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!
To close out an all too-short month, here’s a 3-minute micro
film by Eduardo Sanchez-Ubanell, “Your First Grindr Hookup”.
It borders on “R”, but it makes a real point – what do
people look for? What should they.
The other buy says, “I’m going to make this easy for you” and
invites Eduardo to consider leaving.
Good reason.Eduardo is forced “into the closet” literally
because Ben is hiding something (and "he thmooth").
Pic: Fort Lauderdale Beach, my pwn "luxury" stay in Nov. 2017. No hookups.
“Those Who Fight: A Call to Action” (2014) is a five-minute
short film about the death of an inmate in a prison in Burlington, NJ, directed
by Ford Fischer and Trey Yingst from News2Share, a media company that the
directors formed while undergraduates at American University in Washington DC.
The homeless person was Robert Taylor, 74, who had been
homeless.
The film has interviews (it starts with another previous inmate, who seems pretty intact) and a court hearing.
The film could be compared to some work by Andrew Jenks on
wrongful conviction issues (like “Dream/Killer”)
Picture: Scene in Atlantic City, NJ, March 2013, my trip
after Hurricane Sandy
OK, the Oscars, with no host, gave out more “best” awards to
women and PoC than ever before. Here is
the Oscars linkand watch-on-demand.
Not that I paid that much attention. But I might have to in
polishing my own DADT screenplay (“Epiphany”).
“Shallow”, sung and played by Lady Gaga, with Bradley Cooper
(“A Star Is Born” remake), is one of the most passionate songs ever.It comes across as a tesseract of my own
life. And here is a nice anecdote of
what was said between them.
Ford Fischer, one of the founders of News2Share and producer
of the upcoming “Transhuman”, supplied some footage to “BlacKKKlansman”(the Charlottesville footage), which had many
nominations. Spike Lee played bad sport on that film not winning. Chris Cuomo mentioned the footage tonight on
CNN (Monday, after Bernie Sander’s town hall) in discussing Trump’s
indifference to Charlottesville, but didn’t give Ford credit.
As far as making a statement, it’s OK that “Green Book” won
best picture. It is a valid history
re-enactment. I don’t think a comics movie like “Black Panther”
would have been made appropriate for best picture just because of the cast.
“Time for Love: Homophobia In 2018”, from BBC the Social.
In a park in Glasgow, Scotland, two gay men walk in the park
and contemplate what others think of their PDA.Do the heterosexuals feel a little less secure in their own lives
because of the gay men’s freedom?
“Alternative Math”, by IdeaMan, directed by David Maddox (10
minutes), as a satire on post-fact, post-Trump, post-Kellyann-Conway America.
A grade school teacher (Allyn Carell playing Mrs. Wells) insists that her pupil understand
that 2 + 2 = 4, when he insists it is 22.
The alt-right, anti-intellectual parents and school board
get her fired.But she demands $22000 in
severance rather than $4000.
You can set up a vector space where [2, 0] + [0,2] = [2, 2].
She is presented as the neo-liberal. Conservative values
consist only of social loyalty to your (white) tribe.
In kindergarten, I was ostracized (in 1949) for drawing pumpkins
as red.“Pumpkins are orange”, the teacher
insisted.I remained a “brownie” downstairs
(yes, the teacher used that terminology in an all-white pre-school) and the “elves”
go to go to the living room in the heavens upstairs.Already we had a hierarchal social class.
Ars Technica has posted 10-minute short film, “Sunspring”,
where a computer has written the screenplay, based on certain parameters, like a "48 Hour Film Festival" based on a line, a prop and a character.
The actual film (seems to come from the UK) is directed by Oscar
Sharp and starts Thomas Middleditch, Elizabeth Grey and Humphrey Ker.
The characters are floating in a spaceship pod set up like a
workshop inside and ponder whether they are real humans or robots or something
in between, as a new baby is supposed to arrive – but the old-fashioned way?It seems to matter what will happen when they
get close enough to the next star whose solar system they will visit. Middleditch is cute.
The Mechanical Shark Channel presents “Anarcho-Capitalism: The
Movie” (7 minutes).
In animation, it’s shown that the corporations have taken
over all governments, and the “non-aggression principle” of libertarianism is
exempted when the other guy strikes first.
People’s first names can be trademarked.
North Korea is conquered with a bloody nose, nuclear strike,
and EMP, to protect the MacDonalds in the south.
The film is animated, but at least one character has
artificial body hair.
Joshua Barone describes (in the New York Times) the re-opening Feb. 15 at the Lincoln Center Film Society in New York, of Sergei Bondarchuk’s 1966 7-hour adaptation of Leo
Tolstoy’s novel “War and Peace”
I recall seeing the 1956 VistaVision Di Laurentis version
from Paramount directed by King Vidor, with Henry Fonda. Mell Ferrer, and Audrey
Hepburn.
