I think I have a crush on Kier-La, subject of Celluloid Horror and founder of the Cinemuerte Film Festival. See the documentary about her and her festival in the Boston Underground Film Festival next week…
…how meta, a film festival screening of a film about a film festival…
“It looks just like a hotel room!”
–happy homeowner whose bedroom was just made over on the TLC show Clean Sweep (as if “hotel room” were a good look)
Today’s the last day of the Juried Student Exhibition at the Carpenter Center–you should check it out, there’s some very cool stuff there.
Dumb chicks with big boobs and tight t-shirts up on rocks dancing to disco in the Science Center courtyard to promote some sort of Harvard event. Am I silly to be disgusted and offended by this? Should Harvard be selling its students as sex objects to promote an event? I don’t know what event, maybe it’s some student organization. Either way, a bunch of girls wearing the same tight red t-shirt with hand-prints over each boob and dancing on rocks like they’re dancing on a bar just seems wrong, at 11am on the Harvard campus. I guess it shows that just cuz you’re a Harvard student doesn’t mean you have brains.
Some highlights (i.e. my personal faves) of the upcoming Boston Underground Film Festival (May 6-10):
Robot Rumpus – Jason Dunn, 20 mins.
Kidbot, the world’s first intelligent machine, spends his first day in elementary school, sent there by his scientist father to meet his human peers.
They hate him. He hates them.
A Schulz/ Burtonesque, documentary- style retro sci-fi film set in timeless 60’s limbo.
Son of Satan
The frenetic animation of Jean-Jacques Villard brings Charles Bukowski’s diabolical characters to life in this adaptation of the short story “Son of Satan”, about a vicious group of child bullies ganging up on a pale, freckled neighbor boy.
Ward 13 Peter Cornwell
Hilarious claymation nightmare about a man who wakes up in a nightmarish hospital full of demented staff and zombified patients. The tormented patient attempts to escape the hellish place, and embarks on several dynamic fight scenes armed with wooden canes, brain-exploding strength pills, and, finally, a wheelchair chase scene worthy of Raiders of the Lost Arc.
Celluloid Horror
Documentary about the Cinemuerte International Film Festival, which is the result of one woman’s passion for film coupled with an irrepressible personality. With no prior experience and little money, and in a short three years, Kier-La Janisse pushed, prodded and nurtured CineMuerte from a 16mm and video projection fringe event into a fantastic and shocking cinematic experience that has earned the respect and admiration of filmmakers, distributors and festival organizers around the world – and without a cent of public funding. Celluloid Horror explores Kier-La’s unique appreciation of shocking and horrific films and her compulsion to entice others into at least considering her views as it documents her most odds-defying achievements. You are invited to spend 90 minutes in her company as she struggles to propel CineMuerte toward greater acceptance without sacrificing its or her integrity.
Red Things - Max Porter – Animated film about a mysterious phenomenon that overtakes a small town, wreaking havoc with all things red..
Unicornimation – Ever wonder what unicorns use those horns for? Ever wonder how they copulate with no genitals?
The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam – Ann Marie Fleming
Ann Marie Fleming’s great-grandfather was a Chinese acrobat, magician, vaudeville star, and Orson Welles’ magic mentor. So why hasn’t anyone ever heard of him? Fleming’s documentary playfully examines the mysterious life of her great-grandfather through a combination of animation, archival shots and interviews with people who knew him.
And many, many more…don’t miss the collection of shorts picked by Jim Jarmusch…
Via Dazereader:
A Bay City man who allegedly exposed his privates to customers at Center Avenue businesses at least 16 times said he was just trying to meet women. [...]
“I was only hoping to get lucky, but I went about it the wrong way,” he admitted in a statement given to a Michigan State Police Trooper.
This weekend when I had WAY TOO MUCH work to do I happened to notice in my living room that one of the apes had rented some DVDs. I unfortunately checked the titles rather than scurrying back to my room to get my work done, and discovered they were two films I hadn’t yet seen–Kill Bill V.1 and Master and Commander. So of course I took a 4-hour chunk of precious time and sat down to watch both of them, one after the other. Work was postponed and didn’t make the deadline, but I survived.
And the two films, in retrospect, go together nicely…both orgies of masculinity and cajones, though in one it’s appropriated by women and exaggerated to a ridiculous degree, and in the other it’s an all-male testosterone orgy that is, ultimately, nearly as ridiculous despite the fact that it takes itself seriously. Or perhaps because of it.
