Thursday March 4, 7:00pm / $20
St. Paul’s Cultural Center
Thee Majesty featuring Genesis Breyer P-Orridge!
US premiere of Universalove featuring live accompaniment by Naked Lunch!
Special sneak preview screening!
CIMMfest 2010 kicks off with a William S. Burroughs-themed night of film and music. First up is Austrian band Naked Lunch, who will accompany the US premiere of Thomas Wolschitzs 2008 film Universalove with the songs they built the film around. Next up is a special, but secret, screening of a documentary featuring Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, Sonic Youth, Jello Biafra, Grant Hart and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, followed by Q & A with the director. Finally, for the first time in Chicago, Thee Majesty featuring takes the stage. $20 gets you access to everything.
Joseph Matheny is the co-founder and CTO of Hukilau, host of the GSpot podcast, publisher of Alterati, co-creator of Incunabula (one of the first Alternate Reality Games), and about a million other things. He recently published in conjunction with Original Falcon Robert Anton Wilson: The Lost Studio Session. Having been interviewed by Joe three times now, I thought it was time to turn the tables on him and find out what he’s up to at Hukilau. Read on to find out how you can get an early look at Hukilau.(Update: The private betas are all gone now)
Arthur Magazine editor Jay Babcock has re-published his 2004 interview with Alexandro Jodorowsky from LA Weekly:
I don’t suffer to write it. But when I need to write a new series, a new album, for three days I do nothing. The only thing I can do is to see movies, see television, read . . . Because I am as if paralyzed! Suddenly, [with relief] the idea comes. I say thank you, because I am grateful. I am really grateful because I received the idea. But I don’t construct the idea. I am not a constructor. I receive the idea.
Q: Where do you think it comes from?
The unconscious. It comes directly from the unconscious. I think the unconscious is a very, very enormous universe, no? And when you open the doors to the unconscious, you start to receive. Sometimes you see a terrible vision of yourself: desires you don’t want to have, ideas you detest, feelings that hurt you. When you open the door, you can see yourself in a very weird way, like a bad trip on LSD. You can have that. You have all the hell, and paradise, no? You need to have the courage to open the doors.
The guerrilla pseudo-documentary “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” billed as “A Banksy Film” and narrated by Ifans, will have its world premiere Sunday night. [...]
According to a description, “L.A.-based filmmaker Terry Guetta set out to record this secretive world in thrilling detail. For more than eight years he traveled with a backpack through Europe and America. After he met a British street artist known only as Banksy, things took a bizarre turn.”
But whether the artist known as Banksy directed the film himself is still a mystery.
Above is a abridged version of Night of Pan that was made for a Beijing arts festival. The full version will be shown in LA at the Projections Festival.
In response to this NY Post piece by Emily Nussbuam, Robert Moore makes a persuasive case that Buffy the Vampire Slayer made TV art:
This was the decade in which television became art. So argues Emily Nussbuam in a recent New York Magazine essay, “When TV Became Art”. She certainly makes a strong case that 2000-2009 was a pivotal age for TV and I strongly recommend her essay to anyone interested in the development of television over the past decade. I agree that this was, all in all, the finest decade for great television. Others have argued that TV had arisen as an art form in earlier decades, some (though in dwindling numbers) arguing for the fifties, based on the series that presented staged plays for a television audience, including such original masterpieces as “Twelve Angry Men”, written by Reginald Rose for Studio One, and “Requiem for a Heavyweight”, written by Rod Serling for Playhouse 90. Later, Robert J. Thompson, in his widely cited Television’s Second Golden Age: From Hill Street Blues to ER, argued for the eighties as the crucial period. But Nussbaum has numbers on her side; it is difficult to argue against the sheer quantity of very fine shows that emerged in the past ten years. The number of truly great series from the past ten years is so substantial that it might surpass the number of great shows from all previous decades combined.
Nonetheless, I want to take issue with Nussbaum. I think that chopping the overall picture up into decade-sized blocks obscures the reality. I believe that one can point at a precise point where TV became art, and that point was the debut of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. [...]
I understand Nussbaum’s desire to fit the birth of TV as art into a decade framework, but the truth is that art, like life, is messier than that. TV had become art before 2000 and it was largely thanks to Buffy.
I love the The Wire but it certainly wasn’t the most ground breaking series on television (remember, both The Sopranos and Six Feet Under preceded it). I haven’t watched Buffy, but Moore makes a strong case. Either way, the 00s certainly marked a turning point in the history of television. It was, perhaps, the decade in which television eclipsed film.
Actor Sam Elliott has accused the Catholic Church of pressurising Hollywood producers to scrap a classic fantasy trilogy.
