pullquote

More stars than there are in the heavens

This completely ridiculous article, Porn ignites firehouse fray, which ran in today's Boston Globe, got the cinetrix to thinking. Why is everyone who acts in a pornographic film referred to as a porn star?

Many in this town of 4,500 people say they have known for years that a porn star lived in their midst, but it had not been openly discussed.

The alleged porn star in this case runs a pay-to-view Web site of such limited scope that 65 new customers is reported as a big deal. [Even Pullquote gets more traffic than that!] Videotaping yourself at home doing anything, last I checked, doesn't necessarily make you a star. If you wanted to be accurate, she's never been much more than a porn bit player or a walk-on, say.

Of course, the multibillion-dollar porn industry does have its own stars and its own awards show, the AVN Awards [AVN stands for Adult Video News, which is the Variety of porn.] Premiere ran its only good piece of reporting in the past 10 years, "Neither Adult nor Entertainment," about the adult trade magazine's annual gala. [Published in the September 1998 issue, the article appeared under pseudonyms for writers rumored to be David Foster Wallace and a Premiere editor. There were more than 20 footnotes, which certainly doesn't let Wallace off the hook.] It doesn't appear to be available online, but you can read responses to the article by three AVN editors here.

A little research revealed that the most recent AVN Awards were held on January 8 at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas. Classy. Dubbed the "Oscars of Adult" by Entertainment Weekly a while back, they too laud a "Best Picture," "Best Actress," as well as excellence in some performances that are a little more, shall we say, industry specific. They even have musical numbers that would make Rob Lowe blush. [There's a text-only history of the awards here, but you may not want to risk the cookie at work.]

Bill Murray in his Golden Globe acceptance speech summed up the divide between comedic and dramatic actor nominees this way

Too often we forget our brothers on the other side of the aisle - the dramatic actors. I'd just like to say, where would our war, our miseries and our psychological traumas come from?

In this season of awards shows, the cinetrix asks you also to remember the porn-iest.

Which I hate

Photos of herself as well as, of course, her Golden Globe Award were prominently displayed. Pia jumped up from fooling with her video recorder (she was watching Daffy Duck) and greeted me with a perky kiss on the cheek. She was dressed in a workout-type jump suit and an expensive pair of white boots that still had the price tag on the bottom.

John Waters: All the scandal of the Golden Globe--do you regret having won?

Pia Zadora: Are you kidding? I wouldn't give it back for anything.

Ah, the mysterious Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Whenever I start getting sucked in to its annual circus of the stars, I reread "The Pia Zadora Story" in Crackpot: The Obsessions of John Waters and all is well once more.

You see, Pia Zadora won the Golden Globe for New Star of the Year for Butterfly in 1982. It was widely rumored at the time that her multimillionaire husband somehow bought her the award. Which is part of the reason why the awards were held in such low regard for so long. Now, of course, if Harvey buys you an award, it's OK.

Still, the only thing last night that rivaled Pia's scandal for excitement was Ricky Gervais and "The Office" winning not one, but two, awards. You can listen to him on NPR's Sunday Edition here while the cinetrix meets some pesky deadlines.

Oh my God, you're gorgeous

Run, don't walk, to Mina Naguib's amazing Web site mixmaster. The cinetrix discovered it via Sasha, who sums up its powers for evil succinctly:

Slot the content from one site into the layout of another: instant, time-gobbling fun.

Now various lit blog folks can see what the Times book review would look like if they, not Keller, called the shots.

Here's what Pullquote looks like laid out as the Times Arts section. My favorite hed/dek combo? "The Minor Fall, The Major Lift: Britney or Christina?" [the photo really makes it]

Enjoy! And be sure to scroll all the way to the bottom.

Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?

A.O. Scott ponders whither independent film in today's Times magazine and states the obvious, albeit with refreshing brevity.

In the long run, though, these slacker-era Horatio Alger stories also helped to focus the attention of fans, as well as would-be players, on the mysterious and cut-throat economics of the film business. Thirty or 40 years ago, a sophisticated cineaste would spout the jargon of formalism; nowadays, especially on Internet film sites, you are more likely to hear speculations about production budgets, release patterns and box-office estimates than analysis of tracking shots, jump cuts or subliminal homages to Hitchcock and Welles.

OK, perhaps the inclusion of Welles, in some ways the greatest and most documented "indie" box office failure of all time, is unfortunate. But Scott is right and graciously assumes the mantle of culpability that film critics wear in this first-weekend grosses era.

Like Chevy Chase, the cinetrix once was told there would be no math and has led her life accordingly. We're all about the dizzying swirl of "homages" to other movies in, say, Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, not that distracting "box office failure" noise.

Plus, the article runs with a hiLARious photo of a zygote-age Steven Soderbergh on the set of sex, lies, and videotape. Or, as he once considered calling the film that launched a thousand indies

46:02
8 Millimeter [!]
Charged Coupling Device
Retinal Retention
Mode: Visual
Visual Search
Hidden Agendas

Misfits Unite and Triumph

Hey, kids, it's the Alties!

The wha'?

