Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Legend of the Surami Fortress!

Theme: Stein um Stein - Rammstein

Let me tell you a tale...

Everyone knows Sergei Paradjanov for his seminal 60s classic Sayat Nova (aka The Colour of Pomegranates), an ostensible biopic of Armenia's most celebrated poet. It was obvious to everyone that Paradjanov had the most singular talent and vision among filmmakists since Ozu, but the Soviet regime did not approve of his flagrant flouting of socialist realism formula and penchant for stirring up nationalist sentiment in the benighted SSRs, so he spent four years in a prison camp on what nearly everyone agrees were bogus charges of rayping a Party functionary before being released, only to reprise his controversy-courting schtick in the mid-80s because, in his words, "lmfao yolo nigga idgaf".

Paradjanov surveying all the territories occupied by his balls (1985, colourised).

While this absolute madladdery merits celebration in itself, the fact that Legend of the Surami Fortress adapts so effortlessly Paradjanov's patented succession of album-cover-worthy compositions and bizarre vignettes to a more traditionally narrative folkloric template makes one wonder why no indie hipster fast-tracked by H*llywood has tried to make a franchise flick this way, until one remembers that indie hipsters don't actually watch arthouse films or have integrity, audacity or character. Yes, Legend, set in a bizarrely stylised medieval Georgia, has a plot, albeit one the great filmmakists often seem indifferent to conveying with any great clarity or urgency, in favour of complete non-sequiturs like this:

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The plot concerns a fortress which repeatedly collapses, to the great consternation of the Czar, and the intertwining fates of various slaves, merchants, warriors and clairvoyants that culminate in a solution: a young man must sacrifice his life to be entombed within the foundation of the building, ensuring its stability for the ages. This might seem like an odd idea, but similar legends are found as far off as Japan, so many cultures shared it. I myself have immured several victims in my foetid crawlspace, but less to consecrate the building and more because they wouldn't stop wearing her face.

Neighbours know better than to bother me or ask too many questions. You heard nothing; you smelled nothing.

But Legend's impact lies in its striking visual style over the vicissitudes of plot anyway. Closeups are few, lending the objectivity of detachment that makes the stagey imagery stand out in its naked strangeness. Compare Kurosawa's Dreams and Terayama's Pastoral: To Die in the Country for examples of similar atmospheric derealisation. Off-symmetrical framing is another motif, introducing subtle dissonance into an ordered world:

I'm showing these compositions to Stanley Kubrick to watch his eye twitch later this evening, but you're not invited.

Greatest Album of All Time of the Week DOUBLE FEATURE: Whirlpool and Blood Music!

This year marks the 35th anniversary of Chapterhouse's debut album, Whirlpool, for which auspicious occasion they have reformed and are touring around playing the whole thing for their eminently discerning fans. Sadly I won't be attending any of these shows because I only found out about it yesterday, which made me so mad I spent forty minutes pacing angrily around my room stimming and babbling to myself until I got dizzy and crawled under my weighted blanket for a sob. Fortunately I can still celebrate the occasion with a blȭǥ post, which also gets me out of having to think of a thing to post about.

Shoegaze was brilliant, so naturally the music press hated it and murdered it in favour of utter shit like grunge and brit pop. Ostensibly, the reason they despised it was because it was "too middle class", which is a stupid reason to cut short the best genre of its era. Powdered wig aristocrats have classical, football hooligans have oi!, so why shouldn't the poor saps who pay taxes have a genre for themselves? If jamming Chapterhouse is "middle class", then mow my lawn and run my 2.5 kids off to school, because Chapterhouse is great and Tony Blaircore sucks.

But since so many shoegaze pioneers were too polite and easily embarrassed to resist getting bullied out of soaking longer in their daydream genre (Lush and Ride went brit pop, Slowdive and The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa took a turn for sparse electronic and Catherine Wheel went space rock, prog, hard rock then prog again), it was only sensible and prudent for their fellow purveyors of swirly headcandy to have an escape plan of their own, which was already somewhat telegraphed on Whirlpool: with their followup Blood Music, they went largely dance-rock.

To this very day I can't decide which album I like more. On the side of Whirlpool we have an obvious ringer in the form of "Pearl", which might be the entire scene's most pristine pop gem. "Satin Safe" is as ominously droney as "Breather" is sunny and light, while "Come Heaven" provides the gritty/swirly template for gothgazers Love Spirals Downwards. Blood Music boasts fewer standouts but is more consistent and coherent as a whole. Blood Music loses points for more intelligible vocals but matches Whirlpool's array of pedals with a sonic sprawl all of its own. Whirlpool is the captivating rush of spring and summer, Blood Music the flourescent melancholy of autumn, but, like Yin and Yang, each contains a drop of the other.

