Demons may be hiding in our shadows

I was playing around with the computer the other night, and decided to mash up Black Mountain's Queens Will Play with some clips from Panic Room. I like the way the song has this sense of dread or foreboding. I also like how it sorta explodes at the end, and Amber Webber's voice is flat out amazing.

Panic Room, I think, doesn't really get the recognition it deserves. I mean, I don't think it's a life-changing movie. Its strength lies in the way it is told and the way it unfolds. With the exception of Raoul, I think all of the characters are very real and most people could relate to them in one way or another. I dunno, maybe Raoul was misunderstood. Junior and Burnham didn't really respect him, so maybe he felt like he had to take things up a couple notches in order to show that he was a real player in the game.

In any case, give the movie a chance if you haven't seen it already. You might be pleasantly surprised.

30 Days of Night

I couldn't sleep last night, so I spent my insomniac hours playing around with this. Laugh if you must, but I do like 30 Days of Night. I like the colors, dark with cold shades of grey, almost sorta metallic. Portishead's Machine Gun has the same feel, I think. It's cold, metallic and industrial. It sounds like Beth Gibbons is singing in a factory. To me, the song fits the film perfectly.

Also, please note that this might be a little graphic for some peeps.

Day by day

Hey, I was playing around with another video. These clips are from Hero, directed by Zhang Yimou. If you haven't seen it, I really like the story and the movie looks really, really gorgeous. The fight scenes are awesome. I was gonna make a little compilation of Nameless (Jet Li) knocking off Sky (Donnie Yen), Broken Sword (Tony Leung) and Flying Snow (Maggie Cheung), who are the top three assassins in the country. Somehow, I ended up focusing on the love triangle between Broken Sword, Flying Snow and Moon (Zhang Ziyi) and the subsequent battle between Flying Snow and Moon. I with I could have fit more into it, that scene is so cool. Anyways, this is just one very small part of the film. Go check it out, drop it in your Netflix queue or whatever. I promise it'll be worth your time. Oh yeah, the song is Kaela Kimura's Tree Climbers, from her very cool album, Scratch.

William Blake

I stitched together some clips from Jim Jarmush's Dead Man. This is mostly from the first half hour, or so, of the movie which sets up the rest of the film. The music is Brian Eno's The Big Ship, from the album, Another Green World. I like the tension and the prickly, static-y quality in the song. The way it slowly rises sorta mirrors that uneasy feeling in the movie, at least to me. Also, Dead Man has one of my favorite quotes; "That weapon will replace your tongue. You will learn to speak through it. And your poetry will now be written with blood."

Fucking brilliant.

Chihiro & Haku

Studio Ghibli fans might recognize the clips in this vid. I opted for lighter subject matter in this one. Quick words about the music; I recently picked up Perfume's Game album (the girls pictured above are Perfume), and Puppy Love is my favorite song on there. Produced by Nakata Yasutaka, of (the awesome group) Capsule, Perfume's music has many happys. Give it a whirl.

Chihiro & Haku (featuring Puppy Love by Perfume)

Zodiac X Radiohead

So I cut up another movie and slapped a song over it. I was watching Zodiac recently and Radiohead's Climbing Up The Walls popped into my head, and I felt like it would fit. Both the song and the movie have this slow-burn intensity, a sense of dread and impending doom. This song totally should have been used in the movie somehow. I know it's a period piece, but maybe the song could have been played over the end credits or something. But then again, that's why David Fincher is a famous film director and I am not. S'all good. Check out the Climbing Up The Walls lyrics (which I grabbed from the excellent Radiohead fansite, followmearound.com) and video below.

I am the key to the lock in your house
That keeps your toys in the basement
And if you get too far inside
You'll only see my reflection

It's always best when the light is off
I am the pick in the ice
Do not cry out or hit the alarm
You know we're friends till we die

And either way you turn
I'll be there
Open up your skull
I'll be there
Climbing up the walls

It's always best when the light is off
It's always better on the outside
Fifteen blows to the back of your head
Fifteen blows to your mind

So lock the kids up safe tonight
Put the eyes in the cupboard
I've got the smell of a local man
Who's got the loneliest feeling

That either way he turns
I'll be there
Open up your skull
I'll be there

Climbing up the walls
Climbing up the walls
Climbing up the walls

We Came Along This Road

So this is another vid I made. Again, the scenes are from Seven. This time, the music is We Came Along This Road, by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds. I love Seven, it's one of my favorite films, but I promise I'll use a different one next time.

Is it one too many times?

Recently, I've been playing around with this movie making software that came with this laptop and realized I could make my own music videos, or fan videos; whatever you like to call them.

The Lali Puna track, Past Machine, is one of my favorites on their I Thought I Was Over That album. The way it builds, I always thought it would make a cool musical companion to a movie chase scene, even though most chase scenes are a dime a dozen. The song begins, I don't know, blandly? Generically? Something like that. After a few bars, it starts to get frantic and there's an underlying sense of dread. The notes and textures create those feelings. The drums, especially the hi-hat and cymbal. The electronic flourishes, ticks and glitches. The way she sings, kinda robotic and emotionless but still melodic. It completely lends itself to cinema.

I'll go on record by saying Seven (or Se7en) is one of my all-time favorite movies. Utter perfection, in every way, including the chase scene. By the way, I'm going to talk about this assuming peeps have seen it, so beware of spoilers if you haven't and are planning to see it. The way it starts is innocent enough. Following a paper-thin lead, our two heroes, Mills and Somerset, knocking on John Doe's apartment door. The chase begins when John Doe walks up while carrying a bag of groceries and fires shots at Somerset and Mills, quickly turning the table on them. The whole thing ranges through the apartment building, veers through another resident's apartment, on a rooftop between buildings, back into the building, down a fire escape onto a busy street and comes to a climax in a back alley across the street.

There is a sequence within the whole chase that is just amazing to me. It starts when Mills climbs onto the fire escape ladder and slips. For a moment he is hanging by his fingertips, the camera looking down, the rain pouring down. Just that split second alone, is totally worth it, but there's more. The camera tracks John Doe, who is frantically trying to get across the street without the aid of a crosswalk. It's out of focus and bouncing around. Everything is dark and grey. It completely appeals to me and I love it.

The scene slows for a bit as both John Doe and Mills get across the street and into an alley. Mills, of course, is looking for Doe but Doe appears to be gone. The next bit is sort of vital to the movie. Doe actually stuck around in the alley, ambushes Mills and has a chance to kill him. He clocks Mills with a tire iron and holds a gun to Mills' head...and lets him live. And the film goes on.

For what I was doing, I wanted it to be ambiguous. Where you didn't know (if you had not seen the movie) whether Mills was gonna live or not. So I just had it fade at the scene where Mills is lying in the alley next to a garbage truck in the rain, and Doe is holding the gun to his head. You can see Mills mouth the word, "No", and then that's it. That's the kind of stuff I love, something that leaves you wondering what happened. Then, you fill in the blanks with your imagination.

Now, I'm not trying to say I did all this work and blah blah blah. I mean, really, all I did was cut up a few scenes from a movie and lay a song over it. Also, the edits are kinda lame. Some of them kinda jump a little, not smooth at all. So I'm not trying to take any kind of artistic credit at all. That all goes to director David Fincher and the band Lali Puna. This isn't me being a pretentious jackass (even if I usually am); I'm just a guy who loves music and movies, playing around with a laptop. That said, here it is. And there will be more videos in the future. This is kinda fun, even if I'm not good at it.

DJ Sara and DJ Ryusei

How cool is this? Almost makes me want to have kids. Almost.