LAist’s Emily Lerman royal we’s her enjoyment of  the visually stunning new video titled “The Ride,” inspired by the song “Kings + Queens” from 30 Seconds To Mars. Me, not so much.

The 8.5-minute short (the last 2-plus minutes of which are the credits) centers around a Midnight Ridazz-esque group night ride featuring Jared Leto and his band pedaling along with a purported group of actual Ridazz — I say “purported” because individual close-ups reveal them all to be far too sullenly sans FUN as they journey glumly in the dark across and under the requisite downtown locations such as the 6th Street Bridge, the Second Street tunnel, and Grand Street. Seriously: Why so serious?

But everything’s great eye candy and otherwise going mostly awesome and only threatening to be hugely overwrought and ultra-serious like the song until the video’s director, Bartholomew Cubbins, decides to have a paid-actor/stuntperson get fatally creamed on his bike by a motorist near Pershing Square. Then, while everyone stands dumbly around by the body like powered-down replicants, poor Cubbins couldn’t help but trot out a hornless unicorn galloping in slo-mo up a dark street. Of course, with a visual like that the dead ridah can’t help but awaken refreshed from his unplanned road nap, and  just get up on his undamaged bike to ride away.

After that there’s more of Leto singing, then a critical mass-style “circle of death” at an ironically traffic-less intersection. Then all the still way-too-bummed cyclists start wailing like a giant gruff chorus along with Leto until they magically arrive at the Santa Monica Pier where they disappear. Fade to black.

Your mileage may vary from my curmudgeonly take.

PS. If the embed’s dead up there, here’s the video’s URL:

• http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=100601596

Cinematic Titanic! 5 NIGHTS/5 MOVIES at LARGO at the CORONET!

I was too busy celebrating my birthday to get my act together in time to post so you could get to tonight’s showing of “LEGACY OF BLOOD,” but look at it this way: Now you’re even more motivated to go see the other four movies.

What the heck am I even talking about, say ye? Well gather round and I’ll tell ye about the latest Joel (Mystery Science Theater) Hodgson and his gang, doing their now famous schtick-along to some classic film offerings.

MONDAY OCT. 26th,  7:30pm –  “DANGER ON TIKI ISLAND”
Living on an island near a nuclear testing zone has its downsides – i.e. being terrorized by one of the worst movie monsters ever!

TUESDAY OCT. 27th ,  7:30pm – “SANTA CLAUS CONQUERS THE MARTIANS”
See the fully re-riffed version of an MST3K classic… (more…)

My theory is that, like Halloween, one is either a fan of David Lynch’s films or not.  I am.  Recently, I watched Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive” for the second time, and the first time since moving to the Los Angeles area.  It was quite eye-opening.

As for the film itself, I understood more the second time around.  “Mulholland Drive” simply cannot be viewed only once (unless you are in the category of unfortunate people who don’t like David Lynch films, in which case once is probably too much).  But then I did some research, and found out some really interesting things.  Since I rented and do not own the dvd, I did not know that Lynch inserted ten clues to watching the movie inside the back cover of the dvd box.
  Get a clue, after the jump

The WTF?! Festival, hosted by The Actors’ Gang and curated by Tim Robbins, began last week in an ambitious eruption of creative insurrection.  It’s a ten week multi-discipline performance art festival featuring music, dance, film, theater and more all bent toward the singular cause of putting forth artistic material during an unsavory economic climate.  (Thus the title of the festival which was literally Tim’s reaction to being told there wasn’t enough money in the budget to do theater.)

Each week of the WTF?! Festival offers a wide range of activities from free events to $150 fundraising productions.  Because there is so much going on with this mighty undertaking, I will be doing regular updates here at LA Metblogs to keep you on top of everything, including an interview with Tim Robbins.

Here’s what’s happening on this week!

Tuesday night begins Week 2 with an exclusive look at the as yet unreleased documentary William Kunstler: Disturbing The Universe. It’s the story of the civil rights lawyer who fought for equality with Martin Luther King Jr. and represented the famed Chicago 8 activists as told by his daughters.  The screening will be followed by a Q&A session with Emily Kunstler.  It begins at 8 pm and is free!

Wednesday night is a screening of The Aristocrats after which filmmaker Paul Provenza and special guests will discuss the film, not to mention offer up new Aristocrat jokes live.  Just $15 puts you in a seat for a rare evening of tawdry entertainment.  The bar opens at 7 pm. The show begins at 8 pm.

Thursday night is an evening of theater with the one woman production called The Need To Know performed by former Air Force Intelligence Analyst April Fitzsimmons. It’s a critically acclaimed performance exploring her journey from being a member of the armed forces to an activist in the peace movement.  The show is followed by a veterans’ forum.  The curtain goes up at 8 pm and tickets are $15.

