village voice > film > Blue Velvet by Guy Maddin

village voice > film >Guy Maddin writes about Blue Velvet for the Village Voice, on the occasion of the film's 20th anniversary. Great piece.

Tags: Movies

Jem Cohen's "Chain"

What do I have to do to see Jem Cohen's film Chain? I understood that a theatrical release was unlikely, so I've been patiently waiting for a DVD. What gives? This sounds like a really interesting movie that is being buried.

Tags: Movies

Wired 14.03: Trouble in Toontown

Wired is running a painfully detailed account of the Scanner Darkly production, that I'm not sure everyone involved would exactly agree with, but it's signifigant as the first public airing of some of the issues that occurred during animation. Originally I was kind of heartbroken that I didn't get to work on the film in some capacity, but In retrospect I'm kind of glad I sat this one out, as it would have been really painful to have been closer to some of the stressful things that were happening.

Link

Tags: Movies

NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!

CNN.com - Actor Don Knotts dies at 81 - Feb 25, 2006

Tags: Movies

slomo Austin!

The Slo Mo Video festival is coming to town and two of my shorts are in the program!

From Ryan Junell:

whaaaaaaat's gooooooing ooooonnnnnnnnnn???!!!

the slomo video festival... that's what! two months after the trial screenings on the east coast, the festival is FINALLY about to begin the 2006 tour... many dates need to be booked, a dvd needs to be published, the site updated, blah blah blah... the important news is the FIRST BIG public screening will go down in AUSTIN, TEXAS on SUNDAY MARCH 26th at the alamo drafthouse... here's the weird url for the screening...
http://www.originalalamo.com/downtown/frames.asp?b=/online_tix/show_details.asp?show_id=3407

Les Saignantes

I very stupidly missed a screening of Les Saignantes, a highly stylized film with SF themes (some are calling it a parody) that seems to be drawing comparisons to late 60's Goddard and singer/revolutionary Fela Kuti. It sounds amazing.

A nearly naked woman dangles suggestively in a harness suspended from the ceiling of a cramped room. She pirouettes, somersaults and generally taunts her audience, a middle-aged man greedy for the younger woman's impossibly nubile body. A menacing air hangs over their coupling, heightened by the soundtrack's eerie score. In this, LES SAIGNANTES' hypnotic opening sequence, the stage is set for a genre-blending film that offers an arresting discourse on sexual politics.

The controversial subject matter and erotically charged images in Jean-Pierre Bekolo's LES SAIGNANTES polarized audiences when the film screened in the "Visions" program at the Toronto International Film Festival last September. Viewers have continued the debate on various blogs, and as of last month the film was the subject of a national censorship battle in Bekolo's native Cameroon, a country that has for decades been synonymous with excessive corruption.

Set 20 years in the future, LES SAIGNANTES follows two prostitutes on a bizarre and occasionally hilarious trek through a post-apocalyptic landscape littered with absurdly crooked politicians. Smoke rolls through the empty streets, which are cloaked in constant darkness. Aside from a few minor technological improvements, the town of Yaounde, Cameroon, where Majolie (Adele Ado) and Chouchou (Dorylia Calmel) operate doesn't look all that advanced in the year 2025, which is precisely Bekolo's point.

Janet Pierson writes:

Wiley [...] You didn't miss Les Saignantes. It's playing til Thur at the Dobie in our AFS @ Dobie program.

Hear that? If you are in Austin this week, check it out! I'll post more after I get to see the film.


Tags: Movies

Democracy - Internet TV Platform - Free and Open Source

Brian writes:

Democracy Player is a video content aggregator, and it also includes a component named the Broadcast Machine that allows users (budding filmmakers?) to easily set up a distribution channel for their work. It's very intriguing... I could potentially see filmmakers setting up channels to post short films, sample clips, teasers, or production
videos... who knows! Whatever the case, this is a great way to increase exposure.

Democracy Player: http://www.getdemocracy.com/
Broadcast Machine: http://www.getdemocracy.com/broadcast/

Here is a sameple BM page (complete with RSS feed for Democracy) I set
up: http://www.small-scale.net/bm/

Democracy - Internet TV Platform - Free and Open Source

Christian Bigots and Ramtha cultists go hand in hand

My good pal Ed writes:

I saw on [your blog] that you linked to another scathing review of "What the Bleep Do We Know?" I am completely down with being scathing toward that flick, as it is all too common for me to mention that I studied physics and have somebody want to talk to me about that film.

However, one noteworthy thing about that film that I have yet to see anybody note is that it features psychiatrist Jeffrey Satinover, and who he is. The main focus (and rightly so) is how many of the "experts" in the film are Ramtha cultists. Satinover, however, is, I believe, a rightwing Christian. All the hippy dippy New Agers who think that film is deep might take pause to look at Dr. Satinover's website: http://www.satinover.com

And I mean the content, not the horrible, horrible web design. In particular I refer to the part about his book "Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth" wherein he prescribes treatments for the 'disease' of homosexuality, analogous to treatments of alcoholism. If Satinover is not a rightwing Christian himself, he's at least a fellow traveller loved by them.

Tags: Movies, Science, Crazies

ACH on the 'personals scam' and the pillaging of the web

Great piece by my friend Al on the rise and fall of the web. Al was a Mondo 2000 writer who started an art group I was involved with many years ago called Anathema Enterprises, got involved in web applications development right before the bust, and has an interesting perspective on the whole thing.

There was a time, not at all long ago, when it was imagined that The Web would be both a source of gainful employment for every intellectually capable member of my generation, and the ultimate liberation of the mass audience from the mass media. You may not recall it, but I do. I was quoted in Time Fucking Magazine, for Christ's sake, at the start of the wave. And then the so-called 'bust,' bankrupting and ruining 9/10s of my peers in my field. The natural order of things -would- have been, regroup and rebuild while the broadband infrastructure caught up with the bandwidth need, in order to make, say, grocery shopping online, actually viable. And yet instead, the whole landscape, seemingly overnight, was rent asunder and devoured by the vultures, then raped and pillaged by the theives... leaving the notion of a purely open-sourced, web-based marketplace of ideas and services... Pfaw. Even I can't say it without snickering in disdain.

Link

New Scanner Trailer

There's a new trailer up for A Scanner Darkly. This one seems to capture more of the actual tone of the movie, rather than try and portray it a some kind of 'Techno Thriller'. Check it out.

Note: A nice tidbit from the Honorable Jeff Gorvetzian:

Trivia note: The title 'scanner darkly' usually is regarded as a reference to the first Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians (1 Cor 13, 11):
When I was a child, I spake as a child,
I understood as a child, I thought as a child:
but when I became a man, I put away
childish things. For now we see through a
glass, darkly; but then face to face: now
I know in part; but then shall I know even
as also I am known.

But the truth is, Paul got it from Plato (in the Phaedrus):

For, as has been already said, every soul of man has in the way of nature beheld true being; this was the condition of her passing into the form of man. But all souls do not easily recall the things of the other world; they may have seen them for a short time only, or they may have been unfortunate in their earthly lot, and, having had their hearts turned to unrighteousness through some corrupting influence, they may have lost the memory of the holy things which once they saw. Few only retain an adequate remembrance of them; and they, when they behold here any image of that other world, are rapt in amazement; but they are ignorant of what this rapture means, because they do not clearly perceive. For there is no light of justice or temperance or any of the higher ideas which are precious to souls in the earthly copies of them: they are seen through a glass dimly; and there are few who, going to the images, behold in them the realities, and these only with difficulty. There was a time when with the rest of the happy band they saw beauty shining in brightness-we philosophers following in the train of Zeus, others in company with other gods; and then we beheld the beatific vision and were initiated into a mystery which may be truly called most blessed, celebrated by us in our state of innocence, before we had any experience of evils to come, when we were admitted to the sight of apparitions innocent and simple and calm and happy, which we beheld shining impure light, pure ourselves and not yet enshrined in that living tomb which we carry about, now that we are imprisoned in the body, like an oyster in his shell.

Boing Boing: Clowes joins Gondry on Rucker's "Master of Space and Time"

I try to avoid reposting BB, but this really caught my eye. According to an article on SuicideGirls, Dan Clowes is writing the screenplay for Michel Gondry's adaptation of Rudy Rucker's novel Master of Space and Time.
Link

Cinemarati Blog- "Gary Busey as an organ harvesting Jew"

From Cinemarati- Gary Busey in a Turkish propaganda movie (based on a Turkish TV show). Sounds insane. If he's willing to do this, maybe he will be willing to listen to my idea for a movie version of Shut Up, Little Man! starring him and Nick Nolte, as ambiguously gay drunken old men who live together and can't stop screaming.

