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!
“Wonderkid”, directed by Rhys Chapman, written by Marr
Diss, presents a gay star British soccer player (Chris Mason) trying to avoid
the subtle harassment of his teammates (30 min), om the Alexis Labtec channel.
The kid spends a lot of time sulking in hotel rooms,
despite neatly packing and folding his clothes, and secretly making rendez-vous
near Piccadilly Circus. I don’t know if
this could have happened during the pandemic, the film was released in July 2020.
There is one encounter toward the end.Let your partner do it, I say.
The soccer ("Association football") field diagram embedded from Wikipedia, click for attribution.
“Fractal” (19 min), from Bad Media Student (“Bad Robot”???),
directed and written by Blake Hurford, looks enticing. The title is interesting (self-replication of a pattern, common in nature).
A young special ops student Maya (Skye Butcher) has
finished her training and is sent back to her boyfriend (Zach Raabe), who had
expected a relatively “conventional” relationship.
She keeps relapsing into memories of her trainer (a
fattish guy played by Jaxon Graham-Wilson) and deteriorates mentally.Her genuine (and lean) boyfriend doesn’t notice
the danger he is in, until too late.
I don’t think the physicality of the climax will be
very clear to most viewers.
The film’s scenes are shot with different color
filters to suggest various kinds of color-blindness.
There is some interesting background music:a Chopin mazurka, and then some music that
sounds rather like Max Reger.
Connor Franta does another short monologue in his “Slice
of Life” series, “I Can’t Actually Believe This”, alternative title, “Pigeons
and Doves”. After publication he changed the title to "This Is a Lie"
Connor uses pixie-like effects in his minimalist townhouse
in West Hollywood, where he draws an analogy between the differences between
pigeons and doves, and the dichotomy “Black Lives Matter” v. “all lives matter”.
There’s also the issue of his plants, which seem to be
conscious life forms.
I have pigeons on my balcony, but it Is the crow, who
will watch me work at my computer for 15 minutes at a time and return, like
this unit is his.
TRT World, from the Turkish Public Broadcast Service,
presents a short narrated by Yunus Paksoy, “What Is Antifa?”
Paksoy interviews Antifa activist Jason Charter, who
makes three “demands”.
In the middle of the 11-minute film he migrates to
interview Ford Fischer, who owns his own media company News2Share from
Washington DC.
Fischer points out that Antifa groups believe it is
perfectly legitimate morally to protest in “gentrified” neighborhoods to point
out to new residents and property owners that they have personally become part
of the problem.
Later Paksoy presents some footage of the Capitol
riots and then questions Charter about when violence against ordinary civilians
is warranted.He thinks he does have a
right to barge into gentrified, privilege people having dinner and demanding
allyship from them. He thinks that is not too much to ask given the circumstances.
The Dreksler channel describes “Life on Gas Giants”
(Sept 2018)
Organisms like bacteria could float in the atmosphere indefinitely
because of the strong winds below, in a zone of reasonable temperature and
pressure.
Larger, bag-like and possibly quite large organisms could
evolve (something like our own coelenterates or even octopi) and might even be
intelligent and self-aware.But it would
be hard for them to find materials to build things (with ocean bottom organisms
on Earth can do).
Wikipedia embed of comet collision with Jupiter in the 1990s, click for attribution.
DW Documentary presents “Coronavirus Complications:
Life After the Virus”, from Dec. 2020.
Filmed in Germany, the documentary examines the course
of patients who go to the Schoen Klinik in Bavaria. People who thought they had mild cases find
their endurance and breathing capacity severely reduced even months later.This is being reported more recently.
People go down to it for physical rehabilitation of
their lung capacity.
Maria is a physician and is unable to meet the
physical demands of the job with emergency treatment of patients.On the other hand, Christopher finally
recovers well enough to train for a marathon, after six months.
Recently, medical journals have reported that even
asymptomatic cases often show significant damage on chest X-ray.Among people whom I know, this has not really
been confirmed.
