Yesterday, guest blogger Kevin Lee put two shorts by members of the Court 13 collective on his list of the 5 Best Music Videos of 2008, Benh Zeitlin’s clip for O’Death’s “Lowtide,” and MGMT’s “Time to Pretend,” directed by Ray Tintori. For those unfamiliar with these guys, Zeitlin’s the director of the much-lauded short Glory at Sea, on which Tintori is credited as writer and production designer; and Tintori directed the 2007 festival hit, the Wes Anderson-does-Frankenstein-in-the-style-of-Guy Maddin short Death to the Tinman, which Zeitlin also worked on. The filmmakers, who are mainly based in New Orleans, also worked on the Obama campaign earlier this year, and made a couple of videos for that cause.
Tinman is one of my favorite shorts of the past few years, and I’ve embedded it after jump. You can currently watch the 25-minute Glory at Seaon YouTube, thanks to Wholphin.
Beyonce’s video for “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)” may have already garnered nearly 20 million views on YouTube, but it’s not the best of the many great music videos of 2008. Here are five that are better –– and none of them rip off Bob Fosse. You can see my picks for the 5th through 10th best videos of 2008 (yes, including Beyonce) at my blog, alsolikelife.com/shooting.
5. Killer Mike featuring Ice Cube, “Pressure” Directed by Giovanni Hidalgo
One can only imagine how many hours director Hidalgo spent ripping and mixing clips off the internet, cable news, and who knows where else, but watching the result is like a long night’s cram session for a Black liberation theory class in the space of a song.
The sheer breadth of footage is breathtaking, flashing everything from archival newsreel to Hollywood clips to graphic crime videos. The shock-and-awe montage makes it hard to arrive at a coherent thesis for grappling with the laundry list of social ills laid out by both the lyrics and visuals, full of jarring juxtapositions that radically recontextualize familiar images and figures into an alternative universe of hip-hop resistance. Even Barack Obama doesn’t come away unscathed: his “Yes We Can” iconography is eventually followed by a clip of him dancing with Ellen Degeneres that’s as ingratiating as Stepin Fetchit. The lasting effect is a purposeful distancing from the daily stream of images that spoon-feed us into complacency, something that viewers of any race or background can take to heart.
As Ice Cube says, “I’m here to deprogram you.” A machine gun spray of media-fueled dissonance, “Pressure” accomplishes in six minutes what took Oliver Stone’s JFK three hours.
Zoom in on: 2:46. The juxtaposition of Saddam Hussein and O.J. Simpson at their respective trails exemplifies the mad method of this video: a knee-jerk provocation, an inspired association, or both.
Those who have been following the newssurrounding the hit SXSW short Glory at Sea (see the trailer above) know that the film’s director, Benh Zeitlin, is recovering from a hit-and-run car accident that happened en route to Sea’s SXSW premiere. Zeitlin didn’t have insurance, and his medical bills are reported to be in the high five figures. In order to make a dent, his friends and filmmaking partners have set up two benefit screenings of Sea, one in New York and one in Austin. The New York screening happens on Saturday night, and it’ll mark not only the New York premiere of Sea, but the world premiere of Benh’s short film, I Get Wet. Both films will be screened in Austin, alongside five other shorts by Zeitlin and his crew of collaborators, including Ray Tintori’s beautiful black and white fable Death to the Tinman. If you can’t make it to either event but would still like to donate to the cause, there are details on how to do just that on the Rooftop Films blog. Barring any unforeseen circumstances, I’ll be at the New York screening, so if you’re around come say hi.
I’ve long been of the opinion that films should not be defined by their running time. Terms like ’short’ and ‘feature’ are handy for categorical purposes but have otherwise become unfairly exclusive, creating betwixt them a no-man’s land in which few filmmakers dare tread. I’ve heard enticing rumors of a theater in Paris that showcases films between forty five and sixty minutes and length, and I always admire those filmmakers that go against the advice of festival programmers who suggest that unless a short film is really, really great it shouldn’t run much longer than 10 minutes - just as I admire the programmers who select the 25 and 30 minute shorts that are, indeed, really really great, just like the 5 minute shorts they might be screening alongside of. It’s quality, not quantity, and I don’t care about the latter when there’s an abundance of the former. Suffice to say, I really love short form filmmaking, and I always make it a point at festivals to catch all of the short programs. I’ll be covering some of my favorite short selections from this year’s 2008 SXSW Film Festival in an upcoming article, but there was one film in particular that I felt warranted its own review.
If you were at SXSW this past week, you may have heard rumors about Glory At Sea, whose production and premiere both are almost as epic as the film itself. Directed by Ben Zeitlin and produced by the same folks behind last year’s festival favorite Death To Tinman, the film is a fable of such exorbitantly epic proportions that it could only be described as Herzogian. “Fitzcarraldo!” shouted one audience member, apparently too bowled over by the film to express himself in the form of a question, during the post-screening Q&A. Given that the film took six months to shoot (many of those spent out on open water), its Sisyphean qualities correlate quite well with Herzog’s effort. At the same time, Zeitlin’s vision seems quite a few degrees more ambitious - and even moreso removed from reality - than anything Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald might have dreamed up.
I have a friend who constantly needles me for my inappropriate crush on Michael Cera. He says the problem is not that the star of Superbad and Juno is almost a decade younger than me–the problem, is that apparently every late-20-something girl in New York has a crush on Michael Cera, and they all seem to get a kick out of talking about how inappropriate it is, and frankly, when it comes to inappropriate crushes, he expects me to have slightly more idiosyncratic tastes. I thought he was full of it, on all of the above…until I saw this.
I saw Ray Tintori’s short Death to the Tinman at three festivals in 2007, and it seemed to be a huge hit with audiences at each one. At Vulture, Bilge Ebiri embeds Tintori’s previous short, the apocalyptic Jettison Your Loved Ones.
Is David Fincher’s next film Curiously related to Mork & Mindy? Kevin Kelly at i09 investigates.
More lists: 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days makes the top of David Hudson’s Best of 2007 list. The GreenCine Daily master blogger also gives shout-outs to Silver Jew,The Pervert’s Guide to the Cinema, and Hannah Takes the Stairs. And AJ Schnack names his 10 favorite non-fiction films of the year (plus 10 runners-up).
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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I have a friend who constantly needles me for my inappropriate crush on Michael Cera. He says the problem is not that the star of Superbad and Juno is almost a decade younger than me–the problem, is that apparently every late-20-something girl in New York has a crush on Michael Cera, and they all seem to get a kick out of talking about how inappropriate it is, and frankly, when it comes to inappropriate crushes, he expects me to have slightly more idiosyncratic tastes. I thought he was full of it, on all of the above…until I saw 
