Speaking of great things to share from YouTube (as I'm sure someone just was...that's all we talk about), my friend Larissa just showed me this great stop-motion film that her friend from Occidental made. He took the sound from the move SAW, and redid the images with stuffed animals. It's pretty much the coolest thing of today. He was also on an episode of the short-lived MTV dating show "Wanna Come In?" and he was in fact invited in. Here's the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwdErvQ552o

Let me know what you think.

but I'm 8 post short....so...you know

So my girlfriend got D.E.B.S for us on Netflix, in that, "hey come on, I know it will be bad, but it could be fun, right?" sort of way and I was completely like "Oh my god, we can not watch this, like, fo'reals" but she prevailed, as often happens and we watched the movie.

And you know what? It wasn't actually horrible.
I mean it is in no way a "good movie"
It's a piece of crap, the sound quality is bad and the plot is laughable.

Only two things save it:
1) It doesn't take itself seriously and you can tell,
which is all important for bad movies. If they know they're bad and revel in their badness you can kinda be like "ok, I'll go there with you"
2) No one got reclaimed as a heterosexual,
which has got to be probably my biggest pet peeve with any movie that even flirts with queer content

For anyone who thinks they might actually see the movie *snort* and doesn't want me to ruin it, stop reading, for those who are as morbidly fascinated as I was, read on.

other people have touched upon this in Vaidhyanathan's work, but one of the things he talks about that i find really interesting is how people are taking films and creating their own edits and interpretations, like the Phantom Edit, or Puchkov's goblin dubs. What I liked about this was the idea that usually when people think about art, but particularly with film since production is such a process, what people view is often seen as a finished product. With what these folks are doing, they're asserting that art is never finished, and can always be reinterpreted, retinkered with, etc.

One theme we've talked about in class while discussing authorship, is one does the role of intention play. Does it matter what the author intends at all? As Vaidhyanathan writes, "an author cannot control how a character, idea or plot will be read, refasioned, or criticized".

I am currently in this weird documentary stage of my Netflix, why I have no idea. My recent documentary, The Future of Food worried me a bit. Sure, I've heard all the 'eat organic foods' speeches and yeah, I shop at Trader Joe's sometimes, but I feel that the film should have scared me much more. I wanted an expose on all the crap the dining halls are feeding us. All it really did was make me feel as though I was watching the film in a high school biology or ecology class or something.

First of all, I guess I was expecting to see something like Fast Food Nation (which is now I film, that I haven't seen but I've read the book). What I got was a lesson in genetics and how big companies, such as MONASTO - the makers of Round-up, make genetically altered seeds and then put patents on them so that farmers can't use their seeds. While it is all a bit complicated, basically the big companies sue any farmers whose seeds have any genetic make-up related to their genetically altered seeds. Due to seeds easily spreading (through wind, animals, what have you), cross-polination occurs rapidly and basically all plants become altered with some part of these genetically-engineered seeds.

Not to be predictable, but Melting Pot wasn't really my favorite movie. It did make me uncomfortable. Don't get me wrong, I do believe there is great value in being disturbed. I just sometimes wonder how effective things like that are. I mean I feel like I'm pretty sensitive to racial stuff and pretty aware of white hegemonies and stuff like that. In my case he's kinda preaching to the choir, and making me uncomfortable in the process, so not so effective on that level. And then what about the people who aren't already in the proverbial choir? How likely are they to watch a film called Melting Pot or RACE? I'm just not sure what the goal of that film was.

Okay, so I'm sure that someone has written about Borat, but I can't find it to attach this to their blog, but I'm going to tie it in with Parental Control, so I figure I'll probably say something slightly new to the blog.

I'm sure that many of you have seen the Borat movie, but I'll still try not to give anything away. And I hope that many of you have seen Parental Control, because after Yo Momma it is the best reality show on television. For those of you who are unfamiliar with its genius, the plot is that there are two parents who are ridiculously unhappy with their son or daughter's significant other. So they interview a slew of willing candidates, choose two of them and then sit at home with the unhappy significant other, watching the son or daughter go on televised dates with the new candidates. After the two dates, the son or daughter has to choose between staying with his or her current significant other or taking one of the new candidates. The show makes me feel ridiculously trashy sometimes, but I can't help loving it. Sometimes I'll even skip meals to stay home and watch it on MTV. I often think to myself, "Why do you like this show?" I think it's because I'm convinced it's not actually real.

I was thinking about Manovich’s discussion of remixing in “Models of Authorship in New Media,” when I remembered a really interesting example that I encountered in one of my classes last semester. DJ Spooky (aka Paul D. Miller) is a writer and DJ who recently created a project called “Rebirth of a Nation”. This piece is basically a remix of the technically brilliant yet horribly racist film “Birth of a Nation”. DJ Spooky remixes both the images and the sound, providing his own soundtrack. He says that, “By remixing the film along the lines of dj culture, I hoped to create a counter-narrative, one where the story implodes on itself, one where new stories arise out the ashes of that explosion.” To me, this approach seemed very much in line with Manovich’s view of remix. DJ Spooky aims to engage with the film in deeper, more deliberate manner than is implied by a term like “appropriation”. As Manovich says, "'remixing' is a better term because it suggests a systematic re-working of a source, the meaning which 'appropriation' does not have."

Okay, this is the last thing I’m going to post about comics, I promise. So anyway, over the past 5 years or so, we’ve seen a rash of comic book film adaptation being produced by major Hollywood studios. Most of them have been superhero related (i.e. Superman Returns, Batman Begins, and the X-men series), but other comics have been adapted as well (i.e. Ghost World, V for Vendetta). So I was thinking about why in this historical moment are comic book adaptations all the rage, and also, what makes a good adaptation?

As for the first question, I’m not really sure. In the case of more superhero oriented movies, perhaps it’s like a relatively safe way to capitalize on the action movie market. Characters like Batman and Spiderman have been around for a long time and have established a strong fanbase. Most fans will go see the movies at least once, whether the adaptation is good or not, and the name recognition and hype may be enough to get non-fans into the theaters.

While reading the article "Making Films Asian American," by Sarah Projansky and Kent A. Ono, I found one aspect very interesting. The article focused alot on the economic side of cinematic production, an issue I think has been largely overlooked in other essays but nonetheless is a vital factor in this question of authorship. The article asserts that among other things, the filmmaker is "a laborer within global capitalist economy that continually masks the relationship between workers and products." I think the economic setting in which a film or any form of cultural text is created can potentially have a huge effect on the ways in which authorship is percieved. As the article states on pg. 266, "The flight from the auteur as sanctified origin of textual meaning parallels the postmodern cultural effect of libertating products from any and all sites of production and cultural contexts...labor is alienated from the existential moment of human production and products forever circulate as exchange value versus use value."