"Space Monkey"

"HEAVY WEATHER"

For show info, go here.

 The Journal of Short Film released Volume 15 today. The JSF is a quarterly DVD that, to date, has published over 150 filmmakers from over a dozen countries.

Volume 15 includes a head-spinning variety of experimental, documentary, narrative, and animated work. The collection traverses territory from Guyana to Hiroshima and from young romance to gritty survival.Here is the complete list:

She was always my Dad's favorite. He loved his coffee cup with her picture on it more than his cigarrettes and the coffee inside of it. She was not a bad actress, was capable of good performances. Bon Voyage.

Laura Bickford on the state of the major studios.
Insight: The current distribution model of major studios is simply not sustainable and can not successfully be applied to smaller budget films.
“The reason the studios aren’t doing these [smaller budget] movies isn’t because of taste, it’s because the economic model didn’t work for them. And right now they know they’re on their way down, too. The studios are facing what the music industry was facing. They know that they’re dinosaurs, they know that they’re bloated and they know that they’re going to be over. But they don’t know when and they don’t know what’s going to replace it. Nobody knows how to monetize the internet, nobody knows how monetize video on demand and other forms of that, which is the way of the future shared with the theatrical experience… But they just don’t know where their revenues are going to come from… If we can show them how to make money on smaller budget films they’d be doing it.” (from the LAFF panel via Indiewire

...To this..Holy Cow.

“Why talk to the monkey when the organ grinder is in the room?”  Halpern wonders, quoting Churchill; the answer, he explains, is that in this case only the monkeys really matter.

As the tone of that last line suggests, alas, it’s hard to write a polemic premised on the assumption that your opponents are monkeys without sounding like a particularly high-vocabulary monkey yourself.

Helprin variously describes his foes as “wacked-out muppets,” “crapulous professors,” “regular users of hallucinogenic drugs,” “a My Little Pony version of the Khmer Rouge,” “a million geeks in airless basements,” “mouth-breathing morons in backwards baseball caps and pants that fall down” and so forth. The overall effect is like listening to an erudite gentleman employing $20 words while he screams at a bunch of punk kids to get off his front lawn.

Ross Douthat reviews Mark Halpern's "Digital Barbarism" A Writer's Manifesto" for the NYTS. 

"Why am I an alcoholic?," Shia LaBeouf says during an upcoming Parade interview with Dotson Raider. "I haven't a damn clue! What is life about? I don't know. The good actors are all screwed up. They're all in pain. It's a profession of bottom-feeders and heartbroken people. Every man has those feelings of escape and survival. I know you shouldn't be that way. I'm trying to understand it and find the answers. I don't have them now

Writer-Director James Grey on the importance of asking why something happens to characters in film.

You are always in a struggle to avoid cliche; however, it's very relevant to embrace archetype. Some people go to movies for different reasons. It doesn't mean the reason is worse or the reason is better - but people go to movies for different reasons and some people go to see films for the thrill of the whodunnit.

So the dramatic tension for them is the unfolding of events; they don't know what will happen next, and the whole joy of the experience is the unpredictability of the story. I must say that this is not important to me, which is something that is probably obvious to viewers of the film. It's not important to me, necessarily, that the film is predictable or unpredictable. In fact, I almost prefer the film to be inevitable, that the unfolding of events in the film proves itself to be something you could have predicted would happen. And in fact, I think that this view of cinema is born out of an entire history of storytelling, because it enables you to get out of the way of the surprise. So what do I mean? If you look at a story like Macbeth, for example, the witches more or less tell you at the beginning what will happen, so that the pleasure of the experience becomes not what will happen, but why it has happened.

I think if the joy of the experience is what will happen, it becomes a picture or piece of art with a limited shelf life. That is to say, you watch it once and you find out what the answer is, and then you can't watch it anymore. It becomes an irrelevancy. If the question of the film, or the question of the work of art, is why it's happened, then it never ceases to be interesting, one hopes, it never ceases to be about the lives of the people in it. And that, for me, is a higher calling for any creative work. (link from David Lowery's Drifting)

Clint Eastwood's new film is named after Henley's 1875 poem.

