The final two members of the 40+ person number one dream team who spent some part of the Thursday through Tuesday stretch that made up this year's iteration of our Fourth bash left yesterday at lunchtime. An ungodly quantity of linens have been laundered. There's a super-random assortment of leftovers in the fridges. And hoo-boy am I behind on paying writing/revising/editing gigs. So, naturally, here's a list of stuff to read/watch/listen to. Lemme hear you say ah-ha-haha-ha-hah!
- Grantland's department of made-up entertainment-related statistics runs the numbers: "To determine the numerical amount by which an actor tarnished his or her Academy Award in 2011 (TO (2011)), I calculated the average Rotten Tomatoes score of all of their post-Oscar movies — since (and including) the one that won them their award — through the end of 2010, and then the average of their post-Oscar movies through this past weekend (note: I counted only live-action roles in wide-released movies). The difference between those values gives us their TO (2011), which, for completely obvious reasons, we'll measure in units called 'cubas.'"
- In the Guardian, David Thomson does the math(s): "[D]ating movies affects how we think of them. While appearing to put them in context, the date really abstracts them from the times and places in which they were shown, and makes them seem to have been available at all times, in all places. It helps us forget that films are (still) material objects, susceptible to the vagaries and ravages of history. Yet the specificity of a film's exhibition gives it part of its meaning."
- Richard Brody twits a different Thomson piece, "When Is a Movie Great?" in Harper's: "Maybe looking back nostalgically to an era of prostrate submission to the gods of thunder and lightning—to an age of eyes cast skyward in uninformed awe—is a less valuable kind of critical work than reckoning with the surprisingly diverse beauties and wonders that arise from people living and working cinematically, with their heads up and their eyes looking widely around—or looking others or even themselves in the face—in every kind of weather.
- Mark Rappoport looks long[ingly?] at Marion Crane's undies: "[W]hy has this been sticking in my craw all this time? Let’s go back to the previously mentioned dissolve between Marion at her office and Marion packing her suitcase. If she were wearing her white bra and half-slip while packing, it might suggest that no time at all elapsed between her leaving the office and making the decision to take the money and run. But she would need some time to think over her plans. The fact that she is wearing the black bra indicates several things—that she had indeed spent some time to thinking her plans through, that she most probably—let us say definitely—took a shower, foreshadowing, unseen though the shower may have been, her fatal shower at the Bates Motel, and most important of all, that she wasnaked during the course of the film, actually, during the course of the dissolve—in order for her change her brassiere. It is that unseen nakedness, during the dissolve, that is the very nakedness that triggers Norman Bates’ sexual and, hence, murderous impulses. And to indicate that something important happened in that dissolve interval, Hitchcock has Marion change her bra and slip. It’s a visual shorthand for suggesting that time has elapsed and that she took a shower, the predecessor to the famous shower scene. And, most importantly of all, that she was naked. " [via the good dr.]
- The cinetrix is giddy with delight at the prospect of rewarding herself with Zazie once some work gets done around here. Hell, maybe I'll also pick up the flick that shares its name with my favorite B&B in Montreal's Plateau: Le Rayon Vert.
- Listen to the Polk Theatre answering machine: "The recording sounds anachronistic and stands out in an anomaly in terms of the typical ways we find information these days. The low-fidelity, background noise, and timbre of the 70-something old man’s voice, not just the content, suggests a particular era of sound communication (and also a stark contrast to the visual mode most used these days to gain information about movies being shown, e.g. the internet). The recording also speaks to a localized and low budget operation that is marginalized no longer for its lurid content, but by the failure of this dying porn economic model. “This is a recording,” says Harold Guissin (the proprietor) on the message, feeling it necessary to remind callers that it is not a live person that can be engaged with, that is, no questions can be asked of him. There is a clicking hum of a projector in the background, and his coughs, unedited from the recording, present a lackadaisical and spontaneous approach to the recording of the week’s featured films."
- Saul Austerlitz breaks it down: "Hip-hop films can be loosely organized into three categories: the comedic, the hagiographic, and the gritty. Hip-hop is alternately to be mocked for its excesses, celebrated for its poetic authority, or respected for its integrity to the truth of the streets. Rather than emerge slowly, hip-hop films have tended to emerge in clumps. There are the early 1980s explorations of a burgeoning art form, the early 1990s burlesques of a booming industry, and the attempts of the mid-2000s to romanticize the emergence of a global force."
- Can't wait to be on a more robust interweb connection to watch Matt Zoller Seitz and Kim Morgan assay Ebert's review of Stormy Monday, a film I loved dearly in the dawning of the video store era. The proprietors of our local mom&pop, to which I'd ride my bike, gave me my own account though I was underage and didn't even have a VCR at home at first. [I'd watch movies while babysitting.]
- Aptly enough, I round out this list with a link to Zach Campbell's Counter-Canon post from 2006, a response to the same Paul Schrader piece I wrestled with in a paper I gave in spring of 2007. [via Girish on
— lists]
