If you go to festivals like the NYC Independent Film Festival, you can see films like Yuck, a short documentary directed by a fourth grader about his own school lunches. Here, I’ll let Zachary Maxwell’s voiceover speak for itself:

My name is Zachary Maxwell, and I’m a 4th grader at a large, New York City public school. The city’s Department of Education says that it’s committed to providing “delicious and nutritious meals through their food service program.”

But the lunch they were serving at my school was nothing like what they were advertising on their website. So that’s when I got the crazy idea to start sneaking a video camera into my lunchroom so I could secretly document the truth. And over the next six months, I learned something VERY disturbing.

Unless it involves live rats or dead hookers.I doubt I’m going to be disturbed.

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An English film director (and apparently super handsome guy) was found dead in a boarded up hostel last week, just three days after he started a project in which he planned to live like a homeless person for a week to draw attention to the homeless problem. Now, he’s either a martyr for his cause, a cautionary tale, or both. Or maybe Newcastle is just really gritty.

Friends believed that Lee Halpin, 26, who was discovered in a boarded up hostel on Wednesday morning, may have succumbed to hypothermia as temperatures reached as low as -4C overnight in the city.
But yesterday, detectives investigating Mr Halpin’s death arrested a 26-year-old and a 30-year-old on suspicion of being concerned in the supply of controlled drugs.
A Northumbria police spokesman said the men had been bailed pending further inquiries and that a report was being prepared for the coroner.
Mr Halpin, a Newcastle University graduate, had planned to spend a week experiencing life on the streets and on Sunday, the night before he embarked on the project, he made a video in which he said he wanted to “immerse himself” in the lifestyle.
“I am about to go and spend a week being homeless in the West End of Newcastle,” he said.
“I will sleep rough, scrounge for my food, access all the services that other homeless individuals in the West End use. I will interact with as many homeless people as possible and immerse myself in that lifestyle as deeply as I can.”
In the clip, Mr Halpin said he was producing the documentary as part of an application for a position on an Channel 4 investigative journalism programme.
He said: “I hope that you perceive this to be a fearless approach to a story. “It certainly feels brave from where I’m sat right now. [Telegraph via Gawker]

Obviously, it’s a pretty crappy story, and not just because of Lee Halpin’s rugged good looks. Maybe God just didn’t want such a handsome do-gooder down here making all the rest of us look bad. In any case, if there’s a lesson here, and I’m not sure there is, it’s that you should take care not to confuse making a reenactment look real enough for a movie with doing an actual, real reenactment, provided you value your own good health. Bear Grylls sells his survival techniques well by drinking his own pee a lot, but I doubt he’s ever that far from a PA with a space heater and an elephant gun. Stay safe out there, kids.

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If you’re like I was, and you’ve never heard of an MC5-esque black punk band from Detroit called “Death,” A Band Called Death is going to take a long time getting you there. But when it does, hold onto your handkerchiefs because shit’s about to get touching.  In telling the story of a forgotten punk trio with a vision, Drafthouse’s new documentary from Mark Covino and Jeff Howlett bears more than a passing similarity to the 2013 Oscar-winning documentary Searching for Sugar Man. Amazingly, it might be even harder to get through without tearing up, at least for lesser viewers (NICE TRY, PUNKS, THESE EYEBALLS DON’T RUN, OOH RAH!). And while A Band Called Death might suffer a bit for having been pre-empted thematically, Searching for Sugar Man had to massage the truth a bit to spurt that heartwarming ending. They conveniently left out the part where Rodriguez toured Australia with Midnight Oil years after we’re led to believe that he assumed he’d been forgotten. Sorry, bros, that’s cheating. To my knowledge, A Band Called Death doesn’t commit any similar lies by omission, and in any case, the unfairly-forgotten rockstar story it has to tell is even wilder and more emotional. And I mean that in a good way, not in a bipolar actress kind of way.

