Tchoupitoulas and Tacos

After Monsieur Lazhar, I hustled down to the Violet Crown for a shorts program, but ended up checking out Bill Ross and Turner Ross' Tchoupitoulas at its Buzz screening.  It's part of the Emerging Visions section.  It was definitely experiential and informal, but I'm glad I went.  Then grabbed some Korean BBQ pork tacos from Chilantro on Congress between 2nd and 3rd.  They were okay, standard truck fare. 

Monsieur Lazhar

Philippe Falardeau's French Canadian film about a middle school teacher who helps a class overcome their grief after the death of their beloved teacher.  Loved it.  Review later.

Monday afternoon: Sno Cones and Brooklyn Castle

Chilling with my bro eating sno-cones from Sno Beach after watching Kate Dellamaggiore's Brooklyn Castle at the Alamo Lamar.  Loved it.  Review later.

County Line BBQ and Alamo Village Screening

Our second screening was at the Alamo Drafthouse Village theater, so I arranged for everyone to come up to the County Line restaurant on the Lake for some BBQ and margaritas on the dock.  Some of our crew even joined us by boat.  Delicious BBQ and bread, we have been going to this restaurant for family dinners since I was a little girl.  Then we shuttled the team over to the theater for another showing and Q&A.  Another great day in Austin, TX.

Waiting for Lightning Poster

Poster for Waiting for Lightning, designed by Yogi Proctor. Should have posted this before.

Good first screening this morning.  Very happy and excited with SXSW so far.  Three more screenings of Waiting for Lightning to come.

PREMIERE SCREENINGS

SATURDAY, March 10, 2012
11:00am - 12:20PM
Paramount Theatre

SUNDAY, March 11, 2012
9:45Pm - 11:05PM
Alamo Village

TUESDAY, March 13, 2012
7:45Pm - 9:05PM
Canon Screening Room

SATURDAY, March 17, 2012
2:45Pm - 4:05PM

Stateside Theatre

Premiere at the Paramount!

11AM!

Filmmaker Lunch

At Troublemaker studios. 

Catetered by Franklin BBQ.  Back in Texas!

Good Omen

Woke this morning in Austin to a cracking thunderstorm.  Is that a good luck sign for Waiting for Lightning?  If not this might be:
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118051234

SXSW, Here we come!

We are on our way to Austin this week for the World Premiere of Waiting For Lightning, the film I'm producing at Bandito Brothers.  It's been a long road and we are very proud and excited to see all our hard work come to fruition.  I will be blogging from SXSW as I take in the scene and other films, and I'm also very excited to see my family and show my fellow Banditos around Austin, TX.

Check out our new site for Waiting for Lightning: www.waitingforlightningthemovie.com where  you can view the official trailer and keep updated.

The Water Goblin

I've been obsessed with finding a text of Karel Jaromír Erben's Kytice (Bouquet) a collection of rhythmic poems based on Czech folklore.  I first become interested in "Vodník" (The Water Goblin) when doing some research on Romantic composers.  I came across Dvořák's Vodník, a composition called a symphonic poem, which is a single piece of symphonic music illustrating a work of literature.  The basic story is about a Water Goblin who abducts a young girl and takes her to his home in the lake to be his bride.  They have a child and she eventually persuades him to allow her to return to land to pay a visit to her mother. He agrees on the condition that she will return and keeps the child as a hostage.  When the time comes to return, the mother will not let her daughter return to the lake and the Water Goblin take his revenge.  I was enchanted by the music and when I read that the words to the poem fit naturally to the music I wanted to read the poem.  Natural response right?  Listen to the composition:

The Water Goblin Part 1

The Water Goblin Part 2

The Water Goblin Part 3

So I began searching everywhere for a translation of "The Water Goblin" and found nothing...   I searched Amazon, I searched everything all I could find were discussions of the work but no actual texts in English.  I came across this transcript of a English language Czech culture broadcast discussing Erben and his works.

Susan Reynolds Interview on Radio Praha

A British literary scholar Susan Reynolds from The British Library was working on a translation.  Below are excerpts from her translation.  If you listen to the music, you can hear how it would go rhythmically with the words.

[excerpt 1 ]

On a poplar by the pool
The Goblin sat at twilight cool:
'Glow, moon, glow,
That my thread may sew.

For myself new boots I'm sewing, 

On dry land and water going:
Glow, moon, glow,
That my thread may sew.

'Thursday now—tomorrow's Friday—
sew a coat all trim and tidy:
Glow, moon, glow,
That my thread may sew.

Coat of green and boots of red, 

For tomorrow I'll be wed:
Glow, moon, glow,
That my thread may sew.'

This translation © Susan Reynolds 2002.

[excerpt 2]

On the lake the storm is shrieking;
In the storm the child screams shrill;
Screams that pierce the soul with anguish,
Then they suddenly fall still.
'Oh, my mother, please, oh, please!
At those cries my blood will freeze—
Mother mine, oh, dearest mother,
Fear of him my heart does fill!'

Something fell—beneath the doorway
Moisture trickles—tinged with red.
When the old one went to open,
What she saw filled her with dread.
In their blood, two objects lying
Sent cold terror through her flying:
Baby's head—without a body;
Tiny body—with no head.

This translation © Susan Reynolds 2002.

This poem is macabre and chilling and naturally I want to read the other poems now too and share them with my friend over in The Devil's Playpen.   This interview was in 2002 but there is still no book by Susan Reynolds.  But I did find this post on The British Library page of Academia.edu from Susan Reynolds three months ago:

Final stages of preparing translation of Karel Jaromír Erben's `Kytice' for publication by Jantar to mark his 200th birthday..."

Unfortunately Erben was born in 1811... It looks like she didn't quite make it.  Hopefully she plans to finish it.  You can read some more excerpts from her translations on the Radio Praha link above.

If anyone knows where I can read these poems in English let me know.

WAITING FOR LIGHTNING: One Word Clip

Teaser clip for the documentary I am producing at my company Bandito Brothers.  Final stages of editorial and very excited about the amazing film we have on our hands.

Netflix Update

So, it’s several months later and, still with Netflix. Here’s what transpired to keep me from leaving. First of all, Netflix backed off the Quickster split, so that’s a step in the right direction. Then they beefed up their instant library, though it’s still lacking a bit in my opinion. Lastly, I dropped the blu-ray subscription. The blu-rays seemed to be more trouble than they were worth. Can’t take it with on trips because my laptop doesn’t have a blu-ray player, and they were also having technical problems, which the DVDs never seem to have. Maybe it was our blu-ray player, I don’t know, but with a television the size of ours in our tiny apartment, apparently, you can’t tell the difference. Also, I am working on turning the DVDs over faster too. So now I’m paying $15.98 a month for streaming and 1 DVD at a time. If I manage to watch two things on instant and get two DVDs a month, that’s about the same price as HD videos from those on demand services. I can live with this, but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time until another price hike hits.

Senna

I had hoped to watch Asif Kapadia's Senna in the theaters in support of theatrical releases for documentary films, but it's hard enough to find time to go to the theater in the first place to watch epic action films that should be viewed on a big screen, much less docs that will probably be making their way to Netflix fairly soon as Senna did.  I ended up watching it on Netflix streaming on my blu-ray player and I probably enjoyed it more that way.

Senna is the story Ayrton Senna, a Brazilian Formula One racer whose intensity and brilliance catapulted him to stardom shortly after joining F1.  Handsome and charming, the endless archival footage of Senna is captivating, and its discovery must have inspired the filmmakers to craft this beautiful and poetic story.  The film primarily focuses on Senna's racing career and the intense rivalry between him and French racer Alain Prost.  This is a great documentary and I would recommend it to anyone, doc lover or no.

I think it was the right moment for me to watch it as well, as we are currently wrapping up editorial on our documentary, Waiting for Lightning, another film about an amazing individual who also happens to be an athlete risking his life in pursuit of his passion.  But more about that in later posts.  As I was watching Senna with my fairly critical eye, I felt myself questioning some of the choices made about not showing interviewees, about the way this looked or that, and I kept thinking, I don't agree with this, but at the end of the film, I found myself deeply emotionally connected to Ayrton Senna, and I think I probably reacted just the way the filmmakers were hoping.  

I think as viewers we often second guess the creators, saying, why didn't they do this, or why didn't they do that?  Well, the truth is, sometimes they did try this or that, but it actually didn't work as well, or accomplish what they were trying to do.  I think Kapadia et al gave the archival a fairly light hand, and let it lead the story, or rather appear to, since they combed through 5,000 hours of footage to put together just the right combination, to wonderful effect.  Ayrton Senna crackles with star power on screen, so why mess with a good thing?

DC: H Street Festival

We visited my brother in Washington, D.C. this fall and one day we stumbled upon a street fair.  Music, food, and a carnival like atmosphere reigned.

Film Review: The Tree of Life

Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life sat on our dining room table in it’s Netflix sleeve for a week and a half before we finally committed the two and a half hours necessary to watch this behemoth.  I have seen Malick’s A New World and the director’s cut at that, so I was prepared for a ponderously long film with lots of whispering, but not for two and a half hours of nature footage intercut with a cold man in a cold glass tower, who I hardly cared two straws about, intercut with an intimate, well-acted, if impressionistic childhood story.  I found this film extremely frustrating to watch, at times infuriating.  I am extremely busy with lots of films in my queue and to feel I’m wasting an hour on a ridiculous grandiose vision of life and the cosmos and evolution and being etc. etc. does not sit well.  Mostly, I was frustrated because it felt like a missed opportunity.  The childhood story was great and the performances delivered, particularly by the children were phenomenal, so to ruin it by going so over the top with all the other stuff just seemed a shame. 

Ostensibly, the story is about Jack, a man who has found commercial success in his life, but is still unhappy.  He is remembering his childhood and feeling the struggle within himself of the two opposite world views of his dominant, "take what you want in life" father (Brad Pitt) and his mother pious, selfless, and loving mother (Jessica Chastain).  Really, we hardly even meet adult Jack or care about him at all.  This element to the story, seems completely unnecessary really.  I don’t even understand we bother meeting adult Jack at all.

Malick’s other motive for creating this film, besides telling the story of Jack, a baby-boomer who grows up in Waco, TX, with his two brothers, is conveying some sort of (possibly deist) concept of the origins and meaning of life.  To do this, he feels it necessary to take us from the big bang through dinosaurs to their extinction, all scored with huge orchestral and choral pieces from the annals of classical music history.  For a moment I thought I was watching Fantasia.  One piece he uses, Smetana’s "The Moldau", is used for the trailer as well, and is actually a wonderful piece, that I’ve always liked.

Overall, I felt like there was so much subtlety and nuance in the performances of the actors, but in the storytelling I felt I was being bludgeoned over the head with symbolism that didn’t feel subtle at all.  Every time I felt myself being drawn into the film and the story of young Jack, Malick would do something to jerk me out of the story again.  Very frustrating to watch, especially when everything is so beautiful and he was able to elicit such amazing performances from such young children.  Overall, I wouldn’t recommend this film unless you are a solid Malick fan or a serious film buff and need to make sure you’ve seen it.

Ugliest House

While people all over the country are losing their homes, this resident of the Arcadia neighborhood in Phoenix, AZ took it upon himself to build this monstrosity.  This is possibly the most confused architectural abomination I have ever seen.  We have Grecian columns everywhere, some sort of ugly 80's tan stucco panels, and Spanish red roof tiles and what would be a beautiful Spanish door if belonged anywhere near this misguided opulence.  Don't forget the random barn door and the waist-high ugly cement foundation.  What is going on here?

I hate to be negative, because this blog is supposed to be a collection of inspiring images, but I couldn't resist.

Chicago Preview

During our Chicago weekend, I took all my photos on film, but here's a preview from photos I took with my phone.

The Rubicon Trail in the Sierras

These photos are from the Jeep commercial we filmed this summer.  It was a beautiful five days, camping in the Sierras and hiking the Rubicon Trail with the Jeeps.  Jeeping is a unique way of approaching the wilderness and a long held tradition on the Rubicon Trail.  While it's probably not my preferred way to experience nature, it was interesting to learn about and we couldn't have chosen a more beautiful set.