Double
Feature
 This past weekend
Beloved Girlfriend and I escaped
the heat
by watching a couple of cool movies
both, coincidentally enough, with
titles containing possessive nouns.
It's unlikely you've heard of
either of them. Spoiler alert:
They both come highly recommended.
The first is titled Jodorowsky's
Dune, a documentary of
the first serious attempt to make
a
feature
film of Frank Herbert's
acclaimed sci-fi novel, Dune. Besides
the book itself the title refers
to Alejandro Jodorowsky, an avante
garde actor/writer/director of
mind-bending cult films like El
Topo and The
Holy Mountain. (Both
to be found on youtube.)
The most intriguing part of the
documentary is the group of actors
and technicians Jodorowsky assembled
for the production of the film. Prominent
roles were to be filled
by actors
like Orson Welles and Gloria Swanson,
plus pop culture icons Salvador
Dali and Mick Jagger. On the technical
side were artists H. R. Giger and
Jean "Mobius" Giraud, animation
legend Douglas Trumball,
and Pink Floyd providing the music.
It was planned as a 14 hour epic and would have
been either awesomely bad or truly legendary, but
we'll never know for reasons I hope you'll explore
for yourself. It's worth the trip.
---------
 The
second film was called Tim's
Vermeer,
produced and directed by Penn & Teller, and its
premise is simple and astonishing: A more-capable-than-average
human
with less-than-average art skills decides to create
a painting in exactly the style of Johannes
Vermeer. Specifically,
The Music Lesson.
Vermeer's painting's are such wonders of light and
detail experts have often pondered if he used optical
devices to aid in their creation.
In comes titular inventor Tim Jenison who
believes he knows the secret to Vermeer's craft and
proceeds to spend the rest of the movie
proving it.
There are moments of invention in this documentary
that will take your breath away though I have to
admit to a slight sense of skepticism. If this is
a grand practical joke (consider its provenance)
it's a damned good one.
------------------
Attention iPad users: I've been
told by Beloved Girlfriend that, while on this site
using an iPad,
if she rolls over the main cartoon image it will
rollover to the alternate image but will not revert
to the original image unless she Refreshes the page.
So the question is :
If you're an iPad user, are you having the same issue
as BG and, if you are, why didn't you say something?
Thanks!
=Lefty=
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