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!
New York Times Op-Docs presents a short film by Joris
Debeij, “How Autism Feels: From the Inside”.
This seems to be filmed in Florida. The life of Jordan Kamnitzer,
who works in retail but has few social interactions, but plays jazz piano well,
is shown, as he befriends a woman with more severe autism.
Although Asperger syndrome is medically part of the autism
spectrum, in practice it works very differently, especially in the tech
workplace. James Damore considers himself somewhat autistic or Asperger-like (Quillette story),
but what is different is separating himself from more collective, tribali expectations
of behavior.People with Asperger’s
often communicate very clearly on matters outside of personal relationships,
and seem charismatic when on their own home turf.
“Lemmino” has a short film “Cicada 3301: An Internet Mystery”,
about a bizarre Internet treasure hunt – actually three of them, the first of
which started in January 2012.
The treasure hunt consisted of problem-solving problems on
4chan, sometimes leading to obscure websites, some of them on the Dark Web, and
making at least one physical trip to find an object with a QR code to be
scanned (rather like a paper wallet for cryptocurrency).
Some of the clues were in some specific books, like “Self-Reliance”
and “Liber Primus”.
It is unclear what the purpose of the exercise was, other
than to assemble a team of super-smart people.
I remember that the old Howdy Doody show had a "treasure hunt" in the real (cartoon) world.
Joe Scott asks “Is This Geometric Structure the Theory
of Everything?”
OK, quantum gravity links general relativity to
quantum mechanics, the large to the small.
Scott discusses a UCLA professor now in Hawaii who
developed a theory of E8 Lie Groups, Octonions that when projected make a beautiful
flower-like design. At all the nodes of this structure, every possible subatomic
particle can be predicted, as well as its behavior.
He also explains God, of consciousness, which is
necessary to perturb the smallest pixels in the structure to create a universe.
Living things come along, to oppose entropy, and look
after the universe, because they can make choices.
Does a biological lineage give continuity to
consciousness (vicarious immortality)?
Welcome to tribalism. The idea of
an infinite geometric structure gives the idea of immortality some meaning.
“Bitcoin: Beyond the Bubble” (Full Documentary), directed by
Tim Delmastro, 35 minutes, with interviews and animation, from 100th
Monkey Films, gives a lucid explanation of how Bitcoin and decentralized
digital assets evolved.
The film starts out with a photo of Bretton Woods, NH, as it
looked in 1944 when the world’s leading democracies set up the gold standard,
which Richard Nixon dissolved on August 15, 1971, creating the concept of fiat
money.That’s odd, as it led to Nixon’s
price controls, as I recall.
But the dollar note, backed up with the gold reserve at Fort
Knox, had always been the world’s “reserve currency”.Porter Stansberry and even Ron Paul have said
that removing that idea could lead to world financial collapse.
Digital currency is backed by the work it is done to create
it, solving complex mathematical problems (akin to mining gold). The proof of
value is stored on a decentralized but linked ledger called the blockchain.
Therefore no government can meddle with its value.
Other “value” could be stored on the blockchain, such as
Internet content, in danger of being taken down by censorship. In a sense that gives
the content potential value convertible to tokens (“dark currency” maybe).
The film compares the block chain to Bit Torrent, as P2P
software which was developed as Naptster was taken down. The Winklevii (associated with Mark Zuckerberg
at Harvard) had developed Bit Torrent.
Yet, the irony is that the financial world could still try
to capture the blockchain world and then lock people out, as is warned at the
end of the film.
One speaker, named Byrne I think, looked like Steve Bannon.
Any advanced alien civilization would have developed blockchain and digital currency. The speed of light would still limit commerce.
“Crypto” (Hollinsworth and Round Town Productions) is an important short film by Ansel Faraj,
written by Nathan Wilson, who plays the lead character Wesley, a recovering
addict (in 12-step program) who considers investing in bitcoin to set up money
for his son and bring his family back together.
The film actually lays out the steps of setting up the
digital wallet.
But he gets hacked after putting in $60000.
The film mixed black and white and sepia color in an
interesting way.
The film is a sequel to a 2013 short, “A Gambling Man”,
which I’ll look at later.
