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<Henry Stewart>

02/24/21 2:48pm

Best Djs in history

Choosing the best DJs in music’s history is no easy task but if anyone can do it then it’s Gia Janashvili. As a Dj. music producer and blog author, Gia Janashvili will give us his personal list of the best Dj’s of all times. The success of a Dj. he says comes from the understanding that everyon likes different styles and genres, and what may be cool for someone may not be so for others. Nonetheless, we will face the challenge of speaking of those that left a mark music’s history with their mixes and productions. Rankings for Best DJ have been around since 1993, when DJ Magazine created the first one, since then. it has becme a popular trend. Different media outlets have created their own rankings, through voting or through other criteria, such as winnings or number of concerts per year. Today dear readers, we want to present our list of the best DJs in music’s history, presented to us by Gia Janashvili;

Carlo Cox: All Time Favorite

The 58 years old DJ was chsen as best DJ for the first time in 1997. The English entertainer is one of the highest grossing DJs in the media, and his specialty are mixes of techmo, house and tech-house. Since 1997. he has always been part of the list of best DJs in history. A true symbol and a guest of honor at festival, currently Cox he monetizes through private channels and distribution channels with his fans.

Tiesto: Two Decades Among The Best

This DJ and producer from the Netherlands is loved by festivals and audiences all around the world. He’s 52 and has been mixing since 1984, in 1994 his first album came out. The best electronic music DJ in history for many, Tiesto was added to the ranking for the first time in 2002. He has received numerous awards and recognitions for his music ever since.

Paul Van Dyk: Awards, Award, Awards

Best electronic music DjsThis 49 years old german DJ is globally known for the trance music he has produced. He’s being part of the rankings of best DJs in history for over a decade. His career began in 1991 in Berlin and from there he jumped to stages around the world. He has received more than 30 different awards throughout his career, from different companies and media. His discography is one of the widest among current DJs.

David Guetta: Grammy And Sales

The frenchman Guetta is one of the most recgnized and loved DJs in the international stage. He’s 53 and began his musical career between the 80’s and 90’s. His work in 2009 earned him a Grammy Award and over 5.5 milion copies sold worldwide. Considered by many the best electronic music DJ in history among other genres, thanks to his record breaking sales. He has managed to sell over 45 million records throughout his career, becoming the first DJ to achieve this and for many the main musical companion in nightlife.

Marttin Garrix: Top Spots

The Dutch youth is a big name in current music. At only 24 years of age, Garrix has taken the leap of spot 40 in the rankings to top 1 in preference in the last ten years. His musical career began at age 8, learning how to play the guitar and later, he fell in love with electronic music by wathcing Tiesto and discovering the energy in his music. His career has grown exponentially since 2013, becoming DJ numer 1 in 2016, 2017 and 2018.

Avicii: Recognition Beyond The Veil

His premature passing hasn’t undermine the vitality in his music. The Swedish DJ managed to reach millions of people since 2011, but his first experience with music came at age 8. He was always listed in the top spots of DJs rankings, and his music was recognized by the biggest names in the industry, like MTV, The Billboard Award, Teen Choice Award and many others. His sudden passing left a mark in music history that will forever stay.

Djs in tomorrowland

The List Goes On

Sadly, the available space for this list falls short of the huge amout of talents that require naming. If we wished to talk about all the best DJs in history we would need far more in terms of space, for music’s history is full of great talents and geniuses that have shocked our senses with their music. Steve Aoki, Afrojack, Marshmello, these are just some of the biggest names in the industry tha fall short of makng it on the list, yet theay also deserve recognition. let this short article serve as a start up guide on the most popular DJs according to our opinion, and let our readers add their own artists to create their personal list.

12/20/20 5:52am
Scrooged Christmas Classic

There are many fantastic Christmas themed films to pick from, and each year a new film is released in the hopes of becoming one of the Christmas classics we will want to see again the following year. With so many wonderful films to choose from, it’s easy to overlook the old standbys. There are several fantastic Holiday classics that deserve to be watched again this winter so whether you’re searching for a heartwarming story or a laugh-out-loud comedy, this list is for you!

Let’s take a look at some of the best Christmas movies from 1969 to 2017;

Palestinian Christmas (2017)

The film “Palestinian Christmas”, directed by Shadi Qutob and starring Eman Esfandi, Anna Clare Hicks, and Paul Grubb, is a must-see on Arabic Christmas movie lists and also one of our personal favorites. The film is a Christmas comedy that depicts the story of two Christian families who were neighbors in Palestine until one day they chose to move to California with no other ambitions but to seek a brighter future. Suddenly, they find themselves in Los Angeles, where they must withstand Hollywood culture and American Christmas traditions while also surviving their neighbors from back home. The film is rated 8.3/10 on IMDb and on Rotten Tomatoes it has a rating of 91%.

