|
|
||||
|
Login
Month Archive
This Month
Search
|
Thursday, March 11
THERE'S ALWAYS ANOTHER BAR
by
Lloydville
on Thu 11 Mar 2010 12:01 AM PST
 . . . at the dark end of the street. Hugh McCarten stars in the newest Noir Bars: New York offering from Majestic Micro Movies -- a series of extremely short tales of lost souls in desolate bars on the boulevard of broken dreams . . . now playing on a computer or portable device near you: Noir Bar #8 YouTube Facebook Fan Page Watch all the films in the series as they roll out, then order a stiff drink and try to forget them. Wednesday, March 10
AVATAR
by
Lloydville
on Wed 10 Mar 2010 12:04 AM PST
 Watching Avatar in Imax 3-D was very instructive. For about the first two hours I was in a state of childlike wonder. I thought, "This is what it must have been like when the first cave paintings were shown to the first unsuspecting viewers."  I bought everything up to that point -- the dialogue, which was pretty good, the story, which was pretty good, the imagined new world and its imagery, which were enchanting, often sublime.  And then the story went to hell and I started looking at my watch and wondering how much more of this "experience" I had to endure. All my goodwill and excitement were leached away by the clumsy and trivial evocations of new-age spirituality, by the kick-ass, over-the-top battle scenes in which the noble insurgents became indistinguishable from their corporate oppressors.  Every lesson Cameron might have learned from Seven Samurai about how to stage an epic battle between asymmetrical forces was conspicuously ignored. The character of each side in the battle was blurred in an orgy of swarming CGI "elements", an attempt to overwhelm the eye instead of dazzle the imagination, rouse the spirit.  Cameron became just another Hollywood hack, hauling out the usual action formulas based on the principle of the roller-coaster. The result was paradoxical. A critique of the corporate mentality became an example of it. What might have been a modern myth became just one more exercise in marketing.  When a storyteller loses the thread of his tale, no amount of pandering to the senses can fill up the vacuum that results. I can honestly say that I walked out of Avatar heartbroken. I had seen the future of filmmaking, and I had seen the future of filmmaking betrayed, all in the space of two hours and forty-two minutes. Tuesday, March 9
IN RETROSPECT
by
Lloydville
on Tue 09 Mar 2010 10:59 AM PST
 You know what that means . . . The latest offering in the Noir Bars: New York series from Majestic Micro Movies -- extremely short tales of lost souls in dark bars on dead-end streets . . . now playing on a computer or portable device near you: Noir Bar #7 YouTube Facebook Fan Page Watch all the films in the series as they roll out, then order a stiff drink and try to forget them. Wednesday, March 3
A DARKER SHADE OF NOIR
by
Lloydville
on Wed 03 Mar 2010 12:34 AM PST
 A new offering in the Noir Bars: New York series from Majestic Micro Movies -- extremely short tales of lost souls in dark bars on dead-end streets . . . this one featuring Kristy Jordan, who is not guilty, baby . . . now playing on a computer or portable device near you: Noir Bar #6 YouTube Facebook Fan Page Watch all the films in the series as they roll out, then order a stiff drink and try to forget them. Tuesday, March 2
DUBAI BLUES
by
Lloydville
on Tue 02 Mar 2010 05:32 PM PST
 A new offering in the Noir Bars: New York series from Majestic Micro Movies -- extremely short tales of lost souls in dark bars on dead-end streets . . . this one featuring Matt Barry and now playing on a computer or portable device near you: Noir Bar #5 YouTube Facebook Fan Page Watch all the films in the series as they roll out, then order a stiff drink and try to forget them. Monday, March 1
THE PREACHER FROM THE BLACK LAGOON
by
Lloydville
on Mon 01 Mar 2010 06:09 PM PST
 It occurs to me that many people who have been following Paul Zahl's posts for this site (collected in The Zahl File) may not know that he is a world-famous preacher, or have had a chance to hear one of his sermons. Well, here's your chance: What Is Love? This sermon was preached at All Saints Episcopal Church in Chevy Chase, Maryland on a Sunday in 2009. I doubt if you've ever heard a sermon quite like it before. More than a few mainstream Christians have reacted to sermons of Paul's like this the way the human figures are reacting to the Creature in the poster above. They just seem to miss the point.  1 AttachmentsSaturday, February 27
