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May 31, 2006

Time Travel Primer

It's short-attention span day at The Chutry Experiment, as I continue to find things to blog about when I really should be doing other things. This time, via Craig Phillips at Notes from Underdog, a link to Jeffrey Anderson's Time Travel Primer. Anderson breaks things into four basic categories, "Present Man in Past, Past Man in Present, Future Man in Present and Future Man in Past," a move similar to one I tried to make in my dissertation (but without the gendered terminology, which Laura pointed out in the comments). I'm taking things in a slightly different direction in my book, but Anderson's essay is a good summer afternoon read.

Posted by chuck at 1:48 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Frameline30 in San Francisco

More film festivals I wish I could attend: I got an email tip the other day about Frameline30, the 30th San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival and a related conference, Persistent Vision Conference, which focuses on the future of queer media arts. As usual, the festival schedule is loaded with films I wish I could see. I know I have a few readers within driving distance the San Francisco area (or at least a short train ride), so if you have some time, take in a film or two.

Side note: the conference has a blog, with one recent entry reporting that Batwoman is coming out as a lipstick lesbian in an upcoming comic book story arc. Matt Florence, the conference co-coordinator, suggests the Wachowski Brothers to direct the inevitable film adaptation, but I'd love to see what Mary Harron and Guinevere Turner would do with this material.

Posted by chuck at 1:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Promoting The War Tapes

I've been wanting to see Deborah Scranton's documentary The War Tapes ever since I heard about it back in March, in large part because Scranton's approach to the war documentary is an unusual one. Instead of aligning with a unit as an embedded reporter, Scranton gave cameras to three soldiers from the New Hampshire National Guard serving in Iraq, asking them to document their experiences, which were later edited and compiled into the final film by Scranton. The War Tapes has received a number of enthusiastic reviews, including these three from indieWire and a glowing review from Nora Ephron in The Huffington Post.

The official website offers quite a bit of information about the film, including outtakes and other reviews. The War Tapes opens this weekend in New York City, and the audience size in New York will likely affect how widely the film plays, so if you're in the NYC area, check it out. A few other dates are scheduled, including a screening in DC's E Street Theater starting June 30 (unfortunately I'm moving to Fayetteville that week and won't be able to attend). Also, if your city is not yet scheduled, add yourself to Scranton's Frappr map in order to show interest (BTW, the Frappr map is a really cool idea). There are already several others in the F'ville area who've expressed interest, and it would be fantastic to bring the film there.

Posted by chuck at 11:19 AM | Comments (18) | TrackBack

May 30, 2006

Last-Minute Screening Suggestion

Almost forgot to mention that the DC Jewish Cultural Center(DCJCC) will be screening Marian Marzynski's documentary film Anya (In and Out of Foucs) tonight at 7:30 PM. According to the reviews I've read on the DCJCC website and in DC's City Paper, the film makes extensive use of Marzynski's home movie collection in telling his story and the story of his daughter, Anya. Worth noting: the director will be present at the screening.

Posted by chuck at 3:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 29, 2006

NYT Linkfest

I'm putting the finishing touches on an academic article on new media, and this New York Times article on MTV's plans to develop broadcasting material for PDAs, cell phones, and video iPods, in shrt for the mobile screens that are becoming more commonplace. As the article points out, most of the shows are designed with the format in mind, running no more than three minutes, with lots of close-ups and static scenes. While the mobile video phenomenon is still in its earliest stages, one model speculates that the market for mobile TV will approach $27 billion by 2010. I'm not sure I have much more to say about the article right now--I'd rather expend that energy in my academic article, but it's a pretty useful treatment of how visual entertainment is rapidly changing.

While I'm in the neighborhood, The Times also has an article on the history of The Internet Movie Database, which is probably my favorite website.

Finally, Andy pointed me to yet another Times article on the need for a film that will give science or scientists that same type of appeal that the Godfather films gave crime and that The West Wing gave politics. I'd like to believe that film will be called An Inconvenient Truth. But what I really want to mention about the article is its passing mention of Carlos Molinero and Lola Salvador's The Mist in the Palm Trees, which recently played at Tribeca and has now spiralled to the top of my film wish list. Here's the Times' description:

Directed by Lola Salvador and Carlos Molinero, "Mist" is a presented as fictional documentary about a Spanish photographer and physicist, one Santiago Bergson. In it, the dead Bergson muses on his atomized life and lack of memory as old photographs and grainy home film clips shuffle past, over and over again, arcing from his childhood in Asturia, in northern Spain, to the cataclysmic climax of the Manhattan Project. In one much-repeated grainy clip, a man in a suit leaps headfirst over a row of chairs on the lawn and lands in a somersault.
I'll be fascinated to see how Salvador and Molinero convey the idea of a "quantum film," but as of right now, this sounds really cool.

Posted by chuck at 11:51 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Best Blog Forward

Via Alex: Kevin Lim is requesting that bloggers write a post about their most popular blog entries and to tag the entry through Technorati with bestblogforward. Because I can never resist an excuse to go digging through my archives, I'm happy to comply. As Alex notes, Kevin suggests three different methods for selecting "most popular" entries: by comments, by hits, or by Google. Of course each approach will produce vastly different results, but that's part of the fun.

One of my top entries via Google is a book meme that was circulating in winter 2005. The next entry on Google surprised me a little. When Sin City was in theaters, I wrote an entry, Visualizing Sin City about a website that compared panels from Frank Miller's comic book with stills from the Robert Rodriguez film adaptation. Other top entries were my reviews of Crash, Gunner Palace and United 93. Similarly, I get a number of search hits for a post linking to New Ki'd's pineapple salsa recipe.

In terms of comments, my most popular recent entries would be my top ten movie list for 2005 and my announcement that I have been hired for a tenure-track gig at Fayetteville State University. An entry from a couple of years ago on the Democratic primary for Georgia's 2004 Senate race has drawn the most comments of any entry I've written, including several posts from the candidates themselves.

But I'm more interested in those entries that continue to get comments months or years after I've written them, and here two entries really stand out. The first was an entry I wrote on an ABC special about Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code back in 2003. The entry gets an unusual number of hits becaise one of my commenters misspelled "Magdalene," and it continues to attract people who are curious about Brown's conspiracy narrative, the novel's gender politics, or other similar issues. I write the entry simply to express curiosity about the book and its cult status.

The other frequently visited entry mentions my sadness at learning about the execution of David Harris the very week I was teaching the documentary The Thin Blue Line. While Harris is clearly guilty of murder, I mentioned in passing that Errol Morris's documentary had humanized him for me. The entry has continued to be one of my most visited, and commenters have used the entry to discuss the politics of the death penalty, to talk about the documentary, or in some cases to mourn Harris's death. I might not have written the entry if I wasn't teaching the film that summer, so I find it fascinating that the entry remains one of my most popular two summers after I initially wrote it. I think that speaks to the power of Morris's documentary more than anything I had to say about it, but like the "Mary Magdalene" entry, I'm not sure that I intended the entry to be "popular" or what it means that these entries seem to be more popular thn others I've written.

Technorati tag:

Posted by chuck at 10:28 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

May 28, 2006

Time Perception

I had planned to blog this BBC radio broadcast on time perception a few days ago but happened to be particularly busy that week. The show focuses primarily on biological and physiological causes for experiences of time dilation, the perception that time is slowing down, during car accidents or other life-threatening situations. It's worth a listen while you drink your morning (or early afternoon) coffee. Seen at The Salt Box among other places.

