Wednesday, August 29, 2012
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
Monday, August 27, 2012
Wednesday, August 8, 2012
Haunting.
Information from our favorite source.
"Long Beach, California - Little Phnom Penh - is the world's largest Cambodian enclave outside the homeland, founded by refugees."
Dengue Fever perform's Ros Sereysothea's "A Go Go:"
C.I.: Tulkinghorn
Monday, August 6, 2012
Friday, August 3, 2012
An alternative critical standard...
...with which I am surprised to find I sympathize.
Despite calling "The Artist" "great," [Chris] Rock noted that the film wasn't what audiences want. "['Grown Ups' is] better than The Artist' 'cause the audience says so," he said. "No film critic's going to say it, but 'Madagascar 3' is better than 'The Artist,' and it's better because it makes people feel better. That’s ultimately what it boils down to. --Noted film critic Chris Rock.
Wednesday, August 1, 2012
New "Sight & Sound" lists
Critics’ Top 10 Greatest Films of All Time
- 1. Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958)
- 2. Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941)
- 3. Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953)
- 4. La Règle du jeu (Renoir, 1939)
- 5. Sunrise: a Song for Two Humans (Murnau, 1927)
- 6. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968)
- 7. The Searchers (Ford, 1956)
- 8. Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
- 9. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer, 1927)
- 10. 8 ½ (Fellini, 1963)
- 1. Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953)
- 2. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968)
- 3. Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941)
- 4. 8 ½ (Fellini, 1963)
- 5. Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 1980)
- 6. Apocalypse Now (Coppola, 1979)
- 7. The Godfather (Coppola, 1972)
- 8. Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958)
- 9. Mirror (Tarkovsky, 1974)
- 10 Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, 1948)
Monday, July 30, 2012
What Happened Next?
My new favorite critic, The New Yorker's Emily Nussbaum, on serial storytelling, melodrama, cliffhangers and soap opera. A nice note: The upcoming book she refers to, "Complex TV," is being published serially on its author's blog.
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
Jane
In her brief essay on "Lolita," in "Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel," Jane Smiley tweaks Vladimir Nabokov for "working as hard as James or Tolstoy to promote a theory of art and of the novel that led straight to him and his sort of greatness." But of course this is what Smiley herself is doing in "Thirteen Ways." Probably any novelist writing about novels would be so inclined. Any painter writing about painting, any critic writing about criticism. The number of professional commentators who could resist the temptation to equate excellence with their own practice could be counted (as I believe Pogo Possum once said) on the fingers of one finger.
Thursday, July 12, 2012
Thursday, July 5, 2012
Spend an hour with the guys
Henry Jenkins and Dave Kehr at the Lost Cinema festival in Italy. Looking at Jenkins makes me wonder if there's a factory someplace.. (h/t Howard Rodman)
INCONTRO CON LA CRITICA AMERICANA from cineteca on Vimeo.
....
Wednesday, July 4, 2012
I wrote "So true!" in the margin
New "Spider-Man" director Marc Webb:
It's all about regeneration. "I kept on going back to the single moment where Peter Parker was left by his parents," Webb suggests. "Realistically, anybody's whose parents disappeared in a very urgent or chaotic manner when he was six or seven-years-old, that's going to have a huge emotional impact. And that moment is more definitive than even the spider bite. It defined the character and the movie in a very specific way for me."As far as the orphan story, Webb refers back to Dickens. He finds the whole notion of these kids having a generosity of spirit yet distrust for the world around them very provocative. "It brings up questions of identity and in the last part of the film I inserted a lecture that my high school teacher had given me about there being [only one story] in fiction: 'Who am I?' I find myself when I watch movies or read books thinking that it's the soul of so many stories that I really enjoy. This idea of a kid who puts on a mask and becomes somebody else and has to lose part of his identity and sacrifice other parts of his life: it's the right question to ask."
Tuesday, July 3, 2012
Wired
Harry Edgerton was the model for the character Frank Pembleton, played by Andre Braugher on “Homicide.” Ed Burns was David Simon’s co-creator on “The Wire.”
==========
Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (David Simon)
- Highlight Loc. 1540-51 | Added on Monday, July 02, 2012, 10:33 PM
(Harry) Edgerton’s detachment from the rest of the unit was furthered by his partnership with Ed Burns, with whom he had been detailed to the Drug Enforcement Administration for an investigation that consumed two years. That probe began because Burns had learned the name of a major narcotics trafficker who had ordered the slaying of his girlfriend. Unable to prove the murder, Burns and Edgerton instead spent months on electronic and telephone surveillance, then took the dealer down for drug distribution to the tune of thirty years, no parole.
To Edgerton, a case like that was a statement of a kind, an answer to an organized drug trade that could otherwise engage in contract murder with impunity. It was a persuasive argument. Close to half of Baltimore’s murders were believed to be related to the use or sale of narcotics, though the solve rate for drug murders was consistently lower than that for nearly any other motive. Yet homicide’s methodology hadn’t changed with the trend: Detectives worked the drug-related murders independently, as they would any other homicide. Both Burns and Edgerton had argued that much of the violence was related and could only be reduced—or, better still, prevented—by attacking the city’s larger narcotics organizations.
By that argument, the repetitive violence of the city’s drug markets betrayed the weakness in the homicide unit, namely, that the investigations were individual, haphazard and reactive. Two years after that initial DEA case, Edgerton and Burns again proved the point with a year-long probe of a drug ring linked to a dozen murders and attempted murders in the Murphy Homes housing project. Every one of those shootings had remained open after detectives followed the traditional approach, yet as a result of the prolonged investigation, four murders were cleared and the key defendants received double life sentences.
It was precision law enforcement, but other detectives were quick to point out that those two probes consumed three years, leaving two of the unit’s squads short a man for much of that time. The phone still had to be answered and with Edgerton reporting to work at the DEA field office, the other members of his squad—Kincaid and Garvey, McAllister and Bowman—would each be handling more shootings, more questionable deaths, more suicides, more murders. The fallout from Edgerton’s prolonged absences had served to push him further from the other detectives.
True to form, Ed Burns is at this very moment detailed to a sprawling FBI probe of a drug organization in the Lexington Terrace projects—an investigation that will eventually consume two years. Edgerton originally went with him, but two months ago he was shipped back to the homicide unit after a nasty budget dispute between federal and local supervisors. And the fact that Harry Edgerton is now back in the standard rotation, pecking away at a 24-hour report on something as menial and undramatic as a suicide, is a source of glee to the rest of the shift.
Sunday, July 1, 2012
Saturday, June 30, 2012
Friday, June 29, 2012
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
Saturday, June 23, 2012
Friday, June 22, 2012
Wednesday, June 20, 2012
Back to School
Yale at last! An online lecture course on the postwar American novel including HG favorites Lolita, Wise Blood, Housekeeping, Blood Meridian, and Lost in The Funhouse.... Of course, it used to be that one read these extra-curriculum. We live in degenerate times.
Tuesday, June 19, 2012
Armand White uses The H Word...
...several times, in his piece on the Film Forum Spaghetti Western series.
The Western’s basic civilization vs. wilderness theme gets travestied by Spaghetti westerns into nihilistic prognostications about mankind‘s depravity. [Alex] Cox confesses the young person’s conventional fascination with cynicism as a rejection of sentimentality which hipsters consider weak and untrustworthy (especially in counterculture terms that dismiss established moral tenets). The cynicism of Spaghetti westerns now seems an inevitable development of the skepticism following mid-20th century American imperialism and triumphalism. It was a way for Italian Communist anxiety (a luxe privilege) to express itself within a critique of the American ideals it cannot sustain.
Friday, June 15, 2012
These will be on the test...
Alexander Payne, Filmmaker of the Year, offers five pieces of advice to students at the UCLA/TFT Film Festival "Directors Showcase" event, June 14, 2012.
1. Be prepared for it to take a while.
2. If you're writing a script that you want to direct, don't take any money for it.
3. Watch Ozu.
4. Always get your entrances and exits.
5. Quoting Italian director Nani Moretti, who in turn is quoting writer Eduardo De Filippo: "He who searches for style, finds death. He who searches for life, finds style."
Wednesday, June 13, 2012
Alastair Reynolds makes the big time
(sort of)
There's a non-fannish, genre-informed rave review by Javier Martinez of his new book, "Blue Remembered Earth", on The LA Review of Books website. An interesting political perspective, by the way.... I've never paid much attention to the politics of SF, but Martinez's analysis makes sense to me.
Reynold's frame is a society which is a technological totalitarian state -- and that's OK by Reynolds, apparently. Says Martinez:
This concept half a century ago would likely have been depicted as a sinister hive-mind, a metaphor for global communism, that our protagonist would rally against and overthrow armed only with his smarts and can-do attitude. BRE moves away from this libertarian old-guard position, upheld by such pulp-era titans as John W. Campbell, Robert A. Heinlein, and Poul Anderson - not to mention their ideological heirs, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and the stable of writers at Baen Books.
The ideological shift from individualism toward techno-collectivism is, if no less problematic, evidence of a left-leaning vision in Reynolds's work. A conventional history of the genre can trace the leftist turn in SF back several decades to at least the 1950s, with the pioneering social satire featured in Galaxy magazine. But Reynolds's lineage is more complex: he clearly owes a huge debt to those authors central to the early decades of the genre (certainly the future-history detailed in his "Inhibitor" series is a nod to Heinlein's work, if not his ideology), but he melds this traditionalism with elements culled from the writers of the1960s and '70s - such as John Brunner, Barry N. Malzberg, and Barrington J. Bayley - who turned routine space adventures into more meditative excursions. At the same time, Reynolds expresses an exuberance that aligns him with the outer-space quasi-mysticism of Arthur C. Clarke and Fred Hoyle. Reynolds's romanticism, however, is not transcendental but purely material, a celebration of the endless possibilities of secular culture and the richness of experience technology promises.
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