Bill Hicks is probably the greatest comedian of Generation X. The only competition for that title might be Chris Rock, and both of them are automatic candidates for any top ten list of all-time-best stand-ups. Yesterday we marked the 23rd anniversary of Hicks’ death from pancreatic cancer on February 26, 1994. Of course, Hicks was funny, but, more importantly, he wasn’t afraid to be not funny when making a point about hypocritical politics, the evils of war and racism, the possibilities of higher consciousness. That said, Hicks always had another zinger at hand and his ability to snap from raunchy to real serious and back again was nearly without match — only Carlin might’ve taken the Texan at that kind of quick-draw contest.

Celebrating the man and his amazing body of work, here’s an epic 200 video playlist featuring Hicks’ greatest stand-up specials along with interviews, albums, and documentaries…

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Flipping some stories into {R}emnants yesterday, I came across some breaking superhero cinema news that immediately found me re-visiting a blog post from 2013. The story was about Roger Corman’s 1990′s Fantastic Four movie. Here’s Comic Book Resources with the breaking news followed by some of my original commentary…

Fans will finally get learn exactly what went on behind the scenes during filming of 1994′s failed “Fantastic Four” adaptation. “Doomed,” the documentary telling the story of the film, will arrive on video-on-demand on Oct. 11 and DVD on Dec. 20.

The documentary tells the story of the 1994 “Fantastic Four” adaptation, directed by Oley Sassone (whose most notable other credit is directing five episodes of “Xena: Warrior Princess”) and produced by Roger Corman (“Little Shop of Horrors”) and Bernd Eichinger (2005′s “Fantastic Four”). The film was never officially released, leaving its interesting history long surrounded in mystery.

And from the original post…

The Fantastic Four is an unreleased independent superhero film completed in 1994. Executive produced by low-budget specialist Roger Corman and Bernd Eichinger (who went on to produce a big-budget Fantastic Four film in 2005), the film was based on Marvel Comics’ long-running comic book and featured the origin of the Fantastic Four and that superhero team’s first battle with the evil Doctor Doom, combining the superteam’s origin from The Fantastic Four #1 and Doom’s origin from Fantastic Four Annual #2 with original elements.

…Speculation arose that the film had never been intended for release, but had gone into production solely as a way for Eichinger to retain rights to the characters; Stan Lee said in 2005 that this was indeed the case, insisting, “The movie was never supposed to be shown to anybody,” and adding that the cast and crew had been left unaware.

This flick is particularly interesting given the dismal ‘Four films that have actually been showcased in feature releases. Here’s what Film Threat‘s Clint Morris had to say about this bare-bones production…

“Yes it’s terribly low-budget and yes it’s derisorily campy and feebly performed, but at the same time there’s also something inquiringly irresistible about this B comic tale that makes you wonder why it didn’t get a release somewhere along the line. Even if it does resemble Toxic Avenger [more so] than say, Spider-Man … The script isn’t actually all that bad and some of the actors—notably Michael Bailey Smith—are actually quite good here, and with an extra polish I think they might have been able to release this thing.”

However, it was never to be. Who cares, it’s still a delight. Here’s The Fantastic Four (1994)…

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Been having some trouble sleeping lately. Actually, I’ve been falling right to sleep, but I keep waking up in the middle of the night for an hour or so with some minor nightmare that seems connected to the anxiousness I feel upon fully waking. Of course, the only thing to do is to make myself comfortable, relax and be confident that sleep will come.

That would be the smartest option, and it’s ultimately what happens once my eyes get tired again and I’m sure that I can get my ticket to dreamland punched. However, before that, I’ve been spending my early morning hours adding stories to the Flipboard magazine I’ve been curating with Joseph Matheny and David Metcalfe.

It’s a blast working with such an interesting team as everybody is always turning up some great little nugget of avant garde, countercultural import, and today was no exception. Joseph Matheny posted a couple of stories about French philosopher, writer, filmmaker, activist and revolutionary, Guy Debord who shot himself in the heart 20 years ago in 1994. Here’s a remembrance from Verso…

He is now something of a canonical figure in literature, cinema and the art world. It has become commonplace to refer to the media sphere as a spectacle, and the cut and mix practices of today’s aesthetics appeals to the apparently similar Situationist practice of détournement for legitimation. He has been, as he might say, recuperated back in to spectacular commodity production. Such is the fate of all avant-gardes…

Debord’s work is quite deservedly canonized. His writing has an austerity and beauty all its own. His short autobiographical text Panegyric is a masterpiece. His last work on film, In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimur Igni is a highpoint in avant-garde cinema. The movement he co-founded, the Situationist International, endured for some fifteen years and involved some remarkable collaborators, such as Michèle Bernstein, Asger Jorn, Constant and Raoul Vanegeim, whose work is also celebrated and studied…

It was apparent to Debord that the capitalism of postwar France was a new and strange kind of commodity economy, one in which even the parties and trade unions of the working class had become mere images of themselves. If there was a challenge to the spectacle it might come from boredom with the paltry pleasures of commodified life. And come it did, most famously as ‘May 1968’. Usually thought of as a student revolt, it was also one of the biggest general strikes in history.

The revolution against the spectacle did not come to pass. By 1972 Debord had wound up the Situationist International and gone into a kind of internal exile. His later work has a tone of revolutionary nostalgia, intended not to mythologize past struggles but more to give courage to those to come to look to their own situation and find what might be possible.

