Author: Greg DeLiso

My First Feature Film Is Almost Done

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I’ve told this story a billion times so this time I’m going to try to include some more details.  When my late grandpa, Tom Easton, was ten years old, he saw Fantasia in the theater.  He always wanted to be a cartoonist but his dad was cold and distant and thought cartoons were for kids and no way to make a living.  But despite that lack of encouragement, Tom did some cool things.  He avoided combat in the Korean War by teaching art on base and drawing army posters.
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An Interview with James Merendino, Writer/Director of SLC Punk (But First, A Review Of The Film)

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SLC Punk (1998)
Written & Directed by James Merendino
97 min.

I could never identify the groups in my high school.  We certainly had some jocks, potheads, and even a few hanger-on goths.  But punks, I don’t know.  We had a kid with a mohawk; he was a fucking asshole.  And we had a bunch of kids who loved punk music—a lot of them had safety pins in their clothes and dyed hair, but they seemed to really like some band called AFI, which I always thought was the American Film Institute.  By the time I was in high school, punk music had completely soaked into the mainstream and everybody had heard of Pennywise and Bad Religion.  It was in vogue to go see Henry Rollins do his spoken word shows in Ann Arbor, and if you were really cool, you already liked Bad Brains and Minor Threat.

I didn’t care about any of that stuff and I was tired of every local band sounding like Green Day.  I was like the James Duval character in SLC Punk—the social diplomat.  I could be friends with anybody.  I was too busy getting into movies and figuring out my own depression to bother committing to some specific clique.  Plus, the fashion of punk seemed so childish to me.  It’s music; I don’t wear it, I listen to it.  But that being said, we didn’t have nazis or rednecks either.  Well, everywhere has rednecks, but our punks didn’t beat them with bats.  Our punks were nice kids (except for that mohawked loser) and they got good grades and loved their parents.  They went to Michigan State University and were proud to do so.
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The Blue Goop That Comes Out Of A Bag Of Dead Pig Babies: Nights on Netflix, Part II

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June 29th, 2013 12:06 AM.  My girlfriend and I nestled in for a night on Netflix.  This is what happened.

It started with a really ‘clever’ and ‘quirky’ movie called Spork.  That didn’t last long.  Then we tried Kink, a Canadian TV show about an assortment of really arrogant and obnoxious S&M purveyors.  The bumpers took up more time than the fucking interviews.  Next.  Then we tried that Sushi documentary that every keeps talking about but it was boring as fuck.  Then we entered what I call ‘the blur’. This is where you turn off so many movies that are all so similar that they run together.  I can’t remember what any of them are called.

After a while, Netflix kind of beats you down and you end up sticking with the least shitty thing.  Generally, you want to pick something that’s just bad enough to be fun to make fun of, making it bearable.  Most movies are far below that, but finally, I found one.  Here’s what I wrote right after it ended:
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Nights On Netflix: A Journey Through The Aisles Of Our Friendly Neighborhood Internet Video Store

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Future generations won’t know the joy of driving to a Blockbuster and picking out a rental (or rentals) for the weekend.  It was an inconvenient life, but nostalgia erases that.  Waxing romantic on it now makes me exhale in deep wistful wonder, my heart full of bliss.  Video stores fostered my burgeoning cinephilia in the late nineties, and provided some of the best memories of my life.

But Netflix has changed all that, and I say good riddance. All Netflix really does is add convenience to the already established video store mechanism. Now you don’t even have to leave the house. You can snuggle on the couch with your lover and your Roku box and browse what’s currently streaming (and I suspect, in a decade or so, everything will be).
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The Bet Still Stands, Larry David: An Interview with Indie Filmmaker Sam Henry Kass

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Through the annals of film history, we generally look to the 70s as the epicenter of the independent film explosion.  And while filmmakers like Coppola, Scorsese, Altman, De Palma, Spielberg, and Lucas were the respective patient zeros, this ‘golden era’ really only marks a midpoint in an evolution that began much earlier and has continued on into today.  There have always been independents and they come in all shapes and sizes.  I like to say the best independent film ever made is The Empire Strikes Back.  It’s ironic to think that the epitome of big budget, effects driven, Hollywood cinema could be considered independent, but it is—and Empire’s spirit, and Clerks‘s spirt, are one and the same.
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