Lee Daniels wants you to look. He wants you to look at the horrific abuse in the personal history of his protagonist, Precious Jones. As an audience member, I wanted to look too. In fact, I think one reason people have flocked to this film involves the extremely human desire to stare in the face what is most repulsive, most sick and most grotesque – about as bad as you can imagine it — in human domestic familial life. And he’s got it here – it’s a home-based horror show.
But Lee Daniels also conspires so that you may not look. Oddly, and a little unnervingly, at a few points in the film Daniels actually takes the act of looking away.
Hope can be a precious commodity in developing countries like Haiti. With 80% of the population living below the poverty level, residents will likely welcome any economic opportunity, regardless of social or environmental consequences. The documentary film BLOOMING HOPE: HARVESTING SMILES IN PORT-DE-PAIX documents efforts by a few Haitian citizens, community leaders, and aid workers to build financially, socially and environmentally sustainable business models in one of the country’s poorest region.
My obsession with music video director Eric Wareheim continues with yet another disturbing, yet fantastic video. Once again the band Major Lazer gets Wareheim’s freakish video treatment. The song is called “Keep it Going Louder” and it features your usual rap video girls shaking their booties. This time though Wareheim’s manipulated their faces to make them horribly ugly. Throw in some ridiculous other worldly animation and you’re left with something original and just not right. Two things I simply adore.
An amusing animated short about a tendency we are all guilty of at times: procrastination. Creator Johnny Kelly describes the different ways we spend our time doing things to avoid doing what we should be doing.
Most sports movies will try to convince you that it’s not about winning, it’s about how you play the game. Not DOWNHILL RACER (1969). In fact, one of the primary reasons Robert Redford struggled to get this film made was because no one had made a sports movie with a protagonist whose amorality and arrogance had no effect on his winning streak. He chose to center the narrative around downhill racing pretty much because baseball and football were already taken.
It’s a strange thing to reach adulthood and see, for the very first time, a film everyone else saw before they hit puberty. For me that film is PEE-WEE’S BIG ADVENTURE. I’m not going to lie; When I was a kid, Pee-wee really freaked me out. I thought he was creepy and weird and unnecessarily loud. But as part of Tim Burton’s retrospective, MoMA is screening all of his films, starting last night with PEE-WEE, his 1985 feature film debut. After Paul Reubens saw FRANKENWEENIE (a full-length remake is due out in 2011) he chose Burton to direct PEE-WEE’S BIG ADVENTURE, which had, until that point, been a stage-show at the Roxy in L.A. and of course, an HBO special.
In watching Spike Jonze’s amazing film, WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE, I kept glancing at my five year-old son. Could it be true that we were actually enjoying the same movie on the same level of interest and engagement? That’s both fascinating and a little bit scary.
If you haven’t seen it yet, do. Unlike anything to cross mainstream screens in a some time, WTWTA is built on a series of purely visual, visceral experiences and interactions, and not at all on plot. Perrin Drumm made a similar point in her post on the film. (I won’t be giving anything away by telling you that the road to the climax hinges on one individual wanting to, like, build a really cool secret room out of sticks, and another individual being extraordinarily pissed and offended at the exclusivity of that conceit. The nerve!)
Tim Burton fans came out in droves to the opening of his retrospective yesterday at MoMA. Dressed in red and black stripes and lace and crazy hats – even painted on stitches – they were hard to miss. And with the massive collection of drawings, set pieces and video I doubt they left disappointed. To get to the actual exhibit you have to walk through the mouth of one of Burton’s classic freak show creations, down a hallway lit only by TV screens playing his animated series “The World of Stainboy.” At the end of the hallway is a dark room lit by black-lights where some of his glow-in-the-dark pieces are on display.
This video clip, of Paul Nicklen’s encounter with a giant leopard seal, is sweet and frightening all at once. Mr. Nicklen, a National Geographic photographer, tells the story of a 4 day meeting with the huge sea-going mammal. The images are shocking. Seals get that big! He stayed in the water! WTF!?
But the story is sweet too. The seal tries to share a meal, first a live penguin, with the photographer. When he does not partake in the meal she gets restless and brings him a half-dead penguin. Still no. How about a dead penguin? Nope.
Even the most frightening of animals help one another. Just as long as you’re not a poor little penguin.
The venerable NYC nightclub 1984 has been celebrating the 80s long before they became chic again. And it still offers a remarkable treat to those of us who spent our formative years in day-glo listening to Duran Duran. Resident DJ Chip Duckett, who also happens to be NYC’s biggest drag queen booker, curates a video show each week worthy of price of admission alone.
Last week he played 6 plus hours of all Kate Bush’s videos. Yes, Kate Bush is an acquired taste. And this week’s videos are even more so: Divine.
Alice Guy, as she was known, was not only the first female director, but the first director of narrative films – period. At a time when films were being made mainly for scientific or commercial purposes, Alice Guy had the bright idea to tell a story instead. Her first efforts were short experiments, clocking in under a minute. But as the head of production at Gaumont, she made her first feature-length films like the big budget, biblical epic THE LIFE OF CHRIST in 1906. She was also the first to use synched sound and special effects, like double exposures or running film backwards.
Over the course of her 25-year-long career, Alice Guy wrote, directed and produced over 1,000 films that spanned nearly every genre, from comedies and westerns to detective stories and remakes of literary classics. She has the longest list of credits on imdb.com that I’ve ever seen. To celebrate her work, The Whitney has rounded up an impressive amount of her films for the exhibit “Alice Guy Blaché: Cinema Pioneer.” See this week’s schedule of screenings.
