Movie of the Week

Sidney Lumet's the Offence

2011-12-10T18:18:00.001-06:00

Watching MGM HD, finally had a chance to catch up with Sidney Lumet's The Offence. I have to admit that I have slept some on Lumet's career, but this movie has made me re-think my laxness. From the amazing slo-mo opening to the split second flashbacks that litter the film, Lumet makes the material cinematic while getting great performances from Sean Connery and Trevor Howard, the former as a burned out, angry cop and the latter as a suspected child murderer.

Apparently they filmed the movie in a month, and it really seems as if everyone is just burning.

Flick in the links.

The film music of John Carepenter vol.1

2011-10-31T07:25:00.000-05:00

MichaelJacket at Blogspot has posted an amazing collection of John Carpenter's self-composed film music at that site (clickable in the title of the post).

What can I say? Not only the perfect Halloween music but if you love minimal synth stuff from the 70's as much as I do- just great music, period. Also the curatorship is great and includes lesser known music (and hard to find) from the Fog as well as the great Halloween and Assault on Precinct 13 stuff.

Highly recommended!

Christmas Holiday

2011-08-15T08:09:00.002-05:00

This was a movie that was recommended to me by a friends mother and boy was she right. Excellent example of early noir with a title that belies its dark heart.

The copy here is much better than the video above would have you believe.

Deanna Durbin and Gene Kelly are both excellent in this 1944 Robert Siodmak film written by Herman Mankiewicz (Citizen Kane). Great Script, beautiful cinematography...

Links in Comments

Sandra (Vaghe stelle dell'Orsa... )

2011-07-10T09:56:00.001-05:00

D: Luchino Visconti

I have been on a real Visconti kick lately after re-watching Senso. There are certain films, just like there are certain books, you should not watch early in life and Viscont's work is in that place for me. I saw Rocco and his Brothers and the Leopard years ago and while I understood them to be "masterpieces," I did not have the life experience to actually deal with what the movies were saying.

Sandra is a later film and completely unavailable on DVD in the United States. It deals with Auschwitz while still working in a framework of forbidden love and class differences. It is a fascinating film if not on the same level as the ones mentioned above but perhaps people disagree with that assessment?

Links in the comments and subtitles included.

Claudia Cardinale as Sandra

Treno Popolare (1933)

2011-06-26T09:59:00.000-05:00

"One of the beacon films of the European cinema of the Thirties." Jacques Lourcelles, Dictionnaire du cinéma, Laffont, Paris, 1992

As always, I was intrigued this week by Dave Kehr's article on the films of Raffaello Matarazzo that are being released this week by Criterion under the banner title Raffaello Matarazzo's Runaway Melodramas. The set includes four films, “Chains,” “Tormento” (1950), “Nobody’s Children” (1952) and “The White Angel” ( 1955).

What intrigued me was Kehr mentioning an even more florid melodrama, Ship of Condemned Women” (1953) Which Kehr says, "stands at the most extreme edge of Matarazzo’s art." Looking for it online, I was unable to find a direct download, but did instead score Treno Popolare which also happens to have a role in it for the director (he plays the bandleader at Orvieto).

You can also watch the first 15 minutes of the film above.

Link in comments (no subtitles unfortunately)

Little Man, What Now?

2011-05-24T17:38:00.001-05:00

In honor of the Northwest Chicago Film Society that will be wrapping up their winter season with the above title tomorrow night, I was able to find a copy of this unknown to me Borzage film. I will be honest and say that I have not seen this yet as I want to view it in all of its glory on the Portage screen. Completely unavailable here in the states on DVD, VHS, air mail, whatever, I thought that maybe Borzage would get a boost from the box set of a couple of years ago (A door that shut rather than opened unfortunately).

From the looks of it, this film has a good amount in common with his Man's Castle of a year earlier. But if you are in the Chicago area find out for yourself tomorrow night! Support a local film group that has had nothing but excellent programming and also has the good sense to serve drinks in the theater.

The copy of this here is not great, but it is here! Also has hard French subs. Links in comments.

Rosebud

2011-05-15T08:48:00.000-05:00

There has been a lot more available later period Preminger, mainly due to the VOD services and the small you must support them Olive films (no, really you must support this kind of consumer passion driven archivism- it is needed. For God's sake, they put out Skidoo!).

Look at Dave Kehr's excellent takes on Preminger's much maligned Hurry Sundown and Such Good Friends (again put out by the laudable Olive) in today's NYtimes.

What is nice is some of these remasters are also making their way to cable, including Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon. One of his that I have seen on cable turning up sporadically in its original widescreen glory is this film, but no DVD in sight.

Rosebud is a film about exhaustion and it takes up the form well. The problem is that then some see this as an exhausted film, which is not the case.

Links in the comments.

The Divine Woman

2011-03-27T08:43:00.001-05:00

There is something about the twilight of the silent era. The refinement of the visual language of film and the complex narrative framework and character psychology that good movies were able to establish with an economy of motion are still in many ways unsurpassed. I certainly have a hard time thinking of giving up dialogue when I write, and I always look at these movies with a sense of wonder and constant learning.

Victor Sjöström is someone I wish I have seen more of. While I have seen The Wind, the rest of his available films are on my long list of "To Be Seen," the problem being my TBS keeps getting longer, not shorter.

Well, this is an easy one. Only 10 minutes or so of The Divine Woman survive and it was used as an extra on the Garbo box set that came out a bit ago. Maybe the rest will be discovered someday in an old box in a hospital or someone's garage. Who knows?

Is there something extraordinary about this clip? Sure there is the "multiple clock dissolve to suggest lovemaking" motif around minute eight but instead look at the shots after. There is the casual lyricism of Garbo and Hanson by the moonlight lit win and then the dissolve into medium shot, where we realize the emotions and psychology of the first half of the scene have been reversed. Their love has calmed Garbo but stricken Hanson, who now realizes what he is giving up It is a simple dissolve and it tells us everything we need to know.

Scattered Clouds (1967) Mikio Naruse

2011-03-22T07:43:00.001-05:00

“From the youngest age I have thought that the world we live in betrays us; this thought still remains with me.”

I became enamored of the particular life view of Mikio Naruse before I could see any of his movies. I had picked up Philip Lopate's Totally, Tenderly, Tragically and was engulfed not by Naruse's movies, but Lopate's prose of them. At that time the only movie of his available was A Woman Ascends the Stairs which at that time was on a cruddy VHS tape. I did not take the opportunity to see it, scared away by the muddy image on the tape box that promised a lot of squinting and bad subtitles ahead.

Now of course things are a little different.

Streaming sites and a multi-region DVD player have brought a good number, if not alas, the majority of Naruse's films to us. This has helped go to Lopate's point that one Naruse film will not do, that the style is so invisible in one that it appears to be no style at all. It is only after watching several and letting the themes and images wash over you that a viewer gets the idea of who this man was and why he was such a singular artist.

Dave Kehr in his invaluable NYTimes DVD column talked about the Eclipse release of early Naruse films that is coming out today and I thought it would be a nice correlative to talk about and post his last film Scattered Clouds from 1967.

Auteurist alert! It does share a trait with no less than three of the films in the Eclipse set (Street without End, Apart From You and Every-Night Dreams), in that it revolves around a car accident.

The pregnant Yoko Tsukasa's husband is runover by Yuzo Kayama and after he is found innocent he tries to make amends to her.

This sounds like a case of Sirkian melodrama, and what fascinates about this film is the way the outside world starts pushing in and compressing their relationship. And as with most Naruse, what he offers her before love is money. The idea that everything in the world ha s price, whether it be emotions or death, haunt Naruse's cinema, which is nothing if not truly materialistic.

And look at those colors!

Links in comments

Ball of Fire and Gene Krupa's Drum Boogie

2011-03-16T08:48:00.000-05:00

Watching this movie early n the A.M. and thinking about the seemingly off handed mastery of Howard Hawks.

The first time that I saw Ball of Fire I was around ten years old. No VCRs at that point (or at least not widespread). Our neighbors, the Knupfers, were friends with a guy who worked at a place in Wilmette called Films Incorporated, which would rent out 16mm prints. He was able to get a copy of this and bring it over, where one summer we waited for nightfall and watched the movie in their backyard. I have to say I don't remember the movie from that evening so much as the experience. The specialness of watching something with friends and family in such a setting.

Which isn't to say I didn't enjoy the movie, I did and I do! Anyone who loves language has to (add in Howard Hawks directing, Billy Wilder & Charles Brackett writing, Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck, and Oskar Holmoka acting (among a treasure trove of character actors)).

One point I remember from that screening was how Barbara Stanwyck called the phone the "Ameche" because Don Ameche had just finished playing Alexander Graham Bell. I fell in love with the idea that language was not set in stone but transmutable and elastic; stretching like a cultural taffy to change with whoever decided to change it.

Needles to say it led to a continued fascination with slang, dialects, and any sort of hip patois I can come across.

Watching it this morning though what struck me was the above scene. Look at how Hawks films it- almost all in medium shots except for the cutaways to Stanwyck, and even there she is always presented as part of the larger band. Look at the way the musicians sway to the music and look at each other in appreciation and smiles as they play. This is such a contrast with some other big band shorts of the era where when they are not playing or soloing, the musicians look ahead stone faced and immutable- seemingly scared of the camera and each other.

This is a case of Hawks doing what he does best: Showing the easy camaraderie of professionals who enjoy being able to work and play around each other. It is infectious to watch.

Dusty and Sweets McGhee

2011-03-06T09:09:00.001-06:00

Dusty and Sweets McGee

D. Floyd Mutrux

Finally had a chance to catch up with this after Thom Anderson's write-up in Film Comment. Here he is talking about the film (cutoff at the end):

It has finally come out as part of the Warner Archive collection here as both a DVD and download. It is also available in the Comments section below.

Beautifully shot by WIlliam Fraker with a sense of place in early 70's Los Angeles that s palpable. There is also a great soundtrack with Van Morrison, Harry Nilsson, and a selection of older rock and doo-wop. Anderson points out the similarities between the movie and Pedro Costa's recent work and it is an apt comparison. Though I find Mutrux's work to be looser and not nearly as aesthetically stringent. Both though share a sense of empathy with their subjects that reviewers have taken as morally dubious, though I don't think this is the case.

What is interesting to me is how films like this or Barbara Loden's Wanda are essentially about drift and how those films did not speak to an audience in 1970 but, for whatever reasons that modern life has, speak to us (or at least a select few of us) now.

When I took this out of Odd Obsession, the gentleman behind the counter recommended Cisco Pike to me as another early 70's LA movie in a similar vein. That will be one that I rent today.

Jacques Tourneur's The Fearmakers and J Hoberman's Cold War

2011-02-26T08:19:00.004-06:00

There are a few critics these days that when they put out books, I must buy them immediately: Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chris Fujiwara, and J. Hoberman.

The latter has a new book just out, An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War which is coming out on March 15th. Hoberman seems to be doing a reverse history if we start with his The Dream Life: Movies, Media, And The Mythology Of The Sixties

In anticipation, I have been reading about the book online and the series of films that Hoberman programmed at BAM to celebrate the books publication.

One of my own favorites from this period that is not included in the Hoberman show is Jacques Tourneur's the Fearmakers.

Coming at the tail end of the "commie scare films" (Woman on Pier 13, My Son John) Tourneur did this as a favor to star Dana Andrews, who refused to star unless Tourneur directed.

There are films where we as an audience have to do more work to find the frequency that the film is emitting its particular waves of radiation. Films where perhaps the acting is a bit more stiff, the sets a little cheaper, the production a little rushed. We have to look past the plot to see what the film is actually about.

What makes this film fascinating to me is how little it has to do about communism. Tourneur actually directed a proto pro-socialist movie during WWII, Days of Glory, as well as one of the last Hollywood films with a communist hero in Berlin Express and his politics hd always been left leaning. Here the communism takes a backseat to a pretty scathing indictment of post war consumerism and late period capitalism.

It is cheap and quick with a mis en scene that is scattered. Andrews was perhaps at the apex of his alcholism and his performance is sweaty, nervous and expressive. There are a couple of "Tournean" moments under the title credits and during a nightmare sequence.

In the Facets class discussion linked below, we go into the particular reasons this might be the case and how it leads to an alternate reading of the film. And it is still a fascinating film that tells us quite a bit, if sometimes inadvertently, about America in 1958.

