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Ever onward. Ever upward. Excelsior!

Happy New Year, kiddies!

You'll be pleased to learn that the cinetrix spent some of the waning hours of '04 plotting world domination with instant boon companion Dana Stevens Liz Penn Surfergirl over coffee.

We made a few cinematic resolutions for 2005. [All will be revealed in due course.]

Make any yourself? Fess up in the comments. And remember to hydrate.

Friends with benefits

Apparently, some Netflix customers find the sheer volume of the 25,000-plus titles a little daunting. Enter Netflix Friends, now being tested.

The system works in two directions. Once a network of friends is created, each person in it can view the ratings and comments of others about specific films. Each member of a network can also share ratings and comments about movies with any or all of the others in the network. The more films each member sees and rates, the more value each brings to the network.

Companies just can't stay away from the Friendster model--everyone wants to be the one who figures out how to turn social networks into revenue generators.

Still, the cinetrix is curious. Won't someone invite me? I'll show you mine if you show me yours....

So to speak.

What does it take to shake a movie fan?

The fine folks over at Metafilter, inspired by Anthony Lane's scathing takedown of The Phantom of the Opera, have been diligently assembling a collection of some of their favorite unfavorable reviews. [via]

You're not accomplishing anything at work anyway, so do check 'em out and chime in.

RIP Susan Sontag

[Man, Craig Seligman's phone must be ringing off the hook today.]

In observation of Sontag's passing, a few film-specific excerpts from "Notes on Camp."

5. ....movie criticism (like lists of "The 10 Best Bad Movies I Have Seen") is probably the greatest popularizer of Camp taste today, because most people still go to the movies in a high-spirited and unpretentious way.

19. ....Genuine Camp -- for instance, the numbers devised for the Warner Brothers musicals of the early thirties (42nd Street; The Golddiggers of 1933; ... of 1935; ... of 1937; etc.) by Busby Berkeley -- does not mean to be funny.

20. Probably, intending to be campy is always harmful. The perfection of Trouble in Paradise and The Maltese Falcon, among the greatest Camp movies ever made, comes from the effortless smooth way in which tone is maintained. This is not so with such famous would-be Camp films of the fifties as All About Eve and Beat the Devil. These more recent movies have their fine moments, but the first is so slick and the second so hysterical; they want so badly to be campy that they're continually losing the beat. . . . Perhaps, though, it is not so much a question of the unintended effect versus the conscious intention, as of the delicate relation between parody and self-parody in Camp. The films of Hitchcock are a showcase for this problem. When self-parody lacks ebullience but instead reveals (even sporadically) a contempt for one's themes and one's materials - as in To Catch a Thief, Rear Window, North by Northwest -- the results are forced and heavy-handed, rarely Camp. Successful Camp -- a movie like Carné's Drôle de Drame; the film performances of Mae West and Edward Everett Horton; portions of the Goon Show -- even when it reveals self-parody, reeks of self-love.

21. ...(Persons can even be induced to camp without their knowing it. Consider the way Fellini got Anita Ekberg to parody herself in La Dolce Vita.)

UPDATE: A big kiss for Carrie, who sent along this piece, which reveals that Sontag turned to Hollywood musicals of the '30s, 40s, and 50s  while she was ill following a bone marrow transplant last summer.

It was a whole era she hadn't watched; she was more interested in foreign films," said her close friend Sharon DeLano, a writer and editor who visited often with Sontag over the last months of her life.

Library card

Speaking of Fred Astaire, the cinetrix is delighted that her favorite Fred and Ginger RKO Radio Picture, Swing Time, was one of the 25 films added this year to the National Film Registry. Yeah, Top Hat is the Fred and Ginger movie that everyone knows, but Swing Time is the one everyone should know. The "Never Gonna Dance" number is devastatingly romantic [even when you know they shot so many takes that Ginger's feet bled].

Film is still such a young and fragile medium. Many of the earliest movies were shot on highly flammable cellulose nitrate stock. And then there's vinegar syndrome.... All the cinetrix is saying is that every little bit of preservation helps.

Here's the complete list of 2004 inductees:

1)   Ben-Hur (1959)
2)   The Blue Bird (1918)
3)   A Bronx Morning (1931)
4)   Clash of the Wolves (1925)
5)   The Court Jester (1956)
6)   D.O.A. (1950)
7)   Daughters of the Dust (1991)
8)   Duck and Cover (1951)
9)  Empire (1964)
10) Enter the Dragon (1973)
11) Eraserhead (1978)
12) Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers (1980)
13) Going My Way (1944)         
14) Jailhouse Rock (1957)
15) Kannapolis, NC (1941)
16) Lady Helen's Escapade (1909)
17) The Nutty Professor (1963)
18) OffOn (1968)
19) Popeye the Sailor Meets Sinbad the Sailor (1936)
20) Pups is Pups (Our Gang) (1930)
21) Schindler's List (1993)
22) Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954)
23) Swing Time (1936)
24) There It Is (1928)
25) Unforgiven (1992)

UPDATE: Jette over at Celluloid Eyes asks the tough questions. What does this mean to the average Joe or Jane? Who gets to see these restored prints? Is there any correlation between a film's inclusion in the registry and its eventual availability on DVD?

This is a recording

The NYT today runs an interesting op-ed piece by Gary Giddins that starts with Ashlee Simpson's empty-orchestra mishap but soon takes a far more interesting turn toward the history of lip-syncing in Hollywood film.

Oh yeah, and foot-dubbing:

Hollywood was dubbing more than vocals; feet-dubbers were also in demand, to match dance steps to scenes in which the dancers were filmed without sound. One of the best of them, Miriam Nelson, has told of dubbing the tap routine of a famous star with famously bad timing. Ms. Nelson asked the director if she should duplicate the star's taps or follow the music. The director told her to follow the music, explaining that if the audience heard the correct taps it would buy the illusion that the star was on point.

Fun fact to know and shout: Fred Astaire insisted that his numbers be shot in medium and long shots that showed his entire body while he danced for precisely that reason.

Pickpocket

Not surprisingly, the cinetrix often receives films and books about film on gift-giving occasions. Occupational hazard. But she had never heard of the slender volume the Pickler laid on her this past Saturday: Robert Bresson's Notes on the Cinematographer, working memos the director made for his own use. It's gorgeous and, appropriately enough, pocket-sized.

Here are the three entries on page 107.

Star system
Make nothing of the immense power of attraction which belongs to the new and unforeseen. Film after film, subject after subject, confronting the same faces that one cannot believe in.

Transplantation
Images and sounds are fortified by being transplanted.

Accustom the public to divining the whole of which they are given only a part. Make people diviners. Make them desire it.

[The third one goes out to Paul Hood.]

Special effects

The cinetrix will be back on the coaxial wheels of steel later tomorrow, snow permitting. Meanwhile, she leaves you with the wit and wisdom of one Mister Chris Rock:

CGI, motherfucker! CGI!

Hope everyone had a very merry.

Bah humbug

Nearly forgot. If somebody has beaten you to The Ref at your local rental emporium, get Scrooged.

Come to think of it, all those folks now kvelling over the middle-aged melancholy of Saint Bill Murray should be watching Scrooged. Remember when the guy was a smug, supercilious bastard? Our smug, supercilious bastard?

[Props man tries to attach antlers to a mouse]
Props man: I can't get the antlers glued to this little guy. We tried Crazy Glue, but it don't work.

Frank Cross: Did you try staples?

Plus, what other Christmas movie can boast Robert Mitchum, Bobcat Goldthwait, David Johansen, and Carole Kane?

 

Little stabs of pleasure

The cinetrix has started collecting reviews of film critic David Thomson's latest tome, The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood, in the hopes that Santy might come through. Of course, she'd be happy to add her voice to the fray if, say, a review copy were to wend its way to her. However, this little maxim, from the Observer, may be hard to top.

Basically, a great critic has to have three things: ideas, personality and the nose for bullshit that a German shepherd at LaGuardia has for cocaine.

I'd woulda gone with LES hipster for that last bit, but yeah.