Steady Diet of Film

Short Films: Peque Varela's "1977"

A clip from Peque Varela's film 1977 about a girl who daydreams of a different identity.

Short Films: Theodore Ushev's "Drux Flux"

Inspired by "One-Dimensional Man" by the philosopher Herbert Marcuse, Drux Flux is an intoxicating, disorienting examination of how industrial progress can crush the soul.

NPR uses animated documentary to encourage hand washing

Just in time for cold and flu season.. NPR has this fun story about how germs are spread illustrated with an animated documentary by David Bolinsky.

Short Films: Jonas Odell's "Lies"

Jonas Odell's Lies received the Best International Short film award at Sundance in 2009. The film follows three different episodes of major lies and their consequences.

I saw Lies earlier this year at Hot Docs where it screened with Simon Backes's wonderful documentary Stolen Art (subtitle-less clip available here).

#021 Whip It w/ Leah Hart-Landsberg

This week I am delighted to be joined again by Leah Hart-Landsberg to talk about Drew Barrymore's directorial debut Whip It. We discuss why we love seeing movies where teenage girls fight with their moms, the awkward after-movie discussions that come from seeing "chick flicks" with guys and how Kristen Wiig embodies the Joss Whedon adage 'if an actor can do comedy, they can do anything'. Enjoy!

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Review: Monsoon Wedding

Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding, just out in a new 2-DVD set from Criterion, is the India native's contribution to the unofficial canon of directors' final works from the homeland before emigrating to the United States. Like Milos Forman's Fireman's Ball, Louis Malle's Murmur of the Heart or Susanne Bier's After the Wedding, Monsoon presents the complex story of a multi-faceted, changing nation through a single tight-knit community. The community here being an upper-middle class Punjabi family converging in New Delhi for an elaborate wedding.

Aditi (Vasundhara Das) is a modern working woman who wants to settle down but has a full-time job and an emotionally absent lover that occupy too much of her time to date effectively. She's acquiesces to a partially-arranged marriage (the family picks the suitor but they meet a few times beforehand) and the ceremony is fast-tracked so their new lives can begin. And as with most family procedures everyone is sure to bring plenty of baggage. We witness Aditi's more modern sister trying to talk the bride out of going through with it, a shy servant girl fall in love with the gregarious wedding planner, a stressed out aunt trying to shield the children from a predator she feels powerless to confront and a young nephew arguing unsuccessfully to keep from being sent to boarding school.

Read the rest of this review at Greencine.

Short Films: Orly Yadin's and Sylvie Bringas' "Silence"

Silence is an 11-minute animated documentary film about a little girl holocaust survivor and her learned and self-imposed silences.

In conjunction with the film, Yadin presented a fascinating paper at The Holocaust and the Moving Image held at the Imperial War Museum in July 2003. She writes about the experience of making the film:

Whilst I was interested in Tana’s story for personal reasons, I could not imagine, initially, how to produce a film that would shed new light on survivors’ experiences and how to reach out to a new audience. Apart from a couple of photographs and three letters, Tana had no visual documentation of her childhood. Apart from the Nazi propaganda film made of Theresienstadt, there was no footage that I knew of that could help illuminate her story. I was not interested in filming yet another interview with a survivor talking about events she experienced at a much younger age. So, I kept on saying no to the idea of making a film. Tana, however, was persistent. She was determined to end her silence, but didn’t want to face an audience herself.

#020 At the Death House Door w/ Leah Hart-Landsberg

This week we are joined by ministerial candidate Leah Hart-Landsberg to discuss Peter Gilbert's and Steve James's documentary At the Death House Door. After Hart-Landsberg provides some insight into the careful balance a servant of God walks when representing both Faith and Institution. We then explore how making a 'fly on the wall'-style documentary about people whose lives involve social justice issues can be ethically dicey, how we use Faith to prop up our failing institutions and the secret lives of the women behind the ministers.

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#019 I Am an Animal: The Story of Ingrid Newkirk and PETA w/ Faith Gundran

This week we are joined by animal rights activist Faith Gundran to discuss Matthew Galkin's I Am an Animal: The Story of Ingrid Newkirk and PETA. After Gundran gives us the lowdown on PETA we get into why the better funded an organization is the more muddled their message becomes, when an animal rights activist can boost their cred as identifying as "not a PETA person" and how hardcore humanitarianism is often a reflection of deep psychological dysfunction. Enjoy!

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#018 Capitalism: A Love Story w/ Martin Hart-Landsberg

This week I am delighted to be discussing Michael Moore's new documentary with economist Martin Hart-Landsberg. After Dr. Hart-Landsberg breaks down the ideas Moore presents Marxist-style, we discuss the historical trend to depict collective organization as spontaneous acts, Michael Moore as an auteur and why more than one Editor on a project gives Erin hives. Enjoy!

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Review: Good Dick

When in a state of terror, the brain begins to develop a series of processes to cope with the brutality. Watching a film as bad as Good Dick, I find myself first desperately clinging to hope, trying to find potential in any nook or cranny. Then the monotonous boredom reaches a near Zen-like state as my spirit begins to let go of any concept of there being a beginning or an end, a passive acceptance that what is happening merely is. Eventually, what breaks down the inner Bodhisattva is a profound sense of sorrow that there was a person whose mind generated not only these ideas, but wrote them down, and communicated them to the outside world.

Good Dick is the story of the unlikely romance between two people simply credited as "Man" (Jason Ritter) and "Woman" (Marianna Palka). He is homeless and she is borderline agoraphobic. Once a week, they meet at the video store where he works and she occasionally rents pornography. They have awkward exchanges about her film choices and through the power of terrible movie magic and even worse screenwriting, this all somehow leads to a profound emotional connection that baffles both his friends and any viewer. Man and Woman move in together and proceed to do and say horrible things to each other. Their cruelty is punctuated by long, boring scenes that could possibly be interpreted as happiness, but feel, to the audience, about as pleasurable as having a car door slammed repeatedly on your hand.

Read the rest of this review at Greencine.

#017 Bright Star w/ Cathy De La Cruz

This week I'm joined by the lovely and talented Cathy De La Cruz to discuss Jane Campion's Bright Star. After we discuss what this 19th century romantic drama has in common with the Pussycat Dolls and the Twilight franchise we go a bit off the map (as was so often the case) when we talk about Fanny Brawne as groupie, movie trailers that make us cry and why Cathy and I fundamentally disagree about pets in movies.

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