There is a feature film starring Richard Harmon called
“Woodland” (directed Jon Silverberg) about a journalist’s epiphany in the
woods, and it had been called “Crypto”.I wonder if that movie’s name change was because of this short film.
“Alien Ore”, a fan-made film directed by Kailey and Sam Spear,
from 20th Century Fox, on the 40th anniversary of the
first Alien movie.
On a gray rocky planet being mined for platinum, the crew, much
of it lesbian, finds an exploded body underground and soon the insect-like
monsters chase them back out of the tunnels.
I recall seeing the first Alien movie in Dallas at the
Medallion theater in May 1979.
I saw the 1997 film “Bent” (Film Movement and Samuel Goldwyn), directed by Sean Mathias, based
on the 1979 play by Martin Sherman, in Minneapolis shortly after I had moved
there.I may have seen it in the Bell
Auditorium at the University of Minnesota.
On the late 1930s in Germany, Max (Clive Owen), takes home a
Nazi stormtrooper posing as a gay trick, to the chagrin of his boyfriend.
He is taken to Dachau, does the work details and befriends another
prisoner but “chooses” to wear the yellow star for Jews rather than a pink
triangle.
The initial processing scene is quite striking.Not only is Max’s head shaved (no surprise)
but his wad of chest hair is loped off in camera like it as an afterthought.
The playwright wrote the script, and the film often looks like a filmed stage play.
“Caged”, directed by Dylan and Lazlo Tonk, presents a group
of high school students on athletic fields at a Netherlands school.One of the men (immigrant, Poc) has to get
used to the idea that at least two of his best friends are gay, despite dating girls.
He has to learn to defend them.
The sports are track and soccer, and the title of the film
refers to a wire structure where athletes practice soccer kicking skills. The campus is a huge complex of modern
low-rise buildings.
Wikipedia attribution link for Rotterdam picture, CCSA 3.0.
Screenprism analyses (12 min) the Coen Brother’s film “No Country for Old Men” (2007, best picture, Miramax and Paramount Vantage), especially the abstract and ambiguous ending.
The sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) is somewhat the alien spectator, as he relates what he sees to his wife (Tess Harper), the battle between the villain Chigurh (Javier Bardem) and Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), an ambiguous non-allegro hero.
The film suggests an internal time travel, where Bell changes places with his father, who idealized a simpler world.
The film was somewhat a modern western, set in the early 80s, just before modern tech.
The film is said to be faithful to the novel by Cormac McCarthy.
“The Color Purple”, directed by Steven Spielberg (1985) was
an unusual film for this director. It told a personal story of a black girl
growing up in the South in the early 1900s after abuse by her father (who made
her pregnant). It is based on a novel by
Alice Walker with a screenplay by Menno Meyjas.
I can recall seeing it at Northpark in Dallas. As I’ve gotten older, I seem to welcome this
level of intimacy even more.
It would make actress Whoopi Goldberg a regular, as on the
View.
This is a followup to the physics of the color purple.
“Cultural Marxism Explained”, by Dr. Jordan Cooper, from
July 2018. .
The video is in the style of a grade school filmstrip.
Cooper explains the history of Marxism, and then the development
of the Frankfort School and Critical Theory.
He sees cultural Marxism as the attempt to redistribute
wealth or opportunity strictly along to the idea of belonging to an oppressed
group.Christianity does reinforce helping
the oppressed, but on a case-by-case basis. Until Christianity, he says, here was
no coherent moral theory that it was important to help the poor or oppressed.
You can pay attention to opportunities for oppression on a
much more individualized level (“pay your dues”).You could, for example, restrict the use of
inherited wealth much more than we do now. “Class” and “oppressed group” are
not always the same. I faced this kind of a problem as an individual after a career-ending layoff at the end of 2001 taking my turn with more regimented, menial jobs. That is cultural Marxism at an individual level.
“Brain Divided”, a CGI animated short (5 minutes) by
Josiah Haworth, Joon Shik and Joon Soo, and the Ringling College of Art and Design,
has an odd concept, about a split personality.
An alien with a split brain codes a program to make
two abducted humans go on a "test" date inside their space colony – it’s heterosexual and has plenty of male
chivalry. But the split personality within the alien mind (split between red and blue moral values) causes the same among
the male human character.
