tu(n)esday!

Gorgeous song by Kishi Bashi...

Love this remix!




Norwegian electropop from Lemâitre...




Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs remixes Foals...




I've got a tattered line of string...




New Little Boots... (free dl here)

oscars' best dressed

Here are the looks that stood out for me last night!



Naomi Watts in Armani Prive.

Daniel Day-Lewis's blue Domenico Vacca tux.

Sally Field in red Valentino Couture.

Adele during her peformance of Best Original Song winner "Skyfall" with her hair down in a Burberry black silk dress with degradé hand-embroidered crystals.

Kind of boring but I mean... it's Charlize (Christian Dior Haute Couture).

Best Actress winner Jennifer Lawrence's voluminous pale pink Dior didn't really flatter nor suit her quirky personality but this image of her after she fell with the stair lights illuminating the dress is sort of beautiful.

the jdb awards: my dream oscar picks!

It's Oscar day.  While some of my faves failed to get nominated, it's still fun to see how the night turns out.

Here are my film award nominations & winners!

Picture

Moonrise Kingdom

nominees:

Elena

Holy Motors

Lincoln

Looper

The Master 

Silver Linings Playbook

Tabu

This Is Not A Film

Zero Dark Thirty

Director

Andrei Zvyagintsev, Elena

nominees:

Paul Thomas Anderson, The Master

Wes Anderson, Moonrise Kingdom

Kathryn Bigelow, Zero Dark Thirty

Steven Spielberg, Lincoln

Actor

Joaquin Phoenix, The Master

nominees:

Jack Black, Bernie

Bradley Cooper, Silver Linings Playbook

Denis Lavant, Holy Motors

Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln

Actress

Emmanuelle Riva, Amour

nominees:

Jennifer Lawrence, Silver Linings Playbook

Nadezhda Markina, Elena 

Quvenzhane Wallis, Beasts of the Southern Wild

Rachel Weisz, The Deep Blue Sea

Supporting Actor

Philip Seymour Hoffman, The Master

nominees:

Robert DeNiro, Silver Linings Playbook

Dwight Henry, Beasts of the Southern Wild
Samuel L. Jackson, Django Unchained

Tommy Lee Jones, Lincoln

Supporting Actress

Ann Dowd, Compliance 

nominees:

Amy Adams, The Master

Rosemarie DeWitt, Your Sister's Sister

Sally Field, Lincoln

Edith Scob, Holy Motors

Adapted Screenplay

Tony Kushner, Lincoln

nominees:

Lucy Alibar & Benh Zeitlin, Beasts of the Southern Wild

Skip Hollandsworth & Richard Linklater, Bernie

Terence Davies, The Deep Blue Sea

David O. Russell, Silver Linings Playbook

Original Screenplay

Wes Anderson, Moonrise Kingdom

nominees:

Rian Johnson, Looper

Paul Thomas Anderson, The Master

Miguel Gomes & Mariana Ricardo, Tabu

Mark Boal, Zero Dark Thirty

Ensemble

Silver Linings Playbook

nominees:

Lincoln

The Master

Moonrise Kingdom

Your Sister's Sister

Foreign Film

Elena

nominees:

Amour

Holy Motors

Tabu

This Is Not A Film

Cinematography

Rui Poças, Tabu

nominees:

Mikhail Krichman, Elena

Mihai Malaimare Jr., The Master

Robert Yeoman, Moonrise Kingdom

Gökhan Tiryaki, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

Film Editing

Bob Ducsay, Looper

nominees:

Vidar Flataukan, Headhunters
William Goldenberg & Dylan Tichenor, Zero Dark Thirty

Fred Raskin, Django Unchained

Andrew Weisblum, Moonrise Kingdom

Original Score

Dan Romer & Benh Zeitlin, Beasts of the Southern Wild

nominees:

Alexandre Desplat, Moonrise Kingdom

Philip Glass, Elena

Jonny Greenwood, The Master

Dario Marianelli, Anna Karenina

Original Song

"Who Were We," Holy Motors

nominees:

"Who Did That To You," Django Unchained

"Pi's Lullaby," Life of Pi

"Skyfall," Skyfall

"The Enemy," Wuthering Heights

Art Direction / Set Decoration

Moonrise Kingdom

nominees:

