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I got you, babe

Screw Punxsatawney Phil. The Pioneer Theater in New York has the right idea when it comes to observing Groundhog Day: Bill Murray Bill Murray Bill Murray [preferrably said a la the RZA and the GZA].

That's right. Those of you residing on Peter Minuit's island can observe the cinetrix's favorite pagan holiday* this Friday at 7 p.m. by watching Groundhog Day--again--in beautiful Alphabet City. As for the rest of you, well, you have a few days to make the requisite arrangements with your preferred movie vendor. And to figure out how to watch the movie without seeing Andie MacDowell. [Seriously, the folks behind Greystoke had the right idea.]

O.K. kids, the cinetrix has a bunch of movies she wants to talk about, but she needs to put a project to bed before she can return to the Internets. Until then...

* Seriously. She and the 'Fesser threw a big party five years ago to celebrate.

Critical languors

In the doldrums of worthwhile new releases that is January, the New York Times' film critics succumb to winter discontent.

Witness A.O. Scott's lede for his review of Smokin' Aces:

"F.B.I.! F.B.I.!" Blam blam blam blam. "[Expletive]. [Expletive]." Blam blam blam. Spurt of blood. Plot twist. "F.B.I.! F.B.I.!" "[Expletive]." Blam blam blam blam blam. "[Expletive]." "F.B.I.!" "Hotel Security!" Blam. Exploding skull. Guy sits on a chain saw. Montage. [Expletive]. Plot twist. Roll credits.

Funny stuff, Tony. He helpfully goes on to offer

Watching it is like being smacked in the face for a hundred minutes with a raw sirloin steak. By the end, there's blood everywhere, a bad smell lingering in the air, and vegetarianism — or starvation or blindness — starts to look like an attractive option.

[Yo, Biff Grimes called. He says back off my beat, bitch.]

Reviewing Seraphim Falls, Stephen Holden turns in his usual, plot summary-heavy prose. The last line

It’s like being importuned by carnies while on your way to church.

gets a close, but no cigar from the cinetrix, who couldn't shake the image of the Bindlestiffs busking outside of St. Patrick's.

But the winner of the Ennui Awards is Jeanette Catsoulis. The stringer has both staff critics beat this week. [Manohla's filing from Sundance.] Check out her take on lame sci-fi indie From Other Worlds:

...Joining forces, they track down a garrulous alien who instructs them — in a vocal hybrid of Liberace and the police inspector from "Young Frankenstein" — on how to save the world. Instructions on how to save the script are not forthcoming.

Flirting with fantasy, farce and social commentary and committing to none, the writer and director Barry Strugatz pads his film with ill-conceived characters (Melissa Leo as a coy librarian) and embarrassing puns ("You've been acting really spaced out recently"). Meanwhile his two leads, displaying less chemistry than an American high-school transcript, stagger toward their respective awakenings like dazed lemmings in a movie that never finds a consistent tone.

I think that means she didn't like it.

The cinetrix said it before and she'll say it again. Weeks like this she's glad she retained her amateur status and doesn't have to sit through "a movie that may not only be dumb in itself, but also the cause of dumbness in others."

Enjoy the weekend, kids.

Jazzin for blue jeans

Ah, the oh-so desirable epicanthal fold...

A gentle reminder to all you New Yorkers out there in Interweb land. Micha X. Peled's latest doc, China Blue, begins a one-week stand at Anthology this Friday, January 27. [The rest of youse can check here to see when it's coming to that proverbial theatre near you.]

So what's it all about? Here's the skinny:

Like no other film before it, CHINA BLUE is a powerful and poignant journey into the harsh world of sweatshop workers. Shot clandestinely, this is a deep-access account of what both China and the international retailers don't want us to see: how the clothes we buy are actually made.

Following a pair of denim jeans from manufacture to sale, CHINA BLUE links the power of the U.S. consumer market to the daily lives of a Chinese factory owner and two teenaged female factory workers. Filmed both in the factory and in the workers' faraway village, this documentary provides a rare, human glimpse at China's rapid transformation into a free market society.

