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If You Liked Boxing Helena, You’ll Love Hisss

[ 1 Comment ]Posted on September 29, 2009 by admin in Popular Media

Tuesday, September 29th, 2009

For once the hissing at a Jennifer Lynch film may be coming from the screen rather than the audience.

If you’re looking for the perfect Christmas gift for that ophiophiliac friend of yours, search no more. Slated for release on December 25, 2009 is director Jennifer Lynch’s Hisss. Starring Bollywood’s Mallika Sherawat and shot on location in India, the film is only Lynch’s second in the 15 years since Boxing Helena. Which isn’t surprising; Boxing Helena was like watching a film version of the Aristocrats joke. At the time it was rolled out as a brilliant and edgy film by David Lynch’s daughter, and in an incredible bait-and-switch, turned out to be one of the worst movies of the 90′s, winning a Golden Raspberry Award in 1994 for worst director. In fact, it was so horrible that it was comical, and actually left you wondering if that was its intention in the first place. It also was worthy of note as one of the first films that established actor Julian Sands’ presence in a film as a warning sign that the film would be horrifically awful. I sometimes wonder though if Boxing Helena wasn’t just ahead of its time; the movie Teeth managed to walk that same line with blackly humorous results in 2007. Hisss was originally titled Nagin, after the Indian myth of a vengeful snake woman. The film was perhaps retitled because there are two older Bollywood films called Nagin, rather than for American marketing, as some sources have suggested. Read the rest of this entry »

Best Sites For Watching TV On Line

[ 2 Comments ]Posted on September 26, 2009 by admin in Popular Media

Saturday, September 26th, 2009

Video Killed The Radio Star, but NOTHING seems to be able to kill TV. If you’re ready to surrender, here are 7 great sites for watching TV on line.

Although in general I might rather watch TV On The Radio than watch TV on the Internet, I still do it on occasion. The convergence of The Web and television is an idea that’s been around for ages (anybody remember Microsoft’s early feeble attempt?) but has taken a remarkably long time to catch on. My first bet was on Joost, one of the first web TV services that worked exceptionally well right out of the gate. Alas, America always makes weird choices driven by marketing rather than logic (anybody remember Betamax vs. VHS?) so one of the first pervasive services stateside was Hulu. If you really want to watch a TV show (or even full-length movies) bittorrents might be the way to go, but you have to be a bit of a nerd to figure the whole thing out, and if you want to watch the content as a stream or if you have any respect for those arcane documents that comprise copyright law, bittorrents probably aren’t for you. So back to the point: where can you watch TV on line? Below is a list of sites that actually have worthwhile content and seem to function reasonably well. If you have trouble with getting decent streams on any of these major services, check a few things before you start blaming the service. Aside from having enough RAM or a decent video card, you might try checking your firewall settings, updating your version of Flash, or get your butt off of sites like Facebook that hog system resources and bandwidth. Read the rest of this entry »

Is The Age of Stupid Stupid?

[ Comments Off ]Posted on September 21, 2009 by admin in Clean & Green, Popular Media

Monday, September 21st, 2009

Today is the global premiere of The Age of Stupid, a dystopian eco-film that the New York Times is calling a sterner and more alarming polemic than An Inconvenient Truth. But is it based on solid science?

In spite of being almost foolishly utopian in nature (I genuinely like to believe humans will come to their senses, commingle, and create a beautiful single race blended from all of the current allegedly separate ones) I still loves me a good dystopian film now and then. Which is why I’m disappointed that I’ll probably miss the special global premiere of The Age of Stupid today. In spite of some complaints from the more level-headed members of the progressive scientific community that the film’s heavy-handed assertions about the end of the world as we know it are poorly supported by science, it looks like a thought-provoking film. It’s also getting decent reviews from sources like Wired and the NYT. The clip featured here, for instance, provides an amusing and brief history of war, which, as the clip points out, is always over resources. They move quickly through war for animals, war for water, war for “shiny things”, war for fertile land, war for “nutmeg slice and tea”, and finally diamonds, slaves and oil. The global premiere of the film – which takes place today and tomorrow – will feature a “green carpet” solar-powered cinema tent in New York, and will be linked by satellite to 442 cinemas across the USA (find a theater here) and to more than 200 cinemas abroad. Special guests include the likes of Kofi Annan and Thom Yorke of Radiohead. The film was put together by Franny Armstrong, director of McLibel and founder of 10:10, a UK non-profit. It was crowd-funded by 220 people who donated between £500 and £35,000 each. Read the rest of this entry »

Exploring My Bai Lingualism

[ 3 Comments ]Posted on September 20, 2009 by admin in Popular Media

Sunday, September 20th, 2009

Why I wish I were having Chinese tonight.

I’m not generally prone to star-struck fanboy-ness, idol worship, and fantasizing about romance with movie stars, but Bai Ling has changed all of this. I had seen her name and random photos in the media on occasion, but wasn’t aware of her remarkable depth as an actress* until seeing her performance as a crack whore in the over-the-top but definitely-worth-a-watch Crank 2: High Voltage. Maybe it’s just her archetypal Chinese beauty. She looks like an ancient stylized rendition of a royal warrior, partly because of her strangely-proportioned nose, which I could gleefully ski down, and partly because of the way her bangs frame the gaze of her disturbingly asymmetrical eyes. Or maybe it’s her musical talent. You haven’t really experienced the Divinyls’ “I Touch Myself” until you’ve seen Bai Ling performing it. Or maybe it’s her nipples, which she seems to be obsessed with herself. In this Mr. Skin interview (NSFW), she’s asked what the favorite part of her body is, and she replies: “Probably you already know. My nipples! Once in Asia they asked me ‘what are the windows to the soul?’, and the word ‘nipples’ almost came out of my mouth. But then I swallowed and said, ‘The eyes. The eyes are the window to the soul.’ And that’s true too. But sometimes after I get out of the shower I look at my nipples and think, ‘Wow, they’re provocatively something else.’ I feel like they do not belong to me. They’re supposed to be like an African woman’s nipples. They’re something sexy.” But really I think it’s because Read the rest of this entry »

Videocracy: Media Control & Mind Control

[ 1 Comment ]Posted on September 12, 2009 by admin in Popular Media

Saturday, September 12th, 2009

How Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi controls public sentiment by controlling television

I’m looking forward to seeing Videocracy, in spite of the fact that many sources – Variety, for instance – are giving it rather mediocre reviews. The film, by Swedish film director Erik Gandini (who also brought us Gitmo – The New Rules of War), explores the evolution of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s political power in Italy, which has largely been fueled by his near-total control of the media. Although most early reviews describe the movie as being light on hard facts and meandering in content, I’m looking forward to it the way one might look forward to a Michael Moore film: the facts may be skewed, there may be a significant lack of objectivity, but the subject matter is certain to provoke some thoughtful conversation, and probably needs to be brought to the broader public’s attention. I personally knew a little about Berlusconi’s almost cartoonish gangster/macho Italian style of leadership, but was completely ignorant of the fact that he had such a tight grasp on Italian television. After the bizarre shift in American values over the past decade, largely fueled by a media that catered to the propagandizing of the Bush administration, one can almost imagine one or more of the NeoCons having gotten their inspiration while vacationing in Italy and watching Berlusconi in action. If you doubt the power of television being manipulated as a powerful tool to shape popular sentiment, review and ponder some of the campaigns distributed by the Ad Council over the last few decades. More recently, the spots created early in the Bush administration’s paranoia-inducing “war” on terror, spots like those in the “What if America wasn’t America?” campaign – like Library, Diner and Church – helped convey that feeling that some mysterious enemy was trying to steal our freedom and we needed to go get that enemy, even if we had to create it. Remember, the Ad Council also brought us Rosie the Riveter, Smokey the Bear, McGruff the Crime Dog, and the Crash Test Dummies, some of the most enduring images in American popular media. Although the campaigns were all brilliant in their own ways, one has to wonder if their sheer pervasiveness has perhaps not perhaps been the more important factor in their success. If, like I am, you’re obsessed with this kind of media, the Ad Council has a YouTube Channel. And look for Videocracy in limited theater release until it’s available on DVD. In the meantime, I’m going to watch the moronic Idiocracy again, to prepare myself for the coming Idiocalypse. Read the rest of this entry »

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