***The Talkies w/ John Cameron Mitchell***

almost a year to the date of my last post is the date of the next Talkies this time being held at The Heights Theater in Minneapolis. More below..

The fourth installment of The Talkies (and the first in MPLS) is the most ass-shakin' yet, a double feature of rock musical HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH with writer, director, and star John Cameron Mitchell live in person!

How many inches can you take?

February 5, 2009 – Arrive at 7:00p.m. for the screening of the hit about a transexual punk rock girl from East Berlin. At 9:00p.m. the film screens again with the extra somethin' somethin' that only The Talkies provides: live commentary provided by John Cameron Mitchell himself.

Skip down memory lane, savor every juicy piece of nostalgia, and enjoy a distinctive evening of total glamour. you can purchase yer tickets here

lucky #3

just wrapped up the 3rd installment of THE TALKIES with George Romero this weekend. it was fantastic. Mr. Romero's commentary didn't stop for one second, speaking on a range of topics from the heavy ass WWII cameras used for NOTLD to some crazy ass priest from his catholic school days in the bronx who wielded a giganto rubber scimitar to correct those that got outta line.
i want to thank Tony Allegretti and his staff at the Burrito Gallery for taking care of Mr. Romero and his guests for dinner. A few courageous folks enjoyed the special smoked tongue tacos and one mentioned it felt like making out with yourself. also, a quick special thanks to Jensen Hande for taking the time to document the evening with these swell photos. here is about a 15-second look at the entire evening with Romero.





the next guest might be Jonathan Cameron Mitchell. We will have a sing-a-long of Hedwig and the Angy Inch the night before he gets here. Will keep you apprised of the date.

Hell on Wheels premiere- busted!

we had the east coast premiere of Bob Ray's new doc. on the resurgence of roller-derby, HELL ON WHEELS. considering that we have a roller derby team in town I assumed that the turn-out would have been strong. the largest crowd was 40 and if i didn't know better they were all 16 as it's been awhile since i had to tell someone not to smoke in the theatre. here is a video that was shot by the team's videographer. i appreciate his way of producing a larger crowd.

R.Land's posta for THE TALKIES w/ ROMERO

i am still trying to figure out what to write about in this blog but i thought i would share the more or less finished poster ,for the upcoming visit with George Romero,that was illustrated and designed by ronnie land. not sure how many will be printed but they will be sale during THE TALKIES weekend coming up here Feb. 1s & 2nd. " The glowy green with be more thoughtfully distributed and I'll be adding a few more globs of goop here and there"-R.Land.

new site is up and runnin

thetalkies.net is finished. thanks to Sean Tucker for providing a nice window into this series. Our next guest is George Romero and he will be skipping on down memory lane with his seminal film, Night of the Living Dead which is also turning 40 in 08.

APART FROM THAT (garbage out there)

Just a few weeks ago the new release of Apart From That landed in my mailbox and what a nice surprise it was.

In this, the first foray from film-makers Jennifer Shainin and Randy Walker into the land of feature film-making I found them premiering their film, one that would spark the memory of why I fell in love with the movies to begin with, in Austin, Texas at SXSW in 2006. After 4 or 5 ho-hum days at the festival here was this film that, literally immediately after viewing, I ran back to my hotel room to email Shainin and Walker, hoping they would be kind enough to accept an invite to the Jacksonville Film Festival. Imagine my surprise when without the hemming and hawing which I, as a programmer of a no-name festival, have grown quite accustomed to they accepted and, in fact, seemed truly excited by the invite. From Jacksonville it went on to screen at SIFF, Cinevegas, Edinburgh, was included in a series curated by Ray Carney at Harvard, a part of Indiewire's Undiscovered Gems series and hosted at a slew of other festivals. Still, in 2007 Apart From That finds itself with no distribution deal.

It is these circumstances that surround my surprise and delight with this dvd. Shainin and Walker didn't just allow their film to receive some lazy release: they provided the dvd with special extras such as interviews with Kathleen Mcnearney(Ulla) and Tony Cladoosby(Leo), footage from 5 different auditions which consisted of improvisations based on cold readings, 40 moments behind-the-scenes, trailers for films they dig, the soundtrack to the film and on top of all this the dvd is hugged by a 8 1/2 by 6 80-page hard bound book full of color stills and notes from the film. Truly it looks more like an issue of McSweeney’s than a dvd of a film that was faced with what can only be described as total indifference from theatrical distributors.

