Southern Delights

Directed by Tony Richardson's madcap satire The Loved One is a 60's gem. A young British poet lands in LA and moves in with his Uncle who works as a vocal coach to the stars, after he passes away the nephew must arrange a tinseltown funeral at a guady, opulent cemetary staffed with some rather curious characters, one of whom attracts his eye. Based on a Evelyn Waugh novel and adapted by the brilliant Terry Southern this pacy nonsense has plenty of laughs as it's rolls around poking fun at everyone and everything with gusto. Sporting a fantastic ensemble of actors including Gielgud, Liberace, Coburn, McDowall and Steiger this is a sadly forgotten 60's masterpiece.

Terry Southern's satirical novel Candy, an updated version of Voltaire's Candide, follows the sexy exploits of a high school ingenue as she attempts to share her love on an epic journey across America. Like The Loved One the film sports a ridiculously talented cast with Burton, Brando, Matthau, Coburn and Ringo all appearing as Candy's lovers in a never ending series of comic vignettes but sadly it's not nearly as amusing. Sure there's laughs but it's a patchy and uneven, with some of the sequences overstaying their welcome and by the end it's tiresomely predictable however despite all it's flaws it's a fine example of psychedelic 60's nonsense and there's nowhere else you're likely to witness Ringo Starr portray a Mexican who ravishes a schoolgirl in front of Richard Burton & Sugar Ray Robinson.

Sweet Smell of the Sixties

Haven't seen John Boorman's Point Blank in at least a decade but it's just as stunning as I remember a sleek, stylish 60's revenge thriller that's become a template for plenty of films since. Nowadays it makes me think of Seijun Suzuki's gangster films from around the same time all sharp suits, concrete architecture and stoney faces.

The Prize is a comedic Hitchcockian thriller about a drunken author, played by Paul Newman, who wins a Nobel Prize and on attending proceedings accidentally gets himself rolled up in some East/West espionage shenanigans. The script is quick, full of wit and the action well handled if a little slight but it all crackles along with plenty of brio. You could fault it for it's formulaic plot (Lehman also wrote North By Northwest) but to be honest the quality is so high it doesn't really matter, all in all it's a nicely shot, well acted thriller done with that seemingly effortless 60's panache that it makes you wonder why so few film makers today are capable of producing anything near it.

Mixed bag of Crazy

American weapons from a particular company have secretly inserted bible references into weapon id numbers. Mmm America + dullwittedness + guns + bizarro-jesus + available targets that's a sweet bitches brew of corpses. Maybe Beck/Palin's juju is on the money?

It's ok Haiti the Scientologonks are coming, leading the way is chubby can't-actor Travolta who has offered to fly some lunatics into the site of a devastating catastrophe because tiresome half-assed, made up by a scifi author, pseudo scientific beliefs are exactly was these people need right now. What a guy.

Dennis Hopper, a unique individual I'd think we'd all agree is apparently approaching his end, eek, and he just divorced his wife mmmm classy, regardless he did provide us with many great things over his long career in a number of fields and here's a great spread of his photos from the Selma March via Vanity Fair appropriately enough for MLK day in the US.

Ocean of liquid diamonds on Uranus? or maybe even Neptune? well some well smoked boffins have pondered about recent revelations bout the results of melting diamonds.

Cartoonish megalomaniac Chavez has continued his campaign against video games with his latest well thought out criticism of the genre being that they are "poison" particularly Sony Playstation, guess he's a Xboxer then. Anyways he's, err, an odd one to say the least, if he's started making statues of himself I'd hope the populace are getting scared and not cause of the visage.

Awesome image of China's interweb censorship via Guradina's Datablog sire, via Information is Beautiful.

Feel for author when discussing errors in his newly published book, that's shitty, won't put me off buying one of the books, the blog is amazing, I'm fond of Weed-as-super-drug Chart, totally convinced me.