Not only was Woody Guthrie the father of folk music, he also knew how to make a New Year’s resolution. The Brain Pickings site explains:

As a lover and maker of lists, I often agree with Umberto Eco that “the list is the origin of culture.” But, more than that, it can also be a priceless map of personal aspiration, as is the case of the kinds of lists we make this time of year — resolution lists. This particular one, penned by the great Woody Guthrie in 1942 at the tender-but-just-wise-enough age of 30, is an absolute gem of humor, earnestness, and pure humanity.

Here is Woody Guthrie’s Resolution List, 1942:

1. Work more and better
2. Work by a schedule
3. Wash teeth if any
4. Shave
5. Take bath
6. Eat good — fruit — vegetables — milk
7. Drink very scant if any
8. Write a song a day
9. Wear clean clothes — look good
10. Shine shoes
11. Change socks
12. Change bed cloths often
13. Read lots good books
14. Listen to radio a lot
15. Learn people better
16. Keep rancho clean
17. Dont get lonesome
18. Stay glad
19. Keep hoping machine running
20. Dream good
21. Bank all extra money
22. Save dough
23. Have company but dont waste time
24. Send Mary and kids money
25. Play and sing good
26. Dance better
27. Help win war — beat fascism
28. Love mama
29. Love papa
30. Love Pete
31. Love everybody
32. Make up your mind
33. Wake up and fight

Thanks for reading the blog this year! Here is a special New Year’s gift: David Carradine starring as Woody Guthrie in the Academy-Award-winning film Bound for Glory. Happy New Year!

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While Rick Baker is probably best known for the staggering, Academy Award-winning transformation sequence he orchestrated for the classic An American Werewolf in London, he most recently had another howling success when he took home the Oscar for his make-up in the remake of The Wolfman. He’s won Hollywood’s highest award for Best Makeup seven times for films as diverse as Ed Wood and The Grinch. 

In this episode of Fangoria’s Blood and Guts with Scott Ian, movie make-up master Rick Baker guides a private tour of his display room at Cinovation Studios — presenting a Who’s Who of the monsters, maniacs, animals and aliens he’s created in a decades-long career. Baker also talks about his movie monster heroes and even offers a peek at a rogues gallery of original paintings he’s created to honor the chilling genius of spookmeisters like Lon Chaney, Lon Chaney Jr., Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi.

Here’s “Rick Baker: Monster Maker”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25kqSQ3tt1Y&list=PLdho19ONpbQe7Rq57FwnG7r_7OVXiFIAU&index=1

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British filmmaker Peter Watkins is a docudrama pioneer who has combined documentary and dramatic cinematic techniques to deconstruct historic events and cultural trends. A pacifist and a radical, Watkins’ best work examines media in general and film in particular to ask questions about the relationships between media and audiences.

A powerful and provocative filmmaker, Watkins’ films have regularly gathered both opponents and admirers. The War Game imagined a nuclear war in Britain. It was banned by the BBC but eventually won an Academy Award in 1966. Punishment Park explored a violent political conflict in the U.S. just as the shootings at Kent State were screaming from the headlines.

Even John Lennon name-checked Watkins as an influence:

Citing their 1969 Bed-in efforts and Peace Concert, an interviewer asked John Lennon and Yoko Ono, “Is there any one particular incident that got you started in this peace campaign?”. John answered, “…the thing that really struck it off was a letter we got from a guy called Peter Watkins who made a film called The War Game. It was a very long letter stating just what’s happening – how the media is really controlled, how it’s all run, and everything else that people really know deep down. He said ‘People in your position have a responsibility to use the media for world peace’. And we sat on the letter for about three weeks thinking ‘Well, we’re doing our best. All you need is love, man.’ That letter just sort of sparked it all off. It was like getting your induction papers for peace!” (p.144, The Beatles – A Celebration by Geoffrey Giuliano)

The Universal Clock: The Resistance of Peter Watkins provides a great primer on the man, his movies and the making of La Commmune in 2000.

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So odd to look at the Wiki entry about actress Karen Black and find it reading in the past tense. Although Black isn’t necessarily a household name today, among lovers of both high and low cinema, and bohemian types with a high pop culture IQ, Black was iconic.

A native Chicagoan, Black was a bright kid who started attending Northwestern University at the age of 15. After two years she moved to New York to study acting with the great Lee Strasberg, going on to appear in a number of Broadway productions.

From the theater, Black broke into television, but she’s remembered for her turns in counter-culture cinema classics like Easy Rider, Nashville and Five Easy Pieces. In that film she played the sweet, sad, scattered, pregnant waitress Rayette. The role found Black nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She won the Golden Globe in the same category.

