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2016 is off to a rough start. Less than a month into the new year and we.ve already lost legends like David Bowie and Alan Rickman, not to mention that 2015 wrapped up with the death of Motorhead.s Lemmy Kilmister. Also gone are super producer Run Run Shaw and soul singer Clarence Reid, better known as the foul-mouth grandfather of hip-hop, Blowfly. But the year is not done, as today arrives with the sad news that legendary character actor Abe Vigoda has passed away at the age of 94. According to his daughter, Carol Vigoda Fuchs, Vigoda died Tuesday morning at his home in Woodland Park, New Jersey. In 1982, rumors of his death began to circulate due to an erroneous People Magazine article, and later a website was even created to track whether or not he was alive. The actor fully embraced this to maintain career momentum, and he frequently appeared...

The New York Times is reporting today that singer, songwriter and producer, Clarence Reid, who performed under the name Blowfly, died on January 17 in hospice care in Lauderdale Lakes, Fla. He was 76 years old. According to his manager and musical collaborator, Tom Bowker, Reid had liver cancer and multiple organ failure, which led to his death last week. Known as the original dirty rapper, Blowfly wrote songs for several hit R&B groups in the 1960s and '70s. But he also recorded albums, and performed, usually seen in flamboyant costumes, known especially for his x-rated raunchy raps, starting with a track called "Rapp...

Clarence Reid, the singer turned rapping parodist who had a hand in hip-hop's evolution as the genre's weird, foul-mouthed uncle, died Sunday, according to updates across his social-media accounts. The 76-year-old was last week admitted to hospice care because he suffered from terminal liver cancer and multiple organ failure. "Clarence Reid, the genius known both by his given name and as Blowfly, the Master of Class, passed peacefully today, January 17th, in his hospice room," read a Facebook status written by one of his longtime collaborators. "Thank you for supporting Clarence's 50 year music career — especially these last few years." Reid's musical career began in the ’60s as an R&B singer-producer-songwriter, building a body of his own work and penning hits for other artists such as Betty Wright, Kc and the Sunshine Band, and Gwen McCrae. It wouldn't be until the ’70s that Reid unveiled his vulgar alter...

The name Clarence Reid probably doesn't ring many bells unless you are a soul music aficionado. Reid was among the chief architects of the Miami soul sound in the '60s and '70s and the author of many a hit record.  What many people outside of the business don't know is that by night, Reid would don a superhero costume and become Blowfly, the original dirty rapper. Or so he says.  The party scene originated around the late '60s-early '70s, and several people, including the venerable Rudy Ray Moore, can lay claim to being the originator.  However, any definitive claims as to its origin are specious at best, but that's part of Blowfly's charm.  Johnathan Furmanski's documentary, The Weird World of Blowfly, is as much a...

Do you want to watch a 66 year old man dressed like a superhero lay down some of the filthiest rhymes you’ve heard this side of a 2 Live Crew record? If you answered yes to this question, then you’ll probably want to check out Jonathan Furmanski’s new documentary, “The Weird World of Blowfly”. The film follows Clarence Reid, Aka Blowfly, a purple-sequin-suit-wearing Mc with a dirty, dirty mouth, and an even dirtier mind. This is an artist with songs titles like “Big Fat Ho” and “Rap Dirty”, albums called “Porno Freak”, and who does a rendition of “Do the Twist” entitled “Suck My Dick”. Dropping albums since 1971, some people consider Blowfly one of the first rappers ever. That is the point that “Weird World” tries to drive home, with mixed results, and notable personalities like Chuck D, Ice T, and Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys, will try to convince you.

Title: The Weird World of Blowfly Director: Jonathan Furmanski At 72 years old, Clarence Reid could be your cranky neighbor or arthritic uncle — until, that is, he slips on a homemade superhero costume and starts spitting out raunchy rhymes that would make 2 Live Crew proud. At once a sort of niche canonization along the lines of “The Devil and Daniel Johnston” and a more generalized travelogue documentary about the third-tier touring life for marginal and nostalgia acts, “The Weird World of Blowfly,” so named for Reid’s funky alter ego, is a nonfiction curio that gets by on the personality of its subject, and little more. By day, Reid...

