pullquote

The Film Club

Being the first in a very occasional--who's surprised?--series of posts on film-related books.

If I'm being honest with myself, and with you, I probably first learned of David Gilmour's brisk memoir The Film Club in the pages of Entertainment Weekly, a magazine I started reading during my video store days and to which I continue to subscribe so that I can front to the young people about pop culture without actually, you know, having to watch fucking "Family Guy."

Anyway, Gilmour's book details the three years during which he and his teenage son Jesse watched three movies a week in lieu of Jesse continuing to attend high school. Dad gets to pick the flicks, son can live rent- and job-free as long as he watches and stays off drugs. Awesome, right?

But Gilmour's not gunning for some sort of adolescent-awarded Dad of the Year prize. He's just trying not to lose his not-cut-out-for-school son forever. His proposed curriculum might not fly with most parents, but Gilmour's fortunate to get on well with his ex-wife [Jesse's mom] and to be married to an understanding woman. Also, when the cinematic home-schooling begins he's a little lost, too, scrabbling for writing gigs and trying to keep all the balls in the air. So, the guy's got the time.

They begin with The 400 Blows ["A bit boring"] and, for dessert, Basic Instinct ["You have to admit it, Dad--this is a great film."] and go on from there. Setting up each film sees Gilmour toggle between self-aware pedant and seducer, psychologist and parent. Between screenings, Jesse gets mired in his first poisonous relationship, goes off the rails, gets another girlfriend, goes off the rails, gets some shitty and shady jobs [of his own accord], and starts writing music.

Otherwise, he and his dad watch movies. After Crimes and Misdemeanors: "I think I'd like Woody Allen in real life." Later, crushing his boomer father, Jesse deems A Hard Day's Night, "Dreadful. And John Lennon was the worst of the bunch." Still, Gilmour presses on, picking movies arbitrarily and making up games like "spot-the-great-moment. This meant a scene or a bit of dialogue or image that snaps you forward in your seat, makes your heart bang." Following from there, he designs a stillness unit, examining "how to steal a scene from all the actors around you by not moving." Some of his choices [Around the World in 80 Days] don't live up to his own memories, others occasion all-too-rare-at-that-age serious conversations with his son.

The Film Club is a quick read, affectionate and frank. But I have to admit what moved me most was the faint traces left by another reader of the book [which I borrowed from the university library]. After I came across this passage

Picking movies for people is risky business. In a way it's as revealing as writing someone a letter. It shows how you think, it shows what moves you, sometimes it can even show how you think the world sees you. So when you breathlessly recommend a film to a friend, when you say, "Oh, this is a scream--you're going to really love it," it's a nauseating experience when the friend sees you the following day and says with a wrinkled brow, "You thought that was funny?"

I noticed a faint crease at the top corner of the page, where someone had dog-eared it. From there, I hunted for others, finding four more, including the page with the bit about Woody Allen above, a description of Hitchcock as "a bit of a prick with a mildly unhealthy thing for some of the blond actresses in his films," and a passage saying that The Godfather II's Al Pacino "has the poised, 'held-in' feel of a moray eel at the mouth of a cave."

But better still were the faint dots next to some of the titles in Gilmour's filmography at the end of the book. Had one of my former students been the mysterious reader? Could be--Butch Cassidy, Casablanca, Chinatown, Citizen Kane, and Singin' in the Rain each got a dot. At the least, I'd be willing to wager the reader was an undergrad, given that certain titles [Blue Velvet, Pulp Fiction, Tootsie], to me seemingly inescapable simply by virtue of being alive and a certain age at the time, remained unmarked.

I'm fighting the impulse to divine somehow this book-defacer's identity, to urge him or her to watch Notorious on [horrors] VHS if necessary. Instead, let me recommend The Film Club to you, as a beach read and an idiosyncratic syllabus for rainy vacation days. If you buy the book, consider leaving it behind at the summer share for others to discover. If you borrow it, don't despair: I've transcribed The Film Club filmography for your continued reference after the due date rolls around. So don't write in the library's book!

What Maroons!

Oh, those wacky youngsters at Doc Films! To kick off June, the venerable film society at the University of Chicago swings from the sublime to the ridiculous, programming-wise, in the space of a scant few days. Mark your calendars, third coasters.

The sublime: A CITY OF SADNESS (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1989)

Monday, June 1, 2009
7:00pm - 10:00pm

After much discussion with the Taiwanese Embassy, Doc Films successfully secured a new print of the Taiwanese film classic, A CITY OF SADNESS, to be struck. This means a brand new, NEVER-BEFORE-SHOWN print will premiere at Doc in time for the film's 20th anniversary. Join us for this exciting event.

The greatest film to emerge from the New Taiwan Cinema, this historical epic about the desolation visited upon a native Taiwanese clan over the course of the White Terror, when Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party) imprisoned or executed some 140,000 Taiwanese for dissidence real and perceived, proceeds in half-defined spans of narration, allowing us only a tenuous grasp of history in its making. Similarly deprived of the agency to determine their fate, Hou's characters cannot but endure catastrophe, while fumbling to adequately articulate their experience of time. Archival 35mm

The ridiculous: INDEPENDENCE DAY (Roland Emmerich, 1996)

Thursday, June 4, 2009
9:30pm - 11:55pm
Tickets are $5
Space is limited, so come early to ensure seats

On the Fourth of June, Doc Films celebrates Independence Day a month early with a special screening of Roland Emmerich's 1996 classic. Simply put, not coming would be unpatriotic.

There will also be special secret pre-show entertainment before ID4. It won't include an orchestra like at last year's JURASSIC PARK screening, but I can tell you it will be perhaps even more epic.

Following the standing-room-only success of last year's Doc finale, Jurassic Park, we present a special screening of Jeff Goldblum's other great blockbuster. ID4 follows the multiple interweaving storylines of several characters who must come together to save the human race from a coordinated alien attack. It's like Robert Altman, only shitty! Bill Pullman, naturally cast as the President of the United States, leads an all-star cast that also includes Will Smith, Randy Quaid, Vivica A. Fox, the guy from Taxi, the brother from Mrs. Doubtfire, and Lt. Cmdr. Data. Plus, special pre-show entertainment! 35mm

Glass houses

Stumbled across this oddity while conducting a Google image search [don't ask]: Simon Pearce in the movies. Yeah, the spendy glassmaker has compiled a trainspotting list of the movies in which its geegaws appear & the world is a richer place etc. etc.

Who else can say that they've been in major motion pictures along side Matthew McConaughey, Tom Cruise, Ellen Barkin, Matt Damon & Reese Witherspoon? Simon Pearce! Okay, maybe not Simon himself, but our product sure has.

That's just weird, right?

Regret the error

Ooops, the Netflix site description gets it right[ish]:

Norah (Kat Dennings) wants to prove to her friend Tris (Alexis Dziena) that she's capable of having a boyfriend. At a concert, she grabs the first guy she sees, Nick (Michael Cera), and asks him to pretend they're dating -- but it turns out that Nick is Tris's ex. Despite this hiccup and the fact that they started off as a fauxmance, their relationship turns real as they traipse through Manhattan sharing their love of music and all things weird.

But the DVD sleeve seems to be working from the source novel's version of the plot:

When his painfully recent ex-girlfriend (Alexis Dziena) shows up at a gig his band is playing in the city, Nick (Michael Cera) grabs the first girl he sees (Kat Dennings) and asks her to pretend that she's dating him -- but only for the next five minutes. He never expected their fauxmance to turn into something real. Still the more time they spend together, the more it seems like they're falling in love.

Now, I'm aware this is hardly on the level of Han shot first, but having noticed the discrepancy, I do wonder why Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist put both the request and the kiss in Norah's mouth, when the book--told he said/she said style--has Nick asking and Norah responding with a kiss.

[I need a job.]

The octopus

My friend Rob died three years ago today. Watching movies I can never discuss with him is an octopus I wrestle with all the time. [sigh] "All right, let's shoot this fucker!"

Can't stop the music

A quick note about two musical film events, one tonight and one ongoing [which is to say, on DVD].

First, the geniuses at the Coolidge Corner [by way of the Alamo Drafthouse] strike again.

Labyrinth sing-along, Monday, May 25 @ 7 p.m. $10

What do you get when David Bowie, Jim Henson and George Lucas team up for a film at the height of the cultural weirdness that was the late 80s? A young adult fantasy adventure epic that is like magic squared... maybe even cubed. Long before that Potter kid was even born and back when LotR was just a glimmer in Peter Jackson's eyes, LABYRINTH captivated the impressionable minds of Reagan-era youth with its story of a girl (a very young Jennifer Connelly) who sets out to save her baby brother from the clutches of the beguiling Jareth the Goblin King (a very glam metal David Bowie) -- and tons of Henson's fabulous puppet creations. We'll celebrate the magic-y magical-ness of the film with props, subtitles on screen for all your favorite songs and memorable lines, and other surprises. Hosted by Henri from Austin's Alamo Drafthouse. And rumor is he'll be sporting his own Jareth gear and will beguile us with his hosting voodoo (voodoo? You do!).

Second, the geniuses at Soul Jazz are distributing Dub Echoes. Mmmm, Black Ark-tastic!

