and yet, people need to see this.
maybe it’s because i got my t-mobile bill today and the texting bill alone was $225.00. maybe it’s because i was bedridden with horrendous allergies today and i STILL spent 6 hours on the messenger. as for the texting thing, i became aware of my bill after my friend wrote me, on the instant messenger of course, something to this effect — “could you cool it with the texts. i only have 400 a month and i have to pay a lot.” to which this particularly oversensitive (could be allergies, insomnia, hunger, exhaustion, stress) textophile wrote: WHAT???? YOU DON’T Want ME TO TEXT YOU? and you don’t answer your phone and we never hang out. so i guess we should just email then. or maybe i won’t. FINE. it’s up to you.”
two hours later, upon perusing my own phone bill, i was forced to humble myself and email him: (FREE-MAIL, if you don’t count the monthly wireless bill!) an apologetic message with the subject line “whoa sorry.” body: “for getting sensitive about the texting thing. damn. i just got my phone bill i had no idea. i’m changing my plan too.” oops.
anyway this video is pretty damn hilarious. and annoying. because no one funny who can play guitar should also be good looking and thin and have three hours to spend on coiffing his facial hair.

Last weekend myself and eight hardy souls took on a task that many film savvy folks would consider suicidal - to produce a short film, from idea to authored DVD in a mere twelve hours. This insane mission was dolled out by the fine folks at Film Racing, who also sponsor the New York City Midnight Moviemaking Madness Screenwriting competition.

Here’s how it went. Before the day of the competish, you can gather equipment and locations, wrangle cast and crew, and prep any props and costumes you feel might come in handy. That’s it. And then the day of, at exactly 12 PM, the organisers release the Surprise Theme and Surprise Element that must be included in the film (maximum runtime of four minutes). You then have twelve hours to develop a story, write a screenplay, rehearse it, shoot, edit, create original music, do all your sound design and titles, and deliver an authored DVD. For many of us, this resulted in chaos, hilarity, over-caffeination, the appearance of our first gray hairs, and a breakneck sprint down the streets of DUMBO to the bar where the organizers were waiting, presumably soused on Brooklyn Local One and giggling at the pale, out of shape filmmakers hauling ass across the cobblestones.

There were some unexpected surprises. First off, I was much less stressed during this process than I normally am when entering production. Maybe it was the blink-of-an-eye turnaround, but the lack of control and preparation actually made it more enjoyable. Also, my team (Junction Jump, creatively named after my production company) got through the day without a single argument. This alone was nearly unbelievable. Especially when you take into consideration the fact that we even wrote the story as a collective. Normally you get two writers in a room and one of them leaves with a pout, let alone eight people, all with different ideas about what should be done. But the parameters left little time for ego, and everyone truly kept their eyes on the prize.

In the end, we didn’t quite make the deadline. We turned in our glorified rough cut at 1:55 AM, just under the final deadline for submission. But you know what? We actually made a good film. Funny, creative, well paced. I was so totally impressed. And because we made it in before two we were included in the screening, which was held at the Cobble Hill Cinemas last night. Sixteen shorts screened, and they couldn’t have been more different from each other. There were broad comedies, kung fu pictures, zombie flicks, romances, foreign art house parodies, and our film: the tale of a magical hairbrush, which teaches a stressed out business man an important life lesson through spontaneous, uncontrollable teleportation.

I learned so much through this process about what it takes to make a film, about what are truly necessities, and what’s just B.S. And after turning in a film in fourteen hours, I now know that anything’s possible. I could make a movie tomorrow. Hell, I should be shooting a scene while I’m writing this! I’ve got two hands!

So grab a camera, some good peeps, and do something! Maybe you only have a weekend. Maybe only a day. But just maybe you’ll surprise yourself, and become a better filmmaker because of it.

IDFA, the world’s premiere documentary film festival and market, has allowed for hours and hours of fun for documentary geeks! They have posted a list of all the films that have played at the festival over the past twenty years, and now we get to peruse them, vote for our favorites, feel good about ourselves for seeing so many, feel bad about ourselves for seeing so few, and possibly win a prize!

Vote here:
I’ll tell you mine, if you tell me yours. . . .

For some reason, I’ve lately been having a lot of trouble focusing on films. In the past, I’ve been able to simply sit down and become absorbed in whatever’s in front of me. These days, the conditions must be absolutely perfect - basically, I can only last in a movie theater. So each time I try to sit down at home and watch a DVD, I end up turning it off within half an hour. Not good for someone interning at a film company. So, I started on shorts.

I started watching a collection of shorts the other day, all taken from New Fest, all with the same running theme. A select few will be included on a compilation DVD that IndiePix will be releasing next year. Some were great, some absurd, some mediocre, some just bad, but the one that just blew me away was The Saddest Boy in the World. Many of the shorts, all dealing with homosexuality, focused on adult relationships, and the struggles between homosexual couples. This one went back to the root, childhood. In twenty minutes, we witness the vivid, humorous, highly disturbing childhood of Timothy Higgins.

The film opens with a life-sized doll house, bright green and detailed with children’s toys. A skinny boy wearing a pointed party hat walks in slowly, stands on his small green chair, and puts a noose around his neck. He is Timothy Higgins, the Saddest Boy in the World. With a lisping, mournful voice, and vividly colored images, the boy takes us through his painful adolescence, from being picked last in gym class (even after the chubby boy in a wheelchair), to having his paper-mache bunny rabbit, which he spent two weeks constructing, destroyed at his own birthday party by the class bully. Timothy is different. He is a homosexual. He sees butterflies on Rorschach tests and shines coins for fun. And he presents each incident of his tragic life with an unflinching eye that is so matter-of-fact, so wise and yet innocent, that the story is both hilarious and moving (although more on the hilarious side). I don’t think I can praise this film enough, so I’ll just end by saying, see it. When it comes out on the compilation DVD, or if you can get your hands on it before then, take 20 minutes out of your day to see this brilliant childhood tragicomedy.

