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Look, you will never get to see most of these movies unless you somehow have keys to the vault at the MoMA (which you don't, I know all of you and I know that you do not).
So this means you need to see this. You can either watch a bootleg version of Factory Girl on Youtube again, which the only parts of that movie that are any good are the reenactments of the films they make, or you can go see the films themselves which are about as cool as anything can get. They are basically the precursors to all of your favorite John Waters' movies. They are rad and you need them in your life. If you are not lucky enough to see these at Anthology (first and foremost this means you are UNLUCKY) you should try to get these anyway you can.
Here is the actual press list with descriptions of the movies because I don't feel like finding clever ways to rewrite these already professional descriptions.
THURSDAY’S SCREENING INTRODUCED BY ANDY WARHOL SCHOLAR CALLIE ANGELL!
Andy Warhol
SCREEN TEST #1
1965, 66 minutes, 16mm.
The first Warhol film Tavel scripted, SCREEN TEST #1 stars Philip Fagan as the subject of Tavel’s off-screen examination. In the face of his tester’s increasingly suggestive and campy instructions, Fagan becomes stubbornly unresponsive, refusing to follow Tavel’s lead and falling back instead on the appeal of his own silent good looks. Although Fagan’s wooden performance prompted Warhol and Tavel to remake the film with Mario Montez (SCREEN TEST #2), this first version is a fascinating look into the complexities of queer identity in the 1960s.
–Thursday, December 10 at 7:00 and Sunday, December 13 at 5:30.
Screen Test #2 (c)2009 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie
Institute. All rights reserved.
Andy Warhol
SCREEN TEST #2
1965, 67 minutes, 16mm.
As Mario Montez auditions for the role of Esmerelda in THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME, Tavel, again off-screen, subjects the actor to a series of increasingly humiliating improvisations. But Mario’s faith in his self-created persona sustains the illusion of his character and becomes, in the end, a triumph of performance art.
–Thursday, December 10 at 9:00 and Sunday, December 13 at 7:00.
Andy Warhol
HEDY
1966, 67 minutes, 16mm.
HEDY presents the adventures of Hedy Lamarr, as she receives a face-lift, is arrested for shoplifting, and goes on trial to face the accusations of her five former husbands. Mario Montez gives one of his most outstanding performances in the title role, and the film features appearances by Mary Woronov, Ingrid Superstar, Gerard Malanga, and Jack Smith. Filmed with the usual amount of Warholian chaos in a loft full of used furniture, HEDY also includes live music by the Velvet Underground.
–Friday, December 11 at 7:00 and Sunday, December 13 at 4:00.
Andy Warhol
VINYL
1965, 66 minutes, 16mm.
An adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s novel, A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, which is about as far from Kubrick’s version as possible. The misbehavior and reconditioning of the young hoodlum Victor (Gerard Malanga) takes place in a claustrophobic setting crammed with cast members and S&M practitioners. Though she had a walk-on part in HORSE, VINYL marks the first significant appearance in a Warhol film of Superstar Edie Sedgwick, who, though sitting silently in the foreground throughout, somehow manages to steal the movie from its ostensible stars.
–Friday, December 11 at 9:00 and Monday, December 14 at 7:00.
Andy Warhol
KITCHEN
1965, 66 minutes, 16mm.
Tavel’s heterosexual satire was filmed in a real kitchen, with Edie Sedgwick and Roger Trudeau playing an unhappy couple, Jo and Mikie. The action is interrupted by various chaotic activities: the running of a blender which drowns out the dialogue, the continual sneezing of Sedgwick and her co-stars, a bustling houseboy played by Rene Ricard, and photographer David McCabe, who repeatedly strides onto the set to take photos of the actors. Note: The hair which appears in the frame is part of the film.
–Saturday, December 12 at 4:00 and Monday, December 14 at 8:45.
Andy Warhol
THE LIFE OF JUANITA CASTRO
1965, 66 minutes, 16mm.
An article written by Castro’s sister in 1964 inspired Tavel’s script for this film, a subversive avant-garde satire on Latin American politics in which Fidel Castro is played by a woman, while Marie Menken stars as Juanita. The entire cast, representing Castro’s family, sits in rows of chairs grouped for a family portrait. They all follow directions from Tavel, who sits in the last row feeding the actors their lines, which they repeat in a mixture of Spanish and English.
–Saturday, December 12 at 5:30 and Wednesday, December 16 at 8:45.
Andy Warhol
HORSE
1965, 105 minutes, 16mm.
Staged at the Factory with a rented horse, this is a homoerotic parody of the Western genre. The enacting of Tavel’s script (followed with difficulty from cue cards held up off-screen) takes place on a set crowded with evidence of the film’s production: mounted lights, a boom mic, assorted onlookers, and the Factory doors and telephone all visible in the frame. The film may be shown with either two or three reels. The ‘action’ occurs in Reels 1 & 3; Reel 2, a 33-minute ‘documentary’ shot of the horse standing in front of the Factory doors, may be shown either in the middle or at the end of the film. Any votes?
–Saturday, December 12 at 7:00 and Tuesday, December 15 at 8:45.
Andy Warhol
HARLOT
1964, 67 minutes, 16mm.
Warhol’s first synch-sound feature is an underground version of the Jean Harlow story with Mario Montez in drag as the platinum-haired Hollywood sex symbol of the 1930s. Staged as a kind of tableau vivant on a couch at the Factory, with Montez occupying the center of a carefully composed group of Superstars, along with a large white cat, HARLOT was the first film Tavel worked on with Warhol, though it was not based on one of his scripts. Instead he, Billy Name, and Harry Fainlight improvised the off-screen conversation that dominates the soundtrack, while on-screen the film culminates with Montez consuming copious quantities of bananas in highly suggestive ways.
–Saturday, December 12 at 9:15 and Wednesday, December 16 at 7:00.
Andy Warhol
SPACE
1965, 66 minutes, 16mm.
SPACE is based on a Tavel scenario, in which various characters are supposed to recite lines from eight unconnected scripts while Warhol’s roving camera moves among them. However, the large assembled cast – which includes Edie Sedgwick, as well as folk singer Eric Andersen and Dorothy Dean – seems completely uninterested in following the script, and SPACE transforms itself from a Tavel film into an Edie Sedgwick film before our eyes.
–Sunday, December 13 at 8:30 and Tuesday, December 15 at 7:00.
BACK BY (EVEN MORE) POPULAR DEMAND!
Andy Warhol
THE CHELSEA GIRLS
1966, ca. 210 minutes, 16mm double-projection. With Nico, Ondine, Marie Menken, Mary Woronov, Gerard Malanga, International Velvet, Ingrid Superstar, Mario Montez, Eric Emerson, and Brigid Berlin.
Warhol’s double-screen masterpiece – consisting of 12 unedited reels, shown side-by-side, with only one soundtrack audible at a time – depicts the Chelsea Hotel as a teeming hive of Superstars, junkies, prostitutes, and generally out-sized personalities. Though most of THE CHELSEA GIRLS was unscripted, two of the 12 reels – the sections entitled “Hannoi Hanna” and “Their Town”, and both featuring Mary Woronov among others – were based on scripts by Tavel.
–Thursday, December 17 at 7:00.
Arthur Lubin
WHITE SAVAGE
1943, 76 minutes, 35mm. With Maria Montez, Jon Hall, and Sabu.
In addition to collaborating with Warhol, Tavel was closely associated with Jack Smith, though their work together primarily took the form of theatrical events which, sadly, went mostly undocumented. However, the two artists were cinematically conjoined via their shared passion for the Dominican-born 1950s Hollywood star, Maria Montez, the so-called ‘Queen of Technicolor’. Headlining a string of lavish costume-adventure films set in exotic locales, Montez enjoyed a brief period of popular success, though little critical respect. But both Smith and Tavel venerated her for the transparency of her performances, and for the qualities of role-playing and fantasy-projection she exuded. Constituting an important part of their friendship, their devotion to Montez would soon manifest itself in their own work, in Smith’s famous article, “The Perfect Filmic Appositeness of Maria Montez”, as well as in his films, and in Tavel’s scripts for stage and screen (many of which would star the not-coincidentally named Mario Montez).
–Sunday, December 20 at 7:00 & 8:45.
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On the one side of the street I thought someone was walking a pigeon. I thought, That's a fucking stupid thing to be doing, until I looked to the other side of the street and someone was walking a child.
The pigeon turned out to be leash-less.
The kid was leaning in the gutter suspended only by the harness that his mom was holding with her fist raised in the air so that Junior would not be directly in the muck of the gutter, but merely staring at it from a few inches above, his arms flailing indicating that he wanted to be one with the muck, screaming at it and lunging for it only to be pulled back by his mom who was window shopping.
The kid kept going, "Uhhhhh. UHHHHHHH. UhhhHHHHHHHHH," as it was pulling away from the mother but she didn't blink.
