Kendra Elliot returns in the stunning sequel to Deep Focus . . .
Micro Movie Essay #2 -- Shallow Focus:
YouTube
Facebook Fan Page
Prescription for the future of cinema -- go back to the beginning and rethink everything.
|
|
||||
|
Login
Month Archive
This Month
Search
|
Monday, March 15
MICRO MOVIE ESSAY: SHALLOW FOCUS
by
Lloydville
on Mon 15 Mar 2010 12:01 AM PDT
Kendra Elliot returns in the stunning sequel to Deep Focus . . . Micro Movie Essay #2 -- Shallow Focus: YouTube Facebook Fan Page Prescription for the future of cinema -- go back to the beginning and rethink everything. Saturday, March 13
MICRO MOVIE ESSAY: DEEP FOCUS
by
Lloydville
on Sat 13 Mar 2010 07:47 AM PST
 In a stunning departure which has left the film world breathless, Majestic Micro Movies launches a new series -- miniature essays on cinema by Jae Song and friends, dedicated with much love to J-L G. First up: Micro Movie Essay #1 -- Deep Focus: YouTube Facebook Fan Page Prescription for the future of cinema -- go back to the beginning and rethink everything. Friday, March 12
INTO THE MYSTIC
by
Lloydville
on Fri 12 Mar 2010 12:01 AM PST
 A few days ago I was driving with my friends Mary and Paul Zahl from Kayenta, Arizona, to Moab, Utah. We were going up to Moab to track down the locations where John Ford shot parts of Wagon Master (and other films.) On the way, Paul suggested we make a detour to see the fabled Valley Of the Gods, a large basin surrounded by mesas and dotted with odd rock towers. My instinct was to proceed directly to Moab, but Paul's instinct was stronger so we set off on a dirt road into the valley. It was a good road, of red clay -- or would have been a good road if it hadn't been raining recently. The rain had turned it into glass. My big Navigator, in four-wheel-drive, kept losing traction on it, threatening to slide over the embankments on sharp turns. It was a little scary, but the car handled it all very well.  Then, at the end of the road, we found ourselves driving straight towards the nearly sheer face of a tall mesa. There was, improbably, a road leading up the side of the mesa in a series of hair-raising switchbacks. The maps we had said the road was paved, and it was, but only in parts. The other parts were wet dirt -- something we discovered too late. I started up the road, which is called the Moki Dugway -- seen above in better weather conditions than we faced -- and we all soon realized that we had made a big mistake. But I also realized that trying to turn the car around on such a road would probably be more dangerous than proceeding up it. So we proceeded up it, at a snail's pace, with our hearts in our throats. I hugged the side of the mesa on the sharp curves, honking and hoping we wouldn't meet any oncoming traffic. There were no shoulders to speak of for most of the way, only terrifying drop-offs. If the Navigator's tires ever lost traction on the slippery dirt sections, it would have meant a certain flaming fiery death for all of us. Below is a picture Mary took with her iPhone during the ascent. She took it upside down, as it happened -- the condition of our stomachs at the time.  For a while it seemed as though the road would never end, but it finally did, on top of the mesa, where we were presented with . . . a winter wonderland. An endless plateau covered in snow, dotted with cedars, new snow falling gently on it all.  It was like a vision of peace and grace, granted to us after our ordeal. I couldn't get this extraordinary experience out of my mind. The next morning I had what felt like a revelation -- I felt we had been led supernaturally to the Moki Dugway, where we reenacted, in a sense, the climactic scenes of Wagon Master, when the Mormons take their wagons up the side of a precipitous cliff, where wagons were not meant to go, in order to reach their promised land.  I became convinced that John Ford himself had been riding with us on our climb up the mesa, having decided that we would not just have a leisurely meander up to Moab to gawk at his sublime locations for Wagon Master, but drive right into the heart of the movie. Mystical as it may sound, I think that's exactly what we did. 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. 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" 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 Wednesday, February 17
ANOTHER NOIR BAR
by
Lloydville
on Wed 17 Feb 2010 08:07 AM PST
