Midnight in Paris is one of those fantasy films that you can't believe is a fantasy from a director like Woody Allen (problematic as he is...) Here, we explore a bit about what the film means, how Allen's work of the 1960s and 70s has fared, a bit about Time-Travel and much much more! 

The first part of a multi-parter with MC Lars and Ash Wednesday of Hand Job Academy! Recorded the day before Easter, it's the part where we talk about what computers mean to their work, and stuff...

Intensity is impossible to fake. That is what separates decent performances from great ones. Some say it's focus, others say it's the ability to embody the emotional space of another. Any of these are true, but at other times it's simply the ability to interact with other actors in a natural way. I"m fairly certain that Tomorrow, Maybe... by Jace W. Daniel has actors who employ each of those techniques, and the result is a film that is gripping, clean, and most importantly, honest about what each character is feeling. 

Lloyd was jsut released from prison, and he wants to reconnect with his daughter. She's married to a cop, and he's not a good guy. From there, the story goes into the trio of relationships there in a way that allows each of them to put out performances that are layered, complicated, and most of all, honest. Iris, played by Bethany Jacobs (who I've loved since seeing her in His Eyes) has to swing between extremes of hopelessness and defensiveness. Lloyd, played by the wonderful Robert Blanche (Grimm, and one of hte best shorts of the early 2000s, The Entry) has a combbination of fatherly protection, deep self-disdain, and a layer of questioning that makes his performance so damn powerful. The scenes he shares with Iris are excellent, and one in particular with her husband really turns the film into something massively impressive. 

The ending is heavy, but not at all oppressive. It works and is just about the best emotional outcome a film like this could gave. 

Sunday, June 4, 2017 at 9:30 p.m. as a part of Dances with FIlms at the TCL Chinese Theater in narrative feature competition. There will be a Q & A with Director Jace Daniel, writer/producer Roy Kirk, and stars Robert Blanche, Bethany Jacobs, Grant Davis and Brian Sutherland immediately after the screening. I hope you'll go; it's a brilliantly done film! 

This is the intro to our talk about Rear Window at The Hive yesterday, and it takes my central belief - Rear Window is all about television and it's role in the early 1950s.

I believe that one role of both installation art and film is mesmerization. It is utterly important to be able to be captured, your mind held by what you're encountering, by what's enveloping you. The SUmmer Blockbuster does this, far better than any piece of intimate art film, but nothing does it as well as installation art like the multi-projector works of Jennifer Steinkamp, whose work Madame Curie is utterlty mesmerizing, even when only viewed via a YouTube video. 

Today, Jim Hensosn is largely remembered for the Muppets. And why not? They were the formative players in the up-bringing of so many young people, me included. I went through a phase where I re-watched every Muppet thing I could find, and re-asserted in my mind the impressive power of them. 

For work, I was sent a video - The Paperwork Explosion, which was an IBM industrial film that examined, in a way, the need for new accounting and processing concepts to deal with the new level of powerwork the modern world called for. Jim Henson directed it, and iI was more than a little surprized - it showed that Jim Henson was an avant garde filmmaker!

The entire thing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aIol21yI78brought to mind one of my all-time favorite films - Jonas Mekas' Notes on a Circus.  

There is a movement within SciFi that has come to the front lately. Afro-Futurism is one of the most impressive genre cultural and aesthetic movements that I've come across. Writers like Minister Faust and Nnedi Okorafor have established the concept. I would put the dystopian visions of the brilliant British film Afro Punk Girl in that arena, and even more, that it establishes the emotional content within a visual style that calls to mind the best of of filmmakers ranging from Kieslowski to Brian Beheney. 

Lil is our hero, a punk in a wasteland that is ruled by an incompassionate military. She meets Mr. Dandy, and he takes her on an emotional discovery. It is a beautiful film from so many different directions, especially in the way it looks at the vast empty and places it firmly within a context that makes a viewer consider our world, the horizon of our time, especially with the current political scene. 

This is an exploration, and a marvelous one. 

Afro Punk Girl will be showing as a part of the Silicon Valley Science Fiction Short Film Festival, and first shows at BayCon on May 28th at 2:30 at the Marriott San Mateo! 

This is what video art is meant to be. 

This is Tilda Swinton, in 1989, acting in a video art piece.

This is how I think she sees all of her work, as a video work.

This is a piece that feels as much of the mudium as the Icelandic Saga of which it speaks. 

This is video art, though of the time when creating artistic work with narative on video automatically made it video art. 

This is where we were in 1989. 

​This is amazing.