Randy Lewis of the Georgia Daily Digest, whom you might also recognize as the most frequently-appearing conservative panelist on the Ga. Politics Podcast, had a quote in the New York Times about the soap opera going on at GDOT:
“On the scandal meter, this doesn’t make my needle stand up too much,” said Randy Lewis, a political analyst who runs the Web site GeorgiaPoliticalDigest.com. “Because it’s nothing compared to the rest of the sludge at D.O.T. and what has to be done there.”
I wonder if the Times just missed the double entendre.
I‘m talking with a nice fellow over at IMAGE about recording some of the filmmaker Q&As at the Atlanta Film Festival, which is taking place April 19-28. Would anybody be interested in helping?
There are too many films playing for us to be able to make all of them. Ideally, we’d like to break up the effort such so that each volunteer only was working on recordings for one day or less. We’re not trying to be comprehensive, but it’d be nice to get as many as we could. Even if you could only make it out for a few hours one day to record one or two Q&As, that would be helpful.
This isn’t for money (for us, them, or anybody else), just a get-the-word-out effort to try to help some local filmmakers receive some publicity they might not receive otherwise.
Here’s a rough, not final schedule of Q&As available to record:
Friday, April 20
7:30 p.m. MONDAY, Heidi Van Lier and Joe Kraemer
9:45 p.m. AUGUST THE FIRST, Director Olanrewaju Olabisis
Saturday, April 21
2:15 p.m. THE PAPER, Director Aaron Matthews
2:15 p.m. PEZHEADS–THE MOVIE, Chris Marshall, Chris Skeene, Kendra Skeene
2:45 p.m. ALL THE DAYS BEFORE TOMORROW, Director Francois Dompierre
4:15 p.m. THIRD MONDAY IN OCTOBER, Director Vanessa Roth
4:15 p.m. ELECTION DAY, Director Katy Chevigny
5 p.m. THE INEVITABLE UNDOING OF JAY BROOKS, Director Phyliis Johnson
6:30 p.m. THE KILLER WITHIN, Director Macky Alston
6:30 p.m. DAYTRIP, Tracy Martin, Patrick Parker
7 p.m. DANTE’S INFERNO, Director Sean Meredith
7:15 p.m. HAMILTON, Director Matthew Porterfield
8:30 p.m. BLUE BLOOD, Director Rafael Marmor
9:15 p.m. MURDER PARTY, Director Jeremy Saulnier
11 p.m. THE LAST ZOMBIE, James Murphy and Dan Bartlett
11:15 p.m. FLESH & BLOOD, Larry Silverman and Beki Buelow
Sunday, April 22
12 p.m. SOLDIERS OF CONSCIENCE, Director Gary Weimberg
12:15 p.m. DRIFTING ELEGANT, Director Amy Glazer
2:30 p.m. RESERVATIONS, Director Aloura Charles
4:30 p.m. GREAT WORLD OF SOUND, Director Craig Zobel
Monday, April 23
12:45 p.m. BLUE BLOOD, Director Rafael Marmor
2:15 p.m. PEZHEADS–THE MOVIE, Chris Marshall, Chris Skeene, Kendra Skeene
4:30 p.m. MURDER PARTY, Director Jeremy Saulnier
5 p.m. MONDAY, Heidi Van Lier and Joe Kraemer
Tuesday, April 24
12 p.m. HAMILTON, Director Matthew Porterfield
3 p.m. ALL THE DAYS BEFORE TOMORROW, Director Francois Dompierre
4:30 p.m. GREAT WORLD OF SOUND, Director Craig Zobel
5:30 p.m. THE PAPER, Director Aaron Matthews
Wednesday, April 25
12:15 p.m. DRIFTING ELEGANT, Director Amy Glazer
2:30 p.m. OUR LAND, OUR LIFE, Beth & George Gage
2:45 p.m. ELECTION DAY, Director Katy Chevigny
4:30 p.m. SOLDIERS OF CONSCIENCE, Director Gary Weimberg
5 p.m. THIRD MONDAY IN OCTOBER, Director Vanessa Roth
6:45 p.m. KILROY WAS HERE, Charlie Boyles and Laurka Marciniak Kobylanski
Thursday, April 26
12 p.m. THE KILLER WITHIN, Director Macky Alston
12 p.m. RESERVATIONS, Director Aloura Charles
12:15 p.m. DAYTRIP, Tracy Martin, Patrick Parker
2 p.m. FLESH & BLOOD, Larry Silverman and Beki Buelow
5 p.m. KILROY WAS HERE, Charlie Boyles and Laurka Marciniak Kobylanski
9:15 p.m. OUR LAND, OUR LIFE, Beth & George Gage
10 p.m. BLOOD CAR, Adam Pinney, Mike Brune, Katie Rowlett, Tony Holley
Friday, April 27
3 p.m. THE LAST ZOMBIE, James Murphy and Dan Bartlett
5:15 p.m. BLOOD CAR, Adam Pinney, Mike Brune, Katie Rowlett, Tony Holley
Saturday, April 28
7:30 p.m. FAY GRIM, Director Hal Hartley
Please let me know if you can help on any of those days. And please forward this to anybody you think might be interested in helping. You can email me at rusty@gapodcastnetwork.com. Thanks!
Cross-posted on my Georgia Podcast Network blog
After a hiatus, the Wall of Brown podcast is back with a new format:
In which our heroes return from a long absence and with a new direction, inspired by one Senor Tarantino: namely, they will watch and discuss B movies, cult classics, exploitation flicks, and so on, both informing you that they exist and hopefully providing interesting analysis thereof. The inaugural one in the series is The Abominable Dr. Phibes.
I’m listening to the first episode now, and am really looking forward to this. Amber and I dabbled in movie reviews for a while with a similar focus, reviewing classics like The Amazing Transplant and The Thing with Two Heads among other semi-known and/or semi-respected movies.
And I just noticed this is Team Brown’s 30th episode. Wow!
Also movie-related, the Atlanta Film Festival is coming up April 19-28. I would like to do a podcast related to it, but am sure we’ll be saturated with interview with the organizer/movie line-up type stuff from MSM outlets. Any ideas for an original perspective to approach a podcast from?
Retro edition. From Johnny Ola (played by Dominic Chianese, who also plays Junior Soprano in the Sopranos) in Godfather II:
One by one, our old friends are gone. Death, natural or not, prison, deported. Hyman Roth is the only one left, because he always made money for his partners.
I thought of this quote when I read about the NFL trying to trademark the phrase “The Big Game.” It also generally reminds me of how stupid it is to try to control an idea once it’s taken on a life of its own, and that people who do so (like someone at SoCon said) are usually people who don’t have very many ideas of their own.
Today the greatest comedian to walk the face of the Earth passed. All of my life I have idolized Richard Pryor, and now he is gone. He was 65 years old, and passed away due to a heart attack. For many years he has been stricken with MS so this, although sad, is a time to be glad the he is no longer suffering.
(CNN) — Just days after his 65th birthday, groundbreaking comedian Richard Pryor died Saturday of a heart attack, his wife told CNN.
Pryor, who had been ill with multiple sclerosis, died at Encino Hospital near Los Angeles at 7:58 a.m. PT. Jennifer Lee Pryor tried to revive him at their home before paramedics arrived and took him to the hospital, she said.
“He enjoyed life right up until the end,” she said, adding that Pryor had been laughing a lot and was in good spirits in the two weeks preceding his death. “At the end there was a smile on his face.”
Jennifer Lee and Richard remarried in June 2001, 19 years after they divorced. (Watch an interview with his wife — 6:07)
Pryor was born in Peoria, Illinois, on December 1, 1940, and at the time of his death had long suffered from health problems. In addition to his multiple sclerosis diagnosis in 1986, he suffered a massive heart attack and underwent triple-bypass surgery in 1990.
Pryor was known for his raunchy stand-up comedy and a variety of acting roles, including in “Superman III,” “The Toy” and “Harlem Nights,” in which he starred with his comedic predecessor, Redd Foxx, and his heir apparent, Eddie Murphy.
Though he was known as a comic, Oscar-nominated director Spike Lee said Pryor also was capable of serious roles, such as in 1972’s “Lady Sings the Blues,” a movie that earned five Academy Award nominations.
Lee also noted that it was Pryor who gave several entertainers license to inject social commentary into their comedy, acting or art. Lee, best known for his socially charged “Do the Right Thing,” said he was “definitely” one of those entertainers.
“For me, Richard was a great. He was an innovator. He was a trailblazer, and the way he showed social commentary in his humor opened up a universe for other comics to follow in his footsteps,” Lee said.
Pryor was arguably the biggest name in stand-up comedy during the 1970s, earning Grammy Awards for his comedy albums.
In addition to appearances in almost 40 films, Pryor also was part of the team that created the script for the Mel Brooks comedy, “Blazing Saddles.”
He also directed himself in a semi-autobiographical film, “Jo Jo Dancer Your Life is Calling,” in the mid-1980s, a film he says refused to be written as a comedy.
But despite his achievements on the screen and on stage, Pryor is often remembered for seriously burning over half his body while freebasing cocaine — an incident he later dubbed a suicide attempt.
Even that made its way into his comedy, which his wife said was a common theme in his life — being able to turn crisis into comedy — and one that scored big with audiences at his stand-up shows.
As his disease became more and more debilitating, Pryor refused to abandon his career. He continued to do stand-up — sitting down. Many have called it remarkable that he was so determined to keep performing despite his illness.
One is director Martin Scorsese, who said Pryor’s resilience was inspiring.
“It’s a very savage kind of humor, it comes out of a great deal of pain,” Scorsese said.
Jennifer Lee Pryor said her husband inspired many people by being candid about his own strife.
“He was able to turn pain into comedy,” she said. “He let the world see it, and that was his inspiration, too.
“People said, ‘If he can do it, I can do it.’ ”
Pryor was married seven times to five different women and also leaves three children.
This is from CNN.com.
As someone who has done standup, and loves the craft, he to me is the master. Period. Farewell.
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This is what one does when one is stuck for content and generally bored with his own blogging (hopefully a temporary state of affairs). Time Magazine put out a list of its top 100 films of all time. These lists are designed more to generate discussion and to draw attention to the venues that publish them than they are to be definitive lists, much like AFI’s top 100 list or VH1’s 25 crappiest bands specials. So, to follow the meme, these are the films I’ve seen from Time’s list:
- Barry Lyndon
- Blade Runner
- Bonnie and Clyde
- Brazil
- Casablanca
- Citizen Kane
- The Crowd
- Dr. Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
- E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
- The Fly (1986)
- The Godfather, Parts I and II
- The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
- Goodfellas
- It’s A Wonderful Life
- The Lord of the Rings
- The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
- Miller’s Crossing
- Notorious
- On the Waterfront
- Once Upon a Time in the West
- Pinocchio
- Pulp Fiction
- Schindler’s List
- Star Wars
- Taxi Driver
- Unforgiven
- Yojimbo
First seen at Dylan’s joint. According to Time, I am more cultured than he is with my 27 films viewed compared to his 24. And that makes it so. Really. I’m not kidding around.
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I got to watch Star Wars Ep. III tonight on Lush’s dime which, as I said before, was the only way I’d watch the new film. (tangent: Star Whores was always one of my favorite parody film titles used by the porn industry, right up there with Pump Fiction) My expectations were so low entering the film it would have been impossible for it to be worse than I thought. And, to its (sort of) credit, it wasn’t. Time for a short attention span review, because it doesn’t really deserve actual paragraphs…
Dialogue: painful
Dramatic tension: zero
Acting: sheisser
Explosions and fights: too many, became desensitizing after the first three minutes
Length: at least half an hour too long
Fanboy hard-on from seeing the Vader suit in action for the first time in 20 years: absent
So there you go.
I‘m going to trivia tonight instead of a free Star Wars screening offered to me by a large corporate benefactor. So, I won’t be seeing the new film unless someone pays for my ticket. George Lucas has already taken enough of my money when I was duped into seeing his last two miserable films.
More so than the movie itself, what’s really irked me lately has been all the free publicity the film is receiving; particularly seeing this as the top story on CNN at 4:37 p.m. EST:
Yes, because the film’s release is so much more important than learning a live grenade was thrown at the President of the United States or that, for the first time in months, there’s movement on the judicial filibuster debate.
CNN published another atrocious piece of work today in its coverage of the George Galloway Senate hearings. It’s one of the most pitiful examples of he said-she said “journalism” (snark quote alert) I’ve ever read. What would I have liked to read? How about something that gave me some background on the oil-for-food allegations floating around that would give me an idea about whether they have merit or whether they’re complete fabrications? There must be, you know, some evidence somewhere to support or reject those claims. Instead, we get this trite drivel…
Galloway said he was “absolutely” convinced he had been vindicated from allegations that he received vouchers for 20 million barrels of oil from Saddam Hussein’s regime.
“These people think they can smear people without them having the right to speak back and this time I got that right and I knocked them for six,” he told reporters before leaving the U.S.
He said after his appearance before the Senate panel Tuesday that his accusers had little credibility “outside of Washington.”
But the panel’s Republican chairman, Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota, hit back, telling media after the session that Galloway’s credibility was “very suspect.”
Galloway told CNN that while Saddam’s regime shared a “lot of responsibility” for deaths in Iraq, so too did the policies of Washington and London.
Galloway, an outspoken critic of the war in Iraq, called the Senate panel’s investigation the “mother of all smokescreens” used to divert attention from the “pack of lies” that led to the 2003 invasion.
Novel concept time: gather facts, compare them, and see whose evidence stacks up instead of trusting the parties involved in the proceedings to tell you who “won.” Dare I say it, be something other than a conduit for opposing propaganda. I don’t give half a crap when these people say they won. What else are they going to say?
Bleached blonde CNN reporter: Mr. Galloway! Your thoughts on the proceedings?
George Galloway: The Senate really worked me over good. I am humbled by their on-point indictments of my arrogance, greed and stupidy.
I’ve never read or heard an interview that went like that either.
Someone needs to take CNN out back and put it out of its misery. It’s a worthless and lazy organization.
NOTE: I scrubbed an earlier published version of this post where I railed against the media and the new Star Wars movie in a profanity-laced tirade. The evidence is damning enough on its own without me having to swear at it.
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Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince is going to the be the 6th installment of the 7 book Harry Potter series.
if you haven’t read the first 5 books you should do so now - it only takes a couple days b/c the reading material is easy
for those of you who do follow the series:
i predict a few things for this book: a) the ron and hermonie hook-up b) beginning of ginny-harry romance c) ron and harry are going to become aurors and hermonie is going to become a political activist for NEWT d) voldemort is going to fight harry and it will end in a tie
also , the 4th movie should be out soon too
Editor’s note: This post was part of Blorgy ‘05, where eight of us switched blogs for a week. Mae from Politics 101 was writing here, while I was writing Being Amber Rhea.
This story is sad. MGM and United Artists are being swallowed up by a mega consortium of companies, including Sony. No time for a detailed rant, but… damn. I can’t wait for the conception-to-reception control they’re going after to materialize. Script, copyright Sony Script Writer for Sony OS. Produced by Sony. Directed by a proprietary simulation running on a Vaio PC. Starring actors created in Sony petri dishes. Distributed to your Sony memory stick player on brand fangled new 1 terabyte Sony memory sticks, available for the low-low price of half a week’s wages.
UPDATE: Jesus. It’s worse than I thought.
