What are friends for? Some days, they're about showing you stuff you hadn't seen before. Therefore, courtesy of my friend Rachel Coburn's recent Facebook post, I bring you catnip for a Beatles fan, Barry Lenser's encyclopedic, and massively entertaining, The Daily Beatle.
Enjoy.
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Thursday, July 01, 2010
You, Me and the Mythos
Here’s one advantage of keeping two blogs: linked entries. I’ll talk about the documentary I just watched here, but I’ll discuss one of the ideas it raises over on the Damn Lies blog. Collect the full set!
Over at Internet Marketing for Filmmakers, our current clients include Steven and Whitney Boe, two charming and clever folks who have created a film called Mythic Journeys. And though we’ve worked on some fine films, this one happens to come closest to my own sensibilities, so I want to rave about it a little, not to try and goose its sales (though its sales deserve to be spectacular), but simply because I like it a lot and feel like raving a little.
Okay, I always feel like raving a little. But here it’ll be specific raving.
It’s an odd duck of a film, part talking-heads interviews, and part narrative. With puppets. The backbone of the film is a retelling of a famous Indian story translated as “The Bone Orchard,” in which a king must rescue a corpse dangling from a tree and bring it back to a powerful magician—but the corpse keeps telling stories with complex moral questions, and every time the king’s answer is insufficient, the corpse reappears at the end of its rope, dangling from the same tree. So what you get is a very interesting documentary, punctuated by a really good stop-animation film using puppets by Brian and Wendy Froud, with voice work by Mark Hamill, Tim Curry and Lance Henriksen. (And each of the stories told by the corpse is done in yet another animation style.) It had the potential to be a mess, but it totally works.
It’s also one of the very few films where I ever sat there with a notepad out, scribbling things down. It’s obviously about myth, but the tag line is “Every life is a story, and a story can change the world,” which is exactly in line with my wacky novel. So I’ve thought about this stuff a lot, and am always eager to hear more—which is why the density of the material in this film has such great appeal for me. It gave me ideas, it sparked my imagination, and I will happily watch it more than once, then set it on my DVD shelf next to the Bill Moyers/Joseph Campbell set
, with which it clearly belongs.
I won’t say any more. But it’s available through their site, through Amazon
, all kinds of places. Check out a copy: it’s got the Bob Toombs Seal of Approval, so you know it’s top-notch.
Over at Internet Marketing for Filmmakers, our current clients include Steven and Whitney Boe, two charming and clever folks who have created a film called Mythic Journeys. And though we’ve worked on some fine films, this one happens to come closest to my own sensibilities, so I want to rave about it a little, not to try and goose its sales (though its sales deserve to be spectacular), but simply because I like it a lot and feel like raving a little.
Okay, I always feel like raving a little. But here it’ll be specific raving.
It’s an odd duck of a film, part talking-heads interviews, and part narrative. With puppets. The backbone of the film is a retelling of a famous Indian story translated as “The Bone Orchard,” in which a king must rescue a corpse dangling from a tree and bring it back to a powerful magician—but the corpse keeps telling stories with complex moral questions, and every time the king’s answer is insufficient, the corpse reappears at the end of its rope, dangling from the same tree. So what you get is a very interesting documentary, punctuated by a really good stop-animation film using puppets by Brian and Wendy Froud, with voice work by Mark Hamill, Tim Curry and Lance Henriksen. (And each of the stories told by the corpse is done in yet another animation style.) It had the potential to be a mess, but it totally works.
It’s also one of the very few films where I ever sat there with a notepad out, scribbling things down. It’s obviously about myth, but the tag line is “Every life is a story, and a story can change the world,” which is exactly in line with my wacky novel. So I’ve thought about this stuff a lot, and am always eager to hear more—which is why the density of the material in this film has such great appeal for me. It gave me ideas, it sparked my imagination, and I will happily watch it more than once, then set it on my DVD shelf next to the Bill Moyers/Joseph Campbell set
, with which it clearly belongs.I won’t say any more. But it’s available through their site, through Amazon
, all kinds of places. Check out a copy: it’s got the Bob Toombs Seal of Approval, so you know it’s top-notch.
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