Palmer asked me if I could help him with a documentary project he’s working on, so this Sunday we went to Sacramento to interview locally-based outsider musician Lenny G. Blat. Something about him reminds me of the Legendary Stardust Cowboy.
Palmer’s started editing already, and a couple of clips are up on YouTube.
When the camera’s off Lenny is surprisingly warm, and unpredictable. He sings almost constantly, as if he has a musical variant of tourette’s syndrome.
Last week I finished editing a short documentary profiling the Sustainability Fair the Davis Food Co-op held back in July. I could spend ages tidying it up and making it perfect, but I don’t really have time.
If you’re interested in reading my self-criticism, after the jump are some of the bits I’d spend time fixing in an ideal world in which days last 48 hours, I work for eight hours a day and need to sleep for only seven.
Recently I’ve had ideas for posts, but I’ve either been at work, visiting family, or too tired to be bothered blogging.
I’m determined to make time to write, produce, shoot and edit a short before the year is out, so I’m slotting in screenwriting time when I can. I’m also helping a couple of friends out with shorts, and still trying to finish off editing another couple of projects – one’s work related, the other is not.
What else? I snagged myself a copy of Lindsay Anderson’s If….. I enjoyed it, but would have taken even more from had I not been tired and corpulently well-fed the night I watched it. Court and I rented Truffaut’s Day for Night the other day, and both loved every second, which is rare, and we just watched Miyazaki’s Kiki’s Delivery Service, which was delightful. Now I’ve consumed two feelgood movies in a row, I feel my next cinematic entertainment should be thoroughly perverse.
It will please certain people to discover that Courtney’s been renting DVDs of the re-made Battlestar Galactica this week. I’ve been watching a few with her, and I’m actually really quite impressed. There’s a sense of restraint in the action sequences and with only one real exception, the tension and plotting is good. It also gives a lead role to the guy who played the origami-making cop in Blade Runner.
Avoid Tom Tykwer’s movie The Princess and the Warrior. It would be a good movie if Tykwer had realised he’d written a black comedy. Sadly for us, he didn’t, and all two and a half hours is played with a schmaltzy, po-faced earnestness which makes it utterly, utterly laughable.
Particularly outstanding among a host of contemptible moments is the bath time electrocution. This is a set-piece I’d been planning to use in my imaginary remake of Parting Shots. I’ve not seen Parting Shots, and nor do I intend to; it’s directed by Michael Winner and it stars Chris Rea, the singer. I want to take just the concept and make a bad-taste murderous revenge comedy, because that’s the kind of movie in which you dispose of characters by electrocuting them in the bathtub with a toaster on a 30ft cable.
In its defence, The Princess and the Warrior is beautifully shot and tidily edited. Contrary to the old adage, it is possible to polish a turd.
Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï has to be one of the coolest movies ever made. Just the production details offer a foretaste of its coolness: anything made in France in 1967 starring Alain Delon should at least pique a movie buff’s interest. Le Samouraï blends 40’s American gangster movie aesthetics, 60’s French pop culture and a dash of Samurai mystique.
I’m sad to hear of the passing of Ian Richardson, an actor with one of the greatest voices I’ve ever heard, and coldly hypnotic eyes. I never saw him on the stage, but his performances for film and TV were always mesmerising. Obviously he’ll be well remembered for House of Cards and To Play the King but for me his roles in movies such as Brazil and Dark City are just as important.
Looks like I’ve not posted in a while. Here’s a summary of the last sixty-six days.
Those who saw me and possibly the missus during December will know how much we tired ourselves out having fun and visiting what feels like everyone (but actually wasn’t) during the festive season.
Discovering that I’m a little part of history in a photo in the Globe museum (along with Eyelashjam and a small bunch of others) was a happy experience. Somewhere within me a small organ swelled with pride. Seeing M & K happily set-up in Brighton made both of us happy, and reunions back in Worcestershire and Buckinghamshire were as sweet as always.
We’ve been back in Davis for a month now, and I suppose we’re back in the swing of things. The tiny PS2 Rev Rehash gave us as a Saturnalia present has seen a lot of use, and led me to discover a very 21st century relationship dilemma which I’ll cover in a later post.
I taught my Cornish pastie and Chicken Tikka Masala course at the Co-op for a second time. No-one died. Even better, I’m working with my friend Ellis on a video project which will stay under wraps until it’s ready to be seen. I’m still procrastinating over writing the script for the short movie I hope to make with Jeff. It’ll happen soon; I feel it bubbling up through the mire of my consciousness. I’ve also had an idea for a non-narrative piece which explores reproduction and degeneration.
