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Quint Essential

Noted without comment [save a jealous sigh].

Awwww

Seriously, how cute is this?

Knitwear Babelon, or Missoni Rising

Hey, kids! Following in the august footsteps of fashion photog Juergen Teller, Kenneth Anger is tackling the campaign for Italian haute knitwear concern Missoni's new season. [via]

From Vogue Italy:

“I’m fascinated by Kenneth Anger’s use of color and his ability to transform a film into a three-dimensional texture, a fabric of images in movement,” explained Angela Missoni. This is how she introduced her decision to entrust the Missoni F/W 2011 campaign to one of America’s most famous authors and directors of avant-garde cinema.

Anger — a hyperactive octogenarian who loves working in the wee hours of the night and at dawn using sophisticated instruments such as the RED digital camera that has the characteristics of a classic 35 mm camera – flew in from Los Angeles to film the campaign in Sumirago that involved all the members of the great Missoni family. They are the stars of this campaign that was conceived as a series of superimposed and overlapping portraits. Vogue.it presents a preview of this film: a vibrant and impalpable evocation of unique patterns, patchwork motifs, stitches, knits, and styles, it is a symbolic weave as ephemeral as a dream.

“The images of Juergen Teller for the S/S 2010 campaign reflected and portrayed our everyday family life,” said Angela. “Kenneth Anger’s experimental approach and his narrative style, on the other hand, transformed the new campaign into a sublimation of our world.”

WARNING: Do don headphones before watching, as the "Amon Tobin remixes the Cafe Flesh soundtrack" quality of the music just makes it sound NSFW.

IFFBoston 2010: delayed denouement

Closing out my experience at this April's Independent Film Festival of Boston, three capsules from Monday and Tuesday [I left town before the closing night screening of Micmacs, a late substitution for renaissance man James Franco's SNL doc.]

Forthwith:

• Tiny Furniture. Privileged twenty-somethings and their problems, distaff division! Oh, how I resisted this SXSW-anointed darling, the first feature-length film from downtown scion Lena Dunham, choosing Tilda Swinton instead, as any right-minded person would, during its first IFFB slot. But my other options on Monday night were an Elliott Smith doc, and I'd already given at the mopey indie office at the Magnetic Fields flick; Cairo Time, featuring the luminous Patricia Clarkson, yes,  but coming even as we speak to a theatre near you; and 8: The Mormon Proposition, but I hate the marriage-wanting gays. Kidding! I actually hate the Mormons! Where was I? Ah yes, Dunham is and plays a recent Oberlin grad who moves back into her artist mom's sweet Soho loft. She works as a restaurant hostess, bickers with her overachieving little sister Nadine, and takes up with a moocher played by Alex Karpovsky, mumblecore's own Parker Posey in terms of sheer ubiquity. The highlight for me was the stream of quips from Dunham's friend Charlotte, an acidic Brit, and I laughed at other scenarios celebrating the filmmaker's own abjection. Dunham has something, sure, but I keep coming back to the "self-aware" dialogue in which Dunham's mom asks, "Do you have the same sense of entitlement as my daughter?" "Oh, believe me, mine is much worse." That something may just be money and time. We'll see. [Subjects for Further Study, after Sarris]
• Lagniappe! Later Monday night I watched The Good, The Bad, The Weird, a kimchi Western, I guess, whose inclusion in the festival I took as a particularly pure manifestation of the organizers' tastes. I laughed at the goofy action set-pieces and took no notes.
• Tuesday took me to the still fairly new Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, for another SXSW winner, the doc Marwencol, which just nabbed more honors at Comic-Con. I'm not surprised. The subject, Mark Hogencamp, deals with the aftermath of a traumatic barroom beating that left him brain-damaged by creating a World War II village in his Newburgh, NY, backyard and populating it with action figure characters with extensive back stories. There's a bit of Henry Darger in the obsessively detailed tableaux he photographs to ensure continuity in the stories he devises as well as in his own shattered life. [That's good.] Filmmaker Jeff Malmberg juggles the two narratives, the one created by Mark and the one about him, in an impressive feat of editing that surprises and moves the viewer while never condescending to the subject. The Cinema Guild distributes Marwencol this fall. See it, it deserves every accolade and was a wonderful way for me to close out IFFB 2010.

