BIKE PORN 3: A collection of short erotic films… and bikes.
Bike Porn, a Portland based project initiated in 2007, has developed into a touring film festival of shorts exploring the eroticism and sexuality of human-powered transportation.Though Bike Porn they aim to break taboo, provide a forum for emerging artists to screen their work, and facilitate cultural acknowledgement of fringe communities. The show is an exhilarating experience, but the real magic happens afterwards when people who otherwise would feel uncomfortable discussing sex, gender or other topics are able to speak freely. The films are hetero and queer oriented, but above all sex positive and full of bikesexuality. For adult audiences. Feeling bike-curious? Check out one of the trailers on www.bikesmut.com
Easily the most accomplished current essayist, and possibly the best unheralded contemporary filmmaker, is Czech-born, Germany-based Harun Farocki. Imagine a tryst between Andy Warhol and a Marxist Frederick Wiseman. – Paul Arthur, Film Comment
This beguiling meditation on vision, power and Aufklärung (the German word for both ‘enlightenment’ and ‘aerial surveillance’) centers on historical accident…Farocki zigzags like a dialectician free-associating off this event. The cumulative effect is both arabesque and critical, a metahistory of the eye. – Village Voice
Harun Farocki’s Images of the World and the Inscription of War is unquestionably one of the most influential, quoted and urgent essay films of the past twenty years. By turns curious and furious, the film examines aerial photographs of Auschwitz taken by American bombers searching for targets like munitions factories and chemical plants used to fuel the Nazi war efforts. Somehow the long, sinewy lines of people huddled before gas chambers went unseen. Rather, they were not what the CIA was looking for and were therefore left unexamined and unidentified. The photographs were promptly filed away, only to be unearthed thirty years later. Probing these documents and juxtaposing them with photographs taken by the Nazis, as well as images illustrated by Alfred Kantor, a camp prisoner, Farocki weaves together a sharp, provocative, and multi-layered refutation of photographic reality, using many other tangents that build upon his argument in ways unconventional and intuitive. – Cinematheque Ontario
The title Images of the World and the Inscription of War suggests not only a mediation of the world by images, but also an embeddedness of war in this mediation, and “inscription” implies that both require decoding. Immediately, then, Farocki announces his primary theme–the imbrication of instruments of representation and destruction–which the seventy-five-minute film proceeds to examine through specific examples that, as they are repeated, take on the hermeneutic form of allegorical objects–objects that we must first decipher and then use in further deciphering. – Hal Foster, Artforum
I watched the film “Kurt Cobain About A Son” last night. It’s an autobiographical film (yeah, that genre exists apparently) told entirely by voice recordings of Kurt Cobain and showcasing various Northwest Pacific locations.
If you watch closely, my posters appear in the Olympia segment of the film.
Coming from the 3rd Ward. I haven’t been to one of these yet, but I’m thinking about it…
Moviehouse kicks off its new season with two silly sexy sketch comedies. First the sketch team behind Titsburgwill teach you everything they know about banging your roommate, avoiding STDs, and gummy bears. Then you’re invited to take a behind the scenes look at the man who brought you such phrases as Shake Well Before Opening and Do Not Swallow. And of course there will be tasty treats and a talk with the filmmakers to follow the screening.
Titsburg Chioke Nassor, Tavon Bolourchi and Kristen Holbrook
Titsburg is a web comedy about boobies, and boning and all of the mixed up mis-adventures that happen in between (it’s also a really good excuse to wear costumes, act like an idiot, and talk about poon).
Who Died? Marcel Simoneau
Frank Zip is the world’s most read writer. The Unsung hero of directions writing. The Frank Zip story is part of a series of obituaries written by Dan Menke in his book Who Died?
“Gigantic” is another one of those films that attempts to show us that rich successful white people have problems too. People describe this sort of film as quirky or something that falls into the category of that newly coined genre of cutesy hipster films, TWEE, which include easily forgettable flops like “Away We Go” and “Sunshine Cleaning”. Put bluntly, this film is simply awkward. If its aim is to have us feel empathy for the main character’s sense of alienation, this film at least succeeds in alienating the audience. The plot revolves around youthfully depressed mattress salesman Brian, played by Paul Dano, and his quest to adopt a Chinese baby, a concept a little bit offensive and a lot contrived. But wait, it’s a love story. Just as Brian takes the steps to purchase his black market baby, a pretty girl wanders into his store and falls asleep on one of his mattresses. Her name is Happy (I know… sigh…), and is played by Zooey Deschanel–more on that in just a bit.
Despite its inclination toward pretension, “Gigantic” isn’t all bad. Tender moments are touched on by sage-like veteran actor Ed Asner, who’s role as the aging patriarch guides us along hallucinogenic mushroom trips while conversely struggling with the confounds of modern technology, i.e. cell phones. Those with 80-year-old parents or grandparents can relate… with the cell phone part, I mean. John Goodman also appears as Happy’s zealot of a father, supplying probably the most subdued Goodman-esque psycho movie persona.
But I digress, “Gigantic” is really about Zooey Deschanel, or rather a lack of her. Is it me, or does this look like a Zooey stand-in? I know the film-makers are gunning for those independent points with off-beat humor, drugs and elderly character actors, but what is going on with Zooey? First of all, she doesn’t look like herself, sound like herself or act like herself. I couldn’t tell if she had plastic surgery or if she was on a lot of drugs. Either way, it only added to this film alienating me as an audience. I feel sorry for this film, and for Zach Galifinakis, who appears as some strange 300 Spartan reject bent on terrorizing (murdering?) Dano’s Brian–really, this film doesn’t need him to do that. It kills itself.
Opens April 3rd, 2009.
Summary: watch it if you’re fans of the actors, but don’t pay for it. the plot falls flat, but you don’t have to take my word for it.
p.s. it should be noted the “gerbil dick” cameo is supplied by Leven Rambin from the failing Terminator: Sarah Conner Chronicles… you know you watch it… shut up, i don’t know why i watch it either…
Sita Sings the Blues, “The Greatest Break-Up Story Ever Told,” opened today at the GKIDS/New York International Children’s Film Festival (NY). For now, this is the only way I can think of seeing it on the big screen. Nina Paley, the film’s creator, uses recordings of a real-life flapper-era singer named Annette Hanshaw to voice the bubbly Hindu goddess Sita. The controversy about this film is such that those who own the rights to Annette Hanshaw’s recordings charge much more than what Ms. Paley, a lowly cartoonist can afford–also more than what independent distributors have offered for a theatrical release.
Thus, the film is currently banned from commercial release.
However, since public broadcasting is exempt from this copyright law, starting March 7th, Sita is FREE to view or download through PBS 13’s Website. If you’ve ever had your heart broken, this is the film for you.
I watched an amazing documentary about the Mormons and learned that they can dance like hell. Remember Napoleon Dynamite… There’s something to be said for a faith that celebrates dance.
Nietzsche said, “I should not believe in God who does not dance.”
An observer in the 1850s noted, “Mormons taught their children that they should go to school, but theymust go to dancing school.”