I’m not dissing either film, really. Ridiculous need not be an insult. I’m all for macho films, and I appreciate that Master and Commander didn’t muddy up the waters (pun not intended) with the presence of women and expose itself to inevitable allegations of misogyny. Straight shot of testosterone, neat.
How did this happen again? After enduring cold-turkey withdrawal a couple of months ago, I’m now off the wagon again. I think it is the ubiquity of the drug that leads to easy recurrent downfall. One bleary-eyed morning in the office and the aroma of piping hot Columbian grounds calls my name down the hallway and I’m thinking “Well, just one cup…I am more tired than usual today.” Then it slowly bleeds into a daily cup and before I know it, I’m addicted again. And not looking forward to another withdrawal.
I may not be writing my House of the Apes episodes any more, but if you miss them you can now get a regular dose from a new feature I like to call “Ape Art.” You might not have guessed that my apes are capable of art, but oh they are. Several nights a week they play PBR-fueled games of darts late into the evening, and the morning after they always leave behind a special piece of art attached to their scorecard. Much to my delight, of course. Here is last night’s output:
(WARNING: NOT SAFE FOR WORK)
The Benefit party for the Boston Underground Film Festival is TOMORROW. Pleas come. We need your money!
BUFF Rock n’ Roll Zombie Benefit
Tuesday April 27th
T.T. the Bear’s (10 Brookline Street, Central Square, Cambridge)
BLOWW (Boston League of Women Wrestlers)
Bon Savants
Westbound Train
Tickets: $12 ($15 on the Day of the Show)
Doors @ 8PM, Show starts @ 8:30
Short films will be shown throughout the night, including BUFF classics such as Titler and Can’t Drag Race Jesus, by Bill Plympton. Plympton will be presenting a world premiere of his new animated short Guard Dog, at BUFF. There will also be previews of new film, such as Deliverance: The Musical, and Son of a Bush.
The benefit will also feature a performance by local musicians the Bon Savants, and the Boston League of Women Wrestlers (BLOWW), a troupe of amateur women wrestlers that perform to a punk rock band, as well as the rhythmic sounds of reggae/ska band Westbound Train.
Must be something in the air. Just came across this post at Jay’s Makeoutcity:
“There is a phenomenon called “depressive realism”. Depressed people tend to be significantly more accurate about their positive and negative attributes than do people who are not depressed. Whether depression is a cause of the accuracy or the accuracy is a cause of the depression is an open question. But should you want to cause yourself to be depressed so that you can be more accurate about yourself or work hard to be more accurate about yourself at the risk of causing yourself to be depressed?”
Just yesterday I was staring out the window at work and wondering if it’s better to be a delusionally happy person all the time or a semi-miserable person all the time. The drawbacks being that if you’re delusionally happy about how great you are and how great is the world around you, you’re happier most of the time but then have that much farther to fall when something inevitably goes wrong and reality bursts your bubble. It hurts that much more. It’s more devastating, earth-shattering, etc. But if you’re semi-miserable all the time, you don’t have far to fall. The inevitable intrusion of reality merely re-affirms your worldview, so there’s little that can devastate you. So, which is better–super-happy all the time and vulnerable to catastrophic losses? Or semi-miserable all the time but protected from utter devastation? I don’t know. I don’t think one is necessarily better than the other. Just different. Nor do I think one needs to try to become the other. I suppose the goal is to be somewhere in between. But I worry about people trying to create cookie-cutter personalities. Do we all want to be equally happy all of the time? Do we all want to react the same way to stimuli all of the time?
Whatever. All I know is that I tend to fall in the latter category, and have little patience for those of the former. I don’t want or expect them to change, I just can’t take them for very long.
“If ego is what makes men miserable, then he was surely one of the most miserable men of all time.”
Sounds like a few men I know, but it’s Cintra Wilson discussing Klaus Kinski.
via Greencine
Mark your calendars: the benefit show for the Boston Underground Film Festival is this Tuesday and is gonna be pretty amazing–see here. The festival is May 6-10 and the schedule is nearly final, I’ll post a link here in a few days. You really aren’t gonna wanna miss opening night. Among other things, there’s a short animated film called ‘Son of Satan’ based on the Bukowski short story that is pretty phenomenal. Demented and phenomenal, like all the films in the BUFF lineup.
just because there’s real juice in my smile and buzz in my joke and float in my walk which whispers someone else’s name doesn’t mean there’s not a black spot on my heart in the shape of your name or that I don’t press it sometimes like an old bluish green bruise and feel that old familiar faded pain afresh blue green back into black
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