IFFBoston 2010: loose ends

Somehow I got derailed before writing up some films I very much enjoyed at the Independent Film Festival of Boston back in April. For posterity, and because I think you should seek 'em out, some capsule reviews.

• NY Export Opus Jazz played on PBS, but man am I glad I saw the tensile strength of the New York City Ballet corps dancing in the secret corners of the city on a big screen. [Seriously, the locations look like the sites of unearthed Sesame Street interstitial shorts from the 1970s.] This film version of Jerome Robbins' 1958 "ballet in sneakers" is is all lush cinematography -- overhead shots of dancers' long shadows cast in the McCarren Park pool -- and deft sound design -- the squeak of shoes on an indoor basketball court accompanies charmingly chaste pelvic thrusts in a mating dance. See it.
• The dancing got political in the antic 1955 Mockba-set Hipsters, where boogieing to be-bop clad in skinny ties, DAs, and stockings constitutes the worst kind of teen rebellion against drab Soviet homogeneity. A Technicolor spit-take on earnest post-war juvenile delinquent pictures, the film follows young Mels in his transformation from apparatchik to hepcat. To win the heart of good time gal Polly, Mels gets pudgy Bob [actually Boris] to teach him to dance in a scene that'll make you think fondly of Chris Penn. Our hero also takes up the saxophone, an instrument "only one small step away from a switchblade" in the eyes of the state, the same as a concealed weapon. Ideology proves no match for teen lust; in a comic sequence Mels and his dreamgirl finally go at it like figures from some Cyrillic Kama Sutra. But teen lust is no match for incipient adulthood, and their giddy idyll -- like the Cold War -- cannot last.
• Rounding out a day of music/performance on screen, I saw Strange Powers, the well-edited and paced Magnetic Fields doc. There was something aptly awkward watching it at the Brattle, in Harvard Square where the band pretty much began, in a house packed with rapturous fans and Claudia Gonson's extended family and former neighbors. We see and hear about her fractious platonic partnership with Stephin Merritt, which dates back to high school and manifests itself in misunderstandings and pouts that play like a parody of old-married-couple dynamics. We see performances. We learn about Stephin's uprooted childhood and his stints proofreading and writing reviews for Time Out New York. Merritt smokes and quips morosely throughout. He expresses misgivings about appearing in the film, averring, "I'm not sure this is gonna fit with the expressionless Bresson character I'm playing." Probably not. My main misgiving is that the film trades access for critical distance, but in my experience, Fields fanatics won't even notice.

What is a cult film?

Angelenos, did you know you can take classes at Vidiots in Santa Monica? It's true! You can! And you should! The cinetrix would say so even if her left-brain compatriot Anthony Miller wasn't one of the instructors. But he is, lucky for you. Do take the remainder of his What Is a Cult Film? class. [I wish I could.] Meetings tonight and the next two Mondays, from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m., cover transgressive, sociopolitical, and "oc-"cult movies, respectively.

Nobody likes movies like Teenagers from Outer Space or Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Mummy save any loon sane enough to realize that the whole concept of Good Taste is concocted to keep people from having a good time, from reveling in a crassness that passeth all understanding. — "The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies or, The Day the Airwaves Erupted," Creem (March, 1973), in Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung.

Would Lester Bangs steer you wrong? No. No he would not.

