What we saw on our way home from Philly...

Jaimie, Lauren, Leslie, and Therese took me out for dinner in the city on my birthday. The food was good, the beer was good, we had a swell time of it -- but it was getting home that was the most fun:

Jaimie likes to ask this question: would you rather a) be with a man who must do fish impressions during sex, or b) be with a man who could only have sex in public (and the police always catch you at the *most* inopportune moment)? Well, Jaim, I guess you found the perfect ad...(yes, she's doing a fish impression. No comment.)

Apparently buying a townhouse in Brewerytown Square inspires you to become a yuppie and start watching cooking shows. It must be the garage that does it...



And finally, my favorite:



As the Main Line Chamber of Commerce promises: The Best Things in Life Are Here!

What more is there to life than hos and cars?

Green Wing

Season 2 of Green Wing starts on March 31. Series 2 photos.

And a preview of the quickly-advancing neuroses of Sue White:

Martin: I need some help.
Sue White: Yes, I can see that, Martin, I have got eyes. Now, do you know what day it is?
Martin: Ye...er...eh...do I know what day it is? No. What? Ye-- yes. No...no. YES, er...it...ah, no, I don't know.
Sue White: Oh, all right. This is how it works. You pledge money to comic relief, and women will find you attractive.
Martin: Oh, right!




No, I'm not excited. Not excited at all...

Broadening my film background...

For various reasons, I've recently foregone renting new releases and have been expanding my repertoire of classics that I should have seen ages ago. Yes, James, I finally saw sex, lies, and videotape, so now I know what I was missing when I was five years old. :)

Last weekend I rented Saturday Night Fever; Stayin' Alive is on the Madagascar soundtrack that my mom just bought, and when I heard it at home I commented that I had never seen the film that it's from. Of course that got my parents into reminiscing about how they saw it in the theatre when it was released (!) and that it was nothing like what they expected. So of course I had to see it. I'm vaguely annoyed that the famous pose from the poster is actually not in the movie at all (and I looked for it), nor is Stephanie's dress red; it's white. But yeah, it's kind of a disturbing film, the scene in the car as they leave the dance contest was particularly difficult to watch.

And then there's Bonnie and Clyde, which my brother has been trying to get me to see for the past two years. But James had a video on his blog with Brigitte Bardot and Serge Gainsbourg, and after watching it I wanted to know what the hell was going on. Right now, all I have to say about the film is that when it was over, I thought, 'Holy crap.' and then spent a good five minutes just sitting there trying to get over it's shocking brilliance. Why have I not seen it before?

I also feel I should include the following (also on James' blog...sorry dude) -- I have no idea what this film is or even who Anna Karina is, but I just love it, especially her look right at the end before the fadeout:


I also ordered Vol II of the Journal of Short Film before spring break, and found it in my mailbox on Sunday evening when I got back to school. It's such a cool idea (it's a DVD of (in this case) 11 short films), and I think I might take out a subscription for the rest of the year. There's a cool experimental documentary of two kids walking through the streets of Chicago on a summer day, and a really beautiful kind of puzzle-film (literally...kind of hard to describe) about a little girl and her love of the night. And (all right, yes, this is why I ordered it, and how I found out about it to begin with) The Tourist, by James (this post has turned out to be all about you, hasn't it?) and his brother Jeff; it's about "a woman afraid to leave her Brooklyn apartment...as she struggles with her dreams, memories and the mundane." It has a hint of both Amelie and Run Lola Run to me, in the general style and (quite graceful) use of color vs b&w. It's shot on Super8 film, a look that I've realized is what I liked so much about a lot of the experimental films that I saw in my intro film studies course last spring -- now I have a name for it! Isn't that exciting... (P.S. I started drifting from our discussion of Langston Hughes in class this afternoon and spent a good 45 minutes writing part of a script for a short I've been thinking about since November 2004...if I ever get to shoot this thing, it'll definitely be on Super8 film...)

