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• But forget about positioning and context for a second. I think there are a couple of specific reasons why Raiders of the Lost Ark still sings to us, and why it remains one of the most influential blockbusters of all time. To begin with, for a film that at first seems so cartoonish, it’s surprisingly dark: Scary, gory, elemental. Remember, this is a film that essentially ends with a bunch of Nazis experiencing something akin to a reverse-Holocaust -- a climax that still hasn't been topped by any other action movie, in part because of its simultaneously ironic and poetic sense of catastrophe.
• Welcome to "XFR STN" (that's "transfer station"), the New Museum's daunting new project, eight-week exhibit, and transfer lab all in one—an overwhelming attempt to digitize, present, and preserve artistic materials on obsolete formats, however obscure or unremembered. Three transfer stations sprawled across the Fifth Floor gallery, accompanied by television screens labeled for the three different sources of material: the New Museum's own archives, the Monday/Wednesday/Friday Video Club's archives, and public submissions. A small team of technicians huddled over the equipment, while found footage streamed on a projection screen on the opposite wall. There was more to see on the TV screens, too, free of context or identification: fuzzy black-and-white footage of a jazz pianist crooning, an artist's home videos, a clip of a man I didn't recognize being interviewed by another man I didn't recognize.

• The 1961 version of The Parent Trap has Hayley Mills playing identical twins Sharon and Susan, who meet at summer camp and trip out on their uncanny resemblance to each other. At first of course they hate each other, but once they realize they are actually sisters separated in infancy by divorcing parents, they team up to get their family back together. This plan entails trading places when camp is over, and each girl gets to experience life with the parent they never knew. Can you imagine?! La Lindsay Lohan starred in the 1998 remake, but I’ve always preferred the original, especially for its early-’60s fashion. In one scene, the girls try re-creating their parents’ first date and perform a musical number.
• Called Plan B as a working title until someone realized that was a brand of emergency contraceptive, The Back-up Plan perfectly illustrates Kelly Oliver’s interesting observation in Knock Me Up, Knock Me Down that Hollywood consistently promotes the idea that babies achieved through heterosexual romance are more desirable than babies achieved through reproductive technology. Oliver instances the many films in which the biological parents of a child conceived through technology end up having sex – for the first time – after the child’s birth.

• Who the hell was Cliff Edwards? He was a major record and radio figure of the late twenties and early thirties and later the voice of "Jiminy Cricket" in Disney's "Pinnochio" (and thus the man who introduced "When You Wish Upon A Star"). Edwards was largely responsible for the ukelele fad of the 1920's and was, for a good many years, quite famous and beloved. Alas his star burned fast and his money burned even faster. Drink, drugs and divorces left him indigent.
• The iPhone Marimba ringtone, the buzz of a Whatsapp message alert, the slide and click of the tablet being opened. This is the everyday tech music in many people's lives today. But when was the last time you heard some of these old sounds?

Never Send to Know from Catherine Grant on Vimeo.

[Confidential to Catherine: what is that harrowing soundtrack?]

S[um]merville cinematheque

The cinetrix is housesitting for a pal and enjoying the giddy urban summerime delights of biking, multiple restaurant options, old friends, porch drinking, live music, and, natch, movies. Some on 35mm, even!

And speaking of sun and sea, here's Asia Argento's Sea of Love

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Anyone else beginning to suspect film historian Fernando Peña is actually some sort of Terminator-stylee time traveler? [via]

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And some light reading:

