This Savage Art

Being a lazy Labor Day weekend I thought this was worth sharing for a laugh. I found this article on the Pro Video Coalition website on how to read between the lines and interpret crew listings on Craigslist.

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These are some of the films I will attempt to see this Fall, you know, the film release season that pushes all the crap aside and pulls out all the stops. I’m sure there are others that I will add as the season progresses. Am I missing something?

* denotes must sees.

September

Burn After Reading…9/12

Elite Squad…9/19

Choke…9/26

Miracle at St. Anna…9/26

October

Nick & Nora’s Infinite Playlist…10/3

Religulous…10/3

W….10/17

*Synecdoche, New York…10/24

Zack and Miri Make a Porno…10/31

November

Milk…11/26  and whatever I didn’t see in September and October.

December

*The Curious Case of Benjamin Button…12/25

Valkyrie…12/25

Note to self: take this number and cut it in half, add the remaining to Netflix queue.

More Fall coverage from New York Magazine.

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If you’re in the city this weekend and want to see what looks like a very inside view of the American male in the midst of an emotional tailspin, check out Momma’s Man from filmmaker Azazel Jacobs, it opened yesterday at the Angelica. Here’s a snippet from Karina Longworth’s review on SpoutBlog:

When a filmmaker casts his own parents as parents––in a film about an adult and his relationship to his parents upon returning to his childhood home, a film which said filmmaker shoots *in* his childhood home––you’d expect (or maybe fear) that the result would be meta-personal to the point of solipsism. But what’s really surprising about Azazel Jacob’s Momma’s Man, which stars his experimental filmmaker father Ken Jacobs and mother Flo Jacobs and was shot in the Manhattan loft in which the family has lived for decades, is that it feels completely universal. The story of a 30-something husband and father of a newborn who extends a stay at his parents’ ramshackle New York apartment indefinitely, it’s an incredible portrait of the final phase of coming of age, the transition from being parented to parenting.

I couldn’t wait to see this when Linda was on the verge of giving birth to the boy because, well, it described everything I was going through at the time in a little capsule. The panic, the responsibly, the desire to crawl back into the womb myself. I’m going to try and check it out next week myself but all of you should give this film a little weekend box office love. Check the trailer:

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Wired takes an in depth look at the RED digital wundercamera.

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61 films from first timers. That’s encouraging!

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It’s 4:12 am, Tuesday morning and I just fed the boy so this is a rapid fire, stream of consciousness post because I need some sleep for tomorrow, I mean today. I’m still trying to get a grip on this whole new life, scheduling everything around my son’s schedule thing. It ain’t easy but you knew that already. I didn’t I guess. I mean, I knew in the abstract that I would be busier and time would be tighter but I never knew I would be flexing these organizational muscles that not only I didn’t know I had but found out I’m really a mess in the this department. One answer: iCal. Learn it, know it, live it.

iCal is a calendar app that comes with all Macs including this new MacBook that I saved up for and purchased recently. New Macs are cool. They just run and run their little Intel processors in a way that your old beaten up iBook couldn’t. Anyway, iCal rules my life now. It is my life. Boy needs to go to the pediatrician. Set-up an iCal reminder. Bresson double-feature at the Film Forum that I probably won’t get to see. Set it up in iCal. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by all of the appointments you need to keep. iCal…you get it.

Hey, this is the best I could come up with at 4:12 am. Did you want to look at Walter Matthau’s face below for another two weeks?

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There are a couple of very cool articles over at the Moving Image Source on two film noir pioneers, Jim Thompson and David Goodis, and their contributions to Hollywood.

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There’s a new feature at The House Next Door. Check it out.

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Whether you have the money or not this is some very good advice on what to do with your money and how you, as a filmmaker, should evolve.

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You can see this film and other selections in full screen HD at the Hulu site as part of their Days of Summer promotion. [Hat-tip Filmmaker Magazine Blog]

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