Debord’s first film was an experimental adaptation of Society of the Spectacle made from found footage. Here’s the movie…

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Taking a break from our spooky October posts here at the end of the month — we’ll let today’s merrymaking bring its own hard-earned scares — here’s a great little show from Canadian television that I stumbled upon the other day. Prisoners of Gravity was an interview show disguised as a pirate broadcast, covering all sorts of books, films and art through a countercultural lens to dazzling effect. The series aired 139 episodes over 5 seasons from 1989 to 1994. Here’s the word from the Wiki…

As established through a comic-strip montage opening sequence drawn by Ty Templeton, the premise held that a fan of speculative fiction becomes disturbed by news broadcasts describing the alarming state of the world and decides he must escape. He broadcasts his show each week from an orbiting space station. The show’s presentation was fully wrapped in its quirky premise, featuring on-screen graphics and background sounds to simulate a space station atmosphere, “using active, innovative cinematography to ease the visual boredom that often accompanies interviews with talking head(s).”

The week’s topic was introduced with a few opening thoughts before launching into various interview clips. In each episode, Rick would interview a number of authors and artists, along with filmmakers, animators, and the occasional futurist. Topics that were discussed ran the gamut: censorship, superheroes, humour, religion, fairy tales, Mars, cyberpunk, war, overpopulation, sex… Episodes were 30 minutes in length (having no commercial breaks on public television) and typically showcased six to fourteen interviewed creators alongside bridging commentary from Rick. Roughly six-hundred interviews were conducted and aired by the time the show’s run came to an end.

Prisoners has its own YouTube channel and this playlist is a bit chaotic so you’ll need to bounce around a bit to follow episode to episode. I’ve set the video in this post to start with the first segment of an episode that deals with racism because it dovetails so nicely with the recent news about Marvel’s upcoming Black Panther film. Here’s a bit about that from The Guardian…

The newly announced films are two-part Avengers sequel Infinity War and a Captain America movie called Civil War, alongside new film outings for Doctor Strange and – most interestingly – Black Panther.

The latter will be Marvel’s first lead black superhero, and it’s a breakthrough moment. The positioning of this ethnic minority as heroic – however tortured that heroism may likely be – is a valuable statement in this most high profile of US pop cultural products, in a year when the dominant media image of black men has been as subordinated to (often white) police.

My favorite thrill with this show comes at the beginning of every episode when it seems like a program called Second Nature goes to static and is “interrupted” by the program — so retro-meta I wanna roll around in back issues of Mondo 2000. Enjoy Prisoners of Gravity…

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Continuing to remember the 20th anniversary of the death of Charles Bukowski in 1994, here is a video of the poet’s last reading in 1980. While he continued to write for the last 14 years of his life, he never read his work in public again. Here’s the story behind this document from the Wiki…

In March 1980, Takoma Records was about to re-release an audio recording on vinyl of a Charles Bukowski live poetry reading given in San Francisco years earlier. As part of the promotion of the album release, Bukowski agreed to give a new live reading, even though he hated doing them. Jon Monday, then General Manager of Takoma Records, video taped the event.[1]
But by later that year Bukowski’s book royalties and movie advances provided him enough of a living that he no longer had to do readings.

The Redondo Beach reading turned out to be the very last poetry reading Bukowski ever gave. The video recording of that night stayed in an archive until 2008 when mondayMEDIA entered into an agreement with Bukowski’s widow Linda to release it on DVD.

Bukowski’s readings were known for their riotous back and forth with the audience and this recording shows this in full color. Each poem is set between a tense dialog – with Bukowski giving and taking insults and threats with members of the audience. It ends with the prophetic words “This reading is over”.

Here’s the flick…

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Now that Guardians of the Galaxy has secured the unbridled success of superhero films a guaranteed slot on American movie screens for the foreseeable future, I’ve been looking back to see how other comic book flicks have fared without the support of a trendy tidal wave at their backs.

My favorite find is this 1994 Roger Corman production of Marvel Comics’ classic super-team, The Fantastic Four. Here’s the Wiki…

The Fantastic Four is an unreleased independent superhero film completed in 1994. Executive produced by low-budget specialist Roger Corman and Bernd Eichinger (who went on to produce a big-budget Fantastic Four film in 2005), the film was based on Marvel Comics’ long-running comic book and featured the origin of the Fantastic Four and that superhero team’s first battle with the evil Doctor Doom, combining the superteam’s origin from The Fantastic Four #1 and Doom’s origin from Fantastic Four Annual #2 with original elements.

…Speculation arose that the film had never been intended for release, but had gone into production solely as a way for Eichinger to retain rights to the characters; Stan Lee said in 2005 that this was indeed the case, insisting, “The movie was never supposed to be shown to anybody,” and adding that the cast and crew had been left unaware.

This flick is particularly interesting given the dismal ‘Four films that have actually been showcased in feature releases. Here’s what Film Threat‘s Clint Morris had to say about this bare-bones production…

“Yes it’s terribly low-budget and yes it’s derisorily campy and feebly performed, but at the same time there’s also something inquiringly irresistible about this B comic tale that makes you wonder why it didn’t get a release somewhere along the line. Even if it does resemble Toxic Avenger [more so] than say, Spider-Man … The script isn’t actually all that bad and some of the actors—notably Michael Bailey Smith—are actually quite good here, and with an extra polish I think they might have been able to release this thing.”

However, it was never to be. Who cares, it’s still a delight. Here’s The Fantastic Four (1994)…

Stay Awake!

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Cinema posts.