pullquote

Anticipation and cartography

If you've ever found yourself hopping up and down waiting for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, say, to arrive from Netflix, now there''s something you can do to beguile the time. Triangulate your position based on the location of Netflix distribution centers by consulting this map. You know: knowledge, power, all that. [via Listology]

A pint of beer and a new tattoo

One year ago today, the cinetrix made her debut here at Pullquote. I'd be lying if I said it hadn't changed my life irrevocably.

To celebrate this milestone, I'm leaving on an airplane this morning for a mini-break. Posting will be its usual erratic self--no change there. Rest assured, I'll miss you more.

[It occurs to me that one of the treats of being semi-anonymous is that some might wonder at the timing of my break....]

Aces Go Places

In anticipation of the release of David O. Russell's latest film this Friday, the service journalists over at Low Culture school us on the niceties involved in correctly coding that pesky ♥. They're givers, those guys.

The Typewriter, the Rifle, & the Movie Camera

Quick quiz: Who has been directed by Jean-Luc Godard, Wim Wenders, Aki Kaurismäki, Steven Spielberg, and Claude Chabrol?

If you guessed Worcester native and inveterate cigar smoker Samuel Fuller, writer and director of such white-knuckle Cold War classics as The Naked Kiss and Pickup on South Street, please advance one square. Geek.

Now Ed tips me off that a restored version of Fuller's harrowing World War II flick The Big Red One is making the festival and rep house rounds this fall. According to the Castro's program notes, where it screens December 10 through 15,

The Big Red One was butchered for its US release, reedited and cut by more than an hour. After discovering scripts, 70,000 feet of camera negative, and 112 sound rolls in a Warner vault, acclaimed critic and filmmaker Richard Schickel was able to restore the film to include almost 50-minutes of lost footage, made up of 15 new scenes and 23 extensions and inserts....

Sweet. Fuller's film makes male weepie Saving Private Ryan look like a Merchant-Ivory flick.

You can read more about the restored print here. Chicagoans can catch it during the Chicago Film Festival this October 13, at 8:30 pm at the Landmark Century Centre on N. Clark, where "Jonathan Rosenbaum will introduce the screening and interview Schickel about his work afterwards."

C'mon, when else will you see Lee Marvin, Mark Hamill, and Robert Carradine act side by side?

Apocalypse watch

OK, it's another rainy Monday morning, and the cinetrix hasn't had her USRDA of coffee yet, so she's just going to reproduce this item from Variety's daily email in its entirety:

FULL HOUSE DEALS VEGAS POKER PIC
Affleck, Schwimmer to star; Herzog to direct
Director Zak Penn will reprise the impromptu style he used in "Incident at Loch Ness" for a comic feature set around an international poker tournament.

Can someone please gloss this? Someone who is not too cheap to subscribe to Variety, maybe? Because you know how I read it, right? Yep, that Werner Herzog will direct Ben Affleck and David Schwimmer in a movie. Why not just call it "end days are upon us"?

If that's true, I'd like to choose the physical challenge.

You screw in a lightbulb with one hand, and you pet the dog with the other

That genius description of a certain variety of Indian dancing comes from the trailer to Gurinder Chadha's follow-up to Bend It Like Beckham, a Bollywoodriffic take on Jane Austen called Bride and Prejudice. See it here.

About that trailer? Two words: Leo Sayer. The cinetrix cannot wait. Thanks to Steph for the link.

The movies--already unfathomably large--expand

A pre-film slide at the Brattle Theatre reveals that CinemaScope was one of the first English words in common usage with a capital letter in the middle. [Something like that, anyway.] It was just the sort of trivia that, once learned, is impossible to forget. So when the cinetrix came across the word earlier today with the "s" down [as we editors like to say], her quick fact-checking Google foray devolved into an impromptu history lesson about this spectacular development in cinema.

