Empire II at the Tribeca Film Festival

So the Tribeca Film Festival officially ended last night. I went to a few screenings, and one of them was a special event screening of EMPIRE II by Amos Poe. The film is an homage to the city and Andy Warhol's original EMPIRE, an 8 hour film made in 1964 of the Empire State Building. Amos Poe's film is actually a year-long time lapse sequence shot entirely out of his apartment window in the West Village. He shot an average of 1 mini dv tape per day for an entire year and then this was sped up and compressed into a 3 hour long film.

The New York premiere at the Gershwin Hotel was actually part-screening and part-performance, featuring Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth, Matt Heyner, and Tom Surgal. Two fellow film students and I were there to film the event. It was an amazing performance that was improvised on the spot for the entire 3 hours of the film. It was fascinating how well the music synced up to the film and created incredible mood swings with the on screen changes in seasons, weather, and through various national holiday events as a backdrop to the Empire State Building.

Here are some screen caps of the show from our cameras. We also recorded the performance, so we'll soon have the cut of the eventful night!

Shortbus

While I have never been to a sex club, I hope that they are every bit as awesome as the one depicted in Shortbus. The uncensored trailer gives you a glimpse at the kind of scenes in this film by John Cameron Mitchell about a group of New York individuals who are completely detached from their own sexual being but they come together (in more ways than one) at Shortbus, an underground sex club.

The opening sequence starts the movie off with a bang and every subsequent scene driving the narrative seems to be as irritatingly anti-climatic as the central character Sofia's struggle to achieve an orgasm, manually or otherwise. But it is that very element that is so essential to the realistic portrayal of humans, society and sexuality. Oh and somewhere in all this greatness, there are multiple love stories, a musical and very good sex scenes.

Shortbus - Uncensored Trailer

Anita O'Day sings "Honeysuckle Rose."

Anyone ever heard this song? It's an old Fats Waller jazz standard. My mom used to sing it to my dad during long drives, which really weirded me out; it's pretty erotically-charged.

Anita O'Day sure knows how to scat, though.