1. Tom Carson of GQ is now a blogger, too. His latest post, on Pinocchio, is typically well written and irreverent and smart and totally worth your time. Yup: I saw this through a link at GK's joint. Our quote is from Carson.

["Walt Disney's Pinocchio probably wasn't the first movie I saw, since I've got jumbled memories of being distressed by Leslie Caron's situation in Lili—why was she leaving the carnival?—and puzzled by Judy Holliday putting the bust back in combustion in a now forgotten comedy called The Solid Gold Cadillac. It probably didn't help that my State Department parents had hauled me off to Francophone West Africa before I knew I Love Lucy from Shinola, making confusion literally come with the territory. But those circumstances may help explain why Pinocchio left me unsure whether I'd seen a movie or had a nightmare. I'd already accumulated considerable evidence that I was a marionette with aspirations in a world whose rules eluded me, but watching my doppelganger on the big screen was no picnic."] Continue Reading »

1. At What Is This Light, Martha Polk writes In Defense of Interrogation, focusing on last year's Blindness.

["The last three times I've mentioned that I have Blindness--Fernando Meirelles' 2008 adaption of the José Saramago novel--in my netflix queue, I've received variations of "didn't that go straight to video?" Well no, and in fact, I wish I'd seen it in the theater. There are a few disgusting choices in this movie as well as an intriguing expression of a familiar idea. There's something to be said about Blindness; we cannot stop at the surface, the surface, the surface. Its plot charges through what happens when All Of A Sudden (!) everybody starts to go blind, epidemic-style. Of course "The Government" has to quarantine folks and of course that means things quickly shape up to Lord Of the Flies dimensions and of course our protagonists (Julianne Moor's cheekbones be poppin' and Mark Ruffulo oddly still pulls off Cute) navigate toward a new freedom. I'll account for the above sass by spelling it out: Yes, yes indeed well-read critics, here the movie sits contentedly with the trite. Blindness' plot serves up the apocalypse and when we feel the film using well-worn tactics, it might be frustrating, boring, or downright painful. But here's something, I didn't want to watch just another bad movie about the fragility of humanity, so I didn't."] Continue Reading »

["And likewise, Dreyer's camera plays seer, invoking entrances and outcomes in scenes, but is as interested in the end result as the path getting there, an actor's own hobble (what it's like generally and what it's like in this particular moment), as in the slow walks across Ordet's rooms. Fate, but expressed in natural gestures, the expressions of a face or hand or body, if more slowly than is natural, all the better to see them. (Dreyer was John Cassavetes' second-favorite director—after Frank Capra). Reality and unreality always overlap in Dreyer, as Anne finds herself in a confession's lie (perhaps), as the shadow of the grim reaper in Ordet are the lights from a doctor's car. Ordet's whole point, said again and again, is that the soul expresses itself in the most material of everyday acts. Like walking. What would it look like for Orestes to enter Hades? Perhaps what it looks like for Mikkel (Emil Hass Christensen) to walk around the kitchen, into the coffin room. The body is the signature of the soul."] Continue Reading »

["With many people discussing the prospects of distributing movies over the Internet, it's nice to see someone go the other direction by transplanting online videos from the web to the big screen. That's the plan at Berlin's Arsenal-Cinema on April 17th, when the meticulously edited movie clip deconstructions by Kevin B. Lee and Matt Zoller Seitz will screen as part of a "movies commenting on movies" series"] Continue Reading »

["A week ago Thursday I passed a major milestone in my cinephilia: I saw Chantel Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles for the first time ever. It was screened in a newly-struck 35mm print from Janus, although reel two was sadly misplaced by another institution showing the film, and had to be sourced from a PAL DVD. The transition between film and video provided a fine lesson in the virtues of celluloid over everyday digital projection; though Jeanne Dielman is more of a narrative film than I had been led to believe, it's singularity derives from the way the narrative "events" of the film are conveyed through the subtle variance of repetition. Some of these subtleties are undoubtedly clouded over by the digital haze of even a superb DVD transfer. What's more, the way the film works as a light & motion study as well as a "story" is undeniably altered when the medium shifts. I don't think I have to tell you which of the two I found more visually glorious. For more about the film, I would like to call attention to a piece on the film written by SFMOMA projectionist Brecht Andersch, who was instrumental in facilitating the mid-screening media switches."] Continue Reading »

1. The late, great David Foster Wallace all over this week's The New Yorker with news that his long-gestating third novel, The Pale King, will be published next year by Little, Brown (news via AV Club, not NYT). In that mag, there's a piece of fiction, "Wiggle Room," a profile by D. T. Max, "The Unfinished," and a web-only slideshow of DFW manuscript work. House friend Glenn Kenny responds as one may expect a friend would respond over at his fine blog. Finally: Our excerpt is the first line of the short bit of fiction. Given the snow, and my own daily headaches, as well as the (yup) sadness inherent in these things, I would love some warm beach time. Wouldn't you?

["Lane Dean, Jr., with his green rubber pinkie finger, sat at his Tingle table in his chalk's row in the rotes group's wiggle room and did two more returns, then another one, then flexed his buttocks and held to a count of ten and imagined a warm pretty beach with mellow surf, as instructed in orientation the previous month."] Continue Reading »

["This archival stuff was really fun footage that was just brimming with blatant misogyny and really showed the background of what the country was living through. But the more I worked with the material, the more it seemed to take you out of the story. Slowly I realized that the most powerful thing was what these people on the tapes were say to each other and sometimes to this disembodied listener who winds up being us in the audience forty years later."] Continue Reading »

["The idea of a Christmas promo from the company still makes me smile, but not the news that its library had been used as collateral on a loan that went into default and the company was shut down today. And, among the various modest honorifics that have ever came my way was being quoted on New Yorker DVDs from Tim Roth, Emir Kusturica and Claire Denis, even if the quotes are goofy. For Underground, it's something about beer and women; for Beau Travail, it's the ellipsis-heavy "A MASTERPIECE! Exquisite... Mysterious... Magical." Missing only a second exclamation point! Presentation treatments and the seven-to-fifteen second fanfares that accompany them have always given me a little rush, on films old or new. But the silent white-on-blue New Yorker logo that accompanied movies like Wim Wenders' American Friend is forever married in my memory to the low hiss and crackle of a well-distressed 16mm optical soundtrack."] Continue Reading »

["Wong Kar-wai's Chungking Express (1994) was, for me, a key Strombolian film. The first time I watched it, I remember this: I reached for a pillow and hurled it at the screen! It was at the very moment that Faye Wong put on the Mamas and the Papas' "California Dreamin'" for the umpteenth time. The film seemed to be caught in an infinite loop, uninterested in moving forward. At the time I had been discovering the pleasures of character-driven cinema--like Howard Hawks and Eric Rohmer--and in comparison, Wong's film seemed to care not a whit about 'advancing' plot or character. The reigning mood was one of stasis. [...] I'm wondering: What are your experiences of films that you weren't ready for when you first encountered them? Please feel free to share."] Continue Reading »

["Black folks are a superstitious lot, probably due to our ties to the South. I've written off much of the things we believe in, but I cling to a few of them simply because I don't want to tempt the powers that be. We, like Latin American readers, may have an easier time accepting these paranormal phenomena simply because we've heard stories like these passed down from generation to generation; they become one of those accepted things. Lemmons uses Mozelle's skill as less of an ironic plot point than it may seem, and I was grateful that a film about the past didn't skirt some of the more colorful aspects of the oral tradition of Black history being passed down. We were always told the reader could never read her own future."] Continue Reading »