Let me share a good quote. French critic Jacques Lourcelles, who praises the movie, writes: "the true subject of the movie is fatigue, the wear of the main character, and, through it, the wear of democracy itself"

Here is a link to our Facets class discussion about the film:

And here is an excellent interview with Hoberman at indiewire.

The Salvation Hunters (1925)

2011-02-20T09:11:00.001-06:00

I have been watching the Criterion Von Sternberg box for quite sometime now and really have to hand it to them for doing such an excellent job presenting these films (I am salivating for their Eclipse lines' Silent Naruse set). One of the joys in sets like this is not only with the films you get, but how they make you want more. Thunderbolt? A Woman of the Sea?

Watching the excellent Tag Gallagher essay on his films that comes as an extra, a good amount of time is spent on Sternberg's first film which I had no idea of and then wanted to see now, The Salvation Hunters.

Completely unavailable on either VHS or DVD at least to my knowledge, I found the links below (found in the Comments section) so now you too can enjoy this odd little movie. UCLA did restore the film, but this is not that restoration, just an fyi.

As the forward puts it:

There are important fragments of life that have been avoided by the motion picture because Thought is concerned and not the Body. A thought can create and destroy nations—and it is all the more powerful because it is born of suffering, lives in silence, and dies when it has done its work. Our aim has been to photograph a thought—A thought that guides humans who crawl close to the earth—whose lives are simple—who begin nowhere and end nowhere.

What you get is an amalgamation of realism and allegory all made independently by Sternberg. It has been described as the first independent film (which is a bit disingenuous), Von Sternberg did make it privately for around $6, 000 (later spruced up with 14k more form Chaplin and United Artist after he saw and loved the film. So much so that he cast actress Georgia Hale, in The Gold Rush).

Psychological and expressionistic, the film is a nascent one: slow moving and symbolic it does not completely work, but points to the director Sternberg would become while also becoming an excellent record of parts of California in the early part of the last century that you would not see otherwise. Well worth checking out.

Public Housing

2011-02-20T08:35:00.001-06:00

One of the best films of the 1990s and available for 29.95 through Wiseman's own Zipporah films reachable through the title.

People always talk about Wiseman's ability to capture reality and the time he puts into filming, and I do not want to take away from any of that , but what really catches me when I watch his films is his formalism. The editing that shapes the reality he captures not making a raw slice of life, but molded into powerful essays about how institutions shape our lives.

Look at the way Wiseman opens with the ice cream truck and allows him to pan to the store and then cut to the interactions outside the store and then takes us inside to show us the scene from the cashier's pov, then topping it with how the store operates from both sides of the partition.

Also, I am not sure if this is a purely Chicago thing- the shopping at a convenience store through a bullet proof partition and turnstile that makes buying a box of donuts a parody of high end shopping, like Tiffanys, where the customer asks to see what is on display. When I had my daycare there was a food and liquor store like this at the end of the block and it made buying a soda into a surreally degrading experience.

My Life as Liz

2011-02-20T07:54:00.000-06:00

Channel surfing yesterday I came upon the MTV show My Life as Liz, now in its second season. The show presents life and times of ”Liz” (the quotes are appropriate here as you will see) a small town Texas native who is now in her first year of art school in New York.

The story: She is in a long distance relationship with a boyfriend who is going to school in Austin and otherwise stays in touch with her other high school friends and though it looks like she has been in NY for quite sometime (the weather looks “spring-ish and she talks about going back to Texas for the summer, so I assume we are to think it is Spring but really I am not sure) she apparently has not made any friends or visited any place outside of going to school (the show has a subplot of her Austin boyfriend surprising her in NY and her not knowing anywhere t take him).

The show is, in almost every conceivable way, horrible. But it is expressively horrible.

Though it is in the same genre as a reality show (and even here you have to break it down further: it is not part of the game show reality (Survivor) but more a part of scripted reality (The Hills, The Real Housewives of….) it wears the genre superficially because the plot construction is so naked and the acting is bad (and not just a little bad, really bad)- but this is where it becomes so expressive.

Sidebar: Is there a more expressive term to describe the last decade that we have been living in than scripted reality?

What happens when you present something as reality but then overlay fictional constructs on top of it, just not so well? On shows where they do this seamlessly, the audience does not think about it because it fulfills an audience desire to live in that type of fiction themselves.

Most of these shows do this by presenting not just conspicuous, but almost orgiastic indulgence (I am looking at you Real Housewives). But here there is no such wish fulfillment. Instead the audience desire is not aspiration but identification: The show wants us to identify with the main character and see the world through her eyes. This brings on the double entendre of the title- the show does want to show “my” life as Liz.

But that doesn’t work out so well. The fiction is not seamless.

We want to identify but are continually pulled out of it by being able to see the wiring and stage lights break though the curtain. The camera is always in places it would never be if it was a documentary and the acting is so wooden it does not remind a viewer so much of people but watching pre-schoolers play act as people. It is a new genre: “accidental Brecht.”

And it makes you wonder, “what are they really like?” and “why are they doing this?”

The answer is, I am assuming, wanting to be on TV and that they are being controlled by “Liz.” Does she write these scenarios for them all to play act? The reason I think so brings up the second meaning of the title: It is Liz playing at being “Liz.” In this respect, what the show resembles most is pornography: This bizarro version of the real world where there is only one motivation but “Liz” replaces “sex”.
Everyone, even people thousands of miles away (though apparently not her parents, who are not alluded to) are obsessed with Liz and think about her constantly even though she presents herself as a type of socially awkward art school naïf.

It really does show the world through the distorted lens of a relatively entitled 19-20 year old who can only think about the world narcissistically.

And this is why the show is so expressive: It wants us to identify but really shows someone aspiring: The wish fulfillment is being able to control everyone around you, which is happening because we know it is her show, her fiction, even though the narrative of the show doesn’t present this- only the art school naïf part.

But the manipulation is so mechanical and naked (in the same way that it is with a 19-20 year old) that it becomes sort of endearing because it is s honest about not realizing it is lying to you.

The Sun Shines Bright, the director's cut

2010-09-12T12:31:00.001-05:00

The above is 1st the opening from the film itself and the second is a video essay that Jonathan Rosenbaum did with this and Dreyer's Gertrud.

"Maybe there’s one that I love to look at again and again. That’s The Sun Shines Bright. That’s really my favorite. At Republic, old man [studio head Herbert] Yates didn’t know what to do with it. The picture had comedy, drama, pathos, but he didn’t understand it. His kind of picture had to have plenty of sex or violence. This one had neither, it was just a good picture. But Yates fooled around with it after I left the studio and almost ruined it."
— John Ford

How right he is! There are a few different versions of this wonderful film and this is the 101 minute director's cut. There is also a 92 minute theatrical version that Ford was forced to cut. When the movie failed, the studio made him take a couple of more minutes out of it. For a movie that has so much charm tied in with it's pacing this was regrettable. I hate to have to pick, but especially when it comes to underrated Ford, this and his episode of How the West was Won (The Civil War segment) are favorites.

Ford had made Judge Priest with Will Rogers in 1934 and he revisits the character here, weaving three Priest tales together.. There is such a lovely sense of humanity and tact here that is both tied into the characters and the mis en scene that Ford places them in. You get a sense of a world lost and recreated before your eyes.

Two caveats: These are not my links (I have coded them below, replace "hxxp" with "http") and there are two audio tracks included and the default one is in Spanish. Just switch over to the second audio track and enjoy.

hxxp://www.megaupload.com/?d=V2CWZ835
hxxp://www.megaupload.com/?d=NWP28RP8
hxxp://www.megaupload.com/?d=X1QKWHR7
hxxp://www.megaupload.com/?d=RTUYKSDX
hxxp://www.megaupload.com/?d=DVO9STPG
hxxp://www.megaupload.com/?d=RM1J36X0

Trailers for lost silent films

2010-09-12T09:03:00.005-05:00

The above is a wonderful collection of trailers for silent films that just no longer exist. Uploaded to Youtube by "MrDavidcairns." It is well worth watching in full, One caveat: I am so sick of "silent film" music- the vaguely ragtime piano. TCM a couple of months ago showed a wonderful King Vidor silent Wild Oranges from 1924 with terrific new music by one of their silent score winners, who's name, unfortunately I cannot remember.

Never a Lovely So Real

2010-09-12T08:56:00.000-05:00

I have started a specific blog for the Data that I have done below on children murdered in Chicago at a new blog linked in the title and here. In addition to posting interactive google maps of each year I will also be breaking it down by month as well as trying to tell some of the stories behind that data.

Children murdered in Chicago in 2008 and an explication

2010-08-21T14:12:00.006-05:00

I started putting these databases together out a sense of frustration and helplessness over what is happening to youth in Chicago over the past few years.

While I work in education and have also done some work in regards to educational reform and protest, I still felt relatively stifled in my role and what I felt were my responsibilities. Each one of these charts is an attempt to address the frustration I felt in a language I felt I could express myself in.

When I started to get my Masters in Library Science last year I had a very limited idea of the role of a librarian that was based on old stereotypes of a type of professional that probably never existed outside of pop culture. It is in my role as a budding "informational professional" ( a somewhat funny sounding term to me to be honest). The work done in compiling these maps and graphs is fully within how I now see the role of a "librarian": Someone who checks out books to be sure but is also involved in the archiving of the community that they live in. In this case that being Chicago.

In 2008, 103 children were murdered in Chicago. At the time there was a sense of weary sadness at that number and it has not a feeling that has gone away. The problem for me was at the end of the CPS school year in June I wanted to find the numbers for how many children had been killed over the course of the school year that passed. I found myself surprised that this information was not particularly easy to come by.

After looking through various resources and finally finding the "Data" section of the Chicago Tribune's Redeye site I was able to uild these maps off of the data provided by their fine site. Tracy Swartz and Drew Sottardi do an excellent job on that site compiling and presenting a host of information that more Chicagoans should know about.

I also suggest looking at the excellent Crime Lab site of the University of Chicago for another source of data driven reports and possible solutions to the 3rd world level of violence that is currently afflicting Chicago's streets.

The title is linked to the raw data that I have compiled in spreadsheet form. If anyone wishes to use this raw data please feel free to. I have created it to be shared, amended, corrected, and built on.

Children murdered in Chicago in 2009

2010-08-21T14:08:00.006-05:00

I have collated the same information as for my 2010 map for 2009. 76 children (meaning to me under the age of 18) were murdered in Chicago last year. The above is an attempt to collate and present that data, information, and those lives.

I will repeat the information below that I have put in each of the other posts:

I started putting these databases together out a sense of frustration and helplessness over what is happening to youth in Chicago over the past few years.

While I work in education and have also done some work in regards to educational reform and protest, I still felt relatively stifled in my role and what I felt were my responsibilities. Each one of these charts is an attempt to address the frustration I felt in a language I felt I could express myself in.

When I started to get my Masters in Library Science last year I had a very limited idea of the role of a librarian that was based on old stereotypes of a type of professional that probably never existed outside of pop culture. It is in my role as a budding "informational professional" ( a somewhat funny sounding term to me to be honest). The work done in compiling these maps and graphs is fully within how I now see the role of a "librarian": Someone who checks out books to be sure but is also involved in the archiving of the community that they live in. In this case that being Chicago.

In 2009, 76 children were murdered in Chicago. At that time as in 2008, there was a sense of weary sadness at that number and it has not a feeling that has gone away. The problem for me was at the end of the CPS school year in June I wanted to find the numbers for how many children had been killed over the course of the school year that passed. I found my self surprised that this information was not particularly easy to come by.

After looking through various resources and finally finding the "Data" section of the Chicago Tribune's Redeye site I was able to uild these maps off of the data provided by their fine site. Tracy Swartz and Drew Sottardi do an excellent job on that site compiling and presenting a host of information that more Chicagoans should know about.

I also suggest looking at the excellent Crime Lab site of the University of Chicago for another source of data driven reports and possible solutions to the 3rd world level of violence that is currently afflicting Chicago's streets.

The title is linked to the raw data that I have compiled in spreadsheet form. If anyone wishes to use this raw data please feel free to. I have created it to be shared, amended, corrected, and built on.

Children murdered in Chicago in the first half of 2010

2010-08-21T13:38:00.008-05:00

Over the past few weeks I have been working to collate and visualize the alarming data above and in the next few posts.

