QWFF Day 3: A gay-all time

The Queens World Film Festival is a four-day event which showcases films from around the world at venues within the New York City borough of Queens. Throughout this weekend, I'll write about select films from the show, as well as highlights from the presentation. For more information about the festival, visit the website.

The Roosevelt Avenue/Broadway bus and subway hub in Jackson Heights is all renovated and modern now, but I can't help but see it the way I remember it, when it was a little less sleek. Five trains pass through this junction, including the ever-popular 7 train, plus it's a major bus terminal. The underground section used to have a few small, scuzzy looking shops, including the video arcade I've written about before (and still miss!). As a kid, 12, 13, 14 years old, I suppose I should've been more cautious about this part of the station than I was, but that never occurred to me. This wasn't during the really bad old days of the 70s, but the poorly-lighted passageway, combined with the questionable characters that tended to hang around, made for an unhealthy atmosphere, one not too far removed from most well-travelled stations in the five boroughs back then.

Now the hub is better lit, the shops have been replaced with an expanded stairway, an elevator, an escalator (which keeps breaking down!), a streamlined passageway for the buses, countdown clocks to tell you when the trains will arrive, and a renovated outdoor facade. Cops patrol the platforms regularly. As a vital connection to important Queens locations like Citi Field, the National Tennis Center, Flushing Meadow Park, and LaGuardia Airport, these upgrades were absolutely necessary, yet even after all this time, the changes still seem strange and... "wrong" to me. In my mind, it's still 1987 and I can still play Jungle King in the arcade before getting on the 33 bus to go home.

QWFF Day 2: What's up, doc?

The Queens World Film Festival is a four-day event which showcases films from around the world at venues within the New York City borough of Queens. Throughout this weekend, I'll write about select films from the show, as well as highlights from the presentation. For more information about the festival, visit the website.

I've written about my earliest memories of Jackson Heights and the theaters I frequented, those that are long gone and those that remain. 37th Avenue is a busy commercial stretch that I never explored in any great depth as a kid; not sure why. I suppose I preferred my little chunk of 82nd Street, and why not - it had two theaters, a Woolworth, and I think it had a bookstore too. It also had the music studio where I used to go for guitar lessons (they never took). I appreciate 37th Avenue better now, though - it's got a nice wide selection of places to eat, most of it local. 

It's also one of the primary conduits between the three locales for QWFF, and once I discovered that they were all well within walking distance of each other, that made my life easier. There's P.S. 69, a grade school, where the movies are screened in the auditorium. There's the Renaissance Charter School, a fancy school a few blocks east. Finally, a couple of blocks south and east, there's the Jackson Heights Cinema, and last night I hit all three venues for a night of mostly documentaries. (Since QWFF screens their films in small groups, my reviews will be the same way.)

QWFF Day 1: Things to come

The Queens World Film Festival is a four-day event which showcases films from around the world at venues within the New York City borough of Queens. Throughout this weekend, I'll write about select films from the show, as well as highlights from the presentation. For more information about the festival, visit the website.

I've written before about how Queens in general, and the Astoria/Long Island City area in particular, is a venue for film and television production. The Queens World Film Festival sets out to prove that Queens is also a great place to see films as well, and no place in the borough is better for that than the Museum of the Moving Image, which hosted the QWFF opening night.

The impression I got is that this year's show is bigger than last year's. Last night's films were a sampling of the ones to be screened this weekend, and they were a highly diverse selection indeed. The near-full house in MOMI's main auditorium included a large number of the filmmakers with movies in the fest, who all got up on stage at the end of the night (I estimate there were about at least fifty, spilling off the stage and into the aisle).

Councilman Daniel Dromm

QWFF co-directors Don and Katha Cato were the evening's hosts. How best to describe Katha Cato? Enthusiastic? Exuberant? When I arrived at MOMI, she was right there at the inside front door, shaking hands and greeting everyone as they came in. When she first stepped up onto the stage, she waved her arms to pump up the crowd's excitement - not for her, but for the fest, and the audience happily complied. The podium had a microphone, but as you might imagine, she did not need one. Several other speakers that evening marveled at her energy and excitement, and I suppose you can't blame her for it. Don Cato, by contrast, is the quieter one, though he also seems to be the one with the eye for the talent.

 In addition to the films, QWFF presented a couple of festival awards last night. One went to Councilman Daniel Dromm of Jackson Heights, where the rest of QWFF will take place; a man who, among other things, has done much to improve pedestrian space in his district. The other award went to Troma president Lloyd Kaufman, Troma being based here in Queens. While I can't say I care a great deal for most Troma films, Kaufman himself was a lively presence, dissing The Artist and appearing on stage with a model dressed as Troma's star character, the Toxic Avenger. Kaufman, in turn, presented the Catos with awards of recognition of his own - "Troma diplomas," he called them. A new Troma film, Mr. Bricks, will debut here tonight.

