Entries tagged with “Blog-a-thons”

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Fuck off from Bizarro Box Office Power Rankings. You won't notice any changes here.

Our rankings for these two weeks were won by two brand-new movies: What Happens in Vegas and The Strangers. Critics love them, and audiences are willing to have sex with animals to get into the packed auditoriums. My nemesis said he'd rather get a hot poker up his ass (probably a euphemism) than watch Cameron Diaz and Asthon Kutcher together, and I'm happy to oblige. To the most recent champion, The Strangers, me say: Watch out for The Happening and The Love Guru; they're really picking up steam.

And to you assholes who say that Hulk and The Incredible Hulk are exactly the same, you are absolutely wrong. Me prove it to you.

Hulk. Opening weekend: $62,128,420. Second weekend: $18,847,620. Total after second weekend: $100,593,300.

The Incredible Hulk. Opening weekend: $55,414,050. Second weekend: $22,136,060. Total after second weekend: $97,055,430.

See? Very different.

Hello, and if you come back next week, I'll kill you. Hate, Bons Erutluc

Stop reading for the weeks' full rankings and the methodology.

(Through June 25, we are under the sway of Bizarro. Blame Piper at Lazy Energetic Eye Theatre.)

My distate for the stone-faced British comedian Rowan Atkinson is well-documented, as is my loathing for his signature creation, Mr. Bean. I like subtle, sophisticated verbal comedy as much as the next guy, but Atkinson takes it too far; I've been with people who stare at his almost subliminal act without a hint of a smile, unaware that the turkey-on-the-head routine is a joke.

But in spite of the insufferable Atkinson, I had reason to be hopeful about Mr. Bean's Holiday.

To mark the fifth birthday of Culture Snob — born July 10, 2003 — I'll be hosting the Self-Involvement Blog-a-thon from Wednesday, July 9, to Sunday, July 13. (Previously, I initiated the Misunderstood Blog-a-thon and latched on to Only the Cinema's Short-Film Week Blog-a-thon.)

Put simply, the Self-Involvement Blog-a-thon is about the intersection of movies and life. My hope is that it will serve as a celebration of the power of the moving picture removed from the critical, cultural, and financial contexts in which it is typically considered.

Of course, we bring baggage whenever we talk or write about movies, but this is meant to be more personal — intensely idiosyncratic reactions and analyses, difficult times when movies became more than movies, brushes with movie stars, crushes on movie stars, memories from youthful encounters with film, embarrassing revelations, cinematic epiphanies, meticulous drawings of Darth Vader from your eight-year-old self, ... .

The only rule is that contributions have two central elements: movies and you.

Submissions (or promises of submissions) can be made in comments, through the Culture Snob e-mail form, or at snob@culturesnob.com. New work is encouraged, but moldy links are welcome, too.

And remember: For once, it is all about you.

When you think of David Cronenberg, you're likely to see fusion: Brundlefly, a living typewriter, a gun made of bones.

All of those are the work of Carol Spier, Cronenberg's art director (from Fast Company through Videodrome) and production designer (from The Dead Zone forward, with the exception of Spider).

It's easy to reduce Cronenberg to those signature images, which clearly reflect his longstanding concern with the relationship between technology and the flesh. Yet his two most recent movies — A History of Violence and Eastern Promises — have revealed a filmmaker of startling economy and density who doesn't need to lean so heavily on those old tricks.

Cronenberg's and Spier's aggressive use of the tangibly repulsive — their creations have a physicality that's unparalleled in cinema — obscure their more-mundane (but no less impressive) storytelling skills.

At the Too Many Projects Film Club, Jeremy Bushnell will host the Production Design Blog-a-thon from May 19 through 25.

It's a fantastic idea.

It's too long. We're miffed by the nominations, and sometimes the process itself. The production numbers are cheesy and interminable. We're displeased with the final results more often than not. Years later, we're typically embarrassed by the outcome.

So let's scrap the Oscars.

Even this year, when a reasonable and strong case can be made that the Best Picture winner was indeed the year's best picture, all I heard were complaints. The ceremony was dull, and No Country for Old Men and Day-Lewis and Bardem were nearly inevitable.

