Post blogger Mountaingrown in comment #1: "So non-believers are swine, but I have to buy your DVD to learn how to save the planet....interesting...."
"Within a span of 15 years, the industry has gone from 'location, location, location' to 'incentive, incentive, incentive.'"
Check in on the Movies section on Aspen Post to see what matters on the big screen to Post bloggers.Cameron: I spent the last five years making one movie to move the needle a little bit. "There’s a limit to its effectiveness because there wasn’t a specific message on specific problems with specific solutions. We spoke to people who were already predisposed to that message. "We need to reach people caught in middle and who think that climate change is a controversial topic."
Continue Reading 1 comment August 23rd, 2010
Like the blue folk of “Avatar,” Hollywood is facing an Oscar scandal of massive proportions without a clue as to what happens in the end.
I know because I live in a town that is still trying to recover from Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), the method of misbegotten democracy just adopted by the Academy Awards in this exponential age of ten nominees for “Best Picture.” In the old days—starting in 1946 and persisting until last year—the movie that came away with the most votes won in a simple exercise of plurality rule. To win “Best Picture” this time around, a picture like “Avatar” has to achieve more than 50 percent of the vote—and that could take multiple rounds of voting.
So what’s the big deal? In Aspen, Colorado, where I hover—home to an IRV election in 2008—the new system of ranking voters has left an election still fundamentally flawed and unresolved, with lawsuits from citizens and city officials determined to defend themselves till the final credits against all charges. Litigation about the Aspen Mayoral and City Council elections is still looming as we speak.
Not unlike the City of Aspen, the Academy has gone to a ranking system, with movies gauged by Academy members from 1 to 10. If any movie wins a majority on the first ballot, the party’s over and the new (or old) king of the world can pop the champagne.
Continue Reading Add comment February 10th, 2010
Aspen, Colo, Pathfinders, a comprehensive psychosocial program for cancer patients and those suffering from life-threatening illnesses, is highlighted in the new documentary Pathfinders: What Love Is.
Continue Reading Add comment February 7th, 2010
Darwin’s restaurant was packed, so we went next door the day after Christmas for the next form of evolution: James Cameron’s “Avatar,” albeit in 2-D, the standard stuff that fills screens to bursting and the stadium seating to capacity. Instead of plush, lush 3-D, we ended up in one of the end-of-civilization screens the Bow-Tie Cinemas keep alive at the frontier outpost of El Jebel, Colorado.
All in all, in other words, the worst possible set-up for a movie set up to break the glass ceiling of film with three-dimensional computer-generated movie-making. Even so, with the deck stacked against it, “Avatar” was much better than good: Cameron—he of “Terminator,” “Aliens,” and “Titanic” fame—has now set the bar so high that Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas will spend the rest of their careers trying to reach the planet Pandora, home to foxy and fierce nine-foot, blue-skinned babes with tails who know how to mate, bro.
Continue Reading Add comment December 27th, 2009
Showing Wednesday is “Nine,” director Rob Marshall's musical take on the cinema classic “8 1/2,” Federico Fellini's 1961 meditation on the creative process. The film is up for four Golden Globes — including nominations for best musical, best actor (Daniel Day-Lewis), best actress (Marion Cotillard) and best supporting actress (Penélope Cruz) — and Marshall has a track record with musicals. His 2002 film “Chicago” took the best picture Oscar.
Continue Reading Add comment December 23rd, 2009
Sheri Cogley
Organizing For America
Regional Field Director
970-270-8500 (c)
970-985-4459
Add comment August 18th, 2009
By sheer coincidence—what other kind can you find in deep space—I went to see the new “Star Trek” movie on the same stardate as the news arrived that Pat Tillman’s parents were protesting the selection of the general to lead U.S. troops in Afghanistan—the same officer who botched the investigation into their son’s death.
The Tillmans, not surprisingly, are apoplectic that Lt. General Stanley McChrystal has been appointed by President Barack Obama to lead American troops in the same country where Pat Tillman died by friendly fire. Tillman, of course, is the late National Football League (NFL) star who eschewed $3.6 million and more to enlist after 9/11 with his brother in the Army Rangers. The true story of his death was covered up multiple times by the U.S. Army—long enough for him to be buried as the quintessential American hero who gave his life for a cause greater than his own. The original story of his putatively heroic death turned out to be a complete fabrication: his family became angrier and angrier as the truth failed to unfold and the coverup began to unravel.
Continue Reading Add comment May 15th, 2009
By Frosty Wooldridge
Documentary movie review 'BLIND SPOT': parts 1 & 2
As human beings continue their destructive rampage around the planet, they find themselves facing accelerating dilemmas on every continent. No one can deny quickening traumas facing humanity in the 21st century. Humans spew billions of tons of toxic air into the atmosphere while they plasticize the oceans, cut down the forests and tamper with nature’s environmental balancing systems.
A full third or two billion people lack adequate drinking water daily. Over 3.0 billion humans suffer from malnutrition. Over 18 million human beings die of starvation or starvation related diseases annually. Rainforests burn away and thousands of species suffer extinction annually. A laundry list of humanity’s assaults on Mother Nature encompasses 27,000 square mile dead zones in the oceans at the mouths of major rivers to three million ton floating plastic dumps swirling in the Pacific Ocean known as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch.”
Continue Reading Add comment April 25th, 2009
Well, you have to start somewhere so I’ll start with Neil Young and his plan to publish an archive of songs, lyrics, photographs, articles, and reviews. I’ll start with “Action/Abstraction: Pollock, deKooning, and American Art, 1940-1976” at the Jewish Museum in 2008, the exhibit that included letters, journals, magazines, photos. I’ll start with your garden-variety movie on a DVD, the kind that always comes with out-takes, trailers, scenes cut out of the movie, and actors and directors telling you what in the hell they were trying to do.
Think of it as raw sludge: the raw stuff from whence art or a reasonable facsimile thereof is produced. Think of it as the stuff of dreams or just stuff—the garbage you throw out after a meal. This source material is the sine qua non of any story or history, the exhibits the historian (or forensic CSI criminologist) must sift through to select only those things that bring a story to life.
Continue Reading Add comment February 25th, 2009
John Meyer, the Denver Post
Aspen ski mountaineer Mike Marolt will screen his new film, "Skiing Everest," on Thursday at 7:30 p.m. at the Wheeler Opera House in Aspen to benefit a Basalt couple who were involved in a serious auto accident last spring near their home in Basalt.
The documentary tells the story of Marolt and his twin brother, Steve, as they progress from climbing and skiing Aspen-area mountains to Mount Rainier, Alaska, South America and 8,000-meter peaks in the Himalayas. Included are expeditions to Shishipangma, Cho Oyu and two trips to the North Face of Everest.
Continue Reading Add comment January 21st, 2009