• I was watching that Schwarzenegger film The Last Stand on pay-per-view. It was pretty bad, and I wondered how this’d gotten reviewed. So I looked on Metacritic. There were 60 reviews from which I recognized only two of the publications. One was Variety, one was maybe the Sun-Times. And there were 58 reviewers out there, on websites. It’s not that I didn’t recognize the names of the reviewers, I didn’t recognize the names of the websites. And the truth is, these reviewers aren’t bad. But how do you get through that whole system? The New York Times has good reviewers, and The New Yorker, and those are the ones I read regularly. In some ways the film business is like an animal with four legs: there’s financing, audiences, artists, and critics. Well, the animal’s fallen. And one leg alone can’t get it up. Critics alone can’t lift that animal up. Artists alone can’t lift that animal up. People say, “If we only had better critics,” or “If we only had better films,” but you need all four legs to get that horse on its feet again.
• Junger was the co-director of Restrepo, and also a combat journalist. He has been working since his friend's death to bring something positive out of the experience. RISC began a year after Hetherington's death, and is both a tribute and an attempt to avoid what the medical trainers who run the program refer to by the somewhat counterintuitive name of "preventable death." Any individual person's death may be basically preventable, after all, but not death itself.
• THE BREAKFAST NUB: A scene-for-scene remake of the first 91 minutes of The Breakfast Club. Then, at minute 92, Anthony Michael Hall starts screaming and screaming. There is blood everywhere. Where did his hands and feet go? Oh my god, something ate everyone’s hands and feet, leaving only bloody nubs!!!!!! What kind of a creature would do this!? Then, BOOM. FERAL TWIN. It’s been living under the table this whole time, reading Molière until it got hungry. Molière really pumps Feral Twin’s ‘nads. 
• Sometimes a friend will post a movie photo on his or her Facebook page or blog and my kneejerk response is, invariably, “I am so there!” Kneejerk or knot, I mean literally that. The magic of art in general — and cinema in particular — is that it takes us out of body, recuses us from mundane concerns, from our industry, our labor, our obligations, and woes and transports us to another plane, where we exist in two vicariously exciting dimensions. Well, the movies bring to the party height and width and our imagination provides the depth for a personal 3D conversion that technology could never duplicate, allows us to breach the fourth wall and step into the frame.
• Chungking Express overall has the feel and rhythm of pop music—but in its sense of constant self-creation it’s more like a karaoke performance than a refined studio recording. Made over the course of three months during a break in the filming of Wong Kar-wai’s grand martial arts movie Ashes of Time, it’s a fantastically restless film, a rummaging through of techniques and scenarios that just might jell into an affecting tale of twinned romantic longings. (You can imagine the filmmakers crossing their fingers behind the scenes and in the editing room.) It’s a rare film that is kinetically designed to come at you from all angles, only to ultimately tell a rather simple love story; like Jules and Jim or Punch-Drunk Love, it’s a romance that makes no sense as anything other than cinema. These are people identified by the visual and aural details of their lives,their objects, their music: when, at one point, Faye turns off “California Dreamin’” at 663’s request, she suddenly seems naked. It’s less a reflection of real-world anxieties than an expression of those anxieties—about love, heartache, loneliness—refracted through the glistening, sparkling things that make us want to continue staring at those big, beautiful movie screens.

 

Nostalgia + the light

barbed and galvanized [via]

With scripts, there’s a constant process of writing things that are very literal and having characters say what’s about to come next—which you want to avoid—and then paring everything back. But in transitioning from script to screen, you’re making choices in production about how much to show. And in the edit you find that things can be shown very simply. I would love to find a way to synthesize screenwriting logic and the logic of production and how it all comes together in post-production. But you’re fighting against yourself and dominant forms of storytelling. Does a filmmaker know what we’ll like as an audience watching a movie? All our preferences and dislikes? I try to make sure that we’re not pandering and not withholding too much purposefully. For the subjects I think that sometimes implies distance, but the more I can tell visually, the more exciting of an experience it is for the audience.

2. Tarkovsky wrote a book about cinema called “Sculpting in Time.” At least this was the English title. It can be translated more literally as “Depicted Time” or “Written Time,” which sound less poetic but feel more accurate. A devotee of eternal takes and glacial tracking shots, Tarkovsky was a sworn nemesis of rapid-cut editing and other filmic conventions that alter our perception of time, which we, the audience, often expect and demand. For Tarkovsky, the cinematic image was “essentially the observation of a phenomenon passing through time,” and an image became “authentically cinematic when (amongst other things) not only does it live within time, but time also lives within it.”

3. If you’re looking for a brief definition of exactly what Hollywood movies are not at this moment, you could do a lot worse than this characterization.