Posted by chuck at 12:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 27, 2006

Silverdocs 2K6

Oh, by the way, while my blog was down yesterday, I ended up posting about Silverdocs over at Indie Features 06. Here's what I posted:

For some reason, my personal blog isn't working right now, but I've been jonesing to blog all day (what a boring addiction), so I'll finally blog something here several months after Sujewa invited me (to be fair, I did write one quick entry back in the day). But while I'm thinking about it, I though I'd do a quick mention that Silverdocs tickets are available and to note that some screenings have already sold out for non-passholders.

Silverdocs, for people who are unfamiliar is a documentary film festival held annually in Silver Spring, MD, just outside of Washington, DC. This year's fest looks promising. So far, I'm planning to see Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady's Jesus Camp, at the major risk of bringing back any number of traumatic childhood memories; Susan Dynner's Punk's Not Dead; Gary Tarn's Black Sun, which focuses on visual artist Hugues de Montalembert's experience going blind as an adult; Alexandra Lipsitz's Air Guitar Nation (yeah, there's a musical theme), which comes highly recommended by Sara Jo Marks; Steve Anderson's Fuck, which focuses on the history and significance of the film's title word; Stanley Nelson's Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple; and Michael Winterbottom's The Road to Guantanamo, which looks like an incredibly powerful and potentially controversial film, in part because of its hybrid of documentary and re-enacted scenes.

At any rate, the film schedule looks excellent, and if you're in the DC area, it's certainly worth a quick Metro ride up to Silver Spring. Hopefully things will be up and running in my corner of blogworld soon.

Posted by chuck at 1:37 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Giuliani Time

Kevin Keating's Giuliani Time (IMDB) seeks to deconstruct the popular post-September 11 depiction of Rudolph Giuliani as "America's Mayor," the compassionate public figure that became a symbol of resiliance in the face of tragedy. Keating pursues this goal by looking at Giuliani's early career as a federal prosecutor appointed by Ronald Reagan (Giuliani helped support the decision to turn away boatloads of Haitain immigrants who were escaping Baby Doc Duvalier's oppressive regime) and, more crucially, Giuliani's divisive record as mayor, in which he is credited with making the city safer in part through his "borken windows" policy, which argued that by focusing on petty crimes (graffiti, squeegee guys, panhandling), more harmful crimes would also decrease. At the same time, Keating reminds us that Giuliani's police force also had a reputaion for racial profiling and for using unecessary force in subduing suspected criminals, symbolized most powerfully in the Amadou Diallo case. This behavior by the police became associated with the slogan, "Giuliani time," which was shorthand for the mayor's often draconian, and often hugely unpopular methods for running the city.

The documentary traces Giuliani's emergence as a public figure, starting with his Brooklyn childhood and focusing specifically on allegations that members of his family may have been connected to organized crime. I have to admit that I didn't find this evidence terribly convincing, and the documentary doesn't really work through the significance of these connections. The film picks up steam when it traces Giuliani's history as a federal prosecutor under Reagan, particularly his participation in preventing the Haitian immigrants from entering the United States, and from there Keating focuses primarily on Giuliani's record as mayor and his implementation of the "broken windows" philosophy espoused by the conservative Manhattan Institute think tank.

Keating offers a number of counter-arguments to the "broken windows" thesis. While proponents of Giuliani are correct to state that crime rates decreased dramatically while Giuliani was mayor, Keating points out that violent crime rates were lower throughout the US, whether due to improved economic conditions nationally or other factors. He also notes that crime rates were already decreasing significantly under the previous mayor, David Dinkins, but that Giuliani managed to depict Dinkins as unfriendly to the police and weak on crime (in one segment we see Giuliani arguing that Dinkins cannot be tough on crime if he's against the death penalty). Keating also documents the ways in which Giuliani's "workfare" programs paid low wages and failed to offer the necessary job training that would allow workfare recipients to move on to more productive and satisfying work. The film also traces Giuliani's attempts to defund the Brooklyn Museum of Art for displaying art that didn't conform to his tastes before finally moving into the high-profile cases of police brutality and racial profiling symbolized by the Amadou Diallo case.

While Keating spends much energy deconstructing Giuliani's reputation as "America's mayor" and as an all-around nice guy, the film works best as an exploration of urban life, and I wish the film had taken that focus rather than seeking to discredit Giuliani as an individual. It seems likely that Giuliani Time serves as a pre-emptive strike against a potential run for the Presidency by America's Mayor, but I found myself most intrigued when Keating interviewed the homeless and poor people whose lives were most deeply effected by Giuliani's principles of workfare or the sidewalk artists whose work was destroyed under the auspices of the "broken windows" philosophy.

Posted by chuck at 12:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Saturday Coffee Links

Just a quick note to say that the Wordherders' server has been down for most of the last several days. I'm hoping that the problem is resolved, but we'll see how things go. For now, a couple of pointers to articles I don't want to lose.

First, a Washington Post article by William Booth on The Market, the business side of Cannes Film Festival. Booth explains that Hollywood studios now make the majority of their profits outside the United States and that many big Hollywood films, whose budgets now average $100, are made with international audeinces in mind. He points out, in particular that films that bombed in the US box office, Master and Commander and The Island, actually made big bucks oversaes (Booth attributes the success of The Island in South Korea to the real-life genetic engineer who notoriously faked his research data). While I was well aware of the fact that most Hollywood films make major profits overseas, Booth also lists what kinds of films tend to do well in what countries, with horror playing well in Spain, comedy in Australia, and raunchy sex comedies (such as American Pie) in Germany. The number one movie in France right now? Robin Williams' RV. Mon dieu!

Also worth noting, Jamison Foser's Media Matters essay arguing that "the defining issue of our time is the media." For the most part, Foser revisits many of the claims already established in Eric Alterman's What Liberal Media? and similar texts that dispute the notion of a liberal media. But I mention Foser's essay because he addresses what he describes as a "pattern" of depicting progressives (Al Gore, Hillary Clinton) as stiff or insincere and conservatives (Bush, McCain, Giuliani--more on him later) as real or authentic, including this Jacob Weisberg article in which he faults Hillary for being politically calculated in reporting the contents of her iPod playlist wile giving Bush a pass for a similarly narrow list of "baby boomer" rock and praising classical pianist Condi Rice for including a mix of classical (Brahms) and pop on her iPod. Foser tears apart Weisberg's artcile with far more enrgy than I have, but his essay is worth pointing out because a similar tactic is once again being deployed to discredit Al Gore and, by extension, his new documentary An Inconvenient Truth, in this case by Jonah Goldberg, who attempts to use apparent discrepancies in Gore's records and his public recollections to foster the illusion that Gore is aloof or that everyting he says is politically calculated. I think the one issue I have with the Foser article, however, is that it doesn't explain why these narratives work so well. I think te assumption is that news audiences are passive dupes who accept the storylines they are fed by the media, but I don't think that's an adequate description of what is happening, and I'm less convinced that there is a media conspiracy against liberalism (even if prominent media owners such as Rupert Murdoch are conservative). I don't have time to work through this question in further detail right now, but I think it's worth pointing out the ways in which members of the media are framing the reception of Gore's film (and his rumored candidacy in the 2008 presidential election).

Posted by chuck at 10:45 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 25, 2006

Fly Like an American Eagle

Or not. My return trip from my adventure in Fayetteville ended up taking much longer than I expected due to phantom fires, flat tires, and other unexplained delays that left me plenty of time to read in the Raleigh airport. I drove up to Raleigh from F'ville with plenty of time to spare, dropped off my rental car, and settled in for an anticipated quick read while waiting to board the plane. My fellow passengers and I board teh first plane, and just as we're about to take off (or so it seems), the plane slowly grounds to a stop. I tentatively look up from my book to see our airplane surrounded by fire engines and security people, but my book, Kurt Vonnegut's A Man Without a Country, is a pretty good read (I particularly like his illustrations), so I don't pay that much attention until the pilot announces that a fire has been detected in the cargo section of the plane. "We don't believe there is a fire," he adds. "But we have to check things out anyway. There appears to be some smoke, but that's probably just from the fire extinguisher." There was no fire, but we were compelled to change planes. We climb of the plane, back into the terminal, and wait.

