Images swiped from Fette: top row, Bruce Conner, EVE-RAY-FOREVER, 1965–2006, 3 screen DVD installation, transferred from 8mm film; bottom rows, various screen captures from Irma Vep, 1996, directed by Olivier Assayas.
Greetings! Hope you all watched the movies I missed while flying hither & yon. I did do some improving reading, which I share now with you.
One of the cinetrix's first and all-time-favorite hobbyhorses here chez Pullquote is the subject of a far-reaching piece by Karina Longworth on the new poohbah of LACMA film programming: Mister Elvis Mitchell.
Before the show, I asked Reitman how he'd respond to the criticism that a live table read ofThe Breakfast Club doesn't belong in a museum's cinema screening program. On the other end of the phone, he was silent for a long time. Finally, he said, "The Breakfast Club is a great movie and I think John Hughes is a great writer, so I wouldn't really even know how to respond to that."
This statement is maybe the key to understanding the philosophical rift between Birnie's program and Mitchell's. It's one thing to be more inclusive of audiences who aren't experts on the canon, who don't show up for more adventurous programming — and by extension, accommodate the needs of current and future Hollywood patrons. But does that need to happen at the expense of honoring the canon and adventurous, noncommercial contemporary work? Is the purpose of a museum to validate the general public's tastes, or is it to educate the audience about the past and future in ways that will challenge those tastes and expand them? Does the New Classic have to usurp just plain classic?
Elsewhere on the distaff tip, Joan's Digest launches. Contributors list for ish one leans heavily on the Empire State. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I look forward to its discovery of flyover voices in future iterations. Editor Miriam Bale talks Joan over at Indiewire:
I started this journal because I wanted to see what could happen when a woman film writer wasn’t saddled with being the token female in a male-dominated world. I started this journal when I realized that, at one outlet I wrote for, 5.5% of the reviews were by women (and this was mostly me). I started this journal as a wild experiment. Most films in Hollywood are made by men for mostly male reviewers. What would happen if the critical community shifted? Would that change the basic “by men for men” formula that we accept as neutral, as Hollywood, as just what movies are.
Several muppets, a man and two women watch a television show called, "Punch the Teacher"; we see a man with his head in a stockade about to be punched and a comical punching sound is heard.
A muppet holding a muppet chicken dramatically jumps off a building, hits a sign as he falls, lands in a large crate filled with packing peanuts and is unharmed.
A muppet plays the drums on the heads of four small fuzzy creatures, and they squeak "ouch."
A muppet dramatically shouts and runs away, we see a muppet-sized hole in the wall and then see that the muppet is unharmed.
A muppet demonstrates a yoga pose; we see his arms and legs twisted into a knot.
A muppet passes out from a surprise; he wakes up unharmed and almost passes out again moments later.
A muppet screams continuously for what appears to be a long amount of time and a man and a woman are seen putting their hands over their ears.
A man, a woman, and two muppets scream and hold their ears as a robot makes a loud modem dial-up sound.
A clip from one of my personal fave raves, the always au courant Le Corbeau. I can still feel what it was like watching it for the first time, cold, from the Brattle balcony [uncharacteristically on the left -- sinister -- side] and tumbling out into the alley afterward, rattled.
The HFA gets gritty with The Complete Henri-Georges Clouzot, from November 26 to December 18:
Miller's hard-right, pro-military point of view is not only accounted for in his own work, but in the larger project of mainstream Hollywood cinema. American movies, in the main, often agree with Frank Miller, that endless war against a ruthless enemy is good, and military service is good, that killing makes you a man, that capitalism must prevail, that if you would just get a job (preferably a corporate job, for all honest work is corporate) you would quit complaining. American movies say these things, but they are more polite about it, lest they should offend. The kind of comic-book-oriented cinema that has afflicted Hollywood for 10 years now, since Spider-Man, has degraded the cinematic art, and has varnished over what was once a humanist form, so Hollywood can do little but repeat the platitudes of the 1%. And yet Hollywood tries still not to offend.
Let's close on a beautiful note, shall we? Joseph Cornell movies up on UbuWeb!!! Haven't seen some of these since an HFA program in the early 1990s!
