To fill the yawning expanses of time, how about we play a little game of I'll show you mine if you show me yours? In general, I use my Netflix queues as massive notes to self about films I read reviews of/want to revisit, etc. But then there are the "saved" titles, huddling at the bottom of the page, no release date known. Look at the poor dears.
In the past my desire to like Charlotte Gainsbourg's music outstripped the interest I could actually muster for her tunes. But "Terrible Angels" is a bit of a Goldfrappe-y banger, and the video features an army of dancing doppelgangers. [via]
Imagine the basic dynamics of Baby Mama, but change the infant to a much-needed kidney and you have Jan Krawitz's new doc: “It’s not about organ donation—of course it is, and people will learn a lot about it—but it’s also about where we all reside on this continuum of altruism. And that’s what attracted me to the film. ‘How come she’s doing this and I’m not? How come she is on such an extreme end of the continuum?’ I want people to walk away a little uncomfortable: ‘She’s doing it and I’m not. What am I doing in my life to leave the world a better place, to make the world a better place?’”
So tomorrow sees the first semester since 2006 in which I won't be teaching a single film studies course. Long story, and banal, but it's my hope that my movie watching will see an uptick in the absence of film-as-homework responsibilities.
Other tedious educational tasks beckon, so naturally I thought I'd post up some links first.
Cleaning up my office files yesterday I came across the reading from a special topics course on world cinema by way of the Criterion Collection, which was essentially some overview material on national cinemas and otherwise the essays [commissioned or reprinted] in the DVD booklets. Natch, it put me in mind of Girish's not-so-recent post on same, which begins "Booklets that accompany DVDs are one of the less visible and accessible outlets of film writing."
Or perhaps he just saw British public information film Tufty's Under 5's Ice Cream Van (1973) and realized he'd been bested. Do click through. Transcript: VOICEOVER: This is what happened one-day when the ice cream van stopped by Tufty’s house. TUFTY: Ice cream! VOICEOVER: And Tufty goes to find his mummy. Tufty always asks his mummy to go with him to the ice cream van. VOICEOVER: But Willy Weasel has gone off to get an ice cream by himself. TUFTY’S MUMMY: Oh dear! TUFTY: Oh mummy! Willy has been knocked down by a car. VOICEOVER: Now Willy has been hurt. And all because he didn’t ask his mummy to go with him to the ice cream van. When you want to go the ice cream van, always take mummy with you.
Open Culture identifies 420 [dude!] quality films that you can watch online FREE. The collection is divided into the following categories:Comedy & Drama; Film Noir, Horror & Hitchcock; Westerns & John Wayne; Silent Films; Documentaries, and Animation.
Hotels & filmmakers. Also, "No matter the identity of the person who enters a HOTEL room, the moment he occupies it, the room is completed, its imbalance resolved. The actions of any couple (male-female, male-male, female-female) inside that room result in a new arrangement of space, balanced and whole. From this perspective, any visitor is merely an accessory that transforms the HOTEL room from a purposeless space to a purposeful one. Since the HOTEL has already become a public entrepôt for private sexual exchange, allowing for both sexual performance and deviant lifestyle to merge, it naturally needs to bear the scrutiny of cultural investigation."
Holy philately! John Huston and Billy Wilder round out the 2012 Great Directors postage stamp collection.
Speaking of the U of C, noted alum Dave Kehr is teaching in NYU's Cinema Studies program this fall. "Students should be prepared to write between 500 and 1000 words a week based on a wide range of screenings, on campus and off, that will include old films and new, fiction and non-fiction, Hollywood blockbusters and art house arcana."
Driving with only terrestrial radio and a temperamental CD player means embracing chance and the random. [Also, overlapping NPR, "New" "Country," the Jeebus-inclined, and fervent sports/political commentary emanating from a hateful mirror planet.] So for the final day on the road, I thought I'd put up an alternate mix tape of sorts.
Serge Gainsbourg, La recette de l’amour fou, 1958, live at the Trois Baudets, Paris.