The novel and films correlate Napoleon’s invasion of Russia
and retreat with the personal lives (love triangles and aborted births) of an
aristocratic Russian family;it is in
some ways a kind of Russian “Gone with the Wind”, a period of history that
arguable led to the development of Marxism.
“The JFK Assassination: What Really Happened?” on the
Infographics Show.
This block-animated 7 minute short makes three interesting
points.Trump has talked about the
assassination and conspiracy theories. The Dallas police did not take good
written notes in interviewing Oswald, as they normally would.There was an “umbrella man” on a sunny day, who might have been there for a steganographic signal. And J. Edgar Hoover behaved suspiciously.
I had not realized Oswald was from Belarus (then part of the Soviet Union). The film asks why Ruby didn't just shoot him in the leg.
A separate group in 1979, after I had moved to Texas, found
a conspiracy to be likely, even though the Warren commission did not.
I’ll count this as a film within a film. Dr. Mike Varvhavski
annotates another video debate “Pro-Vaccine v. Anti-Vaccine”.
This is an episode of “Dr. Mike”, a young and handsome physician.
Mike points out that children with autoimmune disorders or
known reactions are not encouraged to take vaccines.They are protected by the herd immunity from
other children who are vaccinated. This is a subtlety of argument often overlooked.
A woman on Facebook once asked her friends how to protect
her unvaccinated daughter from measles in an area with an outbreak (Washington
state). But I don’t know if the child might have had a specific immune disorder.
Another Facebook friend used material from the National Vaccine
Information Center that appears to be government, but is a separate and
apparently biased non-profit, to justify exclusion from vaccines.
Gore Verbinski’s 2001 classic for Dreamworks SKG, “The
Mexican”, probably has a most politically incorrect title given today’s
polarization over immigration and accusations of race bating.
Brad Pitt plays Jerry Welbach, who is challenged by his mob
bosses to go into Mexico and retrieve an ancient gun called “The Mexican” and
bring it back.His girl friend Samantha
(Julia Roberts) objects by Jerry wants to stay alive.
The scenery of the movie works as a palindrome, where a
particular traffic signal in the early part of the film returns.
The gun indeed has a curse.
Picture: My trip, May 2018, actually a park in Harlingen, Texas near the border
“Room Closet”, From Entity Productions, is set in a
micro-bedroom, very simple.
Rafael (Diego Der Vidts, the more assertive of an 18-ish male pair, is ready to “come out” but Dan (Joseph
Keefe), his “best friend”, still wants the anchor of a girl friend first. But
he gets a text that she is indisposed.
It’s a familiar situation from my young adulthood, an idea
that would work in the 70s.
There was no director given in the credits. Certainly a very simple short film to set up.
OK, I’ll count “The ‘Learn to Code’ Meme Controversy” where
comedian Joe Rogan interviews indie journalist Tim Pool in Los Angeles, as a “short
film”, at least on a Sunday night.
Pool talks about the way some people who tweeted “learn to
code” at some laid-off journalists from Buzz-Feed and other places, and how Twitter
suspended them for “harassment”.
The “learn to code” meme is a distant reflection of Maoism,
probably with inversion.Back during the
1960s cultural revolution in China, intellectuals were made to take their turn
becoming peasants, actually on the urging of activists, not just Mao himself. It’s
like my applying for a job as proletarian letter carrier (or cab driver – now we
have Uber) after my “career ending layoff” at the end of 2001 after 9/11.Call it the “Learn to work meme”.
Then Pool gets into a discussion on how middle-range
journalists blew it on the Covington boys scandal.
He talks about the Silicon Valley left wing bias, but
actually it spreads to payment processors who are freaked out by the sudden
rise of the alt-right after Trump’s election, and sensitivity to their possible
complicity with the Russians. And “The Church of Jack Dorsey” seems to favor
intersectional faith.
Jesse Lupini’s “Iteration 1”, from Dust films (12 min).
A young woman wakes up in a white room with a bed.She has sixty seconds to escape before
dropping dead and starting a reincarnation cycle with copies of her previous selves
to help.
The cycles are called “iterations” and are numbered.The time speeds up in the film, as she gets
through twenty of them.
There are balloons, a tree that repairs itself, and drywall.She isn’t alone.Maybe she is supposed to be the mother of a
new civilization.
This concept bears a distant relationship to my screenplay “Epiphany”.
“Railroad Ties”, from the 2019 Sundance Film Festival and
Ancestry, directed by Sacha Jenkins (26 minutes).
The film traces six or more families back to roots,
including European immigrants and African Americans (including mixed), especially
associated with the Underground Railroad.People were arrested for assisting slaves fleeing north.
People with some slave blood maneuvered to be classified as "white".
The Harriet Tubman National Historical Park near Cambridge
MD also has a lot of related material.
