​The movies couldn't be any more different. One is about an obese, kindly high school guy with a heart of gold. The other is about an crime-fighting millionaire orphan inside a cartoonish world full of super-villains, cringe-worthy puns, and Jim Carrey at his muggiest. Obvious Angus is a better film, but you know Batman Forever had Drew Barrymore dressed like this.

But 1995's Angus and Batman Forever both had great soundtracks, that myself and freelancer Cory Garcia were willing to defend. I say that the Batman disc was better than the Angus one, which puts up a valiant fight. Each of them were gateway drugs for many young, budding music fans, with Angus' soundtrack full of future name-check worthy acts like Tilt, Ash, Pansy Division, and Pinkerton-era Weezer.

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​Houston Press was ecstatic when slutwave superstar Katy Perry and comedian Russell Brand broke up, though there were some very different motivations amongst the staff for that joy. For instance, Craig Hlavaty chose that opportunity to place himself in the draft pick for being her next paramour, something he's as likely to accomplish as becoming the Twelfth Doctor.

For ourselves, we were relived because knowing they were a couple was knowing that they were porking, and in our head we had become certain that the sound of one of them disengaging from the other after two and a half minutes of squishy noise probably made a sound akin to that of ripping off a hair covered piece of lint roller tape. Sorry, we know you folk thinks she's cute because she looks like Zooey Deschanel from an alternative universe where she's really easy, but her charms are lost on us, and as funny as we find Brand we have no desire to be within sniffing distance of him. Now we don't hear that sound in our heads anymore.

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photo by Marco Torres

Chingo Bling in Hollywood, May 2011.

​When you think of the big, international film festivals, Sundance is definitely one of the first that comes to mind. Held annually in Park City, Utah, the festival showcases new work from American and international independent filmmakers. Movie lovers flock to the city to catch the next Academy Award winner or brush shoulders with Hollywood celebrities. The 2012 festival begins today, and one local celebrity is on his way to the event.

Pedro Herrera III, better known as Chingo Bling, will be making the rounds at the festival this year as a cast member of the new film Filly Brown, a star-studded movie about an "LA street poet who spits from her heart". The movie includes performances by Edward James Olmos and Lou Diamond Phillips, and is directed by Youssef Delara and Olmos' brother, Michael. Rocks off spoke to an excited Chingo as he was at the airport waiting for his Utah bound flight.

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Photo by Lynne Hawrelko

Gurf Morlix

​Part of a storied singer-songwriter scene, former Houstonians Gurf Morlix and Blaze Foley were living in Montrose during the Urban Cowboy craze but were not impressed. In fact, according to Morlix, they worked so much they "hardly ever had a night off, and if we did we certainly weren't going to drive out to Pasadena to some fake cowboy joint." Somewhat ironically, we had just interviewed Mickey Gilley moments before calling Morlix to discuss his gig and the showing of the documentary Blaze Foley: The Duct Tape Messiah at Anderson Fair Friday night. Morlix, who released an entire album of Foley covers last year, Blaze Foley's 113th Wet Dream, spent all of 2011 traveling with the film, usually performing a set of Foley songs after each showing. We caught up with the Grammy winner at his studio in Austin.

Rocks Off: Is the Blaze Foley phase winding down for you or does it have more legs?

Gurf Morlix: I think I'm about done with it. I devoted all of 2011 to Blaze and the film and my album, but I've got other stuff to do this year.

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Tina Turner in Tommy as Gypsy, The Acid Queen.

​This week the film and music world lost Ken Russell, the director of the film adaptation of The Who's Tommy, Altered States, Women In Love, and The Music Lovers. He also did some weird, soft-core stuff you would see on late-night cable.

Our first taste of Russell was Tommy , which warped our little minds, making what was already a creep double-album about family, drugs, violence, and religion into a bizarro cinematic curiosity shop with a cast of rockers and actors for the ages.