Former Cirque du Soleil performer Daisuke Tsuji executes his one man visual poem Death And Giggles on Friday evening with a frenetic presentation of sock puppets, dance, clowning and balloons.  It begins at 9 pm and is $15.

Week 2 ends on Saturday with an intimate evening of music presented by 89.9 KRCW featuring singer/songwriter Jackson Browne with his son, Ryan Browne.  Tim Robbins and his son, Miles, will also put in an appearance.  This is a $150 fundraising event that begins at 8:30 pm.

For more information about the WTF?! Festival visit the website here.  Otherwise, keep a look out here at LA Metblogs for upcoming events.

OHMYGODOHMYGODOHMYGODOHMYGOD. Seriously, I am slobbering stoked about this. Say what you want about recent Death Cab: Gibbard’s early work with the band, like in “We Have the Facts And We’re Voting Yes,” and his collaborations with Dntel (The Postal Service came about as a result of their first correspondence, the song “(This Is) The Dream of Evan and Chan”) is just fantastic. And Jay Farrar, the other half of Uncle Tupelo (the seminal alt-country outfit that split to form both Wilco and Farrar’s Son Volt) is a great songwriter.

But even I am flabbergasted at what Farrar’s attempted: setting the words of Kerouac to music. The album “One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Kerouac’s Big Sur,” primarily composed by Farrar with collaboration from Gibbard, sounds like the perfect storm of awesome. Apparently the two musicians realized their mutual love for the writer of “On the Road,” while they were involved in the production of a documentary of the same name about Kerouac (which screens tomorrow at Arclight with a Q&A with the director & producers; the film includes reflections on Kerouac by Tom Waits, Patti Smith, Sam Shepard, and more).

The duo is bringing their makeshift band, which is composed of other Death Cab, Son Volt, and Mountain Goats members, here to LA for two of the 6 US dates they’ll be playing. They’ll be at Largo at the Coronet this week on the 22nd, and the El Rey on the 23rd. I am SO there.

Last night I went to see The Third Man at the Hammer and I was reminded of just what a fabulous film it is and how great it is to live in a city where you can watch classic and arthouse films on the big screen. So I’m sorry–you missed The Third Man, but there are still a half dozen other movies yet to screen in the “Footsteps and Fog” British noir series. Friday there are a pair of trucker noir movies, The Long Haul and Hell Drivers. Saturday’s offerings include The Clouded Yellow, a movie described as having “echoes of Gaslight,” as well as The October Man. And Monday finishes the series with The Noose and No Orchids for Miss Blandish, which Monthly Film Bulletin called “the most sickening exhibition of brutality, perversion, sex and sadism to be shown on a cinema screen.” I’m in.

And if you’re hungry for more Brit films with fog, the double feature on Halloween looks promising: The City of the Dead and The Skull. Satanic conspiracies, Marquis de Sade’s skull, witch burnings…what more do you need for a happy Halloween?

Sadness. I’ve just learned from Ed Fuentes at Blogdowntown that the Laemmle’s Grande 4-Plex theater on Figueroa beneath the Marriott Hotel (where Christopher Walken danced in a certain Fatboy Slim video) is slated to shut down October 25, coincidentally just two days before the opening of the Regal Cinemas LA Live Stadium 14.

Fuentes quotes Laemmle Director of Operations Kevin Gallagher: “It’s always been difficult to bring people downtown and even though the image of the city changing, we felt it was best to close the doors.”

The comments to the post echo my dissapointment. But I take some consolation that at least they didn’t close because of me. Laemmles had no difficulty bringing me and my wife Susan downtown from Silver Lake. Long unenamored with the Arclight $tyle of movie-going (and the gridlock getting there), Laemmle’s Grande was a cherished alternative. A bit seedy and frayed and firmly lacking in the latest cinema technology, sure. But none of that mattered.

It has been our theater of choice for going on three years. We could get there in 10 minutes, conveniently park across the street for $2 and relish the $6 matinee ticket prices, which made bad movies suck a little less… like “Public Enemies,” the last movie we saw there.

With the exception of one or two trips to the Vista every movie we’ve been coaxed into seeing since we first found the place in 2006 has been viewed there in the Marriot’s basement — with good popcorn, no screaming kids, no crowds, and by and large among people who know good movie theater etiquette. It was like a best-kept secret — too best kept, I guess (but not for lack of me crowing about it here back in November 2006).

I’m going to miss this place tremendously. In fact, since you won’t catch me navigating the chaos of Regal’s new LA Live pleximania, I’d hazard to say with its closing we’ll be going out for movies less and waiting to stay in and see them on Blu-Ray more.

