This is a Japanamation (I'm bringing it back!) film that really introduced many folks to Japanese Science Fiction Animation! 

For years, I have heard folks talk about Outer Space as one of the truly great avant garde films of the last twenty years. I watched it as the boys were napping and now, now I'm freaked out. 

​It's not a scary film in the traditional sense, instead it is disquieting. The edits are jumpy, rough, over-lapping imagery that seems to flicker in and out of phase with reality. The sound is scrathy, the scene, dark and heavy. It looks as if it is old footage, perhaps found footage, but it is obviously also well-choreographed. This is a phenomenal short film. 

I've been trolling about UBUweb again. The audio section is impressive, but the Film archive section is even more impressive! 

Amy Granat is a filmmaker who is 100% awesome! I'd love to get to interview her, but I've never had any luck contacting her. Her work Landscape is from 2009, but it feels like one of those amazing short experimental docs of the 1960s. It's gorgeously shot in black 'n white, then painted over, dyed beautifully into a new form. The slightly moving image is the canvas on which a color field is painted. The effect is emotional and powerful, and while it's one of those films that only a deep cut film fan can really appreciate, it's also amazing. 

Registry returns with a look at a wonderful film about the incredibly important artist Alexander Calder (and featuring Burgess Meredith!) with music by John Cage!!!

UBUweb has brought me so many wonderful things. Yes, a lot of it is in lo-res/lo-fi forms, but it's the location where you can find so much amazing stuff. Among the films, you'll find a lot of impressive stuff, but nothing nearly as great as the amazing experimental documentaries from the last 50 years. One of them, Andre Luiz Oliveira's A Fonte, is a masterpiece of the genre, and I found an excellent quality transfer of it on YouTube that I'm sharing here. 

The opening alone gives you the idea. The sculpter, MArio Cravo, works accompanied to the sound of race cars flying around a track. We're then taken into Brazil and see life, and Cravo in it. The fluid, often frenetic, camerawork captures the sculpture as it is being created, and the artist working. One shot, two men obvious going over the site, then slipping away as the camera lowers and explores the environment, is amazing in how it deals with space and the artist's approach.

All in all, one of the seminal experimental documentaries.  

Jesse Drew talks about the Glenda Drew and Jesse Drew project Open Country, which examines the political roots and realities of country music!

The DVD Extra is an often neglected part of the Film World, and luckily (and probably unlawfully...) they have started to end up on YouTube for more and more people to enjoy. The Kids in the Hall is probably the most influential sketch comedy group of the 1990s, and if you look, you can see the influence they've had on just about everything that's happened since. The first season DVD set had an Oral History of the group, which is a bit of a misnomer as it's really just a basic documentary, though it's told almost entirely through interviews, which makes it ride the line towards Oral History. 

The story of the group is both smart and funny, and watching Scott Thompson in particular is brilliant, because of all the kids, he's both the most reflective, and the least restrained. Mark McKiney, easily the most successful of the Kids these days, gives some insight into what it meant to be one of them, while Bruce does the heavily lifting of explaining how it all happened. 

​Well worth watching! 

The Los Angeles Short Film Festival is awesome, and many of my favorite shorts have played there over the years. This year, the winner of Best Comedy was an awesome Australian Short that takes a classic arena for comedy, the misunderstanding, and then plays with it. It also has therapists and pitch perfect timing. 

The big thing here is that there's a twist, and it makes utter sense, but it doesn't feel telegraphed, nor out of left field. It hits the enviable sweetspot that M. Night Shaymalan used to dwell in. It's funny, and the interaction between our four actors is so dead-on, at times deadpan, and at other points, merely silly. It's an ideal length too!  Highly recommended!
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Marnie Ellen is a stunning visualist. Her film The DOmestic Life of Housecats is one of those films I would call a Video COllage. It is a series of images that come together not in a story form, but in a nearly meditative form of visual beats and hammering interconnections. It is a filom that is presented b y the film maker, but it is a meaning that is derived from the audiences experience of it. The interactions between the sound design consisting of voice mails, a deconstructed sex tape, and the magnificent visual poetry that uses heart imagery and duplicative repetition in a form Man Ray would have adored, leaves the viewer with work to do, and for the best. Marnie Ellen is an experimental filmmaker to watch, and one I can not wait to see much much more from.

WHen I first saw a preview portion of Sita Sings the Blues a couple of months before it hit the circuit, I knew it was going ot be a huge freakin' deal. When I finally saw the completed project, a malange of 1920s torch song, Hindi mythology, romantic comedy, and incredibly beautiful animation. The entire effect is marvelous, and the length of the piece, and how it works the entire length, is the marvel. Work this wide-ranging can be tiring, the way we see the story unfold along so many different lines, with so many different threads of aesthetic influence, makes this a masterpiece that I really believe will be placed onto the National Film Registry.