film phlegm

Ugh...enough Web 2.0! It makes me want to vomit on myself!

dunedonkey — Thu, 08 May 2008 05:01:04 GMT

There’s no doubt I am officially done with Web 2.0. However, every time I think I’m done, a new, fun, and amazing site appears out of nowhere…so below is my attempt to categorize my current favorite Web 2.0 sites (with links to my profiles in case you feel so compelled to follow/add/fan/stalk me). I will update this list periodically as I get tired of certain sites and ejaculate over others.

Web 2.0 List (Version 1.0)

Facebook (Profile) - Still the champion of Web 2.0 sites, Facebook is using its strength in sheer size, breadth, and numbers to allow other Web 2.0 sites to plug in, which is a compelling proposition since people are sick and tired of having profiles on a bajillion sites and having to log into each to burn inordinate amounts of valuable time doing nothing. Luckily, all the sites I mention below have Facebook applications which allow me to, if not update, then at least view activity on them in one single place. Facebook is also the first Web 2.0 site on which a good majority of my friends, even the technophobes from the middle of Kansas, reside.
Twitter (Feed) - The most brilliant and simple concept to hit Web 2.0 since this whole disgusting phenomenon started. It’s essentially a personal RSS feed of my status/random thought/rant at any point in time, easily updatable from a cell phone. Considered by those in the industry a “microblog”, Twitter boasts an update field that is limited to only 140 characters, so you literally can’t write more than 15 words. I think it’s badass…and it plugs directly into my Facebook status message which is ideal. UPDATE: I use Twitter so much now, I’m sure it’s annoying the crap out of my Facebook friends…so I pulled it from Facebook.
GoodReads (Profile) - This site is allowing me to give away all my real books when I’m done reading them. I used to have a sentimental attachment to them, but what I realized is that attachment was purely a display of egotism and self-worth to others. When friends visited my apartment, I wanted them to physically see what I had read and I wanted to be proud of my literary accomplishments. Well, isn’t that what Web 2.0 is about anyway? Everyone claims to keep their books so they can reread them. I call bullshit, asshole. You keep them so you can feel smart around people you’re trying to impress. With GoodReads, I can just point my friends to my profile and they can see how fucking smart I am. It’s also a good place for reviewing the books you’ve read, connecting with your friends and getting their recommendations and providing them with your own. The UI isn’t great, but it’s still the best book review site out there.
Yelp (Profile) - Ugh yes I opened a new account with Yelp after deleting my first one. Ugh it’s sucking up my life again. And no, I have not become more reserved the second time around. I’m just as obnoxious and incoherent as I always was. There are many levels on which Yelp succeeds. Unfortunately, as a local review site, which is its primary purpose, it’s not as successful. However, Yelp is a big reason why I’m in this Web 2.0 space and why I’m somewhat enjoying it (I think). It does a great job of providing a local San Francisco venue where I can converse with like-minded intellectuals. I’ve managed to make some amazingly close friends over the past two years and I thank Yelp for that. Unfortunately, it’s been matched by an equal amount of time-sucking frustration. My reviews have become far more useful, and I am enjoying conversing with my closer friends the second time around. If you want to see my frustrations with Yelp, check out my review of it.
Tumblr (Blog) - It’s blogging at its simplest. No frills, no crap. It’s a step above the microblogging that is Twitter, but it’s not the rich blogging that you see on Blogger or TypePad. Personally, when I want to jot down a few thoughts and get all philosophical, this is where I like to do it. It’s good for the casual blogger like me. And as we’ve seen in Web 2.0 over and over again, it’s “the simpler, the better” that succeeds.
Spout (Filmblog) - Honestly, the UI is total crap. You can tell this site was not created in Silicon Valley. It would drown. Some asshole could come up with a better site from their living room on a weekend (like Pierre Omidyar did with eBay back in 1995). In fact, this site even looks as janky as eBay. But that said, there is NO GOOD WEB 2.0 site for film reviews (one that’s completely user-generated content I mean). So Spout is the best thing we’ve got and I don’t mind it. The conversation threads are fun and interesting. Get that many film buffs in a room and it’s bound to. As a Spout Maven, I’m a part of this elite crew of film buffs that gets a FREE MOVIE every month on DVD which I need to review on the site. They’re lesser known films by smaller, independent production companies which makes it even more fun. For that reason alone, they get a huge thumbs up. I think it’s a brilliant idea.

Originally posted on:phlegm.

Yet another beautiful and well-executed French drama

dunedonkey — Thu, 08 May 2008 04:00:42 GMT

Ok...I developed a huge crush on Mia Hansen-Løve last night. If she really is still engaged to Olivier Assayas, I might as well just go throw myself off a cliff.

