Alex Cohen's "Swedish Fish Man", a brawl on the Harvard campus for snack food

Here’s a curious little comedy, “Swedish Fish Man”, apparently filmed on the Harvard campus.

It’s on a short film channel of Alex Cohen, writer and director.

Three undergrads chase a lonely man who likes this particular fast food (Andrei Ciupan), who is seen as a physical challenge to three young men played by Ben Sorscher, Tim Waddick and David Frankle.
 
There are battle royales galore with a lacrosse raquet.  In a couple scenes Ben’s handsome character just seems to be cruising.  Or you could think of the men as like tomcats just chasing their share of the food. Humans are primates, are mammals, are animals, and they can’t make their own food.




 The woodwind music score is by Harvard percussionist Grant Hoeschst; it is lively (often in a 6/8 tarantella-like meter) and accessible, and tonal (which is unusual these days).
 
Somehow you think about the days when Mark Zuckerberg invented “The Facebook” on campus.

Picture: My visit to the campus, Aug. 2015

"I Am Puma": a Russian couple adopts a mountain lion cub who grows up to be a typical house cat

“I_Am_Puma” is a series of videos from Russia about a couple, apparently on the Arctic coast, who adopt a puma cub, Messi, because he is too small to survive in the wild.

He grows up to be a normal puma, slightly smaller than normal, and has a companion, a white hairless domestic cat.



In the video shown here, both cats have a GI-tract infection and are coming back to health but have to get shots at home.

Messi makes a lot of different sounds and behaves like a house cat.

In another video, he messages (grooms) the husband when the husband has a sore shoulder and back.
 
By Cm0rris0n - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1994869

"When You Find Out He's a Trump Supporter": Eduardo's (ideological) present to Tim Pool and "Economic Invincibility"

Eduardo Sanchez-Ubanell offers the comedy short film (four minutes) about a hookup, “When You Find Out He’s a Trump Supporter”, co-starring Max Emerson.



OK, this film stays barely within PG-13 territory.  Really just barely. Eduardo may be getting put through a hidden gauntlet.

Eduardo discovers MAGA stuff in the home of his date and gets a political lesson.  There’s nothing inconsistent about being conservative and gay, if you’re a cis male.  Maybe it should be right-leaning libertarian.

Could billionaire Peter Thiel, who spoke at the 2016 convention for Trump, be brought into the conversation?  What about his immortality or longevity project?  I think there is something about sea communities.  Thiel also wants to build a floating city to deal with climate change (or maybe he can build an O-Neill cylinder with artificial gravity and place it at the right LaGrange point).  That sounds like Dubai. He founded PayPal, which has become involved in a potential collusion scandal with the deplatforming of a few “conservatives” following Sargon of Akkad’s fall from Patreon (covered on my main blog).

Eduardo’s films demonstrate a quantum tautology: men are men. Even a John Fish video on quantum entanglement doesn’t change biological fact.

"Into the Streets": LGBT history in Cinerama at the Newseum

I visited the exhibit at the Newseum today called “Rise Up” on level 6.

On level 5, in the superwidescreen auditorium, the theater played a 30-minute short film giving gay history since the 1950s, “Into the Streets”, directed by G. Wlliamson, essentially filmed in Cinerama, as in the 1950s.

The centerpiece of the film is the course of the Stonewall Rebellion at the Stonewall bar in NYC on 7^th Avenue and Christopher, on June 28, 1969, with emphasis on the silly and negative way the press covered them.



The film also went back to the 1950s with the Truman and Eisenhower purges of gays from the government and the history of Frank Kameny.  In the mid 1960s, the atmosphere started to change, although you wouldn’t have realized it from the CBS special with Mike Wallace, “The Homosexuals”. Starting in 1970 in NYC (and 1972 in Dallas) there were big pride marches.

Homosexuality as practiced in private became much more acceptable in the 1970s, despite Anita Bryant.  The film covers the AIDS epidemic in the 80s and Reagan’s indifference, and the surprising fight over gays in the military, up to the time of Obama’s repeal in 2011.

Lou Chibbaro, from the Washington Blade, seems to do most of the narration.

There was also an eight-minute short film “The Hollywood Effect” in one of the booths on Level 6.

The short showed that gay material became acceptable on cable television and then indie film sooner than in large Hollywood films.

"Just One Tree", short film from The Outsidely

A new website from Australia, "The Outsidely",  set up to work on climate change offers a short film, “Just One Tree’, by Ramsay Taplin.



The film presents the tree as nature’s major tool for balancing the right amount of carbon in the atmosphere.

He also discusses the depletion of insects.

The bad news is cutting down of forests, in Australia, and in Brazil in the Amazon under a new right wing leadership.

The one question I would have is, large trees too close to a house can fall on them in storms.

When we played back yard softball in my childhood, there was a large poplar tree that knocked down a lot of home runs.  Then it was struck by lightning in 1986 and barely missed the house.

"Captain Marvel" and Hollywood's blatent but necessary consumerism

OK, Tim Pool gave “Captain Marvel” 4/10 on Twitter.  Indeed it comes from Marvel Studios and Walt Disney Pictures, directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck.

Brie Larson becomes the superhero;  we remember her from “Room” (Nov. 3, 2015).

Marvel Studios give a good synoptic gospel trailer  starting with an image of a defunct Blockbuster video store; later Carol Danvers questions whether her life is “real”.

I’ll skip it, but mention the controversy over the deleted Rotten Tomatoes “pre-reviews”, as Metro-UK and then Cinemablend explain things.   

The film seems to have done rather well at the box office.

But I can’t go along with the idea of seeing another comics movie that seems made just to push casting “diversity” as a new diversity Law.



“Economic Invisibility” has an interesting perspective about this film as becoming an example of “forced consumption”.  He even speculates about a future “Hollywood subsidy tax”. Well, as Nassim Nicholas Taleb pointed out (“Skin in the Game”), more of is need to return to the “real life” transaction economy rather than mull in the lucid dreams of the attention economy.

Picture: Reno, my picture, 2018/9.

"Leaving Neverland" (HBO) stokes the problem on "unpersoning" people from history for distantly past misdonduct

I don’t think I have time for the HBO documentary “Leaving Neverland”, but here is a  first hour from the Documentary Channel , or the HBO-sponsored trailer here for Dan Reed’s four-hour opus.

Now some men speak up about what they allege was going on.  But of course we had heard this at the time of the trial of Dr. Conrad Murray in 2009 for involuntary manslaughter for a cocktail of sleep medicines including propofol.  At the time, there was a lot of talk of inappropriate behavior on Jackson’s part with kids, which led to charges and an acquittal.

But the most interesting commentary comes from Tim Pool “Erasing Michael Jackson, Unpersoning Is Here and Is Getting Worse”.



The video has a cartoonish picture of a Book Burning Mobile (“Fahrenheit 451”, etc).  When a person’s moral reputation has been tarnished by revelations years later, they are to be removed from history. In fact, the radical Left wants to start over with its own pretend history.

Flickr photos of the Neverland ranch in the past are here.