Some of the more esoteric scenes in Tommy weren't too far off from Russell's later work Altered States with William Hurt, like the religious hallucinations. Russell also had a great visual style that would prove to be very influential in the second generation of music videos.

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Photo By Craig Hlavaty

​Ryan Gosling, current Hollywood it boy and probable Oscar nominee for this year's Drive, is here in Austin with director Terence Malick filming scenes for the upcoming feature Lawless. You may remember that at Austin City Limits Festival in September that Christian Bale was also with Malick lensing with Malick for the same picture.

That's Malick directing his cast and crew with Gosling in the middle of the action. Fans were clamoring for snapshots with Gosling as he was filming, mostly unaware that the cameras were rolling.

Social media jumped on the case, following Gosling along the way at FFFF. There is already a Tumblr account dedicated to him here, Ryan Gosling At Fun Fun Fun Fest, with pics of the actor in various places on the festival grounds. Faith Silva, who has shot some stuff for Rocks Off, managed to snag a pic with Gosling on Friday. No word yet on how dreamy he smelled or if you fall in love with him when his eyes look into yours.

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Photo by Ann Summa

​The documentary Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone flirts with a balance between history and character as it looks behind the scenes at a group that failed to achieve large-scale commercial success, but inspired many groups that did.

Directors Lev Anderson and Chris Metzler paint a portrait that feels like an accurate representation of the music scene spanning multiple modern decades. They were able to pull this off, in large part, because of all the footage of the band taken over the years.

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halfwayhousemusic.com

​After giving the deluxe documentary treatment to Bob Dylan (No Direction Home) and the Rolling Stones (Shine a Light), Martin Scorsese now trains his camera on George Harrison for George Harrison: Living In the Material World, his two-part film about the "Quiet Beatle" that airs at 8 p.m. tonight and Thursday on HBO.

Although he was never especially quiet - Rocks Off just read Peter Doggett's You Never Give Me Your Money: The Beatles After the Breakup over the weekend, and we highly recommend it - Harrison was himself a cinephile. After befriending the Monty Python crew, Harrison created the production company HandMade Films to produce their Christ-figure comedy Monty Python's Life of Brian, prompting Python's Terry Gilliam to remark it was the "most expensive script in history."

Harrison sold his interest in HandMade in 1994, but by then it had already produced some of the most successful and influential works in recent British film history, along with its fair share of turkeys. After emerging from financial "restructuring" last year, it's still a going concern, most recently producing the Oscar-nominated 127 Hours. Here's a quick sampling of HandMade's archives.

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​Rappers love to imagine their lives as movies. They see bits of their lives on the big screen and turn to those cinematic treasures to help them make sense of their immediate environment: "If Tony Montana can rise to meteoric heights, so can I; if Frank Lucas can make it out of the game alive, so can I."

Over time, these themes have gradually imbued hip-hop culture with a tinge of fiction. And while that line between reality and art is sometimes fuzzy, the influence of these five movies on hip-hop is undeniable.

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Watch The Throne.

​Were you ever mildly attracted to Jafar in the Disney movie Aladdin? We were, probably because he reminded us so much of Prince. So, needless to say, Rocks Off is pretty stoked that Disney is bringing back some of our beloved iconic villains-like Jafar and Scar-to 3-D.

We've always pictured the villains as artists, specifically rappers-they have all of the bravado, the messed up childhoods, the insecurities, the motivation for world domination. We've put together a list of some classic villains in Disney history and their rapper counterparts. Some of their bear a physical resemblance and some share similar backgrounds.

1. Kanye West as Scar (The Lion King)

Scar wanted to be king really badly; so badly that he killed his own brother for the crown. He said, "Long live the king", killed his brethren, and then blamed it his nephew. That's bad family business. Since The Lion King was our favorite Disney animated film, we can't help but picture Mr. West as the ultimate villain. Kanye's followers are like Scar's hyenas-they'll probably turn on him the second he puts out another 808's and Heartbreaks. He's burned quite a few bridges on his way to the throne, too-pun intended.

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