I saw All is Forgiven at the San Francisco International Film Festival last night. Hansen-Løve took a story which isn't extraordinary isn't even all that compelling, and she personalized it. She turned into a beautiful story. It was a very well-made grass roots debut.

Reasons why I have a crush on Mia Hansen-Løve:

Her eye for casting is unbelievable. With the exception of Marie-Christine Friedrich, the rest of the cast was made up of virtual unknowns. In fact, as she stated in Q&A, she found Constance Rousseau on the street and brought her whole family into the film...and she was unbelievable.
Her taste in music was awesome. She clearly stated that she did not appreciate film scores, that she preferred to take traditional songs as the backdrop for her film. She made a very unique choice by picking two Irish songs and two Scottish songs for the film's music, and they fit so appropriately, even though the film was Franco-German in language.
She is an artist of conviction and principles. Every choice she made was a deliberate one, and it shined through in every shot of the film. During the Q&A she very explicitly stated that every decision was made for a reason and she made no apologies for them. It was then that I knew I was in love. :)

The story follows a man and woman who have a child together (a story based on Hansen-Løve's real-life uncle). The man, a writer, played by Paul Blain struggles with his eccentricity as a creative mind and turns to drugs. The drugs take a toll on his relationship with his Austrian wife, Annette, played by Marie-Christine Friedrich. A catalyctic event takes place and she is forced to leave him with their child, Pamela.

Fast forward 12 years, and we see Pamela as a beautiful, young woman. She's given the opportunity to reunite with her father...

The story was well-told. The French have an uncanny knack of making the most seemingly plain story so beautiful, through the use of subtle but very profound acting, simple film technique, and beautiful scripts, and All is Forgiven is no exception. Paul Blain was so amazing that he really made an impression on me. I hope to see him do more films.

Hansen-Løve's ability to manage the camera and to use it to pull the most of the characters on the screen was awesome. She used close-ups, silences, and it made the film flow so smoothly.

It's obvious that Hansen-Løve's experience working for Cahiers du Cinema gave her a good grounding and allowed her, as a critic, to put her money where her mouth is by producing a brilliantly made film. I look forward to so much more from her.

It reminded me how much I hated high school...

dunedonkey — Thu, 08 May 2008 03:09:58 GMT

Have you ever been catapulted head first into a brick wall at 150 mph? Now imagine that brick wall was high school, and imagine that catapult was American Teen.

Last night, I was instantly transported back 13 years to my high school days. The nervous tick came back. The pain pulled from the very depths of my innermost, repressed soul came shooting to the surface. I was reminded of my own high school experiences, the same experiences that molded me, the tough love I received from my peers, and the thick skin I developed as a result. But I was also reminded of how unhealthy an environment adolescence can be in the US for those living it.

Nanette Burstein documented the lives of Warsaw, Indiana high school students, immaculately picking out what almost seemed like caricatures of the different types of students we all knew in high school. We follow four main students: the jock, the popular girl, the artsy girl, and the band geek. We become intimately involved in all aspects their high school lives; the pressures they face from their peers, their parents, and their futures. However, these students weren’t caricatures, they were real, dealing with the reality that has become the disgusting state of American teen culture taken from American pop culture and exploited in the worst manner ever in our public schools.

What this film made very clear, is that the state of parenting, of education, of adolescence, of human values is so amazingly warped, that American families have completely lost touch with reality. The things that matter most are the things that should matter least and vice versa. We’ve led such sheltered lives that we forgot what it means to be human, and American Teen documents this reality very well.

I realized that high school was no longer about getting a scholastic education, rather high school has taken on a far larger role of parenting - forcing our kids into the harshest of environments into a sort of “baptism by fire”. Parents have forgotten how to raise kids, and teachers have forgotten how to teach them. The best education a kid is getting in high school is from other kids.

I could pontificate on the deplorable state of American families and American education, but all you need to do is watch this film to realize how scary a state it’s in.

That said, Nanette Burstein did a fantastic job of filming American Teen. There were warmer moments throughout the film, but the dark undercurrent of each of these moments was never swept under the rug, and lingered uncomfortably among the viewers. I feel like this film is like taking medicine, it’s something you hate to do, but you know you have to…if for no other reason than to educate and remind yourself what it means to be young, to be human, to be a parent, and to influence the fragile and vulnerable lives of those around you.

The first great 90s period piece...

dunedonkey — Sun, 04 May 2008 13:24:04 GMT

I had the opportunity to see The Wackness tonight at the SF International Film Festival.

It was great. That may sound trite, but in this case, “great” constitutes “big” and “bold” in same way that an adventure or a road trip is “great”. The Wackness is the first great road trip into what I like to call The Identity-Crysis Decade (that hasn’t been coined yet, has it?), where American teens struggle to identify with anything . Generation Why was a generation thrown out to fend for itself while their Baby Boomer parents struggled to cope with their own mid-life crises.

