i liked it better not stoned

HEAVY METAL was the soundtrack of my teenage life.  Hardcore punk/D-beat madness too and loads of Brit pop/alternative shoegazing blah blah blah.  But it always came back to METAL.  Not the pop metal glam stuff mind you, e.g. Motley Crue, Poison, Cinderella, and all that other crap.  No, I liked METAL straight-up: Sabbath, Maiden, Motorhead, Metallica, Slayer, Venom, Celtic Frost, and all the rest of the knuckle-dragging angry riff masters.  Big, brutal, epic, demonic, stoopid METAL.

I’m not proud.

Anyway, I caught Tenacious D’s infectiously silly and hilarious film Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny again this past weekend and… uh, it seemed funnier to me this time around.  Sure, I liked it enough the first time under the appropriate influences.  But this time it just seemed to click better for me.  It’s ridiculous and adolescent stuff, to be sure.  But so is METAL.  And I’m already on the record about that.

And for the record… Dio is better than Ozzy.

some of my favorite things #3: point blank (1967)

John Boorman’s 1967 neo-noir, Point Blank, comes on like a riot, simmers into a coiled narrative fighting stance, then springs into the weird currents of existentialist no exits in its closing, haunted moments.  It’s some kind of pop brutalism, my favorite Boorman film (Deliverance and the flawed The Emerald Forest aren’t too far behind, though), and a wonderfully intoxicating mix of Hollywood action fused with sidewinding avant-garde film techniques.  But most importantly it stars Lee Marvin.  Oozing drop-dead cool and tick-tock detachment, Marvin’s laconic though physically commanding performance holds steady throughout, smoothly delivering that snap, that “it” quality that only the great movie stars are able to harness.  This is an action film when physicality actually meant something, when meat and bone inhabited physical space, and the violence carried with it weight not measured in pixels and glossy poses.

The first video is the original theatrical trailer.  The second one is a short clip from when Walker (Marvin) hits a San Francisco go-go club hunting for the man who double-crossed him.

some of my favorite things #2: “some velvet morning”

I don’t even know where to begin with this song.  It’s been covered repeatedly over the years–maybe most sensationally and disappointingly by Primal Scream and sex kitten Kate Moss, though the Lydia Lunch/Rowland S. Howard version has its murderous charms–but no one has been able to capture the wild doom and psychedelic potency of the original.  As an aside, director Lynne Ramsay (Ratcatcher) used the song in her second film Morvern Callar to great effect.

Without further ado… here’s Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra singing “Some Velvet Morning”.  One of the strangest, most beautifully bizarre pop songs ever.  Hell, it may be the best pop song ever.