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G.J. Echterncamp is a young video director and documentary filmmaker. His latest subject is an utterly absorbing movie about his parents, Frank and Cindy.
In the 80s, Frank was a rising new wave pop star in a band called OXO. He was in his early 20s when he married Cindy, a vivacious blond woman almost 20 years his senior. Shortly after they married, OXO broke up. Cindy supported Frank for many years as he worked the club circuit in Florida, to no avail. They both began drinking and drugging. They also had a child, G.J., who grew up under their non-care for most of his life.
G.J. stays behind the camera most of the time as he films his extremely loquacious, alcohol- and drug-addled parents. I'm surprised he survived, as they are both revealed here to be incompetent, narcissistic, and childish. In spite of their odiousness, there is also something endearing about them, which is why this documentary is so good. You want them to do well, to get cleaned up, to get jobs, to stop hating each other. It's hard not to be disappointed when you discover that they'll never change.
I laughed out loud as many times as I shook my head while watching this. Link
Walt Disney's early cartoons are funny, innovative, and delightful. I bought the two-DVD Silly Symphonies when my first daughter was a baby and she still enjoys watching them with me. It's no longer in production, but you can buy it for about $90 on Amazon.
Fortunately, Disney just released More Silly Symphonies, and the cartoons on this set are just as good as the ones on the first. Over a dozen of the cartoons here have never been released on DVD or video before. For a little more that $20 bucks, you get over five hours of wonderful entertainment.
$22.95 on Amazon.com
It's been over 10 years since Myst came out, and I recently bought this 10th Anniversary edition to introduce the world's best computer game to my daughter. The 3 DVD set runs on Mac and Windows and contains three titles: Myst Masterpiece, Riven, and Myst III: Exile. My daughter is spooked and enthralled by the creepy, lifeless world filled with abandoned buildings and machines. She having a great time discovering the world of Myst, and I'm having a great time rediscovering it. $14.82 on Amazon
I really think John Kricfalusi is the only contemporary animator that has a direct link to the hilarious and brilliant animators of days gone by like Bob Clampett and Tex Avery.
These special episodes of Ren & Stimpy were created (long after the characters' debut in the late 1980s) for Spike TV, a young men's cable channel, and John K was pretty much give free reign to be as crude as he wanted to be. These cartoons are not for kids, because there's a lot of nudity and sexual situations. But they're funny, and if your kids do happen to get their hands on them, they are going to love them.
As a bonus, John K talks at length about each cartoon, and invites his animator pals to stand in front of the video camera pointed at the corner of the den in his San Fernando Valley ranch home to talk cartoons. For a cartoon fan like me, it's pure Heaven. $19.87 on Amazon
German documentary filmmaker Lutz Dammbeck came to the US in 2001 and 2002 to make a documentary about Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who is serving a life sentence for murdering people with home made letter bombs.
Dammbeck interviewed book agent John Brockman (one of his authors, David Gerlentner, lost his hand opening one of Kaczynski's letter bombs), Whole Earth Review and Well creator Stewart Brand, and cyberneticist Heinz von Foerster.
Dammbeck attempts to find a connection between the techno-hippies who embraced both computers and the back-to-nature movement and the scientists who developed computers and the forerunners of the Internet under military contracts. He finds plenty of interesting connections. He also strikes up a written correspondence with Kaczynski (who is as self-absorbed and unrepentant as you might expect a murderous zealot to be).
Brockman is happy to talk about his early days with the likes of Warhol and John Cage, but when the subject of Kaczynski comes up, he only says Kaczynski was a bad writer who had to kill people to get his manifesto published (Kaczynski promised he would stop killing if the New York Times and the Washington Post would publish his 50-page manifesto, which they did). Brockman then says Kaczynski doesn't merit further discussion, and asks to change the subject.
I agree with Brockman. I have nothing but contempt for Kaczynski. I read his manifesto when it was first published and I thought it was inarticulate, poorly-thought-out junk. He's no Neil Postman.
Nevertheless, The Net is a fascinating documentary, especially the interview with 90-year-old von Foerster, who delivers an entertaining riff on the nature of reality and humans' futile but interesting attempts to explain ontological questions. $26.99 on Amazon
About five years ago, I payed $800 for a portable DVD player so my kids could watch cartoons when we took long trips. After many drops on the floor, the player is in bad shape and barely works.
