We’ve shown you the heady David Byrne lecturing sometimes on how architecture helped music evolve, and sometimes on the connections between music and cognition. We’ve also given you the breezier David Byrne extolling the virtues of urban bicycling. Now comes the lighthearted David Byrne interviewing himself in a promotional video for the Talking Heads 1984 concert movie, Stop Making Sense. (Watch a classic clip below.) In a matter of minutes, Byrne, playing the role of interviewer and interviewee, changes character, moving from white woman to African American male, from used car salesman to old geyser, all while explaining the genesis and philosophy of the film. And somehow it all makes sense.…
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Drink our coffee. Or else. That’s the message of these curiously sadistic TV commercials produced by Jim Henson between 1957 and 1961.
Henson made 179 ten-second spots for Wilkins Coffee, a regional company with distribution in the Baltimore-Washington D.C. market, according to the Muppets Wiki: “The local stations only had ten seconds for station identification, so the Muppet commercials had to be lightning-fast–essentially, eight seconds for the commercial pitch and a two-second shot of the product.”
Within those eight seconds, a coffee enthusiast named Wilkins (who bears a resemblance to Kermit the frog) manages to shoot, stab, bludgeon or otherwise do grave bodily harm to a coffee holdout named Wontkins. Henson provided the voices of both characters.
Up until that time, TV advertisers typically made a direct sales pitch. “We took a different approach,” said Henson in Christopher Finch’s Of Muppets and Men: The Making of the Muppet Show. “We tried to sell things by making people laugh.”
The campaign for Wilkins Coffee was a hit. “In terms of popularity of commercials in the Washington area,” said Henson in a 1982 interview with Judy Harris, “we were the number one, the most popular commercial.” Henson’s ad agency began marketing the idea to other regional coffee companies around the country. Henson re-shot the same spots with different brand names. “I bought my contract from that agency,” said Henson, “and then I was producing them–the same things around the country. And so we had up to about a dozen or so clients going at the same time. At the point, I was making a lot of money.”
You can watch many of the Wilkins Coffee commercials above. If you’re a glutton for punishment, there are more on YouTube. And a word of advice: If someone ever asks you if you drink Wilkins Coffee, just say yes.
A couple of years ago, Maria Popova highlighted for us a 2009 talk by John Cleese that offered a handbook for creating the right conditions for creativity. Of course, John Cleese knows something about creativity, being one of the leading forces behind Monty Python, the beloved British comedy group.
Now, we have another talk, recorded circa 1991, where Cleese uses scientific research to describe what creativity is … and what creativity isn’t. He starts by telling us, creativity is not a talent. It has nothing to do with IQ. It is a way of doing things, a way of being — which means that creativity can be learned. The rest he explains in 37 thought-filled minutes.
One day in early 1962, Mel Brooks was sitting in a New York City theater watching an avant-garde film by the Scottish-born Canadian animator Norman McLaren when he heard someone in the audience expressing bewilderment. “Three rows behind me,” Brooks told Kenneth Tynan for a 1979 New Yorker profile, “there was an old immigrant man mumbling to himself. He was very unhappy because he was waiting for a story line and he wasn’t getting one.”
Brooks had made a study of old curmudgeons ever since he was a boy growing up in a Jewish neighborhood of Brooklyn. In a 1975 Playboy interview he described his eccentric Uncle Joe, who would say to him when he was five years old, “Don’t invest. Put da money inna bank. Even the land could sink.”
Later, as a young comedian learning his craft on the borscht belt circuit, Brooks paid close attention to the elocution and timing of the old Yiddish comedians. After working as a writer for Sid Caesar’s early television program, Your Show of Shows, Brooks and fellow writer Carl Reiner hit it big as performers in 1961, with their “2000-Year-Old Man” routine. Reiner was the straight man interviewing an old man played by Brooks. In one famous scene Reiner asked, “You knew Jesus?” Brooks replied, “Yeah. He was a thin man, always wore sandals. Came into the store but never bought anything.”
So when he overheard the old kvetch in the movie theater giving a running commentary on his own bewilderment, Brooks recognized the comedic possibilities. He approached director Ernest Pintoff, whose Oscar-nominated 1959 short The Violinist had been narrated by Reiner, about making a movie. Pintoff hired artist Bob Heath to create the animation, and chose Bach to set the highbrow tone. Brooks was 36 years old when he created the voice of the 71-year-old man. As he told Tynan, the commentary was ad-libbed:
I asked my pal Ernie Pintoff to do the visuals for a McLaren-type cartoon. I told him, ‘Don’t let me see the images in advance. Just give me a mike and let them assault me.’ And that’s what he did…I sat in a viewing theatre looking at what Ernie showed me, and I mumbled whatever I felt that old guy would have mumbled, trying to find a plot in this maze of abstractions. We cut it down to three and a half minutes and called it The Critic.
The film was a critical as well as a popular success, winning the Academy Award for best animated short film of 1963. Putting The Critic into perspective, Samuel Raphael Franco of J, the Jewish news weekly, wrote in 2009:
The film is a relic of quintessential borscht belt humor.…It is also a valuable sociologic portrait of the predominant cultural attitudes of Brooklyn’s first generation of Russian-Jewish immigrants. The influence of Brooks’ development as a comic as a tummler for the crowds in the Catskills surfaces right away in the first line, “Vat the hell is dis?”
