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.