Doug Cummings – Page 36

Los Angeles Plays Itself

May 8, 2005 Doug Cummings Film review

After extended runs in New York, Chicago, and London–among other places–Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003) has finally opened in Los Angeles at the American Cinematheque. Of course, this bit of irony is completely in tune with one of the documentary’s central theses, that despite being the host city for the film industry, Los Angeles–its people, places, and character–is virtually absent in the movies. Multimillion dollar productions by “tourist” directors, absurdly over-privileged and removed from the realities of the majority of Angelenos (less than 3% of whom actually work in the industry), continue to perpetuate myths about America’s second largest …

Beyond no. 14

May 5, 2005 Doug Cummings Site news

For several years now, I’ve been good friends with Karen Neudorf, the visionary editor of Beyond magazine, which she laboriously and skillfully publishes out of her home in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The magazine is an eclectic collection of art, stories, interviews, and humor that revolve around a different theme each issue, and it’s ads free, so it offers at least twice the content of most magazines.

Today marks the official launch of her new issue, number 14, and I’ve only seen parts so I myself am very much looking forward to receiving it. Included with it will be an article …

Killer of Sheep

May 4, 2005 Doug Cummings Film review

The UCLA Film and Television Archive is one of the nation’s premiere film restoration institutions, and they’re currently screening a series of restored films. Last night, they showed one of the most renowned of American independent films, Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, completed in 1973 but unreleased until 1977. Burnett made it while he was a student at UCLA, shooting on 16mm with nonprofessional actors on weekends for an entire year, and edited it with a fine assembly of classic musical recordings.

Accordingly, music rights have kept it from being commercially released, making it a film that has been …

F for Fake

April 30, 2005 Doug Cummings DVD review

The title of Orson Welles’ playful and raffish essay film, F for Fake (1976)–released this week on DVD by the Criterion Collection–suggests one possible word following the sixth letter of the English alphabet, and indeed, the film’s focus on the story of art forger Elmyr de Hory justifies it. But the film could also have been called “F for Fame,” as one of the film’s preoccupations is the way notoriety and personality can overwhelm art, imposing notions of “authenticity” and “fakery,” “expertise” and “value,” in ways that are less certain than one might assume.

The essay film is a genre …

Pin Boy

April 26, 2005 Doug Cummings Film festival

Pin Boy (Parapalos)

My brief, several-day stint at the San Francisco International Film Festival turned out to be a great reunion with friends but an extremely lackluster screening experience. And I’m not the only person who apparently felt this way–the SF Weekly questioned how an “international film festival” could be be 40% American films, and groaned at the fest’s motto (“Every Film is a Foreign Film Somewhere”), which only seemed to rub it in.

Ten films, two incontestably good ones and one interesting mood piece, summarize my take, although I should note that the festival continues for another …

The Corporation

April 7, 2005 Doug Cummings DVD review

One of the most lauded documentaries from last year was a film I only managed to catch up with this week, when it was released as a stunningly produced two-DVD set. The Corporation analyzes what it convincingly calls the primary influence on contemporary life: “Like the Church, the Monarchy and the Communist Party in other times and places,” the narrator says, “the corporation is todayís dominant institution.”

The film is over two-hours long, but the DVD contains over seven or eight hours of supplemental material, including two audio commentaries, a host of clips from screening discussions and media appearances around …