What Does This Button Do ?

Bruce Dikinson is many things except Iron Maiden. A swordsman, a plane pilot, a fillmaker (Chemical Romance), an author. And now he wrote his autobiography, out in October. Yes, Bruce, what does that button do ???

Tobe Hopper RIP

was in Smida on Sunday. Opened imdb and again, sad news...mr. Texas Chainsaw, Tobe Hopper went away. He was 74. Just 2 months after George A. Romero, two of the most significant filmmakers in horror are gone. We will honor both of them at Dracula Film Festival this October (18-22).
my thoughts on Eaten Alive, here !

John Abercrombie RIP

Chitarist american genial de jazz, John Abercrombie a murit pe 22 august. Avea 72 de ani. L-am vazut de 2 ori, odata in 2009 la Garana si pe 17 octombrie 2015 la sala Radio in Bucuresti. Au fost si singurele dati cind a cintat in Romania. Tocmai l-am vazut pe Billy Cobham, care are aceiasi virsta, la Oristano. Cobham a fost unul din colaboratorii lui Abercrobie, sau viceveersa, avind in vedere ca acesta a aparut pe trei discuri ale tobarului, intre 1974 si 1975.

  RIP   John Laird Abercrombie (December 16, 1944 – August 22, 2017)

Jerry Lewis RIP

The Day the Clown Cried...

The King of Comedy was 91...
homage in September on the Comedy Classics at Cinemateca Patria !

Atomic Blonde (2017)

Highly recommended !!!
Based on the graphic novel The Coldest city (2012), Atomic Blonde is a 1989 cold war Berlin and a spy yarn on the back of the fall of the Wall. Cult soundtrack included.
David Leitch's (John Wick) third film and best. Chatlize Theron is amazing and ultra hot as the best (and lethal) blonde Debbie Harry playing David Bowie as a bisexual Bond in neon decadent & violent lights. also with shades of Michelle Pfeiffer in Scarface, and i could see Anita Pallenberg and Nico in that iconic platinum blonde hair, also Bowie's Like a Gigolo and the Dietrich Berliner connection.
Is what Salt and Wanted should've been and Theron is way better and kinkier and colder then Jolie.
The film is imo a homage to Tony Scott, it's constructed like Spy Game (shot on the same Budapest streets with a similar sequence of crossing the Checkpoint Charlie) and two riffs to True Romance.
The famed staircaise fight in on-shot it's actually a trick, it has about 40 cuts into it. Digital age and day !
*
The Bowie connection goes also further than Berlin which was the city of Low and Heroes, into Cat People, song used also by Tarantino in Inglorious Basterds but made (in) famous by the Paul Schrader film from 1982. The filmmakers spoke to Bowie shortly before his death and offered him a part which sadly it was not to be. The soundtrack includes Under Pressure, the Bowie/Mercury hit partnership and a Peter Schilling song entitled "Major Tom".
The soundtrack also includes a cover of Falco's Der Komissar, but by the british band After the Fire, who made that a hit in the US in 1983.
But why weren't they using the Blondie song "Atomic"? maybe cos it was remixed in Trainspotting ?
 Here's an article about the tough (and expensive) job of song clearance for the film. And about the songs that got away.
**** out of five

"This movie has a ton of action but we've made it at the independent price. So it's sort of a catch-22. It is a thinking person's action movie. We released it at a time when people are used to seeing big spectacle movies and it's kind of in-between."
David Leitch

Comrade Detective (2017)

"What would Lenin do ?"
I do not know yet, I am conflicted about this. Was waiting with anticipation for:
Comrade Detective aka Tovarasul militian (previously named Iron Fisting, good riddance of that title that sounded like brutal porn)
6 episodes for Amazon. A police show spoof, shot in Romania in Romanian. Then all dubbed in English.

When you get Florin Piersic jr.(Gregor--- Gregor ???! Anghel) to be dubbed by Channing Tatum, there's reason to be proud. For Piersic, who's doing a real serious job.

And his partner, Laurentiu Ulici (Iosif Baciu, who's name makes for jokes of him being a Goat Fucker, wtf ?, dudes could've used Cioban as that is more of a shepherd....) dubbed by Joseph Gordon-Levitt. You get a supporting female character to be voice played by Kim Basinger ? Yep.

But the screenwriters of this novelty concept series (as novel as Woody Allen-s 1966s Whats up with Tiger Lily  whre he spoofed a Japanese film), haven't done their Romanian/RSR / 80's communism homework seriously. At all. So for Romanians this might be offendable and bad or just dumb. Of course we're just the stand-ins of this spoof series, and I don't know if the American audience bought that it "was discovered" and dubbed after 5 years of digging for it and with the cooperation of "Romanian Film Archive". And yes, it would have been cool to have a series like that in those years. But we didn't. And if we did it sure wouldn't look like this.
RULE #1 of parody/spoof- Know thy subject (and like thy subject as well).
And yes, we're happy this is not Comrade Detective from Moscow but Nikita, Joseph, Ivan and other names are just poor bullshit (all credits of Romania crew is made out of Animal names, up to director Bebelus Pisicuta, -Baby Pussy more likely, or Puss), sorry but in Romanian it spells & sounds just like crap ..and NOT funny) and the captions in Romanian look like they are done with Google Translate. It's obvious their references were Russian (USSR) and any other than Romanian. Plus the buddy cop influences of 80's flicks- 48 Hrs., Red Heat, even Seven (a dinenr scene is lifted directly from there).
Production values are great -and there's a catch, that is where the professionals in the film industry had greenlight and it worked, and btw, who gives a shit in America if it's Dacias with the 4 numbers licence, or b&w TV's and the right uniforms, but they could hire a consultant to improve the accuracy of the plot and names and other anachronisms or goofs- (remember the case of War Dogs last year and Albanian being spoken in Romanian ?, the Bucharest /Budapest syndrome- yep but Holly wood doesn't give a fuck, right?) and it's cool to see Gabriel Spahiu in a white suit with a big white hat (Cuban Fedora !)- an extended cameo and a reminder that great talented Romanian actors have made a career (and money to built houses and shit ;) in playing whatever 9th banana in whatever production is thrown here by any company-and yes, we'll take it. No shame in it, also no glory...
The Cool stuff- The Reagan mask (via Point Break ?), well it adds up to the Reagan era (was it really a Reagan mask on the time of his administration ?), the surreal Jordache jeans plot, the Marx Communist party  book (signed by Marx -probably Groucho ;), the Monopoly game, the mention of Nadia Comaneci and the obsession of gymnastics and...wrestling, the music of Adrian Enescu (from Ringul 7 more).
-Va urma=to be continued...(there are 6 episodes to watch, anyway, ep.2 a vast improvment over ep. 1)
conclusion:
-it gets better and better and finally,  its a subversive surreal little gem. And funny.

Sam Shepard RIP

as col. Garrison in Black Hawk Dawn (2001).
Sam Shepard -gone on July 27th. 73 years old. The writer of Paris Texas, Fool for Love and other indie drama plays. Debut in Bob Dylan's Renaldo and Clara, which he co-wrote (1978).
Last great part: Blackthorn -2011. Last great bit part: Cold in July -2014.
Don't Come Knockin' (as i was talking about this 2005 Wenders film he also wrote in relation with Can't You Hear Me Knocking, the Rolling Stones song from 1971), this so/so song written by U2

Cold in July. Paulo Villagio, Martin Landau, George A. Romero, Elsa Martinelli, Claude Rich, Chester Bennington, John Heard, Jeanne Moreau, Shepard. Too cold. July Mourning.