The Eyeball #42: Talking to Tom Nissley About The Most Dangerous Game
Last year my friend Tom Nissley appeared on Jeopardy!, winning eight straight games, which allowed him to quit his job as a Books editor at Amazon
...morePosts by: Ryan Boudinot
The Eyeball #41: Talking with Aimee Bender About The 400 Blows
I’ve been writing this column off and on for a few years now and I thought I’d shake it up a bit by turning it into a dialogue.
...moreThe Eyeball #40: Unreal Fiction and Film, Part 1
I’m midway through teaching a course at Antioch University Seattle called Unreal Fiction and Film. Every week we pair a film or selection of shorts with a short story. The class is scheduled from 7-10 PM on Mondays, a brutal slot, but every week I’ve left invigorated by the discussion. While recognizing that the very […]
...moreComposing the Wilderness: An Essay on the Nested and Dynamic Model of Nature, Humanity, and Technology
In July, 2010, I delivered a keynote address at Goddard College’s MFA Writing residency in Port Townsend, Washington, on the theme “Composing the Wilderness.” This essay is included in an anthology of addresses given by Goddard College MFA faculty, to be published in early 2011. Following is the essay in full.
...moreThe Eyeball #39: Bros. Quay, Svankmajer, and McLaren
Last week for my Hugo House class on using experimental films as writing prompts we spent 88 glorious minutes with House, the 1977 Japanese haunted pajama party freak-out directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi. This week we puzzled ourselves with three stop-motion animated shorts.
...moreThe Eyeball #38: HOUSE
Session four of my six-part class on using experimental films as writing prompts commenced last night at Richard Hugo House. In previous weeks we viewed films by Buñuel, Brakhage, and Anger, moving westward from Spain to Colorado to Los Angeles. This week we hopped across the Pacific to Japan, where we encountered Nobuhiko Obayashi’s House, […]
...moreThe Eyeball #37: Kenneth Anger
Are there some films you have to take drugs to enjoy? I asked this question toward the end of this week’s session of the class on experimental films I’m teaching at Richard Hugo House, after spending two hours with the films of Kenneth Anger.
...moreThe Eyeball #36: BRAKHAGE!!!
I taught another session of my Experimental Films as Writing Prompts class at Hugo House last night. This one we looked at some films by Stan Brakhage. At the outset of the class I admitted that I had no idea what the hell was going to happen, how they would react to the shorts I […]
...moreThe Eyeball #35: Un Chien Andalou
I’m teaching a class at Richard Hugo House in which we look at experimental films as writing prompts. I’ve always wanted to teach a film class, and marrying writing exercises to viewings of films seemed like a good way to shoehorn this desire into a nonprofit literary arts center. There are aspects of cinema that […]
...moreThe Eyeball #34: The Thorn in My Heart
What’s going on with Michel Gondry’s career these days? Well, this, for starters…
...moreThe Eyeball #33: Why It’s Complicated Actually Is Complicated
You want to watch an on-demand movie with your wife, something funny, something in which you can become invested in the characters’ problems, something from the “New Arrivals” section, and you keep scrolling back to It’s Complicated, a film starring Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin, and you hate yourself a little bit for even considering […]
...moreThe Eyeball #32: Two Ways to Deal with the End of the World
If you’re like me, you grew up running various scenarios about what you’d do if the world were to end. Would you go nuts and run around in a stadium wearing a woman’s slip like the guy in The Quiet Earth? Would you give yourself that mohawk you always wanted and drive a dunebuggy around […]
...moreThe Eyeball #31: The Baader Meinhof Complex
On New Year’s Day this year I removed all the bookmarks from my Firefox bookmarks bar. When I mentioned to a couple friends that my resolution was to lay off the political blogs, I got variations on the same response: Yeah, that’s a pretty popular resolution right now. My resolution hasn’t worked out all that […]
...moreThe Eyeball #30: Introducing a Child to Star Wars
I finally let my son Miles watch Star Wars, the cinematic force that penetrates us and binds us together. It brought back memories of previous viewings, and a memory of getting in trouble for drawing genitals on a picture of C3PO.
...moreThe Eyeball #29: Oscilloscope Laboratories, Dear Zachary
Oscilloscope Laboratories is the movie studio helmed by Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys. MCA isn’t just fucking around, he’s serious about quality films. For proof, look no further than the devastating documentary by Kurt Kuenne, Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father.
...moreThe Eyeball #28: Movie Binge
My family was recently out of town for a five days, leaving me home alone with over 800 pages (no exaggeration) of student work to read and comment upon. My reward for getting through a day of writing about free indirect style and character arcs was to watch a lot of movies, both in the […]
...moreThe Eyeball #27: Apocalypse Now Redux
“The purpose of war is to kill as many of the enemy’s civilians as you can until they surrender.” –Col. John Harbert John Harbert was my grandfather, my hero, a veteran of World War II, Korea, and Vietnam.
...moreThe Eyeball #26: Three Films by Alejandro Jodorowsky
In the past couple years whenever anyone has asked for a movie recommendation, I steer them in the direction of Alejandro Jodorowsky.
...moreTHE EYEBALL: Vicky Cristina Barcelona
When you grow up being called a faggot by farm boys because you like to read books, Woody Allen can appear as something of a savior. That’s my story, anyway. Allen’s early films with their broad appeal mean that even small town video rental stores are obliged to carry his work, shelving Interiors beside Bananas […]
...moreTHE EYEBALL, The Rumpus DVD Column: #24 Nicolas Roeg’s First Five Films
Years ago I happened upon a series of arresting images on cable. There was a young Mick Jagger cavorting in a bath tub with two svelte beauties. A child wearing a fake mustache. A still image of Jorge Luis Borges rising out of a gunshot wound to the head.
...moreTHE EYEBALL: There Will Be Blood
Sometimes I just want an actor to take a movie by the fuckin’ balls. I’m thinking of Benicio del Toro in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or Jack Nicholson in The Shining. Add to that rogue’s gallery of scenery chewers Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood. Just look at this shit: Apologies […]
...moreTHE EYEBALL, The Rumpus DVD Column: Synecdoche, New York
These movies pass through our lives, take up two hours of our time, and go along their merry way. Recently I enjoyed Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve, Orson Welles’s masterful Touch of Evil, and a collection of Pixar shorts. I watched E.T. with my son and was surprised at how dark that movie was. And […]
...moreTHE EYEBALL: This was, is, and will be Spinal Tap
I recently read on some blog somewhere in the bloggy blog blogosphere a reference to certain movies as “wallpaper.”
...moreTHE EYEBALL: Illusions
Remember when The Illusionist and The Prestige both vied to be the winter 2007 movie about magicians? No? Anyway, transport yourself back to those fabled days of January and February 2007. I know what you’re thinking. You were too busy obsessing over the surprising resignation of Kazakhstan’s Prime Minister Daniyal Akhmetov and Japan’s incineration of […]
...moreTHE EYEBALL: Shorties
Hey Eyeballers. I haven’t had the patience to watch anything over an hour long recently. I take that back. I watched Babe with my son a couple weekends ago and as always got choked up at the end. I am a total sucker for talking swine who defy expectations. All my indie cred just went […]
...moreTHE EYEBALL: Rashomon
One weird symptom of watching old movies, for me at least, is that I find myself imagining what the original audiences thought of them. I suppose this goes back to the anecdotes I’ve heard about The Great Train Robbery (1904), which caused viewers to dive under their seats when a bandit points his gun at […]
...moreTHE EYEBALL: Nude Caboose
Yesterday I had the pleasure of interviewing Guy Maddin, the great Canadian auteur and subject of previous Eyeball posts. We spoke for about an hour and a half; he was so generous and real that I ended up just wanting to be his friend forever. Man crush! I’ll post something when the interview appears in […]
...moreTHE EYEBALL: Pig Hunt and Lost Season 4
Tuesday night I had the pleasure of reading a short story at therumpus.net’s Seattle launch party, prior to a screening of the film Pig Hunt. Director Jim Isaac served up guns, blood, taxidermy, boobs, motor bikes, hippies, wild boars, and weed, and what’s not to love about that? What intrigued me most was the involvement […]
...moreTHE EYEBALL: Brazil
Yesterday I got laid off from my day job at a tech company. This got me thinking about an unpublished essay I wrote a couple years ago about my relationship to the Terry Gilliam film Brazil. Here it is. –Ryan Terry Gilliam’s Brazil I woke in the theater to the sound of my own snoring. […]
...moreTHE EYEBALL: Burn After Reading and The Iron Giant
Oscars, whatever. I had two comfy movie-watching experiences this weekend. On Friday I watched the Coen Brothers’ Burn After Reading with my wife and yesterday sat down with my son to watch the Brad Bird animated movie The Iron Giant. Conventional wisdom had it that Burn After Reading was a minor Coen Bros. film, on […]
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