The Movie

I've next to no idea what to make of Ascension; on one hand it's a very well-crafted and thoughtful semi-sci-fi tale of alienation, loneliness, and madness. On the other ... it is, for several lengthy passages, an extremely dull and languid movie. Almost aggressively so in many spots.

But since this is clearly a labor-of-love project, and one that boasts its fair share of assets, let's mainly focus on the positive. Directed with what must have been an inordinately low-budget, director John Krawlzik acquits himself extremely well; his compositions are crisp, his cinematography, lighting, set design, costumes ... all of it screams of a filmmaker with more ingenuity than money, so it's easy to appreciate how good Ascension looks on the screen. Hell, the guy even pulls some rather impressive performances from his three "no-name" leads -- and if you're even remotely famili...Read the entire review

Whenever anyone discusses television as a vast wasteland, they very rarely mention cable public access programming. Perhaps it's because the first amendment based tenets of this entertainment idea lend themselves more readily to a hands-off approach. After all, if you tolerate the love of God or bad conspiracy theories, you've got to allow a lust for strippers and scatological humor as well. It could also be a case of recognitional redundancy. Crap is crap, so there's no need to keep reminding us of such. The truth, however, is somewhere in the middle. Cable access is like deep-fried fast food. There is no inherent value in what it's producing - this is TV, after all - but it also has a certain mouth round fullness and down home comfort food quality that satisfies the soul.

Take The Jerkbeast Show for example. The premise behind the program was simple. Two guys, some dude in a monster suit, a...Read the entire review

The Movie

I consider myself to be a supporter of independent films and some of my all-time favorite movies were made on shoe-string budgets by a group of friends. But, doesn't anyone make good independent films anymore? It would appear that the home-video revolution has given the green-light to any yahoo with a video camera to go out and make a movie and call it art. Ligeia joins this list of shot-on-video head-scratchers.

In Ligeia, Kieran (Martin T. Davis) and Rowena (Bronwyn Knox) are an unhappily married couple. Kieran is having an affair with their friend Kelly (Masha Sapron). Rowena is delighted when her old boyfriend Bobby (Yvette Lenhart) calls her from out of the blue, but is shocked to learn that Bobby has undergone a sex-change operation...but this doesn't stop Rowena from jumping into bed with her old flame. Seeking to further spice-up their marriage...Read the entire review

Perhaps the most promising part of the dot.com boom of the late 90s was the notion of unlimited entertainment options. While the fileswapping facets of MP3 meant a brand new music revolution, the myriad of movie sites, catering to a new bumper crop of handcrafted cinema, seemed to stall before it even got started. Certain companies like Shockwave.com gave a wide berth to upstarts and stars such as James L. Brooks, Tim Burton and Ben Stein. But no matter how novel Stainboy seemed to be, or how clever the various video visions became, there was something missing from even the most magnificent examples of online amusement – mainly, a steady source of income. By the time Michael Ovitz's Scour.com and the Dreamworks backed Pop.com tried their time tested hand in the web-based waters, the bomb was defused and the climate for computer creativity had waned. Soon, layoffs and bankruptcies became the norm and ...Read the entire review

Many aspects of our popular culture are ripe for parody, with the StarWars movies being a favorite target.  There is a wide range ofquality among these Star Wars satires; everything from excellentshorts, such as Hardware Wars and Troops, to painfully badamateur fan fiction, to the "so bizarre it's scary" items like the versionof Episode Four, done in ASCII.  (http://www.asciimation.co.nz/) Another satire has made its way to DVD featuring a much-maligned characterfrom The Phantom Menace.  You can now get the inside scoopwith Jar Jar Binks: The F! True Hollywood Story.

This is a spot-on parody of the E! cable network's show.  Theyshow Jar Jar as a young baby, follow his early attempts to break into showbusiness and then landing his big role in Read the entire review

The Movie:

The independent film world puts a great deal of emphasis on being creative, doing something new, doing something different from what Hollywood puts out. After all, true indie film is done on shoestring budgets with unrecognizable faces; if a film with those limitations is trying to tell the same story as a studio pic with $5 million to spend, it is obvious which will be more watchable.

To that end, Getting Out of Rhode Island is an unqualified success. It is certainly creative. It uses it's budgetary and technological limitations to its advantage to tell a story not often seen – at least, not this way – in bigger budget productions.

However, Getting Out of Rhode Island fails on a more important issue to the viewer. It is simply not interesting.

Jacob Mattison has come home to Rhode Island as a successful Hollywood actor, but wit...Read the entire review

I live in Simpsonville, South Carolina, a fairly tiny town without much of note aside from its proximity to Greenville, which itself is only remarkable for being equidistant to Atlanta and Charlotte. There's a stand-up comedy joint a couple miles down the road that occasionally hosts open mic nights, attracting the grade of talent you'd expect from...well, a stand-up comedy joint in Simpsonville, South Carolina. With each month that passed, the open mic audience got progressively smaller and the comics got progressively worse. The only thing tougher than enduring many of these nervous, shaky, sweaty people fumbling through their routines is suffering through their bafflingly unfunny material...the type of gags that probably sounded pretty funny in the shower that morning, but no...Read the entire review

The Movie

David Lynch just called to ask if I had any idea what this movie was supposed to be about. I told him that I didn't know, but that I would ask Salvador Dali and get back to him.

Frontier is an experimental film from Texas filmmaking brothers David and Nathan Zellner. The film is set in the fictional European country of Bulbovia. Following a revolution, two soldiers (Wiley Wiggins and David Zellner), who are members of the Expansionist Research Corps, are sent to the explore the most remote territories of the country. Once there, the wheelchair-bound soldier is miraculously healed. After that, the two men encounter a hermit, a dowdy woman, and two strange creatures.

Shot on video, Frontier looks like the kind of movie that a group of pre-adolescents would make on a weekend, and then erase the following week after they realized just how bad it wa...Read the entire review