Jangwa!: Innocent, Bereft Little Meerkats Confront the Desert’s Dangerous Unknown!
Jangwa! is a very clever animated short film by Ilija Brunck and Jan Bitzer, which was a Nominee for the German 2006 Baden-Württemberg Award for Best Animated Short Film. In the film, a group of curious little meerkats are quietly standing atop a stone ridge, surveying the desert below them as the sun rises. Suddenly, a strange danger is seen rapidly approaching toward the tiny meerkats from the barren desert below them. The innocent, meek little meerkats stand up in a straight line, one behind the other, all looking in the same direction to protect one another. A sense of great expectant suspense builds as the huge, menacing dangerous, nasty-looking creature rises up right before them, and then….
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Jangwa!: Innocent, Bereft Little Meerkats Confront the Desert’s Dangerous Unknown!
Red Rabbit is a brilliant animated short film by Egmont Mayer, an allegory for the lives of non-social people. The film tells the story of a man who had lived all alone in a small apartment, until one day a few years ago when a rabbit suddenly appeared. Since that time, what little contact he previously had been having with other people dropped to zero after the rabbit turned up. Every attempt he made to get the rabbit out of his apartment failed, and since he wasn’t sure whether or not pets are allowed in the building, he hasn’t let anybody enter his apartment. Over the years, the rabbit has grown and grown and grown…it’s become like his huge, gigantic pet now. But it’s also a reminder that some habits start out small, yet end up growing into something potentially life-threatening!
At the very surprising end of the film, the big rabbit and another huge pet that appears on the scene, seem to stand for the secret corner in everyone’s heart…it can be somebody, a memory, some strange habit, that we don’t want to show to others. We keep them with us carefully, feed them and feel ourselves to be inferior to “normal” people, until one day the wall comes shattering down, and we find with surprise that even the most virtuous people around us also have their own “secret corners”
“It’s the Dream Afraid of Waking,
That Never Takes a Chance.”
On What We Need: First Day of My Life
For all of us, there are genuine needs and wishes, deep longings for human warmth, empathic responsiveness, trust, mutual recognition and creative playfulness. These are many of the ingredients that we think of when we speak of love, or the loving feelings we have for the cherished other person.
Of such feelings about a beloved, one might quietly reflect that, “I’m so glad I didn’t die before I met you.”
Bright Eyes: First Day of My Life
The Times of Harvey Milk: A Documentary Portrait
Before there was this year’s Academy Awards celebrated Milk, there was the widely acclaimed The Times of Harvey Milk, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature Film in 1984, and was awarded The Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, among other awards. The documentary chronicles the political career of Harvey Milk, who was San Francisco’s first openly gay elected Board Supervisor. The film, at times humorous, at times nostalgic, and at other times quite tragic, tells the story of Harvey Milk’s rise to political power and emergence as a symbol of gay political achievement.
The Times of Harvey Milk documents through assembled historic film clips the tumultuous story of Milk’s grass-roots political organizing and election, through the shocking murders and their repercussions. It takes the film’s viewers along with the eloquent candle-light memorial joined by tens of thousands of San Franciscans on the evening of the assassinations, to the scenes of angry crowds who stormed San Francisco’s City Hall in the aftermath of the lenient sentence that Dan White received at his murder trial.
This Academy Award-winning documentary feature film depicts not only Harvey Milk himself, but also the political and social milieu of the era in which he lived. From this perspective, the film continues to have significant relevance for our nation today, standing as a classic portrait of communities and cultural values in severe conflict. The film was produced subsequent to Harvey Milk’s death using archival footage, so that Milk is credited posthumously as the lead actor. Other politicians, including San Francisco’s then-mayor George Moscone (who was assassinated along with Milk) and Moscone’s successor and now United States Senator Dianne Feinstein, also appear in the archival footage. Also featured in the film is then-schoolteacher Tom Ammiano, who has been a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors since 1994, and was elected to the California State Assembly. The film’s outstanding narration is provided by the acclaimed stage and screen actor Harvey Fierstein, who at that time had just achieved great success with his own Tony Award-winning Broadway play Torch Song Trilogy.
The Times of Harvey Milk: The Full Version of the Documentary
OMG Hide, Run for Your Lives! Dreaded Elephandas Are Loose and On a Rampage!
OMG!! Part elephant, part gigantic panda…this dreaded heard of Elephandas, the most menacing of beasts, has been unleashed onto the good peoples of Thailand!
Oooops…Wait, no. My mistake. Turns out, seems like after a couple of very too-popular panda baby thingees was borned in a Thailand zoo, the employees there got sick of everyone saying “panda this” and “panda that.” So they painted up a bunch of poor elephants to look like panda thngs to remind everyone that the elephant is still the national animal of Thailand. Or at least that if they forget that, maybe the dreaded Elephanda will be!!
Le Grande Bisou: I Just Can’t Sleep When the Sun Goes Down
Sweden recently legalized same-sex marriage, and to mark that historic event, Swedish techno-house musician Adrian Lux decided to take a different approach to his new music video for Can’t Sleep. Rather than having the music set to the usual images of “sexually arousing girls in bikinis dancing in front of a green screen-cliché” that you always see in dance music videos, Lux decided to have Can’t Sleep tell a subtle romantic story between two men. In his video, the solitary loneliness of a haunting sleepless night is finally broken by a tender, grande bisou.
For all of us, there are genuine needs and wishes, deep longings for human warmth, empathic responsiveness, trust, mutual recognition and creative playfulness. These are many of the ingredients that we think of when we speak of love, or the loving feelings we have for the cherished other person.
Of such feelings about a beloved, one might quietly reflect that, “I’m so glad I didn’t die before I met you.”
The Online Blue Ribbon