Demos released on their recent Chronology comp suggest a third album might have further integrated the two styles, but we'll never know because after Blood Music they stopped altogether, quitting while they were creatively, if not commercially, lightyears ahead of the curve (no offence to Curve). It's like if I'd dropped The Real Slim Stayvun and The Stayvun by Edgar Allen Poe and then retired into obscurity, content to let the GOATs speak for themselves.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Dude, Where's My Car?

Theme: Ashtray - Screeching Weasel

C'est magnifique.

It's obvious the makers of 2000's perfect time capsule Dude, Where's My Car? set out to make the dumbest movie of all time not just of the week, but of all time. The fact that almost any given movie released after, say, 2012 surpasses it in crayon chewage should scarcely be allowed to detract from their then-seemingly-epochal achievement. Ashton Kutcher (TV's Punk'd!) and Seann William Scott (The Dukes of Hazzard) star as Jesse and Chester (or vice versa), two stoner layabouts one solitary IQ point above the maximum threshold for mandatory helmet allocation or admittance to a Zack Snyder flick.

"MmmDUHHHRrr" - these dudes.

Waking one day after a blurry and forgotten night of excitement, intrigue and illicit substances, our MENSA benchwarmers find that, let's say, Jesse's car is missing, prompting him to utter the titular phrase, to which, let's say, Chester replies "where's your car, dude?" This exchange goes on for a few minutes, and it ain't the last.

Pictures you can hear, exhibit A.

The rest of the movie ostensibly concerns itself with our intrepid breakfast eaters trying to unravel the mystery of what wild and whacky goings-on transpired during their unremembered night of rampage, but nothing like a coherent timeline with causal linkages between beats ever materialises, no doubt to your immeasurable consternation. At some point, we and they learn, they got tattoos, stumbled across a sci-fi quest for the mysterious continuum transfunctioner, and let's say Jesse got it on with Kristy Swanson's character, cleverly named Kristy Boner, which the especially observant viewer may notice is a colloquial term for an hardon.

She doesn't wear this all movie, which I feel was an oversight.

This leads to a series of run-ins with our Swan Swan's bf, who is an hilariously one-dimensional bully with the memorable catchphrase "stoner bashin' time", whom Kristy cannot stand but is dating for some reason. The reason is that she can leave him at the end of the movie. This sort of writing by reverse-engineering is so characteristic of Hollywood slop that it works wonderfully as parody, and so the writers cannot help but undermine their aspiration to be dumb, because the whole film works that way: as a satire of actual movie conventions it's more over the target than Scream, Airplane! or the like. The continuum transfunctioner is a parody of the Hitchcockian MacGuffin, Kristy Boner is a parody of on-the-nose symbolic naming in pretentious scripts, her OTT bad jock boyfriend a parody of The Karate Kid, and Jesse and Chester themselves a parody of stoner buddy duos like Bill and Ted, Jay and Silent Bob, and Merry and Pippin.

I can't believe that hack Jackson omitted their SoCal accents and van with Frank Frazetta's Silver Warrior painted on the side. Respect the source material, fatass!

But we need not even bother to appreciate Dude for this inadvertent (or, perhaps, semi-advertent) hidden depth; for Dude reveals the secret wisdom that dumb humour will always make us actually laugh more than smart humour. Time and again in life I've cracked myself up to the point of tears looking at random people and imagining just going up to them and going "MnnNHUURRRRr".

The retard was me all along.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Beast!

Theme: We Never Learn - Clan of Xymox

Like Jawbreaker, The Beast is what I'd call a problematic fave if I spoke YouTuber With Pending Sexual Misconduct Allegations. This is because it cannot escape the Boomer Truth framework in which (or, very occasionally, against which) virtually all movies have been made. Fortunately, as you know, I have no hangups about liking what I like despite the soy-soaked motivations of its authors, because everything good is derived from a Platonic form of truth crudely translated by uncomprehending mortal vessels blind to its higher significance and resonances in the grand celestial design.

Goddammit, Pat, you are NOT steering this into another hidden depth. I MEAN it, I will turn this tank RIGHT ROUND.

So it is that an H*llywood m*vie doing everything it can to frame its critique of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan within safe regime-compliant terms wound up forecasting eerily the Yoo Ess Ay's own clusterfuck of an adventure in the Graveyard of Empires some decade-and-a-half later. For The Beast has its cast of commie marauders speak English in their own American accents, so if you happened to tune in while channel-hopping on TV (a primitive form of YouTube watched by early homo algorithmus), you might briefly think you'd stumbled on a 2000s movie about then-current events, except that the camera doesn't flail about as though the cameraman were being electrocuted, which for some reason everyone thought looked super cool in the 2000s.

"Uhh don't you think this would look better if we couldn't see what the fuck was going on?" - every director in the 2000s at once.

