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The last days of disco

This post is only tenuously film related at best, but the cinetrix got stuck on this one passage in an article about Kate Moss, Cocaine Fiend, and she just had to share with the group.

Mr. Gross added that since photographs of Ms. Moss apparently using drugs appeared last week in The Daily Mirror of London, he has been re-evaluating the ads featuring her, which show Ms. Moss with other models striking "Charlie's Angel" poses in front of a hot pink neon swan.

The campaign seeks to reconnect Gloria Vanderbilt with the 1970's disco scene that first brought it to prominence. [emphasis mine]

Mr. Gross said that if accusations of drug use by Ms. Moss were true, "we would have second thoughts about using Kate Moss" again.

'Cuz, you know, there was absolutely no cocaine at, say, Studio 54. Yeah, right, and Bianca Jagger never rode in on a white horse.

Take poetic license to the max

The cinetrix's special operative for ex-mayoral cinematic musings, Carlos, came through with the goods this week, and they're worth the wait. In this installment, we find Hizzoner tan, rested, and ready to make pronouncements about the relative qualities of "gay flicks," among other things. Read on...

Garçon Stupide
This movie was given an interesting review by Jeannette Catsoulis in The New York Times. She wrote: "Extremely explicit, yet not at all sexy, Garcon Stupide addresses gay dysphoria with an intelligent script (by Mr. Lionel Baier and Laurent Guido) and a creative use of digital video. While not without obviousness - such as underlying the mechanical nature of Loic's love life with a split-screen image of a gay threesome opposite pounding machinery - the film's dazed atmosphere is rarely disrupted."

The film is half soft-or-hard-core porno, depending on your standards, and half artsy-craftsy so it falls within the rubric of redeeming social value rather than simple obscenity. It works, but just marginally.

The 20-year-old male hustler, Loic (Pierre Chatagny), lives platonically, I believe, with his good friend, Maria (Natacha Koutchoumov). Maria, a teacher and graduate student, is opening the world of learning to Loic. There are explicit scenes of Loic and his male customers involving frontal nudity. Loic is also in contact with a man via the Internet who is never seen but whose voice is provided by the director himself, Mr. Baier, who is no Alfred Hitchcock. During the day, Loic works on the production line of a chocolate factory. His role of inspecting the chocolate bars was reminiscent of Charlie Chaplain in "Modern Times." Toward the end of the film Loic tells us that he is no longer homosexual. Don't you believe it.

This is not a first-rate gay flick with respect to storyline, but the two principal characters are strong actors and will hold your attention. The movie, set in Lausanne, Switzerland, is beautifully photographed. It includes views of the Swiss Alps and a final scene in an amusement park where Luic's seductive talents are displayed.

The director "is no Alfred Hitchcock"? Oh, snap!

The cinetrix would love to hear Ed's definition of a "first-rate gay flick"  one of these days. Wouldn't you? But I guess that will have to wait, because the second movie finds Koch asking the big questions.

Just Like Heaven
Reese Witherspoon, a beautiful woman, and Mark Ruffalo, a sensitive guy, are both good actors. Too bad they accepted roles in this silly and saccharine sweet film.

Variations of this plot have been used in movies many times before: two people who might ultimately marry are prevented from doing so because one is near death. Although I never wished death on the woman, the only sadness I felt while watching this film was that I had to sit through the endless garbage.

The story begins cheerfully. Elizabeth (Reese Witherspoon) is a resident physician in a San Francisco hospital with a bright future. Driving home after a 26-hour shift, her car is struck by a truck. In the movie, she is talked about as though she is dead, but she is in a coma, on a respirator. We learn that David (Mark Ruffalo) lost his wife to a stroke and is now very depressed. He needs an apartment and finds one on a month-to-month basis with the mystical intervention of Elizabeth. The apartment happens to be the beautiful one in which she lived. Her spirit appears in the apartment looking fully alive and not knowing her body at the hospital is on the verge of death. How the two principals meet and eventually fall in love make up the balance of the story.

