"... the rich man sitting reclusively at the heart of Brandy Melville, inside a whirlwind of deliberately confounding shell companies, is exactly who you think he is. Stephan Marsan is the son of a rich man, and he hates taxes and inclusivity and is a very loud Trumper with a fetish for Ayn Rand’s fantasy world of Atlas Shrugged. (He actually named a sub-label of Brandy Melville 'John Galt,' because he is that subtle.)"
Lately, Microsoft is starting to annoy me, for example by being irritatingly obtrusive with their Edge browser, and by integrating generative AI, trained with an overwhelming amount of stolen work from artists, writers, et cetera, without compensating them.
Of course, all Big Tech corporations are guilty of the mass-scale intellectual property theft. 👎
Eleanor Coppola, the filmmaker behind "Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse" and "Paris Can Wait," writer, memoirist, wife of Francis Ford Coppola and mother of Gian-Carlo, Roman and Sofia, has died at age 87. Here's AP's tribute to the matriarch of one of the world's greatest filmmaking families. “I don’t know what the family has given except I hope they’ve set an example of a family encouraging each other in their creative process whatever it may be,” Eleanor told The Associated Press in 2017.
Sure. Why not? I wouldn't mind an #Eno#documentary with a gagillion permutations.
Though it might be frustrating thinking one has missed some crucial parts. Would that make it more compelling, or just pretentious(of course it's gonna be artsy-fartsy)?
Are there any worthwhile Eno bio-pics out there? Might as well make it a non-linear, collage pic.
If only Ken Burns had the courage to do a 10 part series on the guy... /s
If y’all have never seen “Sean,” I recommend spending 15 of your day to watch it.
In 1969, filmmaker Ralph Arlyck interviewed his neighbor, a 4 (and a half) year old boy. They discussed adult topics about life in a complicated world. It’s a little sweet and a little haunting.
Already a future classic, Joy Boulamwini’s Coded Bias. This documentary is already old, but it’s significance will continue to rise, as future generations will increasingly have their lives dictated from behind the scenes by invisible #AI. Schools you can go to, internships you can get, work you can get, loans you can get, how you will judged in court. And they are not talking about China.
I revisited the #documentary Grizzly Man last night. Still holds up - a beautiful but insane account of a man who made it his life’s mission to protect bears in Alaska from poachers. Did he do more harm than good for these bears? Worth a watch just for the footage alone, although some is a bit unsettling. @movies
little story about when you get to see films that make you glad film exists
when i was first dating my wife over a decade ago, i was teaching and used a lot of documentary films in my classes. students had to learn how to observe and interpret people in a safe space.
it was getting late in the year, and i was running out of footage. so my wife and i would stay up until 2am some nights, trying to find enough footage that i could screen the next morning. she'd dig through my old film studies textbook ("A History of Narrative Film"), websites and old forums and imdb, calling out names, and i'd dig them out and watch a minute or two to see if they'd be good candidates.
most of the newer docs were plain bad - more shiny editorials than anything else. people acting instead of being. totally useless for students whose job was to interpret real human behaviour. so i tried to rely on older, more cinéma vérité -style docs.
it was hard to find old docs though - not only because many weren't digitized, but also because young people weren't aware of them, which meant that the web wasn't yet aware of them. imdb might have an entry for it, but only a few thousand people in the world might know the name of the movie.
my wife's secret weapon was a site called jinni. it had some truly solid algorithmic fundamentals that produced high quality recommendations based on what you watched. these weren't the google/amazon garbage recommends you have now: these were based on film qualities, and could produce pretty novel results.
one night it was beyond late, and i was shooting down every movie she recommended. she was getting pissed, and i was getting even more neurotic about finding the right one. she started randomly clicking around jinni in frustration, and came up with a black and white doc from the late 90s with a graffiti title. it looked bad, but i pulled up a low res mpeg someone had stashed on IA
we watched about 3 minutes together and forgot about finding anything else. we watched the entire thing that night, neither of us went to sleep, and i couldn't think about anything else before i taught a few hours later.
it was a movie called Dark Days, about the people living underground in the tunnels beneath NYC: https://vimeo.com/66989517
a decade later jinni's gone, we're married, and no one makes documentaries like this anymore.
Rick Prelinger founded the Prelinger Archives in 1982 with the mission of preserving “ephemeral films.” These pieces of “throwaway media” include newsreel-type documentaries, works of political propaganda, instructional productions for use in schools and workplaces, and a great many home movies that offer candid glimpses into everyday American lives.
You can access the free online collections at the Internet Archive (which contains 9,229 films) and YouTube.
Latest photo-shoot this week: screening at National Press Club of the PBS Frontline documentary "Democracy on Trial," about the Federal criminal indictment of former president Donald Trump, with discussion by producer Mike Wiser and investigative counsel Temidayo Aganga-Williams. 27 Mar. 2024.
There are more than 100 types of #rabbits and hares, both domestic and wild, from snowshoe hares to Flemish giants. Despite their extraordinary ability to reproduce, many wild rabbits are in danger of being eradicated.