- “‘He was once somebody’s baby boy…'”: Critical appreciation of ten film performances by Gene Hackman.
- John D. Cook shares a graph of Voyager 2’s speed as it achieves Solar System escape velocity. “In a gravitational assist, the velocity of a spacecraft with respect to the planet doesn’t change, but the velocity relative to the sun changes greatly.”
- Increasingly Inconvenient MTA Service Advisories, by Tom Smyth.
Trains are being held due to an investigation at the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station. They’re trying to figure out how to pronounce “Schermerhorn.”
- What better name can we give to the realm of music that we call (ill-advisedly) “classical”? My girlfriend in college preferred the term “art music,” but I think that term is too limiting. I’ve also heard “Western concert hall music,” which is getting closer. Matthew Aucoin has some thoughts.
- I’m not a big fan of our commonwealth flag (just the seal slapped on a field of blue), but there’s one element that I’ll speak up for: Texas schools nix lesson over Virginia state flag’s exposed breast.
“I see her as an Amazon,” said Virginia Senate Clerk Susan Clarke Schaar, recalling how a little girl summed up the motto during a tour of the Capitol: “Take that, big boy.”
- Early 20th-century home economics researcher Inga Allison experimented with baking at high altitudes to achieve the perfect Fort Collins brownie.
- I found eighty cents in my sofa cushions, how’s that? Fyre Festival’s embattled founder is selling the brand: ‘It’s time to pass the torch’.
Category: Film
Contemporary American Theater Festival 2024: supplemental
I returned to Shepherdstown for a repeat viewing of Tornado Tastes Like Aluminum Sting, in an attempt to collect all the allusions to films, filmmakers, and characters that CB drops, geek that I am. I missed a couple, but here is what I could capture in my notes, in addition to those called out in my earlier blog post.
- Night of the Living Dead, George Romero, 1968
- The Bride of Frankenstein, James Whale, 1935
- The Ox-Bow Incident, William A. Wellman, 1942
- Francis X. Bushman, something-something Heart of the Holy Ghost?
- The Virgin Suicides, Sofia Coppola, 1999
- The Fly, Kurt Neumann, 1958
- Metropolis, Fritz Lang, 1927
- Lodz Ghetto, Alan Adelson and Kate Taverna, 1988
- Gaslight, George Cukor, 1944
- something-something Birnam Witch Burns?, ca. 1961
- From Russia with Love, Terence Young, 1963
- Basil Rathbone in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Alfred L. Werker, 1939
- Marlin Brando in The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola, 1972
- Laurence Olivier in Hamlet, dir. Olivier, 1944
- the Star Wars cycle
- Willy Loman, pick your favorite version of Death of a Salesman
- Foxy Brown, Jack Hill, 1974
- Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Stanley Kubrick, 1964
- Dracula, Tod Browning and Karl Freund, 1931
- Full Metal Jacket, Stanley Kubrick, 1987
Hmm, now that I’ve seen Akerman’s News from Home, I see that certain liberties were taken when CB describes the film: there is only one door, and there are no brownstones.
Upcoming: 60
Ooh, I’m ready for this: this fall, Feathers McGraw returns to vex Wallace and Gromit.
Some links: 99
- Matthew Jordan (perhaps) explains why I love/d Rollerball so much.
- There’s a ha-ha in Fairfax County. Fairfax Master Naturalist Jerry Nissley visits River Farm.
- See Rosslyn’s gas station-church combo before it’s redeveloped.
- We could have used one of these robots when director Lee was attending rehearsals remotely: Lisa Sniderman collaborates with Open Circle Theatre.
- Thomas Wolf wants to see hard numbers on the Potomac Yard arena boondoggle.
Shame on any legislator who would vote to advance this proposal on such incompetent evidence.
- Restoring Joshua trees in designated wilderness with some camelid assistance.
Some links: 96
- New York begins to roll out new trash receptacles. A heavy base and a light basket that lifts out—what a concept.
- ChatGPT bails out on providing a precise quotation from Proust to Elif Batuman. Surprise, surprise.
2. Did ChatGPT seriously just recommend I “delve into Proust’s monumental work in its entirety”?
3. Am I being trolled?
4. Is it possible that the passage I’m thinking of wasn’t published until after September 2021?
5. No. - T. Rex explains why I like the original Rollerball (1975). (Well, Norman Jewison, James Caan, and John Houseman might have something to do with it.)
Some links: 95
- Peter Dreier for the Conversation: “five unsung labor movies, all based on real-life events, that, in my view, deserve more attention.”
- ChatGPT makes up stuff about John Kelly.
Perhaps the computer program trawled through the multiverse and found a timeline in which John Kelly had nabbed a Pulitzer for his “thoughtful musings on Twiggy, the water-skiing squirrel, and how weird it is that Sugar Pops are now called Corn Pops.”
- At Shorpy, a fine photo of a D.C. Transit streetcar (not a PCC this time).
- ICYMI: The U.S. Geological Survey is collecting dead lepidopterans found by community scientists in AL, GA, KS, NE, OK, and TX.
- An exploration of the oeuvre of Neil Breen (of Double Down and several others).
Some links: 94
- Expurgation considered harmful: What’s Lost When Censors Tamper With Classic Films, by Niela Orr.
- Still trucking: Against all odds, the rare Devils Hole pupfish keeps on swimming, by Nell Greenfieldboyce.
- And still trucking: The Comic Strip That Explains the Evolution of American Parenting, by Julie Beck. Perfect button on the end of the piece.
Vertical
In many ways, the streamers [like Netflix and Amazon] have been rebuilding Hollywood’s old studio system. That system, which lasted roughly from the 1920s to the 1950s, was powered by vertical integration. Major studios like Paramount or Warner Bros. didn’t just own a bunch of soundstages, but also the theater chains that screened their movies, meaning they had complete control over every aspect of a movie’s creation—a straight line down from film production to distribution to exhibition.
Even the sharp corners of ostensibly “bad” moves are being rounded over:
Critic Judy Berman argues in The Baffler, for instance, that the internet and the larger “streaming void” it perpetuates have slowly been killing the cult film, the “scruffy, desperately original, and intermittently brilliant works of transgressive art” once enjoyed communally on the midnight circuit, but now cynically engineered for social media engagement, à la Sharknado. Naturally, it’s not just the makers of would-be Rocky Horrors who are suffering.
Although she mentions the creative financing that powered Irving Levin’s distribution of Ida Lupino’s Filmmakers movies, she misses the opportunity to comment on the similar pattern shown by The Cannon Group during its ownership by Golan and Globus.
That explains Blofeld’s cat
“No time to die: An in-depth analysis of James Bond’s exposure to infectious agents,” by Wouter Graumans et al.
We hypothesize that his foolhardy courage, sometimes purposefully eliciting life-threatening situations, might even be a consequence of Toxoplasmosis.
Particularly worrying:
While Bond was traveling to Japan (1967) shortly after the H2N2 pandemic (1957–1958), his actions were at odds with knowledge on the different modes of respiratory virus transmission. Bond regularly joined crowds without social distancing including on public transport.
Tweaking Rs
Clay Risen has an obit for Joan Washington, dialect coach for many a film actor.
“Cornish is harder and more nasal than Devon because it’s a windy peninsula,” she told The Sunday Telegraph. “If you’ve got the wind in your face, you’ve got to speak without giving much away.”
Sith
Cleaning out a file folder of clippings… I rediscovered this delightful pan of Episode III by Anthony Lane:
… I still fail to understand why I should have been expected to waste twenty-five years of my life following the progress of a beeping trash can and a gay, gold-plated Jeeves.
Atomic breath!
The only way to perform rankings: “Godzilla vs. Kong: A functional morphologist uses science to pick a winner,” by Kiersten Formoso.
Walter Neff agrees
It’s a honey of a headline: ‘Double Indemnity’ Is 75, But Anklets (And Film Noir) Are Forever.
The sizing on the canvas
Twenty Thousand Hertz goes into the booth with a loop group.
Succession
Footnote of the month:
La tête d’un homme [by Georges Simenon] was adapted again in 1949, to lesser effect, as The Man on the Eiffel Tower. A clunky color spectacular starring Charles Laughton as Maigret, it is mostly notable for its location shooting in Paris, and for being directed by co-star Burgess Meredith, who took over after Laughton had the original director fired.
—Jake Hinkson, “Georges Simenon: The Father of European Noir,” Noir City no. 22