Skidoo The Movie: Like Jackie Gleason On Acid
[ Comments Off ]Posted on August 24, 2010 by admin in Popular Media
Tuesday, August 24th, 2010Because, well, it IS Jackie Gleason on acid. If you like 60′s films like The Party, The President’s Analyst, Barbarella, or Head, you’ll love Skidoo. Good luck finding a copy though.
  Strangely, the poster is available on Amazon |
It had been a long time since I had thought of the game Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon. That is, until a friend recently turned me on to a production starring (among others; more on that further on) Burgess Meredith, Frank Gorshin, and Cesar Romero. Sounds like an episode of the Batman TV series, right? Well if you add Jackie Gleason, Carol Channing, Frankie Avalon, Mickey Rooney, Slim Pickens, and Groucho Marx in his final appearance in film, you have Skidoo, creating one of the weirder nexuses possible in the six degrees game. I have no idea how I managed to make it this far in life without having seen this star-studded masterpiece of late sixties psychadelic wackiness. It’s like Jackie Gleason on acid, because, well, it stars Jackie Gleason – on acid. Along with just about everyone else at one point in the film. The cast alone makes this flick worth watching, but you’ll especially enjoy it if you’re into other movies from 1967/68, a couple of years when it seems someone must have been pret-ty busy running around Hollywood spiking the punch and baking brownies. Movies like Head
Why You Need To Stop Uploading Photos From Your iPhone To Facebook. Now.
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on August 17, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Tuesday, August 17th, 2010With over 2 billion photos uploaded to Facebook each month and 24 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every MINUTE, when will we have time to enjoy it all? And where will we keep it until then?
As I bemoaned the fact the other day that I had nothing I wanted to listen to in my music collection, I had to pause and laugh. I have what some of my friends consider to be a rather puny collection at about 14,000 song files. Really? Nothing to listen to? If I DID choose to listen to it all, I just did the math, and it would play non-stop for just over 48 days! And my collection is only about 0.001% of the 13,000,000 songs on iTunes. This reminded me of a discussion I had years ago when I worked in a bookstore and I asked one of the more seasoned bibliophiles on staff when he thought was the last time a person might have read all the books in print, and without hesitating he replied “around the time of Voltaire”. I guess book store employees have time to ponder these things. Today, if you were to read a book a day, it would take you 355,794 years to accomplish the same feat, at least based on Google Books’ count, which is 129,864,880 books. Things get worse when it comes to user-generated content. If you wanted to watch all the videos uploaded to YouTube from JUST TODAY, it would take you about 94 years. Of course, somewhere in there you’d be watching a few thousand versions of Keyboard Cat, but that’s how much video was uploaded today; 24 hours’ worth every minute. And things are for all practical purposes just as hopeless if you have any intention of trying to keep up with feature films; this source says that globally, there were 6,324 made by major studios in 2009, and if you include indy films submitted to major festivals, the number jumps to 50,000 each year. Even if you stuck to only watching the major releases, that’s still 17 movies a day. So where do we store all this media? And when will we have time to consume it? Well, the answer to the first question may soon become a problem; 2008 was the first year in which the data we generated exceeded our available storage space. Thank God we delete old e-mails, right? And the answer to the second is up to you. Personally, this all made me realize that with an estimated 37 years to live (according to this MSN calculator, who knows how much storage space it uses) I probably need to select my media more carefully, and maybe read a book before years’ end. That hour on YouTube, 3 hours on Wikipedia, and 2 hours sharing it all on Facebook last night was probably time better spent. Read the rest of this entry »
Short Horror Films By Independent Film Studio Fewdio
[ Comments Off ]Posted on August 1, 2010 by admin in Popular Media
Sunday, August 1st, 2010Fewdio cashes in on the often overlooked fact that horror films are typically 90% setup to bring you studio-quality, witty horror film shorts. And they’re FREE.
The fact that so many films can be summarized in about 90 seconds is probably one of the reasons I enjoy short film so much. Why spend 120 minutes of your life doing something that can be accomplished in five? What is fairly easy to do, and is done a lot in this genre, is comedy. Which is why it was refreshing to run across Fewdio , an extremely talented and polished group of professionals who had been working in the studio system and decided they wanted to do something where they had complete control, and without a huge budget and production cycle. They cashed in on two facts that are largely overlooked regarding horror: first of all, that the best segments of horror films often stand up on their own and are strung together with setups, and secondly, that no-one was really doing quality horror shorts. As Fewdio’s Drew Daywalt points out in this Shock Till You Drop interview, it’s a very viable and largely unexplored format. As he puts it: “You end on a scare and bang, you’re out…it’s a good model to aspire to. Twilight Zone is formulated that way. Set up, continued set up, expected left turn, roll credits“. All of Fewdio’s films (and there are around 50) have fairly high production values, a clever concept, and exceptional attention to details that are often overlooked in independent productions, especially their attention to sound, probably one of the most powerful tools at a horror filmmaker’s disposal. You can watch most of their films on their YouTube channel, or buy the Nightmare House – Volume 1 DVD on their site. Watch a few below. Read the rest of this entry »
Fetal Distraction: Splice The Movie
[ Comments Off ]Posted on May 27, 2010 by admin in Popular Media
Thursday, May 27th, 2010In theaters June 4th, Vincenzo Natali’s “Splice”, starring Oscar winner Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley, promises to be the best bad movie of the summer.
It is with a moderate amount of shame that I admit that the next film release that intrigues me is Splice, which will be in theaters June 4. The film looks like it falls comfortably into a genre that I for reasons beyond my comprehension am fascinated with, the slickly-produced film that may be really bad but knows that it is, and is therefore exceptional in a twisted sort of way. I have a long list of these that I’ll share someday (it would be very different from Rotten Tomatoes’ list based on the same idea), but recent examples would be Teeth or Hissss. The recent Repo Men should have made it into this realm, but failed, for reasons that I can’t quite put my finger on. In any case, Splice’s premise is from the familiar territory of Frankenstein-meets-egotistical-gene-splicing-scientist stuff, but apparently director Vincenzo Natali (The Cube
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, 2010One 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 »