I can’t believe the film was made and that it came from Russia but reached American distribution alongside Dark Knight Rises and the latest Wayans brothers’ satire, and moreover that it was nary mentioned on a single 2012 year-end list. This is a film I dreamed of making for years – not necessarily the subject matter alone, but the tone, the style, the acting – it’s like John Cassavettes directing Ghostbusters. Leelee Sobieski is amazingly understated but charismatic and sexy in this movie and Ed Stoppard carries the film well, playing the line between insanity and prophecy beautifully.

Anyway, see it. It works and it is wonderful and it will be the first film to be added to my favorites of all time (that includes the aforementioned Blade Runner and Brazil as well as Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Stalker and Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers) since Olivier Assayas’ Demonlover in 2002.

Finally I want to mention that this is a Lionsgate release. LGF has it going ON right now. They are the New Line Cinema for which I originally moved to Hollywood. Fuck the Hobbit. Lionsgate is taking chances and making bold choices – The Hunger Games, The Cabin In the Woods and grindhouse fare like Rambo and The Expendables, and that I have worked on for them via Punisher: War Zone and Texas Chainsaw 3D – which remind of what it might have felt like to work on a Roger Corman film when the going was really good. they are releasing the funnest, most daring slate of any studio around and Branded is a perfect example of that.

The post “Branded” from Lionsgate Films – A Review appeared first on TheCulturepin.com.

From Zeitgeist films, two things struck me about this epic film – the incredibly personal footage that the filmmaker captured amidst the pandemonium and sheer size of this movement, and the insight it affords into one of the most powerful but least understood countries in the world. In spite of its scope, it focuses on the individuals and tells a powerfully intimate human story.

Last Train Home – official US trailer:

Sweetgrass (2009)
“As much a work of cultural anthropology as it is a documentary, this unique film traces the path of a family of Montana sheepherders as they drive their flock down from the treacherous and beautiful Absaroka Beartooth mountain range. With no guiding narration, filmmakers Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor let the natural images speak for themselves, capturing the danger, pathos and humor in this haunting elegy to a bygone way of life.”

If there is a thing that links the five films I have selected together, it is the ability of the filmmakers to render from seemingly abstract subjects, legitimately engaging stories focused on the people inside of their contexts. On the surface, Sweetgrass may appear a remote subject to city dwellers, and yet it works as an analogy that in spite of the incredible feats of which we are capable, the greatest obstacle is often within our own minds. An awe-inspiring document of a reality leaving the modern world perhaps forever.

The trailer for Sweetgrass:

The Cool School (2007)
“In the late 1950s, when Pollock and de Kooning were being hailed as revolutionary artists in New York, Los Angeles was still dealing with a blacklist that gutted creativity in all media. This is the story of the two men who changed all that. Recording a pledge on a hot dog wrapper to open a cutting-edge gallery, Walter Hopps and Ed Kienholz took the West Coast art world by storm, embracing artists from Marcel Duchamp to Andy Warhol.”

Los Angeles is a city like no other. It is a lens and a megaphone, a magnet to the luminaries of so many small villages scattered around the world that transforms and ignites their minds. And yet it is often looked upon as a vapid cultural cesspool. In The Cool School we explore the transformation of a dustbowl into a hotbed of cultural significance that would be exported and impact perceptions of popular culture irrevocably.

The Cool School trailer:

Superheroes (2011)
“Filmmaker Michael Barnett takes on the ultimate odd job in this eye-opening documentary about real-life “superheroes,” ordinary people who don capes, masks and alter egos in their spare time to right wrongs and make criminals pay for their actions. Among other characters, you’ll meet a tight-knit Brooklyn foursome that tackles tough cases as a squad dubbed the New York Initiative and a San Diego security officer who calls himself Mr. Xtreme.”

We collectively pay a lot of money into the blockbusters centered around the fantastical comic book heroes that raised us. Some take these examples of benevolence, courage, public service and yes, pageantry to heart, and in a quest to emulate them, find ways to substantiate their obsession by attempting to make them real. Beyond the rubber-necking curiosity that these real-life characters may elicit, comes a poignant message about being proactive and taking the risk to make a change in the world as opposed to a passive onlooker, judging their often dangerous lifestyle from the sidelines. A parable about taking responsibility and not simply being an innocuous voice of dissent.

Here is the trailer:

Samsara
“A nonverbal film described by the makers as a “guided meditation”. The film uses very high quality images, scenes of nature and mankind to stimulate the viewer. The film contains no plot or actors, although there are several performers in the film. Samsara is Ron Fricke’s 2011 follow-up to Baraka.”

