Vivre Sa Vie - Jean-Luc Godard

I went to Film Forum yesterday for the final day of their Godard week. I was so happy I did because I fell in love with Vivre Sa Vie. Tragic. Real. Unexpected. Lovely.

The entire experience was inspiring -- from the latte I sipped before the movie to Anna Karina's performance to the flow of music versus noise in the composition of the film. I was wholly enamored. J'adore! Or at least I think that's how you say it in French.

Check out one of my favorite scenes, where Nana (Karina's character) dances out of boredom, a need to feel alive and not succumb to the mundaneness of her situation.




Oddly enough, this Myspace site has the entire film on this page... but I recommend you get a higher quality version from your local rental or video store.

Power to the People!!! Please Go See Chicago 10 This Weekend

Last night I went to the screening of Chicago 10, a half animated, half archival footage documentary of the 1968 Democratic National Convention protests. I really didn't know much about this time period other than the fact that Martin Luther King Jr got assassinated and racism and segregation was tearing the country apart. People were calling for an end to war and to bring the troops home.

After seeing this movie, I want to reiterate the parallels of war time today with George W. Bush in Iraq with the war time back then with Vietnam and LBJ. The difference? There are no Yippies today. Where are all the protesters? I think most people are at home worrying about their own life and their declining economic status, not whether or not there are larger conspiracies going on in our own country.



I have to say I am disappointed in myself and the rest of my peers for being kind of lame, but I think we are a product of a lazy, spoiled generation that has been systematically trained to have no hope against fighting the "big" government (reference that Michael Moore doc Sicko). We are not protesting through actual action and marches. Instead we are joining Facebook protest groups and sending around seemingly pointless email petitions and YouTube viral videos. There are no 15,000 people protests at the national conventions of either party.



It seemed that media coverage back then was more on the side of the radicals. Today, it seems the opposite. Media coverage is swayed to the major players and their campaign managers, not to the people of America. When was the last time you saw the news interview people like you and me about what we think of the candidates running for President? And what are we doing to make sure our voices are heard? Young people today (including moi) are more complacent, but I think we have become the very thing that Yippies like Abbie Hoffman feared would be the future if they didn't stand up and make their voices heard... It was the very thing that the protesters in 1968 wanted to obliterate when they risked their lives to fight a scary political machine. It was a war on American territory, a civil war, and it scared the shit out of me to watch this film. I cried at the end because it echoed the hopelessness I have been feeling about the role of the American people and its stodgy, behind-closed-doors government.



One of the most moving scenes was when Bobby Seale was bound and gagged for demanding his constitutional right to defend himself. I was tearing at the thought that Judge Hoffman thought he could so awfully infringe on a man's right, especially a black man's right -- in an era where race relations were on fire.

Since this is a music blog of sorts, another thing I'll talk about is the movie's soundtrack -- full of Rage Against the Machine, Black Sabbath, Eminem and Beastie Boys -- it was an attempt to make the scenes from yesterday connect with viewers today. It was aggressive and charged with good intentions, but sometimes I felt the soundtrack disrupted the power of what was on the screen. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. Nonetheless it left an impact. This movie is worth your time. Tell me you aren't moved by the ridiculous insanity of the recreated/animated courtroom scenes. I was in shock when watching the transcripts unfold. It is a good reminder of what these Yippies did to try to free us, and how we have somehow become captive again. Maybe it's time to break free again? Say it with me... "What do we want?" Revolution! "When do we want it?" NOW!

Watch the trailer below and go see this movie -- opens in theaters tomorrow.

Rock Stars Are Real People Too: Kurt Cobain in About a Son versus Ian Curtis in Control

I just watched two films about two music icons -- last night I went to a screening of About a Son, the new documentary from Michael Azerrad about Kurt Cobain of Nirvana based on 25 hours of never-heard-before interviews he conducted with Kurt about a year before he committed suicide. This morning I went to see Control, a film based on the life of Ian Curtis of Joy Division shortly before he took his own life.

