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