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Trick or treat

Rosemary: still the cinetrix's most successful and cinematic Halloween costume.

Appropriately enough, perhaps, the cinetrix is so tired today she's inclined to pass on the holiday altogether. If pressed, I could swing a last-minute Little Edie, but my fear is that no one will be able to tell the difference between that and my usual mufti.

So, what's your best movie-inspired get-up? One of my students apparently kicked it old school as the original Veruca Salt. Top that--in the comments.

Decisions, decisions

Nikita, hands down my favorite misanthrope in five-inch heels, is even more of a cinematic scaredy-cat than the cinetrix, if that's possible. So it is with great delight that I share with you a blurry reproduction of her genius flow chart, which explains how she decides which movies are safe for her to watch. [You can--and should--admire the diagramming diva's evil genius in its original splendor here.]

Phantom der nacht

New Yorkers, ditch your other plans for tonight and hie thee to Lincoln Center for the Young Friends of Film screening of Werner Herzog's Nosferatu at 7:30 p.m.* It is one of the cinetrix's abiding regrets that she's never seen this lush, romantic film projected. The sequence when the plague sweeps through the city is simply breathtaking, and Klaus Kinski as the titular bloodsucker is beyond riveting. I mean, would you look at the guy? Makes fuckin' Oldman look like a piker.

Seriously, once you've seen this film, you understand why it was the Germans who named concepts like weltschmerz.

Plus, you could do worse than crib from Klaus Kinski if you still need a Halloween costume....

*A special prize for anyone who dares make it an ornate double-bill evening by taking in Miss Marie Antoinette, too. Look, there's a 10:55 show at the AMC Loews Lincoln Square.

I got some reds

"You don't mean communists, do you, Sam?"

Sadly, no. The cinetrix has the mean reds, but bad. She just learned that the dad of her childhood best friend succumbed to cancer this Saturday.

Don was the regional manager of Radio Shack when he landed in our New England burb decades ago, but despite all the corporate relocations, he was a Southerner at heart. It was at his house that the cinetrix first had deviled eggs [thank you, Phyllis] and so many other firsts. Theirs was truly my second home, and Cari's parents--only children parents of an only child--were my own second parents throughout most of my childhood. They took me along on weekend trips to New Hampshire and waited patiently as my carsick self yacked up Taang in some diner parking lot along the way. And we would always go to Pop's Donuts once in Wolfboro. You begin to see what I mean.

And as a Shack guy, Don was an early adopter home electronics gearhead. I experienced my first VCR and later my first CD player at his house, and it was there that Cari and I watched Time Bandits again and again on cable precursor Starz. [OK, and also reruns of The Brady Bunch, but don't tell my mom. She wouldn't let me watch "because the girls don't get to do anything."] Much later, when we were callow adolescents., Phyllis escorted Cari and me to the Queen Ann to see Fletch. It felt so glamorous then.

They were and are good, generous people, Cari's parents, and Don's passing has me crying for both his and my father-in-law's deaths in a way that the past few weeks somehow hadn't allowed.

Don was special. We all knew those grown-ups when we were kids. They maintained the generational hierarchy, yes, but they took our slights and wounds seriously. Hell, Don took the cinetrix and her brother on their first motorcycle rides and escorted us around the neighborhood with Cari for trick-or-treating the year our little bro arrived back in 1980. He was a man full of joy and mischief even as an adult, and the kids could always sense that. Only now do I appreciate what a gift that was, to be so present.

We all had those important, nonparental adults in our lives when we were young [I hope].And oftentimes, one thing they did was take us to the movies. In honor of this dear man, feel free to shout out some of the most memorable cinematic excursions you went on with your own version of Don. And please set aside a moment of silence for him and all those like him in your own lives this Wednesday, October 25, which would have been his 60th birthday.

Resquiat in pace, Don. You set the grown-up cinetrix on her way long ago. Thank you.

American graffitti

One of the nicer things about sitting in on the noir class that meets just before I teach is getting a student's-eye view of things. Oftentimes, this involves watching kids IM or shop on their laptops under the guise of "taking notes," thus confirming I was right to institute a blanket ban on laptops in my class.

But the other day I came in late and got stuck sitting behind some sort of structurally necessary projection. It'd been decorated by countless bored students with the usual stuff about So-and-So smoking pole and the like. Pretty standard. Then I noticed the faint "Charles Kane Kane" graffitto captured above. Film tags, woo-hoo! Was it from my class last spring? Some other teacher's? Whatever its origin, I was glad to see it.

Later the same day, a student of mine who's also in the noir class showed off his Night of the Hunter-stizz knuckle art, also drawn out of boredom. Sadly, I'd used up my cameraphone memory, but just imagine F-I-L-M on one hand and N-O-I-R on the other. Good stuff.

Enjoy the weekend.

Did people ever really dance in bars? I thought that was a myth.

A confession: The cinetrix really kinda wants this affiche. Hell, she'd settle for just seeing The Last Days of Disco again. Her irrational fondness for the mannered Whit Stillman flick stems, no doubt, from having spent her own early 20s as an underpaid cog in publishing, toiling for the Man by day and going out to the Plough or Delux with jmac et al. most nights.

Plus, there is something so joyous and free about the final frames of the film, helped in no small part by the OJays "Love Train," that haunts me to this day. But then you know how I get about pop music in film.

Days has been out of print longer than any of the usual DVD-by-mail suspects have been in business, so if any of you nice people have a less-than-bank-breaking line on a copy, do let me know.

I forget what 8 was for

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.

A fine line between clever and stupid

Me, I got nothing, but do go over and check out my pal Mark Olsen's LA Times piece on the latest crop of "seemingly lowbrow, secretly smart" comedies like Borat.

Also well worth a read is Sac's review of a movie he does not intend to see (The Departed), which was one of the only things that has made me laugh in the past 10 days. Here's a taste:

There will be a montage. There will be gratuitous use of 60s anthems. There will be a voiceover. There will be cocaine. There will be moral ambiguities illustrating that cops and crooks are just two sides of the same coin.

Amen to that.

Going dark

We lost my father-in-law last night, quite suddenly. He was a lovely man who could not abide violent movies but had no problem with a little skin. Only this summer I learned that he'd been a film critic for the Harvard Crimson when he was an undergraduate in the 1950s. I can't believe he's gone.

Keep the 'Fesser and his mother and brother in your thoughts, won't you? And call your loved ones today and actually tell them that you love them. Tell them why you're doing it, too, if you want.

Dangerous minds? Hardly.

The cinetrix had the sort of weekend that makes her want to dismiss the collected corpus of inspiring teacher flicks with a scornful "fuck that noise." There is nothing like plowing through the first batch of student papers to make you reach for a bat, Lean on Me stizz, rather than clamber to the top of your desk for a little life-changing Barbaric Yawping 101.

This is what students forget. Yes, you're getting slammed with midterms, but guess who gets to read your deathless prose? When I told my poetess pal about my exciting weekend plans, she responded

The film Casablanca is a movie in which many various themes and ideas are explored.

 

Good start, no?  I was going to write a whole paragraph, but my brain started to hurt.

Precisely.

It's not all gloom and doom, though. After discovering my first choice--The Basketball Diaries--for a Banned Books Week reading on campus was not among the library's holdings, the cinetrix opted to read a few definitions from Merriam Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary that had gotten various municipalities in a swivet. After opening with "sexual intercourse," I proceeded to drop the f-bomb and the c-word. In a library. Mic'ed. It was so good I wanted a cigarette afterwards.