The Product:
Because of the Puritanical nature of our society, sex never gets a real 'serious' discussion. We're not talking about science facts and figures here. No, carnality frequently finds itself the butt of jokes, the source of scare tactics, and the questionable means to some patently political ends. But where's the artistic approach, the aesthetic appreciation of smut as a legitimate and thoughtful subject to contemplate and consider. Until now, there has really been very few examples of filth as fodder for incisive deliberation. Thanks to Other Cinema, and their latest DVD release, Xperimental Eros, we finally get a chance to see the titillating and the tantric discussed in a visually vibrant and mentally fascinating manner. The results may seem risqué, but they end up being more enlightening than exciting.

The DVD:
As a collection of short films and avant-garde...Read the entire review

Out of the mysterious depths of New York underground cinema comes Mike Kuchar's Sins of the Fleshapoids, a homemade 16mm Kodachrome epic from the wilds of Brooklyn. Like millions of 50s kids with access to home movie cameras, the Kuchar brothers entertained themselves by filming their own backyard spectaculars, a hobby that didn't go away as they left home and took jobs in the real world. Mike became a photo retoucher by day and a secret cinema legend by night, with the help of close friends and like-minded cinephiles bitten by the movie bug.

Earlier experimentalists (think Kenneth Anger, Curtis Harrington and Maya Deren) took as their inspiration the work of artists-turned-filmmakers, like Man Ray. The Kuchar brothers belong to a specific 1960s underground movement that, roughly speaking, includes Andy Warhol's Factory. Mike Kuch...Read the entire review

The Product:
Art, like that famous Supreme Court statement on pornography, is in the eye of the beholder. Some people see a few squiggly lines of an uneven canvas and call it a masterpiece. Others view the glorified doodling and wonder what all the aesthetic hubbub is about. It's all a matter of perspective. People get out of art what they put into it, be that understanding, appreciation or confusion. At the same time, no two individuals see things the same way. One man looks at the Mona Lisa and finds her hideous. Another weeps at the wonderful work of Leonardo Da Vinci. So when one approaches a subject as potentially explosive as American political problems from the last 100 years, the way in which it is explored is very important. A documentary can be definitive, if sometimes twisted toward a particular agenda. A fictional film gets lambasted for taking liberties. But what if one decided t...Read the entire review

THE SHOW:

Anxious Animation is a collection of short animated films from the mid- to late-'90s by four different filmmakers (or six, if you count the trio of Henry Garon Ascher as individual members). There is no great thread connecting them; the title of the DVD is as close to a theme as you will get. All the shorts have some sense of anxiety or dread about them.

In any storytelling form, short subjects are a tricky business. It's not just a simple matter of adjusting your running time to fit the format, the creator has to adjust his or her approach, making choices for economy, searching for the smaller slice of life that will have immediate poignancy. There is no room for excess, and yet it's actually quite easy to have too little.

When it comes to animated films, the approach is often to go experimental, as all the animators do on Anxious Animation. Traditional narrative ...Read the entire review

The Product:
One of the boons of the new technological age is the ease of accessibility for fledgling filmmakers. Where once the process of creating cinema required a decent sized crew and a director with vision and panache, now all that's required is a camcorder and an idea. Nowhere has this dynamic been more successful than in the documentary format. People with little or no money have made movies both important (Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me) and deeply personal (Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation). But with the good has to come some bad – or if not outright rotten, at least misguided and meandering. Such is the case with German filmmaker Lutz Dammbeck's Das Netz (offered with the far more complicated English title The Net: The Unabomber, LSD and the Internet). An attempt to discuss, realistically, the arguments against technology made by the notorious Ted Kaczyn...Read the entire review

The Film:
If you pay attention to the packaging of this collection of black cinema trailers, you might be fooled into thinking this something more than it is. But what this is, quite simply, is a collection of trailers from 31 movies produced between 1946 and 1976. All of the films previewed in these trailers were intended for black audiences, and cover a wide array of genres and stars. And that's a great thing. But claims of this DVD being anything more a compilation of coming attractions is nothing more than hyperbolic bullshit.

The single biggest problem with Afro Promo is that it claims to offer some sort of historical overview or context, when in reality this disc is nothing more than a series of trailers strung together. In fact, the trailers aren't even strung together in any sort of chronological order. There appears to be some sort of thematic order—at first—until you r...Read the entire review

Not likely to be confused with the 60's Blake Edwards/Glenn Ford crime thriller of the same name, Experiments in Terror is a short film compilation with a decidedly experimental, avant garde slant.

First up is Peter Tscherkassy's 1999 film Outer Space (10 mins). Basically the film is just manipulated footage from one of the ghost attack scenes in The Entity (1981) with Barbara Hershey. Tscherkassy has taken the scene and manipulated the film stock in various ways, overlapping it, warping it, and wrangling it in just about every way possible. This manipulation makes seem as if the film itself is being attacked. Neat, but after a couple of minutes the increasingly distorted image started to seriously wear out my eyes.

From 1961, Ursula (13:00) by Lloyd M. Williams, is a nice little childhood horror fable. Little Ursula's stern mother chastises her for playing outdoors in h...Read the entire review

Certain inventions do scream surrealism when viewed in hindsight. Two color 3-D, with those obnoxious red and blue-tinted cardboard glasses, looks more and more like a desperate marketing ploy than an actual advancement in cinematic technology when seen sans fad. During the 40s and 50s some dope got the bright idea of fitting people for shoes via x-ray. Nothing like microwaved bunions and nuclear toe-jam to dispel the myths regarding radiation being bad for you. Medicine has seen many dadaist devices, from machines that supposedly grow hair with magnets, to something called "The Relaxerciser", which was nothing more than mini-electroshock treatments for your tired and aching muscles. From aquacars to videophones, we've had more creation catastrophes than modern technological phenomenon - and the list just keeps on growing.

Just don't lump the 8 Track tape in with the other examples of spoilt innova...Read the entire review

In today's modern multimedia mindset, outsider art and artists get a pretty fair shake. Though they are never truly part of the mainstream, there are still enough outlets desperate for content that, at any given point, even the most underground of movements finds its facade plastered all over a magazine cover or cable news feature. In addition, the Internet acts like a merchandising missing link, giving individuals who used to toil away in abject obscurity an instant venue to shill their specialty. Filmmakers probably have the easiest time of it now. Thanks to emerging production and promotional technology, a couple thousand dollars can be turned into a career. No more paying dues, networking contacts and struggling to scrape together equipment - just head down to Best Buy with a credit card and start creating. In the decades since the ground swell in independent filmmaking, the ability to make and mar...Read the entire review

In 10 Words or Less
The story of the '70s, told during commercial breaks

Reviewer's Bias*
Loves: Old commercials
Likes: Cheesy PSAs
Dislikes: the '70s
Hates:

The Show
If you've ever enjoyed the Clio awards or one of those World's Wildest TV specials, this DVD should be right up your alley. There's something incredibly entertaining about how the way things are sold to Americans age. Commercials attempt to be current to the point where their shelf life is usually quite limited. Occasionally, one breaks the mold and takes on a life of its own, but they are usually quite disposable.

That's why the clips on this DVD were found in a dumpster in Portland, Orego...Read the entire review

Craig Baldwin's Sonic Outlaws opens with a detailed exploration into the legal battle that nearly bankrupted sonic collage artists Negativland.Their song combined, among other things, radio personality Casey Kasem spouting off a stream of profanities and ranting about a band with the letter U and numeral 2 in their name ("these guys are from England, and who gives a shit?") mixed in with an extended sample from U2's "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For". They then slid that single into a sleeve with "U2" printed in big, bold letters behind a shot of a U2 spy plane. A 180 page lawsuit from U2's label almost immediately followed, resulting in the destruction of all outstanding copies of the record, a bill...Read the entire review

Craig Baldwin's Spectres of the Spectrum is an interesting experiment, taking a slew of disparate film clips and combining them into a feature length cinematic collage. Yes, I do mean "interesting" in the politely dismissive sense. I respect the ambition, effort, and creativity that must have gone into crafting something like this, but Spectres of the Spectrum isn't a movie I can honestly say I enjoyed. Piecemealed together from an incomprehensibly large archive of media, including vintage educational films, ancient science TV shows, Fleischer's animated Superman, various car advertisements, an excerpt from Gremlins, and audio lifted from The Outer Limits, among countless others, Spectres of the Spectrum is an amalgam of science fiction...Read the entire review