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:
- More Scandals of Classic Hollywood! This time out, Rock Hudson: Hollywood's Most Eligible Bachelor. "At this point, Hudson looked very much as he would for the rest of his life, which is to say he looked like a Ken doll with a dye job. The same classic good looks, the same soft, inviting smile. But dude could not act FOR SHIT. Nevertheless, Roy caught the eye of Henry Willson, who quickly renamed him “Rock Hudson.” Willson managed to finagle him a bit part in the war drama Fighter Squadron, but Hudson famously took 38 takes in order to properly deliver a single line. So Henry Willson went to work turning Rock from a dolt into a star."
- Via a MUBI link that has since disappeared, Adrian Martin's "Turn the Page: From Mise en scène to Dispostif": "Cinema as a medium ceaselessly ‘puts into place’ (this is the most literal sense of the term mise en scène), arranges or articulates, many things: not just theatrical scenes, but also images, sounds, gestures, words produced as speech, passages of strongly marked rhythm or colour. And here, even the seemingly empty or inexpressive cadences of articulation—the black frames that can separate images, say—have a role to play which is just as aesthetically determining as the more obviously full or signifying ones. Hence Bellour’s provocative spray of new concepts: mise en phrase, mise en image, mise en page, mise en plan, “and above all” mise en pli (Bellour 2000b: 126). Each corresponds to a certain strategy, technique or novel gesture of placement of a material element within a film: its weaving, ‘spacing’, particular emphasis—and, ultimately, its specific place and role within the logic of a cinematic dispositif. "
- Movie Morlocks collects classic insults from classic actors. Frank Sinatra on Shelley Winters: “A bowlegged bitch of a Brooklyn blonde.” Shelley Winters on Frank Sinatra: “A skinny, no-talent, stupid, Hoboken bastard.”
- 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.
- "The Two Horizons" and two excerpts from "What Avatar and Pedro Costa can tell us about narrative cinema today." A. "Bazin snapped into focus something that had been present for, but not as forcefully articulated by, previous thinkers about cinema, which is that there is a tripleness to watching fiction film. We watch, as it were, with three eyes: 1) attuned to the proceedings as artifice, as projected light arranged in patterns that tell a story; 2) attuned to the proceedings of the story; and 3) attuned to the proceedings as their own reality, as documents of events that actually took place." B. "The Surrealists used to movie-hop—flit casually from one theater to another—so as to catch stray elements of movies outside their narrative context. The idea was that any element of any movie, when isolated, begins to describe something from the unconscious. There's a too-muchness of description offered in every shot of film, and by simply adjusting your mind, the Surrealists suggested, you can catch the author unawares."
- Steven Shaviro on the post-cinematic: "The particular question that I am trying to answer, within this much broader field, is the following: What happens to cinema when it is no longer a cultural dominant, when its core technologies of production and reception have become obsolete, or have been subsumed within radically different forces and powers? What is the role of cinema, if we have now gone beyond what Jonathan Beller calls “the cinematic mode of production”? What is the ontology of the digital, or post-cinematic, audiovisual image, and how does it relate to Bazin’s ontology of the photographic image? How do particular movies, or audiovisual works, reinvent themselves, or discover new powers of expression, precisely in a time that is no longer cinematic or cinemacentric?" Related: film, movies, cinema.
- Towards a New Film Criticism: "By considering the product of thousands of film workers’ alienated labor the creative expression of a single director, film criticism champions managers, not the art of cinema. Film criticism must dismiss the concept of auteurs and understand the film as a mass-produced object. Just like a cheap beer on a hot day or a fast food burger on a long road trip, entertainment cinema can be truly satisfying, but do we discuss a Big Mac the same way we talk about a three-star meal? Do we enjoy a Bud by the same criteria of a perfectly crafted Belgian beer? So why do we talk about Thor the same way we talk about Carlos?"
- Mark Feeney joins the Robert Ryan chorale: "Never underestimate the sheer inexplicability of stardom. In the summer of 1977, the smart money would have all been on Mark Hamill, not Harrison Ford, becoming a star and staying one for three more than three decades. The smart money would have given really good odds on it, too."
- 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."
