Movie Details
| Title: | A/K/A Tommy Chong | |
| Director: | Josh Gilbert | |
| Year: | 2005 | |
| Genre: | Documentary | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 09.24.06 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (0)
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 09.24.06 | Alamo Downtown | I missed this at SXSW so it worked out pretty great that they were showing this when I got downtown. Poor Tommy Chong. I guess you could call this a liberal doc... but I'm not sure how liberal you have to be to see the absurdity in sending Chong to jail. So this doc does a good job of underlining the obvious beat to this story, and also following him around right before and after his jail term. While I liked the doc, I think the biggest thing that I learned was that Chong has a hot wife. After that I stayed downtown for this VJ competition thing that was going on. Basically, for the recent series of free concerts that the Alamo's given in conjunction with a few other places (and AT&T), they've had live video mixing to match the DJ playing music. So this was a competition between local VJs... basically they hooked their setup into the Alamo's projector and mixed video images to music that the DJ played... although I think in most cases the VJs brought in specific music but the DJ also did a bit of mixing on his own so I generally didn't know whether the VJ was doing a prepared set or improv'ing. um... yeah I'm not sure about it. I'm going back for the next one to see Tim compete, but I think watching this has dashed any thoughts I had about competing. The majority of these guys had serious setups... like two matching laptops with a piece of mixer hardware and a little monitor... and they still weren't that impressive. It's funny how they were all kind of similar as well though. I think a lot of these guys work primarily with raves or house systems where the visuals are clearly secondary to the music... like the little whatevers playing on the monitors just to have something to look at if the band/dj is boring (and let's face it, most DJs are pretty damn boring to watch, unless you're a DJ yourself)... so there was a lot of belly dancing and fire-eating girls overlayed onto psychadelic color sweeps or mandala patterns... which I found pretty boring. I think, ideally, the music would be a basic beat but the video clips would also have audio to treat as samples... so the video actually becomes the focus of the whole experience... I don't know if the various pieces of software out there support that or not though... but it seems like you just pick your little motion loop, pick which filter you want to fiddle, and call it good. I'm curious with Tim though because he should have a pretty large catalog of video from films... not just a dancing skeleton loop or a travelling-through-tunnel shot. I mean... manipulating a clip of James Brown dancing over a solo sounds cool to me, watching it switch back and forth between 2 still photographs does not. So yeah... mixed results with that. I did have to duck out early though, missing the last two competitors, to get to the midnight movie in time. I'm glad I did though because I really could've used a good movie to end my night with (oh yeah, My throat got sore at some point today, which put me in an angry mood because i hate getting sick). I'm glad I did though... |
