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The Terror of Tiny Town is a 1938 American film produced by Jed Buell, directed by Sam Newfield, and starring Billy Curtis. It is the world's only musical Western with an all-midget cast.
Using a conventional Western story with an all midget cast, the filmmakers were able to showcase gags such as cowboys entering the local saloon by walking under the swinging doors, and pint-sized cowboys galloping around on Shetland ponies while roping calves.
Part 2 Here: Join the Monkees on this made for tv psychedelic movie. There are loads of special guests including Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger, Jerry Lee Lewis, Fats Domino, Little Richard, Clara Ward, Buddy Miles, Paul Arnold and We Three.
The opening sequence of McLuhan’s Wake foreshadows the aesthetic quality of the rest of the film. It begins with a montage of video images – crashing seas, a dancing ballerina, the Challenger shuttle – edited together with audio from Marshall McLuhan and original New Age music. This rapid succession of heterogeneous images fades into a retelling of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Descent into the Maelstrom, complete with animation, special effects and narration by Eric McLuhan. As did so much of the literature that Marshall McLuhan read, The Descent into the Maelstrom impacted his thinking. However, the 1840 Poe short story is even more significant according to McLuhan’s Wake; the film suggests the mariner’s struggle in the story provides a metaphor for McLuhan’s own attempt to make sense of the swirling, whirling culture of media that could have swept him away so easily had he not identified the laws regarding them.
McLuhan’s Wake is organized around McLuhan’s last scholarly book, Laws of Media, which was published posthumously by his son. In this lesser-known publication of McLuhan’s, he and his son argued that there are four laws of media: any medium amplifies or intensifies some situation; any medium makes part of the environment obsolete; any medium recreates or revives any older structure or environment; and any medium, when pushed to its limit, can reverse to create the opposite of its intended function. McLuhan’s Wake explores this tetrad of enhancement, obsolescence, retrieval and reversal with examples from places so varied as an elementary school classroom, the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant, and a Jaguar car dealership.
The film assumes that viewers have at least a rudimentary understanding of McLuhan’s theories. With its abundance of examples illustrating the laws of media, McLuhan’s Wake makes the meaning of the tetrad extremely clear. The film also highlights McLuhan’s better known theories on the effects of technology, including its numbing effect, its potential for creating a global village, its retribalization of man, and its incompatibility with a passive model of education. Excerpts of McLuhan’s lectures and interviews illustrate these theories, edited together with interviews from scholars like Neil Postman and Lewis Lapham and narration from performance artist Laurie Anderson. However, the viewer rarely sees the people speaking, causing them to become disembodied. While McLuhan would likely be quite comfortable with this haunting quality of the film, it has the potential to overwhelm an audience of students unfamiliar with McLuhan’s work.
McLuhan’s Wake does acknowledge criticisms of McLuhan’s theories, but it provides no specific explanation, and attributes them mostly to jealousy or lack of full comprehension. The film, which also loosely follows McLuhan’s life chronologically, portrays McLuhan as having died without ever fully being heard. In this way, McLuhan was the real-life mariner who made sense of and escaped the vortex, only to be dismissed by his peers. The film does highlight the resurgence of McLuhan since the computer revolution, but does not acknowledge that much of this resurgence, at least in popular culture, may be a result of people’s misunderstanding of McLuhan. However, the film does make clear that McLuhan himself believed that computers enabled authorities to exert more control over society. It also highlights McLuhan’s strong objection to technological change on the basis of the resultant unpleasant effects on the human body.
Ultimately, McLuhan’s Wake succeeds as a film. Although it is slow-moving at times, it captures the ideas and aesthetic style of McLuhan. However, because of the McLuhanesque qualities of the film, it falls short as an instructional video to introduce students to McLuhan. However, for students who already have some familiarity with McLuhan’s work, the film can provide insights into McLuhan’s thinking. Additionally, the web-based tools accompanying the video include “Understanding McLuhan,” a brief but useful biography of McLuhan, and an educator’s resource guide filled with discussion-provoking questions and possible assignments. McLuhan’s Wake fills a long-time void for a film about Marshall McLuhan, whose relevance to our contemporary culture cannot be denied. Viewers should just be prepared to experience the film as they might any of his writings, as a psychedelic intellectual journey...
Barney depicts Gilmore's murder of a Mormon gas station attendant in both sculptural and dramatic forms. Inferring that Gilmore killed out of a longing for union with his girlfriend, Nicole Baker, he represents their relationship through two conjoined cars: the blue and the white 1966 Mustangs that they coincidentally both owned. In the murder sequence, Gilmore shoots his victim in the back of the head. This act sets in motion the trial and verdict that will condemn him to death, a sentence he embraces despite all efforts to overturn it. Barney stages the judgment of Gilmore in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Gilmore welcomes death, refusing to appeal his sentence and opting for execution by firing squad, in a literal interpretation of the Mormon belief that blood must be shed in order for a sinner to obtain salvation. His execution is staged as a prison rodeo in a cast-salt arena in the middle of the flooded Bonneville Salt Flats. Gilmore is lowered onto a bull and he rides to his death. In Barney's interpretation of the execution, Gilmore was less interested in attaining Mormon redemption than in performing a chronological two-step that would return him to the space of his alleged grandfather, Houdini, with whom he identified the notion of freedom through self-transformation. Seeking escape from his fate, he chose death in an act of ultimate self-will. Gilmore's metaphoric transportation back to the turn of the century is rendered in a dance sequence featuring the Texas two-step. The film ends in the Columbian Exposition hall where Houdini is approached by Gilmore's grandmother Baby Fay La Foe who will seduce him, an act that sets in motion the circular narrative of Cremaster 2.[5]
...what can i say about Mathew Barney's cremaster cycle that hasn't been said already HERE, HERE, and HERE, except to say - this is some weird-ass shit RIGHT HERE...