Cornell was also one of the most original and accomplished filmmakers to emerge from the Surrealist movement, and one of the most peculiar. Just as the ascetic and introverted Cornell himself held Surrealism at arms length, borrowing only those elements that suited his interests and temperament, his films superficially resemble those made by other Surrealists, they are in truth sui generis. Only a handful of his contemporaries understood the genius of films like his Rose Hobart — an unfortunate situation exacerbated by Cornell's own obstinate resistance to public screenings. No one made films even remotely similar to Cornell's for almost thirty years, and even now the perfect opacity of his montage remains unrivalled.
The actual sequence, for comparison, may be found here.
Took in Point Blank again tonight with the 'Fesser, who'd never seen it before. The clever elves who live inside the DVR also managed to capture a nine-minute MGM promo picture called "The Rock," and "The Man on the Rock," a 1938 short about the death of Napoleon on Helena. Or was it his double, Francois Eugene Robeaud? Either way, nice touch, TCM.
Watching Walker's obsessive quest to recover his money from a sinister corporation got the cinetrix to wondering whether anyone is compiling a list of films, a catalogue raisoneé of cinema of occupation. Why should the #occupy movements limit themselves to libraries when they could have cinematheques?
Somehow, yesterday, I found myself watching three movies on Netflix streaming, all of which I'd seen before, and each with some element of distraction in the mix dividing my attention. A question: Yo, what in the hell was up with the pathologizing of female [late] adolescence in 1990s indie cinema?
First up was Girl, Interrupted. This semester I'm again teaching a 20th & 21st c. lit class in which nearly all of the longer works we read have been adapted into films. This is not a class for majors, so I enjoy the pandering/usefulness of looking at certain sequences -- say, when Jeanette meets Melanie in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, or the key party in The Ice Storm, or the "Eye of the Tiger"-scored transformation sequence in Persepolis [you get the idea] -- and discussing what sort of thing can translate from one medium to the next, and what remains specifically the realm of literature.
I'd never bothered with asking the library to get the Kaysen adaptation -- maybe because when the 'Fesser and I caught it at the Somerville Theatre late in its theatrical run [like, the day before the Oscars, I think] a rodent ran across the bottom of the screen during the "eat-in chicken" scene. Which made an impression. So when I learned it was streaming, I decided to give it a go while tackling one of my least-favorite tasks: ironing.
Guys, it still makes me so sad that Winona Ryder championed this passion project, sure to get her some Academy love, only to let Angelina Jolie eat her acting lunch as the sociopathic Lisa. No Keane-eyed, wan, pixie-cut stylings would ever win out against Jolie's gleeful, seductive rampage. Other things I remembered: pre-Mad Men Elisabeth Moss as face-burned Polly, post-Clueless Brittany Murphy as snarling Daisy, where-has-she-gone Clea DuVall. Things I forgot: Vanessa Redgrave and Jeffrey Tambor as therapists, post-Catalano-lean Jared Leto [surely Ryder must've hit that]. Oh, and MUTHERFUCKIN' WHOOPI GOLDBERG as Afroed nurse Valerie, the magical black person who saves Susanna from herself. My eye-rolling should be downright audible.
Next was a sentimental favorite, The House of Yes. [Confession: my nickname as a video store manager during this stretch of the 90s was Parker Poseur.] A younger pal had sent me a message recently singing her covetous praises for Tori Spelling's dress, which I couldn't recall for the life of me, so back I went into the Camelot-infused madhouse with Jackie-O and Marty. It's still stagey as all get-out, but there's fun to be had with Genevieve Bujold's turn as the wonder twins' icy mother. And Posey, as always, commits. But the film never explains why only the distaff geminid sib is the one driven stark raving mad by these incestuous couplings. Which, really House of Yes? Perhaps a candidate for a Thanksgiving double feature with its fellow 1997 release The Ice Storm [set 10 years earlier on turkey day weekend in 1973]. Or, you know, maybe not.
