Category: All Posts

I Want To Talk About The Internet

youtube


When YouTube started to happen, it seemed like the great leveler.  Kids in their basement suddenly had distribution equal to that of the major Hollywood studios.  And following in the wake of cheaper and better video equipment, it looked like the control of all media had shifted from ‘The Man’ to the everyman.

The results of this have been dismally revealing.

Thanks to the internet, and YouTube, we now have confirmation that 99.999% of all art completely sucks.  Before, we could only look to the establishment and their putrid output to see how bad everything is.  But with every person on earth making stuff, and throwing it up on there, we now have proof that almost nobody can make anything good.
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‘Rehearsals’ is a Zeitgeist and Your Bed is a Museum

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Rehearsals (2012)
Directed by Cody Clarke
73 min.

IMDb Synopsis: An experimental documentary in which fly-on-the-wall footage of the lives of sixteen aspiring actresses from NYC is collaged to form a day in the life of one aspiring actress—each ‘playing’ a different aspect of the woman. Through this unconventional approach, filmmaker Cody Clarke has painted a visual poem; an ode to both the beauty and the pain of solitude.

Spoiler-free.

When I go to a museum with friends, unless I’m really close to them already, I act weird. I move from piece to piece quickly, afraid of blocking someone’s view. I make awkward quips. I find myself concerned with whether the person next to me knows more or less about the art than I do. And I almost certainly never read the plaques, although I pretend to. All this doesn’t happen on purpose—it’s an instinctive, self-defeating defense mechanism, and it’s embarrassing and insulting to the art.

This same insecurity happens to pretty much everyone I’ve watched a Cody Clarke movie with. I know this, because I’ve forced a lot of friends to watch them.
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‘Life is Sweet’ & ‘Naked’: My Mike Leigh Entry Point

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Until recently, I’d never seen a Mike Leigh film. I’ve been familiar with his name for ages, though. Back in my teens, I worked at a hip indie video store that had a ‘Directors’ section—Allen, Godard, Rohmer, Scorsese, Truffaut, Verhoeven, the list goes on. Anyone with a substantial filmography worth exploring was represented, Leigh included.
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My Streets: The Best Parts & Full Review

Last week, I introduced you all to the best so-bad-it’s-good movie you’ve never seen.  The above video is a compilation of my favorite parts, and here is my full review I promised:
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As I Lay Dying: Filming the ‘Unfilmable’

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As I Lay Dying (2013)
Directed by James Franco
Screenplay by James Franco and Matt Rager
Based on the novel by William Faulkner

Spoiler-free.

As I Lay Dying is James Franco’s seventh feature-length film as a director, but only his second to receive much of a release. The first was The Broken Tower, a biography of the poet Hart Crane, which was completed as his MFA thesis for NYU. Despite the fact that Focus picked it up and it starred Franco and Michael Shannon, that film felt like a student film through and through, and Franco received the critical berating he earned. Two years later, he’s back with another difficult work of American Modernism.

James Franco kind of stepped into a minefield with this one. The literary crowd is unimpressed with his famoused-my-way-into-a-book-deal poetry and prose, and his more mainstream fans are turned off by his occasional excursions into ‘pretentious shit’. Here, then, is a way to alienate two distinct fan bases at once.

I must just be a contrarian, because these are the sorts of films that interest me most.
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