movie making on my own

Figured I’d write a brief update. We finished two projects and turned them into the Li’l Film Fest. Carl ended up doing a different short called “Until Death Do We Part”. “Heavenly Family” fell through due to a severe case of Murphy’s law. Just to give you an idea (this is among many mishaps), we went to call one of our main actresses to see if she got the script and her voice message was “Hi, I’m in the hospital for the next four weeks. I can’t have a cell phone here but I can take vistors”. In a really happy voice too.

We might try to make “Heavenly Family” another time. It needed to be longer than five minutes anyway. The original script was 11 pages. It was severly maimed in order to get it into the five minute time constraints. So a chance to make the unmained version might be a good thing.

We’re doing auditions agian. I’m always happier when there’s something to work on. And I can actually use the word ‘we’ and not be meaning ‘I’ lol. Carl, from the last project (The Legend of Milton Blocker), is helping me this time. We’re doing two projects for Li’l Film Fest 10. His, entitled “Heavenly Family”, is a comedy dream sequence of a guy in Heaven taking to Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, and Alec Guinness.

Mine, called “Some People’s Families” is a dark fantasy in which a demon convinces a child to murder her sister. You can read a draft of the screenplay here It still needs a little tweaking.

Simplyscript.com just released another one-week challenge.
Good luck to anyone entering.

If you want info go here to the simplyscripts webpage

I might enter this. My brain is still thinking. I’m also working on illustrating a book for a friend and trying to shock my brain into actually writing this gangster webseries I’ve been kicking around. So we’ll see. There’s just so much time to procrasinate and make excuses to do nothing, haha. However I like family themes because I’m completely obsessed with the mafia genre. The theme for the challange this time is “A secret revealed at a family picnic”. Something like: “By the way kids, your dad’s a hitman”. This makes me think of the Iceman (mafia guy).

I wonder if it’s family month or something. The li’l film fest just released it’s 10th festival theme, which is simply Family.

My brother is pretty heavy into Poetry. This was one of his. If you are wondering about the funny noise in the background, it’s because he decided to record himself next to our mother’s air machine :eyeroll: And yeah, that’s him in the picture.

Sorry, need to go off topic one more time.

[edit: U.S. department of state blog, has some really interesting discussion of things to implement in order to help darfur out]

I got an e-mail the other day from savedarfur.org. They’d asked us to text Clinton about Darfur. She was doing some special thing taking texts to collect questions the public wanted addressed. In the e-mail savedarfur relayed this reply to the subject of darfur:

“What actions will the U.S. take to resolve the crisis in Darfur and bring President Bashir to justice?

In the last few weeks we have seen the International Criminal Court (ICC) indictment of President Bashir; the expulsion of aid organizations that serve the people in the internally displaced persons camps; and harassment of citizens of European countries as well as the United States. The ICC was created to amass evidence and reach conclusions as to culpability and bring indictments where appropriate, which it has done concerning President Bashir and his role in war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur and other government-sponsored activities that have created misery in Sudan. To avoid such misery from getting worse in Darfur in particular, we need to see a return of those aid organizations that have been prevented from continuing their life-saving work in that region.

But we know that this is just the first step. I had a long conversation with the Belgian Foreign Minister on my recent trip to Brussels about Sudan and other conflict areas in Africa and what can be done. This is a matter of real personal concern to me and I know to President Obama as well.

Our hope is that we will come up with new ways of supporting and encouraging positive changes in Africa for the betterment of the people there. But it is going to be a challenging time.”

So, after five years of violence, death and mayhem we’ve made such progress as to have had a nice long talk with Belgium. It’s not very encouraging and that’s all I’m going to say.

—
udate on a more positive note:
After two posts of what were essentially rants on darfur, just wanted to post a piece of better news…well hopefully better news. There’s been an envoy appointed to the Darfur Issue.

