In honour of the great Japanese director's 100th birthday, here's a clip from one of his best, "Yojimbo," starring Toshiro Mifune.

Sometimes I wish it was fashionable to wear a robe out in the street, just so I could imitate Mifune in this scene.

Newsweek magazine call's Bob Dylan's Love and Theft the second best album of the decade, in a list that also includes Fugazi's last album!

Check out the list here.

Newsweek... who knew they had such good taste?

Ever since Bob Dylan finished the encore of his November 7th show in Kitchener with "All Along the Watchtower", I've been thinking about the power of the song and its lyrics.  

Some dismiss the lyrics as nonsense, but I can't accept that argument when lines like " Businessmen, they drink my wine/Plowmen dig my earth / None of them along the line / Know what any of it is worth"  seem so obviously applicable to Dylan's own thoughts on life during the post-motocycle accident period in which the song was written.

A quick Google search termed up this excellent close reading of the lyrics by Herb Bowie.

As noted in the analysis, "Dylan’s accomplishment here is nothing less than amazing."

Agreed.

This morning (Cult)ure was excited to discover that what appeared to be a new and official Gillian Anderson Twitter account had started up.  Then we noticed a second one...

Despite having links to what appears, at first glance, to be Anderson's official website, the accounts are indeed fake, as confirmed by the Official Gillian Anderson Website (GAWS) when contacted by (Cult)ure:

 "Gillian has NEVER had MySpace or Facebook pages and she's also not on Twitter. When Gillian wants to communicate with her fans, she does so exclusively through the news page of her own web site."

After last week's dispiriting entry, I thought I might have to let Bored to Death go. In the series' third episode, things have started looking up. Jonathan doesn't take any cases but his own when he loses the script Jim Jarmusch has invited him to rewrite, and he spends the rest of the episode trying to track it down.

It's a simple plot, but paring things down helped the show immensely. George (Ted Danson) and Ray (Zack Galifianakis) are both drawn into Jonathan's plot instead of people he repeats bits of exposition to, which is great for the audience because both Danson and Galifianakis get to show off their comedic chops this time out. Galifianakis's laundry list of the things he wanted to do to cheer himself up after therapy was a particular highlight. 

More importantly, Jonathan seemed to come alive this episode. Making out with a sixteen year-old and the possibility of working with Jarmusch did much for his character. Oh, and his hair cut. That also helped.

Last night actor and dancer Patrick Swayze succumb to a two year battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 57 years old.

Swayze wooed an entire generation of women as the dance instructor in what is perhaps the most popular chick flick of all time, Dirty Dancing.

And while his line, "Nobody puts baby in the corner," will live on forever in cinema history, it's the speech he gave as Bodhi, the adrenaline junkie surfer and bank robber in the early 90s action classic Point Break, that will always stay with me:

"This was never about the money. This was about us against the system. That system that kills the human spirit. We stand for something. We are here to show those people inching along the freeways in their metal coffins that the human spirit is still alive!"

Day 1:  Wow. I can follow tweets from Courtney Love! How cool is that? This is like a childhood dream come true!

Day 2:  Jeez, Courtney sure tweets a lot...

Day 3:  What the hell? Courtney tweets ALL THE TIME and most of it doesn't make ANY SENSE.

Day 4:  Unfollow Courtney Love.

Okay, so apparently last July it was announced that Roeper and Ebert's contract for At the Movies was not renewed.

How did this not make bigger waves? How did I not hear about this until now? My internet skills have failed me!!!!

Ebert has been off the show for a few years now, due to health concerns, and Richard "Thumbs Down for LOTR" Roeper has always been largely irrelevant. All the same, it is sad to see Ebert's involvement, even behind the scenes, come to an end.

This looks awesome:

THE BEATLES Box Of Vision® USHERS IN A NEW ERA FOR BEATLES FANS AND COLLECTORS ON SEPTEMBER 8th

Deluxe Companion to the Newly Re-mastered Beatles CDs Includes First LP Size Book Of Complete Album Artwork And Storage For The Entire Beatles CD Catalog

The Beatles Box Of Vision will be available at select Canadian retailers September 8, 2009.

Officially licensed by Apple Corps Ltd. and released in Canada by Distribution Select, the stunning collection includes:

There have been rumblings about this in Dylan cirlces for a few weeks now, but I guess I didn't really believe it was true!  Well, the awesome folks over at Columbia Records sent (Cult)ure the following press release this morning:

Christmas In The Heart will be the 47th album from Bob Dylan. Songs performed by Dylan on this new album include, "Here Comes Santa Claus," "Winter Wonderland," "Little Drummer Boy" and "Must Be Santa."

