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Everyone's gone to the movies

So much to see and do over the next little stretch, cinephages, that the cinetrix is reduced to bullet stizz [not to be confused with bullet time].

• Thursday, February 12, 7 p.m., at the Edie and Lew Wasserman Cinematheque, "Michael Shannon, the best and least embalmed part of Revolutionary Road, will appear at Brandeis for a screening of the film and a Q&A led by alumnus Scott Feinberg of the L.A. Times." [via]
• Thursday & Friday, February 12 & 13, former Flaherty fellow Kalup Linzy throws down at the Kitchen, debuting a new dragtastic performance piece. Ten bucks. 8 p.m. [via] [Kalup's You Tube channel here.]
• Friday, February 13, the givers at the Independent Film Festival of Boston keep on giving. This time out it's more Muay Thai Midnight Madness, with the debut of Chocolate. "Exclusive New England screening - Do not miss all the ass-kicking action on the big screen!" Eight bucks. Somerville Theatre, midnight.
• Saturday, February 14, 8 p.m. at MoMA, FOC Hanna Rose Shell and Vanessa Bertozzi screen their fascinating doc, Secondhand (Pepe), about used clothing and the immigrant experience of Jewish ragpickers and Haitian pepe dealers. There's a second screening February 16, also at 8 p.m. Ten bucks.
• Thursday, February 19, at 8 p.m., the sublime Barbara Hammer will be in effect at MoMA to premiere A HORSE IS NOT A METAPHOR (2008 with sound by Meredith Monk) and screen DIVING WOMEN OF JEJU-DO (2007).
• Saturday, February 21, bounce back up the eastern seaboard to the Harvard Film Archive for the latest Film & Reality program, a 3 p.m. screening of Robb Moss's classic Riverdogs with Amanda Micheli and Isabel Vega's 2008 Academy Award-nominated La Corona. Harvard prof Moss and Micheli will be in effect. Ten bucks.
• Sunday, February 22, hop back on the Bolt Bus to MoMA, where FOC Hugo Perez's Neither Memory Nor Magic takes a bow as part of the 2009 Documentary Fortnight at 6 p.m.

Finally, if you have any sense, you'll be at the Brattle on Valentine's Day to honor the birthplace of the Bogie Cult by watching Casablanca. I expect to hear you singing La Marseillaise lustily from the balcony all the way from here.

*Incidentally, try and count how many optical effects they cram into this three-minute trailer. I swear there was a dare involved.

It takes 2 to make a thing go right*

The cinetrix has long lamented the evisceration of her hometown newspaper by Sulzberger's minions. But there is at least one bright shining exception nestling in the hollow shell that was the Globe, the Take 2 video banter bits between staff film critics Ty Burr and Wesley Morris. Those looking for succor in this era of Ben and Ben should look no further for movie banter with bite. Also, Renee Zellweger impersonations!

To quote Morris, "The Van Dammage is high. It's quite high. That's not a recommendation. It's a matter of fact."

*Oh, OK. "It takes 2 to make it outtasight."

No comment

Starting with the January-February issue, Film Comment gets all kinds of listy in the front of the book. Gavin Smith somewhat sheepishly explains the rationale ["People love lists."] in his editor's letter before drawing our attention especially to "the groundbreaking, totally awesome Film Comment Trivial Top 20," in which "we demonstrate the kind of list-making prowess that makes grown men weep."

Oh, men and their lists.

The cinetrix decided, perversely, to make the marketers happy and the editorial side weep by pointing to the first of the Trivial Top 20, the "20 best acting performances by directors in fellow helmer's films," and putting forth my candidate [a.k.a. No. 45], the mournful Barbet Schroeder in The Darjeeling Limited, pictured above. Feel free to do likewise in the comments. The consultants were right! We're like pawns in their hands!

If you click through the link above, you'll see the online version goes to 50 [look! cross-platforms! driving people online!], and they make the following offer:

since we're sure to have overlooked plenty of gems, we invite you to send in your own lists. If we hear from enough of you we'll publish a follow-up readers' poll; if not, we'll at least print the best ones received. Send your entries to [email protected] by February 9.

You know what to do. Generate content, users.

