I'm a Sex Addict

Caveh Zahedi who most will probably know from appearing in Waking Life by Richard Linklater, also makes his own independent films. One of them is called "Tripping With Caveh" and I must see this first episode:

(c) Caveh talking to Greencine

I have this other film project called Tripping With Caveh. The idea is like Fishing With John, but instead of fishing, I'd trip with celebrities. I just did the first one, where I tripped with Will Oldham [singer from Palace Brothers, etc]. When I'm done putting that together I'll send it to a bunch of people and ask them if they want to be in the series.

I like it. And you, er, see this being on cable TV, or distributed on DVD?

I'd love to see it on TV but I can't imagine anybody showing it. I don't think television's ready for it.

Who else would be on your wish list for that series?

Everybody I like. I'd love to have Harmony Korine on it. I was reading an article about Charlie Kaufman and I was thinking he'd be an interesting person to trip with.

Yeah, although with him it's probably kind of redundant.

Hmm. I like Spike Jonze a lot, too. He's really great. And I heard Bill Murray trips - he'd be great.

I'd pay good money to see that.

Yep, me too.

You can watch a short clip here on his website.

And if you're interested in seeing this film or any other Caveh film, you can watch most online at greencine after paying a small amount of $$$. They all look interesting.

Two other links of use:
1. A Caveh Profile
2. Film Threat Interview

Lights Out

The 1,000 Greatest Films

Hum Along The Lawn

I'm still getting used to the new Pitchorkmedia look but I like their new features section. They've asked a few artists to come up with some sort of list. Fun to read really:

Ten Truths/Untruths (and Other Completely Subjective Things)
by Ben Chasny, Six Organs of Admittance

My Favorite Cassettes (I Was Allowed to Listen to), Age 7-15
by Danny Seim, Menomena

My Favorite Things: 2004
by Devendra Banhart

And now let me be cuz I need to work on my Devandra beard.

Zum Tode

So I checked out The Dead Texan and what do you know: another Thin Red Line admirer!

The 5th song: "Taco Me Manque" features a really short sample from TTRL at the beginning. It works perfect on this mellow beautiful tune:

WELSH (Sean Penn)
I feel sorry for you, kid.

WITT (Jim Caviezel)
Yeah?

WELSH
Yeah, a little.

That makes already two amazing songs that I know of which contain samples from The Thin Red Line. The other one off course being "Have You Passed Through This Night?" by Explosions in The Sky:

This great evil
Where's it come from?
How'd it steal into the world?
What seed, what root did it grow from?
Who's doing this?
Who's killing us, robbing us of life and light,
mocking us with the sight of what we might have known?
Does our ruin benefit the earth, aid the grass to grow, the sun to shine?
Is this darkness in you, too?
Have you passed through this night?

Keep that up.

The Chicken and The Egg

http://www.hiddendvdeastereggs.com/index.html

Always with a little humour

John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate is straight rock and roll. Mind you, this is the 1962 version (still have to catch up with the recent remake with Denzel).

Frankenheimer is somewhat of an acclaimed innovative director but I've never been too impressed with his work until I saw The Manchurian Candidate. This is by far the best work he's ever done. The screenplay is mighty interesting with brainwashing communists and a presidential race. It may be somewhat unbelievable at times but this is the movies after all. It doesn't really bother, also because there's a good portion of humour and the commies are like aliens from outer space which is pure genius.

And then there's the cinematography which is truly special and innovative. Especially the famous slightly out of focus shots:



Take this one. Just three people in a car, which is so simple, I would advise the writer to find something sexy but instead it's Frankenheimer who comes up with the sexyness. Look at how wonderful he positioned the characters and how just through style he tells us what every persona is like. The confused sarg, the bitchy mother, the puppet senator.

Superb and he pushes it all the way through. More blurry goodies:





But there's straight up fun with guns as well (the first image is actually reminiscent of the Hitchcock shot isn't it?) and more out of focus touches:





Anyway I could post much more but the real message here is, see it as fast as you can!

Look Familiar Dawgs?

