Lets start with the best: ‘Enter The Void’ by Gasper Noe was easily my favourite of the bunch, daylight second. Lots visual riffs not uncommon in experimental shorts or video art but like nothing I’ve seen anyone do in a feature. Ever I think.

It starts off with smoking DMT in a Tokyo apartment, reading the Tibetan Book of the Dead, then dying, then floating around a lot over the rooftops before 2.5hrs later being re-incarnated mid coitus in a love hotel. It meanders, makes you bored, excited, baffled and amused and is a rare example of courageous feature making that extends the form. Also has the best title sequence I’ve seen in ages.

Not the worst, but perhaps the most disappointing film I saw was Sophia Coppola’s ‘Somewhere’. I’ve liked her previous films mostly and this was disappointing not just because it was a dull film but because it seemed like she had the time resources and intention to make exactly this film and it fails at what is going for so badly.

Admittedly what it is going for, a sort of flat minimal accretion of detail that builds into a real emotional resonance is pretty hard to pull off (though she has done it before) but here it just falls flat.

While we are on disappointments, Christopher Nolan’s ‘Inception’ also underwhelmed me. I was looking forward to seeing it when it appeared on the horizon as it can be a genuinely exciting thing when a big budget sci-fi movie both connects with a massive audience and is also a good film. Inception though, turned out to be an Oceans Eleven style heist movie dressed up as a 3rd rate Phillip K Dick adaptation.

The saddest thing about Inception to me (aside from the complete waste of the talents of Ellen Page) is that the none of the dream aspects of the film were remotely dreamy. No dream logic, no dream imagery, just standard gun battle action.

There was however a sci-fi type film that excited me a lot, that was Gareth Edward’s ‘Monsters’. Shot in an improvised fashion on SLRs with home done digital FX this film had a beautiful tone and while it probably owes a lot to District 9 it looked fantastic and built to a great finish.

It’s casual pace and intimacy suited the narrative and also suited the naturalness of the performances.

There was nothing I’ve seen for years that was anywhere near as charming as Edgar Wright’s ‘Scott Pilgrim vs The World’ which made everything around it seem like it was burning on a very dim wattage. Classic teen movie structure (though all the characters are early 20s) perhaps the Mario/Street Fighter stuff was played out a bit much here and there, but easily the funnest viewing experience of the lot.

Wonderful snappy romantic comedy dialogue the whole way and also my favourite: great title sequence.

Chris Morris’s ‘Four Lions’ had me laughing more than anything I saw. Four British Jihadis plan a suicide bombing mission, hilarity ensues. The funniest bits for me were the sequences in a training camp in Pakistan, but the repeated use of ‘Dancing in the Moonlight’ is also a highlight.

Maybe it was broader and more slapstick and not as uncomfortable as some Chris Morris comedy can be, but wonderful in a very British Buffoony comic tradition.

So, that was the highlights and lowlights, other favourable mentions go to ‘Exit Through The Gift Shop’, which was also very funny. ‘Animal Kingdom’ which although containing a lot of oz movie cliches (70s art direction, check. ironic/poignant use of 80s pop song, check) was also a very good film with an amazing score. And lastly ‘Get Him to The Greek’ a bolted together identikit comedy with a hilarious deranged performance by Sean Coombs, he of P Diddy fame.

It may not have come to your attention but there are quite a collection of original multitracks from quite a lot of classic rock songs especially starting to circulate around the interwebs. My guess is that they’ve started archiving some of these things digitally and the files have gotten out into the wild.

It kind of a revelation to hear some of these tracks broken down like this, especially the 60s/70s tracks when studio technology was rudimentary, to hear the bleed ,the noise and the shonky edits and punch ins and then hear it all together is incredible if you are interested in pop music histories.

I downloaded the original Marvin Gaye “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” tracks recorded in early 1967 in the little room where all of those famous Motown tracks were made Studio A.

It was equipped with a new state of the art 8 track recorder, so I have 8 tracks in mono – background vocals, lead vocals, drums, bass, guitar, electric piano, tambourine & conga, strings & horns. No overdubbing or edits in the tracks, with the exception of the strings and horns (which sound incredible just in isolation) judging by the bleeding all the rest was played and sung at once. Just for comparison this is a protools screenshot of part of an early Lady Gaga single “Just Dance” which contained 100 tracks.

I loaded Grapevine into Pro Tools and another amazing thing about  it was that it hardly required any mixing. A bit of tweaking of levels and hard panning of everything except lead vocal, reverb plate send across the whole mix and an old style compressor over everything and you’d pretty much recreated the mix they’d done with the original release though a bit fuller sounding. Here is the mix I did.

Motown in those days had a reputation as a churn it out production line kind of place and you can hear the workaday vibe on the tape. Marvin Gaye is chatting about something in the backup vocalists microphone when the tape rolls then he complains about the drums in his headphones, then seconds later just drops into that soaring vocal.

I recently discovered The Sisters of Mercy album from the late 80s “Floodland”. Had it on my ipod while biking through China on repeat there for a while. One track in particular with all it’s histrionic camp drama gave me chills everytime it got to it’s enjoyable inevitable conclusion. “This Corrosion” I then read somewhere was a track worked on by this fellow above, Jim Steinman. The guy who wrote Bat Out of Hell, it all made sense the same intense compressed operatic drama, the same fervently realised rock fantasy. This version is the 4minute single edit, the 11minute album version is here (though without a video as such).

What I also didn’t know was that he was also behind the song that I’ve watched so often I’ve worn a groove in the server. But of course once you know it’s all becomes clear.

You can see it all in the original Bat Out of Hell video.

And in the song of his Celine Dion did in the late 90s though it was written the year Total Eclipse came out.

mathematics from chris caines on Vimeo.

25th anniversary the other day of the french secret service bombing of the greenpeace boat Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour. I can still remember the outrage people felt, how obviously french products disappeared from  the shops (cigarettes, cheeses, wines). Certainly Gitanes and Gauloises never returned though the wine and cheese certainly did and I wonder how many people alive at the time remember it at all, I’d certainly forgotten all about it, though I think it formed a lot of my underlying attitudes about France. In retrospect it also   seems like the last gasp of the french flexing old colonial muscle in the pacific.

This is No Fixed Address from the 1980 film Wrong Side of the Road that gave them some profile.

This is Coloured Stone from 1984 – Black Boy.

Them also doing Dancing in the Moonlight from 86.

The fabulous Warumpi Band doing Black Fella, White Fella from 87.

And the original of My Island Home from 88.

Kev Carmody with Thou Shall Not Steal from 89.

Archie Roach, Down City Streets from 91.

*spark d-fuser: dvi mixer project presentation [2010] from toby*spark on Vimeo.