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You Might Be Smiling Now... by The Just Joans

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Album Watch

Cult Scottish miserabilists The Just Joans are delighted to be releasing their first new album in...

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Allison Anders recommended Carnival of Souls (1962) in Movies (curated)

"Another incredible thing about Criterion is that in addition to the classics, the treasures, the widely acclaimed, they also have a true love for cult and lowbrow cinema. Director Herk Harvey explains on the Carnival of Souls commentary that they had hoped the film would have an art-house release, and they actually approached a distributor successful in that market and were told that, since it wasn’t in a foreign language, it didn’t really fit. I’m sure being American-made wasn’t the only reason this was a hard fit for distributors, but it was interesting in terms of what art houses were looking for at that time and how the filmmakers saw the film’s niche. This film taught me how to watch Mulholland Drive . . . which is to say, if you stay with the mood, without fighting it, your intuition will serve you far better than the plot and structure and logic your brain is craving. Because essentially all stories are simple; what isn’t simple is the underneath of it all. And that’s more rewarding in the end. I was on a plane about ten years ago when a businessman sat down next to me. Like most people, I dreaded having to talk to someone new. I figured he wouldn’t talk to me anyway, ’cause I have tattoos and he looked very straight-up corporate. He immediately smiled and asked me who I was, what I did for a living. I told him I made movies, but probably none he’d ever heard of. Indie movies. I figured that would shut him up so I could look out the window and mope. He smiled big—“Oh, you mean like cult movies?” I shrugged kindly—well, yeah, I guess you could say that, hopefully that. He said his sister had been in a movie when he was a youngster. A film as independent as it gets. One that had become a cult classic. Somehow I just knew what he was going to say next. His sister was not Candace but another girl in the film, and that man and I talked about Carnival of Souls for well over an hour. And then we spent the next two hours of our flight engrossed in each other as he told me vividly of the supremely radical life he’d led prior to becoming a businessman for the environment! You just never know . . ."

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