What a good song (and pretty artist).
This was just on the radio.
I had forgotten about the song.
It's been quite awhile since the last time I heard it.
This would sound good in a movie.
What movie? I don't know.
I have to think about it. It just has that sound and feeling to it.
Come to Jesus (a bit grainy):
Adam Lambert on American Idol has once again brought attention to men wearing eyeliner.
The Sun Times created an interesting list below at the link.
Many (most) I like as performers - even going back to Alice Cooper and David Bowie and Johnny Depp. (Of course Johnny was only channeling Keith mentioned next sentence.)
A couple missing from the list would be Keith Richards, Steven Tyler, and occasionally Mick.
As for American Idol, I liked Adam from the beginning,
but have a feeling Kris Allen wins in an upset.
(Voting results Wed night.)
I mentioned I wanted to see this movie in an earlier post. I finally did last night as it stormed around us. Probably not the best choice of atmosphere.
This was the 2008 version with Tim Roth (recently in Fox's Lie to Me) and Naomi Watts (recently saw her in William Friedkin's Bug). And as one of the bad guys, Michael Pitt (recently saw him in Delirious with Steve Buscemi)
Funny Games certainly isn't for everyone but it was different enough for me to like it.
This is a scene by scene English remake of the original Austrian 1997 thriller.
It was unsettling and brutal (but not "Saw" bloody). I thought it was well filmed (great low light inside and outside shots) with an interesting and intelligent dialogue.
I really enjoyed the kitchen scene at the beginning where eggs are borrowed and broken and the friendliness to a visitor slowly disolves into discourteous behavior towards him. It seemed so real given the circumstances.
The two characters dressed mostly in tennis white were unsettling; very creepy but realistic in a way. At times they would talk directly into the camera to us. Towards the end there is a scene that defies time and space. ?????
It has a slow pacing and look that reminded me of another of Haneke's movies, CACHE. I could almost sense a Hitchcockian feel it with the absence of onscreen violence.
Little details that end up part of the plot are almost broadcast to you so they wouldn't be missed later in the movie; for example, a knife is shown at the beginning that you KNOW will be found and used much later. A shortcoming, but in fact I didn't miss anything that way.
From Rotten Tomatoes where it got a mediocre 51%:
Synopsis:
In 1997, writer-director Michael Haneke (CACHE) made the controversial Austrian thriller, FUNNY GAMES, about two young men who terrorize a family on vacation. A decade later, Haneke was convinced...
In 1997, writer-director Michael Haneke (CACHE) made the controversial Austrian thriller, FUNNY GAMES, about two young men who terrorize a family on vacation.
A decade later, Haneke was convinced by producer Chris Coen to bring the story to America, filming a nearly word-for-word, shot-for-shot English-language version, even re-creating the locations and sets as obsessively as possible.
Shortly after Ann (Naomi Watts), George (Tim Roth), and Georgie (Devon Gearhart) arrive in their country home, Peter (Brady Corbet), an eerily polite young man dressed all in white, including odd white gloves, appears on the doorstep, asking Ann if he can borrow some eggs for their neighbor.
Peter is joined by Paul (Michael Pitt), and the Leopold-and-Loeb-like duo are soon doing horrible things to Ann, George, and Georgie, torturing them both physically and psychologically (nearly all the violence occurs off-screen), for no apparent reason other than they can, referring to the whole thing as a game.
And the biggest game of all is whether the family will be alive at the end.
Life imitates fiction in a way.
I heard the following news story last night on the BBC radio news.
A man was murdered.
He had made a tape to accuse his murderers if that in fact did happen to him.
The murdered man, a lawyer named Rodrigo Rosenberg, is putting all the blame of his death on Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom.
(See more below in Huffington Post article).
That scenario reminded me of a movie I have on VHS tape (recently available on DVD).
D.O.A. (1988).
In the movie, the main character is basically dead as he solves the crime of who killed him.
There are three movie versions.
Synopsis: This famous film-noir murder mystery features an inventive twist: the victim as "detective," desperately trying to solve his own murder. An accountant on vacation in San Francisco gets a dose of... This famous film-noir murder mystery features an inventive twist: the victim as "detective," desperately trying to solve his own murder. An accountant on vacation in San Francisco gets a dose of lethal, slow-acting poison. He then begins a desperate search for the individual responsible for his impending demise. Irresistible plot given remakes in 1969 as COLOR ME DEAD, and in 1988 starring Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid.
The original starred: Edmond O'Brien, Luther Adler, Pamela Britton, Neville Brand.
This is a clip from the Dennis Quaid version:
LINK to Huffington Post and full article referenced below.
GUATEMALA CITY - A lawyer slain by gunmen over the weekend appears in a video tape that emerged Monday alleging that if anything happened to him it would be at the behest of Rodrigo Rosenberg.
Colom's spokesman, Fernando Barrillas, issued a statement saying the government "categorically rejects any accusations made in tapes and statements being distributed to some news media."
"This reveals the intention of creating a political crisis around a case that should be investigated and processed by the courts," the statement posted on the government's Web site said.
Lawyer Rodrigo Rosenberg was shot to death by unidentified assailants while riding his bicycle Sunday, the newspaper El Periodico de Guatemala said.
In the video distributed to local media, Rosenberg says: "If you are watching this message, it is because I was assassinated by President Alvaro Colom with help from Gustavo Alejos," the president's private secretary.
Video 1 of 2 (in Spanish):
What a great idea.
Link to short article HERE.
That reminded me of 3D Sidewalk Art. It also tricks your eyes.
Cars made by Detroit automakers race through his songs.
Years later, Chevrolet turned another Seger song, "Like a Rock," a commercial theme.
On Face the Promise(2006 album), he once again turns to writing about cars, but in not such a positive way.
In "Between," he sings: World keeps getting hotter Ice falls in the sea We buy a bigger engine and say it isn't me.
Seger lauds Al Gore for speaking out about the dangers of global warming and says, "The overuse of oil is just wrecking our economy."
But Seger says he doesn't regret that his "Like a Rock" was used to sell millions of Chevy pickups. "I actually helped my hometown. I saved a lot of jobs."
the majority of this text is (from Morning Edition NPR)