So let's replace this evil with another: We'll choose the best movie of the year through something similar to the presidential-selection process.

The "Short-Film Week" blog-a-thon technically closed Sunday, December 8, but I'll happily accept contributions as long as people send them (using the e-mail form or snob@culturesnob.com).

Blog-a-thons are unusual in the world in that they seem a genuine win-win-win proposition. The hosts of blog-a-thons get traffic from participants' readers. Participants get traffic from new readers through the host(s). And the world gets new writing, analysis, provocation, and thought that it wouldn't have had without the blog-a-thon.

In the case of Short-Film Week, we generated roughly three dozen new pieces on short films. This is a small, good thing.

While I hope that the people who host or write for or read a blog-a-thon benefit in some way, that doesn't diminish the need to express appreciation for their contributions.

On the last day of the "Short-Film Week" blog-a-thon, I had planned to write an essay on a music video of my readers' choosing. But my polling functions went poof this week, and I've written enough. So I'll let two of the videos on my ballot do (most of) the talking.

I chose these two because I can't imagine a more efficient way for their effects to be achieved: a poignant look at the career of Johnny Cash, and a dead-on spoof of NFL Films. Sometimes and somehow, the music video can do things (beyond the song) that seem impossible in any other format, regardless if the aims are serious or silly.

The guy who dominates Stefan Nadelman's documentary short Terminal Bar could be related to Robert Crumb, both in his physical features and his matter-of-fact way. He talks about everything from death by alcohol to bathroom blowjobs to the "destituted" people who frequented the titular establishment where he tended bar for a decade. And like the famous cartoonist Crumb, he seems perpetually amused, and it looks suspiciously like a defense mechanism.

He tells of putting cheap liquor in the bottles of more expensive brands, and brags that not one person ever noticed.

In talking about the clientele, he says that the white, working-class patrons died off — often because of booze — and were replaced by gay black men. With a shrug, without bitterness or judgment, he says something along the lines of: If you become a gay bar, you become a gay bar. Whatcha gonna do?

His name is Sheldon Nadelman. He is not the subject of the 23-minute movie, but its character is drawn from him: lively, detailed, aloof, unfocused, and scattershot.

(A warning for sensitive folk: This essay discusses and uses screen captures from a short film in which a man conquers mammoth bare breasts and inserts his entire naked body into a woman's vagina. [And, magically, the number of Culture Snob readers grows exponentially.])

An object within an object of the same type — the novel within a novel, the film within a film — is rarely considered out of its context. Its meanings, and its narrative or thematic roles, are derived from its conversation with the larger work.

But if the object is nearly whole — that is, if it's not just a fragment, if we have a reasonably full sense of its shape, structure, and content — looking at it in isolation can bear fruit and is an act of respect.

The animated T.R.A.N.S.I.T. is a feature-film plot distilled into 10 minutes, and it shows the ways in which the short film is more forgiving than longer cinematic forms. This movie operates wordlessly almost as a plot outline, and it's gorgeous to look at and challenging to keep up with. It feels like a small, perfectly cut gem.

On reflection, that's a good analogy, because Piet Kroon's 1997 short is a beautiful piece of visual craftsmanship that fails as art in any rational analysis.

Like most of his movies, David Cronenberg's Camera is a sly piece of work. On the surface, it's an illustration of the effects of lighting, camera movement, recording format, performance, and even costumes.

Camera appears to be Cronenberg's most warm and human work. But it packs a lot into its running time, and, on closer inspection, it's a downer about submission to addiction.

Short movies are at once the most ubiquitous and the most neglected films there are, garnering little critical appraisal as objects themselves even as they're unavoidable in everyday life.

This lack of analysis is in large part a function of their mostly less-than-noble intentions. Commercials for television (reused in movie theaters and online) are 30- or 60-second movies pushing a specific product or company. Music videos are similar but longer, designed to sell CDs, downloads, other merchandise, and concert tickets. Movie trailers are condensed versions of what they're hawking, yet they're generally so formulaic (more than the films themselves, if that's possible), incoherent, and artless that they rarely seem to merit further discussion.