Elf (2003)

Elf is about Buddy (Will Ferrell), who was raised in the North Pole by Santa’s elves. He heads to New York City to find his father, played by James Caan who thinks Christmas is just an excuse for children to ask for more toys.

However, he soon realizes that Christmas is actually about spending quality time with family and friends.  He later tries to save Christmas for his son even though he does not believe in Santa Claus. Elf is rated 7.6 on IMDb and has a christmas rating of 85% on Rotten Tomatoes.

The Polar Express (2004)

The story is about a boy who goes on an adventure to the North Pole and learns the true meaning of christmas. The film is an adaptation of the book by Chris Van Allsburg. The film is rated 7.1/10 on IMDb and 74% on Rotten Tomatoes.

This Christmas themed movie is pretty similar to “A Christmas Story” only less serious and good for children/tweens. It has some funny parts but mostly it’s family friendly so parents can watch it with their kids without having to worry too much about language or adult content.

The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)

The Nightmare Before Christmas is a 1993 American stop-motion animated musical dark fantasy film directed by Henry Selick and produced/co-written by Tim Burton. The story follows Jack Skellington, a being from ‘Halloween Town’ who accidentally lands in Christmas Town and decides to take over the christmas preparations, but he only manages to become depressed and confused as christmas doesn’t go as his plan. This movie is great for adults that are into animation, but the film is also suitable for families with young children. It’s rated 7.9/10 on IMDb and 96% on Rotten Tomatoes.

home alone movie

Home Alone (1990)

No Christmas without the filme “Home Alone”. It tells the story of a young boy, Kevin, who is accidently left behind when his family leaves for France and has to defend himself against 2 burglars. The movie became a Christmas classic and it received positive reviews from critics on both IMDb(7.9/10) and Rotten Tomatoes 88%.

Die Hard (1988)

Die Hard from 1988 is the first movie in a serie of five and the only one with a Christmas theme. It’s an action movie with Bruce Willis as the lead actor, and Alan Rickman as a villain. It’s a typical christmas-time scenario where all is peaceful and quiet, there’s christmas music playing, people shopping for christmas presents etc.. And then along comes the villain who could care less about christmas, he just wants to do his business. And this is where christmas themed movies get interesting because the main character has to figure out how to beat the man who’s got him cornered, with no experience in fighting christmas villains whatsoever! The fim is rated 8.6/10 on IMDb and 97% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Scrooged (1988)

Scrooged is a Christmas themed film with Bill Murray as the lead actor, where he plays Frank Cross an arrogant TV executive who plans Christmas specials every year. He’s also planning to put on “A Christmas Carol” with a modern twist to it, but his boss won’t sign the deal unless he gets an A-list Christmas star to play Christopher Cross. The film is rated  7.4/10 on IMDb and 67% on Rotten Tomatoes.

It’s christmas time again (1976)

This film is about an orphaned girl who spends christmas with her aunt and uncle, they really don’t want her there and would rather open their presents early. It’s christmas time again is rated 7.1 on IMDb and has a christmas rating of 98% on Rotten Tomatoes.

The Christmas story (1974)

This Christmas themed movie is about a man who is down on his luck struggles to see the magic of Christmas. The christmas story from 1974 is rated 8.2 on IMDb and has a Christmas rating of 97% on Rotten Tomatoes.

A Charlie Brown Christmas (1969)

This movie debuted in theaters in November of 1969 and is generally considered first Christmas themed movie ever produced. Despite it’s age, it still has a very good rating on IMDb & Rotten Tomatoes (8/10). It tells the story of how Charlie Brown tries to find the true meaning of Christmas after he gets depressed with everything surrounding Christmas; from his peers making fun of him for celebrating Christmas to the commercialization of Christmas which gets him very depressed. Eventually his friend takes him to the woods where he shoots off his own Tannenbaum, which is seen as a Christmas tree by Linus. All around the Christmas tree are lit up lanterns, which according to Linus symbolize what Christmas really should be about The story has good messages for kids but also teaches older viewers that Christmas can’t always be peachy & it may take you some time to realize the true meaning yourself. Currently A Charlie Brown Christmas is only available on Apple TV.

