Couldn't resist putting this clip up here.
Yes, that is Crispin Glover (the slightly weird actor who played Marty McFly senior in Back to the Future), and yes, he is doing a drag act of Olivia Newton-John singing her 1978 song Please Don't Keep Me Waiting. This is a small segment from a little seen film by director Trent Harris called The Beaver Trilogy (2000) which I luckily caught at the Auckland International Film Festival in 2001. I waited for the film to come back or the DVD to come out for ages for ages but it never did. Eventually I tracked the director down and asked for a copy. Turns out that he had music licensing issues for Olivia's song and so hasn't been able to release the film but he was happy make me a DVD anyway - very cool. It is one of my favourite films - though is very strange - and I feel privileged to have one of a few copies existing in the world.
(If you like, you can view more of that story here as I wrote a feature about it for an online film site I contribute to.)
The film starts with a strange piece of documentary footage he filmed back in the late 70s with a small town guy (Groovin' Gary) who wanted to be a celebrity and be on TV. He sets up a hokey small town talent quest and invites the director to come down and film it. Harris subsequently remade this bizarre little nothing documetary twice - several years apart - with, first, a very young Sean Penn, and later a young Crispin Glover - hence it is a trilogy. The first remake is virtually word for word but nuances the dialogue and strange events towards a theme of sexual repression in small town America (Beaver is the town the original Gary hails from) whilst the Glover version is a fully blown short film that develops that theme based on the basic outline of the original doco footage.
Harris does a clever job of presenting the surface issue of sexual repression, whilst the major themes are (to my mind) actually the exploitative power of the media, and the viewer as conscious and unconscious voyeur.
Not everyone's cup of tea but I love it!
9 comments:
Ah, Crispin Glover... I remember a great clip of him getting kicked off of Letterman.
http://nz.youtube.com/watch?v=ALapHYNSmoA
Very weird indeed. This clip is pretty out there; I wonder if he is legitimately crazy, or playing it up to add to his "mystique"?
I hear he's due for a return to the mainstream - Tim Burton is still mainstream mostly right? Playing the knave of hearts in Alice of Wonderland. Suitably weird I would have thought.
Alice in Wonderland is my favorite book! And Tim Burton is an absolute favorite as well(anyone who uses Jonny Depp that much has to be a good thing). Welsh Dragon, you just got major cool points (if you care)! 2010 until that movie comes out... supposedly 3d?
If those two topics interest you, you should check into Neil Gaiman's Coraline character, who is soon starring in her own movie as well.... She is like the Alice of this generation. Great book, fun to read. He also wrote Stardust.
Hard to know quite what was going on with Glover Welsh Rarebit. There are rumours that he'd taken LSD prior to the '87 Letterman gig which he has neither confirmed nor denied. Whatever the case he is kind of quirky and apparently somewhat tetchy - illustrated by his lawsuit against Robert Zemeckis/Speilberg etc following the Back to the Future disagreements - and has done some interesting work, of which his Orkly Kid segment of The Beaver Trilogy is the crowning jewel.
Welsh Dragon & Rachel: yeah I am interested in seeing what Burton does with Alice too, it would seem another project suited to his idiosyncratic visual style (much like his recent film adaption of Sondheim's Sweeney Todd). I would agree that he is in the mainstream - if hovering around the very fringes of it - and I also love his work and Johnny Depp's too (we have collected about 6 Burton DVDs so far - all of which include Depp), though our appreciation of Depp's work is broader than his Tim Burton collaboration. Two of my favourite Depp films are his portrayal of 'William Blake' in Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man (1995) and as the eponymous lead in Lasse Hallström's 1993 feature What's Eating Gilbert Grape. Burton & Depp are pure cinematic genius!
Rachel: I've not read Coraline but I really loved the film adaptation of Stardust and my work has copies of Gaiman's Complete Sandman graphic novel series. Crazy to see a film with Brit comediennes Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French also starring Teri Hatcher?! The director - Henry Selick - was apparently specifically chosen by Gaiman because he directed Tim Burton's A Nightmare Before Christmas and this was the kind of visual style he thought a film version would need. An article I read said that Gaiman sent copies of the book manuscript to both Selick and Burton 18 months prior to publication - crazy. So it seems Alice and Coraline are oddly connected lending weight to your assertion re Coraline being the "the Alice of this generation"...
http://ccinsider.comedycentral.com/cc_insider/2007/10/free-excerpt-of.html wasn't sure where to post this for you to see.... enjoy
Rachel: Nice, I checked out a few youtube clips of him as well - pretty amusing. I particularly liked his gag with the prunes at the Emmys this year...
Happy New Year or as we say in the home country: Blwyddyn Newydd Dda!
Blywddyn Newydd Dda to you and yours as well Welsh Dragon!
Ours was pretty quiet just at home with our housemates, but I quite enjoyed the very low key approach this year. The last couple of years we've had a few people around at our place but it was kind of nice not to have to bother organising anything. Hope your celebration were enjoyable!
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