Here’s an article with more indepth information

More reading online popped up that Bush had an envoy to Sudan back in 2006. So Envoys to darfur aren’t a new thing. It’s a step in the right direction. However, we are still awaiting a shove, a leap, a running bolt, more so than a step.

A slightly off topic post for today. Subject: Darfur. In regards to the situation over there, WTF? Apparently the international criminal court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for Bashir. His response? To throw out several of the human aid organizations in Sudan. What a way to prove to the world that you’re an asshole. This whole thing just really boggles my mind.

I could go on for awhile but I’ll keep this brief since it’s so totally left field for this blog. Here’s a link that discusses the current situation in Darfur. For those interested Michelle has several blog posts about this. I’ve found it hard in the past to find current information on Darfur. Just doing a search of “Darfur” brings up articles from 2006. It’s a little different over there since then, however the amount of death doesn’t seem to have changed.

Anyone have any ideas as how to “save Darfur”, as they say? Apparently talking to politicians doesn’t really do much as we’ve been talking to them for the past five years.

Good news: The Legend of Milton Blocker, that short film I’ve been yapping about a lot on this blog, was accepted to Li’l Film Fest 9. Cool ranch beans with Doritos, that’s fantastic. Thus if you live in the Memphis area, you should so come see Li’l Film Fest 9. Details:

Li’l Film Fest 9
Where: Brooks Museum of Art
When: Sat. March 21st at 2pm

They’ll be showing 12 shorts, all five minutes or less.

I’ll tell you the acceptance e-mail I got was a thrill because I’m on a list along with Morgan Jon Fox. For those of you who don’t know, Mr. Fox is one of THE names in the Memphis film community. Truthfully, I don’t know much about him per say. However, you can’t wander around the Memphis film community for too long without running into his name somewhere. It’s just there. It’s all over the place.

I did see one of his movies that played at the Memphis Indie Festival last year. “OMG/HAHA”. Yes that’s a movie title. Doesn’t it make you smile? The movie had a very different structure, very abstract. Which was the point because it’s a moive that explores the aspects of life in this current age. The big thing in the current generation is the internet, a very abstract, ADD tailored contraption.

Here’s Fox’s profile on Live From Memphis. You’ll see he’s got some good credits to his name.

Anyway, to come back from my tangent, here’s the line up of Li’l Film Fest 9.

“Chuck, from Craigslist”
dir. Morgan Jon Fox & John Tom Roemer

“CottonBallLand”
dir. Corduroy Wednesday

“El Regalo” (The Gift)
dir. Angel Ortez

“Journeymen”
dir. Arnold Edwards II

“Just the Facts, Ma’am”
dir. Donald Meyers

“Lady in Blue”
dir. Kyle Henry

“Lady in the Lake”
dir. J. Lazarus Hawk

“An Exemplary Look at Memphis, Tennessee - Free of Charge!”
dir. G.B. Shrewsbury

“Snipe Huntin’”
dir. Eric Swartz

“The Chronicals of Memphis, The Hunter”
dir. Anupam “Al” Lahiri

“The Last Casualty”
dir. Jon W. Sparks

—-see here’s me——-
“The Legend of Milton Blocker”
dir. J.H. Sprenkle
___________________

“Wierd Tales of Shelby Forest Vol. 1 - Thrill Hill”
dir. H.G. Ray

Also, in case you haven’t been around on this blog for awhile…or at all. “The Legend of Milton Blocker” is a short about the founder of Olive Branch, MS. Milton goes crazy after his child dies, digs the corpse up, and hides it in his house. The movie is told mock documentary with a hyper, scatterbrained narrator. It’s a comedy…kind of.

Pictures taken by: Leslie K. Nelson

Question of the week: 2/12/09

What is your favorite movie and why?

My favorite (as of this moment): Dog Day Afternoon

This movie is filled with a hundred great things. Two specifically really make the movie. One, the story actually gets in there and explores the characters. Movies rarely do this successfully. Two, Al Pacino’s performance as Sonny is fantastic. It feels odd to say this, considering the current Al Pacino is very mediocre. However, in the 70s he was awesome. The chemistry between him and John Cazale was really something. They could just look at each other, no words, and you, as the audience, still knew exactly what was going on. There are so many little moments in this movie where the look on Al’s face is priceless.

