Starring: Keri Russell, Thomas Huber, Thomas Kretschmann
When Armin Meiwes, a German computer technician, was found guilty of cannibalism, the world was shocked. Yet what was most shocking was not that he ate someone but that someone willingly volunteered to be eaten. Shooting this semifictionalized account of the crime in the washed-out blues of a German winter, debut director Weisz uses American grad student Katie Armstrong to coolly unravel this conundrum. Played by Russell, who has come a long way since Felicity, she reconstructs and tries to comprehend the incomprehensible. In flashbacks, veteran German actor Kretschmann is Meiwes’ analog Oliver; Huber is willing victim Simon. Both bring a dark, disturbing understanding to their characters. Continue reading Review: Grimm Love aka Rohtenburg (2006)→
“Crazy Watto,” the fan film that made John E. Hudgens famous among Star Wars fans.
John E. Hudgens is the foremost historian of one of the strangest sub-genres of modern cinema: the fan film. He began his career in entertainment making music videos for Babylon 5, but found greater success when he created three of the most successful Star Wars fan films ever made: “Crazy Watto” (which won the Lucasfilm Official Fan Film Awards in 2000 and was shown at Cannes), “Darth Vader’s Psychic Hotline,” and “Jedi Hunter” (which were runner-up and winner of the Luscafilm fan audience awards in 2002 and 2003 respectively.) As a documentarian, he directed Backyard Blockbusters, a history of fan films that played at the Other Worlds Austin Film Festival. I talked to him just before Star Wars Day, May the Fourth, in 2016, about the history of fan films, and what the recent fight over who owns the rights to Star Trek mean for the genre (parts of this interview previously appeared at www.austinchronicle.com.)
Richard Whittaker: As a maker of fan films, hat’s the appeal for you of playing on someone else’s sandbox?
John E. Hudgens: The great thing about fan films is that there’s a short hand. You don’t have to explain the set-up of Star wars. If you’re going to tell your own original story, you have to set up everything, but if you don’t need to explain Darth Vader, you don’t have to explain lightsabers, it’s all already there. It’s all already there, people get it, and that’s one less thing you have to do.
Of course, I say that talking more about parodies, which is more what I’ve done. I’ve not done anything like Star Trek: New Voyages. But a lot of people want to play in that universe, and the only they can get certain things, or see certain things done, is to do it themselves. So “Jedi Hunter” was such a great idea, but the only way to see it was to go make it. Luckily, we were able to pull that off.
There aren’t many celebrity documentarians, but Joe Berlinger is probably on that short list. He established a reputation as director of the groundbreaking crime investigations Brother’s Keeper and Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills and became globally known for his warts-and-warts-and-more-warts-‘n’-all rockumentary, Metallica: Some Kind of Monster. But his follow-up documentary, Crude, drops him into the middle of geopolitics, following the complicated battle over pollution in the Amazon fought between the massed corporate power of the U.S.-based Chevron oil company and the lawyers representing the Ecuadorian tribes whose ancient lifestyle and homelands face devastation. Berlinger describes it as a return to his filmmaking roots, with a minimal crew and almost no external financing. Traveling from Chevron’s corporate headquarters to remote villages in what he called “an area of border disputes and drug runners,” he charts the seemingly endless court case and the ecological genocide that devastates the region.
William Gibson, the godfather of cyberpunk, knows virtual reality. His books have influenced writers and technologists alike in the age of the Internet. But his novel Spook Country turns the idea of how people create their own worlds on its head, as science creates its own ghostly world of digital phantoms superimposed on our own. Making personal and new communal realities is not just about technology, he argues. “I knew a man who was a global financier of some note, and his strategy was to make everyone operate on his time,” said Gibson. “He’d go to various cities on Larry Time, and all these bankers had to stay on his day. He became his own time zone.”
A successful spoof needs two things: an audience that gets the joke and a spoofer with an encyclopedic knowledge of what it is he or she is ripping on. SinceStar Wars has been common cultural currency for the last 30 years, it’s an easy target for satirists, presuming everyone knows a stormtrooper from a tauntaun. No piece of science fiction is so ubiquitous. (Yeah, try making a Serenity parody, and see how many people get that hi-la-rious Reavers gag, fanboy.)
This easy target has paid varying bounties (Clerks good, Spaceballs bad), but Adult Swim’s stop-motion sketch-comedy series Robot Chicken and its half-hour Star Wars special have an advantage in the form of hyperactive actor/writer/producer/all-around creative force/Star Wars fanboy Seth Green. He’s the kid with all the coolest toys, which is handy, because the whole show is a tribute to the twisted, puerile joy of making your Ben Kenobi and Chewbacca figures make kissy-face. It’s Star Wars when the camera normally turns away to follow the heroes, focusing instead on a lascivious Boba Fett and cereal-shilling Adm. Ackbar. Continue reading Review: Robot Chicken: Star Wars→
If you’re crossing the street in Austin at 24th and Guadalupe, tread carefully: You may be stepping on a Pulitzer Prize-winner’s autograph. Back in the 1970s, while cutting his artistic teeth at The Daily Texan with his college-based comic strip Academia Waltz, a young Berkeley Breathed (kinda rhymes with “method”) carved his name into some concrete in front of the United University Methodist Church. Hired straight out of college by The Washington Post, his Bloom County daily strip became an internationally syndicated phenomenon that combined the charm of Walt Kelly’s Pogo with the political edge of Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury. It also gave the world a new Everybird in the sweet-natured and perpetually flustered Opus the penguin. Over the course of nearly three decades, and through successor Sunday strips Outland and Opus, he was a pet, a suspected terrorist, a vice presidential candidate, a fill-in for Santa’s reindeer, and a tuba player with punks Billy and the Boingers.
In 2008, Breathed drew what he has sworn is his final panel containing his most famous creation. (It ended with Opus shown sleeping peacefully in the bed from the beloved children’s book Goodnight Moon.) With his Opus opus now complete, he’s concentrating on his illustrated kids’ books, and this year jumped into the world of young adult literature with Flawed Dogs: The Novel: The Shocking Raid on Westminster. While his name in the Drag’s sidewalk is starting to fade, rubbed away by decades of students’ shoes, comics firm IDW Publishing is preserving Breathed’s complete Bloom County as part of its Library of American Comics imprint (placing him in the esteemed company of Dick Tracy and The Family Circus). The first volume of a planned five-book set takes readers back to the opening days of the 1980s, when America’s idea of an incompetent president was Ronald Reagan and nothing in the world couldn’t be solved with a trip to the dandelion patch.
After the 2000 elections, a swathe of political documentaries painted a grim portrait of the democratic process. For anyone embittered about the whole poll thing, Election Day takes a bittersweet snapshot of voting, American style. From the polls’ open to the final counts on Nov. 2, 2004, it shows the highs and lows of elections. Continue reading Review: Election Day (2007)→
Directed by Martin Weisz
