Klaus at Gunpoint
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Registry - Kids

6/30/2016

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One of the most controversial films of the 1990s, Kids brought us new talent in the form of Larry Clark, Harmony Korine, Cloe Sevigny, and Rasario Dawson. Does it deserve to be on the Registry, and what impact did it actually have on American cinema?
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 The Origins of American Animation - An Amazing Resource!

6/30/2016

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https://www.loc.gov/collection/origins-of-american-animation/about-this-collection/

I love the Library of Congress! Yes, an entity that has had some major issues in the past, and can be difficult to work with, but they do so much important work in preservation that I can't say I don't love 'em. One of the projects they have put onto the web is one dealing with the origins of American Animation called... The Origins of American Animation! 

There are 28 videos to watch, covering a lot of ground. There are some widely-known classics featuring KrazyKat and others, and some absolute gems like I'm Insured and The First Circus.

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The site's worth taking a long, hard look at, especially if you're into the early history of film. You'll likely walk away with a greater appreciation of what it takes to both make an animation, and how a lot of what we're seeing today was formed almost a century ago. 
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Franz Kafka's It's A Wonderful Life - Peter Capaldi

6/29/2016

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Whovian Trivia - Who is the only actor to play The Doctor to have an Oscar prior to his tenure in the TARDIS? If you read the title of this post, you know the answer. Peter Capaldi is one of the finest British actors of thee last thirty years, and he's a helluva writer and director. His short film  Franz Kafka's It's A Wonderful Life is an absurdist's dream, and it much deservedly won the Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film. 

Richard E. Grant plays Franz Kafka, who is desperately trying to cobble together his most famous work - The Metamorphasis. He keeps going down the wrong path, turning Gregor Samsa into a banana for instance, and getting interrupted. Grant is usually pitch-perfect in everything, and here he's great playing Kafka as less the image we have of the idiosyncratic author as a fully-fleshed weirdo. He seems less concerned with making Kafka into the character he is writing about than playing him for emotional impact. Basically, he's carrying the story, but has lightened his load by not going overly creepy. 

The shooting, and particularly the model work at the beginning, are both phenomenal and set the mood and tone. I love the look of the town that is established, seemingly out of a German Expressionist's dream. 
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Registry - El Mariachi

6/29/2016

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Made on a tiny budget by one of the biggest names in film today, El Mariachi has a whole lot to say, and an interesting way of saying it!
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Registry - The Big Lebowski & The Coen Bros.

6/28/2016

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The Big Lebowski may be the most quoted movie ever, but are the Coen Bros. over-represented, and how will that effect the fate of their other films as potential National Film Registry entries?
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Registry - Precious Images

6/27/2016

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One of the best montage films you'll ever see, Chuck Workman's Precious Images shows us all about 100 years of film, mostly feature narrative, and does so with some of the most amazing editing you'll ever see!
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Star Trek Fan Films - We Will Protect You!!!

6/25/2016

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So, Paramount, the owners of the Star Trek franchise, has released a set of guidelines for all future Fan Films in the universe.

These guidelines are, for lack of a better word, bullshit. 

The word came out this week, and so many productions, some of which are amazingly detailed and better than almost any of the latter-day Trek series, are now having to scramble and make changes. Also, there is the threat of Paramount coming after with take-down notices. 

We're pissed. 

So, we're doing something about it. We're hereby starting an archive for all Star Trek fan films - new and old, long and short. That's right, we'll host them here (well, on a sub page...), review them, promote them, and most importantly, save them. Yeah, we figure we'll get take-down notices, and we'll fight 'em, but we'll always find ways to make them available, for free, to as wide an audience as possible. And honestly, we'll do it for fan films in any Universe, because fan films are an important part of the story of film. 

Got a film? Drop us a line at [email protected] and we'll get the ball rolling! As is always the case, no money, we're doin' this because we love fan films, you deserve to have your story seen, and we wanna help!
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REGISTRY - Michael Bay, Ed Wood, and The National Film Registry

6/24/2016

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What role do people play as it goes for Registry films? Is it important to represent the bad as well as the good? And what of Michael Bay? Ed Wood? We talk!
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The Record Parlour - Ryan Goble

6/24/2016

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How is it that an audio medium has so many good films about it? From the works of Les Blank to High Fidelity, records are a great subject for docs, and Ryan Goble's The Recor Parlour is a fabulous entry into that field. 

The basic story - successful guy risks it all to open a record store. Simple, right? It is, and the methodology of the documentary is equally simple. A single interview, some footage of digging through records, close-ups on records, and a bit more. We aren't bogged down with too much information, in a way this is a cover for a book and not a book, which is perfect because what it's really presenting is a simple idea - follow your dream. 

And I HATE follow your dream films. I mean, really, how many times will I have to sit through the 'I worked hard and I finally made it' spiel that they all boil down to? What makes this different, and incredibly effective, is that rare combination of camera work, topic, and precision of presentation. It is not quite bare bone, or even minimalist, but it takes the idea of Chekov's Gun and gives us exactly what we need, and nothing more, which makes everything that IS presented important, notable. It all lands, and that is what makes a short doc, especially one that runs less than ten minutes, especially wonderful. 

You can watch The Record Parlour on Ryan Goble's site. You'll want to bookmark it, because with talent and vision like Ryan's, he's about to become a major player in this game we call film. 

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Digital Dance - Ed Tannenbaum

6/23/2016

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Sometimes, I watch films for the pure joy of it, without any other consideration. In the field of digital and computer graphics, that means watching a lot of old demo pieces and music videos. 

Ed Tannenbaum's Digital Dance is 100% pure joy in movement and interlaced image. The effects for 1982 are pretty phenomenal, though today they seem archaic. That's sort of the point of watching historic videos, you know? Watching how things have progressed as far as technology and the application of that technology to long-standing, recogniseable forms such as dance. If you watch the famed 1930s animation Joie de Vivre and then follow it up with this, you can see how the art takes advantage of the available technology. The important part is the joy that is expressed through the movement and how it plays within the piece. 

The music is also very 1982, and I am playing it on repeat right now!
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    Klaus at Gunpoint

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