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
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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 […]
...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 #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, 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, 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: 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: 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 […]
...moreThe Eyeball: Lord of the Rings
Last Friday I was laid up with some kind of nasty stomach bug that left me prone most of the day. What better time than to revisit Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring? It was literally the first thing my hand fell upon when I nauseously pawed at my DVD cabinet looking […]
...moreThe Eyeball: Fellini’s Amarcord
I Remember Last night I met up with some of my former Amazon colleagues, guys who, like me, served tours of duty on the DVD team, to watch Fellini’s Amarcord at Siff Cinema. The faces, rumps, busts, and girths of the cast jiggled, jumped, and danced. Fantasies and art direction cast their vaudevillian spell. The […]
...moreTHE EYEBALL: What I Watched This Weekend, Yojimbo
I’m fascinated by cultural cross-pollination when it comes to art. The Beatles dug Buddy Holly, the psychedelic bands of San Francisco dug the Beatles, the Britpop bands of the nineties dug those psychedelic bands, and the Dandy Warhols watered down those Britpop bands. When it comes to movies, I don’t think there’s much more fascinating […]
...moreThe 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 I’ve been saving. It’s the Canadian director’s collaboration with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. Which means […]
...moreThe 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 if he got the recipe from somewhere else, but in our house my son calls […]
...moreThe 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 the left is today one of the chief economists at the Federal Reserve, formerly an […]
...moreThe 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 board/blog/hulu/social networking kind of thing. Anyway, one of the postings there recently asked users to […]
...moreThe 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 is slow, and he finds himself in increasingly dire economic straits. He decides to apply […]
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