pcal.net

by Lou Ye

1. Find an attractive female lead who is willing to take her clothes off.
   A lot. Also, make sure she knows how to French inhale.
2. Shoot various cast members having sex.
3. Shoot various cast members brooding.
4. Shoot various cast members smoking.
5. Repeat steps 2-4 until you have no more film.
6. Edit the footage into the following sequence: brooding, smoking, brooding, brooding, sex, brooding, smoking, sex, brooding, sex, sex, smoking, sex, sex, sex, brooding, brooding, smoking, brooding, sex, brooding, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, smoking, sex, brooding.
7. Add voiceover to the brooding and smoking so that the audience understands
   that the sex is just an expression of how deep and pained the characters are.
8. Watch test print of movie. Realize just what a
   
   steaming pile of panda shit you have made. Panic briefly.
9. Go back and splice in random news clips about Tiananmen Square in 1989. Do not be surprised when you and your film are banned from China by the Communist Party.
10. Watch as resulting controversy carries your film to acclaim at Cannes and
    other festivals. Try to contain laughter as festival promoters declare
    your work a masterpiece.

No, I really don’t hate everything. I actually liked his two previous movies.

Last year, my friend Jesse moved his

Midnites for Maniacs
film series to the Castro. 10 bucks gets you in to see three films that haven’t seen the big screen in two decades.

Jesse gives an energetic and fascinating intro for each film - you can’t help but start to love and genuinely appreciate these goofy movies as much as he does (even if you’re laughing at them at the same time). Plus, there are trivia games with amazing prizes.

If you live in SF, you owe it to yourself to go check them out. And you have a great chance tomorrow night at 7pm:
Breakin’, Beat Street, and Cool as Ice!

Went to see Deerhoof play

play the soundstrack

to films by Harry Smith at the Castro on Thursday night.

I hadn’t known anything about Harry Smith, but he seems to have been quite a fixture of the conterculture/avant garde in the Bay Area in 60s. The feature presentation, Heaven and Earth Magic, is black and white stop-motion animation using photographic cutouts. It’s a bit like the animated segments on Monty Python, but about 100x stranger.

I’m not quite sure what the movie was about. There seemed to be a narrative thread in there somewhere, but I couldn’t quite tease it out. I’m not sure you’re supposed to, though.

It was pretty amazing. You just don’t see stuff like this anymore, never mind with a live soundtrack by an amazing band. Deerhoof added some sections of retro-electronic chirps (it often looked and sounded like Donkey Kong on acid) as well as some hits from their records. Good good.

The
tragic accident on Castro

had occurred just a few hours before. After the movie, we emerged onto the street to see burned-out husks of cars and motorcycles and cracked and singed storefronts.

Getting over a bit of being sick, finally took some time to watch the supposedly-best-picture-of-the-year last year, Crash. In light of the accolades it has received, I was awestruck by how bad it was.

And for once, I found some comfort in the fact that a great many people on IMDB agreed with me.
Rather than waste more keystrokes on it, I’ll just quote the

best user comment I found there. I really don’t see how I could come up with anything better than this:

I really liked all the parts that weren’t crap
5 March 2006
1/10

Author: GuyMourning from United States



you could either watch crash or eat a big pile of crap. As I mentioned, before, I found this movie insulting for all the intelligent people who watched, the blatant stolen concept from the film Mangolia made me want to pee all over the film and jump up and down on it. Killing the creators would not be enough, not until everyone that took part of this film is dead, well this injustice be almost pardoned. I found the smell of the box, to be ugly, and I found the directing to be glossy. I feel as if the world doesn’t know the deference between a good film and a pile of crap. If you like this movie, you are now stupid and should, spend the rest of the afternoon questioning your life, because you obviously don’t have the basic intelligence to continue existing

Last night, Jesse got Dac and me in to see another AIFF film,

Linda Linda Linda.
Four Japanese high school girls have three days to put a band together,
learn some songs and play at the annual Rock Festival.
That’s about all there is to it and I couldn’t have asked for more.

Thematic simplicity is what is so refreshing here.
Subplots are suggested but never given center stage. Hints of romance
remain unresolved. Even the plot point that
you’d think would be made into a Big Deal (a Korean exchange student
is recruited to be the lead singer) is really only added for texture.

In the end, the only themes that matter are the simple ones:

   Youth is fleeting. Friends matter. There is no point. Just rock.

The essence of punk, distilled and bottled in Japan and now shipped back to the US. I haven’t walked out of a theater so happy in years.

Only problem is now I can’t get that song out of my head…