I finish the Vonnegut book, which is a god read, if a little short (I started reading it that morning at the F'ville Barnes and Noble). I move on to my second book, Alberto Fuguet's The Movies of My Life: A Novel, a coming-of-age story narrated by an adult seismologist, Beltran, about the movies that most shaped his childhood, which was divided between Los Angeles and Santiago, Chile. Some of the connections between movies and the narrator's life were a bit heavy-handed, but the novel is a fun read, a playful take on popular culture and personality. One of the framing devices for the novel: Beltran mentions that his grandfather gave him a copy of David Wallechincky and Amy Wallace's Book of LIsts (the 1976 edition, I'm not sure if this is the right one), a book that I also cherished as a trivia- and knowledge-obsessed kid. The list format works pretty well and Fuguet effectively depicts how Beltran was affected by American popular culture (most of the films he lists are made by Hollywood studios). Of course it reminded me of blogging and my own compulsion to review and list every film I've seen, but we won't get into that.

While I'm reading Movies, arrangements are made to put us into a second plane scehduled to land in DC. The second plane has a flat tire or something. At any rate, a tire needs changing. Our flight is delayed yet again. I finish my second book. I contemplate going to buy others but am afraid of being left stranded in the Raleigh airport while my fellow passengers find their way back to DC. Instead I start back on Jane Jacobs' Dark Age Ahead, which I believe is the last book Jacobs published. In the book, Jacobs describes a process of "decay" in five major "pillars" of society: family, education, community, science, and self-policing in the professions. Jacobs manages to avoid making her book read as a jeremiad, but the book is a sobering read nonetheless.

But it's difficult not to think about Jacobs' arguments about urban planning as I exchange life in DC for life in F'ville. I had hoped to avoid living in one of those cookie-cutter complexes, but in a town such as Fayetteville, there simply aren't enough of those apartments available, the downtown still too small and undeveloped. In fact, it had been abandoned for some time, though it was showing signs of life when I walked around there the other morning. Developers are planning to build some loft apartments. Hopefully when that happens even more businesses, especially local businesses, will find their way downtown. I finished the Jacobs book around the time I stepped off the subway in Hyattsville (at least the trains were running on time), and while the delays were annoying, I think the airline handled things well enough. But, yeah, it was a long day, much longer than I'd expected.

Posted by chuck at 10:19 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

May 23, 2006

A Place to Be Somebody

Spent the last two days driving around Fayetteville looking for the perfect apartment for next year. I didn't find that apartment, but I found a decent, slightly older complex that should be suitable, at least for the year or two I'll need to decide if I want to buy. The apartment itself is relatively large (about 900 square feet) with an extra bedroom that I can use as an office and plenty of wall space for my bookshelves (why couldn't I choose a field that requires less reading?). My complex also has a pool, a tanning bed, and a sand volleyball court, all of which I will likely never use (okay, maybe the pool).

I've been intrigued by my apartment hunting process this time around, not because I'm particularly good at it, but because I think my process says a lot about my personality. I've moved three times since 2000, and with every move I've spent at least one and usually two or three full days looking at every apartment I can find, often driving randomly down interesting streets with the hope of finding something cool. The search is often very frustrating and I wind up with so many pamphlets that I can no longer match them to the appropriate complex (and in fact many of them are virtually identical), but in the long run, I think this process is vaguely reassuring, providing me with the illusion that I've found the best apartment possible when in fact I'm probably too tired to look elsewhere. But the search process also teaches me a lot about the city, the flows of traffic, the logic of certain neighborhoods, and the location of some independent coffeehouses. And this time, driving around Fayetteville has also habituated me to driving again, which will eventually become useful (at some point I want to write an entry on my year without a car, but that may not happen for a while).

Posted by chuck at 4:50 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

May 20, 2006

Sir! No Sir!

It is impossible to watch David Zeiger's documentary about the GI antiwar movement during Vietnam, Sir! No Sir! (IMDB), in 2006 without thinking about the war in Iraq, and the producers of the film have worked with groups such as Iraq Veterans Against the War to campaign against the war in Iraq by providing free DVDs of Sir! No Sir! to active duty and deployed soliders. More crucially, the activist, agit-prop spirit of the film inspires action through its focus on the Vietnam soldiers' acts of resistance. But what I found most compelling about the film, and what will make Sir! No Sir! an important document long after the Iraq War, was its use of archival materials to remind audiences of a history of protest that has been lost, if not entirely, rewritten in the years since the Vietnam War.

Specifically the film features extensive TV coverage of the acts of rebellion of thousands of American soldiers against the war, as well as lesser known documents such as Newreel films about the soldiers' acts of resistance. The film also featured an extended discussion of the underground newspapers produced by the soldiers, primarily using typewriters and mimeograph machines as their "press" (the film's website provides links to several libraries with extensive holdings of these GI newspapers), and as a media historian, I'm fascinated by this do-it-yourself use of media.

In addition, the film documents the coffeehouse culture that grew up around many of the military bases where soldiers were preparing to go to war, giving some sense of the culture of resistance as well as the documents associated with it, and what fascinated me about the courage of soldiers who saw what was happening in Vietnam and joined the anti-war movement. In Bruce Patterson's review of the film, he describes in some detail his experiences in the anti-war movement. Among other activities, he contributed to the Bragg Briefs, a GI paper distributed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

Sir! No Sir! also explores how the protests against Vietnam have been rewritten, particularly the urban myth that soldiers were routinely spat upon in airports by hippies. The film features Jerry Lembcke, who has challenged the credibility of this myth in his book, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam. The film demonstrates in some detail how films such as Rambo have managed to rewrite these protest narratives. While the film spends less time thinking about how andwhy history gets rewritten, its true value is in offering compelling images of the very significant GI anti-war movement during the Vietnam War.

Sir! No Sir! is currently touring the US, playing in a few theaters a week before being released in July on DVD. It's scheduled to play in DC through Thursday at the E Street Theater.

Posted by chuck at 12:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Code Blue

Brandeis University American studies professor Thomas Doherty has a timely op-ed article in the Washington Post drawing connections between the release of The Da Vinci Code and the old Hays Code that imposed constraints on the content of Hollywod films. Doherty opens by noting that past generations of American Catholics would have greeted a film with Da Vinci's anti-Vatican conspiracy theories with massive protests designed to "bring Hollywood to its knees." I happened to notice a few picketers at the Gallery Place Theater in Chinatown (I was in the neighborhood while waiting for a movie at E Street), but the small scattering of protesters drew little attention from the bored pedestrians rushing past them on the way in to the movie megalplex or one of the neighboring bars or restaurants.

As Doherty points out, however, the Catholic Church--or at least a few powerful members of the church--once maintained tremendous control over the content of Hollywood films. The Hays Code was authored by publisher Martin J. Quigley and the Jesuit priest Daniel A. Lord in an attempt to "clean up" Hollywood films:

A deeply Catholic text, the Code was no mere list of Thou-Shalt-Nots but a homily that sought to yoke Catholic doctrine to Hollywood formula: The guilty are punished, the virtuous are rewarded, the authority of church and state is legitimate, and the bonds of matrimony are sacred.
I'm inclined to ask what changed. Doherty suggests that "the post-World War II revolution in morals and manners" is a major factor, and he's no doubt right about that. But with the ascendence of the evangelical movement and the emphasis on morality there, I think that's hardly the only factor. To some extent, I think this relative indifference can be attributed to the fact that Hollywood films no longer hold the cultural centrality they had in the past. I don't have time to write about this issue in as much detail as I would like (I'm flying out to Fayetteville to look for an apartment tomorrow), but I'll be curious to see how Da Vinci performs at the box office and to see how the film fits within the ongoing discussions of religion and popular culture.

Posted by chuck at 11:14 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

10 Things I Hate About Commandments

More fake trailer fun, this time featuring Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner. Thanks to Tony Pierce for the link.

Posted by chuck at 10:54 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 18, 2006

American Zeitgeist Screening

Via an email tip I've just learned about what sounds like a fascinating documentary, Rob McGann's American Zeitgeist: Crisis & Conscience in an Age of Terror, which will be screened Thursday June 15, 2006, at 7:15 Pm at the New York Society for Ethical Culture to promote the documentary's DVD launch (check out the trailer). The New York screening will feature a post-film debate between Christopher Hitchens and Mahmood Mamdani.

According to the film's website, Zeitgeist "explores the underlying fractures of the War on Terrorism, considering how what America is, what it does and what it represents have become the most explosive questions on the world stage since September 11th." Experts interviewed for the documentary include Richard A. Clarke, Peter Bergen, Daniel Benjamin, Steven Simon, Jessica Stern, Samantha Power, Christopher Hitchens, Paul Berman, Tariq Ali, Noam Chomsky, Hamid Dabashi, and many others, bringing in a wide array of political and disciplinary perspectives on the war.

I haven't had the opportunity to see Zeitgeist, but the doc has received some high praise for situating the war on terror historically. If anyone attends the June 15 screening, I'd love to hear about it, but no matter what, I'm very much looking forward to seeing the DVD.

Posted by chuck at 10:38 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Feline Theology

Via Brian Flemming, tonight's late-night YouTube fun: Kona and Hilo: Talking Cats.

Posted by chuck at 1:00 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 17, 2006

An Inconvenient Truth Trailer

I haven't written very much about the new documentary about global warming, An Inconvenient Truth featuring former VP Al Gore, but that's not because I'm not incredibly curious to see the film. While Gore's documentary doesn't quite have the massive buzz of Fahrenheit 9/11, Gore's star power and the recent stirrings of renewed attention to global warming are setting up a documentary to become one of the more high-profile movie events of the summer. The film's trailer, available on YouTube, effectively sets up An Inconvenient Truth as the "most terrifying movie of the summer," complete with dramatic music and depictions of some of the more dramatic long-term effects of global warming.

Promoting the film has also provided Gore with his widest audience since the 2000 election, including this fantastic Saturday Night Live spoof in which Gore appeared in a mock-up of the Oval Office, addressing the audience as President. What I like about the SNL skit is that Gore parodies his straight-laced campaign while still landing several jabs at Bush's presidency, commenting at one point, "On a positive note, we worked hard to save Welfare, fix Social Security and of course provide the free universal health care we all enjoy today. But all this came at a high cost. As I speak, the gigantic national budget surplus is down to a perilously low $11 trillion dollars. And don't get any ideas. That money is staying in the very successful lockbox. We're not touching it." But what the SNL skit also illustrates is that the documentary will shape public dialogue about environmentalism, even for people who are unable to see the film, and this discussion should be felt for some time.

An Inconvenient Truth has a staggered release, which means that while it will open in some cities on May 24, it won't reach DC until June 2, but it looks like Paramount is planning a relatively wide release. But, again, I'm almost as interested in the promotion of the film as the film itself, which was produced by Participant Productions, the indie production company that has sought to use films to encourage audiences "to participate in making a difference." Will be interesting to see how this doc contributes to public dialogue about global warming.

Update: Just wanted to add this link to the Howard Kurtz "Media Notes" column from the Washington Post, which points out that the Truth hype is interesting, in part, because Gore's 2008 aspirations aren't yet clear. Of course Gore has claimed to be a "recovering politican," but as Gore himself observed, there's always potential for a "relapse." Kurtz's survey of blogworld lays out several compelling narratives (Gore as Comeback Kid, Gore as "what might have been"), which makes the publicity and promotion of the film that much more interesting.

Posted by chuck at 10:29 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

A Messiah in the District

Just a quick note to my DC readers that Chris Hansen's highly entertaining mockumentary The Proper Care and Feeding of an American Messiah will be playing here in DC on July 6 as part of Sujewa's Capital City Microcinema series. The film will be playing at the historic Kensington Row Bookshop.

Chris's film has been accepted to several film festivals and has been getting some good blog buzz, including this review from Lance Mannion, so if you're in the DC area in July (I'll be in Fayetteville by then, unfortunately), please try to check it out. The details: Messiah will be playing Thursday, July 6th, at 7pm, at the Kensington Row Bookshop, which is located at 3786 Howard Ave., in scenic Kensington, MD.

Posted by chuck at 9:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 16, 2006

Walter Chaw Interview

Via an email tip, I was reminded to revisit Jeremiah Kipp's interview with Film Freak Central reviewer Walter Chaw. I haven't read or cited Chaw's reviews as frequently as I should have, but even when I have disagreed with him as I did when he harshly criticized Michael Tucker's Gunner Palace, I've found his writing on film to be consistently insightful (I very much agree with his review of Crash and now wish I'd managed to work it into my far-too-generous review).

The wide-ranging inteview is particularly valuable in addressing some of institutional factors that shape film criticism as it is practiced on the internet by both professional and amateur critics. In particular, I found insightful Chaw's discussion of the process of screening films for critics, a process that he regards as "undemocratic and essentially corrupted." I'm probably a little less concerned about being the first critic to review a movie (although I did manage to catch a world premiere recently), but Chaw's discussion of being based in Denver is a useful reminder that place often detemines access to film and media, an issue I'm likely to confront with my move to Fayetteville a.k.a. Fayettenam.

But while my access to the art house flavor of the week is likely to change considerably, I'll be interested to see how the move shapes what films I see and what I have to say about them. In that sense, I find Chaw's comments about film criticism as autobiography--borrowed from Pauline Kael--worth noting. It will likely come as little surprise to many of my readers that I share Chaw's belief that "good film criticism, as in any good criticism, is 1% savvy, 99% auto-psychoanalysis." Many of my best reviews start with my personal investment in the film or films I'm discussing, and that's perhaps one of the main reasons that I fond writing within the blog format to be so comfortable in that I'm able to foreground those investments in ways that might not work as well in other contexts. At any rate, it's a thought-provoking interview and well worth reading.

Update: Edited to correct the name of the interviewer. Must have written this entry without drinking enough coffee.

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May 15, 2006

"Hollywood Films are the Home Movies of Global Capital"

Snagging yet another link from MobFilms, this time a pointer to creativity/machine, where Jean provides a link to the provocative "Historiographic Axioms of Home Movies" (doc) by Patricia R. Zimmermann and Karen I. Ishizuka.

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War Images

Via MobFilms: Joseph DeLappe's online gaming intervention, Dead in Iraq, in which DeLappe logs into the U.S. Army's online recruitment video game, "America's Army," to input all of the names of the military personnel killed in Iraq. So far, DeLappe reports that he has entered about 250 out of the 2,400 US soldiers who have died. DeLappe writes,

The work is essentially a fleeting, online memorial to those military personnel who have been killed in this ongoing conflict. My actions are also intended as a cautionary gesture.
DeLappe's decision to document this performance via stills is an interesting one, and many of the stills that DeLappe has accumulated show that other participants are responding to his intervention.

