Today is a very special day, when Jason's birthday actually falls on Friday the 13th. Unfortunately, I already recapped all the Friday the 13th movies, so here's a Stayvunpoast instead. No, this has nothing to do with Friday the 13th, but then neither did the Friday the 13th TV show, so consider this a 4D clever meta-commentary on that.
Happy birthday, Jason!!!1
Article theme: War - Edwin Starr
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| "Psst - Fred, don't look now but I think you're featured on Pat Bastard's blðg again." |
Not only the best and most overlooked Hollywood musical, but also the greatest accidentally anti-war movie of all time, it's too obvious a pun to call RKO's 1943 opus The Sky's The Limit Fred Astaire's shining hour (because that is the title of its main theme song), but I just did, so now what, bitch?
Actually, I'm assuming it was unintentional - even a kino factory like RKO wouldn't have dared commit a major star like Astaire to a based isolationist peacenik project at the height of the hostilities - but, just as every Hollywood attempt to marry pozzed messaging with actual artistic talent ends in divorce, so too this effort to keep proto-neocon support for the worst and most destructive war in history high undermines itself so hard you might just start to wonder.
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| Never forget that the same balding twinks who smirk media literately over the ebin propaganda satire in Starship Troopers also soyface into lockjaw over the Holy War Against Fashism based on this sort of farcically corny agitslop. |
Astaire plays Fred (perhaps a clue that this complex character is closer to the real him than his typically airy persona), a fighter ace directed to perform a PR tour from coast to coast on his fleeting leave from the Pacific theatre who goes AWOL instead. The reason suggested is just boredom with his obligations and a yen for anonymity in a country that sees him as a hero for killing le ebil Japs, but this is surface level motivation. Disaffection with the whole war fits better and is supported by the scenes where Fred berates an aeronautical tycoon over the fitness of his aircraft for combat purposes at an obsequious works party in his honour. Through this point he's been a charming prankster, trying to lose himself in the escapism of civilian life, but in this scene his unloading becomes impassioned, showing-without-telling of psychological scars a studio propaganda flick of the period would otherwise have swept under the rug.
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| "Young man, what are you saying?" "Look, personally I just prefer allies who don't sink our ships, send letter bombs to the White House, bomb our buildings and frame the Muslim Brotherhood for it, buy all our politicians and run pedo blackmail rings on our own soil." "I simply won't hear such Woke Right Anti-Semolina-Pudding! Out I say!" - actual dialogue. |
But the unravelling of Fred is gradual, a calendar in which he ticks off the days of his dwindling leave acting like those clocks in Rumble Fish, reminding us of the time elapsing before his freedom runs out, serving as a minimalistic motif to keep the rude awakening ahead in mind throughout the dream that plays out for us in between. First Fred goes looking for romance, and finds it by inventing photobombing and otherwise trolling Joan Leslie's qt3.14 photographer into falling for his impish charms.
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| Remember, boys: if she never looks at you like this... |
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| ...She'll never look at you like this. |
It's a great romance of the cinéma and our foreknowledge of its doomed fate only makes it more poignant and none the less enjoyable as comic entertainment. Crack all the celluloid-closet jokes you will about our Fred, his chemistry with Leslie speaks of straightness you or I can but aspire to (well, you, anyway). Nor can we deny the sack required to smash his "One For My Baby And One For The Road" routine, in which the great danceman opened a leg shattering glass this way and that in an outpouring of sorrow as primal as it is precise. "Can't act" my taint, guy who wrote his infamous first screen test notes, this is a performance physical and emotional that mogs the talents of every pretentious thespian ever to don tights and also unrelatedly play Shakespeare.
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| On this b└og we stan a STRAIGHT king. |
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| The lunch lady at St Pat's Primary School (1995, colourised). |
Everyone loves Demolition Man, the greatest Stallonekino and one of the more entertaining movies of the 90s, or, indeed, ever. John Spartan (Stallone) is cryogenically frozen after a run-in with arch-criminal Simon Phoenix (Wesley Snipes). Flash forward to the far future of 2032 (we've still got time!) and Los Angeles is now transformed into the peaceful utopia of San Angeles. But is all as it seems? No!!!
