Category Archives: Film

Blank City Review By A Fan of Odd Future & Lil B Who Used to Write on Other Peoples Things

Posted on June 10, 2011 by | 3 comments
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Blank City

(Céline Danhier, 2010)

Unmade Beds / Permanent Vacation
// Double Feature
Fri, June 10–Sat, June 11, 2011  |  7:00PM
Wexner Center Film/Video Theater

Celine Danhier directed Blank City, which is a documentary about the No Wave Film movement that eventually ran into Hip Hop & graffiti’s move from the Bronx, and in general the art world.

I typed her name first so I would at least do 1 thing right in this review. I would tell you to google the other reviews, and they would tell you that Blank City gathers stories from people like Akron’s Jim Jarmusch, John Waters, Thurston Moore and Debbie Harry about the early 80’s community of thin, broke people with an excellent sense of style doing whatever it takes to utilize new developments that allowed movies to be made by just anyone, and be shown by just anyone in New York City.

You know kids writing their names big on trains? Well, frail pasty white folk were using film to write their images on anything.

So if you read this blog cause you like rap shit. Then you should watch this movie because eventually it ties in the scene from Wild Style where Lee was boffing that gallery lady to why you be looking at that junkie looking girl at the end of the bar.

Fab Five Freddy, Daze, and Charlie Ahearn are in the building.

Think about Lil B…. how everyone is mad that he can’t rap. But he also has really weird You-Tube videos and is thriving.

Somewhere in the movie, someone says the No Wave Movement rejected everything pre-1976. Think about Tyler, the Creator saying he hates people that only talk about 1994 rap. Continue reading →

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Posted in Film, Music, Review, Video, Wes Flexner

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Times New Viking + Putty Hill Film Screening in Columbus

Posted on March 11, 2011 by | 1 comment

Over at the Wexner Center, Times New Viking will participate in a discussion with the filmmaker of Putty Hill after the screening tonight. Details:

After Friday night’s screening of Putty Hill, director Matt Porterfield will be joined in conversation with Adam Elliott and Beth Murphy from the Columbus band, Times New Viking. They’ll talk about the film, making art on a minuscule budget, and will field your questions.

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Posted in Columbus, Film

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And Starring Kristen Stewart as Joan Jett

Posted on December 19, 2009 by | 4 comments

Click here for more info.

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Posted in Film, Video

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Died Young, Stayed Pretty @ Wexner Center Wednesday

Posted on September 22, 2009 by | 1 comment

Filmmaker Eileen Yaghoobian spent five years – and her own dime – putting together this documentary that is a snapshot of contemporary rock poster artists who live in rock cities other than L.A. or New York. And much like the artists she chose to feature, the film is a cut-and-paste collage of images, personal stories, theories, history lesson, and, yes, rock n’ roll.

As with any sub-culture of artist-types, there are some fucking weirdos in the movie who yammer on and on seemingly about nothing or about the crazy visions they have in their heads. Continue reading →

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Posted in Columbus, Film, Music

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A Family Underground: Insane Clown Posse Juggalo Documentary

Posted on June 8, 2009 by | 3 comments

Just added this to my Netflix queue:

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Posted in Film, Video

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SXSW Updates Official Band List 2/10/09

Posted on February 10, 2009 by | 8 comments

UPDATE: Click here if you just want to see a list of only the bands removed and added to the list.

I think SXSW does a lot of things right, but I really wish when they did these updates they would do something to show what the changes were… Either put a * next to new names, bold them, something. Ah well, we’ll have the full schedule soon enough. In the meantime, here’s the list of confirmed bands from SXSW. The amount of bands is up to 1,800. And remember, THE LIST IS NOT FINAL. Continue reading →

8 Comments

Posted in Film, SXSW Blog

Film review: Star Wars: The Clone Wars

Posted on August 14, 2008 by | 7 comments

Is it possible that George Lucas would okay a new Star Wars film for the express purpose of shutting down all the mean things film critics have been saying about him over the course of his second trilogy of Star Wars flicks?

Probably not, but one could make the argument; after all, one of the very few pleasure of the new computer-animated Star Wars: Clone Wars is ticking off the ways it responds to common criticisms of the past few films, proving critics’ assertions wrong.

For example, one of the most common complaints was that the reason the new trilogy was so goddam awful compared to the six-ilogy’s crown jewel, 1980’s The Empire Strikes Back, was that control freak Lucas was insisting on doing so much himself, instead of turning the scripting and directing over to more competent creators.

Well, Clone Wars is directed by animator Dave Filoni, not Lucas, and it’s screenplay is written by Steven Melching and Scott Murphy. Lucas only gets credit for the “story” (“Okay, so these guys fight these guys, and then they do it again, and then they do it again, and that oughta kill 90 minutes”) and for creating the “characters and universe.”

And you know what? It’s even more goddam awful than the last three movies. So there, smarty-pants critics! Continue reading →

7 Comments

Posted in Film

Film Review: The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor

Posted on August 1, 2008 by | 2 comments

It’s hard to say which summer movie suffers the most from the presence of the other: Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull or The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor.

Obviously, the latter owes its very existence to the former. When writer/director Stephen Sommers launched The Mummy franchise for Universal in 1999, it bore far more in common with the Indiana Jones cycle than the 1932 Boris Karloff movie it was supposedly a kinda sorta reimagination of.

While George Lucas and Stephen Spielberg looked to old B-movies and serials for inspiration, turning out an A-list B-movie in their Indy franchise, The Mummy was a B-movie version of their A-list B-movie, taken the historical swashbuckling action flick back to its shoddier roots, with star Brendan Fraser’s self-aware charm and an at times nauseating amount of computer animation to separate it as a good-bad movie version of old bad-bad movies. Continue reading →

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Film review: Hellboy II: The Golden Army

Posted on July 10, 2008 by | 4 comments

Given the peculiar ambitions of the Hellboy franchise—would-be blockbuster special effects-driven eye candy horror action comedy—it should come as no surprise that the second go-round, Hellboy II: The Golden Army is all over the place.

The tone shifts from scenes of wacky slapstick to too-earnest melodrama to self-serious superhero movie-isms, and you can practically fell the gears grinding when it does.

It’s to writer/director Guillermo del Toro credit that the entire endeavor never completely stalls out, but manages to zip by thanks to copious B-movie charm, and genuinely amazing creature designs, a movie menagerie that could fill more than one of Pan’s labyrinths.
Continue reading →

4 Comments

Posted in Film

Film review: Wanted

Posted on June 26, 2008 by | 11 comments

Like seemingly every third big studio movie this summer, Wanted is based on a superhero comic, a 2003 six-issue series of the same title.

In it, thinly-veiled versions of DC Comics supervillians have conquered the world and rule it from behind the scenes, lulling us into thinking that superheroes are just things in comics, movies and bad TV shows from decades ago. Perhaps due to legal reasons—I’m talking some thin, thin veils over those DC characters—the movie adaptation takes practically nothing from its comic source: The title, a couple of characters’ names, two lines of dialogue and…that’s about it, actually.

That in and of itself wouldn’t really be a problem, at least not as problematic as where director Timur “Night Watch” Bekmambetov gets his inspiration instead: The Matrix movies. You would think that Matrix Revolutions would have been the stake through the heart of Matrix mimicry, but here we have a guy with extraordinary superpowers in a business suit jumping through an office building, gun-fu, bullet time, a sleepy-eyed office drone recruited into a war he’s never heard of, and on and on. Continue reading →

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Posted in Film

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