  I watched the instant Disney classic “Beverly Hills Chihuahua” last night w/ H who loves these kinds of films. The Producers must have played the “Freaky Friday” card to get Jamie Lee Curtis in all of ten minutes of this low-grade-fever piece of dung. They unearthed  every Latino who may or may not have worked in the last 30 years to do the voice-overs of the dogs, occasional rat, and an iguana or komodo dragon (no, it had to be a iguana because there were no Chinese coolie voice-overs or fast-forwards to Bejing that I could tell)

Jamie Lee Curtis is a billionaire perfume designer who lives in a 180 room Beverly Hills village with a white short –hair chihuahua Princess who appears to suffer from constipation. No time for a husband, Jamie Lee’s closest relationships with two-legged mammals are with a Mexican Gardener whom she treats like a son and a spoiled niece who hangs out with her friends around the pool.

As fate would have it, the Mexican Gardener has a brown chiwauwau who has the hots for Ms. Lee’s Princess who, just like the spoiled niece, hangs around the pool with her weirdo dog friends (the prerequisite gay and materialistic girls) in lounge chairs designed just for them wearing the most ridiculous outfits you have ever seen.

The Two Princesses wound up in Mexico where polite, racial hi-jinks ensue.

Mindless goofiness aside, two strange things these types of films have to at least try to get right: One, choose cute dogs and two, don’t scrimp on the CGI.

As I watched the masterpiece I kept being drawn to the dog’s eyes that stood out like Afghanistan refuggees’ against the Disney-lit stages. You don’t have to look closely to see the degrees of shock, anger, and finally a lifeless resignation they leveled at their handlers and co-stars

It just occurred to me that to enjoy BHC even more you could mute the picture and listen/read passages from Jonathan Littell’s controversial WW II opus “The Kindly Ones.”

A 64-spice curry over walked-on cotton candy.

1.  The movies have been so rank the last couple of years that when I see people lining up to buy tickets I sometimes think that the movies aren't drawing an audience — they're inheriting an audience. People just want to go to a movie. They're stung repeatedly, yet their desire for a good movie — for any movie — is so strong that all over the country they keep lining up. "There's one God for all creation, but there must be a separate God for the movies," a producer said. "How else can you explain their survival?" An atmosphere of hope develops before a big picture's release, and even after your friends tell you how bad it is, you can't quite believe it until you see for yourself. The lines (and the grosses) tell us only that people are going to the movies — not that they're having a good time. Financially, the industry is healthy, so among the people at the top there seems to be little recognition of what miserable shape movies are in. They think the grosses are proof that people are happy with what they're getting, just as TV executives think that the programs with the highest ratings are what TV viewers want, rather than what they settle for. (A number of the new movie executives come from TV.) These new executives don't necessarily see many movies themselves, and they rarely go to a theater. If for the last couple of years Hollywood couldn't seem to do anything right, it isn't that it was just a stretch of bad luck — it's the result of recent developments within the industry. And in all probability it will get worse, not better. There have been few recent American movies worth lining up for — last year there was chiefly The Black Stallion, and this year there is The Empire Strikes. The first was made under the aegis of Francis Ford Coppola; the second was financed by George Lucas, using his profits from Star Wars as a guarantee to obtain bank loans. One can say with fair confidence that neither The Black Stallion nor The Empire Strikes Back could have been made with such care for visual richness and imagination had they been done under studio control. Even small films on traditional subjects are difficult to get financed at a studio if there are no parts for stars in them; Peter Yates, the director of Breaking Away a graceful, unpredictable comedy that pleases and satisfies audiences took the project to one studio after another for almost six years before he could get the backing for it.

