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The NFB (National Film Board of Canada) has just released a new free iPhone app that lets you watch hundreds of their films. You can use the app even while you’re away from hotspots by downloading films for viewing during a 24-hour period. The NFB is one of my favorite places on the web for film. They just do it the right way. They make it easy.
This is an excellent way to distribute their huge collection of ground-breaking films.
You can get the app at the iTunes store.
Here’s a horror movie about some U.S. soldiers in Iraq who face an ancient evil in a cave.
This is very mature subject matter with extreme violence and mature language. Not for young viewers.
This is not a very good film. That’s why I posted it. The filmmaking interests me because of its complete lack of vision. It tries to replicate to perfection other films that the director has seen. The director wants to be a professional and get hired somewhere. It shows in his work. Sorry, sir, but you put it out there and I’m calling it like I see it. The problem here is that the film is not frightening. It’s slick and well-shot, like television or feature films, but it spends all its energy that way. You don’t scare people by being professional. You don’t scare them by being violent. You scare them by showing them that you – director – are a little bit off.
That’s how you scare an audience. Not with professionalism. Try again and make it real this time.
The Brain that Wouldn’t Die was directed by Joseph Green in 1959. It’s the creepy tale of a brilliant surgeon who perfects a method for keeping human body parts alive. When his girlfriend is decapitated in a car-wreck, he manages to keep her lovely head alive and talking in a tray. Unbelievable! She talks and everything! I love the tray! In fact, we used the tray idea in our Frankenstein – The Creature Must Die! game.
In keeping with our horrific new game, Frankenstein – The Creature Must Die!, here’s a 1957 Hammer Film called The Curse of Frankenstein. It stars Peter Cushing as Victor Frankenstein and Christopher Lee as the monster.
This version of the Frankenstein story caused critical outrage when it was released. It was ground-breaking in its level of gore and violence and it kicked off a long series of popular horror flicks from Britain’s Hammer Film Productions.
A science fiction web serial! The Mercury Men. This is amazing. I love stuff like this. A group of filmmakers are producing a series of cliffhanger shorts just for the web. The trailer looks very interesting, well-shot, exciting, and perfect for web viewing. These people seem to really know what they’re doing.
The director is Chris Preksta who made the Captain Blasto series. The producer is Kati Lightholder. Mark Tierno, who acted in George Romero’s Day of the Dead and will appear in the upcoming feature, The Road, plays the lead role.
I know it’s going to sound silly, but the Mercury Men Pictures logo with the light bulb is one of the best movie production logos I’ve ever seen. I also love the way the trailer clip uses light and shadow to maximum effect. And the alien is really creepy and looks amazing.
They even have this wonderful poster.
When people do this kind of work on the web they do it with limited means that require them to use real creativity in order to bring their vision to fruition. It lends a sense of adventure and excitement to the endeavor which translates directly to the viewer. This is something that is mostly lacking when you turn to a television. Science fiction is going to have a fantastic golden age because of the web. Keep watching.
Lest We Forget is a short civil war film directed by Brandon McCormick and produced by Whitestone Motion Pictures. It’s the kind of short film I don’t see much of anymore. Very simple and well-produced. I really like its fearless punch and its call to the audience to not forget. Because we do forget. We forget everything. We want to forget. In fact, we’ve been seeing a lot of wonderful old-fashioned folk come out of the woodwork around this country to put on a country fair display of their rancid all-American racism. This film is for that guy at the town hall meeting on health care reform who decided to tear up the poster of Rosa Parks. Boy did he forget! That guy should watch this film and think about it a lot. Then put himself out with the garbage. Because I really don’t care whether a guy like that remembers or not. He’s really just a hole in the road that needs to be paved over.
But the one great thing about all this raging racism coming out, much of which is directed at President Obama, is that it does in fact come out. We see the bigots. Yes, indeed… we know who you are.
Today is the 107th anniversary of the first science fiction film ever made, A Trip to the Moon. It was directed in France by Georges Méliès who had been inspired by the novels From Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne, and by The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells. This is the film with the famous image of the spaceship landing in the eye of the moon’s face.
