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Fishscale

More from David Lynch's Catching the Big Fish:

A Sense of Place

A sense of place is so critical in cinema, because you want to go into another world. Every story has its own world, and its own feel, and its own mood. So you try to put together all these things--these little details--to create that sense of place.

It has a lot to do with lighting and sound. The sounds that come into a room can help paint a world there and make it so much fuller. While many sets are good enough for a wide shot, in my mind, they should be good enough for close scrutiny, for the little details to show. You may not ever really see them all, but you've got to feel that they're there, somehow, to feel that it's a real place, a real world.

We Love roll call, y'all

The cinetrix first saw St. Clair Bourne's doc Making "Do the Right Thing" [now available on the second disc of the Criterion release] on a double bill with Spike Lee's paradigm-shifting flick at the Brattle sometime in 1990 or so. This past April at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival she got a chance to thank the man himself and tell him about catching the screening so long ago. Ever gracious, he chuckled, averring that must have been one of the few during its brief theatrical release.

Bourne was in Durham to screen the doc as part of the Power of Ten program, which looked back over the fest's first decade. An excerpt from his program note:

...At the height of our influence during the late 60's and early 70's, Black documentarians of my generation transformed the treatment of Black subjects in a way in which they hadn't been treated before -- using the interior organic voice of our own people (voice-over) as opposed to a "white expert" interpreter (narration) as an indication of cultural authenticity.

I choose my documentary Making "Do the Right Thing" not because it's one of my films, but because that film and Spike Lee's appearance on the American film scene mark the beginning and end of several cultural and political currents of that time.

...Spike put his version of reality on the big screen and that's what made him distinct. He kept it real before "keeping it real" became a rallying cry of Black popular culture.... Spike's films were as "culturally authentic" as our docs, but had the advantage of being on the big screen, thus marking feature films with a certain authenticity.

As for my own filmmaking career, I felt that I had gone as far as I could within the traditional television-based documentary format of that time. So when I made this film, it gave me an opportunity to incorporate a pop cinema verité approach to my filmmaking. The interconnecting narratives bounce between the mechanics of the production and several insightful lvignettes of Bed-Stuy community life (the Nation of Islam, the homeowner and the crack addict, the effect of this major operation on the community). Also, the theatrical release and positive reception of my documentary introduced a new generation of hip-hop film audience to my work.

St. Clair Bourne died Saturday in a New York hospital after an operation to remove a brain tumor. He was 64.

I believe Mister Senor Love Daddy said it best: "We wanna thank you all for makin' our lives just a little brighter here on We Love Radio!"

Pescatorial pensée

As threatened promised, an excerpt from David Lynch's Catching the Big Fish:

I like the saying: "The world is as you are." And I think films are as you are. That's why, although the frames of a film are always the same--the same number, in the same sequence, with the same sounds--every screening is different. The difference is sometimes subtle but it's there. It depends on the audience. There is a circle that goes from the audience to the film and back. Each person is looking and thinking and feeling and coming up with his or her own sense of things. And it's probably different from what I fell in love with.

So you don't know how it's going to hit people. But if you thought about how it's going to hit people, or if it's going to hurt someone, or if it's going to do this or do that, then you would have to stop making films. You just do these things that you fall in love with, and you never know what's going to happen.

Cosmology

While the cinetrix doesn't ordinarily engage in the whole "look what came in through my referral logs" game [though she is dying to know who you folks in places like South Weymouth, Helsinki, ESRI, and Jackson are--maybe we'll stage a "coming out day"], she can't let this one pass without comment.

Search Engine		ask.com
Search Words		does the camera steal your soul

Uh, yes, Pictou, Nova Scotia, it does. Next question.

Reading is fundamental

The combination of technological difficulties [see below; since resolved] and the aforementioned schoolwork caesura left the cinetrix with an unconscionable amount of time on her hands this past week. What to do? Oh, that's right: reading! Old media. Yeah.

What follows is a grab bag of impressions from my brief foray into the printed [shudder] word:

