Laurel Nakadate’s Untitled : Pornstars reading poems
We are very proud to house Untitled, a film of pornstars reading poems, directed by Laurel Nakadate, based on text by Dora Malech.
Following the break, an afterword by our own Jackie Wang.
A scene with Quentin
In Pulp Fiction, in what has become known as the “Divine intervention” scene, a guy hides inside the bathroom trembling under the weight of both his mortality and huge gun as he hears hit man Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson) recite Ezekiel 25:17 before he shoots a co-conspirator who embezzled Jules’ employer.
The guy in the bathroom comes blasting out of the bathroom screaming “die motherfucker,” spraying bullets which seem to go through Jules and his partner Vincent, after which the former, due to the perceived miracle, resolves to become a spiritual man. This movie is 16 years old, and I’m not saying anything new, it’s just that I saw the film again last night and noticed something very beautiful: the guy in the bathroom’s pants are unbuttoned.
Three Films: The Blah, The Okay & The Pretty Good
Because my wife is away, presenting a paper on The Gurlesque at the National Women’s Studies Conference, I’ve been filling the lapses in my workload with movie watching. I’ve also been reading a manuscript by one of our fellow giants, which brilliantly knocks the rotten teeth out of language. But in terms of movies, I’ve watched three over the last three nights. One was blah, one was okay, and one was pretty good.
9 1/2 Lives, Or Not
Once upon a time I thought Federico Fellini’s 8½ was a perfect movie. The perfect movie. Of course, that’s ridiculous. There is no perfect anything. But one thinks one knows a thing or even two. That’s much of how we get along in the world, from one opinion to the next, doing much selecting, tuning your life to what you’d like to see reflected from out there. I’ve had a lot of perfect movies in my life and now they’re just movies I like and there are a lot of them. Opinions are a pretty kind of paste for brain bricks, and we a bunch of bricoleurs.
Aokigahara Suicide Forest
At VBS, a 20+ min. documentary on Japan’s most popular spot for suicide, at the base of Mt. Fuji.
VBS’s Haitian Nzambies
Vice TV just finished up running a fascinating 6 part documentary, Haitian Nzambies, in which Hamilton Morris (of Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia) travels to Port-Au-Prince in search of a Vodou solution rumored to create actual living zombies: people so close to death that they are deemed dead by physicians, but are actually alive. During his early research he is taken to a voodoo ceremony where a woman spazzes on a possessed chair and he is told that if he has sex on Thursday anytime for the rest of his life, he will be killed. That’s the beginning. Watch if you’re into corpses, ritual sacrifice, ember eating, black magick, and Vice-style seeking for an answer to the zombie powder quest.
How To Explain It To My Parents
How To Explain It To My Parents is a video series featuring conceptual artists explaining their work to their parents.
Here’s an episode with Martijn Hendriks, who did that rad version of Hitchcock’s The Birds where all the birds were erased, and more.
Other episodes are available here. [via Clusterflock]
Johnny-on-the-future
from Naked by Mike Leigh
Blake Butler—
This is pretty wicked: Why Doc Brown is the real villain of Back to the Future [via Matt Bell]
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