the album definitely has legs a year later. MGMT will play Bonnaroo this year, and hopefully there will be new material in the near term. The video has that cheapo chroma key quality of early ’80s Todd Rundgren videos, which is just fine.
Staticblog Is Really Damn Happy About: Tinted Windows
Bun E. Carlos, James Iha, Taylor Hanson and Adam Schlesinger are Tinted Windows.
Anyone with great affection for power-pop should be happy about Tinted Windows, a supergroup of sorts featuring Adam Schlesinger of Fountains of Wayne and Ivy, James Iha of The Smashing Pumpkins and A Perfect Circle, Taylor Hanson of Hanson and Bun E. Carlos of Cheap Trick.
This new band’s debut comes out April 21 on S-Curve, and while we’ve all been burned by supergroups before, I will never discount anything Schlesinger toplines — the man is one of the most gifted songwriters working today. Furthermore, Taylor Hanson gets another shot — it’s easy to dismiss Hanson out of hand for the band’s late-’90s bubblegum image, but he’s a strong singer and I think having his vocals on Schlesinger’s songs has the potential for genius.
As soon as music or video arrives, it will be in this space.
UPDATE: Ryan at Oklahoma Rock posted a video segment from an alleged music show (I agree, Ryan, it looks like a big fake that Schlesinger probably dreamed up as a tribute to TV shows he saw in his Long Island youth) that showcases a couple of Tinted Windows songs. They sound exactly as you might expect, which is pretty awesome. Here ‘Tis:
Tinted Windows - "Rock After Dark" Promo
Static, Episode 2: Maggie McClure
Interview
“What’s It Like”
“Out of My Mind”
“I Wonder Why”
81st Annual Academy Awards Live Chat
81st Annual Academy Awards, Live Chat Sunday Night — Be Here!
Instead of traditional live blog you’ve come to love and fear, at 7 p.m. Sunday I’ll be participating in a live chat that will be running both here at Staticblog and on NewsOK’s Oscar site. Just show up at this location around red carpet time, and we’ll blather, postulate and chortle our way through five hours of magic.
Video of the Day: The Chandeliers, “Mr. Electric”
Ever watch a “Baby Einstein” video, in which the artisans at Walt Disney film various blinking lights, ’70s-era microfilament lamps and battery-operated toys to ostensibly stimulate your infant’s brain? Consider this video “Hipster Einstein.”
Movie Review: “Must Read After My Death”
Charley and Allis in “Must Read After My Death.”
Rating: 79
Domestic psychodramas set in the mid-20th century pique our curiosity because they expose the ugly truths hidden in that era’s idealism, the darkness behind the white picket fence. But while “Revolutionary Road” and “Mad Men” offer smart, often bleak dramatizations of desperation, neither is as jarringly horrific as Morgan Dews’ documentary, “Must Read After My Death.”
Allis and Charley (Dews never gives away the family name of his grandparents) documented their lives in unusual detail for pre-YouTube era. Because Charley spent four months a year on business in Australia, the couple bought matching Wollensak reel-to-reel tape recorders and sent spools of spiels across the water. And that would have been wonderful, if Charley hadn’t been a monster of a husband.
Allis, an educated and worldly woman before she married Charley in 1946, was left in Hartford, Conn. to raise their children: Anne, Chuck, Bruce and Douglas. Charley, who believed in open marriage, fooled around Down Under and told his wife all about it in unsettling detail, even asking his girlfriends to sing into the microphone.
The balance of Charley’s concerns surrounded his family’s bad housekeeping. When he was home, he would drink and scream, and his unloving nature and hateful parenting resulted in psychological trauma for the children. One of them, Bruce, was institutionalized for a year, and Allis and the rest of her family were treated by a Dr. Theodore Lenn, who seemed only to exacerbate their misery.
The audiotapes provide the only narration, and are juxtaposed with often sunny, idealized images of Allis and Charley’s home and family. Dews quilts the audio recordings together with home movies and still photos to create a true-life suburban nightmare.
“Must Read After My Death,” named for a file of transcripts Allis left when she died in 2001, opens in New York theaters but can be seen nationwide starting today here. This documentary offers a strong argument for purchasing a new widescreen monitor — with independent film losing support at theaters, online viewing is its best refuge.
