Some mostly film-related prose I enjoyed...
[via]
Call the Doctor!
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George Méliès, innovator [and Thomas Edison, thieving asshole]:
And make no mistake, Méliès has no intention of hiding his light under a bushel, or of being ripped off again. The copyright difficulties he encountered on his previous film are sidestepped by a cinema history first: the practical, if inelegant, innovation of placing the studio trademark in the film itself. There are no dialogue captions or intertitles here, so the Star Film logo is displayed prominently in the scenery, nestled among the trees on Crusoe's island, or perched on the wreck of his ship.
Via Mubi and the delightful Danny Kasman:
KIAROSTAMI: It didn't effect my film, because I have a Japanese side myself, but I wonder if it would have been possible for someone else. It wouldn’t have been easy for someone with a different state of mind. But I like discipline and I like their way of being, so I could get along with it. It's quite interesting to give you an example. For instance, when I have a Japanese photographer team coming for just one single portrait, and I'm supposed to meet them at 4 at the hotel, I come back at 2:30 and see some people, some lights and everything in the lobby and think maybe it's for me. But now, it's an hour and a half early, so it can't be them, so I go up and rest and when I come down at 4 it is them and they've been ready for hours. So they work under such pressure, with such discipline, with so many stiff rules that while they've invented the digital tool they are not at peace enough with it to acknowledge it and take advantage of it. I think it takes many generations. Maybe after a hundred years there will be a generation that will actually take for granted the fact that it gives them some freedom. At the moment, this is not the case yet. I've never seen such hard working people ever, anywhere in the world. This freedom and lightheartedness the digital tool gives you is something they've not considered yet.
From a conversation with Brian [the "de" is for "fuck DCP"] de Palma:
DE PALMA: Well, it's kind of strange to see them loading [film] magazines that can only do takes of a certain length. You don't have that problem shooting digitally. No—it's the lighting, you're shooting beautiful women, beautiful locations, you have very stylized lighting. I haven't seen this done digitally well yet, but I'm sure they'll get there.
From a conversation with Rick Linklater:
How did you pick Greece?
Like the others, it could have been anywhere. But there's something I like about the ancient qualities of Greece. It's so old, it kind of resonates just by being there, in a way. There's nothing we can experience or think about that the Greeks didn’t already deal with, because anything to do with the human psyche, the human experience, it has been philosophized about. To be somewhere that predates Christianity ... I met a woman who was like, "Yeah, a month ago, I dug up a coin that was 3,000 years old." It's like, Wow, what is that like to have that kind of connection?
Wither Tim Burton?
What happened to Burton? How did a gifted visual director whose late-'80s/early-'90s movies coupled a cartoonist's expressiveness with a deeply humane empathy for the socially dispossessed end up a mere journeyman, trapped in a hollow version of his own aesthetic like Beetlejuice imprisoned in that cardboard town, obliging Hollywood's bottomless hunger for new shit based on old shit? (Burton hasn't made a movie from an original screenplay since 1994's Ed Wood; these days his obsession with re-creating totemic material from his childhood is once again paying off commercially, but not creatively.) And how much of this is Johnny Depp's fault? Time for a tough-love scroll through one of modern moviemaking's most depressing IMDb pages.
Because I am An Old, I loved all three parts of the Onion AV Club's Best Films of the 90s (and the Worst Films), but it's the Orphans, Outliers, and Personal Favorites that really get at individual writers' formulation of a critical sensibility, essentially. So, props to Sam, for Grosse Pointe Blank; to Mike D'Angelo, for Buffalo '66 and Trust; to Nathan Rabin, for Quiz Show; to Tasha Robinson, for After Life, The Last Seduction, and The Age of Innocence; and Alison, for Office Space.
Elsewhere, Vadim takes on David Denby and Devin Faraci, who are... white men with opinions about movies and some semblance of bully pulpit access that encourages each to bloviate? I think? Whatever, Vadim's hilarious and on point.
When I speak of moviegoers, I mean people who get out of the house and into a theater as often as they can; or people with kids, who back up rare trips to the movies with lots of recent DVDs and films ordered on demand. I do not mean the cinephiles, the solitary and obsessed [...] They are extraordinary, some of them, and their blogs and websites generate an exfoliating mass of knowledge and opinion, a thickening density of inquiries and claims, outraged and dulcet tweets. Yet it is unlikely that they can do much to build a theatrical audience for the movies they love. And directors still need a sizable audience if they are to make their next picture about something more than a few people talking on the street.
