Seven Days of Bowie: Day 5 - Strangers When We Meet Live 1995

 

I love this song, and I love this version of this song. 

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Psyched:

Yellowjackets Season Two releases on my Birthday? Wow, thank You, Universe. 

I won't be watching anything else leading up to this. I'm overjoyed to see Elijah Wood join the cast, especially spending time opposite Ricci's Misty. 

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Watch:

Well, I tried.

K and I went to our local theatre to see Kyle Edward Ball's Skinamarink last night. We made it about twenty minutes in and bailed; if I'd been by myself, I probably would have stayed just to see if what I interpreted as the gimmick of the film - constant static shots of the ceiling, childhood detritus on the floor, the upper right corner of an antiquated television, the upper right molding on a door, ever evolved. I'm pretty damn open-minded, and I tend to like and accept art on its own terms, but as I watched Skinamarink, I couldn't help dismissing the film as 'art school nonsense.' I'm not saying I'm correct; when we left, we didn't ask for our money back - I wouldn't take money out of the pocket of an indie creator, and I'm all for doing something different with Horror. I just don't think this concept can sustain a runtime of 100 minutes.

I also feel like, had I done some of the research on the film and on Ball in particular, I might have 'gotten' it more. I still wouldn't budge on the runtime being excessive, and the proof is, after reading this interview with Ball and then poking around on his youtube channel Bitesized Nightmares, I found the short film that served as a sort of Proof of Concept for Skinamarink. It works A LOT better as a thirty-minute short.

This is the goal of creators uploading content like Ball does to his channel, and I don't blame Ball for rolling with the opportunity. Watching a succession of these Bitesized Nightmare films, I'm definitely going to attempt to watch Skinamarink again when it hits Shudder. I'm also interested in seeing what he does from here on. 

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Playlist:

G. Love & Special Sauce - Yeah, It's That Easy

David Bowie - Outside

David Byrne & St. Vincent - Love This Giant

Marnie Stern - This Is It and I Am It and You Are it and So Is...

Idles - Joy as an Act of Resistance

Jucifer - I Name You Destroyer

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Spooky Action At A Distance

 

In preparation for the recording of the first episode of our new spin-off podcast, The Horror Vision Presents: Elements of Horror, I rewatched Jim Jarmusch's Only Lovers Left Alive last night. I have to say, not only do I think this is one of the coolest films ever made, but I think about it almost every day. There is not a lot that moves the needle as far as inspiring me to make music again, but watching or thinking about this film does in a BIG way.

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Watch:

THIS will be in theatres? I won't hold my breath for it to come to Clarksville, however, I'm not averse to planning a trip to Chicago for this (if it even plays there).

 

This might tie Barbarian for the best trailer I've seen all year. Whether the movie lives up to the absolute lo-fi DREAD displayed here will remain to be seen. Below I've posted Skinamarink's summary, courtesy of the mighty Bloody Disgusting, whose article on the film is HERE: 

“Two children wake up in the middle of the night to find their father is missing, and all the windows and doors in their home have vanished. To cope with the strange situation, the two bring pillows and blankets to the living room and settle into a quiet slumber party situation. They play well-worn videotapes of cartoons to fill the silence of the house and distract from the frightening and inexplicable situation. All the while in the hopes that eventually some grown-ups will come to rescue them. However, after a while, it becomes clear that something is watching over them.”

If, like Christmas Bloody Christmas, which I had also planned to travel for, I can't make the trip north for Skinamarink, then the good news that, also like Joe Begos' new film, this will be released on Shudder is a welcome balm. I would drive back and forth twice a month if I could, but the logistics of life do have a habit of getting in the way of plans like that.

Really looking forward to seeing this, the first feature from Kyle Edward Bell.

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Read:

Last year at Severin Films' Black Friday sale, I picked up the Night of the Demon restored Blu-Ray and, perhaps more excitedly, Brad Carter's novelization that Severin commissioned in their possibly over-zealous roll-out for this widely unknown regional Horror film from 1980. 

After finishing Barry Adamson's Up Above the City, Down Below the Stars I was tempted to jump into David Lynch's biography, Room to Dream. I figured I could use a palate cleanser though; Adamson's book was the best book I read all year - or at least my favorite - and I need to put something genre between it and the story of another creator I adore. So I cracked open Brad Carter's translation of this bizarre little Bigfoot tale...

Confession: I've yet to watch the Blu-Ray. I'd seen a good deal of scenes from Night of the Demon a while back on youtube; not a place I generally go to watch movies, but before Severin's remaster, this film was almost as much a legend as Bigfoot itself. Now forty or so pages into the book, I have to say, it is quite well-written. I know the basic story here and it feels quite a bit more substantial as prose than film. Some of that is obviously the hindsight employed, but also I think it speaks to Carter as a writer, and I quickly cued up a few of his novels for future reading, in particular the novel Saturday Night of the Living Dead. 

As for Night of the Demon, I'm particularly interested in how the novel handles the "cult" subplot of the story, which didn't really get the treatment it deserved in what I saw of the film, which admittedly was not the whole thing. Carter gives all the characters involved extra development, which in some cases may have been a thankless task. Being asked to novelize a forty-something-year-old regional Horror film must be comparable to being asked to take agent listings of a house in need of updating. However, where someone else might have been happy to just recreate the schlock seen on the screen, Carter's extra level of care and attention really make this feel like it's going to be a far superior vehicle for the story.

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Playlist:

Beach House - Depression Cherry

Pete Shelley - Homosapien

Uriah Heep - Abominog

Metallica - Lux Æturna (pre-release single)

Revocation - Netherhaven

Tyler Bates - The Punisher OST

Fvnerals - For Horror Eats the Light

Fvnerals - Wounds

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Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Bound Tarot, which you can buy HERE.

Previous issues with my finances (intermittent but seemingly unending fallout from identity theft) will come to a resolution.