Christmas movies are a great way to get into the holiday spirit, and to keep it a bit longer. They provide entertainment and cheer, and can help to create a festive atmosphere. So if you’re looking for a fun way to spend Christmas this year, be sure to watch one, or all, of these classic movies – You won’t regret it!

07/15/15 8:00am

photo courtesy of IFC Films

The Stanford Prison Experiment
Directed by Kyle Patrick Alvarez
Opens July 17

This harrowing dramatization of the infamous titular incident is hardly the first film to take it as its subject. But previous inspirees, from 2001’s Das Experiment to its straight-to-DVD American remake, The Experiment, have been “based on” Dr. Philip Zimbardo’s questionable research into power dynamics, resembling it rather than re-creating it; whether for provocation or titillation, those depictions moved past mere sadism into manslaughter, their filmmakers not realizing that such hyperbole wasn’t necessary; as The Stanford Prison Experiment so efficiently demonstrates, the real story is horrible enough without embellishment.

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05/26/15 7:59am

photo courtesy of Radius

It all began with The Pleasure of Being Robbed, a title that in hindsight perfectly encapsulates what it was like to be young during the Bloomberg years—having fun, going broke. In the movie, released in New York in 2008, Eléonore Hendricks plays a young woman who indulges her curiosity about the lives of others by stealing their stuff: handbags, books, photographs. Generous critics might have seen it as an airy indie fable. But most were unkinder; a headline in the Village Voice called it “A Whimsical Gust of Nothing,” and, in Slant, Nick Schager ended his one-star review by suggesting “the film would be better off being called The Pleasure of Being Shot, with Hendricks on the receiving end of the bullet.”

But I saw something else, something that’s kept me coming back to the Safdie brothers’ work every time they release something new: it wasn’t so much a fable as a parable, a story about New York City and how we live in it now. With its white woman effortlessly robbing us of the things that make us us, stealing the city out from under us, it was, weirdly and allegorically, about gentrification, displacement, development, white return—whatever you want to call the most pressing issue of the last 20 years and the next 20 years, an issue that the Safdies’s subsequent oeuvre has only delved into more deeply.

The brothers—Josh, who lives in Harlem, and Benny, who lives on the Upper West Side, because “Uptown still has a living-city vibe”—make movies about New York like no one else, finding little bits of the old city hidden in plain sight on the streets of the new one, little reminders of the Koch era sneaking into the post-Giuliani landscape like lost time travelers. The people from whom we look away every day are the ones the Safdies turn and point their cameras at, whom they make time for even when their characters won’t. “It’s an onion city,” the brothers write to me by email, “in that the outer layer is always indicative of the many layers beneath it. New York will never be dead because the soul of the city lies in its sidewalks.”

Their latest film, Heaven Knows What, is a perfect example. It’s “Inspired by” a soon-to-be published memoir about drug addiction and homelessness by Arielle Holmes, who also stars. “It’s more ‘based on’ than ‘inspired by,’” Josh writes. “It’s all the same, really. There’d be no film without Arielle and her story. Heaven Knows What is her story. I commissioned her writing. [Cowriter and coeditor] Ronald Bronstein, Benny, [producer] Sebastian [Bear-McClard], we all read her incredibly original writings as they came in. Most times I couldn’t read as fast as she could write! (Granted, I’m a slow reader.) Ronnie and I took her writings and condensed some characters and truncated time, as things always seemed to happen very quickly in her world and in her writings. We just wanted to get at the greater truth. Sometimes to tell the truth, you gotta lie a little.”

The story of how Josh and Arielle met “feels like a Disney film to me at this point,” he writes. It was “while deep in research in the Diamond District. She was there, working as an apprentice for a dealer while moonlighting at a dominatrix club in the 20s and living on the street. I stopped her as she was going into the subway and told her she really caught my attention, and that she should maybe be in this Diamond District film we were trying to do. I didn’t know she was homeless, madly in love with a beautiful crazy person named Ilya, or addicted to dope. I found that out after, during our second meeting. I didn’t know we were gonna make a film together till months into our friendship. I don’t know what drew me to her; you gotta look at what draws one person to another. I became her friend, and she let me into her world. I found an affinity in Arielle and in her friends. It was always now, which in the moment is always exciting. The problem became the curse of the now. With them, there was no future and no past, just drama. I’m a drama addict.”