MobFilms also includes a pointer to Deborah Scranton's documentary, The War Tapes, a film I've discussed in the past. Both Dead in Iraq and The War Tapes make use of digital media and the internet in interesting ways in their attempts to represent war, with Scranton commenting about The War Tapes that "The unseen collaborator on the film is the internet. This is a Web 2.0 outside the wire – the intimate power of the internet exploding on the movie screen. Without instant messaging, the soldiers could never have become filmmakers – without email and cheap video, they soldiers could never have told their stories as they happened."

Update Via Alex, more interesting anti-war images: "Not Your Soldier," a flash video associated with Sir! No Sir!, a documentary about the GI movement to end the war in Vietnam. Sir! No Sir! will be playing in DC at the E Street Theater starting Friday, May 19.

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May 14, 2006

Date Number One

I caught the world premiere of Sujewa Ekanayake's latest film, Date Number One, aptly described as a comedy about several first dates. Ekanayake's lo-fi directorial style and the film's conversational tone combine to depict the dating scene around a prominent Kensington Row bookshop where many of the key scenes were filmed. The twentysomethings and occasional thirtysomethings looking for romance recall Richard Linklater's philosopher slackers and Jim Jarmusch's minimalist attention to conversation, particularly in Jarmusch's underrated Night on Earth. Date Number One focuses on five different first dates, including a ninja (played with deadpan relish by Government Issue bandmember John Stabb Schroeder) rather unsuccessfully looking for love, a woman who punctuates everything she says with air quotes, and a woman hoping to arrange a "first date" matching herself, her ex-girlfriend, and her current boyfriend.

While some of the film's dating scenarios might appear cliched, Date Number One's strength is its attention to the local lingo of Washington, DC, not the lingo of the Hill, but the locals who live and work around the city, many of them--at least in Date's slightly off-kilter world--in the arts and culture fields. When characters first meet, the first question is invariably "What do you do?" followed by an apologetic "Not that you have to do anything." It's a quiet commentary on the ambition that shapes DC culture and the characters' uneasy relationship to it. Other characters refer to local bands and bars, the kinds of places that give the District a character that is often overlooked on the Hill and in the city's other tourist haunts.

Like the characters in Jarmusch's Coffee and Cigarettes who reflect on concepts of celebrity and fame, Date Number One's twentysomethings find themselves returning to certain questions, in Date's case the potential relationship between quantum mechanics and Buddhism, with varying degrees of seriousness and authority. The conversations provide some degree of unity between the various episodes, but more importantly, the conversations seem to suggest the way in which ideas or concepts can weave their way through a community of artists and readers who spend a lot of time in bookstores and coffeehouses. An overheard snippet of conversation might be picked up by someone else, and the questions about Buddhism and quantum mechanics take an unexpected direction.

Finally, I think Sujewa Ekanayake's Date Number One offers an image of urban culture that might be understood as the anti-Crash depiction of life in the city. Instead of a city or community marked by distrust and hostility between racial and ethnic groups, Sujewa's film depicts a comfortably multi-ethnic community, recalling for me the "sidewalk ballet" described by Jane Jacobs in her wonderful book, The Death and LIfe of Great American Cities, rather than the sidewalk mosh pit imagined by Haggis. I don't mean to suggest that there aren't hostile encounters like the ones imagined in Crash, but Date Number One offers a notion of "contact" that is far more subtle, at least in my experience on the sidewalks and in the bookshops and coffeehouses of the cities where I've lived.

If I have made Ekanayake's film sound overly serious, it's unintentional. In fact, Date Number One is quite funny and treats the dating life of DC twentysomethings with a light touch, and many of the actors show good comic timing (particularly the ninja-playing Schroder, Jennifer Blakemore from "A Romantic Dinner for 3" and Jewel Greenberg from "The Superdelicious French Lesson"). But it's also a subtle, thoughtful film, which is what I will take away from it. Ekanayake is currently scheduling tour dates for the film, and if the film reaches your city, I'd happily recommend it.

Update: Here's Sujewa's report on the opening night screenings.

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May 13, 2006

Art School Confidential

Terry Zwigoff and Daniel Clowes' Art School Confidential (IMDB) attempts to satirize the shallow trendiness of the art world by viewing it through the ultra-sincere eyes of the virginal wanna-be artistic genius, Jerome (Max Minghella). Bullied as a kid in his suburban neighborhood--in fact the film opens with him being punched repeatedly by a classmate--Jerome develops the dream of becoming a world's famous artist like Pablo Picasso. Upon graduating high school, he heads for Strathmore, an ostensibly prestigious art school that turns out to be far shabbier than Jerome's treasured school brochure suggests, although Jerome's interest in the school seems almost entirely based on his infatuation with the live-drawing model, Audrey (Sophia Myles), who poses inside the brochure. Jerome is joined by what might be regarded as the usual art school stereotypes (the wanna-be Tarantino filmmaker, the closeted fashion student, the professor living vicariously through his students, the jaded older student who knows all of the stereotypes, including his own). To some extent, the satire succeeds, especially when the film focuses on the seemingly shallow criteria by which art is judged, but for the most part, the humor was relatively obvious, and I never felt as if the film was trying to think about the art world in a new or even interesting way.

When Jerome arrives at the run-down Strathmore campus, which is set in a dangerous New York City neighborhood, the campus is abuzz with fear, but also a certain amount of excitement, about the presence of the Strathmore Strangler, a neighborhood serial killer who stalks the campus. While there seems to be concern about the danger the Strangler presents, many of the students seem equally concerned with how they can incorporate the crimes into their art. The serial killer plot ultimately provides the primary thread by which the romance plot and the critiques of art school are resolved, but in general, I found the plotline relatively artificial and ultimately distracting from the more interesting reflections on art school culture.

At the same time, Jerome encounters the often petty and invariably shallow competitiveness of the art school classroom. Despite the fact that Jerome seems most dedicated to his craft--he continues to draw during class breaks--and the most talented student when it comes to figure drawing (or because of it), he becomes the target of his classmates' harshest evaluations while an enigmatic fellow classmate, Jonah (Matt Keeslar), who wears polo shirts and khakhis--prompting one student to regard his dress as "strange"--and paints poorly-porportioned sports cars and tanks against monochomatic backgrounds receives praise for his vision. Jonah also becomes the primary competitor for the affections of Jerome's crush, Audrey. But like Jerome, Audrey seems to have little personality, other than being the art schol equivalent of the prom queen.

The film disappoints in part because Jerome is a relatively uninteresting character, a generic suburban kid who naively stumbles into the weird world of art school. Perhaps I'm too close to the jaded older student, Bardo (Joel Moore), wanting to make wisecracks from the back of the classroom--and yes, I'm a teacher--than I am to the ultra-sincere Jerome. In this context, I think A.O. Scott's read on Jerome makes sense:

In their previous collaboration, the near-perfect "Ghost World," Mr. Clowes and Mr. Zwigoff used adolescent misanthropy as both a method of analysis and an object of satire. Enid, their heroine, was mean-spirited but also clear-sighted, and she served as a sympathetic foil for the audience and the filmmakers alike. Jerome is a murkier, mopier character, and the movie grinds its gears, much as he does, between defiant romanticism and nasty cynicism.
Like Scott, I never quite got the sense that Clowes and Zwigoff knew what kind of film they were trying to make. In places, the film played like the prototypical PG-13 teen comedy, while in others, the film's cynicism--especially its cynicism towards the art world--was abundantly clear.

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May 12, 2006

Dodging DaVinci

I'm intrigued by the debates among religious leaders (article via Green Cine) about how to respond to the upcoming release of Ron Howard's film version of The DaVinci Code. As Laurie Goodstein points out, both evangelicals and Catholics are divided on how to address the film, which many regard as blasphemous in its implication that Jesus may have been less than divine. Not surprisingly, many groups including the Culture and Family Institute, headed by Robert H. Knight, are calling for a boycott of the film, with Kinght commenting, "I don't have to see 'The Devil in Miss Jones' to know it's pornography, and I don't have to see 'The Da Vinci Code' to know that it's blasphemous."