If you are willing to take poetic license to the max, you might just enjoy such a story. But for me this film was simply two hours of drivel. Why, I kept wondering, would such two fine actors demean themselves by accepting these roles? Can the huge sums of money they undoubtedly earned and will use to buy creature comforts in their personal lives have been worth it? My opinion is a minority amongst moviegoers. Even HS, with whom I saw the movie, liked it. This schlock film was number one in attendance and gross receipts over the weekend. What has happened to quality in American movies?

The cinetrix is so glad that hospital has a bright future, but she thinks Ed might need an editor. Or some cheering up.

Little private jokes in the liner notes

A little Tuesday morning amusement for you good people: Which John Cusack Are You? [via]

No surprises for me:

Of course, given that the cinetrix and the 'Fesser courted in essentially every Wicker Park and Ukranian Village location in High Fidelity save, uh, Rob and Laura's apartment and Championship Vinyl, I could scarcely be otherwise.

A clever pal of mine once developed a whole course on cinematic star theory [this guy's the leading proponent] using only the films of John Cusack, which I always thought was genius. Stephen, if you read this, I'd love a copy of that syllabus....

Chunk died for someone's sins, but not mine

The cinetrix owes all you nice people an apology for the ongoing suckitude around here, as well as for employing that most tired and hackneyed of blog cliches: "the post about why I'm not posting."

Anyhow, there's a good reason. Well, there are several, but the best one is this: At the very last minute, the cinetrix was pressed into service to educate today's youth about something, er, a little outside her preferred subject area, shall we say. Many of the hours formerly devoted to blogging are now spent scrambling not to embarrass myself in front of scores of scornful students. Somehow, though, the cinema keeps creeping back in. It is the lingua franca of today's youth, after all. [No, wait, that's hip-hop.]

Imagine, if you will [or can, without screaming] sitting in a classroom discussing Coleridge's Kubla Khan [cue flashback dissolve]. One of the restive students observes that this is some fucked-up shit, albeit not in so many words. Indeed, opium has a lot to answer for. Still, the cinetrix casts about for a hook, something that will illuminate what's going on in this:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
  Down to a sunless sea.
<snip>
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean

How did yours truly explain the whole rivers and waterfalls underground thing? Um, by invoking The Goonies. And they all got it. How's that for pedagogy? Goonies R Good Enough, just like Cyndi promised.

So you see, the cinetrix always has you in her thoughts, even when she's not serving up the piping hot content, Whatevs stizz. Although she suspects the less said about that time when she described the daffodils in Wordsworth in terms of a Zoolander danceoff, the better.

Block that metaphor

Props go out to New York Daily News film critic Jami Bernard for this gem:

"Proof" is yet another departing passenger from the Miramax clown car as the studio winds down, and it has its problems.

Such an apt image, yet marred by inexpert editing. Unless she's thinking of a hand-cranked jalopy, that is.

Sparkle, Neely!

One of my favorite moments, and there are oh so many, from the 1995 Isaac Mizrahi documentary Unzipped is when Isaac, like the good movie-obsessed queen that he is, lets loose with his Susan Hayward impersonation.

The only hit that comes out of a Helen Lawson show is Helen Lawson, and that's me, baby, remember?

Neely O'Hara resets are kid's stuff. Now, Hayward, that's the sign of an advanced diva degree.

The good news is that tonight you can chant along to every deathless line of dialogue with your fellow devotees if you live in Chelsea [wait, is that redundant?], because Valley of the Dolls plays at 7 p.m. at the Clearview Chelsea. The theater's website barely does this staggering camp achievement justice:

Lured by their dreams, three young women enter the world of show business and discover how easy it is to sink into a celebrity nightmare of ego, alcohol and 'pills'- the beloved "dolls." Based on Jacqueline Susann's phenomenal best-seller about the underside of Hollywood, this fascinating melodrama stars Barbara Parkins, Patty Duke, and Sharon Tate and was once seen as a shocking behind-the-scenes look at show business.

The best thing? All those dolls are rated PG, baby!

