"One of Ann-Margret’s most famous moments in 'Tommy' involved geysers of baked beans being shot directly at her."

"'They came down a chute and then — pow! — it threw me about five feet back!' she said. 'And it smelled!' She recalled that [Ken] Russell said her character was meant to be experiencing a nervous breakdown during the scene, but to some viewers it looked more like she was having an orgasm. 'That’s fine with me!' she added brightly. Townshend thinks the director, Russell, took a bit too much pleasure in having her do the scene repeatedly. 'Ken loved to have a beautiful woman in his clutches covered in beans,' he said. 'Let’s just do it again!' For the new album, he believes Ann-Margret made a perfect choice in having him perform with her on the Everly Brothers song. 'My acoustic guitar style is loosely based on Don Everly’s,' he said."

From "At 81, Ann-Margret Is Finally Living Her Rock ’n’ Roll Dream/The actress and musician, who first burst out in 'Bye Bye Birdie' in 1963, is releasing a new album of old rock covers featuring guests like her 'Tommy' co-star Pete Townshend" (NYT).

ADDED: As for the beans — to add to the endless succession of beans — Roger Daltrey got there first. Here's Rolling Stone in 1967:

"When a blue spirit breathes life into the puppet, Geppetto is initially terrified... But the pair soon settle down, with Pinocchio... helping Geppetto repair the huge crucified Christ..."

"... that hangs like a tortured marionette in the church where congregants shriek about demonic puppets. 'Everybody likes him,' says Pinocchio, pointing up at what looks like a prop from Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971). 'He’s made of wood too. Why do they like him and not me?' This is just one of many profoundly philosophical questions... that Del Toro’s Pinocchio is not afraid to raise. While previous film adaptations... have prioritised a populist litany of instructional morals (honour your father, do not tell lies, do not be lazy), Del Toro’s version celebrates its antihero’s agent-of-chaos nature.... "

Writes Mark Kermode, in "Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio review – a superbly strange stop-motion animation" (The Guardian).

 

What to watch from the Criterion's "80s Horror" collection?

 

You can see the huge set of titles here. 

We chose the one where Hugh Grant says "I hear you're having trouble with a snake."

Pagan vampires, a two-hundred-foot worm, and a profusion of phallic imagery collide in Ken Russell’s typically outré take on Bram Stoker’s most infamous novel. On an excavation in the English countryside, an archaeologist (Peter Capaldi) uncovers a mysterious skull that he comes to believe belonged to the D’Ampton Worm, a mythical snake-like creature thought to have been slain long ago by an ancestor of aristocrat James D’Ampton (Hugh Grant). The strange presence of the enigmatic Lady Sylvia Marsh (Amanda Donohoe) and a series of unexplained disappearances soon hint that the legend of the D’Ampton Worm may be far from dead.

Did we laugh? Of course, we laughed!

Why didn't I see it back when it came out (in 1988)? I loved Ken Russell. "The Devils" was on my list of 5 favorite movies. And, as a law clerk, I'd worked on the case about "Altered States." But I was influenced by the reviews of the time. Which ones, I can't remember, but Roger Ebert wrote:

People expect something special from Russell, whose inflamed filmography includes such items as “Women in Love,” “The Music Lovers,” “The Devils,” “The Boyfriend,” “Tommy,” “Altered States,” “Crimes of Passion” and “Salome’s Last Dance.” Every one of Russell’s films has been an exercise in wretched excess. Sometimes it works. Russell loves the bizarre, the gothic, the overwrought, the perverse. The strangest thing about “The Lair of the White Worm” is that, by his standards, it is rather straight and square. 

Not enough wretched excess!

Feel Facebook/Touch Facebook... On Facebook, we'll see the glory/From Facebook, we'll get opinion/From Facebook, we'll get the story...

Did you know you'll be able to feel and touch the glory that is the Facebook Metaverse? They're inventing a glove. 

Vox reports:

On Tuesday afternoon, Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, made a supposedly exciting announcement: a glove... the prototype haptic glove uses principles from soft robotics and employs pneumatic and electroactive actuators to quickly inflate tiny air pockets on the fingers and palm of the glove. These actuators are essentially tiny motors that can create the sensation of pressure and, hence, touch. The idea here is that if Meta could fit thousands of these actuators onto a haptic glove and combine those sensations with the visual input of a VR headset or augmented reality glasses, which project digital images onto the real world, the wearer could reach out and feel virtual objects. With gloves like these, you might one day shake the hand of someone else’s avatar in the metaverse and feel the squeeze.

