Day of the Outlaw

calumet412: Poster for Riverview Amusement Park, c.1930s,...

Thu, 16 May 2013 13:22:26 -0400

calumet412:

Poster for Riverview Amusement Park, c.1930s, Chicago.

Yikes this family is creepy, what kind of proto-Clowes cartooning style is this

—Martin Amis, The Information

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 20:49:33 -0400

—Martin Amis, The Information

cinephilearchive: Due to unprecedented demand, Steven...

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 17:54:47 -0400

cinephilearchive:

Due to unprecedented demand, Steven Soderbergh has given The San Francisco Film Society permission to release this video that was recorded initially only for archival purposes. The full transcript is also provided. —Steven Soderbergh: The State of Cinema Video & Transcript

With endless thanks to Ted Hope, The Executive Director of the San Francisco Film Society.

“Cinema is under assault,” Steven Soderbergh told an audience in San Francisco over the weekend. He said that the Hollywood studios are to blame and that moviegoers are their accomplices. “Fewer and fewer executives in the industry love movies,” Soderbergh continued, “There’s a total lack of leadership in my opinion, that’s what’s killing cinema.” The director’s remarks came at the San Francisco International Film Festival’s annual State of Cinema Address. It was a sort of Jerry Maguire memo, “Cinema is a specificity of vision. It’s as unique as a fingerprint. If it’s done well, you know exactly who made it,” Steven Soderbergh defined on Saturday, “Is there a difference between cinema and movies? If I ran team America, I’d say fuck ya. Cinema is something that is made, movies are seen.”

Soderbergh said that he needed $5 million to make his upcoming Liberace movie, Behind the Candelabra, which stars Michael Douglas as the famous piano player and Matt Damon as the musician’s lover. Yet he said that the studios needed the movie to gross $70 million to make it work financially. “No one has figured out how to lower the costs of marketing movies…no one,” Soderbergh said. “The thing that mystifies me is in terms of spending, is there anyone in the galaxy that doesn’t know Iron Man 2 is opening that weekend!?” He continued, ”Studios only gamble on openings instead of supporting filmmakers over the long haul. In my opinion, it’s about horses - not races.”

“Executives don’t get punished for making bombs the way filmmakers do,” Soderbergh charged, “So there’s no turnover with people who don’t know their own business.” “I’m spending so much time talking business and sexy math because this is what’s driving everything right now,” Soderbergh said. Yet he also sounded a few optimistic notes. So what would he do differently? “If I were running a studio, I’d get a Shane Carruth, a Barry Jenkins and an Amy Seimetz and ask ‘What do you wanna make?’” Soderbergh said, “I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect someone running a multi-billion dollar business to be able to identify talent. I’m wrong a lot, it doesn’t even raise my blood pressure anymore, maybe the audiences are happy, the studios are happy – maybe I’m wrong. Maybe everything is just fine,” Soderbergh said at one point near the end of his speech. The room erupted with some chuckles because clearly those in the audience agreed with him that everything isn’t just fine. —The World According to Steven: Insights from Soderbergh

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Big deal, people

—Martin Amis, The Information

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 22:33:50 -0400

—Martin Amis, The Information

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 09:51:22 -0400

—Martin Amis, The Information

untitledprojects: Conrad BakkerUntitled Project: Science...

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 15:41:13 -0400

untitledprojects:

Conrad Bakker
Untitled Project: Science Fictions [Scanners]
oil paint on carved wood, 2009

calumet412: Exactly.. Spring snow, 1965, Chicago.

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 11:35:41 -0400

calumet412:

Exactly..

Spring snow, 1965, Chicago.

—Martin Amis, The Information

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 16:28:55 -0400

—Martin Amis, The Information

Trance

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 03:24:00 -0400

[Cross-posted at Letterboxd, because I guess I’m doing that now?]

Danny Boyle specializes in cinema of benevolent pointlessness. His elements of style and motion, however impressive (or annoying) in the moment, rarely breach the inner sanctum. In his restless genre-hopping he’s like a less clever, less purposeful Soderbergh. Not style obscuring substance, but failing to obscure it. Laying bare the who-cares.

In his last couple movies, though, Boyle tried his wavy hand at human-spirit trafficking. 127 Hours and Slumdog Millionaire blurred the line between manufactured uplift and genuine joy to a level beyond the Spielbergian (and were showered with awards attention, natch). Emotional prestidigitation looked like Boyle’s true calling. When newly one-armed James Franco cemented his impossible survival with Boyle’s shamelessly bolded and underlined sense of visual and aural triumph, I couldn’t tell which heartstrings were being tugged and which were vibrating naturally—and in retrospect I’m happier not knowing.

Goodbye to all that. Boyle’s new bauble, Trance, sticks to breezy genre nonsense. Perhaps in reproach to Chris Nolan’s saddlebagged, prosaic Inception, Boyle makes his “mind-bending thriller” on more vulgar terms: fast, cheap and out of control. The operating principle seems to be: throw everything at ‘em so quickly they won’t realize how half-cocked it is. By some British magic, Boyle actually makes this strategy pleasant instead of punishing. One hundred dense minutes pass in a—well, er, sorry, no way around this, in a kind of trance, you know.

