The Internet has set off a desperately-needed nuclear viral cancer bomb under the music industry. The majors are going down the tubes, the distribution channels have been blown wide-open, approximately no-one actually buys or cares about the contents of the “charts” (thirty years ago, the sales of a current UK Top 10 single would have made number five on the indie charts), popular taste has fragmented into a thousand tiny subgenres, the musicians are breathing the terrible and fearsome air of freedom and more good music is being made and spread in 2011 than ever before. And making even more money.

So why do movies still suck so bad? Why does the conservatism of a control-addicted twentieth-century industry finding itself living in the future make the field suck for everyone? Because the means of production are still locked down. This leaves the key question being: “Can it be marketed?”

“The closer you get to (or the farther you get from) your thirtieth birthday, the more likely you are to develop things like taste and discernment, which render you such an exhausting proposition in terms of selling a movie that, well, you might as well have a vagina.”

Breaking the production monopoly will go slowly. But the Edge of the City festival has a category for films made on a mobile phone.

Roger Ebert is a renowned film critic and an excellent and amusing writer. He also wrote a couple of screenplays with Russ Meyer: Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls (produced) and the abortive Sex Pistols film Who Killed Bambi? (unproduced, as Malcolm McLaren ran out of money). He’s just posted the screenplay for the latter. Good Lord.

After screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival last year, Anvil! The Story of Anvil is to go on general release in Australia in September. Yesterday there was a special screening at the Nova in Carlton followed by a chat and Q&A with Steve “Lips” Kudlow and Robb Reiner from the band and the film’s director Sacha Gervasi, which I attended.

Releasing their first album independently in 1981 and cited as influences by Metallica, Slayer and others who went on to great success, Anvil were in the right place at the right time to capitalise on the resurgence of Heavy Metal worldwide in the 80s. However twenty years later, despite still releasing albums, they were forgotten by all but the most diehard fans and metal rocknerds. So what went wrong? That’s what Gervasi, an old fan of the band, wanted to find out. I found the film inspirational; while there are moments in the film which could have come straight out of This Is Spinal Tap and leave one cringing, at the film’s climax (a word one is hesitant to use when discussing Lips, infamous for his lewdness) the audience cheered, because unlike Spinal Tap, Anvil is made of real people.

Iron Maiden has a global fanbase, they even played Poland while it was still in the Soviet Bloc, but there is no better illustration of that than this film and what happened to me while I watched it.

The film, produced by  Sam Dunn, a metal fan and anthropologist, and Scott McFadyen who made Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey, covers the band on the first leg of their “Somewhere Back In Time” tour in 2008, and the first concert of the tour was in Mumbai, India. A guy sitting next to me in the cinema leant over as the film was starting and told me that he’d been at that concert and that he wondered if he ended up in the film. Tashi, as I later learnt his name to be, indeed ended up in the film in several audience shots and also in footage from their press conference in Mumbai.

The amazing cinematography, not just in the concert sequences but in aerial shots of Flight 666 (Iron Maiden bought their own Boeing 757 for the tour which carried the band, crew and all their equipment, captained by their singer Bruce Dickinson who has a commercial pilot’s licence), and almost access all areas to the band, their crew and the fans, make this worthwhile viewing even for those who are not fans of the band.

But for those that are, some of Iron Maiden’s most popular songs in DTS, combined with the concert and backstage scenes, makes the film as exhilarating as seeing them live. By the end of the film all the fans in the audience were singing along and clapped when the credits rolled.

Film site: http://www.ironmaiden.com/flight666/

I was hoping The Boat That Rocked would at least be fictionalised reality about British pirate radio in the sixties, in the manner of Twenty-Four Hour Party People. It’s not — it’s a story invented from whole cloth reminiscent of historical events.

I wanted rocknerd kicks all through the night and didn’t get them. This film gets worse the more you think about it afterwards. Emotional manipulation and the comedy of embarrassment. All a bit Richard Curtis.

I wonder who the DJs were supposed to be. The Tony Blackburn character’s obvious. But no John Peel character is an unspeakable omission. Bill Nighy is perfect as the station owner. I also wonder how well they did on the Prime Minister and Cabinet. (The minister of technology at the time was Tony Benn, who I can’t see behaving quite like that.)

The most stirring scene is (highlight for spoiler) the abandoned records floating underwater. Because they’re the character I’m most interested by. Way too mainstream though.

One to watch on DVD if you happen to be in the room at the time.

Dot.com winner Paul Graham writes on why TV lost — computers + television = computers. Of course as much is watched as ever, but the products (you and me) are getting entirely too uppity for business comfort. The broadcast model is as healthy as major record companies.

I work in media. The future of television is YouTube or similar. We know this. It’ll take a few years before the Internet is a better television than television, i.e. when your connection is a better delivery mechanism than DVB-T over the air. On the other hand, convenience beats quality every time.

We each sit comfortably in the lounge on our own laptop, watching videos as the whim takes us. The younger teenager uses YouTube as her personal jukebox. Even broadcast television (BBC Cbeebies for the toddler) is streamed live over the net. I have a television, and proudly pay my licence fee. I can’t remember when I last switched it on.

*ahem* I told you so.

When Uwe Boll* calls [*may not be 100% true], Richard O’Brien listens. (Or not.) ‘Cos adaptations make the world go round.

(1944 Marxist sociology is often indistinguishable from rock journalism. Or how-tos.)

In the MPAA’s consumer assault, consider the shiny 5¼” disk the Maginot Line. DVD sales are slipping for the first time since 1997. And Blu-Ray “won” the format battle but is losing the war against the Great Slight Economic Downturn. Because statistically, no-one gives a hoot about high resolution, going for convenience every time.

Someone must be making a packet convincing executives that customers will buy what you tell them to, not what they want to. What’s the killer feature on the Blu-Ray release of Sleeping Beauty? Chat, messaging to and from phones, video greeting cards and quizzes for loyalty programme points! ‘Cos there’s vast untapped consumer demand for expensive stuff that’s like the Internet except shit.

At least Pixar’s been allowed to tell the rest of Disney that if you make a sequel, it’s gotta, y’know, not suck.

Going by the trailer, the Watchmen movie might not actually suck. The costumes are right, the scenes are right … the sculpture on Mars is right … even if it makes a tedious movie, it’ll win on eyecandy.

A brilliant single-take music video, for “Grip” by Dutch band zZz. High-quality MPEG4 also available.

(2002, dir. Michael Winterbottom)

Factory Records and its bands occupied thirty to forty percent of my brain between the ages of sixteen and eighteen. I had the most appalling collection of Joy Division and New Order bootlegs. (To the point where the record shop guy granted me access to the box of UK bootleg cassettes under the counter, knowing how far gone an addict I was.) I didn’t get to the stage of dreaming of having my own FAC number, but it was damn close.

24 Hour Party People was a religious experience for me. Wonderfully realised and very amusing.

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First, let’s get into character.

Go find a mirror.

Look into it.

Go “grrrrrrrrrrruff!”

Now hold that look. Hold it … hold it … hold it for 90 minutes.

Congratulations! You are the Vampire Lestat. (Cameron Rogers)

Queen Of The Damned was made in Melbourne with as many local extras as they could scrounge up. A great many of these are posters to the Usenet newsgroup aus.culture.gothic. They had a few words to say concerning the premiere …

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