Fewer than 40 minutes survive of My Best Friend’s Birthday, the first film directed by Quentin Tarantino. But its brief screen time runs dense with references to Elvis Presley, the Partridge Family, A Countess from Hong Kong, Rod Stewart, Deputy Dawg, and That Darn Cat. In between the rapid-fire gab sessions, we also witness a slapstick kung-fu battle and even hear a bit of repurposed early-seventies pop music. Though a fire claimed the second half of what was presumably the picture’s only print, the first half, which you can watch free on YouTube, leaves no doubt as to the identity of its auteur. In some sense, it bears an even deeper imprint of Tarantino’s personality than his subsequent films, since he stars in it as well. To behold the early-twentysomething Tarantino portraying the good-hearted and aggressively enthusiastic but jittery and distractible rockabilly DJ Clarence Poole is to behold the Quentin Tarantino public persona in an embryonic form, a distilled form — or both.
The plot of My Best Friend’s Birthday, such as it remains, finds Clarence looking to give a birthday present to his pal Mickey, who’s been freshly, and harshly, re-rejected by an ex-girlfriend. None of Clarence’s ideas — not the cake, not the call girl — work out quite as intended, though now I suppose we’ll never know how wrong things really went, or if they managed to right themselves in the end. Yet the truncated version of the film feels somehow more fascinating — more satisfying, even — than any completion I can imagine. Both the movie’s hopelessly unresolved story and its dreamy visual quality, courtesy of a beaten-up 16-millimeter print transferred onto what looks like a VHS tape, turn it into the most experimental art Tarantino has ever created. It casts adrift even the director’s hardiest fans in a stark southern California reality: long-running arguments about meaningless culture, ceaseless elevation of the disposable, and a vague, looming, but nevertheless constant sense of threat. And amid all this, it can still serve up a line like, “What made you interested in tackling prostitution as a career goal?”
My Best Friend’s Birthday appears in our collection of Free Movies Online.
And now for something completely delicious: a rare gem from the Monty Python vault called Away From it All, featuring John Cleese as Nigel Farquhar-Bennett, a voice-over artist badly in need of a holiday.
The 13-minute film is a parody of the mind-numbing travelogues they used to show in movie theaters. It was produced in 1979 and screened in British and Australian theaters as a warm-up for Monty Python’s Life of Brian.
The narration was written by Cleese, who Michael Palin once said was born with a silver tongue in his mouth. “John loves words,” writes Palin in The Very Best of Monty Python, “especially ‘nebulous’, ‘trenchant’ and ‘orthodontic’. Though most children’s first word is ‘mama’, John’s was ‘elision’. ‘Mama’ was third, after ‘hydraulics’.” Enjoy.
Terry Gilliam’s funny debut film, Storytime, features three early examples of the Monty Python animator’s twisted take on life. The film is usually dated 1968, but according to some sources it was actually put together several years later. The closing segment, “A Christmas Card,” was created in late 1968 for a special Christmas-day broadcast of the children’s program Do Not Adjust Your Set, but the other two segments– “Don the Cockroach” and “The Albert Einstein Story”–were broadcast on the 1971–1972 British and American program The Marty Feldman Comedy Machine, which featured Gilliam’s Pythonesque animation sequences at the beginning and end of each show. Whatever the date of production, Storytime (now added to our collection of 675 Free Movies Online in the Animation Section) is an engaging stream-of-consciousness journey through Gilliam’s delightfully absurd imagination. If you’re a Terry Gilliam fan, don’t miss these other related items:
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Bill Murray, surely both America’s most and least approachable movie star, seems for almost everything yet unavailable for almost anything. Rarely granting interviews, limiting himself (mostly) to roles he actually cares about, and famously working without an agent, he tends to pop up in places you wouldn’t expect him to. Well, aside from Wes Anderson films, where he’s remained a consistent presence since 1998’s Rushmore — but remember how startling it felt to see the star of Groundhog Day turn up in such a relatively small-scale, low-concept, genreless production in the first place? More recently, his extended cameo in Ruben Fleischer’s Zombieland has become, in the fullness of time, that picture’s very raison d’être. Not long before that, he appeared in a selection at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival: it wasn’t the latest feature from a Wes Anderson or a Sofia Coppola or a Jim Jarmusch, and in fact not a feature at all, but Peter Karinen and Brian Sacca’s short FCU: Fact Checkers Unit.
Karinen and Sacca star as two lowly fact-checkers at Dictum, a publication solidly in the tradition the United Kingdom calls “lads’ mags.” (“SEX WORK OUTS,” insists one cover blurb.) Faced with a draft of an article on celebrity sleeping tips that recommends drinking a glass of warm milk before bed, “like Bill Murray,” the fellows kneel before a shrine to Alex Trebek — their personal god of facts — don their Fact Checkers Unit windbreakers, and go looking for Murray’s house. Sensing their stumbling presence, Murray finds our heroes huddled in the bathtub almost immediately after they’ve broken in. True to his reputation, Murray has not been easy to find, but true to his public persona, he proves placidly willing and able to hang out when found. After an evening of M*A*S*H, martinis, checkers, and lounge singing, the FCU boys discover the truth about Bill Murray and milk. I won’t, er, spoil it.
I can’t help but admire this casting coup; Karinen and Sacca must have gone through just as much hassle as the FCU did to find Bill Murray. (That, or they happened to know him through some coincidental connection none of us could ever replicate.) Even more impressive, in its way, is how they seemingly crafted the structure of FCU: Fact Checkers Unit to accommodate whichever hard-to-come-by celebrity they could have managed to come by. Perhaps a bigger fan than I knows of some deep, long-established connections between Bill Murray, lad’s mags, M*A*S*H, and warm milk, but nothing stops me from imagining the Kevin Spacey version. In fact, I’d like to see the Kevin Spacey version. Insert a new celebrity each week while holding all else equal, and the concept could become an avant-garde web series.
You can find this film listed in our collection of Free Movies Online.
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