NOIR BARS #4
by
Lloydville
on Sat 27 Feb 2010 12:19 AM PST
 The fourth movie in the Noir Bars: New York series from Majestic Micro Movies -- extremely short tales of lost souls in desolate bars on dead-end streets. Now playing on a computer or portable device near you -- a report from girlworld (with apologies for the out of order posting . . .) Noir Bar #4 YouTube Facebook Fan Page Watch all the films in the series as they roll out, then order a stiff drink and try to forget them. Thursday, February 25
ORSON WELLES ON THE AIR: THE HEART OF DARKNESS/LIFE WITH FATHER
by
Lloydville
on Thu 25 Feb 2010 04:07 AM PST
 Gather the household around, dim the lights, click here -- then sit back and enjoy the radio theater of Orson Welles. This week . . . "The Heart of Darkness" and "Life With Father".  This is a Mercury Theater On the Air double-bill broadcast -- the odd pairing of dramatizations of Joseph Conrad's grim short story "The Heart Of Darkness" and Clarence Day's lighthearted book Life With Father. Welles would later attempt to film "The Heart Of Darkness" as his first production for RKO in Hollywood. Budgetary concerns and creative problems caused it to be postponed in favor of Citizen Kane and eventually abandoned.  Life With Father was made into a successful Broadway play a year after this 1938 broadcast, then into a movie in 1947 (above) and eventually turned up as a television series in the 1950s. The show will only be on the site for a limited period, so download it if you can't listen to it right away -- and tune in next time for the nineteenth offering from the Mercury Theater On the Air, "A Passenger To Bali". [You can get more information on Welles's radio work and listen to or download many of his broadcasts here -- The Mercury Theater On the Air. Many more broadcasts can be downloaded at this resource page on Wellesnet. If you get hooked, you can buy a remarkable collection of almost all of Welles' radio work, as both actor and director, in MP3 format on 7 CDs at OTRCat -- which also offers the discs separately.] 1 AttachmentsWednesday, February 24
THE SKIM
by
Lloydville
on Wed 24 Feb 2010 03:00 AM PST
 Meyer Lansky at the Hotel Nacional in Havana secretly photographed for Life Magazine in 1958, just before it all came crashing down for the mob in Cuba. Lansky was reported to be carrying several hundred K in the bag, his share of the skim from the casino at the Nacional, which he controlled.  Lansky was the guy Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista (above) brought in to clean up the casinos in Havana, which used to be cheap clip joints avoided by the high rollers. Lansky knew you had to run honest games to attract the real players. Disposing of the profits could be handled in less above-board ways. Batista and various other government officials got their share, Lansky and his underworld associates got their share -- there was probably just enough left over to pay modest salaries to the nominal "owners" of the casinos. Tuesday, February 23
A NEW APPROACH TO NARRATIVE
by
Lloydville
on Tue 23 Feb 2010 12:43 AM PST
 Following up on a previous essay, "An Experiment In Narrative", Matt Barry has written a broader survey of the state of Internet cinema, in which he argues that the term "short film", with all its (increasingly irrelevant) cultural baggage, needs to be abandoned. Distinguishing something as a "short film" implies that regular films are "long", but today, on the Internet, regular films are short -- long films are the exception. In some ways it would make more sense to refer to those things they're showing at the multiplexes as "long films".  The question, of course, is one of orientation in a time when the mainstream of cinema is shifting. I would guess that for most people under the age of forty, most of the films they watch in any given year, by far, are short Internet movies -- feature-length films, seen in theaters or on DVD, would run a distant second. So what do we mean when we talk about "the movies" today? Where is the real center of the form? Matt also makes a useful distinction between "narrative" and "story". To my way of thinking, a narrative, a logical exposition of a sequence of events, is not by any means always a story. To me, a story is something that makes you lean forward and say, "Wait a minute, how did this happen -- what's going to happen next?" A narrative doesn't automatically do this. Check out the essay here: "A New Approach To Narrative" Monday, February 22
