DC has a good day...

DC found out she made the Dean's List for her first 6 weeks of school. And later in the day she found out she got cast in a local community theater's production of A Christmas Carol!

And to add happiness to gloating, Dea ALSO got cast in A Christmas Carol. So, DC and Dea will share the stage in their first official stage play performances!

Cool stuff.

Unwatchable...

As you can tell from my blog, I watch a LOT of movies. Once you spend nine months building a movie room in your house, well, you end up using it quite a bit. Plus, I don't really watch television much, except for the occasional ballgame. So, while most people are channel surfing, I'm watching movies.

I have spent a lot of time researching and trying to support both microcinema filmmakers and Christian filmmakers. Unfortunately, sometimes I'll stumble across a movie that I simply can't finish watching.

I hate to give up on a movie, no matter how low budget. I really hate doing that. I appreciate and understand from first-hand experiences just how difficult it is to make a competent film. But, with all that being said, my time is very precious to me and there have been some films to which I've had to divest my time.

Some mainstream films I've abandoned after hitting Play? Reservoir Dogs (language) and The 40 Year Old Virgin (vulgarity) to name just two. I know my sensibilities have evolved over the years, but I can't really help that. Some films just rub me the wrong way.

Unfortunately, some Christian films have been unwatchable for me as well... Six, Bells of Innocence and, surprisingly, One Night with the King never made it to the closing credits. My daughter and I sat down to watch King this past weekend and there were so many basic elements wrong with the film, I was amazed it got made as it did.

An audience decides within 10 minutes whether they will like a movie or not. If they decide they'll like it, then the filmmaker has to make sure they don't screw that up before the lights come up and the credits roll.

After the first 10 minutes of King, I was confused. My daughter was confused. The story was overly complex and layered... unnecessarily so. Beyond that, the four main characters were miscast. The direction was, along with the story, choppy and the entire beginning of the film was a mess. I was so disappointed. After 30 minutes I turned to my daughter and said "I don't want to watch this anymore." She quickly agreed.

I hated doing it. I wanna be one of those Christian filmmakers who'll need support from other Christian filmmakers. But, you like what you like. You can't change that.

We used it as a good opportunity to talk about all of the variables that make a good film and where King seemed to fail for us, so the movie wasn't a total loss. It was a good learning experience.

And this is just me... my opinion. Others may really enjoy the films I've listed here... who knows.

For every 10 or so films I watch and comment on here, there is another one that just didn't cut it. That's the price of being a film fan, I guess.

What's Up Doc (1972)

What happens when you cross the characters in Bringing Up Baby (1938) and the wackiness and chase scenes from It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963)?

You get Barbara Streisand and Ryan O'Neal in the 1972 farce What's Up Doc?

What was once old is made new again in this funny and familiar slapstick comedy about four identical plaid travel cases, the four people that own them and the various people trying to steal them. Put them all up in the same floor of a hotel room amidst a busy musical conference and you've got the ingredients for a humorous, fast-paced farce.

Let's compare Baby, Doc and World...

Grant and Hepburn

In the classic Bringing Up Baby, directed by Howard Hawks, Cary Grant plays Dr. David Huxley, a bumbling paleontologist trying to receive grant money from a foundation created by a wealthy woman named Elizabeth Random. The straight-laced Huxley is engaged to the even more straight-laced and picky Alice Swallow. While trying to impress Ms. Random, Huxley encounters her niece, the fiery, fun and catastrophe-inducing Susan Vance, played by Katherine Hepburn, who tears his tuxedo coat upon first meeting him. The rest of his life descends into a maelstrom of one unfortunate event after another, unable to shake Ms. Vance from his life. Throw in two leopards, one tame, one wild, a missing dinosaur bone and a night in prison and you get the jist of Baby.

Streisand and O'Neal

In What's Up Doc?, directed by Peter Bogdanovich, Ryan O'Neal plays Dr. Howard Bannister, a bumbling musicologist trying to receive grant money from a foundation created by a wealthy man named Frederick Larrabee. The straight-laced Bannister is engaged to the even more straight-laced and picky Eunice Burns (Madeline Kahn). While trying to impress Mr. Larrabee, Bannister encounters the fiery, fun and catastrophe-inducing Judy Maxwell, played by Barbara Streisand, who tears his coat jacket upon first meeting him. The rest of his life descends into a maelstrom of one unfortunate event after another, unable to shake Ms. Maxwell from his life. Throw in jewels, top-secret files, thugs, musical rocks, a hotel fire and a night in court and you get the jist of Doc.