In the picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words spirit of Baraka or Koyaanisqatsi, “Samsara” affords us yet another lovingly executed, desperate look at our beautiful planet. At present, Samara, which had its world premier at the Toronto International Film Festival is awaiting distribution. You can help coordinate a screening at the official site.

The post Five great documentaries you should watch and why appeared first on TheCulturepin.com.

Vanessa is studying the semiotics of fashion in Halifax, Nova Scotia where she discovered the language of culture can be unzipped from the patterns found in textiles. From Chan Chan to Lake Titicaca in Peru to the mega-industrialized cities of Canton, there is a history of meaning woven into the very fabrics that under closer scrutiny reveals much about the culture. For example the pelicans find their way into Peruvian “mantas” – cloth used for everything from baby harnesses to satchels for carrying foodstuffs, because the behaviors of pelicans may reveal the stock of fish in a given body of water. The action of a certain animal running uphill may belie the coming of a storm. For these reasons, these systems of communication are transmitted in the images found in the weave.

Vanessa trekked four days up the Incan trail, not only laden with but constructed of a semi-precious green stone called Serpetina, to the mystic cloud city of Machu Pichu. She considered the flora and fauna along the way and how their colors and movements worked their way into the cloth.

At Lake Titicaca, the natives have created floating islands out of reeds where they have taken up permanent residence – powering their internet connection via solar panels. The implications of this are astounding and beyond the scope of this article. But consider what this means in light of a thing like the Principality of Sealand.

Although now some villages are using synthetic dyes and fibers, natural colors were created from insects to onions, from llama and alpaca wool – but now the global popularity of alpaca has forced prices to raise so high the the very natives who innovated use of the material can’t afford it.

A month later, Vanessa finds herself in Hong Kong en route to a tech convention in Guangzhou where the sky is, as she describes, a permanent ashen color from all the pollution to be found in the world’s central factory for technology. Nine-story high building filled with nothing but cell phone merchants bring on intense migraines and colossal skyscrapers – glass and steel wonders that put the best New York has to offer to shame follow the dictates of Feng Shui and yet these things remain virtually unknown and unseen by the Western world.

Textiles are made on looms and looms, which used punched cards to create the complex patterns used in textiles are essentially the precursor to today 8.9″ laptops, thus the patterns thereby created are miniature programs whose propriety belongs to those micro-cultures that developed them. To unlock these codes is to understand hidden knowledge about the world, language and development of a culture. In these times when thousands of unique languages are going extinct by the week, to learn to read these lines of code is to reveal much – to find the seeds for restoring their significance in the world.

I urge you to listen to this extraordinary interview with this designer on my podcast and explore further the possibilities and semiotics of fashion.

Listen to Episode 17 of the KeramCast – or subscribe at iTunes by searching for “KeramCast” in the podcast directory.

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Now that the stream is closed, we want to share some videos from the streets on inauguration day.

Inauguration at Times Square

Inauguration from the National Mall

Up to four million people are expected to attend the Presidential Inauguration of Barack Obama in Washington DC on January 20th, with 25,000 law enforcement officials on the scene. Cellular networks have been pleading with their customers to minimize the use of cell phones during the event, claiming they have already stretched their resources to their breaking limits in anticipation of the bandwidth surge.  The event is projected to easily outpace the numbers of the Superbowl in terms of viewership.

Runs from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. ET. Program is as follows:

• Call to order and welcoming remarks — Dianne Feinstein.
• Invocation — Dr. Rick Warren.
• Musical selection — Aretha Franklin.
• Oath of office administered to vice-president-elect Joe Biden.
• Musical selection — John Williams, featuring Itzhak Perlman, Yo-Yo Ma, Gabriela Montero, Anthony McGill.
• Oath of office administered to president-elect Barack Obama by Chief Justice John Roberts.
• Inaugural address.
• Poem — Elizabeth Alexander.
• Benediction — Rev. Joseph E. Lowery.
• National anthem.

Post your comments to join in the discussion. What do you think about the event?

The post Watch and discuss the Presidential Inauguration on TheCulturepin.com appeared first on TheCulturepin.com.

Compact fluorescent light bulbs have long been known to contain poisonous liquid mercury, but a study released earlier this year shows the level of mercury vapor released from broken bulbs skyrockets past accepted safety levels.