Studio bosses have shelved plans to film the final two instalments of His Dark Materials, despite the success of the first movie, The Golden Compass, two years ago. [...]
Asked what happened to the series, Elliot said: “The Catholic Church happened to The Golden Compass, as far as I’m concerned. It did ‘incredible’ at the box office, taking $380million. Incredible. It took $85million in the States. [...]
A spokesman for New Line Cinema declined to comment.
Now that the comics industry has overtaken film, its outstanding writers are starting to step up to the biopic bar. Subversive brainiac Grant Morrison is up next, with a dedicated documentary due in time for next year’s Comic-Con International.
“He has an uncanny ability to tell stories that are both accessible and progressively avant-garde,” explained indie director Patrick Meaney, whose untitled Grant Morrison documentary, previewed in the exclusive clips above and below, will analyze the writer’s storied run for Marvel and DC Comics on standout titles like The Invisibles, X-Men and Final Crisis as well as more esoteric series like The Filth and Flex Mentallo.
This is geared mostly to aspiring screenwriters, but I think other writers and appreciators of film would benefit from at least reading this article, if not the scripts as well.
In May it was announced that Jodorowsky was going to work with acclaimed director David Lynch on King Shot which was described as a “metaphysical spaghetti western.” Though he hasn’t exactly been relevant in contemporary filmmaking over the past two decades, it looks like his work with Lynch has paid off as Quiet Earth reports that he now has the funding needed to make his dream project Abel Cain.
Jodorowsky calls the film “the sons of El Topo” (see above), a nod to his 1970 revisionist western El Topo. The story follows Abel and Cain who, upon the death of their mother, embark on a journey to bury her holy body next to their father’s grave on a forbidden paradise island.
Looking for an intelligent horror film to watch this Halloween? Check out this Pizza SEO post from a few months ago:
1. The Devil’s Backbone
2. Cube
3. Intacto
4. The Descent
5. The Abandoned
6. Butcher Boy
7. Jacob’s Ladder
8. The Cell
9. Silent Hill
10. Dead Ringers
I love Dead Ringers, and most of Cronenberg’s output – especially Videodrome, which totally holds up. I liked Intacto, but wouldn’t really call it a horror film. I didn’t care for the Cell or Cube. I haven’t seen the others.
Gus Van Sant and author Bret Easton Ellis will team to write a feature about the double suicide of artists Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake.
PalmStar Entertainment, Celluloid Dreams and K5 Film have acquired screen rights to “The Golden Suicides,” a Vanity Fair article written by Nancy Jo Sales. [...]
The couple descended into a paranoid spiral when the artists developed a consuming belief that government and religious organizations were conspiring against them. She killed herself in 2007. Blake found her body on the floor of their bedroom, and walked into the Atlantic Ocean a week later, ending his life.
Did you know that Alejandro Jodorowsky was originally going direct Dune? (I could swear I’d written about this here before, but I apparently haven’t. For this, I am sorry.)
In December 1974, a French consortium led by Jean-Paul Gibon purchased the film rights to Dune from Arthur P. Jacobs. Jodorowsky was set to direct. In 1975, Jodorowsky planned to film the story as a ten hour feature, in collaboration with Salvador Dali, Orson Welles, Gloria Swanson, David Carradine, Geraldine Chaplin, Alain Delon, Hervé Villechaize and Mick Jagger. The music would be composed by Pink Floyd. Jodorowsky set up a pre-production unit in Paris consisting of Chris Foss, a British artist who designed covers for science fiction periodicals, Jean Giraud (Moebius), a French illustrator who created and also wrote and drew for Metal Hurlant magazine, and H. R. Giger. Moebius began designing creatures and characters for the film, while Foss was brought in to design the film’s space ships and hardware. Giger began designing the Harkonnen Castle based on Moebius’ storyboards, and Dali was cast as the Emperor with a reported salary of $100,000 an hour. His son Brontis Jodorowsky was to play Paul. Dan O’Bannon was to head the special effects department.
Instead, some of the people involved went on to make Alien and Jodorowsky went on to write the comic book series Metabarons, and David Lynch gave up the opportunity to direct Revenge of the Jedi to direct Dune (Wikipedia says David Cronenberg was also offered the chance to direct Jedi and turned it down – I didn’t know that before today!)
Anyway, the Drawing Room in London will have an exhibition of the materials created for the movie 17 September – 25 October 2009
(much thanks to Jellyfish for all the Jodorowsky Dune trivia)
Richard Metzger also points to this saying it was some footage from the movie (I haven’t watched it yet): It’s actually trailers for two Moebuis animated movies: 1) L’Incal, based on a comic book collaboration between Moebuis and Jodorowsky and later ripped off by Fifth Element and 2) An animated version of Moebuis’s Arzach. Neither was ever released, to the best of my knowledge. The video was uploaded, incidentally, by the above mentioned artists extraordinaire and pop culture trivia maven Popjellyfish.
