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Guts

This is why the cinetrix loves the local second-run house so much. No sooner had Netflix said there was a short wait for Michael Clayton, which she'd seen and the 'Fesser hadn't, then up popped said flick on the theater's schedule, opening last night. That's right, a mere four days after its DVD debut, it came to the proverbial "theater near you" near us. The choice between Clooney on our wee t.v. screen or projected on the big screen was a no-brainer, so off we trundled to admire his grizzled world-weariness.

This time around, I also focused on Tilda Swinton. In her Times review, Manohla Dargis refers to "the chief counsel for an agrichemical  giant, Karen Crowder, played with twitches and rolls of gut fat by a mesmerizing Tilda Swinton." That apt characterization barely skims the surface of Swinton's unnerving physicality in this picture. Gut fat, yes, forced upward by support hose and girded by unfortunately peplumed jackets that serve to draw attention to the thickness of a middle that fights with the incredible vulpine quality of her narrow face. Karen Crowder is not only not good in her own skin, she doesn't even wear bras that fit, forcing her flesh to bulge out around the tight band across her back.

That last detail really made Karen work for me. Swinton's uptight, detail-oriented attorney has no idea what the back of her looks like, even as she buttons up her appearance in the front. This obliviousness stands in wonderfully for the moral and ethical blind spots that are ultimately her undoing. Let the Zellwegers of the world "courageously" gain weight and the Kidmans don faux schnozzes. The cinetrix wants more actresses with the guts to quite literally go all pear-shaped.

Lines we wish we'd written: Special Oscar edition

Hats off to New York's David Edelstein for this gem:

Atonement is out of it and most voters seem to think Michael Clayton would make a good vice-Best Picture and too many people were bothered, as you were, by the final scene of There Will Be Blood (although I wouldn’t blame Paul Dano, who was trying so very hard to keep up with Daniel Day-Lewis, which is like trying to keep up with Keith Richards doing drugs).

To which the cinetrix can only say, "DRAINAGE!"

In it to win it

OK, New Yorkers. You may not win your Oscar pool on Sunday, but here's how you can sweep into any watching party and occupy the moral high ground. Hit MoMA's Documentary Fortnight on Sunday afternoon to catch the screening of a doc that made the cinetrix cry when she saw it last summer.

Santiago. 2006. Brazil. Directed by João Moreira Salles. The filmmaker interviews his family's remarkable Brazilian butler, a complex, cultured man adept in diplomatic missions and scholarly research. Presented in collaboration with Cinema Tropical and Tribeca Film Festival. New York premiere. In English, Portuguese; English subtitles. 80 min.
Sunday, February 24, 2008,      5:00 p.m.,     Theater 2, T2

Hallelujah!

At long last, the cinetrix is nearly recovered from a particularly pernicious strain of flu that laid her out for days. What she hasn't recovered from is watching holy rolling documentary Jesus Camp. In showing us the boo-scary fundamentalists' children reciting the Christian pledge of allegiance, handing out Jack Chick tracts, and protesting abortion, the filmmakers often tip their liberal hands. Still, it's frequently fascinating, beautifully shot, and takes full advantage of an incredible degree of access to show a world that mainstream, secular Americans don't know nearly enough about--but probably should.

The film kind of comes across as a Pentecostal Spellbound, populated as it is by earnest, tightly wound youngsters keen to please their elders, like young Rachael above. Ultimately, the kids are all right; the grown-ups, not so much. On the whole, I much preferred Camp.

I feel bad about his neck

On the advice of FOC Anthony, who claimed that Imelda Staunton's performance was the best Maggie Thatcher ever committed to the silver screen, the cinetrix finally saw Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix last weekend. He was right about Staunton--her pink-clad, kitten-with-a-whip Dolores Umbridge had me flashing back to all the grim 80s English indies I saw during my formative years.

But I don't want to talk about the Iron Lady. I want to talk about Daniel Radcliffe. Well, about his neck. I know that Phoenix is the surly adolescent tome in the series, and Radcliffe sells every last sulking bit of angst. But whenever he's enraged or frightened, his neck almost seems to thicken and all the tendons stand out in high relief, like Bill Bixby about to morph into Lou Ferrigno. [Kids, ask your parents.] I mean, look at the thing. It's totally distracting.

There, and now I've ruined it for the rest of you. That is all.

OK, not really. Feel free to nominate your favorite role-ruining physical tic in the comments.