I’ve never been able to get through a book by Thomas Pynchon. Well, I should reveal that I’ve only tried once with his Against the Day. Unreadable as far as I’m concerned. But I still went out and bought a copy of Gravity’s Rainbow. James Joyce is unreadable too and yet I still like him. I never hold unreadability against a writer because I know how truly stupid I can be while reading – sometimes falling asleep and having to reread many pages. But this video is probably the best book trailer I have ever seen. I’d been thinking that the book sounded like a bore, but this trailer has me digging into the side pouch of my briefcase to find some spare change for the bookstore.
Another thing – whoever did the voiceover for this little movie is a stark raving mad genius. He should read the entire book out loud. I’d buy that too.
Here’s an experimental film by Xavier Chassaing that uses 35,000 still photos with some stop motion animation and something called ‘live projection mapping.’ The music is by Fedaden.
I found this via Coilhouse.
This is the oldest known film version of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, made in 1910. It was made by the Selig Polyscope Company and did not involve the author, L. Frank Baum.
Smithsonian Magazine has an article called Frank Baum, the Man Behind the Curtain. It describes how Baum came to write what amounted to the first American children’s book and how he was so convinced he’d written a great book that he framed the pencil stub he’d written it with.
Japanese artist Takumi K. made this animation that’s based on ideas from his daughter. It’s a moving story that has been featured on YouTube.
I found this via Cold Hard Flash.
Created by Hendy Sukarya, Aaron Chiesa, Toru Kageyama and Lisa Temes as a student production, this film offers interesting information about the revolution of young people in Iran who have made the repressive Islamic nation the third largest nation of bloggers in the world. It is very well done and packs a good informational punch. Young bloggers getting their words out from under the watchful eye of an extremist religious government is admirable. But a nation that becomes a fanatical religious state run by clerics who kill people for speaking out cannot be trusted even a little. That goes for its young bloggers too. I am wholly unconvinced by the urge to ‘freedom’ in Iran. It requires a fire much stonger than a blog to burn religion out of a government.
I love this! It’s a video created by artist Marco Brambilla for installation in the elevators of the Standard Hotel in New York City. The artist worked with a production company called Crush. The video takes you on a journey from hell to heaven. Where’s Dante when you really need him? On the elevators at the hotel, the film goes up toward heaven if the elevator is rising, down to hell if you’re going down. Clever. I think I’ll spend a weekend at the Standard Hotel inside the elevator.
Film director Jean-Luc Godard is making a film that appears to be called Le Socialisme. I’m not entirely certain, but it sure looks to me from this trailer for the film like Mr. Godard is shooting with a small video camera. I can even hear the wind hitting the microphone during shots on board the ship. He’s always had a keen interest in shooting with small cameras, going so far at one point as to have a tiny 35 mm camera designed for one of his films in the seventies. I like this kind of filmmaking. This is how a filmmaker approaches a method that resembles the method of the painter or the writer. Filmmaking, for all its technical achievements and its massive budgets and enormous popularity, lags far behind painting, photography, writing and music. A filmmaker, in order to really be an artist, must be capable of functioning with the autonomy of the writer or the painter or the composer. Until then, the filmmaker is simply interested in socializing, not making art.
Mr. Godard’s films are often difficult, infuriating, perplexing, gorgeous, ugly, profound, ridiculous, and experimental – but they are always, without a single exception, the expressions of an artist who owes nothing to anyone.
Whether this video news report is real or fake, whether the story is made up or not, it is sheer genius. It is a remarkable modern day fairy tale that expresses almost everything you need to know about our questionable human condition. While repairing an old house somewhere in Pakistan recently, some children found a tiny alien woman walking around. These well-adjusted children immediately understood this tiny creature to be a terrible threat, so they stoned it until it fell down and remained motionless. Then they put her in a bottle for a while and eventually threw her onto some very hot bricks. Following this brutalization of a 4-inch female, flocks of onlookers arrived, at which point the locals decided to bury the dead alien in a hole in order to protect the community from hysteria.
Well, I don’t think the tiny aliens will be interested in returning to Pakistan, that’s for sure. But they can certainly come to Los Angeles where they will be warmly welcomed and given tiny outfits from Giorgio Armani.
I heard about this via Xeni at BoingBoing.net.