(downtown) omaha lit fest

The featherproof books & MAKE magazine Slowdown Happy Hour, featuring readings by Zach Plague, Jonathan Messinger, Starlee Kine & Amy Guth. @ the Slowdown, 729 N. 14th St.

Dean Rank’s film Head, which he wrote and directed, premieres Saturday, Sept. 13th at AV-aerie -  2000 W Fulton , Suite 310, 
Chicago, IL.  Doors open at 7:30 pm and the film screens at 8:30 pm.  The screening will be followed by a Q & A with the cast and crew, as well as a musical performance from Jim Becker and Reid Coker.

Dean curated the screening of experimental videos at the issue 6 release party.  We’re pleased to help him announce Head is ready for the world.

The film features Dean De Matteis as the horse-headed man and Kate Sheehy as the woman who wants to be close to him, with Damon Locks and Jim Finn.  Darryl Miller photographed the film, which also features a haunted score written by Jim Becker and Reid Coker.

Advance praise for Head:

               “From Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête to the recent Penelope, featuring a girl with a pig’s snout, “Beauty and the Beast” is a story that cinematically endures, but no one has approached it quite like Dean Rank with Head. In this case, the main character is neither leonine nor porcine, but equine. Rank subverts the classic fairytale into a fabulist nightmare filled with Monte Carlos, an alarming analyst, and Freud’s unheimlich.  Kate Sheehy delivers a touching opening performance with the horse-man (Dean De Matteis). While Head continually two-steps between horror and humor, the base note is one of profound sadness.

The film’s fulcrum is a primeval forest scene that dramatically shifts from narrative to musical spectacle. Though the film could devolve into mere jokiness, the director never lets it.  A palpable sadness pervades the film’s surprises, where we are lead through a labyrinth of fender-benders, to the graffiting of “I love you more than god,” to a trio of singing dryads, to a Tarantino-style dialogue between horse-man and a character donned in a #9 jersey.

A notable D.P. (Darryl Miller), good special effects, solid acting, a superb score by Jim Becker and Reid Coker, and smart, droll dialogue make this film unnervingly enjoyable, resonating with visual metaphors that will linger beyond the film’s finale: a clay horse ridden by a cowgirl, a marshmallow head splotched with bloody handprints and a series of neon Xeroxes.Head is an exploration of identity and estrangement, of misconnection and disconnection, when the masks we wear become who we are.”

—Simone Muench, Asst. Prof. of English, Lewis University    

From MAKE 5 contributor John McNally:

My new book WHO CAN SAVE US NOW?: BRAND-NEW SUPERHEROES AND THEIR AMAZING (SHORT) STORIES, coedited with writer extraordinaire Owen King, is available now from Amazon and should be available everywhere soon if it isn’t already on the shelves. As the title states, the book features 22 brand-spanking-new stories featuring brand-spanking-new superheroes, with a few villains thrown in for good measure. (For those of you who happen to be from — or around — Burbank, Illinois, my story features a superhero who lives in Burbank.) A few of the writers included are Jennifer Weiner, George Singleton, David Yoo, Elizabeth Crane, Richard Dooling, Jim Shepard, Will Clarke, Kelly Braffet, J. Robert Lennon, Sean Doolittle, Tom Bissell, and Sam Weller. It also includes kick-ass illustrations by the wildly talented Chris Burnham.