The boilerplate:

The "cult" movie is a peculiarly elusive and elastic category.  Any genre which includes such films as Freaks, Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Putney Swope, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Equinox, Performance, Two-Lane Blacktop, Harold and Maude, Pink Flamingos, The Holy Mountain, Phantom of the Paradise, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Eraserhead, Rock ‘n’ Roll High School, Xanadu, The Evil Dead, Forbidden Zone, Liquid Sky, Repo Man, Heathers, They Live, Tetsuo: The Iron Man, Wax, The Big Lebowski, Donnie Darko, and The Happiness of the Katakuris would seem to be an unclassifiable cinematic menagerie. What all these movies share is an audience willing to embrace them in ways that transform them into the stuff of the codes and talismans of secret moviegoing societies. "The work must be loved, obviously, but this is not enough," writes Umberto Eco of cult movies. "It must provide a completely furnished world, so that its fans can quote characters and episodes as if they were part of the beliefs of a particular sect, a private world of their own, a world about which they can play puzzle games and trivia contests, and whose adepts recognize each other through a common competence." This class infiltrates some of these hermetic celluloid worlds and explores what makes them worthy of repeated screenings, fervent discussions, and obsessive veneration. 

There is no secret formula for concocting a cult movie; some films are born cult, some achieve cult-ness, and some have cult-ness thrust upon them. The phrase "cult movie" can imbue a film with subcultural glamour, but it can also make a viewer wonder if there isn't something that he or she might be missing. Claims made for these films blur the boundary between metaphysical and nonsensical: "If you're great, El Topo is great," Alejandro Jodorowsky explained of his phantasmagoric Western. "If you're limited, El Topo is limited." Although we may not delve further into Jodorowsky's particular claim, we will investigate how cult films alter our perception of film totems and taboos. We will also consider cult movies in relation to B-movies and midnight movies and other categories (exploitation, grindhouse, psychotronic, "so-bad-they're-good"). 

Still undecided? Here's a taste of what you missed in weeks one and two:

From the psychedelic cult movie:

Desert Solitaires: Psychedelic Voices Crying Out in the Wilderness

Selected freak-outs from Altered States (Ken Russell, 1980), Renegade (original title: Blueberry: L'experiénce secrète) (Jan Kounen, 2004), and Beavis and Butt-head Do America (Mike Judge, 1996)

From the musical cult movie:

Intro: A Battle of the (All-Girl) Bands The Carrie Nations in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (written by Roger Ebert, directed by Russ Meyer, 1970)

Vs.

The Stains in Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains (written by Nancy Dowd, directed by Lou Adler, 1982)

...

Rock Opera(tion)from Hedwig and the Angry Inch (music & lyrics by Stephen Trask, adapted for the screen and directed by John Cameron Mitchell, 2001)

Hip-Hopera from Trapped in the Closet (R. Kelly, 2005 - )

Outro: "Superhero-pera" (?) from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog (Joss Whedon, 2008)

Not feeling the cult thing? S'OK. We can still be pals. Note, too, there are other classes at Vidiots on genre, anime, auteurs, and censorship in cinema.

The Sins of Cyrus

It's been an odd movie-viewing summer chez cinetrix and 'Fesser. For the most part we've been binging on series 3 of "The Thick of It" episodes, which I can't recommend passionately enough. Oh how I love Malcolm Tucker in all his scabrous fury. And we've only been to the cinema itself twice, with, um, uncomfortable-making results both times.

You gotta feel for the 'Fesser. It can be difficult choosing a movie when I persist in this obnoxious tendency to read about films before I sees 'em. [I know, right?] Or have the temerity to catch flicks at festivals and thus be over them by the time they receive theatrical release. Which is a long-winded explanation for how we ended up watching Harry Brown. After all, who doesn't like late-model Michael Caine? I suspect that sentiment is what lured a lot of the trusting white-haired, NPR-supporting folks into the theater with us for what turned out to be a nasty bit of business indeed. The guy in front of us up and left, maybe sickened by the chav violence. Or the drug dealer violence. Or the violence against Emily Mortimer. Or the OAP/vigilante violence. Tough to say.

Cyrus, which we caught just last week, was equally unsettling, albeit for its violence against the cinema. I am no fan of les freres Duplass, to put it mildly. And I find Jonah Hill to be singularly unpleasant to regard. But the 'Fesser heard John C. Reilly and Marisa Tomei and was hooked. Sigh. What we do for love, you know? I'm still recovering.

