1. Tank.TV is hosting 20 works by Ken Jacobs for October and November (via Chained to the Cinémathèque).
["Tank.tv, an online moving-image gallery and curated series of experimental film and video art, is hosting 20 works by Ken Jacobs in October and November. Click the link to watch! The works will also be screened at Tank.tv events in the UK; Screening schedule and general info on the Jacobs series available here, including Ken Jacobs in person in London at the end of November. Also keep your eyes peeled for Tank Magazine's new issue, featuring a discussion between Jacobs and Mark Webber on Star Spangled to Death, and an essay from Jacobs on contemporary American politics entitled "Failed State." Ken is also answering questions via email in an extended Q+A session. You can email your questions to the artist at ken@tank.tv.
A regularly updated transcript of the dialogue will be online at www.tank.tv/askken."]
2. "Provacateur & Muse": Online for a limited time, Tom Hall speaks with the cast and crew of Battle in Seattle for Hamptons Magazine. (Via Tom's blog, The Back Row Manifesto.)
["Stuart Townsend believes in the power of movies. The Irish actor, best known in this country for his devilish good looks and his off-screen romance with longtime partner Charlize Theron, is on a mission to change American minds, to show audiences that the movies can once again make a difference. During the past year Townsend has become an evangelist of sorts, putting his money where his ideas are and taking his show on the road. All that hard work seems to have paid off: Battle In Seattle, Townsend’s debut as a writer and director, is poised to become the story of the season, a Molotov cocktail of a movie thrown into our country’s already contentious political arena."]
3. "No 'Action!' for Hollywood vets": By Anne Thompson for Variety.
["A generation of lauded directors is MIA in Hollywood. In an industry driven by buzz, heat, youth and momentum, many talented studio helmers now find themselves on the outside looking in. While directors such as Lawrence Kasdan (“Grand Canyon”), Joe Dante (“Gremlins”), Phil Kaufman (“The Right Stuff”) and Jim McBride (“The Big Easy”) were once reliable makers of modest studio hits, enjoying both popular and critical success, they’re rarely tapped for new film projects. And they often hit a brick wall in trying to mount their own passion projects. The heart of the problem is Hollywood’s “What have you done for me lately?” mindset."]
4. Sean Axmaker reports from the Vancouver International Film Festival.
["I've always found Vancouver the most enjoyable film festival of my year, whether for a couple of days or a full week. It's an easy fest to navigate, with seven screens of a downtown multiplex dedicated to the festival and all but one of the ten screens within a few blocks of one another. Set two weeks after Toronto, showcases many of TIFF's North American premieres. And it's Dragons and Tigers sidebar is a fascinating snapshot of Asian cinema that takes chances on early works by promising directors in addition to the big names and domestic hits. More on the smaller films and early works later. For this dispatch, let's take a look at some of the established filmmakers and bigger films."]
5. "Bushwhacked Cinema": A piece commissioned for the 17th edition of Time Out Film Guide, reprinted by the author (Jonathan Rosenbaum) on his personal website.
["According to the trade magazine Boxoffice, on 30 March 2008, The Passion of the Christ in fact placed 11th in its list of “all-time domestic blockbusters,” on the heels of (in descending order) Titanic (1997), Star Wars (1977), Shrek 2 (2004), E.T.: The Extra-Terrestial (1982), Star Wars, Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999) Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006), Spider-Man (2002), Star Wars, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (2005), Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003), and Spider-Man 2 (2004). It’s a sobering thought that six of these came out during Bush’s eight years and the only other films on the list that didn’t qualify as fodder for kids were made during previous decades. But this infantilism can be ascribed to the preferences of the film industry as much as those of the audience, and this audience was plainly as Bushwhacked as the movies it attended. In more ways than one, its mind was elsewhere."]
Quote of the Day: Franklin P. Jones
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): NASA design for a potential space elevator.
Clip of the Day: "We Sing the Forest Electric" by Grickle
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged. Suggestions for links are also welcome. Please send to keithuhlich@gmail.com.
Sunday, October 05, 2008
Links for the Day (October 5th, 2008)
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4 comments:
Rosenbaum's piece is certainly a humorous rant. But I don't think this classic example of the "blame Bush for everthing" school really succeeds at connecting any dots.
In the interests of full disclosure, his citing of Michael Moore (who doesn't really make documentaries) as someone who was "reporting basic information" tainted the well before I even took a sip. BTW, I'll beat my own dead horse and wonder why he doesn't even mention Errol Morris, a true artist in the documentary genre, once.
Rosenbaum uses box office numbers for all-time top-grossing films to demonstrate "infantilism" on the part of the "Bushwhacked" "film industry" and "audience" whose "mind was elsewhere."
Looking at it another way, then, based on the top box office winners from 1992-2000 (Aladdin, Jurassic Park, Forrest Gump, Toy Story, Independence Day, Titanic, Saving Private Ryan, Star Wars Ep. I: The Phantom Menace, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas), one could easily apply Rosenbaum's thesis to the Clinton years.
He says After all, it’s been demonstrated repeatedly by the TV series 24–launched around the same time that Bush became President and still popular today–that government-sanctioned torture continues to be dramaturgically sound and therefore saleable even if it remains questionable on practical as well as ethical grounds.
This may help to account for how Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, in Aramaic, Latin, and Hebrew with English subtitles, managed to come in third among the top-grossing releases of 2004
Seeing the "bad guy" getting their just, if unconstitutional, desserts has been a succesful formula since Dirty Harry and Death Wish. Even NYPD Blue celebrated police beatings well before the Bush administration.
And surely Rosenbaum knows that The Passion (a movie I didn't like) benefited from some well documented and shrewd marketing efforts targeted toward religious groups that created a groundswell of word of mouth. The PR generated by the controversy over its violent and supposedly antisemitic content didn't hurt either. But certainly it can't be established that The Passion succeeded because of a Bush inspired pro-torture zeitgeist.
Another story well worth linking: Max Hardcore Sentenced to Federal Prison. No matter what you think of his work (whether you've watched any of it or not, and I have), you can't seriously argue that he deserves a prison term for what he and his - of legal age and fully consenting - female co-stars do. To call the implications worrisome is a massive understatement.
Yeah, Rosenbaum's article is pretty dumb. I wish there was a law or something forbidding lazy essayists from 'zeitgeist' criticism - "Hey, look! A certain genre or style of films became popular during [this president's] administration! Its so obvious that the former reflects the latter that I don't need to marshall any evidence or engage in any real scholarship!"
Anyway, more to Rosenbaum's point: for the last four years, I've read articles trying to connect the 'torture porn' (sub-?) genre with Abu Ghraib [sp]. I always thought this was too literal-minded, and it was always pretty forehead-smackingly obvious that the SAWs and HOSTELs and such were about 9/11, not anything that the US military might've done (I mean, how could SAW I have anything to do with torture on the part of the US? That movie had already come out and its copycats were well into production by time that story broke in the news. Are these filmmakers psychic?). All these films are told from the pov of the victims, not the perpetrators. Don't you think a moviegoing population just beginning to be acquainted with a new sense of vulnerability might be more receptive to that kind of thing?
(Alright, so I got a little zeitgeist-y, but I still think I made a better case than JR does here. And, yeah, he totally hung a big sign saying DON'T TAKE ME SERIOUSLY around his neck with that "Michael Moore - dispassionate chronicler of the facts!" bit. Sheesh...)
Hey, not for nothing- I would love to see a space elevator built? But it will never happen. Economy aside, America's current apathy towards space exploration aside, there are just too many issues with the concept of the space elevator itself. Sadly, this is a dream we're not going to see come true - ever.
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