From the department of Bloggy Frenzies We Missed While We Were Out: The Playlist has an excellent post on the music used within Ben Stein’s aforementioned intelligent design propaganda film, Expelled. It all started on Monday, when James Boyce posted a story on the Huffington Post titled, “Yoko Ono Sells Out John Lennon To Creationist Manufactroversy.” We assume that’s a contraction of “manufactured controversy”, even though as far as I’m aware, the film’s opponents have done a better job of promotingExpelled via fuss than the filmmakers themselves. Ack! Maybe i09 is right––maybe Expelled is actually a reverse-psychology conspiracy designed to bring down the intelligent design movement. Or maybe not.
If Southland Tales is to survive its Cannes drubbing and crap box office to become the cult classic that it has the potential to be, it will be thanks to two primary factors: in-depth, after-the-fact considerations of the film’s power to seduce even those who want to resist its sloppiness and vulgarity, like this one from Steven Shaviro; and the Justin Timberlake musical number at the center of the film, which is the target of much of Shaviro’s swoon.
Shaviro’s certainly not alone in this–virtually everyone I’ve talked to who finds themselves unable to entirely dismiss Southland Tales talks of that scene, set to “All These Things That I’ve Done” by The Killers. I’ve thought that it was the final image of the scene that really did it for me–Timberlake’s facial expression when the hallucination starts to fade is maybe the only truly felt moment of acting in a film that’s otherwise pretty much about bad acting–but Shaviro nails something about the whole cocoon of it:
In anticipation of seeing Anton Corbijn’s Control at Toronto next week (FYI, that film took a couple of prizes at the Edinburgh Film Festival this past weekend), I’ve been watching some of Corbijn’s music videos on YouTube and iFilm. In the late 80s/early 90s, Corbijn was to go-to guy for Euro-bands looking for something grainy and either black-and-white or in washed-out color, in which they could sulk bitterly whilst stalking around either city or countryside, surrounded with what looked like low-rent Helmut Newton girls in various 80s costumes, and eventually resolve some of the underlying tension and hostility in some suggestion of light S & M.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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