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| "Somehow...Phoenix returned" - not actual dialogue. |
For some mysterious reason Phoenix is sprung from Ice Block C and proceeds to wreak havoc on a world that has evolved beyond violence, and thus has no idea how to handle it. Snipes, utterly wasted in lame hero roles in other flicks, is gr8 fun as the homicidal psychopath finding to his bemusement and subsequent glee that this brave new world is his brave new oyster.
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| Basedly, the Hall of Violence has the same font as the menus in Diablo II. |
Just watching Phoenix go around bullying the bewildered quokka-folk of San Angeles would be entertainment enough, but beaming uniformed waifu Lt. Huxley (lol) (Sandra Bullock, a revelation before everyone got tired of her bullshit five minutes later) has the bright idea to revive Stallone and sic him on the risen Phoenix.
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| Cute! |
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| But also... |
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| Judging by this look and the snail trail she leaves behind her, we're in safe hands. |
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| This dude dressed like if a Japanese chick became Pope might be significantly cast: he played the smooth-talking bureaucrat in Yookay TV's Yes, Minister. |
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| Is the V-shaped SAPD badge design a subtle nod to INGSOC's curiously hash tag inclusive logo? You decide! |
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| "Imma Chargin My Laser!" - actual dialogue. |
Theme: Subcutaneous Phat - Desert Sessions
In the meme years, Sophia Loren is now chiefly remembered for this historic mogging at the hands of Jayne Mansfield:
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| M*n will never understand the murderous rage of a Casey out-Stacied. |
But if being in even a single good movie were a category (it sure isn't at the Oscars), Loren takes the W hands down. Batjac gem Legend of the Lost (one imagines the word "City" might have rounded out the title before some clever clogs realised the title could refer to the protagonists as much as what they seek) sees Loren play petty thief and men-resenting thot Dita, whose hard-knock life in the alleys of Timbuktu must be self-imposed, as anyone who looked much like Loren could easily marry the first rich tourist she meets, but never mind. For some reason, like every Tinder foid, she's never met a moid to satisfy her laundry list of high-falutin standards until clean-cut idealist Paul (Rossano Brazzi) enters her life and introduces her to the radical notion of not being a resentful thot.
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| The hero we need. |
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| One early scene has a comic sleazoid seek out Wayne in this club (he's not even there; the scene is otherwise pointless) just so we can see this chick do this swimming dance: |
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| I have no idea whether they do this dance in Mali IRL but I hope so. Email the government of Mali at MaliGov@whatever.com and ask. |
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| They might not all make it, but we can. |
In the world of album art, the line between great and hilarious is fine indeed, and nowhere moreso than the niche of heavy metal. Sure, a million srs bsns bands with names like Aphonic Threnody (real) or Somnolent Vasectomy (made-up, I think) might play it safe with chiaroscuro lighting and a rotting skull or pentagram or some such bullshit, but if you don't take the risks, you can't expect to qualify for the rewards. With that in mind, here are the album covers that dared to dream.
Watch out, unwary beachgoer! This homeless bum with a condom on his head will grab you! What's most fascinating about this is the perfect placement of the swimmer out at sea, creating a triangular perspectival composition that suggests way more effort went into this shoot than the concept might incline you to believe. Is there a happy ending for our unsuspecting heroine?
No!!!
A pirate getting hit by lightning via his guitar sounds pretty metal to me. Too bad this off-the-rack Halloween costume was the best the record company would deign to splurge for. But just look at his enthusiasm for the role! In my book, this dude belongs up in the pantheon with Eddie and Vic Rattlehead.
AttackeR: "you've read Lord of the Rings, right?"
Gigachad: "yes." *Draws He-Man fighting a green lobster-bat*
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| ???? |
Just kidding. For me, it's Better than Raw:
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| >tfw no goth gf who gets wet af stirring my dinner |
"I want a tiger, a lion, a sorceress with rocking cans, a crystal ball and her hair on fire" - Brazil's Fire Strike, correctly.
