Film
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The Eyeball: A Blog About Film by Ryan Boudinot
Up the Riggings, You Monkeys! For Christmas, 1972, when I was almost two months old, my parents’ friend Mr. White gave them a book called A New Pictorial History of the Talkies. My mom taught grade school with Mr. White…
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The Eyeball: What I Watched this Weekend – Dracula, Pages from a Virgin’s Diary
Hey tweens who enjoy a little abstinence-only subtext thrown in with your vampire movies: go out and get a load of the non-virginal variety in Guy Maddin’s Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary. This was one of the Maddin movies…
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The Eyeball, a Blog Ostensibly About Film by Ryan Boudinot
Your Weekend Popcorn Recipe My brother-in-law Chad Johnson’s popcorn recipe is the best. I’ve enjoyed it at his and my sister-in-law’s place over the years while watching Pulp Fiction and during their rigorously opinionated James Bond sessions. I don’t know…
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The Eyeball, a New Blog by Ryan Boudinot
Acts of Nostalgia My old friend Nate sent me this picture yesterday, taken some 17 years ago. That’s me in the middle, playing drums, wearing a pith helmet onto which is adhered a lit candle. The guy playing bass to…
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The Eyeball, a New Blog by Ryan Boudinot
Double Features I created an account on The Auteurs a couple weeks ago. It’s an addictive site for film nerds started by a company working in close collaboration with The Criterion Collection. Right now it’s in beta. It’s a message…
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The Eyeball, a New Blog by Ryan Boudinot
I mentioned in my inaugural post that I’d recently watched The Pursuit of Happyness starring Will Smith. The movie is about a man who struggles to support his family as a salesman of bone density scanners in San Francisco. Business…
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Dominoes for Pyros
In 1987 Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss used common household items and the laws of nature to form a 100-foot-long chain reaction. They lit it, filmed it, and called it “The Way Things Go.” More weekend project ideas…
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The Eyeball, a New Blog by Ryan Boudinot
Introduction I think the best criteria for judging the quality of a film is whether you’re still thinking about it a week after you watched it. Then there are those films we return to in our thoughts time and time…
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Docu-fantasia
My Winnipeg, Guy Maddin’s ‘docu-fantasia’ film about Winnipeg, Manitoba, should be out on DVD soon. Apparently there’s a book in the works as well. If you don’t know Maddin’s work, it might be described as Canadian ice cream noir, blending…
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A Staggering Amount of Brilliant Free Television
The PBS investigative documentary series Frontline presents some of the best television produced in America. At its web site (here), you can watch over 70 episodes of the program, all for free. In one recent installment (available in full here),…
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Rumpus Original – A Review of Cadillac Records
Good music usually has a story. At 26 Beethoven lost his hearing. Bach had issues with authority. Sid Vicious’ parents were hippies. Sometimes these details explain the nature of the art, other times, they’re just interesting anecdotes that are nicely…
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Miranda July on Voting
This pre-election comment still pleases me: Here’s why you should vote: you are going to really love it, the whole strange procedure. You get to walk right into a building that you would never normally be allowed in, often an…