You Have Been Assimilated

by Lewis Manalo

This is what we have become.  We not only acknowledge that we are plugged in from the moment we wake up until the moment we sleep, we celebrate it.  We take for granted that it is a part of our lives, a part of every small moment that matters to us.   Making out in a cab?  Don’t forget to check your text messages and email.  What identity do we have if we are not plugged in?  Do we even exist away from our screens?

Our hearts and minds are half cybernetic.  We used to shop for comfortable ear buds, but now our ears conform to the buds. 

1,004 Words: Persona

Eye of the beholder.

Freak of the Week: Alice in Wonderland (1949)

This Saturday, Cinefamily in Los Angeles is showing a rarely screened version of Alice Wonderland featuring stop motion animation by Lou Bunin. It looks fun:

Why “rarely screened,” you ask?  Well, it’s a classic case of Disney co-opting a public domain story to the point that they think they own it.  Somehow Disney lawyers managed to bury this 1949 version in enough legal crap to suppress it and avoid competition with their own animated adaptation in production at the time.  Of course, this is not to say anything of how Lewis Carroll’s trippy tale had already been adapted five times prior.  See kids, Hollywood remakes are nothing new.  And neither is poor regulation of big business and disrespect of the public domain.

Learn to Be Herzog

by Lewis Manalo

Really? I read about Werner Herzog’s Rogue Film School in tandem with this promotional noise for Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. But really?

It claims to be “not for the faint-hearted; it is for those who have travelled on foot, who have worked as bouncers in sex clubs and wardens in a lunatic asylum, for those who are willing to learn about lockpicking or forging shooting permits in countries not favoring their projects. In short: for those who have a sense of poetry.” It doesn’t seem very oriented towards technique.

But do you really need Werner Herzog to tell you how to do anything if you’re the type of ruthless soul his film school is for? If you need Herzog to tell you how to lie, cheat, and steal to make film, you probably don’t have the cajones to lie, cheat, and steal to make a film.

Just make a damn movie if you feel like it. Why pay to attend someone else’s publicity stunt?

1,006 Words: Forbidden Games

Ce n’est pas un happy ending.

A Fear Too Beautiful To Resist!

by Tony Nigro

Nobuhiko Obayashi’s Hausu is my favorite cult film that I’ve never seen.  Recently, the indispensable Janus Films has been touring it theatrically and I’ve managed to miss every L.A. screening.  I can only hope the tour means a Criterion DVD or Blu-Ray release is imminent.  The newly subtitled trailer Janus posted today only reinforces that hope.

“HOUSE IS CALLING TO YOU COME BACK HOME AND MARRY ME.”  Enough said.  You had me at the disembodied fingers playing piano.

Be sure to also check out Midnight Eye’s recent feature on Obayashi, and one of his early, rather avant-garde short films.

Freak of the Week: Wapakman

by Tony Nigro

I’m going to be honest here.  I don’t care about boxing.  I do, however, care about aspiring politicians and superheroes because they are the people who make this world go ’round.  Manny Pacquiao happens to be both, with the latter aspiration on display in Wapakman.  So here’s to Pacquiao being the next Dwayne Johnson and learning from Schwarzenegger’s political missteps.  Maybe fighting a giant crab will even help his already stellar boxing career.

I’ll be honest about something else.  The bad aspect ratio of this trailer kills me like fake HD at a sports bar.  Someone please upload a corrected version, or offer me money to do it for you.

DVD: The Exiles

by Tony Nigro

I live a short subway ride away from the site of one of the most interesting neighborhoods in Los Angeles.  (Yes, we have a subway.  Stop asking.)  The architecture ranges from Victorian mansions to Spanish-style hotels to straight up urban tenements.  Some call it a slum, but the people are a diverse group of ethnicities from different walks of life — pensioners, artists, drunks — the high- and low-lifes of a Bukowski novel.  It’s a small community set atop a hill, a true neighborhood with all the character one should expect from a big city.  The problem is, it isn’t there anymore.

Kent MacKenzie’s early American indie entry The Exiles is set in the L.A. neighborhood of Bunker Hill, the area I described above that shortly after the film’s production in the late 1950s and early 1960s was razed and redeveloped à la Chavez Ravine.  Only instead of a baseball stadium there’re a couple concert halls, a museum and some nondescript skyscrapers.  The only remaining icon of old Bunker Hill is the Angels Flight funicular, a short train built to take residents up and down the hill.  And even that hasn’t run since 2001.

This is to say nothing of MacKenzie’s film, which is a sort of diamond in the rough that touches upon the lives of Native American residents of Bunker Hill, people who know their share of redevelopment, to put it lightly.  They are folks have exiled themselves from reservations to the big city, but not to make it big in Hollywood.  They’re just living — drinking, dancing, gambling, carousing, fighting.  MacKenzie takes a doomed neighborhood and in it finds a group of cultural survivors on one melancholy night.  To boot, he does so with a deft touch of humanity and manages to shoot L.A. like it would never be shot again.  The whole thing earns the label “neo-realist,” although it’s just as much a documentary.

Freak of the Week: Häxan

by Lewis Manalo

This Friday the 13th, check out Häxan, the freakiest silent film to ever crawl out of Scandinavia. I stupid, but as far as I can tell the film is a documentary about witchcraft. There’s a whole lotta cool-looking devils and ugly Scandinavian ladies, equally freaky monks and cute Scandinavian witches kissing Satan’s hairy ass. And a kleptomaniac. The production design and cinematography will blow. your. mind.

See it with a bud, but leave that shit that makes you paranoid at home. It plays this Friday the 13th at the MOMA, or check it out online here. (It’s pretty rad if you set the movie to Black Sabbath.)

You think anyone gives a crap about a TV deal? You’re still the same asshole.

by Tony Nigro

When @shitmydadsays “premiered” on the Twitters, it was funny.  A mere month later, when its mastermind Justin Halpern scored a book deal, it was business as usual.  Now, with a recently inked deal with CBS, it’s a sitcom.  You know, those shows only a few people make and even fewer people watch.

I have zero interest in deep discussion about Internet “stars” being co-opted by the entertainment machine.  I think it’s great that it happens.  It’s proof that the Internet succeeds in democratizing entertainment, and it shows that the bigwigs are scared and desperate — especially in the case of @shitmydadsays.

Because really, what is there to adapt?  Does anyone in Hollywood need to purchase rights or hire Halpern to executive produce a TV show about an old man who says funny things?  Cantankerous dads are a dime a dozen in the history of sitcoms, so the only new spin would be one who quips at 140 characters or less.

Unless CBS develops it as a story about a late-twentysomething who moves back in with his parents and every week learns an important lesson about life.  Wouldn’t that be nice?

For now, what CBS has purchased, more than Halpern’s talent, is a name that equals built-in publicity and a “brand” to take home to nervous stockholders.