We're not worthy!

The cinetrix has already expressed her admiration personally, but she really would be remiss if she didn't share this completely enviable confection dreamed up the lovely Alison of the IFC blog, from her post about the regal Helen Mirren's upcoming projects:

If only we had royalty to make movies about! Then we could stop shipping older actresses off to be boiled and rendered into collagen and injected back into the lips of the still young and nubile.

We know what soylent green is, but where are they getting all that collagen?

Scribble scribble

Never let it be said that lit It Boy Jonathan Safran Foer doesn't work hard for the money. According to this email the cinetrix received from distributors Warner Independent, who will be bringing Liev Schrieber's film of the book to a theater near you, the author will be signing $13.95 copies of his novel [shipping and handling included, natch] especially for Warner Independent newsletter subscribers until September 30.

Flicker chicks

If you're in the Boston area, and you haven't yet seen the excellent exhibit Girls on Film over at the Sert Gallery, hie yourself over to the Carpenter Center at Harvard before it closes on September 18. The cinetrix regrets only making it there once, because while it is physically a small exhibit, its resonance is more akin to a sonic boom.

Julie Buck of the HFA and Karin Segal deftly take on two of the biggies in the cinematic experience--spectatorship and visibility--in their gallery of 70 anonymous "China girls," culled from discarded leaders from various films.

But what or who are the China girls? Anonymous women of all races and nations, often secretaries or lab techs, who sat for color-timing test strips so that technicians in processing labs could maintain an even color balance or black-and-white density from one reel to the next. Other than that, these women were never meant to be seen by audiences. Now Buck and Segal give them their overdue moment in the spotlight.

Gerald Peary provides a little more history of the practice and the project in the Boston Phoenix:

What you're seeing is a 16mm or 35 mm color-timing strip that juxtaposes a color bar and a female visage. From 1928 to 1992, film laboratories around the globe used women's faces, ostensibly because of a woman's smooth skin, for color balance and tonal density. Digital technology made these tests obsolete.

Some of the images in the exhibit have been manipulated, and all have been digitally restored and color corrected before being cropped to a uniform size. The artists make these enigmatic women the stars they never were.

Here's what the exhibit program had to say:

 Buck and Segal have rescued these women from the margins of industrial cinema, recasting them as movie stars with their own glossy publicity photographs. (The artist further demonstrate their solidarity with their subjects by including themselves in the series.)

If you can, try to make an evening of it this Friday, September 16, when a program of found footage experimental films unfurl downstairs from the Sert at the Harvard Film Archive.

The Harvard Film Archive will present a program of experimental films on September 16 at 9 p.m. to complement Girls on Film. Each of the films in the program represents a different artist's engagement with found footage. The program will include films by Boston-based filmmakers Abigail Child and Saul Levine, as well as work by Craig Baldwin, Bruce Conner, Hollis Frampton, Ken Jacobs, Owen Land, and Peter Tscherkassky.

Tickets:
$8 Regular Admission
$6 Students, Harvard Faculty and Staff, Senior Citizens

Disclosure statement

With A.O. Scott maundering on in nearly every section of the Times this Sunday, it would be understandable if you found yourself plowing through his musings on the new nostalgia, say, or whatever the fuck he was on about, only to leap up, shout "Basta!" and hurl the offending object far from you in disgust. The cinetrix would do that, actually, but she's fond of her laptop.

However, to so would mean missing out on this painfully coy aside in the magazine, in which Scott, so clearly yearning to be one with the bright, white dudes behind the literary magazines he takes as his subject (you know, rather than labor long for some fusty old fishwrap like the New York Times), shows his true ambition:

(Kunkel, meanwhile, has become the hot young white male writer of the moment, a position once held by Dave Eggers. Now is probably the time to disclose that Kunkel's literary agent, who was once Eggers's, is also mine.)

Is he now? Better step it up, then, Tony. You're running out of time to be a Bright Young Thing.

OK, back to the "reflexive ironizing and ceaseless celebrity worship."