Bad Girls Club

You probably don't need to be told that a reality TV show called Bad Girls Club is not high art. I was expecting, however, that it might at least be guilty fun. The Real World-style formula of taking a group of strangers and recording their (mostly drunken) antics has produced some hits and many misses. From its cloyingly coy title to its faux-self-help premise, however, Bad Girls Club is a clunker. The idea of the show is that "difficult" women will live together for four months in an attempt to overcome their problems.

The Journal of Short Film: Volume I: Fall 2005

The Journal of Short Film: Volume I is comprised of nine films that range from traditional linear narratives to non-narrative explorations to one that calls itself “improvised cinema.” The journal, which was founded to expand the forums available for talented, new filmmakers to showcase their work - much the way writers and poets have literary journals - has grown to include the release of five additional volumes and another in progress. Many of the films in the premier volume center on interpersonal relationships and intrapersonal struggles.

Children of Men

P.D. James’ The Children of Men is a story about the English countryside, devoid of the English. It is the near future, and men have become infertile. Half-deranged, aging women coo over porcelain dolls, pushing their prams through empty streets. An increasingly lonely and oppressed population struggles to maintain normalcy in Britain while chaos rules the rest of this world without hope.

The Journal of Short Film: Volume V

Every film in this volume is so impressive, so full of the detail and thought that makes a film not just good or even great, but f*cking phenomenal _that it’s difficult to say anything more than _just buy a subscription already.

Grilled Cheese Sandwich:The Revolution of Everyday Lunch

It’s everything a good grilled cheese sandwich should be—crunchy around the edges, lightly grilled, completely saturated and, of course, very cheesy. I mean this in a good way when describing this film, written and directed by Jonathan Culp who is co-founder of the Toronto Video Activist Collective.

Scenes from the Silent Revolution

Jess Rowland could not have created the tour de force, Scenes From The Silent Revolution, at a better time than during our current epoch, as we find that we have been swimming in the muck of corporate culture for decades. Rowland punctures the shrink-wrap that corporations have fixed around ourdaily lives with a CD and DVD that leaves you feeling raw and unsettled. The DVD includes three scenes: “Ashcroft vs. The Space Librarians,” “The Barbie Explosion” and “McDonaldland is Changing.” The soundtrack is a thing of genius.

Giuliani Time

What politician can, in the span of a few decades, go from being a Kennedy Democrat to a Reagan Republican and, finally, to a man for all parties as Time’s Person of the Year? The answer, as Kevin Keating’s film reveals, is Rudy Giuliani. Keating turns a critical eye on Giuliani’s path towards becoming America’s darling politician by offering a view of the New York Mayor’s pre-September 11th history – a history marked by racism and the overseeing of police brutality.