Poop Shute

The whole world breathes a sigh of relief. Ahhhhhhhhh.....

By the whole world, I mean me. Hobbit is open and all is well. That mind-numbingly stressful beast of a production is now but a memory and a portfolio piece. And a fat check in the mail. :)

I've made it my mission to buy as many of the Dogme 95 films as I can get my hands on. For those of you who don't know what Dogme 95 is; it's a group of directors who got together in 1995 to form a sort of filming rule doctrine to govern the way they would make films. The rules are essentially limitations put on the director so that he must rely on creativity, well written characters and talented actors to tell his/her stories. The rules include no set building, you must use found locations. No adding of lights, only found lighting on the locations or sunlight. No special effects, no handsome typed out credits, only title-cards. The list goes on. It makes for solid stories that are acted beautifully.

Anyway, I learned about this years ago in my first film class, and I always enjoyed these films, but never made any effort to acquire any of them. Finding them in america tends to be diffcult because of the lack of technical effects most americans won't bother with them. To my surprise I discovered last night I already owned a Dogme film that I had never even watched. It was one of many videos I rescued from a "field destroy" at Blockbuster. It's called "Italian For Beginners" and it's not the best Dogme film, but it's still pretty damn good. I looked into finding more and discovered that my favorite one, and the best one by many film scholars lists (The Celebration), has a release date set for the future. SIX YEARS IN THE FUTURE. It's set for 01/10/2010 Damn it. I'm hoping that's a typo, I need to do a bit more research.