Sublime? Girish, considering the musical, name-checks Dyer ["An attempt to dissolve the very distinction between narrative and numbers by means of something that strongly unites and binds them both together."] and Rosenbaum ["displaying a related impulse — 'to perceive the musical form as a continuous state of delirious being rather than a traditional story with musical eruptions.'"].
Intriguing query via H-Film.net: "A colleague and I are developing English transcripts of some older Hong Kong films that are not currently available with subtitles. Some of the movies are full of colloquialisms, puns, slang, obscenities, and physical gestures particular to Cantonese or even just Hong Kong Cantonese. While these elements are easily annotated within a textual transcript, we're not sure how to preserve them within the space and legibility conditions of subtitles. Should the translation go for literal accuracy or intended meaning? Do subtitles ignore bodily communication altogether?"
The cinetrix will be stopping tonight in Rockaway, not on Amity Island, but the Peanuts/Jaws mashup has me giggling nonetheless.
Capra-corn! "The US Postal Service has announced the second of the four filmmakers it's honoring in its 2012 stamp series "Great Film Directors" (you'll need to go to the bottom of the linked page for info on that particular series). He's Frank Capra, who's seen in profile on the stamp. On the [right] is one of the two most famous scenes from "It Happened One Night." It's the one where Claudette Colbert (showing more than a bit of leg) shows Clark Gable how to get a driver's attention when hitching a ride. "I'll stop a car -- and I won't use my thumb," Colbert tells him."
No, not creepy at all. "Stanley Kubrick allowed his then-17-year-old daughter, Vivian, to make a documentary about the production of THE SHINING." [via]
And why not? "Welcome to the Internet Movie Cars Database. You will find here one of the most complete list on the web about cars, bikes, trucks and other vehicles seen in movies, image captures and information about them."
Andrew Bujalski would like you to give him money. "I’m trying to make a very odd movie indeed, about computer chess programmers circa 1980, and perhaps deep down it’s my attempt to vicariously peek into the fantasy braniac life I ought to have pursued as a kid. It happens to be a fascinating era for the field. As computers were exploding into the public sphere, and regular folks were just getting used to seeing them in the workplace, or home, a group of geniuses at the vanguard of the technology were trying to teach it what seemed like an almost unimaginable skill—could these machines, these glorified calculators, ever conquer the human world champion in chess? Obviously a human being would have to be a genius to be the world chess champ, so if they could get a computer to do it, the computer would have to acquire a kind of genius, right?"
Speaking of car crashes, think kind thoughts while the cinetrix, the 'Fesser, and @Emmainthe864 assay the Eisenhower highways and byways today and tomorrow.
The cinetrix is setting out on what she described to the Facebooks as a "Joad-like haj" over the next couple of days, and there's not enough room in the cah for all these open tabs. Forthwith:
SPOILER ALERT! "[A]ccording to a new study that Wired dug up, knowing a spoiler or two in advance might help you enjoy the movie even more. In the experiment cited in the Wired article, several dozen participants read short stories, some of which contained a massive spoiler in the preface or in the middle of the text. Their findings? The readers who got spoiled were more engaged with what they read." The cinetrix, living far from the metropole and enjoying certain critics for their prose stylings, reads reviews for films she hasn't yet seen all the time.
Finally, "Anew in a Post-Bridesmaids World": "The other day, Matt and I were discussing stoner films we had/hadn’t seen, including Dude, Where’s My Car? and he paused and said “Why hasn’t anyone made “Dude, Where’s My Clit?”. JUDD APATOW YOUR NEXT PROJECT IS WAITING. (Please god, let this show up in the Google Alert he has one his own name.) Meanwhile: Please suggest potential plot synopsis for DWMC in the comments. Mine: Raunchy Pineapple Express For Girls, starring Lizzy Caplan of Party Down non-fame and is totally free of anyone who was in Superbad, unless there is a scene where Michael Cera gets slapped a bunch or stuffed nude down a laundry chute, where he remains for the rest of the movie."