So far this year I’ve caught the following movies at the cinema:
I’m going to make an effort to catch Notes on a Scandal, Little Children and a nice little American social realist pic (don’t see many of those) called Flannel Pajamas. The Last King of Scotland starts at my work in the next couple of weeks, which makes it easy for me to see and I’m hoping we can get Paul Verhoeven’s Zwartboek (Black Book) mostly because it’s guaranteed to be up-front steamy and sexual, and there has been precious little sex on American cinema screens since the end of the Clinton era.
February 18th is the first day of the Chinese year of the Boar. Mmm. Pork. I’m looking forward to it already.
The only bad thing about the new Casino Royale is the title song by Chris Cornell. Discuss.
Yesterday was my mainstream movie day. I caught The Departed and The Prestige at my local evil five-plex. Both good movies, and The Prestige was particularly noteworthy for being a fantastic exploration of artifice and deception, a real puzzle of a movie where the structure of the movie is the same as the structure of its subject – magic tricks.
Of course, we were bombarded with trailers. When I’m putting together the programme at the Varsity I normally attach a maximum of four trailers. Any more than that and I feel like I’m taxing the audience’s patience. At the evil five-plex you get twenty minutes of advertising for products and TV programmes and then six or seven (I lost count) trailers for coming features. Each one is about two and a half minutes. Towards the end of the reel or trailers, just as Jeff and I were asking each other if we were ever going to see the movie, an extended version of this played. "One family. One journey. One child who would change the world… forever." It looks like it will play well to the churches by the interstate in most of middle America. It looks fairly well shot in a Milk Tray advert style.
However, just in case Americans are in danger of forgetting what Christmas is all about, here’s another movie to remind them, Christmas at Maxwell’s, "powerful story of Christian happenings" complete with a small boy with wiggly eyebrows and crackling dialogue.
Look at this neat album! All of the pages are blank.
And here’s a movie about the people who are most likely to watch the previous two movies, Jesus Camp. I feel I should preface this trailer with a warning. It’s almost enough to put you off your dinner.
For no particular reason, other than I’m in the mood and some of this stuff is classic, here are a bunch of songs (with videos) from early eighties Britain which prove the first seven years of my life weren’t all bad make-up, pixie boots and synthesizers (not that there’s anything wrong with a good Moog or an ARP).
1: The Clash – Rock the Casbah
To break everyone in nice and gently and to set the tone.
Here are some of the highlights of the 15th September binge. It’s about 15megs of streaming Quicktime file. Click on the “read the rest of this entry” link to see the video.
It looks like we’re seriously pursuing The Science of Sleep to screen at the Varsity in late August. I love Michel Gondry’s work, so I’m really excited. Check out the trailer here.
It looks as if both a French and English-language version were shot, which is unusual, but not unprecedented. I seem to remember a lame Gerard Depardieu comedy Mon Père ce Héros / My Father the Hero being shot in two different languages. Or maybe it was dubbed and my memory is inventing things.
My friend Jeff Palmer has started a blog about the experience of creating and selling a DVD of his own feature-length indie movie, On the Fringe. Is the indie film world all one-way traffic? How do you get people to notice your film when you don’t have the budget of, say, Miramax?
Last night Jeff and I went to an art show in a cannery. The place has lain empty since 1999, and is due to be demolished in the next few days. Last night, however, it was turned over to a group of University of California art students to do with as they wished. They put on a show called Uncanny.
I’m looking forward to Dominik Moll’s new movie, Lemming. The American trailer isn’t ready yet, so here’s the French one. It looks sexy, creepy and absurd all at once.
Philip French, of the Observer, made it his movie of the week. I hope we get it at my place of employment.
I feel as if I was a little rushed trying to get this together two weeks after the grand opening, especially with all the hours I’ve been putting in at the coffee shop and the cinema, but on Saturday 22nd April DVDs of The Varsity Story went on sale. For $10 you get the DVD, complete with bonus materials in an attractive plastic case. That’s about five quid in real money.
In the process I’ve discovered that Apple’s iDVD program is a real pain in the arse to use if you want to do your own design rather than using the default templates. If in the future I want to produce my own DVDs, I will need serious pro-level DVD authoring software, which isn’t cheap. I also learnt that Kinko’s doesn’t configure its colour laser printers properly, and that if you want a good quality print it pays to hook your own laptop up to their printers rather than using the shoddy worn-out Dell computers they provide.