Following a story reported by WND last year about a Maine woman quoted $2,000 for cleaning up a broken fluorescent bulb, or CFL, in her home, the Maine Department of Environmental Protection studied the dangers of broken CFLs and the adequacy of recommended cleanup procedures.

The results were stunning: Breaking a single compact fluorescent bulb on the floor can spike mercury vapor levels in a room – particularly at a child’s height – to over 300 times the EPA’s standard accepted safety level.

Furthermore, for days after a CFL has been broken, vacuuming or simply crawling across a carpeted floor where the bulb was broken can cause mercury vapor levels to shoot back upwards of 100 times the accepted level of safety.

Read the rest of that article here: 1 broken bulb pushes contamination to 300 times EPA limits

And yet January 12th 2009 cover story of TIME magazine featured a warning that the world must begin to seriously consider its energy crisis, and that the time to fix it is now.  Here is how the article opens:

This may sound too good to be true, but the U.S. has a renewable-energy resource that is perfectly clean, remarkably cheap, surprisingly abundant and immediately available. It has astounding potential to reduce the carbon emissions that threaten our planet, the dependence on foreign oil that threatens our security and the energy costs that threaten our wallets. Unlike coal and petroleum, it doesn’t pollute; unlike solar and wind, it doesn’t depend on the weather; unlike ethanol, it doesn’t accelerate deforestation or inflate food prices; unlike nuclear plants, it doesn’t raise uncomfortable questions about meltdowns or terrorist attacks or radioactive-waste storage, and it doesn’t take a decade to build. It isn’t what-if like hydrogen, clean coal and tidal power; it’s already proven to be workable, scalable and cost-effective. And we don’t need to import it.

This miracle juice goes by the distinctly boring name of energy efficiency, and it’s often ignored in the hubbub over alternative fuels, the nuclear renaissance, T. Boone Pickens and the green-tech economy. Clearly, it needs an agent. But it’s a simple concept: wasting less energy. Or more precisely, consuming less energy to get the same amount of heat for your shower, light for your office and power for your factory.

[snip]

There are two basic ways to save energy without deprivation or daily effort. We can use more efficient machinery, like fuel-efficient cars that guzzle less gas, or those pigtailed compact fluorescent light bulbs that use 75% less power than traditional bulbs, or state-of-the-art refrigerators that are three times as efficient as 1973 models.

Article source: America’s Untapped Energy Resource: Boosting Efficiency

Interestingly, back in September, 2008, WorldNetDaily had a follow up on the incumbent campaign to promote the CFL:

Amidst all the current financial chaos, amidst global pandemonium and the spiraling economy, amidst the dangers from terrorism … you’ll be glad to know that the U.S. government is still hard at work protecting us from a threat so vile, so evil and so dangerous that it dwarfs all those other petty international and domestic concerns we face as a nation.

I refer, of course, to the incandescent light bulb.

[snip]

As an aside, it’s never been explained to me why, if compact fluorescent light bulbs are so superior, they warrant their own personal disposal facility to keep from poisoning the air, groundwater, etc. Nor has it apparently occurred to anyone that the energy required to conduct this specialized recycling of CFLs and corral the dangerous mercury completely offsets the potential energy savings over incandescents. The extra time, energy, cost and gas requirements for people to deliver their used CFLs to recycling facilities also counterbalance any individual savings in energy consumption. And how about the fact that almost all CFLs are manufactured in China under staggeringly hazardous and environmentally dangerous conditions by non-union state slaves?

[snip]

I don’t mean to cast doubt in anyone’s mind about the true environmental benefits of CFLs. After all, doubtless the medical complaints, the potential for groundwater contamination and the EPA requirements for cleaning up a broken CFL are all just right-wing nutjob conspiracy tactics to get We the Sheeple to bitterly cling to our incandescents just like we bitterly cling to our guns and religion.

The transition from incandescent to CFLs won’t be easy, of course. Mandated transitions never are. People tend to approach these things kicking and screaming because most folks have an annoying habit of wanting to think for themselves. Fortunately, the government schools are working on squelching that penchant, and in a few more generations we’ll be just like those genetically altered kids in the Star Wars “Attack of the Clones” movie. Can’t wait.

Don’t be alarmed when some houses burn down after CFLs are installed in circuits with dimmer switches or in track lighting (where they often smoke and cause fires). Also, people with light-sensitive medical conditions may suffer migraines, seizures, vertigo related to heart disease and other maladies. Even some green sites warn against a total ban on incandescent light bulbs, but doubtless they’re secretly in the pay of big oil companies or something. Besides, who cares? We should all do our part to save the earth, no matter what it takes or who has to suffer or die.

