While the cinetrix gets back up to speed, consider reading this droll little listicle over at the Onion: 8 Films Illustrating the Oral Sex and Cars Don't Mix. [Incidentally, you are all more than capable of making the same bad blowjob puns the cinetrix is valiantly trying not to. If you can't keep them to yourselves, well, that's what the comments are for.]
One astonishing omission does come to mind, perhaps because the film [but not the scene] came up in the noir class I audit: Scarlett Johansson's jailbait turn in The Man Who Wasn't There. There's not a straight man alive who saw that movie and didn't make a note to self, so to speak, to follow young Scarlett's career. Are there any others? Or is "8" inherently funnier than "9" somehow? Discuss.
On the pedogogical front [how's that for a segue?], the cinetrix managed to stagger through the second half of the documentary unit this week. It wasn't pretty, but I got through it with the help of Werner Herzog. If you need to vamp, he's your go-to guy for sheer entertainment value.
Showing Grizzly Man sure did get the kiddies talking, which was nice for me. [OK, and doing "I love you! I love you!" Timothy Treadwell impersonations.] One student, G-d love him, even asked whether this film really should be considered a documentary at all. Yes! This was unprompted, mind you, and it made me feel slightly less irresponsible for showing it. Small victories.
What else? We spent a little time divvying up the film between its two filmmakers--Timothy Treadwell and Werner Herzog--and discussed how the latter deploys familiar doc techniques like talking-head interviews, home movies, and still photos in a way that is anything but "objective." I asked what it does to your experience of the film to know from the beginning [thanks to titles] that Treadwell is dead. And what about the mysterious girlfriend?
And then there was my ace in the hole. At the screening I'd asked that they consider Grizzly Man in terms of the idea of an unreliable narrator [or narrators]. So today I gave the kids a glimpse of one of their unreliable narrators in situ: Herzog complaining about the savagery of nature in the middle of a South American jungle nearly 30 years ago in Les Blank's Burden of Dreams. Sure, it could be considered more vamping, but I think it really helped them puzzle out what Herzog's agenda might be in taking on Treadwell's quixotic story. And that nonfiction isn't always the same thing as reality, or truth.