What's remarkable about this argument is how quickly it moves from lamenting that some $30 million dreams go unrealized (free market capitalism's a fickle patron of the arts) to the idea that the near-total absence of mass cultural dreams invalidates film's more obscure achievements, and their lack of mass-viewing cachet in turn weakens the very medium itself. Denby uses "exfoliating" to describe the films he marginalizes and those who love them: they're dead skin. That's fine and leaves my enjoyment of these instantly archaic objects intact.
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I guess someone was really rude to Devin Faraci at Lincoln Center, which is too bad. This isn't really an argument so much as the dismantling of fusty straw man stereotypes and vague assertions about the awesomeness of The Dark Knight trumping film snob milestones. I have no idea why Faraci's so angry or takes this so strongly: logically, if he's won, no one cares about the gasps of the dying breed. And since there's really no conversation to be had when someone's convinced that the wanking dullness of nearly every art film is predetermined, I think he should rest easy, assured snooty weedy types aren't gunning for his terrain. (Faraci's conflation of all arthouse types into one monolithic clique is a massive oversimplification. E.g. a director I spoke to once who candidly, late at night, complained about being unable to get funding because of fundamentally commercial, hollow directors siphoning up the money - like Pedro Almodovar! There are schisms within schisms, which make interfactional debate scintillating. It's a good time to be a cinephile willing to do the work of sorting out the flood of high art cinema. That everyone doesn't feel that way doesn't frustrate me; the ability to see and discuss it, and to keep up with the dizzying flood of restorations, excavations and discoveries alongside new films is a rush. It's OK if you don't want to play! Honest. There are so many other things to talk about.)
Also funny, from Dana's take on Taken 2:
Usually, action heroes tend to function as proxies for the viewer. We’re meant to imagine ourselves in their place, punching out Alan Rickman and rescuing Gwyneth Paltrow (or, if I might conjure up an even better movie, the reverse). But Taken didn’t make you want to be Liam Neeson, exactly—it made you want to be his daughter. (Or maybe his son: There must have been male viewers also drawn in by the primal daddy fantasies that Taken tapped into.) The notion of an über-competent, unstoppably brave, impossibly calm superdad who will find and protect you at all costs—and then, when he finally flings open the sex-dungeon door and lifts you out, it’s Liam Neeson—well, that’s powerful stuff.
Elsewhere, Dave Bry girds himself for the release of Cloud Atlas:
I just had a conversation with a couple of kids about this last weekend. They're eleven and thirteen, and I'm friends with their dad Mark, and I asked them what their favorite books and movies were, and they both mentioned The Outsiders, both S.E. Hinton's book, and the movie that Francis Ford Coppola made out of it with Ralph Macchio and Matt Dillon. That book was a favorite of mine when I was a kid, too. Seeing the movie of it was one of the great moments of cultural betrayal of my young life. In the book, the character Dallas, or "Dally," was described as having "small, sharp animal teeth," and hair "so blonde it was almost white" and eyes that were "blue, blazing ice, cold with a hatred of the world." I imagined him as nearly albino. And thin and lanky and wounded-looking. And this look, his shocking, sort of ghostly appearance, with its hints of inbreeding, became a big part of my understanding of his character. His psychic wounds came in part from looking so different from everyone else, so unhealthy, this was part of his outsiderness. But then in the movie, they cast Matt Dillon as Dally. Brown-haired, brown-eyed, super-handsome Matt Dillon! And they didn't even bleach his hair blonde! If kids had said "WTF?!" back in 1983, I definitely would have said that. (I wonder if David Mitchell would have, too. I bet he would've.) I was furious. This didn't make any sense, and it really robbed something from me that I'd found in the book. I explained this to Mark's kids, and they agreed, but they were not as upset by it as I was, and, apparently, sort of still am. They're pretty well-balanced-seeming, Mark's kids. I think they might have even seen the movie before reading the book, somehow. I don't know how. But they were like, "Oh, yeah, Dally did have blonde hair in the book, didn't he? Huh."
It keeps going, and it is so good about how adaptations can feel like betrayal and how movies can break your heart and make you question what the fuck is wrong with everybody:
Cloud Atlas happens to be starring Tom Hanks. Tom Hanks. Tom Hanks! Now, of course I loved Tom Hanks in "Bosom Buddies" and "Family Ties" and Bachelor Party and Nothing in Common with Jackie Gleason (especially Nothing in Common with Jackie Gleason) and Splash and all that. But then he became so Tom-Hanks-America's-Favorite-Nice-Guy-Superstar around the time of A League of Their Own and Sleepless In Seattle. AndPhiladelphia, which, I admit to thinking he was very good in, but still. And then Forrest Gumphappened, and everybody started talking in that horribly annoying mentally-disabled way he did in that movie, and I saw the movie, and I'm so sorry I did, because it makes you want to puke in your shoes and wash your eyes out with lye, but it won't work. You can never unsee something like that. And then I remember seeing a full-spread two-page ad in the Times one day which showed him in that dumb white suit, and they'd made a huge American flag out of all the stars that different reviewers at different newspapers and magazines had given the movie. And it said something to the effect of, "AMERICA AGREES: FORREST GUMP IS THE MOVIE OF THE SUMMER! GO SEE IT AGAIN BECAUSE EVERYONE ELSE IS GOING TO SEE IT OVER AND OVER AND AGAIN."
I remember seeing the ad and feeling more like I was living in a fascist, totalitarian state than I'd ever felt before. Fair to the man himself or not, I swore that day that I would never watch another Tom Hanks movie, ever.
More disappointment! Poet Michael Robbins finds Neill Young's memoir "as messy as the druggiest Crazy Horse solo":
Instead, if you read Waging Heavy Peace, you will learn more than you ever wanted to know about model trains and old cars, Mr. Young’s obsessive hobbies. You will thrill to PowerPointillist descriptions of his business meetings. You will be told that all good things must pass, but no one knows why. You will be made to feel guilty about listening to MP3s. You will wonder just how many sentences in a single memoir can begin “Anyway …” You will marvel at the wonders of the Lincvolt. (I think this is a kind of electric car, but it is so boring to read about that I learned to start skimming whenever the word “Lincvolt” loomed in my peripheral vision.)
On her majesty's secret servant:
Scrutinising these photographs can feel like detective work. A snap of one-time 007 George Lazenby and Diamonds’ Bond girl Jill St. John relaxing by a pool in late 1969 seems to imply that Lazenby was actually hired again for the role and then walked away. Did St. John get the part because she was his girlfriend at the time? Pure speculation of course but that is part of the fun. These photographs will send your mind tripping in all sorts of directions, particularly a nightmare print of Roger Moore topless in bed sporting the creepiest reading glasses ever. Actually Moore is a photographer’s dream. He plays up, mugs and pouts all on cue. O’Neill’s pic of Moore pretending to snip tailor Douglas Hayward’s tie has been seen before (it was published in Dressed to Kill: The Suited Hero), yet always brings a smile.
In his most recent column, Adrian Martin gets handsy:
the choreography is not only all about their hands, but that it builds, with enormous emotional suspense to those pairs of hands touching each other tenderly.
This mini-drama, almost imperceptible, happens in stages. Stage 1: Fred and Cyd, each in their own characteristic way, keep their hands to themselves as they walk, deep in thought. Hands in pockets, hands that busy themselves with trivial pastimes. Hands that begin gestures of communication but then abandon them: Fred looks as if he about to express something in word or by gesture, but then gives it up and scratches his chin instead.
Stage 2: the dance begins, and sweeps them both up in a mutual movement. But look at the non-communion of their arms and hands: hers are poised at her side, beseeching but still self-contained; while his are clasped behind his back, one of the strangest gestures ever for a Hollywood musical.
Stage 3: the hands begin a tentative conversation. They seem to trace out a mutual space that might ultimately connect these two bodies, but still there is a distance between them, and the lack of a shared corporeal code.
Stage 4: The consummation of hands arrives, but it so understated, so woven into the general pattern of the dance, that it is almost hidden. Fred and Cyd get into a spin and. in that, their hands brush, touch, slide along each others' arms; it is only when the turn is over that a mutually supportive locking of hands finally occurs.
And one last bit of business:
Wait a minute! If Thornhill is heading west on East 59th Street, how the heck does he end up parking in front of the Plaza – on the opposite side of the street? Surely Hitch must have cheated the shot!
…swinging fully around…
…and finally parking directly in front of the Plaza. How did they manage it? You can see the police officer just behind Cary Grant’s head holding back three lanes of (presumably pissed off) traffic:
