Maybe because my girlfriend makes fun of me about my supposed 'crush" on Lila Downs, I overlooked this DVD on my top ten list of last year. It was only recently that I watched Loteria Cantada and I wasn't disappointed. I have to admit, it took me a while to get into Lila's last release, La Cantina. It wasn't until the DJ's started bumping "Cumbia De Mole" at the clubs that I gave La Cantina the once over again. The concert footage was recorded in Mexico City and in her home state of Oaxaca in 2006. Each song on this DVD was edited by nine different visual artists, bringing the concert footage to life with color and imagery synonymous with Mexican art. The DVD is set up like Loteria, with each song being a different card in a Loteria deck. The footage and sound quality are broadcast quality and even if you feel the visual art maybe be too ambitious, Lila performance is top notch. If you are a fan of Lila's music and classic Mexican art like me, this is well worth getting.

Below is a clip from the DVD. It's Lila's version of the Son Jarocho standard, "La Iguana," courtesy of youtube.com.

 

In the Paul D Zimmerman-written and Martin Scorcese-directed 1983 film "The King of Comedy" Robert De Niro brilliantly plays the character of celebrity autograph hound, aspiring stand-up comic , and extremely wannabe star Rupert Pupkin who so desperately wants to achieve success in showbiz that he goes to such extremes as stalking his idol, a late night talk show host named Jerry Langford (played by Jerry Lewis), and eventually ending up kidnapping him with assistance from an equally deranged celebrity hound, Masha - played to perfection by Sandra Bernhard.

If you have not already seen this movie, I recommend you do. It is available on DVD and should be found at each of the three Amoeba Music locations.  I hadn't seen it in many years and just recently  re-watched it and enjoyed as much as the first time I'd seen it.  Although not in a feel-good movie kind of way. To me watching "The King of Comedy" is like some horrible car accident that you don't want see - but at the same time cannot pull yourself away from. In it De Niro is the car wreck as he so effortlessly plays the desperate and totally delusional Rupert Pupkin character to a tee that he has you cringing in your seat as you witness him go to such lengths to convince the world of what he imagines his life to be - or to soon become. Most engaging are the scenes when the ever obsessive Rupert  indulges in elaborate fantasies in which he imagines himself and the talk show host, just hanging as the best of colleagues and friends.

In all of the tributes written about skilled American television host Tom Snyder,  who passed  this week  at age 71 - a victim of leukemia,  one common accolade was how the TV host with the personal yet tough interview style, really knew how to listen to his subjects - something very rare in most television talk show hosts, especially today.  Additionally, unlike most commercial television interviews which never seem to ow to delve deep, his interviews were conducted with enough time for the able host to really allow him, and us, to get to know his guests.

But of all of the interviews he conducted on his NBC program The Tomorrow Show the clip below (in my opinion) is one of the most compelling to watch.  It is Snyder's 1980 interview with both John Lydon (formerly Johnny Rotten) and his Public Image Limited  (PIL) band-mate Keith Levene. Bear in mind that by this stage that Rotten as main spokesman of the Sex Pistols had earned a justified reputation as one of the most difficult and unpredictable interviewees for any  radio or  television host.  But watch it and witness how brilliantly Snyder handles his tough subject and how Lydon, used to knocking over - especially older generation - interviewers seems to have finally met his match and has to struggle a bit to keep in character and try to maintain an upper hand. 

The end result is a perfect sparring match, with both Snyder and Lydon puffing away on cigarettes, that makes for the most engaging type of TV.  Do me a favor: watch it and in the COMMENTS box below rate (on a scale of 1 to 5)  both Snyder's and Lydon's performances. EG:   Tom = 3,  John = 3.

Before you start second guessing that you clicked on the right blog, I’ll explain myself. While I’m known to ogle a pretty gal now and again, the reason for my purchase is for one woman in particular: Sandra Bernhard. 

I finally got around to watching the most recent 北野 武, Takeshi  Kitano  dvd the other night; 2005's  Takeshis' ...


It  concerns  an established actor, Beat Takeshi, and his crossing paths with a struggling actor, Takeshi Kitano. A significant number of the cast play dual roles which I was embarrassingly  slow to comprehend, given the fairly confusing abstractions within film.  As Beat Takeshi,  Kitano plays himself as boorish  and self-important and satirizes his own artistic conventions to comic effect.  In his film-within-a-film,  he plays a  bandaged yakuza character. Annoyed by cicadas at his Okinawan hideaway, his character "unexpectedly" shoots his girlfriend before turning the gun on himself.

The second half of the film grows even less conventional.  Sometimes it just seemed strange for the sake of being strange.  It moved toward abstraction like David Lynch's last few films have, as if to bait the deluded fans into comparing their own narrative reconstructions.  I started to lose a bit of interest at that point since that kind of "artistic innovation" became pretty cliché before my parents ever met.


One ingredient I quickly realized was possibly detracting from my enjoyment was the absence of longtime musical collaborator Joe Hishaishi (or, Hisaishi Joe, Mamoru Fujisawa's Nipponized version of "Quincy Jones"), whose moody, jazz  & Japanese -influenced scores have always contributed to the tone of Kitano's previous films so complimentarily. I guess Takeshi Kitano and Joe Hisaishi got into it on the set of  the amazing "Dolls" a few years back and lamentably ended their artistic arrangement. Apparently, Kitano saw Hisaishi walking in the rain with Hayao Miyazaki.