2.  There are direct results when conglomerates take over movie companies. Heads of the conglomerates may be drawn into the movie business for the status implications — the opportunity to associate with the world-famous. Some other conglomerate heads may be drawn in for the women, too; a new social, life beckons, and as they become social people with great names approach them as equals, and famous stars and producers and writers and directors tell them they've heard from other studios and about ideas they have for movies. The conglomerate heads become indignant that the studios they run have passed on these wonderful projects. The next day, they're on the phone raising hell with the studio bosses. Very soon, they're likely to be directors and suggesting material to them, talking to actors, and company executives what projects should be developed. How bad is the judgment of the conglomerate heads? Very bad. They haven't grown up in a showbusiness milieu — they don't have the instincts or the information of those who have lived and sweated movies for many years. (Neither do most of the current studio bosses.) The corporate heads may be business geniuses, but as far as movies are concerned, have virgin instincts; ideas that are new to them and take them by storm may have failed grotesquely dozens of times. But they feel that they are creative people — how else could they have made so much money and be in a position to advise artists what to do? Who is to tell them no? Within a very short time, they are in fact, though not in title, running the studio. They turn up compliant executives who will settle for the title and not fight for the authority or for their own tastes if, in fact, they have any. The conglomerate heads find these compliant executives among lawyers and agents, among television executives, and in the lower echelons of the companies they've taken over. Generally, these executives reserve all their enthusiasm for movies that have made money; those are the only movies they like.  When a director or a writer talks to them and tries to suggest the kind of movie he has in mind by using a comparison, they may stare at him blankly. They are usually law school or business school graduates; they have no frame of reference. Worse, they have no shame about not knowing anything about movies.  From their point of view, such knowledge is not essential to their work.  Their talent is being able to anticipate their superiors' opinions; in meetings, they show a sixth sense for guessing what the most powerful person wants to hear. And if they ever guess wrong, they know how to shift gears without a tremor. So the movie companies wind up with top production executives whose interest in movies rarely extends beyond the selling possibilities; they could be selling neckties just as well as movies, except that they are drawn to glamour and power.

- Read the rest of the prohecy here.

Everything will get smaller the longer you stay

How old or new means something on the surface

Price means more something but everything will get smaller

the longer you stay

Booze and company nets make you forget the state

of the bedspread for awhile

You spend a lot of time in the big or small lobby

watching the others come and go and you

feel so down you suddenly think of Phil Niekro

and almost laugh out loud

In the bath of the hardest water in the world

You think it’s a good idea to organize the place

to put your mind at ease

and afterwards the tip for the maid goes for a MOD

Outside is nothing but legal tender trade and

Cars that whiz by in the midst which, if

You had your way, would be gorillas that got it over quickly.

- JB

Indiewire's Anthony Kaufman exorcises Von Trier's new film "Antichrist"

While there’s no doubt that the place he goes is off a precipitous edge, one can’t deny the film’s continuing primal power. The laughter heard during the film’s most disturbing final act is probably more a result of its efficacy than its excessiveness, though I can’t be sure. There’s an instance of body mutilation that will turn off the most tolerant viewer (and surely, the most open-minded distributor). And while one can’t begin to dissect the film’s attitude towards women - long a subject of contention for the accused sadist director - “Antichrist” probably won’t do much to change the mind of those who question his sympathies towards the opposite sex. But this is Von Trier, after all. You got to take the brilliance with the pathologies.

I like real babies.

Yes, I am ready for my close-up.

After this, I am off to sea.

Well well well..

           Like a yacht that rocks against its dock and cleats
And knocks the light around its too sleek decks,
A restless man will drink to box the time
Between clams at noon and mussels at five.

On the lap of an oily bay, the fullblown day
Bides, bides completely in the tinks of fire
That a fair wind threw into the dangling flags,
Into the solution of each night’s stars.

Until the deadweight sits on wild palettes
You too should bide, until metaphysics
Is lavished as fiercely as the sunshine,
You should abide this high-falutin speech

As if someone is dying for the news
That takes him beyond a frosted highball
Into a heaven of the gentlest blue —
The empty afternoons are forgiven.