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Ladies first!

An intriguing public service announcement:

The First Weekenders Group supports features directed by women the first weekend they arrive at the box office. The service goes to over a thousand people who are helping raise the box office numbers for women-directed features. Buying tickets to women-directed features is how we can make a direct impact on the industry.

We attend features directed by women the first weekend they arrive at the box office. To accomplish this we buy tickets and go to the movies. Please purchase a ticket even if you can not attend the movie that week. An email comes out each Thursday that highlights those features in theaters now. The list focuses on New York and Los Angeles where distributors often determine the films' distribution path.

The list is compiled and edited by Tara Veneruso and Katie Lanegran who are both passionate about raising the awareness about features directed by women. Please let us know if your film is opening in LA or NYC so we can include it!

You can sign up for the email here. [via the Winter issue of Bust]

Monoliths

Last night, while the 'Fesser was working late, I decided to redress an oversight in my film education and took in a glorious widescreen presentation of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which I'd never seen. As a rule, I'm on the fence about Kubrick's fearful symmetry and dark humor: I don't seek out his films, necessarily, but I usually find something to enjoy when I do see one. And I think I've only seen Strangelove, Lolita, and Spartacus projected. ["I love you, Spartacus."]

In 2003, I feel a little foolish writing about 2001. A few brief impressions, a notion I have yet to tease out, and a segue will have to suffice.

First off, and not surprising, is just how well the film holds up technologically, as a piece of filmmaking and a set of problems to be solved. Somehow the film feels like a collaboration between Kasparov and Deep Blue. Kubrick's special effects are fully and oppressively realized and startlingly beautiful. But what a control freak. Even in the vast screen acreage of Cinerama, he is never not directing the viewer's eye and attention. And I can't remember the last time I've been to a film with an overture and an intermission. Overall, I did find it a bit shiny, though, and on balance prefer Andrei Tarkovsky's equally eerie on a much smaller budget sci-fi epic Stalker.

But does 2001 still deserve its many accolades? Hell, yeah. The essentialism of the many long sequences without language, and without actors in some cases, is almost ambiotically lulling and primal. [Also, I now have a greater appreciation for the failure of the first 20 minutes of the infamous "Star Wars Holiday Special," which shows home life among the Wookies in a no-subtitle sequence clearly modeled after the "Dawn of Man" segment of 2001. Nice try, CBS.]

The closest I can come to locating the sensation of watching those long stretches of pure cinema, in which narrative both does and does not unspool in a way we've been trained to expect as viewers, is--and I think this is weird, too--reading Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, specifically the ten years in 20 pages "Time Passes" section in the middle. There's a similiar meditative quality--a recognition of humanity's place in nature, time, and space--as well as the comfort that comes from surrendering to a master at the top of her or his game. Woolf's stream of consciousness fluidity and Kubrick's seamless suturing of millenia, separated at birth? I'm going to have to think about this.

While I do, let's talk about the music. As it turns out, 2003 is the 70th anniversary of the film score. The November/December issue of Film Comment examines what makes a composed instrumental film score so essential in its listener's guide, "Soundtracks 101." The introduction lays out some ground rules:

[S]oundtrack music... helps tell or interpret a story onscreen and can quicken the relationship between a film and its audience. Some scores stay in the memory longer than the movies themselves. Others have gone beyond the screen to become among the most recognizable music of our time (think Gone with the Wind, The Pink Panther, and Star Wars).

To some, the marriage of music and image is cinema's most exciting aspect. To others, scores that tell us how to feel are inherently redundant and unwelcome--emotional brainwashing. Akira Kurosawa once said, "Ever since the silent film gave way to the talkie, sound has interfered with the image." A score that is too obvious and overbearing can smother a movie. But styles and expectations change. With early film scores, music was generally used as a narrator, scrupulously imitating every movement onscreen. Later, as films grew more complex, equally valid experiments began using music as a counterpoint to the action.

In a sense, true film composing is like scoring a ballet--trying to evoke a story and match certain movements--only in this case the choreography comes first and the composer responds to it.

That master manipulator Kubrick understood how to subvert and harness the innate power of the classical music he chose for 2001's in many ways quite traditional score [OK, except for that atonal monolith screeching.] He knew that his silences became more powerful and portentous in the context of "The Blue Danube" or even "Daisy, Daisy." Yet 2001 doesn't actually make it into the top 101.

Not to worry, there are plenty of argument-starters on the list, from Max Steiner's score for King Kong through the Rozsa-Tiomkin-Hermann-Bernstein stretch of European emigres to the Williams epoch and straight on to Glover Gill's gorgeous dreamlike compositions for Richard Linklater's Waking Life. Nothing like a list or two to stir the pot...

Daisy, daisy: Give me your answer, do. I'm half crazy, all for the love of you.

crazysexycool

Lucia Joyce in Paris, 1929.
This is such a great photo that the cinetrix was casting about for any excuse to post it. Then I remembered this fun fact:

On December 20, 1909, Ireland got its first full-time movie theater when the Volta cinema opened on Mary Street in central Dublin. The venue's mastermind and chief programmer was an impecunious writer named James Joyce. Returning to Ireland from his self-imposed exile in Trieste, Joyce thought he had hit on a surefire moneymaking scheme, and he came with the backing of four continental investors. Alas (or not), the pot of gold at the end of his cinematic rainbow never materialized. Some blamed the rain, others faulted Joyce's programming, but the venture was short-lived. Joyce soon returned to poverty, and writing, on the shores of the Adriatic.

As an augury of the future of Ireland and cinema, this anecdote cuts in two directions. From one angle, it's a gloomy parable of ill omen and failure: bad timing, bad weather, bad judgment, financial collapse. From the reverse angle, that same sign could not be more auspicious: What other national cinema can claim to have been birthed at the hands, not of some addled inventor or carnival huckster, but of that nation's most celebrated artist--in Ireland's case, the paradigmatic auteur of the 20th century? [from Indyweek]

If you ever find yourself at the James Joyce museum inside the Martello tower in Sandycove, be sure to linger long over the hideously clashing tie and waistcoat donated by Samuel Beckett [once Lucia Joyce's intended]. He sent them along with a note that mischieveously suggested Joyce actually wore the two items in combination.

Well, the cinetrix thought it was pretty funny, but then she's been known to stay in on a Saturday night to watch a Beckett documentary she stumbled across on the second-tier local PBS station. The stuff for German TV? Not my cup of tea. But this lovely filmic exercise in the panopticon, starring Buster Keaton, is pretty good stuff.

Bonfire at Vanity Fair?

They sure do have weird notions about number and agreement over at Vanity Fair:

Beth Kseniak, a spokeswoman for Vanity Fair, would say only, "We are a no-smoking building, and we have instructed the staff to adhere to the rules."

Tsk, tsk, Graydon. And the next time you're wondering why you pay copy editors the big bucks, just reread this statement you made to the New York Times about the smoking ban.

But he [Carter] sent an e-mail message. "I find Mayor Bloomberg's smoking laws to be nothing short of asinine and their enforcement to be nothing short of harassment," he wrote.

I would have gone with "the [city's] enforcement of them," to avoid the suggestion that Bloomberg, like VF, also takes the plural. But then, I'm old-fashioned.

Which reminds me of something the 'Fesser once said upon seeing yet another VF cover array of "Young Hollywood" genetic lottery winners: "Pretty soon, they're just going to run a picture of a bunch of zeroes and ones."