Dub Echoes DVD out now on Soul Jazz Records!!!!!! Dub Echoes is a newly produced film about Dub, featuring an incredible array of artists, both original Jamaican artists - U Roy, King Jammy, Lee Perry, Sly Dunbar, Bunny Lee (to name a few), alongside a similarly awe-inspiring array of artists who have been taken Dub into new directions in electronic dance music - Kode9, Roots Manuva, Howie B, Adrian Sherwood and many more. Directed by Bruno Natal over a three year period, this is a killer film to be watched over and over again! covering Dub in all its different guises. The DVD comes with loads of extra features, dub mixes and more. Essential!

Eternal return, Cannes edition (a.k.a. No Quarto da Charlotte)

So, in wading through the [eco-friendly online] reams of Cannes coverage, I came across the above image of ropy-armed Prix d'interprétation féminine recipient Charlotte Gainsbourg from Lars von Trier's Antichrist, which for all the world resembles [to me, anyway] an art-directed*, artificial version of Pedro Costa's In Vanda's Room. Wonder which is scarier?

*A term I use advisedly, given that all of Costa's light looks lifted straight out of the Dutch Old Masters.

IFFB: Summer Hours (The beautiful house is empty.*)

When I walked from the 1369 in Central Square to the Brattle on a gorgeous spring Sunday afternoon [the first of the year] last month, it felt like a homecoming. Aptly enough, as it turned out, Summer Hours was the first film at this year's IFFB I saw at the Brattle, and I ran into people I knew, yes. But there was also the rush of memories of all the films I've seen there since I first started going in college and also memories rooted in the building itself: the familiar seat in the first row of the balcony, the bullet-shaped trash cans I ordered, the kinetic memory of how to move through its spaces in the dark, and the residue of the many daytime hours I spent alone in its dusty corners the year I was the operations manager, my office tucked behind the screen next to the projection booth that houses the rear projectors. And Assayas's was very much the type of film I was frequently fortunate to see there--warm, enveloping, spilling me physically out the side door into the alley at its end while my brain, exhilarated, could not quite wrest itself free from the world of the film.

Summer Hours has been open for a week in New York and L.A., and enters the secondary markets--including Boston--tomorrow, so it seemed as good a time as any to try and shake off my writer's funk and get off the schnide. The critical response has been fairly rapturous, and any number of reviews will tell you about the plot--essentially, the dispensation of a beloved country home and its valuable effects by three adult children after the matriarch dies--and its thematic ramifications--globalization, patrimony, whither France, etc. What stuck with me was the feeling of the final scene, borne out by something Assayas said in an interview at Reverse Shot:

Time is built into film, and you can somehow control the pace of time in a way that you can’t in a novel, because with novels your reader just reads a few pages, puts it back, and picks it up a week later. Cinema’s like a piece of music, it has its own rhythm, its own system of echoes which you control because you know more or less that your viewer is seated in the same theater—though DVDs become a problem because you don’t control what the guy does anymore—but basically the idea is that you can build on the echo of things in time. This film is entirely about that. The film has a billion subjects, but ultimately it has one subject, which is the passage of time.

The film itself begins with a treasure hunt, undertaken by a gang of tumbling cousins [if one wants to be portentous, the next generation--I don't] on what will be their last visit as a family to their grandmother Hélène's home. A pragmatist, she explains to her son Frédéric how to dispense with the house and its artworks after her death, chiding his protestations that his children will return with the wry observation, "It's their childhoods they love. But when they're adults they'll have better to do than deal with bric-a-brac from another era."

She's right and she's wrong. Moreover, the same could be said of Assayas's own career. In many ways the treasure hunt at the beginning ends when the movie does, treasure always being the last place you look. Frédéric's daughter Sylvie and her friends invade the now empty house for one last party before its sale is complete. The camera follows the girl and her copines through the echoing rooms teeming with teens, it, and her, and us the only ones able to see what is no longer there. Commandeering the sound system blasting the boys' Gallic rap, Sylvie instead puts on the Plasticines' "Loser" [see above] and launches into a giddy, Dionysian but self-conscious dance with two other girls. It's breathtaking.

When I recently described the scene to my friend Antonym, he responded, "Oh, Cold Water!" [Foolishly, I managed to miss it when the Brattle--see how this all ties in?--screened the entries from the French television series "Tous les garçons et les filles de leur âge...," although I loved Travolta et moi.] Sure enough, thanks to the kind offices of YouTube and Rai Tre [grazie], I uncovered the 1994 Assayas revisiting his 1970s adolescence at a nighttime party in and around an abandoned house [see below].

