Movie dream

There’s a new movie coming out with Eiko Ishioka's Costume design in it! I can't tell you how much I love Eiko Ishioka's designs...they are always unique and I find them immensely inspiring. The film is directed by Tarsem, who previously collaborated with Ishioka on the movie The Cell.

Events take place in a 1915 hospital, where a bedridden patient befriends a little girl with a broken arm and offers to tell her an adventure story about five men - an Indian adventurer, an African ex-slave, a masked bandit, an Italian bombmaker, and Charles Darwin (what? yes!). The girl is enthralled by the exotic tale, and waits eagerly for every new chapter. But the storyteller, a broken man emotionally and physically, has a dark motive for telling the tale: he wants her to steal something at the hospital in exchange for the story’s conclusion. Here is the trailer:



I did a quick Google search on when the film is coming out: nothing. I did a search for it on IMDB, and learned that it was completed in 2006. Hmm. That’s when I started digging into the YouTube comments. One guy writes that he saw it at a private screening in LA a week ago, and that they asked the audience to critique for the purpose of determining whether it will go on the big screen or on DVD. Another person writes that they have not yet found a distributor. And then there is this comment by Khan Higou:

"I spent a year working on post-production of this movie (in Paris);
I know every single image of this feature and believe me, it IS beautiful for
sure. And you Americans are not lucky about this independent movie
(self-produced, directed, even self-distributed, no big studio logo in front of
this trailer, did you notice…) ’cause I heard it has been rated R in the US; a
way to punish Tarsem everybody thinks here ’cause the movie is not that
violent"

Further research turned up one review that indicates that the film has not been sold for distribution due to scathing reviews at the Toronto Film Fetival. The reviewer writes that Zoe Bell (Death Proof) was the president of the jury that year. “(She was) seated two seats away from me quite enjoyed at least from what I could get from her reactions to the film while it was being shown.” Maybe she didn’t like it so much after all.

Maybe the ending is a little predictable, I admit the cell in terms of plot was pretty crappy...it was a bad movie...but seriously but the visuals look stunning! I want to see this - and I want to love it.

Inspiration

I'm going through a creative standstill. Sometimes, I get this anxious feeling that I'm not creating enough, that I'm not doing anything to satisfy that side of me which demands for an outlet. Normally when I get these urges I close myself out of the world, and live in a hermitine state creating things. Unfortunately I can't do that anymore. Bills must be paid, and in order to pay for them I have to go to work, and at work I am both retracting away from that creative self, and coming face to face with people that don't really connect with that feeling. Anyway, this is not to say I don't think that people in my office are "below" my artistic values...they each are creative in their own way. But I am extraordinarily restless, and the right side of my brain is supplicating for release.

So, I try to do little things to quiet it down. I go online and look up random artists and topics; searching for inspiration. It was then that I came across an entire MySpace page devoted to the "bob" haircut. It's a french myspace that catalogues 1,428 images devoted to the bob hairstyle and its derivatives.

Looking through the images was like shaking a greyscale snowglobe of eyes, lips and hair angels into constant new configurations...a delightful experience that let me feeling awed and inspired. I wondered if I should be feeling a twing of guilt for ravenously going through what can be classified as "stolen images" - gathered from the web, scanned from magazines and even manipulated without credit. And then it hit me: I don't care.

Of course knowing the artists names would've been nice, but it may have been impossible to compile that information. I enjoyed the site anyway. Was that wrong? I guess it depends on where you think the line of theft gets crossed. Of all places, I've observed that the most embarrassing attitudes towards image theft come from within the alt photo/modeling scene. Every day on every networking site, people swap copyrighted photos for inspiration. It's become part of our culture. In reaction, I've seen many alt photographers and models sick their DMCA-fan army like a pack of attack dogs on any DeviantArt artist or naive foreign-language gothchick photo-swapping blog that gets "reported", and it has always left me feeling more sorry for the target than for the artist who's been "ripped off". I bet that at least at one point in their life, every artist has stumbled across an uncredited image they didn't pay for that affected their aesthetic sensibility. Well, it's time to give that to someone else; today's world just makes this process more transparent, and faced with this new visibility into the life cycle of their work, image owners freak out.

Obviously, it's wrong to steal a photo and proclaim yourself the subject or the photographer; still, I feel that humiliating these people (most of whom are just insecure 13 year olds) publicly should be beneath the image owner, and that a private email or website customer service alert should suffice. However, swiping images or complete art direction, as a means to financial gain is the least forgivable thing of all, and that's when I support the heavy-handed tactics.

Anyway, back to the bobsite. It's amazing; Enjoy! And if you're a photographer who ended up there, be happy. It's the residual effect of producing an iconic image. That fact alone -that it ends up in a place like this where people can find it and get inspired in turn -is something to be proud of.