Sound + Vision

From The Sound of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music, by Jeff Smith:

[T]hrough their ownership of publishing and record ventures, film companies also derive additional monies from their control of various copyrighted materials.... [T]hese revenues come from two sources--synchronization licenses and master licenses. The synchronization license is negotiated with the publishers of a particular song, and this entitles the licensee to use the notes and lyrics to a particular piece of music. The master use license, on the other hand, is negotiated with a record company, and it enables licensees to use a particular recording. To use "Bohemian Rhapsody" in Wayne's World, filmmakers paid both kinds of licensing fees, one to the song publisher and one to Queen's record company. To license the song "Mickey" in the same film, however, producers paid only a synchronization fee since they used just the song rather than Toni Basil's recording of it. ("Mickey" is briefly sung by Wayne and Cassandra as they ride in his car.)

Teacher says: Everytime you hear James Brown sing "I feel good" in a trailer, Fort Knox Music hears a cash register ring.

From the flaneuse

Fun fact to know and shout The term window-shopping comes from the French phrase faire du lèche-vitrines, which translates, literally, as window licking.

Confidential to James Lileks

Well, I won't be revealing more of my shameless media crushes any time soon [Anthony, Dalton: you can breathe easy].

If you're clicking over here from the Lileks realm, welcome. This is not a political blog. I'm a fan of pop cultural ephemera, celluloid division, as you can see by looking around the place. Feel free to browse.

That said, I feel some explanations are in order. I share Lileks' sense of frustration that the news seems to be in danger of slipping back into the all-OJ, all-the-time mire. However, in this case I feel his target could have been better chosen. I singled out Sievers' email [from November 19, the day before the Turkish bombings, I might add] as an example of a rare, clear-eyed thoughtfulness and honesty, which too often gets obscured by the night-vision haze of the "news" about the latest Paris does... video.

A little background: Sievers and the other producers at Nightline send out a daily email detailing what they're working on for that evening's broadcast, how they arrived at the topic, and who Ted Koppel or the other correspondents will be speaking with. Occasionally, as in the case of fast-breaking stories like the Turkish bombings, they will send out a follow-up email announcing a change of plans.

Some days, the topic is lighter, because even hardened journos need a break from the constant roll-call of human misery. We all do, which is why a story like Michael Jackson's, or Phil Spector's, has legs. People may have been molested, or even murdered, but these things happened and can be grasped in a quantifiable way that war and terror casualities cannot. A little schadenfreude cleanses the palate.

Sievers acknowledged this pull, and I cited it because I understood: Every day I go by the hotel where two of the 9/11 terrorists stayed before they headed off to Logan--every day. Some of those days it's easier to keep my nose buried in Entertainment Weekly while I do. It's human nature.

Finally, if you think that the Bush administration is all broken up about the shift in focus from Whitehall to "a pervy slab of albino Play-Doh," we'll have to agree to disagree. Just remember, this is the same government that's keeping images of American-flag-draped servicepeople's coffins off your TV screens. That, to my mind, is something to get worked up about.

Tell you what. Here's the deal. Subcribe to the Nightline email for a week or so and let me know what you think. Thanks for reading.

Bad Mothers: Now, Voyager

Thanks to the Old Hag's recent call for works of art that make you weep, the cinetrix went once more to the well. Over the past two nights, I watched--again--Bette Davis' ugly duckling to swan trajectory in Now, Voyager, one of the classic tear-jerkers. Davis is more convincing than most actresses in her "before" incarnation, probably because she understood just how much of the power of the "after" image was rooted in her own forceful, jolie-laide will.

But those who fixate on the "Don't let's ask for the moon; we have the stars" Big Movie Moment--excerpted in a thousand clip-reel ads that try to persuade the home viewer that feeble offerings like French Kiss are on the same plane as romances of Casablanca's heft--overlook just how weird and disturbing the premise of this movie is. And I say this loving spinster movies. And knowing it was based on a book.

A brief aside before I launch into my screed: I'm all for people quitting smoking. It's one of the harder things I've done. But Joe Eszterhas has an uphill battle ahead as long as AMC and TCM show us the stars of yesteryear looking so glam and sexy while smoking. You see, Joe Eszterhas is not glam and sexy. Yul Brenner from beyond the grave? Also not glam and sexy. Jerry [Paul Heinreid] lighting two cigarettes at once and handing Charlotte [Bette] one? Swooningly romantic. In Out of the Past, when Jeff [Robert Mitchum] first meets Kathie [Jane Greer], all dressed in white, in a lowdown Mexican bar, and they sit at the table and smoke? Shimmering with sexual tension.