I’m fairly happy with the results. To my eye it’s not perfect, but as far as I’m concerned the project is finished.
It’s on sale in Davis, both at the Varsity and the Hattie Weber museum.
Life has been hectic this past month, hence the lack of bloggage.
The big news is that the Varsity opened on Thursday 6th April to a capacity crowd, with all the usual paraphernalia. I didn’t have my camera with me, and to be honest I missed most of the fun stuff because I was busy changing into respectable clothes, but we had the Things We Like jazz trio on the roof of the box office playing to our guests as they walked up the red carpet and the Mad Cow String Band on stage.
Sinisa and Jon stood up, gave quick speeches and then called me on stage to introduce my documentary. I forced out a few words and then parted the curtains so my movie could run. It seems to have gone down very well. People laughed in all the right places, and even at bits that I didn’t expect to be so amusing. Afterwards I was nudged back on stage to take a bow. As I stood up I realised my buttocks had been clenched for the entire twenty minutes.
I’m coming closer to a final cut of The Varsity Story, the documentary I’m making for the opening of the Varsity Theatre (cinema, really) on 6th April. I’m happy with the content and how I’ve orgnised it. I’m pleased with the colour correction. The one big thing I have left to do is tidying up the sound editing. I’ve never done sound editing before, and for me it’s probably the dullest part of the editing process. Nearly the whole project was recorded too “hot,” so I need to add compression filters to everything in order to narrow the gap between the loudest and quietest parts of the movie. If I don’t fix this people will turn their TV’s up for the quiet bits and have their ears blown off when an interviewee coughs. Additionally, the Varsity has a brand new sound system which will expose my shoddy sound mix workmanship if I don’t do a good job.
Of course, the compression filter is just one of a number of sound treatments I need to apply. I’m very glad I don’t need to serve coffee tomorrow.
I’ve just discovered this link to a treasure trove of Public Information Films, some of which I remember seeing on the telly, like Say No to Strangers. There’s a creepily odd one called Strange Caller with a fantastic innuendo at the end, a young skinny Rolf Harris urging you to teach youngsters to swim, and about a hundred more.
Today I edited video for about ten hours, and painted for a further hour or so. Consequently I’m too tired to blog anything particularly worthwhile, other than to note that I’m excited about both projects, and that it feels good to be so busy working creatively. I do, however, have the mental juice left to point everyone at the latest Doonesbury cartoon. I must confess it took me a long time to actually get into Doonesbury as so much of it is about US politics, but it’s generally perceptive and clear-headed.
The painting, if you’re wondering, isn’t freehand stuff and it’s not really pointillism, although I’m painting lots of dots. It will all become clearer when I finish the piece and post pictures on the blog. I think it’ll look pretty decent. It’s about all sorts of things, but quite a large chunk is about how our lives are becoming a convergence of the physical and the digital.
We have an opening date for the Varsity, April 6th. I’ve also allowed myself to be roped in to promoting the opening night. All sorts of interesting plans are afoot, but for now you can check out the Davis Wiki entry for the cinema, and the official site, www.thedavisvarsity.com, a preliminary version of which is now online.
My movie, now titled The Varsity Story, is progressing fairly well. I’m shooting yet more material at some point in the next week. Any time I’m not in the coffee shop it seems I’m shooting or editing the movie, or promoting the cinema. It feels good to be busy working on something I care about.
The Varsity doumentary is coming along. I shot interviews two weekends ago, and now I’m amassing documents. Above is an original lobby card for the first movie to play in the Varsity cinema on June 9th 1950. By all accounts, it was a bit of a B movie, albeit one presented in glorious Technicolor.
Update: 1st Feb 2006
On further investigation, it seems that The Eagle and the Hawk was in fact the original Brokeback Mountain, as this alternative version of the lobby card conclusively proves. Who’d have thought? Thanks to Jeff for sending that along. ;-)
No, this is not a reference to the modernist poet. It’s an expression of excitement because my Final Cut upgrade arrived today. I’m ready to roll with editing, now all I need is some footage.
Also, I now have the funds I need to set the Varsity documentary in motion. It’s a tiny budget, but just about workable.
A mysterious box arrived in our apartment yesterday. The contents of the box made it possible to bring you this daft little film, (14.5mb). If you click on the link and just see a big blue Q and nothing seems to be happening, don’t worry. The movie just takes a while to download.
Technically, I think Courtney’s parents are the executive producers for the movie, as they provided the editing station. Thanks, in-laws!
