pullquote

Then I'm a philistine

Great moment in pedogogy? That remains to be seen. But the cinetrix is awfully pleased with the thesis she helped a student come up with this afternoon. The kid was two-thirds of the way there: writing about the opening tennis game sequence in The Squid and the Whale using Bordwell's article about the art cinema. But what she had was description, not an argument. Yeah, Baumbach uses the art cinema styles and themes Bordwell identifies. So what? Or as the cinetrix's own undergraduate adviser so felicitously put it, "Why do we care?"

Here's what we came up with. Bernard conducts himself as though he'd read the Bordwell piece and models his behavior after that of every drifting, aimless, reactive art house anti-hero.  Case in point:

Bernard Berkman: [Waiting to be taken away in an ambulance after having a heart attack] Degolas.
Joan Berkman: What?
Bernard Berkman: It means "bitch." Don't you remember?
Joan Berkman: You're calling me a bitch?
Bernard Berkman: No, don't you remember the last line of Godard's "A Bout De Souffle"? Belmondo calls Seberg a bitch. "Degolas." We saw it at the Thalia with the Dicksteins. I got you in for the children's price. You were pregnant with Walt.
Joan Berkman: Like six weeks.
Bernard Berkman: I still got you in for a children's ticket. You told me you didn't like Godard. You thought the jump-cuts were -
[He is loaded into the ambulance]

He even does the Belmondo lip-smearing move.

What the mixed doubles opening sequence establishes so economically is a fluid family power dynamic that deftly undercuts Bernard's bids to be the sole auteur/protagonist of the narrative.

I think it's going to be a good paper. Now if only I could have an epiphany like that about my own presentation....

Connotation and denotation

This one's for you scholarly cinegeeks: Is there someone I can read whose name does not rhyme with Mristain Ketz on the "Problems of Denotation in the Fiction Film"? I am struggling to examine how two films' use of a certain actor adds additional connotative and denotative [extrafilmic] dimensions to each of the respective texts, but I'm drowning in bullshit semiotic jargon right now.

Seriously, it'd be easier to treat the actor like a much-loved pop song and talk about sampling and citation. Fuck, I might just do that unless you good people come through with the clarity. Thanks in advance.

No fun.

Following a referral, the cinetrix just discovered that she's on NPR's Blog of the Nation blogroll.

Under "Fun News."

With Go Fug Yourself and Post Secret. Honorable associations, both. But Fun News? Not Arts, where you'll find The Carpetbagger, Maud, Haggis et al.?

Don't get me wrong--I'm grateful for any and all linkage. But I also feel like I just realized my slip is showing. Or that I unintentionally sold out while I wasn't paying attention. Pullquote rarely distinguishes itself as topical or cutting edge. I just don't swim in scoop-conducive waters.

Fun News? Thanks, I guess.

Even though it's been skewing more like "No Fun" news around here lately, here's some "fun news" for you. Well, kind of.

On Saturday I caught a midnight screening of a 16mm print of a certain banned movie about eating disorders, doll parts, rainy days & Mondays, and death. That's right. I said 16mm, bitches--jealous?

In case you were wondering, it's just as sad on the big screen.

"Fun" fact: This unnameable succès de scandale was on a double bill with Marlon Rigg's groundbreaking 1990 film Tongues Untied, which was finally making its Durham debut. 

Thank god for Rosey Grier

Long ago he assured the little cinetrix "It's Alright to Cry." I gotta say, the continued news from Blacksburg has me constantly on the verge of tears. See, I may bitch about my students, but here's the thing: They look just like the VT kids.

I promise to rally and return to Full Frame dish soon, but for now, here's Quad Cinema president Elliott Kanbar's recent list of tear-jerkers.

SOME VERY GOOD TEAR-JERKING MOVIES: These may not be the best films you've ever seen, but, admit it, they were able to give you a good cry. Here are 10 good ones that come to mind:

"FIELD OF DREAMS." 1989. An affectionate film about lost idealism and squandered relationships and opportunities. The ending, when Ray (Kevin Costner) has a catch with his estranged father while headlights from thousands of cars are seen streaming to the "field," well, it's truly a magical moment.

"MANHATTAN." 1979. A Woody Allen classic that manages to be funny and sad in just the right places. The emotionally affecting good-bye at the end between Woody and Mariel Hemingway reflects so movingly the pain of making wrong decisions when it comes to love.

"TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD." 1962. There have been few more poignant moments in film than the scene when lawyer Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck) walks out of the courtroom after his black client is wrongfully convicted of rape, and the entire balcony of black spectators stand up to honor him.

"CASABLANCA." 1942. With the mother of all film endings, it deserves inclusion as a top handkerchief film. It's now such a well-worn cliche, but "We'll always have Paris," even after hundreds of viewings, still sounds just so right.

"AU REVOIR LES ENFANTS." 1987. Depicts director Louis Malle's experiences as a young boy in a Catholic boarding school in occupied France during World War II. When, at the end, the Gestapo enter the school searching for Jews, the finale is nothing short of devastating.

"NOT ONE LESS." 1988. Before Chinese film director Zhang Yimou started to make opulant martial-arts films, he made this simple film about a 13 year-old girl in rural China hired to cover a class for a teacher on a one-month leave. Her efforts to save a run-away boy from quitting school shows how beautiful it is to simply care for someone in trouble.

"ON GOLDEN POND." 1981. Yes, it's sappy and a bit maudlin. But to see the aging (and dying) Henry Fonda and his long-estranged daughter, Jane, coming to terms while making this film, well, it's just something very special.

"THE BICYCLE THIEF." 1947. Directed by Vittorio De Sica, this is the best of the neo-realism post World War II flicks. Filmed in stark black-and-white on the war-torn streets of Rome, it tells the story of a simple working-man whose job depends on his bicycle, and the heartbreak when his bicycle is stolen. He then roams the streets and back-alleys of the city with his young son desperately, and tearfully, searching for the thief.

"PATCH OF BLUE." 1965. A sensitive blind girl (Elizabeth Hartman) is brought out of her shell and given a dose of self-esteem when she falls for a guy (Sidney Poitier) she's unaware is black. Without an ounce of self-pity, the film movingly teaches us that sometimes we do have to be a bit "blind" to know when love comes knocking on our door.

"IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE." 1946. Before you moan and groan about this film you've seen a thousand times, think about the very first time you saw it. It's the only way you can fully appreciate how convincingly it sermonized that each and every one of us, in the course of our lives, can positively impact so many  people around us.

Don't agree with 'em all? Me neither. [Give me Ponette over Costner any day.] Nominate your sob stories in the comments. And pass the kleenex.

The Killer Within

The cinetrix does have a lot to share about this year's Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, but right now the only film she can think about is Macky Alston's The Killer Within. It's astonishing and, today, painfully prescient.

An esteemed University of Arizona psych prof in his 70s reveals, first to his family, then to his friends, colleagues, employers, and students that when he was a Swarthmore undergraduate in 1955, he murdered a fellow student. He was institutionalized for several years, found not guilty by reason of insanity, and released.

Until a few years ago, only his wife knew his story.

She and their two daughters embark on this revelatory journey with him, but what still haunts me is his unsettling lack of affect all these decades after the--you knew this was coming--day he set off with several firearms and the premeditated plan to murder everyone in his dormitory.

The Killer Within screened only yesterday at the Philadelphia International Film Festival. It's scheduled on April 21 and 26 at the Landmark Midtown Art Cinema as part of the Atlanta International Film Festival, and on April 26 and 29 at the Somerville Theatre as part of the Independent Film Festival of Boston. See it if you can.

If you are an educator, Diana Kurnit of distributor Discovery Films told me on Saturday that she and Alston were hoping to put together a tour of school campuses. If you're interested in learning how your institution can bring this film to campus, you can contact her here.

Pray for the Hokies.

To her, with love

This e-mail arrived at 8:31 a.m. and made me feel a little better:

Dear [redacted],
All else aside, I would like to really apologize for not reading the article this last class.  Sorry for my/our poor 'studentship' when it makes your teaching hard to impossible, it was pretty shitty of us.
Sincerely,
[redacted].

Not so much better that I'm actually grading their papers, mind, but it's a start.

Seconds of pleasure

The cinetrix experienced a pedogogical first today, and it wasn't pretty. After she screened a little bit of Zizek on pleasure, desire, and shit in Hitchcock and the long-form trailer for Psycho to begin our discussion of various film theories [in the context of last week's look at auteur theory], she began making something of a hash of Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." A slow, creeping realization slowly dawned: None of the little fuckers had printed out the essay and brought it to class, much less read it. A quick survey revealed they hadn't read any of the other reading assigned for today, either.

So I stopped what I was doing, said I didn't see the point in wasting any more of my time on them, and told them all to leave, dismissing class 12 minutes early.

Here's where you come in. Who are your favorite evil teachers in film? List 'em in the comments, please, cuz I sure ain't feeling the "To Sir, With Love" today.

To live and die in LA: postscript

Nearly forgot. Whilst in LA, the 'Fesser and I developed a code word to indicate we'd spotted someone we suspected had been surgically enhanced:

"Baudrillard."

It's fun--try it and see.

[We're now about halfway through The Loved One. It seemed the right thing to do.]

To live and die in LA: Hollywood Forever

Fuck it, kids. The cinetrix is going to lay out the rest of her recent trip to Hellay bullet stizz.

• I toasted St. Patrick's with Lo at The Prince, where Jake and his busted nose meet Evelyn for lunch in Chinatown. They haven't changed a stick of the decor since before the early 70s--and by they I mean the Korean owners who served us Hite.
• The trip to The Prince was suggested by FOC Mark Olsen, who met us for and at Lucious Dumplings for brunch the following day.
• The 'Fesser and I, er, killed time before dinner Monday by strolling through Hollywood Forever cemetery. I was dismayed to run into Jeremy Piven and special guest star M. Night Shamalamadingdong shooting a scene for Entourage. I wanted dead stars, dammit. Not live hacks.
• Elote, si! Drogas, no! My favorite dining experience may have been scoring elote from a street vendor outside a Catholic school a block south of Hollywood Boulevard.
• That's only because Lou on Vine did not have the pig candy on the menu when the Teartles, Antonym, the 'Fesser, Johnnyhongkong, the radiant Mary Milan, and yours truly convened there for Monday night supper. Mr. Manohla's restaurant was fantastic. Only clue of his connection to the world of cinema? The server name on the checks: Travis Bickle.
• Oh, yeah, and I even saw a movie. We hit the Cinerama Dome with a former student of mine for a matinee of Zodiac. Enormous, slightly concave Robert Downey Jr. going to pot... mmmmm....

Los laberintos

The cinetrix has had one of those weeks. After giving the kiddies an extension from Friday to Monday on their papers, she was confronted with the unpleasant and unenviable task of trying to explain the politique des auteurs and Sarris-stizz auteur theory to a roomful of people who clearly hadn't done the reading.

Oh, yeah, and then screen Citizen Kane. Jealous?

That said, one of these days I should post a picture of my now near-patented schematic of Kane's plot. It's a thing of beauty, really, how the various characters' accounts of CFK nestle together like Matryoshka dolls. So tidy.

Borges, as Laura Mulvey reminds us in the opening sentence of her BFI monograph on Welles' debut, described Citizen Kane as a labyrinth without a center. Having managed to survive this hellish teaching week, is it any wonder, then, that the cinetrix slipped off to the dollar theater yesterday afternoon to reward herself with a screening of Pan's Labyrinth?

What a gorgeous fucking movie. I am so glad I saw it projected, even if they had the wrong lens on for the first few minutes, squashing sedans and Spanish soldiers alike along the horizontal plane.

Manmade labyrinths are plenty scary, but since I saw this fearsome fairy tale, I've been thinking more about films' forests primeval. And, you know, fascists. Pan's opening trek through the forest to the mill reminded me of the site of Children of Men's tracking ambush and even the grim chase at the end of Il Conformista.

What about you? What are some of your favorite film fairy tales to get lost in?