Best Video Rolls Out Red Carpet

Casting a mock Oscar ballot at Best Video.

February 27, 2017 - Standing amidst shelves lined with DVDs and tables stacked with mock awards ballots, Best Video founder Hank Paper thought for a minute on which movie would win, and which movie should win, this year’s Oscar for Best Picture.

“La La Land, which is a tribute to everything that Hollywood holds dear, will probably win,” Paper said, referring to Damien Chazelle’s nostalgia-tinged musical about two aspiring artists in contemporary Los Angeles.

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Student Filmmakers’ Work Shines At “BestFest”

Rae O'Hara, 18, student filmmaker from East Haven High School (Thomas Breen photo)

December 12, 2016 - Sitting in front of a white wall covered in band names, bumper stickers, and other vibrant logos and designs, each employee at Darkside Tattoo looked into Rae O’Hara’s camera with a smile and reflected on the art of tattooing.

Carlos Lopez became a tattoo artist when he realized that he didn’t want to be in the streets or go to jail anymore. Dan Adamczyk paints in watercolors or sculpts in clay when he gets tired of making drawing after drawing after drawing. Mikey Har made his first tattoo while stationed at an army barracks in Germany, drawing an L on his buddy’s left foot and an R on top of his right.

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Local Filmmakers Prepare Students For Fall Film Festival

Thomas Breen photo

June 30, 2016 - Surrounded by shelves upon shelves of DVDs, with the Great Directors section to his left and Cult Classics to his right, 17-year-old filmmaker Caden Rodems-Boyd reflected on the challenges of making a feature-length movie while just a junior in high school.

“It was really, really difficult,” he said, looking out at a small but rapt audience of fellow high school students who had gathered at Best Video on Whitney Avenue on Tuesday night.

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Best Video Turns Lens On Kubrick

Mark Schenker (Thomas Breen photo)

November 25, 2015 - General Jack Ripper (Sterling Hayden) knows that the Communists want to contaminate his precious bodily fluids. His jaw clamped on a cigar and his chin cocked at an obscene angle, Ripper outlines his nuclear-war-precipitating conspiracy theory with ferocious calm. His snarling face fills the frame, suggesting that, for the top brass, there is no difference between a threat to one’s sexual potency and a threat to the nation.

This scene, along with many others in Stanley Kubrick’s masterful 1964 Cold War satire Dr. Strangelove, is not just amusing and kind of terrifying. It also challenges the audience to think: about this character and his profound insecurities, about his embodiment of broader national obsessions with violence and victory, and about the strategies that filmmakers use to communicate certain ideas. Kubrick’s movies are dense with these types of moments, continually blurring the boundaries between entertainment, art, and biting social commentary.

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On Broadway

Elihu Rubin (Thomas Breen photo)

October 9, 2015 - There’s a picture of Robert Moses tucked behind Book Trader Café on Chapel Street. His arms are crossed and he’s smiling, though there’s something a little uneasy about his pose: his tie is slightly off-center, his face half-hidden in shadow. He looks eager to get back to work.

For the observant pedestrian, here hangs a picture of a man who was never elected to public office, but who nonetheless exerted so much power, built and destroyed and reshaped so much of New York City over the course of the 20th century, that cities throughout the country are still wrestling with the influence of his vision: one of swift, merciless, inescapable modernity.

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