To Whom It May Concern:

I am now also blogging for the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival.

You can find my first post here at "FLEFF Intern Voices":

http://www.ithaca.edu/fleff/blogs/fleff_intern_voices/

FLEFF is a preeminent film festival that focuses on human rights and environmental activism.

The theme for 2012's festival is "Microtopias":

"Rather than a grand narrative and a large scale, microtopias propose temporary, dynamic, shared worlds, a field of forces shaped on a sustainable scale. Microcities. Micromoments. Micromemes. 

Microtopias congregate people, ideas, and practices on a local, sustainable, decentralized scale. Subcultures. Ant colonies. Anti-colonialism. 

Microtopias catalyzes social interaction, collective participation, and changes in the landscape. Microfinance. Micro credit. Microcosmos. 

Microtopias create interstices that escape domination and capitalism."

More exciting information can be found at the FLEFF website. This year's festival is shaping up to be one of the most dynamic and engaging yet. It runs from March 25th - April 1st at the Cinemapolis, a local downtown arthouse theater in Ithaca, New York.

I encourage all interested to check it out.

In anticipation of the festival, FLEFF is also organizing a screening of Lavinia Currier's OKA!, a film (based on a true story) which follows ethnomusicologist Larry Whitman's (Kris Marshall) as he shares in the vibrant music and culture of the Bayaka people of South Africa. An oppressed and endangered group, the film also chronicles the sociopolitical issues faced by the tribal peoples.

The film will be screened at the Cinemapolis on Sunday, February 12th, at 4:30 p.m. Following the film will be a Q & A with director Lavinia Currier (also responsible for 1998's Passion in the Desert). Anybody in the area interested in or passionate about human rights and environmental issues should make a point of attending this screening. FLEFF welcomes all to engage in this unique experience.

"Niggaz Don't Listen": Communication in Nas's "The Genesis"

The reputation of rapper Nas's debut album Illmatic (1994) [1] precedes it considerably. Daulatzai frames it as one of the last great, if not the greatest, album of a hip-hop "Golden Age" between the late-'80s and mid-'90s (1). It was also the first album to be awarded five-out-of-five mics by the rap zine The Source, christening the album with a cultural infamy transcending its beats or lyrics (Gasteier 52-54). And yet, at a scant 40-minutes (less if one does not consider what is to be the subject of this essay to be a 'real' track), Illmatic is also an anomaly of restraint within the hip-hop music genre, in which works are often notable for excess in length that mirrors the hyperbolic wealth and power of its performers. Compared to other iconic Golden Age hip-hop canon as Dr. Dre's The Chronic (1992 [62:52]), A Tribe Called Quest's People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm (1990 [64:15]), The Notorious B.I.G.'s Ready to Die (1994 [68:68]), and 2Pac's All Eyez On Me (1996 [132:18]), Illmatic distinguishes itself as an album that does not take an entire afternoon for which to listen. In the same vain, it is also probably the only one of those albums listed that demands multiple listens in a single day. Seemingly superficial, it is this brevity - as well as the relative absence of guest artists - that makes Illmatic a reference point for hip-hop artists and groups aiming to scale back (Gasteier 12-13).

My Big Stupid Film File, #72

Now There's Nothing More Fucked Up I Could Do: Kirby Dick's SICK: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist

Sexual sadism actualizes male identity. Women are tortured, whipped, and chained; women are bound and gagged, branded and burned, cut with knives and wires; women are pissed on and shit on; red-hot needles are driven into breasts, bones are broken, rectums are torn, mouths are ravaged, cunts are savagely bludgeoned by penis after penis, dildo after dildo - and all of this to establish in the male a viable sense of his own worth.

- Andrea Dworkin

Don't dream it, Be it

-  Richard O'Brien, "Don't Dream It, Be It", The Rocky Horror Show

Well, if you're gonna go, that's the way to do it.

- Detective Mulligan (Pat O'Brien), Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder 1959)

In Bill Yousman's Blackophilia and Blackophobia: White Youth, the Consumption of Rap Music, and White Supremacy, comes to the unsurprising conclusion that white youth fear black culture, and are thus compelled to consume black culture and images of them as a means of maintaining white supremacy. In the course of his writing, Yousman points out that the predominantly white culture of music critics, music producers, and music consumers have grown quite used to the equation of 'blackness' with 'reality', which exposes a phallocentric and racist view black culture that manifests itself as little more than modern day minstrelsy. In other words, white kids think black kids are cool, coolness is defined by reality, and reality is defined by morbid spectacle of both the racist and the hypersexual.

My Big Stupid Film File, #71

Descent of Man: James Marsh's Project Nim

James Marsh's Project Nim, a documentary about the life of the titular chimpanzee, explores how the fascination of human researchers with their animal subjects often impedes the former from treating the latter with proper respect and dignity.

Born in 1973, Nim Chimpsky (whose name is a play on that of Noam Chompsky) was the subject of a prolonged linguistics experiment managed by researcher Herbert S. Terrace to discover if a primate brought up as a human and taught sign-language could develop a human capacity for speech and communication. In the process Nim's increasingly dominant animalistic behavior clashed with the petty infighting of his many adoptive parents, creating an environment of chaos checkering the experiment.

My Big Stupid Film File, #70

My Weakness Is Strong: Robert D. Siegel's Big Fan

"I am delighted to have you play football. I believe in rough, manly sports. But I do not believe in them if they degenerate into the sole end of any one's existence...Athletic proficiency is a mighty good servant, and like so many other good servants, a mighty bad master."

- Theodore Roosevelt in a letter to his son, Ted (Oct. 4, 1903)

Robert D. Siegal's superbly understated script for Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler (2008) is the kind of thing you don't really expect from a former editor-in-chief of The Onion. Both the film and movie went completely overlooked for both Best Screenplay and Best Picture at the 81st Academy Awards, which took the time to nominate far more underwhelming films like David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (adapted by Eric Ross) and Stephen Daldry's The Reader (adapted by David Hare) for both of those awards. While Araonofsky's eye for visuals certainly plays a heavy role, it's really Siegal's script that carries the story Mickey Rourke's Randy "The Ram" Robinson, an athlete/performer whose life has dived off the rails on both a personal and professional level. Compare The Wrestler to Aronofsky's follow-up/companion piece Black Swan (2010), the combined effort of Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz, and John McLaughlin that attempts to be far too many things at once: an examination of another athletic/performing art (not wrestling but ballet) and the individuals who devote themselves to it, a character-study in fractured identity between the real person and the perfect/invincible alter-ego, a feminist melodrama, an homage to Roman Polanski, an allegorical inditement of that same director, and a trashy psychological thriller. Siegal's script doesn't attempt to drive Randy insane, forcing on the character a schizophrenic perspective that will make it easier for the audience to digest his self-destruction in the most literal terms. Randy isn't literally transformed into a ram before our eyes, and the scenes in wrestling rings aren't transformed into lucid psychotic fantasies that distract from the performance piece in and of itself. The Wrestler is a movie about wrestling, but the same can not be said for Black Swan and ballet. The work of a singular author, Siegal's script is genuinely interested in telling a story about a sport and performing art and what it says about the athletes/performers as well as the cheering spectators.

My Big Stupid Film File, #69

Anti-Twilight: Craig Gillespie's Fright Night

One of the things that is so unique and special about Tom Holland's 1985 cult horror-comedy Fright Night is the way it, like John Waters' Hairspray (1988), manages to capture so accurately the nostalgia of a lost component of television culture. With Hairspray, it was local access teen dance programs like the Baltimore's Buddy Deane Show and Philadelphia's American Bandstand. With Fright Night, it was late-night local access creature-features hosted by a ghoulish curator of the occult, a tour guide through mostly independent and foreign genre films that were relatively easy to license. The titular fictional show, "Fright Night" hosted by Peter Vincent (Roddy McDowall) is a reference to an actual Los Angeles series that ran between 1970 and 1981 under the helm of a Larry Vincent before he was posthumously replaced by Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, and the show was re-named Movie Macabre. And like Hairspray, Fright Night is not even that great a film, but its relevance as a longing homage to classic British horror movies is what makes it so clever. It certainly was not the only horror film from the 80's to have done this, but it is definitely one of the more successful.

My Big Stupid Film File, #68

Leon Ford's Griff the Invisible

Leon Ford’s feature-length debut, Griff the Invisible, is a late entry to the emerging sub-genre of “superheroes in the real world” movies, but comes out ahead of the herd.

Ryan Kwanten plays Griff, an introverted office worker who, by day, is mercilessly bullied by his co-worker Tony (Toby Schmitz). But, by night, he becomes a fearless costumed crusader. He finds something of a kindred spirit in Melody (Maeve Dermody), a self-described ‘experimentalist’ obsessed with two things: passing through walls and Griff. A romance blossoms around an increasingly elaborate fantasy game in which their ‘invisibility’ from society becomes a personal superpower.

The line between Griff’s fantasy and his reality is left blurry, and the film’s primary conflict comes from reality’s increasing infraction upon fantasy and vice versa. What distinguishes Ford’s film from, say, Kick-Ass (Matthew Vaughn 2010) or Super (James Gunn 2010), is that Griff is a study in personal escapism, genuinely interested in the psychology of the man behind the mask. Instead of dynamic and morbid violence, the audience is given only Kwanten and Dermody’s low-key performances. The film is often silent, engaged in following two outsiders playing a game, probing each other’s trust, and experimenting with new ways to ‘fight crime’. And while the constant indie rock soundtrack feels intrusive, the narrative itself never feels pandering.