 Now playing on a computer or portable device near you . . . the second movie in the Noir Bars: New York series from Majestic Micro Movies -- extremely short tales of lost souls in dark bars on dead-end streets. Have a look: Noir Bar #2 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. [Some explicit language in this one.] Tuesday, February 16
WALKING IN MEMPHIS
by
Lloydville
on Tue 16 Feb 2010 12:03 AM PST
 Some thoughts by Paul Zahl (of The Zahl File) on Jack Kerouac and his connection to Michael Curtiz's costume epic The Egyptian. Huh? Read on: The 1954 Hollywood movie The Egyptian, a big picture, with Jean Simmons and Michael Wilding, among many others, is hard to find -- all but impossible to find, in fact, until the days of Internet magic. (It's available on a Korean DVD.) It was produced by Darryl F. Zanuck and directed by Michael Curtiz. Curtiz had directed several big pictures, including Casablanca and Mildred Pierce, not to mention The Walking Dead and Mystery of the Wax Museum. The Egyptian tells the story of a young doctor in Ancient Egypt -- meaning Thebes, Memphis, and Luxor -- who is ensnared pitifully by a temptress known as the "Woman of Babylon", completely loses his self-respect, together with everything he owns as well as his post as Physician to Pharaoh, and finally recreates himself as a healer wandering throughout the Ancient World. He prospers, only to return home to lose his true and loyal love, played by Jean Simmons, and to become caught up in the failed but sublime One God movement of the Pharaoh Akhenaten. In a touching scene that works dramatically and cinematically, Sinuhe, the doctor, is converted to monotheism. After all his sad experience of life, Sinuhe seeks monastic solitude in the desert, a sadder man but much wiser.  The Egyptian is pretty good. The sets are gorgeous, the camera is fluid and assured, the acting (with the exception of Gene Tierney, who is miscast as Pharaoh's sister) confident if a little wooden, and the matte paintings and miniatures convincing. Personally, I like the religion of the film, with Akhenaten's confession of his universal faith going down well, with pathos, at the end. Some might say that The Egyptian is suffused with '50s-style religion in this country, but that would be unfair. The film is so anchored in the pessimistic views -- i.e., life as an exercise in dreamy futility, with loss -- of the author of the original best-selling book, that Akhenaten's "witness" in the last scene but one, comes off as credible, and for me even hopeful. The novel on which The Egyptian is based, incidentally, was written in the Finnish language by Mika Waltari. In the days of our fathers and mothers, Waltari's novel was an international sensation. Waltari's father, incidentally, was a Finnish Lutheran pastor. It was the Finnish Lutherans, of course, who brought us The Flying Saucer Of Love.  Here's the thing: Jack Kerouac saw The Egyptian in a movie theater when it first came out. He hated it! The vehemence of Kerouac's response to this relatively standard Hollywood production is surprising. I read his armchair review, which occurs in Some of the Dharma (page 124), three years ago and was impressed by his very negative reaction. Here is what he wrote: WITH 'THE EGYPTIAN' Darryl Zanuck has purveyed a teaching of viciousness and cruelty. They present him with a gold cup at banquets for this. The author, Mika Waltari, is also guilty of the same teaching of viciousness and cruelty. You see a scene of a man choking a woman under water. Both these men are rich as a consequence of the world's infatuation with the forbidden murder, --- its daydreams of maniacal revenge by means of killing and Lust. Men kill and women lust for men. Men die and women lust for men. Men, think in solitude; learn how to live off your sowings of seed in the ground. Or work 2 weeks a year and live in the hermitage the rest of the year, procuring your basic foods at markets, and as your your garden grows work less, till you've learned to live off your garden alone. QUIETNESS AND REST THE ONLY ESCAPE. The secret is in the desert. Now, Ain't that Peculiar! The Egyptian tells the story of a man disillusioned by romantic love -- in the first half he loses his whole self, his deepest self, to the wily and nefarious siren of Babylon. The Egyptian envisions his then turning aside from the world, and becoming a kind of medical "gentleman of the road", a Sal Paradise of the ancient Mediterranean. With Kerouacian pessimism, Sinuhe observes the fruitlessness of human endeavor, and does so over and over again. Finally, back home in Thebes -- I love writing those words -- he becomes enlightened by Akhenaten, the Sun (One) worshiper, who reveals to him that God is the whole of Reality, and that Forgiveness, of all things, is at the core of that Reality. There is something like pantheism here, together with absolving Christianity, and the the name "Jesus Christ" is invoked on the end-title. How could Kerouac not have responded positively to this, given his Christo-Buddhism, or Buddhist-Christianity, or however you want to call his personal synthesis?  