Watch. Read. Repeat.

100 Greatest Movie Insults of All Time

 

1. Pick two or three favorites. 

2. Practice. Practice. Practice.

3. Unleash with confidence.

 

 

Movie House Pulp: Tyler Stout's Frenetic Posters

 
Master graphic designer Tyler Stout has created this movie poster for Let the Right One In, a killer Swedish Vampire movie, based on an even better book.  As we talked about last week, a new U.S.-produced take on this story will be hitting theaters in a couple of weeks, under the title Let Me In.

Wildly lush and frenetic with imagery, I've always grooved on Tyler's illustrations, the best of which visualize films of the bombastic 1980's and early 90's, and live music (concerts and festivals) like The Decemberists, Death Cab for Cutie, Bonnaroo.  Here are some of Tyler's other movie posters, all of which are available for purchase thru his website.

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Let the Right One In: Birth of a Contemporary Vampire Legend

Illustration by Tyler Stout 
 
With the Millenium trilogy and other great mysteries like The Man From Beijing finding their way into my collection over the past year, I've been on a real Swedish author kick.  Taking a deviation from the inventive page-turners of Larsson and Mankell, I recently picked up Let The Right One In, by yet another Swedish author, John Ajvide Lindqvist.  Set in the early 1980's Stockholm, the story is an unusual blend of a coming of age buddy tale and an eerie vampire horror. 

Twelve-year-old Oskar lives with his mother, is bullied at school, shoplifts, and keeps a scrapbook of notes and clippings about gruesome murders. Eli, apparently about his age, moves in next door but doesn't go to school, leaving the flat only at night. Shortly after, the killings start. At first more fascinated than sorry, since one victim had bullied him, Oskar eventually discovers that Eli is a vampire, stuck permanently in childhood.

What should Oskar do, especially when Eli is his friend as much as anyone is? Lindqvist develops the plot in rich detail. The characters, adult and child, are quite convincingly the sort that one would probably cross the street to avoid in any city. Lindqvist also realistically depicts the aftermath of brutal homicide on the nearby: shock and horror, some sleepless nights and bad dreams, despite which you must go to work and get the groceries; eventually, the police leave the neighborhood.

This is a much needed, fresh departure from the other Vampire stories currently splattered upon the zietgeist.  So before the movie comes out on October 1st, I'd highly recommend that you take a few days (it's a fairly quick read) to enjoy this book.

 Here's the movie trailer:

 

 

Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child

By Michael Kurcfeld

Today we take it for granted when seeing graffiti art in a posh gallery, but arguably the first artist to channel the urban street frequencies of his time and get it onto the "white walls with white people with white wine" was Jean-Michel Basquiat.

In 1988 this singularly gifted artist, who had leapt to fame in Warhol's New York, died of a drug overdose at the age of 27. Filmmaker Tamra Davis took all of the footage she had shot of her good friend, including a never-seen interview and B-roll of him working in his studio, and put it in away in a drawer. 20 years later, she decided it was not hers to hide anymore and made it the core of a superb documentary, Jean Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child.

Basquiat and Davis had bonded over their shared love of film when he came to L.A. and knew hardly anyone. Until his final year, when "he went from a person to a shell," Davis captured on video the intimacy of pals just hanging out -- an endearing counterpoint to the wunderkind's short explosive life. Her seriousness, and the benediction of Basquiat's estate-wielding father, lured art-world heavies like Julian Schnabel, Jeffrey Deitch (the new head of MOCA), über-gallerist Larry Gagosian, art-world sage Glenn O'Brien and others to testify to his quirky greatness. We also hear from sundry chums and girlfriends about the more personal odyssey that unfolded as his fame grew. Gradually, a complex portrait takes shape that swallows any facile notions of what this young genius was about.

Watch Tamra Davis discuss her film in the video below:

Basquiat jumped into Manhattan's fertile downtown art & club scene in the late 1970s, at first surviving by selling his images on postcards and T-shirts. Meanwhile he conjured a droll and recognizable street identity, SAMO, that raised the dialogue of street artists from I Was Here to the kind of ongoing piss-on-authority satire that made Banksy and his ilk possible. Meeting Warhol was almost unavoidable in that hothouse moment, and their friendship grew into collaboration (one more appreciated in retrospect than at the time). The meteoric fame and the inevitable drugs finally made Basquiat a poster child for the toll of premature success, but Davis' film covers every aspect of his life and work along the way: music, black identity, class-shifting, love life, club culture, his child-like nature, his premonitions of death. It is a loving tribute to a raucous time and an indelible talent.

 

Danny and Annie

Danny Perasa and his wife, Annie, recount their twenty-seven-year romance. As they remember their life together from their first date to Danny's final days with terminal cancer, these remarkable Brooklynites personify the eloquence, grace, and poetry that can be found in the voices of everyday people when we take the time to listen.