Panos Cosmatos: What's In My Bag?

I blogged a bunch about Panos Cosmatos' Beyond the Black Rainbow awhile back - see here for links to all past articles. Fans of the film should check out this rather amusing Youtube clip, in which Panos reveals his commitment to genre and recommends some rather unexpected titles (have I mentioned lately how much I hate Ridley Scott's Black Rain? Mostly because of its title, which seems to have been designed to overwrite and obfuscate the existence of Shohei Imamura's sensitive and painful film about the after-effects of the Hiroshima bombing - a film which actually does have black rain in it, as is not the case with Scott's movie. Plus the film is filled with blatant cliches and misperceptions about Japan; no one who has spent so much as a weekend there would credit it. With the possible exception of WWII propaganda movies or more recent fare like The Last Samurai or Memoirs of a Geisha - both of which I have both successfully managed to completely avoid seeing - it perhaps represents the bottom of the film cannister when it comes to Americans getting it wrong about Japan).

By the by, Beyond the Black Rainbow is now available on  Blu-Ray and DVD!