The cinetrix would like to see heist/caper flicks utilizing the following interweb devices. Get on it, filmmakers!
The Google Art Project. "17 of the most esteemed museums in Europe and America have let Google inside. The engineers essentially used the Street View technology indoors, filming paintings in a number of unexpected ways (sometimes using ladders and bicycles, as this brilliant video shows). Users have a 360-degree view of galleries with an option to zoom in or out. An array of extras includes details on floor plans, some multimedia and an excellent search. The result is a site that allows viewers to wander around a museum's galleries and glimpse a few choice paintings without ever leaving one's desk (for better or worse). As with Street View, moving around can be disorienting and occasionally frustrating, depending on the speed of your connection. The technology also seems more suited for zooming down the hallways of the Uffizi (totally fun!) than for mimicking a more casual amble. As with Street View, the brain fills in for itself: tracking through a familiar museum is rather different from exploring a new one; the latter is unexpectedly thrilling."
Chinese search engine Baidu’s unbelievable response to Google Maps. For example: "a fantastically detailed, three-dimensional, navigable illustration of Beijing: a whole city, rendered down to the tiniest details, in pixels. The map is both true and untrue, and we can’t help but notice that this Beijing is curiously devoid of people—a real ghost town. Click on the red star to zoom in, and switch over to street view (the big bottom arrow in the thumbnail illustration above) to see for yourself: It’s like stumbling across a fictional “fact” in some futuristic novel." [via]
Returned from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies in New Orleans (full of gulf oysters) mostly intact and with much to process. Until I have, here's Frank O'Hara to keep you company. [via]
Not you, lean quarterlies and swarthy periodicals with your studious incursions toward the pomposity of ants, nor you, experimental theatre in which Emotive Fruition is wedding Poetic Insight perpetually, nor you, promenading Grand Opera, obvious as an ear (though you are close to my heart), but you, Motion Picture Industry, it's you I love!
In times of crisis, we must all decide again and again whom we love. And give credit where it's due: not to my starched nurse, who taught me how to be bad and not bad rather than good (and has lately availed herself of this information), not to the Catholic Church which is at best an oversolemn introduction to cosmic entertainment, not to the American Legion, which hates everybody, but to you, glorious Silver Screen, tragic Technicolor, amorous Cinemascope, stretching Vistavision and startling Stereophonic Sound, with all your heavenly dimensions and reverberations and iconoclasms! To Richard Barthelmess as the "tol'able" boy barefoot and in pants, Jeanette MacDonald of the flaming hair and lips and long, long neck, Sue Carroll as she sits for eternity on the damaged fender of a car and smiles, Ginger Rogers with her pageboy bob like a sausage on her shuffling shoulders, peach-melba-voiced Fred Astaire of the feet, Eric von Stroheim, the seducer of mountain-climbers' gasping spouses, the Tarzans, each and every one of you (I cannot bring myself to prefer Johnny Weissmuller to Lex Barker, I cannot!), Mae West in a furry sled, her bordello radiance and bland remarks, Rudolph Valentino of the moon, its crushing passions, and moonlike, too, the gentle Norma Shearer, Miriam Hopkins dropping her champagne glass off Joel McCrea's yacht, and crying into the dappled sea, Clark Gable rescuing Gene Tierney from Russia and Allan Jones rescuing Kitty Carlisle from Harpo Marx, Cornel Wilde coughing blood on the piano keys while Merle Oberon berates, Marilyn Monroe in her little spike heels reeling through Niagara Falls, Joseph Cotten puzzling and Orson Welles puzzled and Dolores del Rio eating orchids for lunch and breaking mirrors, Gloria Swanson reclining, and Jean Harlow reclining and wiggling, and Alice Faye reclining and wiggling and singing, Myrna Loy being calm and wise, William Powell in his stunning urbanity, Elizabeth Taylor blossoming, yes, to you and to all you others, the great, the near-great, the featured, the extras who pass quickly and return in dreams saying your one or two lines, my love! Long may you illumine space with your marvellous appearances, delays and enunciations, and may the money of the world glitteringly cover you as you rest after a long day under the kleig lights with your faces in packs for our edification, the way the clouds come often at night but the heavens operate on the star system. It is a divine precedent you perpetuate! Roll on, reels of celluloid, as the great earth rolls on!
Oh, my. It has been a while. The cinetrix went to Ladies' Rock Camp, then graded a gazillion midterms, the same number of shot description/analyses, etc., and now she really needs to write the conference paper she's delivering at the end of the week at the Society of Cinema and Media Studies conference in New Orleans.
Which should explain the tab closing/throat clearing. I'm convinced that procrastination is actually the last refuge of scoundrels.
Via Clothes on Film, the super-creepy oil paintings of Cathy Lomax. Above, one of the 56 costume changes in Rosemary's Baby Lomax painted, which is captioned "Rosemary Woodhouse’s Wardrobe, Outfit 3: Yellow floral print, sleeveless swing dress. (Moving into the apartment)." Look at those spindly legs! My favorite caption, however, would have to be this one: "Rosemary Woodhouse’s Wardrobe, Outfit 21: Short white towelling dressing gown and big fluffy blue slippers. (In kitchen the morning after being raped by the devil)" (Fun fact: The younger cinetrix once dressed as post-rape/knocked-up Rosemary for Halloween.)
The sublime Joanne McNeil shares the name for anacronistic audio: sound skeuomorphism.
Hilobrow points to a genius blog: Deface Value. Who doesn't love a little freestyle détournement? I agree with Josh: "This idea is so straightforward, elegant, and endlessly amusing and enlightening. DEFACE VALUE should be a book published by Princeton Architectural Press."
Via Terry Teachout: "An extremely rare kinescope of film noir actress Lizabeth Scott singing "He Is a Man" on TV in 1958." Sultry!
This is the rare major release that permits – in swampy, criminally expensive 3D – the study of how some effects are too cruddy to achieve specialness, how not all stuntpeople, dancing extras, and men playing State Trooper Numbers Two and Three are created equal. You can also truly appreciate how not every burning car that's piloted over a camp of dancing cultists is awesome, which goes double for fake breasts – even in the aforementioned 3D format. This is a movie that began at the bottom of the barrel and saw no reason to climb out.
But there is William Fichtner, who plows along as an agent of death. He looks hale and self-amused in a decent suit, his skin as tight as a pair of Spanx. David Morse and the horror veteran Tom Atkins show up here and there. And Billy Burke, better known as Bella's dad in the "Twilight" saga, plays the bayou cult leader. He looks terrible (like the lead singer in a Train cover band) and his southern accent sounds worse (like the songs such a band might sing). Burke's dialogue often sound as if it's been achieved by a line generator combining HBO's "True Blood," the Coens's "True Grit," and the unpublished sermons of Quentin Tarantino: "He is the blight and we are the rain. Go forth and pour your anger upon him!" That line and everything else are actually more "True Rhymes with Grit."
Amber Heard, a pert Texan, rides shotgun with Cage. She wears the requisite Daisy Duke shorts and a white tank top that refuses to stain and seems only to tighten around her chest as the minutes drain away. She's the bridge between Scarlett Johansson and Kristen Stewart, but I wouldn't feel safe crossing it. Shooting guns and screaming, Heard has the look here of an actress whose greatest ambition is to survive the opening hour of a slasher film. Cage manages to treat her better than the other men in this film: like a daughter.
Like the leader singer in a Train cover band! Comedy gold, people.
Speaking of Mr. Morris, let me wind this up with some Oscar leftovers, starting with one of his many excellent tweets that evening:
Not content to phone in the Oscar hosting gig, pretty-boy polymath James Franco apparently found time to trifle with power gays like Gus Van Sant and Michael Stipe in his latest provocation, My Own Private River. Whatever, brah.
Showing alongside a series of watercolours by Van Sant designed to recall the colourful cast of hip and troubled teenagers that populated the 1991 release, which also starred Keanu Reeves, Franco's film is by far the more interesting work. Through thick, ragged curtains, which hang from the gallery's high ceilings, the film's viewing space is dotted with threadbare sofas, folding chairs and an instant coffee dispenser.
It's decidedly more support group than cinema, but as Franco's piece, set to a score by REM's Michael Stipe, plays on a loop on the wall, there's something rather comforting about the oddly therapeutic setting.
Related: A.S. Hamrah's recent n+1 Oscar preview. "You know it’s a feel-bad movie when your first thought when it’s over is, “She should have had the abortion.” She doesn’t have the abortion for the same reason John Ford said the Cavalry doesn’t kill the Indians in the first reel: if they did, there wouldn’t be a movie. That may explain a lot about the way abortion is treated in American movies these days." [I just wish there was some sort of podcast version, so you too could have the added pleasure of hearing Scott's voice in your head as you read his words.]