Josh Peck plays a 17 year old kid, a drug dealer, who finishes high school, and missed being a teenager. Never had many friends, never had a girlfriend, never had sex. He wasn’t your typical shallow kid, but a profoundly intimate kid, with legitimate dreams and aspirations. When he and his parents are facing eviction, he's forced to be both the kid trying to grow up and the parent trying to stay young. He's helped through this when he develops a connection with his shrink and client, Dr. Jeffrey Squires (or Geoffrey if you saw his diploma).

Dr. Squires is the middle-aged baby boomer, who sees in Shapiro what he simultaneously saw in himself, a kid who didn’t know how to deal with adulthood.

They lean on each other and use the opportunity to grow, and to learn about themselves through their relationship. Their adventure is one with ups and downs, with sad realizations, and happy discoveries. In the end growing up is just another part of living, and they both make that very clear.

As a debut film, there is no doubt that Jonathan Levine’s intimate, personal memoir of the 1990s, the identity that all Americans tried so desperately to unearth, was perfectly portrayed through the life of a Generation Why teenager and a Baby Boomer adult. The script was well-written, and the acting by veteran Sir Ben Kingsley (who I would never have cast in this role, but I was proven wrong), and an eager young star Josh Peck was equally provocative. The Wackness (unlike Juno, see my review of it) is an example of a film that is independent…in thought - that you can take a period that is so hard to understand and to give it some meaning through the eyes of two people who helped define it. The direction was likewise very well done with great use of lighting and filters, perfectly framed shots, a great soundtrack, and characters who were fresh and exciting. The pop culture references got a little heavy-handed, but they weren't enough to change my opinion of the film.

I look forward to tons more great work from the cast and crew of this film. Definitely see it this July!

Brilliant matter-of-fact fillmmaking

dunedonkey — Fri, 02 May 2008 15:57:15 GMT

To call this film brilliant would be an understatement.

Few films come out nowadays which attempt to breach the boundaries of the status quo and explore the idea of radical, new filmmaking.

Solitary Fragments is one of those films. And it inspires on so many levels. It is a film which excels in subtlety and uses this subtlety to evoke strong, deep emotion out of its viewers.

The plot follows two parallel storylines which share nothing more than a relationship between three characters that live together. The first storyline is that of a woman, Adela, who leaves her small town life to forget her past and to forge a new future in Madrid with her one-year old son. The second is that of Ines and her family and the strong, but tense relationship they all share. Tragedy strikes twice through out the film, once on each storyline, and the characters are forced to pick up the pieces in order to move on with their lives.

The film is a feat in storytelling. It prides itself on the ability to set aside acting in favor of true emotion and real dialogue using silence, awkwardness, joy, sadness. I'm not sure I've ever seen a film where I felt like I was sitting in the living room with the characters and sharing their emotions as if I were talking to them directly. Solitary Fragments accomplishes this better than any film I've seen.

And the basic storytelling is only a small part of it. It's hard to ignore the many technical innovations the director and editor chose to employ to tell the story further. The use of multiple cameras to film a single scene and to cut them together simultaneously and splitting the screen was really incredible. I've never seen anything like it. There wasn't a single moment of music. Silence was the film's score. Finally, there wasn't a single tracking shot or pan throughout the entire film. The cameras were always stationary (with the exception of the POV shots from within the vehicles, where the vehicles moved, but the camera was still stationary). Every shot was filmed from a stationary camera and the characters moved in and out of the frame. I've never seen anything like it before.

It's a film I can only watch once for a myriad of reasons. But it only takes one viewing to fully appreciate the enormity of such a film.

Really blown away...

dunedonkey — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 01:06:04 GMT

Planet B-Boy is a fantastic film about the underbelly of the international breakdancing scene. Like in any other artform, what's been exploited and what is known to the public is the crap...the passionless, marketed, undermining crap. When you dig deeper into the underground and figure out what the artform is truly about, you leave refreshed and invigorated and Planet B-Boy does just that.

I thought the director did an excellent job in bringing to the surface the intensity and passion of the b-boys. The film wasn't perfect. I think it gets a little too personal and sways from the details of the breakdancing movement, but I do appreciate what Benson Lee was trying to get at with the pressures these teens deal with in trying to prove the credibility of their passion to their parents and their respective societies. I especially love how Lee ventures all around the world to show the different countries and their diverse personalities in how they prepare for what is the World Cup of breakdancing.

A must-see for everyone who has an appreciation for a unique underground artform.

Top 5 Most Important American Films Ever Made

dunedonkey — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 20:06:08 GMT

Not my favorite. Not the best...but...