Today I use my PowerBook (and Video iPod) to watch videos, but I am reluctant to let my astonishingly destructive three-year-old daughter use either, especially unsupervised. So I looked around online and found this 3.5 inch kid-friendly portable DVD from Coby for about $100. It's a big hit. She loves to grip its sides and kick back with a Dora the Explorer DVD.
It comes with a nice case, kid sized headphones, an AC adapter to recharge the batteries, and a cigarette lighter adapter. $107.31 on Amazon
What happens when Disney creates a phony band consisting of kids singing Devo covers? Surprisingly, something wonderful. Devo songs are among the best ever written, and these kids, under the direction of Devo member Gerry Casale do a fantastic job of making the songs fun and keeping them strange.
This two disc set includes a DVD with an hour and a half worth of video, including songs and interviews with the original Devo bandmembers. In a world where most kids' music is condescending and vapid, this is an instant classic. $12.97 on Amazon.com
I recently got an iPod video and I use it to watch movies while I pedal and climb on the machines at the gym. It makes the time go by so quickly that I sometimes stay on the machine for an extra five minutes or so during especially good parts of a movie. This is a miracle for me.
I use a fantastic free application called HandBrake Lite to transfer my DVDs to a format playable on the iPod. It's free and couldn't be simpler to use. You stick a DVD into your Mac, click "Open" to select the DVD, then click "Rip." That's it.
On my G3 eMac, it takes about 2 hours to convert a movie. The final size is about 500 MB.
I like watching classic movies on the iPod the best, because they fill the entire iPod screen. Newer letterbox movies become thin horizontal strips.
Link
Entertainers Penn and Teller hate people who try to pass themselves off as having real magic or psychic powers. They also hate people who try to make money through lies. In Bullshit, a half-hour series on Showtime, hosts Penn and Teller use heavy handed, obnoxious, funny, and sometimes cruel pranks to expose charlatans who make their living duping other people. They've gone after penis enlargement pill pushers, channelers, alien abductees, and people who say second hand smoke is worse for you than it really is.
My favorite episode has Penn and Teller going after PeTA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), exposing them as hypocrites of the lowest kind. While PeTA boycotts animal shelters for euthanizing animals, PeTA euthanizes 2/3 of the animals it rescues. And while they support terrorists that firebomb medical research clinics that use animals to develop new kinds of life saving drugs, the woman who is second-in-command at PeTA uses insulin made from animal products to keep herself alive. (She has some nonsensical excuse that its OK for her to save herself by killing animals because she is saving animals). Eye opening bullshit indeed! Season One $29.99 on Amazon Season Two $25.99 on Amazon
1. MAKE: Technology on Your Time Volume 04
2. The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists
3. Gonzo Gizmos: Projects & Devices to Channel Your Inner Geek
5. Life's Little Annoyances : True Tales of People Who Just Can't Take It Anymore
6. Strange Angel : The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons
7. Led Zeppelin's Led Zeppelin IV (33 1/3)
8. Personal, Portable, Pedestrian : Mobile Phones in Japanese Life
10. The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture
11. The Week
12. One Two Three . . . Infinity : Facts and Speculations of Science
13. The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight : Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, and the New Journalism Revolution
Thanks for visiting Mad Professor. BB has over 300,000 daily visitors, and MP has about 3,000, so I consider you all the cream of the crop. *:)
This two volume set of of old black and white Mickey Mouse cartoons (34 cartoons in all) is my two-year-old daughter's favorite thing to watch. The cartoons really hold my interest, too.
The primitive characters continuously bob in rhythm to the happy old-time music, making them hypnotic. I never get tired of watching these cartoons.
It's also fun to watch Mickey smoke, drink, chew tobacco, swing cats around by their tail just to hear them yowl, and play a sow's teats like a musical instrument. What more could you ask for in wholesome family fare? Link
Amazon sells DVD cartoon collections for $1.49. Each DVD has about ten cartoons on it, making it a pretty good deal. There's Betty Boop, Popeye, Little Lulu, lots of good stuff. The quality of the cartoons isn't fantabulous -- who knows where the company got them? -- but they're good enough not to be distracting. Whenever I have to take the kids on a long car or plane trip, I take these DVDs with me along with a portable DVD player. It works wonders -- like having on "off" switch on your kid. Link
Walt Disney Treasures - Tomorrowland: Disney in Space and Beyond
The scientific explanations of spaceflight by rocket luminaries like Werner von Braun are well presented, and they make use of little rocket models that are so neat I would consider killing someone to get my hands on them.
I highly recommend the other Walt Disney Treasure series DVDs, too. They're 2 DVD sets in metal cases and they represent the cream of Disney animation and television. Most of them have over three hours worth of material on them, and I think they're a bargain. I have Silly Symphonies, Black and White Mickey Mouse, Color Mickey, and several others. My 7-year-old and I watch them over and over again. The only one I don't really recommend is the Goofy set, because they skipped the really early black and white stuff (from the Clarabelle Cow and Horace Horsecollar era) and included a lot of the weak "no-ears" Goofy cartoons. I can't deal with a Goofy speaking in a clipped British accent. It's even worse than when Snoopy became bipedal.) *Mac OS X doesn't let you take screen grabs when you are running the DVD Player. I'm not going to waste keystrokes comment on the idiocy of this other than to say you can screen grab to your heart's content if you play DVDs using the open source VLC media player. UPDATE: David wrote about this DVD for BB last year! Link UPDATE 2:". . . they make use of little rocket models that are so neat I would consider killing someone to get my hands on them."Stefan sez: "No need for that young man!" (you can buy the model kits here and here)
"I built the 'Lunar Lander' and have started pre-painting the 'Space Taxi.' The 1940s space men listed here were the subject of an essay by William Gibson. I gave him a couple from my set at a signing." UPDATE 3: A reader sez: "I find DVD Capture to be useful with Apple's DVD player."
Uncovered is a documentary about the way the White House distorted the truth in an attempt sell the American public and the rest of the world on its pre-emptive war on Iraq. I already thought that Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, and the rest of that gang were being sneaky about it, but this DVD nailed it for for me. The reason Uncovered is so persuasive is that the director wisely chose to interview only "insiders" for the documentary -- CIA analysts, weapons investigators, Pentagon officials, and former White House counsels. Their comments on the administration's exagerations and spin are devastating. According to the director, even people who support the war in Iraq become angry after watching Uncovered, because it exposes the Bush administration as a pack of thoroughly corrupt liars. Link
This two DVD set of 31 Disney shorts (over five hour's worth of cartoons) is a cornucopia of wonderful storytelling and animation, from Ub Iwerk's "Skeleton Dance" (a black and white clasiic in which skeletons in a graveyard play on each other like xylophones and rearrange their bones in grotesque forms) to the Academy Award winning "The Old Mill."
These cartoons are the polar opposite of The Simpsons -- if you turned the sound off on The Simpsons, you wouldn't understand what was happening. But you could turn the sound off on a Silly Symphony short and have no problem figuring out what was going on, thanks to the activity, gags, and pantomime. We've watched these cartoons dozens of times and we're still not tired of them.
Includes some interesting supplemental material, such as commentary by Leonard Maltin and Disney animation documentaries.
Link
This is PBS's version of reality TV: Take four American families who are accustomed to the modern conveniences of the 21st century and plop them down in the middle of the Montana wilderness with nothing but 19th century technology, clothing, and transportation. The volunteer families even had to build their own log cabins, and use old fashioned medicine when they got sick. I was fascinated by the way the families adapted to their frontier lives (and sometimes cheated to get by) and how they started hating the other families. It was also interesting to see that the men loved the experience of making houses, farming, setting up fences, and corralling animals, while the woman couldn't wait to get back to pedicures, microwaves, and SUVs. Link
A lot of the 56 classic Looney Tunes cartoons in this collection have been shown on television over and over again, but the versions here are uncut, offering their full complement of cartoon violence. In addition, there are a bunch of cartoons in this 4-disc set I've never seen.
But the thing that makes this package worth the price is the supplemental material. There are tons of commentaries, documentaries, interviews, featurettes, excerpts from live-action shows, art galleries, and best of all, several cartoons with "music-only" tracks, so you can appreciate conductor Carl Stalling's genius. It's no surprise Entertainment Weekly said Looney Tunes Golden Collection was the best DVD of 2003. My six-year-old daughter and I like to watch at least two cartoons from this collection every night.
I hope Warner Bros. eventually gives the same treatment to the other 1000 cartoons in their vaults, especially the work of director Tex Avery, who is conspicuously absent from this collection. Nevertheless, this is my favorite DVD purchase in years.