But he didn't like the film. He focused completely on the Woman of Babylon sequence, with its subtle, slightly-off-frame drowning of the Siren -- she survives -- and the "lust of the eye" and lust of the body which drives the story at that point. Biographers of Jack Kerouac would probably observe in these comments his suspicion of entrapping women and entrapped men, his frequent equation of greed and lust, and his persistent failed efforts to choose celibacy on Buddhist grounds --- "Men . . . learn how to live off your sowings of seed in the ground [my emphasis]." I want to guess that Kerouac got stuck on the performance by Bella Darvi as Nefer, the Woman of Babylon, and did not consider the enduring Treue of Jean Simmons' character, nor the emphatic world-renunciation by Sinuhe, which begins and ends The Egyptian. What his impassioned observations do tell us, and they read as sober and non-Benzedrined, is that Kerouac was touchy about violence. This is the man who would brawl in bars, mad-drunk, and then write remorseful exhortations to the whole world to Be Kind. He was also a man who loved women, but suspected them, and their "designs", through and through, with the exception of Gabrielle, his mother.  Take a look at The Egyptian. It's a good movie. Sure, it's too long. And to be sure, there's not one word of humor. But the liturgical scenes, with their ethereal religious chants praising "Beauty" (I thought I could hear Lionel Ritchie's "You are so Beautiful") -- which work! -- and especially the obeisances, including Jean Simmons's, on the steps of the temple of the One (Sun) God, are sincerely reverent, and affecting. You could compare the scene of Pharaoh's archers breaking into the Temple of Aten with the Roman breach of the Temple in Nicholas Ray's The King of Kings. The latter is bloody and sensationalistic (like the "Civil War" cards little boys loved in the '60s, by the same people who did the "Mars Attacks" cards) -- the former, sympathetic and pitiful. My irony for today is this: Jack Kerouac should have liked The Egyptian. The title character, take away the toga, is the man himself. Maybe he walked out before the end. The editor of this blog taught me never to do that. Saturday, February 13
SURFING THE MICRO WAVE
by
Lloydville
on Sat 13 Feb 2010 12:16 AM PST
 First there was the French New Wave -- an attempt by filmmakers to retake control of cinema from the commercial or state-sponsored studios and get back to basics. Now there's the American Micro Wave, which is basically the same thing, necessary because the eruption of cinematic invention sparked by the young directors of the New Wave has been smothered once again in corporate standardization and dehumanization.  The Micro Wave is about micro movies. This is nothing new. Micro movies dominated the early years of cinema exhibition, and micro movies dominate the Internet. The question is, can modern micro movies on the Internet get more sophisticated than cute clips from home videos, or pseudo-narratives designed to show off the filmmakers' technical skills, basically just self-generated commercials?  In short, can modern micro movies learn to tell real stories, just as directors of the nickelodeon era learned to tell real stories?  Finally, is this new Micro Wave really a wave? Too soon to tell, unless you're in the water. You can't see a wave coming until the sea-swells meet the curve of the seabed running up to the beach, lifting a crest so high that it breaks on the sand. But you can feel it if you're out swimming in it. All I can say is, "Come on in -- the water's fine!" ["Mermaid" illustration by D. S. Walker, with thanks as so often to Golden Age Comic Book Stories, where wonders never cease.] Tuesday, February 9
MAJESTIC MICRO MOVIES: TECH SPECS
by
Lloydville
on Tue 09 Feb 2010 05:07 AM PST
