On Friday, the Abu Dhabi Film Festival announced the winners of its 2010 Black Pearl Awards. Among the winners: Aleksei Fedorchenko's Silent Souls for Best Narrative Film, Andrew Garfield (Never Let Me Go) for Best Actor, and Patricio Guzmán's Nostalgia for the Light for Best Documentary.
The Guardian reports that "BP and several other big European companies are funding the midterm election campaigns of Tea Party favourites who deny the existence of global warming or oppose Barack Obama's energy agenda, the Guardian has learned."
Alexander Anderson—creator of the "characters Rocky the flying squirrel, Bullwinkle Moose and Dudley Do-Right, and the vaudeville-style format for the 1959 animated program Rocky and His Friends and its 1961 spin-off The Bullwinkle Show, known collectively as The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show—died on Friday at age 90.
Links for the Day: A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to ed@slantmagazine.com and to converse in the comments section.
Madonna talks to Gus Van Sant about Sean Penn, Wong Kar-Wai, Hagen Bogdanski, making movies, making music without a record label, and more in the latest issue of Interview Magazine.
Spielberg, Scorsese, Soderbergh, De Niro, and others have joined in the condemnation of Iran's detention of acclaimed filmmaker Jafar Panahi. Check out the official press release and petition.
Steven Boone points us toward some more chatter about M.I.A.'s controversial new music video.
Links for the Day: A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to keithuhlich@gmail.com and to converse in the comments section.
Stripped of its YouTube permissions at least twice in its immediate afterbirth, but proliferating now like the illicit piece of footage it was always meant to be, Romain Gavras's apocalyptically brutal music video for M.I.A.'s "Born Free" has disturbed a lot of people, perhaps most notably among them, the ginger set. (Full disclosure: I speak on their behalf. Though age has darkened what locks stand atop my scalp into burnt umber, rest assured that in my heyday, my head could have been illuminated and used to ward off ships at sea.)
On first listen, "Born Free" is a propulsive piece of punk-pop, a new primal scream from one of pop music's most adept voices of dissent. With an accelerating snare roll-off, it electrifies a sample of Suicide's "Ghost Rider" with gutbucket rock drums that sound as if a Frankie Avalon/Annette Funicello surfer epic just ran up against a tsunami. Over it, bathed in viscous distortion, M.I.A. ruminates, "I was close to the amps staying under cover/With my nose to the ground, I found the sound." No one listening will be the slightest bit surprised that introspection fuels something so unyieldingly hard, so BPM-addicted. Continue Reading »
Jonathan Keefe pointed out that the much-talked-about music video for M.I.A.'s new song "Born Free" takes "Kick a Ginger Day" to a whole new level (be warned that the following clip is not safe for work, children, and some adults):
Finally, what would a post about violence be without a tribute to the Best Slap Ever?
Links for the Day: A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to keithuhlich@gmail.com and to converse in the comments section.
Listen, M.I.A. has never been anything but a one-woman riot, but on her recently leaked new track "Born Free," she sounds more like one than usual. It's as though she stripped away every bit of the breezy swagger that made "Paper Planes" her crossover calling card, and instead allowed the gun-toting rebel protagonist of that song to stand fiercely front and center, daring Top 40 radio to co-opt her again. Because when M.I.A breaks through the borders (of your country, your scene), she's not coming to incite some cosmopolitan liberal love-down—she just wants to get up in your face. Continue Reading »
Due to semi-popular demand, we've decided to post #101—250 of both our Best of the Aughts: Albums and Best of the Aughts: Singles lists. Part of the reason we originally decided to publish lists of 100 is because, aside from the obvious quantity of writing required, the lower down on the list you got, the less consensus there was on a particular title; in fact, outside the Top 150 singles, there were only a handful of songs that were voted for by more than one contributor. That, of course, made for a bunch of unique and/or unheralded selections mixed in with more popularly cited titles Continue Reading »
RECORD OF THE YEAR
"Chasing Pavements," Adele
"Viva la Vida," Coldplay
"Bleeding Love," Leona Lewis
"Paper Planes," M.I.A.
"Please Read the Letter," Robert Plant & Alison Krauss (Will Win)
Eric Henderson: So both the Grammys and the Oscars are hip to M.I.A. now? No matter. Slumdog Millionaire may be a frontrunner for Best Picture, but I bet "Paper Planes" comes in fifth here. Sal Cinquemani: Despite the fact that I can't imagine the academy awarding a song with gunshots in it, I see this as a three-way race between M.I.A., Coldplay, and Plant & Krauss, who could feasibly sweep in every category they're nominated. Jonathan Keefe: I'd say that all of the people who voted for the Ray Charles & Norah Jones duet a couple of years ago would automatically vote for Plant & Krauss this year, except that Adele's single keeps "Please Read the Letter" from being the most boring nominee. Usually the vote-split favors something particularly tepid, but the reverse situation could actually keep M.I.A. in the running here. But it's always a bad idea to bet against Krauss at the Grammys, and I think she and Plant will pull off the sweep.
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