While I have no plans to see DaVinci, I find such arguments deeply frustrating, precisely because they refuse the opportunity to engage with audiences who are quite clearly incredibly curious to see the film (at least if the novel's long-running bestseller status is any indication). To be fair, many Christians such as Richard J. Mouw, have argued that it's important for some Christians to see the film, but I'm more curious about teh motivations and assumptions behind calling for a boycott of DaVinci. The refusal to engage with the film seems to assume that audiences will be manipulated by the film, taking its representation of reality as the gospel truth, rather than viewing it as a historical thriller, or even an alternate history of sorts. Instead of asking what is wrong with the film, a more interesting question to ask might be why so many people, many of whom identify as Christians, have expressed such interest in the novel and film. Well over two years after I wrote it, my discussion of The DaVinci Code remains one of my most visited entries. And, in general, we are seeing more films exploring the intersections between religion and politics, as Alex points out in his early review of Amazing Grace, a film about Christian convert William Wilberforce’s efforts to abolish the UK slave trade, directed by Michael Apted.

My own perspective draws from my experiences while attending an evangelical Christian college in the late 1980s and early 90s. While I was a student there, several of my classmates organized a boycott of Scorsese's Last Temptation of Christ based solely on reports about the film. As someone who was already engaged with questions of representation, especially when it came to the church, I was curious to see the film but as a nervous freshman, I worried that crossing my friends' boycott line might make me unpopular, so I didn't see Temptation in theaters. Plus I didn't have a car.

The other odd aspect of this debate is Barbara Nicolosi's suggestion that DaVinci is somehow a blue-state film. Nicolosi discounts Sony's claims that the film can be used as a tool for evangelism, arguing that "All they care about is getting the box office, and if they don't get the red states to turn out, the movie tanks." Given the degree to which DaVinci has been such a huge cultural phenomeon, it seems undeniable that many of those readers are living in red states. But in both cases, there is little discussion of how audiences are engaging with Brown's novel, whether they take his claims of an alternate history seriously, or whether they selectively interpret the novel, accepting certain details and not others. The comments in my blog entry depict a range of responses, some of them condemning the novel for its limited notion of art history or its purple prose while others praise it for challenging them to read the Bible more carefully or to rethink the history of the Catholic Church.

More than anything, I think that what interests me about the controversy is its opening up questions of spectatorship and audience, about how we watch movies and use them to make sense of the world around us. I probably won't see the movie in the near future because it has Tom Hanks in it and because there are so many other movies I want to see before I leave DC, but I will be interested in seeing how others respond to the film.

Posted by chuck at 3:54 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

DC Movie Events

Currently distracted, but a few more DC movie events that are worth noting. The AFI Silver is currently running Sean Connery and Robert Altman retrospectives. I'll admit that I'm less than enthiusiastic about Connery as an actor (he's by far the best James Bond), but he has had the good fortune to work with some great directors (Martin Ritt, John Huston, Alfred Hitchcock, Sidney Lumet, to name a few). Since I'm only going to be in DC for a few more weeks, I'm hoping to make it to a few of these screenings. In particular, I'm hoping to catch Lumet's The Anderson Tapes.

The Altman retrospective also looks quite good, highlighting many of his best films (Short Cuts, The Player, Nashville), but of the featured films, I'm probably most curious about The Long Goodbye, which I've somehow managed to miss even though I like Altman quite a bit.

Also just noticed that tonight is the last night of the DC installment of the 48 Hour Film Project, whihc I somehow manage to miss every year There's a "Best Of" screening on May 25th, which looks like a good alternative. But my Atlanta readers might be interested in knowing that the Project will be rolling into your neck of the woods on the weekend of May 19th. Here's the full schedule, and with at least two stops in the Tar Heel State, I may be able to catch the fest later on this summer.

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May 11, 2006

Student Journalism Conference

Media studies students in the DC area (including my former students) might be interested in this Journalism Conference sponsored by The Nation magazine:

One Last Notice: Time is running out to sign up for The Nation/Campus Progress Student Journalism Conference in Washington, DC on Friday, June 2. Student writers will have the opportunity to come together for a day of conversations, workshops, panels, and parties featuring numerous Nation editors and writers, including Katrina Vanden Heuvel, David Corn, John Nichols, Eric Alterman, Liza Featherstone, Laura Flanders, William Greider, Ari Berman, Victor Navasky, and many more.

Click here for details and to apply. The conference is free of charge. A limited number of travel stipends are available. Both undergraduates and graduate students welcome. The application deadline is May 15.

Please pass this note on to anyone you think might be interested. Thanks for your help and don't forget to check out StudentNation for the latest info on student-related articles, events and resources.

It looks like they've lined up some cool speakers for the conference. Eric Alterman's What Liberal Media? is an insightful book, and his blog is one of my daily reads, but all of the participants look interesting. Best of all, the conference is free.

Update: Speaking of Alterman, I just noticed his pointer to Marshall Berman's new book, On the Town : One Hundred Years of Spectacle in Times Square, which looks like an interesting exploration of issues of urban and public space through the lens of Times Square. Also worth noting: Samantha Power's discussion of the humanitarian crisis in Darfur.

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Rainy Thursday Links

It has been raining off and on all morning here in DC. Combine that with a late night, and I'm starting slowly today. But here are a few links that I found while drinking my morning coffee (soon to be followed by my late-morning and early-afternoon cups of coffee).

First, I came across a New York Times list of the best American fiction of the last twenty-five years (with the added bonus of linking to the Times' original reviews of the top novels). No surprise that Toni Morrison's Beloved tops the list. I haven't read Underworld, which finished second, but I was glad to see his White Noise make the list. Off the top of my head, I'd likely add Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and perhaps Russell Banks' The Darling. Notably, the list has very little genre fiction (science fiction or horror or other pulp genres). I'm sure the list is missing some glaring omissions, but I really haven't kept up with recent American fiction like I should (too many late nights in darkened art house theaters). So what books should be on the list?

Second, an indieWIRE article on recent documentaries including a discussion of the Nader doc, An Unreasonable Man and Werner Herzog's confession that his favorite recent film is The Real Cancun, which he appreciates because of its lack of pretension.

Finally, a documentary I'm incredibly curious to see. Brian Brooks reports on a new doc called Jesus Camp, which focuses on Evangelical Christian children's pastor Becky Fischer. As many of my readers may know, I was raised as an evangelical Christian. In addition, my younger sister works as a children's pastor, so the film taps into some issues that are close to home for me. The documentary touches on many of the "cultural divide" issues of politics and religion, as well as issues of religion and education, but what seems interesting about the project from reading the article is Fischer's self-consciousness, her willingness to engage with how certain actions might be read by "secular," or perhaps more accurately non-evangelical, audiences. During one scene, Fischer holds a life-sized photograph of President George W. Bush and asks audiences to pray for him. During screenings of the film Fischer has expressed some surprise that viewers would regard this action as explicitly political:

"All you have to do is mention words like abortion, homosexuality and President Bush to [garner] strong feelings from people," said Fischer who maintained that using images of the U.S. President the flags of the U.S. and Israel were not meant to be overtly political. "We are commanded to pray for our leaders and we're commanded [by the Bible] to pray for Israel. So it was a surprise to me because we don't think of this as political. But from a secular point-of-view, I can see how it's viewed politically."
Of course I don't want to evaluate the film before I see it, but I'm incredibly curious to see how the film explores Fischer and her ministry. Having spent some time in those churches, I do think that the prayer for Bush has a politics (I wonder if Fischer would have a life-size photo of Kerry under the same circumstances), but I'm intrigued by Fischer's attempts to recognize children as more fully human than most people assume (she comments at one point that "Kids have been sidelined within the Christian circle").

