The Internet really piles up when you take off for a week to watch 80+ movies and drink and stay up all night. Here are some items that caught my eye from my lost week at the Flaherty Seminar.
- One Connecticut theatre schooled its patrons on patience with Malick. No refunds!
- The Taiwanese animation geniuses broke down the latest Ebert Twitter kerfuffle.
- Defying all expectations, the new BRITNEY SPEARS video is chockablock with knowing winks to Friday, The Terminator series [why, hullo there, Skynet!], and, well, what you see above. I love it.
- Speaking of bring-backs, nymag's Vulture kicks off its Nostalgia Fact-Check series by seeing how Heathers holds up: "Ryder is especially wonderful, so inherently likable that she makes you want to defend her horrible choices (she didn’t want to kill Kurt!) and working the quirk (that monocle, those shoulder pads, the excessive diary writing) without letting the quirk work her. Zooey Deschanel, take notes?"
- David Thomson wants us to take down the Hollywood sign: "Hollywood thinking still wants us to trust that good-looking people are good; that you will fall in love and get a happy ending; that women are seen, while men watch; that desire and dreaming are necessary pursuits that take precedence over evidence and reasoning; that justice will be done, very likely with a gun; that stories are resolved and heroes are sound; that you can understand experience just by looking (so keep everything cinematic); that shopping can make you whole and clean (think of Julia Roberts in “Pretty Woman”, one of Hollywood’s fondest love-letters to itself); that, in the land of the free, celebrity is a hallowed state, instead of the madness waiting for a Charlie Sheen."
- Grantland's Molly Lambert does a reverse think piece on Bad Teacher: "Just because Cameron Diaz and Christina Applegate starred in The Sweetest Thing, the Ishtar of raunchy female comedies, doesn't mean you couldn't make a great Diaz- and Applegate-starring raunchy female comedy.... Romantic comedies that don't insult women with assumptions about their priorities and life goals are few and far between. One of the best romantic comedies in recent memory was actually Anchorman, in which Ron Burgundy learns that his pride is less important than expressing his love for a woman who is better at his job than he is. But then everybody from Anchormangot cast in other movies except for Christina Applegate. Studio executives saw it and said, 'Hey, get me the guy who plays the guy who eats the candle.'"
- Oh, haaay, Peter Greenaway!
- Cinematic scion Sofia Coppola got to collaborate on Louis Vitton's Resort 2012 collection. According to T & Lo: "the resulting collaboration looks like, well, like Sofia Coppola’s wardrobe. That’s definitely not a bad thing because she’s a stylish lady in her own right and while the collection sometimes bounces all over the place, the overall effect does feel like it all came out of one woman’s closet. It also feels a bit like you just stumbled upon the most amazing vintage clothing store in the world. It has a very ’60s and ’70s Paris feel to it; chic and urban, with some references to the ’30s and ’40s. We love the cloche hats, short shorts, cutout skirts and overall sporty feel to the collection. Colorful, fun, and girly."
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Film the blanks: "A series of prints based on famous film posters with the information deconstructed to minimal blocks of colours, leaving a surprisingly recognisable set of striking and iconic images." Here's "I've been to Vidal Sassoon" Oh so clever.
- Finally, this semi-recent contribution of four frames from Zabriskie Point to Movies in Frames made me giggle. See, almost exactly a year ago, while we were in the city essentially overnight so he could act as a judge at Meatopia on Governor's Island one Sunday, the 'Fesser tagged along with me on Saturday night to [redacted film critic]'s birthday party at [redacted filmmaker]'s sweltering loft in the way West Village/Chelsea-ish hinterlands. While we film-y types all threw copious amounts of booze down our throats, in accordance with the traditions of the tribe, the 'Fesser amused himself by playing faux-naif. For some reason the Antonioni flick was on -- for atmosphere? -- so he whiled away the time asking all and sundry, quite earnestly, why we were watching a [mit out sound] Burning Man documentary on the enormous flatscreen TV. It was awesome.
TK, a special Sonic Truth-related link dump!
