The internet is filled with things. Here are some of them.
#movies
2024
Toto, David Lynch, and Brian Eno: Dune2024 Nov 19
Steve Lukather, from the band Toto, on sharing a credit with Brian Eno on the soundtrack to David Lynch's 1984 Dune:
I’ve never met Brian. Love his work, but he wrote a 30-second theme and basically got the same credit as us. They used him because of his name value, so people attributed our work to him and his work to us, and it was confusing. It was much hipper to say Brian Eno wrote the score than Toto at the time. If they didn’t like the movie, they’d go after us. If they liked it, they’d give Eno all the credit. I have no beef with Brian Eno, I have no beef with David. That’s what he wanted so he should have it. I love Brian Eno.
And later in the interview, David Paich, the primary songwriter for Toto, on visiting David Lynch's home:
I remember when I went to his house, he had this haunting, low, whistling sound. I said, “What is that?” He said he went to Scotland up into the hills where there was supposedly a haunted castle. This was the wind whistling through the castle, and he recorded that. He puts it on all of his movies. This low wisp of a sound. It’s almost like a foghorn.
Office Space: An Oral History2024 Oct 22
This is a 2019 article which tracks down and interviews dozens of people who helped create "Office Space", the 1999 Mike Judge cult classic about the absurdity of cubicle life. I've seen the movie a lot. So nostalgia like this is interesting, to learn what the creators were doing and why they were doing it, long since freed from having to promote the movie and sing only its praises.
Too Old To Die Young2024 Sep 27
In 2019, Nicolas Winding Refn and Ed Brubaker created a beautiful, beautifully long and drawn out, enigmatic, brutal, horrific 13-hour neo-noir masterpiece. I just found out it existed two weeks ago, and finished watching it two days ago. Now I'm struggling to understand what I saw, to tie together the threads that the narrative does not make explicit. Linked is my rambling thought process; it is not a review; there are massive spoilers.
Bruce Arntson's "Tree Climbing Shoes"2024 Sep 11
This ridiculous song from Ernest Goes to Jail has been living rent-free in my head for thirty years. "Don't make me climb the coconut tree, these aren't my tree-climbing shoes."
Heavy Metal Parking Lot2024 May 11
Step back in time to 1984 in this seventeen-minute long VHS-quality video of footage edited together by Judas Priest fans interviewing each other in a parking lot prior to one of their concerts. Apparently this used to be traded around in bootleg copies only before eventually making its way, as does everything, to the internet. Now you can pay $1 to watch it on Amazon. And should, because it is simply amazing.
The Hobbit Duology2024 May 9
This feature-length documentary analyzing what's wrong with The Hobbit movie trilogy is fascinating, very well done, and gripping enough to have me watching it's entire running length despite never having seen any of The Hobbit movies. Peter Jackson's LotR trilogy wasn't perfect but it at least felt like a fair adaptation. Whereas The Hobbit turned me off – and you'd think I'd be its target audience – from its promotional material alone. I think this is another case where the movie analyzing what went wrong with a movie is more watchable than the movie in question (see: The Phantom Menace).
Working with Uwe Boll2024 Apr 3
My guess is that most people have probably forgotten about the world's least competent major film director, Uwe Boll, but for some reason I have not. And so I stumbled across this Something Awful article from 2005 (with writing so smug and hyperbolic you should already be cringing) but what it does purport to shed light upon is what is it like to actually work with Uwe Boll. The author is Blair Erickson (who later went on to make some movies I've never heard of) who says he was asked to submit some scripts to Boll early in the development of Alone in the Dark. What amount of the tale is true versus Something Awful's typical dramatic inflation I of course cannot say but it does shed some interesting if not surprising insights.
The Ellison Dispute2023 Jul 1
Did James Cameron rip off a Harlan Ellison story when he made Terminator? So claimed Ellison back in 1984 when the movie came out. And considering that Ellison didn't just get paid, but also got his name added to the credits, it'd seem that the lawyers agreed with him. But did Cameron really rip off Ellison? Or did the famously litigious Ellison just outmaneuver a young, naive, newly successful filmmaker?
Aliens: How Burke takes his coffee2023 Mar 11
I'm always a fan of appreciating the details in a movie I love. But as a quick analysis of how cleverly Burke's subtle villainy was crafted, this is a fun journey back into the universe of the xenomorphs.
Steve Lukather, from the band Toto, on sharing a credit with Brian Eno on the soundtrack to David Lynch's 1984 Dune: And later in the interview, David Paich, the primary songwriter for Toto, on visiting David Lynch's home: