January 2010
37 posts
WatchA 1965 NFB documentary portrait of Leonard Cohen, then known for his poetry and stand-up comedy (a routine of which opens the film). Love the black & white, the fuddy-duddyish narration, the vintage Montreal, and dude being his hilarious self.
Salinger at the NYorker site, including the... →
Reel change
It’s time the film, movie journalism and festival communities took a hard look at a practice that is practically rampant in the cinema world and needs to stop now. I’m taking about the cute homonymic use of the words “real” and “reel.” As a guy who’s written his thousands of movie-related headlines, cover lines and photo captions, I know how easy it is to...
“The most influential of modern fairy-tale theorists was Bruno Bettelheim, who...”
– Jamie James reviews a new edition of Charles Perreault’s “The Complete Fairy Tales.”
“One should also mention the repeating mechanism. In an age when lighting of a...”
– From an anonymous correspondent of Mark Bittman’s, at his Bitten blog.
“A great image is many things, by nature diffuse, and we might agree that any great image moves even when stopped still, opening its own cinematic world. Thus, The Notebook’s decision to celebrate our recent decade not with a list but with this stream. Each contributor was asked to pick 1 film he or she wants to remember from the 2000s, select 1 image from that film to remember it by,...
Thriller idea:
Eat, Pray, Kill.
Why I stopped paying people to transcribe...
Mark: I think your scenes with your character were found the most memorable.
Kelly: Thank you. I love that you get to know how they met. You know the [inaudible] thing. In the book actually they are giving him [inaudible]. The end of it is very different. That scene is very different and much more hysterical. I mean it is hysterical for us. She is just [inaudible].
Mark: In the book I...
This brings to mind a recent conversation I had with [Billy] Wilder in this very living room. He is a master of acerbic put-downs who has little time for TV pseudostars, and when I mentioned the name of Carson I expected Wilder to dismiss him with a mordant one-liner. What he actually said surprised me. It evolved in the form of a speech. “By the simple law of survival, Carson is the best,” he...
Up-All-Night Movies
My favourite genre; I made a list of examples. Got any suggestions?
Every year for the past six decades, a shadowy visitor would leave roses and a half-empty bottle of cognac on Poe’s grave on the anniversary of the writer’s birth. This year, no one showed.
Did the mysterious “Poe toaster” meet his own mortal end? Did some kind of ghastly misfortune befall him? Will he be heard from nevermore?
“I’m confused,...
“Red wine with fish. Well, that should have told me something.”
– 007, From Russia With Love, on discovering the man he’d just dined with was a SPECTRE agent in disguise.
“They also acted differently. Every so often, you would see one waiting on a...”
– “Moscow’s Stray Dogs,” by Susanne Sternthal.
WatchRIP Kate McGarrigle. This dorky video is like the most Canadian thing ever.
“It is a notorious, and notoriously unresolved, tale of espionage: a one-time White Russian general, in exile in Paris, connives with both the Soviets and the Nazis in the mid-1930s. Hoping to use a day out with his wife, once a popular singer in her homeland, as his alibi, he slips away from her for a brief time, during which he oversees the kidnapping of another general, his superior at...
“The Royal Garden sequence, making up roughly half of the film, may be the most formidable example of mise-en-scène in the history of cinema. It is certainly the most Brueghel-like in its expansion of the principle—found in such populated landscape paintings as Landscape with the Fall of Icarus and The Procession to Cavalry—that life and history unfold in a plethora of small, almost...
“What I miss is the society. Lunch and dinner are the two occasions when we most easily meet with friends and family. They’re the first way we experience places far from home. Where we sit to regard the passing parade. How we learn indirectly of other cultures. When we feel good together. Meals are when we get a lot of our talking done—probably most of our recreational talking....
There are strange things done in the midnight sun. →
“By the time Mr. Haugland met Thor Heyerdahl, the future leader of the Kon-Tiki...”
– NY Times Obituary: Knut Haugland, Sailor on Kon-Tiki, Dies at 92 (via yancey)
dstrbo:
Lhasa de Sela was a Montreal musician...
WatchHere’s a thing. This is a (very) short movie I made for the M60 60-second film festival. It stars my friend Matt Silver, was entirely shot by me in one night, and is very much based on true events. It’s called One-Man Party and it will literally only take a minute of your time.