Posted by chuck at 11:21 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

May 10, 2006

More Online Video Links

Via Green Cine, a series of Wired articles on the "online video explosion." I'm not sure they add anything new to my understanding of online video (although they provide some nice pointers to online video sites I hadn't seen), but it's nice to see online video (or blogging or social networking sites) represented as something relatively safe or banal rather than as a threat to civil discourse or a danger to children.

Local news stations here in DC have been relentlessly repeating the idea that sites such as MySpace are constantly placing children in danger, and I'm still not quite sure how to read these "news" stories. I don't think it makes sense to argue that the TV news broadcasters see Internet sites such as MySpace as competition. After all, many of these news stories appear on the local, somewhat tabloid-y Fox News affiliate, and Fox is owned by News Corp, which also owns MySpace. I could likely comment further but should probably get some other writing done.

Oh, while I'm thinking about it, my favorite radio station, KEXP in Seattle, now has a blog.

Posted by chuck at 12:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Irene Jacob Interview

Via the IFC Blog, an interview with Swiss actress Irene Jacob to promote the DVD release of Krzysztof Kieslowski's The Double Life of Véronique, in which Jacob starred. Kieslowski's Three Colors: Red, probably more than any other film, inspired me to study film in graduate school. Some interesting tidbits: Kieslowski originally wanted to cast Andie MacDowell for the double role in Veronique, but she dropped out after a mix-up about contracts. Jacob also mentions that Kieslowski was hesitant to discuss the metaphysics of his films with the actors: "That would have meant speaking about metaphysics and chance and doubles. He told me that because the film could be taken on such a poetic level we had to be very concrete. For him, metaphysics and chance was something always there in banal, everyday life - a piece of light, the rain." If you're a fan of Jacob or Kieslowski, it's an interesting read.

Posted by chuck at 12:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 9, 2006

It's (Mostly) Official

As many of you may know from private conversations with me (and may have guessed from my veiled references to moving away from the District), I have accepted a tenure track position in the Department of English and Foreign Languages at Fayetteville State University in Fayetteville, NC. Because I'm superstitious, I had been waiting for my contract to arrive before mentioing this news publicly, but I've been assured that the contract is on its way.

The idea of moving is still relatively vague, and so far my only sense of Fayetteville comes from my whirlwind tour through the town during my campus visit and reading the online version of the Fayetteville newspaper, which usefully has a number of community blogs that give some sense of what the area is like. I'll certainly have more to say about the move in the days ahead, but I'm still unwinding from a very busy school year and job search.

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May 8, 2006

DC Late Spring Screens

Via Green Cine: a tip from Acqarello on an upcoming series of Theo Angelopoulos' films at the National Gallery of Art here in DC. I'll admit that I'm relatively unfamiliar with Anglopolous, but this looks like a good opportuinty to see some interesting films.

Also while I'm thinking about it, a reminder that the premiere of Sujewa's Date Number One is scheduled for this Saturday, May 13 at 7 PM, at the Goethe-Institut (right next to the Gallery Place-Chinatown Metro stop).

Update: I forgot to mention that David Lowery's film, Deadroom will be screening in DC on Thursday, May 25th, at 7 PM, at Kensington Row Bookshop as a part of Sujewa's Capital City Microcinema series.

Posted by chuck at 1:29 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Octavia Butler Tribute

Via Tstop's Film Shack, a video tribute to the novelist Octavia Butler. I didn't write about Butler when she passed away earlier this year, but her novel, Kindred is one of my favorite books. I've taught the novel twice, once at Illinois and once at Purdue, and on both occasions, it provoked thoughtful and passionate discussion, which I read as testimony to her skill as a novelist. The short tribute appears to have been filmed at a book signing for Fledgling, which I've heard is a great book.

Update: Tstop also offers this Spike Lee interview from German television.

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May 7, 2006

Sunday Procrastination Reads

Here's what I'm reading and watching instead of grading student papers:


Update: Blogger was down earlier, so I couldn't find the link, but I also wanted to mention Joe Swanberg and Kris Williams' web series, Young American Bodies (video is NSFW), which is playing on Nerve.com. Joe reports that the series will be running for twelve episodes, and thus far, it looks quite promising.

Update 2: The grading is done, and my "summer vacation" has begun. I also feel somewhat obligated to mention the fact that I made the Washington Post Express Blog Log again, this time for my snarky comment about Richard Kelly's passport difficulties. Here's a PDF if you want to see for yourself (I'm on page 32).

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May 5, 2006

Academe Blog

Via JBJ, a link to Talk About Academe, a new blog from AAUP, the American Association of University Professors. The blog consists of full text versions of the AAUP's magazine, Academe, with space for comments.

Posted by chuck at 12:14 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

May 4, 2006

Jonas Mekas Reminder

Just a quick reminder that the Hirshhorn Museum will be screening Walden and Happy Birthday, John tonight (Thursday, May 4) and Reminiscense of a Journey to Lithuania tomorrow night.

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What is a Film Critic?

A few days ago, Andy Horbal discussed Scott Kirsner's Boston Globe column, "Everyone's Always Been a Critic -- But the Net Makes Their Voices Count," which explores the role of film and media criticism on the net. As the article's title suggests, Kirsner is arguing that bloggish cultural critics are challenging the centrality of the professional critic, in part because web-based, often amateur, critics have more room to speacialize in a given area of interest (he mentions the example of Nigerian juju, but it could just as well be political documentaries or whatever) while professional critics are forced to generalize. There are a number of assumptions at play in Kirsner's argument, but I think he gestures towards the transformation of film and media criticism associated with the rise of amateur blog-based criticism.

My major concern is that Kirsner places unnecessary limits on what good amateur criticism can do by framing criticism in terms of consumer choice rather than genuine enthusiasm for a genre, medium, or what have you. As Andy points out, Kirsner frames the role of criticism in terms of consumer choice, assuming that the primary role of "the critic is first and foremost a consumer guide to 'cultural choices.'" I'm certainly aware that film reviews are linked to film promotion, but as Andy points out, we don't really know much about the "criticism-reading habits" of moviegoers, how many reviews people read, much less how people read those reviews. And framing this discussion in terms of consumer choice ignores the pedagogical role of reviews, with Pauline Kael's reviews teaching a certain appreciation for free-wheeling, often subjective criticism, to name one example.

With that in mind, I think Andy is asking some interesting questions, many of which I can't answer, except in a subjective, anecdotal way. He asks, "What is film criticism? How is it used? What are its goals?" Some of my tentative answers would be that film criticism for me is an opportunity to engage in a conversation about an incredibly powerful medium, to think about the ways in which movies matter (the same could apply to TV, music, and games, of course). In some cases, I have the goal of encouraging others to see a film I admire, in part because I think it deserves a much wider audience, especially in the case of films that don't receive wide distribution, like Chain. I think Andy's first question ("What is film criticism?") is probably the most difficult. Many of the review entries that I write avoid plot summary and engage with my own subjective interest in the film. In that regard, I often violate the first rule of Mark Schannon's "So You Want To Be A Critic," which warns against the use of the first-person, especially in the opening sentence or "opening hook" of a film review. Perhaps it's the blog format, which no dobt encourages first-person navel-gazing, but I often feel compelled to emphasize my personal investment in a given film, often from the very beginning.

