sundance

David Blaine at TED

Magician David Blaine gets a bad rap in some circles, but I always suspect that they are secretly as fascinated by him and his acts, many of which cross the line from magic to the realm of an endurance sport-slash-public art performances, as the rest of us. Blaine gave this riveting and entertaining talk at [...]

Talking about art at Sundance

Sundance Film Festival attendees who are looking to unglue their eyes from screens and emerge from darkened movie theaters now and again just got a little added incentive. The Festival has announced a series of panels, roundtables and special events examining the powerfully transformative role of art and culture in society

I ran into the biggest bunch of Utah Trannies last night

Paula Froelich and Utah Trannies in Park City to support 8: THE MORMON PROPOSITION
I feel like a gang of roudy elephants held a party in my head last night and forgot to clean up. Some musings after the jump…

The Sustainable Chicken Project: turning trash into eggs

If you’ve ever eaten eggs that comes straight from the farm (especially one that allows its chickens to range somewhat freely), you know that nothing from the grocery store comes close in terms of flavor. Master Composter Tom Shelley and farmer Christianne White, of Ithaca, New York, are trying out a new model for getting local residents hooked on such eggs while lightening their environment footprints: exchanging compostable “trash” for a regular supply of such eggs.

The 4 myths of online profile pictures

OkCupid.com is a free online dating site (with, btw, a weirdly all-male staff, save for the one woman on their about page whose title is, even more disturbingly, “office chick”). They cataloged over 7000 photographs (with average attraction ratings and aged 18 to 32) on their site, analyzing 1) facial attitude (Is the person smiling? Staring straight ahead? Doing that flirty lip-pursing thing?), 2) photo context (Is there alcohol? Is there a pet? Is the photo outdoors? Is it in a bedroom?) and 3) skin (How much skin is the person showing? How much face? How much breasts? How much ripped abs?) — and they found some interesting, myth-busting things. It’s actually a fascinating article with cool charts and graphs that’s worth a look, but here’s the quick gist of the data:

• Women with photos flirting directly at the camera get more messages than those smiling
• But flirting away from the camera is the worst thing a woman can do for generating responses (same goes for men)

Stop-motion: VIDEOGIOCO

videogioco-loop experiment from donato sansone on Vimeo. Utilizing a similar technique to the previously posted Parkour paper-and-ink stop-motion video that I previously posted, “VIDEOGIOCO” by Milky Eyes depicts a slightly-NSFW, yet hilarious and surreal fight in this must-watch short film. [Via]

Madeleine Albright: Read her pins

Madeleine Albright, the US’s first ever female Secretary of State, wrote a book about her pins. Yes, her pins. She used pins to subtly convey her mood, and the nation’s intentions, via costume jewelry. At one point Saddam Hussein called her a serpent; from then on she wore a serpent pin whenever Iraq was the [...]

Summertime pole dancing at P.S.1

In a time when it’s difficult for up-and-comers in any field to get jobs, especially those working freelance, prizes have become an increasingly useful means of getting your name out there. That can mean a magazine’s annual award, the upcoming Sundance Film Festival (42 of the 113 films are from first-timers) or P.S.1 MoMA’s Young Architects Program, which has helped launch designers like SHoP, Linda Roy, nARCHITECTS and Work AC into the public eye.

This year the honor goes to the Brooklyn-based husband and wife team SO-IL for their entry Pole Dance, 100 free-moving white poles centrally anchored in a shallow pool and held together by a net that’s only “taut enough.”

Federal Ghost Fleet Illegally Polluting San Francisco Bay

The federal agency in charge of more than 70 decaying naval vessels stored in northern San Francisco Bay is illegally polluting and storing hazardous waste in the bay, a federal judge ruled Thursday.

Oil From Port Arthur Tanker-Barge Collision Stretches Nine Miles

Cleanup crews and 27 skimmer boats are working to contain and remove oil from a massive spill that happened when a crude oil tanker and a barge collided Saturday in the Port Arthur Ship Channel.

