pullquote

Late to the party: Max Fischer & Nicholas Angel

So, yeah, basically I just realized the opening to Hot Fuzz is essentially the Rushmore yearbook montage. 

(Just yesterday, I saw the "...Baby One More Time" video for the first time ever. What else have I missed?)

Film in a flash

Quick hit of links:

Saw this film at Full Frame and have ideas and thoughts about it I'll get around to sharing one day. For now, here are Matt Zoller Seitz's:

Despite the film's title, Block doesn't interview all 112 couples whose weddings he's covered — just a few of them. There are heterosexual couples and same-sex couples. Some followed up their ceremonies and receptions with long and/or happy marriages. Others basically peaked with the exchange of rings and got divorced a while later. Still others put on happy faces for Block's camera but seem to be hiding something, or tiptoeing around something.

A great piece on seeing the remake before the original:

The same goes for Against All Odds.  I not only saw that before seeing Out of the Past, I saw it five or six times before seeing Out of the Past.   That’s because it played on Showtime seemingly around the clock back in the mid-eighties.   And I kind of liked it back then, too.  Sadly, like every other remake I’ve mentioned so far, revisits have not been kind.  And it goes without saying that Out of the Past is the better of the two and also one of the best, if not the best, noir of all time.

Tom Shone on film scores:

There’s much less Peter-and-the-Wolfing, fewer big themes, spelled out in strings, pegged to specific characters. If “Doctor Zhivago” were made today, there would be no “Lara’s Theme”. Instead you’ll find more layering, more washes of sound, less melody, more rhythm. The work of Thomas Newman is less hummable than it is hypnotic, often marking out empty space with spare, reverb-heavy two-part piano melodies, which step up or down an interval, then hold, as if poised on the edge of something vast. It’s horizontal music, made for the empty earthscapes of “WALL-E” or the oceanic ambience of “Finding Nemo”.

Mychael Danna did something similar with his “Moneyball” score: a work of pure, glittering expectation, like a wet lawn at dawn. That’s his Gorecki-like ascent of chords you can hear building in the trailer for the new Christopher Nolan epic “Interstellar”. Stylistically, Williams’s most immediate heir is Michael Giacchino, who has some of the same ear for high-vaulting melodic intervals, and is thus a perfect fit for any film that puts a low premium on the forces of gravity. That makes him a busy man—he wrote the beautiful cloud-bound waltz for “Up” and will be working on the next “Star Wars”—but not as busy as Alexandre Desplat, the French composer whose name so superbly evokes the image of a tomato hitting a wall. This year he has scored the unlikely trio of “The Grand Budapest Hotel”, “Godzilla”, and Angelina Jolie’s forthcoming second-world-war drama about the Olympic track star Louis Zamperini, “Unbroken”. Desplat likes to combine the lush romanticism of Georges Delerue with a rhythmic backbone of mallet instruments, harps and timpani that somehow recall the inner workings of a grandfather clock

Lisa Rosman gets personal about Roger Ebert:

So, like everyone who had enjoyed his reviews and borne witness to his courage - and especially like everyone who had benefitted from his enormous generosity of spirit - I was bereft when he died. But I was suspicious about the prospect of "Life Itself." I knew that Chaz, his wife, had loved Roger so much and was so understandably proprietal of his legacy that any documentary about his life, no matter how well-intended, might have been a mere puff piece.

I am so happy to admit that I was wrong, that I underestimated everyone involved in this extraordinary biopic. I should have known that Roger respected and loved movies so much that he never would have allowed one to be made in his name that did not live up to the cinematic standards he spent a lifetime upholding. Not to mention that "Life Itself" is executive-produced by Martin Scorsese (who appears in this film) and Steven Zaillian (who produced "Moneyball"), is inspired by Roger's best-selling eponymous memoir, and is directed by Steve James.

Meet cutes and other objet trouvés

Judy Greer Is The Best Friend from Judy Greer

Judy, Judy, Judy! [via]

The thing is, in a similar way to how a “manic pixie dream girl” is a limiting criticism of a film’s characterization, I’m not sure if “the Bedchel test” should necessarily be a “bare-minimum standard,” and what real change comes from criticizing that representation, in movies and TV. At its heart, it’s a joke, and a pretty good one, as seen in the original panel from Alison Bedchel’s Dykes to Watch Out For (above). But when critics mention it as a metric of whether something’s good or bad, judging art by whether it reflects your experience or not, I wonder if we’re losing something.

Bing & Bela from Guy Maddin on Vimeo.

In the company of wolves with Kim Morgan sunsetgun.typepad.com/
conceived and shot by Kim Morgan & Guy Maddin

Contemporary costume, even from popular movies, is surprisingly hard to trace. What has happened to George Clooney’s Aloha shirts from The Descendants? The film’s costume designer Wendy Chuck isn’t sure. “I have no idea where his shirts went, probably into the stock at Fox costume house,” she guesses. And Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s iconic jacket worn as social armour in Brick? Another uncertain costume designer. Michele Posch rented three of the jackets from the Universal Studio’s costume department in order to distress a couple for different moments in the film. Their current whereabouts are uncertain. “The jackets were returned but I have looked recently and they seem to be gone,” Michele explains. “Could be someone has rented them for another project or that they were lost at some point.” Another piece of collectable costume (or three) goes missing.

I still remember the first time I ever saw a two-dollar bill. It was in a wallet, on a TV screen in the living room of my childhood home. The wallet belonged to a dead woman called Ida Sessions, and it was Jack Nicholson who was riffling through it: Social Security Card; Screen Actors Guild Membership; two-dollar bill. I was maybe 12 or 13 and had never even set foot in America, but like anyone in the English-speaking world who watched way too many movies, I felt I knew the country like the back of my hand. Certainly its currency, which seemed more like real money than the colorful, monopoly notes we used, so often had I seen it brimming out of briefcases, left contemptuously on nightstands or fluttering down like green confetti after an explosion. But I had never seen a two-dollar bill, so that, of all things, was the detail that snagged my attention the first time I watched Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown.”

I doubt that it’s of much use to note that a scene in a kitchen brought mid-career Fassbinder to mind. The frame seems boxier here, the colors definitely brighter—see the still above; that orange-red glass and those blatantly yellow fingernails are at one point complemented by the angular turquoise-and-white design of a pack of cigarettes—and there are two camera movements that are clearly meant to draw attention to themselves as well as to the pairing they accentuate.

The continued abuse of a movie that had already been relegated to the slab could be taken as profaning a corpse. But it was on the midnight-movie circuit—a place where the occult is taken seriously and vampires and zombies feel at home—thatShowgirls began its rise from the grave. Though few people wanted to seeShowgirls when it was in theaters, on home video it became a curiosity, and then a minor group-viewing phenomenon. Starting in 1996, MGM graciously offered prints to repertory theaters, and then hired drag queens to attend the screenings and encourage audience participation. 

Suddenly, Showgirls's major reference point had shifted from Valley of the Dolls toThe Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975). "A performer named Winona, in a black vinyl miniskirt and bustier, passed out scripts that cued viewers... when to shout along with the dopiest lines," reported the New York Times. "The movie rolled, accompanied by non-stop shouted wisecracks. When Nomi threw a pile of French fries during a dramatic scene, a heckler yelled ‘Overact, Nomi!'" MGM had allowed their intellectual property to be reduced to a punch line, but in the end, the studio laughed all the way to the bank. The various re-releases shored up Showgirls' box-office take until it became, with all revenue streams accounted for, one of the most profitable titles in the studio's back catalogue. To date, Showgirls has grossed more than $100 million. To quote the film's loquacious screenwriter: "Remember that chicken shit can turn into chicken liver."

Why I'd like to be... [Still waiting for cross-gender-lines candidates in this Guardian role model series.]

But much more importantly, what we witness in Private Benjamin is an awakening of spirit and the uncovering and rejection of the Prince Charming myth. Anyone who appears to be coming to the rescue has something to gain for themselves. This realisation first dawns on our battered and bruised heroine when her parents come to release her from basic training – and she perceives that they are not there to save her, but their family's reputation.

[via]

“The great strength of the movies in the 1940s,” Manny Farber once wrote, “was the subversive power of the bit player.” Few had more such power than the character actor SKELTON BARNABY KNAGGS (1911–55). With Jack Elam and Rondo Hatton, Knaggs was one of the most memorably unattractive men in the history of movies. Emaciated, pockmarked, with waxy skin and bulging eyes, Knaggs had the face and manner of a dried-up tangerine.

[via]

Appearing in the first half of Lauren Greenfield’s Thin (2006), this moment is a remarkable representation of disordered eating. It is neither sensational nor aspirational—it is boring. And when it comes to narratives about eating disorders, the tedious approach is rarely taken. Instead, mainstream media gives us images of shrunken bodies or endless discussions of self-regulation (widely accepted in the form of diet trends and cleanses); eating disorders are either foreign and grotesque (who would ever want to look like that?) or normalized (who doesn’t want to be thin, really?). With no representations of the grey area between these two extremes, this complex mental disease becomes an easily digestible story of shock and awe, sickness and health, and exteriority over interiority. Then there is Greenfield’s documentary. Rejecting these frameworks, she aims for a depiction of something closer to the isolating experience of addiction, emphasizing the mundane, the dull, the routine.

The HBO-produced documentary follows four women at Renfrew: Shelley, Polly, Brittany, and Alisa. For most of their lives, these women have binged, purged, and restricted, which has led to incidences of self-harm and attempted suicide. Renfrew, they all say, is their last hope for recovery. As this brief plot synopsis suggests, the potential for sensationalism lies at every turn. But rather than indulge in theatrics, Thin, like its subjects, restricts its worldview to the present moment. A moment that, for the four women the camera is following, is consumed by and structured around one thing: food.