The script pays lip-service to issues of memory and free will, love and sacrifice and art, but Boyle and co-writers needn’t have bothered with perfunctory gravitas. Danny does what he does: make the moving pictures move. Realities pile on top of and between each other, threaded with thrilling skill. These twisty, cerebral plots only make as much sense as their cinematic correlatives. All else is whatever. Including the actors; you know your director’s priorities are elsewhere when you’ve got Matthew Cassel as a crime boss and he seems like he just wandered onto the set five minutes before the camera started rolling. Image-wise, things get a little banal, too. This is Boyle’s first foray into digital, if I’m not mistaken, and even with Anthony Dad Mantle at camera’s helm—Boyle’s typical collaborator and the genius cinematographer behind some of the best-looking films made in my lifetime, including Harmony Korine’s julien donkey-boy and Lars von Trier’s Antichrist—he can’t quite convert those zeros and ones from information to poetry. Though he does have fun with mirror reflections/symmetry and shifty light.

This kind of movie should be this light on its feet. Leaden Inception feels more and more like a calamity. The loneliness of the long-distance runner: Trance is a breathless race to nowhere. We’ll see if Boyle jogs back to the humanity parties of Slumdog and Hours. Destination? The destination is in your mind, man.

"He gets back to the Casino just as big globular raindrops, thick as honey, begin to splat into giant..."

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 00:32:59 -0400

“He gets back to the Casino just as big globular raindrops, thick as honey, begin to splat into giant asterisks on the pavement, inviting him to look down at the bottom of the text of the day, where footnotes will explain all. He isn’t about to look. Nobody ever said a day has to be juggled into any kind of sense at day’s end.”

- Gravity’s Rainbow

"Obviously it’d be a drag if every film were so aggressively streamlined, but if you’re..."

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 14:32:00 -0400

“Obviously it’d be a drag if every film were so aggressively streamlined, but if you’re not Arnaud Desplechin and you just want to make an unpretentious entertainment about subterranean carnivorous worms, this is how you do it.”

- Mike D’Angelo, on Tremors (1990)

film-dot-com: all of the laughter. The things you miss out on...

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 01:38:44 -0400

film-dot-com:

all of the laughter.

The things you miss out on by avoiding nü-Simpsons…

"So what The Simpsons immediately offered was how the world looked to extremely intelligent people in..."

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 14:54:53 -0400

“So what The Simpsons immediately offered was how the world looked to extremely intelligent people in whom high school had perhaps encouraged skepticism and unconfidence. The result is a chaos of noisy, less-intelligent people holding onto authority by bullying and jargon. Cops and doctors are incompetent; the bartender keeps caged pandas. No straight men; everyone is funny.”

- David Lipsky, demonstrating that he might be the one to write the great Simpsons book that doesn’t exist yet

"Your heart breaks when even the best novel sags a tiny bit, as they all must, sort of like the give..."

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 19:10:11 -0400

“Your heart breaks when even the best novel sags a tiny bit, as they all must, sort of like the give in bridge suspension. A great short story is more like a stiff plank across a narrow but bottomless crevasse. The plank will hold. But that doesn’t mean you are not in danger of freaking out and falling off.”

- Sam Lipsyte

"The searchlights could stay, to light the night, and barrage balloons to populate fat and friendly..."

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 21:01:24 -0500

“The searchlights could stay, to light the night, and barrage balloons to populate fat and friendly the daybreak – everything, even the explosions in the distances might stay as long as they were to no purpose…as long as no one had to die…couldn’t it be that way? only excitement, sound and light, a storm approaching in the summer (to live in a world where that would be the day’s excitement…), only kind thunder?”

- Gravity’s Rainbow

Dance of the Happy Shades

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 03:14:00 -0500

The opening credits sequence implies a tired schema: the literally colorful mentoress brightens the drab routine of black-and-white ballerinas. We can imagine a danced-up, distaff riff on the inspirational teacher genre—perhaps an unusually quick-witted one if we know the métier of series creator Amy Sherman-Palladino—but still a hoary vision of the worldly woman coaxing episodic maturity out of naive girls, one plié at a time.

One of the many surprising pleasures of Bunheads is the ease with which, depending on the episode, it either ignores this template or reshapes it into something meaningful. The would-be mentoress is Michelle, a tough-minded Vegas showgirl who impulsively accepts a marriage proposal by a near-stranger that brings her to a gently quirky California burg called Paradise. Uh-oh: dude dies in a car accident within 24 hours of consummation, leaving Michelle to inherit a house, a difficult mother-in-law, a ballet school, and high-stakes decisions about the direction of her life as a sudden widow. Meanwhile, four teenage dancers enact a künstlerroman that runs the mazes of adolescence with an acuity and wit that makes me wonder why people still think Freaks and Geeks is such a big deal.