More Manchurian Candidate shots to inspire certain people out there:

The Costumes (that game should get a tribute!)






The Dream





The Milk

What a beatiful world it can be.

Johann Johannssons new disc is in residence in Max Richter's CD player.

the real Waldo Salt

Here Comes The Hitch

The Man Who Knew Too Much is not really great. It's Hitchcock after all (yeah yeah blasphemy). But I gotta hand it out to the big old cameo fan, these moments are truly unforgettable:



Talking about the 70's, this is Hitchcock doing it avant la lettre. That being followed sequence with the footsteps when Stewart is going to the taxidermist is just unbelievable good. Was it this scene that inspired Boorman in Point Blank to do one of the best footstep sequences ever?




The Bernard Hermann joke also worked fantastic. To let your film composer exist within your movie and him conducting an actual performance is just hilarious. Duplicate worlds baby.




The Royal Albert Hall sequence. Although its length is rather long (about 12 minutes without any dialogue), it's so well done. I'm not talking about the script (which is actually full of plotholes at that moment) but it's the way it's been edited and shot. The images dance to the suspense and it's exhilarating. Gotta love those cymbals.

Does Alfred Hitchcock appear on all of his movies?

http://hitchcock.tv/cam/cameos.html

to the young

These are our final conclusions:

With our enthusiastic adherence to Futurism, we will:

1. Destroy the cult of the past, the obsession with the ancients, pedantry and academic formalism.

2. Totally invalidate all kinds of imitation.

3. Elevate all attempts at originality, however daring, however violent.

4. Bear bravely and proudly the smear of “madness” with which they try to gag all innovators.

5. Regard art critics as useless and dangerous.

6. Rebel against the tyranny of words: “Harmony” and “good taste” and other loose expressions which can be used to destroy the works of Rembrandt, Goya, Rodin...

7. Sweep the whole field of art clean of all themes and subjects which have been used in the past.

8. Support and glory in our day-to-day world, a world which is going to be continually and splendidly transformed by victorious Science.

The dead shall be buried in the earth’s deepest bowels! The threshold of the future will be swept free of mummies! Make room for youth, for violence, for daring!

(c) The Manifesto of the Futurist Painters

nothingness

or the real question one can ask: how to depict it?

Is there at most one empty world?

Most philosophers would grant Peter van Inwagen's premise that there is no more than one empty world. They have been trained to model the empty world on the empty set. Since a set is defined in terms of its members, there can be at most one empty set.

But several commentators on the nature of laws are pluralists about empty worlds (Carroll 1994, 64). They think empty worlds can be sorted in terms of the generalizations that govern them. Newton's first law of motion says an undisturbed object will continue in motion in a straight line. Aristotle's physics suggests that such an object will slow down and tend to travel in a circle. The Aristotelian empty world differs from the Newtonian empty world because different counterfactual statements are true of it.

If variation in empty worlds can be sustained by differences in the laws that apply to them, there will be infinitely many empty worlds. The gravitational constant of an empty world can equal any real number between 0 and 1, so there are more than countably many empty worlds. Indeed, any order of infinity achieved by the set of populated possible worlds will be matched by the set of empty worlds.

This is true even if we restrict attention to laws that preclude all objects and therefore only govern empty worlds. Consider a law that requires any matter to adjoin an equal quantity of anti-matter. The principles of matter and anti-matter ensure that they cannot co-exist so the result would be an empty world.

Advocates of the fine tuning argument (a descendent of the design argument) claim that the conditions under which life can develop are so delicate that the existence of observers indicates divine intervention. One can imagine a similar sort of argument that stresses what a narrow range of laws permit the formation of concrete entities. From the perspective of these fine tuners, the existence of a universe with concrete entities is an inspiring surprise.

Some existentialists picture nothingness as a kind of force that impedes each object's existence. Since there is something rather than nothing, any such nihilating force cannot have actually gone unchecked. What could have blocked it? Robert Nozick (1981, 123) toys with an interpretation of Heidegger in which this nihilating force is self-destructive. This kind of double-negation is depicted in the Beatles's movie The Yellow Submarine. There is a creature that zooms around like a vacuum cleaner, emptying everything in its path. When this menace finally turns on itself, a richly populated world pops into existence.

