The Killa Thrilla

Thursday, May 21, 2009

A View to a Kill-er opening sequence

The other day we watched an old James Bond movie from 1985, A View To A Kill, staring a young and great Christopher Walkins, playing an Nazi-made, Soviet-sponsored Capitalist-dream-kid villain. The movie was entertaining and it was the best sleep-inducing film in a while (it took us 4 or 5 nights to finish it), but what stood out was the opening sequence, in a good and bad way combined. No fancy special effects, no graphics or nice animations. Instead just a play on lights, which I found pretty cool. The skying silhouettes were really cool too. On the other hand, the dancing is pretty cheesy and kind of ruins the whole sequence.

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Irish Pubs in Montreal

For those out-there attempting to master the art of Guinness drinking in Montreal, this age-old Irish tradition, then waste no time and direct yourselves towards these venerable institutions: O'Regan's Pub, serving Guinness imported straight from Ireland (according to the writers at Montreal-Clubs.com), or go right next doors to the huge Irish Embassy (review of the Irish Embassy here). As if this wasn't enough, you can also try Hurley's Pub (which has amazing traditional music), the Old Dublin Pub (which has amazing burgers), or the more commercial McLean's Pub.

Hope the list is exhaustive enough for your Guinness cravings.

Monday, May 11, 2009

Mutek, the electronic sound festival

Here is an interesting post on MontrealNewYearsEve blog about the Mutek electronic music festival held yearly in Montreal. Mutek has built a pretty solid reputation over the years, as a festival daring to showcase sounds that are quite far from the mainstream. This year's edition of the festival promises to be a good one again.

[edit:]Since I made this pots, the festival has physically started and I published another article on Mutek (a good one of that, or at least I hope)

Beyoncé puts the ring on another dance routine

I thank God everyday that I don't have cable and I am spared the pain of music videos, and TV in general. But today I inadvertently discovered a funny little non-event that has crept up in cyberspace, the spot for all gossip and other possible time wasters.

Here it is: it turns out that Beyoncé's video for Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It) was a rip-of of this dance sequence bellow:



Now that's pretty funny: after re-making all old-time hits, re-sampling and covering everything, the music industry is remaking music videos too, except that this time the girls are wearing 80% less clothing and shaking their booties 80% more. Great, I wonder who's the multi-million-dollar-paid marketing executive who thought of this, the girl/guy must have a really hard job.

What would have been really cool was if Beyoncé had made a video that is an obvious tribute or a spoof of that original sequence, and they could have made it way more artistic and intelligent, for example start off in disco styled clothing and big Afros and then dress-down to modern style booty shaking sequence. That would have been original. Just copying and not referencing or giving props to the original material in any way is really lame.

Friday, May 08, 2009

Girl Talk

I just discovered Girl Talk (on the appropriately titled record label Illegal Art, an entirely sample-based artist, mixing dozens of different sample to make an entirely novel song. The music is really good, and so are the videos you can find on YouTube. It's not very clear to me, but they look like fan-made videos, not official ones by Girl Talk.

Check -out this song, it's amazing, with the Ace Of Base sample, really cool:



This song is really good too, the mix of hip-hop and rock samples works really well:

Tuesday, May 05, 2009

European style: Fleggaard ad

I don't speak danish and I have no idea what Fleggaard is (I believe it might be a retailer or something of the sort). That doesn't prevent me from recognizing a true European ad when I see one. It's funny how much more understandable European-made ads are on the erotic side: you will never see nudity in an American ad, while America is the number one producer and consumer of XXX material, whereas European ads will feature more naked skin, and no one will pay any attention to that or get offended and angry. Let's just say that Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction wouldn't have been a a court issue in Europe at all. Actually, no one would have noticed.

So here is the link to the Fleggaard ad. Obviously, it has been removed from YouTube because it breaks their term-of-services. No surprise there, just the attitude I noted above.