Eugenio Mira, The Birthday, Dangerous Seductress

Last night we watched the brain-meltingly weird film The Birthday, with director Eugenio Mira and veteran actor Jack Taylor in attendance. "The Birthday" is such a jarring, weird film that I may need to see it again before I can properly write about it. It's truly an alien artifact- made all the more amazing by the fact that it stars Corey Feldman, doing a Jerry Lewis (Peter Faulk?) impersonation through the whole thing. It's surreal and apocalyptic, and I recommend it to any lovers of weirdfilm. I didn't get to talk to Jack Taylor much, but I've been talking a lot to Eugenio about movies, and old 80's lucasarts games like Maniac Mansion. I think he's a filmmaker to watch, assuming that his very unique aesthetic finds its audience.


Later that night (at home) we watched an Indonesian exploitation film that had some crew connection with Lady Terminator. This one was called Dangerous Seductress and it was so bad that it warped space and time around it. It may have even been worse than my previous pick for worst film ever, The Judas Project. It was like a rare cheese. I recommend it to anyone who is brave enough to take it.

Tonight is the last night of the festival, which I think we are going to cap off with some karaoke. There may be video, you have been warned.

Calem Vatnsdal

Yesterday topped off with a panel on Canadian films made during the tax shelter period (roughly 1975 to '84), with a vague focus on horror films. Panelists in attendance were Bob Clark (Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things, Porky's, Christmas Story) Thomas Drake (Terror Train, The Keeper) and Author/Filmmaker Calem Vatnsdal. Calem in particular was a really interesting guy- he's been in about five Guy Madden films (he was Christ in Heart of the World, for instance... or rather he played the actor playing Christ) I got him to sign a copy of his book about Madden and talked to him for a while. He mentioned that he had done some directing himself, so I will have to look for his stuff.

Bloodshots Winners

Last night Taylor and I picked the Vancouver Bloodshots winners. Best picture went to "Twice", a surprisingly professional short about a designer drug that makes you spontaneously combust (complete with a burn stunt and some really convincing projectile vomiting). Other awards went to "The Bully Solution" (which included a 7 year old getting scalped), and Bloody Christians, (A pixie-like born again Christian attempts to fend off a Satanist with a weed whacker). In a moment I'm going to go have lunch with the best picture winners.

Last night CineMuerte played one of my favorite movies, John Carpenter's The Thing! It was my first chance to see it in a theater, and I wasn't disappointed.. the print looked good.

More updates later. Unfortunately I missed the Japanese Nunsploitation film "School of the Holy Beast", but I've been promised a DVD viewing by some of the folks here.

Cinemuerte so far!

I got in to Vancouver yesterday afternoon. What a beautiful city. Seriously... Mountains, water... All the people I've met so far have been totally nice. I had dinner last night with Taylor Negron and today we did a short spot on television here for the festival. I drank waaaaay too much last night and I was completely hung over during the interview, but hopefully nobody noticed. I think I'm going to take it easy for the rest of the festival, lest I do something really retarded or end up pickling myself. Today is the first day of the Bloodshots competition here, so I better get myself together and ready to watch some movies.I'll post pictures later when I can do it without running up a bazillion dollar bill on my phone.

Bedazzled!: The Bedazzled Video Hour (and a half) 2005

Spike over at Bedazzled is selling a compilation DVD of a ton of awesome music related videos that he's featured on his site. Os Mutantes, Wire, Dwight Twilley and a ton of other stuff. Grab one while you can.

Bedazzled!: The Bedazzled Video Hour (and a half) 2005

Movies Wallpapers

The person who put these together gets a little too frisky at times with adding text to the images, but there are a few good ones in here, and he has a good selection of movies.
Movies Wallpapers

Ninagawa Mika's Official Website

Photography by Ninagawa Mika.
Link.

Glue Sniffing and Pills Filmstrip

CineMuerte

Sorry I haven't posted much lately- I've been in the process of selling my house and looking for a condo to buy, and going from a two-person household to a one-person household. (I know, tiny violins playing for me. That's life). However in just 6(!) days I'll be headed off to Vancouver for CineMuerte to judge the Canadian Bloodshots competition. I'll have all the time in the world to post gory details about all the movies in the festival.

So tune back in, starting on the 27th!

Hollywood Calls for Cut of Video IPod Pie: Financial News - Yahoo!Finance

Shouldn't be a big deal. Apple is pretty clear that making this stuff available on the iTunes music store isn't to make money off the content, it's to sell iPods. I can understand wanting residuals off of any additional work someone has acted in, and I'm sure they'll figure it out. I doubt the sales figures will be anywhere near video sales, so residuals will probably be negligible. Potentially one day this will be different, as the resolution and variety of offered content increases. This could be a huge boon to music videos, marginalized after being abandoned by MTV and VH1.

Link
Thanks Steve!

Suan Nai (Yoghurt): SHOVED by Herzog!

The title sounds bad, but this is actually a positive story by an extra on Rescue Dawn about getting to work with Werner Herzog.