The resulting movie feels present-tense, with little plot beyond immediate need. It’s a movie about young junkies, and like addiction itself it follows a basic cycle of ever-repeating conflict (how will I get my fix?), resolution (I’m high as fuck!) and conflict (now how will I get my next fix?). It’s a hard-eyed look that eschews sentimentality or theatricality; it’s not sociological—it’s ethnographic (with a nod to film history, as it’s based around the Sherman Square area, a la Panic in Needle Park.) Like the tiles of the mental hospital seen behind the opening credits, covered in a layer of institutional grime no set dresser could so authentically distress, the details give the movie an unfakeable verisimilitude: dirty fingers and bloody cuticles, bad teeth and glassy eyes, malnourished bodies and crushed cigarette butts clearly picked up off the sidewalk.

When I ask where that attention to detail comes from, Josh writes, “When I was a kid and I would draw a scene, I would often add as many details as I could. I liked the effect of feeling them rather than noticing them. When we were kids, our dad filmed us constantly with his camcorder, often focusing on small moments. As a kid, knowing that a camera is a tool for documentation, we’d probably ask ourselves, ‘Why is this moment so important? All I’m doing is combing the carpet with my hands.’”

The authenticity in Heaven Knows What is built in the foreground but also in the margins—with extras and bit players (including the rapper Necro), with familiar locations viewed anew in a different context or from a novel point-of-view. It feels like Kids for the 21st century. That’s one of the many titles the brothers cite when I ask which New York films have influenced them, as well as On the Bowery, Juice, The Cool World, Scorsese—from Taxi Driver to “Life Lessons” to Wolf of Wall Street—Jon Alpert and Spike Lee. “Saturday Night Fever is maybe one of the top 10 films of all time,” they write. “Richard Price always writes NYC with great nuance. I love Bloodbrothers as a great Bronx film… Harmony Korine’s Julien Donkey-Boy is a great Queens film, as is, of course, Coming to America… James Gray did a great job in Two Lovers and We Own The Night… On the lower-budget side of things, Michael Bilandic’s Happy Life, lensed by Sean Price Williams [who also shot Heaven], captures a great New York.” (That said, they deny the new movie is inherently New York. “If Arielle did not live and breath here, I genuinely believe that Heaven Knows What could have been in any town,” Josh writes.)

“A well-captured city [in a movie] should act as a plane ticket and a felt experience, one without the stress of turbulence and long security lines,” they write. The brothers’ earlier films, Pleasure of Being Robbed and Daddy Longlegs (also known as Go Get Some Rosemary), introduced viewers to the city from the point-of-view of its children of privilege. The bad father of the latter was played by Bronstein, director of the Richard Brody-celebrated Frownland (2007) and now a regular Safdie collaborator. His character was a Gen Xer aged out of hipsterdom into parenthood, but acting with startling (if also amusing) entitlement, not just in the way he’d drug or abandon his young children but in the way he abused his city.

I love the scene in which he becomes cross that a mugger (played by Abel Ferrara, a perfect cameo) made him drop his ice cream cones, but even better is another, in which Bronstein takes up tagging, scrawling “DAD” across a doorway, and then can’t believe that the cops who catch him treat him roughly. It’s gentrification in a single scene: the reclamation of a classic urban signifier, recast as anodyne, the watering down of the urban experience into the suburban experience where everything, even Times Square or graffiti, has to be family-friendly—and then the outrage when the old city, in the guise of the NYPD, oozes back up like the slime in Ghostbusters II.

Arielle Holmes, Benny Safdie, Josh Safdie; photo by Eleonore Hendricks

 

The Safdies’ last two films have been about people from the other side of the privilege line, those still struggling in the world their first protagonists took for granted. Lenny Cooke was atypical for them, not only because it was a feature-length documentary and a sports film—about a promising high school athlete whose career unspectacularly fizzled—but because it also used a lot of footage they themselves hadn’t shot. In the context of their filmography, though, the movie helps us transition to Heaven Knows What, whose characters seem to inhabit the city that Lenny Cooke was brought up in: the hard city. Hendricks and Bronstein took whatever they wanted; Cooke had to hustle for it.

Lenny Cooke had the misfortune to be born into the unenviable socioeconomic conditions of 1980s Bushwick (before it became the basin for New Williamsburg’s spillover). The heroes of Heaven Knows What are to some extent more responsible for their lots in life: they’re junkies, not exactly born into this (unless you subscribe to hard determinism). Still, the Safdies make you feel the unforgiving demand that governs their lives; the movie is staged narrative, but it feels like documentary. “Ari says the film feels exactly like what her life felt like then,” Josh writes. “We tried to stick to the facts as much as possible. It’s a true psychodrama in that regard.”

