Well, that struggle has been won and now, through the public television program Reel 13, you (or anyone in the world with an internet connection) can see the entire movie.
Sita is a full-length film, produced by a single artist working on a shoestring budget, on her home computer and backed almost entirely by the film’s enthusiastic audiences around the world. Paley and her allies have now overcome the considerable hurdles, including archaic copyright laws put in place to keep exactly this sort of truly independent, eclectic art from standing on its own two feet.
Get some popcorn. Click. Watch. Enjoy. This is a bold day: something big just changed.
P.S. – Also, for y’all television-watching Yankees out there, it will be broadcast in the NY area on Channel Thirteen/WNET at 10:45 pm on Saturday, March 7.
Left: Weta’s design. Right: Vessey swimming with a fully functional prosthetic tail. (Photo by Steve Unwin.)
As if we didn’t already have a bounty of reasons to love Weta Workshop, this just in via the Dominion Post in New Zealand:
Nadya Vessey lost her legs as a child but now she swims like a mermaid.
Ms Vessey’s mermaid tail was created by Wellington-based film industry wizards Weta Workshop after the Auckland woman wrote to them two years ago asking if they could make her a prosthetic tail. She was astounded when they agreed.
She lost both legs below the knee from a medical condition when she was a child and told Close Up last night her long-held dream had come true… [Read more]
Some mornings are much easier to wake up to than others, eh? Other Coilhouse posts of possible interest:
And now, time for a musical interlude by Gudrun and Blixa! At some points in the video above, the two appear to be lovers, but in all honesty, they just look like fraternal twins to me. Anyway, in my mind, Blixa has only one true mate. But enjoy the video, and the beautiful, breathy electronic lullaby. [Thanks, Kelly.]
“Garland is a superb, crazily imaginative songwriter. Singing through a synclavier or banging on a piece of Styrofoam, he’ll sing about how insane the nightly news is, how painful true love is, how scary getting to know other people is, and it all quietly creeps up and hits you right where you live.” —Kyle Gann, Village Voice
Upon first meeting David Garland a decade ago in NYC, what moved me most was the man’s remarkable voice. David has what I’ve often referred to as an “NPR voice”: calm, gentle, assured, reflective of a deep and kindly intelligence. I could happily listen to him recite the phone book, or Goodnight Moon, or Nietzche’s “Wahnbriefe” for hours on end. It’s no coincidence that he hosts and curates one of my all-time favorite radio shows, WNYC’s Spinning on Air. (If you have any interest in off-the-beaten-path, non-commerce-driven music, you should bookmark that link immediately.)
Photo by Anne Garland.
David’s also a gifted singer/composer, infusing his “control songs” with all of the qualities mentioned above. He’s been keeping busy recording new material with everyone from Sufjan Stevens to Greg Saunier to Diane Cluck. Catching up with me by phone recently, he said he’d just finished shooting his first music video with none other than Amber Benson and Adam Busch. (SQUEEE!!) Here’s what David had to say about the events leading up to their collaboration:
My wife Anne Garland and I had been introduced to the joys of Buffy the Vampire Slayer by our son Kenji in the summer of 2007. Anne and I were happily working our way through the many seasons of Buffy,and had just recently seenAmber’s character Tara killed by Adam’s character Warren. We went out to an Indian restaurant for lunch and waiting in line just ahead of us were Amber and Adam. We got talking, learned of Adam’s band Common Rotation, and enjoyed one another’s company. We’ve done a few projects together since, and now this video. Adam and Amber are creative, generous people, apparently willing to get involved in a project just for the fun and love of it, and I’ve really enjoyed hanging out and making stuff with them. Amber really likes Anne’s Luminous Playhouse photos, and suggested the effective idea of mixing and comparing the miniature and full-size scenes as a visual theme for my song “Diorama.” We borrowed a super-8 camera from Ken Brown and in two intense afternoons shot the footage, Amber and Adam co-directing and filming.
David, it’s an honor and a pleasure to premiere that video here on Coilhouse. Thank you, as always, for your wise and beautiful voice.
Diorama from David Garland on Vimeo. Directed, filmed and edited by Amber Benson and Adam Busch. David Garland’s songs “Prelude” and “Diorama” from the album Noise In You on Family Vineyard. Featuring Anne Garland’s Luminous Playhouse Theater Company. Singers: David Garland, Diane Cluck, Sufjan Stevens, and Mira Romantschuk. Appearing in the film are David Garland, Kenji Garland, his friend Aurora Cobb, Viking Moses (Brendon Massei), Golden Ghost (Laura Goetz), and Anne Garland.
