Fight For Your Right Revisited, a fun short film

Written and directed by Adam Yauch (MCA of the Beastie Boys), this Sundance Film Festival short follows the end of the storyline from the original “Fight For Your Right” music video. As IMDB breaks down the plot, “the Beasties break into a liquor store, drop acid with groupies, and get into a breakdance competition with time-traveling future versions of themselves.” The video was used as a promotional tool for the Beastie Boys’ new album Hot Sauce Committee Part Two. At MTV's Video Music Awards (VMAs), a shortened version of the film was nominated for Video of the Year (for the lead-off track "Make Some Noise") and Best Direction. The video is embedded at the end of this post. 

Kickstarter, and Sundance film On the Ice

by Brandon Isaacson

Kickstarter is an emerging online method for funding art projects, that allows ordinary art fans the ability to co-fund projects in manageable sums. Creative projects can mean films, music, photography, theater, art or anything really. As Shawn Levy put it in The Oregonian, “Kickstarter allows people with creative projects to build pages on the site to describe the work they hope to do and the costs they face, and, crucially, to offer various rewards and benefits to potential backers in exchange for pledges of support.” This method of crowdfunding allows artists to spread the word on their project while raising money and letting their fans be involved. As Levy noted, Kickstarter campaigns use rewards as incentives to donate money. One such example lies with current project On the Ice, an award-winning film that seeks money for marketing. For my donation of $30, I will receive a digital download of the film (upon its release in late 2011 or early 2012), a DVD copy, and a thank you from the film’s Facebook. Interestingly, if a project isn’t fully funded by its stated deadline, it doesn’t receive anything. This all-or-nothing method is cited by Kickstarter as less risky for both the artist and consumer, and motivates consumers to spread the word in order to see a project come to life. Kickstarter truly is a revolutionary way to connect artists to their audience.

If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front, a complex and fascinating take on domestic terrorism and the US’ relationship with the environment

If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front, B+

The Earth Liberation Front (ELF) is the name of an organization that sabotages different operations that supposedly exploit or harm the environment. If a Tree Falls is an objective journalistic effort from Marshall Curry that examines the scintillating moral dilemmas that result. One among many questions it asks is whether or not the Earth Liberation Front members are domestic terrorists. The film focuses on ELF member Daniel McGowan, who grew up a normal suburban teen; he began his life of environmental activism after having his eyes opened to the atrocities man commits on its environment and fellow animals.

How to Die in Oregon: A poignant documentary about life and death

How to Die in Oregon, A

Synopsis, as written by the Sundance Film Festival 2011 guide:

From its opening scene…it becomes shockingly clear that How to Die in Oregon is a special film. In 1994, Oregon became the first state to legalize physician-assisted suicide. As a result, any individual whom two physicians diagnose as having less than six months to live can lawfully request a fatal dose of barbiturate to end his or her life. Since 1994, more than 500 Oregonians have taken their mortality into their own hands.
In How to Die in Oregon, filmmaker Peter Richardson…gently enters the lives of the terminally ill as they consider whether—and when—to end their lives by lethal overdose. Richardson examines both sides of this complex, emotionally charged issue. What emerges is a life-affirming, staggeringly powerful portrait of what it means to die with dignity.

How to Die in Oregon examines the Death with Dignity Act, a law that allows people who are medically declared six months from death the ability to have physician-assisted suicide. The law intends to allow patients to retain control of their lives, instead of fading away painfully and becoming nothing but a burden to those around them.

 

The film focuses on 54-year-old woman Cody Curtis, who is told she has only a few months to live as a result of liver cancer. The film seamlessly weaves all the smaller stories into Curtis’. While each story is both fascinating and heartbreaking, none captivate like Curtis’. Director Peter Richardson certainly recognized this, as he proves himself to be an expert documentarian.

Eliza's Take: Miranda July's The Future

Miranda July’s newest film venture, a beautiful and personal feature called The Future, maintains the same conversational explicitness, sexuality, strangeness, and intense intimacy characteristic of her first film, Me and You and Everyone We Know. July writes in a familiar tone to engage the audience in an extremely candid way.  The Future develops through these same kinds of communication: jokes, small talk, moments of physical intimacy or connection. 

July compliments this conversational tone with a symbolic level of communication in The Future, which she says pulls from her performance upon which the film is based.  At a roundtable discussion in which I participated last week, July discussed the importance of symbols in understanding meaning: big things often “aren’t based in tangible reality,” so July says her characters use metaphors or symbols to approach such big ideas. July and her co-star, Hamish Linklater, portray this anxiety with careful intensity, often holding onto small symbols like life rafts until the last possible moment.  Linklater’s character indulges genuinely in this clinging, while July’s character forces herself to not cling (down to the details: she even disconnects from the internet).  July described her own character, who portrays a strange yet familiar combination of selfishness and self-destructiveness, as “representing the qualities in myself of which I am most afraid.”