Killer of Sheep to be released on DVD

After almost 30 years of anemic distribution due to problems with music rights, Charles Burnett's seminal film Killer of Sheep is tentatively due for a video release next year.
Link

IEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!

VIDEO IPOD! MEDIA CENTER IMAC! VOD ON ITUNES MUSIC STORE!


Sorry. Had to geek out a second there. There's not anything on the iTunes music store I want to watch yet, but it's a start. I'm more interested in encoding my own content anyway. Am I the only one who is thinking that the killer accessory for this would be a mini video projector?

Daring Fireball weighs in on the product announcements. No firewire on the iPod is kind of a bummer, but frontrow does definitely make it look like we're in for some kind of TV connectivity (hopefully wireless), not from the ipod, which will only play 320x240, but from the computer itself. .

Heavy water, clothes as memories

This weekend I caught Peter Weir's The Last Wave on the closing night of Fantastic Fest, and the Haruki Murakami adaptation Tony Takitani last night. Both the films added to an ominous feeling of heaviness that has settled on me this last week, like putting on a cold soggy coat before heading off to work at a slaughterhouse. The Last Wave has that dreamy sort of menace that doesn't quite come together when you try to relate the plot to someone else, but in viewing, its intelligent editing and artful sound design give it a solid competency that make it memorable, if not an outright classic.


Tony Takitani is a great recreation of the Murakami mood, although all the whimsical asides that populate a good chunk of his books (prostitutes with psychic ears, ghosts, men in sheep costumes) are absent from this story. In their place is a metric crapload of ennui and finally abject despair. Life is a prison sentence, physical possessions are memories, memories are shackles- even if you free yourself from them you gain nothing but the freedom to spiritual starvation. I recommend this movie highly, unless you are in a tender emotional state.

Unicef bombs the Smurfs

This is brilliant. Somebody please, please find me a link to this video:

The people of Belgium have been left reeling by the first adult-only episode of the Smurfs, in which the blue-skinned cartoon characters' village is annihilated by warplanes.
[...]
Julie Lamoureux, account director at Publicis for the campaign, said the agency's original plans were toned down.

"We wanted something that was real war - Smurfs losing arms, or a Smurf losing a head -but they said no."

Link

Link to video Thanks for the video link Bob!

The Wild Blue Yonder

Last night was officially my first night of Fantastic Fest. The first film I saw was Herzog's Wild Blue Yonder, a dreamy synthesis of SF fairy-tale and documentary in the same vein as his past film Lessons of Darkness. A lot of the people I spoke with after the screening found the film too long, but I suppose I have such a specific interest in this style of filmmaking that I stayed engaged through the whole picture (though I didn't find it as effective as Lessons...)
In an age of CG fantasies that are vividly plopped in front of us like candy-bars from a vending machine- When any five year old can point at a special effect and tell you it was made with a computer- There is something special and engaging about a tall-tale made up of small truths, to be able to see a fantasy that involves real space-ships, real aliens, real desolate wastelands. I'm working on something much lengthier about all this that I hope to have ready soon.

Works by Evan Cagle

My longtime friend Evan Cagle, one of the lead animators on A Scanner Darkly, just released a 140 page book of artwork and sketches.
Link

south by southwest presents

Just a reminder, Frontier will be on KLRU, Austin PBS tonight at 10 pm.

From David:

The version presented has been previously unseen by US
Audiences and is guaranteed to be more censored than ever
before! Yes, even the Sasquatch Penis has been digitally
blurred for your protection(drawing twice as much attention
to it in the process!)

So stay in, cuddle by the fireside and indulge in FRONTIER.
Or, if you plan to go out, it's over by 11:30, so consider it an
appetizer to fun.

klru.org/sxswpresents/
www.frontiermovie.com
www.fortHQ.com

Well, they cut out the scene where I hump the ground, and in the intro they put a title card up that said David Zellner for Nathan, but it's still pretty cool that they played it.

The FADER Magazine - The Warriors

An Oral History of The Warriors

worship the glitch: Man Ray's "Emak Bakia"

In Emak Bakia, the mischievous dadaist and surrealist Man Ray pioneered the technique of cameraless filmmaking, exposing lengths of film to light after sprinkling them with pins, grains of salt and other common objects. In its playful use of disparate materials - animation, non-objective shapes, rayograms, unfocused and optically fragmented images - Emak Bakia remains fresh and inspiring nearly 80 years after it was made.

Link

David Lynch drinks the kool-aid

This kind of stuff makes me very, very sad.

Abandoning film for DV is one thing, but getting mixed up with a huckster like John Hagelin just kills it.

Here's a little more info about TM and here's some discussion about Ramtha Cult funded recruiting "film" What the #(*#@ do we know.

A history of clunky movies

A History of Violence would have been ten times better if Viggo Mortensen's character had a VCR in his stomach.

w Paul

w Paul, originally uploaded by weevil.

10012005(020)

10012005(020), originally uploaded by weevil.