More Garland-related clips, links and images after the jump.
Some of the most brain-scramblingly brilliant clusterfucks in the English language come to us courtesy of the late novelist Kathy Acker. She was a small and potent leather-clad, post-structuralist prose-styling, sex-positive slip of a woman who, according to loving friends and resentful exes alike, moved through the world with the social delicacy of a class F5 tornado.
I bring her up partly because some retrospectives and conferences celebrating Acker’s work have started cropping up in NYC and London, but mostly because I’m having such a blast revisiting her books lately. Grove Press released Essential Acker a while back, along with some of her previously unpublished early novels: Rip-off Red, The Burning Bombing of America, and Girl Detective. It’s chewy, nourishing stuff, and her tales of rejection and redefinition are hitting me even harder the second time around.
2009 is a fresh, raw, hopeful year… the perfect time for an Acker revival! It’d be lovely to chat about her with anyone else out there familiar with her work. (I suppose I could drive over to UC Berkeley and try to ingratiate myself with a few of those scowling pomo lit profs, but I’m afeared. I’d rather gab with you guys.)
Jonathan Webster: “The most enjoyable thing about having a conversation with the gorgeous, post-punk, post-feminist, pierced and tattooed American novelist Kathy Acker, is that her answers to interview questions take on an elliptical quality. Just as in her novels, you are simultaneously thrown off balance and yet riveted, never quite knowing whether she is going to give you a straight answer or about to go off at a bizarre, but somehow connected, tangent”. (Photo by Kathy Brew.)
She was an obsession of mine as a teenager. Auntie Acker, the mentor I never had, the one who would have bought me beer and beadies and spoken to me candidly about orgasms and revolution when none of the other grown-ups took me seriously. A comics pal of mine insists that Neil Gaiman based his famed Endless character Delirium as much on Acker as he did on Tori. That would make a lot of sense, given her spaced-out, million-places-at-once style, and the giddy arc of her life story…
While one might think LA is a constantly-bumping party, culture and art zone, this isn’t always true. There are dry spells, unless you’re into the Sunset Strippin’, bar-hopping scene. This weekend, however, promises to be rather eventful. At 8 pm on Friday, The Machine Project [got my membership card in the mail last night!] has a lecture by Mark Allen on the topic of How Molecules Move Electrons – hardcore! And Saturday there is an art walk in Chinatown and, and, AND! A screening of Bill Morrison‘s short films at the at the Silent Movie Theater. You might remember this post by Mer showcasing Bill’s heart-stoppingly beautiful film, Light is Calling.
Still from Light Is Calling
The forgotten becomes unforgettable in the exquisite 35mm shorts of justly celebrated filmmaker Bill Morrison, known for his groundbreaking feature Decasia. Resisting the lures of kitsch, nostalgia and winking sarcasm, Morrison’s found footage films could be described as seances or invocations, playing on the idea of the motion picture as a kind of spiritual lost-and-found. Works like Light is Calling and The Mesmerist, which draw from damaged nitrate prints, let time perform its own commentary on the image. The Highwater Trilogy, a response to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, looks at the representation of disaster through beautifully scarred archival clips. In these hauntological shadowplays, figures vanish into the flood of history, only to reemerge as ghostly apparitions and unreal visions. Also on the program are The Film Of Her and Outerborough.
The Silent Movie Theater can be found at 611 N Fairfax Avenue, LA. The tickets are $10 and the magic starts at 7:30.
Gather round, loves. One of our favorite longtime readers, Renaissance man and gentleman pervert Jerem Morrow, is finally dipping his toes into our fetid staff jacuzzi with this fond review of one of the most depraved Australasian cult films east of Bad Boy Bubby. Lets give him a warm round of nervous laughter and stifled coughing, shall we? The subject matter calls for nothing less!
‘Decade or more ago, I frequented an antiquated video store. Kinda place that still had VHS tapes. Crappy paintings of giant monsters, gangsters and vixens adorned the walls. It was called Video Adventures. The proprietor, Brian, was a true film aficionado, someone you never got tired of listening to ramble. That wonderful place saved me from whatever blockbuster atrocities the theaters were pumping out at the time.
