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.
