The Onion headline: MTV Movie Awards Snubs Director Jonas Mekas Yet Again. The fake-quote gem:
“It is a travesty that Mekas’ stark vision of elegiac melancholia has not been rewarded with the coveted Golden Popcorn statue,” Boston University film studies professor Ray Carney said. “His [1997] film Letter From Nowhere—Laiskas Is Niekur No. 1 should have easily walked away with Best On-Screen Duo, or Best Kiss, or at least Best Ass.”
Tee hee and everything, but there actually isn’t a huge gulf between Mekas’ most recent major project and the kind of thing you might see on post-Tila Tequila MTV.
In 2007, the 85 year-old experimental filmmaker made one short video per day with his camcorder, and then uploaded all of these videos to his website. The videos are diaries, confessionals, interviews, collages. In this one, he holds the camera right up to his face and laments “all the papers making jokes about Paris Hilton.” On Day 52, he films a full-page shot of Britney Spears mid head-shave and asks, “Why don’t they leave her alone?”––beating Chris Crocker to the same sentiment by seven months.
The videos were available for download for free on the day of their release; now, each one can be purchased for $1.99 each. But some of the clips have made it to YouTube, like Britney clip, and like the segment above. On Day 93, Mekas spent about six minutes with Harmony Korine, who reminisces about the time he tried to get the legendary filmmaker to “smoke heroin.” “It failed, completely,” Mekas laughs from behind the camera. He then promises (threatens?) to edit footage of Korine at his most drug-addled into a film, “someday, when you are really, really famous.” To which Korine responds: “Yeah, that’ll do wonders for my career.”
Forget about winning an MTV Award––MTV should give Jonas Mekas his own show.
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SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth