foreword.com | FOREWORD.COM INDEPENDENT FILM FESTIVAL:

Dan’s provided a selection of media clips for our edification. I thought it made a nice segue from Rox.

ROX – The World’s Most Independent Television Series:

Bart’s done it. He’s got the whole show online (well, not the whole thing, but it sure likes like he means to). And a comprehensive database of familiar faces, this time, many, maybe most, of whom I DO know. It’s like a video wiki, almost!

Please note that both Bart and Scooter appear in this website as well as in the previously-cited NecroKonicon. There may be greater overlap as well.

UPDATE: The late-nightness of this entry leaves it overly terse. To clarify, then.

J&B On The Rocks, later simply Rox was/is a cable-access show about two young men making drinks and consuming them on camera. Supposedly.

In reality, it was/is an experiment in television, oriented to humor but firmly focused on the goal of creating capital-A art from the raw material of life in my hometown of Bloomington, Indiana, a place very conducive indeed to this specific variety of ingenious strangeness.

B, or Bart Everson, is the mastermind behind that mind-boggling website I link above (it’s sort of like I imagine WAX or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees was intended to be – I say imagine, because I never had the bandwidth to check it out back in the day). As it happens, it helps that Editor B is not only a truly inventive editor who poured his ambition and interest into editing into the show, but also a gifted writer unafraid to put his muse in the service of such a silly idea.

I’m sure that J, the other half of the show, made his own, powerful contributions, but I am unfamiliar with the show in detail, and so can’t identify them. But I certainly heard about the show from folks back home for a few years. I even accidentally attended Bart and Christy’s wedding, just over ten years ago, which was a public party in the former police-station John Waldron Arts Center. It was at that event that I learned that Jake and Freda of the Mysteries of Life had gotten married and were expecting, steps from the place I’d sat as a just-busted 18-year-old, waiting for my folks to come and get me.

It was surreal, because, although I’d vaguely known Bart years before through my ex-wife, he’d been out of town for a significant part of my college career, and then later, we each repeatedly took a video-art class but not together. By the time of the wedding, Bart was a fixture in the local alternative art scene and therefore the people involved in the wedding / puppet-show were all dear and close friends of mine.

Years after that, Viv and I spent a bucolic afternoon hanging out at their near East Side home, playing bocce and shooting the shit about computers and video – Bart was finishing his masters in instructional technology.

So go, watch some clips. Here are two, not-characteristic, ones to get you started:

The pre-ROX Robitussin Rap and also: Carpe DM.)

My favorite boss of all time, Paul Smedberg, brings you some Expert Advice.

(This was originally posted at around 1 am, but then it wouldn’t rebuild and I extended the entry, and… and…

Could the problem character have been that ampersand? Hmm.

No, it appears to be associated with links to the video clips. WTF?

AHA!

Bart links to streaming media clips in his site architecture with a URL formed like this:

However, being a video-oriented guy, he’s configured his server to present media assets, in this case quicktime clips, as index documents, or something along those lines. MT, expecting to be able to analyze the text-based content inbound from that http request, stalls waiting for the document-request to complete.

I shall call it to his attention but don’t know if it’s reasonable to expect a change. Inline links to the clips on the program summary pages would be optimal, I think, and allow him to keep traffic without encouraging deeplinking, as I’m trying to do here.

Ergo, the links now link to the ‘viewer’ 320 x 240 quicktime assets.)

So…

Coen Bros., but you knew that already. Catherine Zeta-Jones and Mr. Clooney, you knew that too.

Story cowrite to Matthew Stone, you may NOT have known that.

Here’s IMDB on it.

My take? Clooney’s as goofily fun as he was in O Brother, but the sense of inevitability – the structure of tragedy in the service of comedy – that makes the best Coen Bros. pieces fly was softened in this one, as with certain other of their work – Raising Arizona, the most-recent Man Who Wasn’t There, and of course that bowling flick (which certain friends refuse to acknowledge as the masterwork it, in fact, is) – what have you.

I was most strongly reminded, though, of Blood Simple. What of critical allegations that the Coens have once again turned out a film devoid of sympathy for their main characters? Well, um, yep, and thank god – it always makes the films better, I think.

