Makes me want to go out and invade a foreign country.

(It was St. Crispin’s Day on Tuesday in case you didn’t know).

As a sequel to the previous post I present this wonderful montage tribute to the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger by Serena Bramble

Kathleen Byron, worth going to heaven for.

This record is pretty heavenly too.

Download: Pearly Gates – Prefab Sprout (mp3)

This collection of vinyl-related movie clips was put together by a chap by the name of Mennomail and is beautifully done, I must admit there were a couple of times when I found it quite moving. You couldn’t make something as lovely as this about mp3s could you?

Apparently there are 16 different films in this but I only recognize seven of them — Ghost World, The Shawshank Redemption, Billy Elliot, High Fidelity, (500) Days of Summer, Crumb, and Poltergeist. Can you do any better?

Surprised he didn’t include The Virgin Suicides though:

The site was down yesterday because of a technical glitch (did anyone notice?) which is of fixed now after much frantic mucking about with code and databases.

Anyways, panic over, back to our regularly scheduled programming.

This record only got to #43 in the charts in 1975 and is something of a forgotten classic, at least I’d forgotten all about it until it popped up on my iTunes the other day and the second I heard the first few notes the whole song came back to me. I love it when that happens, it’s like discovering an old photo of yourself that you haven’t seen for years and some long-lost section of the past is suddenly coloured in.

Download: Shoes – Reparta (mp3)

(Photo: Moira Shearer in The Red Shoes but you knew that, didn’t you?)

Late Friday nights on British television back in the 1970s was essential viewing for a hormonal teenage boy and budding cinephile (especially once his mother had gone to bed) for it was then that they would show cult, arthouse, and horror films which, besides being an introduction to the stranger and more risqué end of cinema, usually had some naked ladies in them too. My personal Hall of Fame from those nights on our couch includes Walkabout, Girl On A Motorbike, Baby Love, The Shuttered Room and To The Devil A Daughter which aren’t all particularly great movies (most of them aren’t in fact) but they burned themselves into my adolescent brain for one reason or other — well, OK, mostly one reason — so much so that I can still remember my first, slightly freaked-out encounter with them 35 years later.

Being a typical teenage boy I was also into comics and science fiction so a movie which combined those things with naughty bits would have to be pretty much the greatest thing since spam fritters, so when I first saw Barbarella — robots, spaceships, monsters and Jane Fonda bonking her way across the galaxy — I thought I’d died and gone to boy heaven.



A kitsch riot of sex, space travel and shag-pile carpets, it was like watching a very groovy episode of Dr. Who directed by Hugh Hefner and featuring Louise Jameson having it off with the Cybermen. Even though it was based on a comic book it was far weirder than anything Stan Lee ever dreamed up and wasn’t set in any world I recognized from reading Spiderman, (though I wouldn’t have minded seeing Gwen Stacy in one of those sexy outfits). I wasn’t really aware of this at the time but there was such a thing as “adult” — and French — comics which, in this case, meant sex, sex and more sex, plus really twisted, creepy things like the evil little dolls with razor sharp teeth which made my skin crawl at the time (and still do actually). The people who made Barbarella were clearly degenerate weirdos who did lots of drugs and it was bloody marvelous as a result. It probably did my head in more than any of the films mentioned above because it was so damn freaky (and silly and saucy) and even though it’s often camper than a row of tents it’s also visually stunning with some amazing set and costume designs.

And, of course, Jane Fonda looks absolutely ravishing in it. She’s had so many other lives since she made Barbarella — anti-war activist, serious actress, work-out video queen, billionaire’s trophy wife — that it’s easy to forget she was once a sex symbol (with a verrrry sexy voice to boot) and she’d probably rather forget she ever did something as fluffy and kitschy as that, not least because she apparently turned down the lead role in Bonnie and Clyde to do it. But my teenage self, for one, would like to thank her very much indeed.

You probably know that Duran Duran got their name from a character in the movie and played their first gigs at a Birmingham club called Barbarella’s, which makes my choice of record easy.

Download: Girls On Film (Night Version) – Duran Duran (mp3)
Buy: Barbarella (movie)

And then there were the sadistic, bullying PE teachers, I hated those bastards and can’t watch this clip without having some very unpleasant flashbacks: The adolescent circle of hell that was the communal changing room, the teacher checking that you weren’t wearing anything under your shorts (was it only my school that had a rule about underwear at games?), or making you feel like a worthless weakling because you forgot your kit or had a note from your mum excusing you. Did I say I hated those bastards?