Raised in Detroit, David, Bobby, and Dannis Hackney are three brothers – by virtue of biology as well as by being three black guys hanging out together in the seventies – who dreamed of playing loud and kicking ass like The Who. They called themselves “Death,” based on a vision David had while staring at the clouds, and in 1974, recorded a demo of fast, hard-driving rock songs that inadvertently stole the balls-out sound of later bands like The Ramones, Bad Brains, the Sex Pistols, et. al. Only no one wanted to buy it at the time, mainly because the band was called “Death.” Which doesn’t seem like that much worse of a name than “The Who” or “The Guess Who,” but whatever. They could’ve just changed the name, but hey, man, you don’t argue with clouds. The demo collected dust in an attic somewhere for a while, while the members of the band gradually gave up and went on their separate ways, playing, at various times, Christian soul music, and cheesy reggae, with songs like “Fire Up the Ganja,” which might be the most generic-sounding reggae track of all time.

And then… And then…

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As a dumb Californian, I knew Ed Koch mainly as the guy who replaced Judge Wapner on the People’s Court. Later I learned he was also a congressmen and an influential, three-term mayor of New York City. His career path is hard for Californians to understand, because here, it usually goes reality show host, mayor, then congressman, whereas Koch did it all in reverse. In any case, Koch, a Neil Barsky documentary about him, opens today in New York, and in the saddest and best promotional tie in, Ed Koch died today of congestive heart failure.

“Koch” offers evidence that the combative mayor had mellowed little in his later years. Filmmaker Neil Barsky conducted extensive interviews with Koch in his Manhattan apartment in 2010 and early 2011, where the former mayor, who ruled New York from 1978 to 1989, spoke of his controversial time in office, offering no restrictions on subject matter or time.
“He was living the life that any 86-year-old would envy,” Barsky says of Koch, who was 88 when he died. “He was out on the street, campaigning for obscure Democratic Assembly candidates, going up to Albany, having spirited political debates with his family over the dinner table. He remained a very funny, in-your-face kind of guy who loved to battle.”
A highlight of Barsky’s movie comes on the 2010 election night when Andrew Cuomo won the New York gubernatorial race. Koch is seen surrounded by adoring well-wishers, but, at evening’s end, goes home alone. [LA Times]

Koch never married and most people think he was gay, and even though he looks like a sweet old man from a Worther’s box, a lot of people think his fear of being outed kept him from doing more to address the AIDs epidemic ravaging New York during his terms.

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If this isn’t your first time on the internet, chances are you’ve come across at some point the picture of a stoned-ass Nic Cage wearing a Superman suit over his pooka necklace, or that video of Kevin Smith talking about the time a producer Jon Peters wanted him to write a Superman with three conditions: I don’t wanna see him fly, he doesn’t wear that f*cking suit, and he has to fight a giant spider in the third act. Incredibly, that Nic Cage picture isn’t is Photoshopped, and but (sorry, I’m retarded, here’s a couple real ones) Kevin Smith wasn’t making the story up (which you know because no one argues about blow jobs or Star Wars). It was all for movie project that never quite got off the ground, Superman Lives, written by Kevin Smith, directed by Tim Burton, and starring Nic Cage. It’s all so beautifully batshit that one man – Jon Schnepp -  has taken to kickstarter to raise money for a documentary about it, called “The Death of Superman Lives.”

I’ve been interested in this film since it was first announced back in the late 90’s. Nicolas Cage was announced as Superman, Kevin Smith was announced as the Writer, Tim Burton was announced as the Director, and fans have had very heavy opinions, both positive and negative, on all of this. As news slowly bubbled out, news buzzed around about Rainbow Robot Outfits, Brainiac Skull ships, Superman not “flying”, Fighting a Giant Spider, Polar Bears guarding the Fortress of Solitude. [KickStarter]

They say their “stretch goal” is to use the original FX crew to actually produce some of the original scenes. They’ve already raised $40 grand. My hope is that they raise enough to actually hire Nic Cage. Hell, I’d settle for video of Nic Cage walking through his house talking about his snake venom and dinosaur skulls in his Superman voice. Actually, considering he did name his son after Superman, I’m not convinced he hasn’t been in character this entire time.

Movieline found a video of the original Superman Lives suit. It basically looks like if dub-step was clothes.

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