... the soundtrack of love and loss

Amazing, heart-in-the-throat story by T.M. Brown in the New York Times on a collection of mix tapes unearthed in a Fire Island house.

Link to The Pine Walk Collection on Mixcloud.

A post from 2013 of vintage Fire Island pics.

madonna remixed!

On a roll with remix playlists.

Here is a curated one of Madonna's great remixed tracks.

She has had such longevity in the industry, particularly on the dance music charts.

mariah remixed!

My new Spotify playlist highlights the best of Mariah Carey's substantial discography of remixes.

the tale of king crab

Sometimes there is propensity for filmmakers within a modern universe to harken back to the bare essentials of the natural world. In Alessio Rigo de Righi's and Matteo Zoppis' The Tale of King Crab, a pair of related folktales emerge, prefaced initially from the modern point-of-view of a group of non-actors regaling in a bar setting. This frame structure eventually dissipates and is ultimately dashed by the end. The filmmakers show storytelling persisting through the ages, and how an assembly of hearty, weathered-faced male hunters relate to and ruminate upon  certain masculine elements in the tropes of romance and western tales. 

The first story follows drunken, bearded Luciano (Gabriele Silli) in the midst of major changes in his meager, lonesome existence. His usual path is obstructed by a gate through the design of a tyrannical prince. It's unclear whether the prince has done this purposefully to spite Luciano, but in addition to that, Luciano's affections for Emma (Maria Alexandra Lungu) are thwarted by the prince as well, and also Emma's father. This is very much Luciano against his world: a rural Italian village where he renders powerless--in his desires and sense of purpose. Eventually he destroys this existence and embarks on travels to remote South America, where he cuts away at his beard and renews himself, disguised as a priest, in a quest with a group of other men, for gold. Supposedly one is to "follow the crab" to find where this gold is hidden. This quest becomes like an every-man-for-himself western, with the score emitting Ennio Morricone-like percussive hits over gunfire and gray, stony terrain. 

The stories are rather simplistic really, and the dull, laconic Luciano as the central figure makes them somewhat tedious, but they are emboldened visually by some truly beautiful shots (the sterling cinematography is by Simone D'Arcangelo), which makes exquisite use of streams of sunlight, hillsides, and bodies of water. The pinkish-red crab skittering about is also a bold (and cool!) image and symbol. To enhance these settings, there is--perhaps purposefully--an exaggerated sound mix of little details: flickering flames, gulps of wine and water, footsteps upon rocks. What comes through the film most effectively is a sun-glinting mirage of hope and the folly of men and their greed and tendencies towards destruction and violence. ***

-Jeffery Berg 

down

Yay. Hot Chip drops new single, "Down," a funk-infused electro ditty. Love the drum break.

Music video below as well.

dark horse

Music video from searing rock track "Dark Horse" by The Velveteers.

Their album, Nightmare Daydream, is now available from Easy Eye Sound.

ambulance

When I first went to L.A. as a teenager, I was so excited about being there that I wanted to take it all in. I stuck my camcorder out of a backseat window and filmed buildings, houses, streets, people as they flipped by. It was an amazing experience to feel and be in the moment of, but watching the woozy footage later, less so. A camera that's always moving and hustling has been the force behind the appeal and appallment of Michael Bay's work. Roberto De Angelis' kinetic photography in Ambulance rarely (never?) falls on a lingering shot as the colorful L.A.-setting zigzags and flits by through the movie's central high-speed chase. 

Heist films and vehicular chase moves can be delicious fun, especially if they are brisk and well-cast, with heroes and antiheroes you care about, or at least intrigued by. But when you are rooting for the police to just end everything already, something isn't right. Part of this is due to Jake Gyllenhaal's Danny Sharp as the ringleader of a bank robbery group. He invites his estranged brother, veteran Marine Will (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, doing a great job despite a rank script), who is desperate for money to cover his wife's surgery. The heist--a buzzy high unfortunately contained in the early hours of the film--goes very awry, and Danny and Will end up hijacking an ambulance with medical worker Cam (Eiza González) and injured rookie cop (Jackson White) in tow as hostages. Gyllenhaal is usually a reliable presence, and a charismatic one, even when you can see him stretching his skills. Yet, he seems miscast here, or not a strong enough actor to tackle the junkyard script--ultimately too puppy-eyed adorable to feel threatening, despite his yelling and neck-vein popping antics. He also seems incapable of wading into any complicated gradients this character could have. There's a mysterious debonair quality to him at the outset, but by the time he's "stressed" in the remainder of the film in the ambulance, he becomes a grating mess to watch. Someone that can portray a sense of deviousness, malice, under the guise of bulk, like Mark Wahlberg, who starred in Bay's, mediocre, but much more involving day-glo bodybuilder crime thriller, Pain and Gain, may have made a more compelling presence. 

It could be a fault of the film that most of the actors feel so inconsequential and irritating. The movie is so incredibly busy trying to make every proceeding an eye-popping thrill-ride. Busy but boring has been how I've deemed many mainstream movies of late; they seem constantly spinning in motion with noise and stuffed with a lot of action, fighting and yelling, and yet, seemingly going nowhere on any satisfying level. A film like Ambulance, a remake of a 2005 film by Danish director Laurits Munch-Petersen, could have been fresh, slick and punchy on a 100 minute runtime--the way those 90s video rental thrillers were constructed (that this movie is being so wrongly compared to). Bay movies are unapologetically dumb action products with sledgehammer subtlety. In this current climate of waning moviegoing, a movie-lover has to feel some sort of reverence for trying to entertain us in a theater, even if one finds the work pretty dreadful. There's just a dissonance between the speed of which Bay's Ambulance is spinning and its unengaging, lumbering feel at two plus hours. The heavy dose of slo-mo schmaltz the movie piles on in its closer is even more wretchedly unbearable. *

-Jeffery Berg