I had no idea that Roland Barthes meditated "On CinemaScope" [in an essay translated by Jonathan Rosenbaum]. The cinetrix had nearly forgotten how delightful a cultural critic Barthes was.

Up until now, the look of the spectator has been that of someone lying prone and buried, walled up in the darkness, receiving cinematic nourishment rather like the way a patient is fed intravenously. Here the position is totally different: I am on an enormous balcony, I move effortlessly within the field's range, I freely pick out what interests me, in a word I begin to be surrounded, and my larval state is replaced by the euphoria of an equal amount of circulation between the spectacle and my body.

The darkness itself is transformed: in the ordinary film, it is tomb-like, I am still in the cave of myths, I have a little flame of illumination which flickers far above me, and I receive the truth of the images like heavenly grace. Here, on the contrary, the cord that binds me to the screen is no longer thread-like, it's a full volume of brightness that is established apart from me, I don't receive the image by those long threads of light that one sees transfixing and feeding the stigmatists, I lean forward on my elbows, becoming as horizontal as the spectacle, and out of my larval state emerge as a little god because here I am, no longer under the image but in front of it, in the middle of it, separated from it by this ideal distance, necessary to creation, which is no longer that of the glance but that of the arm's reach (God and painters always have outstretched arms).

Oooo, what he said.

The cinetrix just remembers racing to screenings of Lawrence of Arabia at the Wang Center--it was always February and freezing--arriving just in time [more than once], and having to sit so close to the 60-foot-wide screen that she needed to physically move her head from side to side to take it all in. She also swears she could see up the camels' noses.

There's a concise technical history of 'Scope here, for you gearheads. And the Widescreen Museum will lead you gently through the thickets of other anamorphic processes like Cinerama, VistaVision, and one of the cinetrix's personal favorites, Todd-AO.

[The Museum's poster gallery is hilarious. The cinetrix is especially taken by The Bonnie Parker Story: Cigar Smoking Hellcat of the Roaring Twenties and the legend atop the My Tale Is Hot poster: It's a Regular Panties Inferno!]

Live large this weekend.

Whammer Jammer Barbara Hammer

Close readers will have noted the cinetrix's recent removal to the south. She apologizes for the constant repetition of this information, but practice, as the saying goes, makes perfect. The closest art house to her country bunker is nearly two hours away from the buckle of the Bible Belt, but the worldwideInterweb goes a long way toward bridging the gap.

Also, sometimes the mountain comes to Mohammed. See, for going on thirty years now the South Carolina Arts Council has helped underwrite the Southern Circuit, which brings six independent filmmakers [three in fall; three in spring] on a microtour of southern college campuses and regional rep houses to show their work and conduct Q&As. Past participants include Ishmael Reed, Emily Hubley, Charles Burnett, Albert Mayles and Charlotte Zwerin, Marlon Riggs, and many more. It's the sort of thing that when you learn about it, you think, "Hey, how comes there's not a Southwest Circuit, or a Great Plains Circuit, or..." Ah, but only in the south can these filmmakers stock up on boiled peanuts and fireworks. At the same time

And sometimes the mountain looks like anything-but-mountainous lesbian experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer, whose early 90s examination of lesbian representation, Nitrate Kisses, got caught up in the whole NEA funding kerfuffle. [It was made with NEA funding, then the agency asked for its credit to be removed, all Alan Smithee style.] In person, Hammer's exactly the spiky-haired, black-clad Westbeth denizen a certain cinetrix rarely sees amidst the blonde sorority types here.

Last night, Hammer screened her documentary Resisting Paradise, a project that grew out of a residency in Cassis, in the south of France, which coincided with the beginning of the war in Kosovo. Originally in Cassis to film the light that so inspired painters like Matisse and Bonnard, Hammer decided to investigate the role that these artists and others in Cassis played during World War II. Then the seaside resort town was flooded with the same flow of refugees she now saw fleeing Kosovo on the nightly news. Shot in 16mm, with interviews transferred from DV, the resulting film asks the unanswerable question, What would you do?

