tomartin
selling your movie as civil disobedience
This filmaker was arrested for selling his own movies in New York:
"To me there seemed to be a void in the development of the moving image. Although I would never put myself in league with those who changed or defined the medium it certainly is a more noble pursuit. We can look back and talk of the Lumiere brothers and their moving picture roadshows and then into the development of film as a language: Eisenstein and montage, the technical illusions of Georges Melies, or the mise-en-scene of Jean Renoir. The Hollywood Studio system certainly propelled actors to the forefront, which was a good thing. The early works of the French New Wave, of Truffaut and Godard, redefined what film could do, and the American independent movement of the 1970s combined the best of all of these moments in time. But where do we go from here? Again I come back to Lars and his Dogme movement, but honestly that is a state-sponsored program. It couldn't work here in the United States. Someone has to break the rules, someone has to shake things up. I believe that there are attempts being made, but it is a difficult task. The media empires have it in their best interest to make a movie that can also become a ride, an attraction, a happy meal, an album (whatever that means), a Web site, a television series, or a reality show. They call it synergy, and more and more it stifles the creative filmmaker many times even before the particular project can get financing...."
Some advice for new filmakers:
"I think shorts are a great way for young filmmakers to test the waters. No one bothers you with short films. The expectations are different. Without looking at the program the audience has no idea how short or long the piece is. With a feature we understand the format, we ramp up the expectations. Shorts are free of all of that. As long as you don't end your short with a dream sequence, a suicide, young children or naked women with candles around them all dead giveaways of first timers then you have a chance to say something different and get noticed...."
poetry i can get behind
"All of the Words on a Bottle of Rolling Rock Beer
in a Different Order"
by Demetri Martin
Women, your ability to operate
extra tender
springs from birth.
Good machinery comes
as your contents
cause enjoyment.
Cash, beer, a car ... rock and rolling?
During "it", the general warning:
"We may risk pregnancy
according to old problems."
Your refund from the government
for alcoholic beverages?
Not OK.
Refund this premium, beer surgeon,
because premium beer impairs taste.
A drink—to the tribute of health, to the pale alcoholic.
Rolling, glass tanks of beverages rock this lined mountain.
Should the defects
of consumption
drive me ...
Or you?
Latrobe, Latrobe COL, CT, DE, IA, MA, NY, VT, CA, MI
"33"
late night diary
A sketch writer does the Slate guest diary. Apparently sketch writers don't do monologues and vice versa.
big brother wants to see you naked
Or, more accurately, he doesn't want or need to see you naked but you think it's a good idea anyway. A security system to be used in airports, which is an xray that amounts to a virtual strip search, is believed by most people to be more effective in it's 'naked' mode than in it's fuzzy weapon finding mode. Most people are willing to subject themselves to the more revealing naked mode.
the heartbreaking beauty of bubblewrap
A slideshow of an exhibit at the MOMA in New York.
this sounds familiar
"Every woman I know is mad at her husband, just mad mad mad at everything," a friend informs Cathi Hanauer, the editor of the best-selling anthology The Bitch in the House (subtitled 26 Women Tell the Truth About Sex, Solitude, Work, Motherhood, and Marriage), now out in paperback. After enjoying "an autonomous decade in my twenties indulging in all the things I had come to value," Hanauer reports that life dealt her a rude blow, in the form of domesticity. She has plenty of company: "Why … hadn't I been warned of this—the loss of identity, the potential claustrophobia, the feeling of being utterly trapped?" another essayist wonders after her marriage fails...."
a thought on infinity
I could think about this all morning:
”It always bothers me that, according to the laws as we understand them today, it takes a computing machine an infinite number of logical operations to figure out what goes on in no matter how tiny a space, and no matter how tiny a region of time. How can all that be going on in that tiny space? Why should it take an infinite amount of logic to figure out what one tiny piece of space/time is going to do?” -Richard Feynman