While most war movies suck and are boring (to say nothing of their propaganda content, which is on a par with newspapers), The Beast is audiovisual candy from its first frame to its last, and makes you wonder why they quit using those dreamy synth scores around the same time everyone traded in their Poison and Cinderella T-shirts for flannel. The detached, crystalline soundscapes and aerial tracking shots along Martianesque canyons render what you're seeing like a daydream, lighter than air, which is no small feat for a movie that opens with a Pashtun village massacre that culminates in a guy getting crushed to death feet-first by the titular tank.

They're doing this to me at work tomorrow.

I could prate on about the obvious parallels between bloated empires ruled by geriatrics overextending with Middle East wars but every day is Groundhog Day and you don't need to hear "I Got You Babe" again from me. The parallel less often drawn is how all libtard empires justify their wars of aggression with appeals to that perennial idol, pRoGrEsS. The Soviet tank crew's Afghan comrade justifies selling out his people on the basis that the Sovs will modernise his backwards homeland, citing laughably outmoded theory of the promised future "dialectical materialism", which is hardly less laughable than the neocon slime bewailing the loss of the Gendyr Stydies Dypartments at the sham universities they propped up during their later occupation of the same unhappy country.

Soviet/neocon outreach to the Afghans (1982-2022, colourised).

Growing up is realising there's not only zero daylight between commies and libtards, but as little between said libtards and neocons. It's all one big slurry of murderous, bottomlessly stupid garbage, every word of it premised on Boomer Truth.

So while this cringe would-be mic-drop seems merely trite if you put any stock in the writers/directors/miscellaneous rapists as the authors of the work, it's actually deeply revealing and thematically on point: the only language the smartest pinko in the crew can grasp onto to gesture vaguely at the truth is LE BAD NATZEES, just as he can appeal only to the women who attempt to stone him with one of three words in their language he's learned the whole time he's been in their country.

Hezbollah bros brief me on the finer points of their Lebanon defence strategy (2026, colourised).

The tank commander tells a story of the battle of Stalingrad in which he was pressed into use as a child soldier using Molotov cocktails to disable German tanks. Sooner than realise his own loathsome regime (who were the majority stakeholder in the invasion of Poland and had already murdered millions in peacetime) was the problem, he and all his fuckup crew can only project onto their archetypal shadow enemy. In Boomer Truth tHe NaZiS are simultaneously unique in their cartoonish evilness, but also every undesirable act by anyone today means they're tHe NaZiS, because tHe NaZiS are the collective boogeyman for generations of arrested children.

This tired maymay is unintentionally brilliant because it perfectly demonstrates the maximum level of introspection permissible under the Boomer Truth Regime: are the objects of the daily Two Minutes' Hate, in fact, The Bad Guys? Why yes, comrade! Back to work, no further questions.

It's worth mentioning that this film was shot in isr**l, an actual supremacist ethnostate with a history of nothing but ethnic cleansing and genocide for lebensraum, whose self-described master race lobby their Epstein colony's congress night and day with definitions of aNtIsEmItIsM that make it a specific thoughtcrime to compare them to the hated natzee shadow archetype, thus making it impossible for the Newspeak speaker even to articulate the thought that anything they do is bad, because badness = natzism and natzism badness.

But since, for now, we have the words to do so, let's reflect once more that murdering the German civilisation in World War Heckin Two did nothing to remove ethnosupremacism from the world, only to clear the way for a far more powerful, dangerous and evil ethnosupremacist clique to seize global control unopposed. For this reason, there can no longer be any defence of the boomoid myth; you must confront it, and repent.

Next week: Dude Where's My Car!!!11

Greatest Album of All Time of the Week: Hollywood Holiday Revisited!

Theme: For Dreaming - Catherine Wheel

IDK whether disdain for plebs was what they were going for with this expression but it fits to an hilarious degree.

Like Minor Threat (in this way only), little-known Paisley Underground also-rans True West's complete discography fits neatly onto one CD (get off muh lawn), so that's the one you should get. I have no idea what the Paisley Underground scene was supposed to be about; only that it had Rain Parade and, I think, the Bangles at one point, and seems to be situated somewhere in a Venn diagram between "jangle pop" and "neo-psychedelia", whatever those mean. True West in particular (evidently there are several bands of that name, so make sure it's the real one) have been compared to CBGB's staple Television, and between their artfully winding lead guitar lines and the brief burst of punkish abandon on frenetically danceable track two "I'm Not Here", I guess I can see that fitting too, but for the most part it's just meticulously composed meat & potatoes rock with a breezy good-time confidence not altogether of this world. "Too Many Steps To That Door" and "It's About Time" chime with lysergic derealisation, while both original and slowed-down versions of "And Then The Rain" speak to the mystery glimpsed briefly where the fabric of the veil is at its thinnest: "Then I caught a distant glimmer/Of why I'm here in this place". There's the triumphal uplift of "Shot You Down" and stoic defiance of "Ain't No Hangman" and bro ode to carousing "Morning Light", but at this point I'm just listing the tracks because there's really no filler, which makes me ponder whether bands should have to condense all their output to fit one disc by law, saving skip buttons wear and tear around the world. Then again, were it not for filler, my ḃḹőǥ would have closed years ago, leaving the internet a sadder, poorer place, I'm sure you'll agree.