From the pyramidal composition to the characteristically "cat-like" features of the enthroned exhibitionist, this is a textbook case of doing it right vis-à-vis Frank Frazetta pastiche. Naturally, we give it to you censored to avoid offence. Honourable mention must go to Ültra Raptör's efforts in the same spirit, which simply rip off the master's poses wholesale, and throw in a dinosaur atop a Mesoamerican-style step pyramid:
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| A band after my own heart. |
As the title implies, this was a do-or-die bid for superstardom from the hair scene's GOAT ensemble. How best to let the world know what manner of virtuosic axework and superlative songwriting were to be found within the album sleeve? If you ventured "the Creature from the Black Lagoon's claw bursting through the aluminium waves from a fiery pit below to grab the band logo rendered in shiny chrome", you share an eerie counterintuitive genius with some based cokehead whom I can't be bothered to look up.
Looking like something out of Games Workshop's Necromunda, Soldiers' album cover will make you pray for a Christian Mad Max ripoff starring a hair metal band tooling around the post-nuke world dispensing justice from their yellow-and-black striped armoured vehicle. Now you want to see it too, don't lie.
It's only fitting that the greatest GOAT metal band of all time (deal with it, tastelets) should have rung in his, uh, their career with this majestically edgy design featuring Vic in what can only be described as what the doodles in the back of my schoolbooks looked like in my head. Too bad the fuckups at the record company lost the original design and so for years it was released with this cover instead:
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| Presumably they got this plastic skull from the same Dollar Tree where Dammaj got their pirate costume. |
This, on the other hand, looks precisely like the type of shit I used to doodle back in school (still do, too). The world is at war between an evil Grim Reaper leading the Illuminati and a good, Buddhist Grim Reaper (????) each armed with shamshir lightsabres (lightshamshirs; OC DO NOT STEAL). I have no idea what the fuck Kai Hansen meant by this, but I'll take it over a band photo anyday.
Do ÿöü have a favourite album cover??? Share in the comments!!!Article theme: Sinnerman - 16 Horsepower
Clint Eastwood might have put the western out of its misery with Unforgiven, but first he gave it a more dignified sendoff with 1985's Pale Rider, a distillation of the thematic and archetypal core of the genre that leans into and loves the mythic side of it that Unforgiven would less interestingly repudiate.
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| Because Eastwood rarely bothered much with lighting for his exteriors, his face is often in shadow as he rides around, making him even more like Death on his horse. |
Pale Rider is largely a retread of Shane and borrows moments from that film so brazenly we say "go for it", out loud to our PC monitors (you don't still have a TV set, right?). It also nods to Once Upon a Time in the West (the one that got away for Eastwood, who was the first choice for Bronson's role), in these guys' uniform dusters:
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| >tfw no friends to walk around with dressed like this :((( |
No doubt a bigger western NERD could point out other little homages, but Pale Rider is also somewhat of a spiritual sequel to Eastwood's own High Plains Drifter. With his characteristically gritty, naturalistic style of filming, Eastwood might seem an unlikely candidate to delve into /x/ territory, but it's evident that Drifter's flirtation with the supernatural stuck with him. Both films concern a mysterious stranger coming to dispense terrible justice in a town afflicted by greed, corruption and sin, who may or may not be a ghost. In Drifter, Eastwood's stranger befriended a dwarf and made him mayor of the town; in Rider, his Preacher faces off with a giant (Richard Kiel, The Spy Who Loved Me, Moonraker), evoking David Lunch's giant and dwarf casting in Twin Peaks in a subtle thematic pairing of the two films and a hint of kinship between the ghostly strangers and people verging on the look of fairytale beings.
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| This is the look I give manlets too. Not heightist, just don't like 'em. |
With its red town and dream flashback sequences, High Plains Drifter is more overtly, garishly surreal, but it's the very subtlety of Pale Rider that makes it so unsettling and atmospheric, to say nothing of its brooding S-tier score. Moreover, Drifter caricatures its bad townsfolk, while Rider skewers a very real type of scumbag in its LaHood (Richard Dysart):
LaHood embodies the selfish boomercon businessman devoid of noblesse oblige, who sees his own people as kulaks in the way of line going up on chart. Preacher's righteous renunciation of his slimy materialism is invoked and catalysed by a young girl's prayer. LaHood's dark interiors contrast with the snow-white mountaintops whence Preacher rides. When his work is done, he rides back off into the white, perhaps until the next time, when the trumpets sound.