Chicago is a violent city. In the first half of 2010, through July 31st, 42 children have been murdered within the city limits. Included are all under the age of 18, from a girl named Molina who died as a newborn from abuse in Edgewater on February 22nd to Eric Stevens who died in Gresham at the age of 18 from a gunshot wound. Another boy, who is 16, was also shot in that attack but will survive. This also occurred during the month of February. All locators have the name of the victim, their age and race, as well as how they died and where. Most also include links to the news stories about their deaths.

I will also be posting interactive maps for the underaged fatalities that occured in 2008 and 2009.

Here is the infomration that I posted with those other two maps as to why I have compled the above:

I started putting these databases together out a sense of frustration and helplessness over what is happening to youth in Chicago over the past few years.

While I work in education and have also done some work in regards to educational reform and protest, I still felt relatively stifled in my role and what I felt were my responsibilities. Each one of these charts is an attempt to address the frustration I felt in a language I felt I could express myself in.

When I started to get my Masters in Library Science last year I had a very limited idea of the role of a librarian that was based on old stereotypes of a type of professional that probably never existed outside of pop culture. It is in my role as a budding "informational professional" ( a somewhat funny sounding term to me to be honest). The work done in compiling these maps and graphs is fully within how I now see the role of a "librarian": Someone who checks out books to be sure but is also involved in the archiving of the community that they live in. In this case that being Chicago.

At the end of this past school year in June I wanted to find the numbers for how many children had been killed over the course of the school year that passed. I found myself surprised that this information was not particularly easy to come by.

After looking through various resources and finally finding the "Data" section of the Chicago Tribune's Redeye site I was able to uild these maps off of the data provided by their fine site. Tracy Swartz and Drew Sottardi do an excellent job on that site compiling and presenting a host of information that more Chicagoans should know about.

I also suggest looking at the excellent Crime Lab site of the University of Chicago for another source of data driven reports and possible solutions to the 3rd world level of violence that is currently afflicting Chicago's streets.

The title is linked to the raw data that I have compiled in spreadsheet form. If anyone wishes to use this raw data please feel free to. I have created it to be shared, amended, corrected, and built on.

Unknown Chaplin

2009-12-20T07:32:00.006-06:00

It has been quite some time since I have written. These past few months have been exceedingly busy ones. I have been working full time as well as started a masters program in Library Science at the University of Illinois. I have also been trying, sometimes vainly it would seem, to complete a script. I have been thinking also about what I would really want to say in a forum like this.

I have certainly seen movies that are worth talking about and commenting on (The Fantastic Mr. Fox), but for whatever reason, I have not been compelled to do so.

One thing that I have though is the above series produced by Kevin Brownlow for the BBC because it was particularly revelatory for me.

I have to admit I have always had a bias against Charlie Chaplin. I did what a lot of unenlightened film snobs do and compared him against Buster Keaton and found him lacking. Keaton seemed to be of the the future, of absurdism, of the 20th Century, and Chaplin seemed like a sentimental throwback to where movies had come from (the 19th Century stage) and not to where they were going.

But if you think about the little tramp in terms of what it represented (as the most popular image, persona of all time) and as a underdog, a truly relatable character, it is easier to see where his influence lies as well as where we have strayed from it. Think of the amount of current comedy that is based on hatred of the other and how an audience is meant to identify with that. Chaplin was always the other.

The Last Five Minutes of Summer Hours

2009-07-10T06:36:00.003-05:00

This goes to an experience I had awhile back, watching Summer Hours in a packed Highland Park theater.

Assayas' "return to form" (after Boarding Gate, maybe, but am I the only person who admired Clean?) fits very well into the "cinema of quality" and the audience loved it's Merchant/Ivory sense of a very material old world succumbing to the modern age.

Then there is the last five minutes.

The audience I was with, primarily well off and middle aged reacted to the scene with gasps of horror.

Actual gasps!

People where Tsking out loud, and i didn't even know anyone outside of kindergarten teachers actually "tsk'ed"

The scene to them was almost like a rape scene. And what was this rape? A bunch of teenagers have a party in an old (I'm sorry "classic") family villa. They smoke some pot, drink some beer and listen to french hip-hop, which by the way comes as a shock on two levels: 1) After a very quiet film, this really disrupts the mood that Assayas has created over the past ninety minutes and 2) French Hip-hop is not nearly as bad as I thought it was.

The audience treated this as if it was a desecration of old world values and not for what Assayas meant: This is just a house. A container of experiences, and this experience is the most vital in the film since the opening scene because it is about living and not commodification.

These kids were not putting graffiti on the wall or wrecking the place. It reminded me of a very similar scene in Cold Water, or several scenes in Irma Vep (actually, is there anyone who films a party better than Assayas?). The scene is integral to the film because it shows the concrete value of what is being passed on and not just the monetary one.

What is funny is they reacted the same way when a maid "accidently" is bequeathed a valuable vase. Is it ironic that she doesn't know the value of the vase or that she will actually use it as a vase, as opposed to an object d'art?

The Highland Park audience preferred to identify with the vase.

Oh well. Great Incredible String Band music at the end too.

The party scene from cold water:

Iran

2009-06-21T10:20:00.003-05:00

Two interesting posts on Iran. The first is on Hussein Moussavi...architect

and the next Iranian director Moshen Makhmalbaf, official spokesperson in the Guardian

1 and 1/2 hours with Bela Tarr, courtesy of the Walker Arts Center

2009-06-15T08:48:00.002-05:00

Oh Bela.

Phil Solomon.com

2009-05-16T06:34:00.003-05:00

One of the pleasures of the web for me is when I am able to see something that has been obscured to me before that point, either by the vagaries of distribution or coverage.

Phil Solomon has always been a film maker that I had heard more about than seen his work, but when I woke up this morning I was reading a little blurb on his Last Days in a Lonely Place in Film Comment and thought to look him up.

I was led directly to his very nicely conceived and designed website (love the orange on grey color scheme!). You can watch portions of his films, view his blog, or read his academic writings. Or at least will be able to soon as the majority of the site is still being put up.

One caveat: I wish the screen to view his films was larger.

Crucified Lovers Class Discussion

2009-05-13T10:08:00.002-05:00

One of my favorite Mizoguchi's and perhaps the one that is considered in Japanese film culture to be his supreme work, The Crucified Lovers is fascinating on several levels. He is adapting the work of Chikamatsu, one o f the most well regarded authors in Japanese Literary history and the story itself takes on the potency of myth.

On a technical level, the work that Mizoguchi does with sound design and spatial orientation in the mis-en scene is masterful, always highlighting the emotional potency of his story.

The class had a lot to say and really picked up on the filmic qualities of Mizoguchi's pessimistic vision.

Clickable through the title above and here.

The Grin Without a Cat, more

2009-05-11T17:57:00.003-05:00

Finally had a chance to digest the whole of this film over the weekend and this certainly lived up to the high expectations I had put on the film in my head.

What really struck me about the movie was the way that Marker took history and made it a representation of history (see my Awkward Family Photos post below). In the first few minutes we see a century and global scale of social demonstrations and see that footage contrasted with Battleship Potemkin. What is that movie? Art? Propaganda? A view of the revolution idealized and left unfulfilled As we watch history collide with an idealized socialist version of the same we do not see a contradiction- we see Potemkin project itself on the twentieth century.

Later we see an Army camp selling war to Latin America and journalists and, what look to be, tourists. They play war for them and then the visitors have a go of it, interrogating a prisoner as the camera interrogates them.

What is a grin without a cat truly but a fantasy of what could be?

Awkward Family Photos, brilliant

2009-05-11T17:53:00.003-05:00

I am more than certain there are quite a few sites like this scattered about. I have even seen more than one. But there is something about this that I love (and I was just alerted to it today). To whit:

One of the beauties to me of family photos is the difference between the reality that people think they are presenting and the reality that other people see. The representation and the reality. And how that representation, that photo, really becomes more real.

Lady of Musashino class discussion

2009-05-10T07:13:00.003-05:00

After the harsh beauty of Women of the Night I decided to step back and show a film that is deceptively more civilized. Not considered one of Mizoguchi's stronger efforts, The Lady of Musashino takes on a strong willed heroine and the change in middle class japan over the post war period in one suburb of Tokyo.

What at first might seem like Merchant/Ivory territory becomes a ruthlessly compassionate study of changing times and those left behind. A fascinating film.

Again, link in the title.

Women of the Night class discussion

2009-05-10T06:49:00.004-05:00

Finally having a chance to edit and upload the class discussions of Mizoguchi. Here we look at his atypical Women of the Night. A very angry film that verges on the type of hardwired B film that Fuller could pump out, Mizoguchi later renounced the film after his Buddhist conversion. This is not to say it is bad. Oh no, it is bad and completely unbelievably powerful.

Link of the discussion in title.

Donald Richie on Japanese Film Over an hour of bliss

2009-05-10T06:27:00.002-05:00

It is over an hour long and well worth watching. Richie in discussion with Tom Luddy about life in Japan and Japanese film for University of Berkeley. If the embedded screen below is slow in loading, link is in the title.

La Jetee

2009-04-22T09:05:00.003-05:00

I think it is pretty apparent that I am a Chris Marker fan and as a fan I urge others to go and buy the Criterion La Jetee/Sans Soliel collection. But, if you are more interested in a quick fix, the entirety of La Jetee is now on YouTube in one file. Give it a second to warm up and then watch the beauty.

The Grin Without a Cat on DVD soon!

2009-04-01T09:28:00.003-05:00

‘Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a grin,’ thought Alice; ‘but a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!’
- Alice in Wonderland

You can imagine how excited I am! This is one of those movies that even as a Marker enthusiast I have had a hard time finding (I will not mention the poor quality and disposable torrent I was able to see).

May 5th. Marker your calendar

The Wire and Psychogeography

2009-04-01T09:23:00.003-05:00

Going through the vast collections of tubes known as the internets this morning, came across this wonderful and thoughtful article on The Wire, Urbanism, Psychogeography and other assorted connections by Jeff Kinkle and Alberto Toscano. Clickable above.

If you are not a fan of the Wire, perhaps this will start your addiction. If you are already, this will make you rethink the series as a representation of refracted reality even more so.

Red Light District

2009-03-27T08:59:00.003-05:00

Openings and closings.

There are very few moments in art where all fuse together into a complete whole. The emotional, the intellectual,the formal.

Such is the case with Mizoguchi's Street of Shame (Akasen Chitai, literally, Red Light District) and more especially, indeed more special, the last sequence and shot.

The look as the young prostitute invites us in, meets our gaze directly, and then withdraws, closing the door behind her.

Read Pedro Costa's lecture about all of this so eloquently in Rouge

I will be editing down the class discussions and posting them quite soon.

Warner Archives

2009-03-24T11:33:00.004-05:00

This has possibilities.

The idea behind this is that you can order from Warner Brothers a custom made DVD of one of the over 3800 films in their library not presently available on a mass produced DVD for around 20 bucks. Of that 3800, about 150 are presently available.

For someone like myself this is a mouth watering possibility, especially when you take into account the availability of films like Tourneur's Witchita which I have only been able to watch in the most dire dvd that was transferred from a 16mm print that apparently was kept at the bottom of a well.

The idea here is that really anything would be better than the print that I saw but the question remains at how good will these prints be? I did notice that they will be in the original aspect ratio, always a good sign, but will they be remastered?

The info is probably on the website but as of this morning they were still working some kinks out of it and I couldn't find it.

Of course what this augers is a more "on demand" future where entire libraries will be on central servers and we will just pick and chose what we want. I am more than certain eventually we will be able to download Joel McCrea himself to give us a nice massage.

But, hey, this is a start.

Gion Festival Music

2009-03-20T08:48:00.003-05:00

Last night we watched Gion Festival Music in class.

Completely unavailable on DVD here in America (though Masters of Cinema put out a nice edition, packaged with Sansho the Baliff in the UK), I have to say that the movie was startling as I rewatched it.

Mizoguchi films split quite easily into his period dramas and his films with a contemporaneous setting. Especially after Kurosawa's success internationally with Rashomon, Mizoguchi started also to submit to international festivals. For the most part it was his period films that were noted in the West, his contemporary films seemed to play more to a Japanese audience. Such is the case here.

The Gion festival occurs every June in Kyoto and has since 896. A friend pointed out that making a movie called Gion festival Music and then not showing the festival would be akin to me making a film called "4th of July Fireworks" and not showing that either. The only invocation we get is a brief shot the traditional lanterns used, toward the end of the film.

One of the fascinating things about the film is that if it is indeed aimed at a japanese audience, it does much to confound the expectations and wants of that audience. Stylistically this is much more westernized than what we traditionally think of when we think of Mizoguchi and his "one take/one scene" style (which, granted, is already a pretty reductive way to think about it).

Instead this film is filled with close-ups and if his other films force and audience to consider a situation, here the emphasis is much more on empathizing with one. If anything there is a transference between the audiences empathy and the feelings that the older geisha has toward the younger at the end of the film, it is as if the empathy we are extending is taken up.

Corroded Art

2009-03-18T09:02:00.002-05:00

Decided to put up a bunch of my photos in blog form here.

This has been a way for me to spend my time over the past few months without going completely nutso.

Mercury Theater On Air! presents The Immortal Sherlock Holmes

2009-03-07T06:54:00.003-06:00

That Orson Welles. Enjoy!

Here.

My friend Owen's daughter was in a recent stage production of Mercury's War of the Worlds (greta idea by the way), and him mentioning it whetted my appetite for some of the uncut stuff. I'll post more as I find it.

The joys of the exploitation trailer

2009-03-05T10:55:00.006-06:00

One of the small treasures of the video age that I have been digging into recently is the 42nd Street Forever series, 4 collections of exploitation trailers from the 70's and 80's. There's a lot to enjoy:

In order to unwind from the heady films of Mizoguchi, this is a great and quick way to recalibrate my brain..

Everyone knows that trailers are better than the movies 98% of the time anyway and I have to admit I enjoy these quick fixes also for their more formal aspects as well:

I love how both of the above show nothing from the movies themselves, but trump the actual films by promising what they don't show. The films themselves do not have that luxury.

I also like how, especially in the first clip, the film becomes about the viewing experience, the spectatorship. He is interrogating the audience in the same way the audience is interrogating the preview.

And, for bonus points, there is the goofy acting that contrasts with all the people standing behind them who look alternately vaguely intrigued and embarrassed. They're critiquing them right along with you. They are the audience!

I also dare you now not to see the film about the "world's dirtiest phone call."

Mizoguchi's Tokyo March

2009-02-25T10:28:00.004-06:00

As I started teaching the Mizoguchi class last week I have become obsessed with finding the earliest films of his that I can. While I have come along with some nice discoveries, nothing is more surprising than this. 28 minutes of his film Tokyo March. What survives and is linkable below is quite different then the way we think of Mizoguchi and much more experimental and free-wheeling. Also included are some wonderful shots of Tokyo itself in the late twenties.

While the film itself is silent there is some excellent narration form a modern day female Benshi, who would accompany the film in the theater.

This was appended on the foreign release of The Water Magician, but is quite expensive here in America.

Tokyo March Part One

Tokyo March Part Two

Tokyo March Part Three

My favorite Mizoguchi Book (FREE DOWNLOAD)

2009-02-17T10:40:00.004-06:00

To a Distant Observer is not strictly about Mizoguchi but Japanese film and, really, the role of spectatorship. The thing is, Burch's argument is so pertinent to Mizoguchi that the whole book is revelatory to his films in particular.

By the way, here is also a link to the Film School

2009-02-17T10:37:00.002-06:00

“When the name Kenji Mizoguchi is intoned, every piece of camera equipment on earth should execute a deep bow. In the six films showing at Film Forum over the next two weeks in new 35mm prints, Mizoguchi’s gentle but unwavering camera nurtures and observes his characters’ often tragic lives with an emotionalism that is, paradoxically, as intense as any committed to film, yet free of melodrama.”

– Bruce Bennett, The New York Sun. Click here to read review

“If you have never witnessed the visual equivalent of perfect pitch, or understood how a single tracking shot can feel like a declaration of faith, here is your chance.”

– Anthony Lane, The New Yorker. Click here to read review

“There’s more experience, more beauty and more elegant craftsmanship in these half-dozen pictures than most directors manage to get onto a movie screen in a lifetime.”

– Terrence Rafferty, The New York Times. Click here to read review

“Japan’s Kenji Mizoguchi is more than simply pantheonworthy (and superior to his better-known peers Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu.) He’s absolutely necessary.”

– Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out New York

I am not known for agreeing with Anthony Lane, a person I tend to like more as a writer than as a critic, but the man has a point.

Pablo Ferro Title Sequences

2009-02-12T11:39:00.005-06:00

The above is for a movie that I have not seen, Women of Straw, look at those wonderful Kodalith images though!
Designed by Pablo Ferro, he is perhaps better known for The Thomas Crown Affair,

I also quite like the Midnight Cowboy titles:

fake Trader Joe's commercial

2009-02-12T10:12:00.000-06:00

I love TJ's, and this commercial captures the good and the bad

Mizoguchi class starts next Thursday

2009-02-12T07:22:00.005-06:00

One of the things I try to do is NOT watch the films I am going to show in class for at least a month before the class begins. I have seen the films several times and if I watch them in that period, it won't be fresh for me the night I show them.

One thing that I have noticed a sI have taught classes is how important it is for the class to see me reacting to the film as we watch them, it sets the tone.

Well I must admit I have been having a hard time doing it this time because the sequences are so fresh that I find myself revisiting them, thinking about them, revisiting them in my head.

These are truly some of the most daring, rigorous avant garde films in the guise of melodramas. They are exciting, I would go so far to say revelatory.

Can you tell I am excited? Classes start this Thursday.

directed by Mizoguchi Kenji

Mondovino

2009-02-04T09:15:00.003-06:00

Great poster, huh?

This is a movie I have had for awhile and for one reason or another have not gotten around to watching until recently. I rmemeber reading abut it when it played at Cannes the same year as Fahrenheit 9/11 and at the time the reactions were extreme and mixed.

Nossiter is an interesting and talented filmaker and his small fiction films Sunday and Signs and Wonders (also shot on DV) are well worth seeking out. As is this one, with some reservations.

The film is basically about the globalization of wines and the influence of America, California specifically, and Robert Mondavi and Robert Parker more specifically, on the marketplace. Some of the criticism comes off as, and please pardon the pun, sour grapes. I only say this because we are never really given the Mondavi's side with any sort of balance that would allow us to make up our own mind. Shots of Parker with Reagan or the same with one of the heads of the Rothschild estate come off as a little overbearing. That being said, it is an argument well worth making and to view the effect of globalization (more specifically Americanization) through the prism of wine is fascinating.

The other problem I have is how Nossiter doesn't ness. address his role in the film. The film feels like a home movie in many ways and I kind of wish he took that into account while structuring the film. We get the sense that Nossiter is holding back, that he does not want to come off as Michael Moore, but his presence is there and as an audience we want that addressed (who is this?

Apparently there is a much longer mini-series of the material available in Europe too and maybe that addresses some of this.

The Nose

2009-01-31T09:41:00.003-06:00

The Nose is a magazine that is now going online only and I must say, I like it. It is not in a cumbersome, at least for my computer, .pdf format (in know, I know, maybe I am the only person who finds .pdf to be this way).

The current issue is all about cults and superstitions with a really nice layout and design.

Jonathan Rosenbaum will never go away

2009-01-26T20:11:00.003-06:00

and this is a good thing.

If you hop on over to his site Jonathan Rosenbaum.com he continues to write like a madman AND there is this where he writes the preface (it is well worth the PDF download).

Oh and this "on Film Canons" recorded at the Newberry Library for BEZ.

And do not forget the public classroom that he runs weekly at the Siskel film center.

My kind of retirement.

I Love Typography's Best Fonts of 2008 and the joys of Museo

2009-01-15T06:33:00.005-06:00

The typography list is clickable above.

Jos Buivenga has designed some excellent fonts and his Museo and Museo Sans makes the list this year. What is nice about Buivenga is that he makes a lot of his fonts are available free including Anivers:

and Fertigo:

Not all weights in each font family but that is a deal! Great list too.

white Milk

2009-01-15T06:25:00.003-06:00

MIlk is a well made, well acted film that also happens to be boring as hell. It is boilerplate ersatz Hollywood hagiographic award bait. Now, perhaps it is subversive because it is gay boilerplate ersatz Hollywood hagiographic award bait but that does not necessarily make it interesting. And there, for me, is the main fault of the film it wasn't interesting past the excellent main credits which show 16mm films of 50's and 60's raids on gay clubs and bars. It is easy to forget how recent our history is sometimes.

But, as Film Comment so snarkily pointed out, Gus Van Sant has made one of the best films of the year, it's named Paranoid Park. And there is an equally great film on Milk, the documentary The Life and Times of Harvey Milk which accomplishes more in 90 minutes than Van Sant's film does in 2 1/2 hours.

Last Night at the Alamo

2009-01-13T12:23:00.004-06:00

Let me define a film geek for you. If you own a Tivo and you put "Eagle Pennell" in your saved lists so it records anything Eagle Pennell directed even though there is nothing Pennell related on the horizon, you are a film geek. You can also replace Eagle Pennell with say, Allan Barron and get the same results (in his case a whole bunch of Fantasy Islands and Brady Bunches from the man who brought you Blast of Silence)

But this is a good thing! Otherwise I would have never taped Last Night at the Alamo, which for some reason premiered on IFC this last Friday at about 5pm, it is playing again on the 22nd.

Does this mean it will soon be released on DVD? His first feature The Whole Shootin' Match is coming on Feb 10th complete with bonus stuff and a restored negative.

If you happened to see me in Austin for SXSW, you might have noticed that I was sporting a t-shirt for my film that read, "Eagle Pennell died for our sins," but this is the first time I had been able to watch Alamo in a long time and it really holds up. The story of a group of blue collar Texans who come to their regular bar, the Alamo, on its last night of service. The film benefits from some excellent dialogue from Kim Henkel and fine naturalistic performances and atmosphere.

What most impressed me about the film was it's view of blue collar life. It does not seem like the type of film, or perspective, that would be available today, where the attitude would have been much more "colorful, or "earthy" and all the more condescending. Pennell and Henkel understand the people enough and empathize with them enough to see them clearly.

It is a wonderful little film.

Chris Ware illustrates Ozu

2009-01-09T08:15:00.002-06:00

Look at that piece of beauty! Anyone want to pony up the money so Ware can do a remake of An Autumn Afternoon?

John Water's Advice for Obama

2009-01-08T07:18:00.002-06:00

The transcript is below. Apparently this was not aired on BBC America.

"Recognize your supporters and some of them are way more diverse than you could ever imagine. I know gay rights are a tough thing and I understand politics. You can only fight the battles that you know you're gonna win. So gay marriage, for some reason, makes middle America go crazy. I'm trying to figure out why. So I've been studying the sanctity of heterosexual marriage which is hard to figure out when Britney Spears can meet somebody in one night, get married an hour later and get it annulled the next morning. But I'll make a deal with you. I won't fight for gay marriage if you do one thing. The day you become President you make heterosexual divorce illegal. Fair enough?

"And this "don't ask, don't tell" thing - that's not working. Let's do the exact opposite. Let's have no straight people in the army. Let us have an all volunteer army of lesbians. Believe me. They could find Bin Laden. I promise you."

"The poor - people that get welfare checks, people that are on disability, people that get food stamps. We have to reward them - they can't live on the checks you give them so they have to sneak around and make illegal money off the books to pay their rent even or buy food.
Let's not penalize them. If they make $25 extra over their check don't deduct it or cut them off - give them twice as much plus welfare and then they learn to be ambitious. Otherwise they're trapped and they have to study and spend as much time on failure as they would on success. Reward them. Let them get hooked on capitalism."

A Matter of life and Death & Age of Consent

2009-01-06T11:26:00.005-06:00

What a bounty for lovers of film!

In the same manner that Bud Boetticher's films were re-released, we now get two films from Michael Powell, one form his heyday and one from much much later in his career. I have been looking forward to both, having a non region one dvd of the former and an okay dub off of TCM for the latter, but really there is no competition: A Matter of Life and Death is a masterpiece, a movie that can be watched and rewatched, Age of Consent is a very interesting film, especially in consideration to Powell's career and I am glad to have it available.

Both are in many ways about artistic temperament, in A Matter of Life and Death it is the temperament that Powell and Emeric Pressburger impose on the film itself and the second is almost a self portrait of an aging British sensualist. In India they call film directors dream merchants, and Powell certainly fits the bill. With a B&W heaven and a technicolor Earth (probably the most realistic view of the afterlife without just filming dirt) Powell understands what the Wizard of Oz never could: Our dreams if e really look, hardly ever match the strangeness of our reality.

You can listen to our class discussion of A Matter of Life and Death here.

Dave Kehr's appraisal is here.

Massimo Vignelli on Design

2009-01-05T09:40:00.004-06:00

Clickable pdf. above and here.

From the apprentice of Mies who brought us this:

Comes this very cool little treatise on design. He is very much the modernist, which might sit well with you or not, but the ideas are always refreshing. A favorite: "Quality has no hierarchy"

Mizoguchi and His Women, New Facets Class starting Thursday, February 19th

2009-01-03T07:07:00.007-06:00

Sisters of the Gion (1936)
Women of the Night (1948)
Gion Festival Music (1953)
The Crucified Woman (1954)
The Crucified Lovers (1954)
Streets of Shame (1956)

Oh yes I am excited.

Tracy Morgan on Tracy Morgan on Letterman

2008-12-28T06:46:00.004-06:00

As my wife and I were watching Letterman the other night, and doing so for the first time in a long while (due to Colbert being on vacation), the above segment with Tracy Morgan came on.
I was delighted!
I kept shaking my head and saying, pleased, "This is so random!" (Watch it and you'll see what I mean).
Aimee looked at me with the "duh"look that I have become quite accustomed to.
It made me realize how much I say that word, how much I take delight in it. Is there anything that I prize more in the world than sheer randomness? Love, relationships, but in terms of dealing with the world? Randomness wins every time.

Of course the beauty of the above is also in it's pure meta-ness. Tracy Morgan (who plays a character named Tracy Jordan, here is playing a character of, well, himself, or at least perception of himself). It is very smart comedy.

Fun with Photofunia

2008-12-24T11:46:00.002-06:00

Just a small little diversive time waster, but like all good time wasters, a lot of fun.

Photofunia

Remember the Night, tonight on TCM

2008-12-24T07:30:00.004-06:00

"Love reformed her and corrupted him."

The best Christmas movie not on DVD and maybe to me, the best Christmas movie.

Directed by the extremely underrated Mitchell Leisen (Midnight) and written by Preston Sturges, Remember the Night stars Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray. She is a shoplifter, him the DA who through a series of deftly handled contrivances has to take her home to his family for the holidays.

The film is showing twice tonight on TCM and you owe it to yourself to dvr it.

This was the last film that Sturges exclusively wrote before turning director, mainly because he was none to happy with how Leisen cut his script (though he felt quite differently about how he handled the earlier Easy Living). Sturges script deftly handles the pathos of the story with an emotional toughness that makes the love of the couple all the more real, all the more tender. The scene at Niagara Falls is built not on the love they have but how vulnerable that love is. Combine this with some family scenes that are almost Renoirian in their mixed emotions and you have one special holiday film.

Act of Violence

2008-12-24T06:25:00.009-06:00

For some reason, I decided to slip in Act of Violence in the DVD player. I had watched it when it was put out on DVD a while back and was impressed with it, but much more so when watching it again.

Zimmeman is one of those directors, like Robert Wise, who is not accorded much love by auteurists. Sure there is High Noon, but Nun's Story? But look at Wise, would you rather remember him for Sound of Music or Born to Kill? Both these works, to me at least, reveal a much more vital artist than one would expect.

The story is by Collier Young, Ida Lupino's husband and partner, and when you look at the story it isn't surprising. Like the films he made with Lupino (The Bigamist), this is a topical story told with genre infused zeal.

What makes the film interesting is the way that Young and Zimmeman twist the audience identification midway through. Imagine Cape Fear if you started rooting for Mitchum midway through (actually...)

What Act of Violence does is show the phantom that is behind the tract home in post war America.

The vets are proud of the fact that none of their families know what happened during the war, but here we see that as Faulkner so beautifully put it, "The past isn't over, in fact, it's not even the past."

David Foster Wallace is Bookwormed (KCRW)

2008-12-18T07:30:00.002-06:00

We are very lucky to have podcasting. And, for that matter, we are very lucky to be able to listen to KCRW. I really enjoy every show that I have heard, whether it is Elvis Mitchell's The Treatment or DnA: Design and Architecture. Just a wealth of stuff. Well, this archival broadcast with DFW was put on the podcast site but not re-aired due to special programming.

This is special programming.

Silverblatt is an astute host and reader, who tends to bring out ideas in his guests that you can tell they didn't think they would be articulating when they wake up in the morning.

What DFW has to say in this 1996 interview is very prescient to the first years of the millenium.

Essential.

Song of the day: World Gone Wrong

2008-12-18T06:19:00.007-06:00

As we get deeper into winter in the midwest of the Americas and night tends to come, oh, about three hours after dawn, and the economy continues it's "trajectory" and Christmas is well Christmas, I like to listen to the Mississippi Sheiks.

"Strange things are happening everyday." Indeed.

Model Shop TCM, Thursday, December 18th, 10:45pm

2008-12-17T13:26:00.007-06:00

It has been awhile since I have done some movie recommendations based on what s coming up on cable and thought I needed something special to do it again. Well, this is one I have been looking forward to for quite sometime.

I originally was going to show Model Shop over ten years ago when I did my first class at Facets, a course called Strangers in a Strange Land: Foreign Directors Discover America. Even then I had a hard time finding a usable copy. Well it is making it's TCM widescreen debut tomorrow night and my appetite has only been wetted by seeing clips in Thom Anderson's Los Angeles Plays Itself.

I always have enjoyed the unique perspective that foreign directors bring to the American soil, whether it is Murnau in Sunrise or Kitano in Brother. I will make some allowances here: The dialogue is, from everything I have heard so far, lousy. Some of the acting is a little stilted, to say the least (this seems to be a problem in a lot of foreign made US films: Discuss.) Gary Lockwood stars, in a part that Demy originally wanted to cast Harrison Ford, along with Anouk Aimee playing Lola from Demy's film of the same name (there is also a little in joke regarding Demy's Bay of Angels, but I'll let you discover that).

Everything that I have seen in terms of it's locale and time, as a very specific look at Venice and LA in the late Sixties shows it to be a quite special movie. I have my fingers crossed that this is the restored print that the American Cinematheque offered up awhile back. Also, excellent Spirit OST if your tastes run to psch-rock.

Goodbye Babylon a redirection

2008-12-16T17:30:00.003-06:00

I have been alerted that the rapidshare link that I have for the above album has been password protected, which has not always been the case. So, apologies all around and let me instead direct you to a website that has all of the said discs:

El Diablo Tun Tun

A couple of caveats. If, in these trying economic times you have the means and can actually find the boxset, do so. Dust to Digital has put together not just a great collection of music, but a great aesthetic experience. Everything from the box, the liners, to the small piece of cotton they include with it is just a complete perspective on a lost world.

The second is simply look around the El Diablo site, there are many, many riches to be had and they really know their music.

Interview on the Obama Logo

2008-12-12T11:50:00.003-06:00

Excellent look at the process behind coming up with the Obama logo, clickable above, including some excellent videos on what didn't make the cut and the work that goes into branding an ideology. Good stuff.

Man On Wire & The Exquisite City: Urban Planning

2008-12-11T07:09:00.006-06:00

This past week I have had the circumstantial opportunity to view three things that are all related to the same one: How we take in and interact with our environment. First there was The Case of the Grinning Cat, mentioned below, then later in the same day my wife and I took in an exhibit at the Viaduct Theater, called The Exquisite City:

A variety of Chicago artist s were given the city as their template and asked to create their own version of it. As with any exhibit of this type, your mileage will vary, some of the work is thoughtful and considered and some slipshod, and a couple of pieces rise above both. One of the first pieces is a small to scale city block, designed for the size of an ant, with lights, signs, buildings and streets. You look at it the same way you look at the Bean in Grant Park, to place yourself in an urban environment that has become strange in it's reflection:

But what matters to me about all of this is the focus.

Man on Wire derives much of it's pleasure from a similar feeling. Toward the end of the film Petit, the man who walked between the buildings, talks about how the press in America kept asking him why he did it. "Why?" He exclaims, "There is no why. I did it because it was beautiful." And he is right. the idea of taking something that inhuman and massive and making it human, part of one urbanite's dreams and magic.

9/11 is never mentioned and it is not needed. What Petit did was his own form of terrorism if you will, if you see it as imposing his ideology on a a place and time larger than himself. All three of these views are personal ones, they are ways of taking the objective, the cold, and making them human, showing how the rationalism that we impose on objects, people, life, is just a thin veneer, an ideology that lets us excuse the most horrific behaviour, waiting for someone to wire walk across it.

The Case of the Grinning Cat

2008-12-06T06:55:00.009-06:00

The Case of the Grinning Cat is about a lot of things: the millenium, art happenings, 9/11, demonstrations, French elections, graffiti, history, socialism, surrealism, the metro...but to me it is mainly about the use of sidewalks.

Like the cat, this is a piece of tiny art, shot on video, with a concentration o the everyday, and people's faces and everyday actions, that makes it a direct response to that other piece of everyday art: The Cat.

The movie did make me think this: Would there be a better director to tackle Thomas Pynchon? Maybe co-direct with the Farrelly Bros. and have Jerry Lewis star.

As Mr. Pynchon said, "There are conspiracies and anti-conspiacies" and Marker's movies are about both.

As the millennium turned and Marker noticed the cartoonish graffiti appearing around Paris, he decided to make a movie with the grinning cat as a jumping off point to consider all of the above but really it can be boiled down to people and how people react to those things that are just without their grasp.

One of the first things we see in the movie is an internet coordinated happening, people turning up corralled by email and texting to walk in a public space and open and close their umbrellas every ten seconds and, eventually, to quietly sing a song.

This is contrasted later with the anti-war and simply "anti" demonstrations that occurred after 9/11 and after certain designs were made where it seemed like powers that be were not listening to anyone in particular.

Which of the two above, the art happening or the protest, did more good?

I don't know if there is a clear cut winner, but Marker wants us to consider the power and secretive tissue of the former.

Marker's movies hit you with about 7 ideas per minute: theoretical, visual, abstract, concrete, but all of them are tied to a root feeling and need to communicate that take sit out of the clouds and back down to the sidewalks, to the cat.

There are three points in the movie that I will consider, random almost in that you could consider many others. In the first Marker is taping some classical performers on the metro. A man starts to walk in front of his camera, notices him, smiles into the camera and steps back. There are no other directors who welcome the subjects gaze as much as Marker.

The second, the year "2002" is graphically dancing across the floor to signal the ushering in of a new year. After a few moments we see children delightedly playing across the graphic, stepping all over 2002.

In the third, Marker is filming a demonstration by some Islamic Women. Marker positions himself not among the demonstrators, or even as a "pedestrian" watching, but among the journalists covering the event. What was human before suddenly becomes distorted and odd, it is no longer about connection but about true "demonstration." It is real because there are cameras there not because of what is happening in front of them.

The cat is one of the things that we cold have lost over the past eight years: our sense of eccentricity, our grin, our human-ness.

It should be said that the movie is dedicated to actor/suicide George Sanders. All the more reason to love it.

Quantum of Solace

2008-11-25T07:33:00.003-06:00

I see what they wanted here. They wanted to go further than Casino Royale in stripping a Bond film down until all that is left is the "B" and "o", then they want to slowly add the letters, "u", "r", "n", and "e."

What they wanted was a Bond film designed by Mies Van Der Rohe.

Or as I like to say, Walter Hill's The Driver.

Here is the problem. Master shots. Small big ideas these. If I cannot understand the physical space that something is taking place in, it doesn't really exist. It's just happening. There is a point early in the film where they are fighting in some sort of church? Chapel? Art Studio?

And we realize Bond is going to go for the kill, but Forster doesn't change the editing rhythms and all of the sudden it's over. Instead of starting at 120 mph, and then slowing down to 80 to the scenery as well as the speed, he just has the speed. You feel like he can't wait to get this overwith and go on to something else. it robs the movie of it's joy and kicks.

Happy Go Lucky

2008-11-18T16:22:00.004-06:00

Not to start out on too critical a note, but could someone tell Leigh he has to change composers? I love a lot about his movies except in every case, the music. Ugh.

I have been reading a lot about Happy Go Lucky over the past few weeks and most of the reviews talk about it as being Leigh's most optimistic film. Te you have Rosenbaum who sees it as the exact opposite. I don't think either one really captures it because I don't think the main character captures Leigh's philosophy anymore than Johnny in Naked captured the totality of it. The movie for me is much more about the powerful effects of disenfranchisement.

Sally Hawkins plays Poppy, a kindergarten teacher not to show us her innocence, but to show how soon innocence vanishes for some kids. The kid in her class who is bullying others is the starting point of the driving instructor who rails through the other parts of the film. Indeed most of her encounters are with disenfranchised members of society (the homeless, low paid foreign workers) or those who try to help them (her fellow teachers and a social worker love interest).

What makes the film interesting to me is how other characters try to view her through that same lens of marginalization. There is a scene where they go and visit her more middle class sister, where the sister attacks her for her "irresponsibility", but Poppy refuses to look at herself this way. Is she naive? I think a lot of people in the audience (at least the audience I was with) viewed her this way. But is it naive not to accept the box others put you into? I don't think Leigh overplays his hand and editorializes (in the way he has in the past with something like the gourmet restaurant in Life is Sweet).

If anything Leigh shows us how determined you have to be in order to be happy.

More Music! The Mountain Goats

2008-11-16T08:51:00.004-06:00

One of the joys of having a commute in the morning again, and yes there are joys to be had, is being able to listen to ALOT of music and just dream for a good 40 minutes each way.

I have always been a fan of the literate songwriting of the Mountain Goats and have started somewhat religously downloading some of their concerts over at Archive.org. My favorite so far has to be one from a few years ago at the Bottom of the Hill in SF and the reason goes to the heart of why I love music and it can all be found in the last two songs, a cover of the Ace of Base hit "The Sign" and his own "The Best Ever Death Metal Band Out of Denton"

Look at the cover choice and the other title, what would you expect? Jokey hipster sneering ha ha music is what I was afraid of but then you listen. You hear an artist really connecting with his fans as something that he is, a fan. Does he hate the Ace of Base. Neigh, he LOVES the Ace of Base, and when you hear the song through his ears, his voice, you understand why he does.

And if you listen to the audience, you know they do to. There is such a connection, such an exchange between audience and performer, that you understand the true meaning of punk: That is one of us up there, and vice versa-the audience and the performer fuse into one.

They are rewarded with a fan fave, "The Best Ever..." and after the audience sings along the entire first verse and you hear Darnielle yell his, "Yes!" in affirmation, the hairs on the back of your neck will not go down for the rest of the song, a song about people denying other people's dreams, where here they are free flowing.

Music! Music! Robyn Hitchcock at the Old Town School

2008-11-16T08:19:00.007-06:00

It isn't often that you see someone being creative in being totally and completely them self. One of the oys of seeing Robyn Hitchcock is seeing such a thing. Last night he played the Old Town in a trio format and primarily, everything except the encore, from I Often Dream of Trains, his 83 solo release.

It is an odd choice for one of those "complete album" concerts that have become popular over the past few years. Trains is a very insular work, one that was created in isolation without an audience ness. in mind. You listen to it like you are overhearing a conversation, but a conversation of that one guy who is talking to himself at the edge of the el car.

The songs translated splendidly to a trio and the wonderful acoustic confines of the Old Town. Hitchcock was stylish enough to have a polka dot shirt to match his polka dot guitar- One yahoo in the audience started the concert by yelling "Nice Shirt!" Why would you pay $35.00 to come to a show to heckle before you even heard any music?

And the music that followed was inspired and inspiring. What makes Hitchcock such an interesting songwriter to me is how he will take a subject that others wouldn't think of for a song, his favorite buildings or tarantulas, and write something that isn't tossed off, but personal and complex.

A good rule for any artistic enterprise is if it moves you, it will move someone else, and that was fully evident in his music.

Take all of that and add a full on barbershop rendition of "Uncorrected Personality Traits" and a gorgeous rendition of one of my faves, "I Used to Say I Love You"...one for the ages.

You can download the excellent Hitchcock concert embedded above here. It is from a radio show a couple of years ago and he is in fine solo acoustic/electric form. I would imagine the old Town show might show up soon because they allowed taping, though you had to ask, the pre-recorded rules at the beginning of the show still said not to.

Eva Zeisel turns 102!

2008-11-13T11:02:00.006-06:00

Designer,potter, writer, Eva Zeisel turns 102 today. There si a nice little tribute at the blogged linked above.
I am a big fan of Zeisel. Her design is beautiful and functional. There is a heft to what she makes and a sensuosness to the curves and feel that just make them fun to hold.
Her book "On Design" is a wonderful model for anybody who wants to do anything creative or, for that matter, humanistic. To whit:

"If you want to be creative, don't try to do something new. Doing something new means not doing what's been done before, and that's a negative impulse. Negative impulses are frustrating. There the opposite of creativity, and they never yield good ideas-not even in business or technology."

Lola Montes

2008-11-10T09:58:00.006-06:00

As with all good things we start at the end. A devastating finale shot in a film that up until that point refuses to devastate us. Lola Montes is the story of a woman who works her way up through the levels of society and back down again with barely a close up.

Ophuls dares us to be intrigued by the woman, look at how he sets up the narration by the ringmaster as a means of luring us into her carnality, and then his filmaking shuts us out. The flash backs start out not at the beginning of a love affair but the end.

We then see her childhood as circus act and as a sea voyage where she is the castaway. The past is in front of her and not behind her, she comforts the little girl playing herself and watches as it unfolds again.

He makes her supposed carnality a matter of conventions, of the manipulation of what people want to think. With his long take style she is not outside of society, but implicated in it with everyone else, a natural.

The last shot is just a continuation of this: The ringmaster invites us (the audience) to play our one dollar for the chance to caress, to kiss, what has remained unknowable to us, a mystery behind bars. As the camera pulls away and we see first the tens, and then hundreds who are lining uyp for the priviledge, it is heartbreaking because we do not see Lola, we never do, we see ourselves.

A Woman Under the Influence and a telling moment

2008-11-07T08:58:00.004-06:00

I have been pretty obsessive about this movie over the past couple of weeks. Watching it a lot, going back to favorite parts and just letting it wash over me. I find this to be very easy to do with Cassavetes. I guess one of the things that has made me want to return to them was watching Thom Anderson's Los Angeles Plays Itself and his assertion that the works of Cassavetes are comedies.

I see what he means, and it has a lot to do with how narrow our definition of comedy is. His movies are comedies to me because they present extremely human situations in a non-despairing way. Even with, especially with, the stuff that would be the meat of a made for TV movie in anyone else's hands. He does this through his concentration on character and the irrational and especially through how he represents children (Boy, I think Cassavetes would have loved Kiarostami).

The above scene is now my favorite from Woman and I think it is the most telling. You can tell that Cassavetes the director trusts those kids and revels in their response. To me it is the key to the entire film. Look at the way the son makes the fist at his father and Peter Falk's heartbreaking nod, his "I know." Not many other directors would have had the latitude for this, to see that moment clearly and capture it.

There is nothing pre-ordained about that response. Sitting in a room thinking of how to write that scene it is not the most logical moment, but it is the most telling and the most true.

His wife has tried to slit her wrists and he puts a band-aide on it! The kids are the ones being real, responding, adjusting, trying. Working in daycare I have seen this many times, where the children become the caretakers. Cassavetes captures it as seldom have.

Robert Breer

2008-11-07T08:53:00.002-06:00

I found some lovely Robert Breer videos on Youtube (this is just the tip of the iceberg, an early but a favorite). There is a retro going on, but god knows when and if that will come to Chicago.

Now that I am dealing with words all day long and looking at computer screens and booklets, to the point where words become letters and letters become typography and typography becomes abstract, I find ending the day on a nice abstract film is the equivalent of good meditation. It clears the mind and gets me ready for the important stuff, like watching Celebrity Rehab.

Breers work, which oftentimes seems frentetic at first glance also has a nice center of calmness, like watchng a helicopter blade.

Joe Fallon responds!

2008-11-06T12:31:00.000-06:00

I have been meaning to put this up fopr awhile and work kept getting in the way (damn you capitalism!). In any case, in response to a post froma couple of weeks ago on the PBS show Arthur and the fine work done by their creative staff and one name that I happened to notice, Joe Fallon. Mr. Fallon was nice enough to respond to the post and I wanted to reprint his nice missive below.
As you can see, he has excellent taste in movies (this is how us men gauge each other) and I still think his writing in particular is quite responsive to the real and imagined lives of children. I have seen a lot of children's television and most of it is written without any respect for viewers. The writing on Arthur is different.

Brandon,

Someone brought your blog to my attention, and I have to thank you for the compliment -- and for even noticing I exist.

I've never been shy about admitting I'm crazy about "Leave It to Beaver," and don't know why anyone should be. The first few years have some of the best kid dialogue ever written. I find that show hilarious and inspiring to this day and find it tough to understand how those guys could follow it up with "The Munsters."

I'm a fan of "Night of the Demon," "Emperor of the North Pole," and a bunch of other stuff I see mentioned on your blog, too. My knowledge of Miles Davis goes no deeper than "Sketches of Spain," "Kind of Blue" and "Bitches Brew," though...

I have to mention that Ken Scarborough did all the hard work in developing Arthur and making it what it was. He went on to Saturday Night Live for a few years, and is now running a show called "Martha Speaks" for PBS.

Thanks again and have fun,

Joe

Welcome to the new America!

2008-11-05T09:23:00.008-06:00

[I attempted to post this yesterday. Conspiracy?]

There is no way you could watch last night, no matter your political persuasion and not be moved. Obama's eloquence, the crowd of so many faces in Grant Park, so many ages, backgrounds, ethnicities. My wife and I watched and thought, that's the America that we live in.

I was surprised and humbled by the number of people, both back and white who are just a generation older than me who said they thought they would not live to see the day. I was surprised by how quickly I was able to forget or dismiss our history.

One sad note and that is that Stud's Terkel did not get a chance to vote. He wanted to wait until election day and be among the rabble, a site I can only imagine he would have enjoyed. As a bit of penance, here is a video of Stud's Place, his television show from, I believe, 1949.

Don Dellilo on Wanda

2008-11-04T10:19:00.007-06:00

Well, you knew he has good taste.

Wanda, the film that will always be known to me as the one that made someone in my class exclaim after watching it, "You have to be fucking kidding me!" is essayed in the Guardian today (linkable above). The perfect antidote for an election where both candidates were kidding us that the middle class isn't quite dispossessed yet. Wanda shows it.

Wanda is, to put it mildly, a divisive movie. I have seen it labeled as feminist, which gives the audience the wrong idea that it is about a woman's empowerment, which is wrong. Instead, Wanda is about the lack. Of empowerment, of everything. When it originally opened it played only in New York and only for four days. Just like it's main character it almost negated itself out of existence.

Let's try another tack: Imagine if someone took a criminals on the road movie and strung it up upside down and slit it's throat. Now your getting at it, kind of. But what this misses is the delicacy and visible always present yet barely understood pain of the movie. When you start a movie with a mother willingly giving up her children with a shrug and an "I guess" do not expect audience identification to naturally follow.

Delillo:

"When reality elevates itself to spectacular levels, people tend to say, "It was like a movie." Wanda takes the movie sensation and denatures it, turns it into dullish daily life, with the jerky gait of a woman walking a dog."

What an image!

Dellilo makes some suggestions about the last shot of Wanda and it is a beaut of a shot. The character we were introduced to lying asleep under a heap of blankets with a bad hangover, becoming visible midway through the shot, now looks at us in close up, squeezed between groups of people at a bar, a band playing in the background. She bums a cigarette off someone. The camera acts as a mirror, we look at her, she looks at us. Delillo suggests the dawning of self-realization, which I can see, but to me it looks a little different, that freeze frame. The movie just ends. The music keeps playing but the camera fades. What it suggests to me is terror.

For her. For us.

One of the most unsettling motion pictures ever made.

A Star is Born

2008-11-01T22:04:00.005-05:00

One of the best things one can do on a weekend is simply watch TCM, not all day, but switch it on when something catches your fancy and turn it off when you are bored. Earlier I watched the majority of 2001, and now coming home I turn on to find A Star is Born

It is a movie about creative love, the love of two artists for each other and their talent and how scary that can be, when somebody believes in you when your not sure if you believe in yourself.

There is one scene in particular when James Mason first hears her sing and he talks to her afterward. Cukor keeps switching the location, from the nightclub to the kitchen, the street, Mason's car, and Garland's rooming house while their conversation, their first, continues on.

My first thought was, "That's not how I would do it." I thought I would keep it tight in one space, letting their intimacy grow in a more hothouse environment. Not saying my approach is wrong, but Minnelli's is right.

The movement draws them closer together and toward their separate homes. The connection is made real because of their movement. It is contrasted later when she is first introduced in the studio, same sense of movement but now it is frightening and confusing because she is a nobody again. In fact they repeatedly tell her they don't want to see her face until they change her name entirely, "Vicki Lester."

What we see here are two artists who love each other because they respect each other's art.

The love is empathetic and adult, these are people who have been around the block. It scares them. To have somebody believe in yourself when you don't. Scary stuff.

"But Norman, I can't sing for anybody, I'm too scared."

"Of course, your scared. We all are."

To me this is the key exchange of the film. That fear of finding a love that will consume you. If you think your crap and somebody tells you your not...

The other thing with the movie is the reconstruction. Many scenes that were lost or partially lost have been filled up with B&W stills over the soundtrack.

What makes this particularly evocative is how they will switch between these stills and, say, a fully saturated technicolor insert of some hand creme. It is completely random and irrational, and therefore perfect. A Hollywood movie becomes a surreal found object.

You can find a wonderful video of the sequence cited above here.

Trash day

2008-10-29T08:50:00.002-05:00

This morning, coming into work, coming into the office, two of my co-workers were talking about trash day.
"When is your?, they asked.
"Tuesday and Thursday." I replied
"Two Days, wow."
"Well, when I lived in D.C. I had two, Tuesday and Saturday"
Saturday I thought to myself, that would be pretty sweet.

Yes, I was fantasizing about a Saturday trash day.

Colossal Youth and Cinemascope

2008-10-28T21:33:00.002-05:00

A little note from Chris K. reminded me of something quite important:

For those of you who subscribed to Cinemascope Magazine in the hopes of getting the DVD of Costa's completely unavailable Colossal Youth, you are out of luck. Though they are still advertising it on their website they have actually substituted a copy of The World and stated that Colossal Youth will NOT be part of their promotion due to rights issues.

I feel sorry for Cinemascope magazine which seems to have gotten right in the middle of a nice debacle trying to promote their fine magazine. Are you still getting a good deal with the mag? Absolutely, but this leaves a bad taste in people's mouths. That is also exacerbated by a couple of things.

1. Stop promoting that you gave away a Colossal Youth DVD on your website. Bad, bad, bad.

2. Give away something comparable. The World is already out on DVD, find something rare that will get the film collector really going.

3. Make sure the film you give away is not in a crappy copy and this is,yes, a pretty crappy copy.

Dagnabbit, I want my Costa

(There is a rumor it will come out on Criterion, how about with The Rabbit Hunters? That would be nice)

The Rabbit Hunters

2008-10-28T14:55:00.003-05:00

Pedro Costa's semi-sequel to Colossal Youth is now available at YouTube and that is the first part above. Now I will fully admit that this is not the best way to become introduced let alone immersed in Costa's very particular cinema. The quality of the video is fine but it is still Youtube quality. There is also the fact that the film has to be cut up into three parts for all of it to fit, leaving the viewer with three "intermissions" whether you want them or not.

In terms of the film itself, I do not think it is a bad leeway into the particular demands of the Costa universe. It is only a little over twenty minutes and I think Costa is one of those rare directors where a longer time span works better for the film (It's that crazy immersion thing). All of that being said, there are few directors working today with the command of such a personal film syntax as Costa (even though some of his admirers think that he will also heal the sick, balance the budget and rejuvenate the world).

Especially if you enjoy Tournuerian film and the mystery that he brought to bear on everyday world, Costa will be right up your alley. This is finally what I find so valuable about Costa: he is clearly someone who perceives and is mystified by the irrational world around him. Others will pretend that it all makes sense but Costa lets it not. Just like Tourneur, the results can be beautiful and horrifying.

Rachel Getting Married

2008-10-26T07:18:00.005-05:00

Yes, okay the rehearsal scene goes on too long. And, sure, okay, the party scene goes on too long as well. Are there such things as perfect films? I don't think so. It's too subjective. there are too many perspectives and anyways is perfection something to be strived over in art?

Expression sure, but perfection?

All this being said, I think it is Demme's best film since Something Wild. I would also go so far to say it is the first film of the Obama era (Even if McCain is elected, it is his era). Silly people call this "post race" but that is wishful thinking and, lets face it, more than mildly offensive. Instead Demme takes a Chekovian approach and shows a world view of people that I also accord to movies: To love them for their imperfection.

Jenny Lumet's script and Demme's direction plunge you right into the story without a guidemap, a very Cassavetes touch. At the end of the film I still wasn't sure how some people were connected to others, but it didn't matter because Demme showed how they related to them. Demme gave the feeling of life happening around them and around us too.

Perceptively written and acted, I can also pay it one of my highest compliments.

It made me cry.

World's Greatest Sinner

2008-10-25T09:05:00.006-05:00

Well it happened last night.

TCM showed it's print of The Worlds Greatest Sinner and I woke up this morning not knowing what to expect.

I have a copy of the film on VHS thta I purchased from Mr. Carey's son, and while I welcomed having ANY copy, it was a pretty battered one. Would TCM be showing the same one.

Well as aI started to watch this morning, thankfully no. It looks almost like a fully restored print.

I know that Cassavetes said that it was his favorite film which ...well, who knows? I can see what he responded to, there is no way you can watch the movie and not get an idea of who Timothy Carey was, its more than a world view or philosophy, its like the rhythm of the film, the editing has his dna in it.

Meijers, at home in the world

2008-10-22T14:11:00.003-05:00

Near where I work there happens to be a Meijers store. People at work have talked about it before and needing to get out I decided to check it out. I think I am still a little shell shocked.

The store is located on a hill, henceforth known as "the hill above the Arbys" and like the titular "city on a hill" or if you prefer Hank Williams to Puritans, "mansion on the hill" this one is there to dwarf those who come before it.

When you enter the first thing you notice is the sheer size. Like a Costco but more. The ceilings are a little higher, the store goes back a little further. I wanted to look at the groceries and had entered on the wrong side, entailing a journey past, and I capitalize on purpose, Everything Else. I pass by people and they look at me in a daze, a few smiling, but, oddly, nobody looking away.

There is no way that you cannot feel dwarfed. You enter and the space screams at you, "You don't matter!", "You don't exist, you are impermanent!" I think we look at each other to be reassured. it is the kind of environment that you can feel yourself tugging back at a memory of a parent in: You want you mom.

Waiting in the 12 Items or less line (how much research went into the 12? I can only imagine months of meetings and stat gathering in terms of the average number of purchases. Families in the middle of a Saturday and single men buying cheese in the middle of the night, all accounted for to come up with that average: 12), the man ahead of me, looking somewhat like Bela Lugosi with red blooming blotches going across his face points to the cash register at the unfazed check out girl,

"That price is wrong! The price is wrong!"

He is buying a twelve pack of Miller and it should read a dollar cheaper. The check out girl looks hardened, past the man and without even thinking knocks the dollar off the price. There seem to be codes and levels to her behaviour, her harsh disregard, that I can barely suss out.

I am momentarily afraid of how she will regard me.

Leaving I am winded. I feel both jangled and exhausted. Strangely there is a part of me that wants to go back.

Caslon, the typeface the cause

2008-10-21T14:42:00.003-05:00

Just found this fascinating as I have become more attuned to type design now that I am working in publishing. The above is a clickable link to the history of the Caslon typeface. The type of America.
Take that you Helvetica Pinko Bastards!

AO Scott on Sullivan's Travels

2008-10-21T14:30:00.003-05:00

The above is a clickable link to a little AO Scott's piece on Sturges 1941 summation Sullivan's Travels. It is odd because I was just watching Sullivan's Travels last week in the middle of a Sturges binge that preceded my Cassavetes binge (Who's next? I'm thinking Oshima).

The piece Scott does is interesting though his criticism seems to define middlebrow NYTimes Arts reviewing. With the wonderful exception of Dargis, I find most of the Times' film coverage to be a little to MOR and too hung up on literature and not really excited by what film is about-just because a film is well written does not make it good.

And this is what I have to say about this Sturges picture: People tend to call it his masterpiece because it is a great "summation" picture. A movie that makes a nice little gift box of all of the director's major themes in one tidy place.

As this it is terrific and a still mighty entertaining film but I do not think it is his masterpiece. I would actually place Miracle, Palm Beach, The Lady Eve, Hail above it in the canon. We do get all of his major themes in Sullivan's but there is a bit of a misshapen quality to it that sets the tone a little off and it just doesn't reach the heights of those other pictures for me.

A minority opinion probably but think of it the next time you watch the movie, I would be interested to see who thinks I am off my rocker on this one.

Funny Face

2008-10-20T10:40:00.004-05:00

This past week I have been going through some pretty major Cassavetes and while it has been fun, challenging, enjoyable, emotional, etc. I have to admit I was quite pleased when last night my wife turned Funny Face on TCM. The Donen musicals rank pretty high up there in the movie movie experience and this is one of the best, especially coming from Astaire. Look at these colors:

Nonetheless it offered quite a bit of culture shock after a week of Cassavetes and it made me look at why on Earth we enjoy watching these things called movies.

I consider myself to be an auteurist by perspective yet I hardly ever stand back to consider what that means. While watching Funny Face last night and the ease and magnetism between Astaire and Hepburn I realised part of my auteurist bent was a transference of star power away from actors to the director. Certainly when you look at someone like Cassavetes, their power as a personality shapes how we view his films. Even in his films without him, his presence looms large over all that we watch and certainly through the surrogate performances of Rowlands we get two of the central pleasures of movie watching: Watching a star and watching a face.

Indeed, this and the other pleasures are harder to quantify. It is very hard to go out and look as intently as we want at people. Study them, look at others as we might look at ourselves ina mirror. Movies offer that forced empathy. The other enjoyment lies at the essence of what makes film watching pleasurable: What we see. Not the themes of the film or the story but something as simple as movement across the screen or the way we are able to look at something as abstract as color and the way that it makes us feel.

The other day I was watching an Iranian film called Bashu and the one image that has stuck with me is a little boy walking down a creek away from the camera and crossing it back and forth midway down. A small image, not set up, thought out, mediated by a director (it is too small to even think about), yet it is what has stuck with me from the film. As I was watching it I remember thinking, "I bet it would be fun to jump across that creek, and then it happened. A tiny bit of wish fulfilment.

More on Love Streams

2008-10-16T10:07:00.005-05:00

I have been thinking a lot more about Love Streams as I have been slowly re-watching it over the past couple of days. There is one scene in particular that Cassavetes has called his personal favorite.

Robert and his sister Sarah are home after their respective nights out, with Diahnn Abbott and, for her, a bowling alley. It is late and they are talking in his kitchen about creativity, about whether love is creative.

There are many ways to shoot the scene all of which would be more conventional then the way Cassavetes does. They talk in the breakfast nook but the camera is placed, almost obstinately, in the kitchen itself, where they alternately come in to make their coffee. For the majority of the conversation, Robert remains off-screen, we only see his hand as Rowlands talks with him and busies herself.

The first time I re-watched the scene, it seemed like an odd one to consider a favorite, no fancy camera moves, emotional histrionics, large and lumbering philosophical points. Instead it is opposite, everything is cut to the bone, even Cassavetes presence!

It is a perfect summation of the film in many ways as we see each character in the absence of the other (even when they are together). Indeed for the first hour of the film, you do not know the connection between Sarah and Robert (past lovers?)

If you think about all of the stuff that SHOULDN”T work in the film like the fact that the house is obviously Cassavetes own, that he and his wife really do not resemble brother and sister, that there is no conventional structure to the film.

Yet, as you actually watch the film, each one of these “mistakes” takes on an expressive quality that works wonderfully in the film as a whole.

The house becomes a projection of the twined desires of Robert AND Sara with the pictures of a family that seems like an alien desire to them, so present yet so mysterious. And the incestuous undertones of the characters come to the forefront with the husband and wife playing them.

It is not a movie that asks to be seen more than once, it demands it. It is a masterpiece because it remains so slippery, constantly eluding our grasp to define it.

Two bits of ephemera. Here is Siskel and Ebert at the Movies reviewing the film (You have to sit through A Soldiers Story):

And here is one of two trailers for the film that Cannon films uploaded to Youtube. Look at how they try to sell this project (I have to say I don't envy them):

office

2008-10-15T16:03:00.000-05:00

Going to the bathroom at work and the guy in the next stall is wearing headphones as he uses the toilet. Then I walk past an empty conference room and looking in I see a woman’s outline in the dark. She is talking on her cell phone and quietly crying to herself. When we make eye contact she smiles at me.

Cassavetes and Arts Turn Ons

2008-10-15T13:43:00.004-05:00

Last week I went on a bit of a Cassavetes kick which is really not that odd, but if you haven’t seen the movies in awhile, you forget how much they just grab you and won’t let go. I have been trying to find an Adrian Martin article that was put in a special issue of Cinemascope and then republished in Senses of Cinema called Inventor of Forms. It places Cassavetes unique achievement away from the more art brut language of Carney and redeems him more in terms of his very unique formalism and expressiveness.

When you look at Love Streams and the last scene where the dog is replaced by the nearly nude man and then magically tranforms back to a dog, what is naturalistic about that? Too many independent filmmakers try to limit Cassavetes in the language (and discrete form) of naturalism when instead his movies are expressive outbursts of his characters inner lives. It is the way that he fuses this emotionalism in a form that can contain it, hold it and give it meaning.

The problem is this. I wake up watch part of something like Love Streams or A Woman under the Influence and there I am, it’s seven in the morning and I am going to work. What the hell am I supposed to do with all that for the next eight hours. I suppose that if I watched them at night I could at least try to go to sleep. The problem with art, especially the good stuff, is that you end up wanting to mainline it, to keep going on that high. And that is not a place you can live very long.
But then you see something like that. Or Fassbinder’s Third Generation, or read a good book, or see some amazing art and you think you can at least try to live in it for a little while longer.

Jimmie Dale in Chicago, offending the locals

2008-10-14T10:56:00.001-05:00

This weekend, went to the Old Town School of Folk Music to see Jimmie Dale Gilmore. Now Jimmie Dale (when you have the chance to write this over “Gilmore”, take it) is what I would call a cosmic cowboy. Sort of if Hank Williams dropped a ton of acid. This is a good thing. Jimmie Dale also likes to talk. A lot.
And the Old Town might be considered a sort of bastion of Leftist thought (shocking that folk music could be leftist, isn’t it?) Well all of this apparently went over the head of the party girl who sat next to me and whooped and hollered up a storm until Jimmie Dale started gleefully calling out the President and Republicans for the past eight years.
“Are there any intelligent Republicans here?”
About four people applauding, including the woman next to me and her date.
“Well, you should stand up, because I have never seen an intelligent one before.”
At first she grumbled to herself, then as he continued she started mildly yelling, “just play your music!” but he didn’t bite and she eventually left after he recommended the book Cronies to everyone and called the Bush Administration, “evil criminals”.
What did she expect at the Old Town School of Folk Music? Bob Roberts?

2008-10-08T15:00:00.003-05:00

Talking to people at work and I realize I am a bit of a freak. Not for my penchant toward street dancing and unnatural love of LaWanda Page but because I , unlike apparently the majority of the planet, have not seen the Lord of the Rings movies.

At some point I will, I'm sure. Down the line. Next year maybe. But I was struck by the immediate heart struck raptness of their response to the film. They don't like it, they seriously love it. Life life changing, lets name our baby after Frodo love.

Now it should be of absolutely no surprise to anyone that I am behind the times and occasionally, really just occasionally, not really with it. It is not that I don't want to see the movies, they don't offend me. They just don't interest me that much. I have to admit when they were talking about it, my first reaction was of a smug condescension, "Oh, those movies". I thought of my own experiences (Cassavetes, Fassbinder, Burnett) as so much better and more healthy and those.

It is a silly thought, I realize. Really it is just a matter of cultural baggage and signifiers. Not that loving Cassavetes makes me cooler, but it seems more acceptable in the circles I run in.

As I was explaining to me there are two kinds of artists, those who show us the world as it is and those who show it the way they want it to be. Genre (even "negative" genre like thrillers and detective fiction) tend to work the latter, or some not as well recognized like "the art house film"(Little Miss Sunshine anyone?).

It is a false dialectic but a pretty powerful one.

So I am sure I will watch those movies at some point but can someone promise me there will be a moment in them like Gena Rowlands in Love Streams when she tells her husband on a payphone that she is ready to come home, that she is "almost not crazy now"?

I think about it and it floors me.

ABC Africa and the Tourists Gaze

2008-10-06T18:08:00.010-05:00

People who read me regularly know that one of the things that I cannot stand is a camera looking down on a child, it is a possessive view point that denies the child a pov or a field of vision of their own. Kiarostami films with his consumer hand held dv camera almost exclusively looking down but here it does not bother or distract me, I find it vital to how he sees himself and "presents" Uganda.

The point to me is that Kiarostami never presents himself as inside the community, always outside, gazing, watching and not ness. judging the people but judging the attitude that is placed around them. Indeed when he does drop and crouch at a child's level it is to allow them to look through his viewfinder and share his vision, his "monitor"

From the first scene when we see the fax coming through to him abut the need to make the film from the UN, to the talking heads who posit the Aids epidemic, the orphans in the context of "Africa" or "Christianity" or "Poverty", Kiarostami refuses much of it just by his gaze, by watching the children and community, their joy, their singing.

It is not that he denies the harshness of their condition but celebrates the fact that they cannot be contained through one lens, the humanity of his vision is that he does not offer false empathy but implicates the outside gaze as part of the problem (whether it be aligned with not offering condoms for fear of offending"Chrisitian" beliefs or the parents at the end picking up their baby to take back to Europe).

There are points in the film where you cringe because of the gaze. When we watch a nurse cut up a cardboard box to carry a baby's dead body on a bicycle, Kiarostami's camera swarms in and seems to infringe on the scene, you want to hold him back, but it makes you realize as a viewer that you are also the one swarming in on this scene: The hospital, the body, Africa.

He refuses to let it "just" be heartbreaking, or tragic. We have the Kiarostami moment, so redolent of The Wind Will Carry Us, as he and his collaborator literally stumble in the dark after midnight when the electricity is shut off, lamenting the lack of television, of the internet.

"It is our good fortune, that as humans we can adapt to anything," Kiarostami states.

It is a sly joke and his vision remains one of critical wonder.

I Was Born, But...

2008-10-06T10:06:00.008-05:00

It is a title that seems apprehensive with the words starting in caps, lowercase letters seem to do it justice more but for now we will bow to the grammar gods.

Can you imagine an American film. A comedy. About children. Created around the same time as the "Our Gang" films being called, "I Was Born, But..."?

As I was watching it I was trying to parse it into an analogy that made sense to me: Kiarostami directs a "Little Rascals"? Way too reductive. I do like the idea that a great director of bittersweetness and outright tragedy as Ozu could make a playful, funny, yet extremely serious and exciting film like this. I look forward to Mizoguchi's Three Stooges films.

The first thing that you notice is, as it has been commented before, Ozu's playfulness, manifesting itself fully in the mobility of his camera, which tracks with aplomb. The second is the earnestness with which he treats the entire situation from the child's POV. We get an entire social and familial system that is incredibly rich and detailed but from the POV of the children in the neighborhood. There is no condescension in this viewpoint, it's primacy isn't questioned.

this is what makes the rest of the film so funny and so devastating. They look at the bully and they look at their father and then at the bully's father and their dad's boss. They see what is ahead of them, mainly a lifetime of eating shit, that the behaviour is just codified. It is a frightening or at least Really Suck-y realization and the strength of the film is that Ozu realizes most kid's have it.

The Earrings of Madame de...

2008-10-02T10:46:00.007-05:00

Interestingly I was thinking about Ophuls last night when I was watching the Cubs. A commercial came on for a movie based on Revolution Road, a Richard Yates novel. The original novel is probably one of the most acidic, funny, and sad books I have read about post-war America and the delusion of a certain type of Suburban person (The kind who sees themselves as above being suburban). The wonderful thing about the novel is the characters sense that they are trapped but certainly can't articulate why they feel this way.

Well all that is apparently shot in the movie when we see Kate Winslet yelling, "I am not that person!" or some such thing. My wife's apt response, "Why don't you just move?"

Well I was thinking how Ophuls would have never let such a moment happen. He didn't need such ham handed screaming. A simple and elegantly gliding tracking shot was all he needed to implicate the characters and viewers in the trap of society.

Look at the shot in Madame de... when De Sica and the sublime Darrieux dance across the floor only to disappear behind an impressionistic canvas of people dancing! Shivers! They have become their own representation, larger than life, a work of art idealized in their own mind and irretrievably frozen in time, a literal relief from the tragedy to come.

As it is put best at the end of Le Plaisir, "But, my friend, happiness is not a joyful thing."

How long it takes to learn that lesson.

Bach in the morning

2008-09-30T09:16:00.003-05:00

The past couple of weeks I have been driving into work listening to a lecture on Bach's St. Matthew Passion and The Goldberg Variations while alternately listening to said music and occasionally throwing in some Ryan(not Bryan)Adams.

The lecture itself is really good, part of the "Great Scholars" courses that you can check out of the library. Dr. Richard Greenburg seems like a good teacher, knows his stuff, enjoy listening to him. It is a great way to spend a morning drive, where your other option is to listen to NPR contemplate the market and swiftly and decisively swerve off the road. This is the better option.

Here is the problem, and it links in to what I was saying about awe in another post. Here I am driving west on Golf rd., listening to, say, chorale number 53. A height of human achievement. Something that connects us to the gods and each other. Then I see a Dunkin' Donuts or think, "Why do pants have zippers?'

Could Bach have imagined that 380 years in the future a geeky man spilling coffee on his pants (with a zipper!)going west at 50 mph yet, miracuosly, sitting almost still, west in a new country on a road named after a sport that hasn't been invented yet listening to the entirety of his Passion on a small silver disc while he thinks about getting a bagel would still be able to find the awe and humanity in his work?

Watch this in your cube and see what I mean:

Sans Soliel+Pierrot Le Fou and waking up too early

2008-09-30T09:10:00.010-05:00

Woke up way to early this morning and while I was deciding if I should work out before or after work (after, nobody should have to put up with me smelling even worse than normal for 8 hours) I decided to make some coffee and slip in a couple of movies and watch them "Godard" style. Flipping back and forth and just soaking in the pure movie-ness of it all.

On the menu, in homage to Godard, Pierrot Le Fou and in honor of inspiration Marker's Sans Soleil. After having spent the weekend watching Ophuls' The Earrings of Madame De..., a truly awesome experience and I don't mean that in the modern skater debased meaning of awesome, I mean, well, "awesome".

The problem with awe, and I mean, it is a small problem, is it doesn't leave you too many places to go. How do you beat awe?

I decided to treat it a little like heroin and just look for more fixes. Okay I have my morning Bach fix. I mix it up with a little "La Cienega Just Smiled", always a good thing. But here I was at 5:30 in the morning and not wanting to wake my wife up, so looking for something I could watch on my computer, something that would make me, you know, excited, pumped, happy to be alive, challenged.

What always draws me into Sans Soleil is the faces. Marker is so sophisticated in terms of how he uses film and the essay form but it is always grounded in the emotions of remembrance, which is to say of being alive.

The opening image of the girls in Iceland looking at the camera- the bewilderment, the challenge, the wariness. The image is mundane in it's humanity. It seems forgettable, ephemeral, yet it stays with you for the rest of the film in the same way.

Per Citizen Kane:
Bernstein: "A fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn't think he'd remember. You take me. One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry, and as we pulled out, there was another ferry pulling in, and on it there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on. She was carrying a white parasol. I only saw her for one second. She didn't see me at all, but I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since that I haven't thought of that girl."

How old would those girls be now? do they remember being photographed in their youth? What do they remember?

Our memory sometimes seems so random, so arbitrary, almost unfair.
I can remember getting an ice cream when I was three but keep forgetting what my grandmother looked like. I have to dig the pieces of her out like a puzzle that has been scattered by a cat.

By the way, you can view the full text of Sans Soleil here.

Pierrot Le Fou is a different beast all together:

Samuel Fuller ties it in right at the beginning of the film, "emotion". It seems like such an odd word when you think of the cerebral Godard, yet I think it is the material he works best on. There is a frisson between his intellectualism and the rueful emotions of his material that it makes the movies infinitely richer, more playful and sadder. it is one of the (many) reasons that Le' Mepris remains such a charged and visceral experience.

You think about the broad outlines of the film, "The last romantic couple", "a boy and girl on the lam". Think about how it would be made now, or in the nineties (oh yeah, they did that, didn't they?). Would there be such a wilfull combination of the head and the heart?

As I switched back and forth watching the two films the one word that kept coming back to me was regret. The joy of regret. Of being able to have them, look back and remember them. Whether they be a movie, a girl or, maybe for Marker, a cat. Grinning, of course.