Anna Karenina

The Deep Blue Sea

Holy Motors

Les Miserables

Costumes

Kasia Walicka-Maimone, Moonrise Kingdom

nominees:

Sharen Davis, Django Unchained

Paco Delgado, Les Miserables
Jacqueline Durran, Anna Karenina

Joanna Johnston, Lincoln

Visual Effects

Life of Pi

nominees:

Beasts of the Southern Wild

The Impossible

Looper

Moonrise Kingdom

Sound

Zero Dark Thirty

nominees:

Elena

Looper

Tabu

Wuthering Heights

Sound Editing

Zero Dark Thirty

nominees:

Les Miserables

Life of Pi

Looper

Tabu

Documentary Film

This Is Not A Film

nominees:

How to Survive A Plague

The Invisible War

The Queen of Versailles
Searching for Sugarman

Make-Up

Holy Motors

nominees:

Cloud Atlas

Django Unchained

Les Miserables

Lincoln

My Top 10 Films of '12.

i've had my share of the crying game...

the screaming 60s by justin lockwood

How appropriate that 1960 saw the release of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.  The classic film neatly separates the more subdued and fanciful horror of the 50s and all that came before from the intense, at times harrowingly realistic movies that followed.  It’s easy to forget how groundbreaking Psycho was when first released, as is often remarked.  Besides the obvious, innovative brutality of the shower scene, there’s a cornucopia of previously taboo subjects on display: premarital sex!  Drag! Voyeurism! Grave robbing!  Oedipal fixations!  The list goes on and on, up to and including frisky costars depicted in their underwear and the screen debut of a toilet.  None of this would seem nearly as striking now, but at the time, Psycho shocked audiences and heralded the breaking down of cinematic barriers.  More adult, previously verboten topics were starting to come front and center.

Hitchcock himself continued the trend of modernistic, unflinching horror with his follow-up movie, The Birds (1963).  While not quite as taboo-busting, the story still involves lusty unmarried lovers—one critic noted that it “starts out like a sex comedy.”  The most provocative element, perhaps, is the ending: an utterly ambiguous final scene in which the central characters drive uneasily away from their farmhouse, surrounded by hordes of birds that might strike again at any moment.  If you were looking for the good guys to win, or for any sort of resolution for that matter, you were out of luck.  Hitchcock’s coda ensured that The Birds’ eerie spell would follow audiences right out of the theater.  The silence that greeted this coda—broken only by the sounds of the car trucking along—enveloped much of the film, which had no musical score.

If anyone really picked up where Psycho’s startling frankness had left off, though, it was Roman Polanski with his adaptation of Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby, released in 1968.  The stylish and deeply disturbing tale of a young woman (Mia Farrow, never better) who comes to realize her unborn baby is the Antichrist is as emblematic of the 1960s as anything could be.  The film manages, in an un-showy, naturalistic way, to challenge religion, modern medicine, the relationship between the sexes, and a multitude of other hot button issues.  Watching the movie for the first time, my boyfriend was impressed by how openly topics like birth control were discussed in the movie.  The trippy sequence in which Rosemary dreams of boarding a yacht with JFK, which plays like a bad LSD trip, is a bit dated, but through its terrifying exaggeration of the fears every woman has when pregnant, Rosemary’s Baby remains relevant and electrifying, and no mere cultural artifact.  For an in-depth look at this seminal film, look no further than this very blog and Jeffery’s recent post on it.

Rosemary’s Baby brought horror into respectable mainstream theaters, but the year’s other horror classic, Night of the Living Dead, aimed explicitly for the drive-in.  George Romero was a director of commercials who pooled talent and resources to make a cheap “Monster Movie” that changed the face of the horror genre.  Shot, like Psycho, in stark black and white and with a cast of unknown but wholly convincing actors, Living Dead depicted the absurd so matter of fact that it felt terrifyingly real.  A group of disparate people hole up in a farmhouse when the dead inexplicably come to life and seek out human flesh.  The radio and television reports watched by the survivors add verisimilitude, but the characters are what make Romero’s opus so convincing.  Like us, they fight, bicker, and get hysterical.  Director John Landis declared that Night pulled an even more shocking twist with its apparent leading lady than Psycho: rather than die, Barbara (Judith O’Dea) goes catatonic after the opening sequence.

