Last week I was reading a review by Arvan Reese of two films, Hot & Bothered and Bill & Desiree, on a website called SexGenderBody. I found the review via @TonyComstock, who made the latter film — which I’m sure is great! — but I want to quote from the review of the first film, which is a documentary about feminist pornography. Reese talks about the “question of how feminism and pornography intersect, coexist and define each other,” and goes on:
“In considering it myself I figured if women are choosing, then feminism is present. The presence of sex is really a non-issue, because it’s their work. It is important but if we were talking about women as carpenters or accountants, would we still be struggling to reconcile their jobs with feminism?
I think that because it is sex, societal norms give people permission to assume that their negative judgment has greater value and must be taken seriously.”
Link.
The Rumpus just published my long interview with Tamim Ansary about Afghanistan and the TV show Afghan Star. Excerpt:
I thought it’d be interesting to sit down with Tamim and subject my naive reactions to his expertise. The result was a fascinating, wide-ranging conversation nominally about the film, but really about Afghanistan in general, touching upon music, the country’s ethnic diversity, the status of women, democracy, the pariah status of artistic truth-tellers like Khaled Hosseini, the successive waves of modernization and backlash that have convulsed the country since 1918, “old men with beards saying horrible things,” and — as a weird bonus — a popular but creepy overweight singer who, in his heyday, walked upon women’s hair on his way to the stage.
The other day I read a rambling but entertaining essay over on Bright Lights Film Journal, called All Tomorrow’s Playground Narratives, which analyzed Kubrick’s Lolita in terms of — well, approximately anything that occurred to the guy, it would seem.
But it contained some memorable quotes, like “Lolita sits at the tape mark on a moebius strip of time dealing with our national obsession for nymphets,” and one really great passage claiming that Lolita was “really the first 70s movie”: (more…)
Reverse Shot — a geeky film journal that I recently discovered and have found interesting — has devoted the bulk of issue #25 to a symposium on the influential French director Claire Denis. Fourteen authors take on nine of Denis’ ten features (including two views of Beau Travail), her documentary Vers Mathilde, her early work and music videos, and they even interview her. The editors write: (more…)
“How many people want to spend their entire day — their entire life, I guess, at this point — collecting heads from rotting marine mammals? Well, Ray does!”
From Shelf Life, a 25-minute documentary you can watch here, about Ray Bandar, a volunteer for the California Academy of Sciences whose personal collection of skulls fills his home. (He’s pictured above with his collection in the 1960s.) The collection is predominantly of marine mammal skulls, but there’s a sizeable number of human skulls, bird skulls, large mammal skulls, rodent skulls, and even an elephant skull.
How does his wife stand it? She only asks one thing: no skulls in the bedroom, please.
Bandar was previously the subject of a 30-minute documentary called A Life with Skulls.
It’s funny how memory works. Budd Schulberg’s death yesterday got me thinking about On the Waterfront and The Harder They Fall, which got me thinking about Hollywood, and Schulberg’s collaboration, when he was 24, with the down-on-his-luck F. Scott Fitzgerald.
This in turn got me thinking about the fall of 2001 — actually, I’d been thinking about that time in my life anyway, so it was just another reminder — because that fall I was reading all of Fitzgerald, and I’d turned 24 myself just a couple weeks before 9/11, which remained in the distant background amid the general meltdown of my entire personal life in the foreground. (more…)
“With Tokyo constantly under attack by giant monsters, of course you need giant ultra-heroes to defend its citizens; but when something that catastrophic had become the mundane for almost a century, what happens to the hero’s status in society?
Do they stay as revered saviors, or would their popularity eventually wane? After all, the world of modern pop culture has a short-term memory. The premise behind Big Man Japan is a mockumentary about a tokusatsu hero whose life is closer to The Wrestler than to Ultraman.”
From a thoughtful review of a truly ridiculous movie, Big Man Japan, written by Arya Ponto over on Just Press Play. (The movie’s out on DVD now.) It’s a film that I kind of loved despite its flaws. (more…)
One of the highlights of this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival was the documentary New Muslim Cool, by director Jennifer Maytorena Taylor. It’s about Hamza (Jason) Perez, pictured above at left, an extraordinary person whose life evolved from that of a drug dealer to that of a rapper and spiritual leader.
The film can still be watched in full at the PBS POV site for now, although it was supposed to be taken down July 24th. I’ve written some words about it after the jump. (more…)
My first review for Greencine Guru is of Erik Nelson’s Dreams With Sharp Teeth:
Harlan Ellison is both famous (if not infamous) and obscure; it depends on who you ask. Over the past week, whenever I’d mention the documentary, Harlan Ellison: Dreams With Sharp Teeth, I’d get one of three reactions: “that’s the science fiction writer, right?” Or if they knew a little more: “Oh, that asshole.” But most often, it was a blank “who?” All of which suggests that Ellison is the ideal subject for a documentary: important and influential in a realm most viewers know little about, and just enough of a, well, jerk to make for compelling cinema.
One of the last living members of that amazing generation of science-fiction authors whose heyday was the 1960s and 1970s, Harlan Ellison is probably best known as the author of the Star Trek (Original Series) episode, “The City on the Edge of Forever.” Like many of his contemporaries – Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon, Ray Bradbury — he has produced a mind-boggling number of stories, books, and scripts, and has won a proportional number of awards.
The other night, all out of Netflix discs and desperate for something to watch, I found a series of videos up at the Internet Archive, courtesy the Prelinger Archives, that give guidance for living to the 1950s teen.
Some highlights: Lunchroom Manners, the classic that gave the band Mr. Bungle its name; Dating Do’s and Don’ts (aimed at boys; one hint: when you drop your date off at home, don’t just say “so long!” and wave goodbye); and The Fun of Being Thoughtful, which combines bad acting with an uninspiring script that tries — yet fails! — to quite make the intended point. Also don’t miss How to Be Well-Groomed, Exercise and Health, and that question I keep asking myself every day, Am I Trustworthy?
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