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Ladies of the canyon

A little excavating. Please indulge. If you've been following the rapturous reviews of Lisa Cholodenko's latest, The Kids Are All Right, one thing you may have noticed is that the lesbian couple played by Annette Bening and Julianne Moore named their daughter, conceived with sperm from an anonymous donor, Joni. After Mitchell, natch. Hell, Bening's character apparently even lets loose with an a capella rendition of "All I Want," at some point.

But it gets a little more complicated than a mere "Oh, the lesbians, with their folk music! Of course!" once you delve into the accompanying pieces, which note that director Cholodenko and her partner have themselves had a child with the aid of an anonymous sperm donor. Her partner Wendy Melvoin. You know, old people:

Wendy?

Yes, Lisa?

Is the water warm enough?

Yes, Lisa.

Shall we begin?

Yes, Lisa.

That Wendy. Who, according to an amazing recent piece* on Prince's "Purple Rain" by Matthew de Abaitua at Hilobrow, not only made her debut with Prince the night that "Purple Rain" was first recorded but also, with then-girlfriend Lisa Coleman:

introduce[d] Prince to music he has never heard before — Gustav Mahler, the English pastoral of Vaughan Williams, the experiments of Joni Mitchell and Peter Gabriel. It’s an education for him.

Joni. For whom Chaka Khan sang backing vocals long before charting a hit with the Prince-penned "I Feel 4 U." Joni, whose 1988 Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm featured a collaboration with... Wendy & Lisa. Joni, whose 1970 album Ladies of the Canyon's name refers to Laurel Canyon. Yeah, that Laurel Canyon.

It's a veritable "Circle Game," amirite? Man, I need to watch High Art again soon.

RELATED: An interview with The Kids Are All Right's music supervisor, Liza Richardson.

*Seriously, go read it RIGHT NOW. Here's the lede:

First Avenue, August 3rd, 1983

Wendy Melvoin is fresh from high school. She is a wearing a V-necked sleeveless top, and patterned shorts. She is playing the first chords of a new song on her purple guitar, opening chords that she wrote, a circular motif with a chorus effect. Wendy is eighteen-nineteen and she has the high cheekbones and diffident confidence of a Hollywood upbringing. She half-smiles at the faces that crowd close to the low club stage. This is Wendy’s first gig with the new band, and the song she is playing is “Purple Rain,” and nobody in the audience has ever heard “Purple Rain” before because this is the night that Prince and the Revolution record the song.

Go here, see this: DC edition

Hie thee to the National Gallery tomorrow at 1 p.m. for what sounds like an amazing program at the cinetrix's favorite price: FREE. Your tax dollars at work!

Phil Solomon: Rhapsodies in Silver

Over a three-decade career, filmmaker Phil Solomon has established himself as one of the great visionary artists of American experimental cinema. Transforming original and found footage into scenes of melancholic beauty, Solomon employs both photochemical manipulation and re-photography of the filmstrip to make haunting, expressionistic films. More recently he has expanded his horizons into machinima, digital art derived from videogame software. "The concept of the filmmaker as auteur has rarely been more appropriate or defensible"—Manohla Dargis. This survey in three parts, each consisting of multiple films, is presented in conjunction with the artist's new site-specific video installation for the Corcoran Gallery of Art, American Falls. The Gallery wishes to thank Paul Roth.

Nocturnes

July 17 at 1:00PM

East Building Concourse, Auditorium

Remains to Be Seen (1989 / 1994) and The Exquisite Hour (1989 / 1994), Solomon's melancholic masterpieces of distressed found footage, envision the passage from life to death. Nocturne (1980 / 1989) and What's Out Tonight Is Lost (1983) are silent imaginings of suburban disquiet. Solomon's haunting Twilight Psalm III: Night of the Meek (2002) appears like an excavation of buried collective memory: an incantation in molten silver, it conjures the Golem on Hitler's Kristallnacht. The program concludes with Solomon's joyful Yes, I Said Yes, I Will, Yes (1999). (Total running time 76 minutes)

(Re)casting Lisbeth Salander

Having burned through the first two volumes of the late Stieg Larsson's ubiquitous The Girl Who... series in pretty much as many days [although I haven't yet seen the Swedish film adaptations], the cinetrix has determined who should play Lisbeth Salander in the unavoidable American remakes. Are you listening, Mr. Fincher?

