Watch more free documentariesCinema [of] attractions, forthwith:
- Let's start with the harrowing: SnagFilms hosts High on Crack Street: Lost Lives in Lowell [above], the HBO doc that followed three crackheads, including Dickey Eklund, high half-brother of The Fighter biopic subject Micky Ward.
- In a NYRB dialogue with Diana Ossana about True Grit, Larry McMurty reveals "My favorite lines in modern cinema are from The Big Lebowski": Tara Reid’s character says, “I’ll suck your cock for a thousand dollars.” And The Dude (Jeff Bridges) replies, “I’m just gonna go find a cash machine.”
- From the NYT Sunday book review of Stefan Kaner's Tough Without a Gun by Holly Brubach: "Bogart’s appeal was and remains completely adult — so adult that it’s hard to believe he was ever young. If men who take responsibility are hard to come by in films these days, it’s because they’re hard to come by, period, in an era when being a kid for life is the ultimate achievement, and “adult” as it pertains to film is just a euphemism for pornography."
- Via the Boston Globe's Movie Nation blog, a Valentine for pre-cinema lovers: "On Valentine's Day, another Muybridge site debuts, the Eadweard Muybridge Online Archive. The archive will bring together and make available thousands of Muybridge images. Among the sequences will be "The Kiss," which shows two nude women chastely doing just that. David Gordon, an artist who teaches at North Shore Community College, created and curates the site. For its debut, he's made a short film loop of the two women kissing."
- Intelligent Life maps the changing afterlife of movies, using my least-favorite male weepie as a test case: "[F]or all its delayed success, “The Shawshank Redemption” was the high-water mark of what might be called the traditional afterlife of a movie. It was released theatrically, given a short rest period, was released on VHS rental, then VHS purchase, then given another rest period, then paid-for television, then repackaged again and sent around the world to re-appear for ever more on free-to-air TV. Its releases on each format were meticulously controlled and measured, and it became a television hit on the cusp of the DVD era, when television movies were still a bonding event—an occasion on which many people looked forward to seeing a movie for the first time, and a natural conclusion to a film’s life-cycle. Just 15 years later, the landscape is much altered, and the familiar afterlife of a movie is disintegrating."
- Let's end with a round of applause! Hilobrow's Josh Glenn brings us "Clapping Music" [below], "Steve Reich’s famous minimalist composition from 1972 “performed” by the stars of Point Blank."
