News 8 Austin | 24 Hour Local News | TOP STORIES | Austin High band plays ACL

[...]Students at Austin High, located near Zilker park, are very familiar with ACL.

"Being at Austin High we hear it every year. You can go out at lunch on Friday and hear it," Hartman said. Local band Octopus Project decided to give these students a chance to not just hear it, but be apart of it. Josh Lambert is a member of the band who always wanted to try something like this.

'We have songs with horns in them and we've never been able to play those songs live and get the full impact so we thought we'd ask some high school kids to come play with us,' Lambert said.

"I Only Said" / "Come in Alone" (Live at ATP New York) | Pitchfork

"I Only Said" / "Come in Alone" (Live at ATP New York) | Pitchfork

Fantastic Fest closing notes

Again this year, most of my favorite films were foreign and a good chunk of them weren't new, and despite the glut of people who left as soon as the 'secret screenings' sold out, I wasn't alone. That's one of the things excites me most about the festival- is that through the lure of genre accessibility, people here are getting excited about foreign films. There's always going to be a big contingent of "what if the cast of star wars were zombies!" style douchebaggery at a festival that promises horror and SF movies, but even nerds with bad taste are passionate about the things they like, and often they just need to have their horizons expanded. This is a great place for it.

I Think We’re Alone Now Review, Fantastic Fest 2008 | SpoutBlog

I'm sick today, so I'm going to defer to my friend Karina instead of trying to pull together a review for the amazing Fantastic Fest doc, I Think We're Alone Now.

[...]If this sounds creepy, at times, it is. Donnelly offers more than a few opportunities to laugh and/or cringe at the obsessive Tiffany fans, but it’s the sadness of their situations that ends up staying with you. Though the stalkers are obviously living in extreme states of fantasy, there’s a thread to their emotional mania that should be recognizable to anyone who has ever felt like they “deserved” love they couldn’t get, to anyone who’s been rendered powerless by their attraction to someone who just doesn’t care. It’s to Donnelly’s credit that he stays with his subjects until their respective cloud covers part a bit, but we never get the sense that there will be anything like “normal” romance awaiting either Jeff or Kelly. I Think We’re Alone Now never artificially humanizes its characters, but it makes it a little easier to understand how a life almost totally devoid of affection or compassion could help treatable psychological issues mutate into unnavigable madness.

I Think We’re Alone Now Review, Fantastic Fest 2008 | SpoutBlog

Blue Film Woman

As with last year's Nikkatsu Action series, I can tell that this year's Pinku Film showcase is going to be both my favorite portion of the festival and one of the most underappreciated. Last night's screening of Blue Film Woman had a lean number of attendees, but those who were there were appreciative of what they were getting to see, the first American showing of a choice 60's pink film on a gorgeous new 35mm print. So, was this a bunch of sweaty weirdos assembled to ogle a porn film together? Any one of the horror movies I've seen at the festival this year was far more sexually explicit than this, or most, pink film. The allure of pink movies, like the allure of a lot of exploitation, is that once the director fulfilled his obligation to show however many nipples demanded by the studio contract, he was essentially given complete freedom to populate the rest of the movie with whatever bizarre vision he might have. This lack of oversight could obviously lead to some cinematic disasters, but since many of the Japanese pink filmmakers were highly trained mainstream artists who were being forced to slum, the number of pink films which are not just watchable, but highly imaginitive and visually engaging is actually quite high. They could also be completely sick, bizarre and deeply cringeworthy, and those tend to be my favorites.

Blue Film Woman, was, blessedly one of those latter films. It was deeply, hilariously wrong.

Rodney Perkins reviews Blue Film Woman, via Twitch:

As one of the earlier examples of a full-color widescreen pinku, Blue Film Woman seems to work on two levels. The projections of sexy images on unclothed women, the color filters, the strobe effects and the funk and soul music (e.g., James Brown) scream of the psychedelic 60s. On the other hand, the film is a morality play that seems to be as conservative as it is depraved. The story is a tragic drama whose core is driven by sex and money. At first, sex and money are shown as potential paths to independence for the women. This idea collapses as the men are the ultimate winners in this greedy fight for survival. Perhaps the chance encounter between Hiroshi and Uchiyama, which is so unexpectedly loony as to defy description, is some sort of justice but Uchiyama walks away. Of course, given the nature of pinku eiga, Mukai’s mixing of these elements could just have easily been the result of a haphazard coincidence. Regardless, Blue Film Woman is a great example of early pinku eiga that deserves to be seen.

