I’m a little late to the party on this one, but last week, Drafthouse posted an undergraduate thesis on the subject of The FP (a favorite around here), entitled “The FP: A Reflection of Cultural Change and Stereotype Exploitation,” from some intercultural communications students at the University of Texas at San Antonio, Forrest Good, Jacqueline Ramstack and Demar Hall. Suffice to say, I read the entire thing. It’s awesome in the way that quotes from blackout drunks embedded into a dry police report are awesome, that endlessly compelling cocktail of clinical robot prose and vulgar vernacular, like making Stephen Hawking read a Penthouse letter.

I’ve excerpted my favorite quotes below:

The lack of alcoholics has caused the local duck population to flee, seeing as there is no one to feed them. As the character KCDC, played by Art Hsu, framed it, “What’s a f*ckin’ town with no ducks, JTRO? It’s nothin’! It ain’t nothin’! How’s a nigga supposed to sort his shit out without no ducks?” (Trost 2011).

Probably the first time in academic history that a motivational speech about bringing back the town’s supply of booze and ducks has been used in a citation. Hopefully not the last.

The FP takes these concepts to an extreme, because it employs the monomyth, it is put in the same cultural conversation as many legitimately respected writings across the world such as Beowulf or The Lord of the Rings.

“…such as Beowulf or Lord of the Rings.” On one hand, I hope they mean the books, because I don’t like the idea that Beowulf and the Lord of the Rings movies are considered “legitimately respected.” If they mean the books, I like to imagine they pulled them blindly from a dirty pillowcase marked “EXAMPLES.”

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If you’re like I was, and you’ve never heard of an MC5-esque black punk band from Detroit called “Death,” A Band Called Death is going to take a long time getting you there. But when it does, hold onto your handkerchiefs because shit’s about to get touching.  In telling the story of a forgotten punk trio with a vision, Drafthouse’s new documentary from Mark Covino and Jeff Howlett bears more than a passing similarity to the 2013 Oscar-winning documentary Searching for Sugar Man. Amazingly, it might be even harder to get through without tearing up, at least for lesser viewers (NICE TRY, PUNKS, THESE EYEBALLS DON’T RUN, OOH RAH!). And while A Band Called Death might suffer a bit for having been pre-empted thematically, Searching for Sugar Man had to massage the truth a bit to spurt that heartwarming ending. They conveniently left out the part where Rodriguez toured Australia with Midnight Oil years after we’re led to believe that he assumed he’d been forgotten. Sorry, bros, that’s cheating. To my knowledge, A Band Called Death doesn’t commit any similar lies by omission, and in any case, the unfairly-forgotten rockstar story it has to tell is even wilder and more emotional. And I mean that in a good way, not in a bipolar actress kind of way.

Raised in Detroit, David, Bobby, and Dannis Hackney are three brothers – by virtue of biology as well as by being three black guys hanging out together in the seventies – who dreamed of playing loud and kicking ass like The Who. They called themselves “Death,” based on a vision David had while staring at the clouds, and in 1974, recorded a demo of fast, hard-driving rock songs that inadvertently stole the balls-out sound of later bands like The Ramones, Bad Brains, the Sex Pistols, et. al. Only no one wanted to buy it at the time, mainly because the band was called “Death.” Which doesn’t seem like that much worse of a name than “The Who” or “The Guess Who,” but whatever. They could’ve just changed the name, but hey, man, you don’t argue with clouds. The demo collected dust in an attic somewhere for a while, while the members of the band gradually gave up and went on their separate ways, playing, at various times, Christian soul music, and cheesy reggae, with songs like “Fire Up the Ganja,” which might be the most generic-sounding reggae track of all time.

And then… And then…

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As you may have already learned via Uproxx email, FilmDrunk is co-presenting a series of screenings of Drafthouse Film’s Miami Connection as it karate kicks its way across the country, and it’s for this reason we were able to procure this exclusive For Your Consideration trailer. In case you don’t know, Miami Connection began as a rare 35 mm print of an obscure, 1987 film release bought for $50 on ebay, which was eventually rediscovered by Drafthouse Films and edited by Hobo with a Shotgun‘s Jason Eisner. It tells the story of 9th degree blackbelt YK Kim, leading his gang of synth-pop martial arts band Dragon Sound against drug-dealing motorcycle ninjas on the streets of Orlando. If that description doesn’t sound awesome to you, we probably can’t be friends.