Can we start with cinema. Is your film “Drivetime” about unleashing powers of chaos by using chaos magic? I do not know if I have this right?
Intriguing interpretation. Though I did not intend make “The Drivetime”as a vehicle for chaos magick, I can see how it could be experienced like that. I wrote “The Drivetime” on the heels of kicking an opium addiction while living in the seaside village of Port Townsend Washington back in 1995. Papaver somniferum blooms wild all over the streets about three months each year and I learned everything you need to know about chasing the dragon from Jim Hogshire’s book, “Opium for the Masses” (Loompanics, Ltd). I was desperate to trade up my opium addiction for an endorphin trigger that wouldn’t vanquish my libido. Inspiration hit when my friend Rob Brezsny, the astrology columnist, introduced me to his spin on the term “drivetime” which refers to the psychic overlays linking daytime and dreamtime realities. This drivetime meme exploded in my imagination and got me thinking about the interface between the aboriginal dreamtime and modern-day cyberspace.
I’m at a loss for words as to just how I upgraded my opium addiction to getting hooked on the poetic imagination but that’s what happened. The drivetime was no longer an idea in my head but an all-encompassing reality that needed an outlet besides my body and so, the momentum was on to channel these visions through the multi-tiered outlet of a cyber-fi feature film. My aim in making the film was to proffer for the viewer an experience of the drivetime as I knew it. And so, I suppose maybe I did unleash the powers of chaos using chaos magic afterall.
So, those were the agendas that we were following then. We thought it would be a great idea if comics could be recognized as the wonderful medium that we secretly knew them to be. And when I say “we,” I’m talking about the 50 actual people who turned up at those early conventions, which was pretty much the sum total of everybody in this country who’d ever heard of American comics. But back then our agenda was this progressive notion that, wouldn’t it be terrific if people were to get involved with comics who could make them more adult, more grown up, to show the kind of themes they were capable of handling? So this was the agenda that, 20 years later, I was still following toward the end of my first DC run. [...]
When I was working upon the ABC books, I wanted to show different ways that mainstream comics could viably have gone, that they didn’t have to follow Watchmen and the other 1980s books down this relentlessly dark route. It was never my intention to start a trend for darkness. I’m not a particularly dark individual. I have my moments, it’s true, but I do have a sense of humor. With the ABC books I was trying to do comics that would have perhaps appealed to an intelligent 13-year-old, such as I’d been, and would still satisfy the contemporary readership of 40-year-old men who probably should know better. But I wanted to sort of do comics that would be accessible to a much wider range of people, and would still be intelligent even if they were primarily children’s adventure stories, such as the Tom Strong books.
DPRGRM/Plotlite announced a project today that forges a new path in independent cinema by bringing together real world experience and film in a unique way. ‘Y’ brings an audience inside the creation of a modern myth. The audience will become actual cast members, and be immersed in the story in real time. The film crew will also be part of the story as well as part of the cast, therefore creating a total immersive experience that bridges the traditional proscenium of audience/performer.
The ambitious staging and shooting technique is enhanced by the premise that in the future, government facilities, such the as one depicted in this film, will have to turn to unorthodox means of funding, such as contracting the facility out as the subject of a reality based TV show. The actual crew will be made up of news, reality and documentary style cinematographers and the production will be filmed entirely in the Cinma vrit style.
Written by John Harrigan and James Curcio, and directed by Joseph Matheny, Y is a unique production fusing characters from Curcios second published novel, Fallen Nation: Babylon Burning and Harrigans screenplay GraveLand, currently in pre production.
“With the Star Wars saga officially wrapped up with Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, fans will seek out any remaining sliver of that galaxy far, far away on screen. The Clone Wars animated movie gave them a little bit of light drone lasering action, but what really caught their attention was Kyle Newman’s Fanboys.
Set in 1998, the film tells the story of four friends who learn that one of their number has terminal cancer, and will die before he gets to see the long-awaited Star Wars prequel, Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Thus the gang scheme to break into Skywalker Ranch and steal a rough cut. This celluloid tribute to Star Wars fandom was supposed to hit theaters in August 2007, but distributor The Weinstein Company thought they could turn it into a bigger event. They hired Steven Brill to reshoot scenes with more dirty jokes and nudity, and removed that downer cancer bit. After news of the new version leaked, a grassroots online rebellion was mounted, spearheaded by a group called Stop Darth Weinstein who helped get Newman reinstated to deliver his version of the film, albeit two years later.