Chumming

Kevin Smith's love for Jaws is an open secret. He's even named characters in his films Brodie, Hooper, and Quint. But the cinetrix didn't realize all it would take was a reference to the salsa shark in my post about the passing of Roy Scheider--OK, and some kid breaking a window--to have this pop up in my referral logs last night.

Domain Name		pacbell.net ? (Network)
IP Address		64.167.89.# (Kevin Smith)
ISP		SBC Internet Services
Location		Continent : North America Country : United States (Facts) State : California City : Los Angeles Lat/Long : 34.0416, -118.2988 (Map)
Language		English en
Operating System		Macintosh MacOSX
Browser		Safari 1.3 Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/4A93 Safari/419.3
Javascript		version 1.5
Monitor		Resolution : 320 x 396 Color Depth : 32 bits
Time of Visit		Feb 11 2008 10:43:59 pm
Last Page View		Feb 11 2008 11:01:47 pm
Visit Length		17 minutes 48 seconds
Page Views		2

Whom shall I conjure next?

Quick stop

Fortunately, the proprietor of the local pizza joint [which suffered a busted window after a kid managed to put his head through the plate glass] grew up going to the same Jersey malls as Kevin Smith.

Rep R.I.P.?

FOC johnnyhongkong sends along an article by San Francisco Chronicle film critic Mick LaSalle, "Audience fading for repertory movie theaters." The short version is nothing you haven't heard before: Home video et al. done killed the rep houses. In fact, if you read only trend pieces you'd be excused for thinking that  it sometimes seems like a race to see which will die first: film criticism or art houses.

Still, LaSalle does a nice job of breaking down repertory's slow decline era by era. For example:

The rise of VHS tape exerted the first culling effect. Locally, the Richelieu disappeared and the Gateway converted into a first-run art house. But as Bill Banning, owner of the Roxie Cinema, has said, exhibitors could survive if they were willing to innovate. By the time he took over the Roxie in 1984, Banning knew "you couldn't show straight repertory and make it. You had to show top-notch films, and you had to have a strong theme - film noir, pre-Code. That worked into the '90s."

Another innovation of the late '80s and '90s was the "long-run revival," the creation of Bruce Goldstein, head of repertory programming at New York's Film Forum since 1986. "If you change the bill every day," he said, "the studios have no incentive at all to make a print. So what we did is we'd go to them and say, 'If you make a print, we'll give you a run, and we'll publicize it.' That's our standard for a long-run revival - it has to be a brand new print."

Goldstein's standard became the standard nationally, and following Goldstein's lead, it became common in the '80s and '90s for exhibitors, when advertising a "long run" or "premiere" revival, to talk up the newness of the print. The promise of a fresh print inspired audiences to flock to films they'd seen before - even TV staples, such as "Casablanca" or "The Wizard of Oz" - for the chance to see them projected in pristine condition onto the big screen.

It goes on in this mode for a bit, like one of those "begat" books in the Old Testament or the cataloging of ships in the Iliad. You know the drill. Kids today with their Netflix etc. The cinetrix will only note that there was nary a mention of the Brattle Theatre's contribution to rep programming, the vertical calendar that offers, say, Film Noir Mondays or Recent Rave Thursdays.

But all is not lost, true believers. It never is. And the reason why is always the same. People. Specifically, people who need people:

With the home viewing experience suddenly reaching new heights of splendor, what conceivably could be the incentive for seeing classic films in a theater? The answer is simple and not what anyone consciously thought of during the repertory heyday: Other people. After all, in all our memories of transcendent theatergoing experiences, those other people - those strangers watching with you - were part of the experience, too. A big part.

"Movies are a group participation art form, to be in a room with 300 people laughing infectiously," Lavine said. "To see a movie at home, even with a group of friends, is like seeing it under a microscope. These were made to be seen by hundreds of people at the same time."

We'll let aside the sheer loathsomeness of many of those hundreds of people [and their fucking cell phones/small children/TB] for now. Do read the whole thing, and if you live near a rep house, be sure to patronize it sometime this month, won't you? Thanks.

Farewell and adieu

Godammit. Roy Scheider died.

Also: Salsa shark! We're gonna need a bigger boat! Man goes into cage, cage goes into salsa. Shark's in the salsa. Our shark.

Pour ne pas vivre seul

The cinetrix woke up with Firmine's song stuck in her head. It's been rattling around there all day. Hey, there are far worse fates.

You can listen to it here, translated into English and sung by John Wesley Harding.