TOP 100 MOVIE SITES
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| MASH creator Larry Gelbart dies at 81 Larry Gelbart, the writer who developed the landmark TV series MASH, died Friday at age 81. cbc.ca |
'Couples Retreat' takes in $35.3 million to top box office Couples Retreat became a destination this weekend for date-night moviegoers, who propelled the comedy to the top on a rare weekend ... rssfeeds.usatoday.com |
Taking Woodstock and cinema's love of trippy scenes | Anne Billson There are plenty of trippy movie scenes – but watching them sober makes you feel like the designated driver in a roomful of drunksThirty-six years ago, I dropped a tab of LSD. It was OK, but I never felt the urge to do it again, and never thought much about it – until the other day, when I was watching Taking Woodstock. To the sound of Love's The Red Telephone, Ang Lee serves up an acid trip so uncannily spot-on, I swear it gave me my first ever flashback.It's not as though there's ever been a shortage of trippy scenes in films. It's just they always seemed to chime more with the experiences of the film-makers than with my own. Indeed, watching them sober, you often feel like the designated driver in a roomful of babbling drunks. In the aptly-named The Trip, Peter Fonda has a psychedelic experience in which, among other things, he shows his bottom, listens to a washing machine and says, "I can see right into my brain!" In Easy Rider, he and Dennis Hopper stumble around a cemetery with a couple of hippy chicks (Karen Black and Toni Basil), accompanied by the sort of lens flare and squiffy camerawork that have defined druggy sequences ever since.Nowadays lazy film-makers are forever recycling signifiers from an over-familiar arsenal of sitar music, multiple image filters and faces distorted by CGI, without ever coming close to creating anything other than a baggieful of cliches. And surely it's time for a moratorium on Jefferson Airplane's White Rabbit, trotted out as the definitive druggy anthem in everything from Platoon to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to The Simpsons?In Terry Gilliam's film of Hunter S Thompson's book, I found myself empathising less with Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro than with the straight waitresses and receptionists being terrorised by their wild behaviour. Raoul and Dr Gonzo are surely only a small step away from Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis in Natural Born Killers (one of those films that looks from the start as though the entire cast and crew were up to their eyeballs on tequila and peyote). When Harrelson and Lewis get bitten by rattlesnakes and start to hallucinate, you say, "Yes, but how can you tell?"In the 1970s, my friends and I used to laugh ourselves silly at the crazed marijuana smokers in Reefer Madness, a favourite on the midnight movie circuit. "Hahaha, we're not at all like that when we smoke," we would giggle hysterically as we passed the joint. Nowadays, I prefer the more benign strain of stoner comedy, where at least it's the stoners themselves rather than innocent bystanders who get terrorised, like Harold and Kumar, whose quest for a burger expands into epic proportions that will be familiar to anyone who ever set out to accomplish a simple task while out of their skulls.I'm told that first generation hippies dug the psychedelic effects in 2001: a Space Odyssey or Performance, even when they weren't stoned or on acid, and I concede that even non-druggy films like Ghost in the Shell 2 and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs have made me go, "Wow, maaan". So maybe film has an important role to play in the so-called War on Drugs. Taking Woodstock's acid flashback made me want to see how Ang Lee would capture other types of drug experience on film, preferably those triggered by the more dangerous substances on professor David Nutt's list of dangerous drugs, such as heroin or ketamine. No one would ever need to snort, smoke or shoot up again; they would get their virtual high by watching a DVD. It would be movie methadone.Of course, there's a risk that addictive personalities could get hooked on the film and end up watching it so many times they'd start trying to insert the DVD into their stomach, like James Woods and his abdominal video cassette slot in Videodrome. Come to think of it, what with The Naked Lunch, eXistenZ and Spider, David Cronenberg's entire filmography is pretty much a cinematic version of Nutt's list of dangerous drugs. The bad trip version.Anne Billsonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Sophisticated style rules AFIs TONI Collette was among local film stars stepping out in style for the 2009 AFI Awards. news.com.au |
DVD in awards season could be the trigger for 'The Hurt Locker' The Hurt Locker is getting ready to redeploy. The film opened in June to critical acclaim but earned only $12.7 million at the ... rssfeeds.usatoday.com |