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29 September 2011
28 September 2011
27 September 2011
Moving right along
So, yes, Nirvana's Nevermind, 20 years old as of September 24, which was also Jim Henson's birthday. Which makes this post a few days tardy. Oh, well. Whatever. It was an important album to me in college. And Henson was an important man to me from the cradle on. Plus, the cinetrix can finally watch 1991: The Year Punk Broke again and thrill anew to the spectacle of gangling Thurston Moore wandering a European city he's never been to before, confident of finding the indie record store. Flimsy excuses one and all to post the following:
Ken Cancelosi and Matt Zoller Seitz celebrate the enduring comedic partnership of Jim Henson and Frank Oz.
And longtime Boston radio fixture Oedipus has been working on an ongoing project, which includes this bad-ass Afro-Cuban cover of "Smells Like Teen Spirit."
Twenty-year-old photos of Kurt originally posted by Mary Lou Lord last week on Facebook, who wrote "Found a camera in a black cab an hour before the London show. Snap I took. I love the hands. Anyway, I have more pics coming on Sunday. A friend of mine found them. I am the most disorganized person in the world and I had lost the pics. It's nice to know someone took care of them...xo"
26 September 2011
Alone, again
Movie-watching for me is frequently a solitary pursuit. [Movie-going? Somestimes, yes. Sometimes, no.] Occasionally, though, the 'Fesser will suggest we eat "like Americans" [that is, in front of the television] and asks if there's anything to watch. Last night, the answer was Bill Cunningham New York, which neither of us had seen. I'd imagine any city dwellers who have days when Manhattan feels too damn big or they feel so damn small should have this lovely portrait of a singular man tucked next to their bottled water, in case of an emergency. Expat New Englanders yearning for the soft accents that sound like childhood should also watch, if only for the pang of saudade that'll pierce them right through the heart whenever Bill says "half."
Elsewhere, that certain look of isolation:
Later, when movies took over practically every aspect of my existence, I started mentally collecting movies that had a look that made me feel good, safe, contented. It wasn’t always stark and desolate but it did always have a feeling of isolation, even if there were plenty of people around. Oddly enough, judging from the early attraction to the Road Runner’s desert locales, the westerns of John Ford didn’t give me that same sense. They certainly fulfilled all of my cinephile needs as so many of them are masterpieces but not my “certain look” needs. Perhaps there was too much energy going on within the films to get that feeling. It’s there, a little bit, in The Searchers but only in the all-too brief winter scenes. But mainly, it’s because I didn’t want the desert-sun-shining-feeling at all. I wanted the isolation, yes, but mixed in with grey clouds and damp weather. It’s just that, at seven, the Road Runner was the best I could do; it gave me the isolation but not the right weather. Which is why if I had to point to a western that gives me that feeling in spades, it’s Shane. The look of Shane relaxes me. It comforts me. It feels removed from the rest of the world and the character of Shane, himself, feels removed from the rest of the world as well. It’s as if that small settlement exists in another universe and despite all the bad things happening there, feels good. Quiet, isolated, removed.
B. Kite places Vigo's Zéro de conduite on a continuum between two terms: ludus and paidia.
An isolated child can be wheedled, goaded, or tricked into a performance—film lore is full of anecdotes of each approach. But en masse, children assume their own momentum, and far from seeking to contain this, Vigo made it the driving force of his film. In a way, the movie might be said to exist to provide a loose, unbinding frame for the cluttered and uncontrolled action of the dormitory riot. All of its branchings lead back and forth from that utopian space, and so must any discussion of it.
<snip>
[W]e’re introduced to a sensibility for which all borders are porous: inside and outside, male and female, human and animal, body and world, animate and inanimate, perhaps even life and death. This is paidia in its purest form. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the school authorities are so immersed in their rule sets that they’ve come to take them for eternal verities. They are wholly creatures of limit, frozen in a set of grotesque postures. Where paidia blends, ludus sets apart...
Call the doctor:
Last weekend, the Wellcome Trust celebrated 75 years of medicine on screen by transforming the Truman Brewery into a 1980s hospital, complete with a therapy on film ward. Here, visitors were offered consultations with a "doctor" who prescribed a healthy dose of film to cure your malaise. I've long suspected the only effective treatment for the common cold is repeated doses of romcom to be applied on the sofa, but can film really make us feel better?
Finally, celebrate the cinema of seasonal affective disorder with the Style Rookie.
23 September 2011
When you're in the Zone
the telephone is always for you. That's what I named a mixtape for a pal who first took me to see Stalker at Facets a millennium ago. And it's also the flimsy excuse on which I hang what my favorite flaming fashion bloggers refer to as your daily dose of pretty.
Sam Smith's print will be available at the gem of Music City, the Belcourt in Nashville, this weekend and in limited quantities in his online shop. Git you one!
Paper prints
Splendid news of two new databases, courtesy of the H-Film folks. Like, Oprah should be introducing this news at top holler.