So there's the echo of time there, too. Not just the duration and dimension any pop song brings to the essentially 2D experience of cinema, but the time that's elapsed between L'eau Froid and L'heure d'été. [and even between 1994 cinetrix and the current edition]. In that time, Assayas has moved into the sun. He's switched from the crackle of vinyl to digital music, yes, and from fueling a bonfire with abandoned furniture to placing it, reluctantly, out of reach, behind glass and velvet cordons in a museum. But the immediacy of the music hasn't changed, even if the quintessentially North American chic of Dylan knockin' on heaven's door and Leonard Cohen's "Avalanche" giving way to Creedence Clearwater Revival has been replaced here by homegrown girl pop. What has changed is the location of the treasure. In Summer Hours the camera doesn't tilt up past dancing teens to follow the path of licking flames against the night sky. Instead it trails Sylvie as she leaves her friends behind and ventures into the pastoral with a boy she fancies. Narrating the invisible history of the French landscape that surrounds them, her face glistens with tears in the summer sun.

*

What he said

In a post-semester attempt to act like good Americans, the 'Fesser and I have been playing catch-up via Netflix. Forthwith, his unexpurgated reviews:

On Vicky Christina Barcelona:*
Woody Allen is Benny Hill fronting like he's Henry James.

On Burn After Reading:
Like a kid with a magnifying glass hovering over an anthill.

Annnnd, scene!

*Please note that I rented this after revisiting Whit Stillman's Barcelona, with the idea of some pithy post in mind. But once we watched Allen's Anthropologie-bloused, sexy Latin caricatures [seriously, ¿how hot are Javier and Penelope?], all I've got is, uhhh, revisit the Stillman, the slept-on middle child of the triptych. Yes, this means I can't wax poetic on the Spanish government's recent pell-mell policy of throwing money at indie American filmmakers -- The Limits of Control! Savage Grace! -- who shoot on site, but Barcelona's insular "Chris Eigermann expresses indignation in anti-American Eighties Iberia" critique engages far more with that country than Allen's "Look, I've gone abroad and revitalized my craft!" shtick could ever dream of, Gaudí name-checks and "oh, ha ha! Peter Hall's** daughter is studying 'Catalan identity'!" be damned.

**Nekkid RADA-ite types, including Diana Rigg, Helen Mirren, and Dame Judi Dench as Titania!

Lares et penates

Hoping to retrieve my laptop from the spelling-challenged casual misogynists ["I suspect the mystery peice was part of a hair clip or something similar that accidentally fell into the laptop."]* at the campus IT dept. in a bit. Meanwhile, four criticism-related items that made me smirk while trying to whittle down several day's worth of RSS feeds.

Jonathan Rosenbaum on "Two Kinds of Criticism in Godard's Work":

I don't feel qualified to discuss what it means to be a French Swiss Protestant in a French Catholic milieu, but I'd like to suggest that the French Catholic cinephilia of Cahiers du cinéma in the 50s partly involved seeing directors as if they were priests. In connection with this, I've always suspected that Bazin's taste for the low camera angles and ceilings in early Welles corresponded in part to the vantage point of someone praying.

These next two involve Rashōmon-stizz takes on Trier's Anti-Christ.** First up, the Globe's Wesley Morris:

The loss does more than upset Gainsbourg. It sends her into an increasingly insane depression. She starts to doubt the quality of her womanhood, says she's scared of the woods, and finds genitalia disgusting, while Dafoe tries some therapy on her. That usually involves his penis. (Not all wood frightens her.)

Rimshot! Next, Roger Ebert, tattletale:

There's electricity in the air. Every seat is filled, even the little fold-down seats at the end of every row. It is the first screening of Lars von Trier's "Antichrist," and we are ready for anything. We'd better be. Von Trier's film goes beyond malevolence into the monstrous. Never before have a man and woman inflicted more pain upon each other in a movie. We looked in disbelief. There were piteous groans. Sometimes a voice would cry out, "No!" At certain moments there was nervous laughter. When it was all over, we staggered up the aisles. Manohla Dargis, the merry film critic of The New York Times, confided that she left softly singing "That's Entertainment!"

[What Ebs fails to mention comes up at the end of Wesley's post, where he coyly notes, "On the street, a friend*** and I ran into Roger Ebert. We asked if he'd just been inside, and he squeezed my hand hard in affirmation. (Roger's cancer has made speaking impossible, for the time being.) He looked like the rest of us, as if he'd survived the movie, and when my friend started singing "That's Entertainment," he did a little dance, complete with cancan kick and jazz hands."]

And, finally, this is why I don't watch television:

The net [CBS] also picked up the new family sitcom Accidentally On Purpose, starring Jenna Elfman as a single movie critic who gets pregnant by a younger man

Xenu wept.

*Friend Jim's suggestion: "Write back that it was actually part of a cock ring."
**RELATED: "My Favorite Angel"
***I find myself inordinately pleased to think of La Manohla and wee Wesley as pals.