Then there are those labors of love, short works made with the understanding that few people outside of film festivals will ever see them. They, too, are often commercial, selling the potential of their creators as suitable talents for paying projects.

From December 2 through 8, Culture Snob and Ed Howard's Only the Cinema are hosting the Short-Film Week blog-a-thon.

The blog-a-thon is technically over, but late submissions are welcome.

(The initial announcements are here and here. Pick up your logos here.)

Bookmark this entry and Only the Cinema to keep up on all the goings-on.

(List of contributions last updated at 11 a.m. on December 9, 2007.)

Anybody wanting to participate in or promote the "Short-Film Week" blog-a-thon is welcome to grab and use the two logos created by event co-host Ed Howard of Only the Cinema.

Continue reading to view and/or download the graphics.

When I read the initial announcement for "Short Film Day," slated for December 4 at Ed Howard's Only the Cinema, my heart sank.

I'd been mulling a short-film blog-a-thon for months, but was hesitant to set a date because of my experience with the Misunderstood Blog-a-thon; these things are a lot more work than I'd imagined.

So Ed beat me to it.

But then my barnacle/parasite/moocher antennae got all tingly, and I proposed that we co-host the blog-a-thon and expand it. He agreed.

Hence: Short-Film Week, running Sunday, December 2, through Saturday, December 8, 2007. During that week, write something, submit an old essay, or point us to your favorite writing on short films.

Commercials, music videos, movie trailers, and episodes of television programs are all fair game, as are proper short films — you know, the type that aren't trying to sell something else.

E-mail Ed or me with questions or promises of contributions, or leave comments on our respective announcements.

Track all the exciting blogging action here and at Only the Cinema.

The first images of Jim Kurring involve his morning routine, and it's nothing remarkable: He eats, he showers, he reads the paper, he exercises.

But there are little hints about how we're supposed to react to him. He laughs out loud — and not very convincingly — at something on the Today show. When he's lifting weights, we see one of those inspirational posters encouraging "determination." And he prays, on his knees at the foot of his bed, with a cross looking down upon him. When he finishes, he gets up and claps his hands together once, as if Team God had just broken from the huddle. We learn through voice-over that he participates in some dating service, or at the least runs a personal ad. He's a cop, and he gives himself a pep talk in the squad car.

At Strange Culture, RC is hosting the Film + Faith Blog-a-thon, running through November 9. (The announcement is here.)

I'm hoping for a diverse, engaging, thoughtful, and provocative batch of essays, because the spiritual component of movies is critical but often neglected. People gravitate toward films that make them feel good — an effect on the soul — even if they typically don't examine the reasons. Sometimes we must decide how movies fit into our spiritual/moral world view, a topic that Will Gray explores in his lovely contribution.

I've resurrected (boooooooo!) old essays on morality and movies and the Exorcist prequels as offerings, and I plan to write at least one other thing. (This essay on Requiem probably fits, too. Hell, so does this thing I posted yesterday.) I wish the blog-a-thon were longer, because I have several other things I'd like to write about.

The morning after the Red Sox won the 2007 World Series (following two miserable seasons of championship drought), two people approached me in McDonald's. I was wearing a Red Sox shirt. We were in northern Arkansas, beginning an 11-hour drive north after a weekend of wedding festivities. Incidentally, I eat at McDonald's about as often as the Red Sox win the World Series.

One person wanted to know how Game 4 had come out. (Very well, thank you.) The other marveled at seeing another Red Sox fan in Arkansas. (Just visiting.)

I smiled and chatted with the people who talked to me, but it didn't feel like my team had just won the World Series.

More than a half-century separates these two movies, and they obviously live in different parts of town. Tod Browning's horror classic Freaks was controversial upon its release in 1932 and hasn't lost much shock value, with its use of real sideshow performers and the uncomfortable mixture of exploitation and sympathy. Peter Weir's Witness is a mild drama about the Amish that masquerades as a cop thriller. (Or is a cop thriller disguised as an Amish drama?)

Yet the two have much in common.

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