Her forearms must be huge.
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Director Ruben Fleishcer
Country USA
Runtime 80 Minutes
Dead Life 9/10
The first person in a movie I was ever super fucking jealous of was Edward Furlong. I mean like real jealous. Like "Jessie's Girl" kind of jealous. First off, if you don't remember, Terminator 2 was the most hyped, and at the time the most expensive movie ever made. Now, we know that this doesn't necessarily make for the greatest movie of all time, but in a time before Titanic this did in fact mean that you were about to see the greatest movie ever. And you know what? It was. It was the greatest fucking movie of all time. It had CGI that didn't suck, the T1000's hands could turn into knives or crow bars and he stabs the stepdad through the mouth while he's drinking milk. There are apocalypse daydreams that could make any 10 year-old question existence and envision the end of the world obsessively, but more than anything, ANYTHING, Edward Furlong got to hang out with Arnold Schwarzenegger. THE Arnold Schwarzenegger. Before you knew anything about politics and he ruined California, he was the most incredible man in the universe... He was Mr. Universe! He had muscles and he talked cool and he fucking killed Predator! How did this kid, this squeaky-voiced kid about my same age even get the chance to be in this movie? My parents sure have failed a lot, but how do you not even know how to get your kid into auditions to meet Arnold Schwarzenegger? I didn't have to be in the movie, I just wanted to meet Arnold.
I had all the press stuff, the novelization, the comics, the production magazine. But after I saw the movie I couldn't even look at this stuff anymore because it filled me with such jealous rage that I did not get to hang out with Arnold and Edward Furlong did that I thought I might murder him if I ever saw him.
The only other thing in life I get this jealous of is people in zombie movies. I want nothing more than for the dead to walk the earth. Lord, if you're listening, and you are a kind and gentle God like I know you to be, then you will smite all the assholes that I hate with a plague of unholyness that the world never thought possible in which the dead roam the earth and I get to hit their awakened corpses with baseball bats. DO YOU HEAR ME GOD? YOU ALMIGHTY FUCKSTICK! YOU NEVER DO SHIT FOR ME YOU ASSHOLE! IF YOU WANT ME TO KEEP BELIEVING AND I KNOW MORE THAN ANYTHING YOU WANT SOMEBODY LIKE ME TO BELIEVE IN YOU THEN YOU WILL MAKE THE DEAD ROAM THE EARTH! YOU HEAR ME! Thank you and amen.
If I wasn't so jealous of the people in this movie I would have given it a 10. My jealousy took a point away. I am not above my emotions. I might marry this movie. Then divorce it out of jealousy and then pine for it again and have a lengthy court battle to determine what's mine.
Posted at 12:07 PM in Film, Movies: Own It | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
The Yes Men are the kind of guys you wished you were. They have beliefs coupled with action. Thought coupled with compassion. Nerves of steel and skeletons of gold and giant balls... Survivaballs.
I was lucky enough to get a few minutes to talk to Mike Bonanno of the Yes Men, the funniest dudes on the most serious mission, on a particularly noisy Sunday afternoon.
Get mad as Hell and check out their newest movie, The Yes Men Fix The World.
Mike Bonanno: Hello?
J: The first thing I noticed about the movie was – I thought that you guys seemed very underwhelmed after each event, after each hoax. Were you displeased with what was happening, with the outcomes or was that just editing?
MB: You mean like that we basically don’t act – like we get all excited and say that we changed everything and that things are – is that what you mean, like it’s a series of upsets?J: Do you think, now recently the ACORN thing that just happened, do you think this is the new journalism or do you think people have been doing this all along or do you think you guys are perfecting it?
MB: I definitely don’t think, I mean if it wasn’t journalism we’d be making it – I don’t know if you saw the op-ed piece that we wrote about the ACORN thing, what the amazing thing about what those people did in relation to ACORN is that congress actually acted on it. If congress had been acting on some of these things that we’d been, let’s say revealing [laughs], some of these sort of sting operations, and con games that we’ve been playing, then we would see a much more accountable corporate sector than we currently do. We would see major corporations losing their funding not just an organization that’s trying to help working families afford their homes. That situation sort of points out something really interesting – that’s evidence that this is becoming more of a hot-button way of acting for activists, whether right-wing activists or leftie-activists. The interesting thing there then becomes, in our estimation, how the public and how the government actually reacts to that information. It seems totally absurd that the government actually responded to that case by taking away funding of ACORN, but sure, if they’re gonna do that if they’re gonna get all righteous about it, someone’s really fixed the problem everywhere there’s corruption, we’re all for that. You may knock out a few ACORN employees, but along with it I hope they’ll be taking basically the entire banking sector, basically the entire fossil fuels industry, all of the half thousand relationships with the government and all of the subsidies that they get are going to have to go… so, yeah, we applaud it.MB: Yeah, I think recently I’m beginning to see what we do as - trading terms - the world of direct action protest, it’s just that our direct action protest isn’t what you typically think of like with a blockade where you lock down and when you go and sit in a tree to keep it from being cut down, but still more of direct action. What we’re doing when we release this film is to really try to encourage as many people as possible to really get active. Especially young people who are frustrated with the idea that they’re going to inherit this mass of problems that the generation before them is creating, and the generation before them isn’t changing the laws to help keep those problems from happening at an accelerated rate like weather change… so they should be really pissed off.