Some cultures have creation myths reminiscent of The Yellow Submarine. Heidegger would dismiss them as inappropriately historical. ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ is not about the origin of the world. Increasing the scientific respectability of the creation story (as with the Big Bang hypothesis) would still leave Heidegger objecting that the wrong question is being addressed.

(c) http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nothingness/

I must copy. Must. Must.

Sorry Criss for always stealing but these photos man. I must, must decorate my blog. Like now. For Real. Ya Dig? Stay old big guy!

The 70's

Talking about good execution (the movie aspect that is), the 1974 original Texas Chainsaw Massacre is superbly done! Yes I only saw it now, shame on me but hey props nonetheless to Tobe Hooper.

The visual imagery (anyone has a still of that pre-the limey shot of their van riding towards destiny?) is great and the soundtrack with the bells and all wow (has this been sampled somewhere?? it should.) The script is so fucking easy and tedious, who needs a screenwriter anyway when you're able to pull this? Just love the 70's for shooting these imaginative films, we need a revival.

When you're becoming older and older it's a necessity to remember what can be remembered, especially if there is no direct memory.

Godard talks about the music of filmmaking
By Mark Feeney, Globe Staf

Q: In the film, you're asked if "the new little digital cameras" are the future of cinema. You ignore the question.
A: No, because I have no answer.

Q: Well, you're a great user of new technology, in sound as well as image. You can't say whether or not that's better for film in the long run?
A: I've always been interested in new technology, since my very first movie where new negatives allowed us to shoot in the street. I like new technology because for a time, at the point of its invention, there are no rules. You have to find the right rules for yourself. But today the new technology, the rules are fixed already in the medium, if I may say so, so you have to be careful how you use it. The new little cameras, everyone says everyone can do his own movie now. But at the time the pencil was invented, its invention did not make obligatory that you can be a new Velazquez or Rembrandt. It is the same with the movies. It's not because you have a small camera and you can go everywhere, under the bed, in the pocket of your boy- or girlfriend, that you can make a "Splendor in the Grass" by [Elia] Kazan or "Touch of Evil" by [Orson] Welles, you see.

Aim High

(btw more new screens here)

Help Wanted

Flat Black Films is seeking fine artists and illustrators to do animation on the Richard Linklater feature A Scanner Darkly. Applicants need to be highly skilled in line drawing, particularly of the human face. Whereas our previous feature, Waking Life, aspired to a painting aesthetic, A Scanner Darkly aims to look more like a finely detailed, well-drawn comic book or graphic novel. Experience with computer animation such as Flash is a plus but not required. If you are willing to work as a local hire in Austin, please send portfolios or examples of artwork to art@flatblackfilms.com or:

A Scanner Darkly

3109 N. I-35

Austin, TX 78722

The Must See More Weird Sci Fi / Fantasy List

old von at his adagio sostenuto best

It had been a wonderful evening and what I needed now, to give it the perfect ending, was a little of the Ludwig Von.
-- Alex de Large

Ludwig van Beethoven's opus 27 no. 2 is the Piano Sonata No. 14 in C sharp minor "Quasi una fantasia" (Italian: Like a fantasy), popularly known as the Moonlight Sonata.

Beethoven wrote this sonata in 1801 and dedicated it to the 17-year-old Countess Giulietta Guicciardi, with whom he was (or, according to some accounts, had been) in love. In 1832, several years after Beethoven's death, the poet Ludwig Rellstab compared the music to moonlight shining on Lake Lucerne. Since then, it has been known as the Moonlight Sonata.

The Sonata has three movements:

i Adagio sostenuto (attacca)
ii Allegretto and
iii Presto agitato

The first movement, written in a kind of truncated sonata form, is the most well known. Its powerful, haunting and quiet melody was at first disturbing to audiences. However, Beethoven later complained of its popularity, writing "Surely I've written better things."

le nouveau Martin Parr has arrived

Look ma, I belong to a cult.