I try not to take for granted the vast number of cool events that happen in Los Angeles. I know that a screening of an almost 60 year-old Japanese movie doesn’t sound like the sort of thing that you can only find in L.A., but it is! The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences is presenting a stunning new restoration of Akira Kurosawa’s classic “Rashomon,” taken from a 35mm print created in 1962 from the original camera negative.

The truth of the matter is that because the heart of the film industry is here in Los Angeles, so is the heart of film restoration efforts. Film restoration is extremely tedious and costly, and many of our film treasures are being lost at a rapid rate. Because are we lucky enough to be in a city where much of the restoration is done, occasionally beautifully restored films are publicly screened here!

In this case, we’ll get to see the groundbreaking Kurosawa masterpiece Rashomon, starring Toshiro Mifune in the role that catapulted him to stardom. The film depicts the rape of a woman and the apparent murder of her husband through the widely differing accounts of four witnesses, including the rapist and the dead man (through a medium). The stories are mutually contradictory, leaving the viewer to determine which, if any, is the truth. Rashomon has become synonymous with the unknowability of truth, and spawned the term the “Rashomon Effect.” regarding the subjectivity of perception on recollection.

Regarding this particular restoration:

While the [35mm print from 1962] print itself was in good physical condition, the source material from which it was made was extremely battered. Due to the extensive printing and handling it had received over its lifetime, many shots were already starting to shrink and warp, and there were numerous scratches, dust, and dirt in the damaged negative. Scanned at 4k resolution, that 47-year-old print has been meticulously cleaned both digitally and by hand, complete with a new, seamless soundtrack. This essential restoration has been made possible by the Academy Film Archive, the National Film Center of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo and Kadokawa Pictures, Inc., with funding provided by Kadokawa Cultural Promotion Foundation and Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation.

Rashomon opens Friday, October 2, 2009 at Landmark’s Nuart Theatre, showing through Thursday, October 8 for an exclusive one-week engagement. Showtimes: Fri-Sun at 12:00, 2:30, 5:00, 7:30 & 10:00; Mon-Thu at 5:00, 7:30 & 10:00. Landmark’s Nuart Theatre is at 11272 Santa Monica Boulevard, just west of the 405 Freeway, in West Los Angeles. Program information: 310-281-8223; www.landmarktheatres.com

The second annual ID Film Festival, dedicated to contemporary digital films that explore and celebrate identity within the diverse Asian/Pacific Islander community, will present an international and local lineup of films this coming week/end, October 1-3 at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles.

The festival will premiere several Hong Kong films, in addition to showcasing Asian American films from the “Class of 1997″: Michael Aki and Eric Nakamura’s Sunsets, Rea Tajiri’s Strawberry Fields, Chris Chan Lee’s Yellow, Quentin Lee and Justin Lin’s Shopping For Fangs — all groundbreaking works in Asian American cinema.

But what excites me is the really special round table taking place on closing night (Saturday, October 3, 2009) with Michael Aki, Chris Chan Lee, Quentin Lee, Justin Lin, Eric Nakamura and Rea Tajiri at 9:30PM after the free 8PM screening of Shopping For Fangs. The round table will be moderated by Giant Robot’s Martin Wong. (The round table is sponsored by Giant Robot and You Offend Me You Offend My Family.) And if that weren’t enough, there’s a free afterparty with sake provided by Sho Chiku Bai.

But don’t wait ’til closing night to check things out! There’s a bunch of other cool stuff during the film festival, so take a look at their entire schedule online and find out how to order tickets in advance.

Watch the Derby Dolls from the comfort of your own Intertube.

Tonight at 6:30, the Los Angeles Derby Dolls are taking the excitement of high-speed all-female banked track roller derby out of the Doll Factory in Historic Filipinotown and bringing it live to the entire planet via the World Wide Web.

Varsity Brawlers (the pretty team) will take on Tough Cookies (last year’s champs) in a full-length exhibition game streamed live to your very own home, office, or car (if you’re on your laptop, parked down the street stealing WiFi.)

Now how much would you pay? But wait! There’s more!…

Have you seen the trailer for Drew Barrymore’s directorial debut, “Whip It?” I can’t wait to see it when it’s released this weekend. Barrymore, Ellen Page (”Juno,”) Juliette Lewis (”Old School,”) and other stars from the movie will be at the event for a post-bout Q&A. I’m told you can submit your questions online, too. There will also be a live half-time concert by Landon Pigg.

All for the low, low price of…FREE. That’s right! All you have to do is log in to www.derbydolls.tv at 6:30pm and it will all stream right out of the internets and into your eyeballs and ear holes.

I’m kind of excited about this, so there’s even more. Click the link and follow me… (more…)