The saga wasn’t all bad for Newman. He met his wife, Jaime King, on the film. She plays a Las Vegas escort who plays Jedi mind tricks with one of the boys. The online support from fans who just wanted to see the original version also warmed his heart. However, the morning of his press junket in Beverly Hills, Newman was already visibly exhausted. The day was just beginning, but the journey to bring Fanboys to the screen was nearly over. All he had to do was keep his posture up on the sofa and answer questions about Weinstein as diplomatically as possible.”
I came across a snippet in Sci-Fi Wire about a couple of producers closing in on a writer for a film based on the Ouija Board. Guess they forgot about the series of Witchboard movies from the ’80’s. This one may turn out to be good, but the movies that I’ve seen recently haven’t impressed me much. (Then again I haven’t had the time to watch very many.) What’s next? Some marbles and Pik-Up-Stiks become animated and seek revenge? Tarot cards come to life and start the revolution? GI Joe zombies??…
“Platinum Dunes producers Brad Fuller and Andrew Form told SCI FI Wire that they’re close to hiring a “very high-level writer” to begin drafting a script for a Ouija-themed movie, tied to the Parker Brothers’ “spirit board” game.
“I don’t think we’ve closed the deal, so I can’t say, but we’ve got a very high-level writer to write that, and we start writing it, I think, within the month,” Fuller said in an interview over the weekend in Beverly Hills, Calif., where he and Form were promoting Friday the 13th.”
(“Closing in on a writer for Ouija movie: The signs are auspicious” via Sci-Fi Wire)
(Related: “Turn your ipod into a Ouija board” via Cnet Uk)
We would talk at great length every time Alan started to script an issue, he’d run by how he thought it might be broken down, then I’d give him my suggestions on that, and then based on the various thing we were talking about – we would both go off into reminiscences, and speculations about how we came through music to comics to childhood experiences to vague feelings about things – somehow we’d come back to the topic of Watchmen again, and this stuff, largely contextual and largely sort of, er, mood as much as anything, would find its way into the finished comic book. We just talked and talked a lot, and then Alan typed and typed a lot and I drew and drew a lot. And then John Higgins – I shouldn’t leave him out – he coloured and coloured a lot, and I very much would talk things through with him, and then just leave him to his own devices. I think good collaborations are like that; you have to trust what the other guy’s going to do, have him put into it, stir the pot, throw in what you’ve got and leave it alone.
Another Philip K. Dick movie is coming soon: Radio Free Albemuth, starring Alanis Morissette as Sylvia, Jonathan Scarfe as Nicholas Brady, and Shea Whigham as Philip K. Dick himself.
“Eliza Dushku has more going on than just her much-talked-about starring role in television guru Joss Whedon’s new upcoming series, Dollhouse.
The Bring It On beauty just told me she’s co-producing a movie about the life of Robert Mapplethorpe, the late photographer who caused national headlines with his controversial homoerotic work.
“Literally this week after quite some time, we finalized the deal with the Mapplethorpe estate,” Dushku told me at Gatorade’s G-Gym at Sundance’s Village at the Yard. Dushku’s brother, Nate, will star as Mapplethorpe, who died of AIDS in 1989 at age 42.”
A subset of the rule that the Elect will survive is that survivalists survive, that bunkered individuals or remote farming communities or whatever have an edge, and that when the crazy starts, it’ll be the people holed up in the hinterlands who will survive and that the rule we can observe all through history — which is that these people are simply prey to larger, better-organized groups — suspends itself for the duration (unless a savior is needed to fight off the Humungous and his mohawked thugs or something — see #2 above).
But real apocalypses are sordid, banal, insane. If things do come unraveled, they present not a golden opportunity for lone wolves and well-armed geeks, but a reality of babies with diarrhea, of bugs and weird weather and dust everywhere, of never enough to eat, of famine and starving, hollow-eyed people, of drunken soldiers full of boredom and self-hate, of random murder and rape and wars which accomplish nothing, of many fine things lost for no reason and nothing of any value gained. And survivalists, if they actually manage to avoid becoming the prey of larger groups, sitting bitter and cold and hungry and paranoid, watching their supplies run low and wishing they had a clean bed and some friends. Of all the lies we tell ourselves, this is the biggest: that there is any world worth living in that involves the breakdown of society.
I mostly look to the periphery for an idea of what dystopias will look like, so my favorite dystopian movies are movies like Salvador, Hotel Rhwanda, and City of God. One sci-fi dystopia that I like is Children of Men, because it seems to be based very much on the reality of the periphery.
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