In my open tabs this week, most, but not all, roads led to the imposter sausage king of Chicago.
- Caleb Crain foretells Ferris's future on the Paris Review blog: "There is further misdirection in the invitation to see Ferris’s evasiveness as an achievement. Ferris has mastered a technology newly emergent in the 1980s: the combination of computers, telephones, and digital audio sampling. We see answering machines that Ferris has rigged to play false messages; we see his stereo amplifying digital samples of his coughs and snores to create the illusion that he’s at home in bed. The director Hughes has cleverly divined what this new technology will come to be used for; it is for not being there. A few years after the movie, one imagines, Ferris will start a company that designs phone trees and voicemail systems; he will be a millionaire by 1990."
- New boy in the balcony Ignatiy Vishnevetsky dismisses the poet laureate of suburban Chicago: "It’s fun. I don’t think it’s a great movie or even a very good one, but it’s a lot of fun. It has, I think, quite a bit of nostalgic value for a lot of people that leads them to overlook its flaws—which is true of all Hughes’ films."
- MROW. Jonathan Rosebaum posts a piece on Irma Vep and posts up on then-New York critic David Denby: "Indeed, if you know as little about French cinema as David Denby, you might arrive at a conclusion comparable to his in his recent rave review in New York magazine... I can’t imagine what sort of French people Denby hangs out with, because this cosmic description of “the French” excludes virtually every French filmmaker, critic, and filmgoer I know — many of whom are even more delighted by “the philistine exuberance of American entertainment” than Denby is. ...if you ignore French cinema as studiously as Denby does — and this isn’t only a matter of not attending festivals like Cannes — any sort of self-validating generalization will make sense. Many of his most prestigious New York colleagues see only one or two movies a day at Cannes — like the alienated laborer who gets driven around in a limo paid for by Miramax, and who this year happily missed the Abbas Kiarostami film that shared the Palme d’Or — and write back to their readers with the same breezy, confident expertise about the moribund state of world cinema, usually concluding that the parties were better than the movies. (And no wonder — the parties speak their kind of language, the movies don’t.)"
- Voyager founder Bob Stein talks about the origin of the Criterion Collection: "[W]ith films like Citizen Kane and King Kong, you’d add everything you could possibly get your hands on. There was only a limited number of things available. Doing a film to video transfer is an art. For Kane and Kong we recruited Ron Haver, the film curator of the LA County Museum of Art and a lovely, lovely man, to come to New York to oversee the transfer. Ron sat with us in a dark video lab and painstakingly directed a shot-by-shot color correction. There were other people in the room — Peter Crown and Jennifer Scanlon — and I think it was one of them who raised the idea of using the extra audio track on the videodisc to record some of the fantastic stories that Ron was telling about the films. King Kong was his favorite movie, so we asked Ron if he would record a second soundtrack. He didn’t particularly want to do it, but we got him very stoned, and he did it. And thus, the commentary track was born."
- It's science! Or pie charts, at least. How do movie villains break out categorically from the 80s 'til today? "I discarded categories with only one or two entries: deranged wives (“Presumed Innocent”), clones (“Blade Runner”), the IRA (“The Devil’s Own”) and split the rest into ten categories: African-Americans (light green on the graphs below), Nazis/Germans (purple), Russians (light orange), Middle Easterners (red), American military/government/law enforcement (dark blue), the mob/organized crime (brown), South/Central Americans (dark orange), North-East Asians (dark green), non-governmental white guys (light blue), and American companies (yellow). ...the overall winner of the villain tally is American military/government/law enforcement. Our own protectors even beat out the Russians in the 80s! We are a country that distrusts government innately and that has translated to film. It’s also just fun when the bad guy is the NSA director or a dirty cop because that adds another level of paranoia and danger from within. The interesting thing is that by 2000, Middle Easterners have fallen off the chart completely (as have Nazis, but what do you expect)."