A TISSOT FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Mon 22 Feb 2010 12:30 AM PST
 Completed between 1883 and 1885, this painting is known as The Sporting Ladies and also as The Circus Lover from a series called Women Of Paris. As with several images of the circus by Tissot, and many other works as well, the painter has created a number of distinct spaces that draw us into the scene progressively -- the space occupied by the gentleman leaning in towards the ladies, with the unseen part of his figure seeming to occupy our, the viewers' space, into which the central female is peering, the space of the seated ladies, the space of the circus ring, and the space of the background seats. The space of the circus ring is further articulated into the aerial space of the trapeze artists and the space of the clown in the sawdust and there is, as a kind of punctuation, a glimpse in the distant background of a lighted foyer opening on to the highest rung of seats. The elegant calculation of the composition makes for a very dynamic and seductive image. Sunday, February 21
PARADISE RECLAIMED
by
Lloydville
on Sun 21 Feb 2010 12:29 AM PST
 [Photo © 1960 William Klein] An excerpt from a 2000 profile of Jean-Luc Godard by Richard Brody in The New Yorker: During our interview, Godard referred to the New Wave not only as "liberating" but also as "conservative." On the one hand, he and his friends saw themselves as a resistance movement against "the occupation of the cinema by people who had no business there." On the other, this movement had been born in a museum, the Cinémathèque: Godard and his peers were steeping themselves in a cinematic tradition -- that of silent films -- that had disappeared almost everywhere else. Thus, from the beginning, Godard saw the cinema as a lost paradise that had to be reclaimed. If love of the cinema of the past doesn't point the way to new, revolutionary work -- as love of ancient Greek art sparked the innovations of the Renaissance -- then it's just an exercise in nostalgia. In other words, the cinema of the past can be alive as a cultural force, as it was for the young French cinéastes of the Fifties, just as ancient Greek art was alive for the artists of the Renaissance. The parade has not gone by -- it may even be passing this way: Majestic Micro Movies MMM Facebook Fan Page Saturday, February 20
NOIR BARS #3
by
Lloydville
on Sat 20 Feb 2010 04:57 PM PST
 The third movie in the Noir Bars: New York series from Majestic Micro Movies -- extremely short tales of lost souls in desolate bars on dead-end streets. Now playing on a computer or portable device near you -- a whole chain reaction of disaster: Noir Bar #3 YouTube Facebook Fan Page Watch all the films in the series as they roll out, then order a stiff drink and try to forget them. [Image by Alfred Stieglitz, 1903]
THE CORPORATE-AMERICAN
by
Lloydville
on Sat 20 Feb 2010 12:52 AM PST
 There is something fantastical, ghastly, almost demonic about seeing a corporation as somehow equivalent, existentially, to a human being. Could a religious person, for example, ever refer to Exxon Mobil as "a child of God," as a "dear soul"? The idea is profoundly unsettling. It doesn't seem like a view one could arrive at simply by specious legal arguments or moral depravity in the service of a political ideology -- it would seem to require something more, some sort of neurological disorder, some actual and fundamental damage to the brain itself. Friday, February 19
CRIME DOES NOT PAY
by
Lloydville
on Fri 19 Feb 2010 12:25 AM PST
 In the glory days (the 1940s and early 1950s) before the comic book industry began to censor itself, to ward off government censorship, comic books could and would show just about anything of a violent nature. Lurid, gruesome, graphic, they approached Elizabethan drama in their obsession with the bloody and the macabre. I doubt if any of them that came into the hands of young children really rotted the kids' brains or corrupted their morals. Young children know perfectly well, from their intuitions and their dreams, that the human psyche, and thus the real world, is filled with such horror. It is only grownups who try to pretend otherwise. A powerful art form was crippled by the state-induced censorship, though. Only today has the comic book reclaimed its right to range over the whole landscape of human experience, in the process producing some of the best fiction of our time. [Via Golden Age Comic Book Stories, the Internet's wonder site.] |
Favorites
|
||