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The man from Hong Kong

Brian Trenchard-Smith, fresh from his appearance in Not Quite Hollywood, introduced and answered questions about one of his very early films, The Man From Hong Kong. As one might expect from an Australian Kung Fu movie, the driving sequences are better than the fight sequences, and the main car chase in the. Movie is actually one of the most impressive filmed, mainly for the demolition-derby ferocity with which the cars slam into one another and a sureness in the photography and editing during the chase. The acting and plotting are the most memorable when they flirt with self parody. The movie was a lot of fun, but pales in comparison to some of Trenchard-Smith's crazier films.

Austin Is Rad - Interviews - Lars Nilsen

There's a good interview with Lars about Weird Wednesday and Fantastic Fest at the disturbingly titled Austin Is Rad.

Not Quite Hollywood

Yesterday we caught a screening of Not Quite Hollywood, Mark Hartley's great documentary about Australian exploitation films. Profusely packed with archival material and interviews, the picture found an extremely appreciative crowd (I recognized a lot of Weird Wednesday regulars) and the director, who was in attendance, said it was the first time an American audience had applauded the titles of the films in the movie before they were described. (Stunt rock got a good cheer, for example). Brian Trenchard-Smith (director of Turkey Shoot and Stunt Rock among many others) was on hand for a Q&A along with the director, and they ended the lively answer session with a competition to see who could crack a can of beer the farthest.

Sauna

I found myself unable to write coherently about Sauna last night partly because it was 2am and partly because I'm still trying to wrap my brain around it. Add a ponderous plot that you may need to be Russo-Finnish to understand on top of some intentional narrative disjointing, and you get something that only succeeds as an atmospheric piece, with some genuinely startling moments. Rodney Perkins and I both were able to draw some dim comparisons between the titular sauna of the picture and The Stalker's "Zone"- But I had a hard time finding any other keys to understanding it. It may bear another viewing. I will say that the cinematography and effects made me interested in the producer's next outing, Iron Sky, a speculative piece about a Nazi moon colony.


-- Post From My iPhone

Fantastic Fest 2008 : Animated Shorts Program

My friend Scott and I were both in love with last years stop-motion short "The Bird the Mouse and the Sausage" so we made sure to schedule this year's animated shorts program, which includes "Fish" a short by the same filmmaking duo. Fish was very good as well, a page taken out of Jan Svankmajer's "Scenes from the Surreal" period. Probably due to the overexposure of CG, the shorts that stood out the most in this showcase were the handmade, low-tech ones. There was a lot of Bolex Bros' style Pixillation (a term no one uses now since computers eclipsed all other uses of the word 'pixel') wherin stop motion is applied to normally live subjects, like human actors. One film, "Muto" used some very impressive animated mural paintings on walls in live environments. I was also happy to see that it also prominently displayed its creative commons license at the beginning of the film.


MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Fantastic Fest 2008 : Animated Shorts Program

Behind the Pink Curtain, Jasper Sharp, Book - Barnes & Noble

Behind the Pink Curtain focuses on the art and industry of one of the most notorious sectors of Japanese filmmaking, the erotic Pink Film, or pinku eiga genre, and the closely related Roman Porno films produced by Nikkatsu studios from 1971 to 1988. A phenomenon distinct from the cheaply-produced hardcore Adult Video (AV) market, from the early '60s onwards major Japanese film studios and independent producers alike have kept up a conveyor belt level of output of pornographic features intended purely for cinema release. Still today, just short of 100 such titles are shot on 35mm every year intended for screening in a specialist network of adult cinema across the nation. In recent years, many have found themselves released on DVD in the West or screened at international film festivals, while many of Japan's most noted filmmakers today have cut their teeth in this industry.

I just picked up this lovingly printed hardbound copy of Behind the Pink Curtain at the festival. Beyond complete and full of color stills and poster images from every era, this is the ultimate Pinku resource. Behind the Pink Curtain, Jasper Sharp, Book - FAB Press

Vinyan

It's a shame that the print of Vinyan was mistakenly sent straight to Sitges from the Toronto film festival and we ended up with a DVD, because this was an amazing piece of filmmaking. Sinister and masterful in it's performances, pacing and sound design. Even quashed through the av bottleneck of an SD DVD, this is my current favorite movie of the festival.


-- Post From My iPhone

Nacho Vigalondo Shorts

Every short in this collection made me laugh out loud, and I'll make sure to imbed any that are available on YouTube here when I get home. Nacho was as funny in person as he is onscreen, and I'd like to see that humor extend more to his feature work.






-- Post From My iPhone

Fear(s) of the dark

We changed our schedules to include this animated anthology when I read that Charles Burns created one of the shorts. The anthology is presented as a collection of real fears, but in reality it was a group of impressive animated shorts bookended by a voice recounting lists of disingenuous, politicized liberal-guilt 'fears' of one homogenized group of French people. "I'm afraid I'm becoming more conservative." "I'm afraid of indigestion, I eat too much" "I'm afraid I might become racist". Right. That's your deepest, darkest, since-childhood fear? The Charles Burns short is a good piece of psychosexual Cronenberg homage, although skinning 3d models with burns' normally flat graphic style isn't always perfect. The real highlight of the anthology was the last short by Richard McGuire, a brilliant, wordless study in visual gestalt- contrasty shapes float in a black space, creating depth and environments in your mind that aren't actually shown on screen.


-- Post From My iPhone

Sorry Thanks wins Adrienne Shelly Grant

The film I worked on late last year, Sorry Thanks, has received a $10k grant from The Adrienne Shelly Foundation and Artists Public Domain, awarded by IFP. There's a new, more complete website for the film now, and a trailer should be added within the week. Check back or join the mailing list on the site for more information. I've already told my friends, but I saw most of the film finally on my last visit to New York, and I think it's the best work I've done as an adult.

IndiewireDISPATCH FROM NYC
Hollywood Reporter: IFP hands out $130K at Indie Filmmaker Awards

Tokyo Gore Police

A squirty bit of GWARish Japanese fun for fans of Machine Girl. I liked the Robocob-esque fake commercials and the appearances by the limbless bondage gimp.


-- Post From My iPhone

Your name here

I had a hard time fighting through the supporting performances and sci-fi original series production values, but Bill Pullman gives a knowing and lovable performance as Philip K Dick analogue William J Frick, and the script, while a little self indulgent and about 20 minutes too long, really made me laugh at each little in-joke I got.


I think I should also mention that the 'Repo- the genetic opera' fans congesting the hallway with their full costume and considerable girth should be herded up and sent back to the local rocky horror picture show or Renaissance festival that they came from. Preferably with high powered cattle prods.

-- Post From My iPhone

The good the bad and the weird

Fun cultural mashup of spaghetti western and modern play-football-with-the-camera action (something I hope to avoid in Asian action films) set in Manchuria and populated by Korean bandits and mercenaries in diaspora. The film is worth watching for a Mad Max everyone-race-for-the-maguffin
action piece - this one incorporating artillery shelling by a pissed off Japanese army, and some very impressive horse stunts.

-- Post From My iPhone

Tokyo!

Interior Design and Merde, the first two thirds of Tokyo! Were imaginative, playful amazing pieces of filmmaking that any artist should be envious of. If it weren't for a sentimental misstep at the end of the final film, Shaking Tokyo, I would be able to say I loved this collection of films without reservation.


-- Post From My iPhone

Just another love story

As Scott said, expect Joel schumaker to pick up the rights to this for a shitty American remake within the next year. This Danish nod to film noir by way of Hollywood thriller wasn't to my taste but others seemed to like it. I was additionally put off by the fact that the movie was delivered on a standard def letterboxed DVD when it was clearly shot on a better format.


-- Post From My iPhone

Fantastic Fest 2008 : How to Get Rid of the Others

The last film we watched tonight was a bit of entertaining, mean-spirited Danish fun. How to Get Rid of the Others begins with the old no exit/cube convention of tossing a bunch of miscreants into a room and letting them stew for a while. The basic conceit is that Denmark has passed an act of Battle Royale-level ridiculousness where the nation is briefly placed under martial law while all the 'good families' are out on holiday. Using predetermined criteria, the military rounds up the worst burdens on Denmark's social services, gives them a quick trial and summarily executes them.