Pre-Code Barbara Stanwyck is the only actress I'd buy as that scary-smart, self-sufficient, and capable of calculated revenge.

Institutionalized

Some compelling announcements from both sides of the Atlantic.

From Blighty [via]:

This week the BFI (British Film Institute) launched a new campaign called “Rescue the Hitchcock 9” that asks the public to help them rescue 9 of Alfred Hitchcock’s earliest films. The original movies were shot on nitrate film, which is notorious for its incendiary properties. Nitrate film can also decompose over time and film archivists are forced to take drastic measures in order to preserve and restore these old films. The 9 silent films that Hitchcock made during the 1920s have badly deteriorated through the years due to general use and they’re currently in dire need of restoration. Thankfully there is new digital technology in place that can help repair worn and damaged films but the process is time consuming and costly.

The 9 films that BFI hopes to restore include Alfred Hitchcock’s directorial debut, The Pleasure Garden (1925); his eerie classic thriller, The Lodger (1926); a boxing film called The Ring (1927); the dark dramas, Downhill (1927) and Easy Virtue (1927); his early comedies, The Farmers Wife (1927) and Champagne (1928); as well as Hitchcock’s last silent film, The Manxman (1929) and his first “talkie,” Blackmail (1929).

And from New York [via]:

The Museum of the Moving Image in Queens officially announced today the opening of its long-in-gestation transformation into a redesigned, expanded hot spot for New York cinema-lovers. Isn’t it about time we had something like this? According to the press release, the $67 million state-of-the-art new building, designed by architect Thomas Leeser, will be unveiled on January 15, 2011.... [T]he goodies they’ve got planned[, which] include[s] “Recovered Treasures,” six weeks of newly restored classics and contemporary films from around the world; experimental, interactive digital showcases; large-scale video installations and animations; a late-night party full of interactive art; an Alain Resnais series; a recurring Hitchcock series; an avant-garde retrospective; and... the very cool-looking new 264-seat theater.

As a bonus, an interview with cinematic institution Raoul Coutard. An excerpt:

You worked with Godard up through Week-End and then not again until the '80s, with Passion. Was there a falling out? How did you get back together? What is your relationship now?
I didn't work with Jean-Luc for 10 years because he had the revelation that he was a Marxist-Leninist and that he therefore could not make films with capitalist money. I think it took him less than 10 years to realize that without that money, no films are possible, but he had to make that turn.

Dooly appointed

A [classically trained pianist] friend asks the following:

Shutter Island was awesome but any theories as to why the Nazis were listening to Mahler given that his music was banned as "non-Aryan" during the 3rd Reich? Is this a clue to another meaning to the film or just a snafu?

The cinetrix [shamefaced] not only doesn't know the answer, she has yet to see the movie. Possible reasons for the oversight? 1) Haven't read the book. 2) Is a massive scaredy-cat. Won't you help?

A long time ago...

...on a World Wide Web far, far away, there was a site called Feed. Now that its archives are back online, those readers sweltering in heat waves could do worse than click through the Moving Pictures section while sitting directly in front of the cold air-producing mechanism of their choice. Why, it'll be almost like sitting in an ice-cold movie theatre!

Travel back to the simpler years of 1998 through early 2001:

• 10.02.98 | Interview
  RE: Kyle Cooper
  Amanda Griscom talks to the master of the movie title sequence.

• 08.06.99 | Daily
  The Final Episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000
  Chris Fujiwara on the final episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000

• 02.14.00 | Feature
  Jumpcuts
  Annette Insdorf, Jonas Mekas, Andrew Sarris, Elizabeth Garbus, and David Thompson pick the greatest scenes in documentary film history.

• 02.14.00 | Dialog
  Unscripted
  Five directors discuss the trends and tribulations of documentary filmmaking. With Albert Maysles, Ross McElwee, Rory Kennedy, Frederick Marx, and Frederick Wiseman.

• 02.24.00 | Daily
  Cradle Will Rock
  Keith Gessen on Cradle Will Rock

• 03.27.00 | Daily
  The Oscars
  Sam Lipsyte on the Oscars

• 07.18.00 | Daily
  The Rerelease of Blood Simple
  Chris Lehman on the rerelease of Blood Simple

• 08.07.00 | Daily
  Coyote Ugly
  Ana Marie Cox on Coyote Ugly

• 11.28.00 | Interview
  RE: Edward Yang
  Kristin M. Jones talks with the maverick Taiwanese director about his acclaimed new film Yi Yi, digital movie-making, and the joys of manga.

• 01.18.01 | Daily
  The Sayings of Chairman DiCaprio
  Scott McLemee on how the Hollywood blockbuster became Beijing's favorite propaganda tool

Yeah, you may recognize some of those bylines.

Short ends on a slow connection

The only way to get the Intertubes all up in the cinetrix's mountain aerie this summer is via a pissy, fascistic satellite provider that smacks you down if you exceed your allotted share. Really. You can get kicked off your connection for 24 hours if you've been greedy. Or watched more than one freakin' video, it seems. And it frequently doesn't work when the weather's bad. So now if someone points me to a clip, I have to keep the tab open, sometimes for days, til I hit the fat pipes of the university town 45 minutes away. And forget about streaming: Tell me that something's currently streaming on Netflix and watch me laugh. Bitterly.

Which is the roundabout way of saying I mostly read the Interwebs these days, and if I've neglected to note the appropriate [via], I apologize. OK, then. Excelsior!

• Andrew W.K. welcomes your queries at his new cinema column. He "has prepared himself for the hardest, most soul-searchingly difficult, ball-breakingly ridiculous questions." Again, really. [via the 'Fesser]
• Christine Vachon talks Mildred Pierce with the NYT.
• Criterion passes on word of the Filmmuseum Munich's new series: "I Love You, I Film You examines movies that betray the love of their directors for their actors." Can any German readers glean whether there are Herzog-Kinski flicks in the mix?
• And speaking of Herr Herzog, CAAF posts the Rogue Film School's reading list.
• Nic Rapold does a lovely job wrapping this year's Flaherty Seminar, "Work," which already seems like a million years ago.
• Crazy from the heat? A brave soul close-reads Armond White.
• Watch the trailer for Rick Moody's new book, The Four Fingers of Death [Do it for the cinetrix who can't. See above.] It's about the author of "the novelization of the remake of the 1963 horror flick The Crawling Hand." [via]
• July's theme in the Boston Public Library's year-long celebration of movies filmed in the Bay State, Made in Massachusetts, is "Danger in the Water." [Or, "Dane-jah in tha Wah-tah," for natives.] You know what that means: "Cage goes in the water, you go in the water. Shark's in the water. Our shark."

I think I stirred a slight breeze closing all those tabs! Stay cool, all you cats and kittens.

Romane a clef

Reading Jonathan Rosenbaum's recent posting of his Les Nuits Fauves review [from 1994] got me to wondering: What's Romane Bohringer been up to lately? [Collard's film really got under my skin when I saw it -- as in I own the book of the same name. I liked Romane in Mina Tannenbaum, too.] Any recommendations? Her dad's turn as Gorodisch in Diva is a longtime fave and I often think of her -- fairly or not, but they're both sorta jolie laide -- as a sort of Charlotte Gainsbourg avant le lettre, y'know?