Timothy by Keith Roberts

I read a short story tonight I think you might like. It's about a young witch that casts a spell on a scarecrow; he comes to life and she goes out at night to play with him and fill his empty head with thoughts.

Tarnation

Tarnation
Originally uploaded by rustedrare.

Just when I thought the documentaries about the average joes of America were getting boring, Tarnation came along and beat my face in with its dirty film stock. The film ends and I immediately thought about my own life, and I think Tarnation wanted that from me. The director (Jonathan Caouette) of Tarnation used his archives of his life to understand his struggles, and as he turns the reflective camera on himself and his scizophrenic mother, we want the same mirror (camera or no camera) in our lives. Jonathan Caouette creates a personal abreaction that he shares with his audience, thus the film becomes a catharsis while we learn from our own ill experiences (I know they all came flowing forward after my viewing of Tarnation). I don't think I want to see it again.

Russ Meyer isn't all dirty pillows

Supervixen Russ Meyer
Originally uploaded by rustedrare.

We need to begin to recognize Russ Meyer's use of the frame. Don't get me wrong; I love the women of his films, but pay attention to the other stuff. Meyer really has some sharp shots in his films.

viva maria by MALLE

viva maria 2
Originally uploaded by rustedrare.

This film would make a great comic book series; Louis Malle's sense of humor is contained in a film frame pretending to be a sequential graphic panel. Brigitte Bardot (Maria II) is sexiest with a Gatling gun, swinging from vines, and destroying with revolution and dynamite. Moreau, from Jules and Jim, is sexy and strong in her role as Maria I. Directed in 1960, Viva Maria follows two side show dancers as they get involved in a South American revolution.
The humor is balanced perfectly: it is over the top without being overboard. The movie is too fun for words. If you love girls with guns and explosives, comic books, and films that define 60's cinema, check out Viva Maria!!!

wanna get off the fun with a chatting bitch-hog?

"Oh, I gotta go; my grandma just fell!!!"

DC Comic's Zatanna #1

zatana
Originally uploaded by rustedrare.

Seems like this series is going to be a hit: the artwork is nice and it seems to be going where She-Hulk has gone lately. This is a comic I will follow for a while. The highlight of number 1 is when the characters get caught in this underworld of strange dimensions and new forms of physics; the artist really creates this nicely in two splash pages. Check it out.

new balance sponsorship

new balance sponsorship
Originally uploaded by rustedrare.

Fuck giving free shit to rich bitch hogs. Give us teachers free junk. I like New Balance shoes, and my students love my fresh kicks, baby. I influence more than those roided up whores in sports. Mac needs to give me some free shit too, because I'm always trying to convert the Pure Crap users to the superior form of computing tech.

they're sampling baby

rusted rare recording studios
Originally uploaded by rustedrare.

Alright you bitch hogs; I figured out how to sample and spread it throughout the keyboard--it's on.
Been using the samples from vintagekeyboardsounds.com
great Mellotron, Farfisa, and Hammond samples

M-Audio 49e Keystation + Mac Mini

something/anything homage
Originally uploaded by rustedrare.

So I got an M-Audio usb/midi keyboard tonight. I plug it into my Mac Mini and open Garageband; there it is. I'm playing the frickin keys, baby. Cold applesauce couldn't keep this bitch hog away. I ordered vintage keyboard sounds (Mellotron, Hammond B3, Farfisa); I'm so excited I could shit in my shoes. And on top of that, I'm finally getting a piano this weekend (free donation from this awesome family, whom I adored before they gave me this 1912 Kimball). This summer is gonna be nice in the recording cave.

Aqua Teen Hunger Force

"The Brood Witch" episode will turn you. Best cartoon to come at us in a while.

RUSTED RARE DVD

They Call Her One Eye
Originally uploaded by rustedrare.

get rare films at http://rustedrare.com

latest releases:

Confessions of a Blue Movie Star
Vampira Vintage Clips
Terror in the Wax Museum
The Unholy 3
Uncle Meat
Brazilian Star Wars

and check out the rusted rare recordings link for over 80 free mp3s of experimental rock!!!!

Ishmael

It is only fitting that Daniel Quinn's book be named after the narrator of Mellville's Moby Dick: a book about self discovery through travel on the glass of the world. In Ishmael an adult student learns the meaning of human existence and how he can save the world; oh yeah, he learns this from a telepathic conversation with a Gorilla (Ishmael).

Even Dwarves Started Small

HOMBRE
Originally uploaded by rustedrare.

"This bunch are low on redeeming social merit. They are mean, petty, vulgar, selfish, and destructive, just like Buneul's recurrent beggers: men and women as confused and undirected as most of the world, trapped in the thought, if not the manners, of the society that has rejected them as criminals and deviants."
--Werner Herzog

After showing this film to my film studies class (after we had watched Pierrot Le Fou), one of my students asked, "Can we watch something normal? These films are really starting to mess with my head."
I answered him back, "That's enlightenment."

DON QUIXOTE de la MANCHA

DON QUIXOTE de la MANCHA
Originally uploaded by rustedrare.

I haven't really discussed literature yet, so why not begin with one of the first novels about literature. The thing I love most about The Quixote is the fact that we lose Don Quixote eventually. Other characters come in to tell their stories; therefore, it is set up that Don Quixote's world (Spain) will change (it must), but the stories will continue.

In Jorge Luis Borges's essay "Partial Magic in the Quixote," he recognizes that the reader has become fiction because the papers they read are fictitious, real accounts.

IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE

wong kar wai
Originally uploaded by rustedrare.

As usual, Wong Kar Wai has pulled me into his film; like all of his work, I couldn't walk away. The imagery is so strong. Wai uses shallow focus in the foreground a lot; it shows the characters sense of confusion. Vertical lines are also rampant in the foreground, and the two main characters are framed exactly the same. In one scene, Wai puts Leung's character, Chow, in a mirror and Chan (Maggie Cheung) in the same frame, both characters are looking to the right with a lamp over their head; It is easily a motif of parallel lives feeding off of each other at horrible times; people who are put in each other's paths to help each other into a happier realm without even carrying on together.

raremovieimages.com

Make this daily study of mise en scene your home page and get a different bad ass film image everyday!!! http://raremovieimages.com

The Intruder (Study 2)

This 1977, French jem has some truly creepy scenes. The antagonist can't seem to forget his ex-wife, so he believes she is riding around with him in his 1960's black English Ford, Thames Van as he follows and harasses his ex-wife's new husband and her son. The camera is in the van alot, and the chase scenes are shot very well. When the protagonist pulls over in broad daylight, the van pulls over behind him; the protagonist gets out of his car to inspect the van; the whole time he looks in the van the antagonist is hiding and the camera's POV is inside the van--it's a nice moment in horror van cinema.

Mac Mini and ibook

Okay, so I've had my G3 ibook hooked up to a monitor and maxed out with usb and firewire entities. I decided to buy a Mac Mini 1.4 and an airport card, so I could use the ibook as a laptop. Needless to say, the Mac Mini is fast and awesome, but I find myself using the ibook more--since I can bring it to the couch. All that aside, there is one problem: I find myself wanting a better laptop; my ibook is great, but it has about 3.7 gigs left in the hard drive, and it is slow when loading the OS and other programs. The ibook surfs the internet nicely, so I really should ride it out; afterall, it was my first tech changing Mac.

Irreversible Gaspar Noe

irreversible
Originally uploaded by rustedrare.