BMFI celebrates 1 year

Last night I went over to the Bryn Mawr Film Institute for their 1-year anniversary celebration and marquee lighting. The old marquee for the theater had been around since the 70s and was looking pretty bad, and its replacement is the end of Phase 1 of the building restoration -- it was built in 1926 as the Seville Theater, and purchased in 2001 by the Institute campaign. I believe the next step is to restore the atrium skylight and 2nd-story arcade that have been covered by a concrete tile ceiling for the past fifty years.


The new marquee.

The celebration started with the marquee lighting at 6.30, and was followed by the Philadelphia premiere of Game 6 (directed by Michael Hoffman) and a Q&A with the producers afterwards. I don't know if I'd call it a really good film, but I enjoyed it. Read the press release here.

Bodies & Jobs

I just got back from the Body Worlds exhibit at the Franklin Institute. It's pretty crazy. Some of the diseased organs are pretty nasty, like the kidneys covered with cysts, and the dilated aorta, but mostly it's just fascinating. My favorite was the series on the cardiovascular system, where besides going through heart disease and the like, there were limbs and a group of bodies where the whole system had been plasticized -- all the arteries and veins down to the smallest capillaries -- and all the other tissue had been removed, including the skeleton. Just a whole body of what looked like very fine red netting. Crazy. The only thing that really disturbed me were the examples of birth defects...I had no idea things like that happened. A cleft palate can be fixed, but when the chest cavity or the skull don't grow together properly, or at all, there's nothing anyone can do, the baby just can't survive. It's awful.

Anyway, let's not be totally morbid here. It's spring break and I'm still at school. I went home for the weekend and came back on Tuesday to do some video stuff, and I'll go back home tomorrow afternoon. My brother was at Dickinson over the weekend, came back Sunday, and moved out Monday morning to go live at Longwood for the next two years, for the Professional Gardener program. So I haven't seen him at all, really, which is quite sad. Other than that, I'm getting really stressed out about finding a job; I started seriously searching this week, and it's rather overwhelming, I've never had to do a job search like this before. If anyone knows where I can get into something with independent film, preferably where I can write, and definitely where I'm getting paid, let me know!

Spring Break

It's gotten pretty lonely around here within the past 24 hours or so.

Claire left this afternoon for Rome. Rachel left this evening for Rome, Florence, and Venice. Anna left this evening for Virginia; and Jaimie, Lauren, Leslie, Therese, and Anna left for the Bahamas while I was in class. It's been a very quiet evening, with almost no one around.

The plus side is, I'm the only one left on my hall -- I'm on the top floor, all that's below is the dining hall kitchens, and the closest people to me live down the corridor, up five stairs, along another corridor, down five stairs, and around a corner.

I can do

whatever.


the hell.





I want.







(always searching for the bright side...)

Fog of War?

...more like the "fog of bureaucracy." Apparently that's what former FEMA chief Michael Brown said yesterday about why the U.S. government didn't respond properly to multiple warnings about the threats of Hurricane Katrina; warnings that were coming out well in advance of when the storm hit.

The Associated Press got its hands on confidential government video tapes (and made them public on Wednesday) of meetings where the president was told, in very clear terms, about the potential for levees to be breached, the Superdome to go under, and the amount of post-storm rescues that would be needed. And we all know what he turned around and told the nation after the disaster.

Of course, the White Hose and Homeland Security are telling people not to read too much into all this. Fine, maybe we shouldn't read too much into it, but there's no dodging the fact that it's bullshit to say that the "'fog of war' blinded [us] early on to the magnitude of the disaster." Well said, Homeland Security, well said. Let's imagine something for a moment here: a meteor hits Washington, D.C.; you call for help from overseas and the UK says, "Sorry, mate, we saw it coming on our telescopes a couple weeks ago, but some heavy fog blew in from the Scottish highlands and blinded us, and we're still pretty preoccupied with trying to clear it out. You can sort this whole thing yourselves, right?" Doesn't feel so good, eh? (Sorry for the random analogy, but it does work.) Anyway, it's an AP/YahooNews report.