Friday, February 29, 2008

There Will Be Milkshakes for Old Men. 2008. SNL.


Seems like SNL got a fresh start after the WGA strike.

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Prologue (Visions of Europe). 2004. Dir. Bela Tarr.



Bela Tarr's entry for Visions of Europe.
The idea is simple:
Twenty-five countries, twenty-five visions from respected film directors from each of the respective countries that form the new European Community. Each director will give a personal vision of current or future life in this coming cultural melting pot.

The conditions are equally simple:
Absolute freedom of expression.

Tarr has a series of screenings at LACMA coming up, including his latest The Man From London and also the full eight hours of Satantango.

Reel Epics: The Films of Béla Tarr
March 7 - March 28

Hungary's Béla Tarr is one of the most acclaimed filmmakers of the last twenty years, yet he remains little known in the U.S. This series tracks Tarr from the stripped-down naturalism of his early works to the mesmerizing formalism of his recent masterpieces. With subtle, textured sound design and spellbinding camerawork, Tarr depicts the relationships among charlatans, demagogues and luckless peasants trapped in crowded city apartments or in remote towns.

March 7 7:30 PM Werckmeister Harmonies
March 8 7:30 PM Damnation
March 14 7:30 PM Family Nest
March 14 9:20 PM The Prefab People
March 15 7:30 PM The Outsider
March 21 7:30 PM Almanac of Fall
March 22 2:00 PM Sátántangó
March 28 7:30 PM The Man from London

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

iBand. Jamsessions?



"the world's first iphone band."

more at: iband.at

Sunday, February 24, 2008

The Dot and the Line. 1965. Dir. Chuck Jones.

"This is the anguished tale of a sensible straight line who falls in love with a dot. The dot, however, finding the line stiff, dull, and conventional, turns her affections toward a wild and unkempt squiggle. The story ends with a punning moral: "To the vector belong the spoils.""

Thursday, February 21, 2008

Be Kind Rewind. 2008. Dir. Michel Gondry

Jack Black stars in Be Kind Rewind, a one-of-a-kind comedy from the mind of writer/director Michel Gondry (Dave Chappelle's Block Party, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). Black stars as a loveable loser stuck in a life that's too small for his big dreams. But when he unintentionally erases all the tapes in a video store where his best friend works, he devises a plan to satisfy the store's few loyal customers by re-creating and re-filming every movie they decide to rent. Be Kind Rewind features a cast that includes Mos Def, Danny Glover, and Mia Farrow.
Michel Gondry's latest film Be Kind Rewind gets released this Friday, Feb. 22. This version of the trailer takes on the same "swede"ing techniques found in the film. Gondry finds himself destroying the original trailer while projecting it. He then recreates it by filming himself as all the characters and then using lo-fi tricks to remake the rest. Brillant!

Friday, February 15, 2008

C'était un Rendezvous. 1976. Dir. Claude Lelouch

On an August morning in 1978, French filmmaker Claude Lelouch mounted a gyro-stabilized camera to the bumper of a Ferrari 275 GTB and had a friend, a professional Formula 1 racer, drive at breakneck speed through the heart of Paris. The film was limited for technical reasons to 10 minutes; the course was from Porte Dauphine, through the Louvre, to the Basilica of Sacre Coeur.

No streets were closed, for Lelouch was unable to obtain a permit.

The driver completed the course in about 9 minutes, reaching nearly 140 MPH in some stretches. The footage reveals him running real red lights, nearly hitting real pedestrians, and driving the wrong way up real one-way streets.

Upon showing the film in public for the first time, Lelouch was arrested. He has never revealed the identity of the driver, and the film went underground until a DVD release a few years ago.

(via jerrykindall.com)

Wiki. Link.
Google Map of the path driven. Link.
Satellite Map. Link.

Also appropriated as a video for Snow Patrol's "Open Your Eyes"

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Tuesday, February 05, 2008

When the Day Breaks. 1999. Dir. Wendy Tilby & Amanda Forbis.


“A rooster has his last biscuit for breakfast and goes grocery shopping. A pig prepares her breakfast (potato peelings, with the potatoes thrown in the trash) and discovers she needs more milk. Their paths cross, a lemon falls into the sewer, and both lives are changed.”

Saturday, February 02, 2008

Two Takes on one "Quiet City."

Quiet City, Aaron Katz's second feature comes out on DVD early this week via Benten Films.
"As an extra, the DVD features Joe Swanberg’s Quiet City, a cute “short film prank” concocted by Swanberg (who stars) and his key collaborator Kevin Bewersdorf (who directed). It’s a six-minute lark, hilariously lo-fi and shot on a dime, and it manages to poke some gentle fun at all the key style points of Generation DIY. As such, it’ll probably unite mumblecore lovers and haters alike. —Bilge Ebiri"
(Via New York Magazine)

Ray Carney writes about mumbling with Katz's "Quiet City."
The verbal effect is to create a monumentally laid-back relation to life. What happens, happens. What doesn’t, doesn’t. No one is pushing the river. No one is making anything happen.

That doesn’t mean that nothing happens, but rather that it appears to originate without personal or imaginative pressure being applied by the characters or by the filmmaker. The relationship of Charlie and Jamie does get somewhere, but Katz’s goal is to present the progress of a relationship that is not rhetorically inflated or narratively pressured, a relationship that is not presented as a series of heightened, dramatic “points” in the stupid movie way. The “slacker” sensibility is at the heart of the project. Hollywood uses the character’s (that is the actor’s) ego as a generator of narrative impetus and movement. Actors (and the characters they play) “make scenes” that “make the movie go.” Tom Cruise and Robert DeNiro strut and fret, and Jack Nicholson and Nicholas Cage shout and showboat their way through their movies, flattering viewers with macho visions of how powerful and powerfully expressive someone can be. Quiet City quiets, stills, and almost stops the acting. The actor becomes a reactor.
Ray Carney "Trumping Trump"
(Via Filmmaker Magazine)