Assemblog: September 14, 2012

You’re Next, 2011

New this week on Popshifter: Emily dares you to get “Les Sucettes” out of your head in her review of France Gall’s Made In France and John places Mary Edwards’s Eastern/Central & Mountain/Pacific in his Top Ten of 2012.

TIFF Vanguard Blogging Bonanza! I’m up to 20 posts now on the Vanguard blog. Whoo! I saw the premiere of Here Comes The Devil on Tuesday and wowza. It’s a corker. Read my review here. I’ll have reviews up for Sightseers and Thale in the next few days, so keep looking.

TIFF isn’t even over but film freaks are already gearing up for Fantastic Fest in Austin, TX. There’s a countdown on the home page, too, so you can gear up with them. There are a lot of films screening, some of which have premiered internationally already, and some that are debuting at the Festival. I’ll be following the coverage and will report back with what looks most promising.

Speaking of TIFF (again), Adam Wingard’s You’re Next was on my “must see” list after reading about it last September and then it basically vanished. Collider reports that You’re Next will finally see a release date of August 23, 2013 after a protracted bidding war between Paramount and Lionsgate. I am pretty excited about this and you should be too!

I may or may not have been half asleep when I read the news about Hannibal Lecter getting his own TV show on NBC, but I was definitely interested when I read that Mads Mikkelsen (Casino Royale, Valhalla Rising, The Hunt) would be starring as the not-so-good doctor. Now that Scott Thompson—yes, from Kids In The Hall—has been added to the mix, I’m even more interested. It will be wonderful to see Thompson involved with something like this and I have a feeling he will surprise a lot of people. (H/T to Bloody Disgusting)

Shock Till You Drop has news about the upcoming re-release of John Carpenter’s Halloween in theaters this October. I have no idea if Canada will be included, but I hope so. The Official Michael Myers site will have updates so stay tuned.

Now playing at TIFF: The Impossible, a.k.a. the Indonesian tsunami movie with Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts. Sean at Film Junk echoes my exact thoughts when I first heard about this movie a few months ago: why so many white people? I get that the producers likely wanted characters that the mostly-white audience could relate to but wait, scratch that. I don’t get it. People relate to characters and what better way to convey the tragedy than to make it about the natives of the area and not a family of wealthy white tourists?

Granted the trailer is gorgeous and moving and McGregor and Watts are both wonderful actors, but the whitewashing makes me sad and disappointed.

Martha Coolidge, who directed Valley Girl, Real Genius, and a bunch of other good things, has written a rousing article on Indiewire that asks “how can we get more women in power as directors?” Read the whole thing; it is nothing short of inspirational. If you substitute “Director” for other professions, it’s a call to arms for feminists and feminist allies everywhere.

The LUND International Fantastic Film Festival will focus on female directors in genre films this year. This news comes from Twitch, which is nice because in the recent past I’ve criticized the site for being a bit of a sausage fest. The official LIFFF website is all in Swedish, so I’ll keep checking for more updates in English (unless you can read Swedish in which case, drop me a line).

The title of this article speaks volumes: King Crimson’s Robert Fripp Quits The Music Business: Tears Pour Down My Face. It’s pretty heartbreaking to read something like this, a situation where talent means fuck all in the face of the almighty commerce. I already dislike Kanye West so the part about Kanye West makes me want to throw things. Here’s an excerpt from the original interview with Fripp from (oh sweet irony) Financial Times:

Despite his avant-rock background, Fripp is, at root, a romantic. “The quality of artistry is the capacity to assume innocence at will, the quality of experiencing innocence as if for the first time,” he says. “Do you believe that Rostropovich was playing a cello just for a living? Do you believe that Hendrix was playing for money?”

I caught snippets of that “Bruce Willis vs. iTunes meme” last week or whenever it was, but until I read Pajiba’s analysis of it, I just shrugged it off. As Genevieve Burgess points out, however, it’s something that we should consider. Your iTunes are not really yours, she proposes:

From a legal perspective digital downloads from iTunes or other similar retailers look a lot more like licenses than they do like a true purchased recording. In the first place, no one ever had to confirm they read a “Terms and Conditions” statement before they bought a record.

For those of us who have limited living space and are already having storage issues with our physical media, this is troubling. It took me years to get over my obsession with the physical copies of music; I haven’t gotten rid of mine but I have started to acquire iTunes copies almost exclusively. The fact is I just don’t have the room.

What bothers me even more are some of the comments in the article, like this one about Spotify, written by a person who seems to equate music with McDonalds:

This is why I’m all for Spotify—there’s no pretense; I pay 10 dollars a month, I get temporary use of whatever song I want to listen to at that moment, it doesn’t take up disk space and I don’t have this weirdo debate on whether or not I can pass them on. It’s streaming temporary music, I don’t give a fuck.

This comment is even more depressing:

Agreed. I was big on downloading music for a number of years. I’d occasionally buy an album that I really liked, but that amounted to probably 3 albums between 2000-2012. The day Spotify was available in Australia I signed up, and now I listen to all of my music through there.

I’m not sure what’s more galling: the idea of music as a mere distraction (which okay, fine, I guess some people just don’t like music, as bizarre as that seems to me) or the idea that there are only three albums the second commenter liked in a 12-year period. What the hell? Are you 95 years old? And do you hate freedom? Or just musicians?

Please someone; tell me these people are trolls. I can’t handle it.

—Less Lee Moore, Managing Editor