KVARESTO8
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Fairfax Cross County Trail, 41 miles: completed 2 July 2010.
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Category Archives: Film
For the bookmarks
Wikipedia’s Film noir (with that fabulous still from The Big Combo) is featured article OTD.
The slow season
Manhola Dargis responds to fellow Times columnnist Dan Kois:
…The Hangover Part II, which I find boring, raked in $137.4 million over the five-day Memorial Day weekend. It’s the kind of boring that makes money, partly because it’s the boring that many people like, want to like, insist on liking or are just used to, and partly because it’s the sort of aggressively packaged boring you can’t escape, having opened on an estimated 17 percent of American screens. Filled with gags and characters recycled from the first Hangover, the sequel is grindingly repetitive and features scene after similar scene of characters staring at one another stupidly, flailing about wildly and asking what happened. This is the boring that Andy Warhol, who liked boring, found, well, boring.
Upcoming: 29
Oh, my: a retrospective of Alfred Hitchcock’s pre-Hollywood work at AFI Silver Theatre. (Link via DCist, again.)
Incredible Girl
Celia Aurora deBlas, an erstwhile theater colleague, is crowdsourcing the funding for her indie film project, “Incredible Girl,” a sexy look at empowerment through the lens of same-sex encounters. Woo-hoo, contributions are tax deductible! but the funding round extends only through 7 February.
Out of joint
Laura Sydell posts about indie filmmaker Ellen Seidler’s fight to protect her And Then Came Lola, a “lesbian romantic comedy,” from pirate sites. The e-mail response that Seidler received from Sven Olaf Kamphius, who’s associated with Pirate Bay, is appallingly childish.
Kamphuis’s e-mail comes out strongly against any kind of copyright protection. He dismissed Seidler’s references to United States copyright law by saying: “ … the laws of that retarded ex-colony cannot be enforced here, thank god;).”
I have my own issues with the current overly protectionist copyright laws of this country, but they don’t extend to ripping off an entrepreneur who’s made a movie on her own dime. Sydell says that Seidler has decided to get out of the movie business. When the arrogance of the Pirate Bay crew means that creative innovation is stifled, something is wrong.
There isn’t a lot that I can do to solve this problem, but at least I can buy a copy of Seidler’s movie.
It’s magic
Robbins Barstow, Wethersfield, Connecticut’s prototype of the vlogger, has passed away. His 1956 Disneyland Dream, a home movie documentary of the family trip to Disneyland (by way of a 3M Scotch Tape contest), with narration added in 1995 (and more than a few corny jokes), is available through the Internet Archive. Disneyland Dream is one of the few amateur works named to the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry.
Mr. Barstow’s survivors include the original cast of Disneyland Dream: his wife, the former Margaret Vanderbeek, whom he married in 1942; his sons, David and Dan; and his daughter, now known as Cedar.
Upcoming: 23
Dave Kehr reports that Paramount is releasing The African Queen on DVD via a digital restoration of the British negative. “Leeches!”
Who killed Sean Regan?
A host of others, smiling killers and gruesome butlers, stalk through the dark,rainy landscape of the film like wraiths. The Big Sleep [1946] is something other than a detective story, with the drive toward rationality that designation is supposed to represent. It is a carnival of criminality, its underworld supernumeraries crowing the film not so much as picturesque character bits, but as tiny, finely-drawn portrayals of deceit and self-interest in a tapestry of meanness.
—Kevin Hagopian, Film Noir Reader 4, p. 42
Cultural touchstones I have never seen
And probably never will:
- E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
- Forrest Gump (1994)
- Alien (1979)
- Titanic (1997)
- When Harry Met Sally… (1989)
The reality train has left the station
Via Ira and Leta, possibly the strangest Barbie collectible to be offered: Barbie as Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) attacked by crows in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.
Dressed in a re-creation of the stylish green skirt-suit worn by the film’s ill-fated heroine in an iconic scene… Barbie® Doll celebrates the 45th anniversary of the acclaimed film. From the doll’s classic ensemble to the perfectly painted expression to the accompanying black birds, every aspect captures the film’s infamous appeal…. Doll cannot stand alone as shown. For the adult collector.
Although it must also be admitted that the two different Hello Kitty Barbies on offer come close, if only for their universe-mixing Spock-meets-Skywalker jumbledness.
First past the post
So the reblogging game is to name your favorite films by these indie auteurs of the 30 years or so: the Coen Brothers, Wes Anderson, Hal Ashby, Kevin Smith, and Quentin Tarantino. kottke.org adds Stanley Kubrick, P.T. Anderson, and Errol Morris to the list. All well and good, but a few of of these guys worked only one seam, and if this is to be a revealing personality test we need some directors with a wider range of material. Offhand, I can think of Woody Allen, Robert Altman, and Steven Soderbergh. So here’s my list:
- Coens: Blood Simple
- W. Anderson: Bottle Rocket
- Ashby: none (Harold and Maude is for adolescents)
- Smith: Dogma edges out Clerks
- Tarantino: Reservoir Dogs, also by a slight margin
- Kubrick: 2001: A Space Odyssey
- P.T. Anderson: Magnolia
- Morris: Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control
- Allen: Hannah and Her Sisters
- Altman: Nashville
- Soderbergh: sex, lies, and videotape
Freebies
Something for those of us with too much time on our hands: Gleeful Gecko points out that IMDB has quietly made available a modest list of feature-length movies for free viewing in a lo-fi window. The offerings are all over the map—everything from The Toxic Avenger to Lost in Translation.
Jackie O
Via Bookslut: a Chris Ware animation of a story from This American Life. How cool is that?!
Two tickets at will call for Pinth-Garnell, Leonard
Via 11D: Joe Queenan parses awful, or why The Hottie and the Nottie is not in the same class of wretched as Heaven’s Gate.
…that is the reason I became a critic in the first place; criticism seemed to be a way to channel my unwholesome fascination with train wrecks and fires into a socially acceptable framework. The truth is, every time I go to the pictures, I get goose bumps all over, anticipating that this, after all these years, could be the worst movie ever made.
Sadly, it never is.
Another friend gone
This always happens when I check back with a morning news source later in the day: bad news. Sommer Mathis of DCist links to a column by Hank Stuever about the closing of the last of D.C.’s crackerbox art movie houses, the AMC Dupont Circle 5. The Dupont 5 never had the scope of the Biograph or the two-story interlock of the lovable Key, but attending a movie there always brought with it the challenge of getting there early enough to secure the one seat in each auditorium with decent sightlines. Apparently the cinemas’ closing has been quietly scheduled for some time. The doors close forever this weekend.
The Dupont 5 was a few dozen extremely familiar steps away from the south escalators of the Dupont Circle Metro station, between a Cosi and a Ben & Jerry’s, and not far from Olsson’s Books & Records. Here you had a perfect world of second and third dates. You could always see someone standing in front of the Dupont 5, wondering if his or her date was going to show up. (This was before everyone owned a cellphone.) A few hearts were broken in front of the Dupont 5.