All of Bob Dylan's U.S. royalties from sales of these recordings will be donated to Feeding America, guaranteeing that more than four million meals will be provided to more than 1.4 million people in need in this country during this year's holiday season. Bob Dylan is also donating all of his future U.S. royalties from this album to Feeding America in perpetuity.

Additionally, Bob Dylan is partnering with two international charities to provide meals during the holidays for millions in need in the United Kingdom and the developing world, and will be donating all of his future international royalties from Christmas In The Heart to those organizations in perpetuity. Details regarding the international partnerships will be announced next week.

Bob Dylan commented, "It's a tragedy that more than 35 million people in this country alone -- 12 million of those children -- often go to bed hungry and wake up each morning unsure of where their next meal is coming from. I join the good people of Feeding America in the hope that our efforts can bring some food security to people in need during this holiday season."

Christmas In The Heart will be available for pre-order starting today on Amazon.com

Hollywood industry mag Variety is reporting that all five original cast members of the Canadian comedy super troupe Kids in the Hall are reuniting for a new series called Death Comes to Town. The eight-part series will be a murder mystery set in Ontario. Filming is set to take place in North Bay, so the 'Ontario' setting, is it seems, does not mean Toronto.  Interesting!

Fanboys is a film with a troubled past; subplots that were shot, then deleted when a new director was brought on board, only to be re-inserted by the original director after that.  The film hit theatres years after its original intended release date, and it played on a limited number of theatres with little marketing to support it.

Which is unfortunate. The film isn't great, but there are definitely three or four huge laughs in there (Peyote Ewok, I'm looking at you) and it is a story with real heart to it.

That said, the studio missed a HUGE opportunity in the marketing of this film. Forget about the all the fantastic cameos (Shatner!). Forget about Seth Rogen playing multiple characters. Forget about all of that.  The studio could have advertised one thing and on thing only, and this movie would have been a hit!

Yes, ladies and gentleman, Fanboys features Veronica Mars in a Slave Girl Leia outfit:

The man who almost single-handedly defined 80's cinema died of a heart attack yesterday. 

John Hughes wrote and/or directed seminal 80's teen films such Ferris Bueller's Day Off, The Breakfast Club, 16 Candles, Weird Science, Pretty in Pink, and 80's comedies such as National Lampoon's Vacation, Uncle Buck, and Planes, Trains and Automobiles.  In the 90's, he wrote successful family films such as the Home Alone series, Beethoven, and Flubber.

Hughes was a huge influence on filmmakers like Kevin Smith, and his films will be remembered and embraced for decades to come.

The final night of Ottawa's Bluesfest finished with all the thunder and excitement a grand finale deserves. Jack White's new super-group, The Dead Weather (featuring members of Queens of the Stone Age, The Kills and The Raconteurs, along with White) took the stage at eight to deliver an incredibly rocking set that was enthusiastically embraced by the crowd.

The highlight of the show, for this listener anyway, was the final song of the encore: an fierce rendition of Bob Dylan's "New Pony" from the 1978 album Street-Legal. (The cover also appears on Horehound, the Dead Weather's recently released debut album.)

The song, I suppose, shouldn't have come as a surprise, given that the White Stripes have previously covered Dylan's "One More Cup of Coffee", as well as his arrangement of the traditional "Blackjack Davie"...  All the same, it was a delightful and surprising finish to a fantastic festival.

Check out the new Youtube Pick - J.K Rowling delivers a POWERFUL commencement speech to a graduating Harvard Class in June 2008. It will move you!!!

In December of 2007 I discovered Bob Dylan. I spent the next year listening to all of his albums in chronological order. My listening habits, however, were weighted towards the studio work, so I'm not as familiar with some of the concert albums.

While fiddling with my new MP3 player, just now, I stumbled across a live version of "It Aint Me Babe" from 1984's Real Live... and it blew my mind.

The 80's are often thought of as the low point in Dylan's career, and yet, here, in this performance of an old Dylan standard, the man sounds as good as ever. I think what really sends shivers up my spine is the moment when Dylan reaches the first chorus and sings, "It aint me babe," and then, suddenly, a crowd of thousands takes over, singing, the "No, no, no's". Dylan becomes silent, letting the crowd sing the next "It aint me babe", before coming in for the final, "It aint me you're looking for, babe," to finish the chorus.

You know what sucks worse than dying?

Dying and having Michael Jackson steal all your press.

In all seriousness, the world lost two icons yesterday.  Farrah Fawcett was THE sex symbol of the 70's thanks to her famous bathing suit poster, and I don't think much needs to be said about Mr. Jackson and his impact on popular music and culture in the 80's and beyond.