The keywords Facebook and Twitter in the short movie abstract caught my attention and made me pick “We Live In Public” as one film I wanted to see out of the great program at the IFF Boston last weekend.
The documentary is a portrait about Josh Harris, a visionary maniac so to say (cf. luvvy) and possibly
the greatest internet pioneer you’ve never heard of.
Having made millions of dollars in the dot.com bubble, he created and funded eccentric art projects like Quiet: We Live in Public, a colony with 100 people living under 24-hour surveillance in a bunker in New York City.
People want 15 min of fame, every day.
The master tapes filmed in the bunker must be a paradise for psychologists and sociologists and probably deserve a place in a university library. The bunker is a very brutal, exaggerated and compressed picture of the effects of sacrificing privacy and sharing your life with literally everybody. That part of the documentary raises the question for me why do we want to share our personal information on commercial platforms like Facebook or MySpace. What do we get in return? Targeted advertising and hundreds of connections to people you barely know, is that it?
I especially like the quote
Everything is free except the video we capture of you. That we own.
of Josh Harris. A principle of the bunker in 1999, but I guess it still can be easily applied to many Web 2.0 business models nowadays.
“We Live In Public” is a truly fascinating documentary and clearly one of my movie recommendations for 2009. Go watch it!
Times change: after all it’s becoming acceptable to talk about Britney in Bobo environments?
Movie mastermind Quentin Tarantino could make the impossible possible and Britney cool. The same way as he transformed John Travolta from a clean family safe star into a killing junkie in the mid-nineties.
He could do the same with Britney. She wouldn’t even have to act very much, in her current condition she could perfectly star as sleazy stripper in Tarantino’s remake of “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!”.
Oh, and let’s face it, Piece Of Me IS a great pop song! [via Ö3]
Good to know that public surveillance is handled responsible and carefully:
If a hot girl walked into the mall, they tracked her from camera to camera to camera, all day long. Let’s say the camera caught under her skirt as the wind blew, they’d take that footage and post it on YouTube. They showed me their highlight reel!
The problem with this film is, that one can watch the characters day by day walking around in this country. It’s not fiction, that’s why Import Export is so disturbing.
It was quite unusual to leave at 6am in the morning for the movie theater, but the film was worth to get up that early. Paranoid Park from Gus Van Sant is a movie I’d definitely recommend watching.
Basically it’s a simple plot, if there wouldn’t be the jumps back and forth in time, telling the teenage story of a young skater who got accidentally involved in a killing and struggles with that incident.
I especially enjoyed the fantastic cinematography, the use of different film materials to match moods and underline the story. In terms of images, visuals and sounds it’s an excellent work and reason enough to go and see it.
Video on demand without “watch it within a day or we blow up your computer DRM”:
Mashable provides a list of 50 full length movies available on Google Video, not quite legal though.
Every time when I’m going to watch new a David Lynch movie for the first time, I’m having a very similar experience. Well, at least this was the case for the last 3 ones: Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr. and Inland Empire.
The initial part of the story, let’s say the first 20-30 minutes, is understandable and no problem to follow. Then the story reaches a certain point which totally confuses me and my mind gets lost. The next 10 minutes I start thinking and try to explain what happened, desperately seeking a way back into the story, but without any luck of course. Then I’m getting kind of angry and upset about the movie, the weird storyline and David Lynch in general. After calming down again I just sit there for while and enjoy the amazing images and soundscape of the movie, without understanding anything of course. Then, after I’ve recharged the batteries of my mind, at some points I guess I’m getting pretty close to enter the story again, but usually I never succeed.
At home I start reading reviews about the movie and try to understand what I’ve seen. The most amazing thing is that, once I’ve finished my movie research, everything suddenly makes sense.
For people like me they should pause David Lynch movies at the point where the story does a 540° turn and do a short recap explaining the things happened, sort of “David Lynch for Dummies”.
But actually that’s the reason why I love his movies: besides the visual beauty, those movies really challenge me, every time I see them.
There are not many movies I had to turn off because I couldn’t stand them any longer. The Passion of the Christ made it on that list. Mel Gibson sees or wanted to show “beauty in brutality”, but this movie is simply insane. Even worse is the message, everybody who claims it’s not an anti-Semitic film probably hasn’t seen it. If Mr Gibson would have read (or understood) the story his movie is supposed to be based on properly then he should know that the sins of every human being makes the guy called Jesus Christ in his movie suffer and die. Jews and Romans are only supporting actors.
Interestingly that Austria’s public broadcaster put it on Good Friday night on the TV program, once a very special date in persecution of Jews.
However, I’m off to spend a few days on the countryside. Happy Easter Holidays to everyone!
A good day starts with a good movie.
There are not many movies I had to turn off because I couldn’t stand them any longer.