For much of the first season—which, unless ABC Family announces good news soon, could be the full series—Michelle and the bunheads travel along parallel narrative tracks, intersecting patiently and organically and sometimes not at all. The double perspective allows Bunheads to follow both of Tolstoy’s proclaimed plots at once: hero goes on journey and stranger comes to town. Michelle’s shaky tenure as an accidental role model is always threatened by her itch to ditch Paradise and pursue the showbiz success that has yet eluded her. She shares with her charges the rapid-fire chatter and allusive loquacity with which Sherman-Palladino’s characters assert control over life’s unpredictability, but all that gamified dialogue masks grave themes: failure, anxiety, sex, death, the fragility of friendship, the wobbly pursuit of happiness, and yes: dancing.

Dance is the constant for these girls and women—order amid chaos, and, like the marathon sentences that spill from their mouths, a weapon against whatever uncertainty brings trouble to Paradise. When Sasha—the bunhead who tends toward prickly affect and contrarian thinking—forsakes the dance ritual in favor of empty cheerleading, she returns almost immediately, having realized that ballet is more than an after-school activity. Befitting an act of such significance, Bunheads’ presentation of dance is among the loveliest and most aesthetically radical things on television. Elaborately choreographed, sometimes expressionistic routines play out in front of a fluid camera, separate from each episode’s narrative business but often commenting on it or providing a counterpoint. These nonverbal interludes are especially welcome in a show with such verbally hyperactive scripts; the effect is not unlike the tension between Aaron Sorkin’s writing and David Fincher’s intense mise-en-scene in The Social Network. Unpinned to a particular style, the show’s formal approach to filming dance has continued to evolve; one pre-credits showstopper integrated nonstop verbal sparring into a full ballet routine in one long, unbroken take.

In some ways I’m an unlikely Bunheads devotee (don’t call us Broheads), not just demographically, but because I never got past the second season of Sherman-Palladino’s Gilmore Girls—a show that felt slightly stiff-jointed and clumsy compared to the dancer’s grace and fluidity with which Bunheads is written, performed and shot. TV’s permissiveness has expanded in the years since Gilmore such that Bunheads is able to get away with honest, though never prurient, inquiries into teen sexuality on a network with the word “family” right in the name. I’m powerless not to compare this aspect of the show to another funny-femme-melodrama, Girls, which couches an absurd(ist?) vision of a world where sex is literally everywhere—on the surface, in all male-female interactions, at all times—in the guise of “brave” frankness. On Bunheads, girls make choices about sex—choices foregrounded in the season finale, which features a peppy musical montage of the bunheads reading books with titles like Girls Who Said Yes—without Lena Dunham’s self-congratulating tawdriness.

The bunheads make a great rhythm section, but Michelle is the lead guitarist, and she fucking shreds. Or rather, Sutton Foster shreds. It would have been enough for Foster to handle Sherman-Palladino’s dialogue like a reincarnated Rosalind Russell, but she also intermittently busts out mind-blowing song-and-dance chops—not merely for showmanship, but as an expressive reminder that our conflicted heroine has talents and dashed dreams beyond helping teenage girls find themselves. The sharpest example of Bunheads’ affective pendulum: a recurring dream sequence in which Michelle crushes a musical-theater audition in a dark void, only to face cold rejection and a visit from her dead husband. Joy and despair, trouble and desire, comedy and errors, cacophony and silence, all co-exist casually in Paradise. It’s cruel but perfect that Sherman-Palladino only puts Foster’s theatrical skills on display in rare and unglamorous moments, like Spielberg keeping Jaws out of view for as long as possible. To modify Dino Di Laurentiis’ ill-fated promise for the ‘70s King Kong remake: Nobody cry when Jaws die, but when Michelle belts “Maybe This Time,” everybody gonna cry.

It’s true that I’ve felt a certain anxiety about my affection for Bunheads, as if the primarily female cast and imprimatur of a network that airs e.g. Pretty Little Liars renders the show verboten for a 26-year-old straight male. But when I’m watching it, I don’t feel like a trespasser. In a show about acceptance and adaptation, Sherman-Palladino’s most lasting lesson to the audience might be how we can accept her work in the capacious spirit in which it was intended. Bunheads is for everyone.

"Then Morris told his story, and it was the best one of all. It was a story about an ambition that..."

Sun, 17 Feb 2013 22:35:59 -0500

“Then Morris told his story, and it was the best one of all. It was a story about an ambition that sifted through the population of a colony over a period of fifty years until it found the several people in whom it wanted to invest. It was the story of the growth of this ambition and the pain and suffering caused by it, as well as the will behind the ambition itself, and the secret workings of the world of which most men are not aware. Also it included a trip to the moon on horseback, and a secret chamber inside of a ring which would fit on your finger but in which you could also sleep the night safely when surrounded by enemies. Both the guess artist and the municipal inspector proclaimed him the winner, and they all went to sleep.”

- Jesse Ball, The Way Through Doors

death records

Sat, 16 Feb 2013 14:24:31 -0500

death records

breakfastineurope: “Jerry Lewis was an evil bastard and I hated...

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 08:28:54 -0500

breakfastineurope:

“Jerry Lewis was an evil bastard and I hated him.” - Vincent Gallo

Today I’m loving: Harmony Korine’s 4-minute short...

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 14:40:49 -0500

Today I’m loving: Harmony Korine’s 4-minute short film Snowballs