Sixteen-year-old Jasmine is a thread-cutter at the Lifeng Factory, one of dozens of denim manufacturers in Shaxi, South China. As she puts it, she makes the 'big and fat' jeans we wear. Like her new friends at the factory – Liping, a seamstress, and Orchid, a zipper installer – Jasmine is one of hundreds of millions of people, mostly young women, who make up the largest pool of cheap labor in the world.

Here's some of what the summary doesn't mention: Girls from the provinces lie about their age to get these jobs. Sewing in zippers is actually higher-paid skilled labor. Factories routinely withhold the first month's salary so employees don't leave. When you work an 18-hour shift to meet deadline, the midnight snack is free. Otherwise, you pay for meals, for a bed in the factory dorm, and for hot water [in a bucket, carried up stairs] to bathe in. Oh, and the Lifeng factory owner was proud to let Peled shoot there because his factory is actually a lot better to its workers than others in the area. Mmmmm... globalization....

China Blue was one of my favorite docs at Full Frame last April. If the cinetrix was given to list-making [you may have noticed, she's not], it'd be right up there with The Death of Mr. Lazarescu for '06.  So I'm delighted it found distribution.

Just check it out, you fucking cynics. You're overdue for a good cry, some liberal guilt, and a bit of righteous outrage.

American sucker in the classroom

By this point, plenty of clever-boots cinemaphages have all had their poke at David Denby for his recent "well, duh" piece on the state of Hollywood filmmaking today, Big Pictures. Still, because of its up-to-the-minute overview of various technologies, I assigned it to the kiddies to augment their textbook [published in 2002] reading on distribution and exhibition.

Also, well, I wanted a whipping boy. See, Denby begins his oh-so-bold sally into the state of the viewing nation by bemoaning the picture quality of Pirates of the Caribbean as seen on an iPod. It sucks, says the American Sucker. But these kids today, with their hip-hop music etc., are what he calls platform agnostic. They don't care how they see what they see. The little vulgarians.

Much better, he tells us, is the viewing experience he had at the high-end home theatre of a well-heeled pal and on another chum's "excellent forty-two-inch gas-plasma screen." Yeah, I bet. Must be nice. But don't worry, true believers. There will always be an England theatrical distribution in some form because, as James Shamus helpfully points out, "You say, 'Do you want to go the movies with me Friday night?' Movies are a pretext for social interaction. So don't think of the future in terms of technology. It's not a question of platforms but of how people want to use social spaces, how given ethnic and age groups want to interact." And kids, students, will always want to get laid. Ah, the eternal verities.

It's about here that I explained to the students that Denby's last book detailed his online porn addiction and his disastrous investments in high tech. And suggested that his argument was not only generationally divisive --"we long to be overwhelmed by that flush of emotion when image, language, movement, and music merge" versus  those poor kids, who "will be settling for a lesser experience, even if they don't yet know it—even if they never know it"--it was all incredibly classist to boot.

Granted, they're not giving away iPods just yet, but it's still a platform that's a lot more accessible to average folks [and by that I mean the youth] than some plasma screen or pimped-out home theatre. And I know the well-heeled audience the New Yorker targets, but c'mon. Condescending shit like this makes the cinetrix wish Denby's traditional-aged fellow students at Columbia had gone all Zéro de Conduite on his pompous ass.

Roll credits.

The Old Grey Lady Goes Blue

Boom-chicka-wa-wa. The cinetrix just loves it when the NYT gets down and dirty, as in today's deeply insightful article [snort] on the effect of high-def on porn.

This may be what they'd like you to think of as the take-away:

Pornography has long helped drive the adoption of new technology, from the printing press to the videocassette. Now pornographic movie studios are staying ahead of the curve by releasing high-definition DVDs.

But this is--if you'll pardon the industry jargon--the money shot:

“The biggest problem is razor burn,” said Stormy Daniels, an actress, writer and director.

Now, the cinetrix and her hoodlum coworkers at the video store were past masters of playing spot the implant scars way back in the VHS days, so she can't even imagine how horrific adult movies look in HD.

O tempora! O mores! O face!

Hey! Antoinette*

One of the nice things about our one-and-a-half run local theatre happens during this stretch of the year. While horror quickies and Oscar hopefuls crowd the multiplex marquees, we're treated to big screen showings of an improbable array of flicks just before they hit DVD--at two bucks a pop. Which may explain how it is that in the past month the cinetrix has seen Casino Royale, Borat [hey, the 'Fesser and a friend had missed out], and [finally] Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette.

So what do you call it when the third film is the sophomore slump? Either the Germans or Pat Riley must have a word for it.

Such a disappointment, this one. Kirsten Dunst is astonishingly beautiful here and wonderfully photographed, but the film is incredibly inert. I get that Coppola probably wanted viewers to experience the regimentation and tedium of the Austrian's life in the court of France. And the static, repetitive sequences of the Dauphins dining together are funny and clever. But they aren't tight enough. To make her point Coppola'd need more of the fearful symmetry of a Kubrick, I'm afraid. Also, just because we all know what happened to Marie Antoinette doesn't mean story can be dispensed with altogether. And it isn't entirely, but the script is starlet-slight.

Thus, there are the many great players who go criminally underused. Judy Davis is all tendoned neck and clenched jaw. Steve Coogan appears to have nicked an aging Prince Valiant's coiffure. Luminaries like Danny Huston, Rip Torn, Shirley Henderson, even Asia Argento, are all left in the lurch, gamely throwing bits of business into the candy-colored void. Poor Mathieu Almaric gets only a blink-and-you-miss-him cameo. And the hungry citizens, when they finally appear in the final reel, show up so suddenly as to seem a flash mob.

Of course, the fashion is divine. The music, not so much. Here's what I mean. Music supervisor Brian Reitzell has done another stellar job of selecting hipper-than-thou tracks, but all too often how Coppola chooses to marry their sputtering energy to her languid imagery feels a half-beat off. [No mean trick in 4-4 time.] It's as though her delight in their sheer anachronism has turned her ear to tin. For a picture that relies so heavily on affect over event, this failed marriage between sound and image is nothing less than a tragedy.

The teaser trailers are everything the film should be, and isn't. Tant pis. Harnessing the headlong, propulsive precision of post punk to Antoinette's giddy swirl of girlyness would have held the movie together and given it the epic shape and towering grandeur of one of the young queen's coiffures. Instead, it falls flat.

*

Between Men

Here's how you know a movie is bad.

Earlier this week. Int. dining room chez cinetrix and 'Fesser. They talk while tucking into a succulent hot bird.
Cinetrix: God, I haven't posted in ages. I'm totally in a slump. Plus, I haven't seen anything since we watched The Ice Harvest last weekend.
'Fesser [pauses, bemused]: Wow. I haven't thought about that movie at all. I completely forgot we watched it.
And... scene.

Jesus God is The Ice Harvest bad. Talk about punching above your weight. And it shouldn't be, which is what makes it even worse. Directed by he may have become a hack but he's our hack [Ghostbusters generation, reprazent] Harold Ramis and with a writing credit from Richard Russo, the movie stars a pale, puffy, bloated John Cusack as not too bright mob lawyer Charlie and the wiry and even  paler Billy Bob Thornton as his pornographer partner Vic. They've conspired to steal a substantial amount of money from Charlie's crooked boss Bill Guerrard [Randy Quaid. I know.] and are about to blow town. Until inclement weather rolls in, and they're stuck. In Witchita [probably the most original aspect of the flick]. On Christmas Eve. Ho ho fucking ho hum.

This set-up should yield something bleak and dark and funny. Should. As Charlie's drunken pal and one-time cuckolder Pete, Oliver Platt is all three, but it's tough to say what Pete's doing there. Hell, what anyone's doing there. Meanwhile, Connie Nielsen lets her Cherries in the Snow-hued lipstick do the acting for her as Renata, the strip club-owning femme fatale Charlie fancies. There's also an incriminating photo of a local pol in flagrante. And a menacing heavy keeps asking after our hero. And so on.

We never learn what made Charlie's heist scheme so clever, and he certainly doesn't convince as the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree. Instead, folks get shot, fingers get vised, Thornton's Vic acts oily, and Charlie keeps getting pulled over by an amiable cop--and let go. The cop has the right idea: Charlie's not worth bothering with.