James Franco delivers as the “fat-breasted, bald, bearded homosexual”

James Franco in HOWL, directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman

HOWL is not an Allen Ginsberg biopic but something at once trickier and more modest: a celebratory adaptation of his most famous poem. For their first fiction feature, the veteran documentarians Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (THE CELLULOID CLOSET, PARAGRAPH 175) have recruited a lineup of top-tier collaborators: an all-star cast led by James Franco, cinematographer Ed Lachman, production designer Therese DePrez, composer Carter Burwell. As you’d expect, HOWL looks and sounds terrific. But the prudent insistence on documentary fidelity — the film was in fact conceived as a doc — is restrictive, even perverse. Just about every line you hear comes from HOWL itself, or is adapted from interviews that Ginsberg gave after its publication and from court records of the 1957 obscenity trial against City Lights publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti that ensured the poem’s immortality.

I think we were the slutty girls you were talking about!

From Left to Right: Fisher Stevens, Danny McBride and Jon Gosselin

Sundance is getting more surreal by the day. Or I should say night. Last night involved Danny McBride and his band of North Carolina brothers, Fisher Stevens, a bad basketball game, a choking man, a quart of booze, two feet of snow and a run in with reality retards.

HESHER: a textbook of indie-film blunders and cliches.

I’m reluctant to add to what I suspect will be a critical pile-on against HESHER, at least based on the reactions after yesterday’s mobbed premiere at the Eccles Theater. But I’ll call it out only because its problems seem to be symptomatic. Despite its appealing cast, Spencer Susser’s HESHER is not just familiar in its failings but weirdly comprehensive, practically a textbook of indie-film blunders and cliches.

This is the kind of movie, all too common among rookie directors, that is so enamored of its cute concept — in this case, anarchist as grief therapist — that it never bothers to develop or explore that concept, or even test its basic plausibility.

What are people saying about HOWL?

Seems like James Franco has been all over the place in the last few days, talking about, among other things, HOWL, the new film by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman in which the actor stars as Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Here he is discussing his love of poetry with Vanity Fair. There he is explaining his love of soap operas to New York magazine. Here he is defending his tendency to play roles based on himself on screen in Movieline. And there he is getting rapped for his shabby grad-school duds by old-school gossipist Cindy Adams: “His black coat was littered with light brown hair,” she sniffed in her New York Post column on Wednesday.

Spike Jonze’s short film I’M HERE

In his feature films, Spike Jonze has successfully melded his singular sensibility with other equally distinctive voices (Charlie Kaufman in BEING JOHN MALKOVICH and ADAPTATION, Maurice Sendak and Dave Eggers in WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE). But for a taste of pure, unadulterated Jonze — to really appreciate the deadpan high concepts, the absurdist melancholy, the skewed sense of enchantment — turn to his music videos and short films.

Written and directed by Jonze (and financed by Absolut Vodka), the half-hour I’M HERE, the high point of a strong opening shorts program, follows in the venerable tradition of sci-fi stories about robots who discover the contradictions of the human heart. Sheldon (Andrew Garfield) is a sad-eyed android librarian in an unfriendly Los Angeles where the robots lead an underclass existence and seem fated for a lonely obsolescence. (He and his fragile fellow bots certainly look like last century’s models: boxy heads, Lego-like appendages, protruding wires.)

Texas Air Cleaner in Four Cities

Lower levels of air pollutants in four Texas cities prompted the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to remove these chemicals from the state’s Air Pollutant Watch Lists, the agency said today. In the case of Corpus Christi, levels of benzene, the sole remaining air pollutant, are now low enough to warrant lifting the entire watch list.

No good happens after 1 a.m.

Repeat after me: no good happens after 1 a.m. WHEN WILL I LEARN??? I pinched a nerve so badly I can’t turn my neck. At all. I look like one of those freaky wooden dolls where you push a lever and their bodies and necks turn with their heads while the lips move. I am creeping myself out. That and I have a zit. Which pisses me off as my mother told me when I was 14 that I’d stop getting zits when I turned 18. But then again she also told me I could get pregnant by sitting on an unprotected toilet seat, so there you go.

