Friday, July 23, 2010

PRINCETON HOLT'S Cookies & Cream and Uptown on DVD

Two films, Cookies & Cream, and Uptown were released on DVD July 21st. .Attached are the press releases. Links to stores, availability, theatrical screenings can be found at the official websites:
www.cookiesncreammovie.com and www.uptownfilm.com

Both films reviewed below. Again, I find these films compelling in their use of technics that brought scenes into a casual immediacy difficult to capture in larger than life films.

Sunday, July 18, 2010

Paper Man (DVD) revisited: and Saturday night TV viewing

The banality of Saturday night television viewing even with the insertion of multiple cable programs seems designed to make the viewing audience forget what life is all about. Comedy with an edge, with a theme that in some way or other resonates with the daily experience of its viewers is far better than the slapstick on the edge of not funny but rather boring films that predominate the nightly selections.

Even the multiple scenes of blood splattered on faces or the transcendence of animals to escape the perils of earthy denizens as provided in HBO’s True Blood is an improvement over the English comedy films that I could never and still can’t laugh at or with.

I don’t know what would satisfy my need to feel connected. I seem to be getting more and more on the periphery of life’s experience that others appear to be part of but I think it’s more to the point that we are all sitting waiting for something to happen albeit, another deastrous hurricane, an abrupt change in the stock market, another bubble burst, a return to or a drastic deviation from what we once took for granted(both would be traumatic).

These are the chaotic times, not so unfamiliar to generations that came before us but no one taught us, prepared us for how to deal with these turbulent days. We are spoiled Americans who seem for the most part to assume food is there for us to eat, the weather will follow a predictable pattern, the seeds of life ever after are laid firmly for us and we assume their presence; but all of that serenity, all of the foundation of our security seems to be eroded and only on the ever expanding television screen does life go on as if there is nothing else except what we know, have known and expect to know regardless of the defiance of an inescapable reality.

Maybe the youth of today will teach us how to live without work, how to fill our days without feeling the emptiness that twins with idleness, how to make a film for general consumption that reflects the emptiness of our hands that have so little value in the creative process of our lives.

We make nothing, we do little, we wait to be called up for what we don’t want to know about or listen to, the sound of man-less drones as they further the cause that we don’t support and never will.

See Michele Mulroney & Kieran Mulroney' Paper Man (DVD)
starring Jeff Daniels, Ryan Reynolds, Lisa Kudrow, Hunter Parrish and be assured that the future of television viewing and film sellection might one day speak to you and me about us.

Commentary by
Linda Zises
WBAI Radio

The New York Philharmonic: Andrey Boreyo. conductor

The New York Philharmonic performed a free concert in Prospect Park's Long Meadow Ball fields where sheep once grazed.

The evenings program included

Tchaikovsky, Polonaise from "Eugene Onegin"

Bernstein, Symphonic Dances from "West Side Story"

Prokofiev, Selections from "Romeo and Juliet"

Each selection had the theme of love and violent death and the program ended on a similar note with colorful red, white, some green or almost blue fireworks projected in multiply patterns simulating the sound of gun shots in their assent to the heavens above.

The concert used a state-of-the-art sound system with a wireless broadcast network and 24 15-foot speaker towers that brought clarity and beauty to the professionally executed music heard by thousands of lounging spectators.

The sound quality was extraordinary!

Of course there was a reason for The New York Philharmonic' selection of love and violent vibrant death onto the serenity of domestic/environmentally rich Brooklyn park bliss but what inspired this program was not disclosed.

I sat in the midst of my YogaSole school friends
happy that in Brooklyn partying with yoga students and teachers is not an unusual event. At YogaSole there is an inclusion without rancor, a generosity that precludes the intellectual substance of the concert's theme.

We are friends, not lovers, not violent but Yogis getting together for a night in the park where trees are again the winners. The shade and lower temperatures they afford reaffirmed our commitment to think green while we cherish the extensive nature that exists in our backyards as much as we cherish the production of excellence in art; even in these violent times when War hovers over us.

It sure beats the sound of helicopters or jets or even subways underground that shake rattle and roll throughout the Borough.

Thank you to all the many sponsors for making this night possible and thank you YogaSole for making this evening another special moment to remember.

Linda Zises
criticalwomen.net