A quick synopsis in case you missed the memo: Reilly is a divorced guy who wears sweatpants. His soon-to-remarry ex is, improbably, Catherine Keener. More improbably, when she drags him to a party, he encounters another hot babe (Tomei) who is charmed by his honesty. Which is thrown to the winds once he discovers his new lady friend has a lumpen 21-year-old son who doesn't relish the idea of an interloper ruining the good thing he's got going on. Holy intimations of the incest taboo, Batman! What's gonna happen?

Ah, who cares? Sweet Jesus, can we call a moratorium on man-boys of all ages? And especially man-boy rivalries in which any female character exists solely to prove the premise of Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick's Between Men theory? Pretty please? Don't get me wrong. Reilly is a peach of an actor, and was sweet as pie in a recent "Fresh Air" interview, but I'd rather watch him really sing instead of drunkenly humiliating himself bellowing "Don't You Want Me, Baby." WE GET IT. He's a sad sack with soulful little button eyes. [Hill is just loathsome.]

Can we also talk about Marisa's renaissance for a sec? I mean, I want to be hot like the 40something Ms. Tomei when I grow up, just like every other woman I know. It delights me that an actress her age isn't cast as a washed-up crone. And I suppose it's nice that she's playing women in age-appropriate [mostly] relationships. But does it ALWAYS have to involve her banging some schlub like Philip Seymour Hoffman or Mickey Rourke or Reilly? Talented actors all, but isn't there someone attractive or fit she could be cast opposite? Is Viggo not available? 

Which brings me, reluctantly, back to Cyrus, in which Tomei's never even naked. Instead, she's poorly lit and shot in incredibly unflattering close-ups, the mascara thick on her lashes. Oh, G-d, and let's not even start in on that Jennifer Beals circa Flashdance mass of curls. The cinematography's no better. Sometimes she's actually out of focus [and not in a rack focus sense]. Much has been made of this flick being the Duplass boys' first foray into mainstream movie-making. Um, hi. Pro tip: You keep Marisa Tomei in focus. And you sure as shit don't make Catherine Keener look worn and DRAB. Where I'm from, that's a crime.

Oh, wait, here comes another unprompted zoom/reframe! And another. That isn't even rhymed in the reverse shot. Awesome! Edgy!

I am trying to forget all about Hill's creepy, manipulative, puling momma's boy, but it'd be hard to mention the diegetic/soundtrack music without the "quirky character trait" that Cyrus composes synth music that'd make Vangelis, John Tesh, and Tangerine Dream gang up with KMFDM to administer a hell of a beat down. Is it so we don't miss the incestuous closeness between Hill & Tomei that we are plagued with "Love On A Real Train" knockoff noodling? And I'm not sure what to do with the dial tone sound undergirding the final scene's soundtrack music, either. Have hangups been resolved? Is the relationship flat-lining? Got me, pal.

Revisiting the crap cinematography and "Oh, ha ha! The kid's into Yanni-stizz shit. Isn't that hiLARious?" soundtrack nonsense reminds me of the biggest misfire in the film. Our not-so-young lovers are in the blissful early stages of cohabitation, a state conveyed to us by an impressionistic montage and a shift into asynchronous dialogue meant to convey the halting, tentative joys of their romance. You may remember this technique from Out of Sight, where Soderbergh assembled the sexiest ever out-of-time interlude between Jennifer Lopez's federal marshal and George Clooney's career con. Watch it now. I'll wait.

That, boys and girls, is gorgeous, artful editing of sound and image. The scene in Cyrus reaches for these heights of improbable intimacy but falls far short, coming off instead as a salvage of images from the mostly improvised shoot with dialogue dubbed over in post.

And then it gets worse. The same technique is pressed into service a second time, only now the creepy voice-over/montage trick is used with imagery of freakin' Jonah Hill. Ewwwwww.