It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World

In It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, a large group of characters engage in a high-speed car chase, careening and swerving through crowded city streets, wreaking havoc on by-standers in an attempt to acquire the contents of a buried briefcase of cash.

What's Up Doc?

In What's Up Doc?, a large group of characters engage in a high-speed car chase, careening and swerving through crowded city streets, in an attempt to acquire the contents of the four travel cases.


As mentioned before, at the end of Bringing Up Baby, the group of characters end up in prison while at the end of What's Up Doc?, the group of characters end up in court.


In Baby, Grant succumbs to Hepburn's charm and they fall madly in love. In Doc, O'Neal succumbs to Streisand's charm and they fall madly in love.

Even though What's Up Doc? is not overly original, it is still very funny. Streisand's beauty and charm combined with O'Neal's hapless handsomeness, along with Kahn's hilarious take as the overly watchful fiancé make this film a great joy to watch.

It just goes to show you that, in filmdom, originality isn't as important as execution.

Happy Birthday Chuckles

My brother Charles turns 45 today. Unfortunately, the older he gets, the older I get. The father of 11 great kids and a wonderful husband and dad, I hope is birthday is full of stillness and silence... two very rare things in his household :)

The Bride Wore Blood (2006)

The reimagination of the Western genre seems to be cropping up lately with the web series The West Side and Bluebox Limited's The Bride Wore Blood. Blood, co-written and co-directed by Bluebox's co-founders Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, follows the exploits of a modern day hired-gun- with-a-conscience, played effectively by Travis Shepherd.

Shepherd is hired to protect a man's soon-to-be bride when things go horribly wrong. Drawn to follow the facts of her death to its ultimate conclusion, Shepherd finds a weaving story of deceit and mistrust make up the driving forces behind his failure to protect the bride.

The film clocks in at 60 minutes and is segmented into four "acts" which twist the story from one unexpected path to the next. All of the cinematic elements are top notch, from the music to the cinematography, to the acting to the directing. The writing is crisp and the camera movements create a wonderful, consistent style of the piece.

After the letdown with Her Summer, I am very excited to find Blood to be such an excellent piece of microcinema filmmaking.

On a side note, having immersed myself in the Bluebox world over the last week, I found myself feeling a strong sense of deja vu. Years ago I bought and watched multiple episodes of the Random Foo/Pangaea low-budget public access series called Fade to Black. Each episode in the series consisted of a number of short films from various genres.

The Foo/Pangaea group were one of the first real "players" in the microcinema world. Their output was tremendous, generating almost 100 short films in a 10 year period (96-05). While watching Fade to Black I saw the same small group of actors in the same locations being used for various projects.


Bluebox does so as well. Through these three films (University Heights, Her Summer and The Bride Wore Blood), the cast has remained primarily constant. And the house location used in the opening of Her Summer is wonderfully used again in a suspenseful showdown between two guns-for-hire in Blood. Kudos for finding and keeping the talented cast members involved in their projects. In microcinema, you use what you have access to and there's no shame in availing yourself to the same actors and locations.

Woods and Beck

I also appreciated Bluebox's understanding of film history, paying homage to both Raiders of the Lost Ark (the coursework assigned to the class is lifted line for line from Ark) in University Heights and The Birds (the car screaming across the horizon, dust and smoke billowing behind it, accentuating the urgency of the moment) in The Bride Wore Blood.

I hope Beck and Woods continue to make movies. They're very talented guys. The Foo/Pangaea group has all but dissolved over the past three years. Jason Santo, of Pangaea, went on to create Mindscape Pictures, but has since stopped making movies. He got married and opened up a comic book store. C.C. Chapman and Dan Gorgone, of Random Foo, haven't made a new film in three years... they have children now and their priorities have shifted.

My hope for Beck and Woods is that they are able to make a living in cinema before the responsibility of marriage and fatherhood enter their lives. These guys have real talent and I'd hate to see their work diminish like so many other previous microcinema filmmakers.