How to Get Rid of the Others is at its best when it is being ridiculous, as it is in its opening image of an obese woman on a rascal-style scooter being airlifted by troops across the Danish countryside. When it flirts with seriousness it gets bogged down and confused as to what statement it should make. Regardless, it was a lot of fun, especially in its last act.

Late bloomer

Next up was a Japanese feature shot on desaturated, grainy consumer video (and preoccupied with the cameras themselves, as the movie is full of them). Late Bloomer is about a handicapped man who lashes out through a string of fairly senseless murders. The movie tries to work with it's lo-fi look by including glitchy Tetsuo/Rubber Johnny-esque flourishes, but made it feel a little dated as a result. I enjoyed the relationship early on between the disabled lead actor and his caregiver, which involved a lot of grunting and beer drinking.




-- Post From My iPhone

Fantastic test kicks off

I avoided the kevin smith opening film and started my festival with the first official feature, Cargo 200. A relentlessly brutalizing tour of late Soviet Russia that makes you smell each vodka-soaked corpse-littered setpiece and refuses to let you come up for air. Abuses of power, an atmostphere of sexual hatred and hoplessness, and period Russian pop music abound. I'll take even the bleakest movie that takes me somewhere I have never been and probably shouldn't go over cutesy pop-cultural wankfests any day.


-- Post From My iPhone

The New Year | Pitchfork

Change comes slow in the Kadane camp, but the latest album from brothers Matt and Bubba and their friends in the New Year shows some chances taken and a subtly expanded palette. After two records that quietly and resolutely plumbed desolation and depression, the songs from their self-titled third album hit on a surprisingly hopeful note-- but even that hope carries its own complications and shades of gray.

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Twitch - An Interview with VINYAN Composer François-Eudes Chanfrault

The music of François-Eudes Chanfrault is an ubiquitous presence in European genre films. His compositional stamp has been placed on such works as Alexander Aja’s Haute Tension, Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury’s À l’intérieur (Inside), Oliver Alexander’s Donkey Punch, and most recently Fabrice du Welz’s Vinyan. Chanfrault kindly answered some questions about his career as a composer, including how he got started in soundtrack work, his compositional approach, and his upcoming projects.

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Fantastic Fest Online

As 2008 Fantastic Fest badges are sold out and some folks don't have the money to travel to Austin for the festival in the first place, we have teamed up with two of our festival sponsors, AMD and BSide, to give everyone a taste of the fun for free.

From September 14-20, AMD FANTASTIC FEST ONLINE will provide five feature films and six shorts from the official 2008 Fantastic Fest lineup to also be available for online viewing for free via the BSide network.

Included in the online lineup is Fish, a new short by the creators of last year's The Bird The Mouse and the Sausage, which was charming and weird and one of my favorite little moments from 2007.

Fantastic Fest 2008 Online:

Arcade UFO : Japanese Arcade in AUSTIN!

Arcade UFO, originally uploaded by nettekins.

Arcade UFO is the result of friendship, coincidence, and a little luck. Many of the people behind aUFO were regulars and/or employees of Einstein's Arcade, which tragically closed on January 1st, 2008. The business didn't go under; the owner simply decided to move on. In fact, all of Austin's arcade closures have been the result of politics rather than bankruptcy. Le Fun's space was leased (purchased?) by the Church of Scientology when Le Fun's lease ran out in 2005, while Dobie Powerplay's owner sadly passed away in 2006.

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DIVYA SRINIVASAN, Fist Clench

My friend Divya has added a new section to her art site Pupae for daily work.
"Fist Clench"

Artnet News - REPUBLICAN VP A MUSEUM FOE

Much of the copious news coverage swirling around Sarah Palin, Republican John McCain’s surprise pick for vice president, has focused on the relative inexperience of the freshman governor of Alaska and former mayor of Wasilla, a suburb of less than 10,000 people outside Anchorage. However, the 44-year-old Palin had proven experience with one thing during her brief tenure in government: slashing museum funding. As mayor of Wasilla, Palin quickly moved to cut the budget of the Dorothy G. Page Museum, a city-run institution that teaches Alaskan history and includes exhibits about the Gold Rush and the Iditarod.
According to a 1997 report in the Anchorage Daily News, Palin summarily fired museum director John Cooper (along with many other city officials. Palin, known for injecting her religious beliefs into government, also reportedly pressured town librarian Mary Ellen Baker to ban books, and then tried to fire the woman when she refused). Palin cut $32,000 from the Page Museum’s $200,000 budget, provoking the three 15-year employees of the museum, Ann Meyers, Opal Toomey and Esther West, to resign en masse. 'They’d rather quit than continue working for a city that doesn’t want to preserve its history,' the Daily News reported. Wasilla was running a $4 million budget surplus at the time.

Artnet News - artnet Magazine

Mind Hacks: Digital drugs emergency - paging Dr. Beat

Mind Hacks chimes in on binaural beats and brain machines after a trashy USA Today piece. This is the first time I've gotten to read a non-hippy authored article about these effects, everything I have read has been 100% "oh, this will put you in a blah blah brain state etc". It looks like there's very little other than anecdotal evidence that these do anything for the majority of users. Bummer, I just recently bought a brain machine kit from make magazine. I wonder if it will do anything for me.
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Spore fans equal 38 per cent of God's output

Will Wright shows off Spore for Mac - Digital Lifestyle - Macworld UK:

Will Wright, creator of Sim City and The Sims, arrived at The Apple Store, Regent Street yesterday to demonstrate his latest game Spore before a packed audience of keen Mac gamers.[...] Wright also talked about the importance of the Spore Creature Creator. [...] It turns out that Spore Creature Creator has exceeded their expectations for creating life forms to be used in the Spore universe. Wright said their original aim was to get 100,000 life forms in the three months between Spore Creature Creator and the launch of Spore itself. They ended up getting this amount in just 22 hours, within a week they had over a million creatures and in 18 days fans of Spore had made over three million creatures. Will Wright said: 'this is interesting because there are only around one-and-a-half million species on Earth'. He also, lightheartedly said: 'the way we see it, God created all life on earth in seven days, so Spore fans equal 38 per cent of God's output'.

The Octopus Project | Daytrotter | Reeling Through Sprinkles And Hott Beats

The Octopus Project | Daytrotter | Reeling Through Sprinkles And Hott Beats

Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea - The Times Online

[...]
All of Miyazaki’s films have their own blithe disregard for narrative logic, but Ponyo is as chaotic and exuberant as a story told by a hyperactive toddler who has just been mainlining Fruit Shoots (…and then a whale did come and it did turn into a wave. And then they did eat noodles…). The rich symbolism and the shadowy frisson of threat in, say, Spirited Away is more or less absent from this film. There is a creepy underwater sorcerer who tries to keep Ponyo the goldfish in his underwater lair, but the sum total of his evil-doing is an injudicious over-application of blue eye shadow and the fact that he once shoots his bubble gun at a passing squid.

Sparsely populated by Miyazaki’s usual standards – rather than armies of soot sprites and water spirits – the film concentrates on family, specifically the relationship between mother and child. Ultimately, the defining feature of this film is its weapons-grade cuteness. It’s utterly disarming, a film that unspools like a big sigh of pleasure. Ponyo in her human form, joyfully careering around on her newly sprouted legs, is a delight.
Link to full review

Twitch - The Films of Chris Marker: An Introduction

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ImpossibleFunky Productions: Confessions of a Bootlegger

Mike White of SuperHappyFun blogs about his experiences bootlegging rare movies.

I tried to stay within the spirit of the law, if not the letter. I tried to only sell titles that weren't available on DVD in the United States. This became more difficult as more and more titles found their way out. I eventually gave up even trying to carry certain directors as they kept being released by obscure DVD outfits.

In actuality, I loved that the titles on SuperHappyFun were being ousted by legitimate release. My dream is that all of the two thousand films we once carried would be as easy to get as the latest hot release. I want a world where the grey market isn't necessary; where all movies are available via a massive movie server where they could be viewed in their original aspect ratio with their original running time with any/all languages available as audio tracks and/or subtitles. Keep dreaming, I know.

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