Gaspar Noe's Irreversible (2002) is a love letter to the word horror. I'm convinced the film stock was fed through the devil's ass before it got to the camera (provided it wasn't shot on DV). If you think horror films can't be affective anymore, think again; Irreversible is a rape revenge flick that beats the shit out of you, and then it allows you to beat the shit out of yourself.
Irreversible plays chronologically backwards. A nauseous tracking shot leads us through The Rectum (an S&M club). Marcus (Vincent Cassel) and Pierre (Albert Dupontel) are hunting the man who raped Marcus's girlfriend Alex (Monica Belucci). As they move through the filth of the French underground, the electronic noises fill the soundtrack with the aural likeness of an elevator trying to crash over and over again. Marcus gets his arm violently broken, and he is nearly sodomized by the same assailant. Pierre moves into the frame to stop the rape by bashing the attacker's head in with a fire extinguisher. When Marcus's arm is broken, the viewer has been shoved; but while Pierre turns a man's face into bloody mud, white knuckles visually pound the viewer as the lower jaw of the man shakes below a pile of crunched skull. It all happens in one camera angle, no edits, and this is where the responsibility becomes the viewer's; you can turn away if you want, at one moment I reached for the remote, but I just didn't get there. The same trick occurs when Alex is raped in a crimson soaked tunnel by Le Tenia (The Tapeworm). For ten minutes we become participants, as the camera doesn't move; again, all responsibility is in the hands of the viewer.
After the rape, Irreversible turns into a Francois Truffaut love story (e.g. Jules and Jim). Pierre and Marcus are in love with Alex; their banter is humorous and uncomfortable, but the horror of Irreversible has not ceased. Alex lies naked with Marcus; they have sex; she showers; again, her beautiful body is violated, but it is the viewer who violates as the voyeur of the film. All in all, the viewer is not supposed to visually enjoy Alex's gorgeous nudity; after all, we take part in the rape, as we don't look away.

Irma Vep reflections

Maggie Cheung as Irma Vep
Originally uploaded by rustedrare.

Irma Vep (1996) is one of those movies where the film goes crazy in Brechtian glory. When the director is out of the picture, the film is gone, loses its heart: auteur. (Maggie Cheung plays herself.) Cheung plays Paris's underground thief Irma Vep (rearrange the letters and you get vampire). In her latex costume, she steals a necklace of jewels from a tenant in the hotel; even the actor is losing her grip on reality. Basically, Irma Vep is a French film about film as a reflection of life: the hand held camera work and characters add to this idea, and, of course, once the director and main actress are out of the picture, the ending breaks down the reality by using a Brackhage style of scratching up the film stock. Where the destruction of film was always a way to pull the viewer out of the escapist ideals of film; this pulls the creators (of film) into film as a reflection of its creators and their society.

great film you've never seen: Andzej Zulawski's Possession starring Isabelle Adjani

El Topo, Holy Mountain, The Tenant...these are some of those films you really need to see. Now let's add one more: Possession. Zulawski's art house love story is confusing, but it calls for more viewings, and each one gets closer to something. I've seen it 3 times, and I'm still not there (full comprehension), but I am closer. A man and a woman must figuratively destroy to get closer to a better life together. I think this movie would make a great double feature with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Jean-Luc Godard films

anna in red and yellow
Originally uploaded by rustedrare.

IF you care about film, you will watch Jean-Luc Godard. Everything we love about movies comes from Godard. (Of course there are others in the pantheon: Eisenstein, Lang, Welles.)

Godard said that it is more important to try new things and fail than to keep doing the same things over and over again. This is an important philosophy in any artform. His films are essays on life and film, and let's not forget the beautiful Anna Karina, who is in some of his best films.

check these out:
Alphaville
Pierrot Le Fou (Perry the Fool)
Contempt
My Life to Live
Week End
Le Petit Soldat (The Little Soldier)
The Riflemen
Band of Outsiders
Made in USA
A Woman is a Woman
Breathless

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) van (Study 1b)

Whose really intruding?
Originally uploaded by rustedrare.

When I think of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), I think of the teenagers as the villians of the story. Tobe Hooper sets them up in low camera angles as they approach the house, and the young villians are silhoutted against the burning, Texas sun. As symbols of the future, these teenagers are also metaphors for the technology that has put the cannibal family out of work.

As the young, suppossed heroes travel in a van, the van becomes a visual metaphor of cattle being led to the slaughter, but if we wanted to sync up with my thesis, we could say that they are even more of a villianous crew because they are the ones in the horror van.