The final pick continued the cinetrix's downward slide from award-aspirational to downright trash: Poison Ivy. Or, as I've long liked to think of it, Teoremafor grrls! Drew Barrymore, clawing her way back to a career after her pre-teen rehab stint, plays Ivy, a bottle-blonde baby Madonna manque who seduces her way through nerdy Sara Gilbert's household, hijacking the affections of her bed-ridden mother, dog, and sleazy [seriously. Tom Skerrit with moustache sleazy. Fucking Barrymore on the hood of a Mercedes sleazy. In the rain sleazy.] dad. It's still awesome, but let's just say no one has a religiously transcendent experience akin to the maid's in its unlikely Pasolini progenitor.
I mean, why would they? After all, it's yet another movie about a hysterical spoiled brat. Right?
The only prominent item on the enormous glass coffee table at the editor’s house was Joan Didion’s then-latest novel, A Book of Common Prayer (1977). Kael asked the host what he thought of it. "The editor reached for the novel, held it up as if it had healing properties, and pronounced: 'It’s full of resonance.'" Wolcott adds: "I didn’t dare exchange glances with Pauline, for whom Didion was full of something, but it sure wasn’t resonance."
Kael, who died in 2001, had a simmering rivalry with Didion that occasionally came to a boil, as Nathan Heller notes in The New Yorker. Like all rivalries, it no doubt owed something to what the two had in common. David Kipen once said, “The story of modern American cultural criticism is the story of three California girls who went East—Pauline Kael, Susan Sontag and Joan Didion.” Kael and Didion both went to Berkeley (Kael didn’t graduate) and shook off sexism and East Coast bias to gain mountaintop perches in the literary-journalistic landscape. It’s not hard to imagine why they would have spent some time playing compare-and-contrast.
The Paulette issue isn't so much about imitation (theirs) as cultivation (hers). Kael was famous for seeking out young writers. She'd give out her phone number, offer invitations to join her at screenings, even help find them jobs. If you were the recipient of one of these unsolicited calls, it seemed like an act of astonishing kindness and concern. Others might equally well see it as claque-building.
For whatever it's worth, the most gobsmacked I've ever been in a fairly gobsmack-prone life was when a colleague in the Globe library told me one day that I had a phone call from Pauline. This was 1983. I'd reviewed her compilation of capsule reviews, "5001 Nights at the Movies," for the Globe that Sunday. "What have you been reading?" she asked. I haltingly got out the title ofIrving Howe's forthcoming memoirs, "A Margin of Hope." "Oh, the excerpt in the Times Magazine looked pretty dull. What did you think?" What did I think? What did I think? I was 25 and worked in the Boston Globe library as a data-base manager (don't ask). Who cared what I thought? Apparently, Pauline Kael did. Intoxicating as her writing was, the realization that the woman behind that style cared was a lot more intoxicating. A lot more.
This comes amid a review of Tower Heist and Melancholia, and while the first is perfect in-bed, at-home, only-while-extremely-ill viewing, I can't imagine seeing Melancholia anywhere but in a theater. In part, that just has to do with size and projection: you can't possibly appreciate the first five or ten astounding minutes on the small screen. (The following 5004238 minutes, though, you probably could.)
A recent entry in the Guardian's ongoing "favourite film series":
In 2007, Portman talked to this paper's Simon Hattenstone about the effect on her life of playing Marty in Beautiful Girls and the very similar Mathilda in Léon in 1994. It made for uncomfortable reading.
I'm trying to think of a sensitive way to ask about playing all these sexualised children, but fail miserably. "Were you aware that you were a paedophile's dream?" I blurt out. She nods. "Yeah!" She giggles, perhaps a little uncomfortably. "It was weird, and it dictated a lot of my choices afterwards 'cos it scared me." How did she become aware of it? "When you're a little kid you get really excited about it and you think being famous is pretty cool, and you get a fan letter and you read it, and then I'd be, like, 'Eeeeeugh!' Terrified." What did the letters say? "You can imagine. I stopped reading them obviously, but it made me really reluctant to do sexy stuff, especially when I was young."
Of Beautiful Girls, she said: "It definitely made me shy away from that kind of role. And there's a surprising preponderance of that kind of role for young girls. Sort of being fantasy objects for men, and especially this idealised purity combined with the fertility of youth, and all this in one."