It’s a pretty bleak film on matters of the heart – will Ken’s new allegiance lead him to endorse or deny it?

(On the way home we swung through Twice Sold, where Jamie was holding book-buying court, and I left with hardbacks of Bill Vollmann’s The Rifles and Fathers and Crows as well as a 1997 bio of Mark Twain, which will be helpful as I puzzle over the proper reading order of all that Palm Pilot stuff. A review, another [NYT, but not charge-wrapped yet], and yet another.)

(Which reminds me: I need to write a letter to another author.)

Fanimatrix: just what you think it might be. Posted sight unseen, via BoingBoing, as a followup to my thinking out loud the other day, and becasue t has come to my attention that if there can be Star Trek bands, there can be Star Wars compilation CDs.

That’s nearly the kind of licensing challenge that makes me think I need to pick up the phone and talk to my licensing schmoes, but Lucas is waaay outta their league.

Huh, looka there:

“6. Dow Jones & The Industrials – R2-D2 (4:20)”

Research reveals that this band is not the band I was hoping they would be.

The connections of that other band, Dow Jones & The Industrials, to my perennial obsession, the Gizmos, are very, very deep. DJI was the other early punk/new wave band in Indiana in the late seventies/early eighties, and in fact shared the 12″ split LP “Hoosier Hysteria” with them. The most recent Gizmos reunions were intended as benefits for DJI founding drummer Tim North, who unfortunately passed away before the shows. DJI did play the shows as scheduled, I believe.

Head Gizmo and pilot of the Vulgar Boatmen Dale Lawrence wrote a preview of the shows, and an appreciation of North, in the May 14 Nuvo.

I do not know if they played “R2-D2.” It seems unlikely, as it’s another band’s song. But a song about Star Wars would not have been totally inconceivable; they incorporated a sufficient amount of bleeping techno burble that something intriguing might well have emerged.

And tonight, it’s off to Ha Na for raw fish with a chaser of Lost in Translation.

I am a bit concerned about seeing the film; it’s been so well received by blog-neighbors it’s kind of like going to see that film that all your favorite critics have warmly praised.

In entirely unrelated news (despite the importance to the plot of a Presidential campaign), Taxi Driver appeared on one of our movie channels last night as I was preparing for bed and cast its’ voodoo spell, as ever, leading to a much later bedtime than planned.

The print was pristine – I presume what aired derives from a version prepared for DVD release – and utterly hypnotic. The film is so much better than Mean Streets. One wonders if Scorsese knew what he was creating back then withthis film and Raging Bull. Growing up I recall lumping Taxi Driver in with Serpico, The French Connection, and Dog Day Afternoon under the sobriquet of “headache films” becasue of the common tendency toward presenting a gritty, dystopian world via grainy, low-light or available-light cinematography.

On thing that jarred, however, was the film’s happy ending! I’d completely forgotten that DeNiro’s idiot cabbie actually survives his epic gunbattle. It has to be a mistake. I mean, sure it’s not a big wedding or an inheritance or anything like that, but, really, the “bloody finger to the head” schtick sorta tells you everything you need to know, I gotta say.

Seems like others have worried this bone in the past, inconclusively. The best argument, I suppose, is that Scorsese is saying that the line between a hero and a madman is very fine indeed.

Viv and I are watching The Two Towers on DVD (we actually started yesterday) and there’s an hour to go.

POINT ONE:
Gollum, as I’ve said before, is looking to me like an ambitious miscalculation. Less than a year after the release of the film, each time I see it, the more flaws and shortcomings in the character’s CGI I see.

This will guarantee reworking of the films once the trilogy is complete – the question is, how long will it be until we see this?

An additional question, of course, is: how much farther will they have pushed the CGI for The Return of the King? The films still obviously reflect a high-caliber commitment to quality; I can’t imagine that effects people and directors on the project are unaware of the issues I see (overly smooth movements, “floating” limbs, ungrounded character presence in certain scenes) and I would assume they were tackling them even before the release of the first film.

POINT TWO:
Geez this is a long film. Apparently, when the extended edition is released in November, we’ll see, as with the first film, an additional forty minutes.

I’m buying stock in lumbar cushion manufacturers.

