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?
Mike D'Angelo gets in the Mood:
The key to the theme’s effectiveness in this context, though, is the simple, repetitive nature of the plucked notes that provide its rhythm, which make the keening melody seem like a lament about being imprisoned in maddening routine. I’ve never seen Yumeji, so I don’t know how the piece was originally used or what might have caught Wong’s attention; the only other filmmaker I can think of offhand who’s appropriated the score from a completely unrelated movie is Quentin Tarantino, who does it all the time. In both cases, there’s the sense of an emotion they wanted to convey that happened to be perfectly encapsulated by some pre-existing piece of music—a piece that their fetishistic nature wouldn’t settle for an inferior attempt to recreate.
"Department Store Movies: A $ign of Our Times":
Though the department store becomes a battleground for labor relations in some movies during the Depression, it never completely loses its connection to upward mobility through romance. Bachelor Mother (1939) stars Ginger Rogers as a New York shop girl who finds a baby. The masquerade in this film is that she pretends to be the baby’s mother. Despite being branded an unwed mother, she lands the store owner’s son, played by debonair David Niven. However, upward mobility has a negative connotation in The Women (1941), in which conniving, working-class shop girl Joan Crawford steals Norma Shearer’s upper-middle-class husband.
Rewatched To Have and Have Not this weekend. Sheer shimmering heaven, this.
Live nude girls! Thelma Adams convenes a gathering of lady film writers to discuss Mulligan, Dunst, and Stewart stripping off in recent releases:
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:
<snip>
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.
ITEM: "Scarlett Johansson's directorial debut will be Summer Crossing, a film based on the lost novella by Truman Capote. The story centers around a teen society girl's coming of age in New York right after World War II, which makes it Capote-ish in the best way. Playwright/screenwriter Tristine Skyler is adapting the book..." [Yay!]
The United States of Documentary by POV. Or should that read "on POV"? Vote for your fave nonfictions by state here.
@jlichman points to an invaluable resource: "The Parents Guide for THE MUPPETS is a must read." Some highlights under "Violence & Gore":
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 muppet beats drums wildly while shouting.
Cameron Crowe made Matt Damon a mixtape... that included a Blue Nile track.
Wesley Morris astutely and hilariously calls "Too soon!" on People's newest Sexiest Man Alive, Bradley Cooper:
The movies haven't figured out what to do with him, and, as much we know what we'd like to do with him, this honor -- silly and empty and irrelevant as it probably is -- might, for now, be better spent on a star with a body of work as thick and lustrous as Cooper's hair. No one wants to say it, but he's the man-cave Katherine Heigl. Why Hollywood is keeping these two away from each other might be a matter of scientific necessity.
Seriously, treat yourself and read the whole damn thing.
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:
Generalized claims are often made for Clouzot's pessimistic misanthropy, a simplification that overlooks the insistent, paradoxical humanism of his desperately struggling anti-heroes and the graphic realism used to depict the lower realms they inhabit. Vivid documents of the French experience of WW2 and its aftermath, Clouzot's films unfold almost entirely within the type of unsavory settings more often associated with contemporary American film noir – dingy garret studios and scruffy dance halls, decrepit insane asylums and squalid backwater towns. However, the dilapidated and dangerous world of Clouzot's films also contains a strangely enduring and even nostalgic side, crystallized in the films' small moments and objects – the Paris metro ticket saved by Yves Montand in The Wages of Fear, the simple Christmas gifts in Quai des Orfèvres.
Rick Moody asks, Is Frank Miller/Hollywood cryptofascist?
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.
