The Truth About Dr. Jekyll

The Quad Cinema is showing Dr. Jekyll & Sister Hyde as part of their Hammer Films retrospective, giving me another excuse to recycle some old material, a clip that was recycling old material to begin with. Back in 2006, I produced a video podcast (before the format had really been established or anyone knew what it was) called Potluck: Substance Over Style. The person I was supposed to interview backed out last minute, so I had to come up with an episode on the fly. I pulled out some old videotape of my mom, a couple of other old tapes and some digitized public domain film and put this together. By the way, my mother has never even seen Tim Burton’s Ed Wood, believe it or not.

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Remember that time I was a puppeteer?

Ten years ago this weekend, I was the host / emcee of The New York Infringement Festival, a series of plays and one person shows held over Labor Day weekend in Greenwich Village. Someone (I forget who) had created this large puppet called Bushiva to parade around Washington Square Park. I don’t know if they had any specific performance planned, at least, I wasn’t given any direction when I was asked to help operate the puppet.

Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans that weekend, and if you remember, the initial government response to the crisis was far from adequate. Consequently, there were a lot of activist groups and politically minded individuals demonstrating when we arrived with this giant George W. Bush head. I decided to give Bushiva a voice right there on the spot and started fielding questions from pedestrians, offering satirical commetary on the policies and practices of our then president.

I’m not sure who shot and edited the video below, which was posted to YouTube some years ago and I came across recently. Even though the general public’s questions prompting the responses aren’t included, you can still get the idea. It would be great to have a look at the raw footage since I’ve never seen it, but I’ll take what I can get.

^{If the embedded video doesn’t load, click to watch
Bushiva at YouTube.}

See Michael Moore’s SICKO now!

Sicko movie poster — Rated PG-13 for brief strong language.

^{(Updated 5:21PM)} I saw Michael Moore‘s Sicko a few weeks ago at one of the test screening things where you fill out the card at the end. I didn’t blog about it, because they would prefer that you didn’t until the movie is out and I can hold up my end of a deal. Well, the movie is not quite out yet, but it hit the internet for a while over the weekend. I had it embedded below courtesy of Google Video, but I had some lunch, ran a few errands and watched the first John From Cincinnati (finally), and it was gone when I came back.

It’s really fucking good, not as political as his others, despite what the advertising wants you to believe. I had one minor problem with it (maybe not so minor, depending on how you look at it, because if I was really a blockhead, that one thing would have negated everything that came before), which I won’t discuss until someone posts a comment and asks me about it.

In the meantime, feel free to watch the video below. It’s from a press conference at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival, where he was promoting Fahrenheit 9/11, and was asked how he feels about it being distributed over file sharing networks without explicit authorization:

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