This blog will present news items about the motion picture business, with emphasis on lower budget, independent film in most cases. Some reviews or commentaries on specific films, with emphasis on significance (artistic or political) or comparison, are presented. Note: No one pays me for these reviews; they are not "endorsements"! Starting in May 2016, many of the reviews for new feature films have been done on a hosted Wordpress site, and this blog now mostly does shorts and older films.
Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!
“Apollo 11”, directed by Todd Douglas Miller, is a film that
recreates the event that put man on the Moon on July 20, 1969, from archival
footage only, some of the film in 70mm.
The film was released theatrically by Neon on March 1, 2019
and shown on CNN on Sunday, June 23, 2019 by CNN Films. Universal Pictures
released the DVD.
The astronauts wore what amounts to Holter monitors
underneath their spacesuits, mostly on the lower ribcages, that transmitted
vital signs that were reported on the flight.
July 20, 1969 was a Sunday. The mission took from July 16 (Wed AM) to July 24. The achievement marked a major change in attitude toward technology as an instrument of freedom. Stonewall had occurred just three weeks before.
“Song of Parkland”, directed by Amy Schatz, is a 29-minute HBO documentary about the students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in
Parkland, FL in a drama and chorus class, taught by Melody Herzfeld.
The students and teacher heard the shots, and Melody
sheltered them for two hours in the Feb. 14, 2018 school shooting until police
led them out.
Two months later, they resume production of a musical, and students
composed portions of it, like a song “Beautiful Things Can Grow”.
Eventually the students perform in Boston, New York,
Washington and San Francisco. They win a Tony Award at the end.
Several students appear and talk about the production, like
Alex Wild and Cameron Kasky.Some of
Emma Gonzelez’s speech from March 24 in Washington.
“State of Pride” (2019), directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey
Friedman, from YouTube Originals and Telling Pictures (71 minutes, 2019), presents
(small town) Ohio-born Raymond Braun as an athletic, “masculine” gay man visiting
pride in Washington DC, Tuscaloosa AL, San Francisco, and Salt Lake City, and
encountering LGBTQ+ people very different from him. The events seem to come from 2018.
Braun says he outgrew his “sassiness” and became a
mainstream-valued and athletic young adult man, but “still” gay. He wrote his mother
a 16-page letter coming out and was reassured by her response, before he went
on the tour to make the film.
In Tuscaloosa, he met the trans community, and especially
POC and underprivileged. He learned about systematic violence against that
community, and noted the cultural separation from white gay men, including
racial problems in the deep south. He is
told that trans pride should be part of the regular pride weekend, and is often
viewed as a “protest” rather than pride.
In San Francisco, he meets a young man who had fled Syria
through Lebanon.It was not clear
whether he was a refugee or asylum seeker (or whether he was Christian or
Muslim, as religion was immaterial).
He also met a young man who had been a gymnast but broken
his neck in an accident in 2013. He was now in a wheel chair but had regained
some leg use.He didn’t even realize he
was paralyzed for a few moments after trying to get up. He was also Mormon, and
had done an LDS mission, and was familiar with the LDS member forced support of
Prop 8 a few years before,Braun accompanies
him to a pride march in Salt Lake, where he meets and has dinner with the
Mormon family.
This little film has quite a narrative, matching some of the
larger films around.
The film is offered for free viewing. It would seem that YouTube (given the current controversy) could help content creators by offering some films for rent ($3.99) from documentary or news creators affected by current issues.
Picture: Tuscaloosa, May 2014, my visit, in area leveled by 2011 tornado
I’ve not talked about the Mandelbrot set here before. So
here is “The Mandelbrot Set: How It Works and Why It Is Amazing”, by Jimi.
It is a set of numbers c on the complex variable plane for
which f-c(z) = z**2 + c does not diverge when starting at z-0.It is a fractal of self-similarity, which
generates amazing shapes with cardioid edges that seem to grow like plants.
This mathematical beauty seems to point to how life would
evolve in an organic soup. It’s very existence seems fundamental almost to
consciousness and reproduction.
This is a relative short video, but there are much longer ones
on YouTube which we can come back to later.
Eduardo Sanchez-Ubanell offers the satirical short, “What if
‘IT’ Was Gay”, with Max Emerson, Michael Henry, Tony Directs and Ruba Wilson.
The short film is a satirical skit based on the Clarabelle-looking
character from Stephen King’s 1986 novel, made into a miniseries in 1990 and a
film in 2017.
If you listen to the dialogue (like “IT’s” lines at around
1:05) you wonder if there is some satire of the Maza-Crowder-gate and Voxadpocalypse.Ubanell’s films and videos seem non-political
(usually about cis male gay life), until you look at the jabs behind the lines
(he made fun of Buzzfeed in an earlier film by posing as a prize-fighter). This little film seems to want to poke fun at
how silly everyone has been recently.
I’m also reminded of baseball player Bryce Harper’s meme “clown
questions”.
TexFilms offers maybe the best film about Titan, the largest
moon of Saturn, yet, “Titan Revealed” (2018, 35 minutes).
The film gives the most comprehensive picture of the geography
of Titan than I have seen, with descriptions and simulated scenery of the large
lakes near the north pole as it emerges from Titanium winter.
The film is in even sections, the last two of which deal
with what like would be like.It would
involve hydrogen as fuel, acetylene, and methane as a by-product, like carbon
dioxide of animal respiration on earth.Would
the methane become a fuel for “plants”?There has been other speculation that life on Titan might consists of
sheets in its lakes that are colonial like slime molds on Earth.
I’ve seen animated designs of the proposed submarine to explore
the lakes before.
See also “Titan: A Place Like Home”, TV blog, Sept. 20, 2013,
BBC.
Cool Worlds imagines an “Interstellar Highway System” (31
min).
Is this like the Interstate highway system as Ike imagined
it?
In conjunction with the Halo Drive, the speaker imagines a
slingshot propulsion system where the traveler “steals” energy from a binary or
circular black hole system.
Just as with the US railroad system, interstellar
civilization “cities” would develop near the black holes.
Then constant acceleration and time dilation would allow “superman”
to traverse the universe in his own lifetime.
You would have to accept the idea that people age at
different rates.