At sixty nine, Blowfly can still make you blush. Given the sexual connotation of the number, the notoriously foul-mouthed almost-septuagenarian should be right at home. That prolific Dp Jonathan Furmanski was moved to make this documentary on the man is no surprise, given just how magnetic the cantankerous old man is. Born Clarence Reid, Blowfly saw a “safe” career as a song writer, most notably collaborating with Kc & the Sunshine Band – while in the meantime developing the sexually explicating shock act that still manages to turn heads. Blowfly’s bread and butter were and continue to be his twisted covers, lacing beloved hits with newly dirty lyrics. For the benefit of the reader, I’ll avoid posting any especially explicit titles – I’m sure you can figure out Blowfly’s alternate title for "Dancing with Myself" by Billy Idol.

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The Weird World of Blowfly, a recent biographical documentary of the raunchy sexual humorist and self-proclaimed inventor of rap music, Clarence Reid (Aka Blowfly), will be a musical initiation for most. Whether viewers fondly remember getting a bootleg tape of his songs, or have no idea who he is, they’ll enjoy following Reid’s orbit as a wild cult personality onstage through five decades to the present day....

"Leonard Retel Helmrich's Position Among the Stars should be essential viewing for anyone curious to know what the rapidly modernizing 'second world' actually looks like," writes Steve Macfarlane in the L: "motorcycles, bootlegged t-shirts, plastic Tupperware containers, cell phones, and scores of dead cockroaches. Indonesia — the fourth biggest country in the world, and the nation with the largest Muslim population — has been the topic of Helmrich's life work, a trilogy of docs culminating here."

This "third documentary about the same Indonesian family is a dazzler in at least a couple ways," adds Seth Colter Walls in the Voice. "First off, it's the rare final chapter in a decade-plus-long saga — a trilogy that also includes 2001's The Eye of the Day and 2004's Shape of the Moon — that you can slide right into without any prior knowledge. There's a brief 'previously in post-Suharto Indonesia' montage at the beginning that draws...

It's a testament to Clarence Reid that many of his best-known songs are unprintable on this site. In 1971, Reid, already a prominent soul singer and songwriter, adopted the alter ego Blowfly, a foul-mouthed character whose sexually explicit songs and outlandish costumes enthralled and disgusted in equal measure.

With a combination of classic song parodies and original tracks, Blowfly’s sing-rap style, recorded years before Sugarhill Gang’s "Rapper’s Delight," laid the template for hip-hop and influenced everyone from Chuck D to Ice-t to Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Reid has always remained a cult figure in music, though in the new documentary "The Weird World of Blowfly," director Jonathan Furmanski chronicles the past and present of the 72-year-old's career. Still rocking crowds. Still dressing up. Still disgusting and perverse in the best way possible.

Blowfly chronicles a year in the life of Reid, a still-touring musician whose venues range from...

The Weird World Of Blowfly at times recalls The Wrestler, only instead of schlepping his aging body from city to city to don outrageous costumes and wrestle, 69-year-old soul-music legend Clarence Reid schleps his hunched-over frame to gigs where he performs X-rated parodies and scatological ditties as incorrigible proto-hip-hopper Blowfly. Reid generously gives himself credit for inventing hip-hop with pioneering tracks like “Rap Dirty,” but as the film opens, he’s just barely scraping by with the help of fan/drummer/manager Tom Bowker. He’s living from paycheck to paycheck while the publishing rights to songs he wrote in ...

Trailers are an under-appreciated art form insofar that many times they’re seen as vehicles for showing footage, explaining films away, or showing their hand about what moviegoers can expect. Foreign, domestic, independent, big budget: I celebrate all levels of trailers and hopefully this column will satisfactorily give you a baseline of what beta wave I’m operating on, because what better way to hone your skills as a thoughtful moviegoer than by deconstructing these little pieces of advertising? Some of the best authors will tell you that writing a short story is a lot harder than writing a long one, that you have to weigh every sentence. What better medium to see how this theory plays itself out beyond that than with movie trailers? Where Soldiers Come From Trailer Documentary filmmaker Heather Courtney looks to have made a movie that keeps the embers of war stoked in our collective consciousness.

Everyone loves movie trailers; we can’t get enough of them here in The City of Films. It’s an art form that stands alone from the film itself and has a remarkable power to move us. Trailers can give us chills, laughs, goose bumps and some even anger us. We can’t always post them all, so here’s where we play catch up; watch More Trailers:

Where Soldiers Come From

Genre: Documentary

Release Date: September 9, 2011

Synopsis: A documentary that chronicles four years in the lives of childhood friends as they enter a faraway war.