That's right. In this self-affirming zeitgeist moment when you're nobody 'til somebody nominates you for something, AlterNet has rolled out its Festivus-style categories, which include "Best 'Feel Bad' Movie," "Transformative Love" [which we misread as more tranny-skewed at first], and "In the Spirit of Catherine Deneuve" [naked old chicks who used to be beautiful starlets are hott].

Nominations can be made in the AlterNet forums from January 12 to 27. Voting will commence on February 3. Please note: "You'll need register for AlterNet Forums to nominate. But don't worry, it's quick, easy, and totally free!"

Right. Whatever. The cinetrix is like Groucho Marx when it comes to that whole "joiner" thing, but if you firmly believe that, perhaps, the MTV Movie Awards callously omitted some vital category, please vote early and often. [via Persistence of Vision]

Tsunami!

The cinetrix is soooo not worthy.

Hie thee over to Cup of Chicha and gaze with stomach-churning envy at the relay race journalism schematic Ms. Chicha created from reviews of Ashton Kutcher's knee-pad bid for seriousness.

We loves us some Iowa-on-Iowa action here at Pullquote.

Deconstruct This

The cinetrix would like to invite any LA readers out there to traipse over to Vidiots out on Pico in Santa Monica for a mind-expanding evening tonight. Yes, at a video store. Read on, Netflix nation, and you'll see why indie video stores are still important. But first, a question.

What if someone came along who changed not the way you think about everything, but everything about the way you think?

For filmmakers Kirby Dick [director of Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist] and Amy Ziering Kofman, Jacques Derrida is that person: one of the most visionary and influential thinkers of the 20th century, a man who single-handedly altered the way many of us look at history, language, art, and, ultimately, ourselves.

Tonight they will be appearing at Vidiots to discuss their acclaimed [and newly available on DVD] documentary, Derrida, and the challenges of allowing Derrida's life and thought to "resonate and interact without either being used to simply 'explain' the other."

Up until sometime in the late 70's, I think, he not only had always refused to be filmed, but had, also, categorically refused to ever have his photograph taken. Even though by that time his work had become well established in Europe, most people still had no idea what he looked like. He had, and still has, a firm belief that the cult of personality is, to large degree, ridiculous. But then he started doing more political work, appearing at benefits for public causes. At one time the press was there, and they ended up running a picture of him in Le Monde - but they ran a photo of, I think, Michel Foucault, and erroneously identified it as 'Jacques Derrida.' Well, Jacques has this incredible power hair, and from that point on, realizing he couldn't control the inevitable, he rescinded his own strict media interdiction: 'Well, if they're going to print my picture anyways, it might as well be the right one!'

That's right, he has power hair. Rent the movie to see what that means.

As an added incentive, Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman will be introduced tonight by the man who shares a left hemisphere [terrifying, but true] with the cinetrix, Anthony Miller. It will be nothing short of epic. So come early, stay late.

I spit on you & your lemur

This has absolutely nothing to do with film. Sub Pop takes the piss and parodies Pitchfork.

The bowl that burped

Forget about Girl with a Pearl Earring, Lucia Joyce, and all the other books and films that tell the stories of talented women who were overshadowed by famous men. This is the story for me.

Laurie Kahn-Leavitt's documentary "Tupperware!'' will be shown as part of The American Experience on PBS on February 9 [check local listings]. Here's just a glimpse of the exciting backstory behind the bowl that burped.

While its creator was a quirky Massachusetts inventor named Earl Silas Tupper, the revolutionary product owed its success to the women who sold, bought, and used it. At the center of this mid-century phenomenon was marketing whiz Brownie Wise, a maverick businesswoman who built Tupperware into an empire and set legions of postwar housewives on the path to becoming entrepreneurs and "ladies."

You can read more about the "ladies" here.

Mr. McGuire: I just wanna say one word to you. Just one word.
Ben Braddock: Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Ben Braddock: Yes, I am.
Mr. McGuire: "Plastics."

Everybody's a critic

Duke Phillips: Why the hell do you have to be so critical?
Jay Sherman: I'm a critic.
Duke Phillips: No, your job is to rate movies on a scale from "good" to "excellent".
Jay Sherman: What if I don't like them?
Duke Phillips: That's what "good" is for. -- from the 1994 TV series The Critic.

The cinetrix is ruing the day she declared her obviously premature moratorium on bashing a certain whiny perv.

Looking for a more productive way to channel my rage than street warfare, I stumbled across this delightful précis examining fictional works that include critics as characters, in particular film critics in films, by [surprise!] film critic Gerry Peary.

Each film critic I've discovered in a movie is a walking, laboriously talking, stereotype. Some portraits are playful and satirical, others malicious, but there's little variance in the picture of the film reviewer as someone boorish, obsessive, and neurotic (and almost invariably male) you wouldn't want to be stuck next to at a movie.

The practice is a little inside baseball, though, Peary explains. "The problem with modern Hollywood poking fun at real-life print critics is that the public doesn't know who they are."

But we do.

Disclosure: Gerry Peary once took the cinetrix to a screening of Robert Altman's 3 Women at the Harvard Film Archive. What a weird fuckin' movie. Which isn't to say we didn't enjoy it.