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Red Letter Media – Brilliant, Hilarious, and… Annoying?

[ Comments Off ]Posted on April 6, 2010 by admin in Popular Media

Tuesday, April 6th, 2010

It would just be silly for us to review a preview of a review of a movie, so we’ll let you decide for yourself what to think about YouTube celebrity critic Red Letter Media.

What’s one half brilliant comedy, one half insightful critical analysis, and one half annoying? The movie reviews by Red Letter Media, that’s what. Yeah, I know that’s three halves, but the math just feels right. I’ve never been a big fan of critics and movie reviews; there’s something intrinsically annoying about someone who doesn’t know how to do something sitting around telling you how someone who does didn’t do it right. We’ve mentioned the “meta” nature of recent pop media before, and this is where the Red Letter Media reviews of films like Star Wars: The Phantom Menace shine. If you haven’t seen them before, the reviews are a strange mix of childish complaints mixed with brilliant insights, delivered with a simple-minded but self-aware lowbrow humor. All read in a contrived voice that sounds like a cross between Strong Bad and Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs . The reviews are sometimes almost as long as the movies they’re skewering, and sometimes worth the marathon, sometimes not. It would just be too meta even for my tastes to review a review of a movie, so I’ll let you decide for yourself. So who’s behind this madness? Surprisingly, it’s not some tormented nerd with a video camera like CopperCab, it’s an indy film actor/director/writer named Mike Stoklasa, who apparently collaborates with fellow indy filmmaker Jay Bauman. Read an interview Stoklasa here, and explore the reviews on Red Letter Media’s YouTube channel. Read the rest of this entry »

Life Is Short – Films Should Be Too

[ Comments Off ]Posted on March 31, 2010 by admin in Popular Media

Wednesday, March 31st, 2010

The internet is one big film festival, and you can be the judge.


Tokyo/Glow Is Gorgeous, Simple, and Short

One of my only disappointments regarding the recent Ann Arbor Film Festival was that I didn’t catch enough of it. Which is a little amusing, since I had a press pass*, and it’s a festival comprised largely of short films. Which are coincidentally kind of a fetish of mine, largely because of my goldfish-like media attention span. I regrettably missed winner’s night, but was confident that I could cleverly find a lot of the films online like I had with some of the opening night entries. How wrong I was. What I quickly learned googling the festival winners was that there are two distinct schools of thought on distribution of these festival-oriented works: one that believes in the new economy of “release it free and cash in later” (as in Chris Anderson’s book Free), and one that maintains its cachet mainly via scarcity of distribution. Ah well. I guess I’ll just have to spend more time in real theaters, watching real films! Until then though, there’s a never-ending film festival online. The biggest problem ultimately is sorting through the astounding number of indy shorts out there to find that genuine gem. Which is – as I just learned – precisely one of the reasons to go to a festival. So with all my complaining about being short on time, it’s rather ironic that I spent as much time as I did to find some sites to share with you. Of the dozens of sites I perused, two that I found that seemed to have the highest density of quality films were probably NZShortFilm.com and CoffeeShorts. My search is only just beginning though; if you have any suggestions, feel free to share. Read the rest of this entry »

Indy Film Alive & Well At The 2010 Ann Arbor Film Festival

[ 1 Comment ]Posted on March 24, 2010 by admin in Popular Media

Wednesday, March 24th, 2010

One of the world’s most respected and longest-running indy film festivals is in the tiny college town of Ann Arbor, Michigan, and if opening night is any indication, this year’s festival promises to be a winner.

I always think of myself as film lover until I find myself surrounded by the passionate fanatics that will comprise a festival like the amazingly long-lived Ann Arbor Film Festival, now in its 48th year. It’s quite a feat filling a classic venue like the 1700+ capacity Michigan Theater on a Wednesday night, especially showing short films that no-one has heard of, but the AAFF did well on their opening night; I didn’t check the balcony, but there were very few seats open on the main floor. I was a little anxious about attending a full evening of indy film festival shorts; the luxury of time-shifted viewing and Internet access to an amazing variety of indy media has made me something of an on-demand media monster. But the festival didn’t disappoint, which is another impressive feat. The double-edged sword of creating a successful festival like the AAFF is that – yes, of course, you’re guaranteed a lot of quality submissions from around the world – but as the festival’s Executive Director Donald Harrison pointed out in his introduction to the festival tonight, their screeners and programmers had to sift through over 2500 submissions this year. I get a headache just thinking about what that must be like. Combine the sheer quantity with the multiple media formats and preparation required for simply projecting the material, and if the festival takes place at all, a monumental task has been accomplished. Think about that if you happen to be lucky enough to attend the festival this year. If you aren’t able to attend the festival, a surprising number of the films are readily available on line. Of course nothing compares to seeing them on a huge classic theater screen like the Michigan, but below are a few highlights from tonight’s entries for your perusal. See the AAFF’s YouTube channel for more previews, and their web site for the week’s schedule and other festival details. Read the rest of this entry »

Does Government Control The Media Or Is It The Other Way Around?

