Motion

The way Julie Delpy floats away from the camera only to turn toward the lens, radiantly filling the frame, has long felt to me like the quintessence of a certain moment in 1990s art cinema -- all milky white skin and sunshine, and then it gets dark.

Stewart Klawans: Karol still sees Dominique as a bride, turning to smile while the air itself veils her in white. (The image pops up magically, without narrative function.) We may even guess that he views her as the cinematographer, Edward Kłosinśki, sees Julie Delpy: as a flawless, pale, sunbeam-haired reflector of light. No wonder that Karol cannot make love to the Dominique who is only flesh and blood; no wonder that he is destroyed when she proves her corporeality with someone else.

Dan Kois notes in Slate: “This film is about humiliation,” Kieslowski says in an interview in the White disc’s extras

tribute to drive from tom haugomat & bruno mangyoku on Vimeo.

Vrrrroooommmmm!

"Finally, Drive gets its own board game in the tradition of beloved panic-attack-inducing Operation." [Ryan Russell via Vulture]

The cinetrix is keen to see The Elephant Boy get the Criterion treatment. There's one scene in particular I remember fondly from the Flaherty Seminar screening [each programmer must include one Flaherty work as part of his or her program] that will only be improved by a sharper image: that elephant stampede. If you've seen the film, I know you know exactly what I'm talking about.

Here's Michael Koresky: The Hungarian-born British cinema kingpin Alexander Korda’s film version of Kipling’s story, made for his studio, London Films, was such an odd, precarious hybrid—directing credit went to both American ethnographic documentarian Robert Flaherty and Korda’s brother Zoltán, maker of glossy adventures—that it needed a strong, likable center, and the effortlessly magnetic Shaik (renamed Sabu by Alexander Korda himself) supplied that and more in Elephant Boy.

Shifting now to the elephantine of the Grand Old Party persuasion, Mark Feeney takes exception to W.'s movie-watching style:

"Two weeks after we moved into the White House, Laura and I held our first movie night in the Family Theater. Situated on the ground floor of the White House, the theater features forty-six comfortable chairs and a ninety-three-square-foot projection screen. The Motion Picture Association of America, led for years by a fascinating Texan, Jack Valenti, generously made movies available to the first family. We never had to sit through coming attractions." -- George W. Bush, "Decision Points"

(Say what you will about the man as a president. Clearly, he's no movie fan. "Sit through coming attractions"? Sit through them? That's like a classical music lover complaining about having to listen to an orchestra tuning up or -- perhaps a better analogy for the former principal owner of the Texas Rangers -- a baseball fan complaining about having to watch batting practice.)

The Umbrella Man - Errol Morris for The New York... by Flixgr

Errol Morris observed the 48th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination by investigating the Umbrella Man.

THE FUTURIST! pens a lovely paean to a somewhat maligned musical, Woody Allen's Everyone Says I Love You:

THE FUTURIST! loved this experiment by his favorite movie maker. Oh, it wasn’t perfect, not at all, but it achieved what THE FUTURIST! thinks Allen wanted to achieve … maybe with a few false steps along the way. He recalls that when he saw another film at his local mega-mega-plex, he sneaked back to the auditorium that was showing this film. He walked into the darkness and took a seat at the back and found he had crept in at one of the moments he loved the most … the romantic dance along the Seine between Woody and Goldie Hawn. It’s a bit much to call it a “dance”, but this sequence expresses most of what THE FUTURIST! feels those musicals stirred in him as a young lad … the magic mixture of song and dance and film. Goldie literally floats above and around Woody in a surreal moment only the movies can provide. Her lighter than air dance expresses her feelings about love and her character’s regret. It lifted THE FUTURIST!, too. Most movies don’t extend their hand to you and take you away on a care-free cloud like they once did years ago … and when they are over, you find yourself back where you started just like Fred and Ginger on that park bench … back to reality and left with the ghost of a smile.

TF! is entirely correct, although the cinetrix prefers the antic energy of the number in the clip above. Hooray hooray hoorah!