But perhaps the greatest crime in The Ice Harvest is the dialogue. The cinetrix can't remember the last time she was subjected to something so overwritten and implausible. It's clear the writers drank deep from the poisonous cup of Chandler and Hammet [and even Leonard]. Yet all the viewer gets served is swilly backwash, which proves impossible to swallow without gagging.

[Thank god we're not in Kansas anymore.]

Stop: Hammer Time!

Bust out the genie pants and-- oh, OK, this post has nothing to do with MC Hammer, so the cinetrix is not even gonna apologize for getting his hit song stuck in your head. [You're welcome.]

Wily West Coast correspondent johnnyhongkong draws our attention to a very special event celebrating Dr. King's legacy this holiday weekend. Yes, it's truly a day on, not a day off at the UCLA Hammer Museum this Sunday, January 14 at 6 p.m., when ManohlaDargisoftheNewYorkTimes and her colleague, "architectural critic" Nicolai Ouroussoff [really? not "architecture critic"? Now I'm picturing a guy built along the Brutalist lines of Boston's Government Center. I still remember Mark Olsen's disappointment when I showed him the place. Anyway... where were we? Oh, right]

engage in a conversation about perceptions of Los Angeles as portrayed in the media, film, and architecture. Dargis is presently a chief film critic for The New York Times and has written for LA Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, and Sight and Sound. Ouroussoff is chief architecture critic at The New York Times and has written about architecture and urban design in cities from New Orleans to Berlin. He was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 2006.

Best part? It's free, the cinetrix's favorite price. We expect a full report from our LA operatives.

Can't make it to LA? Well, to continue dancing about architecture, Bela Tarr's 450-minute epic Sátántangó plays this Saturday and Sunday at the Harvard Film Archive. HFA is housed in Harvard's Carpenter Center, Le Corbusier's only bit of architecture in the United States, which I think Tom Lehrer waggishly described as resembling two grand pianos fucking.

Have a great weekend, folks.

Milk and grenadine, Marx and Coca-Cola

Another semester has started and, once again, in addition to teaching the kiddies about film, the cinetrix is sitting in on a colleague's class. This one's on Godard, Varda, and les freres Dardennes, three filmmakers about whom she knows various degrees of sweet fuck all.

Par example, before today, the cinetrix had never gotten around to seeing Godard's Rohmer-scripted early short Charlotte et Veronique, ou Tout les Garcons s'appellent Patrick (now thoughtfully included on Criterion's edition of A Woman Is a Woman). She suspects some of the students were still too busy recovering from the shock of learning this iteration of Great Directors would be [gasp!] subtitle central to appreciate just how thick and fast JLG flings cultural signifiers on the screen. OK, and, granted, they might be slightly less attuned than the cinetrix to just what a movie-mad snapshot it takes of the state of cinema in the late 1950s.

Transistors and turntables. Hegel and Picasso. Elvis and James Dean. Mickey Mouse, mirrored moues, even a girl and a gun. The hallmarks of nouvelle vague Godard are all there already. And, yes, the director glowers behind a newspaper whose front page decries the Tradition of Quality. But didn't I also glimpse Welles's Hank Quinlan fulminating from the cover of that Cahiers du Cinema on the cafe table? And I'm pretty sure the girls trilled a few bars of "Que Sera, Sera." Bonjour, auteurs! It's giddy, silly fun.

[Also fun is discovering which of the cinetrix's former students have chosen to continue to study film. One seemed confused to see me on the other side of the classroom dynamic; another has gone and transitioned from one gender to the other. Que sera, sera, indeed.]

Dear Yale University Press...

<grovel>
Can you please send the cinetrix a copy of Hitchcock's Music? I promise to make the university librarian order a copy, too, if that'll help.

OK, I'd be the first to admit my track record with the scant review copies I've received could be better [Confidential to Hachette, Bullfinch, and Chicago: I'm a slow reader], but this time will be different. I'll totally cite Sullivan in my SCMS paper and everything. Promise.

Would it help if you knew that this guy once gave me a TV? True story.
</grovel>

My, I'm chatty today.