This film by Jonas Normann is a very nice little glimpse into the neighborhood photo work of Brad Evans and Travis Jensen who spent a year photographing the people of San Francisco's Tenderloin District. The neighborhood often photographed purely for its seamier aspects, is here treated as a community of hard-working and creative people. The photographers produced a book with the material from their year of living respectfully.
Paperman is Disney's Oscar-nominated short animation for this year. Apparently animated with 3D software mimicking the hand-drawn look, it tells the story of an office worker trying to catch the attention of a woman by tossing paper airplanes from one New York skyscraper to another. The film is an example of that way Disney has always had of lending extreme curvature to all form and motion. Disney never moves things across a screen. They sweep them across. I enjoy hand-drawn styles even when they are not hand-drawn at all! Somehow it defeats the plastic look of so much computer animation. The story here is simple and sweet.
This film reminds me of a game I played near the top of a Wall Street building once back in the nineties. We opened a window and tried to hit a building one block away with various paper airplanes. There was a wind current making it possible to get very close to the other building, but invariably the little planes would veer off and go around the building without ever making the expected contact. So I sympathize with this cartoon character's seemingly useless efforts.
Ray Diaz made this machinima version of Ray Bradbury's 1952 short story about an automated house continuing on with its comfort duties for a nuclear family even after war has stripped the earth of all life. It's a simple and eerie little film. The soundtrack is provided by an NBC radio broadcast dramatization of the story.
It's seldom that we get a view from inside Cuba. Here's a short film by photographer Jason Row about the city of Havana – it's beautiful old buildings, absurdly preserved American car fleet from the late fifties, the crushing poverty, and the eerie calm of living under the boot heel of a great slobbering pig dictator whose every breath is an insult to all Cubans everywhere. Why those poor sorry dimwits haven't walked into the dictator's house and eliminated him is far beyond my own comprehension or even my interest. People who are ruled by blathering psuedo-communist retards are truly beneath contempt. How's that for some travel commentary? To hell with Havana. Let's take Cuba and put up a Marriott. How difficult could it be? They have four soldiers riding in a 1959 Ford. Their guns are rusted shut. They don't like their boss. What are we waiting for? Don't we want the cigars? The music? The dancing? Come on Obama! Get it going! Forget all those nations of rapists in the Middle East. Go get me Cuba!
Rafal Milach is a documentary photographer based in Warsaw Poland. He is publishing a book of photographs taken along the Ukraine's Black Sea coast. The short film stands on its own as a glimpse into an industrialized life on the sea in a region that seems caught in a limbo between centuries. The photographs are beautiful and informative. This is the kind of work that makes the devastation of nature its own form of beauty and inspires one to go there and tramp through the oil-slicked landscape in a good pair of boots. The beauty one can pull from the depressing lives of others! One person's struggle to pull a living out of the sea is another's gallery print. That's what being a photographer gives you – a free pass through the lives of others. Ultimately, in spite of all the questions, recording is better than not recording. The people in this film seem close to happy. It would be improper to live along this particular coast and affect a bright, cheery, bouncing disposition. One is liable to slip off a steel deck into frigid waters if one prances about too much. So take your bleak beauty where you find it. That's my advice.
A Happy New Year timelapse video shot by astronauts aboard the International Space Station. It was made by Giacomo Sardelli who downloaded NASA images which he then edited into a timelapse film of extraordinary beauty.