I present to you as a special peek into my other projects (most of which revolve around a very cool theatre in Greater Boston), an entry into the Providence, Rhode Island 48 hour film project, Monday the 13th, by Nature’s Credit Card Productions (a new team we put together earlier this year). You can watch other 48 hour films at www.48.tv.

Our movie was selected for Best of Providence and won the Audience Award at the Best of Providence showing as well as the “Best Rhose Island movie” for its references and jokes about Providence and the area, which they like to encourage.

To keep you honest, every team in the city gets the same prop, character and line of dialog, and each team picks a genre out of a hat. For us, it was:

Character — A hairdresser named Monty Chaney

Line — “If you see him again, tell me.”

Prop — A pear

Our genre — Horror

Enjoy!

Don’t know what the 48 hour film project is and want to find out? Already know what it is and want to talk about it? Just want to bash my movie? DO SO . . . after the jump –

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The moral values that have held together this country and this world are in an advanced stage of decay. From schools to shops to our own homes, we turn on one another — race against race, religion against religion, nation against nation and brother against brother. Feuds great and small divide us. I say, no more!

In such times, we need strong leadership! We need a Lord Protector who guides with his gut to dispel this discord and disagreement that has sapped the world’s vitality and capacity for greatness! I am proud to say, I am that Lord Protector. And I have a plan.

Our true enemy is excessive and destructive emotional freedom — recklessly granted in the well-meaning spirit of progress, it has been abused to the point of madness.

It’s time for a new moral authority, one of tenderness, true, but one supported by the only thing human beings seem to understand — force.

Stare into our brave new world, after the jump —

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The film composer Howard Shore has written an opera. It is an adaptation of one of the movies he did the music for. However, it’s probably not the one you’d expect/hope. Here’s a list of operatic movies Howard Shore has scored, that are NOT the movie in question: The Lords of the Rings, The Departed, The Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia, The Aviator, and The Gangs of New York.

Instead, Howard Shore looked back upon his body of work, and decided The Fly really needed to be an opera. And there’s a photo after the jump. more »

You know, I said I was going to stop writing about horror so much.  But that was before I found out about the Final Girl Film Club, which just seems like too much fun to pass up.  Basically how it works is a bunch of us film nerds agree to review the same obscure horror film on the same day, thus fostering community, attracting new visitors to our respective sites, and generally making the internet just a smidge more similar to having actual friends.  (By the way, If you haven’t seen Stacey Ponder’s little new-media empire, which in addition to the aforementioned Film Club includes two blogs, assorted facebook gruppen, and an agreeably DIY webseries; it’s all well worth a look.  Provided you like horror.  Which if you don’t, by now you’ve probably already clicked through to one of our Disney Princess posts.) more »

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So, let’s talk about Howard Hawks’ The Thing From Another World, or rather THE THING, From Another World. (Thank you, Netflix!)

In many ways, it’s a stupid movie. It’s based on Who Goes There, a smart and deeply horrifying (at least to my 15-year-old self) novella by John W. Campbell, which you can read online for free, and probably illegally, here.

The basic concept (yes, spoilers ahead) is… more »

So I’m reading this film studies article by Linda Williams called “Film Bodies,” which explores the connection between horror films, pornography, and tear-jerkers. She actually makes a pretty persuasive case. Each genre shows us actors experiencing the things we as audience members are supposed to be experiencing (whether it’s terror, horniness, or grief), each displays an excess (of violence, of sex, of emotion), and each focuses on the body engaged in a kind of fit (death throes, orgasm, sobbing) accompanied by inarticulate vocalizations (”NOOO!” “YEEES!” “WAAAH!”) and the fetishized release of bodily fluids (blood, semen, tears). I was a little skeptical about the inclusion of tears in that last one until I remembered this scene from Garden State, which is an emo money shot if I ever saw one. (The salient part appears right at the start of the video*, after the jump.) more »