Wikipedia picture embed from Bavaria, click for embed
SciShow asks, “What’s Up With Those COVID-19 Variants?”
(January 12).
In six minutes, the short covers the B1.1.7 variant
(UK) and B.1.351 (South Africa).
The variants have spike protein changes, making them attach
to ACE2 receptors more easily, and another change that may make it harder for the
immune system to recognize that a cell is infected.
The UK mutation may have occurred in a single patient
who was ill a long time.
People with these variations seem to have several
times the viral loads in their nasal passages.
An increase in transmissibility will increase the
death rate downstream a few weeks later because of more cases. The sudden explosion of the UK variant in early December 2020 has led to a new strict lockdown.
Image, embed from Wikipedia, click for attribution.
The DUST short film “Here Comes Frieda”, directed by Robin
Takao D’Oench, presents a young woman Lilly (Ellie Wallwork) cowering in a basement
apartment in a big city as a superstorm, category 6, approaches.
She has bought a lottery ticket for a lifetime in a
paradise in low orbit (presumably an O’Neill Cylinder). It’s 2040 and climate
change is closing in.
But other people come to her apartment to take the
ticket away from her, or to show it fake.
Crimson Engine explains “What Does a Producer ACTUALLY
Do?” (2018/2/13).
The producer runs the entire infrastructure to make
the movie, but does not provide money.The producer uses money raised by others, which are often financial
entities on Wall Street.The producer
hires (and more rarely fires and replaces) the director.
He discusses the Executive Producer, which is a more
flexible concept having to do with supporting the project and raising money.
He explains a PGA Title, which requires being on the
set for 80% of the set days.
Quanta Magazine presents Rutgers University
mathematics professor Alex Konorovich explaining “The Reimann Hypothesis” (2021).
It’s hard to describe this for a short film review
page. It has been simulated on computers
with trillions of computations, but it hasn’t been proven logically.
It will help predict the distribution of primes. Imagine
a city, maybe in a science fiction movie (maybe in an O’Neill cylinder) where
every building represents the number of floors equal to the number of prime
factors of some prime number, with the streets arranged in a grid matching
these numbers.
Proving the theorem and related ones (there is even a “Mobius
function”) leads to some amazing animation.It also corresponds to how quarks and bosons or the parts of baryonic
matter behave.
Illustration is a Farey diagram, Wikipedia embed,
click for attribution.
Shane Stanley (the Film Courage channel, from Oct 20,
2020, explains “Producers don’t want to read your screenplay; here’s what they
really want.”
They don’t have time for full scripts.They want a logline and two-page synopsis,
one paragraph per act.If appropriate (for
a layered film) they may read a detailed treatment which could run twenty pages
and shows all the backstories and character arcs.You should copyright all your materials first
before you send it to them (with the copyright office was well as Writer’s
Guild. If the treatment is based on a previously published book, the connections (and changes) and legal stuff would have to be clearly stated.
He also talked about the value of art work, and talked
about that kinds of films are perceived as making money.Exotic locations help.
Tyler Mowery (Practical Screenwriting) has a 24-part
thread on Twitter today on screenwriting advice.
Shane Stanley explains “The Mistake I Made When Hollywood
Stole My Screenplay”.
He says register your work with the copyright office, not
just Writers Guild West.
When the film comes out, the Monday before the Friday
opening, you file a complaint.
I wonder how likely this would be with my own “Epiphany”
screenplay.So many charactersm so
complicated.But one good idea I’ll
share here:a guy could to an intentional
community, in resignation after the world falls apart, and offer to build them
a system to turn work credits into cryptocurrency.
This writer says, don’t share their work (even in Zoom
sessions)?Is it really that likely to
happen?
To be “ripped” is a common slang among videographers and
some screenwriters.
There is a different culture between people who write for a
living and people who write out of ego.
“This Is a Test”, by Nathaniel Hoopes (16 minutes) on
the DUST Channel.
Well, in an IT shop, we would have said, if it works,
it’s production, otherwise it’s a test.
