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With your tongue down my throat

When Ebert died last week, the cinetrix felt a little left out. Yes, she'd seen iterations of his show -- growing up in a PBS household, how could she not? -- but I didn't buy the collections or really read much of his writing until he embraced online platforms. So, how did I get here?

This morning I learned the Iron Lady died, and I realized that England made me, to pinch a phrase from an earlier era. 

Thatcherism made me a cinephile.

Oh, Vestron! Oh, Lorimar! Oh, Embassy and Orion! In the early days of the home video explosion [now-defunct distributors; independent video stores as the norm], my friends and I couldn't get enough of these fascinating filmic glimpses into council flats and immigrant struggles. I learned to follow the names of certain writers, directors, and actors from one movie to the next. I never saw any of them projected in a theater.

Yes, there is that Anglophilia that certain pretentious suburban American teens affect, but from the mid-to-late 80s onward, it meant Another Country, Lady Jane [anything with Helena Bonham Carter's hair, really], Gothic. Also, Prick Up Your Ears, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, Wish You Were Here, Aria, Withnail & I, Letter to Brezhnev, High Hopes. Most of all, there was that annus mirabilis, 1985, which saw the one-two DDL punch of A Room with a View and My Beautiful Laundrette that got critics like Ebert talking.

Of course, given the long lag between theatrical and home video, I didn't see either film until nearly two years later, but still. I hated Margaret Thatcher in solidarity with the movies I loved, but today I find myself grateful that her rule inspired production of so many films that changed me -- that made me.

Spend It All

It was my great pleasure [always for pleasure] to spend a week at the Flaherty Seminar in 2011 with Les Blank. His films define generosity and what means to be fully present, and I borrow from filmdom's other great loss this week here as one way in this first, stunned moment of life after Les Blank to try and capture how I felt watching Les's films:

“Kindness” covers all of my political beliefs. No need to spell them out. I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.

If we are fortunate enough that such a place exists in any realm, there must be beer, garlic, and cochon au lait in heaven. But my suspicion, thanks to Les, it that it is here, all around us, all the time, and all we need to do to attain it is be in its midst and strive to really see other people for the gorgeous beings they are.

"This is my happening and it freaks me out!"

Two quick memories:

• Mark Sandman, the late singer/bassist of Morphine, was wandering around Hollywood Express one night with four videos in his hand. We had a promotion where you could rent five not-new releases for four nights for ten bucks, and it was close to closing and I was keen to go home. So I approached him and recommended Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. He took it and was on his way. The next time he saw me there, he made a point of telling me it was the only one of the rentals he'd enjoyed, and moreover that in real life he'd been to the crazy house with the indoor-outdoor swimming pool featured in the film.
• Roger Ebert attracted a shitstorm when it came to light that he'd panned a movie, Tru Loved, after watching only ten eight minutes. He later ran a second, equally damning, review of the lousy thing after people protested the fairness of not giving the movie an even shake. This same movie was the subject of an absolutely terrible film-series selection meeting fight that soured me so I stopped participating for years after. Some jackasses lobbied for this gay After-School Special -- with fucking Bruce Villanch! -- based on its thematic rather than filmic merits (both sucked, if you ask me). It made the cut and inspired one venue that'd been part of the film tour since its inception to drop out for good, rather than screen a film it wouldn't otherwise book. I will always be grateful to Ebert for that feeling of sweet vindication when he panned that piece of shit, too.

Cinematic catch-up

Michel Gondry: A Cinephile's Labyrinth on Nowness.com.

The cinetrix just returned from several blissful days spent out-of-doors, only weakly tethered to the Interwebs via hotel wifi on my phone. Some of my favorites from what the world got up to in my absence.

The Guardian tallies John Cusack's five best moments.

Highlights from the Paley Center for Media's Henson holdings.

Fette Sans interviews Film Forum's Mike Maggiore.

Any interesting stories about filmmaker’s presenting her/his film for the first time at FF?
Many years ago, Francois Ozon graciously came to the theater to do some interviews for one of his early films and he noticed that we were selling popcorn in the lobby. He saw a young woman sprinkling salt in her bag and then taking it into the theater and he pointed at her and said, “She is not taking it inside??” I told him that of course, this is something Americans are very accustomed to. It’s part of the movie-going experience, etc. and he appeared mortified.

US Trailer for Laurence Anyways, directed by Xavier Dolan, 2012. [via]

• Stanwyck had become the highest paid woman in America. "Barbara" was the third most popular baby name in America ― almost entirely because of Stanwyck.
• Kenny on Scorsese and on White.
• R.I.P. Boston Phoenix, where I briefly had a proofreading gig (Hot Dots!) in the 90s.
• Call For Entries: Tribeca Film Festival’s #6SecFilms Vine Competition.

 

Random reading

Once again, I should be grading. So here's what I've been squandering my time on instead.

• "The Great Lebowski Re-evaluation gradually took root among the youth counterculture after the goddamn plane crashed into the building―exactly 10 years after the Dude buys a carton of half-and-half in the opening scene of the movie," Benjamin wrote in an e-mail. And yes, it's true: That half-and-half purchase, soundtracked by a televised George H.W. Bush speech about aggression and the "Eye-rackies," gets paid for by a check dated September 11.

• The Hitchcock handbag -- they're quite fetishistic, vaginal things. I'm not the only one who's noticed this predilection and I don't find it a stretch. With all those crisp, snapped, soft or hard bodied rectangular satchels and muffs, Hitchcock's women clutched wombs of wonder that, like, many ladies obsessed with their handbags, seem to serve the purpose to only mystify men. Who cares so much about a damn handbag? Women do. And not just for fashion, as Hitchcock so astutely noticed, but for what Kier also so astutely pointed out. Organization. Organization in that chaotic organ that will spill out of your satchel in messy, sticky, dysfunctional passionate disarray. And purses, they always lose control.

• But as I reflect on what I could possibly say about a film that's been so closely analyzed, admired and adored, it seems like 8 1/2 calls for some kind of unique treatment from me. It's indisputably one of the great audacious salvage jobs of a man wrestling with creative blockage and artistic confusion, whose vision and scope had progressively enlarged with each new cinematic triumph, to the point where expectations had morphed into assumptions that the brilliance and magic would just flow unceasingly each time the Maestro called his cast and crew together. Of course, 8 1/2 famously draws us behind the curtain of that gruesome process by which the movies so many of us love somehow emerge from the clash of egos, the relentless criticisms and pressures, and the chaotic lunges from one crisis to another in the personal lives of the flawed and vulnerable humans who labor to get something tangible up on the screen. The film is a dazzling display of 20th century modernism, so self-reflexive and aware of itself as a phenomenon that it opens the doors of our perception to all the latent narcissism and willfully indulgent obscurity that eventually came to be labeled postmodernism. And it's also a beautiful portrait (as all of Fellini's films are, at least those I've seen) of ordinary people muddling their way through the plight of their lives with wit, confusion, dread and delight. There's a lot going on here, in this film, in the mind of Fellini as he made it, and in my own life as I watch 8 1/2 again and incorporate it into my own experience 50 years after it debuted. And today I'm just beginning the process of grappling with it all.

• GY: Can you talk about the song in this clip? How did you find this moment of synch sound?
  PL: We spent maybe the first year of the project just figuring out what we were looking at and having these small victories. We were able to say, “Okay, we’ve figured out that this particular clip is Idaho Falls, Idaho.” And somehow we were able to figure out that it was roughly whatever month it was in 1971. Then we were able to go into the White House Communications Agency audio archive and scan for Idaho Falls. And because that clip has people singing, you knew that there’d be some way to find a synch. We were able to do that a few times, but this one was really great because we were able to use someone’s in-camera edits, and also someone else’s in-audio recorder edits. They’re totally unrelated; they just happen to be recording the same event.
  BF: My best guess is that the song was written by a high school teacher, and that it was something the choral group learned for the event. It’s kind of incomprehensible what exactly it’s supposed to be getting at: “We are Americans, we hope that you are too”?
• The early eighties were a particularly fertile period in my cinephilia. Having just gotten both cable and a VCR, it seemed that, after years of reading about so many movies, now I could finally watch them. And I did, one after another, the VCR becoming my best friend. But also, like any teenager/twenty-something, I watched a lot of whatever was on cable. Again and again and again. Two of those movies were Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Taps. Now, had you asked me at the time, right then in 1982 when I was watching these movies on cable, who would become stars and who wouldn’t, I would have probably given the wrong answer on some, the right answer on others.  Certainly Fast Times left me clueless. I found it to be dull, unfunny and shoddily put together.  I probably would’ve said that maybe Jennifer Jason Leigh will go on to big things, and maybe her goofy brother, Judge Reinhold, but nobody else. Oh, I thought Sean Penn was good enough as Spicoli, it’s just that with nothing else to base it on, I couldn’t be sure if this was a performance or, like Pauly Shore later, this was all he could do. Eric Stoltz? I couldn’t even tell you what he did. Forest Whitaker? The football player? Doesn’t seem like he did much. If you told me at the time that both Penn and Whitaker would go on to be highly respected Oscar winning actors, I probably would’ve assumed you’d been smoking some of that Spicoli weed again. Oh yeah, and did I mention Nicolas Cage? That’s right, Fast Times at Ridgemont High had three future Best Actor winners in it. Holy cow.

• Drivers exiting the Skyway onto Stony Island Avenue may mistake the Avalon (later the New Regal) as a religious building, with its minarets and onion dome. When designing this exemplary piece of Atmospheric Moorish Revivalism, Eberson took his inspiration from an incense burner he discovered at an antiques market. The theatre’s 2,255 seats are enveloped in romanticized motifs suggestive of a Persian bazaar under a twilight sky. The Middle Eastern theme continues into the marble-tiled lobby, which includes three large carved wood murals set within massive arches. Soaring above is a flying carpet of sorts―the design of an Oriental rug painted on plaster and inlaid with patterns of cut-glass gems sitting within the recessed ceiling. Requiring minor touchups, this relatively well-maintained theatre is set to reopen in early 2013 as a live entertainment venue.
• Doughty reasserts many of Mitford’s 50-year-old claims; both the sentimentality of love and misguidance of morticians prompt mourners to spend too much on rituals they aren’t invested in or on unnecessary burial preparations. Doughty also shares Mitford’s disgust with the ghoulishness of many standard American practices. Though bodies are viewed in many societies’ funeral practices, “The idea of the open casket is pretty specifically American,” Doughty says. “And that really, I think, came with the body-as-product revolution of the embalmers. … One of the things that they were able to sell was the embalmed body. The idea that they were making this body beautiful and lifelike again, and preserving it for eternity. So that’s when it started to become, we’re going to create this ‘memory picture’ with this beautiful embalmed body and then put it in its casket and then present it to you.”

• Pay attention to the differences that make a difference.
  Do not read about the object before you’ve completed your work. Let the link vultures quote you, not the other way around.
  However, do not be afraid of the associations the object brings forth for you, especially from other art forms than the one at hand. And do your best to find the best in these affinities, these links, no matter how fanciful.
• Obviously much of the initial energy associated with blogging has now been redirected into other formats, especially social media such as Twitter and Facebook (often in ways that aren’t productive?especially on Facebook), but I still consider the blog to be an important part of my academic and professional work, a place where ideas can be developed and shared in an extended format that wouldn’t work as well on other platforms.

• Geoff Gilmore (Chief Creative Officer), Genna Terranova (VP of Programming), Frederic Boyer (Artistic Director) and Sharon Badal (Shorts Programmer) went to the Livestream studio to talk the Festival slate for 2013. Moderated by Slate’s Dana Stevens, the discussion shed light on the programming process, and the group highlighted several films that they believe are must-sees at this year’s Festival. [via Lindsay]

• "I'm used to catching some flak for ever daring to make drinking sound glamorous," Schaap admits. "And I certainly try not to diminish or make light of real issues involving drinking out there. But no one makes it look more glamorous than Nick and Nora do." The author particularly admires the moment in the 1934 film when Myrna Loy orders a row of six martinis ("Line them up right here"), as well as William Powell's method of shaking cocktails to ballroom-dance rhythms. "They're just having such a grand time, and their chemistry is so spectacular, and you can't help thinking that somehow all those martinis make that possible."