Jonathon Delacour, over at The Heart of Things, has an entry examining the misinterpretation of a Talleyrand quotation by Bertolucci at the end of his Prima della rivoluzione (1964):
He who has not lived in the years before the revolution cannot know what the sweetness of living is.
Or so read the English subtitled translation that he and I both read and interpreted as the regret of an aging reactionary pining for the good old days. The original quotation, (from François Guizot’s Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de mon temps, 1858), is different:
M. Talleyrand me disait un jour: “Qui n’a pas vécu dans les années voisines de 1789 ne sait pas ce que c’est que le plaisir de vivre.”
(Monsieur Talleyrand said to me one day: “He who has not lived during the years around 1789 can not know what is meant by the pleasure of life.”)
Not before the French revolution, but immediately before and after the pivotal year 1789, the very year of the revolution. Go, read his entry.
My entry title is from Napoleon regarding Talleyrand after it was discovered by the former that the latter was negotiating with foreign powers.
Ah! tenez, vous êtes de la merde dans un bas de soie.
(Oh, get out of here, you piece of shit in a silk stocking!)
Just watched both the 1934 and 1959 version of Imitation of Life over the weekend. It started because I was leafing through a book of Fassbinder’ writings, and was reminded, again, that I had never seen any of the works of Douglas Sirk. There is a DVD containing both films, and Netflix had it. All in all, I liked the Claudette Colbert / Louise Beavers version better than the Lana Turner / Juanita Moore one. The story, about a young black woman and her obsession with “passing” is dated. But one theme that has not is only present in the later film: working woman. In the first movie, Colbert is as entrepeneurial as they come in the midst of the depression. She tries Beavber’s flapjacks and starts a restaurant which in a decade or so transmogrifies into an Aunt Jemima style pankcake empire. In the Turner version, Lana becomes a famous actress, with no help from Moore, and then starts the John Gavin nagging machine: you cannot be a mother (and a wife) while you’re a successful actress, &c. Colbert has a boyfriend, too, but he’s an ichthyologist and quite oblivious to the fact the she’s a pancake queen (BTW, I see from IMDB that this version of the movie was co-written by Preston Sturges).
Something happened. What? UJG took a hiatus. I’ve been meaning to blog about a recent trip to Europe, but the flu I caught in the Rhineland—my second of the season—took it out of me. That and a rash of spicy pork product infesting the trackback pings. For now, a quick entry about two films I saw recently: Rick and Anbe Sivam (both 2003). They make a weird double feature, and I only saw the first third of Anbe Sivam. Rick was written by Daniel Handler who is better known as Lemony Snicket. It was directed by Curtiss Clayton, better known as an editor. In fact, Roger Ebert tells the following story about Clayton:
NOTE: The director is Curtiss Clayton, who has edited many of Gus Van Sant’s movies. He was scheduled to be the editor of Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny, but walked off the job on the first day of post-production when Rick was green-lighted. I don’t know what passed between them, but Gallo told me he “freaked out” when Clayton bailed; is it possible that Gallo’s propensity for putting hexes on people was the inspiration for Michelle’s great scene?
In Rick, Michelle (Sandra Oh), after being verbally abused by Rick (Bill Pullman) during a job interview and at her place of work, curses him. The story of Rick is based on the Verdi opera Rigoletto (Rick’s name is Rick O’Lette). (Of course, the funny part of this story is that Gallo and Ebert had a hissy-fit shouting match at Cannes which ended with Gallo putting a curse on Ebert’s colon.) Most of the reviews have been negative to middling, but I think Handler got the raw feel of new economy corporate America down pat on his first try.
The other, Tamil-language movie, needs a little back story. After work, I went to visit my friends Sandhya and Krishnan who have been indulging themselves in Tamil movies. So, while I sat chatting with Krishnan and drinking some madras coffee, in went the DVD and on came the flick. We started watching with German subtitles (curiously intermixed with English as is the Tamil) and then switched to English. A young Indian, who works as an ad executive in the States, comes back to India to marry. He’s no longer a typical Indian, but pretty much one confused Desi. He’s loud, obnoxious, impatient, and constantly and facilely swearing in English. He lands in Orissa, north of Tamil Nadu, and discovers that planes and trains to Chennai have been cancelled. So, he ends up in the company of a wiser and older man, who turns out to be a Trade Union rep who is returning to Chennai with a large injury settlement check. This character, played by Kamal Hassan, is also a sympathetically portrayed communist. Unfortunately, we stopped the movie after the first big song (on top of a bus after the ad executive has ingested some bhang), because Sandhya had already seen the film a couple of times and found the last two-thirds sad. Turns out that the woman the ad guy is marrying was also the previously engaged to the trade union guy, and her father owns the factory that he was injured in. I’m sure there were also plenty more songs.
Recovering from my traditional holiday week cold, while deleting overnight unsolicited spicy ham product, when I stumbled [via Cinecultist] across a top ten movie list for the previous year in which I’ve actually seen seven out of ten movies and agree that they were good. Watched Angels in America last night and thought it was a rather good adaptation of a play. I had heard Tony Kushner earlier this year talking about writing the play, the screenplay, etc., and had been looking forward to it. I enjoyed it and my personal ill health just added to the experience. At some point during the past couple of days V. got me a documentary film by Jim Shedden on Stan Brakhage to add to the DVDs of his œuvre she gave me earlier this season. She couldn’d find it in stock online so she emailed the director and he pointed her to a store that had it. Ah, the web, the net, the rhizome.
Saw a great double bill yesterday Boxing Day afternoon on DVD: À ma sœur! (called Fat Girl in its US release) by Catherine Breillat and How to Draw a Bunny by John W. Walter. At first I thought the film about the death of proto-pop artist Ray Johnson was a mockumentary. It had a strange and familiar edge to it, like I’d seen it before on late-night TV, but somewhat later I remembered having read an article about Johnson in Arthur Danto’s wonderful The Madonna of the Future: Essays in a Pluralistic Art World. My favorite sets of interviewees were Jeanne-Claude and Christo and Roy and Dorothy Lichtenstein. Both couples sounded as mirth-inducingly confused as my dad’s generation confronting Warhol’s Brillo Box when they tried to explain what Johnson was on about. In the French movie, the scene of the older sister’s seduction was both hilarious and banally sad. I’ll have to put Breillat’s Romance on the Netflix queue.
Ed Wood’s last film, Necromania, long thought lost, has been found and released on DVD. Nick Paumgarten gives the naughty details in his article in the New Yorker. Rudolph Grey, who wrote the Wood biography, Nightmare of Ecstasy, on which Tim Burton based his biopic, discovered the negative in an LA warehouse. [via the Two Blowhards]
Well, it took me donkey ears, but I finally saw my first Ozu movie Tokyo Story (東京物語 tokyo monogatari). A long time ago, after being taken to see the fresh-from-Cannes Taxi Driver in a København cinema, I ran across Paul Schrader’s The Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, and Dreyer. I read it, but not having seen any of the films of any of the three filmmmakers made for an abstract exercise. A decade or so later, I saw Bresson’s Au Hazard, Balthazar, and some things clicked. Now, after watching Tokyo Story on an overcast Sunday afternoon, I finally see what Schrader was on about. Back when I first started to get serious about motion pictures, I went through a longish phase of distaining the merely entertaining product that Hollywood spewed forth. Later, like so many, I began to develop a taste in guilty pleasures. But these days, I’ve become less tolerant of big budget flicks with lots of explosions and CGI-driven plots, instead of the character-driven subtler ones I cut my æsthetic eyeteeth on.
A nice article by Roger Ebert on Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. Occasionally Roger drops the annoying character he’s built up over the years with the late Siskel and the current Roper, and writes some good film criticism. [via The Chutry Experiment]
Well, Ian, Kari, V., and I went into Berkeley to see Coffee and Cigarettes last night. I wish I could say I loved it, but it left me disappointed. I kept remembering back to a sultry summer in Bonn in 1985, when I walked a couple of miles into the suburban industrial zone to catch Stranger Than Paradise in an art-film theater. It was one of the few films I saw that year in Germany that was subtitled. At first, I was the only person laughing in a packed theater. Finally the person next to me asked me in English if the film was a comedy. That provoked more mirth on my part, but finally the Teutons started laughing, too, and I went home exhausted. But Stranger Than Paradise is a great film, and Coffee and Cigarettes is painful to watch. I cannot imagine watching it again. It is the first of Mr Jarmusch’s films that I can say that of. The high points, as most reviews negative and positive mention, are the Alfred Molina and Steve Coogan and the Bill Murray-Wu Tang Clan vignettes. The others all fall far below anything we could expect from Jarmusch. I had gone expecting more. For one thing, Turbokitty’s review at The Two Blowhards made me made me think it might be more than it turned out to be. There were some great moments, but it was rather like watching TV: there was so much bad to mediocre stuff in between those select cinematic moments. The linking concept of smokes and java was OK, but strained. In fact in the the best sketch, Molina does not smoke and he and Coogan drink tea. Many seem to like the Iggy Pop and Tom Waits blackout, but I think it’s one of the more painful ones to watch. Somewhere in California, two guys whose music I like, painfully act around one another. The fact that I like Jim and Iggy and Tom does not make this sub-high-school afternoon comedy skit any easier to endure. Part of the problem is what I’d call the paralysis of cool. Too many movies rely on the affectless actor, with burning butt dangling from his lower lip, staring unblinkingly at rather than interacting with or relating to the other character(s) in a scene. Didn’t Godard put this one to rest when Belmondo rubs his lip with his thumb in À Bout de souffle? Belmondo’s character leaks more humanity into that scene while attempting to hide behind his Bogie mask of cool than either Tom or Iggy have in their entire scene together. What is this fear that most independent filmmakers have in having their characters show any emotions? I’m not saying that everyobdy has to be Jack Nicholson chewing up the scenery, but maybe somewhere in between.
A while back, V. & I were watching the tail-end of Die Hard (3): With a Vengence, when out of the blue Samuel L. Jackson’s character called Bruce’s character “a melon-farming cracker”. A little bit later, he called somebody else a melon-farmer. At first we were confused, then it dawned us that melon-farmer in all its four syllable glory was standing in for another MF expletive. It stuck. It was melon-farming this and melon-farming that. The inevitable happened, and I uttered the term at work. My office mate perked up immediately from his umpteenth pep rally email from some unknown JAMF Veep of something or other, and soon he was using it, too. Well, imagine my surprise the other day, when he sent me this melon-farming link. How could I have not known that melon-farming was a by-product of Alex Cox redubbing the sublime Repo Man for TV consumption?
Great DVD double bill last night: Girls Will Be Girls and Hundstage (Dog Days in English). The former is to All About Eve as Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is to Hamlet. I admit I’ve always had a soft spot for duelling drag queens, but this movie pushes into some hyperstrange areas of the hollywoodian psyche. Three guys playing three girls in search of fame and stardom à la Schwabs counter discoveries. It proved a good antedote to all those reality TV show commercials. Dog Days is one of the strangest films I’ve seen in a long while. It’s an Austrian road movie on the road to nowhere. Six stories in search of closure. A whole bunch of pudgy sweating dialect-speaking Jedermänner have mechanical sex and unfulfilling arguments in a di Chirico sun-drenched Viennese suburb that looks like some middle European’s nightmare vision of America: strip-malls, empty parking garages, and stagnant ponds of dangerous chemical laced water. The only time standard High German is spoken is during a brief weather broadcast on a car radio. Even the Greek dysfunctional divorced couple (still living together in their single family house) speak thick Lower Austrian dialect. Not since Prospero’s Books have I seen so much unerotic nudity. I highly recommend both films.
While searching for an online text of Hamlet, I came across this fun site: Hamlet the Text Adventure.
Well, I went to see Mel Gibson’s theological snuff film on Sunday. It was better than I thought it would be, but it was definitely not much to write home about. Best laugh was when one of the Roman soldiers (who historically were probably non-Latin-speaking Syrian recruits) said “Facta non verba.” Other than that, the acting was wooden, the script leaden, and the violence ultra. It dawned on me—somewhere in medias scourging—that what Gibson has made is a religious action film. You know there’s always a part in the action film where the stubborn hero gets the snot beat out of him. (Think Clint in those spaghetti westerns, Bruce dying harder, and even Mel in search of lethal WMD.) Then in the last act, the hero catches his wind and annihilates the villains. I liked Shupov as Pilate, but there was very little for him to work with. And at times Caviezel looked like he’d morphed into Mel. The most daring departure from the story line was having JC fall five times instead of three as in the stations of the cross. My suggestion for those who haven’t seen it yet: rent Scorsese’s Last Temptation for the story or Derek Jarman’s Sebastiane for the Latin.
Erling, Lynne, and I went to see Pasolini’s Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma last Friday night, but when we go to the San Francisco Cinematheque in Yerba Buena Center for the Arts a goodly 30 minutes before the showing, it was sold out. We sulked for about five minutes, waiting for scalpers to appear and offer us tickets, but luckless we trudged over to Restaurant Lulu instead for a bit of a nosh. We overdid the victuals and walking back to the car, noticed that The Matrix Revolutions was showing in Imax at the Sony Metreon. None of us having seen it yet, we decided to go in and recover from our dinner. It was fun looking at the thick makeup on Keanu’s mug and being able to see a spec of lint on the Merovingian the size of a Buick, but the movie overall was a disappointment. At the end, as we looked at the credits, Erling leaned over and informed me that Don Davis the composer of the score had come to Sub Pontio Pilato last April and enjoyed it. Also, three people who had sung in our opera had sung in the choir towards the end of the movie. Well, that was nice, but the movie was still bad. It was as though the brothers W. had taken all the iffy and boring parts of the first film and expanded them beyond all comprehension and endurance. Listening to Keanu parrot frosh existential philosophy while others stand around immobilized as if trapped in amber is not much fun. The special effects for the battle for Zion were fun in abstract way. And it was fun to see Phil Tippett reuse the feet off of his Enforcement Droid from RoboCop for the dockloader cloned fighter suits. All that was missing was Peter Weller or Sigourney Weaver. At one point, I found msyelf waxing nostalgiac for Walter Pidgeon and Leslie Nielsen discussing Krell graphemics in a director’s cut of Forbidden Planet. Of course, we could have gone to see Gibson’s snuff flick, but not on a full stomach.
Amongst the more silly things that folks do at any time of the year is to list their top n movies (where n is some positive, non-prime number). Well, why should Uncle Jazzbeau be any different? Except that this list of my top 23 favorites at this point in time exists only because I’ve already missed a day of blogging, yesterday, and that is bad, and lists are easy to make. So, without further ado: La Grand illusion (1937), Sullivan’s Travels (1941), All About Eve (1950), The Thing From Another World (1952), Forbidden Planet (1956), Le Mépris (1963), Casino Royale (1967), Weekend (1967), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), La Voie lactée (1969), Performance (1970), Clockwork Orange (1971), The Godfather (1972), Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (1973), La Maman et la putain (1973), La Nuit américaine (1973), The Godfather: Part II (1974), Der Amerikanische Freund (1977), All That Jazz (1979), Diva (1981), Blade Runner (1982), 37,2° le matin (1983), Sherman’s March (1986), and The Belly of an Architect (1987). That’s a fifty-year stretch, and I think I’ve mixed the high- and lowbrow well enough to upset everybody.
[Update: How could I have forgotten Duck Soup (1933): the best political musical ever? Hakank knows and has shown me. And Million Dollar Legs (1932): best Olympian flick. ]
On new year’s eve, German TV broadcasts a 40-year old, black and white, 18-minute show called Dinner for One. I’ve never had the pleasure of seeing it, but I heard its catchphrase often enough: “Same procedure as every year, James.” [via Language Log via Transblawg] For some strange reason, until recently, I’d believed that it was directed by William Dieterle, one of Fassbinder’s favorite directors, who had returned to Germany after a career in Hollywood. Marvelous how the brain malfunctions.
Since I’ve been working in Menlo Park, California, these days, my thoughts have turned to the other city with the same name on the other coast that contained the famed laboratory complex of Thomas A. Edison. In keeping with yesterday’s entry, did William Dickson actually demonstrate projected film to Edison in 1889 or later? Short answer, no, despite all the history and litigation. I had read a tattered copy of Gordon Hendrick’s The Edison Motion Picture Myth about a decade ago. It was around the same time that I read the debunking of Fritz Lang’s dramatic exit from the Third Reich after turning down Goebbels’ request that Lang head the German film industry. Lang had told his story a few times, but his passport showed that at the time he was coming and going, to and fro, closing down his household in Berlin. Also, Goebbels didn’t mention it in his diary. What next? How old were the Marx Brothers and did Kuleshov really conduct his experiment with Ivan Mosjoukine’s image?
First Bob at Unfogged indicated a hilarious entry at McSweeny's on the impossibility of the Death Star's trash compacter in the first Star Wars flick [via Girl27], and then John up in Redmond sent me a link for a funny little movie about Death Star Repairmen. And after that V. & I watched a nice double bill on DVD: Aki Kaurismäki's Mies Vailla Menneisyyttä (The Man Without a Past) and Pixar's Finding Nemo. The two films have more in common that you'd think at first glance.
Languagehat has an entry about a New Yorker article on Quentin Tarantino that sparked off some strong commentary. Reminded me of something Jean-Luc Godard once said:
I have no "style," I just want to make films. If I have influenced young filmmakers, who are a little bit like my children or my brothers or who may have been my parents before I started, the only influence that I cared for was to show them that to make a film was a possible thing. It is not true that only if you have a great deal of money can you make a film. If you have a lot of money it is just a different kind of film that you will make. If you have no money, you can still make a film.
[My position as a filmmaker] is a position in the margin. But that is normal. No book can exist without a margin, and whether I watch a tennis or a football match, I am always in the margin, in relation to the players, that is, I am in the place of the public, of the onlookers. In fact, to be in the margin, that is the real position of the public. It is a necessary position. That which is seen cannot be seen without those who see it.
["The Carrots Are Cooked: A Conversation With Jean-Luc Godard" in Film Quarterly, vol. 27, no. 3, 1984; reprinted in David Sterritt (ed.) 1998 Jean-Luc Godard: Interviews, p.135.]
Me, I always figured that Tarantino's incredible luck at writing his first scripts with Roger Avary had worn off.
Alexandre at Mnemosyne saw my linguist hero entry and wrote an entry (in French) about the art historian as movie hero. He's asking for more movie titles in the comments and is starting to get them. He's even got an acronym for an organization that will try to promote positive images of art historians in films: HARESSA (historiens de l'art pour une représentation valorisée et équitable de leurs semblables dans le septième art).
This set off some free association on a couple of my favorite films that touch on art: Peter Greenaway plays the invisible art historian as director in some of his films, especially A Zed & Two Noughts with the subplot concerning the Vermeer forger van Meegeren. Tom Ripley (Dennis Hopper) and the allegedly dead painter Derwatt (Nicholas Ray) in Der Amerikanische Freund (1977) by Wim Wenders.
There was also one director in the Alexandre's list that had crossed over from the linguist qua hero list: Raoul Ruiz. Way to go.
An entry over on the 2 Blowhards got me to thinking. No, thinking is too strong a word. Rather it set me to ruminating: chewing the cud, free associating. One of the two, Michael, went and saw Once Upon a Time in Mexico and didn't have a good time. That's OK. Probably lots of reasons for that. (I haven't seen the flicker in question and so I'll refrain from defending or dismantling it.) Are movies shot on DV different than those shot on film? Well, yes, but no, too. You should really just go and read his entry and then the comments. Suffice it to say, I was struck in the same way by the critical apparatus that Rudolf Arnheim erected to explain the aesthetic differences between silent movies and the talkies. You know the drill, expressionism (B&W, silent, montage) versus realism (color, sound, mise-en-scène). I've certainly seen movies that originated on DV that could've been shot on good old-fashioned film: e.g., Italiensk for begyndere. And, I think that the problems of a movie like Attack of the Clones had little to do with its origins in DV; cf. the similar problems in The Phantom Menance. I think that Michael's criticisms have more to do with how the movie was lighted, shot, edited, written, directed, etc., than what medium the images were stored on. One thing that was brought up in the comments, is whether there exists a pattern language (à la Christopher Alexander) for the movies. I think there is, but I've never really cared for most of the patterns you could describe using it. There's a pattern that a friend pointed out to me after Gladiator hit the screens: why are there so many gasoline bomb explosions in movies today that are supposed to take place in antiquity. The answer is because they look neat, and the folks in Hollywood know how to make them. Roger Ebert has been collecting these (anti-)patterns for years. (It's always been a fine line between genre and formula.)
Leni Riefenstahl has died a little past her 101st birthday. The media have been in a frenzy disgorging pull-quotes about Hitler's favorite filmmaker. During the thousand-year Reich's dozen years, she made four films films for the National Socialists: the oft-mentioned Triumph des Willens and Olympia (parts one and two), and the scarcely-mentioned Sieg des Glaubens and Tag der Freiheit—Unsere Wehrmacht. It's debatable whether her films were more popular or successful as propaganda than the works of Veit Harlan (Kubrick's uncle-in-law) or Josef von Báky, but their later effect upon filmmakers the world over is indisputable. I watched Triumph earlier this year and was surprised (again) by the brilliance of the editing and mise-en-scène as well as the tedium of the speechifying. Hitler also enjoyed watching fiction films such as Eisenstein's Potemkin, Lang's Metropolis, and Fleming's Gone with the Wind.
On seeing Soderbergh's Solaris, based as he said not on the Tarkovsky film but on the Stanslaw Lem novel, I remembered this passage:
For some reason in all the science-fiction films which I have ever seen, the audience is forced into a detailed, close-up examination of what the future will look like. Indeed, often (like Stanley Kubrick) they call their films "visions of the future" … I would like to film Solaris in such a way that the audiences are not faced with something technologically outlandish.
If, for instance, we were to film passengers getting into a tram as something never before seen or even heard of, then it would look like Kubrick's moon-landing sequence. But if we film a moon-landing the way they film a tram-stop in an ordinary film, then everything will be as we would wish it.
[Maya Turovskaya Tarkovsky: Cinema as Poetry, p. 59]
I watched Punch-Drunk Love last night on DVD, and was reminded by the name of the production company in the credits that P. T. Anderson was the son of the famous Clevland late-night horror show host, Ghoulardi, whose fans range from Michael Weldon, of Psychotronic Video magazine fame, to Drew Carey. The closest I ever got to Ghoulardi was being in Cleveland once. This got me to wondering about Bob Wilkins who hosted a show on local TV here in the San Francisco bay area called Creature Features. He was on the air for eight years starting in 1971, entertaining us kids with his sarcasm and his large cigar. John Stanley took over after him, and made it into the '80s. Later, Bob showed up as the local TV weatherman and a kids show host called Captain Cosmic. I bumped into him backstage at a science fiction convention in the early '80s and told him how much I'd enjoyed his show, but since others, like George Lucas, had said similar, I don't think it impressed him. I still recall fondly the first movie he showed way back when, The Horror of Party Beach.
Never would've guessed it, but somebody has made a film based on at least some small part of Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. It's German, it's called Prüfstand 7, and it was directed by Robert Bramkamp. It's got everything: Wernher von Braun, General Dornberger, V2 rockets, KZ Mittelbau-Dora, etc. I'll have to get the DVD and watch it. Pynchon has a special place in my heart because he was a technical writer at Boeing in the early '60s who later made a name for himself as a brilliant author of quirky books. In 1997 while I was subscribed to the Pynchon-L list, one of Pynchon's ex-friends surfaced long enough to involve me and the rest of the list into a strange Internet experiment in collaborative fiction. A book was produced and two copies were mailed to me for my part in the weirdness.
[Addendum 07/21/03: Nice von Braun links: Redstone Arsenal and NASA.
Godard's Le Mépris is one of my favorite meta-movies (films about the making of films), and one of my favorite blogs is languagehat. So imagine my pleasure and surpise when I ran across this entry [via Google] in a previous incarnation of languagehat. Compounded with this is the fact that I'd been holding off writing my own entry about Hanns Johst's quotation, "Wenn ich Kultur höre, entsichere ich meinen Browning!" which is usually credited to Goering. Hélas! The Alberto Moravia novel, Il Disprezzo, on which the movie is based is called in English Ghost at Noon. It's a good read, but the movie is better. I remember seeing Jack Palance interviewed on TV, and how he become speechless in a rage about how Godard had directed him (badly). A funny thing about this polyglot movie is how the dubbed version had to invent lines for the translator who repeats substantial amounts of dialog in Italian, German, English, and French for the other characters. Godard allegedly punched Carlo Ponti, one of the producers, at the premiere.
[Addendum, 06/20/03: Here's the newer, MT link straight from LH.]
You are on a twisty turny road that leads nowhere in particular. Then you notice a large Englishman lensing one of his best movies in your neighborhood. Wait a minute! Where have I seen that profile before? Alfred Hitchcock came to San Francisco and shot Vertigo with Kim Novak and James Stewart. I stumbled across this site which compares location shots from the movie in 1958 and today in 2003. [via Monkeys vs Robots] Based on a virtual tour by Lawrence French that has lots of fun-filled information of Vertigo.
Carl "Ratso" Russo (over on indieWIRE) gives a wrap-up for the 46th San Francisco International Film Festival. Good fun. Sorry I missed it.
No situation in Iraq is going to keep Hollywood from attending the French movie industry's big bash on the Côte d'Azur. There's going to be all kinds of flicks there. Lars von Trier, one of the co-founders of Dogme 95 has a new flick, Dogville, shot entirely in the studio and starring Nicole Kidman. Wonder if they used makeup and lighting? It was an interesting marketing experiment while it lasted. And for a bit of the old ultra-violence, there's Tarrantino's new movie, Kill Bill.
Ever since The Matrix hit screens back in 1999, most of us having been waiting for the other shoot to drop. Wired has a nice article on the virtual cinematography used in the soon-to-be-seen sequel. Like most commercial movies, the effect that came to be known as bullet time had been developed by a Frenchman, Arnauld Lamorlette, to fly through a virtual Parisian arispace looking for structural flaws in buildings. He was later hired by PDI which created Shrek. Later it surfaced in a SIGGRAPH short called The Campanile Movie.
John Harden has gotten his film into a science fiction convention in the rainy state of Washington. So, if you're in Seattle on April, 20, 2003, you should check it out.
My friend, Ian, gave me a DVD of Casino Royale, one of my favorite movies. One of the bonus goodies on it is the original 1954 broadcast of Climax! with Barry Nelson as Jimmy Bond (as an American CIA agent) and Peter Lorre as Le Chiffre (as a communist). Other than Bond's naturalization it follows the book rather well, as does the 1967 movie, in spite of it being a parody of parody. Peter Lorre's performance is similar to Orson Welles'.
A while back I stumbled across the pages of film professor and critic, Ray Carney, and found myself exasperated at his bow-tied intransigence. Throwing out the likes of David Lynch, the Coen brothers, et al., while preserving the strange bedfellows of John Cassavetes and Frank Capra, just seemed too damned strange. Over the weekend, the pessimist in me came up with a theory of a theory of aesthetics: (à la Kracauer) any critic's aesthetics are reverse engineered from their favorite films. Not exactly rocket science, but how else to explain Capra and Cassavetes? (Perhaps filmmakers whose surnames begin with "Ca" ...) I like Cassavetes, both as an actor and a director, but I see no need to get rid of David Lynch and keep Frank Capra on theoretical grounds. Just too shrill. Kurt Krens, Peter Gidal, and Malcolm LeGrice, as well as David Lynch, Michael Curtiz, and John Cassavetes are all engaged in making films. Saying they're not and building a theory of aesthetics on these sandy wastes doesn't help me much. (And for the note, I like Frank Capra, especially Hemo the Magnificent ...)
Links that got me there and beyond: Cinema Electronica, Film and Philosophy, Filmmaker Magazine, indieWIRE, Millennium Film Journal.