The Good Stuff goes beyond
population demographics: “Is the World Running out of Children (and Sperm?)”
Geophysicist M. King Hubbert developed used the bell curve (in
a manner similar to Charles Murray) to predict peak oil and other resources,
and the same idea seems to apply to population, as richer countries now have
lower birth rates.
But the film makes the alarming suggestion that men are
producing less sperm, or less effective sperm, which sounds like a sci-fi scenario
(like “Children of Men”). Theories
include pollution, later marriages, more stress, and conceivably unidentified viruses.
Okay, for some advice, “7 Things to Know About Making Short
Films”, by Russell Haussenauer, from 2013, from his Friday 101 series, for Indy
Mogul.
He names a couple of examples where directors got started
with short films, like Martin Scorsese and shaving.
The maximum length for a short film is supposed to be 40 minutes,
but keeping them under 15 minutes, or even under 10, offers a better chance of
their getting into film festivals – and possibly hitting the Oscar circuit.
It’s often useful to make a short film that is later made
into a feature, to get investor money. Jorge Ameer did this with “The House of
Adam” (2006). I think this could work with “Bugcrush” (2006).What really happened to Ben?You might want to redo the opening with
younger actors.
So here is “Super Bowl LI: The Greatest Comeback in Super
Bowl History”. The game was played in
NRG Stadium in Houston Feb. 5, 2017 (shortly after Trump’s inauguration) for
the 2016 NFL championship.
The New England Patriots fell the behind the Atlanta Falcons
28-3 and wound up winning 34-28, after 8
minutes of the 3rd quarter, in OT.
The 39 year old Tom Brady led the rally, and there were two
controversial catches in the game.
Brian Resnickexplains what a lifetime of playing football
does to the human brain. Donald Trump doesn’t want his youngest son
to play (Face the Nation) .
Wikipedia attribution link for stadium picture by eschipur
from Flickr, under CCSA 2.0.
Brandon Rogers and Anthony Florian, with Baily Hopkins as
the intruder, play mental games in “Only Always You”, a short film by Anthony
Aguiar (all in anamorphic 2.35:1).
A homely man hides behind a tree in a park and draws
imaginary scenes in a notebook of his making out with a blond stranger. Then
the Nordic man’s girl friend arrives. She spoils his fantasy, well, almost. The drawing scenes are in black and white, but
what he sees and imagines is in color.
I suppose you could read race or POC issues into this 2013 film
(winner at Philadelphia QFest), although the film was shot before society had
gotten so polarized.
The playful music score sounds French and impressionistic.
Allen Pan and Sufficiently Advanced show us “How to Play 4D
Chess”
First, Allen shows us 3D chess, as 4 16-square boards stacked,
which can be projected onto 3 dimensions. The moves of the pieces are derived
algebraically.
Then 4D chess, on a tesseract (as from the movie “Interstellar”
has a 256-square playing matrix as a projection of four 3-D stacks and again
the same algebra (quaternion) defining the movies.
Allen loses with Black to Diana in 3D’s and then with White
in 4D’s when he blunders a pawn to a knight. Petroff’s Defense doesn’t work quite
the same way as what he was used to.
The term 4-D Chess has been applied to Trumpian politics. You can check "Economic Invincibility" on "I'm Sick of 4-D Chess". Note: chess piece team designation has nothing to do with race.
Eduardo Sanchez-Ubanell presents his short film “Why I Left
BuzzFeed” (5 min). He even shot this film in anamorphic 2.35:1. Maybe it will go to virtual reality.
Eduardo (with the world's best body) boxes with a cartoonish caricature of the BuzzFeed
head (seems to be played by Michael Henry -- but Zach Graves is given by the opening credits). The film emphasizes Ubanell’s own
physicality, although I don’t think he would favor a “Fight Club” (1999) or
play “Cinderella Man” (2005).
He mentions the fact that BuzzFeed was willing to replace
employees with interim “fellows”.
The factual evidence of the recent BuzzFeed article
implicating Trump through Michael Cohen is controversial.Andrew Cohen discusses this at Brennacenter.
BuzzFeed, like many media outlets (even large ones) jumped quickly on the Convington story, but then presented Nick Sandmann’s side later.
Later David Brooks opined what sounds
like a reasonably balanced account while showing how easily social media viral
spread of anger and misleading impression may damage lives.BuzzFeed does NOT appear to be a target of
litigation according to a Cincinnati Gannettnewspaper.
Tim Pool has covered the layoffs at several mid-sized media
companies including BuzzFeed in January, as related to business model sustainability
problems that led the companies to indulge in click-bait.
Ubanell has an earlier film on his channel in April 2018 “Top
Five Things I’ve Learned Working at Buzzfeed”. It’s easy to look up on the channel.Main advice: be quick.
Ubanell appears in another short film reviewed here Oct. 23,
2018, “Pretty Privilege”.