About The Site

I never knew that YouTube could actually be useful, like really useful for stuff. It’s completely trashed by most people, explained away as a pastime of youths doing stupid things for the attention of stupid people. But I never realised that YouTube had so much to offer.

A chance link took me to an old David Cronenberg short film – From The Drain. It was made in 1967 and was not quite The Brood, but it is always interesting to see the first works of the masters to be. (I also found a three part interview with Cronenberg, Carpenter and Landis, which I cannot wait to watch because it was done in the mid-80’s and is going to be the mad Fango style that I miss). I’ve seen Clive Barker’s Salome and Forbidden, and Scorsese’s The Big Shave. Even Robert Rodriguez’s Bedhead is interesting, if not quite a part of his Mariachi Trilogy. Director’s early films are where they master their craft, and apparently there are heaps of them on YouTube, who knew? Chances are taken, mistakes made, ideas sharpened. I like seeing that everyone had a beginning. No one just appeared and made Braveheart on the first go, they had to do The Man Without A Face first. From this one link I found another. La Jetée.

Back in the day I saw 12 Monkeys. While my mates thought it was cool that a spider was eaten, Brad Pitt was crazy and the 12 Monkeys symbol was cool, I was busy telling them that Terry Gilliam directed it and it was based on a French short film, La Jetée. I never could track the movie down, which always disappointed me. Then, here was this link, to the entire flick. I didn’t realise YouTube did this sort of thing, I was honestly shocked.

I watched La Jetée and really liked it. It’s not my favourite movie ever, but I think it was pretty cool. I like the concept of having a movie completely made of still photographs. It’s something different, and I think it works. But sometimes it is just nice to see that someone was trying to do something different. Whether it works or not is sometimes irrelevant, it’s just nice to be surprised. I don’t want all flicks to now start just using still photographs, that’s not the answer. But for 26 minutes, or so, I was happy to listen to the narration and see the pics. It gave the entire thing the feel of a documentary, which gives it the feeling of being real. It made me think of the photo graphic novel that Brian K Vaughan toyed with, which can be seen at his site in the Exclusives link, it’s called Do-Gooder and it’s pretty cool.

Then, later, I was writing the second issue for my Fate mini and I needed a line. I decided to do the best thing for the moment, pilfer something from something else far greater than I. I wanted to verify the line so I went looking for it on the wwInterweb. I was shocked to see it yield no results. This was a film that I had seen back in the mid-90’s. I can remember it was a cartoon about vampires, possibly from Cuba, and it was a foreign language film. With that information I then searched for existence of the film itself. I found the film, still no sign of the line I wanted, but I did find the film uploaded on, you guessed it (and if you didn’t you really need to pay more attention), YouTube. Vampires In Havana has been broken into ten minute segments and placed for all to see, for free from the comfort of my wireless bed/cinema. I can’t believe it. Once I remembered the flick, something I had forgotten about years ago, a nostalgic wave ran through me and I wanted to see it again. eBay had nothing, but YouTube came through with the goods. I’m now going to watch each of the instalments and enjoy me some mid-80’s animation about vampires and trumpets.

And, no I’m not going to tell you what the line was…sorry.

Posted on April 15th, 2008 by ryan
Filed under: movies