I just wanted to send you guys a plug for a really special show I booked at the Silent Movie Theatre this Wednesday, which could easily slip through the cracks.
Brent Green an untrained, completely original animator from rural Pennyslvania, who plays music along with his short films, while narrating them live in freeform, semi-improvised sounding streams of words. He has a homegrown, handmade asethetic, and a exhibition style deeply influenced by music performance:
“When I finish a film we do live shows with bands and sell DVD-R’s with hand-painted artwork,’ Green says. ‘The bands improv the soundtracks and I yell the narration like a preacher. I get to work with artists I love –Califone, Sin Ropas, Garland of Hours and Brendan Canty from Fugazi.’”
The New York Times called his films “some of the most original animations we have seen in years”. His work has played at Sundance, The Getty Museum, The Hammer, The Warhol Museum, and this is a rare chance to see him in an intimate, small theatre, and very few people know it’s happening, so there’s still tickets available.
$10, Wed. You can get them at the door, or prebuy to be safe order a ticket by clicking here.
I distinctly remember this as the year it all changed. Now, you can count on a couple scraps of real entertainment (Will Ferrell, Jack Black, and John C. Reilly), and nothing tooooo tasteless. Personally, I preferred the Oscars as a bloated atrocity. Now it’s just a chubby disgrace, not much to get your bile up.
Remember that Shining redux trailer? The one with the Peter Gabriel song? This one’s from the same guy, Manhattan editor Robert Ryang. He’s got a quite a little resume going at this point. After the Shining trailer got so popular the New York Times covered it, the Independent Spirit Awards hired him to make a couple more. One, in which he would take an independent movie (Blue Velvet) and make it look like a mainstream movie (Monster-In-Law, I guess), which you can look at here. And the one above, in which he was to take a mainstream movie and make it look independent.
There’s a fair amount of more interesting info to be found on Ryang, and other trailer recuts by the gaggle of editors he works with. But, since I’m already at risk of simply parroting another blog, I’ll pass on the interested to The Tattered Coat’s well-researched entry.
I’ve long thought that Fox’s popular TV series 24 is a thinly-veiled piece of right-wing propaganda. An investigative story in the latest New Yorker confirms all of my worst suspicions about the show’s ideology, agenda and toxic impact on American culture. Jane Mayer pegs 24 as a sales pitch for police state tactics in the Bush “War on Terror.” Her article details the chummy relationship between 24’s creators and the White House, and the way right wing pundits have used the show’s bogus scenarios to bludgeon political opposition to torture and racial profiling. More disturbing still, the article claims that some soldiers in Iraq have mistaken the show for real life– mimicking scenes from 24 in their interrogations. (Yeah, yeah, I know. TV doesn’t influence behavior.)
So, is executive producer Joel Surnow simply Leni Riefenstahl with a soul patch? Maybe not yet. (Let’s see if this season’s Muslim internment camps become next year’s Homeland Security policy.) But there’s enough evidence that 24 is having a negative effect on the ground in Iraq, in the classrooms at West Point, and in the national non-debate over torture. Philosopher Slavoj Zizek certainly isn’t shy about comparing the show to Nazi propaganda. Even lefty “filmanthropist” Robert Greenwald believes 24 is dangerous. (And who can argue that the director of Xanadu isn’t some kind of expert on torture?) Just today, the show’s producers announced they’d be dialing down the torture quotient, but they deny that they’ve succumbed to pressure.
Crticism aside, the 24 phenomenon isn’t losing steam. Now in its sixth season, the show has been spun-off into a video game and an upcoming feature film. And it is insanely popular, even among my liberal friends. While right wingers are apt to declare Jack Bauer the very model of an American hero, lefties couch their appreciation in irony or confess that the show is a kind of macho wish fulfillment. For his part, Joel Surnow has no shame in announcing that the new season is for “alpha males, commandos, mercenaries and guys in prison.” If you don’t fit this demographic, may I humbly suggest you skip purchasing or renting 24 and instead send a check to the ACLU. They need your money more than Surnow does.
Surnow’s next project for Fox is a “conservative” version of The Daily Show. Judging from this clip, when it premieres on Sunday night, the only people being tortured will be the audience.
