Films of Rick Schmidt

Started binge-watching Rick Schmidt movies on Fandor. They're pretty good. The fact that I've been able to binge watch them is a testament that.

They're such that when you watch them you feel that you could do it, too. I'm sure it's not as easy as it looks. But I look at my little point and shoot camera, and I look at the movies, and I think...

The movie Morgan's Cake was pretty good, starring Schmidt's then-17-year-old son, Morgan, deciding whether to register for the draft. I never registered. Nothing to it. A little odd that Schmidt films his son making out with his girlfriend and telling her an anecdote about his testicles. The movie looked pretty good considering it was filmed on analog video (I think it was Video8---they didn't have Hi8 yet) and transferred to 16mm black and white film (at a cost of $100 a minute according to his book). It would have been cheaper to shoot on film in the first place (depending on the shooting ratio) but he didn't have the money then and it would have been a different movie if he had.

Most of them are dialog movies. Many were produced as collaborative films by the workshops Schmidt runs. Some list other people as director. One is a Dogme 95 film.

In some of the movies, the conversations go on too long for my taste, or at least they stick to one subject longer than they should.

Schmidt had worked with Wayne Wang who went on to make Chan is Missing, The Joy Luck Club, Maid in Manhattan and many others. The film he and Schmidt made together, A Man, A Woman and a Killer, is on here, too.

I'm hoping that the films of Jon Jost will be available.

And Mark Rappaport's films, if that screwed up little freak Ray Carney would hand his stuff over.

Jost has said in his blog that he'll be arranging fundraising for new prints of Rappaport's films to be made. I'll pitch in a couple hundred bucks.