J: Do you feel that things are too polarized now for any discourse? To me you guys are almost declaring war. I feel like it’s us against them now, or in the case of your movie, it’s us against them instead of “let’s sit down and talk about this” it’s, “You’re a fool, we’re going to reveal that.”Posted at 06:03 AM in Current Affairs, Emetrol, Farming and Its Effects on the Soil, Movies: See It | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
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This is from my newest guest blogger, my great friend Matt Bowdren. You might recognize him from our Youtube masterpiece, Difficulty. Mattie was stolen from me when some numbnuts in Georgia decided he would be good for grad school.
Dear Georgia,
I was walking home from downtown tonight and I got
rushed by a guy who hugged me. He was yelling something in my ear, I’m
sure it had something to do with the football game Georgia just lost. I
thankfully couldn’t hear him because I had my southern hick shield on,
which consists of my sweet ipod and sunglasses. This hick was hammered,
granted so was I, but hicks suck. While he was hugging me, in my head I
was screaming, “Hit him! Hit him!” I didn’t do it of course because
unfortunately there were four of them and I’m a big ol’ pussy.
I
overheard someone at the bar I was at tonight say, “Sure you could move
to New York City, but you’d want to come back to Athens right away.”
What a motherfucking asshole. Obviously this kid has never been
anywhere cool in his life. Who in their right mind (other than me
apparently) would leave the coolest place in the world, the place where
everything happens, and move to some back woodsy college town? The
people here are so confused. Every person I see that’s drunk or stoned
or homeless or doing something different than being an upper class
white southern gentleman, some frat guy in khaki shorts or a sorority
girl with a quarter of a brain says, “Welcome to Athens!” Shut. The.
Fuck. Up. There is nothing fantastic about what you’re seeing,
nothing new. It happens in every other city that is actually real all
day every day and people don’t need to comment on it because it’s a
fucking fact of life. ‘welcome to Athens’ my ass. People here talk
about Athens, Georgia like it’s some big secret that the rest of the
country – not wasting their lives – have never figured out. Let me tell
you something, NO ONE gives a shit about Athens, Georgia. Not your
friends, your family, or your government, no one needs to because in
the grand scheme of things the only thing that seems to have ever come
from the Captain Morgan, money soaked shit hole, are a couple of indie
rock bands that sucked from the start.
Side note – three different people today told me they had no idea who T. Rex was. Go fuck yourselves.
When I first came here everyone told me how beautiful women from the South are.
Nope.
It’s not that they aren’t attractive – it’s just that they look and act
like they have never been fucked. Now, I’m not talking they are
virgins, I’m saying they have never been absolutely F-U-C-K-E-D. Wham,
Bam, Thank you Ma’am Fucked. They don’t walk with their hips, they move
like they are locked. It’s not sexy; it looks like they probably cry.
Often. Not sure where I’m going with this, but it’s not sexy to look at
a woman and feel like you’d have to teach them everything. It should be
good from go.
Let me say something else about the South. If I
get one more goddamn smile from some one I don't know I am going to hit
the roof. Seriously, only here, only in this town can you get this
'gosh darn' interest in people shopping for groceries, or talking on my
phone. It's not like I am standing in public masturbating or killing a
small animal, yet still people walk by and stare at me like I am a
crazed serial killer. Seriously in any real world situation (i.e
anywhere except Athens, GA) some one would stab them in the face.
Which is what I want to do. Daily.
People
keep telling me I'll get use to it, but here's the thing. I don't want
to get used to it, I don't want to like it. I really enjoy hating shit,
and I swear if that ever changes - if I ever become a southerner -
someone please, punch me in the sack.
Love,
Matt Bowdren
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