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Thought I'd pop in to share some of the things I've been watching [or plan to] when I should be grading. Apologies to those who deserve attribution for posting these first that I failed to note. What can I say, I suck.

First up: Peter Bogdanovich in conversation about They All Laughed with writer-director Wes Anderson. [And not just because yesterday I described my outfit as drag Peter Bogdanovich leading a safari. Well, not solely]. Here's part one of three. While watching, try this fun game: drink every time they say "picture!" Then, try to tie a cravat.

Yeah, ol' Peter B. sure knows a lot about old Hollywood. BUT NOT AS MUCH AS MARTIN SCORSESE. NO ONE DOES. NO ONE. Don't believe me? Set aside four-plus hours and see for yourself on the new BFI Daily Motion channel, which offers A Personal Journey with Scorsese, not to mention Terence Davies, Alex Cox, Derek Jarman, the Brothers Quay, and a shit-tonne of Lotte Reiniger animated fairy tales. [via] Speaking of Signore Scorsese, those of youse in the greater Atlanta area can catch his latest doc [with Kent Jones], A Letter to Elia, at the Plaza Atlanta Monday, September 6, 7:30 p.m. as part of an Emory-sponsored Kazan series. [Kazan's Viva Zapata! screens immediately afterwards.]

More interested in the distaff side of directing? Allow me to recommend this sit-down with Nicole Holofcener, courtesy of the fine folks at her alma mater NYU: again following the rule of 1, 2, 3.

Or you could noodle around P.O.V.'s site and see some gorgeous doc shorts like Seltzer Works and Salt as a little lagniappe.

And now to get extra service-y:

• Useful for academics and video essayists: Clip n' save this grid guide to copyright term and the public domain in the United States.
• Useful for aspiring academics and other cinema studies poseurs: Film School Thesis Statement Generator
• Useful for cinemaphages: Criterioncast's exhaustive list of the Criterion films due to disappear from Netflix's Watch Instantly streaming service starting September 22.

So, I guess, get cracking, kids.

Flickers

School started more than a week ago [I know, right?], and the prep and attendant mishegas means I have a buncha tabs open and a ton of late-summer filmy stuff I've had no time to write about. So it's bullet time!

• Do you follow the Boston Globe's Movie Nation blog? You should. A recent thoughtful post by Mark Feeney leapt from a Cronenberg reference in the forthcoming William Gibson novel [squee!] to plumb the way the movies "have a capacity to superimpose themselves on actual human experience as no other art form can." Another touted an exhibit of downright cinematic advertising photos from the pre-Mad Men 1930s at the unlikely venue of Harvard Business School: "Glimpse the right image, though, and a mental movie can emerge unbidden. It's a collaboration between our imagination and years of movie-watching experience."
• Speaking of photography, you have a little more than two weeks to make it to Dartmouth's Hood Museum of Art to catch "Made in Hollywood: Photographs from the John Kobal Foundation." So many iconic silver prints, but also plenty of surprising pictures, too. While you're on the second floor, check out the adjacent piece from the permanent collection, Christian Marclay's 1995 video "Telephones." Then head to Murphy's, sit at the bar, and let Liam look after you. He's like the Irish Jeeves of bartenders.
• According to the Economist, Marclay has a new 24-hour piece debuting at White Cube Gallery in London this October called "The Clock," which "is a montage of clips from several thousand films, structured so that the resulting artwork always conveys the correct time, minute by minute, in the time zone in which is it being exhibited." No dates for a stateside stop for the eternal loop yet, but Paula Cooper Gallery in New York also put up the bucks for the project, so here's hoping.
• While I'm on the subject of ahhhht [as the people of my home state would say], if you find yourself in greater Boston with a few free hours between now and October 17, I simply MUST insist you hit the ICA for the CHARLES LEDRAY: workworkworkworkwork exhibit. I loved it so, I went on two separate days. Plus, there's an amazing patio: drink in the harbor while you drink!  
• Anyone else watch the Chanel ad Scorsese helmed and, aside from the 0:30 nod to "Blow Up," think meh?
• Do you keep reading about the 8 1/2 Foundation and wanna be young again? Or at least work your way through the recommended films? Me, too. Even rolling over the film photos to read the very funny synopses is good stuff.
• "I know deep down it's me, not them." The Guardian's Danny Leigh cops to a growing dislike of Michael Cera.
• Finally, like everybody else, I am making my way through what I hope is the first of many issues of n + 1 film review. I'm going slowly, to savor it, and also because of [see opening paragraph above].

What have you been up to? What shouldn't I miss out there in the wide world?

JLG, soothsayer

NarTube - Watch Video
[because it is awesome]

He's a regular Tiresias, ol' JLG. From Filmmaker, Fall 1994:

GODARD: Projection will disappear. And the possibility that was given by motion pictures will be missed. The possibility of [there] being a real audience – a group of people who have nothing in common, but, at a certain time of the day or the week, are able to look with other unknown neighbors at something bigger than they are. To look at their own problems in big. Not in small. Because if it’s too small, you can’t . . . It was big, so it was evident. And in the beginning, there was not even talking. There was no need for that. Because it was more evident if there was no talking. Only in sports does there remain this fervor, which can even become violent. There’s this desire to see something big.
HARTLEY: But collectively.
GODARD: Yes, collectively.
HARTLEY: The excitement is in the crowd.
GODARD: Yes, but in the movies it is different. You can be with other people, which is ideal, or you can be alone. But to be alone with other people, and not to forget yourself within yourself. And when there’s 100 people around you can’t really forget yourself. Now, this will disappear, obviously.
HARTLEY: That’s sad.
GODARD: Yes, it’s sad for us. But now at my age I understand how sad it must have been for some directors or actors at the time the talkies began. Because, really, a whole continent disappeared.

Watch this. Read that.

"Tomorrow is a drag," claims Phillipa Fallon in 1958's High School Confidential. Looker suggests you watch Fallon's wrists. I concur.

Then catch a Full Frame fave I never wrote about —FREE! — courtesy of snagfilms. It's the perfect length to wile away a jitney ride or afternoon thundershower.

Disco and Atomic War tells the story of a strange kind of information war, where a totalitarian regime stands face to face with the heroes of popular culture. Despite a ban on western media, from the 1950s
onward many Estonias were able to easily pick up Finnish radio and television broadcasts from across the border with homemade antennas. Western popular culture had an incomparable role shaping Soviet
children’s worldviews in those days—in ways that now seem slightly odd. Finnish television was a window to the world of capitalism’s pleasures that the authorities could not block.

David Byrne on Lucy Walker's moving, riveting, and ethically iffy at times documentary Waste Land, which the cinetrix also saw at Full Frame this spring but failed to write up.

The Gramacho pickers live by the dump, and every day they converge when the trucks arrive, attacking the mountains of refuse, from every class of Carioca. Various people specialize in certain kinds of recyclable materials — plastic bottles, PVC, and almost anything that can be recycled. These are “harvested” and then assembled in containers for another set of trucks to pay for and pick up and take to the recycling center. ...

To make a long story a little shorter, Vik [Muniz] photographed some of the pickers and then asked them to come to his studio in Rio where they help him assemble their own portraits — made from materials they’ve collected — as Vik directs from above.

[Source]

These pieces are then photographed and the original assemblage is destroyed. The resulting giant photographic prints will, in this case, be auctioned, and the proceeds will go to help the community of pickers.

If you look closely you can see the tires, shoes, bottle caps and plastic bottles that make up the shading and lines of the image.

All good so far — but there was an interesting moment that I can’t forget. Vik and Janaina, his soon to be ex, are discussing, in a very emotional way, a dilemma they face. After working in Vik’s studio making art for a couple of weeks, the pickers don’t want to go back to the dump. “How do you send them back to the farm after they’ve seen Paris?,” as the old song goes. 

Hal Hartley and Nick Gomez talk influences in the premiere issue of Filmmaker, back in 1992.

HARTLEY: I’m flipping back through my notebook about a month ago in Hamburg. I did 20 interviews that day and had been asked about influences to such an extent that I really got a little upset. So I went home to my hotel room and made a list of "Hal’s real influences" – completely honestly.

GOMEZ: You were drunk.

HARTLEY: Yeah, I was drunk. But, after making eight films in four years — still having to put up with questions…

GOMEZ: About Jarmusch…

HARTLEY: – whose films I largely enjoy. I made a list of all the influences I could remember from the time I was 18 to the present. Here it goes: Robert Fripp and King Crimson; my friend Chris Nicatera who I grew up with; the Yes of Close to the Edge and Fragile – basically early ’70s art rock; the novels of John Gardner and Herman Hesse; David Byrne, especially Talking Heads from 77 to Fear of Music; Eno; Robert Stein, literature professor at SUNY/Purchase; Tom Dunning,* film history teacher; Jim Coleman; the Peter Gabriel of Selling England by the Pound and "Supper’s Ready"; Steven O’Connor, a friend of mine; Woody Allen; Travis Preston, another teacher of mine; Jean-Luc Godard; Victor Hugo; the Beatles; Budweiser; Wim Wenders; Werner Herzog; Murnau’s Nosferatu; Martin Donovan; Almodovar, particularly What Have I Done to Deserve This?; David Bordwell’s book Storyteller about Howard Hawks; the movie Moliere, a French film, I don’t know who made it; Moliere himself; the Poldark saga on PBS, Masterpiece Theater, and the books that that silly series is based on; Adrienne Shelly; Katherine Arnold; my friend Ricky Ludwig; Nick Gomez’s Dear Mom and No Picnic....

I’m more affected by rock music. In music, it’s not so important for a musician to change their character from album to album. In the film business, it’s almost expected. If you make a film that deals with a certain kind of subject matter in a certain way once, if you do it again, you’re fucking up. But your life hasn’t changed that much, your concerns haven’t changed that much, your concerns haven’t changed that much. That’s why I think that music is a much more accurate barometer of a place and time.

*I'm guessing that's a typo, and he means Tom Gunning, who was an associate prof at Purchase at the right time.

More Fun in the New World

Before I had an opportunity to see Lisa Cholodenko's latest film, The Kids Are All Right, I devoted a post to exploring the way all roads seemed to lead to Joni Mitchell: in the movie [the lesbian couple's daughter is named Joni, and Annette Bening and Mark Ruffalo bond by singing "All I Want"], in Cholodenko's oeuvre, in her partner Wendy Melvoin's career. As David Hudson kindly observed, "Now this is a network of allusions and cross-references calling for further exploration."

Well, a week ago Sunday I caught a matinee and now have maybe not corrected so much as revised my initial theories. Yes, Mitchell and her ladycentric California canyon vibe are key to entering into the world that Nic [Bening] and Jules [Moore] have constructed with their children Laser and Joni. But once Mark Ruffalo's leather-clad, motorcycle- and pickup truck-driving, organic-farming restaurateur/sperm donor Paul comes into the picture the soundtrack shifts to a new paradigm and another quintessentially L.A. act: the band X. And even more specifically, More Fun in the New World, as much a secret history of the city as any of Mitchell's albums -- a punk pastiche of Los Angeles Plays Itself.

My notes scribbled in the dark say only "X. Makes sense." It must've been when Paul is listening to track one, side one, "The New World" ["twenty or thirty pounds of potatoes; twenty or thirty beers"], in the truck with Laser. The subsequent songs map out the narrative as it unfolds. Not perfectly, sure, but by the time the film neared its denouement apology scene, in which Jules announces, "Marriage is hard," it was settled. Who better to give that truth voice than the strangely harmonious exes of X, John Doe and Exene Cervenka?

Let's move to track two. PLEASE NOTE THAT SPOILERS FOLLOW.