The Sneaker Heads amongst you will already know about it, but for the rest of you, well, we just had to introduce you to the final word in sneaker documentaries, Just For Kicks.
Written and Directed by Thibaut de Longeville and Lisa Leone, this 2005 doc traces the journey of the humble sneaker as it jumped from a staple of the playground to the most essential streetwear item for a whole generation of people fired on the Hip-Hop explosion.
Hear how Run DMC turned NYC, then the World on to Addidas, and where they got the inspiration for the laceless look. Listen to Damon Dash, Missy Elliott, Grandmaster Caz, Raekwon and Ad Rock wax on how Kicks Culture laced itself through their backstories and go gooey over the accent of the Air Jordan!
We’re not gonna ruin it for you, watch it for yourself!
So they’ve announced the tracklisting to the hotly anticipated Runaways biopic, with only 8 of the band (and associated members) tracks featured in a run of 14. Original Runaways recordings like ‘Hollywood’ and ‘You Drive Me Wild’ cosy up against covers of ‘Cherry Bomb’ and ‘Dead End Justice’ by Dakota Fanning and Kristen Stewart, presumably included to drag in the TwiHard Dollar.
More interesting is the inclusion of Suzi Quatro, MC5, David Bowie and The Stooges on the album, fleshing out what would have been a sub-greatest hits. There’s also a Joan Jett track, but sadly no Lita Ford. You can Preorder it over at the Runawayssoundtrack.com, with the US Digital dropping on 16th of March and the Wax (we wish) on the 23rd.
Here’s the Tracklisting
1. Nick Gilder – ‘Roxy Roller’ 2. Suzi Quatro – ‘The Wild One’ 3. MC5 – ‘It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World’ 4. David Bowie – ‘Rebel Rebel’ 5. Dakota Fanning – ‘Cherry Bomb’ 6. The Runaways – ‘Hollywood’ 7. Dakota Fanning – ‘California Paradise’ 8. The Runaways – ‘You Drive Me Wild’ 9. Dakota Fanning & Kristen Stewart – ‘Queens Of Noise’ 10. Kristen Stewart & Dakota Fanning – ‘Dead End Justice’ 11. The Stooges – ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ 12. The Runaways – ‘I Wanna Be Where The Boys Are (Live)’ 13. Sex Pistols – ‘Pretty Vacant’ 14. Joan Jett – ‘Don’t Abuse Me’
It’s pretty hard to accept that some of your favourite movies are going to be remade by a Hollywood shitout of ideas and lacking a set of balls. Sometimes it’s even harder to accept that the “rebooters” may have done a decent job.
Hot on the tail of Rob Zombie’s not to awful stab at the first 2 Halloween remakes, comes Samuel Bayer’s stab, or slash, at the ultimate kiddie killer flick, A Nightmare on Elm Street.
There’ll be no Robert Englund, which means that there’s likely to be none of the famous Freddy humour on show. They’ve cast Watchmen’s Jackie Earle Haley as Kruger for what is supposed to be a “reimagining”, but from the trailer looks pretty close to a reshoot. Haley, (who actually auditioned for Johnny Depp’s role as Glen in the original) looks the part, possibly even creepier than Englund’s turn as Freddy, but there’s something missing. Freddy may have been a child slayer, but at least he had character!
Other than that, it doesn’t look too bad. What do you think?
The fights sequences throughout the Rocky franchise have always been deeply engaging but outrageously ridiculous in their mechanics, and sternly serious affairs throughout. So it was refreshing that old Sly decided to break the formula for Rocky 3, by inserting some humour with the Charity Fight between Rocky and Hulk Hogan’s‘Thunderlips’, bringing together valiant art of pugilism with the dubious entertainment of wrestling. Of course, pretty much everybody has seen wrestling doc’s like ‘Beyond the Mat’ or heard Mickey Rourke talk about his training for ‘The Wrestler’, with the general conclusion being that yes, these battle are highly choreographed, but the physical side is brutal stuff.
