http://www.fresnofilmworks.org Fresno's alternative film source Sat, 20 Feb 2010 04:04:49 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Many years ago the following announcement of coming attractions turned up on many theatre marquees around the country: SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON AND SELECTED SHORTS. Passers-by sniggered. Some may even have bought tickets expecting Joanne Dru to do a strip tease. Well, theatres don’t show “shorts” any longer, except for ... http://www.fresnofilmworks.org/articles/the-great-democratization-of-the-short-film/ As one war is winding down and another ramping up, more than 1.8 million American men and women have already served in Iraq or Afghanistan.  January figures from the Department of Defense put the number of U.S. casualties near 45,000, and a study by the Department of Veterans Affairs released ... http://www.fresnofilmworks.org/articles/hollywood-comes-home-from-war/ The release of Bright Star has brought critical acclaim for Jane Campion after a five-year hiatus from feature films and the poor reception for her underrated thriller In the Cut (2004).  Campion's return to the spotlight, almost two decades since her best work in An Angel at My Table (1990) ... http://www.fresnofilmworks.org/articles/miracle-of-rare-device-the-british-romantics-in-film/ A Night at the Oscars 2010 Oscar Nominated Short Films Friday, March 12, 2010 Live Action: 5:30 p.m. Animated: 8:00 p.m. The Tower Theatre 815 E. Olive Avenue, Fresno [ more details ] [ buy tickets ] http://www.fresnofilmworks.org/news/welcome/ Our December film, Amreeka--Arabic for “America”--is about a Palestinian woman who transplants herself and her teenaged son to a small town in the U.S. But it’s not really a Palestinian film in the normal sense. Instead, its national identity is blurred. The writer, producer, and director, Cherian Dabis, was born ... http://www.fresnofilmworks.org/articles/buried-cinema-films-from-palestine/ How useful is a term if it delimits nothing? "Pop culture" is this way. Just about everything we feel or touch or eat or hear has been designated pop culture, according to the various sociologists and media experts I glanced at recently. One postmodernist social thinker even calls “high culture” ... http://www.fresnofilmworks.org/articles/thoughts-on-pop-culture/ Sure, a lot of political comedy movies have been made which I could write about to compliment our showing of “In the Loop,” but I want to go somewhat askance here and write about small-scale and metaphorical political cinema. I like to think of the silent-era Keystone Kops flicks as ... http://www.fresnofilmworks.org/articles/off-beat-and-small-scale-political-comedy-films/ Political films come two ways: those based on actual happenings and those based on imagined events meant to be plausible, or at least entertaining. There is a third category--political films about real people actually involved in real events whose lives and plights are rendered ... http://www.fresnofilmworks.org/articles/political-films-fact-and-fiction/ Our June film, Tokyo Sonata, deals with the poverty of a contemporary Japanese family. Here are accounts of seven more films about people gripped by poverty, frustrating them and setting them on certain life courses. The oldest film in my survey is relevant to contemporary ecology conditions. It’s The Plow that ... http://www.fresnofilmworks.org/articles/film-forum-poverty-films-command-attention-for-dreams-resolve/ Two Lovers belongs to a genre of motion pictures I like to call “folk films.” To me, this means they are about ordinary people, not superheroes or handsome men or extraordinary ghetto teachers who, against all odds, prepare their charges to go on to Stanford. Folk films may end upbeat, but ... http://www.fresnofilmworks.org/articles/film-forum-realism-meets-the-everyday-in-these-classic-%e2%80%98folk-films%e2%80%99/