Festival censorship

A film festival is a place you don't usually expect to encounter any sort of suppression of artistic expression. However I've got an exclusive look at the cover of 2 different versions of a festival paper which were printed recently.

I think it gets a bit trickier when you put out printed materials, online and in the theatres you can do what you want but when you print something out and throw it into a person's hand things can get a bit dicier. We had a minor controversy at my festival last year over a bit of printed material, our quickguide went out with this photo in it, showing the naked posteriors of two young ladies:


And we had the local supermarket stuffing these in shoppers bags. So someone called up and complained and the supermarket pulled all the quickguides. I guess they trashed them.

So this year in Dallas, they had to trash a bunch of copies of their daily news because they had printed them with a slightly racy photo on the cover. I've spoke with a few staff here about this and its actually not as reactionary a move as I first believed it was. There are mitigating factors which make me understand the decision to destroy one printed version of the paper and replace it with a new one. Here are the two covers:
One of my favorite movies we showed at my festival a couple years ago was the documentary FUCK. Throw that on your netflix list for sure, it's a very smart and very entertaining examination of modern censorship. We were a bit worried we might not be able to print the full title of the film on our materials, but we did! I would have thrown a big fit if that had been held back for sure.

Star Wars videos

Here is a brief respite from all the festival stuff (it might get a bit heavier soon.) I love these two short star wars videos. I was gonna just email this to my roommate but I decided to post here to share for all of you. This first one I bet a bunch of you have seen before.

Here is Darth Vader being a smartass:


Classic.

And then here is Darth Vader voiced by James Earl Jones, from COMING TO AMERICA:

http://view.break.com/436851 - Watch more free videos

Will Star Wars ever lose its poweful grip over me? I bet not.

Nathan Zellner tells me about GOLIATH

Last night I finally got a chance to see the new feature film by the Zellner brothers, GOLIATH. It's a fantastic film, very much in their style and very unique. There was lots I liked about this film, and I can't wait to see what they do next. One thing I noticed in the film was that it has some cool music in it and I especially liked the opening song. I got a chance to ask Nathan Zellner where that came from and it had kind of an unusual origin.

When they were at SXSW last year, they had stumbled into this band called The Finches. They checked out their myspace page, etc and got even more interested when they found out that the finches had written a song inspired by the film MCCABE AND MRS MILLER. Nathan tells me this is a film him and his brother love so they then contacted the band and got them to help with that opening number.

I love this sort of cross disciplinary interaction that can happen at SXSW like this. It's one of my favorite things about that festival, it feels more like a European art celebration. Except instead of painting and sculpture being showcased along with film, its music and interactive work.

I also love that the Zellners are into MCCABE AND MRS MILLER, it's one of Altman's best films and a fav of mine too. Pictured above is Nathan Zellner at a fancy party in Dallas, eating a plate of apples.

Cinevegas art book

The Cinevegas Film Festival turns ten years old this summer. To celebrate the anniversary they are putting out this book of photography which you can purchase right now. It looks like they have one of those micro publishing deals set up where they are printing as many as they sell through the online service. I think it's a brilliant use of a film festival's content and of the new economy's long tail. Publishing on demand like this is a great example of the kind of on demand manufacturing which Wired profiles this month here.

WTF Dallas?

Check out this news story! A Dallas strip club employs a 12 year old runaway and stays open! The news story is accompanied with a helpful google map of the club's location. Presumably to help the pervs find the place. Oh, and they were employing a 17 year old stripper at the same time too.

The film behind the festival

Last night on HBO the documentary TV JUNKIE was on HBO. It's a film directed by AFI Dallas Artistic Director Michael Cain. It also won a special jury prize at Sundance. I love that this festival is being run by active filmmakers, it makes them understand the experience from a unique and important perspective. I had to passionately argue for this film to included in AFI FEST because some of my co-workers could not see past the "synergy" aspects of this programming choice to recognize that this was actually one of the best docs made that year. Throw it on your netflix list right now if you haven't seen it.

Festival breakfast

Yesterday morning I was super hung over after the opening night party here in Dallas. So I couldn't leave the hotel room for hours but I needed sustenance. Luckily there was microwave popcorn in my gift bag from the previous night which saved my life. Wouldn't it be great if opening night gift bags contained survival kits for the next morning? Maybe some veggie bacon or a breakfast burrito? I hate how gift bags have become comic-con style flyer depositories and I long for they day they will return to relevance and glory! (There was also a giant chocolate chip cookie which I reluctanly ate out of desperation.)

On another note, how come my Shootout posts aren't appearing in my google alerts? I can find them if I do a blog search but they are not triggering either the "afi fest" or "lane kneedler" alert. Weird.

Mel Brooks' Oscar winning short

In 1963, Mel Brooks won an academy award for this short experimental film. It's hilarious and brilliant, mostly so for how simple it is. Below is THE CRITIC:

It's his first film, isn't it wonderful?

In Dallas and on the Shootout

I'm off to Dallas this week for AFI Dallas, and I'll be writing about it for the "Shootout blog" over on AMC. Head on over there to check out my coverage as I'll be only posting here sporadically. And if you are a new reader coming from the Shootout blog, welcome! You might want to check out the stories tagged "film." a little further down on the right.

The end of New York Underground

At the beginning of next month is the "15th And Final New York Underground Film Festival." I never got a chance to attend this event but from some filmmakers and other programmers I talked to it seemed like they had provided a unique environment to discover some truly original stuff. I'm a bit sad to see it go after all these years, I hope the organizers have other cool projects coming in the future. (It sounds like they do.)