That Night of the Living Dead was “read” for a multitude of political meanings probably says more about the 60s than about the movie itself.  Romero and his cohorts just wanted to make a good, scary flick, but in the contemporary climate, having a black lead (Duane Jones) who is accidentally shot by a white zombie killing unit/lynch mob felt like some kind of statement.  So did the dazed, rampaging hordes who could have stood for—take your pick—hippies, antiwar protesters, druggies, and on and on.  Beyond the alleged subtext, Night put a graphic new spin on the horror genre with its vicious gore and relentless nihilism.  This is a film in which there is no escape, no hope.  Its ironic finale was even bleaker than that of The Birds.

If the 60s horror films have one thing in common, it was their refusal to end happily or neatly.  Norman Bates goes completely mad, revisionist 80s sequel notwithstanding.  Rosemary decides to raise the Devil’s baby.  The birds overrun the planet.  So do the zombies.  After this decade, horror stopped pulling punches and started taking audiences into wholly nightmarish worlds they’d have trouble shaking long after the fade to black.


-Justin Lockwood

the age of aquarius

karen g's colossal ads from the 60s

Let me transport you to a world when commercials were sweeping cinematic epics that not only made you remember the company advertising the product, but actually made you really, really want the product too.  The fun, catchy jingles are such a treat!  We live in a world of reptiles and screaming pigs selling insurance and where a family of road-trippers start up the instrumentals to “Crazy Train” by shaking a cup of ice.  (I still don’t know what they were selling there by the way).  In honor of jdbrecords’ nod to the 60’s – below are a few commercials that I hand-picked for their beautiful, and fun spirit. Enjoy.


Yardley’s Slicker Dolly Commercial late 1960s

Colossal Hair Spray 1968

Coca Cola 1960 commercial

Maybelline’s eye makeup commercial 1965

LOVE the Johnny Smoke Anti-Smoking PSA’s from the 60s.

Twist and turn Barbie 1960s

Sanka Coffee 1963 (scoop them granules child)

Joy Detergent commercial 1960s (“Mirror, mirror, on your plate…)

- Karen G.

tu(n)esday!

Ain't nothin' but a disco party with "Voilà"...




Disorder (free download)...




Tight...




Easy now....




Nu Phoenix...




I miss you...

meep's midnite cinema

Check out the mixtape I made of retro movie music, inspired by Cinema Du Meep.

Tracklist:

1. Telescope (from 'Body Double'): Pino Donaggio

2. Hello Mr. W.A.M. (from 'American Gigolo'): Giorgio Moroder

3. The Shower (from 'Dressed to Kill'): Pino Donaggio

4. Love Story / Bozzo Barrett: Francis Lai

5. Profondo Rosso: Goblin

6. Theme from 'Friday the 13th Part III': Harry Manfredini

7. Magic (from 'Xanadu'): Olivia Newton-John

8. Nightcall (from 'Drive'): Kavinsky

9. Soldier in the Rain (from 'Gods & Monsters'): Carter Burwell

10. We May Never Love Like This Again (from 'The Towering Inferno'): Maureen McGovern

11. Blue Velvet: Lana Del Rey

12. The City Theme (from 'Earthquake'): John Williams

13. The Rodeo Collection (from 'Body Double'): Pino Donaggio 

14. The Crying Game: Boy George

15. Theme from 'The Deep' (Down Deep Inside): Donna Summer

16. Christine: John Carpenter & Splash Band

17. Chariots of Pumpkins (from 'Halloween III'): John Carpenter

18. Chase (from 'Midnight Express'): Giorgio Moroder

19. The Terrace: Linus Loves

20. I Never Dreamed Someone Like You Could Love Someone Like Me (from 'Carrie'): Katie Irving

21. Can You Read My Mind? (from 'Superman'): Maureen McGovern

22. Love Theme from 'Flashdance': Helen St. John

23. Pino Grigio: Lovelock

24. Hello Mr. W.A.M. (Reprise): Giorgio Moroder

stevie!

tell her no

Tell her no no no no no no...

honor - fall 2013 rtw

More 1960s inspiration of cocktail dresses, Peter Pan collars, and pink and red, this time from Giovanna Randall's sweet but not too sweet Honor collection. She notes, "I didn't feel like doing a heavy Fall collection, and wanted more of a pick-me-up. So this season began with the idea of a celebratory coat that would make me smile even on the darkest day in winter."  Bring on the hearts, shine, cheer & color, I say. I really love it.