Also, there are little monologues in the movie. Good monologues. Thus, that screenwriting rule you hear all the time, “No monologues”, is bupcas. The rule shouldn’t be “no monologues”. Instead, the rule should be “Don’t be boring”. Thus, no boring, pointless, or otherwise retarded monologues. Dog Day Afternoon follows that logic. The monologues are compelling, well written and draw you in. They help you understand and identity with the characters. They have that quiet, lean-in-and-listen-hard effect on the audience.

I also like the way this movie handles the gay element. It handles it with neutrally. There’s no positive or negative argument. Granted, you do get a bank robber bi-sexual, and a mental ward patient for a gay man. Some people tend to take that as a negative view. I was reading this article. The writer makes this long list of movies to show how cultures of different decades viewed gayness and how until recently gayness is stereotyped with insanity and other perverse behavior. I can see his viewpoint but Dog Day Afternoon shouldn’t be listed. These characters are based on actual people. I don’t know how much stock to put behind the writer of that particular article anyway. For one, he calls Sonny dimwitted. While Sonny isn’t a genius, he’s not stupid. He’s a bit spastic, yes. He might also act a little stupid at times, but anyone would if they had “seven thousand fucking cops all around [them]”. Under that kind of stress most people are morons.

The movie gives a neutral view on gayness because it gives the audience characters who happen to be gay, instead of gay characters. Unlike certain episodes of “Cold Case” where they place gay guys with puppies and flowers and try their darndest to get the audience to say “ahhh, what cute ‘ittle gay characters, how could we ever be mean to them”. You shouldn’t be mean to gay people. The point, here, is that it’s more effective in a movie to simply present the character without a negative or positive message on gayness being shoved down the audience’s throat. It’s a movie about people. It leaves the controversial issues where they should be left—in the background.

Besides the above things, Dog Day Afternoon is also a funny and incredibly witty movie. It’s a bi-polar experience: It has light and fluffy moments, deep introspective moments and one really shockingly horrid moment all roled into one two-hour jaunt. In short, it’s all a movie ever hopes to be. Oh, and Al is really hot in his pretty yellow shirt.

–Jess

Question of the week is designed to help get discussion going with the people who live on the other side of the computer screen from myself. I’d love hear an answer from random people, or even not-so random people. It would make my day.

Live from Memphis had its Li’l Film Fest kick off party tonight. I’m really jazzed about this thing. To clue you in, Li’l Film Fest is a quarterly film festival held in Memphis, TN. Film submissions have to be five minutes or less, hence the li’l in the name. Anyway this year the theme is Memphis fact or fiction. You have to make a film revolving around a Memphis legend or else make something that sounds like it could be a Memphis legend. Fun theme if you ask me.

At the party tonight they released the secret ingredient. You have to include Riverboats somehow. However it’s not really a limitation ‘cause if you want, you can just have somebody come on at the end and say “man, dudes, I really love riverboats”. That’d be a nice random pot head comment, something from that odd character that breaks in a random moments to spew totally unrelated dialogue.

I have no idea what I’m going to do for this yet. However I’ve got six weeks to get something together. I’ll defiantly try. Well more than try, my camera will have to break for me to not give in something no matter what the outcome. This’ll be my first festival to enter and that just makes me oober happy. The winners of the festival, besides getting moolah, also get their film entered into the Memphis Indie fest. And that…well that’s just fucking fantastic. In all seriousness, fantastico.

Here’s the Li’l Film Fest website. If you live in Memphis defiantly check this out. Even if you don’t live here, there’s some cool and cute little shorts on their website from previous festival.

Oh and one last comment: the Live From Memphis studio looks bad ass. Really creative set up. It’s worth the drive to downtown just to sit in there and soak that atmosphere in.