RANKED: Top Ten Moar Animals that are Cool!

Theme: Zoo - Swallow

Another Tuesday finds me characteristically unprepared with a b└ögg post, so, whilst I compose my thoughts like Beethoven at his Moog synthesizer, here's another turbo-low-effort listicle about animals.

Tentacled Snake

Noone knows why Vietnam's tentacled snake has tentacles, nor why what look more like the rhinophores on a good sea slug are considered tentacles at all. By that logic I might well call myself a tentacled bloğğer, but let's not go there. What is of more direct import is that it exists, and coolly trips up and down its watery abode looking for things to eat. Perhaps the real reason it has those things is that it's an metalhead throwing the \m/.

Bat-Eared Fox

Both adorable and deadly, if you're something very small, like a termite, because, honestly, these things are about the size of a comical terrier. One thing I've been told about the bat-eared fox is that they're apparently chill with porcupines, unlike the fabled honey badger, which will maul and eat the spiny bros despite the cost in perforation this inevitably incurs. Bat-eared foxes are found in southern and eastern parts of Africa, where they are every bit as cool as rhinos and other megafauna that are better-known.

Wilson's Bird of Paradise

There are many bird of paradises to be found in the mysterious lands of Indonesia, but no one's ever been there or knows anything about it, despite its having a population of 427 thousand billion people. Wilson's one has this cool tail that curls inwards, perhaps to mimic the impression of a young lady doing her mandatory-under-Pat-Bastard's-dictatorship regime of squats.

Mandarin Duck

Imagine, if you will, a species so alien to the human experience that the men were cool to look at and the women visually dull. The mandarin duck is just such a species, with the male mogging the shit out of his lady friend, which must drive her insane. Fortunately, the male deigns to date down instead of being an homosexual, for which, let's be honest, we couldn't blame him (no homo, no furfag, no bird-botherer). Plumage of his caliber is so patrician that it scarcely seems of this world, but God put him there just to make us happy, and that is an encouraging thought.

Painted Bat

As orange is the colour of Halloween, and bats its patron animal, you might think the bright orange painted bat would be well-known, except to think that you'd have to know about it, but now you do, so now you do.

Golden Poison Dart Frog

In the crowded field of cool frogs, one stands out both by virtue of being bright yellow and also adorably small. The fact these things will kill you deader than a schoolgirl in a country Laura Loomer doesn't like puts them quite strictly in the look-don't-touch category beside roadkill and women who like Beyonce.

Bright Blue Stick Insect

Named achrioptera manga after Japanese cartoons, the bright blue stick insect misses the point of looking like a stick by being bright blue, but by the same token lands a slot on my prestigious list, because bright blue things are cool. When I was but a mere changeling, I had pet stick insects purchased from a classmate at the Yookay workhouse I attended, but they all managed to drown themselves in the water dish provided. Given that the noble stick insect lives in the fucking rainforest, and is therefore conversant with the concept of H2O, I can only conclude this uniform demise was the result of suicide.

Oblong Winged Katydid

What did Katy do? Science may never know, but all katydids resemble leaves, so one theory is that she made like a tree. The oblong winged katydid, however, katydid it wrong by being bright pink (sometimes yellow). Like the above mentioned stick insect, their survival chances' loss is our gain, although I'm sure their predators probably don't see the same colour spectrum we do, so it might not make any difference.

Nilgai

Most people think of antelopes as dainty, springy, sprightly little things. Not so the nilgai, which is ripped af as fuck and will murder you with its roid rage should you get too close. This Indian antelope has never once skipped neck day and is hunted in routine culls because it's been known to total vehicles that presume to trespass on its rightful territory, like the roads. I saw one out the window on an Indian road trip once, but I didn't get a picture, so I'm free to wax one-that-got-away about its brutish physique, even though it was actually fairly medium.

Gibbons

Normally I'd be more specific, but all gibbons are cool. Their exclusion from the title "great ape" strikes me as a travesty of justice, with their funny long hands and arms and ghostly, mournful whooping. Yet none can deny them the epithet "great troll", as evidenced by this four-minute clip of one fucking with tigers for the lulz. Even the humans with the densest scrotum-stretchers in the human kingdom will typically do so only with a steel cage for protection, but the gibbon just does it au naturel for the love of the game, making it the GOAT troll out of all the fauna on the Earth.

"LOL YOLO" - A. Gibbon.

Join me next week for more haphazard filler straight off the top of my head!!!