Time to close some long-open tabs.
- My dear pal Daniel from Itsafuckingfilm.com (Quick, gritty but accessible film reviews. Like if Ebert actually had a pair.) launched the self-explanatory Not Fake Criterions.
- Hilobrow's Josh Glenn took on "authochthonic McGuffins" (a.k.a. movies that "hinge on more or less bald stipulations of metaphysically preposterous states of affairs."): "[T]hanks to what Walter Benjamin calls the “second nature” effect, it’s tricky to distinguish between laws of nature and social laws, nature and culture. I’m exaggerating when I suggest that it’s every bit as impossible to imagine Walter Matthau being hired as a little league coach, or Eddie Murphy firing a pistol, as it is to imagine the same day repeating itself endlessly… but I do so in order to draw attention to the absurdities which realistic movies ask us to take for granted. I know — The Jerk is absurdist, not realistic. My real point is that all realistic movies are absurdist."
- I really want to put together a group Halloween costume of "the end credits of Buckaroo Banzai," which may be why the most recent Film Comment Trivial Top 20 list, "The Most Indelible Songs from 1980s Films," amused me so. (That and knowing just enough of the attributed contributors to speculate about who was responsible for what.)
- 'Swonderful news: Arlene Croce's "The Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers Book" (1972) and John Mueller's "Astaire Dancing: The Musical Films" (1985) are back in print and available bundled.
- Finally, belated kudos to Charles Taylor, for saying this on his Voice ballot: "Critics now seem far less interested in talking to an audience --in alerting them to what they might miss, warning them off overhyped stinkers, making people excited about going to the movies and helping them sort through their feelings about what they've just seen -- than they do in talking to each other. What passes for criticism now is often no more than arcane discussions of issues that have no bearing on actually watching the movie. Or else minute dissections of individual sequences at the end of which the movie is in the same state as that frog in your high-school biology class. No matter what you thought about \The Social Network,\ if all it inspires in you is a discussion about whether it's sexist; if \Carlos\ prompts a disquisition on how adherence to \realism\ has trumped the imaginative vision of directors; if you have to qualify praise for a well-made, accessible, and subtle picture like \The King's Speech\ with the patronizing adjective \middlebrow,\ you're not giving readers, present or future, anything they can actually use. This isn't inviting readers into a discussion as much as allowing them to be spectators at a preening boys' club. There may be some ways in which size does matter -- but not the size of your DVD collection."