Still, I wanted more. Something beyond the Evil Deads, Rocky Horrors and Blade Runners. Love them though I did (and do), I needed more boundary-pushing. My friends and I began an experiment: Proprietor Brian compiled a list of his 100 Least Rented Movies, and we endeavored to watch each and every one. Now, in my twilight years, my brainmeats aren’t what they used to be, but something tells me we didn’t make it quite so far. Still, a few gems passed before our cinephile eyes.
Pre-LoTR Peter Jackson at his most outrageous. It’d be theBraindead/Bad Taste creator channeling Weird TV, had WTV happened first. It’s manic. It’s horrid. It’s brilliant trash cinema. Sweet transvestites find a kindred spirit in this fox puppet crooning a song entitled “Sodomy”. (Five words. Giant. Golden. Glitter. Splooging. Penises.)
Before I saw Bakshi‘s film version of Crumb‘s Fritz the Cat, I was traumatized by walrus-on-literal-sex-kitten soft-core. How about a journalist fly on the wall, mouth full of shit and wee insect heart full o’ spite? Check. Bunnies doing what bunnies do best, but with terrible, terrible consequences? Check. Strung out frog/lizard thingies languishing in a P.O.W. camp? Check. Lovesick singing hedgehogs? Check. Cow-on-cockroach fetish video? Hoo boy, check. And that ain’t the half of it.
Yes, Jackson and crew made me spew “WTFOMGODZILLA” before most anyone else. Maybe Richard O’Brien popped my cherry, but Rocky felt like home, whereas Meet The Feebles was outright alien territory. I was utterly unprepared for the brainpan dervish that played out before me, wracking me with I’MNOTREADY joy.
I can say, with absolute certainty, that renting it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.
It’s with great sadness that the news came that Patrick McGoohan, the brooding genius behind The Prisoner, died yesterday. The second gut-punch came with word that the uniquely regal Ricardo (Mr. Roarke/KHAN!) Montalban had also passed. McGoohan was 80, Montalban was 88.
Despite his status as the epitome of ’60s Brit psychedelic cool, McGoohan was actually Irish American. He took his early fame as “Danger Man’s” secret agent and turned it completely around, creating The Prisoner, a stunningly strange and powerful statement on, well, this:
Ricardo Montalban arrived in Hollywood at a time when the only roles Mexicans could get were as Indians or Asians — and they wanted him to change his name to Ricky Martin. He persevered, eventually finding success as Fantasy Island’s suave host, Mr. Roarke, and becoming a supervillain for the ages as Star Trek’s Khan Noonien Singh:
Montalban worked up into his 80s, including some sly self parody in Freakazoid.
Both were excellent, oft-underrated actors. Both were true originals. Rest in peace, gentlemen.
As an age old battle rages amongst the stars, Kainan’s ship burns brightly as it crashes into the Nordic coast. As his space craft comes to rest in the fjords of ancient Norway, it’s with dismay that Kainan realizes that he wasn’t the only survivor. A second passenger, a Moorwen also emerges from the wreckage. A Fierce and animal-like creature, the Moorwen is intent on causing harm to those it perceives have wronged it. As the Moorwen kills everything in its path, Kainan must work together with the Vikings to destroy the beast before it destroys them all.
Okay, so there’s only one alien. And they probably should have found someone other than a 7th grade remedial English student to write their plot synopsis…
Rina Takeda stars in the most aptly named film since Snakes on a Plane.
Can we just take a moment to revel in how completely !@(&*#$% awesome the recent onslaught of kickass girly martial arts films hitting the international market is? There’s Chocolate, from Thailand, featuring the stunning muay thai stylings of Jeeja Vismistananda. Hong Kong’s national Shaolin Quan Wushu champion, Jiang Lu Xia, will blow your mind inCoweb. Denmark’s Fighter, directed by Natasha Arthy and choreographed by Chinese stunt actor Gao Xian, stars an impressive Turkish kung fu newcomer named Semra Turan. Now, Japanese will-o-the-wisp Rina Takeda has arrived on the scene to make us go SQUEEEE and wiggle and jump up and down and cackle.
Watch her flaunt some formidable (and flexible) karate skills in this teaser for High Kick Girl. The concept sells itself, really:
I mean, come on, what more could you want from the trailer for a movie called High Kick Girl?
Just in case you’re still feeling skeptical about Takeda (or the cutie pie seifuku stuff), fear not: according to recent reviews cropping up all over the internubs, Takeda, like the three aformentioned ladies, can really fight, and the choreography is off the hook. I’m so there.
