Category Archives: Movies

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New Film: Lunch With Bardot

by Cimaxion



My latest little film. It’s actually a cinegram. The subject is trains. Time. Memory. The present doesn’t exist. You can’t find it with measurement. You can’t even define it. The future is not there yet. You cannot see it. The only thing that really exists is the past. I say that because we can all see the past – some more clearly than others. But we can most certainly see it.

A cinegram is a short motion picture that uses images and text that are packed with meaning and suggestion. It’s my new word for things I once referred to as film poems.

Here’s the poem from inside the movie:

Lunch With Bardot

Trains run on time
With passengers asleep
Temporarily forgotten
Between observation points
Colliding lines
Of fictional transport

TheAuteurs.com Offers International Cinema Online

by Editor

laventuraThe Auteurs (www.theauteurs.com) is a site for art film lovers.  Their mission is to offer a huge selection of international art films by the world’s best directors for simple online viewing.  Last night I watched an Italian film from 1960 called L’Avventura, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni.  The image quality was excellent and the sound was also very clear.  It was one of the best experiences with watching a film online that I’ve ever had.  The image in this post is a reduced screenshot taken while I watched.  The film itself is one of the great examples of Italian cinema and is one you will never forget.  Apparently, The Auteurs has partnered with The Criterion Collection to bring many of the best films online.  Each month The Criterion Collection selects three or four films to run on the site for free viewing in a sort of revolving festival of great cinema.  This is an important connection for The Auteurs because Criterion is probably the very best thing that ever happened to DVDs.  Their efforts at finding the very best sources for their films set them far apart from any other DVD producer.  If you are serious about international cinema on DVD, you always look for what Criterion has to offer.

The site, which is still in beta, has about 120 films available at this point.  Most of these cost $5 for a 7-day viewing period.  There are also articles, film reviews, and member forums for discussing films and writing your own reviews.  The monthly curated festivals look like a really good idea and seem to be offering a few free films each month.

But the key to success with a film site like this is volume.  They must secure the rights to show many more films very quickly.  Nothing makes people lose interest in a film site faster than a limited selection.  For now, there are many films listed on the site which are not actually available which is somewhat disappointing.  The site is trying to give visitors an idea of the kind of films they will offer, but it is a distraction that is unnecessary.  Hopefully, the site will use its relationship with Criterion to drastically increase its library which shows great promise.  The idea for a site that culls the best of international cinema is an excellent and overdue one.  Now it remains to be seen if TheAuteurs.com can keep the attention of film lovers.

Green Lantern in Absurd Fan-Film Trailer

by Editor

Jaron Pitts has made a movie trailer for a non-existent Green Lantern superhero movie.  Quite frankly, it’s an odd thing to do and I don’t honestly know why anyone would do it.  I certainly like the way it looks for the most part.  I’ve always liked the idea of the Green Lantern.  But a fan film trailer?  I don’t know.   There’s a mashup of various films going on in here with some effects on top. The main problem with this kind of work is that you take popular and well-understood tropes from Hollywood super-hero action movies and reproduce them with sometimes astounding faithfulness, but what you end up with is a photocopy of current filmmaking habits.  It’s like jumping up and down shouting, “Look!  I can do it!  I can make the ship, you know… like fly just like in the big Hollywood pictures!  Like, you know, it zooms in at you and then it stops, and dips its wings and then darts off in another direction with a big ‘WOOSH’ and a little burst of energy and then the music goes ‘CRASH’ and then we see the guy in the pilot’s seat…”  and so on and so on.  My Green Lantern trailer would just have a tired nut-job sitting at his dining room table with a flashlight and a roll of Scotchtape, trying to fashion himself a green light logo to stick on his chest while he poses in front of a full-length mirror.  But that’s just me.  I would generally advise skilled and talented filmmakers to avoid wasting their time.

Film: I Dreamt of Flying

by Editor

Filmmaker Alex Bland made this animated/live action film about RAF bomber squadrons during World War II.  He mixes hand-drawn illustration and archive footage from the war.  The soundtrack is excellent.  I really like how the film explodes into abstraction as the planes fly through the spotlights during an attack.  Mr. Bland also made an excellent animation called Unforgettable Evil From Mars.

French Navy: Video from Camera Obscura

by Editor

This video is from the album My Maudlin Career, by Camera Obscura.  The song is good and bears repeated listens.  The video is sort of an homage to films about love, or about couples anyway.  There’s a little French New Wave in it.  A little Fellini too.  It works.  We should all dance down the sidewalks and jump over things and climb lampposts when we’re out on dates, shouldn’t we?

ApSci Makes Music Video from Still Photos

by Editor

Electro-hop husband and wife duo ApSci have made a music video for their upcoming album Best Crisis Ever consisting entirely of still photos with no post-production effects at all.  It’s a great idea and makes for an excellent little film.  I like the music too.  They shot the black and white photos that you see held up by a hand with an iPhone and then printed out all the shots in sequence.  Then they travelled around the world and took more still photos while holding each black and white photo up in the original sequence.  So you get the odd effect of two still photo animation tracks going on at the same time.  It’s very clever and very simple.  Of course, it makes no difference whatsoever that it was all shot with an iPhone.  It could have been any camera.