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Adventures in cinema: the bridge of sighs

Sometime during the endless stretch of 2020 I insinuated myself into a weekly movie night. There were some folks I knew, but others were glancing acquaintances or actual strangers. The same could be said of the movies we watched, which had in common only that one person wanted to share it (or sometimes subject us to it). A week ago was our season finale--until the inevitable reboots and prequels. And it happened that the world's vaccinated reopening coincided with my pick. Somehow, no one had seen it save me and it felt like a real To Sir, With Love moment, a valentine to the movies and to the people who love them.

Adventures in cinema: Meta Maggie

Center Stage (dir. Stanley Quan, 1991)

To celebrate the arrival of the Criterion edition of Irma Vep, I finally caught up with this earlier Maggie Cheung meta movie, a biopic of a tragic silent film star with a narrative design that has more braids than a bakery full of challah. It's so so achingly, very brain-breakingly beautiful.

like a clock in my heart

So many good things catching my eyeballs these days. I love what Jodie says below. Haul ass over to Ecstatic Static right now and watch five of her films. I like "Something Between Us" (2015) as a pairing with this passage from a recent Instagram post of hers.

jodiemack When all danger of frost has passed, plant your garden. Create adequate conditions for thriving. Some plants, especially ones with particularly heavy fruits, may require support by way of a stake or trellis. Utilize all parts of a harvest: salad, syrup, sauce, stock. Take photographs and record sounds! Time pesto and time chimichurri!

Time pesto! Time chimichurri! Delicious!

p.s.-Something in the exquisite (as always) sound design about three minutes in drew my usually uninterested dog over to check it out. The only other time she's reacted to media was staring at the television in rapt attention at the sounds the baby seahorse made in the underwater episode of Bojack Horseman. My first cat, elegant and black and part Persian, once carefully watched the scene in The Black Stallion where the boy and the horse are playing on the beach. Game recognizes game. What about you and the animals in your life? 

Together Alone

This week, for a variety of reasons good and bad, I have been thinking a lot about going to the movies. Of communing. And I've set into motion how and with whom I will make my return to the enveloping darkness and lights of the movie theatre.

So, when I read this absolutely beautiful paragraph from Jason Shawhan's lovely Nashville Scene piece on Goodbye, Dragon Inn, I had to put it here right away, so I can always find it when I need it.

There’s a feeling that cinema excels at conveying — a collective isolation that paradoxically allows a viewer to experience art on an individual basis, even when surrounded by others (the Eraserhead effect), while at the same time providing a soft, slack link between everyone who ever watches a film at any point in time. Because film depicts the act of living, to view a film while alive creates a connection. And that connection is what Goodbye, Dragon Inn excels at. The film has never played Nashville before, at the old Belcourt* or at Sarratt, yet I have memories of seeing it there. It wouldn’t have played a press screening at the 2003 New York Film Festival at both the Walter Reade Theater and in Alice Tully Hall — but memory disagrees, letting fuzzy edges and the comforting casserole of the past turn us all into the unreliable narrators of our experience.

I am ready to live again and make new memories to misremember.

*The one time I saw a movie at the Belcourt, it was The Girlfriend Experience.

Green Thoughts*

The Green Fog (dir. Evan Johnson, Galen Johnson, Guy Maddin, 2017)
*

Another One

Talia Shire waiting for John Belushi in Old Boyfriends (dir. Joan Tewkesbury, 1979)
What an unsettling and unsettled little movie.

One off

Nicholas Campbell in Knights of the City (1986, dir. Dominic Orlando)

Adventures in cinema: last-minute lollipops

Lovers and Lollipops (1956, dir. Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin)

Every frame of this film is gorgeous. Even in my cruddy oblique, cropped screenshots you can see that. The placement of the camera and the performance of the juvenile lead Cathy Dunn as Peggy are frequently astonishing. Her single mother's fits-and-starts romance feels equally real. And the damn thing is a documentary of a specific moment in New York history, too. I finally watched Lovers and Lollipops on its last day on the Criterion channel and couldn't stop kicking myself. See, I still remember when we got all three of Engel and Orkin's feature films--Lollipops, The Little Fugitive, and Weddings and Babies--at the video store. On VHS. Why did I waste so many years of my life in a Lollipop-less state?

A hunch

So, we've been watching The Muppet Show in order, an episode a night or so. It was during season one, the only season in which she appeared, that I had this flash of realization: Hilda the wardrobe lady must be a Holocaust survivor. There's a story there, I just know it.

Adventures in cinema: à chacun son goût

How can pictures so good/

Yield film so bad?

I kid! Strong proto Josie and the Pussycats energy

Solarbabies (dir. Alan Johnson, 1986)