There the Media History Digital Library, which is HUGE! How huge? Peep this collection:
Extensive Runs:
▽ Business Screen (1938-1973)
▽ The Film Daily (1918-1936)
▽ International Photographer (1929-1941)
▽ Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers (1930-1949)
▽ Journal of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (1950-1954)
▽ The Educational Screen (1922-1962)
▽ Moving Picture World (1912-1918)
▽ Photoplay (1917-1940)
▽ Radio Age: Research, Manufacturing, Communications, Broadcasting, Television (1942-1957)
▽ Radio Broadcast (1922-1930)
Select Holdings:
▽ Educational Film Magazine (1920-1922)
▽ Exhibitors Trade Review (1921-1922)
▽ Film Spectator (1928)
▽ Harrison’s Reports (1948)
▽ Hollywood Reporter (1934)
▽ Hollywood Reporter Production Encyclopedia (1948-1952)
▽ Home Movies & Home Talkies (1932-1934)
▽ International Motion Picture Almanac (1938)
▽ Kinematograph Year Book (1931-1954)
▽ Motion Picture Classic (1920)
▽ Motion Picture Daily (1931-1934)
▽ Motion Picture News Blue Book (1930)
▽ Motion Picture News Booking Guide (1929)
▽ Motion Picture Story Magazine (1913)
▽ Motion Picture Studio Directory and Trade Annual (1921)
▽ Motography (1915)
▽ Non-Theatrical Film Catalogues (1936)
▽ Picture Stories Magazine (1914-1915)
▽ See and Hear: The Journal on Audio-Visual Learning (1945-1953)
▽ Television Programming Catalogues (1957)
▽ The Film Daily Year Book of Motion Pictures (1923-1963)
▽ The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science: The Motion Picture in Its Economic and Social Aspects (1926)
▽ The Film Daily Presents the Product Guide and Director’s Annual (1937)
▽ The Motion Picture Almanac (1929)
▽ The Optical Lantern and Cinematograph Journal (1904-1905)
▽ The World Film Encyclopedia (1933)
▽ Who’s Who on the Screen (1920)
What'd I tell ya? There's a 1940 Photoplay article on "How Andy Hardy Reformed Mickey Rooney"?!? HUGE!
CineFiles contains scanned images of reviews, press kits, festival and showcase program notes, newspaper articles, and other documents from the PFA Library's extensive collection covering world cinema, past and present. Citations are available for all documents, and page images are available for documents with copyright clearance. New titles and document images are added daily.
CineFiles currently includes documents on the films of more than 150 major international directors, materials describing silent Soviet cinema, and PFA's unique collection of exhibitor manuals, among other documents.
Here's just one example I found in the educator's portal under Bay Area avant-garde:
Guacamole - Strand, Chick - Mexico - 1976 (7 documents)
Dig in, cinephages!
22 September 2011
Everyone's a critic
"Do you think she's talented, deeply and importantly talented?" Why yes, that is a snap of young Nora Ephron's byline on a review of Breakfast at Tiffany's in her college newspaper.
In honor of the grande dame of rom-com chick flicks, here's a bit of snark prompted by SJP's latest [based on Mrs. Anthony Lane's best-seller, no less]
MROW! And speaking of kitties, color Rich Juzwiak less than impressed with Miranda July's vision of The Future:
Granted, it’s narrated by a cat named Paw-Paw who cloys with Yoda-lite musings like, “I’m cat of nobody, I’m not even cat, I’m not even I” (even more cloying: he’s voiced by July, who also plays the protagonist, Sophie). Granted, this is the kind of movie where people bond over cloud formations and say things like, “Your footsteps and your movements sound happy.” Granted, any screaming here is reserved for release and used as an impractical attempt at practical communication (Sophie unleashes to check if a stranger she’s talking to on the phone can hear her from her house). Granted that said confrontation is mostly delivered by mumble. But make no mistake that the confrontation is absolutely there. July has referred to “The Future” as her version of a horror movie, and this is true in the most fundamental, interactive way possible: It is painful to sit through.
**The Anthropologie catalogue could not resist the siren song of In the Mood for Love.
Reverse Shot has dedicated its entire 30th issue to bringing the pain. Recommended Simply the Worst entries [on the worst work in filmmakers' oeuvres] include but are by no means limited to The Ladykillers*, The Life Aquatic, Light of Day, and My Blueberry Nights.**
*Gotta say, more than six years ago [!] I laid into The Ladykillers. Still feeling pretty good about that decision. But, my, the cinetrix was young and angry then!
There are some days when the cinetrix feels like the only person on earth who still remembers the early, smarmy work of Mr. Hanks. All this Saint Tom shit makes me want to projectile vomit. The last movie of his I deigned to see in the theatre was Forrest Gump. I was on a first [and last] date with someone really keen to see it, and to my eternal chagrin, I didn't press hard enough to see The Client, our other option, instead, because, c'mon, The Client? It was meagre consolation that I did not have to pay for my ticket, given that I'll never have back the 142 minutes that Republican Party commercial for conformity and unquestioning loyalty [and against promiscuity and casual drug use--bye, bye Jenny!] took from me.
Hanks is just a self-satisfied, bloated showboater. Acting in a Coen Brothers movie doesn't give him any sort of cred, it just serves to remind the audience how much the success of any of the brothers' past pastiche souffles rose and fell on the work of the character actors that popped in and out of the ensemble--Buscemi, Goodman, Turturro, McDormand, Jon Polito.
The Ladykillers feels like a summer stock version of a Coen Brothers movie. Forget asking how well the remake stands up to the original Ealing comedy. There is no joy, no sense of getting away with anything here. Even J.K. Simmons [Garth Pancake] seems like pale simulacra of the late [and more talented] Michael Jeter. The knowing winks and nods of the past have been replaced with a heavy-lidded, flinty-eyed stare that says to the audience, even if you hate this movie, it's still gonna make shitloads of money. Suck it up, true believers.
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- Bright Wall/Dark Room.
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- Notebook | MUBI
- Out of Focus (Aaron Dobbs)
- Self-Styled Siren (Farran Smith Nehme)
- SPLICED PERSONALITY (Sean Burns)
- The Chutry Experiment (Chuck Tryon)
- The Cinephiliacs (Peter LaBuza)
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- THE FUTURIST!
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Fourwalling and Limited Releases
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