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Adventures in cinema: Color Me Coen

Each Tuesday evening for the last little bit, I synchronously screen a 90-minute or shorter feature on the Criterion Channel for whichever of the students in my honors college enrichment group shows up. Often that means as few as two plus me, but it doesn't matter because it is making me choose new-to-me films in a way I otherwise don't, having long ago lost my sense of urgency after decades of no library late fees as an academic (and a video store employee before that). I narrow my choices down to a few titles and decide right when we start, sending the students a link to the film via Zoom. And then, off we go! Having folx with whom to talk about the film afterward feels like getting away with something.

All this is prelude to saying that this past Tuesday we watched Zhang Yimou's A Woman, and Gun, and A Noodle Shop, which transplants the Coen brothers' Texas-set debut feature Blood Simple to 19th century China. It spins like a top.

And, of course, the colors....

Adventures in cinema: kooky kaddish, loony Lumet

 

The divine Jessica Walter in full Brooklyn bloom in Bye Bye Braverman (1968, dir. Lumet) bodes well for widow's peak doppelganger Parker Posey's grande dame scene-stealing future roles. I have been racking my brain trying to figure out where in time and space the memory of seeing Sidney Lumet speak on stage at some festival somewhere is situated. I do remember being in the balcony. Also, being transfixed by the sheen of his immaculately polished cordovan-color cowboy boots. It was kind of Lumet to give the cheap seats a little visual interest.

Adventures in cinema: Cities of Love and Sadness

Granted, I was feverish. But these two Taiwanese-dialect melodramas presented by Harvard Film Archive were a trip. The first (above), The Husband's Secret (1960), had plot elements that reminded me of aspects of Extreme Private Eros Love Song 1974 (Kazuo Hara). No, there're no live births, but there are nightclub hostesses carving out communal living spaces and arrangements in parallel to the de/predations of their sex work.
The second (below), from 1965, May 13th, Night of Sorrow, rang some Mildred Pierce bells, sans pancakes, with its story of a sacrificing older woman working in a low profession--nightclub singer--to provide a younger woman, her sister, with all the advantages. Said kid sister is embarrassed by her sib's work, a snob and an ingrate, and, well, you know how these dynamics play out. There's a man, misunderstandings, a murder....
(The actress shown wearing glasses in the fourth shot was an amazing physical comedian, forever prat-falling into the glassworks at the plant where she and kid sister work as newly hired scientists and pulling unbelievably elastic moues and eyerolls.)

Adventures in cinema: miniatures set to music

Through some happy accident, I came across this video by Pom Pom Squad for their song, "LUX," inspired by Lux Lisbon and quoting heavily from Sofia Coppola's adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides.

It's a microgenre, to be sure, but I love when musicians riff visually on feature films. Ex Hex is another, with their "Donna Wanna Lose" video taking them on a compressed journey through the visuals and plot of Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains.

And then there are the hybrids I want to speak into existence. HAIM should cover "Help Me" by Robin Gibb and Marcy Levy--THERE ARE HANDCLAPS--and shoot their best Times Square homage with Paul Thomas Anderson (acknowledging it may be too far from the valley to truly take and maybe something from Foxes--Janis Ian's "Fly Too High"?--would make more sense).

Adventures in cinema: the kids, they are all right

While I wasn't paying good attention in this pandemic year, turns out many present/former students got up to movie making. Which is particularly impressive because there are no production facilities/courses to speak of. Even better, it evolved from a COVID-born online movie watching/discussion group, with a list that exceeds 500 titles at last count. (I am particularly in love with their double features.)

Bias acknowledged, ma non c'è male! The short is good, fucking weird, and wears its influences/thefts proudly. The adherence to masking protocols here (see Behind the Scenes below) and on their previous production hurt my black heart because they are getting it done regardless but jfc, this year.

(It occurs to me that I may have to meet/apologize to the director's parents at graduation this spring for whatever bad ideas I might have transmitted via one enrichment thingie and the subsequent two classes with me during said student's undergraduate career.)

Adventures in cinema (studies): We, Insomniacs All*

screen grabs from SCMS. this panel--peopled by presenters from London to California--was a wonderful way to start a Saturday, appropriately pottering about in my pyjamas.

*I aptly, absolutely misremembered this phrase: "We, amnesiacs all, condemned to live in an eternally fleeting present, have created the most elaborate of human constructions, memory, to buffer ourselves against the intolerable knowledge of the irreversible passage of time and the irretrieveability of its moments and events."

Adventures in cinema: aca-alcohol

the way we live now, Society of Cinema and Media Studies annual meeting, 2021
(in fairness, the overdetermined socializing was quite nice, says this somewhat feral semi-scholar)

Adventures in cinema: frog in my throat

One Froggy Evening (1955, dir. Charles M. Jones)
how this first week of one-year pandemic anniversaries has felt: at a loss for words b/w wanting to burst into song

Adventures in cinema: 2 ou 3 choses Richard Lester sait de la couleur

Help! (1965, dir. Richard Lester)
watched for the first time
I read Steven Soderbergh and Richard Lester's Getting Away with It on a beach in Quintana Roo.

Adventures in cinema: written by Maya Angelou

saucer-eyed Stockholm concierge turn-down service

Georgia, Georgia (1972, dir. Stig Björkman)
yes, screenplay and score by Maya Angelou