Kanye is right – the douchebags need a toast.
While there was some of the usual glass-clinking going on at the Golden Globe Awards last Sunday, the praise was mixed for sophomore host Ricky Gervais. Some applauded his wise-cracks with a hesitant clap while others criticized the comedian for his supposed “bad form,” begging the question: Should comedians hold back when celebs are the target? The negative responses to Gervais were largely based on the warped belief that we should be nice to celebrities. And there’s nothing more offensive than that. Continue reading
Indie movies are a great thing. When it comes to the art of film you know there’s no truer testament than the Independent, for everyone involved has cast aside the confines of the mainstream and commercial for the realism of artistic passion. If you’re not in it for the money – and with the dry budget of many indie movies, you can be sure they aren’t – then you’ve got to be in it for the art. But for the indie fan, it sometimes just doesn’t work as well as you wish it would.
For those of us who think that film is important, there is no better case in point than documentaries. Last year two films stood out in the pack of acclaimed docs in their importance. Burma VJ, about journalists smuggling footage of the 2007 uprisings in a corrupt Burma military state, and Oscar-winner The Cove, about the annual dolphin slaughters in a small Japanese coastal town. But if you’ve seen either of these docs you know they don’t just serve to document important events, they are also examples of riveting filmmaking.
