As America heads towards a change it can believe in, real issues effecting real people become more important than ever. To see what’s on the minds of young Americans all across the ‘flyover states’, Current put Lauren Cerre on a bus from Los Angeles to New York, and created The Great American Detour.
The result is a collection of the actual issues that will determine the future of America, told in a voice that is very different from the pundits and the polls that dominate most on-air time screen time:
Tropfest is the world’s largest short film festival.
Founded at Sydney’s Tropicana café in 1993, it now has an attendance of over 150,000 in Australia each February, and thousands more in other cities through out the world at other local Tropfests.
This year, the $20,000 first prize at the Tropfest in New York went to a film called “Mankind Is No Island” which was shot entirely with a cell phone camera.
The music is perfect, the effect is simple yet powerful, and the end result is a very emotional film that challenges the way we look at the world.
Animator Fujio Tanabe’s short, called Fridges, was part of New York’s Japan Cuts, an annual festival of Japanese cinema, and takes a dark look at the often overlooked appliance that’s probably lurking in your kitchen right now.
Bomb It “is the explosive new documentary from award-winning director Jon Reiss investigating the most subversive and controversial art form currently shaping international youth culture: graffiti”.
Through interviews and guerilla footage of graffiti writers in action on 5 continents, Bomb It tells the story of graffiti from its origins in prehistoric cave paintings thru its notorious explosion in New York City during the 70’s and 80’s, then follows the flames as they paint the globe. Featuring old school legends and current favorites such as Taki 183, Cornbread, Stay High 149, T-Kid, Cope 2, Zephyr, Revs, Os Gemeos, KET, Chino, Shepard Fairey, Revok, and Mear One. This cutting edge documentary tracks down today’s most innovative and pervasive street artists as they battle for control over the urban visual landscape. You’ll never look at public space the same way again.
Locations include Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Tijuana, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Hamburg, Berlin, Cape Town, São Paulo, and Tokyo, so all the hot spots are covers as well.
Conclusion: If you have even a passing interest in graffiti, its history, its effect, and its current status, then Bomb It looks like a can’t miss film.
Michael Neff’s Chalk series is a terrific idea in which he outlines various objects’ shadows in chalk, and then photographs them at night, giving each shadow an odd, sort of radiating glow.
So far, cities that he’s done this in include New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and a small town in Oregon, and the series is ongoing, so he has plans for more in the future.
GrandOpening, the store featured previously on DYH, has just reopened, and is now called Everything Must Go, The Lower East Side Auction House.
It’s spring! Empty your apartment of all that drab furniture. Better yet, move and leave all that old stuff behind. This weekend, The Lower East Side Auction House can help you get started.
It looks to be yet another very successful iteration of the GrandOpening idea, so if you’re in the New York area, then definitely stop by and check it out.
Multinational coffee companies now rule our shopping malls and supermarkets and dominate the industry worth over $80 billion, making coffee the most valuable trading commodity in the world after oil.
But while we continue to pay for our lattes and cappuccinos, the price paid to coffee farmers remains so low that many have been forced to abandon their coffee fields.
Nowhere is this paradox more evident than in Ethiopia, the birthplace of coffee. Tadesse Meskela is one man on a mission to save his 74,000 struggling coffee farmers from bankruptcy. As his farmers strive to harvest some of the highest quality coffee beans on the international market, Tadesse travels the world in an attempt to find buyers willing to pay a fair price.
Against the backdrop of Tadesse’s journey to London and Seattle, the enormous power of the multinational players that dominate the world’s coffee trade becomes apparent. New York commodity traders, the international coffee exchanges, and the double dealings of trade ministers at the World Trade Organization reveal the many challenges Tadesse faces in his quest for a long term solution for his farmers.
It looks like a fascinating film, and definitely brings light to an issue that few Americans consider while waiting in line at the local Starbucks.
Lenore Skenazy of The New York Sun left her 9-year-old son at Bloomingdale’s with “a subway map, a MetroCard, a $20 bill, and several quarters, just in case he had to make a call.”
