Five little films that could...

5 of the best films this year were serious ventures with big ambitions but slight budgets. Don't let these indie gems fall under your radar.

Dogtooth

Dogtooth takes a simple and elegant premise and makes it believable and disturbing-- Can mom and dad keep the influence of the great big scary world out of their children's reach? Maybe all it takes is a really tall fence and lots and lots of absurd and bewildering lies. What about when the children begin to come into adulthood? Oh, What tangled webs we weave.




Blue Valentine

Much like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Blue Valentine takes a relationship's sweet beginnings and juxtaposes them with it's painful and awkward disillusion. More like A Woman Under the Influence, it removes all barriers to its realism and plays the notes as earnestly as possible. What it amounts to is a powerful warts and all emotional experience that nearly won it an NC-17 rating for an "emotionally intense sex scene."





Greenberg

Greenberg is smart, but not as smart as he thinks. Life continues to clue him into this and he keeps refusing to listen. He casts nervous aggression haphazardly in all directions scoring a few hits but mostly missing his aim. He's the defensive little egoist many of us know and many of us are. Director Noah Baumbach(Squid and the Whale) and Ben Stiller bring this little monster to life with uncanny precision.



Winter's Bone

In our little corner of the woods...perhaps a little further into the woods, a desperate young woman and her derelict uncle are forced to confront a cadre of grizzled drug runners in order to save the family homestead her meth cook father put up as bond before disappearing. Her heroic story is set against a stark Ozark winter that hits every dismal detail on it's rotten toothless head.




Exit Through the Gift Shop

Fiercely Anonymous street artist Banksy plays puppeteer with a terrible little protege and perhaps the audience as well to ask a well crafted question about art and authenticity.



Of course there's also that insufferable big budget success from the Memento guy that despite it's being completely uninteresting and unimportant, never the less, has sparked more controversy and debate than we've seen sense the original Matrix. But, alas, my tastes are too refined. A great film cannot be properly enjoyed unless only a few people can enjoy it.

Point Omega - Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo seems at his best dealing in bits of minutia, character revealed in the slightest gestures, every detail mined for its significance. It's little wonder then that his newest book Point Omega, sets itself the task of digesting a heady peice of contempory art, where mining for meaning is the name of the game.

The brief novel, singles out a recent video work, a real-life installation by a German video artist entitled 24-Hour Psycho, a slo-mo rendering of the Hitchcock classic with a 24-hour run time. The artwork becomes the jump off point for the story, weaves throughout it, illuminates the story's central themes, to the point that the novel seems as much a work of art appreciation as it does a narrative.

DeLillo's attentiveness to seemingly insignificant detail within his observations reliably cut straight to the heart of the matter. His characters are real and sympathietic, but I feel that however ideosyncratic, they are at bottom a means to a conceptual end. I don't mean this to say that somehow he is a lesser writer for it, rounding the edges off his characters to fit nicely in a conceptual framework. On the contrary, i think he's one of the few writers who can take a top-down idea and see it from the bottom up. In this way he shares a vein with his conceptual artist counterparts.

Having never viewed 24-Hour Psycho, I feel I can appreciate it anyhow. Much like his similar book The Body Artist, all the conceptualizing does take place within the confines of a traditional novel. There are descriptions of art and interpretations of art. But through the words and because of the words, there seems to be very little lost in translation, its almost as if you were experiencing the art first hand with all those fleeting associations, quiet reverences, and little epiphanies caught in their tracks and brought to bear on the page.

Oh i almost forgot...there is a story too! A filmmaker follows an old man(a powerful ex idea-man for the war in Iraq) to his vacation home in Arizona in hopes of making an experimental film about him. Heady Ideas about time and space are rendered realistically and convincingly, and a hunger for film and media criticism is handsomely rewarded. Point Omega is the work of an aging yet powerful writer who still has much to tell us.

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Forty-four foreign favorites streaming on Netflix

Here are 44 of of my favorite foreign flicks, that you could watch right now, given you subscribe. Netflix allows you to view the movies you've rated in a handy best-to-worst list, so i skimmed these foreign gems off the top (4 and 5 star ratings), and whittled them down to stream-able play now titles.


Sanjuro


You the Living




Amarcord


The Sea Inside


Delicatessen


8 1/2


Let the Right One In


Irreversible


My Life as a Dog


Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance


Jules and Jim


4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days


Knife in the Water


Death of Mr. Lazarescu


Gomorrah


Satyricon


Hukkle


La Moustache

Watch the trailer here

Bicycle Thief


Nobody Knows


Rashomon


Code Unknown


Branded to Kill


Breathless


Three Extremes


Seventh Seal


Devil's Backbone


400 Blows


The Piano Teacher


The Orphanage


Solaris


Seven Samurai


Motorcycle Diaries


Battle of Algiers


Taxidermia


Svankmajer's Alice



Audition


Man Bites Dog


Hunger


49 Up


L'Avventurra


Distant


Thirst




Red Balloon

I like movies

these ones are my favorites

Emo Moon

Tonight the man in the moon looked especially forlorn. His face nearly half shrouded in darkness, I realized I was looking at the emo moon. Luckily, it's just a phase.

From the Vault

Fork + Ham from micheal mccubbins on Vimeo.

Long ago and far away beyond the days of YouTube, Matt and I decided that our pointless banter was too amusing to be kept between us, and set out to record a chunk of it. Using the most powerful, state of the art animation tool at our disposal--Microsoft Paint--we were able to create an entire world in which a shitty drawing of a fork and a shittier drawing of a ham stand in a white room and talk without moving too much.

Due to the sophisticated nature of animating the dialogue, YouTube was an unacceptable solution to carry our vision. But now it seems technology has finally caught up with us, and you may now enjoy our idle musings as they were originally intended.

More to come:

Episode 2 - Fork Vs. Ham

Episode 3 - To Fork From Ham

Episode 4 - Forks Over My Hammy