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Panoptebert

That's right, Roger Ebert [or perhaps the cinetrix should say "::rogerebert::"] has a blog. Kinda. [via Chicagoist]

Oh, hell, go look for yourselves. The glossary feature is pretty good, but he's not exactly stepping on any toes [or thumbs] with his greatest films.

Wait, I take that back: Planes, Trains, and fuckin' Automobiles?

Good news for people who love bad news.

The fifth annual Woodstock Film Festival, which runs from October 13 to 17 in Woodstock, New York, will be screening David O. Russell's documentary Soldier's Pay, which, you may recall, Warner Brothers declined to show as part of its money-wringing re-release of Russell's 1999 film Three Kings because it was "totally inappropriate" to do so in a political season.

City of quartz

Long ago, the cinetrix was at school with Mark Olsen, who lands the cover of this month's Sight & Sound with his review of Collateral and interview with director Michael Mann. It's good stuff.

...Mann returns to the familiar territory of the existential crime drama explored using new techniques and ideas. Probably the first studio director to embrace digital for its purely aesthetic potential, Mann uses the high-definition technology - in particular its ability to register a rich array of colours and tones in low light and at night - to realise his vision of the city. If the LA of Heat was crisp, almost photorealist in its high-gloss intensity, here the night-time cityscape is rendered with a watercolour delicacy. Collateral's after-hours timescale may be classic noir, but Mann's subtle night-vision - the dark sky seems bathed in an urban glow (the pale wash of orange street lights, streaks of white automobile headlights) - softens the genre's chiaroscuro tendencies. [via GreenCine]

Now if only the boy would Google himself and get in touch. To be fair, the cinetrix wussed out when she and Slotcar spotted Film Comment's Gavin Smith this summer at Film Forum and didn't ask Smith for Mark's updated e-mail address [Mark is also FC's West Coast editor]. But c'mon, if you were a young woman--OK, a young woman who is not Alissa Quart--would you want to admit to the levels of geekitude that would enable you to recognize that man?

Yeah, I thought not.

Cue music

The cinetrix tumbled to the wonderful world of library music -- instrumental tracks that play underneath scenes on TV and in films -- probably about a year and a half ago now. Being obsessive but not male, she contented herself with keeping an eye out for CDs from the Music for Dancefloors collection and the like, rather than go digging through crates herself. Still, it was with great interest that she read an article in this month's ReadyMade, which profiles library music collector and DJ David Hollander.

Here's why. Hollander spins at an event the existence of which warms the subcockles: the Hollywood Forever Cemetery movie night, "screening under and above the stars." O brave new world! What an absolutely Loved One-inspired idea.

Last night [when, granted, I played hooky and cavorted in Atlanta for a few hours of big-city-too-busy-to-hate fun], Cinespia, the evening's organizers, showed The Long Goodbye. Learning of the screening this afternoon gave me a pang because the cinetrix loves that movie almost as much as the Coen brothers do. [I wonder whether the Angelo crowd greeted the wordless turn by its Governator with cheers or hisses?]

The sleek Cinespia site is a soothing melange of tasteful and lurid photographic stills and loops of library music. The evil geniuses behind it exhibit the best sort of questionable good sense and include among their recommended films Ace in the Hole, Danger Diabolik, and 3 Women.

Even the links bear fruit. Cinemaphilic left coasters tired of staring at blank walls should check out film/art, currently featuring in its gallery the best-designed film posters of the 1960s, which are all for sale.

Horses and marquee moons

Holy crap.

Punk-era New York music icons Patti Smith and Television plan to share a stage for the first time since 1977.

The artists will perform Oct. 2 at Gotham's Roseland Ballroom.

Speaking of immediately sold-out historic shows, it's the cinetrix's birthday on December 16. Can anyone put her in the way of two tickets to the Pixies show that night? Or for the show on the 13th, when Burma is opening?

Sigh. The music and lit bloggers get all the swag, while yours truly is reduced to undignified begging...

Deja vu all over again

I bet I can guess which movie was in director John Duigan's Netflix queue during the Head in the Clouds shoot.

Charlize, honey, so sorry about the recent injury [it was rumored to be trampoline related, but the cinetrix suspects overreaching]. Regardless, you are no Dominique Sanda.

One Plus One Plus Weekend Equals?

The 'Fesser brings the following item to our attention: Cat Power will be releasing a two-hour DVD, "Speaking for Trees," on October 26. But, wait. It's apparently a nature film, shot by photographer Mark Borthwick and featuring Chan Marshall singing and playing her guitar al fresco. [via Fitted Sweats]

Hey, why not?

Those pressed for time can check out mere minutes-long videos for "Nude as the News," "Cross-Bones Style," and "He War" at the Matador site right now.

R.I.P. Johnny Ramone

May flights of punk rock angels sing thee to thy rest.

We have the stars

The cinetrix is in a funk and feeling like a regular pre-chrysalis grub of a Charlotte Vale, if you must know. If there is someone out there with an elegantly embroidered evening cape to borrow and a beautiful hand in which to write its instructions for wear, your hostess will gladly board the boat for Rio. She has always wanted to see the Jesus, if nothing else.

See, she is tired already of feeling like a lowly caterpillar amidst the young, winsome, sylphy butterflies that overrun her new home. Going to a yoga class led by a yoga-bod-ed 20-year-old blondie with no hips who referred to "namaste" as "prayer pose" in a distinctly Southern Baptist chirp did not help. What incenses me is neither does booze. Is there no justice?

It'll pass. It always does. Entertain yourselves with the bright young things to the right until the cinetrix's tongue comes back, all burnished and glinting, from its sharpening, why don't you?

That's entertainment

Graham Greene famously designated the more pot-boiling entries in his oeuvre as "entertainments," a term the cinetrix applies with not a little glee to a certain stripe of workmanlike feature film. Not innovative, almost certainly cynically assembled, and yet...

It's whatever stylistic filigree or actorly filip that extends that ellipsis past "yet" that leaves the cinetrix not feeling like a punk for having spent her time watching.

Case in point: last night's entertainment, Runaway Jury. Now, Runaway Jury is a special case because it also belongs to its own singular category, which trumps genre, actors, even director. See, it's a Grishamovie, a term coined by the cinetrix's lost compadre Mark Olsen in Film Comment a few years back.

The "John Grisham films" pose several challenges to directorial authority. They demonstrate immense similarities with regards to structure, story, and character, even though Grisham himself does not receive screenwriting credit for any of them (although The Gingerbread Man is based on an apparently overhauled screenplay by Grisham). The bidding wars over his properties have certainly provided Grisham with the leverage to secure power of approval over the directors of his films. As with Stephen King, Grisham's authorial identification with these adaptations has grown so strong that the next-to-latest was officially titled John Grisham's The Rainmaker. On the other hand, the heavy reliance on starpower to fuel the Grisham vehicles not only suggests a lack of faith in their merits as pure storytelling, it may affect the balance of power: is The Firm a Tom Cruise film first and a Sydney Pollack film second?

To think of the Grisham cycle is to struggle to remember exactly which film a given scene or character comes from--the events and situations bleed together into some weird loop endlessly supplied with lawyers with accents and corporations and trials and chases. The template for the next Grisham franchise to pop up on the corner would be roughly this: young, earnest Southern lawyer, fresh out of law school, full of ideals and morals and good ole tenaciousness, tries to right some wrong. The bad guys always turn out to be not the government, the time-honored all-pervasive They (in fact, in The Pelican Brief, the CIA are made into guardian angels instead of weird spooks), but instead the new Them: Big Business. Rest assured that there is or has been a Big Cover-Up, after uncovering which the young lawyer finds BB's henchmen on his/her trail, experiences a dark night of the soul, and then a third act Big Trial/Big Chase where justice prevails. In the ideal Grisham formulation, the ending is an outlandishly unambiguous triumph of good guys over bad guys.

Mark wrote this piece well before Jury saw the light of day, and its director, Gary Fleder, is far from distinguished. But, but, but--this one gives a teensy bit more moral ambiguity than usual to its lead, the too smart for his own good juror #9, played by John Cusack. Also, a jury is an opportunity to assemble sterling ensemble players, in this case Luis Guzman, Nora Dunn [looking like Kate Spade will if she spends a decade as a secret tippler], Jennifer Beals, Bill Nunn, and an actress playing a Goth girl named--wait for it--Lydia Deets. [I know, I thought it was funny, too.]

You can't have a jury without scenery-chewing law talkers like Dustin Hoffman. And who vets the jurors during selection? Why, wily ol' Gene Hackman, that's who. Add devious jury-tampering eye candy Rachel Weisz as Cusack's love interest, toss in a colorful Nawlins settling, and, cher, you got yourself a meal.

Lest I forget, I think anyone writing about this film is contractually obligated to say that HOFFMAN AND HACKMAN ACT TOGETHER AT LAST. In a men's room. Big whoop. It's a far cry from either Midnight Cowboy or French Connection, sorry to say.

So, yeah, Runaway Jury tastes like cut-rate Soderbergh [which is to say souped-up Elmore Leonard]. What can you do? Sometimes circumstance reduces you to busting out a box of Zatarain rather than heading to Galatoire's, but a healthy dash of gumbo filé can hide a multitude of sins.