I slept late this morning, so I don’t have time to write-up the films I saw yesterday. (And yes, I want to talk about a couple of them in-depth.) What I do have are some lovely photos of the restored Virginia Theatre for your consumption:
So. Here I am. I enjoy Ebertfest greatly. I’ve attended the film festival since 2009, and I find it to be a great, relaxing endeavor. The festival features only 12 films over the course of five days (compare that to Butt-Numb-a-Thon, which shows that many in 24 hours). The festival …
Yesterday morning, I drove from Minneapolis, MN to Champaign, IL, a trip that takes around 7-8 hours of nonstop driving. Recently, I purchased a glass mount and a power cord for my Sony DSLR, in hopes that I could shoot more sophisticated time-lapse movies during my long road trips. Thus, …
The year was 1948. World War II had just closed, and the difficult job of cleaning up Germany was in progress. Over the rubble, the Allied powers collaborated, clashed, and ultimately sliced Germany into bits. This is the backdrop of a very strange film noir named Berlin Express. Berlin Express was …
Documentary filmmaker Les Blank passed away last Sunday at age 77. He was perhaps best known for his association with a crazy German named Werner Herzog. Personally, my favorite Les Blank piece is Burden of Dreams, which captured the grueling four-year ordeal that was the production of Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo. The …
Yesterday, I waxed nostalgic about my old job at a fish store. Today, please tell me about an unusual job you once had (or, perhaps, still have).
Once upon a time, I worked at a fish store. Specifically, I was once a manager-on-duty and African cichlid expert for a shop that bred and sold pet fish. The shop wasn’t a run-of-the-mill mall-based pet shop. It was a place for aquarium super-nerds. We had about 30 employees on staff, …
Waaaay back in the foggy mists of time, I used to run a web site named Cthulhu Coffee. The site is still out there, laying dormant in the darkest wayward corners of the Internet, looking very… HTML3. I stopped updating regularly somewhere in 2003, but for several years after, I kept …
When I say the phrase, “It’s a women-in-prison movie,” my guess is that your first impression is pretty far from what Caged actually is. The trope of a women-in-prison movie was well-worn in the exploitation era, which means it brings to mind things like scandalously torn clothing, shower scenes, and …
I can credit my intense love of movies to two people: my mom and Roger Ebert. I used to watch Sneak Previous and At the Movies religiously, and I’d make note of the movies I was too young to see, but would undoubtedly seek out when I was older. Mom is …