It's not an easy question. Everyone would like to think he or she would naturally join the resistance. But, see, Matisse continued painting. As his grandchildren explain, that was what he could do. But his daughter did work for the resistance, as did his son. In addition to the Matisse grandchildren, Hammer interviews the stunner Lisa Fittgo, now in her 90s, who led a dispairing Walter Benjamin over the Pyrennes, and the indescribable Marie-Ange Allibert Roderiguez, fantastic and sassy with her dyed brown hair and ill-fitting dentures, who spent the war in the Cassis town hall, boldly forging identity cards for the Jews who fled south ahead of the Germans. [Humanities grad students, please note:, Fittgo pronounced Walter's surname like Private Benjamin, not the overdetermined "Ben-yah-meeen" one hears in the academy.]

The film uses gorgeous decaying archival filmstock and glass negatives as well as re-enactments so moving there should be a new word that distances them from cheesy crime shows. Sound and music pull the viewer in and then create shrieking distance. And always, there is that light, often playing on water. Resisting Paradise is resolutely experimental, yet completely accessible, just like its creator.

The cinetrix was fortunate to join Hammer for dinner before the screening. She's the sort of person who never seems to think someone couldn't do something--like recommending a Bunting Institute stint. Unfortunately, the seemingly benign dish I ordered set my digestive system on spin cycle, so I had to duck out on the postscreening Q&A. A shame, but at least I got to enjoy Hammer vamping before the film, when technical difficulties delayed its start. It's no surprise she continues to wring out funding from arts councils and the like: Hammer is charm itself.

R.I.P. Russ Meyer

Russ Meyer, the "legendary breastman," as he refers to himself on the RM Films Web site, died in Hollywood Hills after a bout with pneumonia. He was 82.

Roger Ebert, screenwriter of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, has written a lovely appreciation of the exploitation auteur. An excerpt:

He made one film after another, all of them involving unlikely plots, incongruous settings and abundantly voluptuous actresses. "Where do you find those women?" I asked him. "After they reach a certain bra size," he said, "they find me." He disapproved of silicone implants: "They miss the whole point."

His films were unique in that the women were always the strong characters, and men were the mindless sex objects. The film critic B. Ruby Rich called him "the first feminist American director." Meyer took praise with a grain of salt. After "The Seven Minutes" (1971), an attempt at a serious mainstream big studio picture, flopped at the box office, he told me: "I made the mistake of reading my reviews. What the public wants are big laughs and big tits and lots of 'em. Lucky for me that's what I like, too."

The cinetrix has a bittersweet Russ Meyer memory. Back when she was a video store drone, she encouraged Mark Sandman of the band Morphine to rent Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. The reasons were selfish: He was clearly one movie away from the five-flick special, and it was nearly closing time. "Here," I brightly said, "try this" and thrust the movie at him. Later that week when he returned his films, he made a point of seeking me out. That was the only movie he liked, turns out. And he'd been to a party at the house in the film, the one with the pool where you could swim from outside to indoors. Who knew then that Meyer would outlive Sandman?

One thing's for certain, Meyer has at least 40 busty virgins waiting for him in paradise.

Whoopee pies and other delights

The cinetrix would like to urge Bostonians to shamble over to the Milky Way Lounge and Lanes in Jamaica Plain this Saturday, September 25, for the Berwick Research Institute's benefit show. The Berwick is perhaps the cinetrix's favorite arts institute located in a former whoopee pie factory, which is saying something.

Sunday, September 26th at 8:00pm
MILKY WAY LOUNGE & LANES
403 Centre St, Jamaica Plain
617-524-3740

FILMS AND VIDEOS BY:
Jess Antonis
Schiller Diny
Lydia Eccles
Katya Gorker
Jon Osorio-Buck
Mike Piso
Noel Webber