“[33] is based on a computational analysis of Ozu’s film. The brightest four minutes of the complete film’s 136 minutes are seen in an alternate visualization: motion over time is presented as geometry, and spatial form as sequentiality.”
Better still, as poster Peggy Nelson notes, "The scenes and results are presented simultaneously, which lends a Borgesian perspective to time-based media."
Just the other day I was sharing with a family friend the story of when I met [my aspirational spirit animal] the delightful Patricia Clarkson. Which ends as the story about how I embarrassed myself utterly in front of [a totally not actor height so how was I to know?] Colin Firth, who was standing right next to her the whole time. Both stories took place in front of the elevator bank at the Durham Marriott/convention center a few Aprils ago, when Clarkson et al. was in town to shoot a movie. This movie.
Related: So excited that Clarkson is joining "Parks and Recreation" this season. As if I needed another excuse to watch my favorite living South Carolinian I have not met [sorry, Colbehrrr], deliciously dangerous Aziz Ansari.
In honor of Clarkson's Louisianan roots, a lagniappe.
The Guardian's Stuart Heritage has been killing it with his close-reading of movie trailers. In fact, emulating him might not be a bad exercise for intro to film studies students. Especially if they come up with gems like this:
Recently on the Facebooks, a fellow teacher pointed to the latest entry in The Hunt for the Worst Movie of all Time, concerning one that many of our female students [inexplicably] adore: The Notebook, a.k.a. Shawshank Redemption for girls. TRUTH. It begins
Still more from the trenches of cine-academe, via Our Girl in Chicago: a totally lovely account of the U of C's Doc Films by a student insider
Unless you’re Tyler Durden, this isn’t the fun part: transferring the film onto show reels, rewinding the film, checking and repairing splices, and adding our own if necessary, noting the scenes where dots (those cigarette burns) appear to indicate the end of the reel, determining the print's proper sound format and aspect ratio.
Doc is dedicated to passing these skills on to new volunteers, and I let my APs do this prep work while I look over their shoulder or tend to the projectors. Hopefully, after three quarters of working under different projectionists, an AP will take the projectionist exam to become a PJ, running his or her own show the following quarter.
The movie plots that technology killed: Modern-day communications technology makes most classic movie plots utterly avoidable. "Before checking into the Bates Motel in a deserted California backwater, Janet Leigh consults Trip Advisor on her iPhone and reads: 'Smelly, dirty, really creepy owner, constantly talks to a mother no one ever sees. Filthy shower, manager's office smells of stuffed birds, no Wi-Fi....'"
I heard that the two of you made mixtapes for each other as sort of a relationship-building exercise? I hadn't made a mixtape since back in the day when there were tapes. I actually didn't even know how to burn a CD, so I had to get technical support for making her mixtape. But Miranda made a mixtape for me that was just, like, outrageous. It was so filthy!
Still somewhat topical! David Lynch's short film about the debt crisis.
Maud Newton endorses Raymond Chandler’s 1945 "Writers in Hollywood," "a scathing attack on the motion picture industry." Seconded!
Even the most talented screenwriters, he says,
devote their entire time to work which has no more possibility of distinction than a Pekinese has of becoming a Great Dane: to asinine musicals about technicolor legs and the yowling of night-club singers; to “psychological” dramas with wooden plots, stock characters, and that persistent note of fuzzy earnestness which suggests the conversation of schoolgirls in puberty; to sprightly and sophisticated comedies (we hope) in which the gags are as stale as the attitudes, in which there is always a drink in every hand, a butler in every doorway, and a telephone on the edge of every bathtub; to historical epics in which the male actors look like female impersonators, and the lovely feminine star looks just a little too starry-eyed for a babe who has spent half her life swapping husbands; and last but not least, to those pictures of deep social import in which everybody is thoughtful and grown-up and sincere and the more difficult problems of life are wordily resolved into a unanimous vote of confidence in the inviolability of the Constitution, the sanctity of the home, and the paramount importance of the streamlined kitchen.
