http://dogwoof.com/planetofsnail
Young-Chan has been deaf and blind since childhood. As he puts it himself, "In the beginning there was darkness and silence, and the darkness and silence were with god. And when 'I' arrived, they came to me." Young-Chan has no idea how to participate in the world until he meets Soon-Ho, who also has a physical handicap. He marries her and learns to communicate with the outside world through her. By softly tapping each other's finger, they can understand one another; it is sometimes as if they are tenderly playing a piano. This documentary follows the couple in the same gentle tempo as Young-Chan moves through his life. We see them replacing a lightbulb together, receiving friends, working on a theater piece, reading a book, and gliding on a sleigh down a mountain. These everyday scenes are accompanied by a poetic voice-over by Young-Chan, in which he reflects on his existence without sight and hearing. He feels like an astronaut, but that doesn't mean he is without a sense of beauty in the world. This becomes palpable when Young-Chan touches the bark of a tree, runs his hand through sand, or brushes raindrops on a window pane with his fingertips.
Stream online :http://dogwoof.tv/watch/planet-of-snail
Watch on iTunes: http://itunes.apple.com/gb/movie/planet-of-snail/id555637418
[Editor's note: In the current issue of the Scene, Jonathan Meador looks at the trend of conservative-themed movies performing well above the national average at the box office in Middle Tennessee, which is becoming a place where even nationwide duds on the level of Won't Back Down and Atlas Shrugged Part II can eke out a few thousand more dollars per screen than elsewhere.
For his story, Meador spoke to Victor J. Morton, the Washington, D.C.-based critic whose thoughts on film can be found most often at his blog Rightwing Film Geek. A self-described "American conservative whose favorite Austrian film artist is Michael Haneke rather than Arnold Schwarzenegger," the scrupulously tough-minded, wickedly funny Morton counts more than a few hardcore lefty cinephiles among his readers. Though he's quoted at length in Meador's article, we posted the rest of the interview below.]
Do you think there has been a rise in mainstream (in terms of budget and distribution) conservative films over the past few years? Why/why not? If so, do you think that it is an artistic/commercial response to the Obama Administration? Is this trend comparable to or different than other presidencies?
There clearly has, and while, like with the Tea Party, President Obama may provide the specific occasion for (most obviously) 2016, I think there are broader factors at play.
One such reason is the backlash against, and the mimicking of, the “liberal issue doc” genre ([Michael] Moore, [Alex] Gibney, [Charles] Ferguson, etc.) which just exploded during President Bush's term of office. Simultaneous with that was the slew of fiction films about the Iraq/Afghanistan wars, which were, almost without exception, openly or covertly critical of the war and of Bush. The few conservatives that exist, or want to exist, in the filmmaking world clearly think, “Now it's our turn.” Not that liberal filmmakers have stopped making liberal films … issues are eternal and there's always more history to mine. And if Mitt Romney wins in a couple of weeks, I fully expect documentaries critical of him in theaters by next summer and some sort of fictional work by 2014.
I would add that part of the reason we're seeing more anti-Obama films is technological — (1) the basic costs of bare-bones filmmaking have declined significantly and have been largely demystified to amateurs (everyone knows what a iPhone camera and a digital-editing program are, in other words); (2) in a similar fashion, social media has democratized and demystified the marketing and distribution side of filmmaking. I'm not suggesting professionals and long-established craftsmen don't do these things far better (as the films themselves generally make obvious); merely that it's easier now for an amateur to think, “I can do it too.”