[ Comments Off ]Posted on March 18, 2010 by admin in Popular Media

Thursday, March 18th, 2010

I think we’ve been worrying about the wrong Big Brother.


I think this poster has it backwards

Quite some time ago, San Francisco radio figure Wes Nisker said If You Don’t Like the News, Go Out and Make Some of Your Own. Apparently Rupert Murdoch, Jack Welch, and other media moguls took his advice. I’ve been fascinated with the literally Orwellian evolution of media control in America over the past decade or two that began in earnest with the deregulation of the Reagan years and has resulted in ten or fewer media companies owning everything. Which is a bad enough thing in itself, but gets really bad when those same companies control the government as well. As a well-conditioned media consumer, I was so busy Facebooking about my emotional knee-jerk reactions to liberal and conservative media pundits that I had forgotten that this behavior of mine was all part of a vast Orwellian 21st century robber baron plan. That is, until I was reminded of this fact last week when I finally saw the 2005 documentary Orwell Rolls in His Grave. It’s a shame that the makers of the film didn’t package the product a little differently; the title gives off a paranoid post 9/11 vibe that detracts from the substance of the film, which is an insightful exploration of the corporate media dominance of what you see, read and hear as a result of influence peddling and Washington’s unprecedented revolving door policies of late. Much like Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent, the film wallows a bit too much in what seems like academic hand-wringing, and plays the Orwell angle a little too hard. The fact is that Orwell wouldn’t be rolling in his grave, because the film effectively makes the case that we’re living exactly the way Orwell envisioned things. I’d still recommend the film, and if you’re interested in this topic, the totally unrelated book The The Elements of Journalism, which explores a similar topic, i.e.: the failure of journalism as a result of the purely profit-driven decision making that has replaced “real” news with entertainment. I sometimes lament that most whistleblower-oriented documentaries – like Food, Inc., Outfoxed, and virtually anything by Michael Moore – end up coming across as liberal whining in the end. It would be inspiring if someone managed to produce a less partisan documentary that just looked at the apalling truth of it all. Yes, the Bush White House that was brought to us by Project For A New American Century was indeed Orwellian in its lies and doublespeak, but the real evil is not the party they claimed to represent, it’s the pathological behavior of the media companies that seek control of government through agency capture. America *needs investigative journalism, hard hitting documentaries, and gutsy exposés more than ever right now. But don’t expect to see them in a major theater in an era when Disney blocks the distribution of a Michael Moore film for telling too much of the truth about George Bush. Fortunately, at least for now, we have the Internet, so you can watch entire films like Orwell Rolls in His Grave on line . Read the rest of this entry »

Great Films That Have No Plot

[ Comments Off ]Posted on March 12, 2010 by admin in Popular Media

Friday, March 12th, 2010

Just because you don’t get it, does that mean that a film has no plot?


You have to be kind of dumb to
think this film doesn’t have a plot.

For some reason, a plotless movie with seventeen or more directors, fifteen or more actors, and the title Untitled Peter Farrelly/Charles Wessler Project seemed to get a lot of press yesterday. Apparently Hollywood thinks we’re overdue for another Amazon Women on the Moon, Kentucky Fried Movie or The Groove Tube. Maybe we are, but what intrigues me more is a thought that evolved out of a conversation with a couple of friends as we tried to recall that short list of plotless wonders. We then went on to ask: are there any really good movies that have no plot? Things got heated at points arguing about whether, for instance, Pulp Fiction or Requiem for a Dream had plots. I’ve compiled my quick list below, and I have to tell you I endured a LOT of pain perusing discussion threads on film web sites, reading commentary by the world’s unemployed film critics whose comments on a film like Requiem would go something like “the effects were kind of cool, but the movie had NO PLOT WHATSOEVER“. Which translated, clearly means “I really am quite stupid and didn’t get this movie at all but I DO have eyes in my head“. Have any suggestions to add? Read the rest of this entry »

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