So, yes, yes--starcrossed lovers and cruel fate and tearful farewells and Hollywood's voguish obsession with the therapeutic process and blossoming self-confidence. Now, Voyager has all that. What it also has, though, is Gladys Cooper, who was nominated for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role as Charlotte Vale's monstrously rigid mother, Mrs. Henry Windle Vale. She may appear only in the bookended sequences in Boston, but the autocratic certainty with which the domineering Mrs. Vale makes pronouncements and trammels Charlotte's spirit is more chilling than any maternal monster Hitchcock ever put on screen. She even chastizes the on-the-brink-of-breakdown Charlotte for bringing shame upon the Vale family name as the first to need a trip to the sanitorium [which this Boston denizen finds hard to believe]. Mother, indeed, believes that she knows best.

Now, classic Hollywood narrative is all about what those clever scholars call "couple formation." [Oh, yes, and a stranger comes to town. And a boy becomes a man. Hi, Shane!] A stray, unattached female is unacceptable--she might get in the way of happily ever after, you see. This leads to the preponderance of punishable bad girls, sexless best friends and nursemaids, and dotty spinsters and widows. All those great Una Merkel, Helen Broderick, and Mary Wickes roles. Which is one of the reasons I referred to the premise of Now, Voyager as weird: An older woman is keeping our heroine down. It's rare that an older, unattached woman wields the power and influence Mrs. Vale exerts. And, though severe, she is still quite striking [you can glimpse the ingenue Cooper played opposite early-cinema heartthrobs like Ivor Novello].

Much of this movie is improbable, calling for greater suspension of disbelief than say, a flying monkey might. But the relationship between Charlotte and her mother, even buried under Hollywood's imaginings of Brahmin mores, is all too real, and heartrending. The unwanted child, expected to be the companion to her mother in old age, stifled and smothered by an imperious woman held upright by her own rectitude and conviction that "I have made all the decisions for Charlotte. The right decisions." Good stuff. That's why they call it melodrama, people.

Before you ladies out there head for home and hearth this Thanksgiving, you could do worse than give Now, Voyager a whirl. [And, it seems, Pieces of April, for the can-do-no-wrong Patricia Clarkson's acid maternal performance, although I haven't seen it.] No well-meaning maternal utterance about your appearance or choices will wound after hearing Mrs. Vale let loose.

Moonlight and love songs never out of date

In case you missed it, the AFI announced on Tuesday its latest list, 100 Years ... 100 Songs: America's Greatest Music in the Movies, part of its ongoing campaign to simultaneously promote and debase the good work being done by the National Film Registry by surrounding it with water cooler persiflage. Be sure to tune in to CBS in June 2004 to see how Prince [c'mon, he's gotta be one of the 400!], Judy, and Barbra et al. fare.

My money's on this guy.

She isn't quite herself today.

...something slant saves my bacon yet again. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the cameos of Alfred Hitchcock, in exhaustive detail.

If you must know, the long-form trailer [requires Real Player] for Psycho is one of the cinetrix's favorite comedic films. I could, and have been known to, watch it again and again.

Not enough gets said about Hitch's impeccable timing and economy of gesture. He is the master of the pregnant pause. When he indicates the tumbling down the stairs of the second victim with one languid hand; when he demonstrates the "twisting" of his neck with enthusiastic vigor, only to pull up short; and when he shuts the door to the office of the Bates Motel--and the fastidious way he brushes his fingertips together--and then shoots the viewers a knowing look...sigh. Well, he slays me every time.

Then again, what can you expect from a woman whose shower stall is decorated with a photograph of Janet Leigh in midscream?