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In every dream home...*

Not much on the cinematic front to report. The 'Fesser and your pal the cinetrix finally watched fackin' Gone Baby Gone last night, about which more later, then spent today engaged in such glamorous "adult situations" as scuttling on the roof cleaning the gutters, raking the beds, and planting the tomatoes. Glam, no?

And now students from one of the 'Fesser's classes are encamped in front of our old-skool television. Having eaten roast pork shoulder, black beans, and rice, they are watching Scarface for what I'm sure is an air-tight pedagogical reason.

More tomorrow.

* Phase shifter!

The True North strong and free!

Perhaps one of the cinetrix's favorite groups on Facebook is Don McKellar Has Made My Life A Little Bit Better. So specific! So understated! If that assertion holds true for you as well, you should probably know about ["aboot"?] the latest venture from First Weekend Club.

First Weekend Club, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting great Canadian films, has recently launched a brand new offering: THE DVD CLUB. It’s like a book club, only for movies. We’re very excited about this new initiative as it’s a whole new way of bringing great Canadian films to Canadians (films which we’ve chosen based on feedback from our members). And it's all FREE, across Canada.

It's a great way to discover Canadian films, meet other film lovers, participate in Q&As with talent and even earn awesome rewards & perks!

The first selection, Snow Cake, which boasts a Broken Social Scene soundtrack, is shockingly McKellar-free, but I'm sure he'll pop up in the months to come.

Them's the rules

From a 2005 critic's notebook by Manohla Dargis [via]

Nothing to It!

In between the release of "Sullivan's Travels" and "The Palm Beach Story,"  Preston Sturges compiled 11 rules for the box office. Like some of Sturges's dialogue, the faster the list is read, the funnier it is:

1. A pretty girl is better than an ugly one.

2. A leg is better than an arm.

3. A bedroom is better than a living room.

4. An arrival is better than a departure.

5. A birth is better than a death.

6. A chase is better than a chat.

7. A dog is better than a landscape.

8. A kitten is better than a dog.

9. A baby is better than a kitten.

10. A kiss is better than a baby.

11. A pratfall is better than anything.

Have a great weekend, kids!

Road movies

For more than a week now, the cinetrix has been meaning to mention the gorgeous Oscar-nominated short Salim Baba, which she was lucky enough to see at Full Frame.

Using a hand-cranked 1897 projector, Salim Muhammad offers his neighbors in the slums of Kolkata, India, a chance to view scraps of films. Although collectors have sought to buy his rare projector, Salim refuses to part with it, as his street shows are often the only films the local residents can afford to see.

The cinetrix is always a pushover for stories about cinema in strange places. Just today she stumbled across one 21st century version of Salim's cinecart, the Cinemobile, Ireland's first traveling cinema. Want one.

What is Cinemobile?
Cinemobile is a large truck which transforms into a 100-seater state of the art cinema, fully heated, air conditioned and with Dolby Surround Sound. Mobile cinemas have been in existence in France for the past 20 years. Our machine was born in 2001, having been built by a French company called Toutenkamion (French word for “all in the truck”). Mobile cinemas also operate in Scotland and Eastern Europe.  Essentially the truck unfolds in 45 minutes to become a fully operational cinema. Watching the machine transform from truck to Cinemobile is entertainment in itself!

Where does Cinemobile tour to?                      
Cinemobile has been on the road since 2001. At that time locations were chosen based on the following criteria:

· Geographical location - locations must be a certain distance from the nearest cinema. We do not want to encroach on any ones business; we want to bring a service to towns without access to cinema.

· Infrastructure - Does the location have a large accessible parking space. Sometimes it’s the supermarket car park; other times the Mart, GAA or Church car park.

· Audience - Are there schools, youth groups, theatre groups, active retirement groups etc-people who will attend screenings?

Over the past four years our schedule has changed however we try to return to towns a minimum of twice each year, generally every five months. We are always delighted to hear from new communities, towns and festivals seeking our presence.

OK, so explain to me why Mr. Landmark Theaters Mark Cuban hasn't reconditioned an old Mavs bus--something--and taken this act on the road? You don't have to to remind me of the price at the pump, but couldn't there be a fleet of 'em stationed strategically--like the Goodyear blimps--in various underserved regions?

