what is this sorcery?!!??

Dragon House!

Dance in the movies

What a goldmine for dance lovers! Flavorwire has posted the videos of 35 favorite dance sequences from the movies. They got such a great response in the comments that they posted 25 more dance sequences in film. Yummy!

Mexican movies in the fifties had some amazing musica and dance numbers. The mambo craze was big, with Pérez Prado's band (and Beny Moré the singer), so films with mambo dance routines were popular. Here's a number called "El ruletero". Sorry about the sound, but it's a classic. The film is "La reina del mambo" (The Mambo Queen) with María Antonieta Pons dancing, one of the many Cubans who came to Mexico to work in the music business, and who became a huge star.


Here's the great Beny Moré singing while the dancer Tongolele combines classical dance moves with AfroCuban rhythms in the film El Rey del Barrio (1949). The music is pure AfroCuban country rumba; Beny invokes the orisha Changó in the first part of the song.


Here's another Cuban band La Sonora Matancera with the Colombian singer Nelson Pinedo.


The Havana sequence in Guys and Dolls with Marlon Brando and Jean Simmons shows a U.S. stereotype of the mambo.



Do you have a favorite dance movie? or a favorite scene of dancing in a movie?

Galaxy songs and Monty Python

Fresca shared the lovely mashup that autotunes the voices of Carl Sagan and other scientists, talking about how we are all connected. I love it, and I know I saw it a while back, but I can't find it on my blog--I'm no good at tagging. Connecting is good when you remember to mark your path somehow.

This recalls another musical musing on our galaxy, by Monty Python:

(via clusterflock) but this clip is Monty Python's very own YouTube channel!!! (Here Eric Idle replies to "fatuous comments" left on the site.)

Website: http://pythonline.com
For 3 years you YouTubers have been ripping us off, taking tens of thousands of our videos and putting them on YouTube. Now the tables are turned. It's time for us to take matters into our own hands.

We know who you are, we know where you live and we could come after you in ways too horrible to tell. But being the extraordinarily nice chaps we are, we've figured a better way to get our own back: We've launched our own Monty Python channel on YouTube.

No more of those crap quality videos you've been posting. We're giving you the real thing - HQ videos delivered straight from our vault.

What's more, we're taking our most viewed clips and uploading brand new HQ versions. And what's even more, we're letting you see absolutely everything for free. So there!

But we want something in return.

None of your driveling, mindless comments. Instead, we want you to click on the links, buy our movies & TV shows and soften our pain and disgust at being ripped off all these years.