• Movies Rock came bundled with my New Yorker. Upon opening it, my first thought was "Oh, sweet Christ! Graydon Carter's hand-chosen guest editor [Mitch Glazer] has that same stupid fuckin' hair." To tell the truth, just the though of any Vanity Fair article, issue, or offshoot makes me tired. Truly, does anyone care about yet another pal of Sinatra's, no matter how talented, or deep background on the Saturday Night Fever shoot? Not to mention the old Dark Side of the Moon/Wizard of Oz canard. Wolcott on Tommy seems phoned in. Ditto Tosches on Elmer Bernstein. I mean, the bylines alone should tip you off. It's like pop culture for old people: slowed down, with recognizable names and lotsa glossy pictures. Pretty much the only entertaining "feature" is the "50 Greatest [Mostly] Rock Soundtracks of All Time," which is the sort of thing Entertainment Weekly regularly pulls out of its ass during slow "news" cycles.
• Reading Film Comment always makes me want to create some sort of diagram [if only I had the graphic skills of the Panopticist] mapping out the book's front matter, feature well, and back pages.  That's because it seems like a carefully calibrated formula is deployed to determine the just obscure enough, lay claim to the right rising talent, and reassess some hoary cinematic giant. And then I start thinking that's impossible, and maybe Gavin Smith just sends some interns over to Broadway and 68th to poll 100 passersby about whether they've heard of, say, Eagle Pennell, a la Us Weekly's recurring "Who Wore It Best?" feature. Even before the backlash began, Starlee Kine's Juno piece put me in a funk, perhaps because it was the sort of thing that used to be written by Alyssa Quart. [Also, once I remembered where I knew her name from, I realized the piece would probably sound better read aloud in a faux-naif voice and broken up with strains of a Yo La Tengo instrumental.] But it wasn't all rough going: in his Toronto report, FOC Mark Olsen ended a paragraph with "Honore's most recent efforts aren't just films that you like--you develop weird little crushes on them."--and all was forgiven. "Weird little crushes" are what keeps me going.
• Don't You Forget About Me: Contemporary Writers on the Films of John Hughes is the sort of collection that makes you say, "Shit, I wish I'd thought of that." The maestro's Molly triptych is well-represented: 13 of the essays touch upon at least one of the three films in which Ringwald starred. Ferris gets four freestanding entries. Some Kind of Wonderful and Weird Science bring up the rear. [Uncle Buck and Home Alone are alluded to in passing.] There's a nice intro by Ally Sheedy, and Moon Unit Zappa writes amusingly about how appealing Hughes' Illinois suburbs were to the daughter of outre icon Frank. There's also a  fair amount about class and burgeoning sexuality, but the collection is burdened by the various contributors rehearsing the same few factoids--Ringwald was on the cover of Time at 16, and so on--which grow tedious on third mention. Still, worth snagging from the library.
• Then there's Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity, which the Penguin rep nicely sent to me a while back. Basically David Lynch's TM version of Robert Bresson's Notes on the Cinematographer, the handsome, blue, square volume seems designed with gift-giving in mind. I picked it up expecting to mock, but I'm really enjoying it and may even post a couple excerpts in the coming days.
• Finally, Steve Erickson's Zeroville was so staggering it deserves its own post when I have the time to do it justice.

Tech support!

OK, kids. Everyone likes giving advice, right? Here's your chance.

The back story: A couple months ago the DVD player* the cinetrix has had since her video store days finally went tits up. Now it taunts the viewer by showing the first couple minutes of a flick, then hiccuping back to the beginning. Is no good.

As a temporary fix, we swapped in a player that a former colleague had left behind in the office that is now the 'Fesser's. It works fine, but it doesn't have a remote control, which means that if the movie we want to watch has one of those high-falutin' menus requiring, uh, navigation, we're screwed.

Now, much as the cinetrix would love a region-free replacement, time is of the essence. The 'Fesser has kids coming over for a screening tomorrow night, so we need to procure a solid, inexpensive player from one of the hideous big box stores a couple towns over. Which inexpensive make and model would you recommend?  Answer in the comments, s.v.p.

*OK, fine. Our television most likely has cathode ray tubes in it, and we only got cable in 2004. We're Luddites. And broke. Happy now?

Gangsters, thugs, and smugglers

In the past month, the cinetrix has seen We Own the Night, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, and American Gangster. All three stories hinge, to some extent, on the violent collision of family ties and old-skool drugs and take place in either the not-quite-now or the way-back-when. What this means is that audiences can count on the obligatory "roomful of naked women cutting up coke" scenes [or, in the case of Dead, the gay hustler swanning around in a silk robe after helping Philip Seymour Hoffman shoot up].

These prestige pictures can get away with what would otherwise be decried as gratuitous nudity because, in addition to titties, they also feature masterful performances so deliberately "understated" that the actors' very restraint becomes distracting. The leads' subtle portrayals of "real" people announce, "Oh, we could gnaw at the scenery, people, but we're gonna go for the twitching jaw muscle instead--because we're just that good." These self-consciously nuanced turns have become so endemic of late that Gangster's final reel showdown/throwdown between Oscar winners Washington and Crowe actually comes as a relief. Russell smolders through his carapace of crappy clothes and corpulence; Denzel flashes his bright smile as he throws back his head for that signature laugh. They're both so delighted with how they've tamped down their respective star personas for more than two whole hours that the audience half expects them to make out.

That the performances in these flicks are aimed straight at Oscar should come as a surprise to no one. And then there are turns like that of Ellen Page in heavily promoted "dark horse" Juno [which I haven't seen, although I've read about it ad nauseam at this point]. Yes, it's a complete different type of acting in a wholly other kind of [Oscar-bait] flick, but I mention it mostly because someone over at the House Next Door recently referred to this season's backlash baby as a "Facebook film." It's not, of course, but the cinetrix was taken by the neologism nonetheless.

What would an actual Facebook film look like? Here's one idea. Most award-angling movies, if they deal with drugs at all [and they frequently do], are still fighting the last Just Say No war. Yes, I know, cocaine never really goes out of style, but face it: a true Facebook film would also have to be an Adderall film. Yet I suspect that any movie based on the premise that college students, no matter how nubile and horny, would take drugs to study will prove so incomprehensible and unsexy to most Hollywood types that it'll take ages for a true Facebook film to emerge.

[Now, Facebook novels, on the other hand, are probably already circulating as ARCs, given New York publishing types' alleged fondness for Adderall and the ongoing colonization of vast swaths of said social networking site by ink-stained wretches old enough to know better.]

Listomania

Well, it's started in earnest: The Top 10s, Year Ends, Insert Award Name Here prognostications and plaudits are upon us. For a list-averse creature like the cinetrix, this annual Best of acceleration rankles like seeing Christmas decorations in the drug store the day after Halloween.

Which isn't to say there haven't been bright spots amid the blitzkrieg of coverage. For example, AJ Schnack highlights some of my favorite passed-over docs of the past year here. Of the films that actually made Oscar's first cut [the deepest], I'm already on the record as favoring Taxi to the Dark Side, which appears to have been picked up by ThinkFilm [yay!], although the cynic in me would advise you to put money on War/Dance for the win right now.

And then there's the Boston Society of Film Critics, which, along with critics' organizations in DC, LA, and NYC [online], announced its awards over the weekend. No surprises among the honorees, but I do commend to you the members' bios; for example, long-time Phoenix film chief Peter Keough's, which is surprisingly self-aware:

He is a member of the Boston Society of Film Critics and The National Society of Film Critics and both organizations regret including him because of his tendency to stuff his pockets with free food from the lunch table during meetings and using his credentials in a vain attempt to pick up women.

Verniere's is also pretty good.

Facebook flicks

The cinetrix is climbing the walls because she's stuck in that strange caesura between the end of classes and the beginning of paper grading. This means she's been screwing around on the Internets even more than usual. The latest discovery? The top 10 movies in her various academic affiliate networks [according to the increasingly pernicious Facebook]. Oh, the horror.

Read this now, so you can draw your own conclusions [the kids still love Fight Club] and skip the inevitable Times trend piece in about six months. You're welcome.

Here's where I teach:

Wedding Crashers
The Notebook
Old School
Boondock Saints
Anchorman
Gladiator
Fight Club
Braveheart
Office Space
Top Gun *

Here's my alma mater:

Love Actually
Garden State
Amelie
Little Miss Sunshine
Crash
Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind
Zoolander
Finding Nemo
Fight Club
The Princess Bride

Here's one grad school where I studied film:

Fight Club
Love Actually
Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind
Wedding Crashers
Garden State
The Notebook
Pulp Fiction
Little Miss Sunshine
Crash
American Beauty **

And here's the other:

Fight Club
Little Miss Sunshine
Pulp Fiction
Office Space
Gladiator
American Beauty
Lord Of The Rings
Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind
Casablanca
Napoleon Dynamite

* There's no easy way to break this to you. Some of my current students were probably conceived to "Take My Breath Away." The others were still just discrete masses of cells housed in their respective parents-to-be. Yeah, welcome to my nightmare.

** I know, still?

Fabric diaspora

Boston-area folks should stir themselves from their holiday party stupors and head on over to the Garment District TONIGHT for a truly inspired pairing of documentary and venue:

Secondhand (Pepe)
a documentary about used clothes and diasporic culture

This Sunday, December 9th
8 pm (doors at 7:30) FREE
@ Dollar-a-Pound/Garment District
200 Broadway, Cambridge

Ever wonder what happens to your old clothes after you give them away? Where do the clothes you find at the thrift store come from? A new indie film about secondhand clothing and immigrant communities, made by duo Shell and Bertozzi, answers these questions and more. On December 9th at 8 pm the filmmakers are screening "Secondhand (Pepe)" as part of a special free event at Dollar-a-Pound (downstairs at the famous Garment District vintage clothing mecca in Kendall Square). In the movie, a historical memoir intertwines with the present-day story of "pepe" secondhand clothing that flows from the United States to Haiti. Plus, great music, archival footage of old-time rag pickers, and behind-the-scenes shots of Cambridge's Dollar-a-Pound.

"We followed the trail of secondhand American clothes all the way from Dollar-a-Pound to Haiti to film for our movie," say Vanessa Bertozzi and Hanna Rose Shell, the movie's co-directors. "We hope some of the same people who were there when we started shooting will come to the screening. This screening brings it full circle. What a great atmosphere to show our movie with people wearing their favorite pieces of secondhand clothing and sitting in the mountains of clothes at Dollar-a-Pound!"

The used clothing business has grown to be an enormous industry over the course of the 20th century. Today billions of pounds of used American clothing make its way to developing countries, and Haiti with its particular political/economic relationship to the United States serves as a remarkable example. Interestingly, the industry in the US has its roots in earlier waves of immigrant communities, notably Eastern European Jews who became ragpickers upon arrival. The impact of this business both economically and culturally and its history are little understood by the average American.

Secondhand (Pepe) serves as a conversation starter for Americans, people of Jewish descent, Haitian-Americans and Haitians. Everyone has a voice in the movie and the imagery, music and language of these cultures inter-mix in the flow of the film.