A look at a documentary about Atari that will be showing at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA tomorrow, Friday, June 23rd, at 6pm. Admission's free! There will also be food trucks out front of the Museum for you to grub on! ​http://www.computerhistory.org/events/upcoming/#ieasy-learn-hard-masteri has more details! 

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.

One of my favorite Disney shorts, it provides an amazing point of consideration for the development of animation's role in the Hollywood landscape. 

Having trouble with the Three Minute Modernist site for some reason, but I'll just put this here for now!

I dislike art pre-1900 for the most part. I just do. Work by the likes of the Dadaists, Surrealists, and especially the Abstract Expressionists makes me happy, and probably always will. This meaningless Franz Kline painting is a very good example of why I'll take meaningless Modernism over perfected craft just about any day! 

This is the part where I give a little bit away about the film programming process. We have to watch a lot of films, and so we don't have a lot of time for things to land. You watch one, you might take notes while you're watching, you rate it and you move on to the next one. That's how it works. There's no real reflection period, it comes at you like you're in a theatre, watching a shorts program. The ones that stick out, that you rate highly, those are the ones that you consider a few weeks/months down the line when it's time to put together your programs. 

But then, there are the other ones. They stick with you, have you thinking about them, basically poisoning everything else you try to watch because the film is so good, so fun, so fresh, so smart that anything else just feels wrong, and you have to stop for a while and re-watch, then let it sink in. The first movie I put on one fine morning was The Eleven O'Clock. The rest of my viewing day was ruined, since I had to re-watch it twice and then just bask in it. 

The story is a psychologist has a patient; the patient thinks he's a psychologist. The two meet and play off each other, trying to convince the other that they're the one that's trying to help. The entire thing is silly, but it's that smart sort of silly that makes you giggle at even serious bits that stick in. 

Watching it, there are three things that stuck me on it and required my re-watching. The first is the acting. Our leads are phenomenal, especially playing pass-and-go with each other within a script that is just about as smart as can be, which is the second thing. They each have a stance, and they both work from it so well. I was noticing tiny little things on my first viewing that stuck with me enough that I had to see it again! The third thing is the way it's shot. It is more-or-less a one location film, but it works within that location so well, I felt as if I was discovering it. That alone made this a film I had to program, and the rest meant I wasn't going to be meeting my 25 Films a Day duty!

The Eleven O'Clock plays as a part of Shorts Program 7 - Comedy Favorites and shows at the Hammer Theatre Downtown SJ on Fri, Mar 3 9:30 PM and at the Century 20 Redwood City on Sun, Mar 5 3:50 PM, Mon, Mar 6 4:30 PM and Thu, Mar 9 8:30 PM