Assemblog: February 15, 2013

Kiss of the Damned (full poster)

New this week on Popshifter: I reveal a behind-the-scenes video on the making of the upcoming What The Brothers Sang album by Dawn McCarthy and Bonnie “Prince” Billy and weigh in on Suede’s new single and video; Paul praises Spotify but has stern advice for Prince; Cait has the scoop on the terrific new Omnivore Recordings George Jones United Artists singles compilation; and Elizabeth reassures us we can still call television “television.”

If you’re looking for a new vampire movie to love, you might find one in Kiss of the Damned. It sure has a gorgeous poster. The film will be playing SXSW (which runs from March 8 – 16 in Austin, TX) but will be available on iTunes and VOD on March 28 and in theaters May 3. The film’s press release describes it as follows:

Beautiful vampire Djuna (Josephine de La Baume) tries to resist the advances of the handsome, human screenwriter Paolo (Milo Ventimiglia), but eventually gives in to their passion. When her troublemaker sister Mimi (Roxane Mesquida) unexpectedly comes to visit, Djuna’s love story is threatened, and the whole vampire community becomes endangered . . .

While there’s no official trailer yet, Bloody Disgusting has posted a short clip that’s pretty steamy. It’s directed by Xan Cassavetes, who is, yes, the daughter of John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands. This is her feature film directorial debut. Movies.com has a short interview with her where you can find out more.

Another film that looks promising is the horror/sci fi/what-is-it-exactly Dark Skies, which opens February 22. It has an interactive media campaign that The Weinstein Company and Dimension Films hopes will appeal to viewers. As cool as interactive marketing is (I’m thinking in terms of Prometheus) I worry that this just feeds into the hype machine and sets viewers and critics up for massive disappointment. Critics especially should not judge a film’s merit based on trailers and marketing, but they do (Prometheus again).

I’m more amenable to this type of interactive experience when it comes to TV shows, which can be watched at a more leisurely pace as plot lines are teased out over time (at least right now; who knows what changes House of Cards and Arrested Development will bring). Perhaps I’m just being old-fashioned when I have different rules for film and TV. Movies already suffer from terribly revealing and/or spoilery trailers; to add more fuel to that fire seems like a bad idea. Or am I just being old-fashioned? What do you think? Should there be different rules for films and TV when it comes to interactive marketing?

Amoeba Records is doing something pretty amazing, according to a recent article in Variety. They are converting “thousands of rare and out-of-print LPs, 78s, and 45s” to MP3 format to be purchased for download from their website. For those worried about copyright and legality, you should read the article, which explains that the money is held in escrow until they are contacted by the copyright holder. Additionally, the music is also undergoing “extensive sonic cleaning and remastering” which is a fine idea and something that would be incredibly time consuming were you to do this at home with your own software.

On the digital rights front, I recently received an email from Amazon that read, in part:

We thought you’d like to know that eligible songs from 3 CDs you have purchased from Amazon are being added to your Cloud Player library. This means that high-quality MP3 versions of these songs are available for you to play or download from Cloud Player for FREE. You can find your songs in the “Purchased” playlist. Please note that some songs from the above CDs are not eligible for this feature and may not be available in your Cloud Player library.

In addition, we’re excited to announce AutoRip. Now when you buy any CD with the logo, all songs from the MP3 version of that album will instantly be delivered to your Amazon Cloud Player library for FREE.

It should be obvious that I have only just heard about this, though it’s been around for almost two years (I don’t buy much music from Amazon). I’m interested in the legalities of this (some of which are discussed here) as well as how this service will compete with iTunes. I’m also leery of cloud-based issues vis-à-vis ownership, but even if I was totally on board, this service not available in Canada for all the same kinds of reasons that we don’t get a lot of other things up here.

If you, like me, are wondering how to do deal with the proliferation of Internet trolls (especially the ones who hate women), this article from Mother Jones might provide a little insight. Although it talks about climate change deniers, there’s a lot in here that can be applied to trolls of any stripe. This sentence in particular rings true:

In other words, it appeared that pushing people’s emotional buttons, through derogatory comments, made them double down on their preexisting beliefs.

The lesson here is: Stop telling me to hate movies that I like just because you didn’t like them. Another article that I found even more enlightening with regard to Internet assholes (a.k.a. 99 percent of people on the Internet, and possibly including myself) is this “How To Deal With Crappy People” article from James Altucher. This is great when you can ignore them, but as we know, this isn’t always possible. And furthermore, we may not be able to teach other people lessons, but what about us white folks standing up for people of color when we see racist bullshit online? Or men refusing to allow misogynist comments to go unchecked? How much of this kind of sparring is our duty as decent human beings and how much of it is a hopeless attempt to teach lessons to the unteachable?

—Less Lee Moore, Managing Editor