Second #6909, 115:09 Detective Williams arrives, too late. Everyone dead is dead. Jeffrey is alive, but not because of the Law. Sandy, behind her father, behind the gun, swoons, electrified and ready to be taken by Jeffrey. This post is as good a post as any to suggest that, just beneath its surface, Blue Velvet is a “trash” film. It’s so overloaded with references to Hollywood’s traditions that always threatens to implode in on itself, perhaps nowhere else more poignantly than in this frame, which evokes everything from noir to the “woman’s picture” to the classic crime film. In Avant-Garde […]
Producer Matt Compton says he knew the feature he produced — a “thinking man’s horror film,” Midnight Son, directed by Scott Leberecht — would eventually be pirated. “I always knew the film would end up on the torrent sites,” he writes in an email, “and that there would be nothing I could do about it. If the major studios can’t stop piracy, surely an indie producer such as myself can do nothing.” But he wasn’t prepared for his film to show up three weeks before the film was commercially available, when whatever word-of-mouth to be gained by the filesharing couldn’t […]
Second #6862, 114:22 In an unnervingly comic touch Frank approaches the closet where Jeffrey hides loaded up with his props, which include Dorothy’s blue velvet gown and his gas mask. He is the exterminator now, inhaling his chemicals, approaching Jeffrey and, ominously, the camera. For Frank has seen us, now. The invisible camera has been called out, hailed, interpolated. Frank stares back at us, returning our gaze, just as the bandit, gun in hand, did in Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 film The Great Train Robbery: Out of the shadows he comes, Dorothy’s tortured, neck and wrist bound husband at his […]
“Creative Capital is a cult,” said Phillip Andrew Lewis at the end of his presentation at the art funder’s semi-annual retreat this past weekend at Williams College in Williamstown, MA. “But it’s a good cult.” Lewis’s was both a good line and an appropriate capper to his presentation, which shocked right from the outset. The installation artist began his talk by saying he had been held captive as a child for two years within a radical drug treatment program sponsored by the U.S. government. “I consider my work a form of deprogramming,” he told the stunned audience. For the record, […]
A musician’s gotta monetize himself… Bob Dylan’s new album comes out September 11, but he’s just released a song from it — as score for a Cinemax promo for its new series, Strike Back. Hear it below. (Hat tip: Talking Points Memo.)
Though Aurora Guerrero made Filmmaker magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film” list in 2006, the director behind this year’s Sundance-premiering, award-winning Mosquita y Mari – which most recently took both Outstanding First U.S. Dramatic Feature Film, as well as Outstanding Actress in a U.S. Dramatic Feature Film for its lead Fenessa Pineda, at Outfest – was a welcome new face to me when I caught the film earlier this year. A tale of two Chicanas coming of age in working-class L.A., Guerrero’s feature debut is breathtaking in its understatement, less your typical “queer flick” than a continuation of the […]
Sometimes the most upsetting news comes in twos. It was only a few years ago that, in what was surely the toughest one-two punch to cinephiles in modern history, we lost Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni on successive days. Now, it’s happened again: two days after Chris Marker’s passing, Gore Vidal has died. A prolific screenwriter (he was such a good script doctor that, at one point in the 1950s, MGM had him on their weekly payroll) and sometimes-actor (screen appearances included roles in Gattaca and Bob Roberts), his contributions to the film world were notable (Caligula aside – yikes!). […]
Confession With just 9 posts to go, I herein and forthwith offer my final confession. As author of The Blue Velvet Project—which owes a moral debt to the Dogme 95 movement, whose practice of constraint was an inspiration—I feel obligated to make this public statement of confession regarding the rigors of the project. This is done in the spirit of Thomas Vinterberg’s confession regarding his film The Celebration. In post #143, I confess to knowing well in advance that I would not write much at all about the frame in question. I had been saving the William James quote for […]
Our friends at the National Film Society sent over this video interview with the filmmakers who go by the name of Wong Fu Productions. If you don’t know them, what’s wrong with you? They have 1.2 million subscribers and over 190 million views. Here, they give us tips on audience building and navigating the waters of the video sharing giant.
The above scene at the Creative Capital retreat this weekend brought back a lot of memories. The arts funding organization’s semi-annual retreat was held at Williams College in Williamstown Massachusetts, and on the final evening the outdoor barbecue got drizzled out. So, it was moved indoors, and afterwards the cafeteria space became a party space, where artist grantees and consultants danced to Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love.” A level up, Cinemad’s Mike Plante set up his microphones and recorded a podcast. The ’80s music, the party, and radio — it was like one of my own evenings in college, where I’d […]