Article source: I guess I’m just a dim bulb

And so here we see again the extremes of opinion and typical alarmist polarities as a fundamental change in lifestyle is proposed.  So what is the stance of perhaps a moderate?

Strangely, it comes from a site called Ask Treehugger:

I quote:

Question: I have been in the process of converting to an all CFL household only to find out by trial and error (and some googling) that CFL’s fail very quickly in track lighting and recessed fixtures. In my online searches I have stumbled upon some real horror stories about people who have broken the bulbs in their homes which has resulted in thousands of dollars worth of cleanup to remove the mercury.

Response: Although mercury is a toxic pollutant, mercury exposures from broken CFLs are not likely to harm you and your family. This is due to several factors, including the amount and duration of your exposures and the specific type of mercury that you are exposed to.
Mercury in CFLs are present as elemental (or metallic) mercury. Once spilled, you can be exposed to elemental mercury by touching it, after which it can be eaten and/or absorbed through your skin. More importantly for health, you can also be exposed to mercury through the air, as elemental mercury vaporizes readily (essentially becomes a gas) and can thus be inhaled into your lungs. Breathing elemental mercury into your lungs is generally more dangerous than if you ate the mercury or absorbed it through your skin. Once inhaled, the mercury vapor can damage the central nervous system, kidneys, and liver.

These toxic effects are why any mercury spill should be handled carefully, including one that results from a CFL breaking. Having said this, careful handling does not mean that expensive or complicated clean-up of the spill is needed or that you should be worried about you or your family’s health, if a CFL were to break in your home.

This is because CFLs contain relatively small amounts of mercury — EPA estimates this amount to be 4-5 milligrams (mg) in a typical CFL. A spill of this amount of mercury is not likely to present any excess risk to you or your family. A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation shows why.

Read the rest of the article here:  Ask TreeHugger: Is Mercury from a Broken CFL Dangerous?

But don’t be fooled by the se;f-conscious name of the source; the article is written by Helen Suh MacIntosh, a professor in environmental health at Harvard University.

In response to this thread, Freedom v.3.0 user Teens pointed out:

Just as an FYI – whatever rigorous testing you think products and chemicals are put through before they can be introduced to industry or to the public does not exist. A bare minimum of testing is conducted on consumer products and little to no testing is conducted on chemicals.

When something is discovered to be toxic it is the result of independant testing conducted by concerned scientists/public interest groups and the validity of such tests are immediately called into questioned by the companies promoting the product. So much (unwarranted) controvery is created and the regulating bodies take years to sift through the test results. The time it takes for a product to be taken off the market or deemed as toxic is laughable.

So where does that leave us? Ideally with a a slightly better informed set of considerations so that we can make our own decisions and come to our own conclusions.

I recently purchased a Sun Blaster bulb for my home so that I can grow some indoor herbs for my cooking, as I love gardening but have no yard. The package promotes the 75% savings (of what I don’t know, presumably energy? Electrical costs?), high output and of course “healthy energy efficient indoor lighting.”

Warnings on the back of the package caution:

• Minimum operating temperature is 8 degrees C/18 degrees F
• Use in dry location only
• Not for use in total enclosed / recessed fixture
• Do not use with dimmer or adjustable circuit
• Lamp contains mercury disposal properly (sic)

And then lists the following website: www.lamprecycle.org that turns out to be an information resource for what when and where to recycle, as opposed to a recycling center in itself.  I recommend checking it out and following some of the outbound links, particularly so as to find a recycling solution for your own CFL’s.

Summary:

Companies once sold nuclear fallout shelters, green-colored Palmolive and even duct tape to protect us from the scourges of humanity and nature (usually humanity).  Now the compact florescent bulb is taking center stage as the solution to “oil” and global warming.  There is some merit to that, as I suppose there is to living in a bomb shelter in the event of a nuclear holocaust.  But be informed when making your decision.  Recognize that as the alarms go off, companies will rush to capitalize on the heightened emotional climate and this rush may lead to not only sub-standard and knock-off, illegitimate products, but also a bum-rush by ill-informed consumers that could create more problems than solutions.

Skip forward ten years to the new cover of TIME wherein we are asking ourselves what to do with the millions of CFLs in homes and landfills containing trace mounts of mercury that we now have to clean up.

Cooler heads will prevail.

The post The Salvation and the Grave Danger of Compact Flourescent Bulbs appeared first on TheCulturepin.com.