Meant to link to the other pieces in the most recent Tablet, two movie reviews. One was for the widely celebrated “American Splendor” and for the less-universally adored “…And Now Ladies and Gentlemen.”

I enjoyed both. Sadly, I typo’ed American Splendor director Shari SPRINGER Berman’s name. It had been typoed when the review originally ran on the web, and I knew I wanted to correct it, but apparently I failed to proof it before I submitted it. Dang.

On friday night Viv and I and our friend David went to see Pirates of the Caribbean again, just before it ends its’ run at the Cinerama.

I spotted a few little continuity errors and plot holes this time – minor stuff, really – but in the whole, the film held up very well. I went googling for obsessive fan sites that chronicled both these issues and the points of congruence with the ride that inspired the film, and unsurprisingly, that’ll await the DVD release, by and large.

I suppose that this is the appropriate time for me to discuss my own avid appreciation of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland and Disney World. The last ride in the parks which Walt Disney personally oversaw the development of, I think that the ride itself – with the film Pinocchio – represents the highest artistic accomplishment of Walt Disney as an artist, as auteur. I noted that I was concerned that the film’s unalloyed success might bring changes to the ride itself, something that I regard as undesirable.

Pinocchio is routinely cited as the greatest of the classic Disney animated films, both technically and as a mature work of art that embraces the dark undertones of the children’s folktales that inspired the series of films that Disney produced between the Depression and the 1950’s. The wooden puppet endures fearful situations rendered with genuine dread and has long been hailed as the darkest work of Disney’s imagination.

I hold the opinion, however, that the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at the parks goes farther than Pinocchio in both depth of artistic resonance and the extent to which it presents a grim and foreboding world of disrupted urban life, ruthless obsession, and stark mortality.

The ride is often paired in the public mind with the Haunted Mansion, an attraction developed nearly at the same time and featuring the imagery of death and morality as well. The most recent evidence of that pairing, of course, is the forthcoming film, coming on the heels of the triumph of the Pirates film.

There are two remarkable fan sites that are devoted to these attractions – DoomBuggies.com and the same-creators TellNoTales.com. Both sites feature detailed walkthroughs of the attractions and extensive fan-supplied lore about each.

But to the point.

The ride opened at Disneyland in California on March 18, 1967 (Florida’s Disney World version opened in 1973). It was developed between 1964 and 1967, and Walt himself passed away in December, 1966. What was happening in the world at that time? Well, the pot of the nineteen sixties was just coming to a boil. Assassinations, riots, blackouts, political corruption, the Vietnam war, pollution – America’s self-image was being seriously challenged.

As this was coming to a head, Disney himself was facing his mortality. His success depended on his ability to hold up a mirror to the American public. He provided myths. His stories allowed the exploration of troubling aspects of the world and the comforting, preferably humorous and practical resolution of the problematic issues in the narrative.

It takes no great leap of the imagination to see Detroit and Watts burning beyond the ramparts of Port Royal in the context of the ride. Look there! The comical pirates chasing women, wine and food in the streets of the sacked and burning colonial outpost! Why, it’s the media image of the Summer of Love! The pirates are hippies and civil rights agitators, and are presented as self-indulgent, silly-looking threats to the social order.

Ah, but do note the troubling point: Port Royal is sacked; the pirates are carrying away the loot. The last thing the visitor sees is the pirates fighting among themselves as the building they are in tumbles down about them, all aflame. No happy ending here, mateys. America burns.

I accept that the majority of visitors will not see things this way. It seems clear to me that this interpretation never occurred to Walt as it was being developed, for example. Yet, I think the failure of the ride to present a traditional happy ending actually has much to do with the success of the ride. It’s unique in Disney’s portfolio. Ah, I would love to have an interview with Walt himself concerning the development of the attraction, its intended meanings and so forth. Of course, it’s far too late for that.

Dead men tell no tales.

Spencer held his annual cinema party – including his latest addition to the liberry, a 3-D short. Here’s the teeming mob prepped for viewing:

Other treats included the amazing expressionist film The Fall of the House of Usher (in a short version) which after viewing I realized I’d often heard of but never seen; the usual selection of Méliès films.