One of the great, time-released pleasures of movie-going is watching the actors of your generation grow older. Maybe pleasures isn’t precisely the right word, but maybe it is. I am only now beginning to discover it, seeking out some sign of accreted wisdom, pain, or contentment–experience–in their faces. This one had a baby, that one just lost her dad. Watching Ethan Hawke in Before Sunset was probably, along with the R-train moment, which happened around that same time, the beginning of my realization that time was really passing, that this thing was really happening. Life began to show itself as more than a series of days, or movies, all in a row, which I might or might not attend. He was gaunt and slightly stooped, but it was his face—rough skin and sunken cheeks, with an angry, exclamatory furrow wedged like a hatchet blade between his eyes—that transfixed me. Some said he’d come through a divorce, and it took its toll; that that’s what life does to people. I’d heard about such things but never really seen it in action on the face of someone only a few years older than me. There was something awful and yet so marvelous, so real and poignant and right, about Ethan Hawke’s face, and about getting to see it in this beautiful meditation on what life does to people, a ten-years-in-the-making sequel to a film about people too young and smitten to be too concerned about what life might do to them. And what was life doing to me? I worry.

Linklater’s greatest formal innovations probably result from his experiments in structuring narratives around real-time sequences. Because he has always favored philosophical dialogue over physical action, Linklater typically also favors long takes to fast cutting, and many of his movies consequently take place over the course of a single day: Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise, SubUrbia, Tape, Waking Life, Before Sunset andBefore Midnight all take place in a span of less than 24 hours. Additionally,Tape and Before Sunset are among the few feature films in the history of cinema that take place entirely in real time. The apotheosis of Linklater’s style can be found in Before Midnight, in which the lack of cutting and the choreography between the camera and the performers seem so organic to the material and achieve such a perfect sense of harmony that the film’s ostensible European-style “art-film” aesthetic has deservedly found success among general audiences — as if it were a more typical American-style rom-com.

With these strictures and reservations in mind, I come to what may be my most controversial recommendation, certainly for me: never again watch the films you cherished in your youth, for youth lends a wonder and tolerance that age erodes and disdains. The point applies equally to the British "Carry On" series of farces and Bergman’s medieval meditation "The Seventh Seal" (1957), wherein Bengt Ekerot’s Death has lost his sting, even when playing chess with Max von Sydow’s knight, and the final hilltop dance of death by the knight and his followers, stretched out, arms linked, is one of the clearest examples of where my abidingly etched memory is far too strong to make a return viewing anything other than an anti-climax.

Here, Cameron Diaz goes looking for the lip gloss on the car floor, ass end up. The biker who passes by presumes some erotic activity, which Christina Applegate takes as an opportunity to have some fun. The biker, by the way, seems a reimagination of the Wolf from Tex Avery's 1943 Red Hot Riding Hood. His manner is animated in multiple senses of the word—he hops on his seat, he grinds his pelvis, he howls. When he crashes, he survives. In this brief sequence, the three actors are performing characters in three different “realities”: Diaz as innocent friend, biker as an energized onlooker, Applegate as ludic puppetmaster. There are three degrees of knowledge corresponding to these realities: Diaz knows nothing, the biker thinks he knows something, and Applegate actually knows something. It is simple, elegant, and what's more it is light and disposable. On to the next!

Now things get really interesting. In Fast Five, the entire cast is on the lam in Rio, Brazil, (cue requisite shot of the Christ the Redeemer statue). We learn Mia is pregnant after she experiences nausea and looks concerned. Vince returns, still sullen and prone to betrayal. The gang is being hunted by The Rock who is spritzed and shiny and so swollen with muscles you cannot help but wonder when his body will break. There’s a train heist. At one point, Dom and Brian jump from a moving car, over a gorge, into a river. There are foot races through the favelas. The Rock flexes. Dom’s t-shirts get tighter. Through some convoluted events, they realize they have something a very powerful bad guy wants. They need to assemble a team so everyone joins in the fun—Tyrese, Ludacris, the two Dominican guys from the fourth movie, Han and Gisele. It’s like the “Quintet” sequence in West Side Story, only spritzier.

"I had this idea," Korine told the Los Angeles Times. "With music remixes sometimes, when certain producers take a song and chop them up and deconstruct them - why not try that with a feature film? Using all different footage, making the same film all over again." ...Korine added: "It'll be the first chopped and screwed movie."