Passage to more than India*

In this season of Slumdog, the cinetrix recently revisited the wicked West's last objectionable exercise in Indio-philia, The Darjeeling Limited. Of the former, the always smart Dennis Lim observes in Slate

If Slumdog has struck a chord, and it certainly seems to have done so in the West, it is not because the film is some newfangled post-globalization hybrid but precisely because there is nothing new about it.... A slippery and self-conscious concoction, Slumdog has it both ways. It makes a show of being anchored in a real-world social context, then asks to be read as a fantasy. It ladles on brutality only to dispel it with frivolity.

Anderson's film dispenses with any pretense of a more than nodding acquaintance with the so-called real world in favor in photographing yet another cross-sectioned cutaway diorama of boys behaving badly. Which is fine. As his pastiche soundtrack of Satyajit Ray and Merchant Ivory signals, he's interested in an earlier iteration of "India" than the transnational site of call centers Danny Boyle sets to Sri Lankan M.I.A.'s songs.

But even a miniaturist like Anderson cannot entirely exorcise the specter of globalization. [No, I'm not talking about the laminator that unseen assistant Brendan lugs with him.] In the Darjeeling making-of doc that details the loving care with which local artisans crafted every covetable element of the mise-en-scene, witness what lurks in the rail yards, in the off-screen, off-camera space the Whitman brothers traverse in glorious slo-mo tracking shots without ever truly seeing.

Holy fuckin' Schivelbusch! SHIPPING CONTAINERS!

 

 

FWIW, my favorite container company, if one can have such a thing after reading William Gibson's latest, is Mitsui OSK.

*

Such great heights

The wonderful symbiotic relationship between film writers and the movies they cover is thrown into bold relief come January and early February. Forced to toggle between think pieces about Oscar nominees they may or may not agree are worthy and obligatory reviews of the shlock Hollywood dumps into wide release immediately after qualifying season, these critics begin to show the strain.

Witness the Globe's Wesley Morris, posting on so-called paycheck acting:

January is a pitiful month for movies. We all know that. But less commented on is what a wonderful time it is to observe an actor doing what he can to make ends meet. In "Taken," Liam Neeson is a vision of hustle. With every kicked groin or threat to destroy the Eiffel Tower, I saw another paid bill. Wham! There's the cable! Pow! The babysitter! Kablooey! The contractor....

[David Strathairn]'s participation is understandable insofar as times for everyone are tough, and one never knows when the next job might come. So here he is, looking lost and confused (if extremely fit, tan, and handsome), even while he makes love to Elizabeth Banks atop an office desk. With each befuddled stare, you can see him having a "Price Is Right" moment. Bob: "Rod, tell our contestant what he's playing for." Rod: "Well, Bob. [Dramatic pause] A new car!"

Or the Guardian's Danny Leigh, examining how [and why] David Fincher goes to the Gump well in Benjamin Button:

Of course, much of the irony lies in the recycling of Gumpisms in what's being sold as a high-flown, semi-arthouse enterprise – and in a David Fincher film to boot. Because as pointedly various as his movies have been, there's still something of a drag act about the heavy sentiment of Gump being associated with a director known for his stylistic machismo, that he-man shtick now buried under the misty uplift of the real Benjamin Button trailer, a riot of by-the-book lip-trembling that prompted a friend of mine to turn to me in a cinema last week and whisper: "Not if you fucking paid me."

Or Slate's Dana Stevens, devoting her considerable smarts to analyzing the carefully crafted public persona of Anne Hathaway:

What does all this image-management savvy have to do with Hathaway's skill as an actress? That's the thing: Hathaway is so smart about choosing roles, promoting them, and winning our sympathy off-screen that it's sort of hard to tell how gifted an actor she really is. Rachel Getting Married is certainly the furthest she's stretched yet, and she's very winning in a role that could easily have been overplayed. But I'd argue that the movie's power derives mainly from its ensemble cast and Jonathan Demme's nimble, roving hand-held camera. Next year, Hathaway will play an ambivalent bride-to-be in The Fiance (sounds like a princessy A role) and the White Queen in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland. (With that director, it's bound to be an elaborately costumed B.) I'd love to see her take on something, anything, completely outside the Hathaway canon: a schlumpily dressed, unprincesslike, unfeisty schmo. (Wait, she could play me!)

Hell, even public television, the Times, and the New Yorker are not exempt. Charlie Rose recently devoted almost 40 minutes to grilling A.O. Scott and David Denby on the Oscar nominees.

The cinetrix can only say courage, critics--February 22nd is right around the corner. And thanks for the laffs.