Okay, everyone just thought about sex. We're not going to all this trouble to shake hands (or are you one of those sick freaks who get pleasure from crushing a hand offered to you for an innocent shake?). 

Here's a vision of Metaverse, felt with a glove:

 

My go-to rock music reference was The Who, but I must acknowledge the obvious 2 runners-up: 

1. The Beatles — Glove! 

 

2. Spinal Tap — "Smell the Glove":

 

It's such a fine line between stupid and clever.

"I believe in what I’m doing wholeheartedly, passionately, and what’s more, I simply go about my business. I suppose such a thing can be annoying to some people."

Thank you, Ken Russell, for that insight, and for committing passionately to your business. Carrying on without the great filmmaker — dead now at 84 — maybe we can can go about our business, with a little more passion and a little less attention to how annoying we are to some people.

For many years — through the 1980s and 1980s — I had a fixed list of 5 films that were my personal favorites. 2 were Ken Russell films: "Mahler" and "The Devils."*

His 1971 film “The Devils,” based on real events that had inspired a play by John Whiting and a book by Aldous Huxley, tells the grotesque story of demonic possession at a French convent, complete with exorcism rituals and blasphemous orgies. Mr. Russell, who converted to Catholicism in the 1950s, saw the film as an attack on the corrupt union of church and state.

The American funders and the British censors called for cuts. The Catholic Church condemned the movie when it was screened at the Venice Film Festival. Even in its edited version, the film was banned by several local authorities in Britain; it was further trimmed in the United States to avoid an X-rating....

Reviewing “The Devils” in The New York Times, Vincent Canby called Mr. Russell “a hobbyist determined to reproduce ‘The Last Supper’ in bottle tops.” Pauline Kael called him a “shrill, screaming gossip.”

Mr. Russell was not above fighting back. Appearing on live television shortly after the release of “The Devils” with the British critic Alexander Walker, who had denounced the film as “monstrously indecent,” Mr. Russell hit him on the head with a rolled-up newspaper.

I don't think there's a decent "Devils" DVD, or I'd order it right now. Wikipedia — with "citation needed" — says: "The British Film Institute have announced they will release the UK-theatrical Version (111 minutes) on DVD in March 2012."

I wish, when a great director dies, HBO (or some other TV channel) would put all his movies up on Video on Demand. I hesitate to link to the trailer for the movie because it's such a pathetic trailer.

I can't even find the rolled-up-newspaper incident on YouTube.
_________________________________

* The other 3 were: "Aguirre the Wrath of God," "My Dinner with Andre," and "City of Women."

"Why portray the king as a cross-dressing homosexual who shoots Protestants dressed as birds in his royal park for fun?"

"Because that's exactly as I saw him," answers Ken Russell, looking back 40 years at his truly outrageous film "The Devils."

Russell's film was adapted from Aldous Huxley's 1952 non-fiction novel The Devils of Loudon, as well as John Whiting's follow-up 1960 play The Devils. They were all inspired by the notorious case of supposed demonic possession in 17th-century France, in which a charismatic Catholic priest, Urbain Grandier, was accused of bewitching nuns. The accusation was trumped up by Richelieu as an excuse to destroy a Protestant stronghold....

Russell mentions he was inspired by one particular line in Huxley's book. "The exorcism of sister Jeanne," wrote Huxley, "was equivalent to rape in a public lavatory." Hence the film's vision of Loudon as a pristine, white-stone city and the convent as clad in white tiles.... Russell recalls the film's final shot: "The girl goes up the hill of broken bricks." The girl (Grandier's recently widowed wife) walks over Loudun's ruins into a landscape in which the only objects are posts topped by carriage wheels, on which Protestant corpses turn in the wind. "Polanski is said to have been inspired by that shot for the last scene of The Pianist," [says Russell's wife  Lisi Tribble].

Russell then suggests The Devils is a religious film that takes inspiration from his own Catholic faith. "It's about the degradation of religious principles," he says. "And about a sinner who becomes a saint."

I had a list of my 5 favorite films that remained the same 5 films for quite a few years, and "The Devils" on the list. What was the rest of the list? Can I remember? "Aguirre the Wrath of God," "My Dinner With Andre," "Mahler," and "It's a Gift." I have had the same 11 films on my Blogger profile list for a long time, maybe going all the way back to 2004. 3 of my old 5 favorites are still on the list. The 2 that are not are Ken Russell films. Ken Russell was really important back in the 1970s and 80s, and I've forgotten about him in the last 20 years. I wonder what sort of impression "The Devils" would make on me now. Or "Mahler." Or all those other fabulous Ken Russell movies we submerged ourselves in, in the isolation chamber of the movie theater.