I've already devoted more time to this flick than it merits, so I'll close with a final point of information query. What the hell do these characters do for a living? They live in modest houses and drive ordinary cars, yes. And I know, Reilly's character is a "freelance copy-editor," which gave this freelance copy-editor a giggle. And of course he works with his ex? Whatever. But what about Tomei's Molly? She "home-schooled" Cyrus, who is now old enough to be a college graduate, yet there is no other parent in the picture. Who paid the bills? Basically, she "goes to work" only to allow Reilly's character to discover evidence of plotting and duplicity when he helps pack up Cyrus's belongings before he moves out. Seriously, where'd the scratch for all those synthesizers come from?

Criterion criteria

The ongoing Barnes & Noble 50% sale of Criterion titles got me to wondering. If I had, say, a hundred bucks to spend, which films would I get, and why? Another version had me choosing ten titles. But which ones? [The former scenario would be exclusive of sales tax and shipping, for the sake of simplicity.]

So, for example, I've been thinking about switching the film I screen when teaching mise-en-scene. So perhaps the newly issued Monsoon Wedding? But then, I'd loved watching "Fishing with John" back when it was on VHS [is that even possible?], and I worked at a video store. And I just caught Down by Law on cable this past week. Maybe my life would improve with the option of firing up the episode in which John Lurie goes ice fishing with Willem Dafoe whenever I want?

But enough from me. What about you? Hundred bucks or ten titles. What'll it be? How would you compile a list for you or possibly a starter set for a budding cinephage? Have at it in the comments, s.v.p.

Mass millions

OK, maybe not millions, but there's a hella wealth of film goodness in greater Boston this week. Peep this, s.v.p.:

• Monday, 19 July, 7 p.m. at the Brattle: The DocYard presents: Frederick Wiseman's HOSPITAL + rare Q&A with Wiseman, moderated by Scott MacDonald. [via]
• Wednesday, 21 July, 8 p.m. at MassArt: The MassArt Film Society presents No Way Out But Onward. The Disembodied Theater Corporation brings you an evening of dispatches, news, songs, and fragments from the Ghost City: the skeletal remains of abandoned towns, railways, and graveyards that stand as remnants of a lost society. Filmmaker Ross Lipman in collaboration with Bryan Papciak, Jeff Sias and Liz Coffey presents this haunting assemblage of ruins, rants, and shards of memory that paint a collective portrait of dystopia. The evening includes a live cinema performance of Lipman's NO WAY OUT BUT ONWARD, and excerpts of Papciak and Sias's feature length work-in-progress, AMERICAN RUINS. [deets and directions]
• Friday, 23 July, 7 p.m. at Harvard Film Archive: Johnny Guitar, followed by Born to Be Bad!
• Saturday, 24 July, 3 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. at the Brattle: Pee-wee's Big Adventure in a double feature with Back to the Future. [A marathon of all three Future flicks plays Sunday].
• Sunday, 25 July, 5 p.m. at the Somerville Theatre screening room: Connect the Docs presents Vapor Trail (Clark) with director John Gianvito in person. There will be discussion, wine, and pizza, but no word on whether Gianvito will reprise his turn on the ones and the twos from last month's Flaherty Seminar.

Those Summer Nights

FOC Gerald Peary landed quite a sweet gig, which he details in a recent piece in the Boston Globe. Warning: Diacritical marks a-go-go ahead.

...I was one of eight international journalists invited by the Swedish Institute to not only participate in Bergman Week, which promised screenings, lectures, and special guests, but to venture where few outsiders went before. In addition to seeing where on the island Bergman shot his famous films, we were the first press allowed to watch movies in Bergman’s private theater, and to tour Bergman’s house.

Our initiation was a conversation with Liv Ullmann, star of four key Bergman features made on Fårö, starting with her dazzling film debut in “Persona.’’ For some years, she was married to Bergman, and, for some months each year, they resided in Bergman’s Fårö house. She had returned there this spring for the first time since his funeral, because their once-shared home, thanks to the Bergman Estate Foundation, was opened to selected guests.

Read the rest here.

Southerners can catch up with Gerry in much warmer climes when he screens his doc For the Love of Movies at the Nickelodeon in Columbia, SC, July 25 -- the same weekend as his high school reunion around the corner at Dreher High School.