Consisting of overlapping and parallel narrative threads that all are playful, courageous and thoughtful there is one scene, in particular, that seems to speak to how the film may be received and possibly why audiences didn't come knockin'. Ulla, a beauty school student, is being roped in to a role playing session for an upcoming intervention with her colleagues worried about the alleged drunkard in their social circle, to be portrayed in this roleplay by the awkward Ulla. At first, Ulla attempts to follow what she hopes are the rules of this invented intervention but ultimately breaks into an incredibly powerful performance that takes her colleagues by surprise and shock, maybe even a wee bit frightened by the emotion that Ulla unleashes upon them. At one point the intensity is so strong the leader of the intervention calls out "Ulla" as if to stop her from going too far. Once Ulla's performance has ended and she exits the room the others are stunned and not quite sure what they have just witnessed. Their idea of role playing has just been completely smashed by Ulla's enthusiasm for the exercise. This may be overstating it but I feel that most audiences react to APART FROM THAT the same way these colleagues of Ulla's reacted to her sense of play in that scene: organized and performed in a way that is unfamiliar to them, becoming an uncomfortable experience because of the choice to hold on to the way they think a film should "act".

I am not saying that everyone would love the film if new rules were handed out at the entrance to the cinema but I do believe that there is a larger audience for the film if perhaps, audiences were not so trained by the fodder that currently is clogging up festivals and the multiplexes (here I may be overstating again). I for one am thrilled that Jennifer and Randy didn't just abandon their project, after no distribution deal was struck, but created a beautiful artifact for those to enjoy and discover, in the comforts of their homes, the brilliance that is APART FROM THAT.

Buy it Here
www.foreignamericanpictures.com

Peter Hutton's AT SEA

Recently I returned from my first visit to the Toronto International Film Festival and there is one film that I can't shake free from craw: At Sea.

25 words or less..."Well, it's about a boat being built, a boat in service, and ends with a boat being taken apart in the third world. Oh yeah, it's silent".

At Sea is a sixty-minute silent film, silent and slow. The film is broken in to 3 sections: birth, life, death. The film opens BIG (very big) with a static shot of the top of an enormous ship strung up as if by the strings of some Daewoo puppet master. Hutton's camera routinely rests from a distance taking in the enormity of the endeavor that we, the viewers, have the fortunate opportunity to absorb: shipbuilding. Hutton lingers long enough for us to take it all in, the length of each take allowing the mind to wander. In this introductory section we not only learn the effort required to construct a ship but the effort required to view a film in which one must participate, not simply watch passively.

Hutton was once a seaman an experience which, thankfully for viewers of his film, never shook free from his imagination. Initially Hutton traveled to Bangladesh to document the process of ship-breaking, an act incredibly dangerous to both the folks collecting their paltry wages and to the environment in which they labor. Due to the latter issue Hutton was only able to get 3 hours worth of shooting time with the ship-breaking. The bossman feared that the 16mm camera was owned by Greenpeace, an interruption that caused Hutton to set out on an entirely different film.

There are moments when Hutton's camera gazes are ineffable; Hutton doesn't dictate our feelings or thoughts to us, giving the unique opportunity to engage in this document in a present tense. When he introduced the picture he forgave in advance those who chose to nap. I, for one, did not nap though I did shut my eyes ever so briefly in the 2nd part (at sea) during a long take of the rolling sea; when I re-opened them the sea was still rolling over and over, undulating, unfinished, never done until... cut, his roll of film ran out. While his film is in essence a documentary it is unusual in that its constructed purely of long takes without any sound at all: no environmental sound to take us away from the image in front of us, no musical cues to guide our emotions. All we have is the image, edits of these images and our choice as to how we will cope with this staggering amount of time that passes across the screen.

After experiencing mankind's ability to create such a monstrosity once it's at sea the camera is locked on to a wide shot of many cargo boxes. I couldn't help but begin to become concerned with what all those cargo boxes contain. Perhaps some of them are full of grain and other essentials but more than likely they contain garbage that will be consumed and tossed out on to the trash heap, just like the ship that carries them.

At Sea is a 60minute motion picture postcard that delivered an experience distinct in the cinema a un-tethered, by the constraints of conventional story-telling, look at commerce and its consequences.