 About six years ago, my friend Jae Song, a filmmaker, told me, in abject astonishment, that with the new HD cameras just coming on the market it was possible to fit the camera and lighting package for a feature film into the back of a station wagon. Today, he's shooting feature-quality HD video in New York bars with equipment he can fit into a backpack.  The center of his current package is a Canon 7D still and video camera, fitted with a Canon 1.0 lens. That lens, no longer in production and hard to find, and the sensitivity of the camera itself allow him to shoot with ambient light (in bars that aren't too dark to start with) and come up with footage that looks as good as most stuff you see in Hollywood movies -- better, as often as not, because Jae has an exceptional eye, artistically speaking. The camera shoots HD video at 1080 resolution and uses the h264 compression codec -- an o. k. codec, as far as Jae is concerned but not Final Cut Pro friendly. He suggests transcoding it before editing.  The key to the look Jae gets, however, is a custom gamma contrast curve that can be downloaded from the Internet for the camera. Out of the box, according to Jae, the camera's images are too contrasty, looking like bad video. The contrast curve he uses gives more info for highlights and shadows, and thus more options in ambient lighting situations and in post. The downside, for some, is a softer image than the one Canon thought people would prefer, but with care it simply gives the footage more of the feel of film. It works especially well for Jae in the bar settings, where the lighting can be harsh at times.  Jae shoots with the lens wide open to 1.0 at all times, at 24 fps, sometimes varying the ISO and shutter speed slightly according to conditions. Jae doesn't manipulate the images in post -- what he gets at the location, trusting his own instincts about the light and the capacities of the camera, is exactly what he wants. A series of short films Jae shot with this camera will be appearing soon on the Internet. You simply will not believe how good they look. Monday, February 8
SOME OF THE MOONRISE
by
Lloydville
on Mon 08 Feb 2010 12:27 AM PST
 Drunk late at night in 1955, Jack Kerouac watched Frank Borzage's Moonrise on TV, and wrote this poem about it, in his notebook of religious meditations eventually published as Some Of the Dharma: DUMB POEM CALLED "MOONRISE" A snake in a pond Slithers out of harm Seeking the frond Of the heavenly farm. Jeb was your Paw Forevermore And this is the law Of love and gore. The blood of the bear Is soaking in the swamp, Such heavenly air
Overhangs his pomp. Give yourself up To the sheriffs of truth, Fear no hound pup No karma of tooth For your sweet smile And meditations desperate
Are wine to the senile And love to degenerate Face the shroudy kitchen Of the sea of the night And make a pretty kitten Of all this abounding blight
(Written after watching, drunk, Dane Clark on TV in movie MOONRISE) --- Some cloth has that sin rip This doesnt  This is Kerouac's little riff on a surprising movie, with its
Prophet of Grace Sheriff and its Recluse of Wisdom Rex Ingram, its
insight about dogs, and its unsensational, unforgettable scene on a
very small ferris wheel.
I think I could preach three sermons arising from stanza four, and another two about the movie's not having "that sin rip". I'm not sure they'd be received all that well -- but maybe on a park bench some day, as in Moonrise.  Kerouac, watching a late night movie on television and drunk, manages to capture the theme of the film. Does "blood"-destiny have to determine the outcome of a life? Or can other things, like love (the shaky and vulnerable heroine), a wise man for father-figure (the Rex Ingram character "Mose", who knows what's really up before anyone else does, and who gives his hounds the dignity of being called "Mr. Dog" and means it) . . .  . . . and a philosopher-sheriff, the likes of whom I have never seen depicted in a movie -- sort of a small-town "zen-detective" (the phrase is Thornton Wilder's) -- who is able to convey a concrete quality of grace in unsentimental terms. Can the "sin rip" (Kerouac's phrase, not the movie's) be mended? Mended in believable terms, in a way that could actually happen?  Kerouac takes karma, and a dog's bite and faithfulness,
and the cabin kitchen at the end; and the swamp of the beginning and
middle; and comes up with a . . . kitten. All while drunk! |
Favorites
|
||