Bruner Blog

In the last six months or so, I’ve been playing the ukulele. I’m not very good yet, but I can strum out about 10 songs at this point. In recent weeks, I’ve finally discovered what everyone else learned long ago: YouTube is awesome. Or, as I like to call it anymore, UkeTube.

An important new mission for the Bruner Blog in the next few months is to share with you some of my many favorite ukulele performances cataloged on YouTube. I just watched this one, from user SmileyAbalone, and it’s an instant favorite, thanks mainly to his adorably talented daughter. (Her outro question is especially cute.)

I’ve been a bad blogger lately, as noted in a separate post, and one consequence of that is that I’ve neglected to praise my beloved wife, Adrienne Haspel, and the talented crop of directors whose movies she edited are winning wide acclaim around the world this summer.

“Night Falls Fast” (IMDB) is a profound short film, NYU graduate thesis project, by Mark Robert Jackson, about a crystal meth addict confronting his addiction and his relationships with his father and his fireman boyfriend in the aftermath of his mother’s death. Beautifully realized, it won the “Best Short Film” category at this year’s Philadelphia Film Festival a few weeks ago. Adi edited it. (Some blogger somewhere praised the editing, but we can’t find that now page now.)

“Triple 8 Palace” is another thesis film by an NYU grad, Alexander Ku, about a Chinese immigrant girl’s New World struggle to pay back her smuggling debt via prostitution or sweat shops in New York. Adi was the editor. The film was accepted to Cannes where it shows on May 24.

“The Treatment”(IMDB) by Oren Rudavsky is a narrative feature Adi worked on in 2005 as second editor that is in theatrical release around the country right now to critical and audience acclaim. It’s documentary film maker Rudavsky’s first narrative feature, starring veteran actor Ian Holm, indie hottie Famke Janssen and newcomer Chris Eigeman, about a commonly neurotic high school teacher falling in love despite his Freudian therapist’s best advice. It won the Tribeca Film Festival’s “Best Narrative Feature Made in New York” in 2006. Music by John Zorn. It opened a 2-3 weeks ago in several cities (see the “View Release Schedule” link in the upper right corner of the film’s web site). Go see it! It’s very New York and cute as hell.

“No Plague Like Home” and three other episodes of Electra Elf by underground film making icon Nick Zedd (IMDB, Wikipedia, his blog) are showing this this coming Saturday, May 26, 8pm at the Millennium Film Workshop, 66 E. 4th St. in Manhattan.

After a year or so of quietly stalking Zedd, Adi has managed to become his principal editor and good friend in the past six months. Of those showing now, she edited “No Plague Like Home,” a freaky conspiracy-theory green-screen puppet-show low-budget special-effects extravaganza. The others he completed earlier.

Here’s what Millennium Film’s site
has to say about the Zedd films it will be showing:

Nick Zedd, long identified with a film movement entitled, The Cinema of Transgression, is a filmmaker, performer, writer and editor. Always highly controversial, his work has been embraced by some and disliked by others. With his recent Electra Elf series, he seems to have moved in surprisingly different direction.

In 2004, Nick Zedd premiered a television series on MNN called THE ADVENTURES OF ELECTRA ELF. Combining action, satire and special effects, the series features local artstars and comedians. Weekly episodes present superheroes and supervillains in absurd morality plays assaulting consensus reality in an offbeat manner.

“NO PLAGUE LIKE HOME deconstructs the genre, addressing the issues of implantable microchips and the 9-11 Inside Job along with the dangers of watching television.” - N.Z.

I’m so proud of her! I can’t wait to see what 2008 brings her way. Maybe, “Spider-Man IV”?