An odd sci-fi concept indeed.Remember “Donovan’s Brian” controlling the stock
market (Lew Ayres) back in the early 1950s?
Suris has short films similar to yesterday’s, where he
offers commentary on another (conservative’s) presentation.
This time is “Hunter Avallon Fails to Use Facts and Logic”. There is an alternate title that is not too complementary. See the embed (well, "Who Knew?")
Avallon attracted attention when he his channel was banned
for part of the day April 8, one day before important House hearings on
Internet content moderation. This 20-minute video was made April 9.
Most of this particular video deals with a lot of the
canards (choice or lifestyle, etc). Ar
4.16 Suris does respond to the apparent argument that people have a moral
obligation to have children.
Suris does a nice job of destroying the usual stereotypes of
LGBT persons (although they were already going away with Stonewall).
“Why You Shouldn’t Debate Leftists: A Response to Prager U”
from Vaush. This indeed a good meta-interview.
Interesting meta-video, responding to Owen Benjamin of
Prager, who divides the world into “liberals and conservatives V THE LEFT.Owen
claims that the far Left has different aims, and wants to destroy current
society with expropriation to invent their own egalitarian utopia. The Far Left
wants America to be ashamed of its exploitations of PoC.
The response mentions that in the first half of the 19th
Century, all children were referred to as girls until about age 5, when boys began
to behave like boys. I had never heard that.
The format of this film reminds me of the book "The Life of a Fact".
“There’s No Purple Light” This should not be confused with Steven Spielberg’s
“The Color Purple” from 1985 with Whoopi Goldberg, which we can come back to another
time. There is a certain correspondence.
This little short explains the color wheel, and why there is
no purple light, even though we can see a color purple as next to red on color
wheel.
It has to do with combined signals of rods and cones.
It also has to do with primary colors for paint, compared to
mixing light.
“New York City, 1981: A Most Violent Year”, from A24 films
(6 minute short).
In 1980, John Lennon had been killed near the Dakota.
In 1981, the AIDS epidemic was just beginning to be noticed.
A black man describes witnessing a kidnapping and then being
kidnapped himself in the same convenience store one week later.He resisted. The bullet is still at the base
of his spine.
For the sake of journalism, I’ll present American Johnson’s “The
Capitalist Agenda” (or “Here’s Wht Capitalism S___ and Why It Needs to End”, as
an animated short (in a series).
It’s on his “NonCompete” channel.
He explains how capitalism replaced feudalism and how that did
give the underclasses a new chance.
But only a few people get a chance to make it if they’re not
already rich.
He also tries to debunk meritocracy.
You have to watch further videos to find out how to replace
it.
Umair Haque seems to want to go back to a system of guilds.So much for self-publishing.
No matter how good you are at your own goals, if you are
seen as an enemy merely because of capitalism, you can be destroyed, he seems
to be warning.I’ve seen this threatening
posture by the far Left before. Except
that this channel wants to “reject capitalism for fun and profit”.That sounds like an oxymoron.
Try this article from John Nichols in The Nation, when socialism "worked', if you like.
“Just Role With It” is an R-rated gay short film (so I won’t embed
it) where an actor is practicing his lines for a play where he loses his girl
friend.Here’s the link(Helix Studios,
and the video resolution quality is finally better than for some of their
earlier videos).
His best male friend comes over, and suddenly really “becomes”
that other character.
Some people have really been transformed by the characters
they acted, as this documentary short shows. (No, really, please don't model your behavior after cigarette smoking in older films; O want your body to stay biologically young forever.)
Eduardo Sanchez-Ubanell did a video where he tries drag at a dance party in West Hollywood (see
the LGBT blog March 31), where the challenge is not to be changed by the “acting”
experience. (Was it at The Abbey? That's the bar I remember well.)
What if a virus could transmit your identity and
consciousness temporarily to somebody else? The picture above poses the question (UFO's).
Here’s an April Fools short, “10 Types of Physics Majors”.
The film calls itself a “Joke”.
The same stereotypically manly handsome actor plays both
professor and student. He looks familiar.
I like the way they throw around the idea if string theory
as an answer to everything.
This video reminds me of asking a professor about the idea of
pursuing a PhD in computer science and not knowing what an index register is
(back in the 1960s).
