Melissa Etheridge – Like the Way I Do
Hey! Hey! We Were the Monkees!
I barely remember this film for many of the reasons cited in this effectively illustrative review. Reading now, I am on my mission to seek it out and live through everything that writer Petra Mayer describes here. I was a prime audience member of the Monkees time on the public stage, both during and after their heyday, including most poignantly, the national and world events attached to their demise. Deep chords struck.
If you’re of my vintage, perhaps you will be too. Read the article, and find the movie to watch. Here’s a link on YouTube that might go away eventually, so check it out if you can in time.
The Monkees Tried To Cut Their Strings With ‘Head’
In Head, the Monkees made a play for creative and cultural respect. Did it work? No. Was it a strangely great movie? Heck yeah.
Photo by Moviestore/Shutterstock
I don’t think, as a teenage fangirl, that I realized exactly how bitter, how cynical, how teeth-grittingly furious the Monkees’ 1968 movie Head is. How it starts with — more or less — a suicide: Micky Dolenz running in a panic through a municipal ribbon-cutting ceremony and taking a leap off of a shiny new suspension bridge, tumbling through the air and crashing into the water to the stately chords of “Porpoise Song” while the rest of the band watches in consternation from the railing. How it ends the same way, except this time it’s all four of them jumping. How the Gerry Goffin-penned lyrics that play over both scenes go “a face, a voice/an overdub has no choice, an image cannot rejoice.”
Triumph of the Will by Leni Riefenstahl
Hitler in Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will” (1935), a “documentary” largely staged. Credit: The Film Preserve
Uh huh…a major buzzkill. But, it happened. Uh huh…yeah. Translation not necessary. Only the stamped memory and awareness of what followed. The 4:43 trailer is all but enough to watch, but there’s nearly two hours more of it in the finished film, reflecting the near decade of real life horror. A cold look at history would show this is just another serving of humanity’s dark side, spanning nothing less than centuries more of equal atrocities. What do we do with that, then?
Triumph of the Will
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- Documentary
- 1 Hour 50 Minutes
The infamous propaganda film of the 1934 Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg, Germany.
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- Rent $3.99
- Buy $11.99
https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/triumph-of-the-will/id1381099792
Ratings and Reviews
Critics Consensus: Triumph of the Will is impossible to separate from its repugnant political context — and impossible to deny as a powerfully made piece of cinematic propaganda.
Earth
An absolute lullaby. On any screen. Sit back and enjoy the ride.
EARTH from Michael König on Vimeo.
A Landmark Legal Shift Opens Pandora’s Box for DIY Guns
The law can address this situation properly given a wary enough Supreme Court, where this will end up, but it’s not likely to matter anymore than the laws already against illegal gun ownership. The real issue, and cause, for gun violence past, present, and still to come, through DIY means, is what it’s also been. The proclivity of certain human beings, mostly men, and mostly mentally damaged from childhood, violent influences, warped localized cultures, and preexisting derangement, is the root of violence and paranoia towards our fellow man. Cody Wilson, followed by his enabling lawyers and founders, is a poster child example of how disturbed a person can be to take his poisonous vision to an endpoint of such nihilistic proportions.
Cody Wilson makes digital files that let anyone 3-D print untraceable guns. The government tried to stop him. He sued—and won.
Five years ago, 25-year-old radical libertarian Cody Wilson stood on a remote central Texas gun range and pulled the trigger on the world’s first fully 3-D-printed gun. When, to his relief, his plastic invention fired a .380-caliber bullet into a berm of dirt without jamming or exploding in his hands, he drove back to Austin and uploaded the blueprints for the pistol to his website, Defcad.com.
He’d launched the site months earlier along with an anarchist video manifesto, declaring that gun control would never be the same in an era when anyone can download and print their own firearm with a few clicks. In the days after that first test-firing, his gun was downloaded more than 100,000 times. Wilson made the decision to go all in on the project, dropping out of law school at the University of Texas, as if to confirm his belief that technology supersedes law.