So before I start, here’s a disclaimer.

I’m a little slow on movies. I live in New Jersey, where good indie films fear to tread, and Hollywood blockbusters go to plunder and pillage. Besides that, my personal financial cup had not exactly been runneth-ing over, so getting to the theatre has become something of a rarity. Saying all of that, I just saw Black Snake Moan. I know, I know, even the controversy around that film has cobwebs now. But I saw it on Bluray! That makes it Hip and Now, right?

The plot revolves around Lazarus, an ageing blues man, with a bad case of (yup, you guessed it) the blues after his wife leaves him for his younger brother, and Rae, an emotionally-scarred, white trash nymphomaniac who can’t keep her hands to herself after her anxiety-riddled boyfriend leaves for the army. When Lazarus discovers Rae in front of his house, beaten up and left for dead in not much more than her panties, he nurses her back to health. Oh, and for good measure he chains her to his radiator and attempts to cure her of her frisky demons through gospel and the blues.

It was good. It should have been very good, but in my humble opinion Craig Brewer (the writer/director) got ensnared in a quagmire late in the second act that left me feeling kinda…bored. A word that shouldn’t even come close to a film that involves Sam Jackson rocking the delta blues and a mostly-naked Christina Ricci in heat. But there were a lot of powerful moments, some great filmmaking, stellar performances and a fantastic soundtrack that stuck in my head long after the credits rolled. Oh yeah, and for the ladies, Justin Timberlake. Gotta love JT.

After watching the film, I immediately put on the ‘Making Of’ documentary. The project seemed to me like it must’ve been a blast to work on. Crazy locations, intense scene-work, quality actors, and enough dough to do it all justice. But the doc didn’t do much more than nod at any of that stuff. The majority of the piece focused on how difficult the film was to get made, and how broke Brewer was at every step of the way. And in a surprising show of candor and honesty, he let the viewing audience in on a bus-load of his own baggage, and how it ended up informing the film.

Afterwards, it was this doc that ended up haunting my thoughts more than the movie did! I’m sort of torn about that. I know, it’s my fault for watching the thing in the first place. There was no ‘Making of’ piece after you watched The Godfather. But my passion as one who makes these things won over, and now I’m irked.

On one hand, the trials and tribulations of the process make a great story, and it was refreshing to see a mainstream artist in such a state of honesty and self-expression. And hearing about a fellow filmmaker overcoming difficulties, sticking to his creative guns and finding success is inspiring. On the other hand, it’s a bit hard to feel bad for a guy who’s second feature was the Oscar-nominated Hustle and Flow . But that’s just my own emotional baggage. The truth is, I’m just sick of hearing filmmakers talk about how hard it is.

The more you say something, the more it becomes Truth. It’s a basic law of the universe. As a quantum physicist, or a Buddhist monk. After all that’s how wars get rationalized into existence. No one actually wants to kill a whole bunch of people they’ve never met and have no personal animosity towards. But if enough people declare it necessary, over and over again, in multiple formats, with satellite coverage, after awhile people believe. It becomes reality. And it spreads.

Personally, I’m interested in cutting through the drama. Well, as much as drama on a film can be cut. Which might only be a teensy bit. But hey, I’d rather live in a world where making the films you want to make is easy. Even if that world only exists in my mind. So as much as I appreciate the director’s honesty, the story he told about Christina Ricci picking out the gauge of steel chain she would wear around her waist for three quarters of the movie was profoundly more interesting. And not just for the visuals. Because that’s really what filmmaking is about. Collaboration. Quirky decision-making. Creative expression great and small. And sheer, unadulterated joy.

So no more whining, okay? Let’s all just make our movies. And just once, let’s say it’ll be easy. Who knows? We might be pleasantly surprised.

In 2000, when my mother took my grandmother to see the new movie, “Into the Arms of Strangers,” I had little interest in joining them. I knew that the movie was about Kindertransport, and I knew that my grandmother had been one of the lucky children sent to safety in England in 1938. Regardless, I felt the movie would be too emotionally taxing at the age of 15 and planned on picking it up at some later point in my life.

Embarrassingly, it has taken me seven years and after watching the two hour long film I’m still very emotionally taxed. Growing up I had always heard my grandmother tell her story, however, hearing others who have undergone the same experiences narrate their journeys, sounding so similar to that which I had heard as a child, is a knew feeling all together. The film is done remarkably well. The way that the stories of multiple children are interwoven creates a certain unity to the experiences they have all been through. Meanwhile, the film retains the individual nature of each child’s journey, by following a few specific cases. It does not allow the viewer to get lost in a sea of anonymous faces, but ensures that one gets to know a few faces and know them intimately.

The old footage taken from the prewar and postwar period is fascinating as well, especially the color footage (I was not aware that color footage existed of Germany in the period before WWII.) Just in case first person narratives were not enough, the photographs, footage and German children’s songs sporadically spread throughout the film make the stories all the more tangible. I know that when my grandmother went to see the movie she came back and said: “that is exactly what it was like,” which would have been enough to qualify the film as a well done documentary. However, I think the success of this film can be seen, not only in those who witnessed the experiences seeing them as well portrayed. But, also in those who have thankfully not had to go through the trauma being able to grasp a piece of what it would have been like to live through the difficult times. Without playing too much on your emotions (of course still playing a little bit on them) this film does a thorough job of giving a complete account of what happened to the children on Kindertransport before they left Germany and what became of them after the War. It’s a heartrending journey to follow, but a fascinating one that is poignantly depicted.