Another day, another line-up for a festival that I’ll be attending in June. This time it’s CineVegas, and in addition to some of the familiar fest circuit favorites (Momma’s Man, Gonzo, Goliath), there are some exciting surprises. The Circuit has the full lineup. Here’s a sampling of what I hope to check out over the course of my three or four days in town:
Two films by Abel Ferrara, including Go-Go Tales (screening in the Diamond Discoveries section for films without distribution––thus squashing last fall’s rampant rumors that IFC had picked the film up around the time of the New York Film Festival?) and the US premiere of Ferrara’s doc about the Hotel Chelsea, Chelsea on the Rocks.
Finally, Lillian and Dan: A no-fi indie which I’ve been looking forward to seeing ever since The Cinetrix described it as “like a Sebadoh cassette stuck in a hatchback’s tape deck.” There’s a hypnotic trailer on MySpace.
Sonic Youth: Sleeping Nights Awake: A concert doc, shot on digital video by seven Reno teenagers in the crowd and backstage at the band’s July 4, 2006 show. See a trailer above.
Dark Streets: Starring Bijou Phillips and Gabriel Mann, Variety’s Mike Jones describes it as a “noir musical.” That’s a combination of words to which I can’t say no.
The Academy’s Sid Ganis, desperate to come to some sort of revealable conclusion as to what kind of Oscars he’s going to preside over, has been pestering the WGA to grant a waiver to allow the producers to use writers/put on a show and not get picketed. So far he’s been denied, and it sounds like his hands are wringing fairly fervently. “I’m nervous. We’re getting down to the final moments; we need to make plans.”
The Playlist passes along word that MVD is gearing up to release a new DVD set featuring previously unreleased film and video work by photographer/experimental filmmaker Richard Kern. The disc includes six “bonus” shorts, which might be enough for any Kern fan, but here they’re ancillary to the main event, called Extra Action. Theofficial synopsis of Extra Action reads like Girls Gone Wild with hipster cred:
Photographer Richard Kern likes real women: unpretentious, unadorned, and definitely undressed. Those who love Kern’s books know each is an invitation to join him as he follows them through their homes-or his New York apartment-from backyard to kitchen to bathroom to bedroom, capturing every sexy and embarrassing moment. Whenever Kern photographs one of these energetic, clothes-dropping exhibitionists, he brings out a video camera and asks them to “roll around and do something interesting for a few minutes”. Extra Action documents 60 of these innocent amateur incidents set to an original musical score by Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth.
I wonder if this is just marketing copy, or if Extra Action is as cheesy as it sounds. I’m a fan of the Kern shorts that I’ve seen, because even when they’re grotesquely sleazy (or, in the case of Straw Dogs, mostly just grotesque), they’re also funny and even witty. And Money Love (which I think is the same think as Scooter & Jinx, which is included as a bonus on this DVD) actually plays like punk critique of pornography. In the hopes that Extra Action is something along the same lines, I’ve embedded it above.
Above: a video for Sonic Youth’s “Jams Run Free”, from their Rather Ripped album, shot by French cinema bad girl Claire Denis. Daniel Stuyck writes about this, and the four other videos Denis has made for the band, in the new issue of Film Comment:
The antecedent to these pieces is not so much Denis’s previous films as Bruce Conner’s Cosmic Ray. Conner’s 1961 short, an essential demonstration of the maxim that pop songs are teenage symphonies to God, reads like a list of chemical ingredients for any of these videos: rock and roll; erotic tension (as P. Adams Sitney is at pains to point out, Cosmic Ray predominantly features the “irreverent dance of a naked woman, which he [Conner] photographed himself”); bland images of daily life and consumer culture (Mickey Mouse, hitchhiking Indians, neon signs, the H-bomb) transformed into something surreal. In other words, a strange alchemy—an area where science and religion meet, not unlike drugs. And that ultimate drug state—ecstasy—is what Conner and Denis are ultimately fixed on: Denis’s unfocused whip pans as Sonic Youth slams into its chorus create the same sensation as Conner’s image of skulls birthing from crotches in an instant between two shots, a revelation of new meanings created by a strange combination of elements.
The Playlist passes along word that Sonic Youth’s cover of The Carpenters’ “Superstar” has made it onto the Juno soundtrack album. The song plays a key role in my favorite part of the film, the friendship between Ellen Page’s pregnant teen and Jason Bateman’s 30-something would-be adoptive father, through which Juno learns perhaps the most important lesson of being a wise-beyond-your-years teenage girl: you can only be precocious and adorable and interested in some older dude’s past life as a minor rock star for so long before said older dude starts getting That Look in his eyes every time you come ’round.
Still, it seems a *little* weird that a song that was originally recorded for a compilation disc would now end up on another compilation disc. Or maybe it doesn’t. I don’t know. The whole point of this post was to have an excuse to embed Dave Markey’s video for the song, which I love, and have loved since I was Juno’s age.
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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The Academy’s Sid Ganis, desperate to come to some sort of revealable conclusion as to what kind of Oscars he’s going to preside over, has been pestering the WGA to grant a waiver to allow the producers to use writers/put on a show and not get picketed. So far he’s been denied, and it sounds like his hands are wringing fairly fervently. “I’m nervous. We’re getting down to the final moments; we need to make plans.”