An obese man does string-theory dimensional travel to various
locations in his life, carrying a pet jellyfish in a bowl, and sometimes using
a Sony HD camera with a small screen.
The effect is that of a David Lynch movie, reminiscent
of Eraserhead and with a song that reminds me of the Lady in the Radiator.
Perhaps this is what happens at Death, time stops and
you loop through your life infinitely. If your brain is still physically
intact.
The end credits roll so fast you can't read the actor's name.
On this crazy day when the Capitol was attacked, I’ll
share a film a little more uplifting, “How I Became Confident”, by Nate O’Brien.
O’Brien, 22, makes videos with financial advice for
teens and young adults, does intriguing selfies around Philadelphia, and makes
the City of Brotherly Love look intriguing, even mysterious.
Yu Gu directs the documentary “A Woman’s Work: TheNFL’s Cheerleader Problem”, an 80-minute documentary truncated to about 50
minutes to fit into one hour on PBS Independent Lens on Monday January 4,
2021.The film is written by Elizabeth
Ai and Jennifer Arbold. Feminism and pro football collide.
There are around ten lawsuits against various NFL
teams by the women, who at first had to deal with not being paid regularly.
Then there was the question as to whether they were employees or contractors.
The job involves a lot of physical fitness sessions,
and I even wondered about Washington’s have a female assistant coach.
There was plenty of script that maintained that women
always have two jobs, including in the home.
The YouTube channel Plot11 offers “Digital Economy Infotainment”,
and on Dec. 18, 2020 it posted “The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin”, directed by Nicholas
Mross, as a YouTube Original.
It seems to be a prequel to “The End of Money as We Know It”
(2015) which I reviewed on Wordpress.
Bitcoin is essentially an open accounting system posted on a
decentralized public ledger called a blockchain, allowing users to process what
amount to “labor credit” in relation to a finite supply of computing power,’
It was supposedly envisioned in 2008 by a person using the
name Satoshi Nakamoto.At the end of the
film, a person named Dorian with that last name is entertained by denies
connection to the project now.
The very first transaction using bitcoin was supposedly a
pizza order.
The film traces particularly the developing of two trading
exchanges, Mt. Gox, which would go under, and Trade Hill.
The film traces the careers of some entrepreneurs, including
Charlie Shrem, who would be arrested and imprisoned for two years for abetting
the operation of Silk Road, on a charge relating to unlicensed financial
transfers (didn’t make a lot of sense).The
film also briefly covers the imprisonment of Ross Ulbricht. The film points out that having a digital currency (and even tools like TOR) doesn't mean you will use it illegally.
The Los Angeles Times has a short film “At the
Intersection of LGBTQ Pride and Black Lives Matter”, posted July 2020, with
Erika D. Smith, Lillian Faderman and Alexei Romanoff, 6 minutes,
I can rather let the film speak for itself.
However the tone of gay rights has changed since 2010
(end of “don’t ask don’t tell” and even 2015 (Obergefell and gay marriage) and
today, with the pandemic and then the unrest after a number of police actions
against some individuals of color.
This year, the pandemic precluded Pride celebrations
as we known them and largely (though not completely) closed bars and discos;
but large protests associated with Black Lives Matter grew.Various influencers in the gay community were
encouraged to vigorously support BLM on their social media pages, often unaware
of the apparent Marxist connections (as with Patrisse Cullors).
The film maintains that Stonewall started among people
of color, not white gay men, who are quite separate in many cultural beliefs.
Max Reisinger, owner of “Perspectopia”, offers a six
minute outdoor meditation, “The Flow State of Life”, otherwise titled “Every
Time I Walked Back to Get My Camera in 2020”.
With lively varied speed photography of the self, he
describes how his life changed when he went to high school in France for a
year, and then came back to North Carolina for his senior year (combined with
college start) and started his clothing company.
There’s a lot or organized stuff in his production
room, which would not please minimalists.
Some of the ideas are similar to the college videos on
John Fish’s channel (Harvard).
I think this could make a nice entry for DC Shorts2021.