In addition to all of her art-house credits, Black played multiple roles in the horror classic Trilogy of Terror: A made-for-TV-movie comprised of three vignettes written by suspense author Richard Matheson. I saw Trilogy when I was a little boy, watching an afternoon horror show in our old living room in Detroit. In the third chapter, “Amelia”, Black receives a Zuni fetish doll that comes to life and tries to kill her. I was terrified by that mean little doll. I also fell in love with Karen Black.

Karen Black died yesterday after struggling with cancer.

Here is an epic montage of Karen Black’s crazy range of roles

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Kevin Schreck is a first-time director whose Persistence of Vision tells a tale of artistic obsession, tracing the career of master animator Richard Williams. Williams is best known for 1988′s Who Framed Roger Rabbit which seamlessly mixed live action and animation, putting the director on the map as one of the master storytellers in the medium.

The success of that film lead to a breakthrough for Williams’ pet project – The Thief and the Cobbler. Conceived in 1964, the movie began as an animated version of the satirical Persian folktales that feature the character Nasrudin – a kind of Sufi fool whose failures teach moral and social lessons. Several versions – and failed funding schemes – later, Williams won two Oscars for Roger Rabbit and made a deal with Warner Brothers to fully finance and market his self-described “masterpiece.”

Schreck’s handling of the subject matter here is respectful without being reverent. The nearly-three-decades-long tale of Williams’ film is convoluted to say the least and Schreck has trouble with pacing in the beginning – the director’s handling of failures of the first version of Thief nearly brings Persistence to a standstill, but once Williams’ project snaps into focus, so does Schreck’s.

Williams’ gorgeous, hand-drawn animations are all beautiful and the footage from Thief is outrageously ambitious. That said, it’s a shame that a movie about beautiful pictures doesn’t labor over its own visuals more. Much of the found footage here looks like lo-fi YouTube downloads and some of Schreck’s own footage is pixelated and washed-out on the big screen. I haven’t found similar criticisms online and I suspect many critics have screened Persistence online or at least on small screens. It’s hard to blame projection problems as certain scenes were jarringly crisp and clear. I’m all for low-quality images in a context where they make sense aesthetically, but in a film about an artistic obsessive who handcrafts perfect pictures, they don’t.

Williams never does get his picture made. It’s eventually taken out of his hands, chopped to pieces and released in various versions under various titles including Arabian Knight and The Princess and the Cobbler. Schreck’s telling of the Thief story shows that the director knows a good subject when he sees one, and his poised, thoughtful Q & A session following the film’s first screening at the Nashville Film Festival found him to be a thoughtful, imaginative artist who already has a good handle on the kind of stories he wants to tell. The end credits of Persistence assure us that Williams is currently working on a new animation project that is “unlike anything anyone has done.” I’ll be looking forward to Schreck’s next film as well.

Here is the cult-tastic “Workprint” version of The Thief and the Cobbler which fills in the blanks in the animation with storyboard images. This is as close to Williams’ original vision as we are ever likely to get.

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George Pal’s Tulips Shall Grow was released in 1942. Nominated for the Academy Award for Best Short Subject, Cartoons this stop-action masterpiece is about the enduring love between a Dutch boy and girl who face the invasion of their idyllic homeland by The Screwballs: A race of mechanical men who threaten to destroy everything in their path. This flick is a transparent metaphor about the Nazi occupation of Holland and a call to the Dutch to fight on to see a day when their beloved tulips would bloom once again.

The gardeners at the Cheekwood Botanical Garden & Museum of Art were digging up thousands of tulips today. They planted 55,000 of them this year so the clean up is also a massive undertaking.

Never that appreciative of flowers, I was schooled on the beauty of tulips by a friend years ago and have never forgotten the lesson. For me – besides their obvious charms – it’s the transient nature of the flowers that really gives them their intense mystique, and seeing piles and piles of ragged, colorful blossoms being shoveled into black garbage bags today reminded me of this film.

As a prelude to the film, Wiki offers this history lesson on The Battle of the Netherlands and the occupation of Holland.

The battle lasted from 10 May 1940 until the main Dutch forces surrendered on the 14th. Dutch troops in the province of Zealand continued to resist the Wehrmacht until 17 May when Germany completed its occupation of the whole nation.

The battle ended soon after the devastating bombing of Rotterdam by the German Luftwaffe and the subsequent threat by the Germans to bomb other large Dutch cities if Dutch forces refused to surrender. The Dutch General Staff knew it could not stop the bombers and surrendered in order to prevent other cities from suffering the same fate. The Netherlands remained under German occupation until 1945, when the last Dutch territory was liberated.

Also, my companera swears the movie is a perfect match with Dark Side of the Moon.

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