I’m guessing I wouldn’t be alone if I said the only thing I remember about Sleep With Me, Rory Kelly’s 1994 independent romantic comedy–so generic it starred Eric Stoltz–is the brilliant deconstruction of Top Gun that Quentin Tarantino wandered onto the set to deliver. It’s funny and shrewd, and exactly the kind of thing video store clerks love to monologue about when you put a beer in their hand. Which is apparently how this bit was born. Tarantino acknowledges it was actually Roger Avery’s brainchild, but claims the two built the bit into feverish longform at parties and bars together, a believable story if there ever was one.
For me, videos like this one, by Dale Hersh and Mike Heim, should be the future of film criticism. With minimal text and a couple bits of a Tarantino explication, it demonstrates it points largely through excerpts of the film itself. Of course, Hersh & Heim (sounds like a candy company, or something), are probably less concerned with the nature of video-form film criticism than with making us laugh. They’re both comedy writers who’ve actually worked this premise–that Top Gun is gay–into a successful full-length Airplane-esque sketch show in West Hollywood, Gay Top Gun.
Style aside, I have mixed feelings about the commentary itself. Latent homosexual subtext is one of the easiest of grad-humour reinterpretations, and sometimes feels like it could be used almost ubiquitously, like the way Slavoj Zizek can do Freudian interpretations, ad infinitum. And though these riffs may be easy, and fun, like pop-level Freud, I have serious doubts about their veracity.
So why are they easy and fun? Well, let’s start with “fun”. I think the humor of them springs largely from the viewer/joker’s own mild homosexual panic. In my experience, the most common purveyors of these humorous reinterpretations are liberal-minded straight men. Yes, Mark Rappaport made Rock Hudson’s Home Movies, a feature-length video-essay about queer subtext, but I don’t think it’s a joke to him. Humor springs from the things in life we are uncomfortable with (think scatalogy), but basically find harmless. Bad, but not really bad, simultaneously. Like how Quentin Tarantino feels about homosexuality (let’s not get started on Bruce Willis’ segment of Pulp Fiction). And, if we’re willing to be honest, a lot of straight liberal guys like me.
And why easy? Because male bonding and fraternal love is everywhere. Every “buddy” movie, you could say. Batman and Robin. Lone Ranger and Tonto. Huck Finn and Jim. All of which have been queer theorized. Not to say that one couldn’t view these easily through pink-colored glasses, but to do so is to willfully misunderstand them for humorous effect (double meanings and misunderstandings are also fun). It seems more likely to me, that the real subtext of these stories is infantile, presexual. The reason the female relationships are so unimportant in these films is arrested development, a fantasy of an extended idyllic boyhood of make-believe, in which we are free from adult worries. Like, you know, women. It’s like the Little Rascal’s “He-Man Woman Haters Club”.
All that said, Top Gun is pretty gay. I mean, look at it.
P.S. Did you know that “Tom Cruise” is, in some circles, actually slang for homosexual. At least according to definitions 23 & 24 on urbandictionary.com.
Last Fall this virus was getting passed around (342,000 views last time I checked). For good reason, it’s pretty contagious. I did the minimal research, and it turns out this is part of a longer series of similar videos. He’s a NY DJ, and his proclivity towards beats and blends is a little more obvious in this work, for example:
If you want to see more work by The Post Show, an online comedy sketch group formed last September by Bob Castrone & Brian Levin, go to superdeluxe.com, a comedy sketch website that’s above average. In the meantime, I’m working on getting a copy of their sold-out DVD for CineFile. I hope its as funny as this bit was.
A really inspiring video mash-up by Los Angeles video DJ, TV Sheriff aka Davy Force. I’m particularly impressed by the percussive use of Jerry Lewis’ trademark squawks and gazoinks, as well as Springer’s chanting minions. The sound in the source videos is unusually essential to the piece, he didn’t just lay a beat and cut some video over it (something that’s so impossible to fail at, it’s a good way to teach beginners how to edit without ruining their confidence). From what I hear, there should be an Othercinema DVD compliation of TV Sheriff stuff coming out in the spring!
I know the holidays are over, but I couldn’t resist sharing this video remix by our friend ZZalgern0n, over at Pixellate.com. He called it a mash-up, but it’s more like a demented piece of video karoake, that shouldn’t make me laugh, but did. Repetively, even. The source material seems to be the making-of interview with Schwarzenegger on our Jingle All the Way DVD. Check it out:
If you want to rate it, or see his ridiculous list of “tags”, go here:
