The 70s were some good times. Disco! Gay liberation! My birth! And the 1970s also gave us the gem of a movie above. It’s an educational video showing a mother walking in on her son masturbating. We’ve all been there. Right? Right?

It is just as awkward and weird as bell bottoms and my mother’s hair back then. But, like those two things, it too is a riot.

Like Arnold in their previous effort, The Anomolies (previously) are back.This time, they apply their considerable skills to the science fiction classic thriller ALIENS where these lyricists engage in a 10 minute rapping tour de force which explains the movie’s plot.

When you’re gay you cherish sex equally as pop. And we idolize our porn stars as much as our pop stars. Madonna shows as much skin as any adult entertainer.  Why wouldn’t we? We also don’t care about the taboos attached to porn. But, then again, we’ve never shared a name with a porn star. Michael David Lukas does however. And in this hilarious essay over at The Virginia Quarterly Review, he writes about adding a middle name as to not be confused with Michael Lucas, the porn king of New York. Now full disclosure: I am friends with this porn king. He sent me this note and I found it too funny to not share. I am glad they both see the humor in the situation.

WINTER’S BONE, Grand Jury Prize Winner at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival

Now that Sundance is over, it’s time for a little perspective. And critics and industry watchers are only too happy to provide it.

Sure, since the awards were handed out on Saturday night and the festival wrapped on Sunday, there have been the requisite stories about which movies to watch out for and the reports on last-minute acquisitions. (Ten movies were acquired at the festival; in the past few days, Weinstein Co. snagged Derek Cianfrance’s BLUE VALENTINE, starring Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling; IFC Films scored the rights to Michael Winterbottom’s THE KILLER INSIDE ME; and Roadside scooped up Debra Granik’s WINTER’S BONE, which won the festival’s grand jury prize.)

But what lessons can we take away from Sundance 2010?

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I came out of André Téchiné’s latest film THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN, haunted by the images of twenty-one-year-old Jeanne (Émilie Dequenne) rollerblading through the streets of Paris. Her beauty and physical strength come towards us in shots that are so close they give us the sensation of being her partner in motion. This power is in contrast to the rest of what we learn about her. She seems, for the most part, intellectually vacant and even her boyfriend, a possessive and aggressive aspiring wrestler (Nicolas Duvauchelle) calls her “an airhead.” Yet the images she occupies give her character weight and the film a level of tension not achieved in any of the dialogue scenes that surround them. By the time Jeanne pretends to be the victim of an anti-Semitic attack, we don’t really mind that we don’t understand. We are fascinated as we watch her speed forward like an empty train hurtling through space. Unable to take our eyes away, we watch with trepidation and awe as she heads for a crash…

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Sundance Channel Spotlight on Meryl Streep, Thursday starting at 8PM

Meryl Streep is one of the busiest working actresses today, starring in 3 films in the last year alone: IT’S COMPLICATED, FANTASTIC MR. FOX and JULIE & JULIA, for which her performance as the much beloved Julia Child has earned her yet another Oscar nomination. In fact, Streep has been nominated for an Academy Award nearly every year since her very first nomination in 1979 for THE DEER HUNTER. And even though her roles in films like THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT’S WOMAN (1981) and POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE (1990) have won her much deserved critical acclaim, she’s only managed to snag two of the golden statues, the first in 1980 for her role opposite Dustin Hoffman in KRAMER VS. KRAMER, which also won in all the big categories that year (Best Actor, Director, Screenplay and Picture), and a second time in 1983 for SOPHIE’S CHOICE.

Streep continues her 17-year nomination streak at next month’s Academy Awards, and in celebration Sundance Channel is showing 3 of her perhaps not lesser-known but recent under-awarded roles all in one night.

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Boing Boing surfaced this impressive colorful stop-motion video KABOOM! from the popular artist PES (previously mentioned here). There’s a disconnect in the experience between the artist’s repurposing of common innocuous items into weapons of war.

Bruce Weber’s 1988 LET’S GET LOST, one of 30 films in the Film Forum screening at MoMA.

When Film Forum opened in 1970 in Manhattan’s Upper West Side it operated with one projector, 50 folding chairs and a $19,000 annual budget, but when Karen Cooper was hired on as director in 1972, things changed. Now, 40 years later, Film Forum is a thriving 3-screen theatre in Greenwich Village and New York’s only autonomous nonprofit cinema. It’s also one of the most relevant and groundbreaking venues for independent art house film and to celebrate its 40 year anniversary, MoMA’s Department of Film has invited Cooper to curate an exhibition of documentary and nonfiction films that have debuted at Film Forum over the years.

The screenings, which begin Wednesday, February 3rd, will be held at MoMA and run the gamut from the 1994 biography CRUMB to lots and lots on war and politics, to a little known Maysles gem on the Getty Museum and two by Werner Herzog, the 30 minute LA SOUFRIERE (1977) and LESSONS OF DARKNESS (1992). For a full schedule see below.

“Karen Cooper Carte Blanche: 40 Years of Documentary Premiers at Film Forum” at MoMA, February 3 – February 20, 2010.

LAST TRAIN HOME (World Documentary Competition)

Anyone who has been paying attention to the remarkably fertile Chinese independent film scene this past decade knows that present-day China, given the sheer speed and scope of its transformations, is a wellspring of abundant contradictions, an endless source of stories and images for the observant filmmaker.

The title of Lixin Fan’s directorial debut refers to the annual exodus of China’s 130 million migrant workers from the cities to their mostly rural hometowns — this happens only once a year, for the Chinese New Year holidays. Fan evokes the mind-warping scale of this event — we see the anxious rush to secure tickets, thronged railways stations and trains — even as he zeroes in on the experiences of one family. The Zhangs left their young children and their farming village so they could work at a faraway garment factory. Now strangers to one another, parents and children (who were raised by their grandparents) struggle to communicate, and the gulf only widens when the teenage daughter decides to leave school and takes a job in the city.

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SECRETS OF THE TRIBE (World Documentary Competition)

The Yanomami Indians are an Amazonian tribe who lived in total isolation from the modern world until a half century ago, when one anthropologist after another started showing up to observe, document, and eventually exploit what they saw (and, in some cases, fetishized) as a virginal society. Piecing together testimonials from key researchers in the field and from tribe members, Brazilian documentarian José Padilha (BUS 174, Sundance ’03) progressively complicates the picture. Underlying all the bitter accusations and recriminations are the starkly opposed views of cultural and scientific anthropologists (the latter emphasize the role of evolutionary biology) and the conflicting assumptions that these native others are either noble innocents or violent primitives.

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LOVERS OF HATE

Rudy (Chris Doubek), the less-than-lovable protagonist of Bryan Poyser’s dramatic-competition entry LOVERS OF HATE, is an embittered sadsack who can barely tolerate the sight of his smug younger brother, Paul (filmmaker Alex Karpovsky, last seen in Andrew Bujalski’s BEESWAX). An author of children’s novels who has apparently borrowed some ideas for his monstrously successful books from Rudy’s childhood fantasies, Paul drops into Austin for a reading and catches Rudy at low ebb: he’s out of work and has just been thrown out of the house by his wife, Diana (Heather Kafka), whom Paul has always had a crush on.

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