Greenfield’s emphasis on this myopia of the moment is what writer Alice Gregory would call “radical.” Writing in The New York Times, Gregory says: “When it comes to writing about anorexia, the only truly radical move, as far as I can tell, would be to show clearly just how profoundly boring it is—not sad or prurient or overdetermined.” For Gregory, discussing EDs should not be centred around idealized tales of tortured geniuses or brave survivors who have found self-acceptance—these are normalizing, unchallenging narratives. As Gregory bluntly puts it: “a voluntarily isolated person choosing not to eat until she’s addicted to not eating doesn’t make for a very good story.” Because of this, Gregory says, “I don’t know what a deliberately boring book about anorexia would look like.” The film version might look like Greenfield’s documentary.

"Dispersion"

A sculpture that retrieves forgotten memories:

In an idle moment on a winter day, have you ever looked at a slant of sunlight through your living room window and found yourself transported back to childhood? Well, even if you haven't, you may still enjoy Dispersion, a towering metal and glass sculpture recently on display at Brown University, which promised visitors a revelatory experience: "It truly can prompt memories that are beneath our conscious minds," stated a news release. How so? Dispersion, created by Providence artist Daniel Clayman, is made from 682 pieces of glass, stained a radiant gold and joined together in the shape of a full sail 16 feet high and 32 feet wide. Sunlight passes through the sculpture, bathing viewers in an amber glow meant to generate what Marcel Proust called "involuntary memories"- forgotten experiences invoked by a single brush of sensation.

"Light passing through any transparent material is assigned an Abbe Value, a mathematical number expressing how much light is dispersed upon passing through a material with a particular refractive index. Working with the Abbe Value and the ensuing quality of light, Dispersions becomes three things at once: a lens projecting and bending light, a filter changing the color and pattern and an object that redefines the space through its towering presence. As the light shines through the antique glass a stage set is born.  Dappled light, projected by the object, becomes a device to capture a moment, in particular, summer sun  filtering through trees."

[I love Tom Scocca's experiment in duration.]

Off to the playground, then, both children speeding ahead on scooters, the younger curling his back foot up flamingo-wise in ostentatious self-confidence. Later, he would experimentally let go of a swing at the top of its arc, to wrap up the day with a fat lip. Excessive possibilities. A small tree under the big trees caught its own portion of sunlight. The clouds had abandoned the sky. Even waiting indoors for takeout was too much. Better to take a slow walk around the next two blocks. A cool wind eased its way up the avenue. Everyone's hair looked fantastic, alive with subtle textures and shadings. The bricks looked good; the stains and grime on the bricks looked good. The bronze-toned facade of the old OTB parlor, now given over to yoga and herbs, gleamed richly. Even the dull red paint, slathered several stories up to further blank out a blank brick wall, was vibrant, each little broken peeling patch a point of interest. Nothing was gilded or honeyed yet, in the long end of daytime, just each thing saturated with the colors all its own.

Recently, he has found himself shaking his head at the litigious direction of his image-conscious occupation as the question of who owns a tattoo has become a source of tension.

To him, it's simple: "Once they paid for the tattoos, man, they paid for it," he said from his shop south of Atlanta.

Other tattooists say the issue isn't that clear, especially in the case of sports videogames, which digitally re-create not just the bodies of athletes, but often their body art as well.

The act of decontextualizing this phrase, and transplanting it from a legal document into something as ethereal and ephemeral as clouds in the sky, opens it up to multiple readings. Seen from below, the words could be interpreted as relating to a spiritual or religious epiphany or an agnostic response to the question of faith. 

Or they might be construed as a meditation on the afterlife or the existence of UFOs: a not entirely inappropriate response given the rapid proliferation of drones populating our skies over the past decade. Anyone familiar with the ongoing litigation would likely recognize the wording for what it is. Yet on that clear day in May, many were left simply asking themselves, “What does this mean?” It’s a valid question that ordinary citizens would do well to ask their government.

Skywriting was invented by British air force pilots during the First World War as a way of making military signals visible over long distances. Today, it is the very piloted planes themselves that are being phased out by the U.S. Department of Defense in favor of unmanned aircraft. [via]

Some Hum investigators suspect that there's a global source responsible for the Hum worldwide. Deming's research, considered close to authoritative in the Hum community, suggests that evidence of the Hum corresponds with an accidental, biological consequence of the "Take Charge and Move Out" (TACAMO) system adopted by the US Navy in the 1960s as a way for military leaders to maintain communications with the nation's ballistic missile submarines, land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, and long-range bombers during a nuclear war. As part of TACAMO, military aircraft use VLF radio waves to send instructions to submarines: Because of their large wavelengths, VLF can diffract around large obstacles like mountains and buildings, propagate around the globe using the Earth's ionosphere and penetrate seawater to a depth of almost 40 meters, making them ideal for one-way communication with subs. And VLF, like other low-frequency electromagnetic waves, have been shown to have a direct impact on biological functions. (Strategic Communications Wing One at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma, which is responsible for the manning, training and equipping of aircraft utilized as part of the TACAMO system, did not respond to requests for comment.)