The Lucifer Bush Cult needs more supporters:

Figuring The Dots

The late British director Alan Clarke seems to have made quite an impact. Especially his last film, the 40-minute "Elephant", was a landmark for at least these 3 filmmakers:

a) Danny Boyle: credited as "producer" of Elephant.

According to dvdoutsider this is how Elephant begun:

The project was originally the brainchild of producer Danny Boyle, later a director of some note himself (do we really need to mention Trainspotting and 28 Days Later? No, I thought not). Having landed a producer's job at BBC Northern Ireland, he became aware that many of the shootings taking place in the province were going unreported on the mainland, presumably because they involved ordinary citizens rather than politicians or others the English press deemed newsworthy. He was also a huge fan of Alan Clarke, and having written to him and been invited onto the set of Clarke's previous 'walking movie' Christine (1987), he hired him with this project in mind, and the two worked together to develop the film to its present form. The decision to shoot, so to speak, on the streets of Belfast was a brave one given that local people were living the reality of the situation on a daily basis, but this not only adds to the documentary-like authenticity, it also provides some arresting locations - strangely empty streets, red brick industrial and municipal buildings and vast but deserted factories, depressingly vacant symbols of Thatcherite industrial policies. The enigmatic title was inspired by Irish writer Bernard MacLaverty, who described the troubles in the province as akin to having an elephant in your living room - it is so enormous that no-one can ignore it, it gets in the way of everything you try to do and yet no-one talks about it, and after a while you just learn to live with it.

b) Gus Van Sant, writer & director of "Elephant" (2003), the feature film about the Columbine High School shooting which won the palme d'or at Cannes.

Danny Boyle reveals on the Alan Clarke dvd that Gus Van Sant specifically asked him if he could use the title for his own film of the same name, a work who style, structure and some of whose key sequences were clearly influenced by Clarke's original.

c) Harmony Korine.

Gus Van Sant mentions in an interview on his Elephant dvd that it was actually Harmony Korine who told him about Alan Clarke. According to Van Sant, Clarke's Elephant is Korine's favorite movie ever.

More on Alan Clarke and "The Alan Clarke Collection" DVD here:

http://www.dvdoutsider.co.uk/dvd/reviews/alanclarke.html
http://www.stopsmilingonline.com/Film_detail.html?id1=212
http://www.dvdmaniacs.net/Reviews/A-D/alan_clarke.html

The french DVD of Van Sant's Elephant also contains the Alan Clarke version as a bonus.

How To Earn The Worst Movie of 2004 Title

1. You assume in the true League of Extraordinary Gentlemen spirit that everything is possible.
2. You set out to make a Dracula film
3. You throw in Frankenstein (say what?)
4. You even get Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde to play a part
5. You realize you need more creatures and write a part for a werewolf
6. You ponder for a moment and yes, there you go: Alien 4 eggs were really scary
7. You think it might all make sense if your hero is the Left Hand of God
8. You're almost done, just one final pretty face high up in the sky and heaven can wait

ps Why not throw in a superhero or predator? Oh wait, that’s been done before.

learn a new word every day

What a floozy

There's a little animator in all of us

Fascinating post over at Ward Jenkins' blog about Polar Express and animation in general. Jenkins tweaked some of the original shots and they look better indeed.

also there was this quote I have to mention to prevent a certain person out there rubbing it in my face next time I see him:

"In my opinion it's always been a fallacy, the notion that human characters have to look photo-realistic in CG. You can do so much more with stylized human characters. Audiences innately know how humans move and gravity works, so if a human character doesn't feel right, they'll feel something's wrong. But if the weight works for stylized characters, the audience doesn't question it - like the Dwarfs in SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS, which were so cartoony and stylized. In THE INCREDIBLES, the characters are cartoony heroes but they can be hurt and they have this family dynamic that makes them believable."

-- Ralph Eggleston, Artistic Director for THE INCREDIBLES