Valley of the Wolves: Iraq, the most expensive Turkish film ever made, is a good ole' fashioned piece of anti-American propaganda that, on paper at least, sounds like a complete fabrication. Yet it's very real, and is currently breaking box-office records in Turkey.
Billy Zane stars as Commander Sam William Marshall (can't get more American than that!), devout Christian and sociopath who believes he is doing God's will by ridding the world of Muslims. Joining him is Gary Busey as a Jewish doctor who removes organs from Iraqi prisoners and sends them off to patients in America, Israel, and the UK.

Link

south by southwest film

South by Southwest announces film lineup. Unfortunately I'll miss most of the festival due to work (even though I have a platinum badge this year. Arrrrgh.)

Elliott & Sid Haig

Elliott & Sid Haig, originally uploaded by swankspike.

My friend Elliott got to go to the Texas Frightmare Weekend, and meet... well... everybody.
Here's some pictures

Herzog as Lincoln, Korine directs new Cat Power video

In an interview with Time Out London, director Werner Herzog explains that he'll be playing a part in [Harmony] Korine's next film, Mister Lonely, which possibly begins filming this month. His role, one has claimed, is as an Abraham Lincoln impersonator.

As if that wasn't significant enough:

Harmony Korine has directed the music video for 'Living Proof,' the first single from Cat Power's latest album 'The Greatest'. The video, which debuted on MTV2's Subterranean in London on the 22nd of January, was shot by Lee Daniel (Slacker, Dazed and Confused) and produced by Margaret Brown (director of Be Here to Love Me: A Film About Townes Van Zandt, also shot by Daniel).

Next time I see Lee Daniel I'm going to ask him nicely to introduce me to Harmony Korine.

The Stranger - Film - Feature - Dance, Ramtha, Dance!

There's a great, funny review of the new 'special edition' of the dippy cult recruiting film 'What the bleep do we know' on the Stranger site today. I get emails from intellectually challenged hippies all the time about this film, comparing it to Waking Life. While Waking Life does unfortunately have a moment or two of questionable pop-pseudoscience in it, the legit comparisons can stop there. This movie is, pardon my French, outright bullshit.

The filmmakers (all of whom are affiliated with the New Age sect Ramtha's School of Enlightenment, or RSE, in Yelm) decided not to remove footage of David Albert, a philosophy professor at Columbia University and one of the film's few legitimate academics, who has publicly denounced the distortion of his views through selective editing. Dumb move. They also retain the testimony of Miceal (sic) Ledwith, one of "Ramtha's Appointed Teachers." According to Willamette Week and Salon, Ledwith, who used to be known as Monsignor Michael Ledwith, resigned from his post as president of Dublin's Maynooth College after a seminarian accused Ledwith of sexually abusing him as a boy. This revelation gives the personal-responsibility shtick he preaches in the film ("If we're victims, we should ask ourselves, have I a victim mentality?") a certain je ne sais-barf.

Link

Firing Squad

Firing Squad, originally uploaded by weevil.

Aubrey Edwards Photography

"'It was not a significant bullet. I am not afraid.'

I fully expect a headline tomorrow to read "Director Werner Herzog travels back in time to best Napoleon Bonaparte in an arm-wrestling match." You just can't help but love him. I wish he was my uncle.

"Herzog, as if it was the most normal thing in the world, said, 'Oh, someone is shooting at us. We must go.'
"He had a bruise the size of a snooker ball, with a hole in. He just carried on with the interview while bleeding quietly in his boxer shorts."
An unrepentant Herzog insisted, "It was not a significant bullet. I am not afraid."

Werner Herzog Shot During Interview :: Hollywood.com

Joaquin Phoenix Pulled from Car Wreck by Director Werner Herzog - Los Angeles Times

Phoenix said he was thrown into the passenger seat when his vehicle rolled onto its roof. In the aftermath, the actor said he felt "a bit confused."

"I remember this knocking on the passenger window," said Phoenix. "There was this German voice saying, 'Just relax.' There's the air bag, I can't see and I'm saying, 'I'm fine. I am relaxed.'

"Finally, I rolled down the window and this head pops inside. And he said, 'No, you're not.' And suddenly I said to myself, 'That's Werner Herzog!' There's something so calming and beautiful about Werner Herzog's voice. I felt completely fine and safe. I climbed out."

Link

Moira Shearer, Ballerina in 'The Red Shoes,' Dies at 80 - New York Times

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