And there are other theories. While Moir agrees with MacPherson that the disturbance is occurring at a very low frequency, he's convinced that the source of the Auckland Hum is primarily acoustic rather than electromagnetic, partially because he claims his research team has managed to capture a recording of the Hum.

"It's a very, very low wavelength noise, perhaps between 50 or 56 Hz," Moir told Mic. "And it's extremely difficult to stop infrasound because it can have a wavelength of up to 10 meters, and you'd need around 2.5 meter thick walls, built with normal materials, to keep it out. It gets into our wooden houses very easily. And part of the reason people have so much trouble identifying the source of it is because of how low frequency the Hum is: It literally moves right through your head before you can figure out which ear picked it up first."

With the help of the Dream Machine, I came to view songs not just as entertainment to enjoy and consume, but as companions—sometimes even support systems.

...But on the weekends, suburban afternoons stretched out endlessly, particularly on bad-weather days. The boredom afforded by TV-watching led us to discover the lower half of the FM spectrum, which was crowded with non-commercial stations full of DJs who weren’t much older than us.

The first one we discovered was all the way at the end of the dial, so far down that sometimes tuning it in involved strategic placement of not only the radio’s antenna, but sometimes the entire device. On the weekends, it went all-metal, all the time. We taped songs we liked, creating chaotic mixes where the opening seconds of each song—Megadeth’s “Liar,” Metallica’s “Last Caress”—were cut off.

But if the conceit of #weirdtwitter is that any average person in America can remake themselves as a pseudonymous #weirdtwitter comedian, corporations joining the fray have an outsize advantage, because they are neither anonymous nor average nor even a person. When corporations tweet something “weird” and “funny” to us, we pay more attention: The thought of a traditional corporate entity, which has historically had no direct “voice,” suddenly distilling itself into an eccentric, devil-may-care character is instantly affecting, precisely because of how uncanny, even creepy, it is.

But he took definite pleasure in displaying his tiny family unit on the back of a new family car only slightly bigger than a toaster, he says, far removed from stick-figure families’ usual habitat: the rear windows of SUVs and minivans.

There, a conga line of figures, from tallest to smallest, provides smug proof of affluence, busyness and procreative prowess: You’ll see a barbecue dad and a shopping mom, followed by an older girl hockey player, a hip-hop teen boy, a girl ballerina and a baby boy, followed by dogs, cats, goldfish—all duly named underneath. Pavlovic admits that image was in his mind. “OK, maybe in the back of my head, I was thinking, ‘Oh, go screw yourself, SUV riders,’ ” he says. “You take up so much room, you have so much—don’t put it in my face that you also have seven kids.”

...What interests Wade most is the blowback to “traditional” stick-family families, from people like Pavlovic. “This is activism happening, when you see couples with no children put decals of two people and piles of money on their cars, or women choosing to put a figure of a woman with a cat, or six.” Identifying yourself as a same-sex couple is another form of resistance, Wade says: “It’s very visible. They’re not coming out to somebody; they’re coming out to everybody.”

Just as encountering something obscure can be very personal and poetic, the act of posting about it can be quite vulgar, as it deprives others from finding it for themselves or having the illusion of being the only one. So, it is with mixed feelings that I share with you the following truly obscure digital artefact.

...In the restoration process, some tender aspects of the artifact could be uncovered. Bomb Iraqperforms best when embedded in its full context—which emulation is able to almost fully capture. While most users will be happy simply to experience Bomb Iraq, the whole system is there to explore. Cory and I worked to remove all the files that could identify the computer’s original owner, moving the focus to an afterglow of this person, drive-by inscriptions in the system’s configuration.

Letters, photos and some game high score entries bearing the owner’s full name had to be deleted, but the arrangement of icons, the software installed , the modified system font and desktop background—which all once made sense to somebody—demonstrate the narrative power of system ambience.

What about the visual side of your project? I love your nails, and you paint on that second set of eyes…

Yeah, like the way fish and insects have a false eye, as a defense mechanism. It’s proper makeup.

So how is that symbolic?

I used to do it before Ramona Lisa even existed, when I was just going out at night, to go to parties—and not even costume parties, but just regular ones, because I enjoyed how it changed my conversation with people. Because I would forget it was there, but they wouldn't, and it would kind of scare people off their guard a little bit. I really enjoyed that. And then when the Ramona Lisa project started coming together, I found myself gravitating toward outfits that were much more feminine, and much more kind of era-ambiguous than the way I would dress normally. Much less street, more formal. But at the same time I didn't want to be a little lady onstage either, I wanted something that would say yes, there’s this elegance, but you’re walking on edge with this dream space too. And I thought putting the eyes with that outfit makes it like the music.

Otherwordly.

Exactly. Otherworldly.

"The curated experience"

Be your own hero. Open a new tab, press play, and read on. 

