Posts with tag brad neely
SXSW Review: We Are Wizards
Filed under: Documentary », Independent », SXSW », Theatrical Reviews », Festival Reports », Harry Potter », Cinematical Indie »

Quick, raise your hand if you're a Harry Potter fan. Yeah, there are a lot of boy wizard fans, which is probably why a documentary about Harry Potter fandom sounded like a great idea. We Are Wizards, though, is not so much a documentary about Harry Potter fandom in general, as it is about the "Wizard Rock" bands that have grown up around the franchise, and a couple of the bigger Harry Potter fan sites.
The film introduces us to some of these Wizard Rock bands, including Harry and the Potters (brothers Paul and Joe DeGeorge), Draco and the Malfoys (brothers Brian Ross and Bradley Mehlenbacher), and The Hungarian Horntails, headed up by seven-year old punk rocker Darius and his four-year-old brother, Holden, who write songs they call "dragon rock."
Washington: The Funniest Short Film I've Ever Seen
Filed under: Animation », Comedy », Independent », SXSW », Shorts », Cinematical Indie »
About a week before I hopped a plane to last March's South by Southwest Film Festival, a funny-looking envelope arrived on my doorstep. It looked a whole lot like the one David Poland received around the same time, and inside said package was an animated short called Washington. I threw the disc into my suitcase and broke it out while I was hanging with my festival posse. (Erik Childress and Eric Snider, if you must know!) To say the three of us "broke down laughing almost to the point of involuntary urination" would not be an understatement, and we spent the next week quoting Washington to one another. ("I'll kick you apart" makes a great stupid threat.)Brainchild of the unquestionably twisted Brad Neely, Washington is a mega-funky animated rock video that goes to great lengths describing how amazingly awesome our first president was. Fantastic blog Screenhead (YouTube now) gives you the chance to enjoy the mini-flick in its entirety, although it might not be "work-safe," as they say. Me, I can't get enough of the thing. I wanna put the song on my iPod.
And if you don't find the short amusing at all, at least you spent 2.5 minutes to figure out what my sense of humor is like.








