Surprise surprise…

This past weekend I made my way down to the AFI theater in Silver Spring, MD, to watch a documentary in the annual SilverDocs film festival. Knowing nothing more than the title and a brief blurb I decided the film What Would Jesus Buy? would be well worth the gamble of my $10 admittance.

What Would Jesus Buy? is focuses on the commercialization of Christmas, consumerism, globalization, and the eagerness of America to over spend. The film’s main character is Bill Talen better known as Reverend Bill, head of the church of Stop Shopping. As you might guess from their name, the Church of Stop Shopping preaches anti-commercialism through choir songs that deal with anti-shopping and anti-corporate themes. Taking their message to the streets, the film documents the many public demonstrations in malls and shopping centers across America, including the Mall of America in Minnesota and Disney Land in California, as the group travels the country in their bus one month before Christmas.

Reverand Billy is an eccentric character who plays the part of a reverend through his wildly energetic speeches to exorcising of large corporate headquarters at big box retailers like Wal-Mart. He was arrested or escorted away by police several times throughout the movie but that doesn’t stop his motivation to get his message out. It is hard to tell if Reverand Billy is a special character for the film or if Bill Talen really acts this way from day to day.

The film was directed by Rob VanAlkemade with Morgan Spurlock as executive producer. I was hoping this film would be more like Spurlock’s hit documentary Super Size Me or another one of my favorite documentaries The Corporation, packed with hard evidence about the topic. What Would Jesus Buy? starts out like that showing dramatic news footage of people getting trampled stampeding to buy Christmas gifts and reading facts about American’s debt after the holidays but quickly drops off to a roadie adventure. The film was entertaining as the Church of Stop Shopping was a zainy bunch, but it just didn’t live up to my expectations as a hard-hitting take action kind of film. Instead, it felt too preachy. I did come away from the film with a bunch of funny quips and terms like “The shopacalypse is upon us” and “Change-a-lujah”.

After the screening, Reverand Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping made a special appearance on stage where they performed two songs and answered questions from the audience. It’s these kinds of events that I really enjoy about film festivals since you would never get a show after the movie at your local cineplex. That made the price of admission totally worth it.

What Would Jesus Buy? is making the rounds in smaller film houses across the country but they expect to have a global release in time for Christmas this year. If you are in an anti-consumerism, preachy-gospel mood, then go check out this film when it comes to your area.

Reverand Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping homepage

I ordered RAM for my 12″ PowerBook from Crucial.com and I am tracking the package via iSnoot.net. The interface is dead simple with one field to enter your UPS, FedEx, USPS, or DHL/AirBorne tracking number. From there, iSnoot automatically determines the carrier and displays the past scans of your package, even displaying a Google map of where your package has traveled. To stay up to date on your shipment an RSS feed is automatically generated as well.

Hopefully my RAM will get here today or tomorrow so I can stop seeing the pin wheel of death every time I switch an application.

Genius!

With so many sites video aggregation sites out there, wouldn’t it be nice if you could search for videos across all of them from one place? Chime.tv lets you do just that and throws on a clean user interface to top it off.

Blip TV, Break.com, Daily Motion, Google Video, MetaCafe, MySpace, Veoh, & YouTube are all used as sources for Chime.tv’s content. The killer feature of this video site is it creates dynamic playlists based on your search term letting you sit back and enjoy the fruits of your not-so-hard labor. The experience is on par with the popular video on-demand application Joost, from the founders of Skype and Kazaa. Chime.tv offers a far better experience, in my opinion, for a few reasons.

1) Chime.tv is in the browser. There is no application to download and you can access your saved videos from any Internet-connected computer that has Flash.

2) All the content on the Internet is available not just select partners. Joost provides a wide variety of content but once you have seen it all the only thing you can do is wait for Joost to add more shows. Meanwhile, the Internet will never run out of things for you to kill hours of time watching. This is also a plus for content providers to offer a new way to distribute content to an audience and not be shut out by the big wigs at Joost.

3) No annoying ads. The ads on Joost, while short, become bland and annoying very fast. Chime.tv offers only the stuff you want without interrupting you for something don’t give two hoots about.

The video quality on Chime.tv is on par with YouTube videos; heavily compressed with visible artifacts. Joost is slightly better but for all the other advantages Chime.tv offers it earns my recommendation over Joost.

The VOCO clock ditches the loud, jarring buzzer usually associated with waking up in the morning and instead uses the voice of Stephen Fry. Who is Stephen Fry? Beats me, but he sounds just like the ideal butler. Come to think of it, the reassuring voice of a butler might just put me back to sleep in the morning. But there is something about the sound of a British butler to make you consider plucking down £29.95 just to hear him every morning.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHn2P7x9hXY

Hmm…

No exercise today due to the fact that my legs still hurt from my jog yesterday. I think all the weight I lost yesterday was water weight. Oh well tomorrow is another day.

For the past couple of weeks I have been following Fox’s newest reality show called On the Lot which is like American Idol with wanna-be filmmakers instead of wanna-be singers. Maybe “wanna-be” isn’t the right word for everyone on the show but it certainly describes 28 year old Kenny Luby.

Kenny comes from a small town Owego, New York, but unlike his residence his dreams are big. He got into movie-making because of skateboarding (me too!) and is proud of the fact that he didn’t go to film school. In fact, he points this out many times in the earlier episodes claiming he doesn’t need a proper education in film if he knows in his heart that he wants to make movies. But for goodness sake I wish he had gone to film school to get all of these pieces of crap that he has been producing out of his system before making a fool of himself on national television.

Now I am on his side when it comes to the notion that you have to go to film school these days; you certainly do not. There are great resources out there to help you learn the art of making movies both on the technical side and on the artistic side. Apparently Mr. Luby didn’t take a gander at these offerings all over the net and instead has fallen victim to the “lets use effects because we have them” mentality. Take a look at his first video on the show titled “Wack Alley Cab”

Note the use of “explosive” text effects, random uses of color filters, and a poor job at even setting up a story. Looks like two people needed a cab home from bingo. I wish this cab would have come over to take Kenny Luby back home to Owego.

Observe his second video aired just a few hours ago called “Edge on the End.”

Kenny, what are you doing?!?! Have you ever shown anyone your films? Do you have anyone you can show your film to who will give you some honest feedback? The whole Internet can be your stage by simply uploading it on to Youtube and shopping it around on some forums for a critique. Is there any connection to the Internet in Owego?

This is the type of work I saw at the beginning of college by students who thought making videos would be neat but never got around to doing any research into how it is actually done. It is a shame you never went to film school so you could get a dose of reality before being thrust upon the cruel world. It’s not too late now. How Kenny made it on the show is beyond me, but I guess every reality show needs someone that the audience loves to hate. Kenny Luby, you are the Sanjaya Malakar of On the Lot.

Because if you don’t find this funny, you must be dead!