"I started calling myself a cyborg."

In that poem, "Café Loop," there are the lines: "My friend says she actually believes/her poems have speakers. Oh that's rich./I'm sorry but if the book is called amputee and you're an amputee/then you are the speaker." In The Book of Goodbyes you play with multiple speakers. Do you feel that abled white male writers are able to decide whether they will write poetry as "themselves" or using multiple speakers without being questioned?

I don’t know what kinds of questions majority writers face. It was a big surprise to have my life questioned right after publishing The Amputee’s Guide to Sex. I was doing an interview for the radio and the questions were focused on my surgeries. So I pushed back. After the interview, the producer said, “One day I hope you come out of the closet.” I think her point was something like, “We brought you here to be disabled. Now be disabled. Otherwise, get off my radio show.” 

This relates to what Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah brilliantly defines as “the curated experience.”  Most portrayals of women with disabilities are curated experiences. 

Shame.

The post-​wounded posture is claustrophobic: jadedness, aching gone implicit, sarcasm quick on the heels of anything that might look like self-​pity. I see it in female writers and their female narrators, troves of stories about vaguely dissatisfied women who no longer fully own their feelings. Pain is everywhere and nowhere. Post-​wounded women know that postures of pain play into limited and outmoded conceptions of womanhood. Their hurt has a new native language spoken in several dialects: sarcastic, jaded, opaque; cool and clever. They guard against those moments when melodrama or self-​pity might split their careful seams of intellect, expose the shame of self-​absorption without self-​awareness. 

I know these dialects because I have spoken them; I know these post-​wounded narrators because I have written them. I wonder now: What shame are they sculpted from?

Shame.

In her 1987 book Practicalities, the French novelist and film-maker Marguerite Duras says many shocking things about what it means to be a woman and a writer. One of her most striking statements is about the difference between male and female drinking – or rather the difference in how the two are perceived. "When a woman drinks," she writes, "it's as if an animal were drinking, or a child. Alcoholism is scandalous in a woman, and a female alcoholic is rare, a serious matter. It's a slur on the divine in our nature." Ruefully, she adds a personal coda: "I realised the scandal I was creating around me."

She'd been an alcoholic, she figured, from the moment of her first drink. Sometimes she managed to stop for years at a time, but during her bingeing periods she'd go all-out: start as soon as she woke up, pausing to vomit the first two glasses, then polishing off as many as eight litres of Bordeaux before passing out in a stupor. "I drank because I was an alcoholic," she told the New York Times in 1991. "I was a real one – like a writer. I'm a real writer, I was a real alcoholic. I drank red wine to fall asleep. Afterwards, Cognac in the night. Every hour a glass of wine and in the morning Cognac after coffee, and afterwards I wrote. What is astonishing when I look back is how I managed to write."

Shame.

This dynamic applies to any group of workers that speaks out on its own behalf, but there’s a special factor at work in the way that people critique adjuncts who want better conditions. Teaching college is a white-collar job. It is not dangerous or degrading; it happens on college campuses, which often are pleasant and have trees and sometimes inspirational phrases about learning carved into stone buildings; it is—except for the low pay and lack of benefits and constant uncertainty about the future—a good job. Gregory calls this a “cruel double standard: you’ve made this choice to go into a bad career that has high social status.” Many of the comments directed at her, and others who raise the adjunct issue, are concerned with protecting the sanctity of teaching. A professor should not be so vulgar as to talk about the material reality of her life.

Shame.

When we got home, the midwife told us there was a 50-50 chance that everything was OK. Try to relax, she said, try to sleep. Maybe you’re in the 50 percent for whom this means nothing. We’ll get you an ultrasound first thing in the morning. Curled around me in the dark, my husband could tell that my body had already changed. In his kindness, he kept that knowledge to himself.

The next morning, we walked across our frozen neighborhood, still in its cocoon of holiday quiet, to the hospital. As I lay on the examining table during the ultrasound, the gum-chewing technician asked me, “Who told you you were pregnant?”

Instantly I was flooded with shame. Who was I to think I could make a baby out of my unremarkable body? Had I made it up? Had I grown my belly out of the sheer force of my imagination and unrestrained appetite? Had I made myself nauseous through wishing?

Shame.

After being fired from a $200-a-month advertising job (“I wouldn’t sleep with the boss,” she said), Lois found herself in a magazine shop, determined to figure out how to break in as a writer. She bought 22 copies of 22 different confessionals — pulp magazines that published lurid, anonymous secrets that hinged on an easily replicated formula. “I sinned, suffered, got caught, and repented,” Lois explained. She regularly began exposing new, fictionalized sins. One week, she was a kleptomaniac who, at the grocery store, couldn’t help but stuff her purse with overpriced tins of smoked oysters. The next week, she was a mother so frustrated with her constantly interrupted love life that she accidentally killed her colicky infant with an overdose of paregoric. Her most popular story was headlined, “I WANTED TO HAVE AN AFFAIR WITH A TEEN-AGE BOY.”

It was a dark business, but Lois excelled. “I confessed to everything there was,” she said.

Shame.

I think these responses are less about alienation and more about vulnerability. The part of us that reads poetry is a reflex part. Men read poetry with their reflexes the same as women do—they put themselves in your trust, they put their bodies in your hands, you tap the right place and the leg kicks. Or the pupils dilate. Or the hackles rise, and something flies out of you on a flock of little red nerves. To feel power shift out of your body is uncomfortable. It makes you feel that it was never yours to begin with. That’s the whole point; that’s the subject here; and maybe what we are seeing is that it is more difficult for men—to recognize that they’re in someone else’s hands, to recognize that they’re at someone else’s mercy, when the author’s touch feels different, when the poems are these poems.

From an old notebook: The To-Do List

</p>With the 'Fesser at the Somerville Theatre.

clever credits

That's all she wrote. I remember enjoying it because, c'mon, Aubrey Plaza. Also, will Alia Shawkat ever age?

From an old notebook: The Heat

Caught at the Nugget Theatre, Hanover, NH, with the 'Fesser.

I took no notes. It was stupid fun.

I was amused by the Boston-set footage, and I keep pressing my pal Sean Burns' review on everybody, particularly this bit:

I just don’t find Melissa McCarthy as funny as it seems the rest of the world does. I think she’s abrasive; she reminds me of that lady at your local liquor store who smokes the extra-long cigarettes and wears that carpal tunnel sleeve all the time to try to get out of work. It’s probably a matter of personal taste, but I’ve never responded well to comedians who work too hard at being amusing—in Jim Carrey, Jack Black, Robin Williams and Will Ferrell, all I read is desperation. The bigger and louder they go, the more I resent them for pleading so hard. Great comedy looks effortless and is elegant. As an old deodorant commercial said, never let them see you sweat.

Extra props to Sean for namechecking Running Scared in his review but demerits for "ad nauseum."

From an old notebook: The Bling Ring

July 17 at the Nugget Theatre, Hanover, NH.

Once more to the barricades w. Something in the Air [ed., No idea]

why are they in underwear in bed

crickets and peepers sound design

testimony: eyes reading faces

drugs & cars & hip hop

Another slight experience. Mostly I remember the use of Azealia Banks' "212" and the way that Emma Watson's hair moved. My pal KTZ told me I should check out the reality show starring the girl Watson's character is based on. Maybe while I'm ironing.

From an old notebook: Before Midnight

At the Nugget Theatre in Hanover, NH, on what turned out to be the Friday of Darmouth's reunion weekend, June 14 [the day before I left for the Flaherty Seminar]. Oof.

[Discerned from writing over other writing] I had one in my bosom and one in my pocketbook.

Pearl handled.

2. There is a quote

Farther than that ye can see

double exposure

French English Arabic

3. Contact sheets

Kids, I think I overprimed the pump. Sunset especially is tied to a very fraught moment in my life. This one, I felt distant. Would like to revisit. I still chuckle at Delpy's titty titty pussy snore routine-sex bit. The sort of nastiness that only comes from true intimacy.

Recent reads round-up

Aaron Dobbs--who long shamed me for having a CRT TV and no DVR [both since remedied, thank you]--advances an intriguing theory, both on his blog [quoted below] and in the first of a series of posts developed with FOC Alison Willmore on Indiewire:

Television has gone through such a shift over the past decade, and I thought it coincided with, and arguably benefited from, the end of the 1990s indie film explosion....

I'm not arguing that the lead-up to this now-monikered "Third Golden Age of Television" is a direct result of big corporations and pop culture co-opting the '90s independent film movement, but the progression is more linear than one might first imagine. Nor do I want to enter the debate about whether film (especially independent film) is dead or alive. More movies than ever are being made today; colossally bloated atrocities as well as tiny stories easily overlooked, many deservedly so. Even as technological and economic concerns have made it logistically and financially easier than ever to make, truly independent film seems to have reclaimed the meaning of "independent."

Elsewhere: Bela Tarr is one of many yawning voids in my viewing, but because I arranged my 20th & 21st century lit class around the movies [shorter pieces engaging directly with them; longer ones having subsequently been adapted into them], this piece intrigued me [via]:

I’ve been thinking about Béla Tarr’s long takes versus other long takes. Damnation, Sátántango and Werckmeister Harmonies are all based on either books, or screenplays by the Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, I’ve been reading his writing too and the work is really phenomenal; he uses these long sentences that sort of cycle through. You start off in one place, and somehow, through the succession of his dense language and phrases, seem to pass through eternity and end up in another place altogether. There’s a similar feeling to a long take, but they’re not the same. The sentences will sometimes describe very simple things, like people in a waiting room and how they’re feeling. But the sentence manages to encompass the whole history of these people and their future and their fates and the feeling of waiting and of eternity; and then, you the reader now feel like you’re confessing your own being to some vague ghost of God while you’re reading the sentence. It’s hard to explain. But I’ve been interested in why Krasznahorkai’s sentences are so powerful for me, and why Béla Tarr’s long takes are so effective, at least for me . . .

Speaking of long takes, I showed my film class The Kiss leading into our discussion of the long take, but what I really enjoyed in this post was its examination of The Life of an American Fireman [and this week we talk about continuity editing]:

Take the Lumiere’s Leaving the Factory.  Well, what kind of a factory is it?  It’s a movie camera factory.  The people leaving that factory are absolutely aware of what that funny box on the tripod is, and they didn’t get to leave the factory until their boss, the guy making the movie, said so.  Or take Edison’s The Kiss—it may look like a couple of middle-aged schlubs having a quick snog but in fact they are professional actors recreating a scene from a play they were in.  As “actualities” go these are staged events involving subjects who are aware of and playing to the camera....

8. Fireman Save My Child

OK, kids, here’s where it gets complicated.  We just saw the lady and her rugrat saved, and now bizarrely the film has leaped backwards in time to show the same events all over again from a different point of view.

Forgive me, but this is the weirdest piece of editing imaginable—this borders on the avant garde.  But this avant garde weirdness only exists here because it hadn’t yet occurred to Porter (or anyone else) that you could cut in the middle of a scene, go look at something else for a while, and then come back.  In other words, cross-cut.

As soon as cross-cutting was an option, it would quickly become the norm.  Filmmakers would abandon the all-or-nothing approach—because it makes no sense.  It is absolutely insane to run a scene through in its entirety, then roll back to the beginning and watch it all over again from a different angle.  It feels like we’re watching the daily rushes, an unfinished product.

Another link swiped from the Film Doctor [who I still can't believe I haven't met yet], this time on depth of field:

While it may have been intentional the effect still stands. In Moonrise Kingdom Wes Anderson went for a very specific look. He lays characters out flat with flattened backgrounds. There aren't leading lines down the frame either. Notice how many straight lines go flat through the frame? Despite being shot on location Moonrise Kingdom looks like a series of sets as opposed to a real world. One of the ways Anderson achieves this is the lack of foreground, middle ground, and background in his shots. This is entirely what Anderson was going for. However if this look is not what a director is looking for, not having depth in his frames will inhibit his movie.

While we're on the subject of Moonrise Kingdom, serious gratitude goes out to Brian Darr of Hell On Frisco Bay for his gracious mention of my round-up about that film in a recent post regarding same, thus answering my question, does anyone not-bot read this site?

And a bit more on depth of field, regarding a film I once wrote a phantasmagoric paper about, now sadly trapped forever on a dead Mac laptop:

At the end of the line, Josef takes his seat before the camera, his many hundreds of coworkers held crystalline in deep focus behind him, their thousands of typing fingers generating a din that sounds distinctly like applause. Josef’s uncle Max (Max Heffler) arrives to express his concern and offer legal advice, but Josef, keen to avoid further trouble, insists that they not talk at length during working hours. But the very moment Josef finishes his sentence, it is as if he has dismissed the office with an inaudible cue: everyone in the room stops typing and stands in perfect unison, streaming from the room in single file with a speed and precision impossible to imagine of a crowd of this size....

The look and feel of this film—an utterly bizarre spectacle of non-traditional framing, focus, and perspectives, shot in a harsh chiaroscuro—depends upon Welles’s technical expertise as much as his desire to both build off of and undermine his history as a filmmaker. That major sequence in the office is typical of the self-mythology the film conspires to deconstruct: it is at once the quintessential Orson Welles shot and a kind autocritical counterpoint to the same, exaggerating the director’s affinity for the grandiose in a context that seems to demand the opposite. It is a caricature of the expected Welles “bigness” of image precisely because the feeling at the heart of The Trial is internal, rooted in the mind: this is a “small” film, in the sense that its fears are located in the paranoia of one man wrongly persecuted, and yet Welles shoots it as if it were an epic.

A tantalizing tease from Nicholas Rombes, another of those smart film people I've been way too careless about meeting in real life:

What happens at 10? At 40?

What doesn’t happen?

What secret memories lurk in the flash of a film frame?

If you misremember a film, it’s still remembering, isn’t it?

Soon . . .

One more from FOC Aaron Dobbs, which recalled a conversation I had last week with Richard Neupert, a film prof at UGA who also serves on the board of Ciné Athens (run by my grad school classmate, Gabe Wardell) about DCP and one of my film class alums (he failed, thanks to devoting his energies that semester to the campus radio station), the technology manager there. Essentially, he worried the kid would get bored because DCP was "just pushing a button":

Digital projectors usually require little attention after pressing play until a movie is over. But once the projectionist in Targets goes down, when the reel empties with nobody to handle the changeover, the film is done even if the movie isn't over. Bogdanovich repeatedly returns to the projector reel, showing its bulk quickly diminish. I don't claim that the director was making a comment on the medium's exhibition technology, but Thompson's attack on the projectionist could be seen as young America's attempt to extinguish old Hollywood. Even more importantly, it stands for an idea that the youth of the era – within and outside Hollywood – doesn't even realize or care how their actions will impact themselves. Thompson, for example, doesn't consider that by targeting the projectionist, he could hasten his own discovery. Still, half-a-century later, its unintentional symbolism regarding the "death of film" may prove even more profound.

What amused me most about this round-up was how many of the indies mentioned in it* I've actually seen:

Two black-and-white comedies took home a lot of green this summer, too: Noah Baumbach’s buzzy Greta Gerwig vehicle Frances Ha made $4 million, while Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing scored $4.2 million ... not bad for a microbudget Shakespeare film that Whedon had originally intended to release online. Radius-TWC’s 20 Feet From Stardom is another summer success story: The backup singer documentary has earned a remarkable $4 million so far, and the jubilant hit is well-positioned for Oscar consideration down the line. Let’s hope awards voters also remember the rapturously reviewed Before Midnight, which has taken home almost $8 million since May, a sum higher than either of the Ethan Hawke–Julie Delpy romances that preceded it.

*For those playing along at home: Frances Ha, 20 Feet From Stardom, Before Midnight, The To-Do List, The Bling Ring, Stories We Tell, I'm So Excited! [Among the other titles mentioned, I could give a shit about The Way, Way Back or Much Ado About Nothing.]

“Oh, Joan, she buys clothes and then she takes it to her seamstress and has it tailored two sizes too small!” It’s a funny little character thing that I love about Joan. Joan wears her clothes too tight—it’s fabulous.

Learn about Laver's Law from the Siren. Made me feel even better for asking students which movies they'd seen the most times on the first day of class:

Laver's Law applies to cinema.

Laver's Law was the creation of James Laver, an art historian and curator at the Victoria & Albert Museum, who helped create the field of fashion history as we know it today. His law is, as it should be, of the utmost elegant simplicity. In a book called Taste and Fashion(1937), he proposed that the way we regard fashions in clothing forms a predictable cycle over time. One item, such as a dress, will be regarded in a number of ways as the years roll on....

The point is that in just a few more years, these films may look different to everyone. Certain films are born great and stay that way; but canons are not immune from fashion. This year's whipping boy may be on my grandchildren's college syllabus. If the Siren has been caught dissing a treasured favorite, comfort yourself with the thought that time's winged chariot may yet run me off the road.

And perhaps somewhat related, a piece from The Toast reminds me that watching and then writing about films should be a source of joy:

Did you enjoy the campy absurdity of movies like Step Up or Center Stage, and do you also like enormous fucking drums? Then you will like Drumline. It is a movie that has everything in it, particularly lots and lots of drums. Swirling drums and giant drums and medium-sized drums and droves moving in unison and sideways drums and upside drums and just when you think there aren’t more drums, there come the drums. It is better than most other movies that exist. Most other movies have an appalling lack of giant fucking drums getting just whaled on by Nick Cannon making the most serious face he can muster. Let us look at the evidence.

Challenger: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Moral of Challenger: Several people with inexplicable hairstyles regret dating Jim Carrey, for various reasons. Having memories is hard.
Parallel Moral of Drumline: GIANT DRUMS ARE AMAZING

Challenger: The Dark Knight. 
Moral of Challenger: Agent of chaos spends upwards of 20 minutes carefully and rationally explaining his justification for becoming an agent of chaos; nobody has any fun.
Parallel Moral of Drumline: BING BANG BOOM CRASH BOOOOMMM

Challenger: Donnie Darko
Moral of Challenger: Do not take your ADD medication. It will kill your sister and it will crash planes.
Parallel Moral of Drumline: Nick Cannon is handsome like an old-timey milkman. And he learns how to stand up for himself with the help of a team of misfit drums.

Challenger: Into the Wild
Moral of Challenger: If your family loves you and sends you to college, you should definitely run away to Alaska and starve to death to show them how fucked up their conventional values are.
Parallel Moral of Drumline: Sure, you’ve played the drums…but have you played the drums while SPINNING AND WEARING A CAPE? GIANT DRUMS ARE AMAZING. WITH A FUCKING PLUMED-ASS HAT ON IT? FUCK YOU AND YOUR SIMPLE, RESERVED HATS. PANTS WITH STRIPES AND SHOULDER PADS WITH STRIPES AND SHOES WITH STRIPES AND BANDANAS WITH STRIPES AND PLAYING THE DRUMS WITH YOUR FEET AND STRIPES STRIPES EVERYWHERE FUCK YOU YA FUCK.

Challenger: (500) Days of Summer
Moral of Challenger: If you loved your girlfriend, and she goes on to love somebody else, you are an interesting person.
Parallel Moral of Drumline: FUCK YOUR SAD EYES JOSEPH GORDON-LEVITT USE YOUR SAD EYES TO LOOK AT THIS: