film ick: The Last Winter From Larry Fessenden

Film Ick has a blurb and a couple of production stills from Larry Fessenden's new film, The Last Winter

Wired News: Bob Dylan: Technology Sucks

Wired ran a short piece about Dylan complaining about sound quality in digital distribution without comment, but the thing is, he's completely right.

I don't know anybody who's made a record that sounds decent in the past 20 years, really," the 65-year-old rocker said in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine.

Dylan, who released eight studio albums in the past two decades, returns with his first recording in five years, Modern Times, next Tuesday.

Noting the music industry's complaints that illegal downloading means people are getting their music for free, he said, "Well, why not? It ain't worth nothing anyway."

"You listen to these modern records, they're atrocious, they have sound all over them," he added. "There's no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like ... static."

Wired News: Bob Dylan: Technology Sucks

Silver Machine

Unknown Treasures of Soviet and Russian Sci Fi Cinema

Nice article on Worldchanging about Russian and Soviet visions of the future in little known SF films currently playing at the Walter Reade Theatre in NYC.

Link

Austin Film Society :: 20th Anniversary Screenings - The Mirror

The Film Society is showing Tarkovsky's wonderful film The Mirror on the 23rd at the Drafthouse. I won't be able to attend because of work, but don't miss this opportunity yourself.

In THE MIRROR, the penultimate film Andrei Tarkovsky would make in his culturally beloved, politically infuriating homeland, the Soviet director explored elements of his own life from childhood to mid-life crisis. Rather than place his “story” in chronological order, he pieced together scenes and shots in much the way the human mind works – free of time and place. Thus, the film contains memories of childhood, conversations from the present, stories about the past, and a mature man’s dreams set in an earlier time. Alyosha, who has reached “life’s half-way mark,” is torn by a sense of guilt for things said and done or undone and unsaid to his mother. Even as his mother seems to deny or disregard any reason for him to feel such a way, he continues to be trapped by memories and dreams that leave him unhappy and directionless at this critical stage of life with a wife and two children.

Link

Radical Software

Collected now online- all the issues of Radical Software, a great 70's MacLuhanite zine about early video art and media activism. This stuff is like porn for me, vintage video gear with a good dose of pre-internet media theory.

As problem solvers we are a nation of hardware freaks. Some are into seizing property or destroying it. Others believe in protecting property at any cost including life or at least guarding it against spontaneous use. Meanwhile, unseen systems shape our lives. Power is no longer measured in land, labor, or capital, but by access to information and the means to disseminate it. As long as the most powerful tools (not weapons) are in the hands of those who would hoard them, no alternative cultural vision can succeed. Unless we design and implement alternate information structures which transcend and reconfigure the existing ones, other alternate systems and life styles will be no more than products of the existing process.

Fantastic Fest! :: Horror, Sci-Fi and Fantasy Film Festival: September 2006 - Austin, Texas

Still from The Glamorous Life Of Sachiko Hanai
It's time to get your badges for the second annual Fantastic Fest in Austin. Darren Aronofsky's THE FOUNTAIN and Terry Gilliam's TIDELAND will be playing, along with at about 40 other SF, horror, and fantasy films. It looks like I will be joining the judges this year for the films that are in competition, this is really exciting because last year I only got to see a few films- this time I'm in it for the long haul!
Get your badges/tickets here.

The Fantastic Fest is an eight day festival of the best new Sci-Fi, Horror, Fantasy and genre films, as well as choice classic and obscure cult titles from all over the world.

Fantastic Fest was created to offer exposure to genre films which are often overlooked by the traditional festival circuit. We strive to offer acquisition, media and exhibition opportunities for undistributed films as well as to spotlight upcoming genre theatrical releases and give audiences a chance to see 35mm prints of repertory genre classics.

Beauty bar pageant photos

DSE_0743.JPG, originally uploaded by FeliciaPhotos.

DSE_0879.JPG, originally uploaded by FeliciaPhotos.

Felicia has posted her photos from the beauty pageant I judged a few weeks ago. Wall-to-wall bad girls and drunk sweaty hipsters. It was kind of raunchy, but the contestants actually seemed like cool people and it was hard to argue with all the free booze.

Mind Hacks: Philip K. Dick video interview

Via Mind Hacks: a Philip K. Dick video interview on writing A Scanner Darkly.

Red Cans at off center, Horse+Donkey and the Carrots at Emos

I'll be at the off center tonight video taping a performance of Red Cans, but if you can't get your tickets in time, check out Horse + Donkey, Those Peabodys and The Carrots at Emos in Austin. It should be a great show. I actually managed to make both shows, and they were both terrific! I'll be editing the red cans show most of today and tomorrow and I'll post a small peek of it here soon.

The Wild Pussy Cat

Last night at Weird Wednesday Lars presented a Greek sexploitation movie called The Wild Pussy Cat that superseded our expectations by a mile. The performances were perfectly overwrought and weird and the melodrama was high, but in this very stylized, syrupy way. This movie did sex and sadism wrestling with one another in a way that I've seen a lot of other films attempt but fail, and clearly other directors have seen this one. According to Kier-La, Joe D'amato remade this one as an Emmanuelle movie, with some very minor changes. I hope someone makes a DVD of The Wild Pussy Cat at some point, it's worth seeing (provided, of course, you can cope with sick greek S&M revenge movies, of course. But I assume that about all my readers).
Link

Your Skeleton

I'll be editing some footage of the actual show this weekend, but in the meantime, here's a little of my projection visuals from the Cue show last Saturday. Here I fit the ballet sequence from Michael Powell's The Red Shoes to Cue's song Your Skeleton.
Link
Quicktime 7 required

The Wizard of Gore (2006)

Good grief! Someone is making a remake of Herschell Gordon Lewis' classic B-horror film The Wizard of Gore, which offhand would just sound like another in a string of horror remakes, but check out the cast- Crispin Glover, Jeffrey Combs, Brad Dourif! The director has only done 'making of' films for HBO, but I certainly don't fault him for having a job. This is one horror remake that I will actually bother to see. It can't be any worse than Lewis' abysmal, unfunny sequel to his own film Blood Feast.The Wizard of Gore (2006)
Thanks Elliott!

film ick: Terry Giliam's Next Film Will Be...

According to film ick, Paul Giamatti is playing Phillip K. Dick in the next Terry Gilliam film. First Bowie as Tesla and now this, and from what I've read, neither film are standard biopics. Should be interesting.
Link

New from Svankmajer: Lunacy

The latest provocation from surrealist master Jan Svankmajer (LITTLE OTIK) is loosely based on two short stories by Edgar Allan Poe and inspired by the works of the Marquis de Sade. In nineteenth-century France (albeit one full of deliberate anachronisms) a young man, Jean Berlot, is plagued by nightmares in which he is dragged off to a madhouse. On the journey back from his mother’s funeral he is invited by a Marquis he meets at lunch to spend the night in his castle. There Berlot witnesses a blasphemous orgy and a ‘therapeutic’ funeral. Berlot tries to flee but the Marquis insists on helping him conquer his fears and takes his guest to a surrealistic lunatic asylum where the patients have complete freedom and the staff are locked up behind bars. Described by Svankmajer himself in a prologue to the film as a ’philosophical horror film,” LUNACY combines live action and stop-motion, sex and violence, grand guignol terror and gallows humor, and a lot of animated meat.

link
Thanks Bleu!

Janicza bravo - miller time

My friend Janicza is a filmmaker and theater director who makes lots of interesting shorts. Check out this clip of her talking to two trashed and utterly loathsome 'life extension' entrepreneurs.

Earworm Assault Devices, Weapons of Mass Distraction on Pixelsumo

The Earworm Assault Devices (EAD) enable individuals or small groups to distribute their own earworms. Small pieces of highly infectious sound or music can be recorded onto the devices and fired at single or multiple persons, eventually spreading your message out into the world.

Link

YouTube - Guy Maddin interview

Thanks Nick!

film ick: Terry Gilliam's Tideland

From film ick on Gilliam's almost ignored Tideland

...just like Psycho before it, Tideland has been heavily drubbed by the professional moviegoers, often with the exact same language, and both goes around, the slurs are shamefully misguided.

I haven't seen the film yet (I don't think it even opened in any theaters here), and I think a lot of people were probably burned by Brother's Grimm, but I'd be willing to give it a chance...

Svankmajer's "Et Cetera"

Thanks Bleu!

Chained Heat on DVD

Panik House are putting out a disc for exploitation classic Chained Heat. I have their Pinky Violence boxed set and it's excellently done, so I'm sure they'll give this a great treatment.

PANIK HOUSE will be releasing the mother of all women-in-prison films: CHAINED HEAT!
This is the first time this title has been released on DVD in the USA, but we have restored all the material that has ever been cut, making our version the global definitive edition. It's longer than any other version previously seen. It has extended nude scenes and crazy girl-on-girl action that nobody -and I mean NOBODY- has ever laid eyes on! Finally we can all throw away those parallel imports and low quality bootlegs, because this one is going to rock!

Panik House Entertainment - The best in asian and international genre films on DVD

From the Atelier Tovar

Found via GreenCine Daily- Filmmaker Guy Maddin's new book, From the Atelier Tovar. If you're interested in Maddin's work, you might also be interested in his friend Caelum Vatnsdal's book Kino Delerium: The Films of Guy Maddin

Cue, Sat August 5th @ Gallery Lombardi

I'll be providing visuals for the Cue show this weekend at Gallery Lombardi in Austin. This is a variation on the video I projected for their show at the Blue Theater.