Of course, there are a lot of similarities between the two films and their respective subjects. Both films are "personal" accounts of artists as human beings. At the screening, Azerrad expressed how he really wanted his film to focus on Kurt as a person, not as a God. He wanted to strip away all the iconography and whittle the story down to just Kurt's regular day life and thoughts. Azerrad did this by layering excerpts from his Kurt interviews over imagery of not Kurt, but of regular people from Kurt's hometown of Aberdeen. There wasn't any Nirvana music used at all but other songs like Mudhoney's "Touch Me I'm Sick" and The Vaselines' "Son of a Gun" were used to move the storyline along. (Barsuk released the soundtrack.)



Control director Anton Corbijn himself stated, "Control is a personal film. It is not a music film..." Unlike Azzerad, Corbijn chose to tell this tale in black and white with actors portraying the story. He also used several Joy Division songs via concert-based scenes to help show the progression of Curtis' deteriorating mental state throughout the film. Songs included "Love Will Tear Us Apart," "She's Lost Control" and "Transmission." (Rhino is releasing the Control soundtrack which also includes previously unreleased tracks from the surviving members of Joy Division -- also known as New Order.) Newcomer Sam Riley did an excellent portrayal of Ian Curtis...



The biography of both Kurt and Curtis run parallel as well. Rock and roll. Angsty poetry. Marriage. A Baby. Drugs. Wanting to run away to a bigger city. Physical pain and ailments. Depression. Songs about alienation. Quick fame. Mental breakdowns. Suicide. Both Kurt and Curtis seemed to feel that fame somehow boxed them into lives they didn't intend to lead. Both problematic lives also compounded by each's physical ailments -- Kurt with his stomach and back problems medicated by heroin and Curtis with his epileptic fits medicated by a slew of random pills.

However, what is clearly different about these two people is how each processes, reacts and thinks about their family life. Kurt leaned on his wife Courtney and welcomed his daughter Frances into his life, even saying that when Frances was born, things seemed to be better in his life. Curtis was the opposite. He kept referring to his marriage with Debbie as a mistake, had an on-road affair and seemed to hardly pay attention to his baby daughter Natalie.

And while both stories did end in suicide, the feeling that I was left with as an audience member was wholly different. Yes, I felt sadness for both tragedies. But I also felt like there is no separating artists from their human self and vice versa.

mogwai scores a soccer documentary

i reported on mogwai's new gig as composers for a soccer documentary coming out... get the details on lifeskooltv.com.

gen art film festival premieres in new york city

The Gen Art Film Festival kicked off last night at the Chelsea Clearview West Theater with the short film Regarding Sarah and feature length Crashing.



Regarding Sarah directed by Michelle Porter is centered around an old woman who starts videotaping her life after she realizes that her memory was fading. The edited footage of her life serves as her virtual memory, and the short investigates (quite efficiently, i must say) how this all begins to affect her life. i loved the idea of exploring the fact that everyone begins to forget moments in our lives, and if we spent all of our time trying to remember every detail of our life, we would forget to just sit back and enjoy life.



I was really looking forward to Crashing, which stars an old crush of mine, Campbell Scott. He plays the role of Richard McMurry, the writer with writer's block, whose life is seemingly getting worse and worse until he finds himself on crashing on the couch of two attractive co-eds, who are also aspiring writers. Much of the script was narrative -- the internal thought process of McMurray as a writer who transforms from disillusioned writer to someone fully inspired by change. I don't know whether it was the fact that I related to a lot of the internal dialogue (as a writer) or whether Campbell Scott is so darn adorable, but I really enjoyed this film. on a side note, David Cross makes a cameo. I almost didn't recognize him in the film without his glasses.

The Gen Art film festival continues for the rest of the week, and there are still some tickets left for the rest of the 7 total films premiering in New York this week. For more information, visit the film festival's official site.

PS. Gen Art is also bringing some awareness to the Adrienne Shelley Foundation, a new foundation that will help future generations of women find their place behind the camera. When filmmaker, Adrienne Shelly, was murdered last November in New York, the film community suffered an enormous loss. Adrienne, an early alum filmmaker and member of Gen Art's film advisory board, had been eagerly awaiting news of whether her latest movie (which she wrote, directed and acted in), Waitress, made it into this year's Sundance Film Festival. (It did, and was quickly snatched up by Fox Searchlight.) Pulse spoke with Adrienne's husband, Andy Ostroy, about what made people love Adrienne, what he sees as her legacy, and how he hopes to help other female filmmakers in her memory.