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Candid

[via]

He’s got enough skin left. Ve do one more take.

Oh happy day! The cinetrix gets to flack two pals with one post by directing your attention to Gerald Peary's review of Chris Fujiwara's latest, The World and Its Double: The Life and Work of Otto Preminger. If anything, ol' Otto was even more of a shit than you've heard. Here's Peary's own telling story about l'auteur terrible.

In 1980, the imperious 74-year-old Hollywood director came to Boston on a publicity tour for The Human Factor, a flawed adaptation of a Graham Greene novel that would prove his final film. I walked in to find Preminger screaming at a local radio reporter who had dared to request a five-minute interview without having first seen the movie. The reporter withered as Preminger blasted him. There would be no radio talk. A few minutes later, the famous filmmaker of Laura (1944), the formidable battler against the puritanical Hays Code, sat among reporters for a round-robin interview. Stephen Schiff, the Phoenix’s film editor, asked Preminger a somewhat challenging question. Preminger reached across the table and yanked Schiff’s beard. Hard! The Phoenix’s own yelled out: “OUCH!”

Figures. Factor was one of Greene's "entertainments," after all. You can read about more of the "hundred well-documented tales" of infamy  in Fujiwara’s book here.

Pullquote and the amazing Technicolor dream clip

Technicolor For Industrial Films, featuring fellow wonders rayon, linoleum, and Jell-O.

P.S.A.

Paying work of various stripes has kept the cinetrix busy all day, so she's ceding the floor to Wallace Shawn.

Blood-stained satin shoes and flying toupees

When the cinetrix was a graduate student--and miserable, natch--she spent a fair amount of time in the stacks of the Reg reading books not for class. Her three faves were The Battle of Brazil, Shock Value, and The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book.

Of course, her love affair with Astaire and Rogers dates back much further. From them she learned about the three B's: bias-cut dresses, bricolage, and Bowes [Maj. Edward], and reconsidered a fourth, Bullwinkle [Fractured Fairy Tales, to be precise], with a heightened sense of appreciation for the vocal stylings of stateside upper-class twit extraordinaire Edward Everett Horton.

The clip above condenses the most fully realized Astaire-Rogers film, Swing Time, into my two favorite dance sequences, but it neglects my parents' favorite number, A Fine Romance. Thrill to it below.

Science!

Shout that post title using your best stentorian Thomas Dolby-era bark, won't you? Then cast your eyes on New Scientist's post-Iron Man celebration of cinema that gets science right. [via]

As you might imagine, some of the usual suspects are listed. [Why, yes, we are looking at you, Gattaca.] But the cinetrix particularly liked the rationale behind the inclusion of Alien:

... It makes the list, though, for the vicious creature the crew encounters, in particular for the finer details of its life cycle.

The alien goes through three stages over the course of the film. It begins as an egg, which produces a kind of head-sized spider, equipped with a strong tail and a vaguely reptilian appearance. This attaches itself to the nearest living body and, while clamped over the face, implants an embryo into its victim's stomach. It then falls off and dies. The embryo survives by feeding on the victim's digested food. Eventually it breaks out (in the least pleasant way possible) and runs amok on the ship.

Every element of the life cycle can be found in nature, variously in parasites, robber wasps and social insects.

Well, when you put it like that....

Hunu?

Fans of The January Man [crickets], rejoice! Sharp-eyed SR sent along this missive the other day:

Have you seen the collection of feature films they have up on Hulu? It's a really weird collection -- everything from Requiem for a Dream to Schwarzenegger's early Hercules In New York. Monty Python and Neil La Bute.

It's like someone ran through a video store blindfolded and digitized everything they could carry.

[Including two Dr. Goldfoot titles--two!] The cinetrix can see it now--an update of Supermarket Sweep that involves cinegeeks sprinting through the vaults of various studios. What would you pitch into your cart? Come to think of it, that actually might be how the majors decide which titles in their libraries get the BluRay treatment.

Anyway, do be sure to check out the user comments for flicks like Bob Balaban's primal-scene scream Parents. Comedy gold.

The Gun Club

To round off the inadvertent firearms theme that seems to have developed here, a little story.

The cinetrix was mooning about the drug store the other day, waiting for a scrip to be filled. She'd remembered a million things she'd been meaning to pick up, as happens when one has time to kill, and had already assembled a collection of necessities that'd set her back a pretty penny when she stumbled across a bin of DVDs.

Aside: You should know that unlike the males of her dark-dwelling species, the cinetrix does not boast a vast library of films. Among other things, she lives with the 'Fesser, so there's already metric tons of scholarly tomes, not to mention CDs and vinyl, to contend with. So, yeah, I don't tend to buy movies much/

Anyway, where was I? Ah, yes. The sort of films that are generally sold at the supermarket or the drug store are low-middling to piss-poor at best, but you never know.... I still cherish my VHS copy of Unzipped plucked from the previously viewed bin at that Blockbuster on Broadway [by Tisch] back in 1996. And, as I mentioned, I was killing time. Which  I think is how I walked out of the joint the proud owner of a $6.99 copy of Drop Dead Gorgeous.

Now, I know that Dick and Bring It On get all the love as far as that moment in the Kiki oeuvre goes, but I'd been thinking about this cynical little Minnesotan beauty pageant flick ever since I saw Juno. Maybe because the films share Allison Janney, she who can do no wrong.

Anyway, nothing profound to report save that this twisted flick--allegedly a documentary, which I'd forgotten--holds up fairly well. Dunst's earnest Amber Atkins has entered the Sarah Rose Miss Teen Pageant because her idol, Diane Sawyer, paid for college with her pageant winnings.*

Of course, a pre-Fat Actress Kirsty Alley plays mother to Denise Richards', Amber's competition. [Utility comic relief Sam McMurray shows up her rich and consistently inappropriate dad.] And Ellen Barkin is snaggled-toothed Dunst's trailer-trash mama. Naturally. Amy Adams does a horny turn as a slutty cheerleader in her movie debut, and Brittany Murphy--recently reviled by Manohla Dargis--reprises her Clueless persona. There's a white girl being raised by her adoptive Asian parents, and a butch gal who thinks best riding a thresher. Something about the vibrations. Matt Malloy lingers around the corners as a pedophilic pageant judge in denial. Lutheran and pageant humor abound in equal measure. And there's a dance number featuring Jesus on the cross--really--that must be seen. Because Jesus loves winners.

Which is all a round-about way of asking , What's your favorite cut-out bin find?

*True!

Under the gun

Back in a bit.

Shots in the dark

The hell? Now Graham Fuller is filing capsule reviews for the Phoenix? The cinetrix doesn't begrudge the brother a paycheck, mind, but... O tempora! O movies!