The leads—especially Holmes, but also Buddy Duress, who plays the drug dealer she hooks up with for most of the movie—bring a naturalism to their performances that feels hard-earned. When the characters shout at each other on the streets—and they’re always shouting, melodrama being a side effect of youth and substance abuse—while gathering up their cardboard signs and Duane Reade shopping bags, or while they’re trying to bum Metrocard swipes, you have to stop to wonder: Was I there when they shot this? This all looks so familiar. Our city exists not next to theirs but right on top of it. “New York City just happens to be filled with a romanticism that comes with island-life, and being able to live 1,000 feet from Donald Trump and pay 1,000 times less rent than him,” the brothers write.

We all live on top of each other in the Safdies’ city. My favorite of their movies was barely a movie at all: it was a program of shorts called Buttons that played DUMBO’s now-shuttered reRun Theater in August 2011. I mean shorts: most of the films, shot by the brothers or Alex Kalman (a friend and producing partner whom they met in college), last only seconds, and are verité glimpses of life in Bloomberg’s city: people eating lunch, others riding the subway, a mailman with a radio, flies in an amorous pas de deux—what I once called “a pocket-camera ode to urban amblers and the sights they espy.” It was like they took my favorite parts of their movies—the way they’ll linger on the guy with a hot dog cart—and purified them, unburdened them of the weight of narrative demand. The “buttons” encourage us, like all the Safdies’ work, to keep our eyes and ears open when it’s so easy to tunnel-vision your way through the city. Everything that makes New York interesting enough to be worth living in is happening around your the edges of your senses. All you have to do is turn your head—or, if you’re the Safdie brothers, your camera.

03/11/15 6:23am

Image courtesy of Radius

It Follows
Directed by David Robert Mitchell
Opens March 13

It’s like John Hughes has become John Carpenter. Those who saw writer-director David Robert Mitchell’s 2010 debut, The Myth of the American Sleepover, a portrait of adolescent hesitation whose romantic imagery belied its textual cynicism, might be surprised to see his byline on this creepy-as-fuck supernatural horror movie. But then again, maybe not. Myth’s depiction of lite pubescent debauchery—kissing, junk food, beer ‘n’ wine—played like a slasher movie with the killer edited out, leaving behind just the sensitive and wistful observations of suburban end-of-summer rituals, from skinny dipping to egging houses. It Follows opens on a suburban street similar to those wandered in the previous film—both were shot around Detroit—as though it were set in a neighboring house. Mitchell emerges not as the nostalgic chronicler of youth he might have seemed, the second coming of a Sixteen Candles maker, but as a documenter of suburban life and the variety of tales contained therein: the innocent and the awful, from Colonial Street to Elm Street.

Maika Monroe plays a coed at Wayne State who has sex one evening with her new, seemingly nice boyfriend; he cums, chloroforms her, ties her to a chair, and explains something very serious when she wakes up. Now she has It—a unique curse involving a supernatural menace, a slow-moving stalker who will always be coming after her until it kills her or she has sex with someone else and passes it on. This “Follower” can take any form it wants, usually something eldritch, like an elderly person in a hospital robe, identifiable by its undistracted, direct-line approach; oh, also, no one else can see it. Good luck!

Myth felt relatively chaste, even a little slut-shamey, and It Follows adheres to a similar if intensified morality: these characters are a few years older, graduated from making out to doing it, and thus the stakes are higher. The worst thing that could happen to Myth’s heroes? Their love could go unrequited. The worst thing that could happen to Monroe is she’ll be brutally killed, her body bent and broken. It’s easy to want to interpret this venereal hex as a personification of AIDS—the lead user-review on IMDb calls the movie “a game of psychosexual-tag-you’re-it featuring the most sinister STD ever”—but the details complicate such a reading. (You don’t get to get rid of HIV by having more sex.) Instead, it’s more about the fucked up relationship between Eros and Thanatos; the movie is so terrifying because the long takes, circular pans and goosefleshing musical cues expose something more fundamental than sexual anxiety: the persistent terror of dying, of never feeling safe, never being able to just go home and lock the door, never being able to stand still or fall asleep. The Follower is inescapable, always approaching, bound to catch up eventually—it’s certain, like taxes and that other thing. Mitchell transforms our usually abstract fears into a menace more distressing than most boogeymen. It Follows is as scary as a serious consideration of your own death.