This latest trailer is aimed specifically at the Academy voter, who’d be wise not to forget the name Maurice Smith when Best Actor nominating time comes around. I just like the whole scene that’s going on around him. Everyone’s either sleeveless or shirtless, there’s a picture of a rock star on the wall, one guy’s crying about a picture of his dead father – it’s like an Uproxx meeting with better haircuts.

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You might expect a Danish documentary about Indonesian war criminals executive produced by Werner Herzog and Errol Morris to be, you know, kind of dark. Let’s not mince words, you’d be right. Here’s the rundown for Act of Killing, which was just picked up for distribution by Drafthouse Films.

Directed by Joshua Oppenheimer, the film ventures deep into the minds of former Indonesian death squad leaders who are challenged to reenact their real-life mass-killings in whichever cinematic genres they wish, including classic Hollywood crime scenarios and lavish musical numbers. A 30-market theatrical release and awards campaign for Best Documentary Feature is planned for The Act Of Killing in 2013.

Chronicling one of the most overlooked genocides in recent history, The Act Of Killing utilizes dramatization to illustrate the banal state of corruption and impunity the unrepentant, locally celebrated former executioners inhabit. The film earned early praise from master documentarians Werner Herzog (Grizzly Man, Into The Abyss) and Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line, The Fog Of War), whose enthusiasm for the film lead to their role as Executive Producers. “I have not seen a film as powerful, surreal, and frightening in at least a decade,” says Herzog, “it is unprecedented in the history of cinema.” Morris adds, “like all great documentaries, The Act of Killing demands another way of looking at reality…an amazing and impressive film.”

Werner Herzog bashes chickens’ heads in with a hammer to unwind, so if he calls it frightening, the rest of us are probably going to have to watch it wearing diapers. “Za feelink of za cheecken’s bludt on mein handz, za taste uff zair flat brainz, is owerwhalemink. Eez poetry.”

No word yet on when it will be released, but here’s the trailer:

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This is part one of my interview with Klown stars Frank Hvam (center, with glasses) and Casper Christensen (top, chin clefting). Klown (read Laremy’s review) opens in New York, Austin, and Los Angeles, and on VOD everywhere, Friday, July 27th. Check back next week for part two. Subscribe to the Frotcast to hear the audio.

Every (Comedy) Scene Has a Story

As my Danish sources tell me, Casper Christensen was part of the original group that introduced stand-up comedy to Denmark in the late eighties, a small and somewhat insular crowd surrounding one bar in Copenhagen. Hvam formed part of a second wave in the mid nineties, at least partly as a reaction to the original group. They’ve been working together since around the late nineties, and you wouldn’t think there’d be any of that initial friction left, having been worn down by success and the passage of almost a decade and a half, but, surprisingly, as I found out, you’d be wrong. I didn’t know any of this going in, but being a stand-up comedian in a second-tier city myself (i.e., any city other than New York or LA, in my case San Francisco), I was curious as to how one gets his start as a comic in a place with an even smaller scene (or in this case, no scene). I figured Frank and Casper might have an interesting angle, and I got all of that, plus a fairly contentious discussion of “kicking up.” Basically, it refers to whose balls you can bust. Most of us are probably familiar (whether we’re aware of it or not) with the concept that it’s better (or for the comedian’s purpose, funnier) to tear down those above you, status/position in society-wise, than it is to hold down those below you. Apparently in Danish, this concept is known as “kicking up.”  A particular event in Frank and Casper’s past had “kicking up” implications, and as I found out, they’d interpreted it quite differently.

The occasion for the interview was the US release of their film, Klown, based on the TV show of the same name, which ran for six seasons (the movie itself was completed two years ago). While the setting wasn’t much different than from a usual studio-thrown junket (apart from the fact that we were sitting in a karaoke room above a bowling alley in Austin and that FilmDrunk was invited), I don’t think it’s going too far to say that I not only got a really intense interview, I’m pretty sure I witnessed, like, an actual moment. Real life rarely has sign posts like fiction, marking epiphanies and milestones with symbolic events where people suddenly learn a lesson or evolve, but I could swear I actually watched Frank and Casper discover something about themselves before my very eyes. And you know I wouldn’t lie to you about something like that because I’m too f**king lazy. It’s possible they could’ve been putting me on, but I doubt it, because I’ve been told Scandinavians turn into gnomes if they lie.

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