The Charity Fight in Rocky 3 is a great example of this. You get the feeling that it was Sly’s intention to script a statement on the argument regarding wrestling’s dubious qualities into the film. It’s certainly relevant considering that Rocky 3’s subplot revolves around the ‘Stallion’s’ ascendancy to an entertainment superstar, merchandised to the hilt for the icon greedy public, something the likes of Hulk Hogan knows all about.
Of course, everybody remembers how the fight runs. Rocky thinks it’s all horseplay, laughing off Thunderlipps’ pre-match insults and expecting the Hulkster to ham it up. A succession of bodyslam’s and suplex’s later, Rocko’s shell-shocked in the crowd, getting his gloves cut off so that he can grapple with the bigman on even terms, eventually tossing Thunderlips into the baying audience with the ref calling a draw just to end the madness.
As a fight scene, the wrestling scenes specifically, it’s pretty physical stuff. Yeah, of course it’s all choreographed, the ring in sprung and blah blah blah, but the whole scene took 10 days to film ($$$$ for the extras), with the Hulkster giving Stallone a bit of a hammering, as relayed by the guys themselves in an excerpt from an interview that Hogan conducted with Sly for the WWE website in 2006.
Hogan: Okay. WWE Superstars like me are always getting injured in the ring. As an action star – the greatest action star of all time – what is the worst injury you’ve ever suffered in front of the camera?
Sly: Truthfully, the hardest I was ever hit was actually by you, Hulk Hogan. We didn’t put it in the movie (Rocky III) because I was so traumatized. It was where you threw me into a corner and you leapt up, and you were really, really light on your feet that day, for 310 pounds. You went up and caught me with your shin, believe it or not, on my collarbone. I collapsed to the ground. I’ll never forget, I was laying there and I was thinking, “I don’t want to look. I don’t want to look because that bone is sticking through my flesh and it’s over. Here’s the end of the movie.” So that was the worst actual impact I ever had that was instantaneous, spontaneous, eruptive, absolutely mind-boggling pain at that time. When people tell me, “Oh, wrestling isn’t traumatic,” I say, “Trust me. He was going easy on me and I couldn’t see straight for three days.”
The Rocky 3 match is good fun, though the WWF tried it for real at the inaugural Wrestlemania, in one of the most ridiculous match-up’s in sporting history: Roddy Piper and Paul Orndorfff versus Hulk Hogan and Mr T, with Muhammad Ali as guest referee and FUCKING LIBERACE ringing the bell!!
Revolution needs art, art needs revolution. The fire in the soul of the oppressed will push them to create slogans and guerrilla art that will threaten the state, challenge the status quo and call the people to arms. Its message and the sheer vitriol of which that message is daubed is what makes it potent beyond the guided propaganda of the state.
When the Polish socialist Solidarity movement, led by the Papal backed Lech Wałęsa and born of a trade union at the Gdańsk Shipyard in 1980, broke the iron grip of communist Soviet rule over the country, it did so with a striking and defiant emblem. The graffiti like, thick blood red scrawl of the party’s name was as dangerous to the state as the message behind it. If you want to topple the state, then you’d better have a flag the people can get behind.
The Polish people got behind Solidarity, and the quake that the movement caused shook the communist eastern bloc from its foundations. Here’s some of the fantastic posters produced by the brass hands of the SolidarityParty.
The Logo: Jezy Janiszewski’s Solidarity Poland
Budecki: Count on Me: 1981
Karol Sliwka’s Independent Labour Union of Individual Farmers, Solidarity: 1981
M Wieckowski’s 1918-1981 Independence: 1981
M Wieckowski’s Solidarity: 10 Million Members: 1981
Marek Lewandowski’s May 1st Holiday of Workers: Solidarity 1981
Solidarity: Food Rationing System Collapses
Unidentified Solidarity Poster
Tomasz Sarnecki: High Noon, July 4th Elections: 1989
Solidarity: Vote With Us: 1989
Vote for Solidarity & Lech Walesa: Election Campaign of Solidarity Citizenship Committee
Liars? They’re BATSHIT crazy, and they’re back with a new album, Sisterworld, out on the 9th of March on Mute. While you sit, whittling a 15th century witch from a bar of medical soap, waiting for the album to drop, why not ease yourself in to the right state of mind by eyeing over the video to the new single ‘Scissor’?
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