Will Sundance 2010 chart indie film’s future?

Talk about pressure. Sundance Film Festival director John Cooper may have the entire independent film industry riding on him. So says New York Times writer Brooks Barnes, positing on Thursday, hours before the Festival kicked off, that “this might very well be the most important Sundance in years.”

Matthew Albanese’s fake landscapes

Matthew Albanese builds miniatures of extremely realistic looking natural landscapes using surprising materials. At first glance, they appear to be real photographs of natural phenomenons, but for example, the fierce tornado above was created using “steel wool, cotton, ground parsley and moss.” I also like his Martian surface built from “12 pounds paprika, cinnamon, nutmeg, [...]

How to make a Michael Cera movie

Michael Cera, who loves to play lovable and awkward teens, is at it again with YOUTH IN REVOLT, in theaters now. Which you may or may not want to see since apparently it is more of the same. Filmdrunk created the below recipe for a Michael Cera film. From JUNO and SUPERBAD to NICK AND [...]

FULL FRONTAL FASHION highlights

Andrew Bevan with a fresh Chanel temporary tattoo Think of this as your FULL FRONTAL FASHION cliff notes. You thought you saw all the awards given out during that three-hour Golden Globes show the other night! HERE are some prizes the Hollywood Foreign Press Association seems to have overlooked… Tired of these cold winter nights? [...]

Opening Night, aka who the hell wants to be sexy at Sundance?

Still from HOWL.

So, I’m doing my schedule for this week and at one point I was wondering if Sundance was a film or a music festival. Seriously. ASCAP has a music series with LeeAnn Rimes, Joey + Rory and the Fray, along with like 20 others. Lyle Lovett is here, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, John Legend, you name it. And I am in heaven.

The festival has finally started – slowly. By tomorrow you wont even be able to walk down Main Street without thinking horrible, dark thoughts about the couple in front of you who insists on strolling slowly down the narrow sidewalks, holding hands – and therefore holding up the foot traffic for miles. And the weather ain’t helping. Eight inches of snow dropped last night and they are expecting at least another six more tonight. Thank God for waterproof boots! Although, the amount of high heeled snow boots I’ve seen already is astonishing. I mean, seriously? Who the hell wants to be sexy at Sundance? It’s like picking up someone on the treadmill. Yech.

RESTREPO, how’s this for an opening salvo?

Still from RESTREPO.

How’s this for an opening salvo? RESTREPO, the first documentary to screen at Sundance 2010, kicks off with a grunt’s-eye view of being caught in a roadside-bomb explosion, and only gets more intense from there. In 2007 and 2008, journalist Sebastian Junger and photographer Tim Hetherington made 10 trips to Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, a six-mile corridor near the Pakistan border, at the time the focal point of the fighting between U.S. forces and the Taliban. A raw, often harrowing piece of frontline reportage, the film uses post-facto interviews with the soldiers to orient the viewers, but mostly, it opts for disorientation — for the surreal ground-level experience of combat, alternating between restless downtime and confusing firefights.

Making music at Sundance

Still from ODDSAC.

Music is surely a strong theme at this year’s Sundance Film Festival: In Sam Taylor Wood’s NOWHERE BOY, a teenage, pre-Beatles John Lennon finds an escape from his dysfunctional family through music (watch a clip here). The band Animal Collective will debut the film it has spent years collaborating on with Danny Perez, ODDSAC, a psychedelic mix of abstract music and visuals. TWILIGHT’s Kristen Stewart stars as rocker Joan Jett and Dakota Fanning plays Jett’s bandmate Cherie Currie in Floria Sigismondi’s rock-and-roll biopic THE RUNAWAYS. And that’s just for example.

From Russia with love

With THE LAST STATION and A ROOM AND A HALF currently out in theaters, it looks as if we have Russia on the mind. I wouldn’t call it a frenzy – both films met with a so-so response from audiences, but the LACMA is doing Russia proud with its weekend screening series dedicated to Andrei Tarkovksy, the director who popularized Soviet cinema.