Man, I'm this close to writing the grant myself, people. Plus, I hear the feds are selling FEMA trailers for scrap. Wouldn't it be lovely to tranform those symbols of failure into cinematic trailers for the power of the moving image?

Sympathy for the devil

In this week's installment, Hizzoner reveals himself as Beatles--not a Stones--fan, but Koch mourns the absence of Jagger's trademark "prehensile tongue" nonetheless.  Read on.

Shine A Light
First an admission. I never really liked the Rolling Stones or understood their enormous hold on their audience. It isn't a matter of a generation gap since I was once young. I simply preferred the music of The Beatles from the time they first appeared on the world stage and still do. I understood and appreciated then, as I do now, the enormous popularity and impact of rock and roll music not only in and on America but throughout the civilized world.

The reviews of Shine a Light, a documentary about the Stones' 2006 concert at the Beacon Theater in Manhattan, were extraordinary. The Times in particular praised the director, Martin Scorsese, and his use of 18 cameras to capture the performance from every conceivable angle. So I decided to see the movie and went to the show at The Ziegfeld, which has the largest screen in town. When the lights went down, the theater was only three percent occupied.

The band members, who began playing together in the early 1960s, have certainly aged, but they continue to have enormous energy. Mick Jagger, the lead vocalist, is still very thin and because of that will probably live to 120. I don't think his voice is what endears him to his fans but rather his constant movement on stage during performances, including the use of his arms, hands and index fingers to convey, at least for me, that he is a matador slaying a bull in the world's largest bullring. Lead guitarist Keith Richards, who wears the smile of a Cheshire cat, has looked very haggard for years. Second guitarist Ron Wood and drummer Charlie Watts look the least worn. Like Jagger, however, Wood exhibits enormous vigor throughout the concert.

One song runs into another and the words with rare exception are never intelligible. Of course, to a knowing and adoring audience, the words are undoubtedly as familiar as the ABCs. What I enjoyed most of all were the too-brief interviews of the group in their youthful days. They looked very handsome, appeared to be highly intelligent, and their comments were refreshing. During one interview, Jagger was asked if he would continue to perform when he was 60 years old, to which he replied he was sure he would. To this day, he continues to strut his stuff even more belligerently across the stage, and he will soon be celebrating his 65th birthday. His prehensile tongue was absent from this performance. A pity, since that is his trademark.

The admission price of $14 for adults and $10 for seniors may have kept people away. I did not particularly enjoy the show, in large part due to the decibel level, but if you're a Rolling Stones fan, I don't doubt that you will have a wonderful time watching the performance. I hope Scorsese decides to do comparable films of Barbra Streisand and Joan Baez, who are more my speed and culture. In the words of Maurice Chevalier in a song from Gigi, "I remember it well," referring to my youth and that of the performers. 

Mahamat-Saleh Haroun screenings at HFA

OK, people. If you care at all about cinema, and you live anywhere near Cambridge, you need to see Haroun's films at the HFA this weekend. The cinetrix was fortunate enough to meet him last summer and to see his staggeringly powerful films.

Mahamet-Saleh Haroun, recipient of the tenth annual McMillan-Stewart Fellowship in Distinguished Filmmaking, awarded by Harvard's Film Study Center, was born in Chad in 1961. Haroun left the country during the civil war of the 1980s and relocated to France, by way of Cameroon. There he worked as a journalist before studying at the Conservatoire Libre du Cinéma in Paris. He is now more than a dozen years into his career as a filmmaker, shooting primarily in Chad.

This career has so far produced three feature films and a number of shorts that have made Haroun one of the leading lights in African cinema. He excels at spinning narratives that begin with easily recognizable situations – usually the loss of a parent – and expand to encompass allegorical and political reflection on the state of Chadian society. Often calm on the surface, Haroun's filmmaking belies this calm with simmering strains of anger and melancholy. While occasionally compared to the work of Iranian directors Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, perhaps because of their deceptively quiet surfaces, Haroun's films recognizably belong to an African tradition of filmmaking stretching from Ousmane Sembene to Abderrahmane Sissako that considers the place of cinema in a postcolonial Africa and, by extension, in a postcolonial world.

  If you can attend only one, Dry Season (Daratt), should not be missed, but they're all just so so good.

Saturday April 19 at 7pm
Dry Season (Daratt)
Directed by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, Appearing in Person
  With Ali Bacha Barkaï, Youssouf
  Djaoro, Khayar Oumar Defallah
  Chad 2006, 35mm, color, 96 min.
  Chadian Arabic with English subtitles.

Following the announcement that the Chadian government has issued an amnesty for war criminals following decades of civil war, teenage orphan Atim is handed a revolver by his elderly grandfather and given a mission of vengeance: the boy must travel from his tiny rural village to the capital city and kill the man who many years earlier murdered his father. His target, however, turns out to be not a bloodthirsty monster but a devoutly religious Muslim baker, who gruffly takes the young would-be assassin under his wing as an apprentice. The elliptical story, graced with notes of humor and expressive silences, unfolds with some surprising twists before ultimately resolving into a quietly wrenching drama of personal accountability and moral choice.

UPDATE: The Globe's Ty Burr reports that visa problems are keeping Haroun from attending.

Television personalities*

The cinetrix had to laugh when she read this bit of A.O. Scott's recent article** on Roger Ebert.

When Roger’s surgery knocked him off the show nearly two years ago, a new round of guest critics, including me, was brought in. About my experiences, which ended when Michael Phillips of The Tribune was made Mr. Roeper’s permanent foil, I will say only that impersonating yourself on television is both more fun and more difficult, with or without the aid of thumbs, than it looks.

All of that helpful feedback I offered when you took your first foal-like steps in front of a camera really paid off. You were first runner up! You're welcome, you ingrate.

*Appropriate snob reference for the self-proclaimed FMU listener.

**Fortuitous timing.

RELATED. Also, genius.

Separated at Birth?

The cinetrix is recovering from an excellent visit with Kentucker Audley and Tim Morton, who screened their film Team Picture last night on their way to show it at the Atlanta Film Festival this Wednesday.

More on the film later [after I pay the Man]. Until then, this one's courtesy of cinematic obsession.

Teacher, teacher, teach me what to do*

Using the release of Smart People as her hook, the Washington Post's Ann Hornaday takes on that time-honored trope of teachers in the movies. [The cinetrix would probably link to it even if Hornaday hadn't brought up her bete noire Mona Lisa Smile in the final graf.]

Testify!

It's a cinematic archetype as reliable as the fish out of water and the blonde in distress: the disheveled, misanthropic college professor, in the throes of writer's block (or some other form of publish-or-perish anxiety), living in book-lined solitude as a result of divorce, death or free-floating disgust with humanity.

So, what's the allure?

In other ways, the bored or blocked professor -- teaching the same texts in the same rooms to the same if interchangeable students, day in, day out, semester after semester -- perfectly embodies the ennui of any job. But in this case, that job brings the added value of involving performance. Thus the professor is the ideal personification of inertia without inert ness, suggests Poirier. "He's onstage every day."

Do click over for the slide show of Dennis Quaid, Jeff Daniels, and Michael Douglas rocking that echt beard/artful glasses look that makes the cinetrix think she's going about this teaching thing all wrong, in terms of both gender and garb.

But then she remembers that Harvard had out-there Elvis Mitchell teaching its undergrads and realizes there's hope for her yet. Scheduled to be at Full Frame last weekend to support The Black List, Mitchell, true to form, was a last-minute no-show, thus thwarting the cinetrix's hope for some site-specific stalking teaching tips at long last.

*Extra credit for all you grade-grubbers out there.

Paging Walter Monheit

The cinetrix just discovered she is blurbing film series at Cornell. Who knew?

See, it all began when she stumbled across a link that helps raise money for the Brattle Film Foundation using GoodSearch. It's a cool idea: the search engine donates 50-percent of its revenue to the charities and schools designated by its users. Curious, I plugged in "cinetrix" just to give it a whirl and up popped the Cornell Cinema page for its Films of Leonard Helmrich series next weekend. Why? Oh, just this little unwitting endorsement.

"The singlemost mind-blowing filmmaking technique the cinetrix has ever seen occurs in the films of Leonard Retel Helmrich, who was at the Flaherty Seminar this week." —cinetrix, daily.greencine.com, June 24, 2007

Right sentiment, wrong site. But that's neither here nor there. If you do find yourself in Ithaca this Thursday or Friday, go see Leonard's films. Because I said so. Apparently.