The MOST IMPORTANT and WHY WAS IT IMPORTANT?

Rules/Guidelines:

YOU CAN'T GIVE MORE THAN 5. Five is the absolute limit.
IMPORTANT means it had a profound impact on the film industry, on art, on social change, on mankind.

My choices:

Birth of a Nation (DW Griffith):

The first American epic. It was longer than any film and invented the "feature-length" film.

The single most controversial American film ever made. Some credit it with reinvigorating the KKK and inspiring a new wave of racism to take hold in the US.

It proved that film could be as important a social medium as an entertainment medium.

The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola):

No film epitomizes the golden age of American cinema more than this film.

This film pioneered the frontier of American epics and changed the face of American filmmaking on an artistic level, giving American film it's first ever unique look and feel.

Star Wars: A New Hope (George Lucas):

This film redefined the Hollywood genre with groundbreaking special effects, mass appeal. This was the first American blockbuster.

For better or for worse, this film sent Hollywood into spiraling into the 80s with summer special effects blockbusters driving much of it's annual revenue.

2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick):

It was so technologically advanced, it inspired everyone to start looking into their own future with a different light.

Few realize that this film kicked NASA into high gear propelling our space program into the forefront of the Cold War.

Citizen Kane (Orson Welles):

It wasn't just the greatest American film ever made, it was the first American film that proved that film was a legitimate art form and not just an entertainment medium.

Orson Welles was 26 when he made it. Seriously. 26.

A sad family drama based on the director's life

dunedonkey — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 23:04:27 GMT

Had the opportunity to see this at the San Francisco Asian-American Film Festival. It probably wouldn't have been my first choice, but a friend who is a big Joan Chen fan really wanted to see it and since I didn't get to see any other films, I went.

It's a story about the Tony Ayre's (the director) life in Australia (and Hong Kong) growing up with a mother who moved from man to man, place to place, dragging her children along with her. She's a beautiful woman who gets men to fall in love with her, but depends on them for her and her childrens' income and well-being. This dependency ultimately leads these men to leave her driving her into a state of alcoholism, chronic depression, and attempted suicide leaving her 10ish year old son and 12ish year old daughter to deal with her self-absorbed nonsense.

The film takes almost directly from Ayres' life and from what I understood, followed it very closely. In fact, he and his sister make an appearance at the end of the film. It's a sad, sad story and I feel like it's been told so many times before, but the acting was excellent, the music was wonderful, and the film was well made in general. Sometimes a film can be a therapeutic release for an artist, and I give Tony Ayres four stars for telling his story.

Better than your average heist film

dunedonkey — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 22:37:17 GMT

My expectations were pretty low going in, but I left entertained. I think what intrigued me more about this film is that it was based on a true story. The plot was a little more complex than your average bank heist plot because it's based on the fact that by breaking into the safe deposit vault of this bank the villains (as they were often called throughout the film) opened a Pandora's Box of lies, deceit, treachery, politics-gone-bad, bad cops, porn and all the juicy details of the corrupt lifestyles of the rich and famous.

Jason Statham was pretty subdued in this role thankfully. In fact, he's made it to be quite the James Bond character in this film. Charisma. Good Looks. Intelligent. Saffron Burrows was stunning. She did well. But truth be told, I think I was too taken aback by her amazing beauty.

It was a well-shot film with a more complex plot. I think there were up to four parties that got incriminated and had a stake in making sure these bank robbers were killed. Technically, it gave a retro feel at points...but didn't stick as consistently close as I would've expected. Jason Statham did not look like a 70s bankrobbing villain. That said...the film does little more than provide filmmaking eye candy, with a light layer of substance on top.

Really well-done corporate conspiracy drama...

dunedonkey — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 19:57:35 GMT

Yeah...I was really blown away.

I had lowered expectations going in...and left incredibly refreshed. The plot...not all that original. Big corporation is killing people because of some sly, underhanded scheme it's trying to cover up. We've all heard it before (The Constant Gardener, Syriana, The Insider). Blah blah blah.

Where this film excels is in its execution. It was phenomenal. The use of silence, camera movement, fluidity, sequencing, and good acting. Tony Gilroy did an outstanding job of pulling it all together. He took all the great elements of filmmaking and made them work together so well, that I see very few flaws with the film.

In terms of It might be George Clooney's best performance and I think he deserved the Oscar nomination. I also think Tom Wilkinson did great. But I really don't think Tilda Swinton deserved the nomination or the Oscar...but that's just me.

I think this film was cursed to come out in a year of such great films. 2007 really was a year of well-made budget films...and although I hate the Oscars, I do like when a film that actually deserves to win, wins (I suffer from Hollywood hypocrisy like the rest of you). I think that in any other year, Michael Clayton would've been a true contender.