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KJ and I recently visited southern California. We spent a day in the Mojave Desert, my old stomping grounds, and shot this video in Joshua Tree National Park. It’s unusual to see water in the desert, much less a big puddle of it like we saw at Barker Dam. And below that, an amazing site: hundreds and hundreds of wind turbines down near the intersection of highways 62 and 10.

Just a few beauty shots from the orchard tour last week.

Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo on DVD. The beetle may have conquered Japan, but the film conquers nothing.

Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo
Grade: C-
reviewed by Brian Charles Clark
directed by Jessica Oreck

Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo promises much more than it delivers. Directed by Jessica Oreck, a contributor to PBS’s Nature, the PR for the film alludes to science and a probing of the Japanese fascination with insects. Although Beetle Queen is a good-looking film with some interesting facets, it on the whole disappoints for its lack of narrative drive and its insistent but meandering obsession with tying together bits of Japanese poetry with shots of landscapes and bugs.

If we expected an in-depth look at Japanese culture and its people’s fascination with insects, I suppose we must be satisfied with the filmmaker’s visual anthropology. There are many arty shots in the film, that’s for sure, but they do not synergize into a narrative, nor do they create lyric intensity. With the emphasis on quoting snippets of Japanese literature, I suspect the latter, lyric mode was Oreck’s intention. I don’t think it works. The film is dry, full of lush (and creepy, no doubt, to the insectophobe) close-ups that ground us in nothing and leave us nowhere, offering nothing more than a macro shot of one bug after another. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been on the road all week with a group of scientists who are visiting pear growers in an effort to understand what they need in the way of research to bolster the pear market. My role has been as photographer and videographer, but I’ve also been helping the group maintain a blog. Here is a short clip I shot of a black lab in an orchard playing with a pear.

"Making Faces" is an unusual documentary about metal type.

review by Brian Charles Clark
4.5 stars out of 5
Directed by Richard Kegler

Jim Rimmer was a British Columbian printer and type designer who cast metal type using the now nearly lost pantographic technique. If that’s all Greek to you (or, if you’re a graphic designer, maybe it’s all greeking to you, too), you need to watch this film by book artist and P22 founder Richard Kegler.

Time was when type was neither virtual nor selectable from a drop-down menu but rather made of tiny bits of metal and set in mirror image, so that when it was inked and pressed against a sheet of paper it read correctly. Time was when “font” meant the whole collection of faces – for instance Times Roman – with italic and bold variations, and in all their myriad sizes.

Change is inevitable, but it’s terrible to think of losing the art of letterpress, that is, of printing with metal type. A letterpressed broadside or chapbook feels and smells very different from a page run through an offset press or a laser printer. If you’ve never experienced letterpress, seek it out: the tactile experience alone could change the way you experience the printed word. Read the rest of this entry »

Howard Zinn You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train

review by Brian Charles Clark
5 out of 5 possible stars
Directed by Deb Ellis and Denis Mueller; narrated by Matt Damon

Originally published on Curled Up with a Good DVD

One day — I think it was a Tuesday — about 25 years ago, someone handed me a copy of a book and said, “You’ll love this.” The book was Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. At the time, I was in college and had heavy stats and logic (if P then not Q and such nonsense) homework. I made the mistake of dipping into Zinn’s book over lunch and couldn’t stop reading for three days straight.

I was too young to have taken part in the radical ’60s and then in the ’70s – well, let’s forget the ’70s existed. In any case, I’d never heard of Zinn until I read A People’s History. But I quickly discovered that he was a member of a loosely affiliated cluster of radical activist philosopher-historians, a group that includes Noam Chomsky and many others, some of whom appear in this film. These activists were fighting the good fight against that relentless tide of greed called capitalism: they educated and advocated for civil and women’s rights, unions and labor rights, and against wars big and small, hot and cold. Read the rest of this entry »

Plastic Planet - have you had your Bisphenol A today?

Review by Brian Charles Clark
4 out of 5 stars
Directed by Werner Boote

Originally published on Curled Up with a Good DVD

At the rate we’re going, we’re all going to need to isolate ourselves from the toxins we’ve dumped into our environment by diving into HazMat bubble suits. We’ll have to invent filters that keep the nano-sized particles of cancer-dealing crap out – but, hey, we’ve got the technology for that. And plastics.

On second thought, no: plastics are one of the biggest sources of toxins. Bisphenol A, for instance, is a plasticizer that makes plastic, well, plasticy, and has been a known estrogenic since the 1930s. Estrogenics are those wonderful chemicals that are the secret culprits behind the bitching and moaning of the Iron John crew. Chief among them, Robert Bly has long complained that men have become too feminized, and clearly plastics are to blame, not doting mothers. I mean, look at the amphibians: scientists have been observing them changing sex, male to female, mid-stream for years, so why not humans, too? Is there a problem? Read the rest of this entry »

Fellini's Clowns is not-to-be missed cinema.

I Clowns (The Clowns)
review by Brian Charles Clark
4 stars (out of a possible 5)
Directed by Federico Fellini

Originally published on Curled Up with a Good DVD

Fellini’s I Clowns (The Clowns) is a fun and colorful way to delve into ontology, the philosophy of representations and appearances–with emphasis on the first half of the sentence. You could safely ignore the ontological cogitating burbling away in the film’s interrogative engine, but only if you were really stoned. Otherwise you’d just wonder what the hell was going on, as Fellini and crew caper about… like a bunch of clowns.

I Clowns is part documentary, part screwball comedy, part really deep thinking, and all extraordinarily well imagined and realized. This made for TV movie was released on Christmas day, 1970, around the time of Fellini’s other wonderful fantasy films, Satyricon (1969) and Juliet Of The Spirits (1965), and perhaps represents a mainstreaming of–or new-found docility in–Italian art film. Read the rest of this entry »

Loving Lampposts, a documentary by Todd Drezner: highly recommended.

Loving Lampposts: Living Autistic

Review by Brian Charles Clark
4.5 stars (out of 5 possible)
Directed by Todd Drezner
Originally published on Curled Up with a Good DVD

Todd Drezner’s beautiful investigation of autism is motivated by the personal. His son is autistic and loves to look at lampposts. They walk every day they can in Central Park and the young boy gazes up at the lampposts, recognizing them as individuals in ways us mere normals simply cannot.

There is a lot of bad information about autism out there and, with grace and compassion, Drezner gives even the lamest and most discredited notions their moment in the sun. The film is divided into sections and a recurring one is called “Autism is…” The reality is, no one knows for sure. But it is certainly not caused by vaccines or mercury, and it very likely isn’t genetic, either. Read the rest of this entry »

The Fernando di Leo Crime Collection is a 4-DVD box set.

Review by Brian Charles Clark
Directed by Fernando di Leo
Four films, box set plus many extras. Caliber 9, The Italian Connection, The Boss, Rules of the City

More whiskey, more scantily clad women, more cars and, definitely, more guns – those are the constantly recurring images in this collection of films by one of Poliziotteschi’s (Italo-crime) greatest directors, Fernando Di Leo. Add to that the incredible locations and Luis Enriquez Bacalov’s cool, noir-funk musical scores, and this box set of four mob films is a feast for the eyes and ears.

A still from one of the films in the Crime Collection.

Di Leo, who died in 2003, was the king of Italian crime films. If the mafia was going to exploit and corrupt the working class by infiltrating and coercing union bosses and shopkeepers for protection money, then Di Leo was going to exploit that trend by splattering it across the big screen. And splatter it does: in these four films, there might be one where five minutes goes by without a fist fight (including women getting socked in the mug), a shootout (including kids being gunned down), or a car chase through city and country. And in those five minutes, there will surely be macho posturing as partners in crime double-cross one another.

These films aren’t about the forces of prescriptive law overcoming those of evil. Here, crime most assuredly pays and the winners are those outsiders –prostitutes, freelancers — who confront and defeat the organized mobs.

Di Leo laid down the blueprint for future directors of action and crime flicks. Quentin Tarantino, among many others, cites Di Leo as a key influence and Pulp Fiction bears a striking resemblance to The Italian Connection, included in this collection. He also provided a home for has-been American actors, like Jack Palance, who plays a mob boss in Rulers of the City.

Carefully restored, remastered, and loaded with tons of bonus material, this quartet of pictures is a treasure trove for lovers of action cinema as well as film history buffs.

Originally published on Curled Up with a Good DVD. Copyright 2011 Brian Charles Clark