Troma's Lloyd Kaufman, w/Don & Katha Cato (l), Kaufman's wife Pat (r) and Toxie

QWFF screened eight short films last night, half of which were world premieres (WP):

• War Story (WP), an Iranian film about two soldiers facing off in the desert sands. Very Sergio Leone-like in its use of its landscape, the elements, and music.
• Andrew: Story of a Closet Monster, a stop-motion animation story about an ineffective bedroom monster. Funny, but I thought the kid looked creepier than the monster (something about the material used to make him), but then, I've always found stop-motion slightly disturbing.
• Model Rules, featuring long-time TV actress Marlyn Mason, whose career goes back to the early 60s, in a character study about a nude art-class model (and yeah, she still looks pretty good at her age!).
• Easy Street, about an unusual job interview between a law student and a judge with political implications.
• Something Left, Something Taken, a computer(?)-animated piece about a couple who may or may not be getting taken for a ride by a serial killer. It looks computer-animated, but the way it's done makes everything look like it's made out of fabric, or cardboard, or things like that. Quite eye-catching.
• Can't Dance (WP), about a widower who is spurred towards finding love again by the ghost of his late wife, directed by a Queens native.
• There Is No Goodbye (WP), a Spanish film. Unfortunately, this was shown without subtitles, so I can only guess at the story. I thought it was about two characters at three stages of life - as kids, as young adults and in old age - but I'm not certain about that. It looked nice, though.
• Queen (WP), the one that got the biggest cheers, and deservedly so, because this one totally rocked. It's about a drag queen trying to adopt a child, and it was awesome. I'll talk more about it on Sunday.

All in all, QWFF got off to a great start.

Shut Up Little Man!

Shut Up Little Man!
from John & Sue's DVD collection
2.25.12


Covert surveillance - catching people with their pants down doing silly, embarrassing or incriminating things - is an idea that's both titillating and terrifying, depending on which side of the recording device you're on. As technology has improved over the years, it has become easier and easier to do just that, as millions of YouTube videos will attest to. Is it a morally defensible act, however?


Living in post-9-11 New York, in which surveillance has been taken to great extremes, I try not to think about all the hidden cameras that follow one around almost everywhere these days - and I'm not even talking about for security purposes. Anyone with a cellphone can catch you on the record for whatever reason they like, and you don't even have to be aware of it. Maybe they think you dress funny and wanna make fun of you on their Facebook page. Maybe you got drunk off your ass at a bar last night and someone posted a video of you on YouTube. And these are the relatively benign examples.

It's disturbing, without a doubt. At what point does it stop becoming entertainment and start becoming an invasion of privacy? I have no idea. It's easy to blame technology, but technology is neither good nor evil. It's all in how it's applied. The truth is, we are little children playing with new toys. We have little sense of restraint and we're more concerned with self-gratification than with any notion of boundaries.


I certainly can't deny that videos and pics of this nature are amusing. I don't actively seek them out, but if I see one and it's funny, I'll laugh, secretly grateful it's not me getting punk'd while ROFLing at how stupid and/or gullible some people can be.


Sometimes seeing these images are necessary in order to negotiate behavior. There's a blogger who takes pictures of people eating like pigs on the subway, and after browsing through the site, I've been scared straight enough to practice more restraint (not to mention cleanliness) if I ever eat anything bigger than a candy bar on the subway (which is not even all that often). But do we need such shame-inducing tactics to get us to behave better? The more I see of people, the more convinced I am that the answer, sadly, is yes, because some people are simply without shame. But that's another post.

This brings me to the phenomenon that is Shut Up Little Man. In the 80s, two dudes living in a dirt cheap San Francisco apartment were subjected to the loud, vitriolic ravings and arguments of two old men (and an occasional visitor) living next door to them. Reasoning with them didn't work, so instead they chose to amuse themselves by secretly recording the old men's conversations - which was easy to do, since they were so loud. They made a bunch of cassette tapes and shared them with their friends, who shared them with their friends, and before long, a cult sensation was born. The title comes from a phrase one of the old dudes constantly repeats in his more agitated states.


The documentary Shut Up Little Man! is the story of how this all came to be. I watched it at John & Sue's place last weekend. Part of the reason they own it is that Sue knows one of the people interviewed (though not directly), but it's still the kind of movie they'd own anyway because it's such a bizarre story.

