Thirty-five years ago, two things that fundamental changed my life happened in the same summer. In May, Star Wars was released. In August, Elvis Presley died. The arrival of Star Wars turned the thing that everyone in my small town mocked, that had gotten me teased and beaten up, into the hippest thing in the world. Spaceships, aliens and robots … Read More
Review: Road to Hell
There are a lot of film parodies, but not so many films that function as commentaries. Offhand, the best known example might be The Freshman, in which Marlon Brando both spoofs his Godfather persona and simultaneously creates a new, ironic character. Road to Hell, the new film by Albert Pyun, is a commentary film, in a sense. Michael Pare plays Cody, … Read More
Interview: Filmmaker Sterlin Harjo
Sterlin Harjo is an Oklahoma filmmaker with two extraordinary feature films under his belt. His first, Four Sheets to the Wind, is about a young man struggling to connect to the world after the loss of his father; Barking Water tells of two elderly lovers on a last road trip. Both are set against the background of Oklahoma Native Americans (Harjo … Read More
Interview: Kim Dryden, co-director of Appalachian film “Over Home”
My introduction to Appalachian culture, which figures so strongly in The Hum and the Shiver, really took place in the late 1990s. Prior to that, I’d looked on the Smoky Mountain region of Tennessee with some of the same distant awe as anyone else. Tennessee is a long, narrow state, and I grew up on the whole other end from … Read More
Film review: “Dawn of the Dragonslayer”
First, a digression: the SyFy Channel, much like MTV before it, has done considerable damage to the very thing it first embraced. Now the phrase, “A SyFy Original Movie” elicits the same sort of laughter as Mystery Science Theatre 3000, and for the same reason: you hear it and you know you’re in for a bad movie. And SyFy is … Read More
What lives in Blackheath Woods?
I’m fascinated by the fae. Not the Tinkerbell kind of fairies, Disneyfied out of all ambiguity, but the elemental, primitive spirits believed to exist in pre-industrial times. They don’t often make it into popular media unprocessed for mass consumption, but occasionally one slips through, as in this brilliant short film by Ciaran Foy: (apologies for the Portuguese subtitles; it’s the … Read More
Interview: Lisa Stock, director of the Blood Groove trailer
I first encountered the films of Lisa Stock, and Lisa herself, at WisCon in 2008. She was promoting her short films and multimedia work (such as the phenomenal Through the Cobweb Forest), and I was absolutely astounded by them. When it came time to do a video trailer for Blood Groove, I knew I wanted to work with a real … Read More
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