She's right, of course. Marty calls herself "an old soul", but she could only be a fiction, this girl so wise and funny. It's only the knowledge that she could never be real that makes the scenes she shares with Willie bearable, let alone as touching as they are. Take the beautifully acted moment when she suggests to Willie they could be girlfriend and boyfriend, and for the merest moment he allows himself to think of it.
Speaking of age, Wesley Morris asks, "At the movies, is there even a place for gray hair to go? What would it do? Is this a trend or a permanent condition? Who can say?"
Can you sum up what the movie is about for you? My work is never only about the story—it is always about what is inside the people who are in the story. But, in the most basic sense, it's about time: getting through it, minute by minute, stopping it, and the end of it, death.
You’ve said that The Future is your version of a horror movie. Can you explain why? The character I play in the movie fails to make the dance she sets out to make, and then flees her life. She moves to a world where she will never have to try and fail again. No one cares if she's creative there. This is a sort of horror movie for a person like me, who has created her sense of self through making things. But it's also a fantasy: a fear-fantasy.
Let's close with some bad bitches, shall we? First up, because it makes me so so happy: I SAW THAT watches The Hunger.
So it turns out David Bowie is just the latest of Deneuve’s long-term lovers. She turned him into a vampire in the 18th century and they’ve been having a grand old time, but now suddenly he’s aging. Aging!! And really quickly! AMAZING MAKEUP EFFECTS! He demands to know what became of all her other lovers, who he refers to somewhat disturbingly by name, like, who are all these vampires and where are they now? And how old is this Deneuve person, if she’s had all these lovers who all lived hundreds of years? (We briefly see later an image of her in ancient Egypt, so, there’s that) She says all her lovers had the same thing happen to them–suddenly they started aging, and couldn’t sleep, and she doesn’t know why. Bowie understandably seems to think she should have told him about this before vamping him out back in pre-revolutionary France or whatever. She doesn’t seem too concerned–she mostly just leaves him alone in the house, apparently hoping he will finish aging and dying so she can get on with her life. He querulously asks her who she’s going to replace him with and she won’t tell him. THEY SMOKE.
We have also met a very young Susan Sarandon who has the most badass haircut ever. She’s a doctor, working on the secrets of aging. She and her team have this emo monkey in a cage who ages 100 years in five minutes and then turns into a skeleton and then crumbles into dust right there on the VHS tape while they all smoke intensely and watch. Sarandon goes on TV to talk about aging, and poor aging David Bowie sees her and tries to go get her help. Instead she calls him a “crank” and abandons him in the waiting room for hours, during which time he ages roughly 500 years. Then he’s like “You disappointed me” and she’s like “WHAT, YOU GOT SO OLD, WAIT DON’T LEAVE” but he does. When she follows him to his house, Catherine Deneuve tells her he went to Switzerland.
So then check this out. Bowie is now indescribably ancient and stumbling around, and Deneuve is kind of grossed out and sad. He begs her to kill him, to “release” him, and suddenly she tells him that she can’t. That the flip side of their gift of eternal (or at least, very long) life is that they actually can not ever die. That their bodies might wither all the way to dust but still they’d be there, conscious, watching, feeling, within “the rotting wood” of the coffin. He’s so ancient and gnarled and mummified and shrunken that she carries him like a baby up into the aforementioned dove-filled attic, and puts him in a box she has waiting there, and then the camera pulls out and we see a huge stack of those boxes. And she puts her hand on one of them and is like “Alexander, Cynthia, this is John. I love him, as I love you. Be kind to him tonight, my loves,” etc.
Sadness is not only an affect we experience; it is also a label is ascribed to us, or that we ascribe to others. In English, to call someone 'a sad case' is not compassionate but derisive; it means they are pathetic, hopeless. In a forgotten, early 'cultural studies' essay of 1960, the windy, conservative American poet Randall Jarrell evoked "a sad heart at the supermarket": "It is a standard joke of our culture that when a woman is bored or sad she buys something to make herself feel better; but in this respect we are all women together, and can hear complacently the reminder of how feminine this consumer-world of ours is".
