I'm telling you people, low-fi recreations....they're reaching critical mass. This production promises to recreate live on stage, scene by scene, the entirety of Spielberg's finest work of cinema. How will they do it? Much paper mache is said to be involved, and probably no small amount of theatrical ingenuity. This event has been talked up quite a bit from the Village Voice to the NYTimes, so I know I'm getting there early.
UPDATE 3/4/08: If you missed this, we've got a full report.
Your chance to meet a whole bunch of comic creators, after the jump... Tuesday, March 4
Midnight @ Midtown Comics West, 200 W 40th Street, Manhattan
If you really want to stalk Peter David, you actually have two event options; at 8pm at Comic Book Club, Peter will talk nerd shop with the lads from The Stack, so if you go to that first you can have something to talk to him about during those all important 20 seconds when he's signing your copy of Dark Tower (or any of the other great books he's writing, for that matter).
7pm @ Housing Works Cafe, 126 Crosby Street, Manhattan
French comic-book creators Philippe Dupuy and Charles Berberian, the duo responsible for the award winning comic anthology Get A Life, will talk about "the global graphic novel", which sounds very grandiose and probably has something to do with Tin Tin.
Wow, so many comic artists are doing events this week! They must all be in town to see the Jurassic Park show. Adapted from the book Three Days as the Crow Flies, '85 is a graphic novel about NYC in a tumultuous time, with lots of drug addicts, artists, and other off-the-grid grittiness.
7pm @ The Japan Society, 333 East 47th Street, Manhattan
Animated war propaganda is as entertaining as it is unsettling, as anyone who's watched Walt Disney Treasures - On the Front Lines will attest. As a sheltered American, I've rarely had the chance to see propaganda from other countries, and this sample of animated shorts from 1930-40s Japan promises a very different brand of ambiguity-free emotional manipulation. These films will be presented with recently created music and live narration, and the program includes titles such as Momotaro's Sky Adventure and Sankichi the Monkey: The Storm Troopers. $10, $4.50 for students.
This year's crop of Oscar Short Docs and Michel Gondry invites you to (re)make art, after the jump... Saturday, February 16
Do you want to make a lo-fi recreation of your favorite movie, but you need the process to be within a carefully structured environment? You're in luck! As part of a new exhibit of Michel's Gondry's art/promotion for Be Kind Rewind, Gondry will be making over the Deitch gallery in the image of the video store from his film, complete with a backlot with ready-made sets and video equipment so attendees can (re)make their own movies. The videos will then be exhibited in the gallery, so this is your shot at fame, people. Commercial New York Art World Fame! Sunday, February 17
5pm@ The Museum of Modern Art (Titus Theater 1), 11 W. 53rd St, Manhattan
The bane of every Oscar Pool is the Documentary Shorts category. Usually an educated guess amounts to looking up the synopsizes and trying to pick something about the holocaust. But thanks to MOMA, you can now watch the four nominees yourself and either vote your heart or gauge for yourself what those squares in the academy will like. $10 or $6 for students.
Lo-Fi Movie Recreation:The product of an attempt to recreate an existing (frequently high budget) movie without the budget, technology, or talent that distinguished the original.
Sounds awful, right? They're usually not meant to be screened. Lo-Fi Movie Recreations tend to be simple expressions of fandom, designed to expel a burning compulsion from the creator's system. And geeks sure do have that compulsion. Fanboysngirls have been attempting to recreate the the objects of their cinematic affection since video cameras became cheap enough to give a twelve year old for their birthday.
But the apocalypse draws neigh: soon, the Lo-Fi Recreation will no longer be the territory of the obsessed fan. With two major movies on the subject looming on the horizon, the trend is about to go from underground to all around with the force that will blow YouTube's servers out the back of their office.
The trailer for the film that's going to blow it all wide open, after the jump. I give you the bootlegged trailer for Be Kind, Rewind, Michel Gondry's latest bit of weirdness (via Solace In Cinema). The film follows the adventures of two video store clerks, who decide to replace their ruined inventory with homemade versions of every movie in the store. The trailer is a little shaky, but the Low-Fi goodness starts at -1:46.
And since Hollywood does everything in pairs, Paramount has writer Daniel Clowes working on a screen version of the true story of three kids who produced the most legendary Lo-Fi Recreation to date - a full length, shot for shot, seven-year-in-the-remaking adaptation of Raiders of the Lost Arc. See the trailer for the boy's opus below, (you can also read Geekanerd's review of the film). The Clowes script is still in the works, but if Be Kind, Rewind does well, which I think it will, you can bet The Adapation adapation will be fast tracked.
Once Gondry's and Clowes' films are out in the public square, everyone and their mom is going to be trying their hand at recreating classic film scenes. And why not? It's easy. Here's what you need to make a lo-fi recreation of your favorite film:
1. A camera 2. A DVD of your favorite movie (which you already own) 3. Ingenuity
Ah, but is it art? An innovative recreation can definitely be entertaining, but is the mere copying of an impressive work of art/entertainment something worth celebrating? The film snob in me says "NO, NO, NO, NO!", but the film geek in me, who remade Episode I's climatic lightsabre battle in high school, will keep me from raining on anyone's parade.
