hot girl summer

New video for "Hot Girl Summer."

I heart this song.

movies of '79 podcast

Meep & I's discussion of our favorite movies of 1979 is now available to listen to on YouTube on the Retro Movie Love Podcast!

Such a great year for movies. I watched Starting Over and Chilly Scenes of Winter for the first time and loved them.

the flying fish

Turkish artist Murat Sayginer's animated short, The Flying Fish, is a dazzling achievement of music and visuals. Schematically, the film is a metaphysical journey of life and death with sleek geometric representations--from spheres wriggling sperm-like to a neon-drenched afterlife. Scintillating, metallic textures and imagery abound, juxtaposing the ancient and pure with slick and occasionally glitchy, computerized sheen.

One of the most compelling images was a skeleton hunched within the cage of an overturned shopping cart--an obvious metaphor linking death and consumerism--but the image sticks and is brilliantly evoked in a desert wasteland of scattered bones. Highlight for me in The Flying Fish was the "The Safe Zone" which includes pulsating crystal rectangular bars lit in hyper colors with Sayginer's effective score pumping at shiny synth heights. Riding off into a neon sunset, it becomes a comforting closer to Sayginer's dense menagerie.  ***

-Jeffery Berg

yesterday once more

New mix featuring remixes of Felix Da Housecat, Donna Summer, Mariah, Groove Theory, Daft Punk, & more!

woodstock or bust

Charming and innocuous, Woodstock or Bust follows two songbird friends (played appealingly by Willow Shields and Meg DeLacy) who attempt to trek to the 1969 music fest with dreams of performing on-stage. Directed with delicacy by Leslie Bloom, the film is one of those coming-of-age tales of young friendship that may have hit me harder emotionally as a freshman college student--it seems aimed at this demographic who may be just beginning to dip their toes with interest in a time gone by, rather than an older group accustomed to either real-life experiences or more enveloping, complex portrayals.




As mentioned in previous reviews this year, there's been a bevy of late 60s / early 70s-set movies in recent months (Annabelle Comes Home, Rocketman, Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark) of varying degree of quality. All share a similar ache. Woodstock or Bust, with its plucked guitar throwback score by Blair Borland (slight incarnations of "Born to Be Wild, "Touch Me," and "Eight Days a Week" abound) and angelic original songs by Michelle Curtis Purvance ("Northern Lights" is a highlight), is a road-trip movie of an emboldened female friendship that lands with a starry-skied hush. ***


-Jeffery Berg

1997

My appearance on Cinema du Meep's podcast Retro Movie Love on 1997 movies is now available on YouTube!

art + gifs by chromo valdez

via Chromo-Valdez