I’m just going to say it, despite the bad reviews, and or any fear of recrimination from fellow film aficionados. David O. Russell’s AMSTERDAM is a great film. Sure it’s flawed on several fronts. It’s weighed down by Russell’s scrappy scattershot script, by his attempts as an artist to reach too far in an entirely new direction for himself and create something new and fresh and outside of his usual fare.
As I was explaining to Princess Little Tree earlier this evening, who professed to not liking it, and actually fell asleep far before midway, there’s a difference between professional film makers and artists. Professional filmmakers give the world Hollywood blockbusters like Marvel movies. They pay the bills. They make a lot of money to be able to afford the world great art. We don’t have to watch them. But we can’t diss them, at least not publicly, due to the fact that without them we’d never see great film as art. There’d be no money for it.
Russell, who tends to work more slowly than most, has given us at least two professional filmmaker films, Silver Linings Playbook and his masterpiece so far, American Hustle. Both of which also happen to be great works of art as well. He also gave us the incredible I Heart the Huckabees. Another work of art.
What appeals to me about watching an artist work, perhaps as an artist myself, or just a lover of artists and the process of creating great art out of nothing, is watching them start from nothing and decide one day “I’m going to stretch. I’m going to go out on a limb and do something entirely different for me. I’m going to push the art envelope entirely I’m going to create something brand new and fresh.”
Even if they don’t quite achieve Apocalypse Now, it’s still a thrilling ride to behold them attempt it.
I was disappointed twice this year by two of my favorite filmmakers as artists. Both Paul Thomas Anderson and Wes Anderson tried but failed to deliver as much as I would have liked. Truth is, Wes phoned his French Dispatch in. I cannot say with certainty I even got through that whole movie. After three attempts.
And Paul, though he did try, very hard, it’s obvious, just couldn’t manage to make his Licorice Pizza an enjoyable film experience. For all the trying it was still long and boring and rather a dud by the end. Though I did manage to enjoy it and get through it 3 times. But never once did I say “wow. What a great work of art. What a masterpiece.”
I’m not saying that about Amsterdam. It’ll take me a few viewings to get to the meat of the bone as to why it feels so clunky and at times off kilter. But as an artist he has absolutely nothing to be ashamed of. He broke a lot of rules. He was all over the place. His script was disjointed. But boy was it fresh.
I’m not even going to say I recommend it as a great movie, except to fellow artists or lovers of artists. For you, you’ll dig watching Russel try pushing the boundaries and try getting something out of himself totally different than anything he’s ever attempted before. And to me that’s what great art is all about.
Transcendent Television Starring Ed Hale — The Trailers
Transcendent Television starring Ed Hale
5, 10 and 15 minute trailers for the TV show Transcendent Television starring Ed Hale, lead singer of the rock band Transcendence. A look at the world through the eyes and perspective of generation X exploring current events, modern culture, religion, spirituality, politics, science, environmentalism, activism, and much more.
Produced by Polar Productions in association with Transcendent Media Group LLC.
Edited by Charlotte Rademakers of Spinning Films Inc
Well we finally finished filming for the time being, and the initial editing stage. Definitely a lot more work than I realized going into it. I’m not sure what I expected going into this thing. As with most art for art’s sake I don’t know if I was doing too much thinking at all per se. There was just a lot to capture lately it seems — times are crazy; a lot to study and explore, and it seemed a good idea at the time to film it all. After that documentary that they filmed of the Nothing is Cohesive album and tour — that being the recently televised Everything is Cohesive (which can be seen here), I started to get used to the idea of filming everything. And if I was already constantly studying and researching various topics and travelling around to explore everything I found interesting or intriguing, why not film it all and turn it into some kind of film…. It makes sense.
Eventually the idea for Transcendent Television arose. From there it seemed easy. Just film everything. I honestly thought that doing something in TV or in documentary film would be easier than the music business, as difficult as the music business is. It sounds naïve now. The truth is that people who work in film and TV have just as much of a challenge, just as many obstacles and hurdles to jump over as we do in the music business. More really. And it’s a lot more expensive. (Okay that’s a maybe actually… making a new album from start to finish, and launching a tour, are both very expensive endeavors.) But there are definitely a lot more people needed in order to create visual art, or video content. Originally I was just live-filming everywhere I went and everything I did if it was cool or interesting, engaging or educational. Hell, sometimes even when it wasn’t cool or interesting to be fair. But that real time documentation of even the mundane seemed at the very least to be an intriguing concept for an art-film project.
Reality TV is in full bloom now and is taking over everywhere. It’s only a matter of time before technology catches up with us and enables us to be able to upload and host video content to the internet as well as TV. Hell, YouTube already enables it to a certain extent. It’ll take time for the tech to get there of course. Speed and bandwidth is slow and clunky now. But I wouldn’t be surprised to see live streaming of video content online at some point in the future, where everyone in the world has their own personal TV channel and is constantly broadcasting the day to day goings on of their life. It’ll happen. It’s the future.
I’m working on a book now, maybe a book, maybe a white paper, not sure yet, to express this thesis that we are entering this new age I just described above. I call it The Personal Expression Age. There’s a lot to it. I’ve observed collected and catalogued over 20 different Signatures that signal this new era and make it completely unique compared to any other time in human history. Just getting started on that though.
But that’s a different story. That’s where I started. Film everything. Break through the fourth wall a lot. Don’t worry about quality as much as content. Go for what’s real and genuine. But once the formal meetings with Peter and Kevin and the production staff started in New York, and they informed me just how complex and intricate the whole process was, it suddenly occurred to me that this wasn’t as easy and simple as I originally assumed. In reality you need 2 to 3 cameramen, a director, a boom mic operator, and sound team, production staff, logistics team… and that’s just to film content. Little did I know that once you were finished filming that you’d still need a whole team of editors to digitize all the footage and scroll through it and then piece it together in order to try creating something even semi-cohesive. From the moment we formally stopped filming (I never stopped myself… I’m still grabbing cameramen from Craigs List all the time and running out to shoot something no matter where I happen to be in the world…) and started the editing process, It took almost a full year for them to create episodes using the footage we had collected. Not a fast or easy process. But worth it.