Andy has already revisited these claims, pointing to a Wall Street Journal article by Joe Morgenstern, arguing as the title suggests that "Rumors of Critic's Demise Are Greatly Exaggerated." I assume that Morgenstern means "critics'," but grammar snark is a little too easy. To give Morgenstern some credit, he does acknowledge the valuable role that web critics can play in sustaining and promoting independent (and international) cinema. I should really be grading right now, but I'm intrigued by this conversation because it speaks to my interest not simply in the movies themselves but how, where, and why people watch them.

Posted by chuck at 10:02 AM | Comments (14) | TrackBack

May 2, 2006

Where is My Mind?

Via Documentary Insider (DI) news about two cool documentaries, loudQUIETloud: a film about the Pixies and Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man. I pretty much missed the Pixies the first time around in the late 1980s because I was somewhat oblivious to the whole college radio thing (in part because my college was, umm, isolated--and not just geographically), but more recently I've become a big fan. Sara at DI has a very positive review of the Pixies doc and the trailer looks very promising. And I have Oliver Stone and Atom Egoyan to thank for introducing me to Leonard Cohen's music (say what you will about Natural Born Killers, that soundtrack is amazing). The trailer for his film also looks promising, with Cohen displaying a wry sense of humor that I enjoyed.

Now I really should be grading....

Posted by chuck at 10:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Lazy Tuesday Links

I continue to be interested in the ongoing renegotiation of moviegoing habits, and indieWire points to some interesting discussions of this topic. First, a Tribeca panel on the changing distribution platforms for movies featuring Steven Soderbergh, distributor and theater owner Todd Wagner (2929 Entertainment, Landmark Theaters), Dean Garfield from the MPAA, and Ashwin Navin of BitTorrent.

Navin makes the point that digital distribution via technologies such as Bit Torrent has pretty much arrived and that the indie film community is central to digital distribution, while Soderbergh continues to argue for something like day-and-date release, claiming that "Cinema is a language that you use to make a movie, so I don't care where (people) see it, because I know that that the language I use to make it is in tact. So, I am not precious about that." While I would tend to favor multiple forms of distribution, especially for art house and indie films that are only screened in a few major cities, I don't think Soderbergh is entirely correct here. I think it matters deeply where people see a movie, that the trappings of a Landmark Theater where you might be able to buy a glass of wine and an expensive dessert shape the movie experience far differently than watching the same film on DVD at home or on a computer work station in your office (I have in mind the MoveOn movie parties here as one powerful illustration of this principle).

Alongside the Tribeca panel, I found it interesting to learn that AMC Theaters is planning to enter the art house market, with 72 screens in 39 markets (more from Reuters). According to Reuters, moviegoing demographics have shifted in some surprising ways: "Between 1986 and 2005, the annual percentage of admissions of 40-and-older moviegoers rose to 35 percent from 14 percent, while 12- to 29-year-old ticket buyers fell to 49 percent from 66 percent, according to the Motion Picture Association of America." Not sure I have much to say about this right now, but it represents an interesting shift in movie attendance (update: The LA Times is also reporting on this story, and the tone of the Times article leads me to wonder how thi smight affect smaller cities where art house movies are often unavailable).

Finally, a documentary that will likely make me feel very guilty: California Newsreel has secured distribution rights to Black Gold, a doucmnetary that "explores the world of coffee, from the Ethiopian farmers who grow it, to the international coffee culture that has grown to make coffee a multibillion dollar business."

Posted by chuck at 11:53 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

May 1, 2006

A Star is Blogged

Interesting Washington Post article on the rapid popularization of YouTube, which amazingly debuted only five months ago, even if it feels like it has been around much longer. The Post article places emphasis on the relationship between YouTube and celebrity, highlighting viral video hits such as David Lehre's MySpace: The Movie and wanna-be net celebrities such as Terry Turner who produces weekly political video podcasts with the hopes of becoming the next Bill Maher (or at least the next Wonkette).

Both Lehre and Turner are explicit in viewing their work on YouTube in terms of celebrity, with Lehre describing the site as a "promotional vehicle" for the 50 other short videos he has made and discussing his negotiations with one of the major networks to work on a show on Fox. The desire associated with YouTube celebrity seems not unlike the desire for celebrity associated with "reality TV," including shows such as American Idol, and while it seems to underscore a desire to be a producer of media rather than a mere consumer, I think that's only a partial explanation for the appeal of posting these videos online.

At the same time, the article emphasizes the do-it-yorself aspects of the site, implied in YouTube's marketing slogan, "Broadcast Yourself," and to some extent, I think this is where the site's politics become fairly interesting, even if it also limits how the technology is used. This slogan suggests that the videos are based in personal expression, that the videos are in some sense, drawing from one's identity. Such a characterization might seem to situate YouTube as little more than a glorified version of America's Funniest Home Videos minus Bob Saget's snarky comments, but I think that these videocasts can be used to play with identity and performance in complicated ways (the example of the British collge student who pretended to be an emo kid from Ohio is one potential example). In addition, many of the more adept video makers demonstrate an acute awareness of the codes of films and other media, perhaps reinforcing Nick's argument about "self-theorizing media."

Still, by framing YouTube in terms of personal expression, I wonder whether the "broadcast yourself" slogan isn't a constraint of sorts. In this sense, it's worth thinking about the fact that YouTube is compelled to remove copyrighted content, such as the SNL "Lazy Sunday" sketch that appeared briefly on the site before being pulled (the first SNL skit I've seen in nearly a decade and possibly the last I'll ever see). By positioning the content on YouTube as personal expression and by limiting the ability to show copyrighted images, does that make it more difficult to use YouTube for certain forms of political commentary, especially the media or political process commentary associated with series such as The Daily Show? Of course I'm assuming that people would want to use the medium in this way, which is a major assumption. But the Post's article oes raise some interetsing questions about how YouTube will be and can be used.

By the way, you can see one of Terry Turner's videocasts at the Washington Post website.

Posted by chuck at 11:13 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Instructive Games

Jeff of Kinshasa on the Potomac mentions yesterday's rally here in DC to save Darfur. I now regret not attending the rally, but as Jeff points out, rallies such as yesterday's draw desperately needed attention to a serious humanitarian crisis. Jeff also mentions the Washington Post article on a video game that was "launched" by MTVu in conjunction with the rally called "Darfur is Dying." The game is part of what is described as a "games for change" movement that intends to instruct game players on social issues as well as to move the player to take action, whether by writing a letter to the President or one's Representative in Congress, as well as other actions.

The primary game itself is relatively basic. You take on an avatar representing a Darfurian in a refugee camp. You can be Poni, a thirteen-year-old girl or Jaja, a twelve-year-old boy, and your goal is to obtain water from a distant well 3,000 meters away before you are swept up by the members of Janjaweed patrols in passing jeeps. After you are captured, the game explains the likely fate of a Darfurian child under those circumstances, explaining that a Darfurian girl is likely to be raped while a boy may be killed or abused if he is captured, as well as describing the difficult circumstances that many Darfurians face.

As Jeff's entry points out, such a game risks exploitation: "I realize that, when conducting an information campaign, one has to appeal to people using whatever methods seem most likely to get a positive response. But, this particular idea is in such poor taste, that it should be stopped." I think the game avoids any of the voyeuristic or lurid qualities that would at best be in "poor taste." And it depicts in relatively explicit terms the defenselessness of the Darfurians. Your only options in the game are to run and hide. Of course a relatively simple Flash game cannot depict the scale of the crisis, but I'm not sure if that is even possible. Like Jeff, I'm somewhat conflicted about the game, but I do think that calling attention to the genocide in Darfur is urgent and hope this game can contribute to the public's awareness of what is happening in Darfur.

Posted by chuck at 10:35 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack