Welcome To Australia-Let's Talk About Nick Cave

Having spent four days in Australia so far, there’s no question that Nick Cave is considered a national hero. You can’t go five minutes without someone mentioning him. He’s as big as Bob Seger is in Detroit. Fortunately, that’s ok by me. And not only are people constantly talking about him, but as it turns out, he even has an exhibit at the Western Australian Museum here in Perth, where I’ve spent the last few days. The show is pretty cool. It’s essentially Nick Cave ephemera mania. Three or four rooms filled with journals, folios, sketch books, studio notes, curios from Cave’s house, bookshelves filled with books from his Sussex home, artwork that inspired him, and original photos spanning his career, many of which you’re all familiar with. There are lots of Birthday Party and Bad Seeds videos, as well as Nick Cave docs screening on monitors spread throughout the exhibit. There are also some very cool curio cabinets hung on the wall. They contain little speakers and when you open them, you hear Cave wax rhapsodic about love and life. For some reason, all the 10-year-old kids at the museum were immediately drawn to those. There was something perverse about that.

And if that wasn’t enough Nick Cave for the day, later that evening, I caught a Nick Cave doc at the Revelation Film Festival (the reason why I’m in Perth in the first place). Do You Love Me Like I Love You, Part 5: Tender Prey is a 30 minute doc by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard on the making and the meaning of Tender Prey. Apparently, they’ve made 14 of these films, interviewing over 300 people in the process. They’ve made one film for each Bad Seeds’ record and the films appear as bonus material on re-issued collectors’ editions of each record. The film is pretty awesome. 30 minutes of beautifully shot talking head interviews with the people involved and influenced by the record in question. It is a thorough analysis of all things Tender Prey. Dissected are the songs, the lyrics, the emotion, the smuttiness, the meaning, the images, the photography, the recording, the mixing. Weighing in are the likes of Blixa, Mick Harvey, Alan Vega, Kid Congo, Mark Arm, Noah Taylor, Flood and many, many more both male and female. At times, the film yearns for a little music or a little live footage, but the interviews are so good that’s all forgiven, especially considering these are ultimately part of a cd package where you can pop on whatever song you want to hear.

Heck, I even debased myself before the screening, crooning a little bit of Lover Man in order to win a giveaway of From Her To Eternity.

Now I’m off to hunt down Bon Scott’s grave.

Public Enemies, Moon, The Song Is You. Book and Movie Round Up

Moon
Awesome. Sam Rockwell is diligently at work in solitude on a lunar station. Two weeks left to go on a three year stint. There’s an accident. Things go wrong. He’s starting to lose his marbles. Is he seeing things? Are there clones? What’s going on? Creepy, sci-fi quietude channeling 2001, Silent Running and Demon Seed. Is the computer good or bad? What about the corporation behind it all? A grim 70s view of the evil corporation and the sci-fi world in general. And it was shot in Shepperton. Right on!


Public Enemies
Not down with this at all. The film was pretty much a compilation of prison breaks (apparently very easy to do), bank robberies (apparently very easy to do) and shootouts with the cops featuring lots of tommy guns and dead people. But honestly, where was the story? If you’re gonna make a movie about Dillinger, you should at least give some insight into the inner-psyche of the character, what makes him tick, blah blah blah. Did I miss something? Depp could have been any gangster. Pretty generic at the story, back story and inner story level. I was also irritated by the camera work (oooh, low angles all the time, how ominous) and the music. I guess I didn’t like it. Marion Cotillard was purty to look at, but not so sure about the acting chops. There were moments where the film addressed the changing nature of crime during the depression and shifts taking place within the FBI and the world of crime fighting. I liked those moments, but those were fleeting at best.

The Song Is You by Megan Abbott
Fantastic neo-noir. Channels Ellroy and Chandler in a delicious way. Great story about the underbelly of Hollywood in the 40s. Desperate, wanna-be actresses, willing to do anything for a role. The stars and the studios willing to prey on these star struck girls from the Midwest. The jaded hangers on in the system undercutting their morals for a taste of fame and money. Expertly written.

Skate & Destroy

It’s a weird world to be sure. Back in 1986, over the course of one day, I made a short film called Skate Witches. Tonight it appears on MTV. Never in a million years would I have predicted that.

The film was inspired by my friend Dana. She had skated a bit and wanted to bring her board to Ann Arbor as a way to get around town. But since she was a girl, she figured she’d get hassled by the boy skateboarders. Jokingly, I suggested she start a female skateboard gang as a way to address that problem. Within minutes our friend Karen, who claimed to be a good skater, joined up, as did our friend Jenny, who openly admitted to never having skated. A gang was formed, a movie script was plotted, and the back of a leather jacket was emblazoned with SKATE WITCHES in white spray paint.

When we started shooting, Karen, for some reason, refused to skate. We worked that into the script. During the shoot, we found a couple of friends skating. They were recruited to be hapless boy victims, being shoved off their skateboards and having their boards stolen by Jenny. I think because she was the most novice skater, it was decided that she would be the tough. All of our pet rats appeared as well. Mr. Ig Wigg, Maggie, and a rat whose name I can not remember.

The film was shot in an afternoon and one evening. We shot a night scene where Karen skated at night, backing up her claim in the film that she “only skates at midnight.” That was lit by the car lights of a 1982 brown Horizon. That footage was unusable.

We finished the film and essentially no one cared. It did screen at the Ann Arbor Super 8 Fest in 1986 or 1987. I remember being irritated because they had a prize for best Michigan Film. I’m not saying I deserved to win, but they did give that award to a filmmaker from Ohio that year.

Underground films like this were a tough sell in 1986 and not until the 90s with the founding of NY and Chicago Underground Film Fests did this kind of work even gain traction. Skate Witches got a couple of nice screenings throughout the 90s as Skate Film Festivals (esp. Cut & Paste) started coming to the fore.

But then the internet. Skate Witches has been a hit with the youth on YouTube. It’s funny. And now MTV.

The film, “discovered on YouTube”, is going to be featured, and I believe made fun of, on a show called DJ and The Fro. Kind of like Bevis and Butthead, but featuring guys in cubicles sharing viral videos. We’ll see. It appears on an episode called Substitute Boss. It’s set to air Friday, July 3, 12:30 am. Set your TIVOS and check your local listings for repeat airings.

And for what it’s worth, Dana still has the jacket. Let the eBay bidding wars commence!

Watch it below with out the smarmy MTV comments. Also, it's available on my Warts & All DVD.

Moby Dick--The Book, Not The Song

Never read Moby Dick. It’s been on the to-do list for years. Just finished it up. But I can’t think of anything more pathetic than a blogger in 2009 reviewing such a classic tome. So I won’t. I will quote one passage however.

“At such times, under an abated sun; afloat all day upon smooth, slow heaving swells; seated in his boat, light as a birch canoe; and so sociably mixing with the soft waves themselves, that like hearth-stone cats they purr against the gunwale; these are the times of dreamy quietude, when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean’s skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember, that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang.”

Now that’s some good writing.

Plotbox Turns 1

This week marks the 1st anniversary of the Plotbox blog. 69 posts in all. Titter...Titter. I’m celebrating by heading to the mountains of Northern California and attempting to read Moby Dick. There will be no internet and no posts for at least a week. What better time to read some posts you might have missed the first time around.

Chuck Barris
Don Rickles
Roky Erickson
Raveonettes vs. The Polyphonic Spree
Slapshot
Palahniuk
Fatty Arbuckle
Anvil
Jonathan Lethem
Sheman Alexie
Las Vegas
Roman Polanski
Clint Eastwood
Hair Metal
Boris
Klosterman on Metal
Sara Palin vs. The NHL
Mark The Bird Fidrych
The Dream Syndicate (full show audio for download)
Flaming Lips
Ibis Attack
Motley Crue
Crime Novels
Cometbus
Scott Walker

It Came From Kuchar

I love the brothers Kuchar. Mike and George, have been making weird, offbeat, underground films since the early 60s. In an era where most experimental filmmakers were dabbling in formal exercises, the Kuchars were pounding out bizarre melodramas, starring elderly women with insane eyebrow make up, putting turds in toilet bowls years before John Waters, and cornering the market on amazing film titles—The Devil’s Cleavage, Sins of The Fleshapoids, I Was A Teenage Rumpot, to name a few. They’ve continued putting out several films a year, embracing digital video after years of shooting on 8mm and 16mm. They are awesome. They are the real deal. They ooze the strangest energy. They are twins. They have strange speech patterns, and their Bronx accents are thick and delicious. It Came From Kuchar is an awesome doc that captures the beauty, the hilarity, the sadness and the energy of the world of the Kuchars. Kudos to director Jennifer Kroot for pulling this one off in great form. I love the Kuchars and was naturally apprehensive going in that the film wouldn’t do them justice. It does, and then some. It’s a great look at the NYC underground film world of the 60s, the SF underground film world of the 70s and does a great job focusing in on the creative process, how these guys work, how they are driven to work, and why making art is so damn important to them. The film mixes amazing clips of their films, lots of screen time for George and Mike, and lots of top notch interviews with the likes of John Waters, Buck Henry, Bill Griffith, Guy Maddin, Wayne Wang, Jack Stevenson and more. If it’s showing at a festival near you, go see it.

If you’re in SF this Tuesday, Curt McDowell’s Thundercrack, penned by George and starring George is playing at the Victoria. It’s the greatest underground film of all time. It’s a porn, it’s a comedy, there's a gorrilla involved, it’s one of a kind. It’s not available on video.

Here's a bit of Mike's The Craven Sluck

The Girlfriend Experience by Steven Soderbergh

I’m reminded of an episode of Barney Miller where, as part of a sting operation, the Ron Glass character has to make a porn with precinct money. What he makes is so boring, arty and pretentious that the sting operation fails. That episode sheds a lot of light on this film.