Wow, only seven movies and one notable video short were viewed back in June, and only two of those eight were seen on The Medium itself, film. Even further, of the two on film, only one was actually great, WALL-E. Something sad happened in June, methinks. Was it a melancholy anticipation of the summer's end, even though it had just begun? Ah, but it was not a total loss! Though on DVD, Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man, Claire Denis's The Intruder and Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry were viewed all for the first time. Eeek! This dummy summer post is turning into a real confessional, my god! Before I discredit myself further, I shall stop. The full queue is below, and you can never see Director Josh Weinberg's The Website Is Down too many times!Sex and the City - (2008) - Film
Seen: Sunday, June 1, 2008
I'd be lying if I said Sex and the City didn't make me feel a little dirty inside. It was more of a hollow feeling really. Yes, the fashion was fantastic, the slideshow montages of clothing changes pretty and enviable. But something about 40-something women longing for their 20-year-old selves just made me miss my boyfriend, my friends and everything else important to me--the things that get better with age, which is all drastically unlike la moda in a New York minute. I let my feelings be known that I didn't care for it over here.
Speed of Life - (2008) - DVD
Seen: Tuesday, June 2, 2008
I interviewed Director Ed Radtke here, as a contribution to the Asian-American International Film Festival, and he was a pleasure to talk to. His movie, shot collaboratively with Brooklyn youths in their own neighborhoods (olde Billyburg included), was a mixed-medium picture that combined everything from digital video to VHS recordings to capture his narrative with a documentary twist.
Pretty to Think So - (2008) - DVD
Seen: Monday, June 9, 2008
Directors Francis Hsueh and Steven Hahn's Pretty to Think So had some of the better production values of small-budget independent pictures. But the story, amidst a lower-downtown with Trade Center towers visible in one shot, was strangely disjointed from some of its more grounding, intimate settings.
Grizzly Man - (2005) - DVD
Seen: Wednesday, June 18, 2008
The Intruder - (2005) - DVD
Seen: Friday, June 20, 2008
Herzog's and Denis's flicks were talked about here, along with Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry (see below), at Scarlett Cinema.
The Website is Down - (2008) - YouTube
Seen: Friday, June 20, 2008
A bit more about Weinberg and The Website Is Down can be found here!
Taste of Cherry - (1997) - DVD
Seen: Saturday, June 21, 2008
(see above)
WALL-E - (2008) - Film
Seen: Friday, June 27, 2008 (opening night!)
Going back to the 70s, George Lucas's films THX 1138 (1971) and Star Wars (1977) changed the way the future is imagined in mainstream culture. His future was a revolt against the perfectly rounded edges of an ultra-modern landscape, rejecting a fully automated future that does not reference everyday equipage of the present. Lucas's THX1138 has its characters tethered to thick telephone cords, and Star Wars references the same dusty landscape of the American Western. 
It also visualizes spacecraft as rather clunky pieces of man-made hardware, dependent on and vulnerable to the human touch. I believe it was sound artist Walter Murch who coined the term "used future,” the remnants of the past that are either constituent parts or leftover relics in the imagined future; in short, a landscape of the future cluttered with a whole lot of the objects and structures of today. 
The veteran Pixar employee and director of WALL-E (2008), Andrew Shapiro’s picture of the future—at least on Earth—is not simply of a “used” future as per Murch, but one of total disuse. Earth is crumbled and abandoned, only one green sprout remains alongside dear WALL-E in his hovel of discarded human possessions. The Rubik’s Cube is the most obvious, and what a call back to a time when Lucas’s Star Wars still reined supreme (and maybe it still does). So there are elements of the “used future” here, but WALL-E is much darker than that. I loved the sparse dialogue, letting the story tell itself with only intermittent blips of sound from the old VHS tape of Hello Dolly (1969). A movie I have never seen, nor really cared to see, suddenly took on major significance, giving an unlikely answer to that question among cinephiles, “if you could take one movie into the future...?” 
Also, doesn’t WALL-E look like #5 from Short Circuit (1986)?
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