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MEDIA CURRENT: THE IP WARS
After the Thanksgiving recess, Congress is expected to vote on two bills that will influence the future of online Intellectual Property (IP). The Senate bill (S. 968) is dubbed the “PROTECT IP Act” (PIPA) which stands for the “Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act”; it was adopted by the Judiciary Committee in May. The House bill (H.R.3261) is the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and is currently being deliberated. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the music industry and a handful of digital rights holders, including games companies Sony and Nintendo, are […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #46
Second #2162, 36:02 “Frank? Frank! What’s the matter with him?” Dorothy pleads on the phone about her kidnapped husband and son, Don and “little Donny.” There are facts, and there are facts of the frame: 1. This shot of Dorothy completely breaks with Jeffrey’s implied point-of view from the closet. 2. Dorothy is a woman in trouble. 3. This is the first instance of Frank in the film, invisible over the phone line, somewhere else, an implied presence and absence at the same time. 4. Dorothy’s maternal vulnerability, the fact of it, and the way that Jeffrey will sense and […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #45
Second #2115, 35:15 Jeffrey, startled by Dorothy’s return, hides in the closet. She undresses, and comes toward the closet and, just as Jeffrey is about to be discovered, the phone rings. It has not rung yet at the moment of this frame, which captures Jeffrey’s fantasy-dream at its edges: what are the chances that the woman of his dreams would strip to her underwear and approach him? The angle of vision is not directly from Jeffrey’s point of view, slightly dissociating us from his gaze. But that phone ring, as if dialed in from the stock sounds of classic Hollywood […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #44
Second #2068, 34:28 “I hope you’re careful, Jeffrey,” Sandy whispers to herself, gazing up at Dorothy’s apartment, where Jeffrey has just not-heard her car horn warning because—and there is a strange, haunted reference to Psycho somewhere in this scene—he is in Dorothy’s bathroom and has just flushed the toilet. Laura Dern’s face is made-up in a way that hearkens back to her role in 1982’s Ladies and Gentlemen the Fabulous Stains, a film which teetered so delicately between the sweet danger of punk and the even sweeter danger of new wave pop that it practically imploded. Lines upon lines could […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #43
Second #2021, 33:41 The tension in this sequence—as Jeffrey sneaks around alone in Dorothy’s apartment while half-listening for Sandy’s warning car horn—is sustained by carefully modulated shifts in what we as the audience know in comparison to what Jeffrey knows. While our knowledge of what is happening sometimes equals Jeffrey’s (those moments when we know nothing more or less than he does), at other times we are suddenly thrust ahead of his limited omniscience. In the previous scene, as Jeffrey explores the darkness of Dorothy’s apartment, we know what he knows, and nothing more. But once the film cuts to […]
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The Microbudget Conversation : Ex Girlfriends
Earlier this month I had the opportunity to take a master class with Ted Hope and Christine Vachon. Now out of respect to them I will not reveal all that was discussed, but what I can tell you is that my perspective of things has been altered quite a bit. I first started this blog with the intention of showcasing microbudget work as the passionate filmmaking it is…and fuck the rules. (The whole series of manifestos is evidence of that.) We were making cinema fast and cheap, and we needed to completely re-write the rules; a message that can be […]
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Lady Vengeance: The Bride Wore Black Review
Loaded with recognizable tropes just begging to be tampered with, genre film is fertile spoof material, as can be evidence by obvious examples like the pointless Scary Movie franchise, or even within the same film as in those slasher film that knowingly straddle the line between terror and comedy, or B-Movies so tongue-in-cheek campy they function both as a good-humored critique of the genres the are playing against as well as a standalone narratives in their own right. Francois Truffaut’s sometimes goofy, sometimes chilling 1969 film The Bride Wore Black is genre lampoonery in the hands of a French auteur, […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #42
Second #1974, 32:54 What does it mean to speak of the cinematic image in the age of cinematic images? This frame, captured from the 2002 DVD edition of Blue Velvet, isn’t really even a frame; its relationship to the 35 mm source film is ambiguously fraught with the complications of digital coding. For one thing, if the film has been MPEG-2 compressed, what has been lost? The information in the frame leaks in and out, depending on our viewing medium of choice, so that we experience the digital image not so much through presence, but through absence. Spatial and temporal […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #41
Second #1927, 32:07 Jeffrey and Sandy have agreed on four honks of the car horn: this will warn Jeffrey to leave Dorothy’s apartment. Sandy waits in the car outside, in the night, in her own cocoon of nervous electricity. This is when Blue Velvet begins to go very, very dark, as Jeffrey makes his way through the India Ink of the screen into ever deeper and deeper blackness in what are perhaps the most psychologically violent moments in the film. Where has Blue Velvet taken you? When he woke up he thought he’d dreamed about a movie he’d seen the […]
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Buck — A Hammer to Nail Review
On its simplest level Cindy Meehl’s documentary Buck tells the story of the cowboy Buck Brannaman, a horseman who travels the United States conducting clinics for “horses with people problems.” First-time director Cindy Meehl met Buck at one of his clinics, and wanted to share his wisdom with a wider circle than the ardent fans he’s built among “horse people.” A wise cowboy, eh? It doesn’t help that the film opens with iconographic Western shots: a cattle herd, a yellow sun, and galloping cowboys, all underlined by David Robbins’ thrumming score. I admit I was a bit skeptical. The census […]