And They’re Off…

Release Date: October 28, 2011

Synopsis: The story of a losing thoroughbred horse trainer whose only chance to save his career and get back into the winner’s circle is to hire his erratic ex-girlfriend / jockey, who is equally as desperate to get back into His circle.

The Weird World of Blowfly...

Director: Jonathan Furmanski Clarence Harry Reid, along with his songwriting partner Willie Clarke, wrote almost 1,000 R&B songs in the 1960s and 1970s for the Miami-based Tk Records including Betty Wright’s “Clean Up Woman,” Gwen McCrae’s “Rockin Chair,” Kc and the Sunshine Band’s “Sound Your Funky Horn.” Reid is also known as Blowfly, the original dirty rapper. He is the oft-proclaimed inventor of rap music (he recorded his first Blowfly album in 1971); to hear it from Blowfly, Sugarhill Gang’s “mammies were wearing diapers when I was doing rap.” The Weird World of Blowfly starts in 2008. Donning a sparkly sequins superhero suit, Blowfly (at age 69) is on a comeback tour. (In 2003, Reid sold the rights to his entire catalog of songs to pay off debt, so he now sees no royalty income from his body of work.) Almost all of his audience is white (a mix of...

Less than a week worth of recovering from the Sundance Film Festival, and we are already looking forward to our next, big film fest coverage. That would be the South by Southwest Film Festival held annually in Austin, Texas. Last year, Scott and I brought you all kinds of coverage from the Lone Star State, and this year doesn’t look to be much different.

With that, the announcement came last night of the feature films that will be playing at the SXSW Film Festival. Previous announcement were already made about films like Cold Weather, Electra Luxx, Hubble 3D, Lemmy, Saturday Night, and The White Stripes: Under Great White Northern Lights making their debut. Kick-ass was recently announced as the opening night film, as well.

Among the other films being presented this year are some Sundance darlings, a few, highly anticipated premieres, and MacGruber.

Check out the full list...

I was so excited at seeing the SXSW line up last night that I completely forgot to post it and started searching the interwebs for cool content to go with it. Oops. Yes, I wish I was there but alas, it wasn’t mean to be (though don’t despair. We’ll be bringing you wicked awesome coverage).

But enough rambling, you want to know what’s all playing. Well, for a start there’s the much anticipated McGruber (trailer), the Duplass’ semi-mainstream comedy Cyrus, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Micmacs (trailer, review), Daniel Stamm’s horror flick Cotton and that’s on top of the previously announced titles which include Electra Luxx (Carla Gugino as a pregnant porn star? Bring. It. On.) and Kick-Ass (trailer). That’s already a great line-up but dear me, some of the other titles are pretty awesome too.

There’s Clay Liford scifi drama Earthling (trailer...

Late yesterday the SXSW Fim Festival, which runs from March 12-20 in Austin, TX, announced the full lineup of films that will be screening at this year’s event. And baby, it’s quite a list. Mixing big name films with intimate indie gems, the sheer number of films and the vast array of talented filmmakers is sure to be a hit with attendees and critics alike.

This lineup includes premieres of studio films such as Universal’s MacGruber, Lionsgate’s teen superhero actioneer Kick-Ass and smaller films like Tim Blake Nelson’s Leaves of Grass, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Micmacs, Michel Gondry’s The Thorn in the Heart and Steven Soderbergh’s And Everything Is Going Fine. With so many films to watch, it will be very difficult to find time to seem them all during the events nine days. But hell, we’re going to try.

For more on...

The 2010 SXSW Film Festival and Conference has announced its initial slate of titles. The list is rife with hot world premieres (Kick-Ass), films fresh from Sundance (The Runaways, Cyrus), hot titles from the 2009 editions of Tiff and Cannes that haven't had much U.S. play (Enter the Void, Dogtooth, Trash Humpers), interesting documentaries (Lemmy, The People v. George Lucas) and much, much more. Simon Rumley's Red, White & Blue, which has received much praise on Twitch based on its Iffr screenings, will have its North American premiere.

Midnight programming courtesy of Fantastic Fest is also back with titles like Higanjima, Monsters, Serbian Film, Outcast, and a yet to be announced special film. Keep eye out for SXSW coverage at Twitch, but for now, pursue the massive list below (descriptions courtesy of SXSW).

Headliners

Big names, big talent:  Headliners bring star power to SXSW, featuring red carpet premieres and gala film...