The appeal of the Little Man tapes is in the level of the unrestrained profanity, bigotry and bile unleashed in a completely real and authentic setting. (Apparently there's a name for this sort of sub-sub-genre: audio verite.) These two old men lived together, yet they bickered and fought on an epic scale, one that makes the Odd Couple look like the Get Along Gang.


The Little Man tapes led to a wide variety of spin-offs in other media, including a stage play, comic books (Ghost World's Daniel Clowes is among the interviewees), a puppet show, songs, and more, and Little Man the doc captures it all. The Australian filmmakers even create dramatizations of selections from the Little Man tapes, in which actors play the roles.


There's much more to the story, including what happened when the surviving old men learned of the Little Man phenomenon, the inevitable Hollywood involvement, the gay angle, and the morality question. It's an utterly fascinating tale, and well worth watching.

Why does the Lorax speak for the SUVs?

...Yes, it’s come to this. Theodor Seuss Geisel’s 1971 parable about environmental stewardship is now being used to make people feel less guilty about purchasing Mazda-brand motor vehicles. The Mazda cross-promotion, it turns out, is one of 70 sponsorship deals that Universal has worked out to increase the return on its investment in a feature film version of “The Lorax.” Not pictured in the ad: The Truffula tree forest that was clear-cut to make way for the four-lane highway the Once-ler built to sell more Thneeds. (Today Mazda CX-5 owners use that highway to get to their outrageously wasteful, greenhouse gas-spewing subdivisions.)

I never read The Lorax as a kid, but I did see an animated version of it on TV (I forget who made it), so I have a general idea of what it's about. It's an environmental parable, basically, so to see such a story and such a character be used to sell SUVs, of all things, in a movie-tie-in commercial no less, is pretty much the definition of tacky. I urge you to not take your kids, nephews, nieces, rugrats, what have you, to see The Lorax this weekend, and if this really pisses you off, perhaps you'd like to sign this petition against it.

Oscar 2011: The winners

Best Picture – The Artist

Best Director –  Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist

Best Actress –  Meryl Streep, The Iron Lady

Best Actor –  Jean Dujardin, The Artist

Best Supporting Actress –  Octavia Spencer, The Help

Best Supporting Actor –  Christopher Plummer, Beginners

The rest. 

 My happiness at getting twenty out of 24 correct (which has to be a personal record for me) is mitigated by my disappointment at seeing Viola Davis lose, but then again, there's no real shame in losing to Meryl Streep, is there? Still, the injustice of having only one black woman win a Best Actress Oscar remains, and now that we know the demographics of the Academy, at least we have a better idea of what to expect the next time this happens. And whether she has a little gold man or not, the whole world now knows what kind of actress Davis is.


Sheesh. I went 20-for-24. I would've liked a little surprise at least. I guess Dragon Tattoo winning editing is perhaps the biggest surprise.... maybe? Possibly?


Eh. I'm just glad it's all over.


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Related:
Oscar 2010: The winners

The videos of Michael Jackson: Thriller

Michael Jackson made some of the most iconic, visually fascinating music videos of all time. Some of them were more like short films, especially given the level of talent he worked with. For this and every Saturday in February, we'll look at some of his videos as if they were movies and discuss them accordingly.

In watching "Thriller," one gets the impression that director John Landis really tried giving it the hard sell as a legitimate horror movie. Naturally, it invites comparisons with his An American Werewolf in London, a movie that, for all its scary moments, is also balanced with more than its share of dark humor. There's less of that in "Thriller," which is kind of a shame in retrospect. I would've liked to have seen a bit of that kind of sensibility.

Instead, "Thriller" hearkens back to the older, drive-in-era horror B-movies of the 50s, although perhaps that's more fitting, given the tenor of the song itself. The lyrics suggest a supernatural apocalypse of some sort, but in the end it's all a put-on - just another late night creature feature. I mentioned previously how this video came out during a period of parental unrest over alleged satanic messages in rock music, hence Michael Jackson's disclaimer at the beginning that this song is not about devil worship, though it probably would still get a pass today if it was!

This video, of course, has achieved legendary status. It's Jackson at the absolute apex of his popularity. The jacket, the zombie dance, the werewolf transformation (which compares favorably to American Werewolf) - in many ways, this is the video that defined the 80s, defined the MTV generation (ironic, given how long MTV resisted black music). When were videos more popular? When did they ever have more cultural cache? Whether you watched them on MTV or on video music shows (like I did before I got MTV), "Thriller" is emblematic of a time - maybe the last time - when pop music seemed more universal... though that may merely be my nostalgia talking. 

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 Previously:
"Ghosts"
"Smooth Criminal"
"Bad"