Several hours later…he turned up at home, safe and sound.
Surprised?
Half the people she told that story to were, but for what reason? Have we come to distrust our fellow man so much that we feel the need to keep children under lock and key so that they have no chance to foster any type of independence? I think we have, and Lenore would agree.
The problem is not that we aren’t aware of the risks, and haven’t heard stories of what can happen, it’s that “we all know that story — and the one about the Mormon girl in Utah and the one about the little girl in Spain — and because we do, we all run those tapes in our heads when we think of leaving our kids on their own.”
Except, instead of making them safer, locking them up just makes them dependent and afraid of the world.
The statistics show that this is an incredibly rare event, and you can’t protect people from very rare events. It would be like trying to create a shield against being struck by lightning.
So perhaps it’s time for everyone to just relax a little bit, trust a little bit, and give a little bit, because otherwise, what kind of world have we created for ourselves?
Get a jump on the Easter season with MOO’s Egg Hunt.
MOO has hidden eggs online, in MOO products, and in the great outdoors, and finding one could win you one of over 3,500 prizes.
Each working day they’ll hide new clues in the MOO Blog, and there are also clues hidden in orders for current MOO customers.
The first person to find each egg wins a prize, and another nine random finders will also win prizes, for a total of 10 winners per egg.
They’ve also partnered with Flickr, so if you’d like to get started with finding eggs in the great outdoors, and live in either London, Montreal, Bordeaux, Oaxaca, Tokyo, Paris, Niagra Falls, Toronto, New York, Brighton, Glasgow, BC, Oslo, Barcelona, Brussels, Silicon Valley, Wellington, Oxford, Austin, Konstanz, or San Francisco, then check the map for an egg near you.
I Am Legend felt like a good idea that no one knew what to do with.
There were a few shining stars:
Will Smith’s acting was superb, in a Tom Hanks on an island sort of way, and you really feel for him as he navigates the empty streets of New York with Sam, his devoted dog, and his slowly fading sanity as he tries his best to cure the zombied world around him.
The CGI work was also superb, and you will easily believe that New York was stripped bare and left to sit for a few years to give it that true, hasn’t seen humans in a while look and feel.
However, there were also a few disappointments:
The story was…less than superb. It starts out slow, which is fine, since Will is, after all, alone, except for his dog, so he doesn’t exactly have a lot to do. He spends his time driving around the emptied streets in abandoned sports cars, hunting for deer that now roam those streets, teeing off on the back of an aircraft carrier, and, when he has a few spare moments, trying to cure the zombie disease that has killed off the rest of the world. And hiding from darkness. This takes up most of his time, and most of the first half of the movie is spent setting this groundwork for the story that you think will come.
Unfortunately, the second half of the film doesn’t do much better. There are a few moments when the pace picks up, and you begin to feel as if something is actually going to happen, but they’re few and far between, and you’re soon lulled into a sedated state as you begin to simply watch Will live. Then, the end of the film arrives, and it comes so abruptly that you hardly have time to comprehend what’s going on. Just as quickly as it began, the lights flick back and on you’re left sitting in your chair with a strong feeling of “Meh.”
The story also suffers from the problem of “Well, isn’t that convenient.” Every time something needs to happen, it does, and every time you see a movie cliché building, it doesn’t fail to disappoint. I can only think of one twist that I didn’t see coming, but even that twist seemed forced and didn’t make much sense when you consider what was discussed during the preceding parts of the movie. The ending basically rounded out the whole film, as it managed to be both conveniently timed and cliché filled.
I Am Legend just feels like a film that relied on a lot of CGI and Will Smith to cover up a thin plot and poor, cliché details. It lacked the scare that it needed to be a good horror film, the emotion that it needed to be a good ‘man on an island’ film, and the twists and turns it needed to be a good action/adventure film. Instead, it forces its way through a butchering of Richard Matheson’s story, and avoids anything that could have made this a great film.
I Am Legend felt like a good idea that no one knew what to do with.
